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Cheery Alex Fletcher lives comfortably in Manhattan off the residuals from his 80's pop success and reprising his hits at school reunions, theme parks, and state fairs. But those gigs are declining, so he jumps at the chance to write a song and record it with reigning teen idol Cora Corman. Trouble is, he's good at melodies but needs a lyricist and has less than a week to finish. Enter Sophie Fisher, subbing for a friend who waters Alex's plants; she's a pretty good poet, quick witted, and could do it, if she'd agree. But there's some sort of shadow over her head that Alex may not be able to charm his way past. And what if they do get a song written, what then?
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It's impossible not to feel affection for "At Long Last Love," Peter Bogdanovich's much-maligned evocation of the classical 1930s musical. It's a light, silly, impeccably stylish entertainment, and if the performers don't come up to the comparisons they evoke with the genius of Astaire and Rogers, that's not entirely their fault; the studio tradition that developed and nurtured the great musical stars no longer exists, and a movie like this has to be made from scratch.Well, not altogether from scratch: The music and lyrics are all by Cole Porter, a special enthusiasm of Bogdanovich and his star, Cybill Shepherd, who recorded an album of Porter last year. There are 16 Porter classics, and in an age when original songs composed for the movies tend to seek the level of "Love Theme from the Towering Inferno," maybe it's a good idea to go back to the golden age of popular American composition and cherish once again "It's De-Lovely," "Well, Did You Evah?," "Just One of Those Things" and the title song (which, legend has it, Porter acually began writing while waiting for the doctors to arrive at the scene of the accident that crippled him for life).Bogdanovich has found a story and setting that sound the right tone in company with the songs. His screenplay involves a sophisticated (and yet sometimes childishly innocent) dalliance among four members of the idle rich or would-be rich (everyone's idle). There's Burt Reynolds as a playboy millionaire, Miss Shepherd as a beautiful heiress, Madeline Kahn as a Broadway star and Dullio Del Prete as a seductive Italian gambler. They sip champagne almost without respite, dance the night away, run through a series of wrecked limousines and touring cars, trade partners and try never, ever, to be bored: It's like 'Private Live' rewritten by Thorne Smith.The story, of course, is totally inconsequential, as it should be, and Bogdanovich is good at keeping it floating some few inches above the ground; he's not giving us a tribute to the great musicals like "Swing Time" and "Top Hat," he's trying to make another one. He doesn't succeed, primarily because his performers aren't really suited to musical comedy, but he doesn't fail to the extent some of the reviews would have you believe.Cybill Shepherd is a wonder to behold, but she isn't a gifted singer and no regimen of voice lessons is going to make her one. She didn't do a very good job on her Cole Porter album, and she's no better here, although at least we're permitted to see her as she sings, and that provides a certain compensation. Before Bogdanovich, a devoted student of movie classics, makes further attempts to present Miss Shepherd as a singer, he'd do well to rerun "Citizen Kane," particularly the scene of Susan Alexander's disastrous opera debut.Burt Reynolds, on the other hand, isn't really expected to sing and dance well; the fun is in watching him try to have fun in a low-key way without making a fool of himself, and he generally succeeds. His Clark Gable-style moustache and his over all bearing remind us of Gable grinning foolishly during absurd production numbers and having a ball. Miss Kahn is tart and has a nice edge, Del Prete is a satisfactory Latin lover and there's a very funny, understated supporting performance by John Hillerman as Rodney the butler.The movie's no masterpiece, but I can't account for the viciousness of some of the critical attacks against it. It's almost as if Bogdanovich is being accused of the sin of pride for daring to make a musical in the classical Hollywood style. "At Long Last Love" isn't "Swing Time," but then it isn't "Funny Lady" either, thank God. Bogdanovich has too much taste, too sure a feel for the right tone, to go seriously wrong. And if he doesn't go spectacularly right, at least he provides small pleasures and great music.Download here
Music and Lyrics (Comedy,Music,Romance)
Coyote Ugly (Comedy,Drama,Music,Romance)
The Boss. The Law. The Dreamer. The Flame. The Heartbreaker. The Girls of Coyote Ugly.
This party never ends.
Tonight, they're calling the shots.
Wanna dance? The hottest party of the year.
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Sexy, romantic comedy about a girl in her early 20s named Violet Sanford going to NYC to pursue a dream of becoming a songwriter. Violet gets a "day" job as a bar maid at a nightclub called Coyote Ugly. Coyote Ugly is the city's newest hot spot were the employees are a team of sexy, resourceful women that provoke the clientele and press with their mischief.
