Foxy Brown and Elmer Gantry? Nay, nay.

How can anyone deny Foxy Brown a kiss with Burt?

By Jerry Saravia

While fiddling through Pam Grier's autobiography, "Foxy," I came across something rather disturbing. It turns out Pam Grier had been cast as the late Burt Lancaster's girlfriend in 1988's "Rocket Gibraltar." Unfortunately, her scenes were cut out completely, thanks to the film's director Daniel Petrie who "feared repercussions from the interracial love scenes," according to Pam. Daniel Petrie had cast her as a prostitute in 1981's "Fort Apache: The Bronx." I suppose a black prostitute is okay as long as she is not engaged in a relationship with a white man, especially if 7 years later she appears with Burt Lancaster.

What is odd about this story is that she was cast and her scenes were shot for "Rocket Gibraltar," and then the director got cold feet (though I wonder if he would've had second thoughts if he had seen 1987's "Fatal Beauty" where there is one or more intimate scenes between Whoopi Goldberg and Sam Elliott.) Still, this was a shaky period for interracial relationships in Hollywood pictures (Denzel Washington never had a romantic relationship with Julia Roberts's character in 1993's "The Pelican Brief," though he did kiss a white woman in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X"), and the 1970's was a more adventurous period where such things weren't questioned as much. Take for example the fact that James Earl Jones plays a heavyweight fighter and Jane Alexander is his white mistress in 1970's powerful "The Great White Hope." Why is it then that eighteen years later, Pam Grier as Burt's mistress is questioned? Maybe because race was not an issue as much as Pam's super-hot, foxy charisma? Who knows, but Pam Grier was disappointed when told by the director that her scenes were excised.

Still, in 1997's "Jackie Brown," Pam is Jackie Brown and she has a few intimate scenes with the very white Robert Forster, including sharing a kiss in the film's finale where, in movie theatres, you could hear a pin drop. Whether it is 1988 or 2012, this shouldn't be a big deal anymore in mainstream Hollywood movies but, for some reason, it still is. Hollywood hasn't quite caught up to reality, and it proves that they are not as liberal as people might think.

McCain-Palin Politics as Kabuki Theatre

GAME CHANGE (2012)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Whatever political beliefs one has towards Sarah Palin, one can't help but feel a smidgeon of sympathy for her in "Game Change," an HBO film that is pungent, extraordinarily acted and written and is as enveloping and fascinating about the political process as almost anything else I've seen in a while.

The superlative Julianne Moore is the Alaskan governor who is picked at the last minute to be Republican John McCain's vice-presidential nominee in a run to the White House against the Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. Although she doesn't agree with all of McCain's ideology (stem-cell research, abortion), she feels it is God's way of telling her to run so she goes for it, unhinged and fearless. Woody Harrelson is Steve Schmidt, the campaign strategist who helps with an iron and sympathetic fist. Sarah Paulson is Nicole Wallace, the senior advisor to the campaign who tries and repeatedly fails to prep Palin. One awfully cringe-worthy scene shows Sarah Palin getting a history lesson in foreign affairs, particularly with Afghanistan and Iraq (she runs with the false notion that Saddam Hussein started the 9/11 attacks). I do not doubt that this scene happened in real life but it is hard to figure a woman running for Vice President who has no idea that North and South Korea are in fact separate countries.

Ed Harris is brilliant as John McCain, and the Arizona senator is shown as a strong, idealistic man who doesn't like negative campaign ads nor does he seem very pleased to have a naive woman running side-by-side. The implication seems to be that Palin is getting all the press, all the glory, and McCain is shut out by the voters and the press. What McCain may or may not have thought about all this is left to the imagination, and we never really see the two sharing more than the occasional photo-op at conventions.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has trouble following the nuances of foreign policy; is texting more often than listening to Sarah Paulson, who tries her damnedest to prep the Alaskan governor; is forced to memorize answers to her Vice-Presidential debate (ah, so that is why she did so well); fouls up the infamous interviews with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, and so on.

The impression left from "Game Change" is that McCain's advisers and strategists threw this "moose-hunting" woman to the wolves when she came close to having a nervous breakdown. Her only success was the Vice-Presidential debate but it did little to stir voters and was a muted success at best. She is seen as naive and uninformed and unsuitable to run for office, which can hardly be debated. Her "Troopergate" controversy, the Bridge to Nowhere, her daughter's pregnancy and the expensive suits she wore are given minimal exposure, and rightfully so (the relationship with her husband, Todd, could've used more screen time). Julianne Moore doesn't try to outdo Tina Fey's comical mimicry of Sarah Palin nor does she turn her into a clown. Moore invests humanity and compassion into a woman who truly did seem to care about people - Sarah Palin never struck me as artificial or heedlessly kowtowing to beliefs she did not actually feel. She is a celebrity and she has a strong personality and remarkable composure - love her or hate her, her star shines.

