Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella

*½

Cinderella, this can’t be what your daddy had in mind for you, baby.

The year is 1997. Pop-singer Brandy is cast in a made-for-TV version of Cinderella. No expense is spared on the out of the box casting. I personally thought that the mishmash of ethnicities for the characters was fine. The Prince, played by a Filipino actor named Paolo Montalban, comes from an interracial royal couple played by Whoopi Goldberg and Victor Garber (the dad on “Alias”). I don’t think that the film is trying assert that a black American and a white American having a child would be Filipino, but more that the race and ethnicity of characters are not relevant in this fairy tale. That is a nice message and led to some cool casting. The only problem is that the crux of Cinderella is that the Prince does not know the name of the girl he’s fallen in love with, nor can he apparently recognize her. The Prince isn’t presented as a moron, but it’s hard not to think of him as such when he cannot even remember something like her skin color. Of all of the fairy tales that Disney adapted, this might be the least suited to casting like this.

A counterpoint that one of my cousin’s raised in response to this was that it’s a fairy tale and a magic shoe might magically fit only one person. I wish the writers could have used magic to come up with a decent punchline for some of these wonderful actors to deliver. Of note, Jason Alexander and Bernadette Peters made me laugh through sheer comic force of will. On the other hand, I thought that Whitney Houston’s Fairy Godmother was disappointing. I also didn’t feel like Cinderella really spent that much time right by the fire – and if the movie cannot convince me that Cinderella’s cruel nickname is legitimate, then the whole story falls apart.

If there is a positive from this adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, it’s that clearly both Rodgers and Hammerstein were holding back. They kept the enduring melodies and great lyrics for The Sound of Music. I would rather have one great musical than two pretty good ones.

Blade

We have a good arrangement. He makes the weapons. I use them.

Blade – That song is a remix of Confusion.

What do you rate a movie that is simultaneously schlock and genius. I thought I should look up the director, because I’ve written about the writer – David S. Goyer. Stephen Norrington is that director. He only did four movies, the final one in 2003, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is infamous for being terrible. Sean Connery said it made him retire from acting. It made Alan Moore stop watching adaptations of his comics, which is too bad because V for Vendetta was great. Personally, I enjoyed the film for what it was.

Speaking of “for what it was,” Blade is 100% that. As much as Robert Downey, Jr. just became Tony Stark/Iron Man, Wesley Snipes became Blade. His casting was brilliant and so was everyone else in this. I’m surprised that the female lead, N’Bushe Wright, didn’t go on to have a bigger career since she’s solid in this. It is hard to seem grounded when growly Black vampire and even growlier old white guy are spitting vampire dialogue at her for minutes at a time, so I give her credit for enduring gibberish for hours every day.

The reason I put this movie on again was just for the opening scene. In my memory it was a masterpiece and truth be told it was even better than I remembered. The immortal Napster track “Blade – Techno Theme.mp3” is actually “Confusion (Pump Panel Reconstruction mix) by New Order”. Yes, “Blue Monday” and “Bizarre Love Triangle” New Order. I still have no idea who played the original vampire and the dumb white bro who comes along to be her snack in a shower of blood from ceiling spigots designed to put out fires. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that scene sets a tone that the rest of the film cannot possibly live up to, but makes the endeavor totally worthwhile anyways. Like X2 and Nightcrawler in the White House! A film that would not have happened without the success of Blade.

****

Blue Streak

**

Recently I recorded some of my memories from the house that my grandparents had in the Catskills until I was about 20. One of the memories I have is of going to a movie theater that my great-uncle worked at. I remember looking up at the booth and wondering what it looked like inside there. I probably watched five movies there, but I really don’t remember. Somehow I remember watching Blue Streak. For some reason my memory has merged this with Hollywood Homicide, but who knows why. Feel free to leave a comment if you have a theory. But that is why I have chosen this forgettable Martin Lawrence vehicle. Here are my thoughts as I watch(ed) the movie in 2021.

