Good Will Hunting (1997): A Mathematical Review

1997’s Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant, is an excellent drama about a troubled young math genius who learns to overcome his past demons and open his heart to those that want to care for him.  This film launched the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and showed the world that these two actors were very talent, not only in acting but also in writing a damn good script.  It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two, one for Best Supporting Actor (Robin Williams) and one for Best Original Screenplay (Damon and Affleck).  Stupendous acting from the entire cast, an excellent script, a memorable and uplifting story, and a great soundtrack all make Good Will Hunting an easy recommendation to movie lovers.

But I don’t really want to talk about the movie, per se.  I’d much rather talk about the depiction of mathematics within the movie.  WAIT, DON’T LEAVE!!!  I completely understand that mathematics does not interest everyone the same way it interests myself, but I do feel it is important that an academically themed movie such as Good Will Hunting gets its subject matter right.  Ever since mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles famously completed the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem back in 1995, several members of the entertainment industry became interested in mathematics and released a number of plays, movies, and novels that largely focused on math and members of the field.  They found that math was a very versatile tool for storytelling; you can pull enough techno-babble out of it to make a given character appear smart, and yet find simple problems and pretty pictures to “edutain” the audience with.  But as an aspiring mathematician AND a film lover, I want to know whether a particular movie does the math culture justice, whether they care about the mathematicians and their work or just indiscriminately used confusing notation and terminology solely for convenience.  And in the case of Good Will Hunting, I regret to say that the math is rather ridiculous.

The mathematician in this film is fictional MIT professor and Fields medalist Gerald Lambeau, played by Stellan Skarsgård.  Skarsgård is actually an excellent casting choice for part, just because he naturally looks like your average math professor.  It is kind of unnerving, though, to see Lambeau hit on every female student he comes in contact with in this movie, but whatever.  The class that Lambeau teaches is “Applied Theories”, which is a hilariously generic name for a college math course.  It would be like if they offered a philosophy class called “Reading a Bunch of Old, Weird Books”.  I couldn’t really tell if the class is undergraduate or graduate level.  I’m guessing undergraduate, just based on the stuff written on the chalkboards and the large class size.  But, of course, according to the MIT website, the course doesn’t exist in real-life.

Early in the movie, Lambeau announces in class that he put a problem on a chalkboard in the halls of the math building.  He said that anyone who could solve the problem would be in the same intellectual category as the other MIT professors and many other brilliant scientists.  Sometime after class, a student rushes to Lambeau and informs him that the problem has been solved.  He goes up to the chalkboard, followed by many students, and confirms that the answer given is correct, although the identity of the problem solver is unknown (of course, its Damon’s character).

There isn’t really a good view of the chalkboard problem, but it can be seen in its entirety and has been copied down by many observant viewers (You can see it here).  The problem is actually four problems, all relating to graph theory.  I have never taken a course in graph theory, but I could easily answer the first two problems off the top of my head.  I knew what had to be done for the other two, but I didn’t know the right theorems to simplify it enough for a satisfying answer.  Still, all of the problems are simple exercises that you would see in a linear algebra or discrete mathematics college course, and yet they have been played up in this movie to be super hard.

But that’s not all.  After the problem had been solved, Lambeau announces in class that he is going to put another problem up, and this one is able to challenge even the greatest minds in the world.  He states that it personally took him two years of research to solve this problem.  Similar to before, the problem is actually two problems.  The first one is simply finding Cayley’s formula, which Arthur Cayley proved way back in 1889.  The second problem is a very simple exercise taught in any given undergraduate graph theory class.  Here is a video that shows just how easily it can be solved.

Damon’s character says to Lambeau late in the movie that he can do all of the work very easily and that Lambeau’s research is a joke.  And you know what?  I agree!  This guy is supposed to have a Fields medal, one of the most prestigious awards a mathematician can receive, and yet he just wastes time throughout the movie dinking around with graph enumeration problems.  Now don’t get me wrong, graph enumeration is a very important aspect of math and is certainly Fields medal-worthy.  But the problems that he does are obviously at the undergraduate level, involving really small graphs that no one cares about.  If the creators of this movie were trying to make Lambeau look like a very smart mathematician, they probably would’ve been better off using nonsensical notational jibberish instead.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I admit that I am being very nitpicky in this review.  The attention in this movie is not really given to the mathematical work.  The problems on the chalkboard are barely visible and were obviously not taken to be essential to the plot.  And it is perfectly reasonable for them to use the problems that they used; graph theory is a highly visual subject in math and its work looks good on the screen.  It was also nice that they told the story about the real-life mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Still, though, it was very annoying that they didn’t show off some advanced mathematical theorems, if only to appease the highly mathematical viewers such as myself.

