MY MOVIE SHELF: Out of Sight

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 172  Days to go: 171

Movie #205:  Out of Sight

Out of Sight is a coming together of greats. Everything great about director Steven Soderbergh is here, from his stylized aesthetic to his inventive nonlinear heist structure and the great performances he pulls from scores of interesting actors. Everything great about writer Elmore Leonard is here (the movie is based on his novel), from the interesting characters to the snappy dialogue to the sparkling chemistry and thrilling plot. Everything great about George Clooney (as Jack Foley) is here, from his suave, effortless charm to his no-nonsense confidence to his playful sex appeal. And Jennifer Lopez (as Karen Sisco) is at her very, very best in this film. Selena might’ve been her breakout, and she has certainly stalled as any kind of successful actress after the Gigli bomb (or the Maid in Manhattan bomb) (or the Monster-in-Law bomb) (or whatever), but she is phenomenal in Out of Sight — calm, cool, collected, enigmatic, assertive, outspoken, powerful, a force to be reckoned with, and absolutely the sexiest she has ever been, no lie.

Jack Foley is a bank robber, but the nice kind. He never uses guns, for example. As the movie starts, we see Jack leave one building in a fit of anger and frustration, notice the bank across the street, and go over to rob it as a way of calming himself down. He’s very smart, very methodical, and very courteous. He robs the teller almost entirely on wit and charm and only gets caught because his car won’t start. He winds up at Glades Correctional in Belle Glades, Florida, where he escapes with the help of his oft-times partner Buddy (Ving Rhames), and where he meets Karen Sisco, US Marshall, for the first time.

Karen is at Glades by chance, winds up witnessing the prison break by several Cubans, and is confused and then abducted by Jack and Buddy when Jack emerges from the escapee’s tunnel wearing a prison guard uniform. (It was a top-notch plan, if not for her presence.) They put her in her trunk, which Jack climbs into as well, and Buddy drives them off safe and sound. This is Jack and Karen’s meet-cute, where they spend a car ride locked in a trunk trading thoughts and feelings on movies and other minutiae. They have a lot of chemistry, but it doesn’t stop Karen from trying to do her job and foil their getaway. She only partially succeeds, however, and the rest of the movie chronicles Jack and Buddy’s working toward their big score up north and Karen’s constant pursuit of them, all while the two would-be lovers contemplate a life in which they could maybe take a time out and explore these ever-increasing sparks of theirs.

Soderbergh is known as an actor’s director, and it’s easy to see why with the amazing performances he gets out of not only his leads, but every single supporting actor (and even those with cameo roles) in his films. I love Don Cheadle, and his work here at Maurice “Snoopy” Miller is almost unrecognizable in terms of his total immersion into the role of a vicious, irredeemable criminal. Whether it’s murder or grand larceny or just throwing a fight, Snoopy has no qualms, no conscience. Meanwhile national treasure (and seriously one of the funniest character actors of our time) Steve Zahn — as screw-up stoner thief Glenn Michaels — is dopey and ditzy in the best possible ways, plus he manages to accomplish 90% of his acting through the wearing of a ridiculous headband. There’s also Albert Brooks as Ripley, who manages to look even dumber with hair than without, and Dennis Farina as Marshall Sisco, Karen’s dad, who is as no-nonsense a detective as she is but who is also so loving and accepting of her. Pile on top of that great small performances from Luis Guzman (who can’t believe magicians use fake legs), Catherine Keener (as Jack’s adorable ex-wife), Michael Keaton (as Karen’s FBI guy squeeze), and even Samuel L. Jackson as an inmate with a history of leaving custody, and you have a film chock full of surprising and entertaining performances. Honestly, every single one is a delight (even Isaiah Washington pre-Grey’s Anatomy as Kenneth who likes to tussle, and early era Viola Davis as his sister Moselle). That’s not an easy thing to pull off, but Soderbergh is a whiz at it.

The tone of the movie is light, but also foreboding and wary. There’s a lot of hesitancy between what Jack and Karen feel for each other, what’s prudent, and what they can reasonably expect out of their attraction given their completely different lives, but in the end it’s actually heartwarming the way Jack and Karen’s fatalistic attitudes toward their futures don’t prevent them both from looking out for the other — Jack emptying his gun, Karen shooting him in the leg — and keeping each other safe. It’s as if they know they can’t call time out right now — and alter-egos Gary and Celeste have no chance of making things work — so they wait to find a better time. And, hey, it’s a long drive to Florida.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Get Shorty

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 256 Days to go: 256

Movie #121: Get Shorty

If you remember my post about Be Cool, some two and a half months ago, you maybe realized I wasn’t super fond of it. Get Shorty, I find, is worse. Tonight was my second viewing of the movie, and each time has been boring. I find myself drifting off, doing other things, contemplating tomorrow night’s menu or what my husband’s upcoming work schedule is. That’s not the sign of a great film.

