Secretly Awesome - What Maisie Knew

Release Date: May 3, 2013
Directors: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Writers: Nancy Doyne, Carroll Cartwright, based on a novel by Henry James
Cast: Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan, Joanna Vanderham, Alexander Skarsgard, Onata Aprile
Box Office: $1,066,471
Rotten Tomatoes: 88%



Normally I reserve this column for older, forgotten films, or those which I feel weren't given their due: great '90s thrillers, like Breakdown, to unexpected delights, like Young Sherlock Holmes. But the intention has always been to highlight films that deserve to be part of the conversation, but generally are not. Which is where What Maisie Knew comes in, which is easily one of the best films of 2013.

Maisie follows a little girl, Maisie, caught in the middle of a custody battle between her parents, a touring rock star (Julianne Moore) and a traveling businessman (Steve Coogan). The film opens with a break-up and Coogan's swift marriage to the nanny (Joanna Vanderham). Though their relationship seems genuine, Moore's character sees it as a ploy to get a leg up in the custody hearings, and marries a friend (Alexander Skarsgard) for appearance's sake.

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Secretly Awesome - The Ninth Gate (1999)

Release Date: December 24, 1999
Director: Roman Polanski
Writers: John Brownjohn, Enrique Urbizu, Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Cast: Johnny Depp, Frank Langella, Lena Olin, Emmanuelle Seigner
Box office: $18,661,336
Rotten Tomatoes: 41%



Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate has it all. It's a globe-trotting supernatural thriller full of mystery, double-crosses, bad vibes, secret agendas, and sexy femme fatales. It's sort of what Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been, had it been R-rated and inspired by noir films from the 40s. It's maybe a little uneven, with an ending that lacks punch, but it's wildly eccentric, beautifully shot, and directed with wit, making it a blast to watch, despite whatever imperfections there might be.

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Secretly Awesome - Young Sherlock Holmes

Release Date: December 4, 1985

Director: Barry Levinson

Writer: Chris Columbus

Cast: Nicholas Rowe, Alex Cox, Sophie Ward, Anthony Higgins

Box Office: $19,739,575

Rotten Tomatoes: 65%

Back when Steven Spielberg attached his name to creatively interesting projects rather than high-profile, big-budget blockbusters that don't exactly need his endorsement to be made, he produced a little film called Young Sherlock Holmes. It was written by Chris Columbus and directed by Barry Levinson which, including Spielberg, is virtually a mid-80s all-star team. The result is not exactly great, but is as hinted above, creatively interesting. I've always found modernizations and re-imaginings like this to be fun to watch. Well, maybe not always, considering the last one I can remember is Julie Taymor's take on The Tempest. Yeah, on second thought, some of them can be pretty awful, which just makes it that much better when a good one comes along, as is the case with Young Sherlock Holmes.

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Secretly Awesome - Little Big League

Release Date: June 29, 1994

Director: Andrew Scheinman

Writer: Gregory K. Pincus, Andrew Scheinman

Cast: Luke Edwards, Timothy Busfield, John Ashton, Jonathan Silverman, Dennis Farina, Jason Robards

Box Office: $12,267,790

Rotten Tomatoes: 33%

There were a handful of solid kids' baseball movies released in the mid-1990s, the least remembered, most underrated of which being Little Big League. In my experience, I find that people who were actually kids when these movies came out seem to gravitate towards The Sandlot, which always surprises me. Perhaps they are just nostalgic for a time they never experienced, because anyone who has seen The Sandlot after turning fifteen has to agree that it doesn't exactly hold up well, and that it's essentially just watered-down Stand By Me. Not the case with Little Big League, however, which features a better premise, better characters, and much better comic relief, not to mention better baseball.

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Secretly Awesome - The Last Mimzy

Release Date: March 23, 2007

Director: Robert Shaye

Writers: Bruce Joel Rubin, Toby Emmerich

Cast: Chris O'Neil, Rhiannon Leigh Wryn, Timothy Hutton, Rainn Wilson, Joely Richardson, Kathryn Hahn, Michael Clarke Duncan

Box Office: $21,471,047

Rotten Tomatoes: 53%

Rather than wallow in my disappointment over last week's far-less-than-stellar Super 8, I decided to revisit the most recent movie I can remember that successfully attempted to portray the wonder and mystery of children discovering aliens, The Last Mimzy. I must admit that the differences between the two films are greater than I remembered, not having seen Mimzy in several years, there are enough similarities for me to wish Super 8 director J.J. Abrams had watched it before finishing his screenplay.

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Secretly Awesome - Vampire's Kiss

Release Date: June 2, 1989

Director: Robert Bierman

Writer: Joseph Minion

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Jennifer Beals, Maria Conchita Alonso

Box Office: $725,131

Rotten Tomatoes: 62%

Buy It!

Whenever someone claims that Nicolas Cage is a terrible actor, I know I can name at least a half-dozen movies that person has never seen. Sure, some his recent stuff is pretty questionable, though not all of it (I'll get to some of those another time), but he has a solid bank of undeniably brilliant performances that will forever keep him far away from legitimately being labelled terrible.

Secretly Awesome - The Escape Artist

Release Date: May 28, 1982

Director: Caleb Deschanel

Writer: Melissa Mathison, based and a novel by David Wagoner

Cast: Griffin O'Neal, Raul Julia, Desi Arnez, Teri Garr, M. Emmet Walsh

Box Office: $143,369

Rotten Tomatoes: N/A

Buy It!

