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Reviews
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
A mediocre film that knows it could have been much better.
Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" is that rare piece of forgettable mediocrity not content with leaving the audience to guess how it could've been a better film. Instead, the movie chooses to one-up us by showing how it could be better in the first half. As played by Robert Downey, Jr., the Holmes in this film is an uncouth and scruffier detective than the ones we've seen in previous adaptations. Some might complain he no longer wears that ridiculous deerstalker hat or the fact that he never says, "Elementary, my dear Watson." That said, opening scenes are quite steeped in what really made Sherlock Holmes such a fascinating character his uncanny sense of deductive reasoning. Hot on the trail of a murderous cult leader named Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), he spots some hired muscle guarding a corridor. Then in an inventive sequence, we hear Holmes' inner monologue as he sizes up the goon's various weaknesses based on the way he walks. Meanwhile, Ritchie's ever-anxious camera gives a slowmo, telegraphed demonstration of how the fight will actually go down, followed by a sped-up version wherein Sherlock bests his foe with almost phantom speed and accuracy. A similar moment takes place later on during a hilarious boxing match, but then this approach is abandoned for the rest of the film. This is a real shame, as it was a lot more fun to watch than the mindless fisticuffs that punctuate the latter two-thirds like exclamation marks in used car lot ads. We get another great moment after Lord Blackwood is apprehended wherein Dr. Watson played by Jude Law who walks away with the entire show coaxes Holmes to leave his cluttered office for a change and meet him at a restaurant. Holmes obliges, arriving at the restaurant early only to lose his mind paying attention to the tiny physical details and tics he could use to identify every single person in the room. Again, this moment was a solid inclusion for a movie attempting to reinvent Sherlock Holmes for the Mountain Dew generation. If the good detective must become a scruffy action hero, at least let him be a thinking man's scruffy action hero. But then the movie ditches the point of view that powered the first act in favor of slap-happy double and triple crosses that make little sense in terms of both the characters and story, and worst of all, the film loses sight of Holmes. Oh, we still see him all right, but we're no longer inside his head as he investigates a mystery that points to Blackwood returning from the grave after being executed for his crimes and attempting to put his pagan cult in control over London. And when it comes to movie villains, Blackwood is more of the dumb James Bond variety. He might be brilliant enough to invent the first remote control biological weapon, but he bungles important details like loading his bombs with enough explosives to kill his enemies when they detonate them. According to the opening credits, "Sherlock Holmes" was scripted by three screenwriters Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg and while this is not unusual for a studio blockbuster, my hope is that the producers will realize which ones were responsible for the movie's best parts (i.e. the beginning) and rehire them alone to pen the inevitable sequel. The only praise I could give the trio of writers collectively for their Frankenscript is that they had the smarts not to make Sherlock's foes capable of actual magic. I spent much of the film dreading that this is what they were going to do. And while you can deprive the detective his hat and oft-quoted line, if you remove the logic as well, you might as well call it something else.
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
The Antithesis of "Beauty and the Beast" (and Seth Rogen Movies)
Conventional movie wisdom states that when a lonely man regardless of how loathsome, unkempt, or generally unattractive they might be meets an attractive woman, the two will fall in love by the end of the movie. This logic has appeared in movies like "Beauty and the Beast," "Edward Scissorhands," plus most of the movies that star Woody Allen and Seth Rogen.
All of this brings us to the British dramedy "Happy-Go-Lucky." Written and directed by Mike Leigh, the movie follows Poppy, played by actress Sally Hawkins, a lovely, effervescent, and seemingly care-free grade school teacher whose only regret when she discovers that someone stole her bicycle is that she didn't get a chance to bid her bike farewell.
Poppy spends her days hanging with her rowdy party-girl friends while looking for love in what seems to be a world filled with ugly and hateful men. One of these hateful men is Poppy's driving instructor, a fellow by the name of Scott. Scott seethes with rage, his upper row of teeth is beyond rotten, and even worse than that, he's something of a white supremacist.
As with the rest of the characters in the film, Poppy is constantly joking with Scott, and even flirts with him, though slightly. And while he has no reasonable way of expressing it, Scott starts to grow feelings for Poppy. Poppy on the other hand, sees Scott as an example of why she should take her job working with children seriously at times, especially when one of her male students begins to lash out with rage. By caring for this student, Poppy meets a social worker named Tim, played by Samuel Rokin.
