Volume 3, Issue 14
July 5 - July 18, 2001

MOVIE REVIEW

MADE

I drink, and when I drink I move in the wrong direction. One morning after a long bout of moving in the wrong direction, I was pestering my roommate with techno-style dancing while he was in the bathroom. Fresh out of patience, he punched me as hard as he could in the balls. I dropped to one knee and took a forceful slug at his nuts, but only succeeded in hitting his thigh. Unsatisfied, I stood up and gave a hearty kick right to his crotch. He winced, called me a fucker, and then closed the bathroom door. It took us several days to fully put the incident behind us. This was nothing new. I've known the guy since we were kids. We've always engaged in petty bickering as a form of avoiding real conversation.

It's been pretty effective so far, and I was reminded of this by the relationship between John Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Made. In this film, they play Bobby and Ricky respectively. They are two half-assed boxers who grew up together, and whose primary form of communication revolves around instigation and reaction. These L. A. kids are trying to rung their way up the organized crime ladder, and get their big break when crime boss Max (Peter Falk) sends them on assignment to New York City. Bobby works for Max as a bodyguard to his own girlfriend,

a stripper, Jess (Famke Janssen), who is indebted to Max. Bobby and Ricky jet off to New York to prove themselves in the presence of another thug, Ruiz (a remarkably unaltered Puff Daddy). It is here the chemistry between Favreau and Vaughn, which was forged in Swingers, really sparks up, although they are far more trifling here. The boozy Ricky is so ornery and stupid that while you want to slap the piss out of him, you can't help liking him. Bobby is the smart one. He just wants to make enough money to take care of Jess and her daughter. You can feel his pain as he tries to take his pal with a grain of salt, while Ricky wreaks havoc on the utter simplicity of their assignment. They frequently show up to meetings with Ruiz sporting freshly split lips and blackened eyes, always from one another's attacks.

Favreau wrote the impeccable Swingers, and here he extends himself as director as well. I was worried that the self-aware hipster schtick that made Swingers so palatable would dissolve here in some attempt to make a hard-assed snappy crime flick, but fortunately it has been replaced by a humble sense of dignity and humility that really gives Made a grinning poignancy. I never thought this would make for a complimentary phrase, but the "My Two Dads" resolution of the film is so damn sweet that I had little Paul Reisers, Greg Evigans, and Staci Keanans dancing in my head the whole walk home.

Look for a subtle reference to the "always double down on 11" bit from Swingers, and also be ready for an amazing cameo by Dustin Diamond that's Samuel "Screech" Powers.

As a huge fan of The Dirt Bike Kid, I suppose I should have known I would like this movie from the moment that I saw Peter Billingsley co-produced it. You might remember Billingsley as Messy Marvin in the Hershey's chocolate syrup commercials of the early '80s, or possibly as Ralphie Parker in the ill fated and rarely-seen-on-cable A Christmas Story. From the moment his name popped on-screen, this movie stayed true and interesting, never moving in the wrong direction. B+ Josh Tyson

Movie Review

A. I. : ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

You have to feel for Stanley Kubrick. He is regarded, and rightly so, as one of the greatest directors cinema has seen, and he died in the midst of two projects. He was just finishing Eyes Wide Shut, which was altered after his death for a more financially viable R rating. Just minor changes, but changes which angered a lot of his die-hard fans.

When Kubrick died in March 1999, he was also developing another project, about an artificially intelligent boy. That one was taken over by Steven Spielberg and now we have A. I. Those die-hards are going to hate this one.

Kubrick's influence can be seen in the movie, but sadly, Spielberg's obscures it.

Kubrick always put the protagonist's struggle with hubris in the forefront, letting the story come after. Here that common theme of his work is lost, especially in a final half-hour, which just seems more and more tacked on as it goes, passing one after another perfect endings, for one after another too-perfect coincidences.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Most of the first two hours of A. I. are great filmmaking. Spielberg doesn't try to imitate Kubrick's unique visual style, which would have been a mistake. He opts to make the movie look like his own, and only occasionally goes overboard with stylized camera setups and motion.

He also avoids dwelling on the easy environmental message. Yes, the icecaps have melted and flooded the coasts in this vision of the future, but only as an explanation for some excellent imagery toward what should have been the end of the movie.

While avoiding the tired and safe "save the earth" argument, A. I. manages to touch on some very interesting philosophy. Yes, most of it is a variation of what this branch of sci-fi has been exploring since Frankenstein, but most of the questions are left as unanswered talking points for the people who were paying attention.

For the rest of the audience, there are parallels to Pinocchio that are hammered into place with unnecessary force. Yes, the classic fairy tale pertains strongly to the storyline and is one of the more interesting character motivations in the movie, but Spielberg almost overdoes it. I half expected the kid's nose to start growing.

That kid is David, a prototype android child programmed to love his mother. Haley Joel Osment gives his best performance since the movie with all those dead people, and once again restores a grain of hope that not all child actors have to be whiny and annoying. Now let's see if he can pull a Jodie Foster and avoid burning out by the time he turns 18.

