MY MOVIE SHELF: The Usual Suspects

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: 145  Days to go: 98

Movie #293:  The Usual Suspects

Some people may think I overreact with regard to a movie’s running time. Maybe I’m a little oversensitive about a movie I think is too long. To those people, I present The Usual Suspects. One of the most elaborate and intricate stories filmed in at least the last quarter century, if not ever, The Usual Suspects clocks in at 106 minutes. One hour and forty-six minutes, total. A film doesn’t have to be long to be incredibly smart and impressively layered. The Usual Suspects reveals itself incrementally, in pieces, then doubles back on itself to put different pieces of the puzzle together before moving slowly forward again. And it does all that with none of the bloat that plagues a lot of the current film industry.

The Usual Suspects is ostensibly the story of five criminals involved in a huge shootout on a boat in San Pedro — the story of how they came together, how they operated, how they succeeded, and how it all fell apart — the story of Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), Hockney (Kevin Pollack), McManus (Stephen Baldwin) and Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), as told by their compatriot Verbal (Kevin Spacey), the only one of the five to survive the night — but the real star of the film is the mystery man no one ever sees, the criminal kingpin pulling all the strings behind the scenes, a man called Keyser Soze. Who is he? Is he anyone at all? That’s the true crux of the film, and it’s such a brilliantly crafted mystery that Gabriel Byrne himself famously thought he was Keyser Soze all the way up until he saw the finished film for the first time.

But if Keyser Soze is the unseen star of the film, the five main characters are an integral part of the foundation that makes it great. Each character is different and specific, bringing their own style and verve to the mix. Keaton is gruff and no-nonsense. McManus is obnoxious and manic and crazy. Hockney is a wiseass who couldn’t give less of a fuck about anybody. Fenster is a mush-mouthed slickster with a silly sense of humor. Verbal is seemingly weak and innocent, underestimated on purpose, with an answer for everything. These five personalities, and the performances that surrounded them, and the amazing, memorable, quotable lines of dialogue they were given, give the movie breadth and depth and form. They make it three-dimensional. They make it genuine — which is why it’s just as much of a gut punch to us, the audience, as it is to Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) when he lets Verbal go, looks at the bulletin board, and realizes it’s all a facade.

There is no Redfoot (Peter Greene), for all we know. The real name of Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite) might as well be Joe Miller. There was no barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. Verbal never picked coffee beans in Guatamala. There was no coke on that boat. And Dean Keaton is not Keyser Soze.

And then POOF. He’s gone.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Romeo + Juliet

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: 157+55 (from our late holiday. Merry Christmas to MEEEEEEEE!) = 212  Days to go: 149

Movie #226:  Romeo + Juliet

If you take the manic energy of Moulin Rouge and insert it into a modern (’90s) retelling of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, what you get is this raucous, visually arresting spectacle of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. I remember a lot of brouhaha over the idea of placing the familiar tale in a modern city — with cars and guns and everything — while retaining the original Shakespearian dialogue, but the more I watch it, the more it works for me. The movie places kids like Jamie Kennedy (with pink hair) as Sampson and other Montague boys in the position of representing the youth of the day within the context of this classic old tale, thus demonstrating how relevant it still is, and how relatable.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Romeo, in love with being in love and uninterested in his parents’ feud with the Capulets. Claire Danes is Juliet, uninterested in her mother’s designs for her to marry young Paris — Dave Paris, that is (played by Paul Rudd). Both actors are at peak loveliness here, framed in shots underwater and through aquariums and against stunning backdrops that nonetheless can’t compete with the stunning blue of their eyes. Truth be told, when each character speaks of the other’s beauty, this film makes you a believer in it. I’ve never seen such gorgeous leads.

