Rocky Balboa

Despite all the positive reviews on Sylvester Stallone’s latest Rocky movie, I still had a few reservations going into the theater. I am not a big Rocky fan. When I saw the first one, I was not particularly impressed and thought it was a joke that Rocky could beat Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men to win that year’s Best Picture Oscar. I also had a hard time understanding Stallone’s slurred speech.

Fast forward thirty years. Stallone still has a thick tongue, but my listening comprehension has improved dramatically. Rocky Balboa is not a classic in my eyes, but I have grown to love this character. When I came out of the theater, I was relieved that the movie is much better than I had expected. It may not say much, but as a fifth sequel to one of best known movie franchises, I consider it a good compliment. Rocky Balboa has Rocky come out of retirement and re-enter the ring. The movie may be a bit slow and too nostalgic for young people, but for anyone who has contemplated issues such as aging and mortality, Rocky has quite a few life lessons to offer.

I am also glad to find that Stallone recognizes a core part in his first Rocky movie is the love story between Rocky and Adrian. I may be the only person who views Rocky and 1984’s The Terminator as romance movies instead of a sports film and an action thriller. What moves me in those two movies is the love between the main characters and I keep hoping that things will work out between them. In Rocky Balboa, Adrian passed away a few years back and Rocky misses her terribly. In his effort to add some emotional impact, I think Stallone may have overdone a little and made his reminiscence a tad too sentimental and sugar coated. The storyline revolving Rocky, Lil’ Marie (a girl that Rocky warned about in the first movie) and her son is also too obvious as a plot device for us to see how he wishes to reconnect with his own son and goes back to his old time with Adrian.

Stallone clearly has a genuine affection for this character that had made him famous years ago. He is not much of an actor, but Rocky is right up his alley and he plays it with all the ease and charm. When the Rocky theme starts again in the middle of the movie and Rocky starts climbing up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I can’t help rooting for this underdog one more time. In the final fight scenes, Stallone’s Rocky moves considerably more slowly and each punch looks labored, but I have to admire his fighting spirit. Burt Young reprises his role as Paulie and offers most of the comedic relief in the movie.

Besides Rocky Balboa, I have not seen any other Rocky sequels. It may be time for Stallone to finally retire this character and Rocky Balboa seems like a good place to finally let this champ rest.

For Your Consideration

With the awards season in full swing, it is a perfect time to see Christopher Guest and company’s new venture, For Your Consideration.

Guest started his unique brand of satirical comedy when he co-wrote and co-starred in Rob Reiner’s 1984 cult classic mocumentary This Is Spinal Tap. In 1996, he directed his first feature, Waiting for Guffman, a movie about a group of small town thespian-wannabes putting on a show and hoping that famous critic Mr. Guffman will come to see it on opening night. In many ways, it was For Your Consideration in a theater world. Back then when I saw that movie, I really didn’t care for it too much. I felt it was trying too hard to mock those small town people. Consequently, I purposely skipped Guest’s Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. However, this time when I saw For Your Consideration, I actually quite enjoyed it.

The critics have concentrated on one aspect of the movie - what an Oscar buzz can do to an actor, but the movie is really much more than that. It is about the movie industry as a whole. Guest takes the trouble to show us outsiders the ins and outs of how movie gets made and promoted to a prospective audience. We see all kinds of entertainment types that we encounter daily through omnipresent media outlets, but also get a glimpse of those who mostly operate behind the scenes. In Guest’s typical fashion, he simply exaggerates all the characters a little bit to achieve the best satirical effect. There is an Entertainment Tonight look-alike show with two hosts that have perpetually frozen smiles; an Ebert & Roeper rip-off that instead of using thumbs, the hosts either love the movie or hate it; a MTV TRL type of show that has actors (no matter their age) groove with the hip-hop music; and a Charlie Rose like interviewer who never stops talking. Besides the usually neurotic actors in the movie, we encounter a whole array of industry types: a movie producer who knows nothing about the business, but has the money to finance a project; studio heads who consider nothing but the financial prospects of a movie; writers who have to bow to the studio’s wish and drastically change their scripts; a sleaze ball agent (Surprise!) who constantly cons his maybe only client; a publicist who actually has no idea about currently most popular way of publicity – the Internet; and of course, a director who constantly plays the peacemaker on the set. To us, the whole movie-making process seems so glamorous and mysterious, but Guest shows us that it is just like any regular job to people involved in the business. I love to watch the little details that Guest deftly inserts in the movie. In between shots on the fictional movie within the movie, we see the workers text message on their phones, grab a snack or chat among themselves. It is just like you and me in our offices.

