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Reviews
Hollywood Ending (2002)
Leoni's Great
Woody Allen can get any actor he wants to be in his films because he's Woody Allen, so this film has a great cast. Tea Leoni, Treat Williams, George Hamilton to name a few. The comedy is subtle; so much so, it's almost on life-support. Allen's comedy is absurd and fun and that's entertaining, but there are only a few big laughs.
The conflict: If you believe Woody's character, movie-director Val, is really worried about his career's impending demise, and that's the premise at the start, you're alone, but the suspense does kick in when Val loses his sight.
Unfortunately, the psychosomatic blindness is milked through the entire movie, much to its detriment. There are two possible reasons Val goes blind: 1. He is blinded by his alienation from his son, or 2. he's blinded by his ex-wife, Ellie's (Tea Leoni) engagement to a megalomania-cal screen mogul, Hal (Treat Williams). One of these two plot-lines takes the lame-red-herring-award-of-the-decade.
About the performances: Tea Leoni should have been nominated for an Oscar. She owned the film. Debra Messing, who plays Val's live-in dumb girlfriend Lori, puts on a 1940 period costume to act in Val's movie. Messing is the spitting image of Ingrid Bergman, in particular the hair-do and nose. Spooky. Treat Williams has never been better as the controlling, manipulative movie producer. George Hamilton has big laugh lines. Woody's Val is effective, but a little flat.
I blinked many times because the whole movie seemed to have been filmed in a lengthy master shot. I never notice the close-ups in Woody's movies. Maybe it's the cinematography. this film is fun because there are so many wonderful characters in the frame at any one moment.
Gangster Squad (2013)
they remade the Untouchables
This movie has a powerful cast but a pretty rickety screen play with stupid plot twists and a totally contrived, happy ending. Sean Penn shines when he's stewing about his territory, but most of what Brolin does is so worn out, it's empty; ditto to Ryan Gosling's character, though the shoe-shine boy scene is worth the admission. Watching Mireille Enos as Brolin's wife after seeing her in The Killing was frankly hard on my head, even if she did more than the average wife-character.
But there's plenty to love here. The spectacular action scenes worked. The police corruption scenes were priceless. The dumb moves the squad unintentionally committed were great; but when Brolin put together his off-the-shelf gangster squad, it looked so much like the Costner Untouchables, I completely zoned out. In addition, setting up the killing of the squad's geek member(Giovanni Ribisi) was too much like the elevator assassination of Charles Martin Smith and the bookie in the Untouchables. Ugh.
The penultimate shootout between the gangsters and the squad had its moments, but all the fireworks dulled compared to the Penn/Brolin fist fight that followed. It's a fun film, but forgettable.
Brush with Fate (2003)
Melodrama, interesting structure
I checked this out because of the cover. IN the opening scenes, Glenn Close acts so well I sat through the rest of the film, even though she did only the intro and the outro. Her eccentric, somewhat blind old academic was a stereotype, but I won't discuss it further because it would turn into a spoiler. Suffice to say, much of the movie that came after went a little over the top, full of exaggerated conflicts and exaggerated emotions. The interesting part of the film is the structure. It's an ass-backward way to doing history. I imagine Close's character, who narrates the stories to her colleague, opened one can of worms in her investigation only to raise a question about an earlier time, and so on, and that's how she tells the story. A little confusing at first, but when I figured it out, I spent time after making the connections.. That's how it runs, and in that way, it's interesting.