Blue Highway (**3/4) [screening]

This comedy-drama is nice, and I wanted to like it more. It’s a road movie, and I kind of like road movies. Not only that, but it’s writer-director, Kyle Smith, took the trouble to actually drive to all the locations his lead characters do. His lead characters, Dillon and Kerry, are played by his friends Dillon Porter (who resembles Seann William Scott) and  Kerry Bishé, whose experiences on a long car trip inspired the script. So it has a very realistic feel to it. The fictional Dillon and Kerry are twenty-something friends making a cross-country move from Richmond, Virginia, to Los Angeles, in and old jalopy without a radio. Perhaps inspired by William Least Heat-Moon, whose bestseller Blue Highways told the story of a trip through small-town America, they’re staying off the interstates. (Talky Dillon seems like he might have read it; Kerry definitely hasn’t.) The reason for the move is briefly mentioned, but it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.

So that’s the plot. I think one thing a movie ought to do is accurately portray a reality, even if that reality is a fantasy. But also, a movie ought to make that reality interesting. This movie so accurately simulates what these particular characters might experience that it may leave you with the similar feeling of wanting to get to wherever you’re going. Or at least take the faster interstate. It’s not all bad. There are some funny scenes as they make brief pilgrimages to places where different films are set, meanwhile quizzing each other as to which movie is being paid homage to. But they mostly find no trace of the former sets, so these scenes too are often set on ordinary stretches of highway. (Texas: long, flat, dull.) Dramatically, there is one very well-done scene, toward the end of the film where we discover more about the relationship of these two characters that in the rest of the movie put together.

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viewed 9/19/13 7:45 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival] and posted 9/19/13

Bernie (***)

In the stranger-than-fiction category comes this small-town tale. Jack Black plays the title character, an assistant funeral director beloved in his adopted hometown of Jasper, Texas. Shirley MacLaine plays the wealthy widow, beloved by no one except Bernie, who is nonetheless driven to a desperate act. With the help of Skip Hollandsworth, whose Texas Monthly article inspired the movie and who gets co-screenwriting credit, Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, Fast Food Nation) has fashioned Bernie’s story into something like a docudrama. A few dozen actual townspeople appear in the movie in interview segments. (Wait for the ending credits for a glimpse of the real Bernie talking to Jack Black.) It would have been easy to make this into a straight comedy, or give the narrative an air of condescension, but Linklater simply presents the story as it happened, with commentary. It’s a pretty good yarn.

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viewed 6/14/12 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/14/12

Seven Days in Utopia (**1/4)

I’m always suspicious of titles wherein one of the words is both the name of something and also means something else. Utopia is the name of the tiny Texas town where frustrated golfer Luke (Lucas Black) finds himself after blowing the chance to win his first big tournament, crashing his car, and tossing his cell phone in frustration. That’s another thing I’m suspicious of. Who besides characters in movies like Wild Hogs intentionally chucks a cell phone? Anyway, first person that lucky Luke runs into is also a once-promising golfer (Robert Duvall, Black’s Get Low costar) who just so happens to have settled in this town of under 400. Not quite the second person he meets is the waitress at the improbably bustling local diner, who appears to be the only pre-menopausal woman in town. (Melissa Leo plays one on the other side of that divide.) She’s got an obnoxious quasi-boyfriend, but by about the third day, she saying things to Luke like, “Sometimes I think you might be hopeless.” Seriously, who thinks anything “sometimes” about a person she met two days ago?

It’s nearly the same setup as comedies like Doc Hollywood or the animated Cars, only it plays out like the Karate Kid, if the hero had been a little older, his crush object prayed a bit more, and Mr. Miyagi was an old white guy who taught sport by making his student paint pictures instead of fences. And, inside of a week…well, nothing surprising happens. Duvall, playing basically the only interesting character, comes close to rescuing the movie. When he tells Luke about having “a purpose and calling that went beyond any scorecard,” it only sounds a little corny. Mainly though, the movie suffers from blandness. Even the fish-out-of-water element is pretty mild. Luke’s neither a big-city slicker—he’s from nearby Waco—nor an egotistical big shot. You’d think there’d be more humor given the title and the premise, but about the only funny thing in the movie is the name of Luke’s golfing nemesis, a Korean (or maybe Korean-American—he never speaks) called T. K. Oh.

