pbubny Reviews

Mystic River (2003)

a cop procedural with pretensions

[24 February 2004]

Maybe it's because Clint Eastwood has played a cop in so many movies, but the scenes that really crackle with life in "Mystic River" involve Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne piecing together the murder mystery at the core of the story. Almost everything else, sad to say, is either inflated with pretensions or cut short. There are a lot of loose ends here, and while it is not the function of drama to tie up everything neatly, there should be some continuity. The scene toward the end, in which Laura Linney's character--who hasn't had much to say or do for most of the movie--suddenly morphs into a Boston-accented Lady Macbeth is a good example. It leaves you thinking, "Where did THAT come from?" It came out of nowhere, and while the closing scene (SPOILER ALERT) gives you some idea of what it leads to--that the Sean Penn character has become a small-scale Tony Soprano--it's all too typical of the sloppy construction of a movie which somehow wowed the critics.

The movie does have its moments. However, none of them involve Penn, who never allows us to forget that he's a Great Actor. Tim Robbins and Marcia Gay Harden, and some of the lesser-known supporting players, disappear into their roles, but Penn contents himself with a mannered star turn. Since he fails to make his character sympathetic--and even a thug who becomes a bereaved parent should elicit some compassion--he leaves a gaping hole in the movie's center.

Eastwood has made a great movie about a man whose violent past catches up with him and compels him back into violence to avenge a wrong. That movie was "Unforgiven," to which this one can't compare.

Twister (I) (1996)

A dust-devil of a movie

[3 August 2003]

Seems to me that a much better movie could have been made, using the same basic premise (storm chasers in Tornado Alley). The filmmakers could've even gotten away with the same one-dimensional script and bad dialog if they'd just put a little more imagination and realism into the scenes everybody came to see--the tornadoes. Extreme weather--and it doesn't get any more extreme than a full-blown (excuse the lame pun) tornado--has got more than enough stranger-than-fiction quirks that the filmmakers could've incorporated some of those without straining credibility. What DOES strain the credibility here is the usual blockbuster cheats--e.g., a tornado that's powerful enough to lift an 18- wheeler off the highway and fling it back down again but nevertheless leaves the two main characters totally unscathed (not to mention that it doesn't ruffle the grass in the field they're running through). When the only character to get more than a bruise is poor old Aunt Meg--who was at home minding her own business when a twister blew through, not trying to see how close she could get to a funnel cloud without getting sucked up into the skies--you know you're in Hollywoodland.

Not only that, the storm scenes aren't all that frightening, for all the airborne wood, cars, and cows they kick up. (Only the nighttime shots of a twister disintegrating a drive-in movie screen are eerie.) TV news footage as recycled on the Weather Channel's "Storm Stories" is easily more scary. That's because the news footage is REAL, and looks it. It doesn't look like the product of a carefully controlled movie set. A little more effort to make the storm scenes in this movie suggest that the crew might have been in actual danger filming them (maybe a little shaky camerawork, a little rain and mud spattered onto the lens, shots of flying debris that weren't always perfectly composed but looked a little more chaotic--y'know, like a real natural disaster) would've gone a long way.

Substitute 100-foot waves for 300-mph winds, and all the comments here would also apply to "The Perfect Storm," another extreme-weather blockbuster that, aside from the primal fascination of the subject matter, is really pretty awful.

The Patriot (2000)

Our forefathers won their independence for this?

[19 June 2002]

Terrifically entertaining, if overlong and often inaccurate historical drama about how a warrior, played by Mel Gibson, avenges the loss of someone dear to him and helps win independence for his country, triumphing over a sneering English foe. Oh sorry, that was "Braveheart." Mel's **other** overlong and often inaccurate historical drama about an avenging warrior/patriot with a sneering Brit nemesis is pure Hollywood cheese. Beautifully filmed cheese, but cheese nonetheless. The inaccuracies are not the problem; the predictable plotting and tacky dialogue are. Did our forefathers struggle for American independence just so that their story could one day be told in the most cliched terms possible?