..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Death Race
plus reviews of The Longshots, The Rocker, Fly Me To The Moon, The House Bunny, I.O.U.S.A., and Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Vault

Death Race Two stars
U.S.; Paul W. S. Anderson (Universal)

Death Race -- with Jason Statham as an unjustly imprisoned racer trapped in a deadly “reality show” car race -- is an almost monotonously exciting action movie. Like too many modern movie thrill-spectacles; it puts you through the wringer but leaves you with little afterwards. It’s so fast and slick and grimily violent, so empty of human content or humor, that it almost puts you to sleep: a modern crash-athon that’s a remake of the Roger Corman-produced 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000, directed by the genial Paul Bartel), this new one makes you long for the good old days when you could make a movie for a million or slightly under -- and when that movie was as likely to have the content of a The Last Picture Show or a Five Easy Pieces as an Easy Rider.

Like many movie-loving ‘60s survivors, I have a soft spot for Corman, the man who made Bloody Mama and many others -- an honest-to-Vincent Price drive-in movie auteur who directed films like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Wild Angels, who was once described as The Orson Welles of Z Pictures and whose bulging IMDB filmography includes 55 films as helmer and 385 as producer -- including the current Death Race (where he‘s an executive producer).

Death Race keeps the guts of 1975's Death Race 2000, an Melchior-Robert Thom-Charles Griffith script that starred David Carradine and the pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone as dueling drivers Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe. In the new Death Race, written and directed by Paul M. S. Anderson (Alien vs. Predator), those two roles are taken by Statham and Tyrese Gibson (Four Brothers). But the names -- and the idea of a murderous road race conceived for a bloodthirsty future audience -- are the main legacy from the first movie, which was a cheerfully blowzy satire as well as an action movie, somewhat campily directed by Bartel, about media violence and car culture. This one is more expensive and bloodier.

Anderson’s Death Race jettisons most of the humor, settling instead for a grim, grinding set of car races staged inside a prison for a sadistic, wildly popular reality TV show, sanctioned by opportunistic warden Hennessey (Joan Allen). The combatants include Statham as the screwed-over Jensen Ames, falsely convicted of his wife’s murder, now masquerading at Hennessey’s behest as the legendary driver Frankenstein, and Gibson as his main rival. Among the other drivers: the killer who murdered Jensen’s wife and framed him for the slaying.

When Corman and Bartel made the first Death Race (much admired by Anderson), it was part of a whole ’70s series of cross country car chase or race films, ranging all the way from lyrical naturalistic sagas like Two Lane Blacktop, to surreal or comic concoctions like Vanishing Point or The Gumball Rally. Death Race 2000 was both surreal and comic: the drivers got points for hitting pedestrians and Bartel sent up machismo. This Death Race wallows in it, salting in lots of macho encounters between Jensen and Joe, Jensen and hard-bitten mentor Coach (Ian McShane, on a holiday) and even Jensen and Hennessey. There’s a sex interest: Natalie Martinez as Jensen‘s navigator, and there’s a sort of surprise ending that doesn’t quite work.

One of the big problems with big action movies these days, may be that so many of them have made money, without good characters or a decent script, or with trunkfuls of cliches -- just like this one -- that producers may feel that originality and personality and social insight aren’t necessary. That’s why Pineapple Express was such a surprise; it could have been an entertaining movie, even without the action scenes. Death Race without action scenes, would have been arduous and grimy -- and Anderson probably shouldn‘t have scripted it all by himself, without apparent collaborators. The dialogue is so functional and soulless, that the cars have more personality than the drivers.

Death Race, which was shot on a real location, Montreal’s Terminal Island, has a lot of visual smack and pow. But too much of the time, that’s about all it has. Corman used to do it cheaper, better. Remember?



The Longshots Two stars
U.S.; Fred Durst (Weinstein/MGM)

Based on real life -- which has however been shamelessly abandoned and left for dead -- this is the story of a young female quarterback named Jasmine Plummer, who becomes a sensation in the Pop Warner league and carries her team to the national championship game. Along the way, she inspires her economically strapped town to a new sense of pride and purpose, besides triggering and helping solve several crises in her family -- among her plucky single mother (Tasha Smith), her jobless but football-savvy ex-star uncle/teacher Curtis (Ice Cube) and her long-absent father.