Those with a taste for a certain sort of old-fashioned wholesomeness (the movie’s rated G and extols faith) may enjoy this, but they’ll likely forget it in about seven days.

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viewed 8/29/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/6/11

Crazy Heart (***1/4)

From the moment country singer Bad Blake, personified by Jeff Bridges, steps out of his old truck in front of a bowling alley, you can practically imagine the plaque on his arteries, the tar covering his lungs, and the alcohol saturating his liver. Bad is bad to his body, seemingly a collection of bodily fluids. But he’s very good on stage, even if he has to take whiskey breaks, and the stage is in a bowling alley in the Midwest. Actually, Bridges is very good, sounding like an undeservedly forgotten great from the outlaw heyday (the 1970s) of country music, not a singing actor. As it happens, give him a scraggly beard and he looks a lot like Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson must have been an inspiration to first-time director Scott Cooper, who had wanted to make a biopic about Waylon Jennings but instead adapted a novel by Thomas Cobb. It helps that the songs written by T-Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton are entirely convincing as old classics, especially the song that’s supposed to be Blake’s signature song. (“Funny how falling feels like flying…for a little while” goes the chorus.)

Blake doesn’t seem like a unique character, but rather someone who feels familiar from the first, even if you may not know anyone like him. (The 2001 movie Jackpot covered some of this same turf, but less successfully, and with lesser singing talent.) The next low-paying gig, the next bottle of whiskey, and the next (hoped-for) record deal keep him moving forward. He resents the success of his onetime backing-band member (Colin Ferrell, who also sings) who now plays His shot at redemption—a romance with a Santa Fe single mom (Maggie Gyllenhaal)—is a fairly obvious plot device, too. Yet the movie, like its central character, has an easy charm about it, and the portrait of life on the road, and Bridges’s captivating performance, make this worthwhile, especially, though not exclusively, if you like rootsy country music.

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viewed 1/27/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 1/27–29/10

Tennessee (**3/4)

Brothers (Adam Rothenberg, Ethan Peck) trek east from New Mexico in this low-key drama. On the way, they meet a waitress in a diner (Mariah Carey) whose husband has become abusive. Although there is also abuse in the background of the brothers—their father is the reason they fled—the movie has nothing new to say on that subject. It’s all about brotherly love. The older of the two, once a protector, has become alcoholic. The younger one is sick, which is, indirectly, why they are returning to Tennessee. What they will find there is what drives the plot. Director Aaron Woodley favors a still camera and subdued lighting to such an extent that it’s monotonous, despite some painterly tableaux. The only music is Carey, humming to herself and, later, warbling a tune she wrote with Willie Nelson in a singer-songwriter style not common on her records. The conclusion is satisfying if you don’t like having every loose knot tied up.

IMDB link

viewed 6/4/09 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 6/19/09

No Country for Old Men (***1/2)

Joel and Ethan Coen harken back to their first film, Blood Simple, with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas murder tale. Josh Brolin, who played a different sort of greedily reckless character in American Gangster, is great as a hunter who finds a couple of million in cocaine money. But it’s Javier Bardem, as a sociopoathic killer-for-hire who dispatches his victims with a bolt gun, who you won’t forget. Bardem’s creepy demeanor and deep voice practically had me quaking in my seat. The two men play cat and dog across south Texas. It’s like a western with cars instead of horses (there’s a couple of those too, though), or like a film noir with a couple of less hard-boiled characters (Tommy Lee Jones’s as a sheriff and Kelly McDonald’s as the wife of Brolin’s character). The Coen brothers effectively use light and shadow, and a minimum of dialogue, to maintain the tension for at least 90 minutes. The last act is more philosophical, and may be a letdown for those expecting an explosive finale.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07

The Hottest State (***)

