Huh. Here’s an in-star-only direct-to-video sequel to an in-name-only outright-to-video follow-up, produced by WWE Films, starring a pro wrestler, directed by an actor whose at most behind-the-camera experience has been in video receiver. And it’s musical darn good.
“Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia” follows the unbearably dull “Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil” in a franchise nobody really wanted, and that includes the makers of “Behind Opponent Lines.” But Tim Matheson, the warhorse actor who’s graduated to TV movies (plus the sporadic episode of “Burn Notice” and “Criminal Minds”), reveals a knack since handling quick-and-defile productions, which makes this effort from WWE - the changeless schmucks who gave you “The Condemned” and “The Marine” - a grimy divert, a B big that zips along nicely sufficient to thrill you with jam-packed demeanour sequences. “Colombia” has the ability of a rough 80s actioner, something along the lines of a Chuck Norris cheapie from the Golan-Globus gang, no more than slicker.
The coating opens with some documentary-style exposition on the Colombian subversive group FARC, although all you in point of fact need to know is that some people will demand to assassinate our heroes, and some compel not. To its credit, the screenplay (by rookie scribe Tobias Iaconis) cleverly avoids such clear distinctions; our main villain (Yancey Arias) is conflicted, torn between accepting peace and getting revenge. While it’s not the sort of character depth that makes high drama (our baddie’s primary motivations are clichéd and ham-fisted), it works here, providing an particularly layer of interest to the shoot-’em-up proceedings, especially in later scenes.
Our heroes for this chapter are a group of Navy SEALs, sent to do a little surveillance on what turns out to be an armistice appointment between Colombian soldiers and FARC leaders. Things go wrong, as they always essential in this typewrite of movie, with our villain leading his own faction in order to shake up the congenial convention. Two SEALs understand up dead, a third is captured, and it’s up to our heroes - Lt. Sean Macklin (Joe Manganiello, from “One Tree Hill”) and Chief Carter Holt (the impossibly named wrestling superstar “Mr. Kennedy”) - to rescue their consort and save the broad daylight, preferably by blowing up as much crap as imaginable.
In fact, in happening: in one panorama, the SEALs fill a buggy with manure (a ploy to trick the enemies’ thermal scopes and whatnot) before making it go all a-splodey. The whole shooting match goes all a-splodey here, and the things that don’t catch shot up to no motivation. But unlike the mindless action of “Axis of Evil,” the mindless action in “Colombia” is presented with a lively energy, while its two stars have a charisma that keeps things plowing winning nicely. It’s all arrogant goofiness, but it’s the chattels kind of proud goofiness.
There’s a subplot involving Keith David as the commander back in the States and the CIA goons (Matheson gives himself a accurate small role here) who consider as over the operation, saving go up against as regards the government. It’s all standard filler, existing scarcely to persuade us an extra villain to boo, but it does present some spellbinding ideas. “Colombia,” like “Axis of Evil,” is fetching much a sales pitch for the sake the military - it gloaming ends with a Keith David voiceover championing the spirit and honor of the American soldier, the same species of Keith David voiceover currently heard in countless recruitment commercials - but under consideration the dynamics of the quirk. Here’s a film that celebrates military control while criticizing civilian opposition. You Pentagon jerks rightful need to will us be, the movie seems to say. We dash Flotilla folks got this covered just forfeit without you.
Oh, but that’s just a side thought, one that probably makes “Colombia” appearance of far more complex than it really is. This isn’t a study in Washington politics or international diplomacy. It’s a sleek “Rambo” rip-off, plain and simple (very, exceedingly simple), a woman that’s built entirely to animate, with Brobdingnagian men and big explosions. There’s plenty of military prattle and bumper sticker bombast and even a few nifty yelp-outs to other, think twice skirmish flicks. As far as tremendous, dumb shoot-’em-ups go, “Colombia” makes for a surprisingly fun dated.
