Eric Binford fades from memory

FADE TO BLACK (1980)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(Originally reviewed in 2002)

A scrawny, unlikable weakling is an unlikely character lead in a movie but "Fade to Black" is one of those low-budget stinkers that tries a little too hard to be clever and ends up delivering nada in return.

Dennis Christopher ("Breaking Away") is the unlikable, scrawny weakling, Eric Binford, who loves movies more than life itself. He believes movies are life and among his favorites are "White Heat," "Kiss of Death" and anything with Marilyn Monroe. Eric works at a film studio handling film reels, and does the job badly. Everyone at work hates the kid including his boss. Eric lives at home with his aunt who is in a wheelchair, watches old movies all night and assumes the identities of famous characters in real life. Eric's identity crisis goes a little too far as he begins killing people in various disguises, including Count Dracula, Hopalong Cassidy, the Mummy, and so on. Meanwhile, a coke-sniffing psychiatrist (laughably played by Tim Thomerson) feels that the kid is a victim of society and can be helped. This conceit is nothing new and very popular nowadays in light of recent crime cases involving Colombine high school and John Grisham's uncle killed by hallucinating teens inspired by "Natural Born Killers ," but I digress.

"Fade to Black" has a terrific idea defeated by the most unlikable, unpleasant characters to surface in a movie in a long time. No one emits the slightest care in the world about anything and that makes it harder to care about them. Even Eric's aunt is unsympathetic and loud. Only Linda Kerridge as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who takes a liking to Eric is borderline normal, but what does she find appealing in Eric?

The filmmaking is amateurish and the cinematography is badly photographed to the point where scenes are so dark that I had trouble figuring what was happening. I am assuming the filmmakers were aiming for a realistic documentary look in the style of George Romero's "Martin" but it hardly meshes with the underdeveloped story and characters. A climax at a movie theater is as ludicrous and laughable a climax as I have seen in a long time, and I thought "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" was bad.

"Fade to Black" seems to have been made for people who hate movies. In that spirit, it fades from memory long before it is over.

Footnote: Look for an early appearance by Mickey Rourke as a studio employee who knows everything about "Casablanca" except the full name of Humphrey Bogart's character.

1950's swathed in Nostalgia

BOOK OF LOVE (1990)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

The Fifties remains an era I am always fascinated by. I think the main reason is because it only seemed so innocent and innocuous but, underneath, there might have been what one Beatnik poet referred to as "intense psychic pain" due to the missile crisis and other factors at that time. Yet movies like "Book of Love" insist that the fifties was an era of innocence and nothing more. Isn't every era innocent?

Jack Twiller (Chris Young) is the new kid on the block. He looks smart, is well-dressed, and takes up dancing lessons thanks to his doting mother. His buddies are Crutch (the always dependable Keith Coogan) and Floyd (James Cameron Mitchell), who looks like a Beatnik poet. They spend their time getting inebriated, taking more dance lessons, driving around and generally goofing off, not to mention lip-synching to "Earth Angel."

Jack is head-over-heels in love with the blond, teasing, beaming Lily (Josie Bissett), who is of course dating a school bully named Angelo (Beau Dremann). Jack wants to take Lily to the school prom, but finds himself ironically asking Gina (Tricia Leigh Fisher), the switchblade sister of the school who is also Angelo's sister, to the prom.

I first saw "Book of Love" back in 1990 with a date and found it funny and pleasing. Seeing it again recently, I found it lesser in quality than I had thought. As directed by Bob Shaye (president of New Line Cinema, who never directed another film since), it is cloying and a little too precious. There are lots of visual gags, like the bodybuilder who emerges from those famous ads to persuade Jack to lift weights, but some of it gets trite after a while. Jack is never a fully developed character - his biggest scene is when he apes Jimmy Dean in "East of Eden." I would have liked to learn more about him as an individual, and why he had such aspirations to become a writer. His buddies are fun to watch but are given little screen time to do anything other than sing and goof off. Ditto the underused Tricia Leigh Fisher as Gina, a bad girl who suddenly shows a sympathetic side. It is hard to see the attraction between Jack and Gina and her tough-girl tomboy image is given meager screen time to make any kind of impression.

There are bookends to "Book of Love" with an older Jack (played by Michael McKean) reminiscing while looking at his high-school yearbook. But this is no "American Graffitti" or "Diner." "Book of Love" safely assumes it is enough to be nostalgic.

