Reviews

This weak, unbalanced and (mostly) unfunny attempt at a teen sex comedy left me with a new lack of respect for Corey Feldman, which is quite a feat. It's full of dialog that you can tell is SUPPOSED to be funny, but never really manages to draw out a single laugh. The opening scene is a prime example of this...if you don't laugh in the first five minutes of the movie, just turn it off because you are in for a whole lot more of the same.

The pacing of the movie doesn't make any sense. You'll see Corey Feldman (Ryan) do mean thing after mean thing to his decade-younger girlfriend, only to have her come crawling back every time, never learning a thing. You expect some kind of turnaround or revenge to come out of all this suffering, but it never does, which makes the movie's ending all the more depressing, not to mention sudden. It's as if they ran out of budget in the middle of shooting and the director said, "Okay, I guess we've got our movie!" If I were being forced at gunpoint to say something nice about the movie (which I am, at this very minute, please help), I'd say that Leah Viens-Gordon (Michele) is a cutie and probably has the potential to become a decent actress. There, I said it. Now please let me live!

This is one of my least favorite movies ever: a movie geared towards people who don't really know anything about music, and as such, reveals its complete stupidity to those who do. Mr. Holland's Crappy Opus is the story of Mr. Holland, a cranky guy who's not a very good teacher, not a very good musician, not a very good husband and not a very good father. To put it mildly, he has no redeeming qualities.

He works for his whole life on this "OPUS," and when it finally gets performed, it's god- awful. It sounds like he wrote the soundtrack to a lame movie (except the people who really do write movie scores don't spend a whole lifetime on one film). How can you work on music composition your whole life, and still have no talent for it? Is it possible? Well, in the movies, anything's possible.

The movie seems to credit Mr. Holland with inventing the pep band, which makes him all the more despicable to me. When the pep band at my high school started playing "Louie, Louie," the kids at the game didn't cheer. They would roll their eyes, and/or vomit. No movie can make me believe that being in a marching band is cool. Drumline, this means you. I was in the marching band from 6th grade until high school graduation, and it was decidedly not cool.

There's also the pointless Rowena Subplot, which culminates in a gripping scene where Richard Dreyfuss's wife reads Rowena's name on a program, discovers that Rowena is not just a celtic mythology figure that her dorky husband is in love with and consequently makes a face. You'll be glued to your seat as a spectrum of emotions from stern disapproval to disapproving sternness passes through Mrs. Holland's face, and then the Rowena subplot proceeds to go precisely NOWHERE.

Mr. Holland "touches the lives" of all these students...and each life he touches is destroyed! He tells the redheaded girl to play the sunset; she becomes a miserable politician. He gives Rowena "voice coaching" (is that what the kids are calling it now?); she runs away, never to be seen again. He hits that football player kid on the head with a bass drum beater to teach him about rhythm. (Yes. The only black guy in the movie has to learn about rhythm from a white guy.) And that kid dies! The film's solitary saving grace is the fact that it introduced Alicia Witt who, after appearing in Mr. Holland's Stupid, Life-Sucking Opus, went on to become the cutest redhead I have ever seen. She can play my sunset any day. Or something.

But what's up with that scene where the hearing-impaired people "appreciate" music by watching idiotic flashing lights? Nice going, Mr. Jackass, you've just implied that deaf people are morons. Let's wait and see whether they thank you for touching THEIR lives, dickweed. I actually found myself rooting for William H. "This Is My Deal Here" Macy, the school's evil, conservative, buzzcut-sporting budget Nazi. "Go, Mr. Macy. Cut his budget! Cut it DOWN! The school needs three new football stadiums, not creative arts education! Burn those violins on the baseball diamond!" So, if you like movies that are just ill-conceived vehicles for 60s pop rock montages (blah blah blah, fake moon landing footage, blah blah blah, Martin Luther King Jr, blah blah blah) and scene after scene of Richard Dreyfuss being a jerk, run out and see Mr. Dickweed's Heinously Barfalactic Opus.

The plane crashes at the end. And when it does, you'll be confused. You'll wonder, "What's this Playstation game that's suddenly appeared on the screen? Why is an airplane animation, rendered by my little brother with Poser, taking place before my eyes, when I should be seeing the spectacular end of an edgy action film?" It is one of the worst CG effects ever produced by human beings with good intentions.

Harrison Ford plays "the dream president." Well, I don't know about that...he's probably only 49% of the US population's idea of a dream president. And his Vice President Glenn Close will have you in stitches of laughter as she utters stone-faced lines like, "IS THE PRESIDENT SECURE?"

