Movie Reviews

Richard Donner gave us Lethal Weapon.  Bruce Willis gave us Die Hard.  Teaming up, the two give us 16 Blocks which is a more than a little reminiscent of both but is also fairly entertaining and a pleasant surprise for an early March release.

16 Blocks
3 Stars

An aging drunk loser cop is given the choice to do his job by turning on his friends to protect a con whose testimony will hurt the department or just walk away and let them kill him.  Well if he chooses the second we don’t have a movie, do we?  Bruce Willis and Mos Def try to stay alive and get to the courthouse in time for him to testify.  Take a watch with you because the film unfolds in real time in a clever use of suspense and tension.  Is it great?  Nah.  Is it good and worth a look?  Yes.

New York Detective John McClane Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis) is an out of shape, lazy drunk of a cop.  At the last minute he’s given the task of transporting Eddie (Mos Def) across sixteen blocks in time to testify before the grand jury.  Trouble is that Eddie’s testimony will be very harmful to the force and many of the city’s finest will do whatever it takes to make sure he never makes it to his court date.

Mosley’s former partner (David Morse) is one of the men who would be implicated by Eddie’s testimony and he offers Jack the chance to just walk away, but Jack decides to do the right thing and becomes a target as well.  Can he get Eddie to the courthouse in 90 minutes at which time the case will be thrown out or will he be stopped by men he considered his friends?

The film is full of trademark touches from Donner and he does a good job at presenting everyone in the film as real people each with their own flaws.  Morse and his men are on the wrong side of this but they never become throw-away movie cliché villains.  Willis shows he can still play this Die Hard role in his sleep.  Mos Def gives a good performance that starts out more than a little annoying but is filled in by events and dialogue throughout the film that make him an interesting (if still annoying) character.

The film has a few plot twists and misdirection scenes that fans of this genre will see coming long before they pay off.  There are also quite a few pleasant surprises like the absence of a forced romance in the plot and the side story of Eddie’s dream meeting his sister in Seattle and owning his own bakery.

Of all the action movies out this spring this is the best of the bunch by far.  Sure it has elements we’ve seen before but Willis and Mos Def work well in this buddy picture that’s really more than just a buddy picture.  There are a few head-scratchers and one or two groan moments, but the film stays on track and entertains (even when it gets caught up in a Speed moment on a bus).  Not a must see, but good enough to think about if you’ve got nothing else going on this weekend.

Sometimes a movie is so awful you need a shower to get clean.  Freedomland is just such a movie.  One of the worst films of 2006 and the most vile and disheartening films I’ve seen in quite some time.  I still can’t believe I saw what I saw or that parents with small children allowed them to view this violent, distasteful, and heartless film.  Whatever you do this weekend keep you and yours out of Freedomland.

Freedomland
Negative Stars

The trailer for Freedomland tells about a kidnapped child whose been taken by some evil men to the worst part of the city where they are doing all kinds of offensive and malicious things to him and only Samuel L. Jackson can save the day.  Well, turns out that’s not really what the film is about.  The film is about race relations between the inner (black) city and the surrounding (white) suburb that boils over when a mother says a black man has stolen her child.  The result is a chaotic mess.  And seriously folks after this can’t we take Julianne Moore’s movie mother license away from her; it seems like every movie she’s in a kid of hers is killed or is a pornstar or doesn’t exist or has been abducted by aliens or whatever.  Just make it stop.

Brenda Moore (Julianne Moore) shows up at the hospital hurt and bleeding.  She tells police detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson) that her car has been stolen by a young black man and her four year-old son was asleep in the backseat.  The issue quickly becomes highly pressurized and isn’t helped by the fact that Brenda’s brother (Ron Eldard) is a cop.  The black community is quardened off and you know soon or later things are going to over boil and spill out into a full riot.

Lorenzo is skeptical about Moore’s story and the holes she isn’t able or willing to fill in and believes she knows more than she is telling him.  There are also other stories involving Lorenzo’s incarcerated son, a black man who didn’t make his court date, a friend of Lorenzo’s who has an abusive boyfriend, city politics, and more.  None however are as interesting as watching paint dry.

For a movie to include an issue like the abduction and possible murder of a child it better make it important and emotionally accessible to the audience.  This film does neither.  From the very first time we see Brenda she is lying and hiding things from the police and so as the only character in the film with a connection to the child (Eldard’s character is only present to stir the pot) we never get a feel for the actual victim, Cody (Marlon Sherman).