However, nothing that I have said above detracts from the greatness of the movie.  Everything that I have just described accounts for less than 10 minutes of the actual running time.  If you love math like I do, you will be somewhat disappointed in the math shown on the screen, if you even pay close enough attention to it.  Fortunately, you can easily take your mind off of it by watching the fantastic story instead.  And even if you can’t tell a square root symbol from a pi symbol, you will still thoroughly enjoy this heartfelt film.

Rating of the movie:  4 Stars

Rating of the math:  2 Stars

Distributed by Miramax Films

Studio: Lawrence Bender Productions

Running time: 126 minutes

Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him) (2010) Review

The title for this documentary, produced by David Leaf, John Schienfeld, and Lee Blackman, kind of serves as a sad epilogue to Harry Nilsson’s life.  This singer-songwriter is not a household name at all, despite the fact that he was one of the most influential and respected musicians in America.  His music spawned hits for both himself and other groups who covered him.  His songs are repeatedly featured in crucial scenes of films and television shows.  Heck, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney even named Nilsson as their favorite American artist during one of the Beatles’ press conferences!  And yet, almost no one outside of the music industry knows who the man was or what any of his songs were.  Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him) attempts to rectify Nilsson’s virtual nonexistence in the public consciousness by detailing his life and career.

And what’s a better way to introduce a music artist to an audience then by playing a crapload of his music?  The background soundtrack that plays during the interviews and historical footage consists entirely of tunes that Nilsson sang and/or written.  Through the soundtrack, you can get a sense of how great of a songwriter Nilsson was.  Each song sounds fresh and unique, and they each perfectly capture the mood of the segment.  He definitely had a gift of writing a good melody, and his amazing voice only sweetens the package.  One thing in particular I was impressed with was the range of song styles that Nilsson worked with.  You have the raucous “Jump Into The Fire”, the trippy “Coconut”, the sad, retrospective “1941”, and the absolutely sweeping “One”.  Even if you have no idea who Harry Nilsson was before watching this film, you are guaranteed of recognizing at least a couple of these songs, and you will be shocked to learn that these all come from the same writer.  For the most part, though, the genre of the music is quiet singer-songwriter.  If singer-songwriter songs aren’t really your cup of tea, you will likely tire of the soundtrack after a while.

As for the non-musical aspect of Nilsson’s life, it was pretty interesting to watch how this former bank employee became such a prolific and renowned musician.  Through archival photographs, video and audio recordings, you will get to see Nilsson’s tragic childhood of poverty and parental abandonment, the prime of his career with the Nilsson Schmilsson album, and his fall into alcohol and drugs.  For the most part, it plays out like your typical life story of anyone in the music industry, but there are a few twists and turns that keep it from being forgettable.  For example, you get some insight as to how Nilsson never really found a following within the mainstream audience.  He was far too self-conscious to want to perform live, and he never went on any tours.  Though I could somewhat sympathize with Nilsson for this decision, in hindsight, it sure was detrimental to his legacy.

I’m not really an expert as to how a documentary should be edited, but I thought that the editing in Who Is Harry Nilsson? was well-done and sufficient.  The song selection was wisely chosen, the documentation used to represent the various stages of Nilsson’s life was right on the money, and the interviewees that they used in the segments spoke very emphatically about the man.  Robin Williams, Terry Gilliam, Van Dyke Parks, Yoko Ono, and about three dozen others spoke about Nilsson with great remembrance and reverence, leaving the viewer with an unspoken sense as to how big of an impact Nilsson actually made among those who worked and lived with him.  If I had one of gripe with the editing, it was that the segments did not always transition nicely.  It was fairly obvious that the producers were following a “happy-sad-happy-sad” pattern with the segments, and this sometimes made the narrative feel broken.  As an example, after a segment about Harry meeting his final wife, there was a sadder segment, followed by another segment about Harry’s wife.  I felt that these two segments should’ve been combined into one.

