Let the Fire Burn (***3/4)

Anyone who lived in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1980s will remember the police confrontation with the radical group MOVE on May 13, 1985, that resulted in the deaths of eleven group members, including children, and an out-of-control fire that destroyed multiple city blocks in the West Philly neighborhood. Those who don’t remember may find even more bewildering the sequence of events that resulted in such a calamity. This documentary tells the story extremely well using, exclusively, period footage, primarily local news coverage, film of the hearings held by the city in the months after the confrontation, and the videotaped deposition of thirteen-year-old Michael Moses Ward, who had been living in MOVE house with his mother and survived the conflagration.

Told sequentially, the film provides some of the history of MOVE (not an acronym), which formed in the early 1970s. Under the guidance of spiritual leader John Africa (whose followers adopted the same last name), the group espoused an anti-authority, pro-self sufficiency philosophy and rejected most modern technology, though not autos. To many people, they just seemed dirty and odd. To their neighbors, they were a nuisance. To the police, they represented a threat, and a 1978 confrontation with the group left one officer dead, one MOVE member beaten on camera, and the MOVE “compound” destroyed.

After that, the group relocated to a row house where the 1985 confrontation took place. The last two thirds of the film recount that fateful event, interspersing the news footage with the later testimony in a way that seems as clear as possible and fair to all sides. Today, the MOVE fiasco is a symbol of a decade when the city had reached a low point. It’s still possible to argue about the extent MOVE was to blame and how the city should have handled the group and the plan to evict it from the West Philly row house. It’s unclear what lessons are to be drawn from it. Still, watching it occur is like watching a suspense thriller, albeit a depressing one.

A sad footnote that occurred after the film was complete was the death of Ward, also known as Birdie Africa, in September 2013.

IMDb link

viewed 11/7/13 7:30 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/7/13

The Spectacular Now (***)

There are basically two types of movies about high schoolers. One plays in multiplexes; it usually has a bunch of actors in their mid-20s, divides the kids into a bunch of types, usually sorted by popularity, prominently features a prom or other party as a major plot device, and can be summed up in a sentence. The other, indie-type feature is usually adapted from a novel, features more age-appropriate casting, a first love, more prominent parents, and main characters who are writers or artists. It can be summed up as a coming-of-age story. This one is a little bit of a mash-up. The main character, Sutter, is played by Miles Teller, an actor in his mid-20s who a few months earlier was in 21 & Over, in which he played a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drank too much. Here he begins as a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drinks too much and is busy trying to get his nerdier pal laid. Pretty conventional, as is the college-essay-question framing device and lengthy narration employed.

The other main character, however, is played by Shailene Woodley, whose angry-daughter role in the Descendants was as memorable as George Clooney’s lead. She’s every bit as good here in a completely different kind of role, a brainy girl who’s into genre novels and Japanese animé. She draws, too. Unfortunately, all of those characteristics are depicted in the very beginning of the movie and dropped thereafter. She is unfortunately mostly a character there so that Sutter can work out his issues. Still, in every scene she is utterly natural.

As for the story, it is kind of a first-love story (first for her — he’s getting over a breakup), in some ways a popular-guy-meets-unpopular-girl story, but also a coming-of-age story. The drinking issue is handled with subtlety. Sutter drinks too much, but he has other characteristics.

IMDb link

viewed 8/21/13 7:15 at Ritz East and posted 8/21/13

Lebanon, PA (***1/4)

Ben Hickernell made a pretty good suspense drama called Cellar that never got shown outside of a few film festivals. But at least he got to make a second movie, and it’s also pretty good. Here, a Philadelphia yuppie with pro-whale and pro-choice stickers on his VW finds himself in a conservative small town following his father’s death. It’s a chance to get away from a marketing job he’s tired of and a girlfriend who’s dumped him. Charmed by a local schoolteacher (Samantha Mathis), he thinks of staying. But different values, and not just saying grace at supper, come along with the change of scenery.

The pro-choice message isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan, as one of the two main plotlines involves the pregnancy of a high school senior who lives across from the father’s house. The other involves the charming teacher, who’s married. The screenplay is solid, though not penetrating. It’s a movie about a small town, but clearly from the perspective of the outsider. Yet the duel plotlines were enjoyable, and I wasn’t sure how either would end. Rachel Kitson makes a credible debut as the pregnant girl, whose dream of going to college at Drexel may be jeopardized.

