Spellbound
Guest Review by Geoff
Theatrical Release

So, I saw a movie today... a documentary. I went and saw it at the Parkway for the afternoon matinee. Nothing like sitting in a theater on a hot afternoon, on a COUCH, sipping your beer and scarfing your nachos. In fact, if you live in the Bay Area, really you should check them out. Here is their website.

So, ANY movie there is great.

But this documentary was very interesting. It was about spelling bees. And the kids who are in them. They took about ten cases of district champions, filming them and their parents and following them through the bee.

It's... um... well, it's just a really good look at an interesting group of kids and a little slice of the beautiful diversity and slightly nutty insanity of American life. I dunno. Just a nice, pleasant reminder of what we do here, who we are...

I'd recommend it. Probably too late to catch it in the theater, but maybe you should rent it.

Chicago
Wow. A good song-and-dance, but with no good-guys.
DVD Review

Based on a Broadway play, the story dabbles it's toes in history. During the Roaring 20's, there was a string of female murderers who were more tried in the papers than in the courtroom. Taking that concept, the story of Chicago was born. Enter Roxie Hart, a wannabe who is so selfishly intense about making it big that she cheats on her husband in the hopes of getting an introduction to someone who can give her a break. Things go badly when she finds out that her ciscebo is in fact just in it for the sex and doesn't really know anyone in the business, and she shoots him. She tries to pin it on her husband, who botches it. She is sent to jail, where she meets Velma Kelly, the very chanteuse we see Roxie watching in the opening of the film. Just before that scene, Velma had caught her sister and her husband in flagrante delecto, and had shot them both. The prison is run by a mercenary matron called "Mamma", who has you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours down to an art. Then enters Billy Flynn, the most cheerfully predatory lawyer I've ever seen portrayed. Thus ensues a fierce battle to get the column inches to influence your jury to get you off. I won't spoil the rest of it for you if you haven't seen the play or the film.

In an interesting thematic approach, they don't try to merge the world of exposition with the musical realm. Instead, you have real life sections, which are interspersed with these muscial numbers that form fantasies in the lead character's head. Sort of reminded me of Broadway Melody. They didn't tie it together by blending the edges, either. The tying point is actually the floor of the set. The production values are lavish, but minimalist all the same. The real-life scenes have a slightly unreal look, like stage sets. You can actually see the boards of the stage peeking out from under every piece of the furniture. Then, when someone has to do a number, their stage is set to evoke the place the characters are at in the real life story with those same boards holding it up. The dance numbers also use the black sets of yesteryear fashion to stunning effect. See the "He Had It Commin'" number for a beautifully staged example, and Roxie's "I Move On" (the version in the black dress). The closing number is pure MGM over-the-top. Truly lovely work.

The "amateur hour" cast acquits themselves quite well. I knew Zeta-Jones had enough to at least get into the chorus line, so I figured with editing help she would be fine, but I was shocked by Zwellinger. She managed both sides of her character so well it is almost like two different women. In real life, she was her wispy self with a core of pure nasty brass. In the staged sequences, she was seriously channelling Bernadette Peters, but she did it very well indeed. Zeta-Jones was in fact her sultry, scene-stealing self in the real life sequences and taking the stage as well. Gere was a total surprise - he wasn't so stellar you were stunned, but with the help of a good director and choreographer who could work with him, he gave a solid musical performance, and the detached smarm-fest of his real life character is his stock in trade. Queen Latifah's stage number showed off the sultry voice that supports her sharp-tongued rapping, and her other "assets" as well. It's rare you get to see a larger woman get out there and strut her stuff like that in film. O'Reilly's turn on the stage as the tramp singing "Mr. Celophane" stole the whole show, in my opinion. Well played, and a nice set of pipes to carry it with.

The story really shocked me, though. Now I have to explain that. Sigh. I hadn't seen the play, and I didn't even realize there was one until I watched the little "making of" documentary on the DVD. I had done my homework, though so I knew a lot of what the film was about before watching it. But even knowing the hard facts of the case didn't prepare me for the way the material was treated. I was expecting "Singing in the Rain" set in a women's prison; what I got was "8 Mile" with jazz and dolls. It's the OJ Simpson trial, but with sequins instead of ill-fitting leather gloves. There is no good guy to root for here. There is only one decent person in the entire film, and even he gives up by the end. Everyone is on the hunt for themselves, and they revel in it in a most indecent fashion. Cheerful malice bathes every scene. There were several places where even my boys looked shocked at what the characters did. It wasn't the sexual stuff, but the pure cold ruthlessness.