1. This theme song is terrible. Could they not get SWV (Sisters with Voices)? Also, most of the music in this is pretty bad.
2. Redfoot from The Usual Suspects is the villain in this!
3. Dave Chappelle is in this!
4. I knew that was John Hawkes! I didn’t know he was getting movie roles in 1999. My first memory of him is from “Deadwood.”
5. I love how the security guards in this movie look like real guards and behave like real ones, not the elite commandos from Oceans 11 type movies.
6. This police officer just looked at the roof of his car and sensed to duck from a falling man he couldn’t see. This reminds me of Dark Knight.
7. If your plan is to steal a stone and then keep it for yourself so you wouldn’t need to share it…why shoot your partner before you have the jewel and alert the police? That is ridiculous.
8. I think the math works on cutting a zip line and crashing like one floor below. But why would the zipper you hold stay attached to the cable so you wouldn’t just fall straight down? I think I may have more questions than answers in this movie.
9. What you gonna do with one shoelace? Floss your ass? Ha, I gotta go!
10. Future Oscar winner Octavia Spencer is in this!
11. This is competently directed.
12. I don’t trust this captain (see above photo of Graham Beckel). He’s been a dirty cop with the LAPD for 60 years, dating back to his time in the movie L.A. Confidential!
13. Luke Wilson is really playing up the boring white guy character.
14. It’s a cute premise – criminal has to pretend to be a detective in order to get back to the 17 million dollar jewel he hid before being arrested.
15. Police brutality is played for laughs. It’s…awkward.
16. And…the extremely rude insult is to call Martin Lawrence…”gay.”
17. I don’t care what time of year it is. Running in a pants and a leather jacket in L.A. seems awful.
18. Of course he drops his stolen diamond into a giant box of drugs. He has to take it out to look at it and kiss it because, of course he does.
19. The key to enjoying this is to just go along for the ride and accept that these are just setups for individual Martin Lawrence setpieces.
20. Not to be overly critical, but why would the Mexican Border Agents permit a man who illegally enters via speeding cop car, who then proceeds to fatally shot someone in their country, both leave and come back in without even checking his ID. I just cannot accept that as realistic. Everything up and until this point, sure, extremely believable, but this? No! Martin Lawrence, you have gone too far.

Total Recall

****

If I am not me, then who the hell am I?

In my life I have mocked Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Verhoeven, Philip K. Dick adaptations other than Blade Runner, and Sharon Stone. But together they team up for a surprisingly good movie. Superficially there is a lot to make fun of in this movie, but that just adds to its charm. This probably has the best Schwarzenegger performance and the jokes land a lot more squarely than in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.

Speaking of Starship Troopers, according to IMDb’s Connections, Michael Ironside loses an arm in both ST and TR. Ironside is an actor I have a soft spot for because I loved “Seaquest: DSV” and he stepped in for Roy Scheider as the skipper of the submarine. And I have a soft spot for Roy Scheider because he was Chief Brody in Jaws. And I didn’t realize his name was Brody until I worked as a chef and one of the managers would call me “Chief” instead of Chef and I finally asked why. I seem to have digressed a little bit, what I was trying to say was that I don’t really appreciate The French Connection and soundtrack/score. So if you want to watch a gritty 1970s drama about a racist cop breaking up an international drug smuggling ring, then watch Total Recall, which is set in the future (cooler than the 1970s) involves crime on Mars (cooler than NYC) and the racism in TR is about mutants!

Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe

*

Secundus (Sven-Ole Thorsen)

It has been a long, long time since I have seen such a terrible movie. It was so bad that I can only compare it to The Devil’s Rain, which to-date is the only 1 star movie I have seen since 2004. So now that I have explained how bad it is, I should tell you what Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe is.

