The Bounty Hunter: Double take

The costumes in “The Bounty Hunter” are horrible. Gerard Butler is dressed in a $20 plaid gap shirt, ill-fitting khakis, and chunky sneakers. Jennifer Aniston spends the movie in a skirt so tight that it gives her a pooch the entire time. That’s right. Jennifer “90 pound” Aniston appears to have a belly because the costume designer was too concentrated on making her boobs look good.

My passion about the costuming is about as much emotion I can scrounge up about this romantic? Comedy? I admit I was expecting it to be bad, really bad, Godzilla (1998) bad. I now see that this was actually wishful thinking because at least bad is something. The Bounty Hunter is nothing.

Gerard Butler is an ex-cop turned bounty hunter. Jennifer Aniston is a hard-hitting reporter who skips bail for a minor crime to pursue a story involving a suicide/murder/police cover up. Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston wrestle and get back together and break up. And there is also a bookie looking for Butler to collect $11,000 in kneecaps. Yar di yar yar.

It reminded me, in some ways, of a screenplay I wrote when I was 18 about rival gangsters crews in Boston. It was a terrible screenplay because I didn’t know anything about gangsters, but I did know a lot of clichés. This holds true for screenwriter Sarah Thorp as well.

Cheap is the best way to explain this movie. Cheap clothes. Cheap lines. Cheap plot. Cheap acting. Gerard Butler appeared to be in a drunken black out for much of the movie. And for his sake I hope it’s true.

Christine Baranski was really great though. She mostly talking on the phone to Jennifer Aniston (her daughter) and made jokes about drag queens. Her name was Kitty Hurley.

Can we please have a movie about her?


I give this movie 1 Michael Douglas’s out of 5.

Repo Men - Doubletake: Actually, I don't feel so good after all...

Until I saw “Repo Men,” I had completely forgotten Forest Whitaker was in “Battlefield Earth.”

Not that he’s the worst thing about either movie. No, that blame in both cases has to lie with the script. But he signed on to those scripts, and frankly, he knows better. Forest Whitaker, you are actor-grounded until after actor-prom. Which I guess is the Oscars. And since they just happened, you’ve got about eleven months to think about what you’ve done.

Jude Law, I’m disappointed in you, but I’m sorry to say I’m not surprised. This is about what I’ve come to expect from you.

Liev Schrieber, you were a beacon of light in the midst of this mess, making a meal out of a morsel. Thank you for being so deliciously despicable.

The truth is that “Repo Men” is an enormously frustrating movie, amounting to a massive mismanagement of an intellectual property. I can’t write it off as just bad, because it is such a great concept. Oh, wait. Yes I can. In ridiculously appropriate fashion, I would very much like to surgically open up the movie, remove its vital organs, and transplant them into a body that makes sense, isn’t riddled with plotholes, and isn’t getting into absurd and unnecessary fist, gun, and knife fights every ten minutes because it’s so afraid its audience will get bored with it and go wander into “The Crazies.” “Repo Men,” you don’t need the popcorn theatrics; just be yourself. You are the codependent girlfriend of movies: the more desperate you are to keep us with you, the more you scare us away.

The themes and premise of this flick are intriguing and timely. There are flashes of absolute brilliance. The first five minutes set up a gritty film noir future, and the last ten showcase the most unique sex scene I’ve ever seen. Everything in between, however, made my brain roll its eyes.

The morality of the universe never makes sense for an instant. It’s very hard to swallow that even if the business of forcibly repossessing delinquent artificial organs existed, that the “repo men” entrusted with the job would do it out in the open. Or if they did, that anyone would use their product. The movie tries to wipe this inconsistency away with Frank Mercer’s (Schrieber) pitch to a potential client that “What you’ve heard about us on the news almost never happens.” But with as indiscrete as Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) are, it seems likely that not only has this client heard about this on the news, but he probably witnessed one the murderous reclamations for himself on his way up the escalator (In a clever move, the offices of The Union - the sinister corporation behind all these shenanigans – are located in a suburban mall, presumably between a Hot Topic and an Orange Julius).

