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In The Anniver­sary Party, Jen­nifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cum­mings (co-writers and direc­tors) try to update the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood line, “Hey every­body, let’s go out to the old barn and put on a show!” Sadly, the barn is not burned with them in it. Not that I really want them to die, but if they had been dead, this exer­cise in van­ity would not have been made, and that wouldn’t have been a shame.

Jen­nifer and Alan play Sally and Joe, a Hol­ly­wood power cou­ple who have been hav­ing mar­i­tal prob­lems for their entire mar­riage. To com­mem­o­rate the fifth anniver­sary of their nup­tials they have decided to have an anniver­sary party rather than spend the day alone with each other (which might have made a bet­ter film), and the film encom­passes this one day.

And what a day it is! What an overblown, bloated, fat, stink­ing, pre­ten­tious day! The main thing that the film wants you, the viewer, to real­ize from that one day is that these are just plain ol’ ordi­nary peo­ple just like you and me with prob­lems and argu­ments and phi­lan­der­ing and drug use and lost dogs, too. Sally and Joe’s really great group of friends allow all of this to go on and they even join in, just to show Sally and Joe that their lifestyle is reg­u­lar and aver­age. It makes these peo­ple look pathetic.

Star­ring:
Alan Cum­ming, Jen­nifer Jason Leigh, Gwyneth Pal­trow, John C. Reilly, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates
Directed By:
Jen­nifer Jason Leigh & Alan Cum­ming
Release Date:
June 8, 2001
MPAA Rat­ing:
R for lan­guage, drug use and nudity.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Fine Line Fea­tures
1 Star

Stand­outs in the group: Kevin Kline as an arro­gant lead­ing man try­ing to break his stereo­typ­i­cal mold and John C. Reilly as his direc­tor, who’s life is a train wreck wait­ing to hap­pen. Reilly’s scene after almost drown­ing in Sally and Joe’s pool tore me up and was the high point of the film, even if it was a low point for him. One of the few times I smiled dur­ing this film was when Kline danced an impromptu bal­let with his real life daugh­ter. See­ing such a small sim­ple thing in this two hour piece of tripe was light-hearted and wonderful.

Pans: Can I blame any­one besides the two peo­ple that started this whole thing? I think not. Where’s my ham­mer? Let the bash­ing begin.

Is there any­one more annoy­ing than Alan Cum­mings? Jesus! He was annoy­ing in Cir­cle of Friends, he was annoy­ing with his fake Russ­ian accent in Gold­en­eye and I’m sure untold more films that I haven’t wanted to see. The only time I’ve really liked him was in Spy Kids where he played the naïve children’s tele­vi­sion host Fegan Floop. But then again, he did have a direc­tor that wasn’t him­self. He plays a man who is lit­tle more than an eight year old boy with the men­tal clar­ity of an four year old. He likes to be bad and he hates it when he gets caught. Well, Alan, we caught you again, in a case of BAD ACTING!

Jen­nifer Jason Leigh can do spaced-out, and she can do intro­spec­tive loner, but a self-centered diva she can’t very well do. Her whin­ing and com­plain­ing put me over the edge and made me won­der why Sally loved Joe or if she loved the idea of lov­ing Joe? She should have left his ass ages ago, instead of stick­ing around for five years so we could have the story of their anniver­sary party.

If a time machine actu­ally existed, I would have trav­eled back to stop myself from rent­ing this. Please take my advice and get some­thing else.

I should have known as we walked into the the­ater to see Cars and my son started scream­ing, “No! No! No!” that I should have heeded his warn­ing. True, he wasn’t scream­ing at Cars, but at a pre­view for some film called Ant Bully, but still, dense dad that I am, I should have lis­tened to him. He’s young with those hip new ideas about things, you know.

You know his opin­ion of Cars, now here’s mine.