Based on the controversial book "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime" by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the movie has already been accused of having a "false  narrative" by Sarah Palin (who lavished the same charges on the book in 2010). Every non-fiction film plays with truth since it is intended as a dramatization of events. But as a behind-the-scenes 21st-century look at the political process by which a candidate is selected in this media-saturated age, it is deeply absorbing and also very troubling. Deep down, I think Sarah knows it too.

A Cinematic Trip to the Georges Melies Moon

HUGO (2011)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Silent films received a much needed shot of adrenaline in 2011. "The Artist," the first silent film since 1989's "Sidewalks of New York," won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and reintroduced a form that has not had many antecedents since the early days of cinema. "Hugo" is also a celebration of that very same time that has been long forgotten, and it is infused with humor, heart and pathos. It will make you swoon with the power of silent cinema.

Based on the inventive multi-media book by Brian Selznick, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," the film "Hugo" places us squarely in a world that seems ancient and yet so inviting. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living in a Parisian train station (the Gare Montparnasse) who is trying to find a secret to an automaton he keeps inside his living quarters. Hugo is good at fixing mechanisms, having learned the art of it all from his late father, a clockmaker (Jude Law) who dies in an unfortunate fire. After being cared for by a mean drunk of an uncle (Ray Winstone), a watchmaker who disappears, Hugo is left to his own devices and has to do his uncle's job of maintaining the train station's clocks. Hugo keeps a notepad that has a litany of descriptive drawings of all the intricate mechanisms that make the automaton work. All he needs is a heart-shaped key that winds it up.

Meanwhile, Hugo tries to evade capture from the relentless Station Inspector (a daffy Sacha Baron Cohen) and steals tools and other devices from Papa Georges (a solid Ben Kingsley), a toy shop owner at the train station who is actually the film director Georges Melies. Papas Georges wants to be left alone but he is taken with Hugo and his knack and grasp of mechanisms and rotors and such.

What is miraculous is that Martin Scorsese made this film. Many critics have declared it his most personal work and it might be (he has said his fantastic documentary, "Italianamerican," is his best and most personal work). Scorsese makes it a flight of fancy and wonder, injecting the film with touches of slapstick and providing Hugo with a great deal of subjectivity as in his observation of little vignettes, such as one man who is smitten with a woman despite a snarling dog. The movie also makes us feel Hugo's insular pain and his sweet relationship with another orphan, the adventurous Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who happens to be Georges' goddaughter. But what really makes the film a work of wonder is seeing the early days of Melies making his own films, such as "A Trip to the Moon," in a glass castle to allow sunlight to peer in. You definitely sense the man's ability to create magic on film and not just on the stage with his parlor tricks (Melies was initially a magician before making films).

This is an extraordinary cast at work here. Asa Butterfield resembles a cross between a young Malcolm McDowell and Daniel Radcliffe (I can only imagine what this kid might have done with the Harry Potter role), exuding all the qualities of a tough, determined urchin who discovers the truth about Papas' identity. Chloe Moretz is an affable personality on screen, a girl who is transfixed by the sight of Harold Lloyd at the movies (well, who wouldn't be) and transfixed by Hugo's situation. Ben Kingsley is one of our national treasures, an actor who delivers every nuance of regret and remorse as you might expect as the elderly Papa Georges. And adding a layer of towering presences is the one and only Christopher Lee as a book shop owner who can't help but elicit a smile when he gives Hugo a French translation of "Robin Hood." Plus there is the small and significant role of fictitious film historian and author Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg, who currently plays a smooth gambling operator in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire"), who wrote a book about Melies believing that he had died in World War I.
  
"Hugo" is a movie steeped in the magic of movies (the art design of the station itself is amazing) and in the process of discovery. Between the station inspector's mannered politeness and the choice vignettes of discovered love, the movie is in love with love and with the cinema. It restores in good faith what cinema ultimately was and what it can still be - a place of dreams that can still make you go, "Wow!" Scorsese is at the top of his directorial powers and makes "Hugo" a valentine for the most impassioned filmgoer and cineaste, and it is a masterstroke in the director's inarguably varied career. You'll come away smiling and in a cheery, heartfelt mood, something I never quite expected from Martin Scorsese. Bravo!

Greatest Transparency Ever

THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Did you ever wonder what was really going on with Bill Cosby's smile as he held a Coke can in "Leonard Part 6"? Morgan Spurlock's "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" will give you hints, fashioning itself mostly on the ubiquitous advertising in films, TV, 42nd St, etc. I always thought that the high ratings of "CSI" in its current network, for example, helped keep local news on the same channel alive. Well, it does, but advertising is the real impetus, the nucleus of almost all programming and of just about everything else.  