It’s not that I don’t think a corporation wouldn’t stoop to murder to make a buck, particularly in Movieland, I just think they would have to cover it up a bit better. As we learn from a scanner scene in an airport (remember how I said there was a ton of timely thematic material?), not only is it not covered up, but the FAA must be in on it too. The scanner is geared specifically to pick up these delinquent artificial organs. Since the FAA is a federal organization, that must mean that the government knows about all this casual civilian murder as well. I know this is the future, but I don’t think society is going to change so much that folks stop giving a crap about murder. 

I’m a real “glass half-full” kind of guy.

So I didn’t buy that part of the premise. But the underlying bits, that in the world the filmmakers set up, people enter into unsustainable financial contracts in the name of obtaining the health care they need, that human beings are becoming overly reliant on technology and get suckered in to buying things they don’t need. and that corporations are after profit at the expense of everything else…that stuff I buy. The bones. The blood, the muscle, the tissues, the organs. What’s wrong with “Repo Men,” is the treatment of the potent thematic elements it’s got floating around inside. Ironically, for a movie about people replacing their failing insides, the surgery the film itself needs most is a facelift.

Repo Men: The Feel-Good Family Film of the Spring! - Take

Buried deep in the recesses of “Repo Men,” somewhere beneath the action film with pretensions of social commentary, beats the dark, ugly heart of a poetic and intriguing film noir. Unfortunately, the quartet of strong performances from the likes of Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber and Alice Braga never quite manage to drag the movie up from the B gutter into the light of an A picture.

“Repo Men” grows from a fertile premise. In the future, every type of artificial organ has been perfected. Their distribution, however, has been completely privatized under the auspices of a company known as The Union. Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) are two of The Union’s “Repo Men,” assigned to repossess organs whose owners have fallen behind in their payments. As all good sci-fi does, “Repo Men” meditates on and extrapolates from concerns that are thoroughly grounded in modern-day reality. The universe crafted by screenwriters Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner (Garcia wrote the novel the film is based on) provides a thematic sandbox filled with issues like health care, unchecked capitalism, and privacy rights. The movie does indeed touch on all these, but too often devolves quickly into knifefights. Because you know what’s great to do with a phenomenal actor like Forrest Whitaker? Give him lines like, “I had him. Didn’t you see I had a knife in his side?”

Liev Schrieber, however, can use his nasal Bronx drawl on the line “Gimme yer feckin’ hyeart,” all he wants.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a good, enjoyable action thriller. But it had the potential to be something truly great and original, a mix of “Gattaca” and “Dirty Pretty Things.” For all the gleaming, futuristic production design, the actual production values rarely rise above a cable TV drama. The spine of this thing cries out for bold, uncompromising direction. The casual violence done to human bodies calls to mind Cronenberg. Unfortunately, in the hands of relative newcomer Miguel Sapochnik, it all ends up feeling rather pedestrian. One can almost hear the executive producer saying “No one gives a crap about existential moral fables. Can he taser two more guys in this scene?”

After the basic set-up, the story kicks into classic chase mode when one of Remy’s repo jobs goes awry and ends up costing him his own natural heart. The Union generously implants one of their own “artiforgs” (the clunkiest, fakest possible colloquialism for artificial organs) for which Remy can’t come close to paying. So he goes on the run, meeting up with Beth (Braga) a multiple implantee in similarly dire straits. Predictably, they fall in tragic love and set out to bring down the corrupt and evil corporation that Remy had no problem with until it decided it wanted to carve him up into flank steak and serve him with a side of country fried potatoes.

“Repo Men” is a fun, testosterone-charged night out at the movies, with enough of an intellectual bent to keep you from putting a fork through your own eye for shelling out nine to twelve bucks to see it. But it really is a shame that in the end it doesn’t amount to more than that.

