The movie that made us believe we couldn't trust Sharon Stone, but I think it's a Michael Douglas problem, not an us problem. Just look at his output in this era.
While some will most remember the horrible crime at the top of the movie, it's just background to Harvey Keitel's steady and uncompromising descent into hell. That last minute is as harrowing as it is indelible.
While some of the action beats would feel at home in a Hong Kong cop movie (and in fact, at least one sequence was ripped off of Police Story after de-soulifying it), Bad Boys II is even more noisome and irritating than the original. Michael Bay just will not hear of something called "consequences", so the boys can do anything and it doesn't really matter.
Michael Bay isn't quite Michael Bay yet in Bad Boys - it's his first film, after all - reserving his trademark stylish motion for the action beats and transitions, but the film pretty much STOPS for dialog scenes. There's a feeling that because the stars have backgrounds in comedy, they can just improvise banter and it'll be good, but it goes on forever, and it's NOT that funny. In fact, the dialog is pretty dumb across the board, the characters badly motivated and spewing nonsense. The number of times someone says "ENOUGH!" or "SHUT UP!", they should have realized they should turn it down a notch and cut this down to the energetic 90 minutes the film deserved (it tries my patience at almost 2 hours). Bad Boys minted Will Smith as an action star, and he pulls it off, but woof, Martin Lawrence really DOESN'T. I would say he's the main problem. He's over-acting and making gurning expressions and making us realize the script makes ALL these cops highly incompetent (including, and perhaps most of all, they captain Joey Pants). Téa Leoni is a bright spot, but Bay doesn't work to make her continued involvement believable, and Marg Helgenberger is completely wasted. We're left with a pretty standard buddy cop plot and a memorable musical theme, but so much annoying "comedy bickering" that I can hardly believe I had a good reaction to this when I saw it in theaters.
The Odessa File adaptation pulls the same trick as the novel by Frederick Forsyth, which is to say it's based on true events - an Egyptian plot to throw hundreds of missiles at Israel in the early 1960s, if only an organization of Nazis in hiding can supply them with the rockets - though there's more "alleged" than "true" here. Certainly, John Voight as a crusading German journalist who picks up the ODESSA's trail and has a hand in stopping them is fabrication. In terms of paranoid thrillers, it's a little "made for TV" and not as scary as we want it to be, despite the plot elements offering a frisson for tapping into current events. And I could do without the final twist. But it's still adequately suspenseful, and makes use of great German locations, as well a stable of recognizable British actors like Derek Jacobi, Mary Tamm and (not sharing the screen with her, but to play opposite her in Doctor Who's The Androids of Tara) Peter Jeffrey.
While we do see the serial killer that terrorized New York in 1977 and the cops that hope to catch him, Summer of Sam is a Spike Lee film through and through, and is much more about a South Bronx Italian-American community under threat and how it reacts with fear and paranoia. Lee focuses on two best friends whose friendship is tested during this time - John Leguizamo, who routinely cheats on his wife (patently insane given that Mira Sorvino has never been lovelier), and Adrien Brody, a punk rocker whose adopted cultural differences make him a suspect for the murders in the neighborhood. No one's thinking straight in this cast, whether because of drugs, alcohol, sex, love, heat, or straight up madness, and things spin out of control. It's also a love letter to the late 70s, and Lee includes a lot of historical detail, which does mean the movie rambles a bit, but it also lends a certain authoritative authenticity to the proceedings you might not get just with music and fashions. And if you're doing a "70s film", you can't really be criticized for giving it the meandering feel of a 70s movie.
When you think about it, Training Day is one Denzel Washington's coaching movies, and he's only slightly more terrifying in it than in Remember the Titans or The Great Debaters. While I was always rather mystified that THIS is the one that landed him an Oscar for Best Lead Actor, it's certainly a showy and memorable performance. The movie presents the L.A.P.D. as just another criminal gang, which young Ethan Hawke isn't quite ready to be disillusioned about, but is forcibly taken into the loop of corruption on his first day in an elite narcotics squad. While Training Day was commenting on past abuses from its perspective, it sure feels at times like it became a training video for bad cops in our own era. It's like a turbo-charged Bad Lieutenant, but you still can't help but feel like stuff like this is really happening. Antoine Fuqua bastes his modern Noir in golden sunlight, uses a great hip-hop soundtrack, and casts a lot of memorable faces even in smaller roles. Watch for a young Terry Crews as a beefcake gangbanger with no dialog.
Who did they make Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend for?! It's got a cute baby dinosaur with human emotions being hugged by the leads, but it's also got lots of nudity (even of minors, but I guess the racist MPA considered this "National Geographic" nudity, and still gave it a PG - I did see it in the theater age 14), and what I find most bothersome, some very misogynistic dialog played for "laughs" in the first 15 minutes. It's also pretty violent, so even if the animals here are fake, it would still be hard for more sensitive audiences to watch them under threat (or worse) on such consistent basis. Patrick McGoohan shows a lack of scientific ethics, ruthless in his pursuit of these legendary beasts (a real legend, but geographically shuffled), Sean Young and William Katt aren't really any better since they also plan to take Baby out of its habitat for study. At least they didn't throw in with a trigger-happy local army like McGoohan, people who keep shooting in the direction of priceless dinosaurs. I'm impressed by how well the dinosaurs walk, given they are people wearing rigs, even if their faces are stiff. I can take the cheap effects. It's the haphazard tone I have trouble with.
