Dumb & Dumber

Year 2, Day 240 - 8/28/10 - Movie #606

BEFORE: Another movie that it seems has been seen by everyone in the world, except for me. Hey, I've been busy in the last 16 years...plus I suppose I avoided this film as long as I could. Why? Because it's dumb, it says so right in the title.

It's no coincidence that my Jim Carrey chain overlaps with my mental illness chain - playing various morons and idiots was his stock in trade for years.

THE PLOT: The cross-country adventures of two good-hearted but incredibly stupid friends.

AFTER: Yeah, it's pretty dumb. There are one or two slightly redeeming jokes... ("Pull over!" "No, it's a cardigan!") but the movie lost me with the toilet humor. I don't find people accidentally drinking urine, or ingesting industrial-strength laxatives, to be laugh-worthy humor. It's pandering to the basest level of human existence, making light of bodily functions...entertainment on a third-grade level.

Maybe it's better to watch this one with a group of like-minded people, I don't know. I just found that most of the jokes didn't land for me. And the stupid parts, even though intentionally stupid, were just stupid...and not even "stoopid".

Starring Jim Carrey (last seen in "The Mask"), Jeff Daniels (last seen in "Good Night, and Good Luck"), Lauren Holly (last seen in "Turbulence"), Charles Rocket (last seen in "Delirious"), and character actor Mike Starr (last seen in "Blue Steel"), with cameos from Teri Garr (last seen in "Michael"), Karen Duffy, Harland Williams, NHL legend Cam Neely, and Nibbles, the New England Pest Control termite mascot.

RATING: 3 out of 10 beer bottles

The Dream Team

Year 2, Day 239 - 8/27/10 - Movie #605

BEFORE: I really need to watch some light comedy, and what's funnier than mental patients? This is part of the "crazy people go on a road trip" chain...

THE PLOT: A group of mental patients on their way to a ballgame are stranded in New York City and framed for murder.

AFTER: OK, so most of it wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but it managed to be heartwarming in its own weird way. Kudos for showcasing 4 entirely different types of mental defect - the aggressive psychotic, the catatonic, the religious fanatic, and the obsessive-compulsive with delusions of grandeur.

And the mental patients want to go to Yankee Stadium? Actually, that does sound about right. I was there earlier this year and saw a lot of people who'd probably qualify to be locked up in the looney bin...

Naturally, since this was light comedy, the experience of being lost in New York, arrested, and framed for murder proves to be just what these mental cases need, in a strange roundabout way. They're forced to overcome their differences, and their disorders, to work together to find their doctor, face two crooked cops, and get themselves back to the asylum.

No, it's not Shakespeare, but after the depressing week of movies I just watched, I applaud a film that doesn't take itself too seriously.

The most logical film to watch after this would be "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", but I'm saving that for my Jack Nicholson marathon in September...

Starring Michael Keaton (last seen in "Johnny Dangerously"), Peter Boyle (last seen in "Monster's Ball"), Christopher Lloyd (last seen in "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai"), Stephen Furst, Lorraine Bracco (last seen in "Being Human"), and Dennis Boutsikaris (last seen in "batteries not included"), with cameos from Milo O'Shea (last seen in "Only the Lonely"), Philip Bosco (last seen in "Blue Steel"), and Michael Lembeck.

RATING: 6 out of 10 hot dogs

Niagara, Niagara

Year 2, Day 238 - 8/26/10 - Movie #604

BEFORE: Examining different forms of mental illness this week - a couple strays before I start the Jim Carrey chain of "morons, psycopaths & mental defectives".

THE PLOT: An outsider and a young woman plagued by Tourette's syndrome meet and together journey to Canada.

AFTER: Family abuse, mental illness, booze + pills, random violence, robbery and auto theft. It's another dark, depressing film developed over at the Sundance Institute - what's wrong with you people over there, were you not held enough as children or something? You know what people like? Light comedy, that's what - Will Ferrell is very popular these days, I'm just sayin'.