Morgan Spurlock ("Super Size Me") has come up with a way of using sponsors on his latest film without losing his integrity. He decides to make a film about Morgan trying to get sponsors for the very film you are watching. Coke and Pepsi opt out, apparently because they do not consider documentary films to be on the same wavelength as feature films! He goes to several meetings, presenting his own unique storyboards on how he can get the sponsors shown in his film (he comes up with inventive and funny commercial ideas). POM Wonderful agrees to be used in the film, as well as Solstice Sunglass Boutique, Old Navy, Sheetz (a gas station), Movietickets.com, Merrell shoes, Jet Blue, Ban deodorant, and so on. There are of course stipulations like with any contract: the movie must make 10 million at the box office, sell a half-million downloads and DVDs, and generate 600 million media impressions (The movie as of August 2011 generated 638,476 dollars at the box-office).

So what is the point of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold?" Merely that it doesn't take much to get sponsors to appear in a film since Spurlock allows full transparency. Advertising is advertising, and if it pays the bills and helps provide a budget for even a documentary, then why not do it. Ads appear everywhere in the United States (including at high schools with limited funds) yet in Sao Paulo, Brazil, advertising has been banned and been termed "visual pollution" (a shock to me since I used to live there back in the late 70's and recall a giant billboard for "Star Wars"). TV commercials are never enough since their brands appear in TV shows in glaringly obvious ways, and sponsors advertise in scrolls while a program plays. The point is that ads are in your face, everywhere you go (Internet has ads in just about any website you visit. Again, it pays the bills). Is there a limit? According to some professors interviewed in the film, yes, there should be a limit. Ads make you want to have a certain product with the belief that it makes you happy. But since it rarely does, then it is not about truth in advertising, it is about the subliminal message.

As snappily funny and sharp as "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" is, it is also oddly not as transparent about itself. The movie seems to be a critique on sponsors but Spurlock can only go so far since the film itself has sponsors whom he does not want to offend - their products are featured in the film and the sponsors are initially wary of being associated with a controversial filmmaker. I am usually not prone to being affected by ads but this film did make me want to try POM juice. It tastes good and has powerful antioxidants and it is 100% pomegranate juice, so what does that say about me, the consumer? I guess that is partially the point.

Willis adrift in forced whimsy

DISNEY'S THE KID (2000)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Bruce Willis is an admirable and occasional risk-taker, choosing roles that range from comedy to drama to action-adventure vehicles. But maybe an overly cute and highly overdone movie like "Disney's The Kid" is not what I would expect from him or any actor. It is what I call "forced whimsy."

I am a sucker for whimsical fantasies but this one is extremely demanding on my whimsy tolerance meter. Willis is Russell Duritz (see if you can remember that name), a 40-year-old image consultant who has no wife, no family and no dog. Oh, what a shame. He is cold, cynical and only gets three hours of sleep a night. Russell is rude to his overworked assistant (Lily Tomlin, shrewdly cast), calling her at obsessively late night hours to complain about his house's supposedly faulty security system! The reason is because some kid has been in his house. Who is this kid? None other than Russell as a young eight-year-old Rusty (overplayed by Spencer Breslin, and that includes his crying fits).

The question remains: why does the kid chase him in the opening scenes of the film in a cargo plane? No idea, but I went along with the movie's concept. Can Russell really see the kid or is all this in his mind? Paging the Sixth Sense. All I can say is that the movie boils it down to one odd conceit: if the young Russell had taken charge and won in a schoolyard fistfight, he might have grown up to be a well-rounded family man and settled with Emily Mortimer, who plays his on/off again girlfriend. The eight-year-old Rusty calls his future adult self a loser. How dare he?

I will not say I hated "Disney's The Kid" (the title was changed from "The Kid" to "Disney's The Kid" to avoid confusion with the Charlie Chaplin classic) but the movie overplays its hand. The sentimental and highly manipulative music score would make even Steven Spielberg and his composer John Williams cringe. Willis is adrift and looks lost, which may be the idea, but the movie never gives us a chance to see much more than Willis having a facial tic. The kid is all wrong for the film, looking like a mature version of  Jeff Cohen's "Chunk" character from "The Goonies" (Yes, I went there). I appreciate the ideas in the film but I think it could've been a funnier and more complex picture had it focused on the insights into a 40-year-old man's emotional problems that did not exclusively center on a childhood fight and not owning a dog.  

The Academy Awards Best Picture goes to Angelina Jolie's leg!