Denzel Washington's first feature film, Carbon Copy, is a race relations satire that's perhaps a little too dry for its own good. Really a vehicle for George Segal, who mostly plays up the comedy by repeating everything he hears to make sure we understand it's shocking, he plays an advertising executive who married the boss' daughter and struck it rich, but is too good a person to be in that position. It's a job that once cost him - at his boss' urging - a woman he loved very much and who happened to be black. When Denzel shows up and reveals he's the fruit of that union, Walter (Segal) isn't too happy, but even though his son is clearly trolling him (which makes him suspect on the one hand, and hard to get a handle on on the other, at least until the end reveals all), he's ready to do the right thing by him. At which point, his white privilege is stripped from him and his entire entourage start talking as if Oscar Wilde had written 80s race comedies. Whiteness as an exclusive club. It's an interesting take, putting a white character through the tropes of a black story (which knowingly leans into the clichés to examine their value), but I feel like the terrible comedy music and Segal essentially doing shtick makes the satire go out of focus. By the end, we might reevaluate Denzel's character enough to make the creakiness of some scenes work better, however.
Watching Mississippi Masala for a young Denzel Washington, but charmed to find he's playing opposite an even younger Sarita Choudhury, here in her first role, long before she would become one of the go-to actresses of Indian descent in television and film (Homeland, Hunger Games). She plays Mina, whose family had to leave Uganda during the Amin regime. Love is on the wing when she meets Demetrius, a man outside her cultural circle. The romance is pretty straightforward, but for the culture clash (and even so, she's a modern Americanized woman), but director Mira Nair uses it to present a subtle exploration of race relations. It's not just that Mina's community goes from ally to enemy when one of their own is "threatened" (so to speak), but that her father, who considers himself a Ugandan where Asians were an economic upper class, has reason to suspect that she is of mixed race to begin with, even if Nair leaves ambiguity there. The race-driven romance is familiar, but usually the dynamic includes a white person. The narrow gradient makes Masala more original and more interesting.
The problem with Furiosa is, of course, that it's a prequel and therefore a lot of its results are foreordained. We know where these characters will end up, which will survive, and which are unlikely to. We don't always know where Furiosa will succeed, but we certainly when she must fail. And being set in the same Wasteland as Fury Road, there's a certain sense that we're revisiting old haunts, so the world building isn't as novel as in the previous film. That said, it's still pretty cool. We spend a rather long time with Young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy has such a distinctive face, the poor actress had her face digitally manipulated to fit), and while I like that version of the character's resourcefulness, the movie REALLY picks up when the lead is squarely in the driving seat (well, a little before that, if we take it literally). There are some great action scenes from that point - the attack on the war rig, the Bullet Farm fight - and Tom Burke (who looks like a young Stacy Keach here) is a strong mentor/partner for teenage(?) Furiosa. She's a badass with or without. As for Chris Hemsworth's Dementus, a sort of neo-Roman wannabe Renaissance Man, he's often too goofy for me to really tap into his menace, but ultimately, he's a coward who got ahead of himself, and his last stand in particular has a Shakespearean undercurrent I rather enjoyed, even if I wasn't always convinced Dementus was as entertaining as he must have been on the page. Nevertheless, a good time at the movies.
I've always loved Spike Lee's playfulness and it's definitely on show in Mo' Better Blues, in addition to some great jazz and blues, with Denzel Washington as the dangerously named Bleek Gilliam, a trumpet player and band leader who has put all his eggs into the same musical basket, so to speak. His music is more important than the women he loves, the musicians he leads, or other people's music. The irony is that he stands to lose everything because of the one person he might care about more than the work - his childhood friend and patently useless manager played by Spike Lee himself. Is there something for Bleek after he sounds his last note, or is jazz his only possible mistress? A story of obsession and non-pharmaceutical addiction that Lee might be equating with film making (I couldn't say), but that resonates with anyone who's put the purity of their work/art before what others call "life" (*raises hand*). Washington is great, as usual (MORE than usual). Lee gives us a lot of interesting shots, two arguments for the price of one, and a very clever, redemptive ending.
I'm not always keen on sports movies, whether based on true stories or fictional, but I AM usually keen on COACHING movies (given my background coaching for theater games). Remember the Titans worked both ways. It's a great story about coaching, and indeed, a strong interacial coaching partnership, as a high school in Virginia presents the first integrated football team in the state back in the early 70s. Denzel Washington is probably too hard on those kids, but he needs to break down attitudes before they can act like a team. Before long, the team's success brings the whole community together, but also attracts nasty racism from other teams, so even as winners, the Titans are an underdog. So it's also a rousing sports movie that works on its own terms, distinguishing a lot of players (including baby Ryan Gosling) and making us care about their personal successes, failures and sacrifices. And the football action is clear, varied and well choreographed. Exciting, often funny, but also pulling at your heart strings, Remember the Titans is a great entry in the sports, biopic AND race relations genres.
