CulturePulp.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Death Sentence'

Movie review in the Friday, Aug. 31 Oregonian:

"Death Sentence" is an ugly, stupid and meaningless thriller. But I will say this for it: Director James Wan ("Saw") turns out to be really good at filming down-and-dirty action scenes.

By which I mean: It's straight-to-video junk in which a few people are memorably chased and/or blown away.

The movie's about a corporate family man (Kevin Bacon) drawn into a violent web of revenge against gang members who all look like Vin Diesel. We know Bacon is a family man because we see his home movies, in which everyone hugs and laughs. We know Bacon is doomed because when we first meet him, he's quoting insurance-company figures that say people who take fewer risks live longer. I believe Mr. Wan and his screenwriter would call this "foreshadowing," and it's about as subtle as the bullets and beatings that follow.

Bacon's son is macheted to death (macheted?) during a gas-station robbery. Bacon may or may not go all Charles Bronson on someone between bouts of grief-shaking. And the remaining gang members may or may not show up at Bacon's office and house between bouts of chasing him around a city that consists largely of alleys and abandoned buildings. Also, Bacon may or may not partially shave his head and look really cool and grim-faced while blowing off assorted limbs with a shotgun.

Wan has a real knack for foot-chases and semi-cathartic violence. His action scenes use long takes and elaborate camera swoops through hallways and parking garages and the like, and after this particular action-movie summer, the fact that you can actually tell what's going on is almost refreshing.

Unfortunately, other than offering a couple of mean plot twists, "Death Sentence" is plain foolish. It can't decide whether it's a cheesy-earnest morality play about violence or a bloodier-than-usual revengesploitation flick. (I'm spoiling nothing by revealing that the movie is far better in one role than another.) The dialogue is horrible. Several supporting characters (cops, lawyers, criminals) are so exaggerated, I kept waiting for the camera to pan over to Leslie Nielsen. There are too many moments that don't make sense, and way too many moments where something horrible happens and the soundtrack immediately cues up a sad little emo song that tries to do all your feeling for you.

Bacon gives it his all, but the script asks him to perform tasks that include, I kid you not, leaping out of a hospital bed seconds after waking from a coma to run down a hall and give a heartfelt bedside speech to another patient -- all while wearing a cartoon bandage on his head.

In fact, that moment sums up "Death Sentence" pretty well: It's a cartoon that thinks it isn't one.

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C-minus; 110 minutes; rated R for strong bloody brutal violence and pervasive language.

'Death Sentence' (The Oregonian, Aug. 31, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters'

Movie review in the Friday, Aug. 24 Oregonian...

So one of year's funniest movies -- and its most inspirational sports drama -- is a documentary. A documentary about two middle-aged guys who are really, really good at Donkey Kong.

(That's right, Donkey Kong -- the '80s coin-op arcade game with the monkey and the ladders and the barrels and the little Italian guy with the 'stache and the hammer.)

"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" is shamelessly manipulative and wildly entertaining. It had me simultaneously laughing at and rooting for a group of spectacular nerds obsessed with something society deems unimportant. And by film's end, director Seth Gordon had persuaded me that this unimportant something was a valid sport with its own hard-to-master skillset and hall of champions.

Gordon starts out by introducing us to the insular world of elite vintage arcade-game masters -- specifically, to Billy Mitchell (pictured above), the self-styled "best classic arcade player of all time." Like many of the people we meet in "King of Kong," Mitchell has a personality so outlandish, the fact that Hollywood is thinking of adapting Gordon's doc into a feature film seems redundant.

There's no doubt that Mitchell is a stunning talent. In 1999, he played a literally flawless game of Pac-Man, and his 1982 Donkey Kong score of 874,300 stood for decades. But Mitchell is also possessed of a competitive ego as vast as his flowing mane. He wears patriotic ties and uses the high-score initials "USA" and has his own line of hot sauce and is prone to trash-talking like Clubber Lang and comparing himself to Helen of Troy. And he's worshipped by the self-appointed referees who run Twin Galaxies, keepers of the world's highest video-game scores.

