Drama

Resurrecting the Champ

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Resurrecting the Champ
  • IMDb: link

Resurrecting the Champ

I remember watching the trailer for this film and wondering why it wasn’t made for the ABC Family channel.  Truth is I’m not much of a Josh Hartnett fan, other than his small roles in films like The Virgin Suicides and Sin City.  This film, as cheesy as it is at times, comes off with some heart, and Hartnett deserves most of the credit.

Erik Kernan (Hartnett) is a sports writer, who, as his boss (Alan Alda) describes, has a talent for typing with very little writing.  Looking for a shot on the newspaper’s magazine, and a cushier gig, Erik proposes the story of a former boxing champion Bob Satterfield (Samuel L. Jackson) now living on the streets.

Although much of screen time of the film is taken up with Satterfield and his story and Kernan’s attempts to tell it to the world, that’s not what the film is really about.  More than anything else this is a film about fathers and sons.  Kernan deals with being separated from his wife (Kathryn Morris) and six-year-old son (Dakota Goyo), and at the same time tries to come to terms with the legacy of his father, a legendary radio announcer.

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Save Yourself From September Dawn

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: September Dawn
  • IMDb: link

September Dawn

What a horrible film.  The “true untold story” of the Mountain Meadows massacre is a blueprint for all future filmmakers on how not to make a film.  Filled with a heavy handed message, simplistic characters, insipid dialogue, religious intolerance, and a laughable love story, the script for this would have been better used as toilet paper.  From beginning to end September Dawn is a mess.

A wagon train of settlers are traveling west.  The good Christians making up the wagon train pass through the Utah Territory and come face to face with the vicious evil Mormons led by a diabolical Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight) and lorded over by the emperor of evil Brigham Young (Terrence Stamp).  You remember the movies Hollywood used to make about evil bloodthirsty Indian savages?  Well Christopher Cain brings the style back using Mormons instead.

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Worth a Listen

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Talk to Me
  • IMDb: link

Talk to Me

Petey Greene (Don Cheadle) is a con artist and a convict.  Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) works for the local Washington D.C. radio station WOL.  Through a chance meeting as Dewey visits his brother (Mike Epps) in jail a long, and often tumultous, friendship develops between the pair which lands Petey an opportunity as a disk jockey.

Martin Sheen provides a nice supporting performance as the radio station’s manager who is less than thrilled with putting a malcontent ex-con who speaks his mind on the air.  Dewey’s gamble pays off however and Petey provides the voice the station and its listeners have been waiting for.

The film is bursting with great performances.  Aside from the two leads, who will knock your socks off, and the nice turn by Sheen, the film also features Taraji P. Henson as Petey’s girlfriend and Cedric the Entertainer in a humorous and subdued performance as the Nighthawk.  All are terrific.

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Rescue Dawn

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Rescue Dawn
  • IMDb: link

Rescue Dawn

The first thing you notice about Rescue Dawn is how low-tech an enterprise director Werner Herzog has undertaken.  No big special effects, no prolonged large action sequences.  This is a character study, and a darn good one.  Here is a director with a camera in a jungle letting the actors tell the tale.  It’s a great substitute for the big popcorn flicks of the summer for those of you who could give two shits about robots transforming into cars or what kind of wacky weddings Hollywood stars get themselves into on film.

Rescue Dawn isn’t a fun movie, but it is a well made film with a collection of strong performances that provide stark drama in the jungles of southeast Asia.  Based of the true story of the only American POW to ever make it out of the Laotian jungle, it’s an experience to remember.  In 1997 director Werner Herzog captured Dieter Dengler’s life in his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly; now ten years later Herzog returns to give us a film based on his remarkable tale.

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Paprika

/ / Movie Reviews

I’m not a big anime fan, but the idea behind this film of a machine that could invade your dreams brought the sci-fi geek ready and willing to give this film a a shot.  Paprika isn’t a great film, but it is an entertaining one with terrific animation, a strong story, and some intriguing ideas about dreams and reality.  For fans of the genre should be pleased, and it might even satisfy a few others, who like me, aren’t big fans of anime but are just looking for new and interesting stories told in a compelling way.

Paprika
3 & 1/2 Stars

“This is your brain on anime.”

Scientists have created a new experimental dream machine which allows therapists to enter a person’s dreams in an attempt to help them with their problems from inside their own mind.  When several of the machines are stolen, however, everyone who has ever used the machine becomes susceptible to its influence, whether asleep or awake, and the walls between reality and dreams break down.

Attempting to retreive the device and stop the criminal are a beautiful scientist (Megumi Hayashibara) who lives as ‘Paprika” a sort of guide and savior for those trying to understand and overcome their fears and doubts in their dreams, and a cop (Akio Otsuka) who is haunted by dreams of a recent case.

The film is a more straightforward mystery than many anime films, which is probably why I enjoyed more than most.  In the final act however as the walls between reality and dreams breakdown it marches proudly into crazywackofuntown as the higher ideas and discussions of the film are lost in unleashed chaos.

The ideas of invading one’s dreams and then having the ability to inflict others with the fevered dreams and nightmaes of strangers is a terrific hook for the film.  A dream machine might be a wonderful thing, but, as shown here, in the hands of the wrong person it could a terrible weapon.  The film succeeds as a sci-fi film and as mystery, and although I got a little bored when the story started to drag as the craziness took over in the final third of the film, it comes together in a satisfactory ending.  It is not a must-see, but for fans of something different and more thought-provoking than the usual summer fare you might want to invite Paprika into your dreams.

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