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"Coyote Ugly" is a cliff-hanger in which Piper Perabo ventures into a Jerry Bruckheimer production and escapes more or less untouched.The film stars Perabo as one of a group of heedless wenches who dance on a bar and pour straight shots down the throats of the seething multitude. In a movie of this sort, it is inevitable that the song "I Will Survive" will sooner or later be performed by drunken pals. Next week's opening, "The Replacements," makes us wait an hour to hear it. "Coyote Ugly" takes no chances and puts it under the opening titles. Do you get the feeling these movies are assembled from off-the-shelf parts? There is a story beloved in movie lore about the time Howard Hawks asked John Wayne to appear in "El Dorado." Wayne had already starred in Hawks' "Rio Bravo" and "Rio Lobo," which were essentially the same picture. So was "El Dorado." "Shall I send over the script?" asked Hawks. "Why bother?" asked the Duke. "I've already been in it twice." Does Jerry Bruckheimer have the same nagging feeling of deja vu as he compares each new screenplay to those that have gone before? I wonder if he suspects his movie may not be original, as he contemplates a story about a girl from New Jersey who dreams of being a songwriter, moves to Manhattan, meets a guy, gets a job and has a heart-rending reconciliation with her dad, all in a movie that ends (yes, it really does) with the final line, "What do you do when you realize all your dreams have come true?" Bruckheimer and his director bring superb technical credits to this wheezy old story, and they add wall-to-wall music to make it sound like fun. But you can pump up the volume only so far before it becomes noise. I don't ask for startling originality in a movie like "Coyote Ugly." I don't object to the scene in which the heroine and her guy neck in a convertible and regard the lights on a Manhattan bridge. I am not even surprised that the hero drives a classic car (no characters in Bruckheimer movies drive cars less than 25 years old unless they are parents or gangsters). I don't even mind the obligatory line, "It's payback time!" All I ask is that I be surprised a couple of times. Give me something I can't see coming and make it more unexpected than a beloved character getting hit by a car instead of having a heart attack.In the movie, Perabo, who has big-time star power, plays Violet, a working-class girl from South Amboy, N.J., who packs up and moves to a cheap apartment in Chinatown (where she meets not a single Chinese person) and gets a job in Coyote Ugly, a bar that would be the result if you took the bar in "Cocktail" and performed reckless experiments on its DNA.It's the kind of bar you would fight to get out of--and you'd have to. Customers are jammed so tightly together, the fire marshal can barely wedge his way into the room. They are offered no mixed drinks, no wine, just "Jim, Jack, Johnny Red, Johnny Black and Jose--all my favorite friends," according to Lil (Maria Bello), the sexy blond who owns the club. "You can have it any way you want it, as long as it's in a shot glass." Violet auditions for her job, which consists of dancing on top of the bar, pouring drinks, dumping ice on customers who get into fights and spraying the others every so often with the soda gun. These are skilled dancers. They can do Broadway routines on a slippery bar top, while drunks grab at their ankles. Every once in a while, just for variety, they pour booze on the bar and set it on fire.Many of the movie's shots are high-angle, looking down at the customers, their mouths upturned and gulping like gasping fish. Illuminated by garish neon, they bear an uncanny resemblance to Hieronymus Bosch's paintings of the damned roasting in hell.After a shaky start, Violet becomes a hit at the bar; meanwhile, she tries to place tapes of her songs around town. She has stage fright, you see, and can't sing her own songs because she's afraid to sing in front of an audience, although she will obviously do almost anything else.She meets Kevin (Adam Garcia), an awfully nice Australian short-order cook who encourages her, and even bribes a guy to give her an audition by trading his precious Spider-Man comic. They would no doubt have steamy sex, except that Bruckheimer, a student of straws in the wind, knows this is the summer when PG-13, not his old favorite R, is the coveted rating. (His "Gone in 60 Seconds" was also PG-13, which may explain why Angelina Jolie was missing from most of the film.) "Coyote Ugly" finally leads up to the questions: (1) Does she find the courage to sing? (2) Do they stay together after their Idiot Plot Misunderstanding? and (3) Do all of her dreams come true? There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo, who I first noticed in "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle," writing that she was "so fetching she sort of stops the clock." She has one of those friendly Julia Roberts smiles, good comic timing, ease and confidence on the screen, and a career ahead of her in movies better than this one. Lots better.Download here
8 Mile (Drama,Music)
Every Moment is a Chance to Turn it Around.
Every moment is another chance.
Find Your Voice
Go back to where it all started.
Helt Eminemt [Denmark]
If the streets had a voice, this would be the story they'd tell.
Look, What if You Had One Chance to Seize Everything You Ever Wanted? Would You Capture it? Or Would You Let it Slip? [full trailer]
Lose Yourself In the Music
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A rap version of "Saturday Night Fever." B-Rabbit, a wannabe rapper from the wrong side of Detroit's 8 Mile, has problems: he dumps his girlfriend when she tells him she's pregnant; to save money to make a demo tape, he moves into his alcoholic mom's trailer; his job's a dead end, and he's just choked at the local head-to-head rap contest. Things improve when he meets Alex - an aspiring model headed for New York - and a fast-talking pal promises to set up the demo. Then new setbacks: Alex isn't faithful, mom rejects him, rifts surface with his friends, and he's mugged by rivals. Everything hinges on the next rap showdown at the club. Can B-Rabbit pull truth out of his cap?