It’s a better movie than star-producer Ice Cube’s recent string of banal family comedies. (Well, except Barbershop.) But it’s still bogged down in outrageous melodrama and almost nonstop clichés -- and, for my taste, the football scenes tend to go by a little fast. But director Durst is good with actors, especially Cube and Matt Craven as the team‘s stricken coach, and most especially. the terrific young Keke Palmer (of The Wool Cap, Barbershop and Akeelah and the Bee) as Jasmine. She‘s fresh and full of feeling, she convinces you she can play -- and she holds the screen like few younger actresses ever have. Despite myself, the film moved me -- and a lot of that was due to Palmer too. Never mind Pop Warner championships; she’ll be winning movie audiences for quite a while.



The Rocker Two stars
U.S.; Peter Cattaneo (Fox)

Rainn Wilson plays rock drummer Robert “Fish” Fishman, who was tossed out of a band that eventually became a super group; now his nephew, needing a drummer for his local school band, gives him a second chance. It sounds dumb and it is -- though the movie makers show some wit, give Wilson some lines and even have a part for ex-Beatle drummer Pete Best. (Ringo replaced him.) But despite some humor and a heroic effort by Wilson to be raunchy, clueless, lovable and cool all at the same time, The Rocker -- directed by Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty -- doesn’t rock the house. It’s entertaining only on the most obvious and shallow levels. Nice though to see The Office’s Wilson in a big, non-geeky role, where he can try to pull some Keith Moon rough-house licks.



Fly Me to the Moon Two stars
U.S.; Ben Stassen (Summit)

Spectacular 3D effects can’t redeem this feature cartoon film from a loony and slightly repellent premise: It’s about the adventures of several intrepid flies, who accompany Neil Armstrong and Co. on their historic moon shot and moon walk. These filmmakers unhappily go all the way: There are miniature fly space suits and evil Russian spy-flies trying to foil them. The voice actors include Tim Curry, Ed Begley, Jr., Trevir Gagnon, Nicolette Sheridan, and Buzz Aldrin (as himself), all buzzing away to little avail. And they don’t even give us Sinatra’s cover of the title song under the credits!




The House Bunny Two and a half stars
U.S.; Fred Wolf (Columbia)

This one looked predictably corny and awful -- a comedy from he “Legally Blonde“ writing team (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) about blond Playboy Mansion Hef-mate Shelly Darlingson (played by Anna Faris of the Scary Movie series) who supposedly gets kicked out of the Mansion as too old (she’s a venerable 27) -- though actually it’s through the machinations of a wicked housemate -- and ends up as a college sorority house mother for a housed full of lovable losers, wallflowers and misfits who’ve gotten themselves in an Animal House fix. They’re about to be decertified for lack of pledges, and they’re being sabotaged by the nastiest, snootiest, bitchiest sorority in town. Naturally, Shelly pops up, spiffs up the sorority gals and seems to save the day, proving that Marilyn Monroe and Reese Withertspoon weren’t the only “dumb blondes” who weren’t dumb, and that its dangerous to call somebody vapid when you probably don’t know what it means.

Surprise: this movie is very funny -- largely due to Faris, who manages, like MM, to be sexy, sweet and hilarious all at once. I loved her Exorcist voice and her sex appeal tutoring and, in general, she cracked me up continuously. The House Bunny has exactly the stuff you’d expect. It’s full of dopey things, and there’s a whole romantic subplot with Faris and Colin Hanks that makes little sense. But, like Mamma Mia, this is a movie that may make you smile and laugh despite yourself. An added bonus: The Playboy mansion scenes have cameos for Hef and his Gleesome Threesome -- from that surprisingly diverting reality TV show, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. Not as diverting, funny or charming as Anna Faris though. She’s a superbabe bunny and a half.



I.O.U.S.A Three stars
U.S.; Patrick Creadon

I.O.U.S.A. is another new kind of disaster movie in the An Inconvenient Truth mold -- one that substitutes charts and talking heads for natural or man-made catastrophes. But it’s no less a portrayal of a cataclysm: the descent of the United States into mind-boggling national debt and looming financial meltdown.