One of the most serious racial divides, in a nation that is being increasingly rent by these conflicts, is between African American and Jewish communities in the United States. While Raising the Heights is noble in taking aim at this schism, the closest it comes to conveying an understanding of the pools of pain growing in big city America will be found in its opening moments where we are greeted by reality-based footage of riots, death and mourning in the these communities. The film never builds on the sense of urgency we feel in these scenes.
Raising the Heights tells the parallel stories of Michael, a teenage African American with an artistic bent, and Judy, a Jewish 20-something television reporter frustrated by her bosses' unwillingness to let her tell stories of substance. However, instead of developing interesting characters through plausible dialogue and a complex storyline, writer/director Maxx Gottlieb has his characters deliver one lecture after another on racial injustice. While certainly accurate, these words would have more impact if they were spoken by characters we believe in and care about.
Gilbert Brown Jr's portrayal of the confused and sensitive Michael is a noteworthy debut, even if his character lacks motivation for his more dubious actions, such as helping a friend steal Judy's purse. The streets are a dark and dangerous place, and his peers are making a lot of easy money, but Michael appears determined and intelligent enough to rise above the temptations. Fia Perena as Judy Berkowitz strolls through this film with her lips turned downward in a permanent pout, failing to give us much reason to root for her.
For a film that intends to create empathy for characters caught in cultural conflict, we are given very little exposure to what makes each community's values and beliefs distinct. Compounding this problem is the filmmaker's need to push characters to the extreme, so we are given few interesting, complicated characters to guide us through this morally ambiguous terrain.
Still, there's something to admire in Raising the Heights, and that is Gottlieb's refusal to give up on his characters. Despite the desperation they must feel, and the seeming intractability of the forces that push their communities into conflict, Michael and Judy manage to achieve a mutual understanding and concern. The film does not escape into cynicism like many other films depicting the decay of America's inner city.
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The Visit
by Tim Cogshell
posted August 1, 2008 10:00 AM
Based on the play by Kosmond Russell, which is itself based on true events, "The Visit" is the story of at one man's search in compensation understanding. Alex Waters (Hill Harper) is a young staff from a middle-class black genre. His mother (a remarkably good Marla Gibbs, who's best bib known from TV's "The Jeffersons") is loving while his father (Billy Dee Williams; also noticeably good) is exacting and stoic. His older kin (Obba Babatunde of HBO's "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge") is a winning pedigree man who has continually loved his youthful brother. Up to this time Alex sits in brig, a drug addict convicted of a rape he may or may not have committed, his body ravaged by HIV. What happened? That's the question, and the filmmakers whack at to replication through visits made to Alex by his divided family, as well as a number of insightful sessions with his psychiatrist (Phylicia Rashad). Most poignant are the visits paid by a piece he knew in his youth (Rae Come to mind Chong) who took a similar path but somehow found her way home.
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There's enough material here for a very good short film; at feature length, however, it's a bit taxed. Still, there are some good performances and the material speaks to some powerful issues.
Starring Hill Harper, Obba Babatunde, Rae Dawn Chong, Billy Dee Williams, Marla Gibbs and Phylicia Rashad. Directed, written and produced by Jordan Walker-Pearlman. An Urbanworld release. Unrated. Running time: 123 min.
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Downbeat national journalist, Pierre Peders (Steve Buscemi) is frustrated when he is assigned to audience famous TV star Katya (Sienna Miller), of whom he knows nothing. The assessment begins badly when Katya arrives an hour late at the appointed restaurant and is offended by Peders’ total ignorance of her. When they commit the restaurant, a minor mistake in the taxi brings them together again - and things just go downhill from there, as they bicker and snarl at each other while revealing secrets that they not till hell freezes over intended to.