A lot of people compare this film to Moulon Rouge. I wouldn't actually stack them up against each other. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, and they don't really overlap. Luhrman's intense visual and editing style gave Moulon what gravitas it had. Rob Marshall has a mental proscenium in every shot. The almost silly feel to the Moulon story elements let us get through some very heavy stuff without having to carry away too much baggage. On the other hand, Chicago takes it's weight from the more familiar settings and its underlying theme. It is in characters that you see the only real comparison point, but even then they are so different that it is hard to judge. If I had to pick, I would say that Chicago's character group is the piece's main flaw. Not the inviduals themselves, but the whole cast together. You almost wish they all got what they deserved by the end of it. Moulon Rouge, on the other hand, has Christian to root for. His tortured refrain during the Roxanne tango still echoes and gave a hook into the film the total lack of sympathetic characters leaves out of Chicago.

Technically the DVD is a great job. The 5.1 track was clear and clean all the way down to 2 db, even the brass section on the numbers kept it's brightness. The DVD transfer is clean saturated color where it needs to be, and velvet black in all the right places with nary a compression artifact. The extras are skimpy, though. We get the featurette and one deleted scene, and boy do you know why they deleted that scene. Well performed but it would have messed things up something fierce.

I'm not sure this one ushers in the new age of the movie musical, which so many people claim that it does. But at least it's let it grow up a bit. The characters aren't squeaky clean cardboard cutouts, but people with some of the darker elements of real life. Technically beautiful, it takes age-old techniques of staging and showmanship and brings them out again rather than finding some way to shoe-horn something new into it just for the sake of it. The story is a refreshing change from the usual boy-meets-girl fare. It will be interesting to see how this one stands the test of time.

Solaris
Hunh?! Let me watch it again.
DVD Review

To quote Tony Shaloub, "That was a hell of a thing." Still processing it, in many ways. This one is sort of a time-delayed movie bomb; you'll be doing laundry or something hours later and something will just pop into your head and you go, "What the hell did THAT mean?!" Complete with the all caps section. ;)

Unlike most sci-fi I watch, I haven't read the source materials. This is a good thing and a bad thing. No preconceptions to base my read on, but also it gave me no primer for some of the visual imagery in this movie. It is based off a novel by Stanislaw Lem published in 1961. Taken at face value, the screenplay is a Star Trek episode waiting to happen (it probably already did; it carried shades of "Shore Leave" and "This Side of Paradise"). A precis would read something like: Company sends mission to weird planet-thing, mission goes awry. For some reason they can't recover the crew, so they send in our hero to save the day. Many long pans with creepy music later, we find out that things aren't exactly what they appear to be. Dum dum dum!

But that is giving short shrift to the thing, it really is. Reducing such a visual and emotive story to bald words is very difficult, especially once it has already been rubbed through the fine screen sieve of a screenplay. It's like trying to get the original photograph back out of a web graphic. Of course, if you view a web graphic through the right filter, things come sharply into focus. That's what the film does for us.

I liked the fact that they avoided the usual "we are too stupid to know not to go into the woods at night when there is an escaped madman around" cliches. These people are scientists and engineers and they figure out in very short order exactly what is going on. But somehow, you realize that it doesn't matter. Here, the facts don't matter as much as what you feel about them. The "truth" has to fight for space next to the emotional reactions of the crew when motivating their actions, just as it does here on the ground. This is usually fallow ground for sci-fi, but it is the spine of this film.

We actually have a sci-fi film about human beings. Technology and exploration are tossed off without a whimper to mark their place. The film is about the people. About their relationships, and about how they deal with the dawning of the truth that they are stuck in. This is shown in a lot of subtle ways - for one thing, the ships don't ever speak, which is an oddity in our animistic dealings with technology. I don't want spoilers in here, so I won't go on, but suffice it to say that all sides of this thing hold up their parts beautifully.