All the usual suspects in a Guest movie show up in For Your Consideration. Guest’s former costars in This Is Spinal Tap, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, look very different now, but they are still terrific, especially Shearer. Eugene Levy is also exceptional as the agent. However, Catherine O’Hara completely dominates the movie. Like the movie Jezebel O’Hara’s character, Marilyn Hack, is watching at the beginning of the film, O’Hara has that same energy Bette Davis projected in that movie. When Hack thinks that she may be nominated for an Oscar, she apparently goes through a facial transformation. It is amazing to see an actress without a face lift play an actress with a face lift and O’Hara pulls it through effortlessly. It is heartbreaking for me to see that O’Hara has been left out this year’s Golden Globe nominations. I can only hope that Oscar voters don’t make the same mistake.

In the movie, the publicist says of actors, “In every actor there lives a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale.” I guess it doesn’t only describe actors, but also describes the bad and the beautiful movie business.

The Last King of Scotland

Filmmakers have always been drawn to portray real life characters on the screen, but good biopics are hard to come by. However, this year seems poised to be a stand out year for the genre: less than a month after I saw The Queen, another biopic, The Last King of Scotland, has also left a deep impression upon viewing. Not only have both movies succeeded in humanizing a character that has long been portrayed one dimensionally in the media, but they also have brought some original ideas and new approaches to the bio-genre.

The Last King of Scotland is based on the book of the same title by Giles Foden. I have not read the book, but the script is absolutely brilliant (credits should probably go to both the original author and screenwriters). It creates a fictional character to help reflect the brutal rein in Uganda under its dictator Idi Amin. Yes, the king in the title is not some British royal family member and is none other than the dictator Amin himself. He apparently loved everything Scottish except the red hairs on some Scottish men’s heads. Under his 8 years rule (1971-1979), approximately 300,000 people were killed. Some even put the number close to 500,000. Nobody knows for sure how many had died under his regime, but one thing is certain now that his regime is one of the worst ever in African history.

The fictional character in the movie is a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan (played by James McAvoy). He comes to Uganda on a whim and is also caught in the political storm by chance. Garrigan is a voyeur for audiences. Through him, we see how Amin has charmed people at the beginning into believing that he would make a difference for them. As time goes by, we gradually realize Amin’s paranoia, twisted mind and psychopath behavior. When Garrigan first meets Amin, he cannot help laughing at his jokes and admiring this “people’s general”, but Amin’s close aide never laughs at whatever he says. Near the end of the movie, Garrigan has become the one who is incapable of laughing while watching Amin charm the journalists. Director Kevin MacDonald has made a pure and heartbreaking film about a dictator’s rise and fall, and the end of a young man’s innocence. When Amin first comes to power, he is loved by his people, but as in too many cases, people soon find out that they simply have one tyrant replace another and the new tyrant often turns out to be even worse. Young people like Garrigan come from wealthy backgrounds, dream about exploring the world and endeavor to do some good for the poor and the unfortunate in the world, but end up coming to a realization that the world has much ugliness and sometimes one can be quite powerless. Because Garrigan is a fictional character, there are no historical facts to help one to learn about his fate. Hence the movie becomes quite a thriller for me. MacDonald shrouds the whole movie with an implied malice and one knows that something awful may happen to Garrigan but have no idea as to when or what. MacDonald also gives the movie a grainy look to add a documentary feel to it and grant a sense of authenticity. At times the movie can be hard to watch yet impossible to forget.

Forest Whitaker’s Amin is the best performance so far in his career. His Amin has so many masks. It is hard to tell which one is the real Amin or if he is all of them. He can also switch his masks at the drop of a hat and instantly go from a jovial clown to a ruthless murderer. As brilliant as Whitaker is, the scene stealer in the movie for me is Gillian Anderson. Amin is a dream role for actors and Whitaker can easily show his acting range, but Anderson’s role as a British humanitarian worker is much more low key and much less flashy. In this movie, Anderson is a revelation to me. Her performance is absolutely convincing without one minute of overacting or unnecessary suppression of emotions.

