Category: Review

There are things about this movie that will make my older sister cry. Possibly quite a bit, actually. The least of which is the confirmation that Kathy Bates would play our mother in a movie version of our lives with uncanny accuracy. Her character in this movie has very nearly been written as though someone had known my mother and put her into their screenplay. It’s uncanny, really, some of the details they got right.

Anyway, in case you aren’t already aware, About Schmidt is possibly the most engaging and yet at the same time almost impossibly boring film you’ll see all year. Since I always seem to end up giving away the movie anyway, and since there is so very little to give away here, this is your warning that if for some reason you want to be suprised by a drama not to read on. About Schmidt tells the story of Warren Schmidt from the very minute he retires after 42 years from the Woodmen Insurance company. Before he figures out how to adjust to retirement, his wife dies suddenly. He is hopeless, and after a couple of weeks of making mess with no one to clean up after him, he decides all of a sudden to drive across the country in the Winnebago his wife made him buy. I might point out that it is an $125,000 Winnebago, The Adventurer. Anyway, he was going to drive from Omaha to Denver, where his daughter is preparing to be married, but when he calls her to tell her he is on his way, she tells him to turn around and not show up until a day or two before the wedding at the earliest. So he decides to just drive around. He visits the place he was born and the university and fraternity he was part of, but you can see that he doesn’t really know the significance of what he finds there yet. He communes with fellow travelers on the road, and with nature, and begins to come to terms with the death of his wife. He finally ends up in Denver and then has to deal with an entire family of in-laws he does not approve of his daughter marrying into. After so long with no involvement in his daughter’s life, there is really no way he can influence the situation at this late hour. Just as he was powerless to help the man who replaced him, powerless to save his wife’s life, powerless to influence his daughter, and powerless to come to grips with his own life, he finds in the end that he must at least accept these things.

There is beauty in this film. In the cinematography, sure. In the way it so accurately depicts the powerful details of reality, of life and of death as well. But also there is beauty in Schmidt himself. In watching Schmidt as he learns about Schmidt himself. This is possibly the best performance I have seen give jack Nicholson give, and it is masterful. Warren Schmidt is a fully realized human being and you can see his struggle, see his pain and sadness and you can see the undercurrent of anger that never really has the opportunity to surface properly, and you can see how you may end up at the end of your days as you see your humanity reflected in Schmidt.

I think that’s all I have to say about Schmidt.

Since The Lord of the Rings is not only based on a well-known and widely-read book, but extremely well-covered by the media, by advertisements, and behind-the-scenes-type-shows, I won’t even try not to reveal story points. You already know just about everything there is to know. And you’ve probably already decided whether or not you’re going to see this excellent movie. So, just a few comments.

Other reviews of this movie have said that it was disappointing. That the characters are flat, and show no internal conflict or growth except one. That like the current bout of Star Wars movies, this part of The Lord of the Rings is simply plodding along towards a known outcome that removes any tension or suspense from the proceedings. In some ways, all of these things are true.

I heard a lot of hype about the battle of Helm’s Deep. It is the climactic battle between the 10,000+ strong army of evil against the remaining forces of Men totalling less than the number of people in the movie theatre with me as I watched it, and you and I both know how it turns out in the end. I heard that they spent over two months filming this battle, and several of the primary actors were actually injured during its production. Exciting new AI software was generated to bring the 10,000+ fighters to realistic life without having to outfit and train 10,000+ extras.

Now, I forgot to check my watch, but for everything I heard about it, it didn’t seem long or interesting or detailed enough. I’ve seen huge, realistic battle sequences in movies before, and although the sheer scale of this one was much larger, it did not have as much of an impact on me. The battles in Saving Private Ryan and Braveheart make an impact, and I think a lot of it has to do with focus. Most of the shots in the battle of Helm’s Deep have a huge scope and a lot of camera motion, leaving me with a blurry impression that a battle is taking place without actually seeing much in the way of actual fighting or dying by good or evil. Plenty of good dwarf humor, but very little dwarf fighting.

