Black Hawk Down Movie Review

As I rewatched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down for the first time I more than a decade, two other war Berchtesgaden more than a year later. The similarities are numerous. Both are based on books that attempted to recount, in as much factual detail as possible, the events surrounding are large contingent of American soldiers in conflict. Both were released toward the end of 2001, coinciding with post-9/11 American jingoism. Both focus heavily on the responsibility soldiers in combat feel toward each other more than to the ideology or politics behind the war. And both unflinchingly portray some of the horrors and carnage of war. The other is the more recent Lone Survivor, whose primary focus is on the fact of soldiers in harm’s way pulling for each other. The latter film has faced criticism for being a form of war porn, which you could also say to some extent about Scott’s film. But I think the positives to take away from all three far outweigh any negative observations regarding the depiction of blood and guts in battle scenarios.

The Counselor Movie Review

In general I try to avoid what other critics have to say about a film before I see it. Sometimes I have a general idea of the critical consensus, but in the case of The Counselor I knew nothing. I was shocked to find that the majority of critics had ripped it apart. It would have been surprising enough only for the fact that it was directed by Ridley Scott from an original screenplay by novelist Cormac McCarthy (his first produced). McCarthy is, after all, one of the greatest contemporary fiction writers in America. It also features a phenomenal cast of highly capable actors. Mostly my disbelief registered so high because I thought The Counselor was just wonderful, exemplifying the very best of what McCarthy accomplishes in his novels.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1987

David Mamet's first film as director was House of Games, one of the great films about confidence men.

Before Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to the Oscar for Best Director, she once directed a cult vampire film called Near Dark starring Bill Paxton.

The late 80s saw a string of films similar to Like Father, Like Son, in which two people change bodies for a while. In this one medical doctor Dudley Moore and his son, a high school track runner played by Kirk Cameron, accidentally exchange minds after ingesting an Indian potion of some sort.

Tony Scott Dies

This is a shocker if only because it's unusual to hear of suicide stories involving men in the twilight of their lives. Scott was 68 years old and married. He drove his car onto the Vincent Thomas Bridge in L.A., got out, climbed a fence, and jumped off. A suicide note was found in the car. Who knows what was going on in his life that spurred him to call it quits.

In addition to being one of Hollywood's most successful action film directors, he was also a producing partner with his brother Ridley and produced the recent Prometheus.

His list of director credits is a what's what of big dumb action thrillers: Top Gun; Beverly Hills Cop II; Days of Thunder; The Last Boy Scout; The Fan; Enemy of the State; Spy Game; Man on Fire; Domino; Deja Vu; The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; Unstoppable.

His feature debut was an indie vampire film starring Susan Sarandon, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie called The Hunger. It might have suggested a career path more like Ridley's until the dollars came calling, I guess.

He also directed True Romance, an early Quentin Tarantino screenplay and Crimson Tide, a pretty taut and well-made submarine thriller starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington.

He directed Washington in 5 films, making one of the most successful actor-director partnerships in recent memory.

Prometheus Movie Review

Ridley Scott’s highly-anticipated return to science fiction after a 30 year hiatus turns out to be provocative, fascinating and also deeply flawed. Scott has continued to ride a wave of good will brought about by having directed two of the best science fiction films of all time. Since then, he’s unleashed a stunning torrent of fodder for the masses, the vast majority of which has been utterly forgettable – even the best among them like Black Hawk Down.

In Prometheus he returns to Alien territory in a film that takes place within the same universe, so to speak, but is really cagey about the connections until the end. It takes place about 30 years prior to the events in Alien and like other prequels made long after their predecessors, it suffers from use of technology that is far more advanced than what was used previously. Consider that in Alien a simple two-dimensional grid pattern screen is used for tracking the creature and Dallas, represented by crude dots. In Prometheus, a high tech 3D holographic image of an elaborate system of caves can indicate where ay life is. To the great credit of the production team, the design of the eponymous ship: everything including walls and corridors; doorways and hatches, is fairly consistent with the original. Considering it is still the fictional Weyland Corporation, that makes good sense.

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1986

It turns out April 1986 was a rather uneventful month at the cinema in the United States. The two biggest box office money earners were basically flops. First was Ridley Scott's Legend starring a pre-Top Gun Tom Cruise.

The second was the low-budget creature feature Critters starring Dee Wallace and a teenage Scott Grimes.




If we ignore a forgotten film from 1974 and a nearly forgotten horror flick called The Hand, Oliver Stone's first important directorial feature was released this month. Salvador stars James Woods as a journalist who travels to El Salvador to document the 1980 civil war and becomes entangled with both the guerrillas and the right-wing military.

Hannibal Movie Review

This review was written in February 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

There is an unfortunate stigma that comes with sequels: the belief that it must be as good as or better than the earlier film in the series. Comparisons are always inevitable in such cases, but if a sequel can stand on its own, why is that not good enough? I've always maintained that the third installment in the Godfather series would be an excellent movie had it not been the third in a series of fantastic films. Hannibal, the sequel to 1991's critically acclaimed Silence of the Lambs, now faces the task of being measured against its predecessor.

Cyrus Movie Review

Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei have an especially close mother-son bond.

Cyrus is a movie about a war of nerves between two emotionally stunted men. John C. Reilly plays John, a man stilled scarred by a divorce seven years ago, and his foil is Cyrus (Jonah Hill), the son of a woman he thinks he may have a future with. The film is directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, who have a couple of minor features and short films to their credit, but finally struck some luck by getting serious financial backing from Scott Free Productions, the production company owned by Tony and Ridley Scott.

