If you thought Halloween 4 was crap, wait until you see Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, a title so stupid it will make you light headed. Every movie is about his revenge. What's so special about this one? Other than being a piece of shit, I have no idea.
It's one year since the events of Halloween 4 and after shooting Michael Myers into an abandoned mine the good people of Haddonfield are ready to go on with their lives. Halloween arrives and SURPRISE! Michael isn't dead because your idiotic Haddonfield police neglected to actually check the mine for a body, showing you how great a film this is going to be. Michael is after his niece Jamie (Danielle Harris) again, who is out of her freaking mind after stabbing her mother with scissors at the end of the previous installment. Her parents, showing their love and affection for their adopted daughter, decide that the best way for her to heal mentally is for her to be under the care of creepy, charbroiled Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) because he is obviously a great children's psychiatric doctor.
So the film goes through the entire chop-chop, OH! there's a cat bullshit for two hours with Johnny Cash walking around town, chain smoking and looking at murder scenes. There's some kind of psychic link and tattoos... hell, forget it.
Halloween 5 is a turd. Donald Pleasence may have made the last installment tolerable, but even he can't save this lumbering, nut infested turd from bad writing, bad direction, and bad acting. You have to wonder if John Carpenter has seen any of these sequels. They just keep getting worse.
It is full of laughs, though.
Who would have thought that a film that has the likes of Ray Liotta, Harvey Keitel, and Robert DeNiro would have a true break out performance from...
Sylvester Stallone.
I remember first hearing about this film and the cast and thinking why in the hell Stallone was in this. He was going to ruin this film. I have to honestly say that Stallone's performance as Freddy Heflin, the small town sheriff of Garrison is Sylvester Stallone's greatest performance of his career. And yes, I am counting Rocky.
Cop Land is about a small town called Garrison, New Jersey that is right at the bottom of the George Washington bridge and faces New York City. It's a town built by cops from the city in an attempt to get out. The problem is that many of Garrison's cops are crooked and the recent shooting incident involving one of the officers drags internal affairs into the town and investigating what goes in in the precinct and the town of garrison itself. This leaves Sheriff Heflin (Stallone) right in the middle.
With a cast like this the acting is going to be excellent. Keitel and Robert Patrick as rogue cops. Liotta as the coke head undercover cop. Frank Vincent commits a real stretch as a union president. Writer/director James Mangold creates a story that is a compelling piece that is really a woe-is-me story from the point of view of Heflin. The sheriff is a disabled (lose of hearing in one ear from saving the local beauty queen in a submerged car) NYPD wannabe that most of the community sees as a Barney Fife. This is why the film isn't typical Stallone. This character is overweight, and almost wishy-washy. This isn't Rambo or Cobra, but a guy in a rut that he knows he'll never be able to get out of and at times he's too afraid to do anything about it otherwise he'll upset the status quo.
Cop Land is a cop movie like no other and is certainly under rated as hell. I never realized it buy it has come to my attention that this is almost like a modern day western, ala Shane or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a reluctant protector has to go above and beyond to save his town. A man's gotta do...
Wall Street is Oliver Stone's love letter to the bears and the bulls that spells out what the hell those guys in Manhattan were doing in the mid 1980's. The film revolves around young Bud Fox, a low level stock broker who not only dreams of being rich he's obsessed by it. He is able to worm his way into the inner circle of legendary tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and ends up working on deals that will bring them millions, only in illegal ways (insider trading).
Michael Douglas won a well deserved Oscar for his portrayal of Gekko, the arch stereotype of money grubbing in $2000 suits and offices with glass walls. Gekko is our Mr. Potter and Douglas plays him in a way that you like him and hate him all at the same time. Charlie Sheen is also good as Fox, the naive as hell boy who ends up way over his head and is able to somewhat dig his way out. The rest of the cast is just as exciting, except for Daryl Hannah who flat out sucks in this picture. But she was hot at the moment...
The story is a sound, almost Biblical fall from grace and redemption tale that focuses on taking the wrong path. Bud sells his soul to the devil and has to give something up to make things right. That's the basic tale. The only real complaint is based on my own ignorance of stocks and moving money. I don't understand much of the jargon that the film throws out there so some parts are difficult to follow, but when you get to the real humanity (or lack thereof) it's a splendid film that comes from the golden age of Oliver Stone. it's not his best work, but it is a very good film.