The Bounty Hunter: Take

A lot of people are probably guessing that Jennifer Aniston’s upcoming Rom Com “the Bounty Hunter” is terrible title, terrible premise, and a terrible movie. What those people don’t know is everything.

“The Bounty Hunter” starring Aniston and hunk of the moment Gerard Butler starts out as a cookie cutter story. Butler is a down on his luck hunter of bounties and is surprised to learn that feisty ex-wife Aniston is his latest target. Blah blah blah Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But just as we are gently lulled into a feeling of security screenwriter Sarah Throp (formerly of TV- good for her) puts our head in a trash can and bangs the outside with a fucking pipe wrench in the form of SPACE WARS!!

That’s right. 17 minutes into the movie the whole tepid “bounty hunter” bullshit is thrown out the window as Jupiterians (of Jupiter) invade the lower 48 states and and start killing everyone with marrow in their bones. It’s up to Butler and Aniston to come together and fight these evil monsters for the sake of the human race!

The last third of the movie takes place entirely in the silence of space, a bold move for Sweet Home Alabama director Andy Tennant, forcing his two leads to communicate non-verbally and for the audience to truly learn what those secret looks between lovers are really about.

Sadly, they both die trying to save the lower 48 states. And sadder still, the lower 48 states are also lost to the Jupiterians. Is this a metaphor for the futility of love? Or the devastation that space exploration has wreaked on our economy? Only Frosty Lawson (Racetrack Attendant) knows, and he ain’t telling.


Frosty Lawson.

So much for the 21st Century - Cop Out Doubletake

The title “Cop Out” is no accident.

Man, is this a bad movie. Like, roll-up-a-newspaper-and-swat-it bad, because this movie does to your mind what a new puppy does to grandma’s Persian rug.

It’s the first movie Kevin Smith has directed without also serving as a writer, and it actually makes clear what a good writer he is. There are several very Smithy flourishes in “Cop Out,” but what’s missing is his truly unique voice. In a lot of ways it seems that everyone involved set out to do a by-the-numbers buddy picture – Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis emphatically debate the pronunciation of the word “homage” inside the first five minutes - it’s just that it’s tough to parody a genre that’s already pretty much a parody of itself. Despite a number of clever, and even laugh-out-loud moments, “Cop Out,” puts its run-of-the-mill, generic, borderline racist story ahead of the funny at almost every turn.

It says something that the most shining moments in the movie are the most incidental. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but everything gets a hell of a lot shinier whenever Seann William Scott is onscreen. His bizarre, over-the-top wackball pours a little juice into this jalopy, but he only gets a total of about ten minutes onscreen. The other standout supporting player is the lady who catches him while he’s trying to burgle her house. Her string of self-censored curses is the funniest scene in the movie. Which makes me a sad rabbit.

The structure is all over the place. There are extraneous relationships and plot strands that go nowhere (my only problem with Radha Mitchell in lingerie on a nanny-cam is that it was in this movie, where it both wasn’t funny and didn’t add anything to the story). The first twenty minutes is a nigh-unwatchable mess. Once Jim (Bruce Willis) goes to sell a baseball card to finance his daughter’s wedding, things pull together a little bit. The card gets stolen and voila, a clearly defined goal. For one of the two characters who are onscreen for ninety percent of the movie.

The other character, however is Tracy Morgan’s Paul. I suppose the level to which you enjoy “Cop Out” will depend largely on how you feel about watching a grown man behave like a developmentally challeneged middle-schooler for an hour and a half. He manages to channel the same shtick to more productive ends on 30 Rock, where at least there’s a bit of a wink, but here…man, childish histrionics is not the same as comedy. Like everyone else here, he’s got a few choice lines, but by and large he’s the biggest nail in the lid of this turkey. Maybe it’s my elite East coast liberal education talking, but on top of his general lack of funny, watching a grown black man behave like an idiot for money for 90 minutes just feels kind of dirty. But you know what? Who am I to tell Tracy Morgan he can’t be the next Adam Sandler? It is the 21st century, after all.