Per IMDb – (1)An alien “policeman” arrives on Earth (2) to apprehend a renegade of his own race (3) who impregnates a woman (4) with a potentially destructive mutant embryo. Written by N.X.K. emegas@vecanti.org. [Parenthetical #s added]

(1) This “policeman” or “Finder” is Abraxas, played very poorly by the former professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura. He said “Ain’t got time to bleed” in the movie Predator, so I mistakenly thought that meant he could act. (2) The “renegade” is Secundus, which is actually a cool name and portrayed by the toughest mall security guard of all-time, Sven-Ole Thorsen. I could have just referenced Conan: The Barbarian, but Mallrats was the movie I loved first and in it he was La Fors, the head of security. Abraxas and Secundus were partners over 1,000 years ago, when Secundus betrayed the Finders and went to jail. Since then he has escaped repeatedly and murdered tons of living beings. BUT in this Finder code, you cannot kill a Finder, even one who has betrayed and killed other Finders and is literally not a Finder anymore. (3) Secundus lands on earth with Abraxas right behind him and after some fighting puts his hand on the stomach of a woman named Sonia, who is walking in the forest at night. (4) Secundus thereby impregnates Sonia and the Finder commanding officers order Secundus to kill Sonia just in case the baby (called a comater) has special powers. She gives birth, in the forest, a few minutes later because Abraxas doesn’t kill her.

And that is the first five minutes of the movie. The premise is stupid; the acting is bad; the characters have no chemistry; there is inconsistent morality; and the special power Tommy, the comater has is explained in this quote from Secundus,

Almost? Virtually? It’s not enough, when I can have it all! The key is the birth of a comater. The comater will be able to compute the anti-life equation. That child will be a comater. Join me. To stop me now, you have to kill the girl. I know you, you can’t do that.

If “the anti-life equation” sounds familiar, then you are probably a fan of DC Comics. Darkseid was the basis for Marvel’s Thanos. Darkseid uses the anti-life equation by repeating it enough times to enslave people to serve him. This movie didn’t even try to change that! It blatantly and boldly just passes this off as a thing in their universe.

What else is ridiculous in this? Beyond all of the scifi mumbo jumbo, and a crappy appearance by Jim Belushi, I think that Abraxas’ reaction to a topless woman was the worst. In 1,000+ years…not once has he seen a humanoid topless? And he was a virgin too. I wonder if Secundus was a virgin too, or if putting his hand on women’s stomachs qualifies as sex for a Finder.

I could truly go on and on about everything wrong in this film, but I wanted to say at least one nice thing about it. It did a lot of little stunts and practical special effects. At 86 minutes, it is more evidence in support of the 90-minute Crap Barrier in movies. This movie is not “so-funny-it’s good”, so please avoid it.

Good Will Hunting

This was not the first time I had seen this movie. I watched this movie when it came out in high school. Then I rewatched it with my ultimate frisbee team in college. Now I have rewatched it with family. It went from engenius, to trite, to surprisingly good. I find it interesting to see the parts that I remembered clearly, and the parts that I did not.

• How do you like them apples? – I always hated that line, because it does not make sense and never will make sense. I hoped that rewatching would provide more context. I felt worse for the phony grad student than I had in the past.
• Solving the impossible problem – This one happens pretty much how I remembered it. It got parodied in Community though, so that helps.
• It’s not your fault – This got parodied a lot too, so it’s a testament to Matt Damon’s performance that even after the satire, the scene can evoke such strong emotions

Also interesting are some of the key elements that I forgot about.

• Best part of my day – Ben Affleck’s confusing quote about the best part of his day. Let me tell you what I do know. Every day I come by to pick you up. And we go out we have a few drinks and a few laughs, and it’s great. But you know what the best part of my day is? It’s for about ten seconds from when I pull up to the curb to when I get to your door. Because I think maybe I’ll get up there and I’ll knock on the door and you won’t be there. No goodbye, no see you later, no nothin’. Just left. I don’t know much, but I know that. The confusion stems from the lack of a goodbye. People want closure, so this is odd.
• Not being honest or open with Minnie Driver – I somewhat remembered this part of the film, but I forgot about him hesitating to pull the trigger on moving out of Boston with her.
• How/why Robin Williams provides therapy for Matt Damon – He did it for Stellan Skarsgaard and was like the 8th choice.