IMDB link

viewed 10/15/10 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/15–16/10

Night Catches Us (***)

Ang Lee’s brilliant film The Ice Storm eyed the osmotic flow of counterculture values into suburban America, and Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty followed 1960s radicals still on the run almost 20 years later. Tanya Hamilton’s film, set in 1976, revolves around former Black Panther Marcus (Anthony Mackie), who returns to his former home in West Philadelphia when his father dies. There he finds varying reactions—a brother resenting his disappearance, a fellow Panther calling him “snitch,” and a friend and lawyer (Kerry Washington) offering to assist. Washington’s character, who defends Panthers but seems no longer to have her heart in the movement, is a widow who deflects her daughter’s questions about the past.

The best thing about the film is its portrayal of the era, although clearly the low budget prevented better known songs from being used. (The Roots contribute a score, however.) The Panther movement as portrayed has devolved into a vestige of itself, its leaders imprisoned, as Marcus was, or mellowed out, as he is, its remaining followers without an agenda other than nihilism. Mostly white cops patrol the middle-class neighborhood with little attempt to integrate themselves into its fabric. It is an era of decline in old cities like Philadelphia.

Hamilton paces the film deliberately, holding back on revealing the circumstances by which Marcus wound up in prison, and how his former colleague was killed. Meanwhile, the presence of Marcus forces the young mother into her own kind of self-examination. I might have wished for there to be more about the Panther movement and what it meant to these characters and what it meant to the United States. Nonetheless, I appreciated the movie’s lack of an agenda in depicting this fading bit of history.

IMDB link

viewed 12/24/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/27/10

Dare (**3/4)

An ego-shattering dressing down sets good girl Alexa (Emmy Rossum) to a do-it-yourself refurbishing that has repercussions for her loner pal Ben (Ashley Springer) and bad boy Johnny (Zach Gilford). Alan Cumming has a brief but memorable role as the sharp-tongued acting coach who tells Alexa, a prim high school senior in a posh Philadelphia suburb, that she can’t be great without having taken any risks in life. Her initial steps at doing so are somewhat comical and involve changing clothes, but that gives way to taking them off along with Johnny, who hadn’t previously noticed her. Ben gets jealous, though not in the way you might think. While Ben and Alexa are sexually inexperienced, Johnny is more emotionally inexperienced, and Dare is about these characters prodding each other into sexual and emotional entanglements for which they haven’t prepared. They surprised me too, so I won’t give much away.

Dare, expanded from a 2005 short, provocatively explores its themes, but is somewhat forced in its plotting. The events, particularly jock Johnny's transformation into sensitive new age guy, would be more believable if they weren’t compressed into an extremely short time span. Dare is a promising, lively first feature for its writer, David Brind, and director, Adam Salky, but would have been better if its dramatic conflict seemed to spring organically from the plot rather than the latter having, seemingly, been created to fit the former.

IMDB link

viewed 10/17/09 at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival screening) and reviewed 12/4/09

The New Year Parade (***)

If you live in Philadelphia, where this drama is set, you know the parade in question is the Mummers Parade, where large string bands compete every year for prizes and prestige. Covering the twelve months in between the 2004 and 2005 parades, this somber feature debut by writer-director Tom Quinn looks at a parental breakup from the viewpoint of a musician and his teenage sister. Quinn makes a virtue of a low budget by shooting in a naturalistic style and making good use of South Philly location shooting. The actors, especially leads Greg Lyons and Jennifer-Lynn Welsh, match the low-key vibe. What the movie lacks in terms of fancy plotting it makes up for in authenticity and empathy for the characters, and although the fact that the father and son are members of a string band is not the only focus, it provides an element of novelty.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/5/09

The Happening (***)

People are going to disagree with me about this M. Night Shyamalan movie, I realize that, but I liked it. They’ll disagree because it has pretty much no ending, more pseudoscience than an astrology textbook, and precious little action. But I still marveled at Shyamalan’s ability to conjure up creepiness out of stillness and silence, out of amber Pennsylvania fields and widescreen Americana. Even the opening, a time-lapse shot of clouds moving against a darkening sky to the James Horner score, is creepy.