I may be looking for the wrong kind of thing though. In the last couple of days I saw movies like The Matrix and Equilibrium, whose fight scenes have similar odds of more than 30 bad guys to every good guy, but which have fight scenes I get excited about. Monday during Equilibrium I was squealing and vibrating and pointing with excitement during fight scenes I’d already seen a little over a week before. I could feel the intensity and skill and energy and focus and challenge of every move and strike and attempt at striking in every fight, and it made it interesting, especially since the fights were so fast-paced. The main characters from the fellowship of the ring who are fighting at Helm’s Deep are supposed to be the best of the best of middle earth, so I expect them to fight with a similar level of skill and intensity and focus as the fights I like, and for at least some of the good and the evil soldiers to fight with at least some level of skill. And here’s where I think I’ve gone wrong: I expect to see it.

Here’s an interesting thing to keep an eye out for during the Battle of Helm’s Deep: Watch the difference being AI makes in the intensity, detail, and quality of our heroes right after the dwarf toss. It’s only for a few seconds, but in a nearly impossible crane shot the characters had to be replaced by CGI & I tell you that that was the best fighting I saw. I get the feeling that if the evil forces weren’t all black-skinned creatures in black armor on black ground, pressed together into a nearly continuous mass of bodies, at night, in the rain, I might have been able to see more than a roiling sea of shades of black on black and been impressed by the fighting there, too.

I guess I’m saying that the live-action fighting was not as well choreographed as I would have liked, and the direction and editing left something to be desired. If there had been more clear and convincing depictions of individual conflicts between the vast crowd-on-crowd action, I would have been more satisfied. Certainly the scale of the battle was conveyed, but after I was sure a full quarter of the good forces had been destroyed there was a shot of them all rushing forward as a group, and as I saw that I turned around to see the audience of about 350 people behind me, and it seemed a smaller group than the remaining forces of good. They didn’t feel nearly as outnumbered to me as they should have. Oh, and where did the 9k+ dead bodies go? They should be stacked against/around the wall dozens of feet high.

Now, on to the characters. For the most part, we already know everything we’re going to know about these characters at the beginning of the film as at the end, even if we’ve never laid eyes on the book. There are plenty of new characters introduced in this volume. So many so that several times I had no idea which exiled group of human warriors I was looking at, what their leader’s name was, or even whether or not I’d ever seen them before. There was a powerful scene where a character totally changed in appearance before our eyes, but I was focused so intensely on HIS eyes that until there was a subtle change in them I did not notice that his entire visage had been shifting around them. Consequently I was a little confused about who this new person was that everyone was treating like that other guy that disappeared without explanation…

So, for the most part, the characters you already know, you already know everything there is to know about them, and the characters that are introduced are exactly as they seem at first which often means indiscernable from other new characters. Still, many of these characters are fun or interesting to watch, or at least bring the world to life by existing at all. And then there are Gandalf and Gollum, Samwise and Sméagol and Frodo.

Gandalf’s changes hint at something very interesting and the possibility that there is something new and innocent about him. Every scene he appears in for the first half hour or more make it seem like he (and his change) will play an important part in the story to come. Maybe they will in the third installment. They certainly didn’t here. Gandalf, a powerful wizard able to defeat a Balrog and return from the grave, who claims to have known every spell of man and elf alike, able to communicate with creatures big and small, does little more at the Battle of Helm’s Deep than smack people with his staff and glow a little. If the most powerful wizards were this ineffective in battles, no one would ever play them in role playing games or games like EQ. Gandalf has very few lines and very little screen time in the second half of the film, and although he was promissing at the beginning, he did not come through on that promise.

Gollum did not do much in the first movie, but is a major player in this one. Gollum and Sméagol are probably the most entertaining characters so far in either movie. Sméagol is the only character that showed any real signs of growth or real depth, and Gollum was constantly trying to suppress those very features in him. They have both been transformed by the ring of power, but Gollum is basically the ring itself or the power of Sauron speaking and acting directly while SmÈagol hold on to remnants of his former humanity. Their struggles with each other and with trying to attain and to serve the ring of power are the most intense and believable struggles in the entire movie.

