Feast Of Love

Writer: Allison Burnett (based on a book by Charles Baxter)
Director: Robert Benton
Rating: R
Run Time: 102 minutes
Trailer: Click here to view
Release Date: September 28, 2007
The Reel Man: 1 reel
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***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***
Master of the voiceover, Morgan Freeman opens Feast of Love with a monologue (likely lifted from the Charles Baxter novel it is based on) about how the Greek gods, to cure their near clinical boredom, invented humans. And when that didn't work, Freeman continues, “they invented love. And then they weren’t bored any longer.” But rest assured you won't find this film in any of the gods' Netflix queues - except maybe Zeus's, because despite popular belief, the ruler of Mount Olympus is a pretty easy deity to please.

An ensemble piece set in hip-city-of-the-month, Portland, Oregon, Freeman plays Harry Scott, a college professor on indefinite leave after the sudden death of his son from a heroin overdose. One of the finest actors to ever carry a SAG card, Freeman conveys volumes in a single look or raised brow. Unfortunately, his talents are wasted here and one can't help but wonder what better projects Feast of Love forced him to turn down.
Harry's friend is Bradley Thomas, played humorously by Greg Kinnear. Bradley owns Jitters, a coffee shop where a lot of the characters first meet. It is his story we are most invested in, and it delivers the majority of the comic relief. For instance, after a softball game, Harry, Bradley and his wife, Kathryn (Selma Blair), are at a bar when a woman from the opposing team joins them at their table. Within seconds, a more-than-friendly connection forms between the two women. Later, Harry remarks to his own wife, "Funny thing is, nobody noticed. Not even the husband.” His wife responds, "I’m sorry I missed that.” Harry adds, “I imagine he will be too."
But soon the film plays it safe as the lesbian story drops out entirely, as if to imply that homosexual couples do not encounter the same relationship hurdles as heterosexual couples. Of course, Kathryn is most likely not a lesbian, which will mean copious amounts of entertaining drama, entertainment that the film seems bent on avoiding. The feast, it turns out, is more of a snack.
Meanwhile, Bradley meets the cure for his broken heart, the sexy, oft naked realtor, Diana, played by Radha Mitchell. But Diana comes with enough baggage to tire even the Samsonite gorilla. To her, being faithful isn't anything more than a word.
There is also the young lovers' story. As good as Alexa Davalos looks in her Daisy Dukes, she looks even better out of them. In Feast of Love, she plays Chloe, new girlfriend to Oscar (Toby Hemingway), the "ex-jock, druggie” who still manages to make his bed and put his teddy bear on the pillow each morning. Their budding relationship is threatened by Oscar's abusive, knife-wielding, alcoholic father, Red Herring-- I mean, Bat.

Then there is the ham-fisted attempt to connect the battle of the sexes (or sometimes same-sex) with sports. Oscar and Chloe make love in an empty football stadium. And Harry witnesses another couple bump uglies on the 50-yard line (though perhaps the end zone would have been more appropriate.) And there is the aforementioned softball game, as well as a very significant plot point involving a friendly game of touch football that proves psychics really can see the future. I wish I had consulted one. Then maybe this mortal movie reviewer would not have been so disappointed.