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Pale, depressed, Jimmy Smith Jr. (Eminem) skulks through a life that has been so terribly unkind to him. His girlfriend has gotten pregnant and broken up with him, and although he did the right thing by her--he gave her his old car--he now faces the prospect of moving back into his mother's trailer home, with her boyfriend who hates him. Jimmy carries his clothes around in a garbage bag. He has a job as a punch press operator.We see him, early in "8 Mile," about to do the only thing he does well and takes joy in doing. He is about to go onstage at the Shelter, a rap club that looks uncannily like a deserted building, and engage in the hip-hop version of a poetry slam. In this world, he is known as "Rabbit." He rehearses in a mirror in the men's room, fiercely scowling at his own reflection and practicing those hand gestures all the rappers use, their outboard fingers pointed down from jerking arms as they jab spastically like Joe Cocker. Then Rabbit throws up. Then he goes onstage, where he has 45 seconds to out-rap his competitor in a showdown. And then he freezes. The seconds creep by in total silence, until Rabbit flees the stage and the Shelter.We are hardly started in "8 Mile," and already we see that this movie stands aside from routine debut films by pop stars. It stands aside from Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and the other hit machines who have unwisely tried to transfer musical ability into acting careers. Like Prince's "Purple Rain," it is the real thing. Eminem insists on Rabbit's proletarian roots, on his slattern mother, on his lonely progress as a white boy in a black world.Whether "8 Mile" is close to Eminem's own autobiographical truths, I do not know. It is a faithful reflection of his myth, however, beginning with the title, which refers to the road which separates Detroit from its white suburbs. He lives on the black side of the road, where he has found acceptance and friendship from a posse of homies, and especially from Future (Mekhi Phifer), who emcees the contests at the Shelter. When Rabbit gets into fights with black rivals, and he does, they are motivated not by racism but by more wholesome feelings, like sexual jealousy and professional envy.The genius of Rabbit is to admit his own weaknesses. This is also the approach of Eminem, who acknowledges in his lyrics that he's a white man playing in a black man's field. In the climactic performance scene in "8 Mile," he not only skewers his opponent but preempts any comeback by trashing himself first, before the other guy can. At one point, devastatingly, he even calls another rapper "too generic." They must read rock critics in the inner city.The movie, directed by Curtis Hanson ("Wonder Boys") and written by Scott Silver, is a grungy version of a familiar formula, in which the would-be performer first fails at his art, then succeeds, is unhappy in romance but lucky in his friends, and comes from an unfortunate background. He even finds love, sort of, with Alex (Brittany Murphy), who is loyal if not faithful. What the movie is missing, however, is the third act in which the hero becomes a star. We know that Eminem is awesomely successful, but "8 Mile" avoids the rags-to-riches route and shows Rabbit moving from rags to slightly better rags.There has been criticism of Kim Basinger, who is said to be too attractive and even glamorous to play Rabbit's mother, but this strikes me as economic discrimination: Cannot poor people as well as rich people look like Kim Basinger? Given the numbers of ugly people who live in big houses, why can't there be beautiful people living in trailers? Her performance finds the right note somewhere between love and exasperation; it cannot be easy to live with this sullen malcontent, whose face lights up only when he sees his baby sister, Lily.As an actor, Eminem is convincing without being electric. Perhaps the Rabbit character doesn't allow for joy; he seems to go through life forever remembering why he shouldn't be happy. As it happens, on the same day that "8 Mile" was screened in Chicago, I also saw "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a documentary about the studio musicians who created the Motown Sound. The contrast was instructive. On the one hand, a Detroit white boy embracing the emblems of poverty and performing in a musical genre that involves complaint, anger and alienation. On the other hand, black Detroit musicians making good money, performing joyously, having a good time and remembering those times with tears in their eyes. What has happened to our hopes, that young audiences now embrace such cheerless material, avoiding melody like the plague? At least in their puritanism they still permit rhymes.Eminem survives the X-ray truth-telling of the movie camera, which is so good at spotting phonies. He is on the level. Here he plays, if not himself, a version of himself, and we understand why he has been accepted as a star in a genre mostly owned by blacks. Whether he has a future as a movie actor is open to question: At this point in his career, there is no reason for him to play anyone other than himself, and it might even be professionally dangerous for him to try. He can of course play versions of Rabbit in other movies, and would probably play them well, but Rabbit, let it be said, is a downer. I would love to see a sequel (maybe "81/2 Mile") in which Rabbit makes millions and becomes world famous, and we learn at last if it is possible for him to be happy.Download here
Wedding Singer, The (Comedy,Music,Romance)
Before the internet, Before cell phones, Before roller-blades, There was a time... 1985. Don't pretend you don't remember.
He's gonna party like it's 1985.
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Robby is stood up at the altar by Linda, who decides that the prospect of marrying a guy who sings at wedding receptions doesn't equal the attraction she felt when he was lead singer in a rock band. Robby finds consolation in his friendship with Julia, a waitress at the wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs where he performs. Julia asks Robby to help her plan her upcoming wedding to Glenn, who isn't interested in the details of the ceremony. Robby learns that Glenn also isn't totally interested in Julia and is marrying her because she "deserves it" after sticking with him for years and because he knows she's not marrying him for his money, since she dated him back before he started pulling down the big bucks.