And then a newbie crashes the party, and all hell breaks loose.

Steve Wiebe (above, right) is an easygoing seventh-grade science teacher in Redmond, WA and a perpetual runner-up in life. He's choked on the pitcher's mound, gone nowhere with his garage band, and was laid off from Boeing the day he signed the papers on his house. But then he has the audacity to not just break but smash Mitchell's Donkey Kong record in his garage, scoring over 1 million points. (The videotape of Wiebe doing this as his toddler son screams at him is priceless.)

But when Wiebe submits his record to Twin Galaxies and unbalances the apple-cart of Billy Mitchell worship, it sets in motion a chain of subterfuge and one-upsmanship and ego-popping too juicy and hilarious and rock-concert exciting to spoil here. It involves accusations of game-motherboard sabotage, travel to and confrontations with critics, curious rule-bending, and at least one lackey who is basically the Mr. Smithers to Mitchell's Mr. Burns.

Grown men cry. A wife becomes a fan. A person calling himself "Mr. Awesome" urges Wiebe not to "chumpatize" himself. And there are detailed explanations (with graphs!) of how Wiebe and Mitchell just absolutely rock Donkey Kong all the way to its legendary "kill screen."

I do want to note, again, that "King of Kong" is manipulative as heck. We get to know Wiebe and his family fairly well, but only see Mitchell's public persona, which would make Tony Robbins blush. There are even "training montages" set to '80s sports-movie schlock classics like "Eye of the Tiger" and "You're the Best." Mitchell is making a big stink about how he's portrayed as the villain of the piece, and he may have a point. It's also worth noting that the Mitchell-Wiebe rivalry has reversed itself once or twice since the doc stopped shooting, with no end in sight.

But none of that makes "King of Kong" any less moving or inspiring. By film's end, you're out of your seat -- realizing with perverse joy that this trivial pursuit has escalated to "Thrilla in Manila" levels of ferocity and drama. It's "Over the Top" via Nintendo, and it is stunning to behold.

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B-plus; 79 minutes; rated PG-13 for a brief sexual reference.

‘The King of Kong’ (The Oregonian, Aug. 24, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Right at Your Door'

Movie review in the Friday, Aug. 24 Oregonian….

"Right at Your Door" starts out so very well. In Los Angeles, an unemployed musician (Rory Cochrane) sees his white-collar-professional wife (Mary McCormack) off to work. Minutes later, a series of dirty bombs bearing a mysterious "molecular toxin" go off across L.A.

Writer-director Chris Gorak (an accomplished art director who worked on "Fight Club" and "Minority Report") does a lot with very little here -- using Cochrane's terror, radio reports and the briefest glances at ash-clouds and emergency vehicles to create a real sense of panic while keeping the worst destruction completely off-camera.

But then -- as soon as Cochrane seals himself into his house and we're forced to settle in with a handful of survivors -- the movie slowly but surely loses its hard-earned claustrophobia.

The dialogue devolves into endless f-bombs and actorly exhales. The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.

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C; 96 minutes; rated R for pervasive language and some disturbing violent content.

'Right at Your Door' (The Oregonian, Aug. 24, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Rocket Science'

From today's Oregonian....

Hal Hefner is stuck in hell. And in New Jersey.

Hal (Reece Thompson) is a smart and perceptive high-schooler -- but thanks to his bullying brother (Vincent Piazza) and a debilitating stutter, he's paralyzed by neuroses and panic attacks. His father recently left his mother. His mother then shacked up with a judge (Steve Park) with a horrifying sense of humor. And Hal gets terrible advice from everyone -- including a school counselor (Maury Ginsberg) with the barest understanding of speech pathology who advises Hal to "go back to where you were before you tried to exceed expectations."

But Hal's real journey into hell begins when he joins the Plainsboro High debate team because of a woman. Specifically, he joins the team because of Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) -- a master debater who talks faster than Maude Lebowski and warms Hal's heart with (a) her girl-next-door loveliness and (b) her persuasive arguments that she sees hidden talents in Hal.

