Saint John of Las Vegas

Oh my gosh!  Funny, bizarre, and one to watch!  Not since Fargo (1996) has Buscemi been this good.  I mean he has been good in other movies, but this was a great vehicle for him and just the odd person he plays serves as a lightening rod for the other oddities in the cast.  Buscemi plays John, a compulsive gambler, who now has a stable job in an insurance company and is given his first fraud investigation case with the potential for advancement and a raise...provided he does well on this case. 

He is paired with Romany Malco who plays Virgil (an experienced investigator who has no time for John) and is just a killer mix of Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal of Shaft (2000) and Chris Tucker's portrayal of Carter in "Rush Hour" (1998).  The conflicts John runs into are not only with his partner but also within himself as the investigation takes them to Las Vegas where temptation becomes too great to resist.  Fortunately, this is not one of those movies in which an "on the wagon personality" falls off into a grave.

The script is just awesome, the directing is good, the cinematography is good, and the acting is consistent and done well.  A good one!

Farewell

Well written, well acted, well directed, well scripted but 'Oh well.'  With all the pluses, I find another film that was good while in it, but not one that I can emphatically say "you have to see this!"  Movies like this kick in places like the Sundance Film Festival and all of that, but I guess that I have to accept that I am not an artsty pootsy kind of guy.  Things that would be described as "Emotionally charged, delicious tension, beautifully portrayed, a gem, etc" scream to me, "boring, chick flick, oh God, run away!" Another thing, there has to be another category for actors that isn't A list or B list, but maybe AB.  Willem Dafoe and Fred Ward are good actors but will forever be known as "that Platoon (1986) guy" and "that Tremors (1990) guy."  They are talented so they can't be placed in a category with the campy crap acting B movie crowd, but after those two movies, neither of them has really had a starring role in any A movie block buster.

Okay, on to the movie.  A French engineer stationed in Russia and becomes the reluctant pipeline of info fed to him by a KGB agent who sees communism as a bad systesm and wants to speed it on its way out.  Now, I am not sure of whether this was based on actual events or not, but Ward's Reagan portrayal is pretty funny.  Sad, but funny.  So things go well with the info making its way to the West, yet as things go on, the engineer and his family starting getting uncomfortably deep.  This bugs me because he has kids and they are put in jeopardy...punk.  The Russian dude is screwed and comes across as a someone who is slowly committing suicide, but who doesn't have the courage to pull the trigger himself.  He is never there for his son, he is going to town on women other than his wife, he drinks too much, and he takes vaguely concealed risks which could get him caught at a moment's notice.  A moment does come up.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Hory Mory!  Awesome!  It has been a long time since I have been just stoked on a film and this is the one that did it.  In short, see it!  Now it ain't no family film as there is a lot of gun play, blood, but not to the level of a movie like "Saw" or something where you actually see blades and things slicing through people and their parts.  Nah, not that but a ton of action, comedy, and tension.  Awesome!

Self proclaimed as an Asian Western, it is.  As far as I can tell, the timeline is right before the beginning of World War II and somewhere along the border of China, Mongolia, and/or Korea.  Unbeknownst to each to each other, 3 men descend upon a train.  One (a Buster Keaton type funny dude thief) is after whatever, one (a sinister cross between Prince in "Purple Rain" and Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow) is after a treasure map, and the third is a bounty hunter (decked out in full on cowboy gear with a knarly Winchester Rifle) atop a horse and just loaded with riding and shooting skills who is after the first...initially.

Buster Keaton gets the map first, realizes what it is and goes after the treasure.  The only issue is that the other two are hot on his trail.  However, not only does he have those two to worry about, he also has to worry about the Mongol nomads who have caught wind of the map and want it, and he also has to worry about a contingent of the Japanese Army who see the treasure as being able to determine whether their conquest for world domination will succeed or fail.  Pretty soon everyone is chasing everyone and everyone is running from everyone.  Awesome.

Directing was great, the dialogue a funny mix of surfer and something, the acting was awesome, and cinematography rocked.  SEE THIS!

Holy Rollers

I am stuck in a bind here.  The dilemma is that movies like "Holly Rollers" are well directed, acted, scripted, shot, etc., but they are stories/subjects that are not that intriguing.   Where they really get hammered is that there are no special effects, crazy scenes, or whatever to help them get out of the shadow cast by poorly acted, terribly written movies that have huge budgets splorted on special effects, explosions, gory fights, action, T & A, etc.  Crimony, I bet more people saw 2005's "The Dukes of Hazard" than saw "Holy Rollers."  Now that is a shame.

As mentioned, the cinematography is great, the acting is great, the writing is great, and the directing was great, but it is like those stinking F-15 models I used to build as a kid: I spent hours and pushing my abilities into beautifully crafting and painting the jet engines, landing gear, etc. only to have encase and hide them in the fuselage never to be seen again.  There are too many other movie choices out there to select and watch.  I have to say, "pass on this one."