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Well-to-do older white characters are often seen poorly dancing and poorly singing gangsta rap or modern R&B, always for laughs. See "Head of State," "Scary Movie 2," "Malibu's Most Wanted," "Bulworth," "Austin Powers 3," "The Wedding Singer," "The Super," etc.PATRICK KEYS, HOUSTONDownload here
Be Cool (Comedy,Crime,Music)
Everyone is looking for the next big hit
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Streetwise mobster-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is back, but this time Chili has abandoned the fickle movie industry and veered into the music business, tangling with Russian mobsters and gangsta rappers and taking a talented, feisty young singer named Linda Moon under his wing. From the recording studio to an Aerosmith concert to the MTV Music Awards, he manipulates events to watch them play out the Chili way, using his signature blend of wiseguy skills and negotiation tactics. It's a dangerous business, and everyone's looking for their next big hit.
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John Travolta became a movie star by playing a Brooklyn kid who wins a dance contest in "Saturday Night Fever" (1977). He revived his career by dancing with Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction" (1994). In "Be Cool," Uma Thurman asks if he dances. "I'm from Brooklyn," he says, and then they dance. So we get it: "Brooklyn" connects with "Fever," Thurman connects with "Pulp." That's the easy part. The hard part is, what do we do with it?
"Be Cool" is a movie that knows it is a movie. It knows it is a sequel and contains disparaging references to sequels. All very cute at the screenplay stage, where everybody can sit around at story conferences and assume that a scene will work because the scene it refers to worked. But that's the case only when the new scene is also good as itself, apart from what it refers to.
Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" knew that Travolta won the disco contest in "Saturday Night Fever." But Tarantino's scene didn't depend on that; it built from it. Travolta was graceful beyond compare in "Fever," but in "Pulp Fiction" he's dancing with a gangster's wife on orders from the gangster, and part of the point of the scene is that both Travolta and Thurman look like they're dancing not out of joy, but out of duty. So we remember "Fever" and then we forget it, because the new scene is working on its own.
Now look at the dance scene in "Be Cool." Travolta and Thurman dance in a perfectly competent way that is neither good nor bad. Emotionally they are neither happy or sad. The scene is not necessary to the story. The filmmakers have put them on the dance floor without a safety net. And so we watch them dancing and we think, yeah, "Saturday Night Fever" and "Pulp Fiction," and when that thought has been exhausted, they're still dancing.
The whole movie has the same problem. It is a sequel to "Get Shorty" (1995), which was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard just as this is based on a sequel to that novel. Travolta once again plays Chili Palmer, onetime Miami loan shark, who in the first novel traveled to Los Angeles to collect a debt from a movie producer, and ended up pitching him on a movie based on the story of why he was in the producer's living room in the middle of the night threatening his life. This time Chili has moved into the music business, which is less convincing, because while Chili was plausibly a fan of the producer's sleazy movies, he cannot be expected, 10 years down the road, to know or care much about music. Funnier if he had advanced to the front ranks of movie producers and was making a movie with A-list stars when his past catches up with him.
Instead, he tries to take over the contract of a singer named Linda Moon (Christina Milian), whose agent, Raji (Vince Vaughn), acts as if he is black. He is not black, and that's the joke, I guess. But where do you go with it? Maybe by sinking him so deeply into dialect that he cannot make himself understood, and has to write notes. Raji has a bodyguard named Elliot Wilhelm, played by The Rock. I pause here long enough to note that Elliott Wilhelm is the name of a friend of mine who runs the Detroit Film Theater, and that Elmore Leonard undoubtedly knows this because he also lives in Detroit. It's the kind of in-joke that doesn't hurt a movie unless you happen to know Elliott Wilhelm, in which case you can think of nothing else every second The Rock is on the screen.
The deal with The Rock's character is that he is manifestly gay, although he doesn't seem to realize it. He makes dire threats against Chili Palmer, who disarms him with flattery, telling him in the middle of a confrontation that he has all the right elements to be a movie star. Just as the sleazy producer in "Get Shorty" saved his own life by listening to Chili's pitch, now Chili saves his life by pitching The Rock.
There are other casting decisions that are intended to be hilarious. Sin LaSalle has a chief of staff played by Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000 of OutKast), who is a famous music type, although I did not know that and neither, in my opinion, would Chili. There is also a gag involving Steven Tyler turning up as himself.
"Be Cool" becomes a classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever. The movie is like a bureaucrat who keeps sending you to another office.
It doesn't take the in-joke satire to an additional level that might skew it funny. To have The Rock play a gay narcissist is not funny because all we can think about is that The Rock is not a gay narcissist. But if they had cast someone who was also not The Rock, but someone removed from The Rock at right angles, like Steve Buscemi or John Malkovich, then that might have worked, and The Rock could have played another character at right angles to himself -- for example, the character played here by Harvey Keitel as your basic Harvey Keitel character. Think what The Rock could do with a Harvey Keitel character.
In other words, (1) come up with an actual story, and (2) if you must have satire and self-reference, rotate it 90 degrees off the horizontal instead of making it ground level. Also (3) go easy on the material that requires a familiarity with the earlier movie, as in the scenes with Danny DeVito, who can be the funniest man in a movie, but not when it has to be another movie than the one he is appearing in.Download here
Moulin Rouge! (Drama,Musical,Romance)
Above All Things This Story Is About Love
Believe In Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and above all things, Love.
Club Moulin Rouge - an experience you won't forget!