If you are eager to discover some great music and an excellent overlooked artist, Who Is Harry Nilsson? is a decent first step.  If you are at all like me, you will feel compelled to look for Nilsson’s Greatest Hits compilation right after watching this.  Its traditional documentary editing doesn’t really make any courageous moves, but it doesn’t drop the ball, either.  Its does what it sets out to do, introduce a great, virtually unknown artist to the masses and give him the recognition he deserves.

Rating: 3 Stars

Distributed by LSL Productions

Running time: 116 minutes

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) Review

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is one of my favorite movies of all time.  This film, more than any other sci-fi movie, truly immerses the viewer into the feel of space exploration and the range of emotions that comes with it, from the exhilarating sense of discovery and wonderment to the cold, lost, impersonal ennui of the deep black void.  The almost complete lack of dialogue allows the viewer to meditate on the spectacular visuals and focus on their possible hidden meanings.  It polarized audiences at its release and it continues to polarize viewers today, but 2001 is arguably the finest work in Kubrick’s illustrious career and one of the greatest and most influential sci-fi films ever made.

There’s no doubt that Kubrick was very good at making films, but unfortunately, he was also just as good at pissing off authors.  Anthony Burgess resented Kubrick after the release of A Clockwork Orange due to the director’s supposed ego and the mishandling of the negative reactions to the film.  Stephen King initial disapproved of Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel, The Shining, and later supervised a television adaptation that was more similar to his own book.  I’m guessing that the same type of falling out occurred between Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who collaborated with Kubrick during 2001 and wrote a novel of the story during the development of the film.  It is reported that Clarke left the theatre in tears during the intermission of the film at the world premiere.

This could be a very good explanation for the production of this review’s film, 2010: The Year We Make Contact.  This 1984 sequel to 2001 wasn’t directed by Kubrick, but by Peter Hyams, a mediocre director whose only somewhat successful film before 2010 was Outland.  2010 was an adaptation of Clarke’s second novel in his Space Odyssey series.  As such, the themes and the direction of the film more closely resembles Clarke’s work than Kubrick’s film, by placing a greater emphasis on dialogue.  However, Hyams does retain some elements of the film 2001 by using some parts of the original score, recasting Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain in their iconic roles, and fantastically recreating the set and models that were destroyed after 2001’s production.

2010 takes place, conveniently enough, 9 years after the events of 2001.  It follows Heywood Floyd as he and an American crew reluctantly team up with Soviet cosmonauts to explore the deserted Discovery, the spaceship in 2001, which has been orbiting around the planet Jupiter all that time.  Their objective is to figure out what exactly happened during the first mission to Jupiter that caused the death of 4 astronauts and the disappearance of Dr. David Bowman.  Along the way, the Americans and the Soviets share a tension and distrust of each other that mirrors the international conflict occurring on Earth.

The new cast for 2010 isn’t particularly memorable, but they do a good enough job.  Heywood Floyd returns to the story, this time played by Roy Scheider.  Scheider does a great job in this role, but I still ended up making Jaws jokes during this film (“We’re gonna need a bigger pod.”).  It was also kind of fun to see a young John Lithgow and a young Helen Mirren in this movie.  By the way, a fun little fact, Mary Jo Deschanel, mother of Zooey and Emily Deschanel, plays Heywood’s wife in this film.

My biggest complaint with this movie is that there was too much explanation of what happened in the first movie, and it took away from the time this film could’ve used to establish its own style.  The main difference between 2001 and 2010 is that 2001 showed the viewer what was going on, while 2010 told the viewer.  Lengthy explanations are almost required in novels, since every element of the story has to be communicated through written word.  But film is a visual medium, and that additional dimension can be used effectively to reduce the verbal load of the dialogue and make the message of the film more impactful on a visceral level.  2001 masterfully visualized the awe-inspiring effects of space exploration and scientific achievement so well that dialogue was hardly needed.  2010 deviates from this style by declaring every conflict and situation through the dialogue of the characters, with barely any attention given to the intergalactic surroundings.  All sense of wonder for space is gone in 2010.

Even if I could separate 2010 from its predecessor, it still wouldn’t hold up.  There are many moments in this movie in which suspense is kind of building up, but immediately farts out to nothing.  In one scene, when crew members first board the Discovery and test the oxygen levels, there is a momentary panic that the air they are breathing is poisonous, due to a strong odor.  One of the astronauts then immediately concludes that the odor is actually coming from spoiled food.  There are so many of these false moments of suspense, and they are all pointless.

