Bryan Sumner
(Movie Review by Richard Lewis) I sat down in the theater with a big smile on my face. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I had managed to somehow find a seat up front in a sold out show. Frankly, I think it’s just because I actually like superhero movies. I normally give these films the benefit of the doubt and judge them on their own merits, based on how well the film accomplishes what it sets out to do. In the case of Ghost Rider (2007), the film started out well enough, and the set-up is good — a tale of young love gone awry, a deal made with the devil, loss, lost loved ones, lost love, lost soul, and a chance for redemption. All very dramatic, eternal themes.
In a desperate attempt to save the life of his cancer-stricken father, young stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) makes a deal with the devil. Except in this case, the devil’s name is Mephistopheles, who is well played by Peter Fonda. Although in a movie about a (literal) hell-on-wheels biker, I am surprised the filmmakers missed the opportunity to put Fonda, the former star of “Easy Rider”, on Blaze’s chopper at least once. It would have been a nice touch for Fonda to maybe drive the bike up and turn the keys over to the new rider.
Another veteran actor who comes across very well, and steals all the scenes he is in, is Sam Elliott, who plays the mysterious Caretaker. This is the stereotypical wise one who understands the hero’s dilemma and can explain to him (and us) everything that is going on. Elliot is no stranger to superhero movies. He played the menacing General Ross in director Ang Lee’s “Hulk” a few years ago. With Elliot’s trademark southern drawl and smiling steely eyes, the clich’ works pretty well here. (By the way, if you want to see a film that really showcases Sam Elliot’s talent, I strongly recommend you go out right away and rent 2003’s “Off the Map”. In this far superior work, Eliot delivers one of the most intensely subtle and affecting performances I have ever seen on film, as a father who overcomes a crippling depression.)
The lead role of Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider is played effectively by Nicolas Cage, although his alter ego owes as much to the CG artists as to Cage’s skills as an actor. In fact, the animators used an actual x-ray of the actor’s skull, while computer programmers wrote brand new code for his flaming cranium. Cage, who is a confessed comic book fan, is likable as Blaze, although something is lost when he transforms into Ghost Rider. (He was originally considered for the lead role in the recent “Superman Returns”, by the way. The actor has said that he opted for the less iconic but darker role of Ghost Rider.) Once Cage “flames on,” instead of being frightened by his laughing skull, I found I was also laughing, not with Ghost Rider, but at him. He just looks too darn silly to believe.
Eva Mendes is TV reporter Roxanne Simpson, the movie’s love interest
. Although not credible at all as a news reporter, Mendes is quite likable as the girl (we all wish lived) next door. Mendes shows enough cleavage in every scene to keep any male over 14 interested until the credits roll. And she does have genuine chemistry with Cage, who nearly devours her face in one of their kissing scenes. (*Sidebar: chewing scenery aside, Mendes apparently has a problem with biting her nails. In many of the film’s close-up scenes, her lovely, long fingers appear barely tipped by nubs gnawed to the quick)
The biggest disappointment of all comes from the performance of Wes Bentley as the villainous Blackheart, the film’s main antagonist. Blaze is forced by Mephistopheles to battle Blackheart (Mephistopheles’ devilish son) and Blackheart’s posse of wicked fallen angels previously kicked out of heaven by none other than Saint Michael the Archangel. Blackheart, it seems, is “hell-bent” to take over the satanic family business against the wishes of dear old dad. Bentley won critical acclaim and numerous awards for his performance as teenager Ricky Fitts in the Best Picture of 1999, “American Beauty.” A fine actor, Bentley was dark and chilling as Fitts, but in “Ghost Rider”, he falls flat. The actor is too weighed down by excessive make-up, over-the-top effects, and corny dialogue for his performance to come through. It is a shame because I really expected Bentley to steal the show.
Writer/director Mark Steven Johnson does a competent job of directing “Ghost Rider”, although his script leaves a lot to be desired. He telegraphs the ending of how Ghost Rider will eventually overcome Blackheart so much so that even a child will see it coming a mile away. Johnson has written other superhero flicks, 2003’s “Daredevil” for example, which also suffered from silly dialogue. The director’s most effective accomplishment is the love story between Roxanne Simpson and Johnny Blaze, and I enjoyed that much more than the battle between Blackheart and Ghost Rider.
Who knows, maybe some day Eva Mendes and Nicolas Cage will team up for a romantic comedy, hopefully one that will not involve anyone’s head bursting into flames.
Mark Steven Johnson (director) / Mark Steven Johnson (screenplay)
CAST: Matt Long … Young Johnny Blaze
Raquel Alessi … Young Roxanne Simpson
Brett Cullen … Barton Blaze
Peter Fonda … Mephistopheles
Nicolas Cage … Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider
Donal Logue … Mack
Visit: Free Movies Onlie
Shortcut to important advice in the sphere of Bakerys – study the site. The time has come when proper information is truly within one click, use this opportunity.
Tags: Free Movies Online
Posted in Film · February 11th, 2010 · Comments (0)
Gazing Down, From a Suburb of Heaven, at an Earthly Purgatory
We all like children, and — at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama — we seem to like them best when they’re abused, endangered or dead. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril. This is hardly news (Charles Dickens made a nice living trafficking in the suffering of minors), but for some reason the past decade has seen an epidemic of cinematic and literary crimes against the young.