Samwise does not see the struggle between Gollum and Sméagol, and does not trust or respect either of them. Their relationship is forced by Frodo, and the tension between them is palpable. In the first volume, Sam seems simple, weak, and pitiable. He does not want to have even left home but has made a promise to keep his best friend safe and does not know how to break his word. In this volume, he appears to have grown some backbone. He has become hardened by their journey and by battle, and the weight and difficulty of their quest weighs heavily on him. He just wants to get it over with, get back to the Shire, and put this all behind him. Everything he says and does is based out of that selfish and short-sighted drive, and it puts Frodo between a rock and a hard place.

Frodo is finally being taken in by the power of the ring, although he stays strong enough or protected enough throughout the entire film not to put it on once. If you watch closely you can even start to see a little of the voice that speaks through Gollum coming through Frodo. Actually, you probably won’t have to watch closely, as both Sam and Sméagol seem to notice it. Frodo is smart enough and dedicated enough that he doesn’t just want to charge headlong into Mordor only to lose the ring of power to Sauron himself, and does everything he can to be sure he’s making the most of Sméagol’s knowledge and Gandalf’s guidance and his own intuition. As opposed to the very animated and expressive inner struggles between Gollum and Sméagol, Frodo’s struggles are mostly represented by blank expressions and staring off into space.

Still, there are some very cool things about the movie. While the Battle of Helm’s Deep is busy being disappointing and massive, there is another battle taking place at Isengard that I did get very excited about. The Black Riders’ new mounts are also very cool, especially when we get to see them very close up. The Oliphants are cool, and I wish I could have seen more of them. Every shot with Gollum of Sméagol in it is very, very cool, and perhaps more convincing than many of the flesh-and-blood characters in the movie. The sequence with Gandalf at the very beginning of the movie is a misleadingly exciting opening to a movie that seemed to move very slowly at times. Overall, I would definitely recommend this movie, though with a warning that it is about war and contains a lot of violence and cruelty and death. You probably already know that if you’ve seen the first movie and/or just about anything about this one on TV, but the warning needs to be there.

Oh and a warning that the meek attempt at romance was either inherently slow and boring and unbelievable and re-hashing things that were overcovered in the first movie and totally out-of-timeline, or there is something about Liv Tyler that puts me off. The vague impression of interest/attraction that Aragorn and Éowyn share is more interesting, believable, and compelling. The elves in this movie (and I don’t just mean Liv Tyler) prove little more than a distraction, which is disappointing, since there can be so much more to them.

Is that enough? Too much? A few comments, I said. Imagine if I was trying to do a proper review or a full-sized report on the film. Here’s hoping I have even more to say (and all of it praises) for the third volume.

Empire, Starring John Leguizamo, was not the movie the previews led me to believe it would be. If you watch the trailer for Empire, it may lead you to the impression that the story goes something like this:

Drug dealer meets wall street investment banker, drug dealer gives wall street investment banker a lot of money, investment banker disappears, drug dealer and his well-armed friends track down investment banker and a literal class war erupts, and since the drug dealer was the good guy in this story, he wins in the end.

Nope. Most of that is not what this movie is about. To explain, I’m going to reveal the entire movie. You weren’t going to go see it anyway, but since the only reason to watch it is for the outstanding performance by Leguizamo, knowing the story may just prepare you for the sort of turmoil he goes through.

The main character, a drug dealer played excellently by John Leguizamo in one of the most serious and emotionaly intense roles I remember seeing him in, does in fact meet and invest with an investment banker who runs off with his money, but that’s not what this movie is about. This movie is really about said drug dealer’s downward spiral.

He starts the movie the most important person in his neighborhood, with literally millions of dollars of liquid assets, a girlfriend that loves him, and a crew he can rely on and has known his entire life. He’s putting his girlfriend through college, where she makes friends with the girlfriend of the investment banker, and at the end of the first night our hero meets the banker at a party his girlfriend dragged him to uptown, she also reveals that she is pregnant with his child, and he gets shot by a member of a competing dealer’s crew. These events all coming together at once convince him that he needs to get out of the business and into something legitimate to protect his girl and his child, and of course he gets in touch with his new investment banker friend.