Part of the problem is the movie is much more interested in the effects of the kidnapping on the city, in a superficial way, rather than the child himself.  Cody is basically only a plot device to get things rolling and that is more than just bad writing; it’s wrong.  Nor does the film earn the riot and the scenes of the white cops in full riot gear beating young black men, women and children within inches of their lives.  Nor after the story of Cody is concluded does the film take any kind of look at the action of those involved or the consequences of their actions.  That’s more than just wrong folks; it’s irresponsible.

The movie’s only interesting character is Karen Collucci (Edie Falco) a mother whose son was kidnapped ten years ago and now helps run a volunteer organization of parents who look for missing children.  Falco gives the film a slight thread of credibility but her character and story are gobbled up and wasted by the rest of the film.

The film never earns the race riot it so badly wants to put on screen and so orgasmically happy to show, nor does it ever make Cody real enough to make the audience have any emotional stake in the film.  For a film to take on such topics as kidnapping, murder of children, race riots, and police beating down African Americans in such a loose, insincere, disrespectful, and disingenuous way made me want to vomit.  The best thing about Freedomland was when the closing credits finally rolled.

Winter Passing is the type of film I strongly dislike.  It’s a film that’s dark, moody, edgy, and eccentric for the sake of being dark, moody, edgy and eccentric.  It never earns the style it so vehemently wants to impose on us, nor the necessary redemption of its leading character.  It’s just pretentious as hell.

Winter Passing
1 & 1/2 Stars

I like Zooey Deschanel.  I like Ed Harris.  I like Amelia Warner.  Yet I did not like this film.  Oddly cobbled together with a forced vibe of weird and edgy, dark and moody, the film is just an odd compilation of performances.  It’s almost as though these actor’s agents got together and had them make a reel to show to directors and producers showing off their talent for films they want to be considered for.  And note to the writer/director – having the main character drown a kitten makes it a little hard to accept her as a sympathetic character later in the film.

Reese Holden (Zooey Deschanel) is a mess.  Living in New York as a struggling actress in off-off-Broadway productions she spends most of her time drinking, smoking cigarettes, doing cocaine, humping any guy who is nice to her, and banging her hand in dresser drawer.  But she has a kind side; she’s taken in a stray kitten who she takes care of….oops, she found out it has leukemia.  Well she’s still a nice person she’s not going to….hey, why is she walking into the river with the cute cuddly mewing kitten and a small duffle bag??  Oh my god!  Cruella De Vil wasn’t this evil!

The kitten killer’s mother has just committed suicide and bequeathed her a collection of letters she and her father, both famous authors, wrote to each other in their youth.  A publisher (Amy Madigan) offers Reese $100,000 for the letters and so the kitten killer returns home to Michigan on the bus to find her father (Ed Harris) living in the garage and a former student Shelly (Amelia Warner) and an odd character Corbit (Will Ferrell) living in the house.  Seems Daddy’s gone ‘round the bend.

The rest of the film is the unremarkable story of how rigid and mean Reese begins to accept and understand these people who are living in the house and taking care of her father and finding her father has a side she didn’t know.  Awwwww.  The performances aside the entire film is a waste of time and money.  Reese isn’t an interesting or sympathetic character and her father and Corbit are too crazy to be cared about.  The only slightly interesting character is Shelly who has a real story of tragedy and loss that is quickly glossed over in favor of Reese’s self-indulgent pseudo-tragedy.

The story is also oddly interrupted by scenes that have nothing to do with anything connected to the characters or story.  An example, one night driving Reese stops as a deer has been hit by the side of the road and gets out of the car to drag the deer to the side of the road.  Next scene.  Huh?  The film has at least a dozen such moments that make the story structure of the film less and less cohesive.  And we won’t even get into the numerous continuity and logistical issues such as having Ed Harris play a guy with hair, but using an older picture of him on the back of his novel being bald.  Hmm…I think someone should have noticed that before me.

There are no reasons to see the film unless you just really love Zooey Deschanel and want to see her go through all the motions in a bad movie.  The movie makes her character so unsympathetic that we can never accept her as anything else (did I mention she zips up a kitten in a duffle bad and drowns it alive in the Hudson River?).  At least everyone got some good clips to use to land them their next role.