The spirit of the tale is kept intact as well, though. Both DiCaprio and Danes master the coyness, the despair, and the double entendre with aplomb. Even if you don’t understand the words themselves, the expressions of their faces tell all. Tybalt (John Leguizamo), too, is fiercely offended and rage-filled when he goes after Romeo. And when Mercutio (Harold Perrineau, who never once screams “WAAAAAALT”) is dying in Romeo’s place and declares “a plague on both your houses,” his resentment is palpable. Then, when Romeo is in hysterics, shouting at Tybalt “Either thou or I or both must go with him,” insisting Tybalt pay for Mercutio’s death, it’s perhaps the most powerful moment in the film, and his despair is felt.

I love Romeo + Juliet, but I’m totally one of those goofballs who practically itches with anxiety in the final scenes, as all the missed connections lead to the tragic end. How does the Priest (Pete Postlethwaite) not get the message to Romeo directly? How does he not have a backup plan? I get upset — every time — that things aren’t just a second altered in order to things to work out. Look the other way, take another moment, give a second’s pause. In any of a dozen moments, that’s all it would take to completely change the outcome, and yet it never happens. It nearly kills me every time.

“For never was a story of more woe, than that of Juliet and her Romeo.”

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

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: 216  Days to go: 218

Movie #161:  The Lost World: Jurassic Park

I actually always thought the name of this movie was Jurassic Park: The Lost World, not the other way around, so this kind of screws with my alphabetization but I absolve it since I bought them in a packaged set. I have very particular rules for these types of things, which honestly probably makes it fortunate I’ve never worked in a library.

The Lost World picks up a few years after Jurassic Park, when our intrepid chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) finds out Hammond (Richard Attenborough) still hasn’t learned his lesson and instead of napalming the whole Jurassic Park site and experiment, has instead allowed an heretofore unknown Site B of free-roaming dinosaurs flourish on a nearby island from the original park. What could go wrong?

Malcolm is immediately in a frenzy over the idea of this, much less Hammond’s plan to send an observation team to the site. Naturally, though, Hammond has once again ignored the voice of reason and already has a team made up of Eddie Carr (beardless Richard Schiff) and Nick Van Owen (a regrettably macho Vince Vaughn — tough guy is not his forte) prepping for departure as well as Ian’s own girlfriend, paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) already on site. This freaks Ian right the hell out and is the only way Hammond gets him to go on this crazy adventure, but of course there has to be a kid involved, which is how Ian’s daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) winds up stowing away in the communications trailer.

Once again, the scientists are initially interested solely in the academic aspects of observing and analyzing the dinosaurs in their natural habitat, but when Hammond’s son-in-law brings a second team to trap and transport the animals back to civilization, things go haywire once again.

Lots of people don’t really like the Jurassic Park sequels, but I do. Instead of being simply a carbon copy of the original, The Lost World hits similar notes on the island to its predecessor, but then ups the ante by bringing a T-Rex and its young to mainland San Diego, where the elder beast wreaks havoc on American soil, when it becomes up to Ian and Sarah to lure and trap the animal on a barge set for transport back to the island. (Still not sure why nobody bombs the hell out of said island, but what do I know.)

A T-Rex loose in San Diego might be a pretty effective plot twist (complete with dog house hanging from its mouth), but don’t discount the island terror either. First there’s the arrogant hubris of big game hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite) intent on capturing a tyrannosaur as has prize. He captures a baby to lure the parent into his trap, but when Sarah finds it and takes it back to set its broken leg, the T-Rexes track down and attack their camp. The entire sequence of the slowly cracking glass underneath Sarah’s weight is thrilling and awful to witness, but at least the high-hide being at perfect biting height doesn’t lead Kelly to her doom. Next there’s the little lizard dinosaurs attacking that d-bag Dieter (Peter Stormare) en masse, for which we get just a trickle of blood joining the flow of the stream to let us know his fate. This is nothing to the rapid attack of the raptors through the high grass, though, which surpasses even Kelly’s acrobatic gymnastic defeat of them later on. With no evidence of their presence but a ripple through the grasses as seen only from above, they pull their prey (the fleeing members of Injen’s second team) down with a vicious flash. It’s visually striking and so, so scary.