Batman Rises to the Occasion

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

 I guess I was wrong. The trailer for "The Dark Knight Rises" rubbed me the wrong way. I was dismayed by what was seemingly a comic-book movie that looked like "The Departed" or any of Sidney Lumet's cop pictures. I was also underwhelmed by the casting of Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and thought to myself, after the stunning conclusion of "The Dark Knight," there was no place to go. Even director Christopher Nolan stated as such. But I do believe that seeing the final product is believing and "The Dark Knight Rises" is as great as the 2008 sequel and closer in spirit to "Batman Begins," the finest Batman film ever made. What "Rises" does is bring us closer to Bruce Wayne, closer than ever before and that is a major plus.
 

This sequel takes place eight years after the debacle involving the murder of attorney Harvey Dent by the Joker, a crime mistakenly attributed to Batman. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has been in hiding at Wayne Manor all this time, walking around with a beard and a cane and eroding like some pale imitation of Howard Hughes. The public has not seen him or the Dark Knight but Bruce can't let go of the tragedy of his girlfriend's death, Rachel Dawes (played in the last sequel by Maggie Gyllenhaal). It has kept the billionaire playboy as insular as ever. His dutiful servant, Alfred (Michael Caine), is worried for him. When Selina Kyle aka The Cat (Anne Hathaway, a better-than-expected and puurr-fect performance) slips in a maid's uniform and gets a sample of Wayne's fingerprints, it breaks Bruce and makes him confront Gotham City and all its denizens. When the muscular Bane (brilliantly played by Tom Hardy) holds Gotham hostage by blowing up football fields, killing Wall Street brokers, trapping thousands of police officers underground and threatening to blow up the city with a fusion reactor converted into a nuclear bomb, Bruce comes out of his shell and dons the rubber suit. However, Bane, the masked villain who inhales analgesic gas to keep himself alive and free of pain, is a tortured, pained individual who either wants to get rid of the ruling classes or blow up the city or both. Batman never had to face this much anarchy.
 
"The Dark Knight Rises" juggles a lot of characters and perilous situations with ease, thanks to writer-director Christopher Nolan. I haven't mentioned the return of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) where his police record comes under scrutiny; Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a headstrong police detective who believes Bruce Wayne and Batman are one and the same; Marion Cotillard as Miranda who has a vested interested in Wayne's fusion reactor and becomes his love interest, and returnee Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox who provides Bruce with all the high-tech weaponry.  All the characters come together and have their own share of practically equal screen time that allows their roles to breathe without the constant bombardment of explosions. When the action does set in, it is as dazzling and as sweeping as ever before. The final hour of the film supplies enough dramatic moments amidst an imminent terrorist bombing and jaw-dropping action that supersedes anything you might find in any current superhero action flick.
 
Bruce Wayne's attempts to come to terms with being a redemptive hero in the Gotham city crisis is this movie's highlight. When dumped into a prison by Bane which precious few humans could ever escape from, Wayne finds his own inner strength to preserve what he has left to give to Gotham. This is where Christian Bale really brings his Bruce and Batman character to full fruition - it is astoundingly nuanced and formidable acting that is resplendent in its authority.  It is what was missing in "The Dark Knight," a great movie that was resolutely about a clown-faced terrorist who beat Batman with piercing words. "Rises" reestablishes Batman as our nocturnal hero, our own dark knight whom we can root for all over again. Nolan has closed out one of the most fascinating, ambitious and serious-minded comic-book films ever with a delectable coda and a stirring climax. The Bat Signal shines brighter than ever.
 
Footnote: "Rises" did face controversy in July with the unfortunate Aurora, Colorado shootings that mirrored, intentionally or not, the dreary world of Christopher Nolan's own revisionist take on the DC hero. I have written about this and having seen the film, I was wrong to think that the world of the movie, which I had not seen at the time, was the same as our world. Nolan deals with real-life, 9/11 pre-occupations and terroristic activities, in addition to post-Bush paranoia. With "Rises," he exploits Occupy Wall Street paranoia and anger. None of this has anything to do with the Aurora shooting because in the end, despite such doses of 9/11 reality, this is only a Batman movie at heart and it never sides with the "liberating" efforts enforced by Bane.

20-minute time-travel warning

RETROACTIVE (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

 

Time-travel is such a fanciful fantasy plagued with so many intricate problems and paradoxes that it might not be worth the trouble. In the case with "Retroactive," the issue is stopping not just one murder but several murders. Good luck with that when you got a 20 minute jump start.

Karen (Kylie Travis), a psychotherapist, has car trouble in the middle of the desert. She is helped by Frank, a boisterous and very rough Texan (Jim Belushi) who treats his wife, Rayanne (Shannon Whirry), like garbage. Karen wants a ride to get a mechanic, but Frank has other ideas and one of them involves murder. Rayanne is shot in the head and Karen runs into a conveniently located government facility where a scientist named Brian (Frank Whaley) is conducting a time-travel experiment with mice thanks to a particle accelerator. Can Karen use the experiment to prevent the killing of Frank's wife?