Light­ning McQueen is a liv­ing, breath­ing car that lives in a strange alter­nate uni­verse where cars, not peo­ple, are the dom­i­nant life form on the planet. They do every­thing that humans do, except that they’re cars. If I were an ama­teur film critic in this par­al­lel uni­verse he lives in I’d prob­a­bly say “Cars is 16 cylin­ders of fun!”, or “Race on down to it!” or some­thing lame like that, since I would also be a car who loves other cars and other car-related things.

But I’m human and not a car and don’t love all car related things. Most of all, I didn’t love Cars.

Star­ring:
Owen Wil­son, Paul New­man, Michael Keaton, Bon­nie Hunt, Richard Petty, Cheech Marin
Directed By:
John Las­seter & Joe Ranft
Release Date:
June 9, 2006
MPAA Rat­ing:
G
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Buena Vista Pic­tures Dis­tri­b­u­tion
2 Stars

It’s not that I don’t love Pixar films. I usu­ally freak­ing LOVE Pixar films. God bless Pixar, for they are the only rea­son that Dis­ney makes money any­more, and hon­estly, shouldn’t Pixar be mak­ing ALL Dis­ney films at this point? A Pixar film is a hall­mark of cin­e­matic qual­ity; when you see that lit­tle bounc­ing lamp come out at the begin­ning of their films, you know you’re in for a great time and you’re also going to be amazed in some way. Not only are you going to get great look­ing ani­ma­tion, but a sto­ry­line that is engag­ing and funny too.

I love Toy Story, both 1 and 2, and The Incred­i­bles is one of the great films of the past 10 years. My son loves Find­ing Nemo and every time he sees a clown­fish it’s named “Nemo”, never “Fred” or “Biff”, just “Nemo”. I have less admi­ra­tion for Mon­sters, Inc. and A Bug’s Life, mainly because I didn’t find them as inter­est­ing in the plot depart­ment, but they still looked great. If you watch the “mak­ing of” bits on each DVD for these films you can see the evo­lu­tion of the Pixar ani­ma­tion process and they grow expo­nen­tion­ally with each new release.

Cars looks phe­nom­e­nal. You’d think the open­ing bit, where Light­ning is intro­duced, was the cam­era pan­ning over a real car it looks so good. Pixar cares about how their films look, and the detail is great, but before where the plot­lines were semi-complex, Cars could have been writ­ten by me in 2nd grade. Come on man, who couldn’t have come up with this?

An arro­gant race car gets lost on his way to a race. While try­ing to find his way back to where he got lost in the first place, he comes upon a sleepy out-of-the-way town where time prac­ti­cally stands still. In the process of try­ing to leave the small town, he will come to under­stand that being arro­gant isn’t every­thing it’s cracked up to be and he will make new life­long friends where before he had none. He will also over­come adver­sity in the final “bat­tle” and be suc­cess­ful with­out over­do­ing it the way he did before.

Take out the phrase “race car” from the first sen­tence of the para­graph and you’ve got a generic movie of the week or even some of your friends’ lives. It’s not a very com­plex story, but it also isn’t a very inter­est­ing story. What the Pixar peo­ple try to do with this weak story is make up for it with eye candy, but it’s not enough. The plot just doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain.

Back in 1989 when the orig­i­nal Bat­man film came out me and my whole gang of friends went to see the film open­ing day. It was sum­mer and we’d hit the North­park I and II in antic­i­pa­tion of see­ing Bat­man. I, per­son­ally, was stoked, and we had this goofy thing that we were all going to hold hands until we saw Bat­man on screen.

We didn’t have to wait long for­tu­nately, or my ADD addled mind may not have stayed in phys­i­cal form. At the time I really liked Tim Burton’s take on Bruce Wayne/Batman, but I don’t think its aged well. It’s too flashy, too neony (is that a word?), too car­toony and the whole Prince score thing left me a lit­tle desen­si­tized to the film. Also, who ok-d the killing of the best bad guy you’ve got from your canon in the first film? Unless Jack Nichol­son was only con­tracted for one film it was an idi­otic move that could have fed sequels for years.