Robin Tunney (last seen in "End of Days") does a good job, I guess, of portraying Marcy, a woman with Tourette's Syndrome - is there a right way and a wrong way of doing that? I mean, you just say and do things randomly, right? A couple of twitches and tics and curse words? She goes on the run with Seth, played by Henry Thomas (last seen in "Gangs of New York") and has a hard time getting her medication from pharmacies on the way to Toronto. Apparently there are no doctors in upstate New York that could possibly confirm her condition and issue a prescription, so they're forced to break into a drug store.

From there, they get access to all kinds of uppers and downers, plus whiskey, all in the name of controlling Marcy's condition. I dunno, it seems a fairly long leap from petty shoplifting to armed robbery, but not for these two. Before they can follow in the footsteps of Bonnie and Clyde, they are befriended (sort of) by an upstate chicken farmer. He's an odd geezer who's also prone to random swearing, but not in a Tourette's kind of way.

What bothers me is that all of the mishaps and tight situations this pair encounters are never prefaced by either of them explaining, "She's got this condition" or "I've got Tourette's syndrome." Because I supposed that would be like admitting that this condition has power over her, and she doesn't want to feel helpless. I get that, but if you've got a medical condition that causes you to act wildly, and someone's holding a gun pointed at you, you might want to explain that you can't help BUT make sudden moves...

So there's not much logical sense here - I'm not even sure why they think things will be any different or better in Canada. Even that common myth about people being nicer there turns out to not be true.

I've witnessed quite enough tragedy on celluloid for a while - both intentional and unintentional. Tomorrow I've got to start lightening this up.

Also starring Stephen Lang (last seen in "Manhunter"), Michael Parks (last seen in "From Dusk to Dawn"), with cameos from Clea Duvall (last seen in "21 Grams"), Candy Clark (last seen in "The Man Who Fell to Earth"), and John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco from "The Sopranos")

RATING: 3 out of 10 crushed cars

I Am Sam

Year 2, Day 237 - 8/25/10 - Movie #603

BEFORE: I went to a beer and ice cream tasting event tonight, where 6 gourmet ice creams and sorbets were paired with microbrews. The highlights were a chocolate ice cream topped with candied bacon, paired with a Achen Bruin (Trappist Dubbel) and a Grado Plato Chocarrubica Oatmeal Stout from Italy, in a beer float with vanilla ice cream.

Wrapping up my Sean Penn movie chain with the ultimate challenge for an actor, which is playing a mentally disabled/challenged character...you know, the "R" word...

It can either win you an Oscar (Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man") or sink your career (Rosie O'Donnell, Juliette Lewis).

THE PLOT: A mentally retarded man fights for custody of his 7-year-old daughter, and in the process teaches his cold-hearted lawyer the value of love and family.

AFTER: Those are IMDB's words, not mine - see, they said "retarded", not me. I'm not even going to discuss Sean Penn's portrayal of a mentally-challenged individual, because I'm starting a whole chain of movies on the subject, and watching this is like setting the standard - I'm laying down a baseline. I will say that for the first time, I could actually see Sean Penn playing Larry Fine in the proposed biopic of "The Three Stooges".

No, I want to discuss the character of Rita, the lawyer played by Michelle Pfeiffer (last heard in "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas"). Since they couldn't give Sean Penn's character any sort of arc or character development, they TRIED to do it with her character. So when we first see her, she's a rich, successful, entitled lawyer with rage issues, relationship problems, and food issues - and she only takes Sam's case as pro bono work to make herself look good, which misses the point entirely.

She's a blatantly obvious foil character for Sean Penn's Sam - he loves his daughter very much, and would do anything to get her back, while as a wife and parent, Rita's just going through the motions. They say half of life is just showing up, but she's barely doing that.

If you've ever seen the show "Kitchen Nightmares", chef Gordon Ramsay visits a restaurant that's not doing well, and usually ends up verbally sparring with a restaurant owner or chef who's given up or lost their passion, has let the quality of the food go downhill, and then wonders why the customers aren't coming back.

So Chef Ramsay shows up, and after butting heads with the restaurant owner for two days (and an appalling dinner service), finally the dawn breaks, and they "get it" - oh, you're supposed to serve fresh food that tastes good! And you're supposed to be NICE to the customers, and give them what they want! And I watch at home and wonder, "Could they really have been THAT stupid?"

