Boston Illegal

Okay, Boston. I get it. You are loyal, you are proud, and you are segmented as an ant’s thorax. Some of you don’t pronounce your R’s, most of you don’t take shit from anyone, and all of you worship your Sox.

It’s a funny place. It steeps in the brain fluids and doesn’t drain out. Everyone is vocal about his hometown, but Bostonians seem especially so. And Ben Affleck, for better or for worse one of its most famous alumni, can’t seem to let it go professionally. All three of his major non-acting credits—as director for “Gone Baby Gone”, co-writer for “Good Will Hunting,” and now director for “The Town”—have been not only set in Boston but are very much about Boston. What’s next Benny? It’s going to be hard to find someone ugly enough for the Larry Bird biopic.

Apparently, though, despite the prevailing pride, the whole point is to get out.

Just as Will Hunting skedaddled to see about his lady, Doug MacRay (Affleck), flawed hero of “The Town,” is all set to depart as well—with his lady. He just has to do it without dying. Tougher than it sounds.

You see, Doug is a bank robber—a pretty good one. He decided to be that because his daddy was that, and that’s just the way things are done in Charlestown. The movie opens with his biggest score yet. He and his boys, dressed in menacing crypt masks and robes, knock off a bank and wind up taking the assistant manager (Rebecca Hall, “Vicky Christina Barcelona”) as an “insurance” hostage. They let her go, but she’s shaken up.

The score is big enough that the FBI rears its ugly head—well, I guess not so ugly in this case, represented by Mr. Jon Hamm—and is soon breathing down Doug & Co’s necks. Then, in an unlikely and perhaps dispensable turn, Doug falls into a romantic relationship with the assistant manager he’d abducted and finds himself in the old “Do I tell her I’m a bad guy?” predicament we’ve seen in “Heat” and “The Departed.”

His newfound love as impetus, Doug suddenly wants out of the racket, out of the city, out of his life of beer with his buddies and comically unfulfilling sex with his increasingly violent best friend’s slutty sister (Blake Lively, her attempted Boston accent sounding like the gauzy, drugged-out expulsions of someone who’s just had her wisdom teeth removed).

However, “The Florist” (Pete Postlethwaite, excellently), the man financing these crimes in exchange for a cut, is not prepared to just let his best money-making mule go and see about a girl. Emerging as a very effective villain late in the film, he threatens Doug into doing one last job for him by invoking the fate of his fair lady.

This is going to sound wacky, but what “The Town” lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in realism. It runs into plausibility issues with the romance and with Doug’s ability to, as an ex hockey player, outsmart the FBI. But these are plot points. The actual execution of the action is very well done, the car chases riveting but not frantic, the robbery scenes full of real-life problems, and the dialogue brimming with profanity. Affleck doesn’t go for the slick, improbable caper as the Ocean’s movies did.  He asks himself, “How would this really go down?” and he shoots it.  

The issue that prevents Affleck’s latest effort from being an excellent movie is character development. Despite its length, none of the characters is fleshed out enough to care about him. For example, I would not have been upset if Douggie had gone down at the end–to jail or otherwise. In fact, it may have made a better film.

Because of the overarching lack of real connection to the people on screen, most of the suspense of the movie came not from “Oh my God, is he going to get shot?” but “Oh my God, if she found out he was the skeleton dude who abducted her it would be soooooo awkward!” That’s not cops-n-robbers suspense. That’s rom-com suspense. And Boston is the wrong place for that.

Machete cuts everything but his hair

The beautiful thing about Robert Rodriguez is that he’s figured out how pointless it is to grow up. “Machete” is the kind of entrails-and-bone-chips film one might storyboard with markers in a treehouse with one’s fellow chock-faced hee-haw hormonals. Markers, yes, and we might need a few extra red ones.

It may sound like I’m about to give this movie a bad review. But in truth, it was a love letter to suppressed inner pubescents everywhere, and it was much appreciated by the seventh grader who lives in me, shouldering all my dirty jokes to the surface. And it was also a love letter to a genre that Mr. Rodriguez obviously adores. “Planet Terror” was the first such love letter, but ended up as more of a spoof than an homage to the grindhouse style. “Machete” strikes a better balance.

But who is this…”Machete”? Well, you know that Hispanic guy in all those Hispanic movies who plays the giant, leather-faced, ostensibly evil enforcer? That’s him. Danny Trejo. Blossoming into a leading man and putting up a Bond-worthy sexual tally despite his face looking like it’s been rototilled. His character, as any self-respecting teenage-boy fantasy would have it, is a loner, a military-trained hero whose family has been murdered by this dirtbag trafficker Torres (hilariously, Stephen Seagal). He tends to choose his machete knife over guns when it comes to killing bad guys, but he will kill with whatever, if there is no machete around. That’s how committed he is to killing people.