Angelina Jolie's Leg wins Best Picture

By Jerry Saravia

The 84th Annual Academy Awards had given a host of Oscar wins to "The Artist" and "Hugo" but you wouldn't know it from all the rapt attention given to Angelina Jolie's leg. As she appeared on stage, she extended her emaciated and thinly shaped leg from her black Atelier Versace dress in a provocative pose. The next day, the Internet and the media was all over it and it even inspired its own Twitter account. Why? Because Angelina Jolie is possibly the biggest female movie star in the world and attention on her is paid inordinately. Why did she strike a pose? Nobody truly knows, and nobody should really care. Never mind the fact that a historic win was announced at the Oscars: "The Artist," the first silent film possibly since 1989's "Sidewalks of New York," won Best Picture which is the first time a silent film has won since 1927's "Wings." That should leave room for ample discussion, not the posed leg of a movie star.

The problem is that film analysis and discussion is not given mainstream attention or close scrutiny of any kind on television (hence TV's ill-fated future of "Ebert Presents At the Movies"). Most filmgoers could care less about discussing the merits of "The Artist" or "Hugo," particularly when the nominated films focus on the turn of the 20th century when cinema was still a wonder for the eyes. In many respects, the 84th Annual Academy Awards Show was singularly focused on a world of cinema that no longer exists making it the most attuned to the art form itself in quite some time (make no mistake, it is an art form). Aside from returnee Billy Crystal's hosting duties and occasional wisecracks, the show featured a mock 1939 focus group segment where the focus group (including actors Christopher Guest and Fred Willard as laypeople) give their trivial assessments of "The Wizard of Oz." One even comments that they liked the "flying monkeys." Such triviality also speaks of most actual focus groups who probably know as much about cinema as Pauly Shore does. But the Academy Awards has never been about the art of cinema but about the commerce and the little pat on the back for a job well done furnished with a shiny gold statue.

As the late Gene Siskel once said, maybe when a winner takes the gold, the host or someone in the background could give tidbits on the film itself - something concrete that would inspire intellectual discussion that didn't revolve around dollar signs. That is probably too much to ask for a show that can run almost four hours but then again, what is any of that compared to Angelina Jolie's leg?

A bloodless Cimmerian

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (2011)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

 The original "Conan the Barbarian" with Arnold Schwarzenegger remains something of a dusty, moody sword-and-sorcery masterpiece. It had James Earl Jones as the villainous, serpent-like Thulsa Doom, Arnold flexing his muscles and thrusting his sword with flair at anything or anyone, and the intoxicating Sandahl Bergman as Conan's lover. 2011's revamped and far bloodier "Conan" film has nothing up its sleeve except gore, disembowelments, decapitations, blood spraying from various amputations and anything of the "300" variety.

If nothing else, the opening sequence shows promise. A spectacularly bloody battle scene featuring Conan's father (vividly played with prowess by Ron Perlman) shows the birth of Conan as a Cesarean is performed (in the midst of battle, mind you) on Conan's mother whose last dying breath is to call her son "Conan." Then we get an extended sequence showing Conan as a young and adept warrior in the land of wintery Cimmeria, learning how to forge a metal sword with the use of fire and water. Conan also destroys single-handedly an entire squadron of creatures who look like the descendants from "Lord of the Rings." Conan's father is eventually killed by an evil warlord named Khalar Zym (played by an unrecognizable Stephen Lang) who wishes to obtain the missing piece of the Mask of Acheron in order to resurrect his dead wife, a sorceress, and conquer the land of Hyborea. With the help of his nasty sorceress daughter, Marique (Rose McGowan), Khalar needs a "pure-blooded" woman (a virgin to the rest of you) whom he can sacrifice while he puts the missing Mask piece(s) together. At one point, in Conan's later years as a full-fledged warrior, he captures that one "pure-blooded" woman (there is only one in these lands?) and they, spoiler alert, have sex!!! I wonder if that will make a difference.

The 1982 film is evocative for showing set pieces that seemed at home in its heavy metal quirks: the Wheel of Pain, the Tree of Woe, the palace where Thulsa Doom resides, etc. This 2011 redux is not as interested in locales of such richness - the jagged camerawork and choppy editing do not allow such scenes to breathe. There are flickers of imagination. I do love the opening scenes of Conan's youth, the fight scene with the warriors made of stone that break very easily like fine ceramic pottery but these are minute flashes in a film that runs almost two hours.

Jason Momoa looks like the Conan as interpreted by the pulp writer Robert E. Howard, with his dark mane of hair and occasional flicker of a smirk. I love his one line that defines the pulpy barbarian in all his brutality: "I live, I love, I slay, and I am content." Other than that, I prefer Schwarzenegger's take any day of the week. Arnie brought humor and seemed to dominate the screen with his physique - he made Conan the king of all warriors. As for villains, Stephen Lang is menacing enough but the implied incestuous nature of his relationship with his evil daughter may make some a little uncomfortable.

The biggest fallacy with "Conan the Barbarian" is that it is not much fun. The film thrives on bloody rampage but with little momentum other than making the next swordfight bloodier than the next. There is not much soul, human interest or personality in this film. It is an ultraviolent video game but even video games have more of an edge than this.