Come And Get Me Boys!
Every man wanted her. But One man dared to love her.
He entered in a world where fantasies are real.
No Laws. No Limits. One Rule. Never Fall In Love.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.
The show must go on
This is a story about LOVE, Music is the food of LOVE, Nothing matters but LOVE.
This Story Is About Beauty
This Story Is About Freedom
This story is about love, overcoming all obstacles.
This Story Is About Truth
Truth - Beauty - Freedom - Love
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Christian, a young wannabe Bohemian poet living in 1899 Paris, defies his father by joining the colorfully diverse clique inhabiting the dark, fantastical underworld of Paris' now legendary Moulin Rouge. In this seedy but glamorous haven of sex, drugs and newly-discovered electricity, the poet-innocent finds himself plunged into a passionate but ultimately tragic love affair with Satine, the club's highest paid star and the city's most famous courtesan. Their romance is played out against the infamous club - a meeting place of high life and low, where slumming aristocrats and the fashionably rich mingled with workers, artists, Bohemians, actresses and courtesans.
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Like almost every American college boy who ever took a cut-rate flight to Paris, I went to the Moulin Rouge on my first night in town. I had a cheap standing-room ticket way in the back, and over the heads of the crowd, through a haze of smoke, I could vaguely see the dancing girls. The tragedy of the Moulin Rouge is that by the time you can afford a better seat, you've outgrown the show."Moulin Rouge" the movie is more like the Moulin Rouge of my adolescent fantasies than the real Moulin Rouge ever could be. It isn't about tired, decadent people, but about glorious romantics, who believe in the glitz and the tinsel--who see the nightclub not as a shabby tourist trap but as a stage for their dreams. Even its villain is a love-struck duke who gnashes his way into the fantasy, content to play a starring role however venal.The film is constructed like the fevered snapshots created by your imagination before an anticipated erotic encounter. It doesn't depend on dialogue or situation but on the way you imagine a fantasy object first from one angle and then another. Satine, the heroine, is seen not so much in dramatic situations as in poses--in postcards for the yearning mind. The movie is about how we imagine its world. It is perfectly appropriate that it was filmed on sound stages in Australia; Paris has always existed best in the minds of its admirers.The film stars Nicole Kidman as Satine, a star dancer who has a deadly secret; she is dying of tuberculosis. This is not a secret from the audience, which learns it early on, but from Christian (Ewan McGregor), the would-be writer who loves her. Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), the dwarf artist, lives above Christian, and one day comes crashing through the ceiling of their flimsy tenement, sparking a friendship and collaboration: They will write a show to spotlight Satine's brilliance, as well as "truth, beauty, freedom and love." (I was reminded of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor's motto in "Singin' in the Rain": "Dignity. Always dignity.") The show must be financed; enter the venal Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), who wants to pay for the show and for Satine's favors. The ringmaster is Zidler (Jim Broadbent), impresario of the Moulin Rouge.Each of these characters is seen in terms of their own fantasies about themselves. Toulouse-Lautrec, for example, is flamboyant and romantic; Christian is lonely and lovelorn; Satine has a good heart and only seems to be a bad girl; Zidler pretends to be all business but is a softy, and the Duke can be so easily duped because being duped is the essence of his role in life. Those who think they can buy affection are suckers; a wise man is content to rent it.The movie was directed by Baz Luhrmann, an Australian with a background in opera, whose two previous films were also experiments in exuberant excess. "Strictly Ballroom" made a ballroom competition into a flamboyant theatrical exercise, and his "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" updated the play into a contempo teenage rumble. He constructs "Moulin Rouge" with the melodrama of a 19th century opera, the Technicolor brashness of a 1950s Hollywood musical and the quick-cutting frenzy of a music video. Nothing is really "period" about the movie--it's like a costume revue taking place right now, with hit songs from the 1970s and 1980s (you will get the idea if I mention that Jim Broadbent sings "Like a Virgin").I am often impatient with directors who use so many cuts their films seem to have been fed through electric fans. For Luhrmann and this material, it is the right approach. He uses so many different setups and camera angles that some of the songs seem to be cut not on every word of the lyrics, but on every syllable. There's no breathing room. The whole movie is on the same manic pitch as O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number in "Singin' in the Rain." Everything is screwed to a breakneck pitch, as if the characters have died and their lives are flashing before our eyes.This means the actors do not create their characters but embody them. Who is Satine? A leggy redhead who can look like a million in a nightclub costume, and then melt into a guy's arms. Who is Christian? A man who embodies longing with his eyes and sighs--whose very essence, whose entire being, is composed of need for Satine. With the Duke, one is reminded of silent films in which the titles said "The Duke," and then he sneered at you.The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess. While it might be most convenient to see it from the beginning, it hardly makes any difference; walk in at any moment and you'll quickly know who is good and bad, who is in love and why--and then all the rest is song, dance, spectacular production numbers, protestations of love, exhalations of regret, vows of revenge and grand destructive gestures. It's like being trapped on an elevator with the circus.Download here
Bodyguard, The (Drama,Music,Romance,Thriller)
Never let her out of your sight. Never let your guard down. Never fall in love.