Also, the Cold War theme in this film, which was not present in the novel, seems very tacked on and not well-developed.  Near the end of the movie, the crew on the spaceship finds out that a war has broken out on Earth between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Therefore, the American astronauts are forced to reside in the American-owned Discovery, while the Russians are prohibited from boarding the vessel.  At first, you would think that this would lead to an interesting moral dilemma, in which the characters have to choose between their national allegiance and their humanity towards those outside of their own kind.  This plot point only lasts for about ten minutes as they all agree to break the boundary, thus eliminating any sort of ethical conflicts that the situation could have spawned.  And on that note, the resolution of the war on Earth is one of the most unrealistic, bullshit endings to a war that I have ever seen in fiction, and that’s as far as I would like to talk about it.

2010 is not a bad movie; it has quite a bit of interesting scenes within it.  However, I find this sequel to 2001 to be completely unnecessary.  After all is said and done, it is a generic, somewhat boring space flick that spoils some of the mystery that 2001 effectively embodied.  If you would like some explanation and closure to the 2001 story, I suppose you could watch this film.  But even so, I think I’d still recommend the Arthur C. Clarke books over it.  They explain more the details of the original cinematic masterpiece, yet still manage to become a separate, incomparable entity to 2001’s narrative.

Rating: 2 Stars

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

            Running time: 116 minutes

The Phantom of the Opera (2004) Review

I am a huge musical theatre fan.  Therefore, by definition, I absolutely adore Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.  After seeing the show live in London’s West End a couple of years ago, I have become completely captivated by the Phantom, the music, the drama and the story.  It was unlike anything I have seen before, and I still haven’t seen a musical similar to it yet.

When I finally came back to the States, I immediately searched for the DVD of the 2004 Phantom of the Opera movie and ordered it online, without knowing hardly anything about it.  As soon as I received it, I put it in my TV/DVD combo and began watching it, because I couldn’t wait a second longer to immerse myself into the Music of the Night again.  As they rolled, I couldn’t help but notice two things within the opening credits.

“A Really Useful Films Production”

That’s when I thought:  Hey, that’s Lloyd Webber’s production company!  He must have had an important role in the development of the script, the casting, the set design, and everyone else.  That’s good to know that this movie was in the good hands of its composer.  How could this movie possibly suck?

“Directed by Joel Schumacher”

Oh crap.

That’s right.  Joel “Bat Credit Card” Schumacher.  To be fair, Schumacher has had a great career before…”the Incident that Shall Not be Named”.  He directed such underrated classics as The Lost Boys, Falling Down, and A Time to Kill.  He was approached by Lloyd Webber way back in 1989 to make a film adaptation of Phantom, which would use the original stage cast.  However, due to various scheduling conflicts, the script sat in development hell for over a decade.  Obviously, the film was eventually made, but with a whole new cast playing the now iconic roles.

So, to answer the question I know is on your mind right now, no, the movie does not suck.  But that is about all does.  Schumacher doesn’t really take chances with this movie as he has in his previous films, and what we are left with is an overabundance of adequacy.  The costumes are adequate, the acting is adequate, the cinematography is adequate, and the effects are adequate.  But Phantom should not adequate!  Phantom should be a jaw-dropping experience, as I’ve had in the West End!  Maybe the amazing stage show spoiled this movie for me, but I felt that the film didn’t live up to the show it was based on.

But maybe there is a silver lining within this thick cloud of “meh”.  For one thing, the musical score is virtually untouched from the original show, which is great.  If you do call yourself a “phan”, you’ll be happy to know that all of your favorite songs appear in this movie, albeit in a somewhat different order to match the adaptation on the screen.  Better yet, the score has been revived by a 105-piece orchestra in this film, compared to the 27-piece orchestra of the original soundtrack.  The score sounds great and familiar to those like me who can sing along to the entire song list, although there are numerous annoying lines which were sung by the characters in the stage show that are now spoken here in the film version.

While we are on the subject of music, let’s talk about the cast and their voices.  First up is Gerard Butler as the titular character.  Purists would call out that Butler was nowhere near as good in the role of the Phantom as the originator, Michael Crawford.  But I don’t personally like comparing performers to other performers; I like to judge performances on their own merit.  With this in mind, I actually enjoyed Butler in this film.  Sure, his singing was very shaky at times, but he absolutely nailed “The Music of the Night”, which was important for myself.  Overall, I was surprised as to how well this buff action-movie type with no real singing experience was able to perform the arguably most difficult role in musical theatre history.  To add to that, he brought such a raw, primal energy to the Phantom character that I haven’t thought about before.

