Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
With the aptly titled Cocaine Bear, there is indeed a bear who is on cocaine. If that’s all you’re looking for from a movie like Cocaine Bear – a bear on cocaine who attacks humans – I guess this ought to satisfy those bare minimum requirements. If however you’re looking for things like three-dimensional characters, well-written bits, or even basic movie logic, you’ll find Elizabeth Banks’ film pretty, well, barren. Read More
“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony Soprano once remarked around a table of champagne, lobster shells, Paulie Walnuts, and some one-night-only broads. Despite his seeming disdain for callbacks to the good ole days, Tony Soprano remained a man often ruled by nostalgia. His admiration for the Gary Cooper generation, the strong silent type who took their licks quietly, informed the impending storm of dread that drove him repeatedly to the therapist’s chair. Whatever the New Jersey mafia had become under his watch, it surely couldn’t measure up to the hay days of the shy guys of his father’s generation. Read More
Kill the Messenger is a magic bullet meant to assassinate – or at least tarnish – the reputation of the CIA for their uber illegal association with Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Their anti-communist war effort was funded in part by *gulp* distributing crack cocaine to Central LA ghettos, a network Webb contends the CIA was complicit – or at least complacent – in facilitating. And like the projectile from any effective firearm, the path it travels is straight and narrow. Lead Jeremy Renner is monstrous good as big-in-his-britches San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, an ambitious journalist who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong and ends up getting stung by the barbs of a well executed smear campaign, but director Michael Cuesta never lets the work truly take off. It’s a competent, A-to-Z biographical picture that misses the moments to really get in the head of a man pushed to the brink or elevate his tale into a thing of true artistry.
Cuestra spends the first half of the movie setting up Webb’s pending investigation and eventual damning story “Dark Alliance” that would win him the Bay Area Journalist of the Year Award, a celebration that lacked the fanfare he had once envisioned. Stumbling upon the trail without meaning to, Webb (Renner) is tipped off about a local drug kingpin with ties of the CIA. Upon digging into the shadowy association, Webb begins to connect dots that go deeper than he could have ever imagined and proposes that in order to wage an anti-Communist war that Congress had already voted against, Reagan and his inner circle conspired to fund the Nicaraguan Contras by knowingly allowing cocaine to be smuggled into the US and sold without penalty in underprivileged neighborhoods. According to Webb, this significantly worsened the crack cocaine problem that had become pandemic in African American communities in the 1980s.
Racing to find proof of this heinous allegations, Webb leaves behind wife Sue (Rosemarie DeWitt) and children to solidify sources in the thick of Central America. Not surprisingly, few officials are wont to rush forward and those that do aren’t necessarily in great standing (being drug dealers, slimy bankers or others involved in the black market lifestyle.) Upon publication of Webb’s record-setting article, outrage explodes across African American communities and general populations equally, until the spotlight is turned on Webb by a CIA scurrying to discredit everything about the man.
With a background in political slowburners like Homeland and Elementary and bloodlusters like Dexter and True Blood, Cuesta understands storytelling but has not adapted his style from the small screen to the big one perfectly. To get the bulk of the narrative onscreen, he’s simplified events done to the meat and potatoes version. We hit on each major point like SparkNotes, never really getting the time to dive into the intricacies that make everything so compelling. At just under two hours, it either feels too short or two long. An HBO miniseries would likely have been a better avenue. Without Renner’s captivating turn as Webb, the story would feel too much like a moving document; the cold hard facts of a national outrage turned media circus.
But in a time where the US has seemed as internally adversarial as ever (look at the recent outcry at Ferguson and prevailing Us vs. Them mindset of nationwide citizens and police forces), Cuesta’s telling of Webb’s story is worth remembering for the cold hard facts alone. Since his death – two gunshots to the head, deemed a suicide – Webb’s allegedly falsified charges against the CIA had been vindicated. While his controversial point ended up proven to be true, he wasn’t there to see his day of salvation. And this is the most important story of all: truth being met with brutality and the ease of which such can be covered up with the wave of a wand. Cuesta goes to show how the mere mention of conspiracy can sometimes be enough to transform an expert newsman into a theorist crackpot. That’s the tale here: man finds conspiracy, man validates conspiracy and man goes down in flames for it. It’s the equivalent of Loose Change confirmed ten years from now. Definitive proof that the moon landing was a hoax.
And yet for all the controversy Webb’s story whipped up, the end result is a man lying penniless in a hotel room with two bullets in his skull. Years later, official validation of Webb’s controversial story came and went like a summer breeze. The hive mind of Americana had moved onto a new scandal. Oval office blow jobs triumphed over one of the most damning government cover ups of all time. This is the story that Cuestra should have been telling, not something to leave until an end credits stinger.
A living reminder of our government’s readiness to desecrate an individual in order to escape ownership of past crimes, Kill the Messenger is a wake up call for a slacktivism-obsessed generation of American citizens. It’s a film about caged justice, about evil actually prevailing and the lengths to which our once great nation will go to validate each and every transgression of their past.
The picture this paints is not a pretty one. It’s one of deception distributed wholesale, of a blindly lead populace, of a mastermind behind the curtain pulling levers and blowing smoke to scare people into submission. Were the meek to inherit the Earth, we’d have a nation owed many inheritances. And the most frightening aspect of all is that the one behind the curtain is seemingly calling the shots unchecked. America the Great is as desperate, deranged and unpredictable as Oz. The fungus of corruption has infected her immune system. Nothing is left untarnished.
