During the Friday, Oct. 29 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast -- easily one of the most random episodes I've ever participated in -- we eventually discussed "Tron Night" and a bunch of great Halloween movie events happening in Portland. But first, a strange comment by Cort kicked off a 20-minute pinball machine of riffing about, among other things, smooth '80s music and keyboard scarves and "Mortal Kombat" and God knows what else.
(Also: Dig that new "Cort and Fatboy" Web-site header -- drawn by Fatboy -- which now features all the regular guests.) _____
Big-Ass Sandwiches proprietors Brian and Lisa Wood just announced on their Twitter feed that they'll be resurrecting the weekly special named after naughty instructional cartoon character Mr. Don't.
The recipe for "The Big-Ass Mr. Don't," which debuted in June: homemade chicken-fried steak, fries and Brian's homemade country gravy.
The sandwich goes on sale Monday (Oct. 25) for $9. It is worth every penny.
"Conviction" is an agreeable little legal docudrama that's doomed to faint praise: It earns head-pat adjectives like "admirable" and "inspiring" and "restrained" and "well-acted" and "solidly crafted," but never quite stirs the deeper passions.
The film recounts the real-life 18-year struggle of Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) to free her hothead brother Kenneth (Sam Rockwell) after he was wrongly convicted of murder in Massachusetts in 1983. The obstacles are Sisyphean, the achievement superhuman: In the movie, Waters earns everything from a GED to a law degree while straining her family, working as a waitress and waging a painfully slow war against bureaucracy, politics, corrupt cops, unreliable witnesses and the careless storage of evidence.
It's a remarkable real-life story, and director Tony Goldwyn does a decent job skipping through time in the film's first half as he skims the Betty/Kenneth backstory. And with the exception of the underused Rockwell -- who sadly doesn't have much to do here except throw a few fits and sit in prison while his eye-wrinkles deepen -- the performances by actors not named Juliette Lewis are for the most part nicely ... restrained. Swank's Massachusetts accent never feels like an actorly affectation, for example, and it's nice to see Minnie Driver and Peter Gallagher on the big screen again as Betty's legal allies.
But the Pamela Gray script also feels a bit like it's running on TV-movie rails, keeping a nice respectful distance from anything too emotionally thorny, including Kenneth's depression in prison and the familial costs of Betty's obsessive pursuit of justice. I never minded the movie; I just wish I'd felt its beat-the-system drama more profoundly, instead of giving it a polite nod as it ended. It's the sort of earnest drama that might earn a token Oscar nomination and make everyone involved feel good about themselves before quietly fading from cultural memory (precedent: John Travolta's "A Civil Action," 1998). _____
(107 min., rated R, playing in Portland at the Fox Tower)Grade: B-minus
Now online (and in print, on page 6 of The Oregonian's Oct. 8 A&E): the first new "CulturePulp" reportage comic strip in about a year. In this installment, I hang out with actor, musician and paranormal enthusiast Dan Aykroyd as he signs bottles of his "Crystal Head Vodka" at a Portland liquor store.
The endnotes beneath this installment are extensive.
"Secretariat" is an unapologetically earnest biopic about the breeding and training of history's fastest racehorse -- the 1973 Triple Crown champ so overpoweringly fast, his records still stand today. (Imagine "Seabiscuit" without the dramatic underdog status or any major setbacks.) The movie's an effective crowdpleaser, but it also feels self-consciously designed by a team of engineers to have "heart" and get nominated for popular awards, and I wish its characters had a bit more dimension.
Director Randall Wallace ("The Man in the Iron Mask") worked with screenwriter Mike Rich ("The Rookie") to adapt William Nack's nonfiction book. They compensate for the sheer indomitability of their lead animal by finding drama in money problems and very, very lightly touching on issues of familial neglect.
Steel-willed housewife Penny Tweedy (Diane Lane) takes over her senile father's breeding ranch, much to her husband's blandly sexist consternation. Penny inherits a sizeable tax burden, but also the titular genetically gifted super-horse. She soon gathers a pack of colorful characters (including John Malkovich as a French-Canadian trainer who favors ugly hats), and they manage their born champion while fretting about leveraged breeding rights and disapproving relatives, with occasional breaks for the odd schmaltzy gospel-music-scored horse-washing scene.
"Secretariat" strives to be an old-school awards-season melodrama -- the sort of flick I tend to call "handsome" -- and the actors and the film's genial nature help it go down fairly easy. (Also, hi-def camera tech has gotten so compact that director Wallace can get right in there and film from beneath the stallions as they thunder around the track; the racing scenes are frequently magnificent and surprisingly thrilling, given the preordained outcome.)
But the movie never dives deep, emotionally speaking. Penny's long-distance marital conflict is glossed over in a few scenes of vague disapproval, for example, and I never got a sense of the underpinning psychology or precisely how torn up Penny was over missing huge chunks of family time. And every character is boiled down to an easy-to-read "type": Penny is quietly tough as nails, just like her daddy, or so we're continually told; rival trainers and jockeys snarl and bully and might as well be twirling mustaches; our heroes get tidy grandstanding speeches or stare meaningfully into one of Secretariat's eyeballs whenever things get rough, and no one ever carries the same emotion through more than a scene or two.
(The movie's also full of semi-portentous dialogue that manages to have double meanings while also feeling weirdly on-the-nose, e.g. when someone says portentously, "Great colts come from great sires." Wait, are they talking about the horse or Penny? Oh, I get it -- they're talking about both of them.) By the time Penny and a wealthy horse owner (James Cromwell) were meeting in a restaurant to negotiate a deal and the waitress asked something like, "Have you decided?" and that was supposed to be a double-meaning moment, I was sort of done with that particular screenwriting device.
Still, it's all mildly uplifting in the way of an unchallenging sermon -- I had a perfectly decent time, and I'm guessing it'll make a modest fortune -- but the movie also plays it safe in the shallow end of the emotional pool. I suspect this will keep it from enduring. _____
• During the Friday, Oct. 1 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, I talked about my run-in with Dan Aykroyd (soon to be a comic strip) and gushed over "The Social Network" and "Let Me In." We were maybe less excited about "Star Wars" in 3-D.
• We also recorded another of our rambling "Midnight Movie Commentaries" -- this one for "The Lost Boys," with Cort, Fatboy, Dave Walker, Erik Henriksen and yrs. truly. Marvel as we obsess over the glistening gyrations of the Well-Oiled Sax Man! (Fun fact: The last five minutes of this yack-track are us watching this scene over and over and over.) _____