My complaints for the Phantom have more to do with the direction than with the acting.  First, the horrible, devastating deformation of the Phantom’s face “tis but a flesh wound” in my eyes.  I just couldn’t see how this large, birthmark-ish feature on the right side of his face could have subjected him to a life of exclusion and freak-show confinement.  And speaking of which, the Phantom’s quick 5-minute back story just seemed too contrived and uninsightful, though I suspect was pulled right from the 1909 novel.  And finally, the Phantom in this movie has lost all of the magical powers he had in the stage show.  While this creates a more realistic story, it ultimately makes the Phantom more human and not as threatening as he was on stage.  It completely changes the story from being a horror/drama hybrid to just being a drama.

There isn’t much to say about the rest of the cast.  Emmy Rossum as Christine has a very good voice, but I didn’t really appreciate the “sad little girl” look glued onto her face throughout the film.  Patrick Wilson as Raoul was also a good singer, but not memorable after that.  The rest of the cast just wasn’t developed enough to call interesting, but served their purpose.  However, the less I say about Minnie Driver as the prima donna Carlotta, the better.  Driver thought that the best way to represent the arrogant Italian opera singer was through her best Rosie Perez-impersonation.

As for the story, what can I say?  The film was based on the 1986 musical, which was based on a 1976 musical by Ken Hill, which was based on the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, which was based on the novel by Gaston Leroux.  This movie is a fifth-generation adaptation of the original story.  But there is a good reason why there are so many versions of this story: it is a damn good story.  It is a classic “Beauty and the Beast” tale that completely embraces its romantic yet dark atmosphere.  It was only natural that the story would become an opera, and it was only natural that the opera would become a movie.

Phantom has some very silly moments, but I am still recommending it solely because it is the only film adaptation of the Lloyd Webber musical, which is an excellent piece of work (by the way, Les Miserables better follow suit pretty damn quick!).  I would recommend buying the original London soundtrack to everyone, but not before seeing the story played out at least once, either through this film or through the actual stage show, so that you can understand the context of the music.  You might not be completely blown away by the movie, but I guarantee that the music will astound you.

Rating: 3 Stars

Distributed by Warner Bros. Films

Produced by Really Useful Films

Running time: 143 minutes

Troll 2 (1990) Review

CORKY…

…What?  Oh, sorry, still not completely over the suckiness of that God-forsaken movie.

If you all recall from my Corky Romano review last week (actually, it was more of a frothy-mouthed rant), I wrote that Troll 2 was so bad, it’s good, while Corky was so bad, it had nothing redeemable.  That got me to thinking, what makes a movie so bad that it is actually enjoyable to watch?  How can Troll 2, which I admit is technically worse that Corky, be so much more entertaining?  I mean, compared to Corky, Troll 2 has worse acting, worse special effects, worse music, worse dialog, worse editing, worse everything.  And yet, I found Troll 2 to be a much better movie.  Mathematically, this did not make sense.

I guess the main reason why I am more capable of forgiving Troll 2 is the fact that the odds were very much stacked against its production.  This movie was filmed in Utah, yet the director, Claudio Fragasso, was Italian, and the production crew that he brought with him did not speak a word of English.  Also, the leading actors of this movie originally auditioned for roles as extras and had very little acting experience (one of the actors was actually a patient in the nearby mental hospital).  And to top it all off, Fragasso made the actors read the script verbatim for filming, despite the fact that he and another co-author wrote the whole thing in very broken English.

In spite of all these faults (or maybe because of them), Troll 2 has a huge cult following.  It is played religiously in the many film festivals devoted to campy sci-fi flicks such as this one.  The stars of the movie (including George Hardy, a real-life dentist who played the father) are now instantly recognizable icons to the many fans of this film.  There is even a documentary about Troll 2’s success called Best Worst Movie (which I haven’t seen yet, but I would love to do a review of it sometime in the future). This begs the question:  Who in their right mind likes this horrible movie this much?

Well, I do.  I know that this might greatly discredit me as a reviewer, but I enjoy these types of infamously bad films.  It is the same kind of enjoyment I get whenever I watch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (if you haven’t seen this show, shame on you).  I know it’s bad, I know it’s insulting to my intelligence, and I know I could be watching much better films than this one.  And yet, I am entertained by it, and I don’t regret watching it.  To me, the stiff acting, the ridiculous costumes, and the unconvincing special effects are much more hilarious than anything Corky tried to put out.