If she were a best friend, you’d send her kicking and screaming to a mental institution for delusions of granduer. If they were your employee, you’d fire them for flagrant misconduct. As a governing body that represents the will of 300 plus million people, truth, integrity and basic human values – the pillars upon which a nation should stand – have been relegated to the lowest wrung of the totem pole. The right to life, liberty and happiness comes with a big, blaring asterisk. The sad truth, when one man’s honest zeal is pitted against the reputation of one of the secret-coveting countries in the world, you better believe he’s going down in flames. This is the ugly picture that Kill the Messenger paints and the million discussions it will warrant afterwards. Though deceptively straightforward in its telling, it’s the aftermath of Michael Cuestra‘s film that should matter most.
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An argument could be made that Sin City: A Dame to Kill For isn’t really a movie. There’s no real story to speak of, and what does try to pass as a story is a shambled mess of ultra-violent non-sequiturs; a collage of half-thought through ideas that never add up or mean anything in the context of one another. A movie flows through a collective of ideas adding onto one another to create a cohesive narrative. This is like someone cut up a bunch of comic books and glued their favorite parts together. And that someone is 12 and loves blood and boobies.
Nine years ago, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller were truly onto something with Sin City. Their electrifying visual palette – stark blacks-and-whites accented by flourishes of blood red and bastard yellow – wasn’t just a new ballgame. It was a whole damn other stadium. But for all the success and acclaim their co-directorial debut received, the aesthetic trend never caught on.
Be that because Miller nosedived that visual flair into the ground with the widely panned The Spirit or because it felt like an aesthetic signature that only worked for something so rooted in the comic world and violence is unclear. What is however abundantly clear is that in the nearly 10 years since the original’s release, the largely black-and-white, entirely CG graphics have stagnated and soured. Their visuals do look straight from the pages of a hardcover graphic novel but they also lack any consequence and any gravity. Each blow is goofily powerless. Each sword strike looks like it missed. The over-seasoned and thoroughly mannered dialogue do little to convince us otherwise. But they sure do try.
This wouldn’t be such a monumental problem if the whole movie wasn’t a symphony of slamming cars, chopping off heads and getting thrown through pane glass windows. And boobies. For all intents and purposes, Miller’s sparsely imaginative storylines boil down to poor plot devices that get someone’s face from point A to point Through a Glass Window. That is intention numbers one through five. Six through ten consist of getting a dame from point A to point Naked. Seriously, if you can prove to me that this movie wasn’t one long con to reunite Jessica Alba with a stripper pole, I’ll pay your ticket price.
The craziest part is, for all the excessive nudity smeared throughout the flick, none comes from Alba’s Nancy, a stripper who spends the majority of her screen time onstage slapping flesh on hardwood and slithering around on all fours. You see, the boob award goes to Eva Green and her magnificent tata’s. That sex-kitten/minx manages to expose her simply awesome breasts for 90% of the time she occupies the space. When she’s not flipping nude into a pool, rubbing and tubbing up her silky smooth breastoids or macking out with anything with a pair of lips, she’s slipping off her garnets like they’re made of live rattlesnakes. Seriously. Chick lives in the buff. Why she doesn’t work at the strip club is beyond me.
At said Strip Club – Sin City‘s equivalent of Friend‘s Central Perk – one can stumble upon rapscallions of all shapes and sizes. Here, Alba gyrates like a made-up mechanical bull as box-faced Marv (Mickey Rourke) and other scalawags drown their sorrows in booze, taking in fully-clothed Coyote Ugly shows. I swear, Kadie’s Strip Club is the only place in the movie you won’t find a naked lass’ ass.
Here at Kadie’s, the movie reveals itself for the big show of sexy, stylized, senseless smut that it is. Here, plot lines are born and die without a smidgeon of fanfare. Here, characters rub elbows like they live in a small town of 2,000 residents. Here, lives the deus ex machina that is Marv, an individual whose sole purpose is to help characters murder other characters. He’s more MacGuffin than person, more meat than man. He’s only there to get peps out of a fix but has no storyline of his own. I guess someone out there needed to cut Mickey Rourke a paycheck.
Characters slither in and out of Kadie’s to grab their few minutes in the sun and bump uglies with the charter of vixens sprawling indoors. Joseph Gordon Levvett is compelling as a smooth-talking gambler but his plot line goes absolutely nowhere real fast. Alba, reeling from the loss of loved one Hartigan (Bruce Willis), eventually goes through a wardrobe change supposed to signal character progression but none is emotionally present. She goes from whoring herself with dangerous men to hurling herself at dangerous men and then all of a sudden the screen goes black. Nothing really happens. Just lots of murder and titties.
In the most movie-like portion of the film, Josh Brolin steps in for Clive Owen and captures the only almost-fully formed story of the bunch. However, his saga is littered with major congruency issues and logic problems of its own, the least of which is why he seems to believe that suiting up with a bad wig will make him look like an entirely new person. You scratch your head that someone actually wrote this stuff down.
For my barrage of complaints, it wouldn’t be fair to say that I hated Sin City: A Dame to Kill For because I quite honestly didn’t. I enjoy the ultra-violent, ultra-silly take on film noir. I chuckle at the trumped-up performances, meretricious violence and graphic sexuality on neon-flashing display. I gobble up the stubborn dedication to bring a comic book to life. But to claim that it’s not a bad, unnecessary, boorish slouch of a film would be a bold-faced lie. There’s little here that makes sense and nothing that will add to your understanding of Frank Miller‘s should-be compelling world of sin. Like 300: Rise of an Empire before it, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is just another chance for Frank Miller to show off how poor he is at extending franchises.
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