Basically wildlife footage to which they set a story... well, maybe I shouldn't use "story" per se when discussing Tarka the Otter. We see Tarka being born, emancipate himself from his parents (not by choice , so if you ever wondered what Bambi's mother would play like in live action...), run into a threat (often some bloodthirsty humans and their hounds), escape, kill and eat some other creature, rince-repeat. I don't think there was enough material here for a 90-minute film (the movie proves my point by suddenly tapping into a subplot about a couple cranes), but they had all this footage! There are a couple of rather violent images, though there's no real contact between the otters and other animals with "handlers" credited. It still manages to be pretty harrowing for a "family" film. The narration, read by Peter Ustinov, is strong and poetic (though why can't Tarka's mom have a name like he does? "The otter bitch" made me cringe), I can't fault the editing, and of course, the otters are very cute. Which makes the bleak tone of the piece all the more questionable.
If you're a fan of 30 Rock, then Baby Mama will probably to your liking, and feel like a parallel world where Liz Lemon is desperate to get pregnant and tries surrogacy. Tina Fey turns to her real-life bestie Amy Poehler, playing some ignorant white trash that could derail her attempts, or turn into a nice onscreen friendship. From there, it heads into romcom formula and a pretty pat ending. Most of the time, it taps into Fey's brand of comedy so well, I thought she might have written it, and it could honestly have used more of her type of send-up (Steve Martin's granola nutbar and Sigourney Weaver's sales pitch are good examples of what I mean). As is, it's got some good bits and a lot of SNL performers in large and small parts, but it gets more smiles than laughs, and it's always dangerous to make one of your leads "amusingly irritating" because they can come off as simply irritating. But there's nothing wrong with a comedy that makes you smile.
The movie Daniel Espinosa hopes to be remembered for instead of Morbius, Safe House is a pretty solid spy action thriller in which Ryan Reynolds plays a CIA safe house keeper itching for more action and gets more of it than he ever bargained for when Denzel Washington's renegade agent is caught and brought there. Seeing as Denzel's character is a master manipulator (but is he nonetheless righteous?), I imagine an alternate universe where this premise was used for a claustrophobic, one-location thriller. Instead, it goes for a more formulaic chase through South Africa, with Reynolds trying to keep his "guest" safe from unknown assassins, and himself safe from the guest. Lots of strong supporting players, violent fight scenes and stunts, and Reynolds doesn't undermine the tension with his trademark humor. Safe House is borderline bleak as the green rookie gets an eyeful of the true face of intelligence services, and wonders if he'll get burned because he really quite expendable. Better than it's given credit for.
Pretty usual for an 80s historical biopic, Glory is a black story as told through the Messianic white character who wrote the history (in this case, through letters). It's something Denzel Washington's almost too modern black activist might have called out, and that hurts the picture in retrospect. Unfortunately, the problem is compounded by casting Matthew Broderick as Colonel Shaw - the man in charge of the first black regiment in the American Civil War - and I have a hard time buying him as any historical personage. Washington gives a strong and varied performance - and got his first Oscar for it - but props should also go to a very young Andre Braugher as his counterpart, an educated New England soldier who character arc is almost opposite. He hardens where Washington softens. Needless to say, Morgan Freeman and Cary Elwes are good too. The Civil War is from an era where, because of technical limits, they had the dumbest strategies - the whites of their eyes, indeed - but director Zwick manages to make the main battles reasonably exciting. The film takes the Rebels' perfidy for granted, and so doesn't spare the Union any criticism. It comes off as just as bad or worse, but for their cause. Well made and all, but I can't get very excited about it.
A much better action thriller than one might think from the stock title, Ricochet stars Denzel Washington as a maverick cop, then maverick D.A., on his way to maverick mayor, whose most notable arrest comes back to haunt him in the form of an insane John Lithgow whose plans to destroy his humiliator's life border on the supervillain. For Daredevil fans, this is Denzel: Born Again. Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, Razorback) directs this thing with an eye for the novel and unusual, and I can safely say it contains scenes I've never really seen before - the initial arrest, the arm wrestling, the parole hearing, and Denzel Washington flashing his willy at the Bionic Woman - despite the essentially formulaic nature of the genre. Everyone is clearly having fun with the material - they even let Kevin Pollak do his Captain Kirk impression. Which is sort of at odds with just how dark the story gets, but I don't think it's a deal breaker. Lots of energy on the screen counts for something.
In the shadow of the Gulf War, a (fictional) woman is set to receive a Medal of Honor for combat (posthumously) for the first time. If the story of her Courage Under Fire (that's the title) can be cleared by a benched armor unit commander played by Denzel Washington. His story is fairly compelling - after a friendly fire incident and being under review himself, he becomes obsessed with getting his report on the fallen chopper pilot right, just as he feels his own culpability should come to light. Through interviews with the men who were saved in the incident, he finds discrepancies that soon turn into a Rashomon situation. So it's a little difficult to get a handle on Captain Walker, whose character changes from telling to telling, even if she weren't so obviously miscast as Meg Ryan. I'm sorry, but she just growls her way through a heavy Southern accent through every flashback and with her trendy haircut never really seems to be the person she's portraying (except when she's at home with a small daughter). And that undermines the whole affair.