Except now he also has to deal with the competing dealer who shot him up, and he’s got to convince his crew he isn’t betraying them to want to get out, and he’s moving uptown, and things start falling apart. He gets arrested for the murders of the competing dealer and his crew & has to turn to his investment banker friend’s uptown lawyer to get him out of jail. His friends begin to turn on him, and with good cause; he is a changed man, and doesn’t want to involve himself with their lifestyle anymore. He is trying to seperate himself from the dangerous life he was living, but his girlfriend still feels a connection to her friends and family and neighborhood they are leaving behind and they fight about it and he leaves her standing very pregnant alone at night on a street corner in the ghetto.

Now, he’d already invested a million dollars with his investment banker friend, and right after his girl leaves him he gets back two million on his invesment, so he thinks he can really finally get out of his old life. His investment banker friend tells him about a much bigger deal, this one he needs to put of 4.5 million dollars, and by the end of the week. What do you think he does? This is where his downward spiral really gets out of hand. He contacts the woman who supplies him and his competition (played adequately by Isabella Rosellini) and asks her to invest with him because he’s short 1.5 million dollars, promising her amazing results. She tells him he just needs to keep the person he put in charge of his crew from resorting to violence re:the competition. So of course the guy shoots the competition in the head and our hero must kill him for the supplier. Except he doesn’t; the supplier’s goon has to do it for him.

In between, he is stressing out about how far down the tubes his life is going and he gets a call from his investment banker friend and asks again if the investment is legitimate, and mentions that he’s going out of his head just sitting alone in his apartment. The investment banker secretly calls his girlfriend and has her give him a visit. She pretends she hasn’t heard from him and is genuinely interested in our hero. He shows amazing resolve, and is pushing her off him when his girlfriend walks in to try to make up and instead she leaves in tears.

He gets the money together and gives it to the banker. The banker disappears. Every trace that he was there is gone. There’s a different business where his business had been, his home is empty, his phones are disconnected. That heoric battle between the drug dealers and the investment bankers I envisioned earlier? It can’t happen now because half the dealers in New York are dead, and those remaining consider our hero a traitor. He can’t even turn to his girl for support because she believes he was trying to cheat on her with the banker’s girlfriend.

The intensity of the situation is amazingly well crafted, and John’s performance was impressive. I won’t reveal the very end of things, but suffice it to say it doesn’t magically get better all of a sudden. His spiral just keeps going down, and there’s a confrontation scene where he’s almost more like an enraged, caged animal doing whatever he needs to get himself out of the situation he’s got himself into, and it is gripping in a way you haven’t seen John Leguizamo attempt before.

If Wil Smith deserved the Oscar nomination for Ali, John Leguizamo deserves a nomination at least for this performance. No, he wasn’t recreating a historical figure, but there was more depth of character and intensity of emotion all across the scale here. Not a groundbreaking story per se, but a breathtaking performance.

I’m not actually going to review the content of the movie at this time, and I’ll tell you why. First though, I need to say that Training Wheels is an independent film, locally written, filmed, edited, and shown. It is playing right now at the Harkins Centerpoint theatre in downtown Tempe, and will be playing through Thursday (11/14/2002). If you have the opportunity to, you should go see it. It was filmed digitally and is projected digitally, but it is one of the best looking digitally created independent films I’ve seen.

So as I was watching it, I was impressed by the story and the acting and most of the writing (this is Matt Lagman’s first screenplay, and is very well done), but as an aspiring film maker most of my attention was on the technical aspects of the film. I’d emailed with the Editor Friday, and seen and read everything on the website for the movie, which really helped me to see what it had taken to create each scene to the degree that is possible with a finished movie. I definitely learned a lot by watching it, and from teh Q&A after the movie and by chatting with the film makers afterwards even further.

So most of what I would have to say about the movie is not a review of the story, but my impressions of the movie from a technical standpoint, and that’s not what you want to read. (I think.) Not helping is that the movie is actually a pretty complicated thing, with half a dozen main characters plus some supporting characters, and a lot of believable character growth and experience throughout. I was a little confused about one or two of the characters, and now that I think about it, they seemed to disappear somewhere in the bigger story of the movie, but taking them away may have made the scope of the movie seem much smaller… I should stop talking about the movie so you can go see it. It’s only playing for a limited time, don’t miss out.

I don’t support local bands, but I definitely support local films. You should, too.