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A pop singer has been receiving threatening notes, and her manager hires a bodyguard known for his good work. The bodyguard ruffles the singer's feathers and most of her entourage by tightening security more than they feel is necessary. The bodyguard is haunted by the fact that he was on Reagan's secret service staff but wasn't there to prevent the attack by Hinckley. Eventually the bodyguard and the singer start an affair, and she begins to believe his precautions are necessary when the stalker strikes close to home.
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Almost the first thing the samurai sees when he arrives is a dog trotting down the main street with a human hand in its mouth. The town seems deserted until a nervous little busybody darts out and offers to act as an employment service: He'll get the samurai a job as a yojimbo -- a bodyguard. The samurai, a large, dusty man with indifference bordering on insolence, listens and does not commit. He wants sake and something to eat.
So opens "Yojimbo" (1961), Akira Kurosawa's most popular film in Japan. He was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford's gallery of supporting actors.
Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one: Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), with Clint Eastwood, is so similar to "Yojimbo" that homage shades into plagiarism. Even Eastwood's Man With No Name is inspired, perhaps, by the samurai in "Yojimbo." Asked his name, the samurai looks out the window, sees a mulberry field, and replies, "Kuwabatake Sanjuro," which means "30-year-old mulberry field." He is 30, and that is a way of saying he has no name.
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All Dogs Go to Heaven (Animation,Drama,Family,Musical)
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When a casino owning dog named Charlie is murdered by his rival Carface, he finds himself in Heaven basically by default since all dogs to heaven. However, since he wants to get back at his killer, he cons his way back to the living with the warning that doing that damns him to Hell. Once back, he teams with his old partner, Itchy to prep his retaliation. He also stumbles on to an orphan girl who can talk to the animals, thus allowing him to get the inside info on the races to ensure his wins to finance his plans. However, all the while, he is still haunted by nightmares on what's waiting for him on the other side unless he can prove that he is worthy of Heaven again.
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The first thing I noticed about Don Bluth's "All Dogs Go to Heaven" were the colors - the rich, saturated colors that I identify with the early days of animated features. When Technicolor shut down its classic color operation and led the movie world to an inferior but cheaper system, animated films suffered more than live-action movies, because their bright primary colors were essential to their over-all effect. Most movies made from the early 1960s to the late 1970s have suffered serious fading, but the animated movies looked a little pale even to begin with.Now Technicolor is back with an improved color system, and in "All Dogs Go to Heaven" it permits such a voluptuous use of color that the movie is an invigorating bath for the eyes. The bright palette is used to paint animated characters who are also a treat, because in his latest animated feature, Don Bluth has allowed his characters to look and behave a little more strangely. There is a lot of individualism in this movie, both in the filmmaking and in the characters.Bluth is the former Disney animator who led a group of artists away from the studio during its doldrums in 1979 and set up his own animation operation. His feature credits so far include "The Secret of NIMH," the dinosaur adventure "The Land Beyond Time," and "An American Tail," the story of an immigrant mouse that set box office records for an animated film. Now here he is with a fantasy about canine low-life in New Orleans.The movie involves the adventures of Charlie B. Barkin (who not only has the voice of Burt Reynolds but even some of the mannerisms). Barkin is a professional criminal who has teamed up in the past with a pit bull named Carface, but Carface has Barkin rubbed out and he finds himself in Heaven, which should not be a surprise if he has read the title of his movie. Bent on revenge, Barkin returns to Earth, and the main story of the movie begins as he makes friends with a little girl who has an amazing knack for predicting winners at the track.The movie tells its story with several timeouts for song and dance numbers, notably one in which an alligator does an Esther Williams imitation. The plot is not particularly inventive (all but the younger viewers should be able to call most of the big surprises), but the style and tone of the movie is fresh. Although Walt Disney's very earliest movies had a lot of fun playing around with animation, most modern animated characters seem to come out of the same image bank.They look more or less like residents of the same reality level. What Bluth has done in "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is to allow the characters to be drawn in a more parodistic, even slightly bizarre way, so that their very shapes seem to change to echo their moods. It's fun.There must be some sort of law in Hollywood that says movies of the same sort must open on the same day. How else can you explain that even though new animated features are rare treasures, "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is opening opposite "The Little Mermaid," Disney's latest film? Of the two, I prefer the Disney, which is the studio's most inspired feature cartoon in years. But "Dogs" is also bright and inventive, and it was Bluth's revolt that helped jolt Disney out of its production-line lockstep a decade ago. Since both films are likely to be around for awhile, they give parents an unusual choice of good G-rated material. And they will both, of course, be around for a very long while on video.Download here
Little Mermaid, The (Animation,Comedy,Family,Fantasy,Musical,Romance)
Love has no boundaries.
Somewhere under the sea and beyond your imagination is an adventure in fantasy.
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Loosely based upon the story by Hans Christian Andersen. Ariel, youngest daughter of King Triton, is dissatisfied with life in the sea. She longs to be with the humans above the surface, and is often caught in arguments with her father over those "barbaric fish-eaters". She goes to meet Ursula, the Sea Witch, to strike a deal, but Ursula has bigger plans for this mermaid and her father.
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Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny (Comedy,Music)
An epic quest. A magical guitar pick. A chance to put the D in Destiny.
