Movie & Video reviews

Ben Dugan

2/23/2006 - Fifth Element (1997)

  This film is just weird enough to be popular. And that is what it is – weird. It is an off center science fiction film that draws the viewer in so as to see what happens next. It is not as high caliber as Star Trek or Star Wars but does manage to hold its own. It has become a cult classic in the science fiction circles. It has an all-star cast: Bruce Willis stars as lovestruck Major turned cabdriver Corbin Dallas, along with Milla Jovovich as the beautiful super-soldier believed to be the Fifth Element. Gary Oldman is the ruthless Emanuel Zorg, Ian Holm is Father Cornelius, and Chris Tucker plays celebrity D.J. Ruby Rhod.

  In 23rd Century New York City, down on his luck cabdriver Corbin Dallas gets the surprise of his life when the woman of his dreams suddenly crashes through the roof of his flying taxi and into his backseat. Corbin is instantly caught up in an eternal and universal battle between good and evil on which the fate of the Earth depends. Leeloo, the mysterious young woman, who has fallen into Corbin's life, is sought after by both forces, and it's up to him to protect her and see that she is able to carry out her secret mission. Together with the help of the government and a pair of monks, Corbin and Leeloo travel to the vacation planet of Flaustin. Flamboyant radio D.J. Ruby Rhod is also along for the ride. Aboard the luxurious cruise ship hotel known as "Flaustin Paradise," Corbin and Leeloo battle off the attacks of hideous alien rogues and powerful businessman Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, and meet an enthralling opera singer called Diva Plavalaguna who provides them with the four sacred stones necessary to save the Earth. Of course, the stones are useless to the heroes without the most important element to their cause, the Fifth Element.

  If you can handle a silly premise intertwined with continuous action and visually amazing scenes then this is the movie for you. Check it out at your video rental counter. It’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Reign of Fire

  This science fiction film presents an interesting effort to get its message across. There are holes in the plot and storyline but it still works as a futuristic doomsday piece. The world has been destroyed by dragons, and a new world rises from the ashes. First they have to kill the main dragon to stop the dragon species from dominating human existence.

  At the age of twelve, Quinn Abercromby (Ben Thornton) is the first to lay eyes upon an enormous fire-breathing dragon. As his mother is a construction engineer, she and her crew inadvertently awaken the deadly creature. Now, eighteen years later, it is the year 2020. The earth has changed as the dragon and his offspring have scorched the earth and the human race is on the brink of extinction. Grown up Quinn (Christian Bale) now leads a community of English men, women, and children as they struggle to survive in Northumberland. But the future looks grim, their existence is only the stretching out of the inevitable: the humans will not last long. One day, a U.S. military commander Denton Van Zant (Matthew McConaughey) shows up with a small battalion of tanks and an Apache gunship, flown by pilot Alexandra (Alex) Jenson (Izabella Scorupco).

  The meeting between Quinn and Van Zant immediately becomes a clash of wills as the two stubborn individuals have decidedly different outlooks on their bleak future. While Quinn believes that he and his band of survivors can hide and outlive the dragons, Van Zant believes their only chance is to destroy the creatures once and for all by executing a daring plan. There will be no compromise for the two men, yet both of them know that they are running out of time.

  While the special effects are fairly well done, you can’t take this movie too seriously. If you appreciate this movie for what it is, then I would recommend it for an evening's entertainment just to say that you have seen it.

Blue Chips (1994)

  This is an excellent film and was directed by William Friedkin. It deals with college basketball and a Bobby Knight type of coach. It also deals with shaving points and illegal gambling. These activities are still prevalent today. Blue Chips is an engaging and thought-compelling look at a dark side of sports. Nolte gives a great performance as a coach forced to go under the table to get his team back to its winning ways.

  Nick Nolte stars as college basketball coach Pete Bell who is the head coach for the struggling basketball squad of Western University; and Bell does not enjoy the "struggling" part of that equation at all. He does not like losing. Therefore, Bell lowers himself to engaging in shady, under-the-table tactics in order to stock his anemic roster with star-caliber players (played by real-life basketball stars Shaquille O'Neal and Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway).

  Many other famous faces from the world of basketball put in appearances in Blue Chips too, including famed Indiana University coach Bobby Knight, which is a bit ironic, because Nolte's character is quite obviously patterned a great deal after Knight's coaching style and explosive temperament. Coach Rick Pitino and legendary former players Larry Bird and Bob Cousy also put in cameos.

  Nolte is outstanding as Coach Pete Bell. Other solid performances are turned in by Mary McDonnell and J.T. Walsh. Walsh died in 1998. He was excellent in everything he had ever done, including this movie.

  While verbally abusing his players during the film-opening sequence, Coach Bell proceeds to also wreak havoc on the water cooler and whatever else happens to be within arm's reach. It's a great beginning to the film that sets the loud and argumentative tone for the movie.

  With the NCAA Final Four tournament coming up, this would be a good rental to check out and see how the “behind the scenes” really works.

  Highly recommended. You’ll be glad to say that you saw this one.

Any Given Sunday

Review by Travis Lavan 

The idea behind Any Given Sunday was ostensibly to expose the tug of war between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideology in the world of professional football – the friendship driven ‘patriarch’ model of the past and the supposed win-at-all-costs corporate greed-driven world of the present.

  These two extremes are caricatures not entirely representative of the reality of professional sports but for the sake of storytelling it isn’t a comparison without merit. In fact, there are probably two ways to go about making a movie about such a thing.

