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Not So Tough

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 23:22:31 +0000

Not So Tough Chet Kozlowski August 29, 2024 - 19:22

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I approached Uwe Boll's First Shift with trepidation (and curiosity). I had heard the director's name before, though I wasn't familiar with his movies. Certain YouTubers make fun of him, calling his movies some of the worst ever made, and lumping him in with narcissistic nuts like Neal Breen (messianic complex) and Steven Segal (lazy messianic complex). Is he really that bad, I wondered? I was prepared to turn it off after a few minutes and not write about it. I swore when I started reviewing that if I couldn't say something good about a movie, I wouldn't say anything at all.

I stayed with it. The word that keeps showing up in my notes is "endless." Yet I stayed with it. And I can report…I kinda liked it.

"Endless" because scenes just go on too long. The credit sequence is interminable; we follow our protagonist waking up in his apartment, shaving, brushing his teeth, cleaning his toothbrush, making a power smoothie, washing out the juicer, and I'm thinking: Come on! Get on with it!

Then the overlong montage of New York City streets, which follow no pattern—here we are on Times Square, now in the Bronx, now in the Financial District, now Staten Island—set to incongruously swelling music. Mr. Boll loves New York. We get it.

The basic idea is a cliché. Deo is a scowling city detective, a maverick, who is partnered with a woman his opposite. Angela smiles a lot, posts selfies, and comes off to Deo as a ditz. The alpha male begrudgingly takes on the Instagram queen and they attend to crimes while bickering comically.

But Deo and Angela settle their differences pretty quickly. First Shift becomes a pokey thriller with comic undertones: not too many thrills and goofy but endearing comedy. It comes on like an old dog looking for attention, and even has a dog in a pivotal role. So it can't be all bad.

The action is pretty tame, and not all that coherent. Deo and Angela outwit a guy threatening passersby with a meat cleaver. A mob boss has to be foiled. A PTSD guy locks himself in the bathroom after committing a heinous crime. An old guy leaves his dog outside a supermarket (again, going through the aisles with him and his cart: interminable) in which he promptly has a heart attack. The ambulance loads him, leaving the dog. Deo fetches him. All in a day’s work for a NYC cop.

But the actors, Gino Anthony Pesi as Deo and Kristen Renton as Angela, fit together nicely as a team. He's got a Soprano-ish appeal (he had a role in TV's Shades of Blue), and she's pretty and flighty until it's hammer time (she was in FX's Sons of Anarchy). The banter isn't as cringe-y as it might be. They cruise around the city and for the most part I enjoyed watching them. I wondered where exactly director Mr. Boll was going with this. Check the time, the movie's almost over and not much has happened, when suddenly a title card comes up: "Coming soon: Part Two." Okay, Part One was relatively painless. I'd watch more.

Uwe Boll reminds me of a New York filmmaker I admire: Larry Cohen. Mr. Cohen was a journeyman director who made Manhattan-centric movies on miniscule budgets. Phone Book and It's Alive are his. He worked with character actors like Tony Lo Bianco, David Carradine, and Michael Moriarty. His movies were offbeat and loosey-goosey. Check out Q: the Winged Serpent and God Told Me To. Most of all, Larry Cohen really loved making movies. He died in 2019.

So does Uwe Boll. First Shift has that same carefree quality. His filmography is Cohen-like. Mr. Boll is a journeyman filmmaker, too, training his camera on whatever he's being paid to, yet somehow making it part of his oeuvre. He writes a lot, directs a lot, produces a lot. He has nearly forty movies to his personal credit, with titles like Rampage: Capital Punishment, Assault on Wall Street, Bloodrayne, and Blubberella. He rarely gets above a 5.0 rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet I've seen worse, and more opportunistic.

Maybe he just caught me on a good day. Would I recommend First Shift? Sure, as long as you're willing to suspend disbelief and a standard of quality. Just relax and lean into it. It’s like spending time with a new friend.

And he likes dogs.

__________________________________________

First Shift. Directed by Uwe Boll. 2024. From Event Films. In select theaters and VOD. 88 minutes.

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An Ambulance with Flat Tires . . . or Michael Bay’s on Life Support

Brandon Judell — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 14:00:00 +0000

An Ambulance with Flat Tires . . . or Michael Bay’s on Life Support Brandon Judell April 10, 2022 - 10:00

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Never has a film been more in need of a defibrillator than Michael Bay’s latest effort, Ambulance.

Implausible. Incomprehensible. Deafening. Seemingly never-ending with crass crash after crass crash. Bang. Bang. Mentally boorish. More bang-bang.