Killing off the Joker led to a down­ward spi­ral of lesser and lesser bad guys (Bane, Poi­son Ivy, Two Face), until we hit rock bot­tom with the embar­rass­ing Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger as Dr. Freeze (“Adam and Evil!”). George Clooney scratch­ing old-school style on the Batmobile’s CD player, Chris O’Donnell’s inces­sant com­plain­ing and whin­ing. Blah, blah, blah. I’m sure that dur­ing Bat­man For­ever (wasn’t that a dou­ble album by Queen in 1974?) I prayed “make it end, just make it end, dear lord.”

Star­ring:
Chris­t­ian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Nee­son, Katie Holmes, Gary Old­man, Mor­gan Free­man, Tom Wilkin­son, Rut­ger Hauer, Ken Watan­abe
Directed By:
Christo­pher Nolan
Release Date:
June 15th, 2005
MPAA Rat­ing:
PG-13 for intense action vio­lence, dis­turb­ing images and some the­matic ele­ments.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Warner Bros. Pic­tures Dis­tri­b­u­tion
3.5 Star

And now all of that garbage that came before has been wiped from my mem­ory hard drive, washed down into the sewer sys­tem of the new, grit­tier, more real-world Gotham in Christo­pher Nolan’s new film Bat­man Begins. Gotham is a real city now, not some Tokyoesque-city-of-lights car­toon like in the first film. Wayne Manor is A MANOR where peo­ple who loved each other lived and played and watched out for one another. Bat­man has been made real finally, not a car­toon char­ac­ter that sprang forth from some MTV-addicted com­mer­cial director’s brain with flashy style and bright lights and thun­der­ing bass. What we’ve had made for us is the story of Bat­man, with his quirks and faults and guilt and vic­to­ries; he’s a per­sonas well as an icon.

It seems as if this take on Bruce Wayne’s alter ego was pre­or­dained; every­one in the film is as whom they should be. Michael Caine is Alfred, Bruce’s con­fi­dant and But­ler. Gary Old­man is Cap­tain, then Lieu­tenant, Gor­don. Cil­lian Mur­phy is creepy as Dr. Johnathan Crane, mag­is­trate of Arkham Asy­lum and the future Scare­crow. The other play­ers (Mor­gan Free­man, Tom Wilkin­son, Liam Nee­son, Ken Watan­abe, Katie Holmes, et al) do good jobs, a com­bi­na­tion of both fine act­ing and an excel­lent direc­tor pulling good per­for­mances out of them. Of them I enjoyed Free­man the most for his jolly per­for­mance. He forks away from his Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby role as a wealthy man put into a dead-end job but who loves what he does nonetheless.

So, lastly, is Chris­t­ian Bale any good? Or is he going to be another Val Kilmer? I didn’t have high hopes when I went in. I liked him, as a teen, in Empire of the Sun, but hadn’t had a lot of inter­est in see­ing him in any­thing else since that film. He did a bunch of films I never saw and then he was in Amer­i­can Psy­cho, a film I never wanted to see based on a thor­oughly rep­re­hen­si­ble and revolt­ing book. Then he did some stuff I wanted to see but never got around to (The Machin­ist and Equi­lib­rium). Will I see them now, based on his per­for­mance in this film? Yes. The man nails it. He’s brood­ing and even funny some­times. I was impressed by him. He goes from a Chi­nese prison camp at his low­est to sav­ing the city that his par­ents attempted to save. Along the way the loner makes some valu­able allies as well as some ter­ri­fy­ing ene­mies, but with the panache that some­one raised in wealth would have been groomed to have. Of the pre-Nolan Bat­mans, Michael Keaton was my favorite, mostly because I didn’t feel he was as wooden as his fol­low­ers. I liked him in a Connery-vs.-Moore kind of way. Keaton is now #2. Bale owns the role.