Shutter Island: Double Take

Scorsese’s newest movie film, Shutter Island, sticks close to the director’s strengths of something I like to call “captain obvious makes an experimental film.” But because it’s Scorsese, girl, it works. We start out with Scorese’s man-boy muse, Leonardo Dicaprio, as Marshal Teddy Daniels, investigating the disappearance of a psychopathic murderer from Shutter Island, home for the criminally insane.

The stilted acting, heavy handed dialoged, and too-loud dramatic music of the first five minutes were a stunning choice by Scorsese. It was like watching a 1950’s movie where Marlon Brando never happened to acting. But such deliberate direction could only mean that something mysterious was going on. Were we about to watch a honest to gawd B Horror movie? Were the characters just pretending to be who we thought they were? The first moment of “natural” acting didn’t occur until we meet the patients of the asylum. Yes, they were crazy, but they were real people compared to wooden Marshall Teddy Daniels.

It doesn’t take long to realize that there is something very wrong with Shutter Island. And it takes even less long to learn that Marshall Daniels is not just there for business. He has been damaged both by WWII and the death of his wife in a fire set by a patient he suspects might be hidden on the island. By the second day a hurricane hits, disabling the mainland ferry, of course, and more and more people seem to be telling Daniels, he ain’t ever leaving this island. His desperation and devotion to his wife’s ghost make Daniel’s head a horror film as much as the real horror film going on around him.

Although, to call Scorcese’s move a horror film is not accurate as much as you could call “Age of Innocence” or “Raging Bull” horror films. There is suspense; of course, quick pans revealing disturbing things, people jumping out at you, a wall of rats, and many, many…too many…images of dead children. But the best part about Shutter Island is, that as mediocre as I found the story to be, Scorsese’s wonderfully heavy-handed direction makes everything even lame seem like a bold production choice: His metaphors that involve showing you something, and then explaining to you what you were meant to get out of what you just saw…his many dream sequences and flashbacks to (thanks Scorsese!) piles of dead Jews…and children…the three big info dump scenes, which could easily be called “exposition crypt” “exposition cave” and “exposition light house”…well I just feel like I am watching a goddamn good ole’ American picture. I can’t bristle under that kind of enthusiasm.

Mini Spoiler alert: In the end there is a major twist, of course. And it’s not like the audience wasn’t expecting SOMETHING, but rather… which one of these three more obvious twists it will be? Thanks to “exposition light house” we knew the answer. Because Ben Kingsley told us in a lot of detail. And then Scorsese showed us a flash back of it. Which was just the way it should be. I give it 4 Daniel Day Lewis’ out of 5.





(This x4)






Just don’t see it if you have kids. Seriously. There a lot of dead kids.

"Cop Out" - Take-lette

I hate buddy cop comedies and smart people acting stupid. I can't deny that I laughed...but I felt bad doing it due to the levels to which people I like stooped to make them happen.

"Cop" a Feel - Take

“Cop Out” is the first feature feature film directed by Kevin Smith that is not also written by Kevin Smith. It proves beyond a doubt that he is a very talented...writer.

In a related story, I built a time machine, went back to when I was working at the sub shop and ordered a sandwich from myself – a 6-inch tuna with cheddar, no mayo – thus opening a hole in the fabric of space-time to a dimension where Kevin Smith and M. Night Shyamalan team up to make a movie that is both decently written and visually appealing, since neither one of them seems to be able to pull that off over here.

The level of enjoyment you will get out of “Cop Out” will be directly proportional to the level of enjoyment you get out of Tracy Morgan acting(!) stupid and Bruce Willis acting like Kevin Smith has his beloved German Shepherd, Ulrich The Untamed, tied up in the trunk of his car somewhere.  Between Morgan and Seann William Scott, who is still paying off his Karmic debt for indirectly dragging a growing succession of struggling young actors into roles as Stifflers (I caught 2 minutes of “American Pie Presents: Band Camp” on Comedy Central last week – and I do mean caught. My doctor says if I apply the ointment 4 times a day, the rash should clear up in a week or so), there’s more mugging in this movie than there was in the stairwell of my apartment building before they started putting pepper spray in the vending machine.

