The Celebrity Connection: Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke is such a strange man that it's always surprising to rediscover just what a great actor he is. And once upon a time, he looked like something that could possible resemble a sex symbol. Today he looks like someone who looks like he's about two or three steps from ending up in the ICU (I always wake up expecting to see headlines that say Mickey Rourke: 1952-2010), but in the 80s he was a hot commodity.

I was watching St. Elmo's Fire tonight which was also a staple of the 80s (like The Breakfast Club after graduation) and noticed something peculiar. Check it out:

Could Judd Nelson just be Mickey Rourke in disguise? You decide.

Why Bruce Dern Should be in Every Movie

A little context first. I was talking to the missus the other day and she said I should come up with more regular features on this site (like Celebrity Connections, which I haven't done since the Oscars). I thought about it and then it hit me. I'd keep extending a piece a wrote last month about why Charles S. Dutton should be in every movie. It will be a regular adding to that short list of distinctive actors who make you perk up whenever they come on screen because no matter what, you know what's coming is going to be something good. Oh ya and that whole Movies that Are Just Like Other Movies thing that I've promised at least twice by now, well, it's still coming sometime.

I was watching Hal Ashby's emotionally effecting Vietnam tale Coming Home in which Jane Fonda plays a woman left behind as her husband (Dern) goes off to fight. She takes up a position as a volunteer nurse at a veteran hospital and there begins an affair with a wounded soldier played by Jon Voight. Although the film has little social relevance today it is still an effecting work because of the quality of the acting and the impact of the relationship between the two leads.

Although the film is somewhat (maybe wrongly?) criticized for losing its course in the third act when Dern returns home after sustaining an injury, there is a scene within this time that I shall never forget. Dern, having been clearly effected by what he has witnessed in combat and by what has injury has done to his pride, finds out about the affair and erupts in anger over everything. A lot of actors play big scenes with big emotions. You can see them going into acting overdrive. They play bigger, they tremble, they raise their voice, they put the fruits of their entire craft on full display. Not Dern. His eruption is so pure and unexpected that it is almost hard to watch. He gives himself over to the scene entirely, cutting himself open and laying himself bare for the camera in the span of mere seconds. I've never seen anything quite like it before. It certainly may be the most honest and open scene Dern has ever played.



But now watch Dern play the goofy sidekick in Hitchcock's final film Family Plot




And now look at Dern as the ugly, emotionless villain of The Cowboys

Because Wild Celtic Made me Do It

A couple days ago Burning Reels posted a list of little blurbs on eight movies that had seemingly nothing in common other than the fact that he saw them in close enough proximity that he felt they could all be crammed into one post. One of those films was Angels and Demons, which, apparently, I am one of the few people who actually liked it. I said this in the comment section and Wild Celtic let me know, in a much friendlier way than I am used to, that I was wrong in my appreciation of said film. So here is my rebuttal: a posting of my original review from last year. It's from Suite101.com, which means it isn't written in the first person (ugh), but I don't have the non-Suite one saved on this computer so we'll work with what we have.
"Both book and film have caused tremendous public outrage within the Catholic church, which wanted it banned. The irony with this church-related controversy is that it has gotten so huge that people will read the book and see the film just to see what all the fuss is about. If the church wanted to hurt the Da Vinci Code, they would keep quiet about it, and then there would be no hype, no expectations, no reason to see the film other than for purposes of entertainment."

When that was written (by me) about The Da Vinci Code in 2006 it was trying to both stir the pot and skirt around the fact that there wasn’t much to say other than that the film itself was pretty entertaining.

However, now in 2009, with the film’s sequel, those words are almost prophetic. The film, based on the book by Dan Brown, has neither the hype nor controversy surrounding it that the original did and it opened to nearly $30 million less at the box office than its predecessor.

That means that, Angels and Demons’ returns are based, more or less, on people’s desires to be entertained by the intricate yarn it weaves and not any sort of outside cultural force. So, with no pots to stir, here’s the review of Angels and Demons in three words: it’s pretty entertaining.

Tom Hanks reprises his role as symbologist Robert Langdon who is summoned to the Vatican after a terrorist revival of the Illuminati, an ancient enemy of the church, begins running amuck around Vatican City.

Needless to say, Langdon, who has fallen out of favor with the church after the last films events, is their last hope after the pope has died and the cardinals who are set to replace him are kidnapped and will be killed one by one, hour by hour at different locations around the city.

