Playwright David Mamet makes films that unreel as if he's laid out the pieces to a puzzle and the audience has to figure out how everything fits together. He's a fan of the sleight of hand, a follower of sardonic grifters who practice the big con with a smile. Even in something as seemingly mainstream as his new sports movie, "Redbelt," Mamet tosses a little bit of grift into the mix.
I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed "Redbelt," which is about the code of honor that exists among the men who engage in the sport of mixed-martial arts fighting. The cast is a hodgepodge, but they all come together in ways that surprise.
How about Tim Allen, known more for his comedy, starring as a deadly serious action movie star trained in the rules of Asian fighting styles. Joe Mantegna, David Paymer and Ricky Jay are businessmen with their eyes on a lot more than just martial arts box office gold. Alice Braga and Rebecca Pidgeon are wives who find a common ground, albeit an unexpected one. Emily Mortimer is a confused lawyer edging too near the mental breaking point. But the real stunner in this movie is the exquisite performance of Chiwetel Ejiofor. You may not know his name, but you've seen his face in such films as "Amistad," "Dirty Pretty Things," "Inside Man" and "Children Of Men."
Ejiofer plays Mike Terry, a mixed-martial arts instructor who runs a center for the sport but refuses to ever step into the ring, believing that the ultimate honor is in knowing how to fight with grace and dignity and not worrying about championship belts. The multi-layered movie contains some sharp satire about Hollywood and moviemaking, but it's also a serious and believable drama about the courage of one's convictions.
Mamet, who wrote the screenplay and also directed, stresses Terry's idealism and allows that character to be interested in emotional reactions to the games nefarious people play. A cop's suicide and the fact that the fix might be in at one championship match are two things that hover over the goings-on and create some unusual tension.
"Redbelt" asks the audience to consider how far it would go if honor meant more to them than money or career or happiness. It's a tough choice. But it's a terrific movie.
Imagine that your brain is fried and you've been miniaturized. Then somebody sticks you inside a pinball game. Are you picturing it? OK, that's "Speed Racer," a pointless, relentlessly noisy, thoroughly uninteresting mess from the men who gave us the "Matrix" films, the Wachowski brothers, Larry and Andy.
"Speed Racer" is based on an animated Japanese television series that did play on U.S. TV screens, but hardly earned cult status. John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are Pop and Mom Racer. Both are wasting their prodigious talents here. They've got a son named Speed, played by Emile Hirsch, who is wasting the cachet he earned for his brilliant acting turn in "Into The Wild." Speed has a girlfriend named Trixie, played by an out-of-her-element Christina Ricci. The Racer family has been disgraced due to the nincompoop behavior of another son. So they prepare for a big race in order to get even with, and thumb their noses at, a boob of a corporate villain.
Most of the unwieldy film is about building the perfect race car and taking part in a speed tournament. This is where the mind-boggling (and not in a good way) special effects come into play. They are not all that impressive. The entire enterprise is the cinematic equivalent of shouting. At two hours and 15 minutes, it's over-long. Heck, it's overlong at one hour and 15 minutes. Nothing else really happens in "Speed Racer." The family-at-home material is worse than the worst situation comedy. Jokes zing at you and fall flat. There's none of that crossover appeal, where kids will love the special effects and adults will get the satire. In fact, this may be the first movie for 10-year-old boys who've never seen a movie.
The movie hurts like a headache, but I will grant it this: It's wildly colorful.
"Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?" is a documentary from Morgan Spurlock, the affable chap who gave us the excellent "Super-size Me," about his antic adventures eating nothing but food from McDonald's for 30 days. Spurlock's health actually began to suffer from this dietary regimen, and seeing it fragment on screen was a little bit alarming. Now Spurlock has decided to answer the questions about Bin Laden's whereabouts. The movie is engaging, but hardly heavy-duty sociological rant or much in the way political theater. In other words, Michel Moore doesn't have any competition.
I did enjoy watching Spurlock interact with ordinary citizens in Morocco, Egypt, Israel and other places in North Africa and the Middle East, but this time around his goal is not really that arresting. You already know the answer to the title question going in. So, in order to offer moviegoers some tension, Spurlock cross-cuts his world travels with scenes of the impending birth of his first child. He wants us to make some sort of connection between death and rebirth and how it relates to bin Laden's activities. Will he get home in time to be at the birth of his child is actually his primary question. I really didn't care. I love traveling around the world and I would have preferred to have seen even more scenes with average foreign citizens, people who, by-and-large, love the American people, but aren't too keen on the current government. It's always great to see other cities and lifestyles.
The breezy movie unreels like a travelogue, and seeing Spurlock earn his macho stripes firing some sort of cannon at some rocks in Afghanistan was a little bit weird. It might have been fun for him, but why is it in the movie? It came across like that odd moment when presidential candidate Michael Dukakis drove a tank wearing a goofy helmet. Spurlock seems genuinely proud of his cannon work, but it really wasn't food for thought, just more fodder for criticism. Jane Fonda sitting in the seat of that howitzer in North Vietnam had more drama than Spurlock's gunplay.
Overall, the peppy film doesn't quite come together but, as always, the red-headed, easy-going Spurlock is fun to listen to. He's got an infectious, engaging style. He's a bit of a whiz-bang kid at heart. He tries hard for satire, but misses grabbing the brass ring.
Regarding satire, movies these days are promoted in myriad ways on the Internet, and I almost never pay attention to all the folderol that encompasses today's hype machine. But I'm hooked on the variety of nuttiness on the Web sites PitkasBookClub.com (a spoof of Oprah) and TheGurupPitka.com, both geared to drawing attention to the upcoming Mike Myers' comedy "The Love Guru," which opens June 20. Anybody who dares to write that he has "more wisdom than Oprah" immediately gets my attention and my vote.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 13 2008 |