The look. God, I could go on for hours about the look. Gone is the four-color clean Spielberg and Howard spacecraft palette. It's a minimalist's dream-world, where everything is done in a coture-pallette of deepened colors. The design of the world is unusual. We get something as complex as a centipede's backbone, but every piece of it makes sense. For all it's color and texture, it is an oddly bleached place. Even blood is a thin red that almost blends with the floor. And outside every window and casting light on every scene is that huge mottled enigma of Solaris itself.

The CG is present, of course, but someone went very all-out. They kicked the resolution of the models up to past that of the film stock itself, and the effort shows in the spacecraft and the planet itself. Even on my computer monitor I couldn't see the seams on this one - just pure beauty. Cinesite and Rhythm and Hues outdid themselves again. The delicacy of their work added so much to the experience of the movie by not being noticable, because it kept the machines and the grandeur of the environment that most people get stuck on from overwhelming the story inside those ships.

The cast does an outstanding job with some very demanding parts. Clooney's usually insouciant charm is thin on the ground, replaced by a controlled professional who breaks like safety glass. This role just brought him off my list of "people who are paid just to be themselves" actors. The rest of the cast is right there with him, bringing layers of depth to their performances totally unshadowed by the setting or the story. Again, I can't go into details without spoiling the thing, but watch Voila Davis. Just watch her.

I know that a lot of people didn't like this film. But I honestly believe that's because they were looking for something it isn't. This isn't Soderburg's usual shiny pretty world, and it doesn't ever degenerate into that silly sort of fist fight/explosion fest that most people expect when you say the word "science fiction" these days. And they just don't know what to do with it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it either, to be honest.

I almost feel like this isn't a full review. It's more a first-impressions thing. There is so much I know I was missing (for one thing, the houseapes were up and I was in a constant state of filmus interruptus). For another, I'm not sure how many viewings it would take to truly sink in. Some of the same people who pan this flick on RottenTomatoes also pan Kubrick's "2001: A Space Oddyssey". And if you don't like Kubrick, I don't think you're gonna care too much for this film. I don't think we'll ever get another Kubrick, but Soderburgh gives us a very interesting re-statement of the themes.

Daredevil
A crooked smirk and a whip
DVD Review
Also posted here.

Comic book fans have something else to drool over besides those Doc Ock pictures for Spiderman 2 that got released this week. Daredevil hit DVD.

When I heard they were making this one, I was a little afraid. I was always amazed my parents let me read these comics. They are very very dark and grim, full of adult themes and concepts, and the religious undertones are very deeply ingrained. I think if they had taken the time to read them they would have had a complete cow. From what I remembered, I could see this making a stunning anime series in Japan, but I didn't think the mainstream American audience was going to do too well with it. Or, if they toned it down enough for the obligatory PG-13, you were going to loose so much of the substance that it would look like faded 4-color. Well, I was half right. They toned it down, but they did it in stripes. Rather than bleaching the whole thing down several shades, they just washed a few specific areas lighter, but managed to keep enough of the gray and black in the rest to intrigue. This isn't the real Daredevil, but it is an interesting take on him.

The opening credits are cool. If you were wondering, yes, it looks like the Braille is correct for the names - the kids got out some of my books and ran some comparisons. That clear blue shot of the moon over New York was a great setup - you rarely see the skyscrapers from that angle. And then morphing that beauty shot into that puddle reflection with the rat to show that you were not in Kansas anymore was an eloquent setup for the rest of the film. Beauty and power contrasted with darkness and squallor. It was the heart of the whole story, right there.

They don't beat you over the head with the religion, but it is still palpably there. That first shot running up the facade of that church (complete with the blood trail over the face of Mary in the window) lets you know right off the bat that they decided to keep at least some of the symbolism, and that means they kept some of the problems, too. And when you get to the top and see him wrapped around the base of the cross, you know you are right in the middle of the battle of good and evil in both the metaphysical and the physical. The confessional scenes are well handled - especially the first one.