In the 1960s, the term “happening” gained currency as a term applied to large gatherings of people for some hip purpose. Here, something is attacking large crowds and turning them into suicidal automatons. The movie’s R rating comes from some of the gruesome ways they off themselves. As for the cause, I won’t give that away, and really, the movie doesn’t either with any degree of specificity, which is one of the things that will probably annoy a lot of people. Let’s just put it this way. Mark Wahlberg is supposed to be a science teacher at “Philadelphia High School,” and in one of the first scenes we see him telling his students that nature is something “beyond our understanding” and that reasons science posits will be “just a theory,” thereby echoing the language creationists use to disparage evolution. At this point I rolled my eyes, and not for the last time. This is a science teacher?

Yet I was enthralled by the way Shyamalan depicts the frightened people trying to figure out what is happening as they fan out from Philly to the countryside, where loonies live. (That’s the director’s apparent opinion, not mine.) Shymalan focuses primarily on the teacher and his googly-eyed wife (Zooey Deschanel), who seem to have grown apart. To Shyamalan, a continental catastrophe is worth years of $150-an-hour counseling. At least he doesn’t (overtly) suggest that it was God’s plan, which just ruined Signs for me (along with lame aliens). Think of this as Signs with an anticlimactic ending instead of a stupid one. I mean, you don’t even get to see how many people die. All that matters is whether one married couple get over their rough patch.

My suspicion that this would be a polarizing movie was confirmed by looking at the IMDB score, which confirmed a higher-than-usual percentage of both 1 and 10 ratings. I admit that the movie is dumber than Britney Spears’s last baby, but the small details and atmosphere made it work for me. Or maybe I was just glad not to be re-watching Shyamalan’s last effort, the godawful fairy tale Lady in the Water. Sometimes these things are just beyond understanding.

IMDB link

viewed 6/14/08; reviewed 6/17/08

Baby Mama (***)

Even as unwed motherhood is declining in the US, it’s becoming a minor epidemic in American cinemas. Unlike some of her on-screen sisters, Tina Fey’s character has been trying to get pregnant, but that hasn’t worked out. Enter Amy Poehler as the surrogate she hires, via an agency. There’s a slight parallel with Helen Hunt’s character in Then She Found Me (released a week later), who’s also nearing 40 and wants a biological child. However, the better parallel is to Knocked Up, in which Seth Rogen’s underachiever tries to mesh with the professional gal he’s impregnated. Baby Mama, a directorial debut for Austin Powers co-writer Michael McCuller, is less funny, but part of what both movies are about is class. At first blush, it seems like the Poehler character will simply be a crass and nutrition-averse pox on health-food exec Fey’s snooty Philadelphia house. Theirs is a forced marriage without the sex. But that only forms part of the story; both characters are sympathetic, making Poehler a female counterpart to Rogen, not Adam Sandler. Supporting characters account for some of the funnier parts, including Dax Shepard as Poehler’s low-life boyfriend, and Sigourney Weaver as the over-50, yet infuriatingly fertile, operator of the surrogate agency. Some romantic comedy elements come courtesy of Greg Kinnear, whose regular-guy vibe is a match for emerging star Fey.

IMDB link

viewed 5/3/08

Pride (**1/4)

-->? The place is Philadelphia in the age of plaid, when the O’Jays (1974) and Philly soul ruled the charts. Unable to land a job as a math teacher, former college swimmer Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard) takes a job at the run-down Marcus Foster Recreation Center, which is about to be shut down by the city. There, he starts a team that proves that black kids really can swim.

+ The best things here are Howard and the character he plays. While the storyline is heavily fictionalized, it’s true to Ellis’s modest, unassuming way. As a profile of Ellis in February 14’s Philadelphia City Paper put it, “When there was racism, he taught his swimmers to recognize it, then rise above it.” Bernie Mac lends some gentle humor as the rec center’s other employee. The pacing is good.

- Pride strains so hard to be inspirational, as the title suggests, that it feels false. The plotting seems convenient rather than believable. Take, for example, how Ellis supposedly gets his team. One day, a city worker takes down the basketball net outside Foster where five friends like to play. Lo and behold, all five agree to transform themselves into a swim team. Gee, not one of them says, no thanks, I’m not that into swimming? Tom Arnold is the cartoon racist who won’t hire Ellis to work at the preppy “Main Line Academy.” Lo and behold, not only is he the head of the school, but he also coaches the swim team, which just so happens to be the best in the Northeast corridor, thus the eventual rival to Ellis’s team. There’s a cartoon criminal too, singlehandedly representing the element Coach Ellis is trying to help the kids resist. He’s so generic you can barely tell if he’s a drug dealer (as I assumed) or a moonshiner, and the scene where the coach faces him down is way corny. The students themselves are underwritten characters, and there’s hardly anything about swimming or Ellis’s actual coaching techniques.