On the plus side, three nice actors will be richer. According to showbizgalore.com, Jake Gyllenhaal will now be banking $2.5 million, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II $700,00, and Eiza González $600,00, while my audiologist will rake in a measly $125.

Mr. Bay has bragged, "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh dear, what a crime." If Ambulance with its nonending collage of indistinguishable shootouts, vehicular pulverizations, and the eradication of two-thirds of the Los Angeles police force is the result, one can only despair that this crime is not punishable with a life-sentence, guillotining, or worse.

To add depth to dreck, scripter Chris Fedak, whose career highlights, according to press notes, includes selling glow-in-the-dark necklaces at Disney World, exploitatively backstories the "hero" of this tale, Will Sharp (Abdul-Mateen) with the past of a highly decorated Black veteran who once fought in Afghanistan. Will is now desperately trying to get the VA to pay for his wife's experimental surgery, but to no avail. In desperation for a job, he visits his white criminal brother, Danny (Gyllenhaal), whose family adopted Will when he was just a kid.

The pair haven't seen each other for years, but their loyalty to each other hasn't died, although a whole lot of other people will within the next two hours. You see this is the very day that the highly manic Danny and his gang of thugs are planning to rob a bank of $32 million. What could go wrong? Danny insists that Will join them in the heist to solve all of his family’s financial problems. Warily he agrees, but what was promised to be a pleasant walk in the bank becomes a gigantic fiasco, not unlike Ambulance itself.

Sadly, the film doesn't end there. Instead, we are forced to ride along on an O.J. Simpson-like car chase with Will and Danny in an ambulance they've highjacked, both initially unaware of the hard-as-nails yet lovely paramedic (González) who's trying to save the life of a shot cop in the rear. As a bonus, there's some closeups of delicate spleen manipulation at 100 miles an hour. Just imagine Fast and Spurious meets Grey's Anatomy. Not exactly a healing entertainment, although a terrific ad for ibuprofen.

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Oedipus Wrecks

Brandon Judell — Sun, 02 Jul 2017 10:29:20 +0000

Oedipus Wrecks Brandon Judell July 2, 2017 - 06:29

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Vroom! Vroom! Ansel Elgort, the cute-as-cute-can-be lead of the cancer romance, The Fault in Our Stars, bops around Baby Driver like Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero, with his ear buds semi-glued in. You keep expecting a few disco balls to pop into view while the Bee Gees let loose on the soundtrack.

Sadly, no balls. No white suit. And not much of a credible plot in this frenetic crime/coming-of-age hybrid.

What we do get is a rhythmic youth delivering coffee and pizza, driving getaway cars, caring for a deaf, mute, disabled older gent, and falling in love with Debora (Lily James), a singing waitress, to the throbbing beats of Queen’s "Brighton Rock," The Champs' "Tequila," and Barry White's "Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up." Imagine Derek Hough in Pulp Fiction.

A masterwork??? Some media folks have been raving over Baby Driver weeks before its release date. IndieWire insisted that director Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright was delivering "one of the best movies of the summer." Variety included this romp on its "The Best Films of 2017 (So Far)" list along with Get Out, Split, and the highly deserving Lost in Paris. Only if you bothered to read on could you catch critic Pete Debruge noting, “This unapologetic exercise in style might not be deep.” An understatement. If this venture were a pond, all the minnows would now be floundering about, gasping.

Yet you probably won’t ever be bored, or maybe just momentarily here and there. Remember depth doesn’t always mean entertaining, and shallow can be at times a knee-slapper.

Vroom! Vroom! The Atlanta crime boss here is the passive/aggressive Doc (a standard Kevin Spacey) who’s punishing Baby (Elgort) for stealing his car that had been loaded with some sort of contraband. To make up for his youthful indiscretion, Baby has to drive various crooks to and fro bank and armored truck robberies that Doc sets up . . . or ELSE: "So what’s it going to be? Behind the wheel? Or in a wheelchair?"

Yes, our hero, Baby, who is suffering from tinnitus, pushes full throttle for various gangsters including the lovebirds Darling (Eliza Gonzalez) and Buddy (a dapper John Hamm), plus a quick-on-the-trigger Bats (a constantly mumbling and snarling Jamie Fox). You’ll have to wait for the DVD's subtitles to comprehend all of what Bats is carping about.

Well, all goes rather swimmingly until the corpses start piling up, and Baby falls in love with the aforementioned Debora, who reminds him of his late mother, who was also a singing waitress who served club sandwiches in the very same restaurant. Kismet. So can the lad ever go straight and romp through flowery fields with his sweetheart? He’ll certainly try.