If you are susceptible to bad acting, then you should avoid this movie.  Michael Stephenson, playing the main character Joshua Waits, is the bad child actor’s bad child actor, delivering each line with the same whiny inflection I used when I begged my mom to buy me action figures at the store.  The rest of the actors, especially Connie McFarland who played Josh’s sister, have really forced readings and would have been laughed off of an audition for a community theatre production.  These forced readings do provide the audience with a plethora of unintentionally hilarious scenes.  My personal favorite is the scene in which Josh’s father yells at Josh after he peed all over the family’s food (“And you can’t piss on hospitality!  I WON’T ALLOW IT!”).

If you get tired of laughing at the acting, you can always laugh at the horrendous special effects.  The “trolls”, which are actually goblins (long story), all wear these obvious rubber masks along with burlap-sack jumpsuits.  The blood and green goo that excretes from the characters are clearly painted on the actors.  Bodily transformations only occur in between jump cuts.  In one scene, in which a character supposedly has melted into a pile of ooze except for her head, you can easily see the outline of the tub that the rest of the actress’ body is hiding in.  There is not a single effect in this movie in which I cannot explain how they did it!

If I were an official movie reviewer, hired by some sort of publication, I would rate Troll 2 1 star.  However, I feel that I should review this movie based on its entertainment value and not solely on its production quality.  In that case, I would highly recommend this movie, as long as everyone who is watching it knows that it is laughably bad.  If you have this sarcastic attitude about bad movies, you will find that Troll 2 is one of the most unintentionally hilarious films of all time.

Rating: 4 Stars

Distributed by Epic Productions

            Running time: 95 minutes

Corky Romano (2001) Review

CORKY…

How could I possibly write a coherent, thoughtful review for this festering piece of shit?  This review is the product of all the pent-up rage I have suffered through since the first time I’ve seen this movie, many years ago.  I needed to vent my feelings through some sort of outlet, even if it meant watching this turd a second time for this review.  Corky Romano has wasted 3 hours of my life that I will never get back.  This review is payback.  I refuse to show mercy!  I refuse to give credit where credit is NOT due!  I WANT CORKY’S HEAD SERVED TO ME ON A PLATTER!!!

You might think that I am too much of a movie critic to enjoy stupid comedies like Corky Romano.  Wrong!  I was a child of the 90’s.  My first loves in film were Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, Dumb and Dumber, Tommy Boy, and the Austin Powers flicks.  Even though I have “expanded my palette” in films, I still enjoy watching each and every one of those movies.  Sure, they may be dumb and generic, but I still find them uproarious, and compared to Corky they are like Stanley Kubrick films!

The title character in Corky Romano, played by Chris Kattan, is a naturally skittish assistant veterinarian banished from the family mafia by his crime lord daddy (Peter Falk) and his two brothers Paulie and Peter. (Peter Berg and Chris Penn.  Seriously, guys, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!)  When the family gets in trouble with the FBI, they enlist the unlikely Corky as a spy to pose as a highly specialized federal agent and destroy the crucial evidence held by the FBI, of course with hilarious results!

First of all, Chris Kattan is not a leading actor.  He may have had some funny moments on SNL and other movies, but here he is just not funny.  The script tries to make Corky likable by making him wear colorful ties and sing cheesy 80’s tunes.  Instead, he comes across as supremely annoying and pathetic through Kattan’s constant mugging and twitchy acting.  Kattan just tries way to hard in this film and takes it nowhere.

But don’t worry! The rest of the cast has the exact opposite problem; they don’t try at all.  Despite the somewhat big names in this movie, no one steps up to be memorable or likable here.  It is painfully obvious that none of the other actors care, and I can’t really blame them.

Secondly, Corky’s rise through the ranks of the FBI is completely implausible at best.  This addle-brained, fumbling mess of a human being just casually walks into the FBI headquarters, flashes his fake badge, and immediately receives assignments from the higher-ups.  No one at any point questions his guise, despite the fact that he obviously has no idea what he is doing and consistently puts everyone’s life at risk through his stupidity.  Correction:  There is one agent who DOES see through Corky, but nobody believes him.  AND he turns out to be the primary villain.  Fuck this movie.