So, do you think I liked it?

Ha.

Chuck Bar­ris pro­duced many suc­cess­ful tele­vi­sion game shows, such as “The Dat­ing Game”, “The New­ly­wed Game” and “The Gong Show”. He wrote a song I sort of like, Pal­isades Park (What does the guy do to the girl in the tun­nel? He gives her a hug, how whole­some). Chuck, dap­per gen­tle­man that I’m sure he is, also claims to have killed 33 peo­ple work­ing for the CIA as a con­tract killer in his book “Con­fes­sions of a Dan­ger­ous Mind”. He searched and searched for his niche in soci­ety, think­ing it was as a TV pro­ducer, but it sounds like, in his mind, he was bet­ter at snuff­ing out the ene­mies of the US government.

My take? None of the film is real. But it’s a movie, so who the hell cares?

Chuck (Sam Rock­well) starts out his career in tele­vi­sion as a page at NBC in the early 1960’s, lead­ing tour groups and work­ing his way up the cor­po­rate lad­der until he gets to pitch the idea for “The Dat­ing Game” to NBC exec­u­tives. Dur­ing this time he’s been in con­tact with Jim Byrd (George Clooney), who even­tu­ally becomes Bar­ris’ CIA han­dler and con­fi­dant. Byrd guides Bar­ris through his train­ing and even­tu­ally, dur­ing the actual pro­duc­tion of “The Dat­ing Game,” sug­gests that the win­ning cou­ples go on dates to such won­der­ous and beau­ti­ful locales as Berlin and Roma­nia. While the new love­birds are hav­ing their jol­lies, chap­er­one Bar­ris is tak­ing care of his true “busi­ness” in the shad­ows. While on one such globe jaunt in Berlin he meets Patri­cia Wat­son (Julia Roberts), a fel­low con­tract killer who will even­tu­ally be one point in a love tri­an­gle with Chuck and Chuck’s live in girl­friend, Penny (Drew Bar­ry­more) and lead to rather dire cir­cum­stances for one of its members.

Adapted by Char­lie Kauf­man (Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind) from Bar­ris’ own book, the film begs the ques­tion: Why hasn’t George Clooney decided to direct a film before now? If all of the lead­ing indi­ca­tors are cor­rect, he should be win­ning count­less Oscars by this point. He’s got a new one com­ing out this fall that I’ll prob­a­bly catch, Good­night and Good Luck, but the boy has an eye for style, and being a fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor with pal of Steven Soder­bergh can’t hurt. he’s def­i­nitely learned from one of the mod­ern mas­ters of visual grandeur. I liked Clooney’s style here, adding just the right amount of goofi­ness to the game show scenes as well as a dash of malaise as Chuck begins to spi­ral down into depression.

I’ve liked a lot of movies that Sam Rock­well has had small parts in (In the Soup, Light Sleeper, The Green Mile) and I loved him in Galaxy Quest, prob­a­bly one of the most under­rated come­dies of the past ten years. He’s also good at the cagey, slightly off char­ac­ters, like Jimmy Silk in Heist or Frank Mer­cer in Match­stick Men. He was a bold choice for a lead­ing man and I think he does a pretty good job of it. He’s not a very good look­ing guy, but hell, even Woody Allen, who’s a total toad of a guy, still gets the ladies in his films.

The sad truth about this great lit­tle flick is that it was a fail­ure at the box office. Mira­max has a ter­ri­ble habit of pick­ing up pic­tures left and right and then either hang­ing onto them for eons (see Shaolin Soc­cer or this fall’s The Great Raid) or releas­ing them and then not sup­port­ing them with any ad cam­paigns. Con­fes­sions of a Dan­ger­ous Mind fell into the lat­ter cat­e­gory. They tried to pathet­i­cally re-release it to gar­ner some Oscar buzz, but it was sim­per­ing and too-little-too-late. Since it’s too late for this one, it’s well worth check­ing out on DVD.