Four Movie Reviews

I've fallen way behind on my movie reviews, so let me catch up with some short ones.

Hellboy II - Was a lot of fun. It's not what you think. Sure, it's a superhero fights demon story and it's not quite Buffy, but it is also a romance. Hellboy might look all demony but he's a big lug. And it has the best use of a Barry Manilow song in any film, and I mean that seriously. I thought the early fight scenes were a little weak and it drags a little about 2/3 of the way through, but the end picks up nicely. Guillermo del Toro's visuals are of course magnificent. If Dark Knight is still sold out or if you've seen it a few times and want more superhero stuff, this is the movie to see.

The Wackness - Teenage angst set in NYC. Josh Peck, who I've never heard of but has apparently done lots of things, plays Luke Shapiro, a high school graduate feeling lost before going to college. He makes money selling pot and is trying to sell a lot this summer to help his somewhat dysfunctional family's money problems. One of his big customers is Dr. Squires, a psychiatrist played by Sir Ben Kingsley. He's a bit spacy and dare I say wacky but you can see how this relationship developed as they exchange therapy sessions for drugs. Squires has a daughter in Luke's class named Stephanie and they start hanging out, even as Squires marriage to Stephanie's mom (Famke Janssen) is falling apart. I'm not sure there's much new here, but it's bit darker than the normal kid learns a life lesson film. Alright there is something different, I never would have expected to see Sir Ben Kingsley make out with Mary-Kate Olsen, and I feel a bit scarred for it.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson - I've never been a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and found the first chapter to be amazing and the rest pretty boring. I didn't know much else about him aside from the various spoofs of his alter ego Raoul Duke in Doonesbury and Transmetropolitan. But this is a documentary by Alex Gibney who also made Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room so I wasn't surprised that it was interesting all the way through. Johnny Depp reads some of his works and various politicians and his colleagues talk about his effect on them. I loved the quote (I think by Pat Robertson) that his reporting on one political event was the most accurate and least factual of all. I'm now curious about Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and how people believed that Edmund Muskie was addicted to ibogaine. The soundtrack has lots of good 60s/70s music, though some of it repeats a little much.

Rendition - I missed this last year because of the middling reviews but caught it on DVD. Anwar El-Ibrahimi is an Egyptian who's been living the US for years and is married to all american Reese Witherspoon. After a terrorist bombing and a misdialed phone number he's rendered and tortured to find out what he knows. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a CIA analyst who starts to question what is happening but his boss, played by Meryl Streep is too hard line. Witherspoon is working through official channels (that is Peter Sarsgaard) to find out why her husband got on the plane but not off and is not having any success. There's a sub plot following two young Egyptian lovers and a twist but it doesn't quite fit into the film. Maybe I've read too much about this and seen too many documentaries on it but I didn't think the film went far enough. The interviews with people who've had this happen to them describe how it's totally changed their personalities. The effects are devastating and this film has too many white middle class Americans talking how dangerous things are. Eh.