It'll Change Your Life

 THE GAME (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Originally viewed in 1997

David Fincher's "The Game" is quite a mind-bending trip to endure, and it is fitfully labyrinthian and complex enough to give Kafka nightmares. It is manipulative, thrilling, exciting, nerve-wracking nonsense designed to give you a volatile charge every few minutes, and it certainly succeeds.

Actor Michael Douglas gives us a solemn portrait of a wealthy investment banker, Nicholas Van Orton, who lives in a luxurious mansion complete with a forgiving maid (Carroll Baker) and little else. Nicholas lives in solitude with just a television and a remote to occupy his time when he isn't working. One day, he meets his smart-aleck brother, Conrad (Sean Penn) who gives him a pass to CRS (Consumer Recreation Services) for his 48th birthday. This company offers grand entertainment and big thrills - "It'll change your life," says the grinning Conrad.

It certainly does. Nicholas is initially reluctant for excitement but goes along with it anyway. He undergoes an extensive, all-day application process answering feeble-minded questions, enduring various psychological tests, fitness exercises, etc. Eventually, though, his application is rejected but by
then it is too late, the game has already started.

This is an intriguing premise for a movie because the "game" itself depends on unpredictable surprises, and sometimes Nicholas is unaware when the game is real and when it isn't. A waitress (Deborah Kara Unger) accidentally spills a tray of drinks on him, but was it really accidental? Could there be a plot
against Nicholas perpetrated by a rival (Armin Mueller-Stahl) to take away his fortune? Is Conrad behind all this considering he was a former CRS player? Are people trying to kill him or is this just a game gone too far? Without the right actor in the lead role, the movie's double twists and red
herrings would have been hard to swallow. Douglas is, however, perfectly (and credibly) cast - he brings pathos to this cold, emotionless Gekko-type who we learn to care about, and whom we believe may be in danger. This threatening, terrifying game slowly brings Nicholas out of his repressed shell to confront his feelings, his emotions and his desires. Douglas, a veteran of shattered male egos from "Fatal Attraction" to "Basic Instinct," fully encompasses Nicholas's fears, flaws, and horrible memories specifically his father's suicide that we see in flashbacks.

The rest of the cast does as well as they can with such a mentally puzzling screenplay. Deborah Kara Unger (the siren from "Crash") is the obligatory femme fatale - an enigmatic, voluptuous woman who is fired from her waitress job and accompanies Nicholas to determine the extent of the game he's playing - she is, of course, not what she seems. Nobody in the movie is. Sean Penn has a brief, electrifying cameo as the tense (what else?) Conrad, and veteran actor James Rebhorn is the sly CRS executive who vaguely explains the nature of the "game." There's also a nice bit by Carroll Baker ("Baby Doll") as the maid who tells Nicholas stories about his father's past.

The movie "The Game" is not a complete success due to a cop-out finale that renders the rest of the film as a tad insubstantial - let's just say that Kafka was never accused of being a sentimentalist. Still, director David Fincher ("Seven") imbues the screen with his shadowy angles and low-key colors making the "game" as mysterious and frightening as possible. Michael Douglas makes the
film his own inhabiting every single shot of the film - we, in effect, are playing the game along with him. "The Game" is not as daring or as original as Welles's "The Trial" or Lynch's far more enigmatic "Lost Highway," or as much fun as the Kafkaesque "U-Turn," but it is a finely acted, occasionally
thrilling diversion.

Time of your life, kid

 RISKY BUSINESS (1983)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

1983's king of teenage sex comedies, "Risky Business," is more than just a teen sex comedy - it is a sophisticated, slightly sardonic though always humanistic teen sex comedy (I can't think of any other during this period that fits that bill). It was also part of the 1980's youth-movies trend where wealth is everything and all that matters. Writer-director Paul Brickman might have had a tougher ending than what we got but the message remains the same. Time of your life, huh kid? Sure, "isn't life grand" (the presumably darker ending has this voice over line) isn't a line that occupies the lively comedy I saw 

Looking back at "Risky Business," it is amazing how mature these high-school teenagers are. Sure, they have their childish games yet they also play poker, drink, and wonder about their future ("Future Enterprisers" as it were). Joel Goodsen (Tom Cruise) is one of those white rich kids in a Chicago suburb, specifically the Chicago North Shore area of Glencoe. His strict parents are going out of town and are especially adamant about the house being in pristine condition, which includes dad's stereo ("Do you hear a preponderance of bass?") and mom's precious glass egg ("an artsy fartsy thing.") Joel sends them off at the airport, promises to use mom's station wagon instead of dad's Porsche and also to use "good judgment" when inviting friends over. Well, he followed all those rules dutifully, oh, please, we go to movies like "Risky Business" to see kids defy their parents, not respect their wishes. In the 1980's, teen comedies always had kids outsmarting their parents and, in some cases, the parents were always dolts. The parents here are not dolts although Joel's SAT scores were pretty damn great, close to perfect score of 1600, yet his mother asks if he can take them again. I got less 700 when I took them, so please don't tell anyone. 