The movie is “written” by TV veterans Robb and Mark Cullen, but if I were them, I would probably just go back to sticking extraneous consonants onto the end of my name. The alleged “plot” follows Paul Hodges (Morgan), an NYPD detective who has to recover a stolen baseball card to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Bruce Willis plays a jaded, hardcase, wisecracking, bald-headed, seemingly invincible, borderline sociopath who is somehow also gainfully employed by the NYPD.  He is playing that part, however, in a Renny Harlin movie about killer traffic lights when he accidentally wanders onto the wrong set and Hodges, believing him to actually be John McClane, hits him over the head with a sack of nickels. He then spends a full three minutes of screentime cooing into Willis’s ear, “We’re buddies and we’re cops.” It’s pretty weird.

Over the course of the movie, Willis comes to appreciate Hodges’s unorthodox and inept brand of police work, while Hodges just keeps bugging Willis about the time he shot that guy even though he had diplomatic immunity. Eventually they get the baseball card back from the mobsters who stole it, but its corner gets bent in the climactic gun battle, downgrading it from “mint” to “very good” condition. So Hodges’s daughter has to settle for having her wedding in the alley behind Gray’s Papaya, which is really just as well because she was getting kind of all Type A about everything anyway.

The Wolfman - Doubletake

"The Wolfman" is clearly a labor of love for the director (and, I'm guessing, the star - Benicio Del Toro - as he's listed as one of the producers). Monster movies, the classics from the 1930's and 1940's, are the kind of art-cinema classic that endear themselves to the minds of those who watched them as young children. In a lot of ways, Joe Johnston's "Wolfman" mirrors Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of "King Kong." But where Jackson was painting on a myriad of canvases -- 1930's Hollywood culture, the foreboding Pacific, Mysterious Islands that time forgot, and the spangley new world metropolis of New York City, Johnston's story has a lot less fun ground to cover. Which in essence sums up "The Wolfman" -- less fun, or at least not as fun as you want it to be.

The film opens on the gray/blue, brown/gray village of Blackmoor (a place we're stranded for most of the proceedings). Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) is called home from a very long absence to help search for his missing brother, only by the time he gets there his brother's status has been upgraded from missing to dead (oh, what did we ever do without cell phones?). Upon tersely reuniting with his father (Anthony Hopkins) and consoling his brother's grieving fiancée (Emily Blunt), Lawrence sets out to avenge the death of his brother by finding and killing whomever or whatever rent him into an unrecognizable pile of meat.

The plot moves briskly through these beats. Save for one strange stroll down memory lane in which Lawrence recalls his mother's suicide, it's not long before we get to the gypsy camp (at which many of the townspeople's fingers are pointing and where Lawrence's brother was known to have been brokering deals) and we get our first full encounter (well, at least in swift-moving darkness) with the beast in question.

And what an encounter it is! While the movie faithfully (ploddingly, at times) reproduces the stuffy Victorian business of it's spiritual (and literal) namesake, the one place where the stakes go up is the gore factor. Dismembered limbs, heads torn from their shoulders, gaping wounds of ribbon-slashed faces, the movie pulls few punches in this department yet saves from lingering too long on any particular horror, so as to artfully supply the wall between gore and fetishism (the latter being the purview of more say the "Saw" franchise and the like).

The beginning of a running theme that all but the completely un-cynical would have already guessed before entering the theater begins here -- the movie tends to get markedly better when there's a wolfman on the prowl. I'm not giving too much away, given that the title character must be bitten in order to be infected ("lycanthropy" they whisper) that there are more than one wolfmen in the film, and each iteration is lovingly rendered in both the oft-highly scrutinized transformation sequences and in full form - hairy brutes that owe much, if not all, in terms of design to their 1940's inspirations. Gone are the hulking wolves of the "Underworld" or "Twilight" movies. These here are gen-u-ine wolf MEN. A great credit is due the effects team in particular, as each wolfman bears eerie resemblances to the actors from whom they transform.