Attempting to mind his own business doing roofing and septic work, Machete is selected to be framed in a political stunt to turn the people of Texas against Mexican immigrants and get a hard-liner on the issue elected. This stunt sets off a series of borderline-insane events during which Machete and his friends have to kill and maim hundreds of people. That’s just how these things go. After all is said and done, the evil men will find that they have, as is plainly spelled out for them in Machete’s first text message to anyone, “fucked with the wrong Mexican.”

The movie is almost worth seeing for the casting. Aside from Mr. Seagall’s high-comedy turn as the ex-Federale Mexican drug lord, Robert DeNiro plays an evil immigrant-shooting Texan gubernatorial candidate, Don Johnson plays “Von Johnson,” a vigilante border policeman, Cheech Marin plays Machete’s hermano who’s gone into the priesthood but retains his impressive artillery, and Lindsay Lohan plays the wayward & rarely clothed daughter of the governor’s right-hand man. Score one for the team.

[On a side note, I’m disappointed Cheech and Don Johnson didn’t interact in some kind of special Nash Bridges reunion moment. But my heart may not have been able to take it.]

While this movie won’t be getting any five-star reviews for its Intelligent Commentary on the Arizona Situation, it may at least do the favor of bringing the issue back into the American consciousness, from which it seems to have fallen ever since the Lakers knocked the Suns out of the playoffs. No, this movie is more about a different kind of Freedom–the one that allows a writer/director to have his hero swing, by another man’s unfurled large intestine, from one story of a hospital to another. It’s the freedom of the movies, and this Mexican knows more about that than you.

Good “Day” for a Cruise

I asked a couple people if they wanted to join me for “a movie” after work today. It turned out they both had plans already, so, as I often do, I went alone. It’s just as well. I didn’t want to admit to anyone that I was seeing “Knight and Day” anyway. “It had a funny preview,” I would have choked out. But that would have been disingenuous of me. The real reason I went to see “Knight and Day”—aside from having an AMC gift card to burn—was that I wanted an excuse to write about Tom Cruise.

There are very few celebrities bigger than Tom Cruise. I would wager that more people know his name than Beyonce’s. I would wager that more people know his name than Meryl Streep’s. Than Wolf Blitzer’s. Than Salman Rushdie’s. Think about that line from “Gone in 60 Seconds”: “Impound them all. I don’t give a damn if it belongs to Tom Cruise!” They could’ve chosen any L.A.-based celebrity for that line. And they chose him. There’s a reason for it.

He’s just been so big for so long. (t.w.s.s.) Find me someone who’s never seen a Tom Cruise movie and I’ll give you $10 (blind people don’t count.) And yet he’s the reason—let’s be real here—for my lack of disclosure today: “You’re going to see that Tom Cruise movie?” my friends would’ve said, “Why?! He’s nuts!”

I’m just going to say it: I enjoy Tom Cruise. I always have. I don’t think he’s the greatest actor of our time. I don’t think he’s a particularly awesome person. I don’t think I’d really want to have a coffee and scone with him. But you can’t deny that he’s made some classic-ass movies. He has an on-screen quality that one doesn’t see every day. I don’t care about all the shit people say about him—that…

a)…he’s crazy! Did you see when he was jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch shouting about how much he loved Katie Holmes!? Yeah, I did. Did you see that time Ozzie Osbourne ate the fucking head off of a bat in front of 10,000 people? Did you see Christian Bale go off on his production team? Did you see the way Dave Eicke ripped off his belt and threw it across the room at karaoke the other night? People do crazy things. Especially entertainers. Especially when they’re in love or trying to fake it. Jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch and declaring love for your lawfully wedded wife is not an offense punishable by loss of respect as a performer. It was actually refreshing to see someone not turn into The Orphan Oliver in front of Oprah.

b)…he adheres to a crazy religion! Do I even need to deal with this? Let’s say an alien landed on Earth and we all took turns explaining our belief systems and the lore involved therein. Scientology would not sound any crazier than any of the other religions (see George Carlin). Perhaps it would even sound less crazy. At least he’s not bombing anyone or holding Inquisitions.

c)…he brainwashed Katie Holmes! Bullshit. Katie Holmes did not drink any Kool-Aid. She chose to become Mrs. Cruise. She chose to be a Scientologist. She chose to towel off after Dawson’s Creek. No one brainwashed her but herself.

d)…he’s a bad actor! No he’s not. Watch him in “Magnolia.” Watch him in “Jerry Maguire.”  Christ, watch him in “Tropic Thunder”! When he wants to, the man can act.

e)…but he’s playing the same crazy character in all those movies! So is Jack Nicholson.

