Category: Movie Dramas (Page 7 of 188)

Wild Rovers

March 17, 2011 /

This nearly forgotten 1971 western drama from the late Blake Edwards was reportedly butchered by MGM, but eventually restored to road-show length by the director and is now available via the Warner Archives. “Wild Rovers” stars craggy William Holden and fresh-faced Ryan O’Neal as a pair of cross-generational buddies who have come to recognize why mommas shouldn’t let their babies grow up to be cowboys. Their not-smart solution: become wealthy bank robbers. The likelihood of tragedy grows even greater when their rancher boss (Karl Malden) sends out his loutish sons (Tom Skerritt and Joe Don Baker) in hot pursuit of the men who looted his payroll.

Edwards was a master of sorts, but on his first western as a director he tries much too hard to both pay homage to and outdo the competition. We have Howard Hawks-like dialogue scenes that go on forever, epic vistas shot in John Ford’s Monument Valley, and a few lifts from Sam Peckinpah. Blood squibs go off and characters writhe in slow motion a la “The Wild Bunch”; a lyrical montage about breaking a wild horse goes on and on like an outtake from “Major Dundee” or “The Ballad of Cable Hogue.” Considering the presence of “Wild Bunch” star William Holden and Edwards’ tendency to gentle wit, it’s impossible not to make the doubtless often repeated quip describing “Rovers” as “The Mild Bunch.” The problem, however, is not too much copying or excess affability, but Edwards’ undisciplined screenplay. It leaves an outstanding cast, and one of Jerry Goldsmith’s best scores, twisting in the wind like a horse thief on the end of a rope.

Click to buy “Wild Rovers”

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Groupon: Hollywood’s new money launderer?

March 16, 2011 /

We’re still trying to wrap our heads around this one. A “Super Groupon” appeared in our inbox this afternoon, offering tickets to Matthew McConaughey’s upcoming legal thriller “The Lincoln Lawyer” (which is not being screened for the majority of critics) for six bucks. The fine print: the ticket must be purchased through Fandango. This is a nifty way to promote a movie, but it also raises some questions.

lincoln lawyer

“How much did you pay to see my movie? HOW MUCH, damn it?”

What is Fandango’s surcharge for this transaction?

Groupon recently ran into trouble when they ran a deal with FTD Flowers, and FTD turned right around and raised their prices for Groupon customers only. Groupon eventually made good on FTD’s bait-and-switch – and surely bitch slapped FTD back to the Stone Age for their truculent ways – but what is Fandango going to charge for “processing” these orders? A buck? two bucks? Not really much of a deal once you factor in surcharges.

That’s the lesser of our concerns, though, by far.

How will Lionsgate report the sale of these tickets?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Groupon sells one million tickets to “The Lincoln Lawyer” through this promotion. Groupon has a 50/50 sharing policy with their clients, which means that Lionsgate would net $3 million from the deal. However, those are a million potential full-price tickets that they just sold, meaning that, with the national average at $8.00 per ticket, they could report that those tickets were the equivalent of $8 million in receipts, giving them a much better than expected opening weekend, which as we all know is the true worth of a movie these days. Later, when the movie has run its course in the theaters, they can cook the books, if necessary – after all, they might actually make that money back once that bloated opening weekend total hits the wire – when the movie ships to DVD and VOD. Call us suspicious, but it looks as though Groupon just inadvertently created an elaborate shell game that will allow every studio to goose the profits of any movie tracking below expectations.

Why do we get the sense that there is nothing about this Groupon that is meant to benefit the consumer?