Back when Apartheid was at its height as a global hot button issue, we got Cry Freedom. Biko's story takes place in 1977, the film was made in 1987 (South African Apartheid would only end in 1991), but it's amazing how much of Biko's language about racial equality and self-determination sounds like the way we speak about it today. Talk like white privilege and cultural genocide feels more of the "now" than they did in the 80s (but maybe it's because I was 16 when I first saw the film, which still influenced my values about racial equality as I recognized at least one argument I integrated as my own). Denzel Washington is great as Biko - this could almost be a compare/contrast performance to his landmark Malcolm X - but since the adapted book is by a white man, it's really a white man's story. There's a deep irony to a black story being told through the lens of Kevin Kline, his family, and his less than credible accent, an irony the movie seems to be aware of at times, but it's nonetheless another affront to the native Africans this is supposed to be about. By the time we've made a complete switch to the White Messiah who will bravely get the story out, it's more like Cry Me a River than Cry Freedom.
A young Denzel Washington is the eponymous police chief of a tiny Caribbean (but American) island where everyone knows everyone in The Mighty Quinn, a charmer of a detective story where the setting does a lot of the heavy lifting. Denzel's vacillating Jamaican accent aside, he's great in this as one of two local legends, of the kind only small isolated places can spawn. The other is the island's Bum Eternal, suspected of the murder of a rich white businessman, or at least that's what the privileged a-holes want Quinn to think. This happens now, while his marriage is in trouble? Director Carl Schenkel isn't a recognizable name, but he has a lot of fun staging this thing, with cool but not over-stylish shots, an evident sense of humor, and a lot of music. It's always great when the titular hero gets a song of his own. The Mighty Quinn is kind of like a blaxploitation film on vacation, with reggae airs instead of dirty funk, and it's a lot of fun.
A sunny noir if there ever was one, Out of Time stars Denzel Washington as the police chief of a small, coastal Florida town whose affair with a married woman takes him to the brink when she dies as a result of foul play, and he's named as her insurance's beneficiary. He has to investigate, while also covering up his own connections to the murder while his estranged wife, a high-profile police detective from the Big City, is on the same trail. And it's great - give or take the unconvincing casting of Eva Mendes as the wife; Sanaa Lathan is much better presence as the other woman - until a very stupid ending ruins the whole thing for me. There's one ridiculous twist too many. There's an unearned happy ending. And while John Billingsley provided fun comic relief as Denzel's buddy medical examiner throughout, the kind of comedy they make him do at the end is dumb as rocks. What a waste!
Not the strongest Grisham adaptation, The Pelican Brief solves its legal mystery early, but withholds the information from the audience. Denzel Washington's reporter therefore seems to do pointless things while we wait for him to meet Julia Roberts' brilliant law student who's cracked the case wide open with instinct and research. What works in a novel doesn't always work in a movie. The editing here is often a hash, characters disappear for too long or are introduced too late, and the ending is anti-climactic exposition. There is a certain frisson to be had 30 years later, with this yarn of political corruption, the murders of Supreme Court judges to restructure the Court before an election, story ideas that could have been had today. And certainly, the all-star cast gives better performances than the material demands. I do question why the movie is so needlessly in love with Julia Roberts' character, though. That cheeseball ending. Come on now.
It's a mouthful, but Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes continues the modern franchise's unbroken string of quality films starring your favorite apes. Well, in this case, we're generations after the previous film, so a new cast has to be introduced, but we warm to them pretty quickly (and AGAIN, the orangutan is a highlight - there was a Michael Dorn quality to his voice, and then I realized it was Peter Macon, fans of The Orville will now how I crossed my wires there). Noa is a chimp in the Caesar mold from a hawking clan, whose people is forced into slavery by an ape king who wants to get at a human bunker and its advanced weapons. To free them, Noa has to team up with a human girl who hasn't succumbed to the virus and who ALSO needs to get into that bunker. A lot of world-building, taking us forward, but also harking back and foreshadowing elements of the old Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and of course strong action pieces with absolutely perfect photoreal creatures. I like its moral shades of gray. No matter what victories humanity ekes out in this, our hearts are with the hero apes, and therefore an interesting ambivalence as to our own fate as a species. Apes together strong!
Two things that tend to radicalize you: Oppression and Education. Both come together in The Great Debaters, a dramatized true story about a segregated African-American college in the 1930s spawning a successful debate team that would go on to debate white colleges (not specifically Harvard though, that's part of the dramatization). Denzel Washington plays their teacher and directs with great sensitivity, rendering a multiple coming of age story that's steeped in radicalization. The word "radical" is often used as a derogatory, but it need not be. It merely means that one's ideas buck the mainstream, and when the mainstream is an oppressive system, people are right to resist. And a debate team is a great place to explore that, since it's about exploring ideas, dissecting them, and getting to the point where you can speak with authority, convincingly. The movie is a little manipulative at times - for example, I doubt all the issues "resolved" were specific to this theme, and there's no accounting for Washington's sudden presence at the end - but it makes you care about the characters (their parents too) and the power of education.
