Dogs Bark

The Out Of Towner - - U-Turn (1997) - - 24 December 2009

Recommended. You either get it or, like most critics, you don’t. Those boys probably don’t get the Three Stooges either. The plot of U-Turn, a variant of the trapped-in-a-small-town nightmare, is just nonsense and a very funny send up of noir paranoia. There are many versions of this story, John Dahl’s Red Rock West being a recent example, but U-Turn goes the extra, gravel-paved mile. Well, heck, what else from director Oliver Stone? He went mental on the camera, in the style of Natural Born Killers, and talked Ennio Morricone into writing a score.  The star-packed cast, headed by Sean Penn as the luckless city mouse, and Jennifer Lopez as the femme fatale, seems to be having more fun than is legal. Of particular note, Billy Bob Thornton as a mendacious mechanic and Joaquin Phoenix playing Johnny Cash on horse tranquilizers. The rest I’ll let you find on your own.

Earless In Plaza - - Blood And Sand (1941) - - 22 December 2009

Not recommended.  I queued this up because I’d never seen it and wanted to evaluate the bullfighting sequences. I was also interested in a legendary dance sequence between Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn. The movie is terrible, even by 40’s weepy standards. Stars, Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell, were never much more that attractive fluff; as Spanish peasants, they’re awful. Hayworth’s father was born in Sevilla and Tony was from Chihuahua. Might they have saved the picture playing the bullfighter and his virtuous lady? Quien sabe. Hayworth and Quinn weren’t the box office they soon became and Blood And Sand gives them little chance to shine. The bullfighting is also anemic and sparsely used. This gores the story further; Power’s rise to glory is so weakly depicted that one can’t gauge his fall at the end.  The movie made money, although panned by critics. You can skip it without hurt.

Crashed On Landing - - Up In The Air (2009) - - 20 December 2009

Recommended. I had some serious problems with this. I recommended it because of the witty dialogue and great performances from George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and especially, Anna Kendrick (Twilight), as a brittle, ambitious, and very familiar, alt-yuppie. Clooney and Farmiga play a charming pair of unfettered grown-ups, the kind usually dismissed by Hollywood as “selfish” because they have no mortgage, no roots, and no children. Yet, despite this and his job as a professional “terminator,” Clooney acts with wry kindness throughout, supported nicely by his friend with benefits, Farmiga. He fights a heartless corporate attempt to replace personal pink slipping with a teleconference. But suddenly, near the end, the movie veers off course and replaces him with a lonely loser, validating the bourgeois life. I don’t know why director/writer Jason Reitman made this choice but it transforms a unique and interesting movie into a mockery of itself. Ugly, very ugly.

Breaks Just Like A Little Girl - - Factory Girl (2006) - - 14 December 2009

Not Recommend. It’s not that I hate this movie. I think that director George Hickenlooper felt some real affection for the historical Edie Sedgewick. I understand since there’s a little Edie in the girls I whimper over, too. Beautiful, self destructive, boho babes. Oh yeah. Sienna Miller nicely gets the Edie look, with a nod to costumer John Dunn (Mad Men, Basquiat, Casino)  But on this we gotta go with Jack Fate, or Quinn, as he’s called in the movie. After all he, not Andy Warhol, wrote two Great American Songs about the chick. Dylan threatened to sue if they used his name in the movie and so his character and manager Bob Neuwirth are pseudonymed.  I think I know what he didn’t like. He already told his story and he’s sticking to it.  It’s not a bad movie but far more simple than the mystery of the real tramp.

Mara Por Nada, Homie- - Sin Nombre (2009) - - 4 December 2009

Recommended. Sin Nombre [Nameless] is technically every bit as good as its reception at Sundance. The story is an expert tapestry woven from the jornada norte of a Honduran girl (Paulina Gaitan) and a gangster (Edgar Flores) fleeing Chiapas. There’s a bit of melodrama in their characterizations, despite completely realistic performances. Rookies Gaitan and Flores suggest a bright future. Most of the story takes place on the top of a moving train, allowing spectacular scenery shots and admirable production chops. My only quibble was with the near-unreadable subtitles - - not the fault of Oakland, CA director/writer Cary Fukunaga. However, realism makes me squirm when he casts the Mara Salvatrucha gang as a player. MS-13 is a real-life, international plague and although Fukunaga represents them as absolutely despicable, big-screen brutality only gilds their sordid lily in gangsta ‘culture.’ Movie shouts to the home boys should be generic, if required at all.