A friend of mine said, after seeing the preview, that it “looked like Tom Cruise playing a secret agent guy—playing Tom Cruise.” All right, I’ll give him that. Cruise didn’t really “dissolve” into this character as the great actors do. He didn’t become Roy Miller. It was more like demonic possession.

But, you know, if was fun to watch.

“Knight and Day” knows exactly what it is. The action is so hyperbolic that it would almost qualify as a send-up of the Bond Genre. What makes the movie work, I think, is the dialogue during the action scenes. (I would call it “banter,” but there’s too much screaming.) Cruise plays an action hero that also doubles as a sort of life coach, full of smiles and compliments and positive reinforcement for Cameron Diaz’s horribly incapable character, which, amid the car chases and gunfire and helicopters, is somehow hilarious.

Diaz and Paul Dano also pretty much play themselves, Diaz a spastic, goofy, leggy, and  occasionally moronic blonde named June and Dano a geeky boy-genius named Simon Feck, inventor of a Certs-pack-size battery, code-named Zephyr, that never runs out of energy.

The plot of the movie revolves around the Zephyr. Everyone wants it: Spanish arms dealers, the CIA (once again portrayed as corrupt) and of course Roy. Roy’s the only one left who wants to protect & preserve the inventor and the invented for honorable purposes, and June gets wrapped up in it all unwittingly. Action scenes ensue, along with a running gag of people getting drugged. Solid. Gotta love GHB jokes.

I love it when movies like this don’t take themselves too seriously. It embraces its physical impossibilities, its Dad jokes (“I have to be there. My little sister April is getting married. She’s April. I’m June. She’s Marching down the aisle…”) and its subtle references (Tom Cruise’s opening scene is him eating an ice cream cone–a nutty one–wink!). Sure, there’s not much chemistry between Cruise and Diaz, but how is anyone going to have chemistry with Cruise these days? It’s like having chemistry with Gary Busey. Frankly I would worry. Chemistry is overrated anyway, when there’s ridiculousness to be had. And with these reactants, plus Hall and Oates on the soundtrack, there’s perfect chemistry for that.

“The Losers” vs. Bucho Jr.

Max wears a white suit. Most of the time he wears a matching glove on one hand. He’s evil. He’s in control of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he wants to start wars. He plans to do this by…dissolving?…Los Angeles with some kind of new weapon that turns land masses into pixels and swirls them into non-existence. The effect they use would’ve made an awesome screen saver in the 90s.

In his way, though, is the titular assembly of screwed-over special-ops soldiers thought to have been toasted in a Bolivian-jungle helicopter “accident.” However, instead of killing the Losers, Max’s missile kills 25 or so children that they’d just saved from a bombing. Good thing. Otherwise, there’d have been no movie. (Unless you want to make a movie about Bolivian kindergartners, and who’s going to see that?)

So, you know, vengeance unto Max would be nice—he having tried to kill them and he having framed them for the death of 25 children—but they’re kind of stranded in Bolivia. So, like, whatever. The Losers get jobs as mechanics and place bets on cock fights. That is, until they meet the lithe and enigmatic Aisha (Zoe Saldana), who promises to get them out of there and back to the States as long as they can help her “get” Max. Shortly after her appearance, she exchanges roundhouse kicks with Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the hairy, barrel-chested leader of the gang, then later has slow-motion hair-tossing sex with him. As one would expect. (I’m beginning to think she only goes for white guys. Not that, as one, I have a problem with that.)

From here, it essentially turns into a caper movie. Each of the guys has a particular talent, a la the “Ocean’s” integers and “The Italian Job“—Pooch does heavy ballistics, Cougar does “long-range-elimination,” etc. And thus equipped, they take on the CIA. Or something. Normally, I love caper movies. But this one lacked the charm of its predecessors. There are a few chuckles, but the majority of the jokes fall flat to the point of me cringing alone in the dark.

What ruined this movie for me, though, was not entirely the bad dialogue. It was the fact that Max, the villain, was about as complex as a beach ball. I saw this same guy in “Desperado” didn’t I? Bucho? Anyone?

While he admittedly had some funny lines, his character is written with such blatant laziness that one just becomes insulted after awhile. There’s no psychology to him. At least Magneto and Ozymandias had semi-coherent motivations, and the Joker…well…he had clearly swum way out beyond the safe harbor of the Sanity Fjord. This “Max” was essentially a Captain Planet villain: directionless evil. A demon on a lily pad.

And of course, for the sake of posterity, he gets away at the end.

So it is not without grounds to expect a follow up. I’m hoping they don’t make their money back, or if they do they simply smile and thank the Higher Powers and run. “The Losers” wasn’t terrible, but still, we don’t need any more of them. Polluting and polluting is not the way.