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Movie comment on Basic Instinct
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The movie that made us believe we couldn't trust Sharon Stone, but I think it's a Michael Douglas problem, not an us problem. Just look at his output in this era.Movie comment on Bad Lieutenant
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While some will most remember the horrible crime at the top of the movie, it's just background to Harvey Keitel's steady and uncompromising descent into hell. That last minute is as harrowing as it is indelible.Movie comment on Bad Boys II
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While some of the action beats would feel at home in a Hong Kong cop movie (and in fact, at least one sequence was ripped off of Police Story after de-soulifying it), Bad Boys II is even more noisome and irritating than the original. Michael Bay just will not hear of something called "consequences", so the boys can do anything and it doesn't really matter.Movie comment on Bad Boys
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Michael Bay isn't quite Michael Bay yet in Bad Boys - it's his first film, after all - reserving his trademark stylish motion for the action beats and transitions, but the film pretty much STOPS for dialog scenes. There's a feeling that because the stars have backgrounds in comedy, they can just improvise banter and it'll be good, but it goes on forever, and it's NOT that funny. In fact, the dialog is pretty dumb across the board, the characters badly motivated and spewing nonsense. The number of times someone says "ENOUGH!" or "SHUT UP!", they should have realized they should turn it down a notch and cut this down to the energetic 90 minutes the film deserved (it tries my patience at almost 2 hours). Bad Boys minted Will Smith as an action star, and he pulls it off, but woof, Martin Lawrence really DOESN'T. I would say he's the main problem. He's over-acting and making gurning expressions and making us realize the script makes ALL these cops highly incompetent (including, and perhaps most of all, they captain Joey Pants). Téa Leoni is a bright spot, but Bay doesn't work to make her continued involvement believable, and Marg Helgenberger is completely wasted. We're left with a pretty standard buddy cop plot and a memorable musical theme, but so much annoying "comedy bickering" that I can hardly believe I had a good reaction to this when I saw it in theaters.Movie comment on The Odessa File
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The Odessa File adaptation pulls the same trick as the novel by Frederick Forsyth, which is to say it's based on true events - an Egyptian plot to throw hundreds of missiles at Israel in the early 1960s, if only an organization of Nazis in hiding can supply them with the rockets - though there's more "alleged" than "true" here. Certainly, John Voight as a crusading German journalist who picks up the ODESSA's trail and has a hand in stopping them is fabrication. In terms of paranoid thrillers, it's a little "made for TV" and not as scary as we want it to be, despite the plot elements offering a frisson for tapping into current events. And I could do without the final twist. But it's still adequately suspenseful, and makes use of great German locations, as well a stable of recognizable British actors like Derek Jacobi, Mary Tamm and (not sharing the screen with her, but to play opposite her in Doctor Who's The Androids of Tara) Peter Jeffrey.Movie comment on Summer of Sam
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While we do see the serial killer that terrorized New York in 1977 and the cops that hope to catch him, Summer of Sam is a Spike Lee film through and through, and is much more about a South Bronx Italian-American community under threat and how it reacts with fear and paranoia. Lee focuses on two best friends whose friendship is tested during this time - John Leguizamo, who routinely cheats on his wife (patently insane given that Mira Sorvino has never been lovelier), and Adrien Brody, a punk rocker whose adopted cultural differences make him a suspect for the murders in the neighborhood. No one's thinking straight in this cast, whether because of drugs, alcohol, sex, love, heat, or straight up madness, and things spin out of control. It's also a love letter to the late 70s, and Lee includes a lot of historical detail, which does mean the movie rambles a bit, but it also lends a certain authoritative authenticity to the proceedings you might not get just with music and fashions. And if you're doing a "70s film", you can't really be criticized for giving it the meandering feel of a 70s movie.Movie comment on Training Day
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When you think about it, Training Day is one Denzel Washington's coaching movies, and he's only slightly more terrifying in it than in Remember the Titans or The Great Debaters. While I was always rather mystified that THIS is the one that landed him an Oscar for Best Lead Actor, it's certainly a showy and memorable performance. The movie presents the L.A.P.D. as just another criminal gang, which young Ethan Hawke isn't quite ready to be disillusioned about, but is forcibly taken into the loop of corruption on his first day in an elite narcotics squad. While Training Day was commenting on past abuses from its perspective, it sure feels at times like it became a training video for bad cops in our own era. It's like a turbo-charged Bad Lieutenant, but you still can't help but feel like stuff like this is really happening. Antoine Fuqua bastes his modern Noir in golden sunlight, uses a great hip-hop soundtrack, and casts a lot of memorable faces even in smaller roles. Watch for a young Terry Crews as a beefcake gangbanger with no dialog.Movie comment on Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend
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Who did they make Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend for?! It's got a cute baby dinosaur with human emotions being hugged by the leads, but it's also got lots of nudity (even of minors, but I guess the racist MPA considered this "National Geographic" nudity, and still gave it a PG - I did see it in the theater age 14), and what I find most bothersome, some very misogynistic dialog played for "laughs" in the first 15 minutes. It's also pretty violent, so even if the animals here are fake, it would still be hard for more sensitive audiences to watch them under threat (or worse) on such consistent basis. Patrick McGoohan shows a lack of scientific ethics, ruthless in his pursuit of these legendary beasts (a real legend, but geographically shuffled), Sean Young and William Katt aren't really any better since they also plan to take Baby out of its habitat for study. At least they didn't throw in with a trigger-happy local army like McGoohan, people who keep shooting in the direction of priceless dinosaurs. I'm impressed by how well the dinosaurs walk, given they are people wearing rigs, even if their faces are stiff. I can take the cheap effects. It's the haphazard tone I have trouble with.Movie comment on Carbon Copy
