As most people know, Joe Strummer died last week. With the passing of Strummer, Jam Master Jay, John Entwhistle, Ted Williams, James Coburn, Richard Harris it’s been a brutal year for genius.

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When Gangs of New York was first announced, it seemed like such a slam dunk. Martin Scorsese and massive amounts of street violence are such the perfect pair that I couldn’t imagine this movie being bad. Still, the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz made me cock an eyebrow, and when the rumors started swirling about Harvey Weinstein throwing his weight around and asking for different cuts of the film, I pretty much lowered all my expectations. The mixed reviews for the film didn’t really help.

After actually seeing the movie (something I generally recommend doing before actually talking about the film), I was surprised to find one of the best pictures of the year. Set in Civil War era New York, Gangs of New York is about … well… the Gangs of New York. Specifically, the gangs are the “native” tribes of William “The Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis) and the “invading hordes” of immigrant Irish.

The movie starts with a massive bloodbath at the Five Points, where Cutting kills Priest Vallon, leader of the Dead Rabbits while Vallon’s young son Amsterdam (DiCaprio) looks on. It flashes forward and then settles into a Dumas-like revenge story about how Amsterdam grows up aching to murder the Butcher. The main plot line is fairly straightforward, but well done and very well acted. Lewis has a field day with his character and is a lock for award nominations. Cameron Diaz and DiCaprio both shed their polished charm for something earthier and pull it off well. Diaz, in particular, surprised me. Without falling back on ditzy charm or random ass-shaking, she was able to remain interesting and watchable, although not really spectacular. John C. Reilly, Brendan Gleason and Liam Neeson all turn in fine work in smaller roles.

What really takes Gangs to another level is the amount of fine historical detail Scorsese has woven into the film. The history of the place is very much part of the plot, and lets Scorsese address more than his basic characters. He gets to dip into the class structures and politics of the era, and creates a rich environment for his story to take place. This is helped by some really magnificent production, including a full size replica of the Five Points built on a studio lot in Italy.

When the tagline says “America Was Built in the Streets,” they aren’t kidding. As much as the commercials push this as a revenge film with a love triangle, it is more about our nation being built on blood, crime and exploitation. He gets to address the nation and its corruption while simultaneously getting to explore the honor and code of the street rabble.

So, yeah, Martin Scorsese and street violence. Why did I ever doubt this?

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So after a year of listening to people babble on and on about the first film, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy finally continues on with The Two Towers. I really liked the first movie, despite not being a huge fan of the books (granted, I haven’t read them in almost a decade). It condensed the sprawling book into a blend of good action and fun character work, while maintaining the grandiose scope and epic worldbuilding of the Tolkien originals. Peter Jackson’s always been one of my favorites, and with this trilogy he’s jumped from being one of the world’s most underrated directors to being one it’s premiere names.

So how’s the second chapter? It’s pretty good. It didn’t really blow me away like the first one, but I don’t think that’s surprising. The world is essentially the same as the first, and you only really get one chance at being new. The movie plods along for its first hour or two, but saves itself by pulling out all the stops at Helms Deep, the climactic battle for the men of Rohan.

While quite a bit of plot happens in the beginning, I really didn’t find any of it particularly interesting or dramatic. A lot of the dialogue is perfunctory and awkward, put in strictly to explain the happenings (even if we’re seeing it happen in front of us anyway). As a result, you get a lot of random closeups of Legolas saying stuff like “the red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night.” It’s all fine and good but it’s not particularly interesting, you know? Especially since we saw all the blood being spilled.

All the returning characters from the first film pretty much cycle through the same emotional notes without a lot of change. Gandalf’s a bit livelier, Merry’s a bit smarter and Gimli talks too much now, but other than that it’s fairly unchanged. Aragorn’s still badass, Frodo and Sam still are a bit too friendly to each other, and Legolas is still the Pretty One. A lot of this stems from the broken fellowship and the resulting troika of plot threads. There isn’t a lot of time to get around to all three plots and make them all work well.

The newer characters (mostly humans from Rohan) fare better. Theoden and Eowyn both have lots of good character bits, and show themselves as characters you want to know better. Grima Wormtongue is perfectly evil in his brief appearances. Just as an aside: How does anyone know this guy ISN’T evil? His last name is WORMTONGUE. The completely computer generated Gollum is very impressive from a technical standpoint. His face is very expressive and for the believable. It looks a lot like Don Knotts/Steve Buscemi, but it works. While his character and his struggle against himself lies is an important part of the story, I found his long Oscar-clip style monologues a bit tiresome. The ring fucked you up, we get it.

By the third hour, everything has advanced sufficiently to get three real payoffs, cut together perfectly. There are three battles going on, but enough down time in each plotline to intercut with each other to prevent battle fatigue in the viewers. As the movie closes, everyone’s biting their own arms off waiting for the next one. So in that sense, The Two Towers is a rousing success.

One thing that’s bothered me about the LOTR trilogy so far is how generic Jackson’s shot choices are. There aren’t a lot of decisions or compositions that really jump out at me as stylistically Jackson work. From the “making of” material that I’ve seen, Jackson seems to have given a lot of stuff filmed by second, third and FOURTH units. After he recuperates from the trilogy, it will be interesting to see him get at some something smaller where he can let his oddball sensibilities run free again.

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For a more straight forward experience at the movies, I’d personally push for everyone to check out Drumline, the new movie about marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Anyone that’s seen the Bayou Classic each year knows that the marching bands in this arena are a far cry from your usual lock-step crew. The marching and the playing are married with a little hip shaking flair and funk.