Everything that can go wrong goes very wrong - merrily wrong - in Joel's life. Joel's friend Miles (Curtis Armstrong) calls the escort service to come to Joel's house. Joel plays up all the bass levels on his dad's stereo when dancing to and mimicking Bob Seger's classic song, "That Old Time Rock N' Roll" (one of the definitive tracks for a classic, fantastically energetic sing-along that you will ever see). Getting back to the escort service, Joel decides to call for himself for a one-night rendezvous with mysterious Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) and, slowly but surely, things get heated and out-of-control. Miles' advice to Joel prior to all this is "sometimes you gotta say, what the heck...make your move." Oh, Joel sure does but he has his regrets. In order to pay Lana for her services, he has to cash some of his bonds. Then there is the matter of the sleazy, though smart and aggressive pimp (Joe Pantoliano) who might be a little too dangerous. And can this possibly future Princeton student who has aligned himself with Future Enterprisers have the savvy business sense to make it big, particularly when he has to make some dough to pay for his father's nearly damaged Porsche that fell into Lake Michigan? 

Making it big means inviting a bunch of young males to his house for sex with prostitutes. Meanwhile, Joel has to simultaneously conduct an interview with a Princeton admissions interviewer (wonderfully played by Richard Masur) while Lana keeps interrupting by trying to make every room available for hanky-panky with a fold-out mattress. Joel has become an entrepreneur and, by the final scene, he is Lana's pimp. Whether that was planned or it just, pardon the pun, fell on his lap is not certain. Will Lana join him at Princeton and make big bucks in prostitution? Will the Princeton University students go for it? That remains ambiguous regardless of which ending you see, the original ending being available as a DVD extra. And yet, as the film's credits came up, I had one thought I recalled when I first saw it multiple times on cable in the 1980s - forget "Dirty Dancing," I had the time of my life with this raucous, almost poetic and romantic teen movie. 

You can kiss my furry butt

 MEN IN BLACK (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 1997

Do we really need more movies about aliens? Since the success of the mediocre "Independence Day," the multiplex has been full of them. Television has "The famous black-and-white footage of a supposed alien autopsy. We have also had the marvelously witty and wicked satire "Mars Attacks!" but seriously folks, the thrill is gone. "Men in Black" is an entertainingly engaging comedy, and is full of whiz-bang effects galore, but it doesn't come close to the level of "Mars Attacks!"

During the opening sequence, we see Will Smith as a cop chasing a remarkably fast and superhuman killer who leaps from a high-rise building and disappears. It turns out the killer is an alien, and the Man in Black (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives on the scene and blasts Will's face with some kind of flashlight stick called a "neuralizer." Pretty soon, Smith hesitantly joins Jones in a secret organization called M.I.B., led by a big boss played by Rip Torn who "works 27 hours a day." Their job is to monitor the 1,500 extraterrestrials who disguise themselves as humans and are mostly residing in Manhattan. Any human memory of aliens is zapped by the M.I.B's neuralyzers. The aliens themselves are not
really evil or monstrous, they are really annoying! One of them even disguises himself as a dog.

One evil visitor lands in a farmer's backyard. The bug-like alien kills the farmer and assumes human form as played by Vincent D'Onofrio - he becomes a decomposing zombie with an obvious limp. This becomes a sly, amusing joke and it as wacky and overdone as you can imagine. Still, director Barry Sonnenfeld ("Get Shorty") has a commonplace flaw - he tends to take the spontaneity out of
all the numerous gags and jokes by presenting them one after another and compressing them, and then giving us some dead space until the truly funny climax. This become more overbearing than exhilarating, and you might forget most of the jokes since they slip by so quickly. "Men in Black" runs by at a full-throttle speed of 98 minutes, but it never truly takes off.

The performances hit all the right notes. Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith have great comic chemistry and seem to be having a great time. D'Onofrio is a real riot to watch, although Linda Fiorentino is underutilized, as most female leads are nowadays, as a doctor who is constantly neuralized. The biggest scene stealer is an alien disguised as a dog ("You can kiss my furry little butt") that provides the biggest laugh in the entire movie.