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Denzel Washington's first feature film, Carbon Copy, is a race relations satire that's perhaps a little too dry for its own good. Really a vehicle for George Segal, who mostly plays up the comedy by repeating everything he hears to make sure we understand it's shocking, he plays an advertising executive who married the boss' daughter and struck it rich, but is too good a person to be in that position. It's a job that once cost him - at his boss' urging - a woman he loved very much and who happened to be black. When Denzel shows up and reveals he's the fruit of that union, Walter (Segal) isn't too happy, but even though his son is clearly trolling him (which makes him suspect on the one hand, and hard to get a handle on on the other, at least until the end reveals all), he's ready to do the right thing by him. At which point, his white privilege is stripped from him and his entire entourage start talking as if Oscar Wilde had written 80s race comedies. Whiteness as an exclusive club. It's an interesting take, putting a white character through the tropes of a black story (which knowingly leans into the clichés to examine their value), but I feel like the terrible comedy music and Segal essentially doing shtick makes the satire go out of focus. By the end, we might reevaluate Denzel's character enough to make the creakiness of some scenes work better, however.Movie comment on Mississippi Masala
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Watching Mississippi Masala for a young Denzel Washington, but charmed to find he's playing opposite an even younger Sarita Choudhury, here in her first role, long before she would become one of the go-to actresses of Indian descent in television and film (Homeland, Hunger Games). She plays Mina, whose family had to leave Uganda during the Amin regime. Love is on the wing when she meets Demetrius, a man outside her cultural circle. The romance is pretty straightforward, but for the culture clash (and even so, she's a modern Americanized woman), but director Mira Nair uses it to present a subtle exploration of race relations. It's not just that Mina's community goes from ally to enemy when one of their own is "threatened" (so to speak), but that her father, who considers himself a Ugandan where Asians were an economic upper class, has reason to suspect that she is of mixed race to begin with, even if Nair leaves ambiguity there. The race-driven romance is familiar, but usually the dynamic includes a white person. The narrow gradient makes Masala more original and more interesting.Movie comment on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
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The problem with Furiosa is, of course, that it's a prequel and therefore a lot of its results are foreordained. We know where these characters will end up, which will survive, and which are unlikely to. We don't always know where Furiosa will succeed, but we certainly when she must fail. And being set in the same Wasteland as Fury Road, there's a certain sense that we're revisiting old haunts, so the world building isn't as novel as in the previous film. That said, it's still pretty cool. We spend a rather long time with Young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy has such a distinctive face, the poor actress had her face digitally manipulated to fit), and while I like that version of the character's resourcefulness, the movie REALLY picks up when the lead is squarely in the driving seat (well, a little before that, if we take it literally). There are some great action scenes from that point - the attack on the war rig, the Bullet Farm fight - and Tom Burke (who looks like a young Stacy Keach here) is a strong mentor/partner for teenage(?) Furiosa. She's a badass with or without. As for Chris Hemsworth's Dementus, a sort of neo-Roman wannabe Renaissance Man, he's often too goofy for me to really tap into his menace, but ultimately, he's a coward who got ahead of himself, and his last stand in particular has a Shakespearean undercurrent I rather enjoyed, even if I wasn't always convinced Dementus was as entertaining as he must have been on the page. Nevertheless, a good time at the movies.Movie comment on Mo' Better Blues
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I've always loved Spike Lee's playfulness and it's definitely on show in Mo' Better Blues, in addition to some great jazz and blues, with Denzel Washington as the dangerously named Bleek Gilliam, a trumpet player and band leader who has put all his eggs into the same musical basket, so to speak. His music is more important than the women he loves, the musicians he leads, or other people's music. The irony is that he stands to lose everything because of the one person he might care about more than the work - his childhood friend and patently useless manager played by Spike Lee himself. Is there something for Bleek after he sounds his last note, or is jazz his only possible mistress? A story of obsession and non-pharmaceutical addiction that Lee might be equating with film making (I couldn't say), but that resonates with anyone who's put the purity of their work/art before what others call "life" (*raises hand*). Washington is great, as usual (MORE than usual). Lee gives us a lot of interesting shots, two arguments for the price of one, and a very clever, redemptive ending.Movie comment on Remember the Titans
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I'm not always keen on sports movies, whether based on true stories or fictional, but I AM usually keen on COACHING movies (given my background coaching for theater games). Remember the Titans worked both ways. It's a great story about coaching, and indeed, a strong interacial coaching partnership, as a high school in Virginia presents the first integrated football team in the state back in the early 70s. Denzel Washington is probably too hard on those kids, but he needs to break down attitudes before they can act like a team. Before long, the team's success brings the whole community together, but also attracts nasty racism from other teams, so even as winners, the Titans are an underdog. So it's also a rousing sports movie that works on its own terms, distinguishing a lot of players (including baby Ryan Gosling) and making us care about their personal successes, failures and sacrifices. And the football action is clear, varied and well choreographed. Exciting, often funny, but also pulling at your heart strings, Remember the Titans is a great entry in the sports, biopic AND race relations genres.Movie comment on Tarka the Otter