Also, I have never seen as much humor shoved down the audience’s throats as I had in Corky.  “You like midgets, right?  Well, we have a midget in this movie, and he’s a kung-fu fighting gangster.  That’s hilarious, right?  Or do you like bestiality implications?  Our main character gives a dog CPR!  And you will absolutely bust a gut when you watch Corky speak to kids while high on cocaine!  Comedy gold!”  Seriously, how many times have you seen these tired comedy movie gags?!  I feel so God damn insulted by this movie!

And let’s not forget the obligatory romance that “blossoms” between Corky and fellow agent Kate (Vinessa Shaw).  Near the end of the movie (yes, I’m spoiling the ending of this movie, because I simply do not care), the most jarring relationship transition occurs.  In one shot, Corky and Kate appear to have just started to like one another.  In the next shot, they are walking down the aisle.  Really?!  They get married?!!  This is complete bullshit!

But the thing that pisses me off more than anything else in this movie is the fact that many people actually like it!  As of right now, the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com is 42%.  WHAT!!!!!!!  That is a little less than average.  This movie is nowhere near a little less than average!  Some people put this movie in the “so bad, it’s good” category.  Listen, Troll 2 is so bad, it’s good.  The Room is so bad, it’s good.  Corky Romano is so bad, it’s frickin’ unbearable!  It is insulting, vacuous, and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  There are so many more things I could bitch about this movie, but I hope that I have said enough here.

AVOID CORKY ROMANO AT ALL COSTS.  PLEASE!!!!!

Rating: 1 Star

Distributed by Touchstone Pictures

Produced by Robert Simonds Productions

Running time: 86 of the longest minutes of my life

Dogtooth (2009) Review

Dogtooth, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a perverse take on the atomic family.  This Greek film features a man (Christos Stergioglou) and his wife (Michelle Valley) who raise their son and two daughters (Christos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, and Mary Tsoni) in a secluded area, fenced off from the rest of the world.  The parents have kept the early adult-aged children from ever leaving the premises in order to protect them from the dangerous outside world.  They eradicate the children’s interest in leaving the premises by teaching them different meanings to words (“sea” means a leather armchair, “motorway” is a strong wind, etc.), prohibiting any form of outside media such as movies and television, and making up stories about a son who died after leaving the home.  The only other person the children see outside of the family is Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a coworker of the father, who gets paid to relieve the sexual tension of the son.  The name of the movie comes from the fact that the parent told their kids that they are allowed to leave once one of their dogteeth fall out.

The film is worth a watch if only to see the clever ways in which the parents keep up this lifelong façade.  For example, they tell the children that the planes they see flying in the sky are only little toys.  They even go so far as to buy airplane toys, place them in the backyard, and tell their kids that they have fallen from the sky.  In another clever scene, the whole family listens to a Frank Sinatra song, which the children think is a recording of their grandfather singing.  The father translates the English lyrics into a sort of propaganda, praising the way in which the children are raised.

The one thing that I admire the most about this movie is its simplicity.  The camera shots are all static, the acting performances are mostly sedated, and the visual effects are kept at a minimalist level throughout, from opening to ending credits.  Also, there isn’t any sort of emphasis on symbolism in order to address any particular issue in the world.  Because of this, Dogtooth can serve as a parable for everyone.  One can take the film literally as a warning against over-parenting and over-protection, or one can go further with the film’s themes and compare them to situations involving the government, the media, religion, or society in general.

I have seen many comparisons between the style of Dogtooth and the styles of other European directors.  I myself have found similarities between this and the works of Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Robert Bresson, and even Stanley Kubrick.  A more pretentious reviewer would lambaste this film for copying other people’s work.  I, on the other hand, believe that while these comparisons are easy to make, Lanthimos effectively uses these influences to develop his own style and voice in Dogtooth, much like Quentin Tarantino in his movies.  There are enough elements in this movie to help differentiate Lanthimos’ humor, pace, and aesthetic from the previously listed directors.

This movie gets dark in many places, though.  There are scenes that are disturbing, violent, and awkwardly sexual, revolving around lesbianism, incest, and child abuse.  Despite all of this, the overall tone of the film is not so bleak.  The film manages to maintain a humor mostly in the innocent, childlike natures of the siblings, who constantly play weird games with each other and misinterpret well-known aspects of society through their nurtured ignorance.  It is very misleading, however, to call this movie “hilarious”, as I have on seen many posters for this movie.  That is much like calling Funny Games hilarious.  Humor is to be found, but only so to counterbalance the dark weight of the rest of the movie.