Costumes in these movies are always a problem. What looks good drawn in a 3" x 2" square and printed in four colors and what looks good made of fabric and wrapped around a real guy on the big screen are rarely the same thing. I like this translation. Spandex is fine for the circus, but if you are thrashing around with something big and ugly, why would you run around in something thinner than your underwear? I would want at least leather to help protect myself, and that's the way they go. They kept enough of the silhouette and features of the drawn costume to evoke his identity, but grounded it in enough reality you can believe that he went to a really upscale motorcycle shop and had these made. Kingpin's suits play their part in making you feel like he came up from the streets. He is dressing the part of his new life but with that slight touch of over-the-top that subliminally shows that the fine garments don't quite fit the soul within. Bullseye's drawn costume is frankly ridiculous, and thankfully they tossed it completely with only a lame joke left to remember it by. Elektra's annoyed me, but not in the way you probably think. Her costume in the comics would actually have gone down very well indeed and was just as skimpy as the Dominatrix Dress-up Kit they gave her, so the change just seems gratuitious to me.

The concept work on the echolocation was inspired. It was well thought out, and well carried out. Not only that, they handled the more mundane aspects of blindness amazingly well. The tags on the clothes and the scenes of him putting his walking-around money in his wallet were real examples of how the visually impaired handle these sitations. Affleck does a very good job of looking without looking like he's looking. Except for a couple spots in the fight scenes, you can believe that he really can't see. He's got one of the best blank stares in the business. ;)

Out of fourty-some-odd-years of material they had to work with, the story they picked to drop us into the middle of was a good choice. I don't know of a lot of the others they could have choosen without eviscerating them. You know they won't make one of these without a "love interest", but most of his other girlfriends are not of Elektra's stamp. He has a lot of very rocky relationships, and like most of his type, things usually don't end well. Yes, Elektra died, but at least she wasn't a really messed up person while she was alive. I don't think movies are ready for a junkie female lead with AIDS. Not in a comic book movie, at any rate. The origin materials were also well-done. If the relationship between him and his father hadn't been developed properly, the entire basis of his character wouldn't have worked. As it was, the motivations seemed almost logical and they brought that hokey "Man without Fear" concept in so daintily it doesn't choke you when you get hit hard with it towards the end.

Michael Clark Duncan was a true find, and I have to give kudos to the director for having the cojones to cast him rather than forcing a white guy just to stick to canon (Vladimir Kulich is too pretty, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura too old). Or, I just had a nauseating thought, he could have gone CG. Mercifully he didn't, and we get a Kingpin with the physical attributes along with the charisma to back it up. He literally blots out the background of the scenes he's in, and that basso profundo could recite the Cat in the Hat and make you feel threatened. His sheer mass is just this side of unreal. Affleck isn't a small guy, but when he's standing there in front of the stripped-for-action Kingpin, you see comic-book proportions in real life.

Garner and Farrell turn in solid performances. It was interesting to hear Colin get to use his real Irish accent - we've seen him do American so many times it sounded wrong, almost. Bullseye is a sociopathic freak to the core, and he played him as such. Garner's experience in Alias gave her a familiarity with mayhem that comes in handy. Maybe it is just street-cred; we've already been introduced to the concept of her kicking the holy crap out of someone in her previous work, so the leap isn't as high as it might have been. Favreau's turn as Murdock's partner was subtle and the chemistry between them showed - he provided a bit of real contact and a light touch on the comic relief aspects of the role that made it even more believable.

Affleck. How do I begin. Physically, they made a good choice, I think. As far as the acting, well, he was Ben. Luckily, Ben-as-Ben is a fairly good take on Matt Murdock. You believed him when you saw him in the suit, and you believed him in the costume. That is a tough line to find and maintain. They haven't really tried to do a super-hero with a working secret identity since the Superman movies. I don't count Batman - Bruce Wayne is rich enough he could wear any damned thing he wants. The X-men are rather obviously themselves, spandex or not. Matt Murdock has to work for a living in a business that does care what you come off like. He delivers his cheesy dialogue with a touch that somehow works. The blindness just makes it all a little harder - since he can't use a look or a glance to portray anything, it is hard for these performances not to come off flat. He did all right though - that crooked grin did wonders. All in all, a workman-like performance that gives us a solid base to see where he goes in a sequel.

And we'll probably get to see it. I just read in the IMDB they have announced a spin-off named "Elektra", starring Garner. If they're basing this off the "Elektra Lives" graphic novel, this could get very interesting indeed.