Wright, who's directed such tongue-in-cheek semi-cuties as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Hot Fuzz and who's had an angst-filled relationship with Ant-Man, doesn't take much seriously here. He's a likeable visual stylist with a flair for over the top silliness. If you enjoy fast and furious car chases intermingled with young hopeful amour, Baby Driver will fill up your tank.

Jason Bourne Gets Even More Fast and Furious

Brandon Judell — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 12:35:43 +0000

Jason Bourne Gets Even More Fast and Furious Brandon Judell July 31, 2016 - 08:35

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Lickety-split is how everything goes in the latest Jason Bourne adventure starring Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass, an old hand at shaping this series (The Bourne Supremacy (2004)); The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)).

For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Bourne, a hero of Robert Ludlum’s bestselling novels, he was introduced to our local cinemas in Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), floating face-up in the ocean, unconscious, with several bullet wounds. Picked up by a foreign fishing boat, Bourne awakens to the fact that he doesn’t know who he is. Just to make sure we get the point, he has an interior monologue that is narrated aloud: “Do you know whom I am?”

Later he asks the same question to a crooked gent (Chris Cooper) at the CIA: “Who am I?”

The response: “You're U.S. Government property. You're a malfunctioning $30 million weapon. You're a total goddamn catastrophe.” You’re a trained assassin.

For the rest of the film, and the series, if memory serves me well, the CIA tries to kill off or manipulate Bourne, as he searches for his true identity.

The late Roger Ebert probably encapsulated the Bourne enterprise best in his review of Identity:

"A skillful action movie about a plot that exists only to support a skillful action movie. The entire story is a set-up for the martial arts and chases. Because they are done well, because the movie is well-crafted and acted, we give it a pass. Too bad it's not about something."

Truly, few people can helm a film that’s about nothing (Ultimatum) or about something (Bloody Sunday (2002)) as skillfully as Greengrass can. With innovative editing (Christopher Rouse), sweeping cinematography (Barry Ackroyd), and a solid cast that seems to be saying something of significance even when it’s not, this eponymously titled latest addition has two plot lines. A corrupt CIA is vehemently trying to mow down anyone who might reveal its new hush-hush project to transform select folk into dehumanized killing machines. Main target: Bourne. The secondary storyline has the CIA trying to manipulate the owner of a Facebook-like service into spying on his customers for them.

Connecting the few lines of dialogue supplied by Greengrass and Rouse are nonstop chases through buildings and crowds of protesters, followed by nonstop chases both in cars and on motorcycles. There are, of course, the anticipated crashes, and the equally expected fisticuffs, all accompanied by the at-times tedious and grating compositions for strings by composers David Buckley and John Powell. On the plus side, Damon takes off his shirt to display his newly hypermuscularized physique, but for some reason that's not repeated.

We have seen all this accomplished with more heart in the previous Bourne efforts and in the Road Runner cartoons. Also, with more restraint that built at least a little tension. Here Greengrass keeps nearly every scene going on for far too long, often passing from exhilarating to exhausting.

At his greatest, the director, has expressed in the past the epic madness of our computer-driven age and the self-centered corruption at the heart of our governments. Here he seems to almost become the victim of this state of affairs as opposed to its chronicler.

An Arachnid Idyll

Brandon Judell — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:22:19 +0000

An Arachnid Idyll Brandon Judell July 3, 2012 - 11:22

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It's web-delicious.

An adolescent boy's gossamer dreams are beautifully captured in what should deservedly be one of summer's biggest hits, The Amazing Spider-Man. Astutely cast, soundly directly, and penned by a bevy of screendom's top writers who among them have scripted Ordinary People, most of the Harry Potter installments, and Zodiac, this actioner swings from effective drama to endearing teen romance to campy monster brawls, all in glorious 3-D.

That these disparate elements meld so well will be no surprise to fans of director Mark Webb. In music videos such as the one for The All-American Rejects' "Move Along" and in his film (500) Days of Summer -- one of the top 10 indie love stories of the past decade -- he has been able to seamlessly hyphenate "joyful-angst." And that's what Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is all about.

Orphaned at an early age, Parker is raised to teenhood by his saintly Aunt May (Sally Field) and Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen). Considering what life can hold, all is going well for the young man, except for some bruising bullying in high school and an unrequited crush on a blonde science whiz, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). Then one day, Parker discovers his late dad's briefcase. Inside are notes detailing Pa's top-secret cross-species genetic research.