Pfeiffer's Rita is like that restaurant owner - finally realizing that maybe she should be NICE to her son, and not be such a raging emotional drama queen with her husband. The revelation comes too late - like those customers, hubby hits the road, but hey, at least she learned a valuable lesson, and that's good, too, right?

Come on, if you need a retarded person to show you that you need to be nice to your kid and love your husband, you're pretty goddamn stupid. Or else this movie is manipulation of the highest order, which I suspect is closer to the truth.

Let's talk about cover versions of Beatles songs - I, for one, love them. I have a huge collection of them, more than I could ever listen to in fact. I've owned the soundtrack to this film for years without watching the movie. Unfortunately, I have to ask myself why they're here, and I have to point to further manipulation - it's a handy way to fill space, without them the movie's story probably merits no more than 45 minutes.

It's certainly not the only movie to have an all-Beatles covers soundtrack - so this one falls somewhere between the films "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Across the Universe", both chronologically and in terms of quality.

Also starring Dakota Fanning (last seen in "Charlotte's Web"), Dianne Weist (last seen in "Synechdoche, New York"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Laura Dern, and Loretta Devine, with cameos from Ken Jenkins (also last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Powder"), Brent Spiner (last seen in "Phenomenon"), and Rosalind Chao. Also Sam's friend Robert (the paranoid one) was played by character actor Stanley DeSantis - who once made some t-shirts for my boss, he had a little printing business on the side. (We tried for years to track down Stanley to make more shirts, but he passed away in 2005, so we never got our master templates back in order to make more shirts.)

RATING: 4 out of 10 capuccinos (that's 2 points for the Beatles, 2 points for the artists who covered them...that's right, without the Beatles songs, this movie was in danger of receiving a zero score!)

Milk

Year 2, Day 236 - 8/24/10 - Movie #602

BEFORE: The spotlight falls on Sean Penn this week - displaying his acting range from a drug-dealer, to a math professor/transplant recipient, to a gay politician.

THE PLOT: The story of Harvey Milk, and his struggles as an activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official.

AFTER: Penn got his second Best Actor Oscar for this film, narrowly (?) edging out Mickey Rourke's performance from "The Wrestler". I've now seen both films, and I understand why the race was so tight - but I still don't know if the right man won. Rourke's performance was certainly more action-packed, and more visually interesting - there's only so much excitement you can get from watching a man propose city ordinances and dictate his life story into a tape recorder.

With the depiction of the civil rights issues in this film, it's obviously easy to draw parallels to the current controversies over gay marriage. People who oppose gay rights do so in the name of their religion or morality, but how moral is it to discriminate and oppress other people? I'm far from an expert on these issues, so in a way I feel somewhat disconnected from this film - but I know bigotry and oppression when I see it.

I vaguely remember the 70's movement led by Anita Bryant, and later the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's. But saying that all gays are perverts is like saying that all Muslims are terrorists...it's a convenient way to pigeonhole people, to further an agenda. In fact, I also see similarities to the controversy over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. I see the irony in people who don't like the oppressive policies of the Taliban blocking the mosque, because in doing so they are trying to curtail civil rights, which is a very Taliban-like thing to do. So congratulations, you just became the exact type of person you yourself disapprove of.

I keep waiting for the religious right and the conservative party to collapse under the weight of their own arrogance - every time a Jimmy Swaggart or a Jim Bakker or a Larry Craig (or Mark Foley or Ted Haggard...do I need to keep going?) is revealed to be the type of "sinner" they condemn, I think, this is it! The conservatives and Big Religion are finally going to be revealed as a big bunch of hypocrites! But these revelations are seen as one-offs, and no one seems to be looking at the big picture. I guess I'm like the Harvey Milk of agnostics - I want to recruit more people to my form of non-religion through logical arguments. Quick joke: How many Republican policitians can you fit in the closet? Apparently, all of them.