  You could craft an imperfect but complex tale full of personal drama and gritty trench-warfare conviction like North Dallas Forty, or…you could spew forth a pompously overblown, garishly colored, obnoxious slice of late nineties hip-hop zeitgeist like Any Given Sunday.

  That Any Given Sunday and North Dallas Forty are often compared it isn’t entirely fair – North Dallas Forty is an exponentially better film, for one - but it isn't entirely without reason. Both films purport to be a somewhat realistic portrayal of modern professional football, but while Forty is based on a well regarded novel by an actual former professional football player, Sunday is merely the speculative nonsense of someone (writer John Logan later redeemed himself by penning the infinitely superior Gladiator) who would appear to know very little about his subject matter.

  And Sunday is of course directed by Oliver Stone - a man who seems to feel he knows a little bit about everything.

  The basics are these:

  Idealistic Miami Sharks head coach Tony D'Amato (A badly miscast Al Pacino) has crafted a winning tradition in his town based on the traditional values of hard work, dedication, discipline and loyalty. As the film starts we discover the team is on a four-game losing streak – much to the chagrin of new team owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz, even more hopelessly miscast as a middle aged white male in a young woman’s body).

  I was at odds with this immediately. Even in today's win-now-or-you're-fired NFL paradigm it is customary for just about any franchise to give a new coach at least one or two full seasons to run a franchise into the ground before he’s shown the door. But D’Amato isn’t a new coach; he’s a veteran winner with a proven track record. That a new owner would begin to lose such absolute faith in a historically successful coach after just four games for me stretched credibility to almost outlandish proportions.

  Desperate - after four games - for a change in fortune, Pagniacci’s prayers are answered when historically dependable veteran quarterback and D’Amato Best Boy Jack Rooney (Dennis Quaid, almost typecast) goes down with a season-ending injury. Enter showboating third stringer Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx, stereotypically cast as a black athlete who is a total pill). Beaman has a slow start when he can’t quite make D’Amato’s system work but quickly recovers when he begins calling his own plays.

  The team suddenly starts to win – thanks to Sunday’s typically erroneous notion that a heroic quarterback is the sole factor necessary to a team’s success - and thus begins the tug of war between D’Amato and Pagniacci with Beaman gleefully cashing in on the conflict, playing one off the other as a spoiled child does a pair of hopelessly myopic parents.

  What we now see is D’Amato’s ‘team first’ philosophy being challenged by a rebellious upstart and a meddling owner who has sided with the quarterback! At this point, even despite the simplistic manner in which this film treats its characters and subject matter, there still could have been room here for compelling drama.

  You see, in a nutshell Oliver Stone is trying to tell us that football has changed. It is no longer a sport based on honest American values of teamwork and professionalism, but is now a faceless corporate juggernaut run by soulless businessmen and unscrupulous advertisers who will gladly sell the players, the fans and the game itself up the river just to make a buck.

  And of course by extension Stone is most likely trying to tell us that America has changed as well.

So is any of this true? Is the NFL (who wisely declined its participation, leading to the ridiculous team names and uniforms on display in the film) more a money grubbing corporate entity than a sports league? Of course it is. But the music business stopped being about music long before the NFL ceased being about football. Journalism has likewise degenerated from the voice of America’s conscience into a fragmented, biased cacophony of ad-driven media swill.

  But what few people ever consider is that perhaps these things aren’t bad so much as they just are. Perhaps all of these things are as much a product of public ignorance and apathy as they are the work of some unseen and nefarious Corporate Conspiracy.

  Fans of any medium tend to receive the entertainment they demand and deserve. We live in a fast paced world that insists upon instant gratification of desire and if the fans who watch the sport of football were more accepting of the fact that it takes time to build a winning team, team owners might be as well.

  The needs of any business are driven by the demands of the marketplace as often as they are by the whims of shadowy back rooms stuffed with snickering, cigar chomping middle aged white males. What we see in Any Given Sunday is a gross oversimplification of a complex subject and a clumsy attempt to superimpose the state of one of America’s most beloved past times onto the state of America itself.

  But nothing has happened in the NFL that fans have not allowed and very little happens in America that we ourselves don’t condone through the consent of the voting booth or the folly of our own inaction. As he often does, Stone forgets to place any culpability for the world we live in at the feet of the people who live in it; rather he chooses to place it at the altar of the Forces of Darkness that in his mind, truly control everything.

  Yet neither sports leagues nor governments exist in vacuums, and we all regularly receive from each precisely what we’ve asked for. There is accuracy in some of what Stone shows us in this film but it is accuracy of the over-the-top, dumbed down MTV variety that Stone has always implied was beneath him, but we see here that it isn’t.

  What Stone’s movie lacks in realism, it more than makes up for in ridiculously exaggerated game action sequences that reminded me of the comically unbalanced representation of boxing famously depicted in the Rocky franchise. Add to this enough flashy rap montages to start a VH1 spin off and more nauseatingly trite, ultra-hyperbolic oratory than even Al Pacino can chew on.

  Do you remember how your ninth grade math teacher taught you that you can’t multiply anything by zero, because you would just get zero? Well I am here to tell you that she was wrong. Somewhere out there there’s a number you can multiply by zero to get even more zero, and only Oliver Stone knows what it is.

  It is part of the equation he used to make Any Given Sunday.