The thing is, I don’t find John Travolta all that intimidating, maybe? He’s a big tough loan shark (thankfully, this movie doesn’t use the term “shylock” as often as Be Cool does), apparently the best fighter around, and can outsmart anyone and everyone. It’s a bit much.

What else is a bit much is the plot, which, while a decent send-up of the Hollywood hustle of putting a movie together that can maybe feel like a mob shakedown, is unreasonably convoluted and all over the place. Chili Palmer (Travolta) starts in Miami where he has a few run-ins with Ray Barboni (Dennis Farina, who is kind of funny as a bumbling mobster, but who is much more satisfying in things like Big Trouble as a competent mobster), then goes to Vegas to collect a debt, where he gets a job to collect another debt in L.A. Deciding he just “likes it” in L.A., he opts to leave loan-sharking to become a movie producer, as you do.

So in the midst of all this movie wheeling and dealing there are shakedowns and double-crosses and all sorts of underhandedness, featuring additional toughs drug dealer Bo Catlett (Delroy Lindo), stuntman-turned-heavy Bear (James Gandolfini), and the guy who played Lazlo Hollyfeld in Real Genius (Jon Gries) as some guy named Ronnie.

And on the movie side of things there’s Gene Hackman as B-movie producer Harry Zimm, acclaimed actor Martin Weir (Danny DeVito), and actress-turned-producer-turned-Chili’s-girlfriend Karen (Rene Russo). (Elmore Leonard might have a thing for chicks named Karen.) All the movie people try to act at least as tough as the mobsters and drug dealers and other criminals.

It’s kind of funny, like I said, but it’s also kind of a mess. Not only that, but being the “Cadillac of minivans” couldn’t save the Oldsmobile Silhouette (or any other Oldsmobile), so it’s kind of disappointing in general.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Be Cool

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #25: Be Cool

I’ve never seen this movie before (it’s my husband’s), though I have seen Get Shorty once, which Be Cool is the sequel to (watching them out of order because that’s what happens when you don’t give your sequels alphabetically-later titles). So I find myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in 2005, when this movie came out. I feel like maybe The Pussycat Dolls were a thing? This movie makes me feel like it’s referencing the time when people were trying to make Nicole Scherzinger a thing — like, a solo thing. I could be wrong. Maybe The Pussycat Dolls were later.

Anyway, this movie, like its predecessor, is satirizing a lot of things: gangster stereotypes, the movie business, the music business, girl groups, rap groups, etc. It really crams a lot in there. Unfortunately, it only feels like maybe half the people working on it were aware it was a comedy. I’m unsure at this moment whether the writer of the screenplay was one of those people. Elmore Leonard wrote the novel, of course, and I really dig his stuff — as will be immediately apparent when we get to the undervalued masterpiece Out of Sight — but some of his slickness and ease with the written word and with the worlds of hoodlums and wannabes seems to have been lost in the translation of this one. Get Shorty was revered in its way — Hollywood loves a good inside joke, which was all Get Shorty was, really, one big mock-up of Hollywood insiders — but despite its overtly meta jokes, Be Cool falls a little short of that insider-y vibe. It feels a bit slapped together, sloppy, loose around the hinges.

There’s also the problem of its jokes not aging that well, what with T-Mobile Sidekicks, dusty caricatures of both black men and white men who “act like” black men, and some cringe-inducing attempts at gay-bashing humor, but if you can tune some of that stuff out, it’s really not all that bad as far as lightweight comedies go. The attempts to go meta land fairly well, and whoever costumed Uma Thurman was just goofy enough to put her in cutesy t-shirts advertising her newly widowed status. Plus, Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin) is really kind of delightful as the awkward and clumsy rapper Dabu, and The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) is often downright hilarious.

The entire plot, concerning Christina Milian’s character Linda Moon, is tortured, it’s true, but without it how could they have shoehorned Steven Tyler’s terrible acting into the mix? And really, I would watch this movie just to see the late Anna Nicole Smith make out with Danny DeVito on the Kiss Cam at a Lakers game. Not even kidding.