"Retroactive" has a few lapses in time-travel logic, if such a thing even exists. How can Brian prepare a videotape of himself and have it be viewed once he goes back in time, approximately ten minutes before he kills a mouse (DO NOT ASK!)? The movie's internal logic makes no sense because the movie never establishes that alternate timelines coexist or merge. So when Karen keeps going back 10 or 20 minutes before Rayanne's murder, no other action committed by Karen remains in the future timeline she keeps returning to, which means there are alternating timelines. Whew!

"Retroactive" is an action thriller with a sci-fi concept but the movie manifests as nothing more than a series of endless shootings. Karen shoots at Frank and practically misses every time. Frank shoots back, is thrown through glass partitions, drives like a maniac and keeps shooting. Shooting after shooting after shooting - what an exhausting time travel cycle that must be to return to. The movie becomes a wearying chore to sit through and lacks any psychological aspects or fun character types (a family in a stationwagon and M. Emmett Walsh's nervous impulse with, again, the trigger of a gun is as sharp a character definition as you will get). The movie never lets us in on Travis's Karen, the protagonist we are supposed to root for - she got into some haywired mess in the past but it is barely dealt with. Jim Belushi's Frank is a one-dimensional side-burned psycho who keeps getting pounded and shot at but he is nothing more than a cartoonish Terminator on the loose. Whirry's Rayanne is a looker but precious little is divulged about her aside from being physically abused by Frank. I wish I could go back in time and say something different but "Retroactive" is a numbing bore.

Jennifer Lopez dies in the first ten minutes!

JERSEY GIRL (2004)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Has director Kevin Smith gone soft on us? The king of "dick and fart jokes" has sold out to the corporate world of Miramax by making a film that is no different from the average romantic comedy? No, it is not so. Besides, unless you are unaware of Kevin Smith's work, he is revisiting the kinder, gentler workings of his inner "Chasing Amy."

Ben Affleck is Ollie Trinke, a hotheaded Manhattan publicist who is so cocksure of himself that he is certain Will Smith will never be a movie star and George Michael is definitely into women (the story begins in 1996). He is married to Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez), who is quite emotional since she is pregnant. The problem is that Ollie can't make it to the Lamaze classes on time - will he choose to work long hours or will he try to spend more time with his family? As you probably know, Gertrude dies in the first ten minutes of this film while giving birth to their baby daughter. To make matters worse, Ollie has lost his job after decrying the press and Will Smith's stature. So now Ollie and his daughter move into his dad's house in Highlands, New Jersey. Seven years pass, and now his daughter, Gertie (Raquel Castro), is a happy-go-lucky kid in Catholic school. Ollie now works for the public works department, along with his dad, Bart (played as straight-as-an-arrow by George Carlin). Ollie still dreams of working as a publicist, and continues attending interviews only to be rejected. His life changes when he meets a cute-as-a-button video store clerk, Maya (Liv Tyler), who is doing research for a pornography study.

Okay, don't get me started. This does not sound like Kevin Smith material at all. No kidding. And yet, it is a personal story for writer-director Smith who has been raising his own daughter, Harley Quinn (who I think shows up in a cameo). Even though this is the View Askew Universe to some degree, there is no Jay or Silent Bob on display here. No Quik Stop cameo, no nothing. Only Jason Lee and Matt Damon have brief funny cameos. This is the adult Kevin Smith, the man who gave us one of the best romantic comedies of the 90's, "Chasing Amy." Is this film as good? Not quite, but no failure either.

My main problem with "Jersey Girl" is that it aims for well-traveled cliches and an incessant cuteness that is more harmful than disarming. That is not to say that every scene is forced or too cutesy, but its level of occasional cuteness is not what I would expect from Smith. A highly contrived finale involving a school play version of "Sweeney Todd" and an aghast audience is pushing the limits of cuteness, even for Smith. The movie follows the traditional formula of how a dad learns to love his kid and spend time with her, as opposed to being sucked up by the corporate world of media publicity (Living in Manhattan is seen as a sin as opposed to the suburbs of Jersey). This is tired nonsense that has more resonance in Hallmark television, not in a Kevin Smith flick. I mean, we are talking about a director whose first film, "Clerks," was so potty-mouthed that it almost earned an NC-17 rating.