The visual effects are impressive, especially the final shot of an alien holding the entire universe on the palm of his hand, and Sonnenfeld has a quick directorial eye (his visual inventiveness since "The Addams Family," though, has diminished). The movie is definitely fun yet somewhat dispiriting, and is
not half as clever as the original "Ghostbusters." Another flaw is that it starts and stops frequently after a bright, rhythmic half-hour - a problem that conflicts most box-office bonanzas. It's decent fun but, frankly, I've had it with aliens and would prefer more dinosaurs any day.

What does KGB stand for?

 SPIES LIKE US (1985)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia 

If Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd team up in a movie, make it one worthy of their comic talents. As such, "Spies Like Us" is fitfully amusing with a few chuckles strewn through the last half of the picture. The first half is often uproarious but I still feel, after close to 40 years when I first saw it, that the potential was not fully realized. 

The opening half-hour has plenty of laughs as we have a legacy government employee, a womanizing diplomat's son named Emmett Fitz-Hume (Chevy Chase), who doesn't disclose much to the press by pretending his mike is getting cut off (very funny stuff). Then there's the smart Austin Millbarge (Dan Aykroyd), a code-breaker who is relegated to working in the basement of the Pentagon and never allowed much advancement. Both of them have less than 24 hours to take a Foreign Service Exam which Emmett tries to cheat by use of a false arm sling and an eyepatch and asks Austin, "What does KGB stand for?" Neither passes the exam of more than 500 questions and yet they are promoted as spies! Say what? Well, they are actually decoys since the Defense Intelligence Agency doesn't expect them to complete their mission; they are meant as a distraction from the real spies. There's also the launching of a Soviet ICBM nuclear missile that is part of a laser guidance system in space and...everything goes wrong. 

Chevy Chase is at his best when sizing up a situation by minimizing it, particularly during a G-Force training scene where he glibly says, "Piece of cake." He is fantastically funny when he cheats on the exam in an extended sequence that stands out as flat-out comedy magic. Less funny is the Pakistan desert footage with an excruciating moment where everyone addresses themselves as doctors when, in fact, there are no actual doctors. Ha! Bob Hope, by the way, pops into frame playing golf and I had wished the movie had more of that kind of lunacy. Director John Landis is known for his in-joke cameos and this movie could've used more of them. When Chase and Aykroyd arrive at the Soviet border in below freezing temperatures, the movie packs up a little more heat with the doofus pair dressed as extraterrestrials as they try to fool the Russians. 

I will say Aykroyd is naturally adept at delivering nuclear jargon like an automaton and he is as always immensely likable. Chase, though, seems to walk away with this movie yet I wished the writers (including co-writer Aykroyd) tried to make the twosome more compatible. Still, on director's John Landis comedy meter, not as good as his "Animal House" or "Trading Places" though miles ahead of most other nuclear comedies such as the excruciatingly unfunny "Deal of the Century." And I still don't remember what KGB stands for.

Wenders' Existential Dream

 THE AMERICAN FRIEND (1977)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

A virtually self-indulgent Wim Wenders film is not a bad thing, and self-indulgence is something to be expected from any film director looking to make their individual mark in their outlook on the world and humanity. Perhaps what I just wrote sounds self-indulgent. "The American Friend" is not a typical Wenders film - crime and noir mystery is not his usual subject - yet he makes it into a hypnotic existential dream and that usually can describe Wenders to a tee.

Set in Hamburg, Germany, Bruno Ganz plays a picture framer, Jonathan Zimmerman, who is dying of a blood disease or so he thinks. His doctor tells him that he will live for a while longer than expected and not too worry. Jonathan has a wife (Wenders regular Lisa Kreuger) who works and they are raising two kids and though they may be struggling a bit, they somehow manage. One day at an auction, a painting from a "dead" artist is sold for huge sums of money. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper, odd casting to play Patricia Highsmith's sociopathic antihero) is at the auction and is introduced to Jonathan who sees right through him - Ripley is involved in art forgery and Jonathan knows that the painting is "too blue." Jonathan doesn't give Ripley a warm reception so Ripley lies to others that the picture framer's disease is fatal. Though Ripley is trying to be friendly with Jonathan at his place of employment, a scheme is developing involving hiring Jonathan to kill a gangster. Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) emerges from the criminal underworld and asks Ripley to do the job and when Ripley resists, Jonathan is next in line (naturally, he has no experience as an assassin). 