During the next three weeks we are going to be hit with what are essentially origin stories telling tales about characters that are already cemented in our popular culture. When the hell did all this start? Oh yeah, Lucas.
The first entry in this category this month is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. At least this title lays it out for you. If you've seen any of the X-Men trilogy you may remember that Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has no memory and is in search of what he is and where he came from. This film fills that gap, going back. Way back. 1840's back. Apparently Wolverine is immortal and along with his brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber) they fight in every U.S. war between the Civil War and Vietnam. They are soon recruited by Stryker (Danny Huston) into an elite group of mutant mercenaries. But as the group becomes more and more violent Wolverine walks out on the group and disappears into Canada. But some of his peers want him back and a figure eight of revenge ends up giving Wolverine his metal skeleton and claws.
Now what I predicted last summer has occurred. Critics hate this film and I'll be perfectly honest it's not the greatest super hero out there. But we're living in a post-Dark Knight world and anything that is in the least bit hokey isn't going to fly to some people. This film is just the first casualty. It's your basic, over the top action flick that doesn't really make sense because it doesn't have to. The acting is adequate with the highlights being Schreiber's Sabretooth and Ryan Reynolds too short appearance as Dead Pool. The direction is OK: it's an action movie so it's: kill, explosion, jump, repeat.
The real weak point is the script. You could have called this film Revenge. The problem is that the person that is being revenged against changes every five minutes. Enemies become friends, then enemies again in a blink of the eye. It's a tale of ever shifting goals that tends to get predictable and cliched in places. I also have to complain about the use of two characters in the film. The first is Gambit (Taylor Kitsch). Apparently he's in the film just so that Gambit can appear in the film. His character is complete throwaway seeming to be a last minute addition to make the fan boys happy. The second character is Reynolds' Wade Wilson a.k.a. Deadpool, a character that is treated so shabby that when you think about it the angrier you get. Here you have an interesting character that you refuse to build on, then use him as the catalyst of a turning point in the film. There's no time to bond with the character earlier in the film so that later on it's an "eh" moment. A waste.
Wolverine is meant to entertain and that it did for almost two hours. What's interesting is that this seems to be the first of a series about the X-Men characters and it's mainly a work-up to X-Men 2, which is the superior film of the trilogy. No, this film doesn't live up to that one but it accomplishes its job by being the first blockbuster out of the summer gate for 2009. It's not the greatest film in the world, but it keeps you interested.
One of John Huston's final films is a mob/love story/dark comedy that falls like a set of well placed dominoes. Jack Nicholson plays Charlie Partanna, a middle man in the Prizzi crime organization who becomes instantly obsessed with a woman named Irene (Kathleen Turner) at a wedding. Days later he winds up in Los Angeles looking for a large sum of money that had been stolen from the family and ends up whacking Irene's estranged husband. They meet again and quickly fall in love, but Charlie doesn't know that Irene is also a "contractor" who had been in town to pull a hit. The missing money, a kidnapping gone astray, and a jealous lover (Angelica Huston) end up turning this romance into a one debacle after another.The acting in Prizzi's Honor is great. Nicholson shows his chops once again, playing the not so bright Brooklyn criminal. At first it's shocking to hear Jack talk like this, but it quickly grows and becomes a stellar performance. Kathleen Turner's performance as Irene is laid back without the over acting that Turner has been known to perform. Of course Angelica Huston one an Oscar for this one, but there are two other actors that need some praise. The first is William Hickey as the Don, a shocking turn for someone who is usually an unpleasant old man. The second is John Randolph as Charlie's father. Randolph also pulls off the Brooklyn accent and is fabulous when he's on screen. Hickey and Randolph would team up again in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.Huston doesn't feel like a dinosaur directing this film. It's more modern than some of his younger brethren were producing at the time, yet there's a timeless quality to it. It could be the fifties and it could be present day under his direction. Prizzi's Honor stands as one of the last notches in John Huston's storied career and shows that he was able to adapt to the times and still be relevant in the film business. A great flick from a legend.