My friend took us to this bar. If you notice, the table is oddly thin.

To me this is a **** movie. It is enjoyable, filled with emotion and good performances. But there was also room for improvement. Also, the Red Sox suck and the movie’s attempts to make people care about some attachment to them were major missteps, but I understand that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in Boston, so it’s not their fault. It’s not their fault.

Face/Off

**½

OK, then… plan B, why don’t we just kill each other?

John Woo is a great director. I can understand how American moviegoers from 1996 – 2003 might not have realized this, but I assure you that he is great. His American run for me started with Broken Arrow, a movie that reinvigorated Christian Slater’s career, by attaching himself to John Travolta’s reinvigorated career. A year later Woo teamed up again with John Travolta to make this movie. Three years after this he got hired to make Mission: Impossible II. Then came Paycheck in 2003. To describe these movies as critically panned would be accurate. But financially they all crushed it, except for Paycheck which was poorly marketed—how else can a John Woo adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story starring Ben Affleck, Aaron Eckhart, Uma Thurman and Paul Giamatti, with a score from John Powell not make money?

This is a long way of saying that I think that although Face/Off is over the top, self-seriously cheesy, and just plain ridiculous, I think it was well directed. There were so many stunts and so many action shots. Internationally this film made more than it did domestically, which makes sense considering how a functional understanding of English probably detracted from the enjoyment of the film. So if you want an exciting action movie directed by John Woo…you should probably watch Hard Boiled, but if that is not available, this one would do the trick.

Ladybugs

**

What’d you do? A girl doesn’t give the opposing team the finger and tell their coach, “Up yours!” A girl doesn’t refer to the referee a blind bastard. A girl doesn’t slap another girl on the ass and say, “You’re hot stuff!” And a girl doesn’t say “I gotta take a leak so bad I can taste it!”

First off, let me say that “How Did This Get Made” deserves all the credit for getting me to watch this movie again. It is unlikely that anything I say here will be half as funny as what they said. So just click that link and be shocked at how disturbing and offensive this Rodney Dangerfield soccer comedy really is.

One thing their review touched on, but I do not think they connected it, was that the inappropriately sexualized teenage girl in this film was played by Vinessa Shaw, who was 17 when this was filmed. She was 16 when she was inappropriately sexualized in Hocus Pocus. Even under these conditions she seems like a solid actress, but it is still so gross to watch as an adult. As the podcast repeatedly hammers home — if this story were told from the point of view of the teenagers, this could have been different, but it was not, and that makes it far creepier. But hey, when I was 11 I thought this was funny, so if it were not full of awful life lessons and offensive stereotypes, I would say it’s just a movie for kids. But it is not. It definitely is not.

Defending Your Life

**½

I said “pretty much” never lied. I didn’t say I never, ever lied. You have to lie sometimes… in an emergency. But, ah, it doesn’t mean the bond is affected. If you’ve got the bond the bond is always there, and if you have to lie occasionally you’re not going to interfere with the bond. You know, the bond can wait for a little lie and… in the end it’s there for you. You know, sometimes in the middle of a lie I found that the bond would kick in… maybe squeeze a little truth out.

This Albert Brooks movie is very Albert Brooksian. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. As writer/director/lead actor he can really, really tell a story about himself. The premise for this story seems like it would be harrowing — Judgment City, with one week to defend your life. But this is a comedy, so the stakes are actually extremely low. If you win, you get to evolve. If you lose, you get sent back to earth to be reincarnated as a human again with no memory of this experience. Even evolving does not seem objectively better than being a new human. The basis for this determination is that two “Big Brains” provide snippets from the decedent’s life before two judges. The basis for their judgment? Fear. During life did the decedent overcome fear? Not maturity, kindness, bravery, empathy, but fear. Note, they do not look for bravery directly, more a lack of fear. Bravery involves facing your fears, not failing to have fears in the first place.