And yet, there are pluses to "Jersey Girl." Jennifer Lopez, in an opening sequence I call "Jennifer Lopez Dies in the First Ten Minutes," is quite lovely and understated, showing how her daughter will acquire her mother's personality. Ben Affleck finally gives us a nicely modulated, restrained performance as Ollie (though his crying is a bit overdone). I also like Raquel Castro as Gertie, the girl who loves "Dirty Dancing" and the musical "Cats" (though these jokes get old). There is also George Carlin, once again dialing down his persona for some humorous moments. Liv Tyler is stunning in every way as Maya - I like her smiles preceded by shrugging her shoulders. Still, Tyler is underused, and one wishes she had more to say and do. Mr. Kevin Smith, please work with Liv Tyler again and make her the star of your next film.

There are admirable qualities to "Jersey Girl." The film is often quite funny and the performances are engaging. I just sense that the real Kevin Smith was dialing himself down for a PG-13 rating in order to be more accessible. I still love the raunchy Smith who chased Amy and cavorted with the likes of Jay and Silent Bob, but that is just me.

Dude, this pot is toast

BONGWATER (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

You could call "Bongwater" a precursor to the "Tenacious D" movie considering the level of pot smoked and the few trippy montages in it, and the fact that Jack Black and his partner, Kyle Gass, appear in this movie. Other than that, despite some level of inspired new form of trippiness, "Bongwater" fails to rise as any sort of comedy-drama.

Luke Wilson, one of my favorite modern unsung actors, is a Portland, Oregon pot dealer who spends his time smoking his bong, sleeping, hanging out with friends, smoking some more and taking calls for selling the proverbial weed. In his life enters Alicia Witt, who becomes entranced by Wilson's paintings and introduces him to an art dealer (Brittany Murphy) who wants nothing more than giddy sex. Then we shift to Witt leaving Wilson for the Big Apple, just after inadvertently burning down Wilson's house, and her encounters with a paranoid sociopath (Jamie Kennedy), some guy who lives underground (Scott Caan), and the ugly world of cocaine parties!

Somehow, this middle section with Alicia Witt doesn't gel with Wilson's lonely life in Portland, Oregon, amongst his gay friends. It seems the film is more about Witt's search for her identity than Wilson's, though Wilson's character is the one I was drawn to. We also get a nearly unwatchable sequence with Jack Black as a jolly pot farmer and some trippy points-of-view shots, not to mention Patricia Wettig as Wilson's dead mother. Although Black brings a jolt of energy to the proceedings, this section is bogged down by nothingness, an empty void no less, and Brittany Murphy's grating smile (sorry, it does get on my nerves). Maybe the movie's own inertness is its point but an inert state of being was handled with far more savviness in Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise."

The movie finds its spirit in those early Portland scenes, especially a tender moment where Wilson plays footsie with Witt. Witt is also a believer in UFO's and other paranormal activities, though the movie short-shrifts through all the delectable dialogue in the beginning for a bigger message, but what is the message?

"Bongwater" never quite finds the identities of its characters and thus prove to be unengaging. Turns out Wilson doesn't care about his burned down house or much of anything else except for the darling Alicia Witt who treats him horribly from the start. All we are left with is a marijuana haze, a UFO, a gay party where Andy Dick gets to strut his stuff, and nothing more.

Don't go back in time

TIMERIDER: THE ADVENTURE OF LYLE SWANN (1983)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

The name Timerider refers to a time-travel device in the middle of the desert. It is put to use but unfortunately, a motorcycle rider from the Baja 100 race has inadvertently crossed its path and been sent back to the Old West, circa 1870's. Great idea, horrible execution of the material.

Fred Ward is Lyle Swann (not the catchiest of names), the motorcycle rider who has no idea he is in the Old West. Outside of a pack of cowboys led by the scenery-chewing Peter Coyote (in what may be his sole villain role), the lack of phones, a buxom Belinda Bauer who doesn't take too long before she removes her clothes, it all looks the same as the present. Add to the cast a listless, taciturn L.Q. Jones, himself a veteran of westerns, and Ed Lauter as a priest and we got the makings of a cinematic disaster. Fred Ward looks too out of place as the clueless hero, Bauer is there to show some flesh and look helpless as she is tied to a bed and little else, and Coyote and most of the cast overact to the hilt.

After Lyle finds himself in the Old West, we get a love scene and numerous shootouts that are badly staged and edited - they take over the last three-quarters of the movie and add nothing to the story outside of reminding us that the Old West was a stomping ground for wild and crazy trigger-happy cowboys.

There is one good scene where Peter Coyote wants that motorcycle, referred to as the "machine," and he finally gets a hold of it. Coyote tries to start it up and rides it, only to fall on his bum. Other than that, "Timerider" is a snore-inducing and highly indifferent picture that bears some of the nifty ideas of time travel without realizing them. There is no fun to be had here and with a less than engaging hero and cumbersome acting by all involved, no one to root for either. A twist of fate at the end of the film lends some gravitas but you'll forget about it the next day.