The only way to discover the location of the church where the next assassination will take place: a complex web of ancient symbolic clues of course.

At the end of the maze, in the hidden Church of Illumination, is a canister that contains a stolen entity which is referred to as antimatter. This antimatter is the result of the crashing together of different neutrons and protons and other neat special effects and is considered highly explosive when it comes into contact with normal household matter which is, supposedly, everything that is not antimatter.

Unfortunately for Langdon and his allies at the Swiss Guard, the batteries on the antimatter’s container are running low, risking the complete obliteration of the Vatican. You’d think with technology advanced enough to create antimatter in the first place, there’d be a better means of storage for it than battery powered containers, no?

The official name of the antimatter is “The God Particle.” That’s what passes for irony in Dan Brown’s literary universe.

This is, let’s face it, basically nonsense. To put a description of Angels and Demons in print reads like the product of an overactive imagination trying to pull a complicated inside joke.

But Ron Howard is such a good filmmaker and Tom Hanks is such a good actor that they somehow get away with things that a lesser labyrinth potboiler wouldn’t.

Like the way Langdon, faced with an impossible riddle, looks off into the distance and conjures information that no normal human being, no matter how much passion they have for their field of study, should know off the top of their head, or that maddening way movie killers have of thinking up impossibly elaborate ways to commit their dirty deeds when a simple bullet would have achieved roughly the same effect.

But Howard is a true storyteller. He approaches the plot head on, treating it, not like a preposterous potboiler, but like an honest suspense film. To provide any hint that Howard or Hanks didn’t believe in this material would send it spiraling into chaos and self-parody, but because they approach it with a straight face, and keep the motion kinetic, it’s easy to get involved in the chase.

And like with The Da Vinci Code, Howard knows how to take a waterlogged story and weed out the true excitement in it. Dan Brown is an author whose plots are so complex and so steeped in history that his books sometimes get mistaken as great literature because they give the illusion of waging great debates between religion and culture or science, when really they are just pulp stories masked behind a wall of historical jargon.

Any Brown story can be broken down in several key actions: 1) description of exotic location, 2) heroes talk about plan of action, 3) heroes perform action, 4) heroes talk about performed action, and 5) repeat.

There’s a lot of standing around and talking in the Brown universe, as if time is infinite despite the hero’s constant working against the clock. Howard gets rid of that excess, always finding a visual momentum that keeps the story pushing forward.

And that’s the verdict. Angels and Demons, like The Da Vinci Code, is not a great film, but it gets the job done well enough, raising slight ideas about the associations between religion and science while twisting and turning upon itself so many times that it’s hard to tell if it’s even tied up all its lose ends by the conclusion.

Sometimes, when done well, that’s all anyone needs. It’s this simple: if you liked The Da Vinci Code, the chances of you liking this one are in your favor, and if you hated The Da Vinci Code, well, why read this far in the first place?

One Minute Review- Franklyn (2 out of 5)

Franklyn is the kind of labyrinth film that begs to be decoded but never quite reaches the point where it seems to be worth much thought. The film tells two parallel stories for little apparent reason other than that they both involve religion in some way and that first time writer/director Gerald McMorrow wanted to see what would happen if an angsty drama was intercut with scenes from Watchmen.

One of the stories takes place in the fictional place of Meanwhile City, which looks like George Orwell crossed with Alan Moore, requires that every inhabitant practice religion of some sort by law and is haunted by an atheist played by Ryan Phillippe, who apparently has the same fashion consultant as Rorschach.


The other story, which takes place in contemporary London and weaves together several stories including a man searching for his son, a man haunted by a former flame and a suicidal woman. All of this is directed with style and I'm sure there is meaning to be found in some of it, but by splitting the story down the middle neither side quite manages take-off. The Meanwhile City sequences are merely a distraction and add confusion to an already muddled plot that never seem to come around full circle to an acceptable explanation.

My Life For the Next Two Weeks

And if you haven't seen The Paper Chase, what exactly are you waiting for?

Stealing a Fun Idea

I've been mostly M.I.A. for the past couple of weeks and by the look of things, will be for the next two weeks as well until my exams are over, with maybe a one-minute review popping up here and there just to stay in the game during that time. Therefore, for one, if I haven't commented on your blog posts or contributed in some way, I apologize. It's not that I'm not reading, I'm just not taking the time to think up meaningful ways to respond. With that I wanted to write a post that could get people talking so that I can simply watch what is being said and chime in from time to time in the comments section. So, here it is:


Do you read The Movie Snob? Well if not you probably should start. The other day he wrote a post about how the next Batman movie should be cast. Check it out here.