Presented in even lower stakes than the nebbish-y Brooks, is Brooks’s love interest, Meryl Streep. Her story is totally subordinate to Brooks’s. She is a slam dunk for evolving, so you never need to worry for her. She died leaving behind her kids and husband on earth, but she is presented as totally available to Brooks. She is presented as the perfect woman, which her prodigious acting skill allows her to portray despite Brooks’s self-centered view.

Fear is the driving force on determining your…value? maturity? worth? Why not if you’re a good person? Streep is so completely fine in this situation, she wasn’t a real character. Her acting covered up a lot (bad writing), but what do you expect from such a narcissistic project. And since it was so self-centered the film fails to ask why is this angel at all attracted to this putz? The second best performance in the film goes to Rip Torn’s Bob Diamond. The best part of the film was the look and creation of Judgment City.

As I wrap up this review, I think it is important to include that I did not buy the ending. But this film was not made for me to watch, it was made for Albert Brooks to watch and to make his friends watch with him.

Deadly China Hero

I seldom drink wine, because I always killed others after drunk. OR I seldom drink wine, because I can’t stop giving heavy punches when drunk.

The best translation has to be somewhere between those two statements. Hopefully from the small image I chose, you can already tell that this movie does not take itself very seriously. If you search for large images “Jet Li chicken vs centipede” you only get 1 result! And it’s of the secondary/tertiary villain who gets killed by Wong Fei Hung’s disciples, one of whom is Ah So with cinema’s largest fake buck teeth.

At this point I have no idea what to give this movie. The opening was so jarringly awful that I texted a college buddy, with whom I am sure I watched this movie, “Deadly China Hero (Jet Li) is not good. I don’t understand why this movie exists. I want to know why we enjoyed it at the time.” I decided to continue watching so I could review it anyways. The subtitles were not great, the acting over the top, which some people can pull off, and others cannot. For some context Deadly China Hero (aka Last Hero in China) is Jet Li in 1993 portraying China’s greatest folk hero, Wong Fei-Hung. Jet Li is my favorite Wong Fei Hung, and when I say that, I am choosing him over Jackie Chan as the Drunken Master! Master Wong gets called the Chinese Robin Hood, probably because he stood up for the peasants against the British in late 19th century China. In real life he was a doctor too.

Two years before this film, Jet Li became a major Chinese star with Once Upon a Time in China (Wong Fei-Hung was the Chinese name of the film). It was a serious, if propagandistic, movie. He followed it up with an awesome sequel, and a less awesome sequel. And then, he did this parody. It felt like blasphemy to hear the Wong Fei-Hung theme appropriated for parody—it’s actually a version of On General’s Orders, which I just learned. But somewhere I started to get invested in the kidnapping story, probably a little more with each awesome Jet Li fight scene. We are talking Yuen Woo-Ping here! The guy they hired to choreograph the fight scenes in The Matrix.

Jet Li did not disgrace Wong Fei-Hung here, it was more like zany people were around him. The film never turned some corner that made it fully serious, but the villain and his cackle actually became more menacing as it became more and more clear how deadly he could be. So, sure, the penultimate fight scene is chicken costume Jet Li vs deadly centipede, but the final scene gave me chills. When he grabs a jug of wine that could have been in Drunken Master, and that theme hits, I was 100% behind this film and felt the prior 78 minutes had been totally worth it to get to this scene. At 84 minutes, it comes it below the crap barrier, and in many ways, this is a crappy movie, but it has some truly wonderful moments. I would not have written this long of a review of a 1993 Jet Li movie if I hadn’t really enjoyed it.

***