The greatest motion picture of all time.
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This is the story of a friendship that changes the course of rock history forever, of the fateful collision of minds between JB and KG that led to the creation of the precedent-shattering band Tenacious D, and of the two heroes' quest to find the fabled Guitar Pick Of Destiny...
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Mo' Better Blues (Drama,Music)
A Spike Lee joint.
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Opens with Bleek as a child learning to play the trumpet, his friends want him to come out and play but mother insists he finish his lessons. Bleek grows into adulthood and forms his own band - The Bleek Gilliam Quartet. The story of Bleek's and Shadow's friendly rivalry on stage which spills into their professional relationship and threatens to tear apart the quartet.
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Be Cool (Comedy,Crime,Music)
Everyone is looking for the next big hit
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Streetwise mobster-turned-movie producer Chili Palmer is back, but this time Chili has abandoned the fickle movie industry and veered into the music business, tangling with Russian mobsters and gangsta rappers and taking a talented, feisty young singer named Linda Moon under his wing. From the recording studio to an Aerosmith concert to the MTV Music Awards, he manipulates events to watch them play out the Chili way, using his signature blend of wiseguy skills and negotiation tactics. It's a dangerous business, and everyone's looking for their next big hit.
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John Travolta became a movie star by playing a Brooklyn kid who wins a dance contest in "Saturday Night Fever" (1977). He revived his career by dancing with Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction" (1994). In "Be Cool," Uma Thurman asks if he dances. "I'm from Brooklyn," he says, and then they dance. So we get it: "Brooklyn" connects with "Fever," Thurman connects with "Pulp." That's the easy part. The hard part is, what do we do with it?
"Be Cool" is a movie that knows it is a movie. It knows it is a sequel and contains disparaging references to sequels. All very cute at the screenplay stage, where everybody can sit around at story conferences and assume that a scene will work because the scene it refers to worked. But that's the case only when the new scene is also good as itself, apart from what it refers to.
Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" knew that Travolta won the disco contest in "Saturday Night Fever." But Tarantino's scene didn't depend on that; it built from it. Travolta was graceful beyond compare in "Fever," but in "Pulp Fiction" he's dancing with a gangster's wife on orders from the gangster, and part of the point of the scene is that both Travolta and Thurman look like they're dancing not out of joy, but out of duty. So we remember "Fever" and then we forget it, because the new scene is working on its own.
Now look at the dance scene in "Be Cool." Travolta and Thurman dance in a perfectly competent way that is neither good nor bad. Emotionally they are neither happy or sad. The scene is not necessary to the story. The filmmakers have put them on the dance floor without a safety net. And so we watch them dancing and we think, yeah, "Saturday Night Fever" and "Pulp Fiction," and when that thought has been exhausted, they're still dancing.
The whole movie has the same problem. It is a sequel to "Get Shorty" (1995), which was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard just as this is based on a sequel to that novel. Travolta once again plays Chili Palmer, onetime Miami loan shark, who in the first novel traveled to Los Angeles to collect a debt from a movie producer, and ended up pitching him on a movie based on the story of why he was in the producer's living room in the middle of the night threatening his life. This time Chili has moved into the music business, which is less convincing, because while Chili was plausibly a fan of the producer's sleazy movies, he cannot be expected, 10 years down the road, to know or care much about music. Funnier if he had advanced to the front ranks of movie producers and was making a movie with A-list stars when his past catches up with him.
Instead, he tries to take over the contract of a singer named Linda Moon (Christina Milian), whose agent, Raji (Vince Vaughn), acts as if he is black. He is not black, and that's the joke, I guess. But where do you go with it? Maybe by sinking him so deeply into dialect that he cannot make himself understood, and has to write notes. Raji has a bodyguard named Elliot Wilhelm, played by The Rock. I pause here long enough to note that Elliott Wilhelm is the name of a friend of mine who runs the Detroit Film Theater, and that Elmore Leonard undoubtedly knows this because he also lives in Detroit. It's the kind of in-joke that doesn't hurt a movie unless you happen to know Elliott Wilhelm, in which case you can think of nothing else every second The Rock is on the screen.
The deal with The Rock's character is that he is manifestly gay, although he doesn't seem to realize it. He makes dire threats against Chili Palmer, who disarms him with flattery, telling him in the middle of a confrontation that he has all the right elements to be a movie star. Just as the sleazy producer in "Get Shorty" saved his own life by listening to Chili's pitch, now Chili saves his life by pitching The Rock.
There are other casting decisions that are intended to be hilarious. Sin LaSalle has a chief of staff played by Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000 of OutKast), who is a famous music type, although I did not know that and neither, in my opinion, would Chili. There is also a gag involving Steven Tyler turning up as himself.
"Be Cool" becomes a classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever. The movie is like a bureaucrat who keeps sending you to another office.
It doesn't take the in-joke satire to an additional level that might skew it funny. To have The Rock play a gay narcissist is not funny because all we can think about is that The Rock is not a gay narcissist. But if they had cast someone who was also not The Rock, but someone removed from The Rock at right angles, like Steve Buscemi or John Malkovich, then that might have worked, and The Rock could have played another character at right angles to himself -- for example, the character played here by Harvey Keitel as your basic Harvey Keitel character. Think what The Rock could do with a Harvey Keitel character.