Ip Man

Hmm.  The salvation for this movie was that I had no little red envelopes sitting on the night stand awaiting my popping them open.  "Ip Man" was all I had.  Thank goodness.  The first 20 minutes of English voice over almost made this unbearable.  Cheese of the grandest scale was what I witnessed, but as I had no other discs to toss in the player, I soldiered on and am glad that I did.  This got better, much better. 

It is weird in how things attract other things.  WW II had just been finished with my watching "The Pacific" HBO series and then bam, this movie.  "Ip Man" follows (from what I read the following day) not too closely the life of Ip (Yip) Man.  At first I thought 'Ip' was an adjective of some sort and was thinking that like "Repo Man," which starred Emilio Estevez as an extraordinary repo man, the movie was going to follow the story of some dude who was really good at ipping...whatever ipping might be.  I digress.  So in following the life of Ip Man, we see the peaceful warrior hanging out in China through the invasion of the Japanese in WW II.  So there you go, another WW II movie and the law of attraction.

Ip Man is living the good life in China and is the dude in the village that no one can beat, but also a dude that does not go looking for fights.  No matter how much he works to avoid them, fights find him.  All good.  The Japanese come, hardship befalls, etc.

The directing is good, the story is good, the acting is good, and the cinematography is good as well.  The only goofer is that towards the beginning and end, there is Kanji (I think) that was not translated.  All good.  The visual and all makes it pretty easy to grasp what is going on.  As for a thumbs up or down, well, who knows, it was better than ok.

The Pacific: Discs 1-5 and Bonus Disc 6

Okay, I feel horrid here, but I have to be honest.  Stick with HBO's other series, "Band of Brothers."  This was a good series, but as soon as it started with the HBO choral of guys going "Ahhhhh" (for the HBO audio signature) my expectations rose and immediately and I was ready for a "Band of Brothers"-esque experience.  I did not get it.

There were key differences that kept me from getting as involved with this series as I did with "Band of Brothers."  It took a bit of reflection, but key was that "The Pacific" followed three story lines and the offshoots of each.  "Band" followed the 82nd Airborne and that was it.  The acting in "Band of Brothers" was better too and therefore made it easier to get emotionally into it and the characters.  In "The Pacific," no, I did not become attached to any of the characters. 

Okay, characters is perhaps the wrong term as the people followed in the series were real, but the series overall was just such a let down.  It is sad that this came after "Band of Brothers" which was an incredible series.  Perhaps, had this come before "Band of Brothers," I might have been more into it, but timing was against it.

The directing and cinematography were great, the story was, is, and always will be awesome, the plot, well, the plot is what is was: the invasion of the Pacific Islands and death crawl by the U.S. Marines toward Japan until its surrender.  The acting, well, it was not that good and that just might have been the real key as to why it was so hard to get as involved here as I did with "Band of Brothers."

I have to pan the movie for entertainment but recommend it on an historical level.  It can serve well as a companion to chapters you might read in a history book covering the Pacific Theater in WW II.  By itself, a history book with a handful of pictures is too sterile.  This series will force you to slow down and actually see/realize what the men of the U.S. Marine Corps endured and sacrificed so that we could have what we have today as Americans.

Frozen

Ahh, I don't know what to do with this one.  The thing that sticks with me the most is that this seemed like a film that straddled the "Made for TV" or "Theater" line.  After the first night of watching it, I almost thought of just packing in its little red sleeping bag and senidng it off to never never land. 

The reason I almost sent it back is because the storyline is a familiar one: A group of people is trapped with certain death awaiting should they do nothing.  So, one person at a time risks life and limb to escape, get help, and return for the rest.  The drama, tension, etc. is delivered through the viewer of the movie sticking with the remainder of the trapped group and (with them) wrestling with the conflict of, "Do we hang and keep faith that Johnny made it to safety and is coming back, or do we accept that he did not make it and risk another one of us trying to get out of this trap and going for safety?"  With this in store for me, I figured that I would not have the patience to sit through this line with the only twist being which of the victims would make it.  BUT!  I perservered and was not let down.

3 punks con their way onto a chair lift for free.  At the day's end, they finally move to the mahco slopes only to find the chair lift, because of heavy incoming weather, is shut down right as they get there.  They (for the second time) sleazily manipulate their way for one last run.  As they are the last trio, they are on their way to the top until, due to a change in chair operators, the lift stops and the entire mountain is shut down for the next 5 days until it opens the following Saturday.  Great, elevated 50 feet above ground in subzero weather for 5 days.  Hmm, will they make it?

The acting was okay, the script actually was not bad, the directing was okay, but the cinematography and score was cheese.  This is a movie that could/should be remade with a clear intent to be either an rated R film or puffy little Halmark Channel film.  For you my faithful readers, I would pass on this.