Reilly has almost made an entire career out of playing big lovable lugs who wear their emotional insecurities on their sleeve. John, the character, bears a number of similarities to Reilly’s character in Magnolia, also a divorced man perhaps a little too open with his feelings and looking for the right woman.

Robin Hood Movie Review: Get Ready for Robin Hood 2

I’m 32 years old now and it’s time for me to put away childish things. One of those is the idea that Ridley Scott, the visionary director of Alien and Blade Runner, will ever return to the kind of inspired filmmaker that started his career. Or will he continue being a Hollywood director-for-hire of genre pictures. Come to think of it, those two early films of his were genre pictures: slasher and science fiction, respectively. Since then he’s made fantasy, road movie, epic, thriller, war and romantic comedy, often with little critical success, but massive box office results which is probably his reason for continuing in this vein.

I liked Robin Hood a lot better when I was 13 years old and it starred Kevin Costner. Not that the newly updated version directed by Scott from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland from a story by Helgeland, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris is all bad. And certainly not to suggest that the previous film was really good. The logical question to ask is, Why another film version of the Robin Hood legend?

The answer is that Hollywood loves returning to the same well again and again. Another possible reason is that this one, though it takes place at the turn of the 14th century, contemporizes the background elements. King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) is returning home from the crusades via France and sacking castles that stand in his way. The man who will later become Robin Hood is a mere archer for hire in his army, known initially as Robin Lonstride and played with typical brooding and smoldering intensity by Russell Crowe.

Unlike previous depictions of Richard I in this legendary tale, this one is more up front about the nature of The Crusades. They do not shy away from Richard’s nature, the fact that he went on an ostensibly religious mission to convert the pagans of The Holy Land to Christianity, impoverishing his own country in the process. Robin, of course, is established early on as morally virtuous, despite his involvement in the wholesale slaughter of Arabs. He relates to the king a moment during a massacre when a woman looked up at him not with fear or hatred, but with pity. Robin has the gall to stand face to face with the King and tell him that his Crusade was wrong. This doesn’t work out so well for Robin.

While I don’t think the screenwriters necessarily intend to draw a parallel between England’s Crusade under Richard I and The United States’ War on Terror, surely the seed for that story development came from contemporary history, all the way to depicting a country full of people who have given over all their tax money to fight an unwinnable war.

Maybe it’s obvious by this point that this is not the Robin Hood we all know from Errol Flynn to Sean Connery and the Disney animation. Sure, there’s Little John (Kevin Durand) and Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and Marian (the lovely Cate Blanchett). Robin is not of Loxley, although he later has the chance to pose, for reasons far too complicated to get into, as Robert of Loxley. There’s even a scene in which Robin and his men (sometimes merry, but not yet Merry Men) steal seed grain in order to return it to its rightful owners, but this is not what Robin is about…yet.

An incredibly convoluted plot precludes the possibility of my explaining it effectively here, but I’ll provide the broad strokes. Richard dies in battle in France, but that doesn’t matter because he would have been ambushed and killed by Godfrey, an English double agent played by Mark Strong, who was also the one-dimensional baddie in last year’s Sherlock Holmes. Godfrey wants Prince John to be elevated to the throne and then wreak havoc across the English countryside in the name of King John so the land barons will rise up against him in civil war, thus paving the way for the French army to easily invade and conquer. What’s in it for Godfrey? Well it’s in service to the plot, duh!

Robin and his pals pose as knights to receive safe passage back to England. Incredible coincidence offers Robin a sword with a familiar inscription and then lands him in the home of the blind old Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow, trying very hard to maintain what’s left of his dignity by appearing in a film far beneath his talent) who may know something about Robin’s long lost father. Here he meets Marian, who was married to the man whose identity Robin has borrowed.

Prince John is portrayed by Oscar Isaacs in a performance that bounces from evil maniacal to foolishly naïve and then back. Why is it so difficult for Hollywood screenwriters to paint morally ambiguous villains? Why must we be bombarded with cartoonish venom? Mercifully Eileen Atkins signed on to play the role of John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, so we have some reserved and professional acting to balance out the bombastic Isaacs. William Hurt is also along for the ride as the King’s Marshal, a trusted confidante of Richard’s summarily dismissed by John upon his ascension.

If you’re going for the action, there’s plenty of it. Although Scott has a good deal of experience directing big action set pieces there is nothing here on the level of Black Hawk Down or even Gladiator. Many of the battle sequences are marred by jarring close-ups that provide no sense of perspective on the action. Some of that blame should probably be placed on film editor Pietro Scalia, despite his great work on the two aforementioned films, even winning the Oscar for the former.

There’s little here to get really excited about. It just about meets expectations for a film of this nature. Do you think there will be a big climactic battle sequence? Do you think Robin and Marian will fall in love, even if the step from admiration to “I love you” is actually a leap? Do you think Tuck, a beekeeper in this incarnation of the story, will use his bees as a weapon at some point? And why the hell are Peter Pan’s Lost Boys running around the forest waiting to become saviors at the end?

Most disappointing of all was the realization at the end that this Robin Hood is nothing more than an origin story, a two hour commercial for the next in the series. Because that’s all they do in Hollywood nowadays: remakes, sequels and prequels. Hey, this one is two of those at the same time.