Also, watch for the climactic scene where Harry Ford says, "Get off my plane." Be careful, the line is likely to blow out the speakers on your home theater system, because for some reason, it's louder than every other sound in the movie. When I saw this film in the theater, an elderly woman died when that line was uttered. Apparently the sudden fluctuation of sound waves interfered with her brain impulses and her bodily functions just quit simultaneously.

Gary Oldman is the master of accents. He should be in every movie.

All in all, Air Force One is too patriotic for me. The one-sided depiction of the "bad guys," coupled with punching-yourself-in-the-crotch moments of stupidity (like the part where President Ford cuts the green wire because it isn't red, white or blue) made me squirm with jingoism-induced discomfort. I wish this movie really were the "Die Hard on a plane" everybody makes it out to be. Die Hard on a plane would be awesome. But Die Hard is not a movie about the heroics of the American government.

Look at all the ellipses in the review before mine.

Somewhere along the line, someone realized that it's nigh impossible to make a good movie based on a video game. So instead, they made a movie about the entire Nintendo Entertainment System, thereby capturing all the feel-good nostalgia associated with its hundreds of titles, but without crippling handicaps such as an unfeasible plot or Jean-Claude VanDamme as Colonel William F. Guile. Thus was born The Wizard...a shameless consumerist repackaging of The Who's Tommy, adjusted for a new audience and coming at you in full-on buddy film fashion. Fred Savage explodes onto the screen as a curly-haired dork with highly articulate eyebrows. He's caught between his divorced parents in a custody battle over his autistic, obsessive-compulsive, equinophobic, dyslexic, colorblind kid brother Jimmy. Realizing that being in the custody of one or more of his parents will most certainly kill Jimmy (and that Jimmy has the superhuman ability to reach level 3 on Double Dragon), Fred Savage does the right thing and whisks his kid brother off to exploit his virtuosic video game playing ability for cash and prizes worth well over $130. Along the way they meet Haley, who's totally hot if you're 12. Haley misleads Fred and Jimmy on many occasions, notably one scene where renegade truckers steal their entire video game pilgrimage budget and presumably, molest them. Still, they stick to their guns (or should I say, their Nintendo LIGHT GUNS, for use with Duck Hunt), even managing to outsmart the enigmatic Lucas, a rebellious young boy who apparently lives alone in the desert like Mohammed. Only this messiah has a Nintendo POWER GLOVE, buy yours today! Lucas complicates the story, creating a sordid love triangle between himself, Fred Savage and Haley. He taunts Jimmy ruthlessly ("We wouldn't want you to...WHIZ on yourself.") and, despite having devoted his life to Nintendo games and thus presumably having no friends, a crowd of prepubescent disciples follow him at all times. His secret to success is the Nintendo Power Glove, which is, in Lucas's own words, "so bad." But as most of us know, the truth is that the Nintendo Power Glove was "totally gay." It only did what you wanted it to do when you were punching your friend in the face with it to vent your frustration about its lack of response. The protagonists' path is beset by peril on all sides. There are teenage white trash hoodlums who exist solely for the purpose of stealing Jimmy's hat and saying lines like "What is this kid, some sort of cyborg?" There are fat salesmen who talk like Foghorn Leghorn, unable to believe that a scrawny kid is better than they are at Contra. And don't get me started on the creepy bald guy hired by Fred's mom to bring the kids back home, dead or alive. His name is Putnam and repeatedly touches Haley's breasts. Meanwhile, Beau Bridges plays Nintendo like my dad, yanking the controller this way and that. Every time Beau Bridges and Christian Slater run into Putnam, a redneck banjo riff kicks in and the whole movie starts to sound like a Menard's commercial while the adversaries engage in automobile/ gardening tool combat. Saved from certain molestation by a grotesque man-child named Spanky, their adventure climaxes when they play Ninja Gaiden with a scary gravel-voiced MC (who also seems to be a child molester) and nearly get eaten by a fake King Kong at UNIVERSAL STUDIOS THEMEPARK, now open! By the way, Jimmy knows the exact location of the Warp Whistle in Super Mario Bros. 3 prior to the game's release because he reads Nintendo Power Magazine. Jimmy gets the warp whistle and uses it to reach World 4 (yes, "Giant World") and Lucas looks on helplessly as his empire of Power Gloves comes crashing down around him. Spackled with golden dialogue, this movie is a subculture in its own right. But while many people quote Lucas's "it's so bad," or Haley's "he touched my breast," for me it doesn't get any better than when Christian Slater says, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."