Secretly Awesome - Mr. Baseball

Release Date: October 2, 1992

Director: Fred Schepisi

Writers: Gary Ross, Kevin Wade, Monte Merrick

Cast: Tom Selleck, Ken Takakura, Dennis Haysbert, Aya Takanashi

Box Office: $20,883,046

Rotten Tomatoes: 13%

Tom Selleck plays aging, dick-head first baseman Jack Elliot, a veteran Yankee who gets traded off to Japan to play for the Dragons in Mr. Baseball. The Dragons' uptight manager, Uchiyama (played wonderfully by Ken Takakura), brings Elliot on to help them win the pennant and save his job, but stubbornness and ego get in the way, and Elliot ends up being more of a problem than a solution, bringing embarrassment and shame to the team, goofing around rather than owning up to the hole in his swing and accepting Coach's advice on how to fix it.

Hanna - ****

Hanna is the kind of movie that should be making one-hundred million dollars. It's original; it's intense; it has a great hero, fun villains, and some amazing action sequences staged in creative locations. It's gorgeously shot, and it also features a brilliant score by the Chemical Brothers, who use techno beats and lullabies that keep things fast-paced, even in the quieter moments. What more could you ask for?

Cedar Rapids - ***1/2

Nice guy leaves his cozy surroundings and gets sucked into a lifestyle of chaos and debauchery... It's a familiar comedy premise, and a tired one at that. Ed Helms plays our nice guy, Tim Lippe, a small town insurance agent chosen to go to an annual insurance convention, where the Twin Diamond Award is given to the representative who displays outstanding character and respect for God. What's amazing about Cedar Rapids is that it completely sidesteps all of the boring pratfalls that most films of this kind seem to indulge.

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.

Limitless - **

And we have our first contender for Most Deceiving Title of the Year, Limitless disappoints with its utter lack of imagination and ambition. What would you do if a pill could make you smarter? Apparently pretty much the same thing you would do if you won the lottery. Bradley Cooper plays a struggling writer who gets addicted to a hard-to-come-by street drug that allows him to use one-hundred percent of his brain. He gives up writing to play the stock market, and deducing from the film's hypothesis, brain use only correlates to how much money you want to make, and how fast you drive your car.

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.

Sucker Punch - 1/2*

There is a scene late in Sucker Punch in which a guy running a fancy whorehouse/dance studio/prison describes what it's like to save virgins for the "High Roller"..."It's like I'm in the corner of the sandbox watching everyone else play with my toys." Watching Sucker Punch, a live-action manga nightmare, one can't help but think of writer/director Zack Snyder seeing his actresses in much the same way, as dolls to accessorize and play dress-up with, outfitting them with crazy weapons, and contorting them into sexy poses. I wouldn't really have a problem with that if there were a payoff, but Snyder keeps all of the fun for himself while boring the rest of us with a poorly-conceived story of a fight for freedom inside of a girl's head... inside of a girl's head.

Paul - **1/2

Paul, both the character and the film itself, is kind of a one-trick pony. Paul is an alien who crash-lands on Earth in the 40s and escapes from the government in present day into the hands of two British nerds (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), in from England for Comic-Con and a road trip to all of the extra-terrestrial-related sites in the American Southwest.

It's a pretty nice little movie until Pegg and Frost actually meet Paul, who essentially just acts contrary to most on-screen aliens have in the cinematic past, which would be refreshing if it didn't mean simply swearing, getting naked, and getting high. That still might sound satisfying enough, but it honestly just gets old really quickly. Aside from a few random inserted jokes, like a flashback to 1980 that has Paul giving Steven Spielberg some advice on what E.T. should be like, Paul doesn't really offer up much that is worth your while. And aside from a handful of top-notch Star Wars references, Pegg and Frost don't really do too much either. There are some great supporting performances from Jason Bateman, Joe Lo Truglio, and Bill Hader, as well as an amazing cameo by Jeffrey Tambor as an asshole of a sci-fi novelist doing a signing at Comic-Con... "Did you buy a book? Well, then get the fuck out of here."

Paul really isn't a bad movie; it's enjoyable enough, but it's just kind of bland. It's not that the jokes fail, so much as the jokes are not even there to begin with, and there isn't enough plot, character depth, or just general originality in the film for it to be lacking in humor.

Secretly Awesome - Breakdown

Release Date: May 2, 1997

Director: Jonathan Mostow

Writers: Jonathan Mostow, Sam Montgomery

Cast: Kurt Russel, Katleen Quinlan, J.T. Walsh, Jack Noseworthy, M.C. Gainey

Box Office: $50,159,144

Rotten Tomatoes: 79%

Buy It!

Breakdown is something of a rarity. It's pure suspense. The plot is thin, the characters are pretty much two-dimensional, and the motivations are always clear from the start. Simply saying that the end justifies the means wouldn't do Breakdown any justice, nor would it give writer/director Jonathan Mostow the credit he deserves, because Mostow makes such perfect use out of these means that adding depth or backstory, or sub-plots would just screw the whole thing up. It's sharp, concise, and always gets right to the point; dialogue is only spoken when necessary, but most of it is just a high-wire act set at top-speed on moving vehicles.