= **1/4 I’ll admit that the preview audience seemed to like this from the comments I overheard, and it certainly left me in a pleasant mood, but since about a dozen of these “inspirational” BOATS (based on a true story) movies come out every year, there are better ones to watch. Recently preceding this were Invincible, another Philly sports story that was actually partly filmed there, and Freedom Writers, which isn’t a sports movie but covers the raising-up-urban-youth angle. You want both? Watch The Gridiron Gang.

IMDb link

Shooter (**3/4)

? A US special-forces marksman (Mark Wahlberg), hired to thwart a presidential assassination, winds up a target of the would-be killers. Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directed Jonathan Lemkin’s adaptation of the Stephen Hunter novel.
+ I was into this movie for the first half, although I figured out who the villains were. (No big deal, as that gets revealed early.) Here we see the hero display all the tricks of his trade. Like so many criminals, he figures out that Philly is a good place to kill someone and get away with it, so the pivotal scenes take place around Independence Hall, and there’s some impressive aerial footage of the city. With the help of one of the feds and a schoolteacher, he takes on platoons of unfriendly types with just some household items. The main appeal, besides huge explosions, is watching the lone wolf use his superior training to outwit and outfight everyone.
- An exciting setup, but both the premise and the outcome become implausible, then absurd, as the movie goes on. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that I was expecting one of them to shout “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” One actually does say, “I win; you lose.” Twice. But by then the movie has descended into trite formula.
= **3/4 Worth a look for shoot-’em-up fans and conspiracy-movie buffs. Sort of similar to The Sentinel, which is a better movie.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/29/07

Rocky Balboa (**3/4)

? Sylvester Stallone’s unabashedly nostalgic sequel finds the boxer mourning his late wife and running a South Philly restaurant named after her. But the lure of the ring beckons in the form of surly heavyweight champion Mason “The Line” Dixon, in need of an image boost.

+ For better or worse, this is Stallone’s attempt to re-create the feeling of the first film, and he’s fairly successful. Rocky spends the first hour visiting his wife’s grave, checking out old haunts, adopting a mangy dog, hanging with his mopey old brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young), and telling old war stories to his customers, the better to remind us that Rocky’s a regular guy. It’s no coincidence that you only hear him talking about Apollo, who defeated him in the first film, or that the sixth film in the series has no number. Stallone would like us to forget the other, mediocre sequels, so the story closely follows the outline of the first and best film. Rocky has decided to return to boxing, but gets an unexpected shot at the big time. There’s even a sort of substitute (younger) Adrian, sweetly played by Geraldine Hughes. Bill Conti’s original theme music is there, too. I think Stallone would have dug Burgess Meredith up if he could have. In films II through V, Stallone worked hard at coming up with ways to keep Rocky seeming like an underdog, even though he kept winning, making for some heavy melodrama. Mason Dixon, played by the light heavyweight Antonio Tarver, doesn’t seem as menacing as Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago (from III and IV), but pushing 60 will make any boxer seem like an underdog. Still, Stallone looks better than almost any other 60-year-old guy. (For the record, Archie Moore, at 48, was the oldest man to ever hold a real world title.)

- If all of the above sounds pretty dull, you’ll want to avoid this. There is only one boxing match, and there’s not a lot of plot. The other characters are there more to show you that Rocky is still the same guy from the streets of Philadelphia, rather than move the story along. I’m not sure why Dixon’s handlers think beating up an old guy will boost his image; he’s one of Rocky’s duller opponents in any case.

= **3/4 I enjoyed this for what it was, a walk down memory lane, which it clearly was for Stallone, the actor and writer, too. If you’ve wondered, hey, what would Rocky be doing in late middle age, and would he still train by drinking raw eggs and punching meat, this is your film.

IMDb link

Invincible (***)

? Think of this as a football version of Rocky, only true. Well, sort of, in Disney’s heavily fictionalized story of how Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg), a down-on-his luck pickup-team player, unexpectedly wound up a 30-year old rookie on his local team, the hapless Philadelphia Eagles of the mid-1970s. Greg Kinnear plays the team’s new coach, Dick Vermeil, and Elizabeth Banks is a romantic interest.