For the most part, Tim is everything that Scott is not: friendly, caring, conventionally handsome plus he's one of the very few British people I know whose teeth will allow him to smile without irony.
There's no reason why Poppy should love the wretched Scott over the handsome Tim, and fortunately the movie is smart enough to realize this. While the movie certainly feels for Scott, who is caught in the cycle of responding to the unkindness of women by being unkind to them thus sparking even more unkindness from women it is simply not Poppy's responsibility to fix such an unlikable person.
Redacted (2007)
A work of bad film-making, plain and simple.
The Iraq War drama Redacted is the worst kind of 'controversial' film. What I mean to say is that it's a movie so poorly made and acted, that no one would have had any reason to see it or talk about it if all the right-wing pundits - many of whom never even saw the film - simply kept their mouths shut for a change.
Whether or not you agree with the politics of Redacted, it's a work of bad film-making, plain and simple. However, because these Fox News and radio personalities bashed the film on the air and in print, it has suddenly become a far more 'important' film than it had any right to be. Mark Cuban, the film's producer, wrote on his blog that Bill O' Reilly was his "new best friend." Now that I have seen the film, I think Cuban should buy O'Reilly some flowers and a gold watch, too.
Redacted is an entirely fictional faux-documentary based on the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings, wherein a group of U.S. soldiers raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, and killed her along with her younger sister and parents. In the fictional recreation, there are two soldiers who are directly involved in the assault. The two soldiers are played by actors Patrick Carroll and Daniel Stewart Sherman.
As characters, Carroll and Sherman's soldiers lack so much dimension, it's almost like the actors decided to play their characters at one speed: "villain." Their performances might have been passable as the bad guys in a cheap revenge movie from the 80's, but for a drama that demands to be taken seriously, it's very distracting. By the time we get to the rape scene, which should have been harrowing to watch, I was reduced to a state of apathy because of the duo's over-the-top performance and the exploitative manner in which it was shot.
Sherman's role as a soldier might very well be one of the greatest intentional casting blunders in film history, and I found him to be most distracting of all. The actor is too overweight to play a combat-ready soldier. This was obviously a cheap attempt by writer- director Brian DePalma to further demonize a character who was already bad enough because of his crimes, vulgarity and frequent racial slurs. On top of that, every time I saw Sherman on screen, I couldn't help thinking that the U.S. military would not deploy a soldier who could not run, and would be the least-challenging target for enemy snipers.
But what really hurts Redacted from the very beginning is its premise of pretending to be a multi-media collage culled from several video sources. These sources include Middle- Eastern news footage, scenes from a French documentary, internet videos and a video diary from a U.S. soldier among others. Strangely, despite the fact that these videos supposedly came from different sources, most of them look like they were shot by the same photographer using the same cameras. While DePalma might have been kind enough to include a caption at the bottom of the screen to let us know where each source came from, it's apparent the filmmaker did not master their visual textures, styles or even potential.
Comprising most of the film is the video diary, which is also the most vexing of the movie's sources. The Hispanic soldier recording it (Izzy Diaz) claims to be doing so because he wants to get into film school. However, his footage is too dumbed-down by amateur editing transitions to believe anyone who studied film today - and had any hope of continuing to do so in college - would have used them. More importantly, since the film was culled from various sources, why wouldn't the 'real-life documentarian,' who purportedly combined the various footage together, not edit out all the foolish mistakes himself? Just because Redacted is a 'fake' documentary does not excuse it from the same criteria we give actual documentaries as well as all films in general. There's also the highly-contrived manner in which the soldier records the assault. Knowing the offending soldiers would not let him carry a video camera to record such damning evidence, the soldier gets his hands on a hidden camera which he installs on his helmet and then somehow manages to capture high-quality video. Where did the camera come from? The mail? Better yet, how was the soldier able to pay for it?
Having made well-polished films like "Scarface," "Blow-Out" and "Carrie," DePalma has proved to be skilled at what he does. That said, he's obviously out of his element with Redacted. A young visionary director could have handled the movie's faux multi-media aspirations, but DePalma was simply too old to learn the new tricks a movie like this would have required. Redacted should have been raw, and yet it felt overwrought; it should have been a natural portrait of life on the warfront, and yet it was a shallow melodrama; more importantly, it should have hit my brain like a well-aimed needle of subversion, and yet it knocked me down like a claw-hammer to the skull.