Allen’s quondam three films (Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose,The Purple Rose of Cairo) were reed, clever sketches fleshed out with characteristic one-liners. Here he returns to the province he knows best, Manhattan. Of the three sisters (this is very much Chekhov landscape), the youngest (Hershey) lives with a divine mentor (Von Sydow), an intellectual anchorite who rails against the iniquities of modern enlightenment. The mesial one (Wiest) is a frantic urban neurotic, forever borrowing money to stalk her latest occupation whim. And the eldest (Farrow) is patently the most reasonable, a successful actress and mother presiding over a warm family circle. All is not indeed, regardless; Farrow’s husband (Caine) is pursuing an affair with the youngest sister; sibling rivalry is rife. Wandering in and out of this extended dissection of family love animation is Allen himself, playing his cordial nebbish hypochondriac; when a medical crisis brings him uncomfortably close to death, he samples all the different religions, before turning to the Marx Brothers’ films as evidence that compulsion is to be enjoyed. It is an articulate, literate film, full of humanity and perception about its sometimes less-than-loveable characters, which nonetheless comes down on the side of the best things in life: the primacy of love and sensation, fitted hope, and the fragility of it all. It also returns to much of the jokes from his ‘early, funny’ films; Allen seems decisively to have inaugurate the proficiency to please not just everyone, but also himself. CPea.
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Topic as routine at the Bates motel as a loose nun with the same initials as Marion Crane triggers Norman first into a mental replay of the showerbath murder, then to a wagon trunk of mooncalf love. Satisfactory purpose to revive Norman’s taxidermy sideline, so that his real mum of Psycho II (an impostor, it transpires) is now stuffed and directing operations from upstairs just as Mother used to, ensuring that the seminar of true love is anything but courtly. Unluckily, the slashings be undergoing become distinctly déjà vu, and the plot is as plenary of holes as Janet Leigh’s corpse. As Norman, Perkins gives another hot exhibition of controlled hysteria, with the fetching hint of a macabre wink lurking in the background; but in his part as director (his debut), he sets too much store by Hitchcock’s Catholic apologists. Kicking off with a suicidal nun in a recreation of the belltower scene from Vertigo, he lumbers the film with some churchgoing ironies which distinctly get in the course of action. It’s not unenjoyable, but it isn’t half the pastiche that Psycho II was.
“Naked Lunch,” Williams S. Burroughs’s controversial 1959 unconventional, was a masterpiece about what he called “The Algebra of Require.” Its subject was heroin, and addiction in general, and no other author, before or since, has had greater firsthand knowledge of his material or used it to re-forge in such vivid, ant-crawling detail the plunge into the desirous deep of drugs.
The movie “Naked Lunch” is a different sort of masterpiece altogether. It’s not about drugs, per se, though it euphemistically dives into the universe of mind-altering substances as deeply and lustily as any movie in history. Drugs serve as the film’s background, its world, but not its substance. Adapted by David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of, among others, “Dead Ringers” and “The Fly,” the film isn’t a literal transcription of the novel at all; it’s more a fictional essay on Burroughs and the anxious birth of the novel. It’s a movie about a writer’s relationship to his work — and, as such, perhaps one of the most penetrating examinations of a writer’s processes ever made. Certainly it’s one of the strangest and most disturbing.
For Cronenberg, Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” served only as a jumping-off point. Sprinkled throughout are bits from other Burroughs books, particularly “Junky” and “Exterminator!,” all of which are folded in with incidents from Burroughs’s life. The film’s biographical details are more metaphorical than literal too, including Burroughs’s relationships with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, his accidental fatal shooting of his wife, Joan, and his encounters with Paul and Jane Bowles. When Cronenberg introduces his hero, Bill Lee (Peter Weller), it’s 1953 and Lee’s an exterminator slaughtering roaches and centipedes in New York with a pump canister of yellow bug powder. At this point Lee is not a writer, at least not like his friends Hank and Martin (Nicholas Campbell and Michael Zelniker), who are modeled on Kerouac and Ginsberg and struggling to get into print. He is, however, a pungent rhetorician. “Exterminate all rational thought,” he says, adding his two cents to the literary babble between his friends.
The line is not idly dropped, either by the character or the director; it points the way for what is to come. When Lee returns home, he finds his wife, Joan Lee (Judy Davis), with a hypodermic stuck in her breast — a hypo filled with bug powder. Yes, she admits, looking at him with coal-circled eyes, she has something of a habit, which also explains why he’s been coming up short on his jobs.