+ Even if Papale’s NFL career was less unlikely than the film makes it seem (the real Papale had played two years in the flop World Football League), the only part of the movie that seemed probably false to me was how his marriage’s end and new romance is timed so coincidentally to his burgeoning football career. The best thing about the movie, though, is the way it evokes the spirit of 1970s Philadelphia at the time, for better or worse. The Veterans Stadium boo birds make multiple appearances, and scrappy working-class South Philly seems just about right, right down to the trash on the street and the nearby picket line. The idea is that the success of the underdog and local boy Papale gave some down-on-their luck people something to rally around. Yet it doesn’t push this theme too hard like, say, Remember the Titans, which I thought laid its “inspirational” message on pretty thick. Banks’s largely made-up role as the down-to-earth girlfriend is appealing and should propel her to greater fame. And BTO’s “Let It Ride” is one of the excellent choices as soundtrack music, a propulsive jock-rock hit that’s been forgotten enough that hearing it really brings back the period.

- Even given that the story is no mystery, the ending is pretty anti-climatic. Although Kinnear is a good Vermeil, the parts with the coach’s family don’t add much to the story. No doubt Vermeil’s life could make a good movie on its own, but what’s here is too insubstantial to amount to much.

= *** Another feel-good sports movie in the vein of The Rookie. Both movies are about modest sports heroes who learn confidence as they meet success. For non-sports fans, there are relatively few play scenes. A lot less corny that than it could have been, it’s inconsequential but entertaining.

IMDb link

10th and Wolf (**3/4)

? A mobster’s son (James Marsden), dishonorably discharged from the Marines, is forced by circumstances to re-enter the world he’d tried to escape. Brian Dennehy plays a Philly cop who offers him a chance to avoid jail and protect his brother (Brad Renfro) and cousin (Giovanni Ribisi), who’s angling to control the local sin trade. The story largely revolves around this struggle for control and Marsden’s efforts to get his cousin’s rival on tape for the cops.

+ The brisk-moving story has a couple of surprises and kept me interested. Renfro is effective as Marsden’s loyal, simple brother, and Piper Perabo is all right as a childhood friend with whom Marsden gets reacquainted.

- This was the follow-up to Crash for its co-writer, Bobby Moresco, who makes his directorial debut here. But if Crash arguably suffered from an excess of self-importance, this could use some of that Oscar-winning film’s heft. Once the plot has placed the main character back on the street, Moresco mostly forgets about what made him want to escape that lifestyle. You expect the flashback scenes to explain some of this, but they really don’t. The film hits all the usual mob film touchstones—there’s misguided loyalty, there’s a trigger-happy nut (Ribisi), there a big showdown, and so forth. But it never coalesces into something richer like Goodfellas or The Godfather. Leslie Ann Warren’s character, the mother/aunt of the principals, is mostly superfluous. And if you’re going to have PT Transit buses obviously visible and have pivotal scenes take place at Wholey’s seafood market in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, why not just set the film there? The movie has the feel of being set in a somewhat smaller city, anyway. Watching this, I had the idea that the whole Philadelphia mob consisted of about half a dozen guys. (It’d be nice if that were true.)

= **3/4 If you’ve seen other mob movies, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before. But if you like mob movies, the lack of originality might not bother you.

IMDb link

In Her Shoes (***1/2)

In Her Shoes, based on the semi-comic novel by Philadelphia writer Jennifer Weiner, is fortunate to have a screenplay from Susannah Grant (Erin Brokovich) and direction by Curtis Hanson, whose adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys is one of the better character-driven literary adaptations of recent years. The story is a tale of two Jewish sisters. Rose (Toni Collette), the lawyer, is the brainy achiever, while Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is the pretty, irresponsible one. A long-lost grandmother (Shirley MacLaine), living in a Florida retirement community, indirectly brings them closer together. That may sound trite, but it never feels that way because the characters never seem like types. This is also true of the supporting characters. It’s nice to see the old people portrayed as neither feeble drones nor unconvincingly “hip” grannies. In Her Shoes, which has some nice shots of Philly, isn’t only about sibling rivalry but about being comfortable with who you are and figuring out what you want. Both Collette and Diaz are excellently cast. (As she did for her breakout role in Muriel’s Wedding, Collette gained weight to play the role.) I was impressed by the way Grant retains the essence of Weiner’s story (and often more, right down to a reference to the Pepper Hamilton law firm that gets repeated) while tightening up the plot. In a few cases, I thought Grant improved upon the novel by mildly altering a couple things I found corny or fanciful.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/3/05