Curious, Parker seeks out the one-armed Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), an old colleague of his dad's who seems to be carrying on the cross-species experimentation at a huge corporation, OsCorp, which is funded by a dying billionaire. Well, Parker gets bitten by a spider and starts spinning webs on villains; Connors becomes a giant lizard; and if all isn't set right, the inhabitants of New York City might soon become scaly and develop a hankering for flies.

Well, the ending is preordained. In fact, I've just looked out my window and the only aspect of the Big Apple that's currently reptilian might be its morals.

But what's surprising about this little epic is that few of the lead characters are monochromatic, other than the callous capitalists and Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Even Parker, after he first gains his supernatural powers, goes a little crazy, sort of like a Holden Caulfield on a 5-Hour Energy buzz.

Yet thanks to the L.A.-born Garfield, who's one of Britain's finest young actors (Boy A, Death of a Salesman), the character is -- as is the film -- always grounded in a semi-poignant reality, proving Virginia Woolf's adage: "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

Battleship: How to Get a Sinking Feeling at the Cinema

Brandon Judell — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:32:15 +0000

Battleship: How to Get a Sinking Feeling at the Cinema Brandon Judell May 17, 2012 - 17:32

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If Ed Wood had a budget of a $100 million to throw around, even he might not have been able to direct a film as godawful as Battleship -- or as in poor taste. This cheesy exploitation of our men in uniform, including those who lost their limbs overseas in the belief they were fighting to preserve democracy, makes you almost cringe at the hubris of the Hollywood types who pulled this fiasco together.

There is basically no plot. The direction is nil. The acting is uneven. (Brooklyn Decker is clearly up for a Razzie this year.) The screenplay is truly one of the worst of the year so far, and that’s saying a lot. If you can sit through the film’s first half hour without wondering if anything is ever going to happen, you are either brain dead or an eleven-year-old boy.

Brian Goldner, the president and CEO of Hasbro, and one of the producers of this crapola, clearly has a cash register where his heart ought to be. Let’s hope his intestines at least function, because if he’s suffering from fecal retention, he’s a goner.

But before I go on rhapsodizing about Battleship's merits, please note that the folks at Universal Pictures have politely instructed that "during the course of your reporting or reviewing, we request that you not reveal plot points toward the film’s climax and conclusion so those surprises are retained for the audience."

What plot points? What surprises?

Well, in the beginning some scientists convey messages to a newly discovered planet that seems to profit from the same environment as Planet Earth's. Maybe there are friendly life forms over there who will send back some Chanukah cheer. Oh, no, instead of dreidels, we get mean-spirited spaceships and whiskered aliens who desire to put the kibosh on the human race. Who can save us? Lieutenant Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), that's who! This ex-alcoholic, self-centered, overgrown tot -- who thinks nothing of breaking into a store through its ceiling to get a burrito for a pretty blonde he just met in a bar -- will be our knight in shining armor.

Instantly, Kitch as Hopper does again what he did for John Carter. He makes us want to stay home and watch the second season of Sherlockon PBS.

Uninvolving, charmless, unimaginative, yet loud with loads of metal-upon- metal destruction, Battleshipturns out to be as pleasant as being stuck in 1974 Volvo with squeaky windshield wipers on a rainy day.

But there is a plus side; Rihanna is not bad as Petty Officer Cora "Weps" Raikes, and Pres. Obama doesn't embarrass himself in a cameo. Yet everything else in this totally improbable adaptation of a board game feels torpedoed. However, just chalk this one up as a learning lesson. The next two projects Universal and Hasbro are working on sound quite promising: 3-D versions of Q-Tips and Anusol.

The Perishables

Dusty Wright — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:04:39 +0000

The Perishables Dusty Wright August 17, 2010 - 18:04

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Have we become so accustomed to violence that our movies have to hyper-inflate it? I'm no prude, but implied violence is always scarier than watching a body explode in front of you after being hit by a bazooka. Looking for a summer escape on Sunday afternoon, I slipped into a midday screening of Stallone's latest strutting machofest, The Expendables.

Boasting a cast of former and current action heroes must have been a dream come true for Lions Gate (distributors). Moviegoers certainly get their money's worth seeing a ridiculously fit Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Terry Crews (Everybody Hates Chris), Stone Cold Steve Austin, even former UFC mixed-martial-artist Randy Couture on the screen (plus limp cameos from Bruce Willis and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger). Throw in a corrupted CIA op played by Eric Roberts and what could be bad?

Everything, except one heartfelt monologue by Mickey Rourke explaining how war can suck a soldier's soul into a black hole. So what you get instead is 90 minutes of nada character development, an abundance of eviscerations, pat repartee, huge explosions, utter mayhem, more huge explosions, dozens and dozens of knife deaths, a waterboarding scene with our ingenue (Giselle Itié), and the final 30 minutes of mind-numbing death and destruction.