Writer-director Ethan Hawke’s talky talky tale of a romance gone bad stars Mark Webber and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace). A 20-year-old aspiring actor meets an aspiring singer in a New York City bar. Things go well for a time, but as Webber’s narration tells us from the start, “by the time I was 21 I was heartbroken.” That is very nearly all of the story. Hawke, who adapted his own novel, also appears as the father who lost touch when his wife (Laura Linney) and young son left him, and Texas. This is a subplot that is supposed to connect to an inability to recover from that later heartbreak, but I’m not sure that made sense to me. The gist of it, and the thing the two stories do have in common, is having to reconcile and accept things that will never make complete sense, because people do things for which they themselves can’t, or won’t, articulate the reasons. Probably a lot of people (most?) will find this movie overlong, though less morose than it might sound, because really the bulk of the movie is about the process of understanding this, about things sinking in. The singer-songwriter Jesse Harris, besides appearing as a musician, contributes a bundle of songs voiced by Americana stars like Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, and Cat Power. Their laid-back vibe approximates the feel of this movie.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/7/07

The Astronaut Farmer (**3/4)

? Billy Bob Thornton plays one of his least eccentric eccentrics, a family man and former NASA employee who happens to have obsessively pursued his dream of building his own rocket. This is the fourth film from Mark and Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot, Northfork), but, perhaps due to its larger budget, jettisons the austere approach of their earlier work while maintaining the American heartland setting.
+ This is the very definition of the feel-good movie, crossing the inspirational sports movie genre with a family story and makes it about getting into space rather than getting to the major leagues or winning a race. (It’s not a true story, though.) Virginia Madsen and Bruce Dern play the wife and father characters. The would-be astronaut can be seen as a selfish character, but he also cares about his family, even as he threatens to bankrupt them. They’re all sort of nice to be around, and their indulgence of Dad’s weird hobby rings true. There’s a little bit of humor (including the ubiquitous Jay Leno cameo), a few FAA and NASA nogoodniks, and a some life-in-a-small-town stuff, but none of the story elements overwhelms the others. Some nice location shooting finds New Mexico substituting for Texas.
- Notwithstanding the indie credibility of the Polish Brothers, the rocket plot’s trajectory is only a little different than you’ll expect it to be. I suppose October Sky would be the other movie about rural folks headed for space, but the better comparison would be last year’s underappreciated The World’s Fastest Indian, which was also about an eccentric who liked to tinker. I’d give an edge to October Sky because it was grittier and to Indian because the Anthony Hopkins character was so endearingly odd and the story a little more elliptical.
= *** If you’ve enjoyed inspirational sports movies but have gotten tired of the sports part, this’ll be a very easy movie to like.

IMDB link

reviewed 2/23/07

The King (**1/2)

Characters whose motivations are opaque undermine a provocative film about a Navy vet who goes searching for his biological father but winds up sleeping with his underage half-sister.

The charismatic Gael García Bernal has, by starring in four popular Spanish-language films (Y Tu Mamá También, The Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros, and El Crimen del Padre Amaro), became about as well known a star as you can become in this country without speaking English. But he does speak English, and pretty well, in James Marsh’s The King. Saddled with that most iconic of norteamericano names, Elvis, he plays a Navy veteran who goes right to Corpus Christi upon his discharge, and, pausing only to engage the services of a hooker, a used-auto dealer, and a motel clerk, heads over to see his dad (William Hurt), the popular pastor of a modern yet conservative local church. The product of the pastor’s pre-Christian youth, Elvis has never met his dad. However, given a cool reception from the pastor, he instead immediately focuses his attention on his sixteen-year-old half sister (Pell James), who doesn’t know who he is.

Marsh is a documentary filmmaker whose credits include something called The Burger & the King: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley, and nothing else really explains why his main character is called Elvis and the movie titled as it is. There’s a lot unexplained here, in a movie almost entirely without subtext. We know almost nothing of Elvis’s past. Why is he so instantly smitten with his relative, who is underage and not beautiful? She seems even more of a blank slate. If she has a rebellious streak, it’s not apparent. What, besides his obvious good looks, makes her willing to start a relationship she must hide? The viewer may form ideas about these questions, but I believe they will be mere guesses. The King held my curiosity as any movie with a secret (and not just the one I’ve identified) at the center is apt to do. The way the family (including the pastor’s wife and son) reacts to the stranger is surprising. I thought from the early scenes that the family’s seemingly simple religiosity would be the target of satire. But in fact only Hurt’s supporting character takes on any sort of complexity. He’s the only one you feel like you understand more at the end of the movie than the beginning.