I will not reveal much more to "The American Friend" because it unravels at such a leisurely, graceful pace that it proves to be a mesmerizing drama with muted thriller aspects. All the actors, including the typically hot-tempered, discombobulated Dennis Hopper, are low key in performance though the humor quotient is there in spades (major kudos to colorful cameos by Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray). There are also some suspenseful scenes at a train station, virtually comical, messy murders inside a train, and some gunfire in and around Ripley's virtually empty roundhouse. Finally, it is Bruno Ganz's Jonathan who realizes his end is near and we wait for the inevitable. Was anyone really lying about Jonathan's disease or is his doctor simply not telling the whole truth? Whatever it is, doom is around the corner in often bright daylight scenes and a serene beach with a burning ambulance - all of it is the antithesis of what we expect in a noir story involving Ripley. "The American Friend" is not a perfect film but it is certainly one of the most absorbing and beautifully made of all Ripley adaptations. 

American Prometheus had blood on his hands

 OPPENHEIMER (2023)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Christopher Nolan's 3-hour "Oppenheimer" is an emotionally draining, occasionally exasperating yet deeply haunting biopic of the "father of the atomic bomb" himself, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. It does reach the heights of greatness and yet, for such an expansive, richly layered film, it also does have a few edges that peel off the screen revealing some flawed characterizations and an elongated section involving hearings that runs on way past the tolerable meter.  

Nolan, per his refined storytelling prowess, flashes forwards and backwards between the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) hearings on Oppenheimer's loyalty to the U.S. that includes his past Communist leanings and the possibility of a spy in Los Alamos while creating the atomic bomb, to his less than sparkling marriage to an alcoholic wife, Katherine "Kitty" Puening (Emily Blunt) who was also a Communist, to his recurring affair with a troubled Communist, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), where sex, martinis and the quoting of the Hindu verses from Bhagavad Gita result in heated sex, to the truly momentous and riveting sequences where Oppenheimer is testing math equations of Quantum Mechanics while his team of scientists build the bomb in Los Alamos, testing each separate core in a series of explosions.

Though introspective and fascinating in its own right, it is a risky move for writer-director Nolan to invest copious amounts of time to the security hearings with Oppenheimer, his associates and even his wife who handles herself better than expected - these hearings figure heavily in the last hour of the film. Only Oppenheimer is not looking for a fight and never has and Nolan details this man as singularly obsessed with the atomic bomb and nuclear fission (lots of metaphoric shots of raindrops falling on lakes) - the women in his life exist peripherally while the bomb is very real to him. These detailed hearings go on for long stretches of time, testing Oppenheimer's loyalty to the U.S. and if his Communist affiliations are enough to take away his government security clearance. They kind of tested my tolerance as well because they detract from the nature of such a historically infamous powerful bomb that changed the world and Oppie's (his nickname) views on war - no longer were men needed to fight on ground level if Fat Man and Little Boy could decimate entire cities in the blink of an eye. The man himself is depicted as slightly sorrowful and critical of the bomb and filled with some measure of remorse. There is truth to Oppei's change of heart and despite showing his slight guilt as shown by Cillian Murphy (a performance worth a thousand suns burning through your consciousness - yeah, it is a nuclear performance of enormous weight), the real Oppenheimer defended the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima until his dying day. Nolan is not invested in that as much, nor does he show much of the destructive nature of the bomb (we get glimpses from Oppie's point-of-view about what it could do to the human body and brief glimpses of charred corpses). The Trinity test merely looks like a regular explosion at first - something that is not powerful yet somehow scaled back as if everyone at Los Alamos saw it as just another explosion. Then you wait and you can see  how it becomes increasingly more dynamic and dangerous, particularly the shock wave. Keep in mind, in those days, everyone had the gravitas and imagination to create a powerful weapon but never truly considered the repercussions of such a bomb and the vast amount of radiation. Nolan fills the screen with fire but at first you don't gather the enormity of such a weapon - although I have seen my fair share of actual filmed nuclear tests, they do not compare to those who were there firsthand.

The women in Oppie's life are shown as tortured and belligerent yet they are short-shrifted in the screenplay, and this is one aspect of the film I felt needed more investment. I wanted to have a clearer view of Oppie's wife Kitty and we get mostly a dissatisfied woman who supports her husband yet takes a drink at every interval - Emily Blunt has one moment where she challenges questions at the AEC but that is as deep as her character gets. We just get quick flashes of her pregnancy, their marriage and their life in Los Alamos and she consistently yells at Oppie. Same with the Jean character, an intelligent woman with a mental illness who can't stand receiving flowers from Oppie. Their affair is strained since he is married but there is not much more divulged from their get togethers. You get more of a sense of who the antagonistic AEC chairman Lewis Strauss is (a dynamo of a performance by Robert Downey Jr.) than gleaning any real insights into the women in Oppie's life.