The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters

Director: Seth Gordon
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 79 minutes
Trailer: Click here to view
Release Date: August 17, 2007 (limited release)
The Reel Man: 5 reels
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Long before learning how to carry numbers or diagram a sentence, I discovered what a perfect afternoon consisted of: a walk to the local 7-Eleven (back when its name reflected the hours it was open) for a Slurpee and arcade game. If you were good enough, a quarter could pay for the entire day-– well, except of course for that Slurpee. Pong was already a distant memory, and classics like Asteroids and Space Invaders were about to be supplanted by an angry simian at a construction site.
Simply put, The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters is a nostalgic documentary about an egotistical “celebrity” video gamer, Billy Mitchell, and the good-natured, everyman, Steve Wiebe, who threatens to break Mitchell’s record high score on Donkey Kong. Full of unexpected twists and gut-busting laughs, it is quite possibly the most enjoyable movie experience you are likely to have this year. It features a “cast” of characters, most of who convention-going Trekkers would be in their right to bully. However, the heart of this film is found in an unlikely hero we can all relate to.
35-year-old Wiebe is a family man who, after losing his job at Boeing, earned his masters degree to teach 7th/8th grade science. When he sets a new Donkey Kong record, Wiebe’s integrity is called into question due to his association with an old rival of Mitchell’s, gamer Roy Schildt, the self-proclaimed “Mr. Awesome.” Wiebe must try and prove himself by leaving the safety of his garage to play the game in public.
Mitchell, Wiebe’s nemesis, ranks among the most entertaining foes to ever grace the silver screen. The mullet, trimmed beard, patriotic ties and dark shades speak volumes about this Floridian restaurant owner and hot sauce manufacturer. Mitchell struts and primps his way through the film like a rooster in a hen house. Nothing is more important to him than retaining the title he won in 1982. At best, his tactics are insulting; at worst, they are downright dirty-handed.
The greatest triumph of King Of Kong is the way something as passive as a video game seems as dynamic as the World Cup. But what really pulls us in is the spirit and passion which these gamers exhibit. To his credit, Wiebe manages to escape being labeled pathetic, no small achievement given his commitment to an arcade game that most people quit playing decades ago.
On the downside, the nostalgic feeling the film delivers begs for a soundtrack featuring more than just a handful of tunes from the synthesized era that Donkey Kong was born in. Director Seth Gordon misses an opportunity to needle-drop Pac-man Fever by Buckner & Garcia, as we learn that Mitchell once played a perfect game of the hungry Japanese import. Of course, music rights are very expensive and so the absence of familiar songs is an understandable omission given the film's small budget. And on the plus side, it leaves room for Wiebe to provide a surprisingly listenable contribution on piano.

Bottom line: The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters is a cinematic ride that will tickle you out of your seat and leave you wanting to play Donkey Kong as much as you did in that 7-Eleven convenience store of yesteryear.

The Invasion

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Rating: R
Run Time: 93 minutes
Trailer: Click here to view
The Reel Man: 2 reels
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On its surface, The Invasion is just another summer horror flick. But as much as the original 1956 adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a parable about the threat of communism, director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s updated remake is about the threat of terrorism and its effect on the American psyche. Unfortunately for the hopeful science fiction geeks (myself included), it is not entirely successful. Nicole Kidman stars as Carol Bennell, a Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and single mother who soon finds herself in the minority of people whose mind and body have not been “hijacked” by an alien endospore brought to earth by a doomed space shuttle (not so accidentally named Patriot). Once a person is infected with the extraterrestrial bacteria, a metamorphosis occurs during REM sleep, yielding their will to that of the invaders.
In a nod to the 1978 film (a remake as well) for which she also guest starred, perennial alien horror movie actress Veronica Cartwright plays Wendy Lenk, a patient of Bennell’s who is one of the first people to notice that something is not right. At her regular therapy appointment, she anxiously explains, “My husband is not my husband.” When Bennell’s ex-husband begins to exhibit odd behavior, posing a threat to her and their son, Carol finds support in friend and romantic interest, Ben Driscoll, played by the current James Bond, Daniel Craig. What follows is a familiar plot that leads to a sudden and unsatisfying conclusion.

Thematically, The Invasion hopes to be a comment on our times. It examines our collective fear through the lens of post-9/11 America. That by now ubiquitous paranoia that fills the vacuum left behind by the end of the Cold War. With “terrorism” on the verge of surpassing “the” as the most common word in the English lexicon (or at least in the news media and State of the Union Address), we’ve come to suspect as “evildoers” the pedestrians we pass on the street, the passengers we sit next to on the commuter train or who stand in line at the airport security check, impatiently watching their carry-ons pass through the X-ray machine. To quote Carol Anne's (from Poltergeist) indelible observation: “They’re here.”

But The Invasion offers only a weak cinematic discourse on the subject and it is much too self-conscious. It redundantly reminds us of the September 11th vantage point that it’s coming from. Much like the hijacked planes of the terrorist attacks, here the space shuttle is hijacked and sent crashing to the ground, delivering the alien endospores to Earth. And standing atop a building surrounded by the infected, a couple leaps to their death while holding hands, an obvious allusion to the World Trade Center victims who tragically jumped to escape the inferno. The "War On Terrorism" gets an "honorable mention" in the form of looped radio and television news reports about the Iraq War and North Korea.

There are several spots in The Invasion where it seems as though a scene has been cut, as if we must piece together what happened during the two minutes we missed on a trip to the restroom. Indeed, there are scenes absent. Dissatisfied with the film as delivered by Hirschbiegel (who also directed the Oscar nominated Downfall), the studio hired the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue for reshoots. Although such recasting of significant production roles does not always mean disaster (the highest grossing film of all time Gone With The Wind changed directors), such an outcome is a rarity.