The extras on the DVD were really good. There are two "making of" documentaries that cover the production really well. The Evansecence video is a great addition. Whatever you do, get into the storyboards - they are a graphic novel in and of themselves and a stand-alone work of art. The concept art is good, too. The best stuff is buried at the bottom of the menu. Choose "Comic books". You get a great set of interviews with a bunch of the writers and artists who have brought Daredevil to life all these years. Some great stuff in there.

I won't say this one makes my top 5 for the year (they would have had to make a rated R movie to include the stuff to do that) but the extras push this one into the top 10 for sure.

Who Critiques the Critic?

In today's fast-paced world, summary is king. We can't take the time to read the whole thing - Cliff's notes, the Reader's Digest Condensed Version, the abridged dictionary all give voice to our ever-increasing need for speed. News services, online magazines and links lists give us our daily dose of just what we want to pay attention to. Even critique has joined this trend. There is so much data out there no one would have time to sort through it all: a search on Google for movie critic returns 649,000 results. The web has provided an unprecedented opportunity for anyone to get up on his or her soapbox. How do we get to the information we need? The summary phenomenon kicks in, and we have websites online that gather together large numbers of critical articles from all over the web -- metacritics.

The concept isn't new - the word "metacritic" has been around a long time. Usually used in academic circles, it basically means a critical reader of criticism. Anyone who has ever been in the Movie Fray on Slate has a visceral working definition of the term; many of the posts are critiques of the criticism posted. Metacritical sites exist to review or provide data about other critics.

Most review sites do some cross-linking to other reviews, but that is not what I am talking about. Many review sites provide their own reviews and then annotate them with reviews from others. I am referring to sites that almost exclusively catalog other people's content.

How were the sites chosen? I use Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes all the time already. The others were found via cross-linking with those two sites, or via a Google search on "movie reviews".

Rotten Tomatoes - (http://www.rottentomatoes.com)

Overall
It's kitschy scheme doesn't cover up the raw power under the hood. They also have two scoring systems, one based on percentage to allow for averaging scores, and a binary (sucks/doesn't suck) rating. The About section contains reviews by reviewers of a site that reviews their reviews -- very surreal.

Scoring
All over the site you will see little red tomatoes, or green splat things. Basically, if a movie has a better than average percentage (60%) out of all the reviews listed, it gets a red tomato, and less than that gets a green splat. This gives you a quick yay or nay. If you want to see how it got its overall Tomatometer rating you choose the film (via link or search result), which takes you to its page. The page will default to the reviews section, and list with links all reviews of the movie, with links and their individual scores. Each review gets either a tomato or a splat based on the reviewers scale, and then the percentage of tomatoes from all the movies reviewed is its overall score, which is expressed both as the percentage and an overall tomato/splat rating.

Reviewers
Getting on their reviewer list reminded me of becoming a member of Costco -- you have to belong to one of a list of movie critic associations, or you have to be verifiably employed as a movie reviewer with a certain amount of work under your belt. This allows for a wide range of reviews from all sorts of sites without polluting the reviews with a selection of my-first-fansite types.

Search
They have a generic search at the top of the page, or you can go to the Tomato Picker, which allows you to search by genre and scoring.

General Movie Info
They list reviews from offline, as well as reviews from newsgroups. The text is submitted by the reviewer and placed into something that matches their site, and displayed. All information about all incarnations of a film are accessible from the same page using a tabbed system at the top. Besides specific film information (cast/crew, plot summary, numbers/stats), they also provide photos, trailers/media, and a forum for discussion.

Pros
All the info is in one place - everything from reviews and movie info to merchandise. It doesn't interpret the data, it just presents it. Also contains game review information.

Cons
The homepage is almost too dynamic - the feature items change so often sometimes it can be hard to find them. For some reason, they pre-populate their search input boxes with something, so you have to delete it to put in your own search. Sometimes the pull quote in the review listing doesn't seem to agree with the rating.

Metacritic - (http://www.metacritic.com)

Overall
Metacritic has a clean layout - a little clunky but fairly easy to navigate. You can either search their large database of previously cataloged movies, or you can follow their navigation to recent releases. They cover film, video, music, and games.