Things don't go well for our hero, as you can imagine, and it isn't long before the action takes a welcome and dramatic shift to London. Everything is better in London, and here is where the movie shines brightest. The stakes are higher, the streets are clogged, and it's the one point in the film where we start to feel maybe we don’t know exactly how these dots are going to connect. The somewhat surprising revelations delivered by the not-so-surprising villain (there's a very early bit of foreshadowing that will likely tip you off, though some gender reversal is involved to make it work and don't read too hard into the allusion or it falls apart) isn't exactly what we expected, and adds a layer of convolution and confusion to what had been, up until this point, fairly staid and two dimensional characters. Genre films populated entirely by cardboard emotions can work, and while we all love to see more fleshed out reasoning and depth in our film's villains and protagonists the worst is when that transformation from 2D to 3D gets mangled along the way and we wind up with a lot of deformed, partially realized dramatization and emotional plot holes.

A combined failing of the actors and the director. The former problem is most particularly perpetrated by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who misses a lot of opportunities to sink his teeth in (no pun intended), instead eschewing towards the subtle. Understandable given the period of the piece (the lips of the British have never stiffer) but lamentable for the film as a whole. The latter failing from the director comes from a clear focus on style and the beast over a more coherent emotional message from the actors. At no point are we confused by certain revelations, but they fail in raising the stakes emotionally and as such only serve in wasting the filmgoers' time. Del Toro is notably restrained but still manages to occasionally smolder, the flip side of the extroverted types he tends to be known for. Emily Blunt is the best of the lot, putting a lot of fresh and real into a film that feels, in many ways, like it belongs in another time.

Shutter Island: Take

Scorsese’s newest movie film, Shutter Island, sticks close to the director’s strengths of exploring the darker sides of human nature. Surprisingly, it is also the most cheerful film he has made to date! We start out with Scorese’s man-boy muse, Leonardo Dicaprio, investigating the disappearance of a psychopathic killer from Shutter Island, home for the criminally insane.

Dicaprio’s investigation seems pretty slow until you realize that it’s all an allegory to the 17th century Holland Tulip Wars. Believe me, that little factoid adds much appreciated clarity to all those times Ben Kingsley stares off in the distance for waaaaay to long and whispers “tulpengekte”.

Dicaprio is terrified at first at all these mentally deranged human beings, especially that balding chick with the crazy eyes (the character is called Lady Cuckoo Beans, typical Scorsese laziness), but then comes to realize that in this 1950’s world the people of the island are just the progressive thinkers, homosexuals, feminists, and future folk artists of the future! When Lady Cuckoo Beans performs a rock ballad about freedom and tulips (OK Scorsese we get it!), Dicaprio realizes that he is actually home.

The love story between Jackie Earle Haley and Dicaprio is disgustingly beautiful.

As the movie progresses, the viewer begin to feel as though they themselves are crazy. Crazy for looking at someone like Lady Cuckoo Beans, or Mad Jack Simpleton, or Black Guy (I swear, that’s his name! Scorsese!!!!), and thinking “that person is awful because they want to murder me”, when we should have been thinking “That person is SANE because they want to murder the OLD me and make way for the new, better, progressive me! Thank you!!”

Spoiler Alert!!!! You probably guessed it, but I was very surprised to learn that Ben Kinglsey and Leonardo Dicarpro’s characters were actually the same man, himself a “looney” confined to a cage in 18th century Paris along side the Marquis De Sade. But Daniel Day Lewis’s surprise monologue in front of black as the credits rolled was the real gem of the picture. Yes, it is in dutch, but you understand what he is talking about. And that is the ravages of alcoholism.