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Basically wildlife footage to which they set a story... well, maybe I shouldn't use "story" per se when discussing Tarka the Otter. We see Tarka being born, emancipate himself from his parents (not by choice , so if you ever wondered what Bambi's mother would play like in live action...), run into a threat (often some bloodthirsty humans and their hounds), escape, kill and eat some other creature, rince-repeat. I don't think there was enough material here for a 90-minute film (the movie proves my point by suddenly tapping into a subplot about a couple cranes), but they had all this footage! There are a couple of rather violent images, though there's no real contact between the otters and other animals with "handlers" credited. It still manages to be pretty harrowing for a "family" film. The narration, read by Peter Ustinov, is strong and poetic (though why can't Tarka's mom have a name like he does? "The otter bitch" made me cringe), I can't fault the editing, and of course, the otters are very cute. Which makes the bleak tone of the piece all the more questionable.Movie comment on Baby Mama
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If you're a fan of 30 Rock, then Baby Mama will probably to your liking, and feel like a parallel world where Liz Lemon is desperate to get pregnant and tries surrogacy. Tina Fey turns to her real-life bestie Amy Poehler, playing some ignorant white trash that could derail her attempts, or turn into a nice onscreen friendship. From there, it heads into romcom formula and a pretty pat ending. Most of the time, it taps into Fey's brand of comedy so well, I thought she might have written it, and it could honestly have used more of her type of send-up (Steve Martin's granola nutbar and Sigourney Weaver's sales pitch are good examples of what I mean). As is, it's got some good bits and a lot of SNL performers in large and small parts, but it gets more smiles than laughs, and it's always dangerous to make one of your leads "amusingly irritating" because they can come off as simply irritating. But there's nothing wrong with a comedy that makes you smile.Movie comment on Safe House
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The movie Daniel Espinosa hopes to be remembered for instead of Morbius, Safe House is a pretty solid spy action thriller in which Ryan Reynolds plays a CIA safe house keeper itching for more action and gets more of it than he ever bargained for when Denzel Washington's renegade agent is caught and brought there. Seeing as Denzel's character is a master manipulator (but is he nonetheless righteous?), I imagine an alternate universe where this premise was used for a claustrophobic, one-location thriller. Instead, it goes for a more formulaic chase through South Africa, with Reynolds trying to keep his "guest" safe from unknown assassins, and himself safe from the guest. Lots of strong supporting players, violent fight scenes and stunts, and Reynolds doesn't undermine the tension with his trademark humor. Safe House is borderline bleak as the green rookie gets an eyeful of the true face of intelligence services, and wonders if he'll get burned because he really quite expendable. Better than it's given credit for.Movie comment on Glory
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Pretty usual for an 80s historical biopic, Glory is a black story as told through the Messianic white character who wrote the history (in this case, through letters). It's something Denzel Washington's almost too modern black activist might have called out, and that hurts the picture in retrospect. Unfortunately, the problem is compounded by casting Matthew Broderick as Colonel Shaw - the man in charge of the first black regiment in the American Civil War - and I have a hard time buying him as any historical personage. Washington gives a strong and varied performance - and got his first Oscar for it - but props should also go to a very young Andre Braugher as his counterpart, an educated New England soldier who character arc is almost opposite. He hardens where Washington softens. Needless to say, Morgan Freeman and Cary Elwes are good too. The Civil War is from an era where, because of technical limits, they had the dumbest strategies - the whites of their eyes, indeed - but director Zwick manages to make the main battles reasonably exciting. The film takes the Rebels' perfidy for granted, and so doesn't spare the Union any criticism. It comes off as just as bad or worse, but for their cause. Well made and all, but I can't get very excited about it.Movie comment on Ricochet
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A much better action thriller than one might think from the stock title, Ricochet stars Denzel Washington as a maverick cop, then maverick D.A., on his way to maverick mayor, whose most notable arrest comes back to haunt him in the form of an insane John Lithgow whose plans to destroy his humiliator's life border on the supervillain. For Daredevil fans, this is Denzel: Born Again. Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, Razorback) directs this thing with an eye for the novel and unusual, and I can safely say it contains scenes I've never really seen before - the initial arrest, the arm wrestling, the parole hearing, and Denzel Washington flashing his willy at the Bionic Woman - despite the essentially formulaic nature of the genre. Everyone is clearly having fun with the material - they even let Kevin Pollak do his Captain Kirk impression. Which is sort of at odds with just how dark the story gets, but I don't think it's a deal breaker. Lots of energy on the screen counts for something.Movie comment on Courage Under Fire
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In the shadow of the Gulf War, a (fictional) woman is set to receive a Medal of Honor for combat (posthumously) for the first time. If the story of her Courage Under Fire (that's the title) can be cleared by a benched armor unit commander played by Denzel Washington. His story is fairly compelling - after a friendly fire incident and being under review himself, he becomes obsessed with getting his report on the fallen chopper pilot right, just as he feels his own culpability should come to light. Through interviews with the men who were saved in the incident, he finds discrepancies that soon turn into a Rashomon situation. So it's a little difficult to get a handle on Captain Walker, whose character changes from telling to telling, even if she weren't so obviously miscast as Meg Ryan. I'm sorry, but she just growls her way through a heavy Southern accent through every flashback and with her trendy haircut never really seems to be the person she's portraying (except when she's at home with a small daughter). And that undermines the whole affair.Movie comment on Cry Freedom
