Cinematic Throwbacks: January 2003/2013

2003:

25th Hour is the last of the truly great Spike Lee movies.

It also has one of the last truly great performances by Edward Norton, who plays a man living his last day of freedom before starting a long prison sentence for a drug conviction.

This is a spectacular film, with some of Lee's most emotional work. The entire film has this feeling of sadness to it. The mournful Terrence Blanchard score is so great I even bought the soundtrack. 

The ensemble is amazing. Norton's girlfriend is Rosario Dawson in one of her very best performances. His two best friends are a razor sharp Barry Pepper and a doofus-y Philip Seymour Hoffman. Anna Paquin goes full on temptress as teacher Hoffman's student. Brian Cox is wonderful as Norton's dad.

The film is full of incredible scenes, like Norton's rant against every subsection of New York, and an ending (dream?) sequence that is one of the most emotional closers in any movie. It hits way closer to home for me than I would dare explain here, but that last line gets me every time. 

Alright, here we go with some peak level Brittany Murphy cuteness. On the surface this is nothing more than a silly early 2000s romcom. We got a lot of these. Few were really any good.

But none had the effervescent delightfulness of Brittany. This isn't my favorite movie of hers, but it is my favorite of her comedies.

She and Ashton Kutcher (who the lucky bastard dated around this time) have their meet cute, and quickly get married. Then they go on their honeymoon in Europe and everything goes wrong. It's a lot of slapstick silliness, but a good version of it.

Kutcher is good in this. In general I have always found him kind of underrated. But c'mon, Murphy walks away with this. She is just on full display here, being silly and giggly throughout. 

There are no bad Final Destination movies. It probably has the best batting average of any horror franchise.

2 is the one that opens with a huge freeway pileup that kills a bunch of people. It follows the formula, where our lead (in this case the very cute AJ Cook) has a premonition of the disaster, and intervenes to save some people, who then begin dying in various gruesome ways. I've always liked the cynical joke of these movies that has the victims getting it worse than if they had just died to begin with.

Ali Larter pops up as the lone survivor from the original (Devon Sawa was killed off screen). Nobody in the cast is that big of a standout, probably the film's big weakness. 

I always appreciate the intricacy of the deaths. This one has a good nerve-jangler at a dentist office, and a very funny final death. This one tries to play around with the lore a little bit too. 

City Of God is set in the slums of Brazil, following a collection of characters in and around the gang culture.

This was one of the all time examples of a movie that Roger Ebert turned me onto. It was reviewed on his show, and I decided to check it out. I loved it. It got a few Oscar nominations that year. 

It's a great film, completely engrossing and shot so well. The only actor in the cast who really went onto some wider fame was Alice Braga, whose role here is kind of small. A lot of the actors in it weren't actors at all. 

I honestly hadn't watched this in years. It's hard with subtitled films to just throw it on when I like to multi-task. But on the plus side it makes the film feel fresh again. 

I figured director Fernando Meirelles was going to be one of the greats, but it never happened. He did The Constant Gardener (good, got Rachel Weisz an Oscar) and then Blindness (fucking AWFUL) and then nothing else. 

2013:

Zero Dark Thirty is a procedural about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. It was Kathryn Bigelow's first movie after she won the Oscar for The Hurt Locker. This one didn't get the same level of awards love. I get it. I think this is probably the better made film overall, but it does come up short as a piece of entertainment in some ways.

It doesn't come up short with its lead. Jessica Chastain is superb as the fictional CIA analyst spearheading the investigation. The cast is full of excellent character actor types and even a few budding stars like Chris Pratt.

The 3rd act is finally the big raid that killed Bin Laden. It's terrific filmmaking, and very tense even though we know it works out. The killing is presented almost as an aside, which maybe robs the viewer of that cathartic thrill. But it's just not that kind of movie. 

The Impossible is based on a true story that took place in the aftermath of the big tsunami of 2004.

Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor bring their 3 sons (including eldest Tom Holland in his 1st major role) to Thailand on vacation, then the tsunami hits.

We then follow parallel stories. Watts and Holland wind up together, though she is badly injured. Holland ends up at a hospital with Watts, and also goes about trying to help reunite other separated family members. McGregor and the 2 youngest sons try to find their missing family. 

The film works as a disaster film. The tsunami sequence itself is effectively terrifying and realistic. And the human drama really hits some big emotional highs. Watts was deservedly nominated for an Oscar, and McGregor also gives a career high performance. And even not knowing then what was coming, it was clear that Holland was a major talent.

The film got some heat cause the family the story is based on were Spanish, not white, although the real woman who Watts plays did choose her. I really don't think it matters much in the film. 

Other releases....

1993:

-Alive: The film about the soccer team who crash landed in the mountains and in order to survive resorted to cannibalism. I've watched this film in bits a lot over the years. It's good. 

-Matinee: I saw this in theaters back then. It's a charming movie that's kind of a tribute to atomic age monster movies. 

-Leprechaun: They have made a whole bunch of these. Never seen any. This one starred Jennifer Aniston. 

-Body Of Evidence: I watched this sleazy Madonna thriller back in the day because I was a 14 year old boy. 

-Nowhere To Run: One of the better Van Damme movies, as I recall. Rosanna Arquette was super hot in this. 

-Hexed: Another movie I watched on cable a fair amount. Was kind of a stupid sex comedy. 

2003:

-The Recruit: One of the more generic attempts to turn Colin Farrell into a traditional movie star. 

-Biker Boyz: Hey, as blatant ripoffs of The Fast and the Furious go, this wasn't that bad. 

-A Guy Thing: Pretty lame romcom with Julia Stiles. 

-Lost In La Mancha: Documentary about Terry Gilliam's failed Don Quixote film (which actually DID get made in recent years). 

2013:

-The Last Stand: This was Arnold Schwarzenegger's first kind of big movie in his post-governator comeback. It flopped, but I thought it was a simple, solid action flick. 

-Gangster Squad: A hell of a cast assembled for this old time gangster movie, including Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and a shamelessly scenery chewing Sean Penn. It's not bad but should have been better. 

-Mama: Most memorable thing about this horror movie was Jessica Chastain's grungy look. 

-Texas Chainsaw 3D: This slasher flick had Alexandra Daddario in 3D, so it had that going for it. 

-Movie 43: An infamous flop in which a whole bunch of big stars somehow wound up in this loosely collected series of lowest common denominator skits. It's more run to read about than watch. 

-Parker: A decent Jason Statham flick, with one of the better post-singing career performances by Jennifer Lopez. 

-A Haunted House: The Marlon Wayans spoof of Paranormal Activity. It was terrible, and somehow they made a sequel. 

-Broken City: Mediocre drama with Russell Crowe and.Mark Wahlberg. 

-Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters: Lame monster movie that kind of tanked Gemma Arterton's career. 

Coming in February...

I get to talk about the 20th anniversary of the unjustly maligned Daredevil. And the 30th anniversary of maybe the most underrated spoof of all time.