I sat down several months ago expecting a dirt-ball action movie to have on in the background while I surfed the internet, but ended up watching the film for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, until I finally gave up trying to surf and closed my laptop about forty minutes into the film. When I looked it up on imdb earlier today, I saw that I had rated it a four out of ten, based on my memory of seeing it when it came out. Ashamed, I quickly changed it to a ten. It is that good. I turned it on to refresh my memory while I write this, and had to pause it at the 42:20 mark because I hadn't even logged into the site yet. It is completely absorbing.

The plot is this: Kurt Russel and his wife, played by Kathleen Quinlan, are moving out West, and their car breaks down in the middle of the desert. A trucker offers to take Quinlan to a truck stop to call a tow-truck and kidnaps her. The rest of the movie is a frightened Kurt Russel running around frantically through the desert looking for her. It's not concerned with twists and turns, no big shocks or revelations; it's all laid out pretty simply in the first fifteen minutes, and the rest is watching Russel unravel as he becomes more and more desperate, isolated in a world he knows nothing of, amongst truckers and red-necks who don't care about him or his situation, with nowhere and nobody to turn to. It's beautiful.

And when I say that these characters are two-dimensional, I don't mean that it doesn't take any skill to play them. On the contrary, there are some brilliant performances not only from Russel and Quinlan, but also from J.T. Walsh, Jack Noseworthy, and M.C. Gainey as the group of seedy truckers who prey on his initial trust. Nobody in the late 90s played a shady villain like J.T. Walsh, and nobody played the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances like Kurt Russel, who has the right physique and the perfect blend of intelligence and naiveté to pull of the everyman who gets in further and further over his head.

Mostow's direction is near-perfect. It's not showy or overly stylized, and he doesn't hide behind fast cuts when it comes to the action. He's more interested in bleeding a scene or situation dry of its inherent tension. At the 42:20 mark there have really only been a handful of scenes, which are dragged out to achieve their full potential. It's full of scenes that make Russel seem crazy to anyone who could help him, or long shots of him against an empty desert to highlight his isolation. That's the type of pace Mostow sets. It's not a typical action film, with a big set-piece delivered every twenty minutes. It's slow, it takes its time. There is a sequence later in the film that is just Russel climbing from the bottom of a moving truck's trailer to a safer spot in-between the truck itself and the trailer, where he can stand until the truck stops. It lasts for three full minutes, and it's just him struggling and grunting, trying not to be seen by the driver... and holy shit is it tense. And as I believe all great 90s action films should end in a crazy location, so ends Breakdown, but I won't give it away. See it for yourself.

Sorry for the awful trailer quality. It was the only one I could find.

Drive Angry - ***

Drive Angry is a quick redemption for Nicolas Cage from the more-horrible-than-you-can-imagine Season of the Witch, which was released about one month prior. It's all of the awful ridiculousness you hope for in a non-legitimately-great Cage film, all of the silly fun you used to get out of such an in-between Cage film, back before people associated him with pure shit, which really isn't fair, even after garbage like Bangkok Dangerous or The Wicker Man, back when his "in-betweeners" were more like National Treasure or The Rock. Pure, unabashed fun, with no point or reason for existing other than entertainment, Drive Angry has the goods.

Drive Angry is essentially what Grindhouse and Machete and anything like that released in the last few years was trying to be, except it succeeds. It features a lot of the same things as those films, hot girls, fast cars, crazy weapons and extreme violence, so why is it better? Because, unlike those films, it's not trying to be cute. It's completely sincere in its mayhem. There's no winking at the camera, the images weren't made to look grainy and scratched in post-production, and I actually get the sense that the filmmakers think what they are doing is legitimately cool, not just kitschy and ironic. It takes a particular combination of talent and lack-thereof to pull off this kind of film, and I'm sorry to say, but Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are simply too talented to waste their time trying (though "too talented" doesn't account for Inglorious Basturds (or however the fuck it's not spelled)).

So what is Drive Angry? Well, Cage breaks out from Hell, steals the "God-killer" from Satan, which is a big gun that blasts any living thing, divine or not, into nothingness (but for reasons unknown only comes with three bullets), teams up with Amber Heard on a road-trip to track down the leader of a Satanic cult, who intends to sacrifice Cage's new-born granddaughter after raping and killing his daughter, all while being chased by the Devil's Accountant, played to brilliance by William Fichtner (watch for the greatest delivery of "Come here, fat fuck" you could ever hope to see). And it delivers on everything that description promises, which includes a fist-fight in the midst of a gunfight inside of an RV that is in the middle of a ten-minute-long car chase. Among other things. It'll certainly do until Cage's next Bad Lieutenant.