But there is an interesting argument made by the film about those handy portable devices we all carry: cell phones. Driscoll reminds Bennell of a trip they took to the Aspen Grove in Colorado and how it made her ponder what the world would be like if "people lived like trees, completely connected to each other as one.” In contrast to this, the saturated use of cell phones in the film suggests that despite putting us more in contact with one another, they actually serve to distance us by dissolving the impetus we would otherwise have for some quality face-to-face time. Our iPhones and Blackberries enable us to have more frequent conversations that often amount to nothing more than chatter, lacking any real substance and meaning.
But in a point of view seemingly sponsored by the Church of Scientology, The Invasion puts psychiatry on trial. Humans infected with the virus are without emotion, their mood is flat-lined. But Carol's converted ex-husband argues the same was true before the aliens arrived. Being a psychiatrist, Bennell writes out the gamut of prescription medication to her patients. And when Bennell is on the run, she seeks refuge in, where else, a drug store.

While The Invasion offers some genuine scares, these are undercut by some unintentional laughs. For example, during a press conference, two aliens vomit into pots of coffee to contaminate it with their endospore. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to do that in the kitchen where there’s no one around to witness it? Maybe they’ve never seen a Folgers commercial. As a result, the scene plays like something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch.
There is also the small but distracting matter of product placement. Perhaps it helped finance all those reshoots. To avoid being taken over by the alien virus coursing through her blood stream, Bennell must stay awake, but she chooses to drink only Pepsi products. Sure, Coke is caffeinated too, but I guess it just doesn’t taste as good as Mountain Dew. And when the very survival of the human race is at stake, there’s nothing more important than taste.

Finally, without spoiling the ending, I'll offer only that it includes an unnecessary bit of exposition that states explicitly what the subtext is. It’s a flaw even in the last minutes of Hitchcock’s Psycho. A good film (even a bad one) doesn’t require a college lecture at the end.

So if you’ve never seen the 1978 remake, add it to your Netflix queue. Hurry - before it’s too late!

Once

Writer/Director: John Carney
Rating: R
Run Time: 85 minutes
The Reel Man: 5 reels
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Some of the best films don’t seem like films at all. The characters pull us out of our butter-flavor-stained seats and into the fictional, but seemingly real world they inhabit. These movies make benevolent spies of us, the kind we become while people-watching on a park bench or waiting for the boarding call in an airport terminal. Once is the latest example of that rare cinematic experience.

A modern-day musical set in Dublin, Ireland, Once centers around a “broken-hearted hoover-fixer sucker guy” played by Glen Hansard, frontman of the Irish band, The Frames. “Guy” (his character does not have a name) is a struggling street musician who in the not-so-distant past, lost the love of his life. He meets a young salesgirl, “Girl,” played by Marketa Irglova, a Czech immigrant, who is dealing with a similar loss. After several stumbles we’ve all been through more than we would care to remember, the pair form a unique relationship, a respite from the depression they’ve been suffering under. But to say much more than that plot-wise would spoil the film.

Once sits atop a sturdy foundation of memorable, and sometimes heart-wrenching, music. We are left with the impression that Hansard himself lived the pain his character is singing about. But this was almost not the case. Director John Carney (also of The Frames) had a choice to make: hire actors that could half-sing or musicians who could half-act. Fortunately, his decision was made easier by the loss of Cillian Murphy who was originally cast in the lead role.

Now on to the technical pluses… The majority, if not all, of the lighting is natural. And with the exception of two perfectly placed crane shots, most of the camerawork is handheld. Both elements contribute to the film’s documentary feel and overall realness. In addition, the camera moves do not seem staged, but rather discovered in the moment. This is especially true in the music store scene where our heroes first perform together.

It should be noted that Once is a film that is more than the sum of its parts. It rises above being just another dramatic movie to, in this humble reviewer’s opinion, a priceless work of art. There is an intangible, unnamable element that exists between the frames. The overall result is that we believe “Guy” and “Girl” to be more than just characters born out of a starving screenwriter's mind (in this case, Carney's), but living flesh-and-blood people with beating hearts.

If there is any nitpicking to be done, there are times when the shadow of the boom microphone pulls us briefly out of the experience to remind us for a moment that it is a film after all. And in the same way a crowd forms behind an on-the-scene television news reporter, the drummer in Once is a bit preoccupied with making sure he is on camera. Also, “Guy” and “Girl’s” cute-meet is perhaps a little too cute.

