Four Brothers Movie Review

Maybe it’s my love of westerns that made me fall so hard for John Singleton’s Four Brothers, his 2005 Detroit-set revenge film and his best work since Boyz N the Hood. I didn’t realize it then, or even the second time I watched it, that it’s essentially a modern urban western. The lawlessness of the open land and small towns has been replaced by the gutted and run down Motor City. Instead of some evil landowner there’s a crime boss (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor early in his Hollywood career and long before his star turn in 12 Years a Slave). Replacing the heroic gunslinger is a criminal and his three brothers, in town for their mother Evelyn’s (Fionnula Flanagan) funeral and to exact revenge for her murder in what appears to be a convenience store robbery. Many of the western tropes are there. There are gunfights. There are shots establishing the landscape, in this cast derelict buildings and snow-swept (as opposed to wind) open spaces of frozen lakes.

Lone Survivor Movie Review

I think when Marcus Luttrell complains that he doesn’t understand how people could possibly say Lone Survivor, the movie based on his memoir, glorifies war because “there is nothing glorious about war,” he is missing the point. Due respect to Luttrell – he’s been to Afghanistan, watched his friends die, and was incredibly lucky to come out alive, but saying that a Hollywood movie glorifies something is not the same as saying that that something is glorious. No doubt being in war is terrible beyond words. That’s why veterans tend not to talk about the experience of war outside the context of the buddies they made and the stories they told and created. But a movie can make that experience seem, to the uninitiated, sexy, desirable, exciting, fulfilling, and yes, glorious. There’s an extent to which all films that depict war are inherently pro-war. You can’t show an image of something without tacitly endorsing what it represents. Whether or not Lone Survivor goes out of its way to glorify war or whether it is a form of war porn I’m not sure. Does the level of realism make it more or less responsible?

From My Collection: Boogie Nights Movie Review

On big happy dysfunctional family.

From the explosively charged opening tracking shot that introduces most of the major characters to the quietly triumphant closing, Boogie Nights never lets up. It flogs you with an emotional paddle again and again. The ups are sometimes as extreme in their euphoria as the downs are dismal. For me, it is still the most exciting film Paul Thomas Anderson has made. It was only his second feature, but his dialogue is truly second to none and he squeezes in a remarkable amount of character development. He can economize better than any other writer-director working.

Ted Movie Review

Loosed from the constraints of working in network television, Seth MacFarlane was permitted the chance to make a foul-mouthed raunchy live action comedy film. What makes Ted work so well is its loose tongue and general ease with which characters use colorful descriptions. The fact that a cuddly teddy Bear does most of the cursing is subversive in a kind of brilliant way. The film works a lot less when it ventures into the “Family Guy” territory of shock humor.

From My Collection: The Departed Movie Review

When Frank Costello asks a man how his mother is and he replies that she’s on her way out, Frank’s rejoinder, “We all are. Act accordingly,” sets a tone for the film. As the title suggests, death hangs like a pall over Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. It is a film in which most of the characters live with the fear of death around them at all times. They are cops and they are criminal mafia.

The story is of two young men, played by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, who become embroiled in an elaborate plot to take down Costello’s crime organization from one end and infiltrate the Massachusetts State Police Force from the other. Damon plays Colin Sullivan, the mole inside the State Police investigative unit for organized crime. He is recruited by Costello as a boy in an extended prologue that introduces most of the major players. Then there’s DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, a new police recruit fingered for a special deep undercover assignment to help bring Costello down.

The Big Hit Movie Review

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 1 May 1998.

Republished here with minor editorial adjustments that do no affect content.

At first I wonder how one knows that The Big Hit is an action comedy functioning almost as a satire. It was not billed that way in advertisements and certainly the people associated with the film have never delved into comedy. Director Kirk Wong is best known for a Jackie Chan vehicle, Crime Story, which is considered one of Chan’s only serious films. Executive producer John Woo takes his action very seriously with such films as last year’s Face/Off and the internationally acclaimed The Killer. The actors, Mark Wahlberg, Lou Diamond Phillips and Bokeem Woodbine are generally billed as ‘serious’ actors. Maybe the only evidence is the fact that the film is so campy, so cheesy and so lame that it could only be a satire. Contrary to that argument, the same cannot be said for Waterworld.

The Fighter Movie Review: One Fights and the Other Boxes

That David O. Russell’s The Fighter is “based on a true story” is not what makes it so good. After all, everybody’s life is a true story, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t make even watchable movies. Anyway, “based on a true story” is always a misleading entry into a movie. No matter how much truth is in the screenplay (in this case the product of Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson), the writers always end up playing fast and loose with some story elements.

I can’t say how much of the story of brothers Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, professional boxers from Lowell, Massachusetts, is true or not. But looking at Micky’s list of professional fights on Wikipedia, it’s clear that his late-stage successful career has been truncated for dramatic effect. Not that this matters much, but it serves to highlight how even a film as steeped in realism as this one can play with facts to enhance not only the dramatic power of the narrative, but to keep the plot within manageable constraints.