Rounding out the electronic cast are Jude Law as an entertaining robotic gigolo and Jack Angel as the least irritating talking teddy bear I have ever seen in a movie. Frances O'Conner dominates the biological side of things as the mother David is built to love. Watching her deal with the complex situation her character finds herself in is the difference between a good and great first act of the movie. Hopefully people will remember that part of her performance, and not the contrived way she is written into the final scenes.

So we have strong performances, great visuals, and some interesting philosophy. A. I. would be one of the best movies of the year to date if not for a tacked on ending and a voiceover narration almost as unnecessary as the one in Blade Runner. This is still a very good movie, but I think

it could have been so much better if the man behind 2001 had lived to make it. B- Chris Ward

Movie Review

KISS OF THE DRAGON

Why is it whenever one of my favorite actors is ready to break into superstar status, he or she usually takes a turn for the worse. Case in point: Jet Li. He's slowly been building his American fan base with Lethal Weapon 4 and last year's surprise hit Romeo Must Die, but now takes a detour down the wrong path with his latest film Kiss of the Dragon.

Li is John, a Chinese detective flown into to Paris to work hand-in-hand with French officials in order to catch an Asian thug. For reasons unknown to anyone, the French police murder the thug and frame Li, and a massive manhunt ensues.

While hiding out, Li befriends an annoying hooker, played with ease by Bridget Fonda, who happens to work for the same man Li was framed by. Her sappy story involves her kidnapped daughter, and together these two join forces to retrieve her child as well as Li's innocence.

In a film such as this, there is only one saving grace the fight scenes. While the action scenes are good (Li carries a bracelet of needles used to paralyze his victims), they are too few and far between to make this film worth watching. And if you thought chemistry was lacking between Chow Yun Fat and Mira Sorvino in The Replacement Killers, Li and Fonda make those two seem like a happily married couple.

Unlike Jackie Chan, Li is not an actor who can be funny and kick ass at the same time. It's not his style. He is a man who means business, an actor who almost seems uncomfortable cracking a smile. Although this may be his meal ticket, this may also be his weakness with traditional American audiences.

His next chance to break into the mainstream comes this November with the release of The One, a sci-fi action film that involves parallel universes and what not, much like The Matrix (coincidentally a film he turned down). Unless state-side audiences are ready to accept Li's style and persona, he might have to remain back east and maintain his cult status amongst fans of his genre. D+ Neal James

DVD REPORT

ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA II

Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung (Jet Li) journeys to Canton with his Aunt 13 (or Cousin Yee in the dubbed version) and his student Foon (Max Mok), to demonstrate acupuncture at a medical conference. Once there, however, Wong finds himself caught in several crossfires: a militant cult called the White Lotus Sect is killing all foreigners (and take a special dislike to the Westernized Aunt 13), but the government forces are more concerned with pro-democracy revolutionaries headed by Sun Yat Sen (another true-life historical figure). Commissioner Len (Donnie Yen), charged with capturing the rebels, is ambitious enough to work with the White Lotus to get what he wants, and Wong has not only befriended Dr. Sun, but he finds himself the steward of a group of children the cult wishes to kill for the crime of learning English.

Obviously, Once Upon A Time In China II tries to tell a more complex, epic story than the first installment, and this works both for and against it. It builds logically, if a bit hysterically, on the East vs. West clash that drove the first movie, but Wong Fei-hung almost seems a supporting character in the second act. After the first encounter with the cult, and until the sect's final attack on the British Embassy, the martial arts are at a minimum, which might puzzle people who see the words "JET LI" emblazoned on the front and have been trained to equate that with "non-stop action."

At that point, however, Wong decides he has to go to the White Lotus Temple and put a stop to this non-sense. The fight in the Temple more than makes up for the story-heavy middle; forklifts were probably needed to carry the copious amounts of whoop-ass Wong Fei-hung uncorks on the cultists and their seemingly invincible leader. And if that's still not enough, Wong must then take on the corrupt Len, in a fight that is refreshingly devoid of the artificial speeding up that has marred so many other Donnie Yen slugfests. Yen is a good fighter, and really doesn't need that sort of assistance.

Overall, more leisurely paced than the first movie, but it grows on you.

Unlike the first disc, there is no commentary track, and I feel an odd pang of loss there. Ric Meyers' track on part one had its flaws, but remained informative throughout. Some historic background by another knowledgeable chap would have been nice, but I suspect time constraints did not allow the necessary research and recording time.

Once more, the English-dubbed version is included as an extra, and once again this deviates from the first disc: scenes with characters who spoke only English or Chinese and the difficulties this engendered were simply cut from the first movie. In Part Two, the scenes were re-written so everybody seems to be speaking English, and westerners are just plain jerks. I'm not certain which way I prefer.

Although I'm not quite as astounded this time as I was the first, Columbia has still produced an outstanding disc, and I wish more distributors were taking this sort of care with foreign film. A- Dr Freex