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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (***1/4)

-->Fans of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s Amoros Perres and 21 Grams will appreciate this mystery-cum-western that marks the directorial debut of its star, Tommy Lee Jones.

Tommy Lee Jones stars in and makes his directorial debut with this West Texas-set drama. I took awhile getting to see it, in part, because the title sounded boring or pretentious. It’s neither, though it is slow-paced. It starts off like a John Sayles movie, cutting between a border guard (Barry Pepper) and his wife (January Jones), a waitress in the local coffee shop (Michelle Leo), and Tommy Lee himself, as a friend of the recently shot title character. But then—mystery solved—that’s only the first two burials. The last, longest part of the film winds like a snaky appendage from the rest, slowly shedding the layers of the main characters. Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges makes the most of the location shooting, with Texas also doubling for Mexico. This movie wasn’t nominated for any Oscars, but did earn both Jones (as an actor) and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga honors at Cannes. Admirers of Arriaga’s last two films, Amoros Perres and 21 Grams, will probably like this one too. It starts off like a Tex-Mex hybrid of those movies, yet the second half is something different, an eccentric Western that offers a couple more surprises and some absorbing, border-crossing detours on the way to that final resting place.

IMDb link

posted 9/9/13

Glory Road (**3/4)

A drama about Texas Western men's basketball coach Dona Haskins (Josh Lucas), the first to play five black starters in an NCAA title game. Entertaining, though rarely rising above the formula it employs.

These films about underdog sports teams seem to come out at regular intervals. Sometimes they’re comedies; 2005 alone brought us Kicking & Screaming and the remakes The Longest Yard and The Bad News Bears. Sometimes they’re dramas, like Miracle (2004) and Remember the Titans (2000). In the comedies, the coaches and players are usually both inept to start with but somehow figure out how to win (usually aided by a ringer or two). The dramas tend to focus on a godlike coach. The sport here is basketball. Josh Lucas plays Don Haskins, the real-life coach of the Texas Western Miners. Recruiting black players when other southern schools had none gave him an edge that helped send the team to the NCAA championship game in 1966. Like Titans, set just a few years later (and likewise produced by slick-meister Jerry Bruckheimer), Glory Road means to give you a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about the triumph of the underdog and how far racial relations have advanced.

Except for one brief scene that name-checks Malcolm X, there’s little attempt to tie the events of the movie into the larger social changes happening in the 1960s. I’d have also liked to see the flashback scene, cut from the film, that might have helped explain Haskins’s willingness to challenge white racists. Lucas is very good in a role not unlike Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks in Miracle, but, as written, a shade less three dimensional. On the plus side, there were only a couple things that had me thinking, no way did it happen like that. (One is that it appears as though Haskins is a first-year coach whose black players are all freshmen; in fact, he’d taken the job in 1961 and inherited an already-integrated team.) These underdog films go down like slices of pizza, filled with tasty cheese like, “They can’t take your desire away from you.” Even when they’re nothing special, they’re still perfectly enjoyable, as the cheers from the crowd I saw this with suggest.

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viewed 1/13/06 at Moorestown

Varsity Blues (***)

This is a lot like Friday Night Lights, which came a few years later. That is to say, it focuses on high school football in a small Texas town. This is less of a downer, though. The coach, played by Jon Voight, is as mean as anyone in the later movie, willingly sacrificing the health of his players, tolerating no challenges to his authority. The hero (James Van Der Beek) is the second-string quarterback, who seems to have talent but irritates the coach because he does things like read books and suggest different plays. His girlfriend (Amy Smart) doesn’t care for football players.

There is some attention paid to the role the game plays in an otherwise dull small town, and to the outsize privileges and attention afforded to its young stars. (The movie’s best-known scene involves Ali Larter’s cheerleader character’s innovative use of whipped cream as a tool for seducing them.) But compared to Friday Night Lights the story is more about the hero’s clashes with the coach and his own morality, less about seeing the town or the coach (an easy villain) as a microcosm of something larger. Still, it’s easy to watch and enjoyable, with Ron Lester’s Billy Bob probably the most compelling supporting character, a 300-pound behemoth who proves the most fragile of the players.

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viewed 1/99 at Moorestown; re-viewed 01/30/10 on television; reviewed 1/31/10