The Escape Artist is like a well-executed magic trick: It pulls you in with its oddity and charm, and though you walk away pleased with what you saw, you don't really know exactly what happened. Of course the analogy breaks down when considering that a film thrives on clarity of narrative and purpose. It's not a perfect film, but its flaws are minor when compared to its triumphs.

Secretly Awesome - Event Horizon

Release Date: August 15, 1997

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer: Philip Eisner

Cast: Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy

Box Office: $26,673,242

Rotten Tomatoes: 21%

Buy It!

Event Horizon follows a rescue team on a mission to investigate what happened to a portal-jumping space-ship that has just re-appeared after it was missing for seven years. It turns out the ship has been to some Hellish dimension and brought back some kind of energy force that drives people insane, and when the rescue team arrives, they find the bloody remains of the ship's crew. What may sound like a routine B-movie turns out to have some top-notch production value, a cast of under-used character actors, and some surprisingly reserved direction from none other than Paul W.S. Anderson, the man responsible for the Resident Evil franchise, which is anything but reserved.

The first hour of Event Horizon is all tension build-up, and surprisingly effective build-up at that. Sure, we learn all of the things we expect to learn, and quickly realize that the crew members will be separated through a strange sequence of events and picked off one-by-one in the end, but what makes Event Horizon different is its amazing set design and art direction, as well as some eerie lighting effects. There's something creepy in every room and every corridor that sets a very unsettling tone that the rest of the film keeps pace with for a while, as the crew explore the ship, and come across places like the hatch that opens up into the green ventilation shaft maze. As this goes on, we start to see the crew's waking nightmares, which cause them to do some crazy things until the whole thing devolves into a big, bloody death-trap. And I say "devolve" there with love, because the last half hour is actually pretty satisfyingly gory.

A lot of this could have been terrible (I'd be interested to read the screenplay to see how bad it might be), but it was really well-cast. The actors take the material seriously enough and deliver the expository dialogue with enough gravity for me to be more than willing to suspend disbelief. And Anderson's direction is pretty subtle at times; he lets a lot of moments play out slowly, sometimes almost painfully slowly, like a scene in which a possessed crew-mate goes into the cargo bay with the intention of opening the hatch into space. The scene lasts for minutes as the powerless crew try to talk him down. It's pretty intense. And of course, Event Horizon ends like a 90s action film should, with a showdown in a random location. In this case, Fishburne faces a demonic ripped-faced Sam Neill in a literal bloodbath at the base of a spherical room which holds a spinning orb-like multi-dimensional portal, which is on fire. Not to be missed.

Secretly Awesome - Virtuosity

Release Date: August 4, 1995

Director: Brett Leonard

Writer: Eric Bernt

Cast: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Kelly Lynch, William Fichtner, Louise Fletcher, William Forsythe

Box Office: $24,047,675

Rotten Tomatoes: 34%

Buy it!

What better way to start of this series than with Denzel Washington himself? 90s Cyberpunk doesn't get much better, or much worse than Brett Leonard's Virtuosity. Okay, it probably gets a lot worse, but not while maintaining such a high level of enjoyability.

The plot of Virtuosity is nonsensical at best, though it is the best kind of nonsensical, revolving around a computer training program for police to track down serial killers that is given corporeal form and set loose on a killing rampage around L.A. Fittingly crude CGI effects involving Russell Crowe's limbs regenerating when he touches glass, silly demonstrations of predicted futuristic technology, and a mess of hokey computer interfaces are just a few of the wonderful things you'll find in this film. And that's not even mentioning the symphony of human screams scene, in which Crowe's Sid 6.7 terrorizes a nightclub and tries to orchestrate screams into music. It's twisted and bizarre, and played with a wink, as pretty much all of Crowe's scenes are.

People might just see a lot of this movie as being so bad that it's good, and they wouldn't be totally wrong; but it's also just a brilliantly strange film, and I always love to see a fully-realized Hollywood production of something that is this bizarre. That said, the one thing that is genuinely great, and the reason Virtuosity deserves to be called "secretly awesome" is Russell Crowe, who turns in what had to have been one of the most enjoyable performances of 1995. It needs to be added to the cannon of the the all-time great over-the-top screen performances. Sid 6.7 is an attention-craving, cocky cyber-bully synthesized from the personalities of two-hundred notorious serial killers, who goes on a creative kill-spree in L.A. And Crowe just feeds off of the ridiculousness of it, playing Sid with a swagger and a gorgeous comically demonic laugh. It's beautiful to watch. As for Denzel... well, he pretty much phones it in. But even a phoned-in Denzel can be entertaining. According to the imdb trivia page, he accepted the role because his son asked him to. But honestly, Crowe more than makes up for it.

In addition to Denzel and Crowe, Virtuosity also boasts a nice supporting cast, which includes Louise Fletcher, William Fichtner, and William Forsythe, who gives the greatest delivery of "Anybody using this chair?" you could ever imagine. Seriously. And Virtuosity ends how all 90s action-thrillers should... with the good guy squaring off against the bad guy in a random, inaccessible-under-normal-circumstances location. In this case, on the rooftop heating combines of a skyscraper which houses the television station in which Sid 6.7 is broadcasting live murders to the world.

Brett Leonard also directed The Lawnmower Man, another 90s techno-thriller and surely a candidate for a future post, as soon as I can track down a copy of the out-of-print DVD. But for now, Virtuosity will definitely suffice.