When we leave the theater, we know nothing of these rogue mercenaries except that, for a hefty price, they will "fix" a problem, preferably one that our own government won't do with our own special op troops.

I couldn't help but wonder what John Woo or Quentin Tarantino might have done with this cast and a real script. But I guess it doesn't matter to our blood-thirsty American moviegoers, as it grossed 35 million this past weekend. And I suspect with those opening numbers a sequel is in the works featuring these additional aging action dudes -- Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan.

My recommendation is to save your money and watch the trailer instead. Then go rent the brilliant Micmacs by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Now that's a movie about how a group of rogues expose government corruption and how war is bad business for everyone.

Doris Day Redux

Brandon Judell — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:20:22 +0000

Doris Day Redux Brandon Judell June 26, 2009 - 17:20

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SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE -- Watching The Proposal in a Mexican multiplex does supply this romantic comedy about immigration with an unsettling moral twinge. So let's quickly address the little that's wrong with Sandra Bullock's latest.

As you've garnered from the commercials or viewing the film -- as much of the female American movie-going public has already -- the visa application of Margaret Tate (Bullock), a high-end editor at a major publishing company, has been denied, and she's being deported.

Tate: "Deported? It's not like I'm an immigrant or something. I'm Canadian."

To remedy the situation, Tate blackmails her assistant Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds), a full-blooded American, into marrying her.

Before that can occur, though, the duo, thanks to a plot device, has to visit Paxton's family in Sitka, Alaska.

Now in Sitka, we get to meet Ramone (The Office's Cuban-born Oscar Nunez) who portrays the ethnic comedy fixture (or minority Everyman) of this tiny town. He's a server of hors d'ouevres, a salesman at a local shop, a male stripper on his nights off, and a preacher to boot. There's also a possibility, we learn at the end, that his citizenship papers might not be up to par.

All this comic busyness might work a bit more if Ramone's onscreen time were all that amusing. His thong scene on Lady's Night, for example, has the female audience in the film howling. "Why?" you'll ponder. Even though it's supposed to be a terrible act, there's no reason for it to be so contrived. Lameness can be amusing, and often is. (If only Cuban-born Ãngel Salazar had been cast. Catch his strip tease and Tina Turner impersonation on The Latin Legends of Comedy DVD.)

In the end, Ramone is basically the only non-white actor with lines in the Alaskan scenes; he's the film's tepid clown. A buffoon of inept masculinity. It's a misstep, especially with the current take on illegals. In fact, would The Proposal have gotten the go-ahead if Tate had been cast as an African or a Hispanic woman? Possibly nowadays, but her profession would certainly have had to be switched according to Catalyst Magazine: "A recent survey . . . confirmed that publishing remains an overwhelmingly white industry."

The other less egregious flaws here are the film's finale (the last two or so minutes) and the outtakes that are interspersed throughout the end credits. They are horrendously unfunny. The cast members are interviewed by a U.S. Immigration officer, and their seemingly ad-libbed responses are spectacularly pedestrian and confusing. A Mexican woman sitting behind me asked her date, "Que pasa?" I wish I had understood her beau's explanation. I needed one.

Otherwise, The Proposal is a delicious revamping of a Doris Day-like vehicle for Bullock (e.g. Pillow Talk). A virginal (or near-virginal), uptight heroine loosens up and finds true love after she discovers the man she has little patience for is her ideal mate.

Bullock, whose films are seldom classics, is such a wholesome, loving presence that if you find yourself alone at night with a box of cold pizza and flat Coca Cola, you'll feel God has blessed you if you turn on the TV and you see her making believe she's dating a man in a coma (While You Were Sleeping) or trying to fake being a beauty queen (Miss Congeniality). But if only Billy Wilder or Howard Hawks were still directing! Bullock's career has started decades too late.

As for Ryan Reynolds, he's certainly given himself a "dynamic body" and you can see why Scarlett Johansson and so many others adore him. But at the moment, there's still something a bit off, a bit lacking. His face, and it's possibly just his eyes, are not a window into his soul -- and that's what makes a great star. Maybe he's too hot now to laugh at. Still, Reynolds holds his end up of the comedy quite well, as does the supporting cast, especially Mary Steenburgen and the great Betty White.

As for the beautiful state of Alaska, I was going to write it has made a great comeback here after its Palin debacle, but luckily I checked the facts first. The Proposal was shot mainly in Massachusetts. Possibly the director, the multitalented Anne Fletcher, didn't want to disrupt anyone's moose hunting.