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Back when Apartheid was at its height as a global hot button issue, we got Cry Freedom. Biko's story takes place in 1977, the film was made in 1987 (South African Apartheid would only end in 1991), but it's amazing how much of Biko's language about racial equality and self-determination sounds like the way we speak about it today. Talk like white privilege and cultural genocide feels more of the "now" than they did in the 80s (but maybe it's because I was 16 when I first saw the film, which still influenced my values about racial equality as I recognized at least one argument I integrated as my own). Denzel Washington is great as Biko - this could almost be a compare/contrast performance to his landmark Malcolm X - but since the adapted book is by a white man, it's really a white man's story. There's a deep irony to a black story being told through the lens of Kevin Kline, his family, and his less than credible accent, an irony the movie seems to be aware of at times, but it's nonetheless another affront to the native Africans this is supposed to be about. By the time we've made a complete switch to the White Messiah who will bravely get the story out, it's more like Cry Me a River than Cry Freedom.Movie comment on The Mighty Quinn
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A young Denzel Washington is the eponymous police chief of a tiny Caribbean (but American) island where everyone knows everyone in The Mighty Quinn, a charmer of a detective story where the setting does a lot of the heavy lifting. Denzel's vacillating Jamaican accent aside, he's great in this as one of two local legends, of the kind only small isolated places can spawn. The other is the island's Bum Eternal, suspected of the murder of a rich white businessman, or at least that's what the privileged a-holes want Quinn to think. This happens now, while his marriage is in trouble? Director Carl Schenkel isn't a recognizable name, but he has a lot of fun staging this thing, with cool but not over-stylish shots, an evident sense of humor, and a lot of music. It's always great when the titular hero gets a song of his own. The Mighty Quinn is kind of like a blaxploitation film on vacation, with reggae airs instead of dirty funk, and it's a lot of fun.Movie comment on Out of Time
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A sunny noir if there ever was one, Out of Time stars Denzel Washington as the police chief of a small, coastal Florida town whose affair with a married woman takes him to the brink when she dies as a result of foul play, and he's named as her insurance's beneficiary. He has to investigate, while also covering up his own connections to the murder while his estranged wife, a high-profile police detective from the Big City, is on the same trail. And it's great - give or take the unconvincing casting of Eva Mendes as the wife; Sanaa Lathan is much better presence as the other woman - until a very stupid ending ruins the whole thing for me. There's one ridiculous twist too many. There's an unearned happy ending. And while John Billingsley provided fun comic relief as Denzel's buddy medical examiner throughout, the kind of comedy they make him do at the end is dumb as rocks. What a waste!Movie comment on The Pelican Brief
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Not the strongest Grisham adaptation, The Pelican Brief solves its legal mystery early, but withholds the information from the audience. Denzel Washington's reporter therefore seems to do pointless things while we wait for him to meet Julia Roberts' brilliant law student who's cracked the case wide open with instinct and research. What works in a novel doesn't always work in a movie. The editing here is often a hash, characters disappear for too long or are introduced too late, and the ending is anti-climactic exposition. There is a certain frisson to be had 30 years later, with this yarn of political corruption, the murders of Supreme Court judges to restructure the Court before an election, story ideas that could have been had today. And certainly, the all-star cast gives better performances than the material demands. I do question why the movie is so needlessly in love with Julia Roberts' character, though. That cheeseball ending. Come on now.Movie comment on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
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It's a mouthful, but Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes continues the modern franchise's unbroken string of quality films starring your favorite apes. Well, in this case, we're generations after the previous film, so a new cast has to be introduced, but we warm to them pretty quickly (and AGAIN, the orangutan is a highlight - there was a Michael Dorn quality to his voice, and then I realized it was Peter Macon, fans of The Orville will now how I crossed my wires there). Noa is a chimp in the Caesar mold from a hawking clan, whose people is forced into slavery by an ape king who wants to get at a human bunker and its advanced weapons. To free them, Noa has to team up with a human girl who hasn't succumbed to the virus and who ALSO needs to get into that bunker. A lot of world-building, taking us forward, but also harking back and foreshadowing elements of the old Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and of course strong action pieces with absolutely perfect photoreal creatures. I like its moral shades of gray. No matter what victories humanity ekes out in this, our hearts are with the hero apes, and therefore an interesting ambivalence as to our own fate as a species. Apes together strong!Movie comment on The Great Debaters
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Two things that tend to radicalize you: Oppression and Education. Both come together in The Great Debaters, a dramatized true story about a segregated African-American college in the 1930s spawning a successful debate team that would go on to debate white colleges (not specifically Harvard though, that's part of the dramatization). Denzel Washington plays their teacher and directs with great sensitivity, rendering a multiple coming of age story that's steeped in radicalization. The word "radical" is often used as a derogatory, but it need not be. It merely means that one's ideas buck the mainstream, and when the mainstream is an oppressive system, people are right to resist. And a debate team is a great place to explore that, since it's about exploring ideas, dissecting them, and getting to the point where you can speak with authority, convincingly. The movie is a little manipulative at times - for example, I doubt all the issues "resolved" were specific to this theme, and there's no accounting for Washington's sudden presence at the end - but it makes you care about the characters (their parents too) and the power of education.Showing items 1 – 25 of 5680