What the film really becomes is a vehicle for Penn's acting, which really takes off when Milk faces off against fellow city supervisor Dan White, played by Josh Brolin (last seen in "American Gangster"). The movie falls just shy of getting into White's head, suggesting that he himself might be a closeted gay man, but also suggesting that he had a grudge against Harvey Milk merely due to the politics of, well, politics.

And remember, kids, always load up on sugary junk food before committing a crime - hey, if the "Twinkie Defense" worked for Dan White, then all bets are off.

Do I need to worry about spoilers with this one? Is there anyone who goes into this film not knowing what happens at the end? The scenes of Harvey's own dictations seem to indicate that he knows how it all might end for him...there are similarities to the final scenes of last night's film, and also both films messed around with the linear timeline, since Harvey's dictated remembrances take place out of context, logically set after most of the events depicted, and before his death.

Also starring James Franco (last seen in "Pineapple Express"), Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna (last seen in "Criminal"), Victor Garber, Dennis O'Hare (3rd time this week!) and Joseph Cross (though I thought that was Shawn or Aaron Ashmore)

RATING: 5 out of 10 ballot boxes

21 Grams

Year 2, Day 235 - 8/23/10 - Movie #601

BEFORE: I've seen some fairly depressing movies in the past few days, and it looks like the trend continues tonight...

THE PLOT: An accident brings together a critically ill mathematician, a grieving mother and a born-again ex-con.

AFTER: I do enjoy movies (duh...) and I enjoy challenging movies, ones that tell stories in different and innovative ways - "Memento", "Donnie Darko", "The Butterfly Effect" and "The Time Traveler's Wife" are a few of my favorites that play around with the time-stream. But this is a jigsaw puzzle of a film, where all the scenes are like the pieces that have been scrambled together, and you can only see one piece at a time, while trying to remember the shapes of the other pieces.

Alternating between scenes that are pre-tragedy and post-tragedy is confusing, to say the least. We see the three main characters at high points and low points in their lives (mostly low...) and the viewer has to re-construct a chain of events in his or her head that makes some kind of sense. I'm still not sure if there were three timelines, each moving forward, or if everything was just random.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we learn the relationships between the three main characters - who did what and when, and what the effects of each action were. How often have you heard a siren, or seen the aftermath of a highway crash, and wondered what sort of effects are going to be rippling through the lives of people that you don't know? At least, you hope not to anyone you know... This movie is a look at those ripples of tragedy.

But jumping around randomly through these people's lives could possibly be the sign of a weak screenplay, or it could just be a gimmick, which might even be worse. It raises the question - what sort of movie would this have been, had it played out in linear fashion, cause and effect in that order? Perhaps it was edited that way, and found to be too depressing? Or was it deemed not confusing enough?

Knowing that the tragedy is coming/has come - but we just haven't seen it yet - is like waiting for the other shoe to drop...on to someone's head, killing them in the process. What's interesting here is that we're used to seeing the ways that tragedy divides people or tears them apart - is it possible for a tragedy to bring people together?

There's a whole symbolism involved with organ donation - and it seems that our language, though an adaptive one, still carries echoes of our outdated scientific beliefs. We still say that the sun rises and sets, for example, even though science has proven that the earth is turning and only makes the sun appear to move. Our language also still suggests that we believe that the heart is the center of human emotion, even though science tells us that it is just a muscle that pumps blood. The statement "My heart is broken." can have two very different meanings. It would probably be more accurate to situate emotions in the human brain, yet no one ever says, "I love you with all my brain."

There's a religious argument here, too - one worth noting - since one of the characters is a "born-again" - if there is a God, why does he allow tragedy to happen to his believers? If prayer doesn't stop tragedy, then what is its purpose? Can something that seems like a gift from God later be seen as a curse? And if prayer does divert a tragedy, like a hurricane, let's say - doesn't it just end up somewhere else? Did those people now affected not pray hard enough, or is their God less efficient?