Hubris, naturally, is never rewarded in these films, as Arliss Howard (Peter Ludlow) gets to be carnivore training for little baby T-Rex. Your arrogance will be punished in the most brutal and karma-appropriate way, sir. Count on it.

Honestly, I don’t buy the relationships in The Lost World of Ian and Sarah, or Ian and Kelly, or Sarah and Kelly for that matter. And, as noted, Vince Vaughn will never make a reliable tough guy. So in that sense, the film falls decidedly short of Jurassic Park, yet on a purely action-adventure level, I think it succeeds just fine. The only place it perhaps fails (aside from the positively robotic and forced cameo performances of Hammond’s grandchildren) is in doing more world-building in a world that was already sufficiently built in the first film. Regardless of the fact that it deals with a second site, I think perhaps the film takes a little too much time getting us to the island this time. Thankfully, that won’t be quite as much of a problem the next time around. (Spoiler.) Stay tuned!

MY MOVIE SHELF: Aeon Flux

The long and the short of it is, I own well over 300 movies on DVD and Blu-ray (I’ll know for sure how many at the end of this project). Until 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 #8:  Aeon Flux

Okay, first things first. My husband and I have very different tastes when it comes to certain things, and he came into our relationship owning several movies that I never would’ve even considered owning. Enter Aeon Flux.

The really disappointing thing about this movie (out of MANY options), is that this is the kind of movie Hollywood types think of when they say women can’t headline superhero films. (Aeon (Charlize Theron) isn’t a superhero, per se, but she is definitely some sort of otherworldly fighter-spy person. There is really no explanation as to why or how.) But the reason this fails as a sci-fi kick-ass woman film is because it’s incredibly ill-conceived in almost every imaginable way. Daredevil was a horrible superhero movie too, for similar reasons. As were at least two movies about the Hulk. The fact that Aeon is a woman has nothing to do with it.

Actually, the biggest problem is that the movie is deliberately opaque, withholding all manner of information from the audience in order to beef up the climax, which doesn’t work at all because the audience has been given no reason to be invested in it — motivations are fuzzy, characters are crudely drawn, and the stakes are muddy at best.

The opening story cards inform us that in 2011 a virus killed 99% of the world’s population, that a man named Trevor Goodchild found the cure, and that the remaining 5 million people all live in one city where the “Goodchild Dynasty” has ruled for 400 years. Fine. Then we are told in voice over that there is a rebellion against this Dynasty, for reasons that are never articulated, and that Aeon Flux is one of these rebels, called Monicans. The rest of the action plays out as if the audience is supposed to know this story, these characters, and this universe. (It’s true the that film was based on an old MTV cartoon, but unless you made up part of its very small viewership over 16 total episodes — that largely lacked continuity, explanation or even dialogue in all but the final season, so maybe there’s a larger problem at work here — you would be hard-pressed to follow along.) Not only that, but when it’s revealed that the leader of the Goodchild Dynasty in the film’s present is also named Trevor, it is never clarified whether he is Trevor the fifth, or Trevor the seventh, or if the original Trevor has been living for 400 years, or anything.

Finally, about twenty minutes before the end credits, there’s an extended exposition scene to explain the entire plot of the movie, but at that point it’s kind of a lost cause. And even with a basic understanding of the plot, many things still seem to happen that don’t make sense and are given no context or explanation: Who is Frances McDormand supposed to be and why is she only living in the Monicans’ heads? What is the autofit alien thing that makes Aeon disappear and reappear (it first seems to be just changing her surroundings visually, like with a hologram, but then she uses it to evade an attacker, so …)? Why and how does Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo) have hands for feet? (And so very many more.)

Pete Postlethwaite, playing an unidentified wrinkly hologram of some sort who used to be a scientist, closes the movie with what is no doubt intended to be the great explanation of how Aeon Flux came to be, but all it amounts to is yet more exposition and one last unanswered question: If she was their salvation, why did he wait 400 years to bring her back?

If that question makes no sense to you, well, you’re not alone.