The movie itself is a pretty standard fish-out-of-water/Rocky combo plot. Like last year’s “Bring It On,” it saves itself with warm, likable characters and absolutely electrifying “action” set pieces. It’s a bit weird to think of half-time performances as must-see events, but the material is shot and edited well, and choreographed to an unreal degree. Like 8-Mile’s freestyle battles, the drumline faceoffs carry the drama to it’s payoff in a much more satisfying manner than the actual narrative.

As a bonus, despite being filled with a bunch of Black people, nobody gets shot. Yay!

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I caught the latest Spike Jonez/Charlie Kaufman collaboration, Adaptation, sometime last week. It’s all a bit much to try and explain, but the basic idea is that Nicholas Cage plays Charlie Kaufmann, who is trying to adapt an unadaptable book by Susan Orlean called “The Orchid Thief.” So it’s a movie about a writer adapting a screenplay of a book for a movie that you are currently watching.

It’s all a bit too meta and self involved sometimes, but for the most part it’s very entertaining and filled with some really charming performances. Cage is sharp as the nervous, self loathing Charlie Kaufman as well as his annoyingly gregarious twin brother Donald. There are nice bits all around from Chris Cooper, Meryl Streep and Bryan Cox as well.

This sentence won’t really make any sense until you’ve seen the movie, but I’ll say it anyway. The movie goes downhill at a stupendous rate once the re-writes start.

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Just when I thought all reality shows couldn’t really get much worse without actual death or dismemberment, Fox makes a liar out of me.

They’re starting a show called Joe Millionaire, which will be structured much like The Bachelor or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, where twenty or so women will vie for the affection of a man reportedly worth $50 million.

So what’s the catch? The guy is actually a construction worker that makes about $19,000 a year. If the final chosen woman accepts the marriage proposal, the bachelor must admit the truth.

I really hope this is the disaster it sounds like it’s going to be. While I normally think that people dumb enough to go on shows like this deserve what they get, I’m already feeling sorry for the eventual “winner.”

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I got bored and decided the header graphic should be more metal.

It’s completely out of place and stupid, but so’s most heavy metal, right? Right.

Posted in Endless Whining 1 Comment »

I wish I could say the lack of updating is because of my incredibly busy and adventurous life, but that’s not really the case.

That said, random bits of my last few weeks:

I read Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, a non-fiction book about the world of competitive Scrabble. If it sounds a bit silly, it is. That said, I found it really fascinating. I’m always intrigued by people who are gifted at one specific thing, or those committed to something so much that they can throw 8 hours a day at it without the promise of compensation.

The book chronicles Fatsis’ own descent into Scrabble obsession. He starts off as a researcher and finds himself slowly being swallowed up by the tiles. He eventually begins competing in tournaments and seeking advice from the sage ScrabbleMasters that surround him (most of them being nerdy old White guys, naturally).

Personally, I’m not particularly good at anagramming, and have no desire to pour over pages and pages of word lists. Did you know there are seven words that use the letter Q but do not use a U?

Recommended reading for… word freaks, I guess. Amazon has the first twelve pages available for reading. An interview with the author is located here.

On the movie side of things, it’s been pretty light. I’ve been avoiding most everything, although I have seen the two blockbusters, Harry Potter II and James Bond 20. I wasn’t really super-enthused about either one, but they were both decent ways to spend an evening.

I thought Potter’s second try was considerably better than its first, with the caveat that I haven’t read any of the books. The second film in general has a lot more action and plot, and the setup section is shorter than the first film (which had something like an hour of film before Harry had actually settled in at school).

The movie’s still too long by quite a good half hour. I’m not sure if any of the subplots needed to be cut out completely, but Chris Columbus is a bit too enamored with the kids’ reaction shots, and his camera lingers about too often. In general, the movie spends a bit too much time on plot (yeah, I know I shouldn’t ever say that). By that I mean, there’s all these red herrings and side bits they use for the whodunnit section of the plot, and honestly, I’m not sure anyone really cares about that stuff.

Nobody except the bazillion kids in Gryffindor scarves that are holding knives up to Columbus’ tender bits, I guess.

As for James Bond: Die Another Day, I had a great time. This is surprising, because I pretty much hate the James Bond franchise. Maybe hate is too strong a word, but I think the majority of the movies are pretty dull. Out of 20 films, I probably enjoy about five or six.

I wasn’t planning on seeing this one in the theater at all, but it ended up being the best of my options on Friday afternoon, so I checked out a screening at the beautiful Cineramadome.

The movie has more action than any of the recent Bonds, possibly more than ANY of the Bonds. It starts off strong, with some good nasty villains, a neat hovercraft scene and then a smart little subplot which takes Bond away from the usual glitz and glamour. This slight adjustment makes the character tons more interesting, since the last few films have had Bond in control almost the entire time.

Halle Berry is god awful everytime she speaks or has to make her “action” face, but Rosamund Pike, Toby Stephens and Rick Yune fare better. Later action setpieces set in a giant ice hotel are great, and the Aston Martin/Jaguar car duel on the icelake is outrageous fun.

The movie sputters for another half hour doing next to nothing, but the core of the flick is solid, if slightly disposable, entertainment. If you like Bond, you’ll probably love it.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks as a UCLA sportsfan. Ugh. It’s best I not speak any more of that, as anyone who cares knows exactly what I’m talking about already.

Enough of all that. Sleepy time, the Grind awaits tomorrow.

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