Scoring
Their big feature is a leveling factor they call Metascores. For each review, they standardize the scoring on a 1-10 scale so they can come up with average scores, which are then multiplied by 10 to give the two digit score. That allows users to see what the prevailing opinion is on a given item, without having to dredge through several hundred websites and newspapers and correlating the scores. They also use a graduated coloring system (sort of a stoplight thing) to give you a quick way to see the range of the score.

Reviewers
The site has chosen 30 reviewers based on their proprietary system.

Search
Their search is solid but sort of vanilla. You can search for review by score, but it doesn't state it explicitly. There are a couple of canned searches off the homepage to allow you to look at their best/worst.

General Movie Info
On each movie page there is some information about the movie (release dates, MPAA rating, etc), and on the left is a column of all the current releases they have scored. DVD/Video is rated separately, but they don't re-review the content.

Pros
They include some reviews that are not available on the web; the Time magazine review of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring is rated and scored in there just like Salon's. They also cover games.

Cons
Their Metascoring system seems to skew reviews with very simple or odd scoring systems, so sometimes if you read the text of the review you will find yourself disagreeing with their translation of the score. If the reviewer doesn't give a specific numeric score, they assign one based on their impressions of the review. Also, they only use 30 reviewers, and they weight the average. Taken all together, it feels a bit like scoring figure skating to me. Offline reviews are scored, but you can't see more than the one line summary listed by the score.

Movie Review Query Engine - (http://www.mrqe.com/)

Overall
This is a plain jane UI, but it seems to find an amazing amount of data. If you want to get off the beaten path and find some of the odder goods, this might be the way to go.

Scoring
There is actually no scoring. If the reviewer puts a score in, it is put next to the listing, but they don't do any sort of comparisons.

Reviewers
The list comes off a newsgroup called rec.arts.movies.reviews, and a long list of other sources. No real info as to why they are chosen, but it does solicit others to be added to the list at the bottom of the page via mailto link.

Search
This is a standard search. It came back with 253 citations for "Lord of the Rings". It doesn't group the links in any way; just throws them out in some unobvious order.

General Movie Info
Absolutely none - this just as a list of links to the various articles.

Pros
If you just want a launch point to see other people's reviews without all the other stuff, this might be for you. Since it includes newsgroup entries as well, there is content there that is hard to find other places.

Cons
Absolutely no other information. Search doesn't seem to index abbreviations or commonly used acronyms (didn't return on LOTR, for example).

The Internet Movie Database - (http://us.imdb.com/)

Overall
Cited as a source by several other sites, and cross-linked from several others. It concentrates more on who did what than what people thought of it.

Scoring
Doesn't seem to score anything - just gives information and reports the scores in the review articles rather than summarizing.

Reviewers
Apparently their list is driven by submissions and hand-maintained. Seems to be 30 or so. No real information as to how or why they are chosen.

Search
Search is a standard text-input, and you can group it by type of media. In an odd quirk, it seems to change all searches to lower-case (they still seem to work just fine, though).

General Movie Info
There is so much data that can be entered for a film it requires a very extensive help system to explain it. The reviews cannot be seen if you don't click on a small button on the left navigation.

Pros
The level of detail is astonishing. You can get the entire closing credits in here.

Cons
The search information isn't keyed off the movie, but rather off the individual item. If you wanted to see who was the Key Grip on the movie XXX, (Jiri Gazda) you can't search on "key grip" XXX to get it - that returns all people whose first or last name contains Key, the first or last name contains Grip, or containing the letters XXX.

This list isn't even close to complete, but it does give a start. I would use each of these in different circumstances. When I am looking into a movie and deciding if I want to see it, I usually look at the overall score on Metacritic, and then hit Rotten Tomatoes and browse around through various review pullquotes for interesting tidbits. Depending on how badly it was lauded or panned, I may or may not go to and read the individual reviews. If I am looking up hardcore who/what/where/when data on a movie, the IMDB is the way to go. If I am just wandering around looking for something new, I might put some stuff in the Movie Review Query Engine, just to see what comes up.

How well does this work? Well, it stopped me from seeing Master of Disguise before it was too late. On the other hand, I almost didn't see 13 Days due to the lukewarm reviews on Metacritic, and if I hadn't been forced to see it by a friend I would have missed a movie I ended up enjoying. It all still boils down to caveat emptor, but at least there are more tools to help you look before you leap.