"I'm ferreting you," she tells him. "Deformed people are the best. Maybe it?s because they have deep reserves of anger."

What follows is "Rocket Science," a dry, vicious, and deeply moving little comedy that sort of takes the structure of a teen sports movie, then undermines that structure at every turn.

Thompson is phenomenal as a smart, funny kid who can barely speak -- driven to drink and stalking and revenge and experiments with accents and sing-talking as he blunders through a world full of "kids wielding words like weapons and brandishing ideas like axes."

Writer/director Jeffrey Blitz (director of episodes of "The Office" and the documentary "Spellbound") has an incredible ear for dialogue and the mechanics of debate, and he gets wonderfully offbeat performances out of everyone. "Rocket Science" is a spiritual cousin of comedy-dramas like "Rushmore" and "Election" and "The Squid and the Whale," and it uses the form of the sports movie to challenge notions of victory. Hal "ups his game" over the course of the movie, as Ginny puts it at one point. But does he become a "winner" in any conventional sense? And does that matter?

This is a frequently ribald teen comedy, the sort of movie where one kid talks about his father being "the Kama Sutra Barry Bonds" -- but it's also a powerful, funny film about the cost of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone when you don't quite know who you are. Hal's heroic journey recalls Rilke's poem "The Man Watching": "This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, / by constantly greater beings."
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A-minus; 98 minutes; rated R for some sexual content and language.

'Rocket Science' (The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2007) 

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Invasion'

From today's Oregonian....

As a stand-alone thriller about aliens quietly taking over the planet, "The Invasion" is intermittently spooky, mostly perfunctory and occasionally very lame.

But it doesn't get off that easy, because it's also the fourth feature adaptation of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." And when you compare this "Invasion" to its predecessors -- which include Don Siegel's 1956 Red Scare allegory and Philip Kaufman's terrifying '78 remake, which contains one of the creepiest final moments in movie history -- the whole exercise seems offensively pointless.

Original director Oliver Hirschbiegel ("Das Experiment," "Downfall") was pushed aside to make way for re-writes and -shoots by the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue, and it's pretty obvious. Half the time, the film is a mild chamber piece making vague points about our culture of pill-therapy and war-mongering; then, suddenly, it’s a weak-sauce zombie movie full of gunplay and and helicopters and flaming car chases and greenish "Matrix" lighting. Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig are adequate leads, but no great actor will be more squandered this year than Jeffrey Wright, who does nothing but speak in vast paragraph blocks of exposition while looking haggard and bored.
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C; 93 minutes; rated R for language.

'The Invasion' (The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Death at a Funeral'

Movie review in today's Oregonian....

So director/puppeteer Frank Oz -- smarting, perhaps, from the disappointments of "The Stepford Wives" and "The Score" -- has gone off and made a tiny British comedy.

"Death at a Funeral" is modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge. Something like 80 billion people, most of them pasty-faced Brits, descend on an English country cottage for a father's funeral. Among them are a meek wannabe writer (Matthew MacFadyen), his lit-star brother (Rupert Graves), a drug dealer (Kris Marshall), the poor sap he accidentally doses (Alan Tudyk), a dwarf with a secret (Peter Dinklage) and assorted long-suffering girlfriends, fiancés and mean old people.

A lot of low-key Brit-com wackiness follows -- some of it living up to the film's title -- as Oz stuffs all these characters in a metaphorical bottle and shakes. The results are sporadically funny (Tudyk does a great drug freak-out), but for the most part, "Death" is just incredibly modest: modestly funny, modestly well-acted, modestly shot and modestly ambitious. If those British sitcoms you see on PBS on Saturday nights had swearing and poop jokes, they'd play like this.
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C; 90 minutes; rated R for language and drug content.