One of my suggestions would be to have Ethan Hawke play the Riddler, if that is truly to be the next villain. The reason for this is that, I think anyway, the best actor for the job will be the least expected.

When Jack Nicholson was cast as the Joker way back in the late 80s it made sense but the end result was simply Nicholson doing his usual thing but with face paint. When there were talks of who could potentially play the Joker in The Dark Knight Robin Williams is one of the people who made sense to me. He'd worked for Nolan before and he can play characters that are both dark and zany. But, like Nicholson, he was too much of an easy choice. I know big stars sometimes like to take on the role of villains so that they can dress up and act devious and go over the top but generally, when movie stars are cast in such roles, they tend to simply rely on their presence and phone it in.

Therefore, when Heath Ledger was announced as the actual Joker I scoffed only to realize, like everyone else, Ledger did the unimaginable: he went for broke and completely disappeared from the scene, creating a fully realized character. I thus realized that villains need to be played by actors not stars. I think Hawke is such an actor. It's been seen over the duration of his entire career that he is intelligent, versatile, and can play both dark and brooding while also zany and off-the-way. I threw around other names in the comment section at Movie Snob's post so check those out there.


So what do you think? Who should play the Riddler? Penguin? Catwoman? Poinson Ivy? Mr. Freeze? Who could work that Heath Ledger magic and create meaningful characters within these roles as opposed to the movie stars who played them in the past? Let's throw some ideas around.

While we are at it: who do you want to see as the new Spider-Man and who do you want to see as the villain and played by who? I'm curious to see how everyone weighs in.

The Rating Scale

So the other day when I wrote a one minute review of Next Day Air Andrew over at Encore commented that the movie sounded passable but he was surprised by the high rating which I allotted (3.5 out of 5). This inspired me to throw out some context.

There is one fundamental rule that I believe when it comes to scoring films: it is pointless. I do it because it comes with the territory but really, what does a rating out of four or five prove? It doesn't assess the worth of the film itself because it is based on the preference of the writer and reflects their experience of the film and not the film's overall worth, in which case you should scrap the rating and just read the review seeing as that's what it is there for in the first place.

It also doesn't assess the worth of a film in relation to other films because every rating is the rating solely of that film and not all films. It is possible to use other like films to justify a certain rating but when I give a five star rating to Up in the Air that by no means it is the equal to The Godfather which would also get five stars. Up in the Air is a five star film in the world of corporate human comedies and The Godfather is a five star gangster movie. In no way do either of those five stars cross over in relation to one another and I don't even begin to know how they would begin to compare in the overall world of film. However if The Dark Knight is a five star movie then the other four Batman movies before Batman Begins are around 2-2.5s.

Now, as for why I use five stars. It's because I like that extra star for indifference. Four stars doesn't really give you much wiggle room. However, in terms of thumbs up or thumbs down, five stars offers the 3-3.5 range which is basically the same (overall indifference) but 3 reflects the thumb tipping slightly in the down direction while the 3.5 reflects the thumb tipping slightly in the up direction.

But again, we're beating a dead horse because, as proof right in the first paragraph, the meaning of these ratings exist solely in the mind of the review (Andrew perceives 3.5 to be of greater worth than me and that's his right). To me good film criticism has, is and will always be about someone who writes about film sharing their experiences with those who like to read about film. As I've said elsewhere on this site, I read a review not to know if the movie is good or not (I can decide that on my own) but to see what reviewer X had to say about it. When I read Andrew's blog I care much more about who his personal favourite actors and actresses of the decade are and why he thinks so rather than what films he thinks I should be seeing because, knowing me, I'll probably see them regardless.

With that said, in most cases, to reference Jean Renior once again, the reviewer is often more important than the film he or she is reviewing, which simply acts as a springboard or starting point from which that person can begin to share their personal thoughts, fears, anxieties, philosophies, emotional responses, etc. Film criticism, like all art, is fundamentally composed of two parts: the emotional and the intellectual. It's on one (or both) these two levels that all great film (and art in general) moves us on. If a film doesn't stimulate a viewer's mind or move them to some emotional response then it has failed and this can only be expressed in the body of the review, not in the arbitrary number I put in brackets after the film's title.