The bank scene bends the reality that the film works so hard to achieve, but given that it provides a good laugh as well as explain the ease at which the characters get over their financial hurdle, it’s a forgivable indulgence.

Once stands, to date, as one of my favorite films of 2007.

I Know Who Killed Me

Writer: Jeff Hammond
Director: Chris Sivertson
Rating: R
Run Time: 105 minutes
The Reel Man: 0 reels

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After recent run-ins with the law, including a car chase through Santa Monica, queen of the supermarket tabloid, Lindsay Lohan, has become so ubiquitous that every morning I half expect to pour her out of my box of cereal. The likely result of this scenario would be Lohan clinging to a Cheerio life preserver, and no matter how many times I tried to submerge her with my spoon, she would resurface somewhere else in the bowl.

The irony of Lohan's arrest is that it may have actually saved her career for it prevented the freckled starlet from promoting what is arguably her worst cinematic outing to date, I Know Who Killed Me. The movie theatre I saw it in was empty. Although to be fair, it was the 10:45AM, Sunday matinee, as well as the Open Captioned version for the hearing impaired - because everyone knows that deaf people are notoriously early risers.

Lindsay Lohan plays Aubrey Fleming, a good-natured, high school senior and aspiring writer. The central character of her short stories is Dakota, a teenager who escapes the horrors of her life by retreating to the shelter of her imagination. The town is shaken by the recent disappearance of Jennifer Toland, a classmate of Aubrey’s, whose body is soon discovered with her right leg and arm amputated. It isn’t long before Aubrey is abducted and found near death, with similar injuries. An FBI agent investigating the case explains that the dismemberment of the victims is about punishment. Ah, our first clue as to who the killer is.

Aubrey doesn’t recognize her parents and, in fact, claims she is not Aubrey at all, but rather Dakota Moss, a down-on-her-luck exotic dancer from a seedy gentleman's club. Is she telling the truth about her identity? Or is Dakota really just Aubrey’s alter ego, a kind of psychological safe haven? After the fastest amputee rehabilitation program in screen history, complete with bionic prosthetic, Aubrey-- er, Dakota, goes in search for answers.

In his first produced screenplay, writer Jeff Hammond phones in a plot that is as uncooked as the yellowtail sashimi at Nobu. It seems as though he worked backwards, using the title of the film as a starting point. He might have done well to read Aubrey’s tackboard with notes on Three Act structure. The FBI agents come off more two-dimensional than the paper their dialogue is printed on, which is no surprise since their purpose in the story never rises above the occasional mislead or piece of exposition. Inept to a fault, they fail to ask the most obvious question: What do Aubrey and Jennifer (the first victim) have in common? And that sound you hear is Sherlock Holmes vomiting into his overpriced bag of popcorn.

The list of suspects is long, a writing tactic intent on hiding the “ball." Is the killer the hunky landscaper, the helpful bus passenger, the disappointed piano instructor, the creepy father or the eunuch boyfriend? Unfortunately, the writing is not the only flaw in this alleged summer thriller.

Bruce Dickenson is to cowbell as director Chris Sivertson is to blue. It’s a color motif that is beaten over our heads. There’s the blue rose, the blue competition ribbon, the blue hospital gloves, the blue cat collar, the blue football jerseys and the blue condom (Dakota may be the daughter of a crackwhore, but she still practices safe sex.) Sivertson employed so much blue, in fact, that American films currently in production are scrambling to import the color from overseas. But blue is not the only important color in the film; red is just as significant although less obvious. Both colors play as stand-ins for the film's central Yin-Yang theme. Blue is Aubrey; red is Dakota. It's a somewhat interesting device made a little less so by its abundant use the past three seasons on ABC's Lost.

I confess that when Aubrey tells her friends about a killer on the loose who stabs theatergoers in the back of the neck, I did a whiparound to check if anyone was behind me. However, that speaks more to my paranoia and cat-like reflexes than it does to any success of the film.

But despite this diatribe, the film is not without its positives, most notably Production Assistant Lindsey Isaacson, who I’ve been told never let the office phone ring more than once before answering. In fact, often she would pick up before it rang. The catering is also reported to have been quite good, although a handful of the crew complained about a lack of cream cheese at the bagel table.All kidding aside, for me personally, the best thing about I Know Who Killed Me is the opening song, "Step On Inside" by Vietnam. Singer Michael William does little to hide his influences, especially that of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. It is a track destined to make my Best of 2007 CD. Holler if you want one.