There is some balance here - people are united in their miseries, they do meet, they do have feelings for each other, get reunited, get clean, but mostly it feels like they're all circling the drain. I'm sorry, but I have to believe that life is more than just a series of disappointing events that lead up to one's death. Tragedies happen to us all, and occasionally we all feel like we can't go on. It is possible to keep going after tragedy, but with difficulty, of course. But if you only focus on your tragedies, especially the final one, you'll miss out on the happy accidents that might occur along the way.

Starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts (last seen in "The Assassination of Richard Nixon"), Benicio Del Toro (last seen in "Snatch"), Danny Huston (last seen in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (last seen in "I'm Not There"), Melissa Leo, Dennis O'Hare (last seen in "Half Nelson"), and Clea Duvall.

RATING: 6 out of 10 oxygen tanks (not necessarily for being entertaining, but points tonight are awarded for being at least thought-provoking)

The Falcon and the Snowman

Year 2, Day 234 - 8/22/10 - Movie #600

BEFORE: Welcome to the big Spectacular 600th consecutive review! Who would have thought it would have gone on so long? I'd like to thank my enablers, I mean sponsors, Time Warner Cable, Toshiba DVD Recorders, and Pepsi, makers of Diet Mountain Dew ("When you absolutely, positively need to stay up two more hours...")

These anniversary numbers can be tricky, since I need to rely on what I've read or heard about these previously-unseen films, in order to determine which ones are the "important" ones. This one is one of my wife's recommendations, I think...

THE PLOT: The true story of a disillusioned military contractor employee and his drug pusher childhood friend who became walk-in spies for the Soviet Union.

AFTER: Yeah, I got a little bit of bad intel on this one. I thought it would be more about drug-smuggling, and not so much about wanna-be spies. Yes, one of the leads is a drug dealer - Daulton Lee, played by Sean Penn (last seen in "Colors") and there is a lot of action that takes place in Mexico, so back-to-back films set in Latin America is nice. But I was saving a long list of spy films for November. I could easily bump up the spy-film chain to August, but my plans are to follow up with more Sean Penn movies.

The other lead character, Christopher Boyce, is played by Timothy Hutton (last seen in "Q&A") and I have to admit that he's popped up in the last 600 movies more times than I expected - 6 times, which I guess is still only 1 percent of the time.

Again, I have to fault Hollywood for showing me the WHO and the WHAT of a situation, but not really delving too deep into the WHY. Daulton seems motivated by money, that much is pretty clear - but what makes Christopher so keen on giving CIA secrets to his buddy, to peddle to the Russian embassy in Mexico? We get that he's a rebellious sort, and there's some loose metaphor involving falconry (which isn't really much of a metaphor...) - does he really care about foreign governments so much that he wants to keep the CIA from messing with them? Is that enough of a justification to sell secrets to the Soviets, who were our enemies at the time?

It just seems to me that when you find yourself handing over decoded messages and satellite codes, there should probably come a time when you might stop and ask yourself, "Isn't this a form of treason?" It just seems to me to be quite a big leap from "I don't like the way the CIA operates" to "I'll sell secrets to the Russians." I suppose you could cite Watergate as a factor, and the disillusionment that the twenty-somethings of the 1970's felt with regards to their government at the time.

Of course, seeing "Based on a True Story" directed me to the internet to see how close the movie came to the actual facts. I think I also saw these guys profiled on that new TLC show "I Didn't Know I Was Betraying My Country"... Everything seems pretty much in order, and Wikipedia had some updated information - Boyce escaped from a federal penitentiary in 1980, and committed 17 bank robberies in Idaho and Washington. He was arrested again in 1981, and released on parole in 2002. Daulton Lee was released on parole in 1998, and at some point was hired as a personal assistant to Sean Penn.

I've got no time to cast judgments, just to rate films and cross them off the list. It's kind of like when Forrest Gump decided one day to go out for a run, and soon he'd criss-crossed the country several times. One day, 600 days ago, I decided I'd like to watch some movies, and look what happened. And with 380 movies still on my list, and Hollywood still making new ones, the 1,000-film mark is only a year and a month away.

Also starring Pat Hingle, Dorian Harewood, Joyce Van Patten, Lori Singer and Richard Dysart (last seen in "Wall Street")

RATING: 5 out of 10 pigeons