My main complaint with this movie (and most movies with foreign characters, for that matter) is the accent. Because all the African characters have to speak English with a Ugandan accent, sometimes it is hard to understand them. Most audiences know Whitaker and Kerry Washington are not Ugandan and I personally don’t need them to speak with Ugandan accent to convey a good performance. I would rather not struggle with a fake foreign accent so that I can concentrate more on the stories.

Minor flaws aside, MacDonald’s The Last King of Scotland is an excellent history lesson for those who didn’t live through Amin’s tyranny. There is an old Chinese saying “Accompany an emperor is like accompany a tiger”. Working under Amin is a perfect example of this saying.

Fast Food Nation

Richard Linklater’s new movie Fast Food Nation is about fast food production rather than consumption. It can’t be easy to adapt a non-fiction book full of statistical data (I only read the review of the book and heard author Eric Schlosser’s interview on the radio). A natural choice would have been to make a documentary out of Schlosser’s best-selling book of the same title, but Linklater is never one to do things easily. Together he and Schlosser paint on a large canvas to illustrate how America produces large quantities of fast food at such cheap rates. The answer is not pretty. It lies in third world poverty and corporate exploitation of the situation. Inevitably one major issue in the movie is illegal immigration from Mexico to America.

Linklater and Schlosser’s story revolves around three sets of characters: Don (played by Greg Kinnear), an executive of fictional fast food chain Mickey’s; Amber (played by Ashley Johnson), a high school student and part time counter worker at Mickey’s in Cody, Colorado; Raul (played by Wilmer Valderrama), Sylvia (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Coco, three illegal Mexican immigrant who work at a meat processing plant in Cody that makes all the burger patties for Mickey’s. Most of the non-Mexican characters in the movie are created as mouthpieces to pass out some of the information from the book to the audience. They feel staged and cliché. One can sense from miles away how their plot lines are going to turn out. However, they do also serve as a contrast to the hard immigrants’ lives in America. The scenes keep juxtaposing our daily lives in the States and the hard journey made by the Mexicans. The scene in which Amber and some other young idealist try to free the cattle is also quite telling about effective activism. The movie is at its best when it tells the story of those three immigrant workers. Linklater and Schlosser succeed in questioning the social consequences of globalization and awakening our moral consciences.

To me, Linklater is always a crafty director. Even in a movie that is uneven from time to time, his brilliance still shines through. One little detail particularly stands out for me. When Don is hesitant about whether he should do the right thing to disclose the truth about the meat plant, he stands in his room with half his face in the dark and half in the moonlight. Then he gradually completely retreats into the dark. At that point, we know what he has decided to do before we hear him on the phone to the company’s CEO.

The cast of the movie includes many familiar faces, but unfortunately most of them basically repeat their familiar roles here. Kinnear plays another family man struggling with what is morally right and what is best for his family; Ethan Hawke’s role is simply his character in Reality Bites 10 years down the line; Moreno is good as Sylvia, but Sylvia is really not much different from Maria she played in Maria Full of Grace. Valderrama actually turns in a strong performance here, but with all the tabloid stories about him, it is just hard to take him seriously in any movie. One actor that does leave a strong impression for me, even after the movie, is Esai Morales. He has only a few minutes’ screen time, but during that time period, he got my full attention. When he talks with Don and Amber, he makes such smooth transition in his tone and attitudes that he is absolutely convincing as a shrewd small business (in this case, one Mickey’s restaurant) owner.

Fast Food Nation has the saddest and most heart wrenching scene of all the movies this year. When Linklater shows the slaughter of the cattle, I cried, not just for the inhumane treatment of the animals, but also for the indifference people have exhibited on the spot in the slaughterhouse. I was saddened and scared to see that people could learn to adjust to this kind of cruelty every day and become immune to this kind of violence. That whole sequence of cattle killing is soul-shockingly powerful and it may haunt you for a long time.

Along with Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation will make people think twice before stepping into any fast food restaurant. Unfortunately, not too many people have seen both films.