MovieComment

Prey For Rock’n'Roll

Posted by Player under Drama

Ever since I watched the movie Face/Off, I’ve been strangely fascinated with Gina Gershon. She is not your typical brunet actress. Gershon just looks and talks differently from other women, and it is this that makes her appealing, and when you add movies like Show Girls and Bound, the appeal easily crosses gender lines, to the point, that now Gershon is not only popular with men, she’s absolutely famous in the gay community with both men and women.

In Prey for Rock & Roll, Gershon is stunning as Jacki, an aging guitarist and lead singer of her own struggling all girl rock band. Once again Gershon’s character is the strong female who may have her doubts at times, but who is as tough as any man. The most striking comeback in the film is when her drummer’s brother asks her how old she is, her response is a quick, “How big is your dick?”, meaning you don’t ask a woman her age in this society, just as you don’t ask a man to tell you how long his sex organ is.

The storyline sees Jacki keeping her band together in spite of her drug addicted bass player and her tragedy stricken drummer. Her only solace is Lori Petty’s character, who is the ever positive lead guitarist. Oh and of course her drummer’s brother who just showed up out of prison and who is attracted to the older Jacki.

Overall the acting could have been better by the supporting cast in some scenes, and the music, well that is usually personal preference, but on average it could have been better as well. Gershon does all her own singing, which is pretty unusual in rock movies nowadays, which comes off as being more believable, but again, the music just did not work most of the time, except for the “Every Six Minutes” song that becomes a major statement about women’s vulnerability and their will to not be victims.

In the end, though Prey For Rock’n'Roll is worth watching not because of Gershon, but because major Hollywood films today lack not only believability, but legitimacy. A lower budget film like Prey For Rock’n'Roll, is not suppose to make you feel better about the world, it is suppose to show you how some women still manage to survive in this world. And for that it makes no apologies, and it asks nothing of you. As Jacki saids, “I use to watch all these movies, to pretend I was somewhere else than where I was at; But now I don’t watch movies anymore.”

I, Robot

Posted by Player under Action

I, Robot is perhaps the first film I’ve ever seen, where it was made fun of even before it debuted in another film. In the movie Jersey Girl, Will Smith stars as himself and jokingly he refers to his latest movie. But ironically, Will Smith’s film really ends up being just that, a film that could have been about the big questions of life, like what is life? or why are we here?, but which ends up being just another action film.

I’m sure some fans of the author of I, Robot will not see this film based on principle alone, but since I have never read the original book, (although I have read some of the short stories,) I took a chance and sat through the film.

The story begins with Will Smith’s character. A homicide cop who is divorced and who has a prejudice against robots in general. It is he who is called to an apparant suicide at US Robotics, who is the world’s most powerful company. The company’s co-founder and chief scientist has just killed himself. USR is about to unleash it’s biggest rollout of their new NS-5 robots, but Smith thinks the suicide was really a homicide and all clues point to one NS-5 unit who just happens to be very unique for a robot. Eventually all events lead back to USR headquarters where the real enemy is revealed, and when of course all NS-5 units go crazy.

Will Smith proves that even if the script sucks, that he can still act and that he is still one of the most charming actors in Hollywood. It is his charm that makes I, Robot watchable. His supporting cast is mostly terrible or one dimensional characters without depth. The robots have more depth in this movie!

The special effects are actually not very believable. The Robots are all CGI animations, and although they are very cool looking, their physics sometimes boggles the mind, more than it amazes it.

In some moments, the film stops and asks some deep questions, but the answer never comes, and instead some more action takes place, which makes me think, the action movie was more important than understanding the human dilemma.

I, Robot is not the drama that A.I. was, and does not exceed The Chronicles of Riddick on the action movie scale, about the only thing it has is Will Smith.

The Hulk (Ang Lee)

Posted by Player under Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Like most fans of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I think I expected too much from Ang Lee, this time around. The Hulk, this time around is a drama with some action, but for the most part the film is a lot slower than most fans of say X-Men2 would expect. This is not to say that Lee did not do some really inventive and cool things in this film, it is just that overall the film never quite makes the same category of films that it could be associated with.

The storyline is pretty basic, but also very Greek Tragedy. Father wants to remake the world, has son, loses everything in the process. Son grows up, comes full circle with father, must over come father’s weaknesses. There’s a love story there too, but it is not as developed as one would have thought.

The look of The Hulk is interesting, Lee portrays a natural world and a human world. The natural world is colorful and absorbing, the human world is divided, less colorful and did I say dimly litted. The action scene with the hybrid dogs is just one dark fight scene. By far the best action sequences that Lee shows the audience, are when The Hulk is jumping and running by himself. Probably the best thing the Lee does overall is his capturing of how The Hulk jumps to travel large distances. This is done even better than in the many cartoons that The Hulk has had over the years. As for CGI Hulk, it just is not that realistic, this Hulk looks more like shiny green clay than a real creature. The tank scene is pretty much the best action scene in which a CGI Hulk battles human looking objects.

What I really did not like about the film was the Sam Elliot character of General Ross. It was too over the top and I really did not think the acting was that good overall in the picture. Average drama like in the film Space Cowboys, is really hard to come by, and The Hulk lacks it in a few places.

In conclusion, if you are absolute Hulk fan, see this film. If you have seen A Beautiful Mind, well then you have seen a better Jennifer Connelly film than this.

Shallow Hal

Posted by Player under Comedy

From the same people who brought you Kingpin and Something About Mary, comes Shallow Hal, a film about a young man trying to be successful in both love and work.

The Ferrely Brothers, like to make movies that make fun of everyone and on some perverse level, their comedy does seem to work for some people, but let me warn you that Shallow Hall goes above and beyond their usual jokes and touches on what is probably the single most important factor in our lives: our looks and what other people think of them. It is a touchy subject and one which the Ferrely Brothers stomp all over. Even Fox, the studio who produced the film, attaches a warning label to the beginning of the film.

Jack Black plays Hal, an unsuccessful ladies man who was emotionally damaged by seeing his father on his death bead. It is from his father’s last words that he inherits his shallowness and winds up being an adult who fancies more a woman’s body than her mind. That is until one day, when he is stuck in an elevator with a motivational speaker who hypnotizes him to “only see people’s inner beauty”. At this point, Hal meets the most unattractive women and finds them incredibly alluring and beautiful. The point being is that he is himself and that truly is what women are attracted to in the end. Hal of course does not realize any of this and when he meets an incredibly thin woman (played by Gwenyth Paltrow), his honesty gets him not only a girl, but a relationship. This does not sit well, with Hall’s friend, played by Jason Alexander, who has his own insecurities.

In between there are a lot of fat jokes and what many will find sick humor, from chairs breaking every time Paltrow sits down, to even making fun of handicapped individuals. The Ferrely Brothers do not hold back anything and many will wonder if this is really necessary, just for some jokes that end up not working many times.

By the time the film is almost over, the one thing that stood out for me was the scene where Hal visits a hospital ward for children and sees a little girl as she really is physically. It shows pretty much what the Ferrely Brothers wanted to say about vanity; somehow this message gets lost for most of the film.

Shallow Hal really tries to deliver on the jokes, but I think the subject matter was too much to overcome and the movie ends up being half a cruel joke instead. As far as Ferrely Brothers films go, this one did not succeed on all levels, like Kingpin, Something About Mary, or Dumb & Dumber which are their most successful works to this day.