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SXSW 2011: Surrogate Valentine

March 12, 2011 /

“Surrogate Valentine” isn’t the first movie about the life of a struggling musician, and it probably won’t be the last, but while there’s nothing particularly special about Dave Boyle’s latest film, it has an undeniably sweet quality to it that ultimately wins you over. San Francisco-based musician Goh Nakamura stars as himself, a soft-spoken singer-songwriter who’s barely scraping by when he reluctantly agrees to teach TV actor Danny Turner (Chadd Stoops) how to play guitar for an upcoming movie role. After all, he could use the cash. But when the two embark on a road trip to Seattle for an upcoming gig, Goh discovers that the movie in question is suspiciously similar to his own life – only this time, he might actually end up with the girl (Lynn Chen) he’s been chasing all these years.

surrogate_valentine

Despite having no previous acting experience, Nakamura delivers a surprisingly solid performance that is both natural and charming. Granted, there’s no real acting involved when you’re playing yourself, but he still makes his co-star look like an amateur in comparison. Though Danny is supposed to be a bad actor, Stoops is so dreadful even when he’s not purposefully hamming it up that it stops the film dead in its tracks every time he’s on screen. The chemistry between Nakamura and Chen is much stronger, and it’s hard not to wonder how much better the movie could have been if Boyle had focused more on their relationship than the one between Goh and Danny. “Surrogate Valentine” is still mostly enjoyable thanks to Nakamura’s involvement, but at a lean 75 minutes, there’s no reason that Boyle couldn’t have dug a little deeper into his subject’s life.

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Thelma and Louise

March 9, 2011 /

Considering the controversy that surrounded its initial release, an action-packed plot line involving impulsive crime and platonic love-on-the-run, and its iconic ending, “Thelma and Louise” once seemed well on its way to the status of a genre-creating classic along the lines of “Bonnie and Clyde.” Today, it plays like a glossier, more sentimental, and politically charged variation on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but there’s nothing wrong with that. Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, the story is as simple as any western. Tightly-wound waitress Thelma (Susan Sarandon) and too-sweet housewife Louise (Geena Davis) hit the road, ducking her ridiculously chauvinist husband (Christopher McDonald). Their plans for a relaxing fishing vacation die alongside a probable serial rapist (Timothy Carhart) who is impulsively murdered by Thelma after attacking Louise. In no time, the two women are playing cross-country cat-and-mouse with a sympathetic police detective (Harvey Keitel), surviving via some help from Thelma’s smitten boyfriend (Michael Madsen) and armed robbery.

Khouri’s Oscar-winning screenplay feels slightly glib, though its humor, emotion, and some moral complexity remain. Scott’s showy, ultra-confident direction looks great on MGM’s 20th anniversary Blu-ray and involves the usual barrels of ersatz rainwater and a shot of Thelma applying make-up at a crowded ladies’ room mirror that was copied three years later by a famed admirer of Scott in “Pulp Fiction.” Still, it’s Sarandon’s and Davis’ show. When they hold hands at the end as they make their final leap of faith, we’ve got to kind of love these two women and believe they love each other, and we do.

Click to buy “Thelma and Louise”

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Mesrine: Killer Instinct

March 1, 2011 /

Having never heard of Jacques Mesrine prior to watching the first film in director Jean-Francois Richet’s two-part epic on the real-life French gangster, it seemed a little presumptuous that his story was so fascinating that it warranted being stretched across two movies. As “Killer Instinct” demonstrates, Mesrine certainly led the kind of storied criminal career that makes for an entertaining gangster tale, but the film is so disjointed that you’ll wish Richet would have just cherry-picked the best moments to create a more focused biopic. After opening with a cool and cleverly edited introduction that teases Mesrine’s eventual demise, the film tracks back to the beginning of the story to show how he got there, including his time as a soldier stationed in Algeria, his early years as a petty thief under the guidance of a ruthless crime boss (Gerard Depardieu), and his incredible prison break from a maximum-security penitentiary in Canada.

It’s a lot of information to cram into two hours – especially when you consider he has three different romantic relationships that all played a role in shaping the man he would become, even if one of them seems to blossom out of thin air. And then there’s the fact that this is only half of the story, with the second part, titled “Public Enemy No. 1,” scheduled for release next month. “Killer Instinct” is definitely captivating enough that you’ll want to see what happens next, but it also feels like a cheap trick to get you to pay twice for what ultimately should have been one movie. It’s not quite good enough to rank among the best gangster films, but thanks to Vincent Cassel’s career-best performance as the title character, it’s one that fans of the genre will want to add to their Netflix queues immediately.

Click to buy “Mesrine: First Instinct”

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