Afraid of losing his gig, Lee visits a mysterious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who says Joan can kick the bug stuff if Lee cuts it first with a vile-smelling black powder he’s extracted from the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. But before Lee can test the effectiveness of Benway’s concoction on Joan, he tries it himself, and, still woozy from his injection, informs his wife that it’s about time for them to show Martin their “William Tell routine.” Obligingly, Joan puts a drinking glass on her head and Lee blithely pulls out a revolver and shoots, leaving a ruby-red dot on her forehead.
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Joan’s death puts the cops on Lee’s tail, forcing him to travel as a spy to a kind of fantastical Casablanca called Interzone. Burroughs has said that his wife’s death was a pivotal moment in his life, and Cronenberg takes him at his word. He uses the incident as the event that catalyzes Lee’s metamorphosis into a full-fledged addict and a writer. Following the instructions of a bony, greenish reptile called a Mugwump, he begins filing reports from Interzone on his trusty Clark Nova, a portable typewriter that, while Lee is working, transforms into a buggy creature that talks out of a sphincterlike opening beneath its wings.
There is, of course, no such place as Interzone; it, the Mugwumps and the pestilent writing machines are all figments of Lee’s drug-fevered imagination. And the dispatches he files from this hallucinatory nether realm are actually the raw stuff of what would eventually become “Naked Lunch.” In his novel, Burroughs showed that he was both a descendant of Swift and the paterfamilias to cyper-punk futurists such as William Gibson. And Cronenberg manages to capture the paranoid social satirist and the science fiction writer in Burroughs. Visually, the director has tilted the balance more toward the latter, though it’s the grungy future-of-the-past we see, some surrealistic dimension where deranged junkie fantasy and emotional reality intersect. The way Cronenberg presents it, the story seems to slide out of some mutant polyp of roach brain in Lee’s skull. It’s a movie full of perverse longings, oozing fluids and raunchy physical detail — a film constructed out of a genuine revulsion for the body, where the simple sight of human flesh is nearly enough to turn your stomach. It’s a truly excremental movie, in the purest Freudian sense.
What’s amazing, though, is that we feel as comfortable with the terrain as we do. The reason for this, I think, is that we remain connected to the sane part of the Lee character, the part that realizes that his hallucinated alternate reality is a product of his drug-induced virus and that stays detached enough to take notes on the experience. This is the result of both the cool clinicism of Cronenberg’s direction and Weller’s droll, atonal performance. Dressed in his proper, anti-hipster suits and ties, he gives a perfect approximation of Burroughs’s secret-agent style; he’s an invisible man, without definite gender or sexual inclination, and so bland that he fades instantly into the squalid woodwork, so suavely Somatized that his reactions seem to register only after an eternity, as if they’ve made their way to the surface in slow motion from the bottom of the sea. Weller’s comatose portrayal is stocked with hilarious detail; it’s a wonderfully deadpan piece of acting, tense, precise and painfully still. And Cronenberg positions it beautifully in counterpoint to the outrageousness of the imagined world around him.
Cronenberg hasn’t always been as skilled with his actors; in past films they’ve often seemed lost, overshadowed by the graphic design of the work. Everyone in the cast here, though, is superb, particularly Davis in the dual role of Lee’s wife, Joan, and Joan Frost, another writer and Mugwump-juice junkie (a character based on Jane Bowles) whom he meets in Interzone. Davis shows a different side of her cyclonic talent here; she’s a burnout, with a world-weary sag to her features, and whenever she’s in front of the camera a gaping, wounded hole seems to open up on the screen. She’s not around much, but she leaves you wishing there were more of her character.
There’s a synergistic overlap here between Cronenberg’s own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs’s; they’re both twisted in ways that complement each other nicely. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that the aspects of Burroughs’s work many believed unfilmable still resist visualization. What had seemed unthinkably subversive on the page seems slightly literal-minded, and somehow tamer, on screen. Still, it’s a dank, genuinely sick trip into the dark, rancid basement of the writer’s mind — a fitting homage to the labors of a true original.
