1988’s Eight Men Out focuses on the 1919 World Series and the controversy and trial which followed involving eight members of the Chicago White Six cleared of criminal charges for taking money to lose baseball games but each still receiving a lifetime ban from baseball for their knowledge and participation in the conspiracy.
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Throwback Thursday takes us back to a movie that feels every bit the 80s comedy that it is. One Crazy Summer casts John Cusack as an aspiring artist who heads off for a summer vacation to Nantucket with his high school best friend George (Joel Murray) after their graduation. There the artist, who knows nothing of love, will catch the eye of a young rocker (Demi Moore) headed home to help keep her father’s estate from falling into the clutches of a greedy land tycoon (Mark Metcalf), and the bombshell girlfriend (Kimberly Foster) of the local douchebag (Matt Mulhern), who, of course, is also the tycoon’s son.
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Love & Mercy gives us two separate looks at the life of Brian Wilson (played by Paul Dano in the 1960s and John Cusack in the 80s). While the past deals with the beginning of Wilson’s mental instability the later storyline picks up years later with Wilson being taken advantage of by therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti).
Although both stories are interesting by themselves, for me the two parts never came together. Dano is intriguing as the younger version, especially while struggling to create Pet Sounds. Cusack’s doped-up older version of the musician is far less interesting, but that plotline does give us Elizabeth Banks in one of the actress’ best performances. Several pieces and performances of Love & Mercy work well, including how director Bill Pohlad incorporates the Beach Boys‘ music, but the script struggles to merge the two-parts into a compelling whole while simplifying Wilson’s mental illness and Landy’s villainy for dramatic effect.
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One of only two feature releases for the short-lived Fox Animation Studios, 1997’s Anastasia has the feel of a Disney princess movie while mixing the look and design of a Don Bluth film. Beginning with the fall of the Russian Czar by the evil Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd) and the disappearance of the family’s young daughter (voiced as a child by Kirsten Dunst), the story picks up a decade later with an older Anya (Meg Ryan) leaving the orphanage where she was raised to journey into the wilder world searching for a family she scarcely remembers.
Along the way our heroine will encounter a pair of con men (John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer) who attempt to take advantage of Anya’s resemblance to the missing princess by training her to be Anastasia (not realizing she is indeed the genuine article). On the way to Paris to present Anya to the Dowager Empress in exile (Angela Lansbury) the group will also have to deal with the undead Rasputin out for vengeance and his cute sidekick Batrok (Hank Azaria).
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Directed by Kasper Barfoed, The Numbers Station looks and feels every bit the low-budget thriller that it is. Set almost entirely in an underground bunker, the thriller somehow finds a way to make the setting feel empty and endless rather than claustrophobic. Mixed with what appears to be an extremely low budget and a circumspect screenplay that can’t find a way to make the idea of numbers stations exciting in 2013, The Numbers Station is the kind of straight-to-DVD B-movie that fizzles more than it entertains.
Our protagonist is Emerson (John Cusack), a government assassin with an acute case of conscience sent to Suffolk, England, after failing to murder a young woman (Hannah Murray) who was witness to his latest kill. Emerson’s new assignment is to protect Katherine (Malin Akerman), a cryptographer at a small numbers station used to relay encrypted codes across Western Europe. Haunted by his failure, and the death of the witness, Emerson tries to put the situation behind him, at least until the facility comes under attack by an organized group of terrorists.
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