Among the witnesses here: Comptroller General David Walker, Concord Coalition exec Bob Bixby, moneyman Warren Buffet, ex treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and others. The revelation: another fine mess that Bush and his G. O. P. cronies have gotten us into -- partly though their obsession with tax cuts partly through Iraq spending sprees and partly through what seems sheer economic imbecility. They’re not the only culprits, or the only guilty party, however. And it seems obvious here that, as with climate change, something has to be done about it soon. Not as entertaining a film as director Creadon‘s crossword doc Wordplay, but maybe a crucial one.
 


Vicky Cristina Barcelona Three and a half stars
U.S.; Woody Allen (Weinstein/MGM)

A sunny, funny little romantic comedy from the much-dissed Woody Allen. From now on, will he have to exile himself from his movies to get lots of good reviews?

Like Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a movie in which Allen gives himself no speaking part, large or small, and that also doesn’t contain his usual trademarks. If you were a little lazy and he released this one unsigned, you might mistake it for the work of some other director -- maybe a combination of Eric Rohmer and Mike Nichols or Pedro Almodovar in a more hetero mood. Whatever your guess might be, it’s still a very good movie.

The stars of “Vicky“ -- a quadrangle romantic comedy set in Spain --are Javier Bardem as Juan Antonio (his filmmaker-uncle‘s name), a masterly painter/seducer; Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as Vicky and Cristina, two American pals, who fall under the spell of Juan Antonio; and Penelope Cruz as Juan‘s volatile ex-wife. None of them looks or talks like Woody (or Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow, for that matter) and neither does Chris Messina as Doug, Vicky‘s slightly doofus good-guy fiancé, who is the most Woody-ish character, with the most Woody-ish lines. Neither does the part that actually seems a no-brainer choice for Allen: the wry omniscient narrator, a role taken here by Christopher Evan Welch with a delivery that suggests John Cusack. Cusack would have been better; Woody better still.

Hall‘s Vicky and Johansson’s Cristina give us a fine complement of wired-tight and easy-going sexuality. Bardem continues his run of excellent performances, showing an effortless romantic comedy touch worthy of a Cary Grant, that should be exploited more often (but hopefully only by writers as good as Allen). Cruz, like Bardem, does a flashy bilingual role, alternating fire and honey. As for the production, the settings are gorgeous, the cinematography, by Almodovar collaborator Javier Aguirresarobe, is luminous. And even if Allen doesn’t show up on screen, his writing and direction are fully present and first rate.
 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASES

Recount Three and a half stars
U.S.; Jay Roach, 2008 (HBO)

One of the best dramatic movies about American electoral politics -- except, of course, it’s not fictional. The subject: the 2000 Florida vote recount in that year’s bitterly contested presidential election between “winner” George W. Bush and “loser” Al Gore -- which was finally decided by mere hundreds of votes, after an embattled series of machine and hand vote recounts and courtroom maneuvers. The perspectives: those of the two warring political teams: the determined Democrats spearheaded by Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey) and, more briefly, Warren Christopher (John Hurt) and the resourceful Republicans, led by James Baker (Tom Wilkinson) and Ben Ginsberg (Bob Balaban), with a tremendous assist from that supposed neutral official, Florida’s zany Secretary of State and Bush election chair Katherine Harris (Laura Dern).

The performances here are incredible -- especially Wilkinson’s smooth-talking Texas sharpie Baker, a near-perfect impersonation, and Dern’s priceless Harris, a figure, with quasi-vamp makeup and wildly flickering smile, right out of a classic ’30s screwball comedy. (Others in the super keen cast include Denis Leary as Michael Whouley, Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies, and, briefly the real Gore and Bush on TV). The movie follows the facts pretty closely and it would be silly not to. They support a story wilder, more startling, and funnier, than almost any fictional drama could be.