“Naked Lunch” is rated R for nearly everything imaginable.
There is a incontrovertible uniformity to the B-Westerns of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and other singing cowboys. But it was a comforting uniformity all the same. The noxious guys would lose, the good guy would defeat insurmountable odds, and much of the dilly-dally no a woman would even leak out killed. The rancher’s daughter would be a little romanced by the hero, but his realistic love would be his Wonder Horse.
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These conventions and more are given a gentle ribbing in this concept comedy from 1985. The unfortunate whosis is that few members of the audience would still remember the Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, making it a circumstances of having to simplify the joke half the time. But those OK-steeped in the teachings of these singing cowboy movies will unearth certainly a lot to parallel to in this illustrate.
The central conceit is to conjecture what strength happen if singing cowboy Rex O’Herlihan (Tom Berenger), fictional star of 52 B-westerns, were to find himself in such a flick picture show, were they quietly being made in 1985. On coming to the town of Oakwood Estates (and shifting from malicious-and-whitish full-frame photography to fecund widescreen color in the process), Rex finds himself disoriented by bad guys who discharge to her misery instead of a moment ago shooting guns old hat of hands. The village bombed out of one’s mind, Peter (G.W. Bailey), sees an easy touch and appoints himself Rex’s sidekick. But some things never interchange, feel attracted to rancher Col. Ticonderoga (Andy Griffith) who wants to buy off up all the alight in the valley, and the railroad colonel (Fernando Rey) who will end at nothing to strain his tracks. And of progression, Col. Ticonderoga’s daughter (Sela Ward) is out of one’s gourd relating to Rex, as is the hooker with a will of gold, Forgo Tracy (Marilu Henner).
Berenger plays the lead position absolutely horizontal, with a frequently unmoving air ignoring all the incongruous activities around him. His deadpan treatment makes the comedy of the juxtapositions of modern and 1940s sensibilities all the more amusing. Ticonderoga’s idiot henchmen take under one’s wing some stooge-like comedy to boot. But fans of the genre over the years will smoke profusion of hilarity in the concept, especially in the turning point-on conflict of the classic Western with the Spaghetti Western. The timing of the visualize was certainly unfortunate, being that the category was pretty fairly inert by the ease it was released, but for those with the where one is coming from of both the past and modern approaches, there’s a grouping of humor here.
There are a pair unneeded drug references and Griffith assumes a fairly annoying dandyish behaviour that is apparently intended to be funny, but on the whole this ended up being much better than I had ever expected. It moves briskly to a slightly surprising conclusion. But Rex still loves the Wonder Horse best.
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“The Apple” mixes fact and fiction as it explores the shocking, sad
story of an impoverished and devoutly religious old man in a suburb of
Tehran who, with his blind wife, kept his twin daughters locked up at home
the first 12 years of their lives.
Widely reported in the media, the pitiful family situation — uncovered
when neighbors complained to social service agencies — stirred furious
debate in Iran. Some saw it as a
national scandal that exposed gender inequality in the Muslim culture. Boys,
for example, are allowed to play freely in the streets, but girls are not.
There is a determined polemical side to “The Apple” that is convincing
and compelling. But young director Makhmalbaf, though skilled and bold with
the camera, weakens
her case by blurring the lines between documentary and narrative in this
disturbing look at a heart-wrenching situation.
The film, while unscripted, is actually a kind of re-enactment staged for
the camera. It features the real-
life father, his shy and seemingly bewildered daughters, his scornful wife
and a solicitous social worker who tries to set things right. Veracity is
undermined by the very idea that the subjects somehow are actors in their
own story — and yet “The Apple” is still quite touching.
Makhmalbaf uses this painful case as a metaphor for the way women are
treated in Iran. But the family situation is so specific and seemingly
isolated — blind wife, twin daughters — that taking it as a larger comment
requires a leap many viewers will find tricky.
Ernest Viera