“Watch The Lovely Bones (2009),” Alice Sebold’s 2002 best seller, now a film directed by Peter Jackson, stands out as a singularly bold and complex treatment of this grim and apparently inexhaustible theme. In spite of the horrific act at the center of the story — the rape, murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl — the novel is not depressing or assaultive but rather, somewhat perversely, warm, hopeful and even occasionally funny.
Ms. Sebold pushes the dead-child narrative to an emotional extreme, and at the same time undermines its exploitive tendencies, by means of a simple and radical formal device. She makes the victim, a daughter of ’70s suburbia named Susie Salmon (“like the fish”), an omniscient, beyond-the-grave narrator, with a lively voice and a comfortable perch in the afterlife from which to survey the doings of her family, her friends and the neighbor who killed her. The novel is conceived with enough audacity to make this gimmick intriguing, and executed with enough art to make it effective.
Mr. Jackson’s film, from a script he wrote with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, his frequent collaborators, shows less audacity and too much art. Susie’s unearthly home, in the book a minimally sketched, nondenominational purgatory where the dead loiter on their way to heaven and keep tabs on unfinished business down on earth, has been expanded into a digitally rendered Wonderland of rioting metaphors, crystal seas and floating topiary. It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. “Heaven,” a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is “a place where nothing ever happens.”
Accordingly Mr. Jackson’s interest in the “in-between,” as this suburb of heaven is called, is primarily visual. The drama is all down below, where the surviving members of the Salmon family contend with the loss of their eldest child. Susie’s sister, Lindsey, is played by Rose McIver; her brother, Buckley, by Christian Thomas Ashdale, while George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), the reclusive, seething killer, prunes his rosebushes and decorates dollhouses. By all appearances he has gotten away with his crime, and Susie hovers in the in-between partly in the hope that she might find a way to bring him to justice.
She is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. We are always in Susie’s company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film — it makes us, in effect, Susie’s fellow ghosts — a detachment that Mr. Jackson’s stylish, busy technique makes more acute. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson shares her concern.
Yes, he grooves on the wild color schemes and peculiar fashions of 1973. (Richard Kelly had a similar field day with 1976-vintage patterned wallpaper and fat neckties in “The Box,” his recent entry in the suburban-’70s-supernatural sweepstakes.) And this director’s fondness for odd angles, intense close-ups and trick perspectives — he films one scene as if peering out from the rooms of a dollhouse — animates a drab Pennsylvania landscape of shopping malls and half-developed farmland. As a pictorial artifact “The Lovely Bones” is gorgeous. It pulses and blooms and swells with bright hues and strange vistas.
But it does not move. Or, rather, as it skitters and lurches from set piece to the next, papering the gaps with swirls of montage, it never achieves the delicate emotional coherence that would bring the story alive. My point is not that Mr. Jackson and his fellow screenwriters have taken undue liberties with the book, a complaint that some other critics have made. On the contrary, the problem with this “Lovely Bones” is that it dithers over hard choices, unsure of which aspects of Ms. Sebold’s densely populated, intricately themed novel should be emphasized and which might be winnowed or condensed.
The filmmakers’ evident affection for the book expresses itself as a desperate scramble to include as much of it as possible, which leaves the movie feeling both overcrowded and thin. The anguish in the Salmon household is dutifully observed: dad smashes his collection of model ships, mom withdraws and then flees to California, and in the middle of it grandma arrives, a brassy boozer played by Susan Sarandon. But there is a puppet-show quality to their grief, and also to the puzzlement of the detective (Michael Imperioli) investigating Susie’s death and the sorrow of her schoolmates, Ruth (Carolyn Dando) and Ray (Reece Ritchie), the object of Susie’s first and last major crush.
The title of “The Lovely Bones” refers to the relationships among these people that knit together in Susie’s absence. In Mr. Jackson’s version, though, they are hastily and haphazardly assembled, so that nothing quite fits together. The movie is a serial-killer mystery, a teenage melodrama, a domestic tragedy and a candy-hued ghost story — a cinematic version of the old parlor game in which disparate graphic elements are assembled into a single strange picture. It’s sometimes called Exquisite Corpse.
“The Lovely Bones” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The murder of a child, discreetly handled.
Directed by Peter Jackson; written by Mr. Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, based on the novel by Alice Sebold; director of photography, Andrew Lesnie; edited by Jabez Olssen; production designer, Naomi Shohan; music by Brian Eno; produced by Mr. Jackson, Ms. Walsh, Carolynne Cunningham and Aimée Peyronnet; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes.
WITH: Mark Wahlberg (Jack Salmon), Rachel Weisz (Abigail Salmon), Susan Sarandon (Grandma Lynn), Stanley Tucci (George Harvey), Michael Imperioli (Len Fenerman), Saoirse Ronan (Susie Salmon), Rose McIver (Lindsey Salmon), Christian Thomas Ashdale (Buckley Salmon), Carolyn Dando (Ruth) and Reece Ritchie (Ray Singh).
Visit Free Movies
Check out helpful tips in the sphere of Jake Ruston – please read this page. The times have come when concise info is truly at your fingertips, use this opportunity.
Tags: Free Movies Online
Posted in Film · January 14th, 2010 · Comments (0)