Dogtooth is not for everyone.  You can easily judge from the trailer if you would like this movie or not.  For those of you who are adventurous enough to give this film a shot, I assure you that this will not disappoint.  Despite its heavy themes, the film feels optimistic, and there is enough in here to entertain even the most fervent European film haters.  It is also a fun film to dissect thematically, if you are into that.

Give this film a shot.

I dare you.

Rating: 4 Stars

Distributed by Feelgood Entertainment

Produced by Boo Productions

Running time: 96 minutes

District 9 (2009) Review

I’m not going to make many friends with this one.

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson, is based on a 6-minute short film titled “Alive in Joberg”, also directed by Blomkamp (it can be seen here).  Both films depict an alternate reality in which extraterrestrial aliens take the place of black Africans in apartheid-era South Africa.  In D9, in the year 1982, Aliens descended to Earth in a huge mother ship hovering over Johannesburg.  Humans eventually board the ship and discover a horde of malnourished insectoid creatures, whom the humans derogatively call “prawns”.  The South Africans, not knowing what to do with the aliens, place them into a government camp where they live in desolate conditions and are subjected to prejudice from the locals.  At the turn of the 21^st century, a private military company, called the Multinational United (MNU), is called to evict the aliens from District 9 and move them to a new district, which they do by rather violent means.  The story is uniquely told by incorporating mock news and documentary footage to depict the conflict between the prawns and the humans.

And…I have a number of problems with this movie.

Let’s start with the documentary footage, which take up a good 20-30 minutes of the beginning.  While I admire this approach to tell the story, I felt as though there should have been much more of it here.  There is no sense of wonder or discovery with the aliens.  Going by the mock footage, it seems as though the humans put the prawns in the camps and treated them like garbage right after discovering them.  I would liked to have seen an initial interest and respect for the aliens and their technology that evolved into a disdain and disgust for them, but there is no time for the documentary to show this.

And right after the first 30 minutes, the film switches direction and drops the mockumentary gimmick, taking on the traditional third-person camera perspective.  From here on out, the film becomes your usual sci-fi summer blockbuster, complete with all of its well-known, tired clichés.  The writers and the directors should have been more confident in the mockumentary approach, either incorporating it more to better establish the altered universe or even filming the whole movie this way.  As it is, the transition is jarring and unwelcome.

I appreciate the fact that Blomkamp, a South African, is trying to show the horrors of the apartheid through a mainstream sci-fi action movie.  However, I question the effectiveness of replacing “blacks” with “prawns” in this movie.  I don’t see how the switch makes this film any more insightful than if it had just been a historical account of South Africa.  To me, it seemed little more than an excuse to include mechanical suits and high-tech weaponry in the action sequences.  The average moviegoer is not going to connect the abuse of the aliens in this movie with the abuse of the black Africans in the apartheid.

Any attempt to show the triumph of humanity in an inhumane world seems very forced in this film.  The main character, Wikus (played by Sharlto Copley), only changes his initial cruel outlook on the aliens after he begins to transform into one.  He starts to help their cause, but only because they offer to change him back to normal.  There was never really a moment in which he saw the true horror of what he did in the past, which I thought would have been necessary for this film to convey any sort of moral message to the audience.  He is sympathetic to the prawns only because they have means to help him.  Why didn’t he care about them when he was burning their live babies earlier in the film?

I was very disappointed with District 9.  There are so many things that I admired about this film: the documentary approach, the parallels to the apartheid in South Africa, the excellent animation despite its low budget, and the use of unknown actors.  However, the bevy of Hollywood clichés, the numerous plot holes, the contrived tolerance message, and the disconnection between the prawns and the real-life victims really spoiled the whole experience for me.

If I had reviewed this film while it was still out in theaters, I would have given it a light recommendation, if only because the summer of 2009 was not a good time for movies (Transformers 2, anyone?) and this one stood on top of the rest.  Now that it is out on DVD and on Netflix’s instant queue, I would recommend almost any dystopian sci-fi film over this one.  If you’re in the mood for a movie like this, I would recommend the highly underrated Children of Men instead, which has similar themes and a much better narrative.

Rating: 2 Stars

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Production Company: WingNut Films

Running Time: 112 minutes