In other words, (1) come up with an actual story, and (2) if you must have satire and self-reference, rotate it 90 degrees off the horizontal instead of making it ground level. Also (3) go easy on the material that requires a familiarity with the earlier movie, as in the scenes with Danny DeVito, who can be the funniest man in a movie, but not when it has to be another movie than the one he is appearing in.Download here
Aladdin (Animation,Comedy,Family,Fantasy,Musical)
Imagine if you had three wishes, three hopes, three dreams and they all could come true.
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Aladdin is a street-urchin who lives in a large and busy town long ago with his faithful monkey friend Abu. When Princess Jasmine gets tired of being forced to remain in the palace that overlooks the city, she sneaks out to the marketplace, where she accidentally meets Aladdin. Under the orders of the evil Jafar (the sultan's advisor), Aladdin is thrown in jail and becomes caught up in Jafar's plot to rule the land with the aid of a mysterious lamp. Legend has it that only a person who is a "diamond in the rough" can retrieve the lamp from the Cave of Wonders. Aladdin might fight that description, but that's not enough to marry the princess, who must (by law) marry a prince.
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Robin Williams and animation were born for one another, and in "Aladdin" they finally meet. Williams' speed of comic invention has always been too fast for flesh and blood; the way he flashes in and out of characters can be dizzying. In Disney's new animated film "Aladdin," he's liberated at last, playing a genie who has complete freedom over his form - who can instantly be anybody or anything.The genie is the best thing in the movie, which is good fun but not on a par with "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast," the two films with which Disney essentially gave rebirth to featurelength animation. The weakness of the film is in its leads, a street urchin named Aladdin and a sultan's daughter, Jasmine. As a romantic couple, they're pale and routine, especially compared to the chemistry between beast and the beauty. They look unformed, as if even the filmmakers didn't see them as real individuals.All of the film's best moments come from the genie and the other supporting characters, which include a plump little sultan, his scheming vizier, an angry parrot named Iago, a chattering monkey, a friendly flying carpet, and even a magic cave that turns into a fearsome face so that Aladdin has to venture down its throat.Ever since Jiminy Cricket first danced onto the screen, Disney animators have created entertaining supporting casts, and the magic carpet is one of the most ingenious: with only tassels and body language to work with, it somehow possesses a complete personality, whisking Aladdin and Abu, his monkey, on terrifying swoops around the kingdom.But it's the genie who stops the show, and I would like to know which came first, the pictures or the words, because Williams sounds like he's improvising as he careens from one character to another: from Ed Sullivan to Elvis to Arsenio Hall to a tailor to a Scottish terrier. There is genuine exhilaration in these passages.The plot is basic fairy tale. The sultan informs his daughter that she has three days in which to get married (fathers are always providing fearsome deadlines to their daughters in these stories). Distraught, she flees from the palace and encounters Aladdin, who knows his way around the streets and alleys of the city, and enchants her with his cheerful ways.Meanwhile, the evil adviser schemes to marry the princess and become the sultan - not difficult, since the sultan falls under his spell and doesn't seem too alert at the best of times. Meanwhile, Aladdin explores the magic cave, finds a lantern, rubs it and unleashes the Robin Williams scenes, which are so captivating we almost forget about the rest.One distraction during the film was its odd use of ethnic stereo types. Most of the Arab characters have exaggerated facial characteristics - hooked noses, glowering brows, thick lips - but Aladdin and the princess look like white American teenagers. Wouldn't it be reasonable that if all the char acters in this movie come from the same genetic stock, they should resemble one another? Original music was one of the key qualities of both "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast," and the composers of those films, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, collaborated on three songs for this one before Ashman's death last year (their work includes Williams' showstopper, "Friend Like Me"). Menken then collaborated with Tim Rice on three more songs, but some ineffable quality seems missing; the music isn't as magical as in the two previous films. The bottom line is that "Aladdin" is good but not great, with the exception of the Robin Williams sequences, which have a life and energy all their own.Download here
8 Mile (Drama,Music)
Every Moment is a Chance to Turn it Around.
Every moment is another chance.
Find Your Voice
Go back to where it all started.
Helt Eminemt [Denmark]
If the streets had a voice, this would be the story they'd tell.
Look, What if You Had One Chance to Seize Everything You Ever Wanted? Would You Capture it? Or Would You Let it Slip? [full trailer]
Lose Yourself In the Music
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A rap version of "Saturday Night Fever." B-Rabbit, a wannabe rapper from the wrong side of Detroit's 8 Mile, has problems: he dumps his girlfriend when she tells him she's pregnant; to save money to make a demo tape, he moves into his alcoholic mom's trailer; his job's a dead end, and he's just choked at the local head-to-head rap contest. Things improve when he meets Alex - an aspiring model headed for New York - and a fast-talking pal promises to set up the demo. Then new setbacks: Alex isn't faithful, mom rejects him, rifts surface with his friends, and he's mugged by rivals. Everything hinges on the next rap showdown at the club. Can B-Rabbit pull truth out of his cap?
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