'Death at a Funeral' (The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2007) 

CulturePulp 64: The Faerieworlds Taxonomy

Last month, my stepdaughter wanted to go to the 2007 Faerieworlds Festival -- a sort of Saturday Market / outdoor concert for people who like to dress in "magickal" costumes and bliss out to shamanic healing songs.

It was a lovely afternoon. And it was interesting to see how attendees slotted into certain demographic subcategories. In fact, you can read a non-fiction comic strip on this very subject right here, at CulturePulp's new WCN archive.

CulturePulp 64: The Faerieworlds Taxonomy (Webcomics Nation)

Complete CulturePulp archives at WCN

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Rush Hour 3'

"Rush Hour 3" fails to get us worked up during the Aug. 10 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast.

However, I do get worked up over the fact that I totally suck at Guitar Hero. And later -- after yours truly has exited the broadcast -- the boys get very worked up about another Oregonian story.

Cort and Fatboy (Aug. 10, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Rush Hour 3'

Movie review in the Friday, Aug. 10 Oregonian....

There seems to be an unwritten rule about action-movie franchises: The longer a franchise goes on, the more each new sequel feels like a TV-series episode.

The casts get bigger. The setups get shorter, The jokes get broader. Everything feels less epic. This is especially true of all the action series that kicked off in the '80s: "Die Hard" and "Predator" and "Alien" and the latter two's horribly commingled bastard children. (Heck, "The Terminator" actually is about to become a TV series.) By "Lethal Weapon 4," you're listening for the laugh track and looking for Stephen J. Cannell's name in the credits.

All of which leads us to "Rush Hour 3" -- which bypassed this dilemma entirely by feeling like a TV series from the get-go.

Maybe the best thing you can say about the third installment in director Brett Ratner's fish-out-of-water/buddy-cop series is that it's consistent. If you laughed at the first two, you'll laugh at this. It moves fast and delivers the "comedy" and action beats you'd expect, when you'd expect them, in less than 90 unchallenging minutes.

The story -- which is about as memorable as an 90-year-old's breakfast -- starts with an assassination attempt on the ambassador from the first "Rush Hour." This leads to a hunt for the elusive secret name behind all Triad criminal activity. And that hunt takes Lee (Jackie Chan) and Carter (Chris Tucker) to France, where they're both fish out of water for a change, cutting a wide swath of vulgarity through Paris that includes a battle royale on pretty much every surface of the Eiffel Tower.

Oh, and it turns out Lee has an evil brother (Hiroyuki Sanada) who leaves you wondering if Lee's mother was having an affair with Benicio Del Toro. (You'll see what I mean.)

From here, "Rush Hour 3" is an exercise in critic-proofing: If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

Much of it is mind-blowingly stupid, like when Chan and Tucker get into a fight with an eight-foot-tall Chinese man for absolutely no reason other than that it looks funny. (This is immediately followed by a play on the old "Who's on First?" routine, this time with two gentlemen named Mr. Yu and Mr. Mi.) Some of it is actually pretty fun, as when our heroes convert a French cabbie (Yvan Attal) into a raging, bloodthirsty action-hero wannabe.

Jackie Chan brings it as hard as a 53-year-old man can bring it with the assistance of stunt doubles and digitally removed wires. Chris Tucker shrieks a number of off-color improvised remarks along the lines of telling Chan, "You can't be black -- there's a height requirement!? There are several gratuitous, in-your-face shots of women's behinds. And keeping us the derriere motif, Roman Polanski turns up as a Parisian cop prone to cavity searches. Jackie Chan jokes about renting porn. Jackie Chan jokes about soiling his pants. And there are moments of gay panic that make "Hot Fuzz" look positively butch by comparison.

In other words, it's pretty much business as usual.
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C; 90 minutes; rated PG-13 for sequences of action violence, sexual content, nudity and language.

'Rush Hour 3' (The Oregonian, Aug. 10, 2007)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'The Bourne Ultimatum'

I get the boys all worked up about "The Bourne Ultimatum" as they broadcast live from the Bagdad during the Aug. 3 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast.

Cort and Fatboy (Aug. 3, 2007)