Recount also presents a finally sobering view of the pitfalls and perils of modern electoral politics. Ingeniously mixing staged scenes and TV archive footage, brilliantly written by Danny Strong and sharply directed by Jay Roach (whose comic touch proves just right) -- and executive produced by the late Sydney Pollack, who intended to direct it -- Recount is funnier than Pollack’s Tootsie and Roach’s Meet the Parents. As for the drama here: The best man, it seems. did win. He just didn’t have all his votes counted.
Extras: Commentary with Roach and Strong; conversations between actors Kevin Spacey and Bob Balaban and their real-life characters, Ron Klain and Ben Ginsberg; featurette; inside story on the 2000 election recalled by Strong and TV legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

CLASSIC RELEASE

Twenty-Four Eyes Four stars
Japan; Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954 (Criterion)

One of Japan’s most beloved films, and one of the country’s supreme tear-jerkers, is this great anti-war drama by writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita, with ‘60s Japanese superstar Hideko Takamine as Hisako Oishi, the lovely, smart and compassionate young elementary school teacher known affectionately by her first grade pupils as “Miss Pebble.” Kinoshita’s epic story, beginning in 1928 and stretching though to the ’50s, follows the fortunes of Miss Pebble and the 12 pupils (or 24 eyes) of her first class though the travails of life and the tragedies of World War II, all the more devastating for being shown indirectly, from the home front. The children believably grow and suffer convincing and sometimes shattering setbacks, and traumas. And so does Miss Pebble, a born teacher who has to cope not just with the grief and suppressions of wartime, but the prejudices of her bosses and coworkers. The ending breaks your heart.

Kinoshita is a great Japanese filmmaker who rarely gets his due here in America. But it’s a mistake to compare too closely to either Yasujiro Ozu -- who handles similar subjects -- or to Kinoshita’s friend and admiring colleague Akira Kurosawa, whose last film, 1993’s Madadayo, had a similar portrayal of teacher and pupils. Kinoshita, whose model here was Jean Renoir‘s The River, lacks Ozu‘s Buddhist serenity and Kurosawa‘s dynamism but makes up for it with a genuine connection to Japan’s culture and people that illuminates these wartime and postwar years with unique warmth and depth. Twenty-Four Eyes was one of the major hits of its era, and it became a success all over again, when it was remade, scene for scene from Kinoshita’s script, in the ‘80s. It was also the major Japanese movie award-winner of its year, winning the Kinema Jumpo “Best One” prize over a field that included Kurosawa‘s masterpiece Seven Samurai. They’re both great films on war, one from the viewpoint of the warrior; the other, movingly, from the twenty-six eyes of both soldiers and civilians. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Extras: Interview with critic/historian Tadao Sato, theatrical teasers, booklet with Audie Bock essay and interview with Kinoshita.

BOX SET

Popeye the Sailor, Vol. 2: 1938-40 Four stars
U.S.; Dave Fleischer, 1938-40 (Warner)

The second box set devoted to Paramount’s and the Fleischer brothers’ ineffable and wildly popular, super-tough, spinach-loving sailor -- along with his spider-thin bombshell Olive Oyl, hamburger-snarfing freeloader J. Wellington Wimpy and burly basso profundo rival/nemesis Bluto -- is another joyous romp through a lost classic childhood world of gritty, ethnic black-and white cartoonery. Among the popgems here: “Plumbing is a Pipe,” “The Jeep,” “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp” and that nonpareil nightmare “Goonland.”

As Popeye would say (or mutter) “I yam what I yam!” Amen and hurrah to that, sailor man.

Extras: Commentaries, popumentaries; Non-Popeye cartoons and shirt from the Fleischer/Paramount archives.

- Michael Wilmington
August 22, 2008

August 15: Tropic Thunder, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Henry Poole is Here, and Lola Montes
August 8: Pineapple Express, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hell Ride, and Brideshead Revisited
August 1: The Mummy 3, Swing Vote, Step Brothers, and X-Files
July 25: A Superhero Summer, American Teen and CSNY Deja Vu
July 17: The Dark Knight, Space Chimps, Mamma Mia!, Encounters At The End Of The World
July 10: Hellboy II: The Goilden Army ,Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kit Kittredge, Wanted, The Wackness, The Heartbeat Indicator, Monsieur Verdoux
July 3: Hancock, The Mother of Tears
June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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