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Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen
by Cole Smithey
L.I.E.
Debut director Michael Cuesta wrenches limp social satire from a suburban
story about a chaste relationship between Big John (Brian Cox – Manhunter)
a war veteran pedophile and Howie Blitzer (Paul Franklin Dano) a sexually
confused 16 year-old rich kid. While the film takes an unadulterated
approach in its exploitation themes of homosexuality, alienation and loss,
it reverts to standard third-act clichés that reveal the film’s
overreaching weakness. Overwrought sub-plots, about the death of Howie’s
mother and legal charges brought against the father, come off as contrived
and vague. Still, outstanding performances by Brian Cox and Paul Franklin
Dano give the movie an urgency and emotional realism. Dano’s narration
about ‘wanting to survive the Long Island Expressway because so many
people have died there,’ sets up the film’s divisive traffic-as-backdrop
motif.
Rock Star
As the best movie to come out Hollywood this summer next to Rush Hour 2,
Rock Star does a neat trick of giving the people what they want. If
millions of people fantasize about being plucked out of their daily
drudgeries to become rock stars, then Mark Wahlberg couldn’t be cast
better to encompass that impossible dream. With the character ambition of
a Rocky, the fashion vanity of a Saturday Night Fever, and the fanatic
excitement of a real heavy metal tour, director Stephen Herek (Mr.
Holland’s Opus) unwraps a smart confection of the American dream. Rock
Star could be a companion piece with Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous for its
sincerely executed attempts at recreating a musical tone and mood
reflective of its time. The story’s theme that ‘the glamour of the rock
‘n’ roll high life isn’t what it’s cracked up to be,’ is about as
pedestrian as they come but it works like a charm in this well-crafted
tour through the mid ’80s heyday of heavy metal excess.
Jeepers Creepers
Jeepers Creepers is a below par horror movie with a grotesque murderer who
wears a silly hat and long coat. Apart from a few minor gross-out scenes
the movie rallies little suspense or surprise while a brother and sister
duo make themselves targets for the killer’s vengeance. It’s more of a
poorly edited and paced chase movie than anything than a genuine article
of the horror genre. Jeepers Creepers should have gone straight to video
but had strong enough publicity to open large. The Others (currently
playing in cinemas everywhere) is a far better choice as a Gothic horror
film in the Hitchcock tradition.
Our Lady of the Assassins
Celebrated director/producer Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Foutune)
returns to his roots to make a foreign art house film. The script (by
Fernando Vallejo) plays like a Spanish modernized Death In Venice with a
world-weary gentleman arriving in a city (in this case Medellin, Columbia)
to have a last homosexual fling with a teenaged boy and die. Alexis is a
street kid who packs a gun and uses it with impunity in the presence of
his lover, the much older Fernando (German Jaramillo). A third world city
life-is-cheap mentality provides violence to punctuate the nihilist love
story at the movie’s heart. Our Lady of the Assassins is a visually
interesting and provocative movie that chases its own tale rather than
fulfill the dramatic questions it raises.
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