"Oppenheimer" is a titanic, expertly made production full of much sound and fury and some of it could be considered experimental in terms of editing - sometimes you feel you are being pummelled into believing a catastrophe awaits your eyes (again, interesting that the one atomic explosion we do see faintly resembles the magnitude and force it really had). There are times that the soundtrack fills us with thunderous, piercing sounds and feet thumping on bleachers from almost anywhere - you feel the screen is about to be ripped apart by some delayed detonation. Cillian Murphy plays Oppie as a man who doesn't fight back against AEC or anyone - he fights back tears when Jean Tatlock dies from suicide. He almost always threatens to detonate, to unleash some fury upon others and he never does. Only the bombs do the detonating for him.

Payne sketches pain with joy

 THE HOLDOVERS (2023)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Irresistibly bittersweet describes most Alexander Payne films, at least to me (though I have yet to see "Downsizing"). At his best, and that is pretty much all the time, Payne evokes emotional clarity and deep pathos for his troubled, flawed characters. He wants us to like the people we see on screen regardless of their flaws and their often manic behavior. Such was the case with Paul Giamatti in "Sideways," one of the best road movies ever made where merlot was a plot point, and such is the case again in casting Giamatti in "The Holdovers" which is Payne's first film set in that awkward era, the 1970's. I always felt that the 1970's was a way of finding one's groove, one's own personal link to society and the world. "The Holdovers" has that in spades and it is also unequivocally a great film and one that stands proudly with his other supreme directorial efforts such as "Nebraska," "About Schmidt," "Election" and "Sideways." 

Set in the 1970's at Barton Prep School in New England, Giamatti (in the most perfectly realized role he has played in quite some time) is the erudite, pipe-smoking, Jim Bean-imbibing European history teacher Paul Hunham. The students all hate him because he gives honestly deserving exam grades such as D's and F's (to be fair, his students don't seem all that bright). Mr. Hunham is blunt, perhaps too blunt, and not just with his students but also with the dean of Barton. Thanks to the faculty head, Hunham is the newly elected teacher to stay with holdovers over the Christmas break. He doesn't care that he has to stay in his usual academic environment but the few students who can't stay with their families do care. One of them is the lanky, intelligent Angus Tully (played by first-timer Dominic Sessa) who scores the higher grade in Hunham's class. Angus is angered by his mother who tells him he can't come to visit due to his stepfather and some planned honeymoon. Throughout the environs of this school, the cafeteria's head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is also staying behind though she had hoped to see her pregnant sister. Outside of Angus, the rest of the students manage to leave after all and now it houses the sole student Angus, Hunham and Mary. Hunham can smoke his pipes and read all the books he wishes yet Angus wants to venture to Boston and Mary would like to visit her sister. 

Pain and deep sorrow informs the lives of Angus and Mary, the latter especially due to losing her son in Vietnam. Angus has issues with his mother and the purported loss of his actual father - he also feels that nobody really likes him. Hunham may have issues yet pain and sorrow are not in his desolate life - he has never been married and seems to carry no regrets although you sense that he wished he had a romantic partner in his life (Barton's administrator, Lydia, almost leads to the possibility of a romance in Hunham's mind until he discovers she's involved already). In one truly magnificent scene of self-revelation, Hunham confesses that life is bitter and complicated and "that it feels the same about me." This scene alone encapsulates what we love about Giamatti and his difficult yet slowly approachable character of Hunham - his life is not easy and he has to work harder to get people to approach him. Same with Angus, a kid who has his whole future ahead of him and seems to have a more finite understanding of it than anyone else. 

"The Holdovers" expertly deals with these three characters with such sensitivity and humanity that you almost feel like you've never seen people like them before. Astutely written by David Hemingson (though you feel Payne must have led an uncredited hand in it), every singular moment and every scene has a crackling vibrancy to it as if we are witnessing actual lives being led. Along with Giamatti, the bold newcomer Sessa and the sympathies we especially feel towards Da'Vine Joy Randolph (she was memorably cast in TV's "People of Earth"), "The Holdovers" becomes that rarity in cinema today - a first-class act of wonder all the way around. Sweetly tempered tones, richly textured characterizations, quotable dialogue particularly from Hunham's mouth, absorbing mix of academic life along with road movie aspirations and a touching and witty finale, movies just don't get much better than "The Holdovers." And they don't get much better without Alexander Payne at the helm.