I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked this summer because of two big distracting factors: #1. My wife and I moved from our house in Raleigh to Clayton (roughly 20 minutes outside of Raleigh), and that was really exhausting. #2. I’ve had a few health issues over the last few months including an inflammation and a blood clot – and that’s been pretty painful.
While I’ve been recovering I’ve been making my way
through a bunch of Blu rays and DVDs that have stacked up in my office over the
last few months. Most of them are from the world of VOD (Video On Demand), and
had either limited or no theatrical release, so you may not have heard of them.
Most of them aren’t very good either, but there were a few halfway watchable ones. Let's take a look at a handful of 'em, shall we?
First up, there’s Philip Martin’s THE FORGER,
starring John Travolta as, yes, a master art forger who makes a shady deal to
get an early release from prison, but in return he must pull off “one last
job.” So it’s a heist movie, and with Christopher Plummer as Travolta’s father,
and Tye Sheridan as Travolta’s dying son both in on the caper, it highly
resembles FAMILY BUSINESS, a less than stellar ‘80s comic thriller that starred Sean Connery,
Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick in the grandfather-father-son roles.
Set in Boston with bad accents to boot, THE FORGER is a competently dull collection of clichés that’s a good example of how much Travolta’s been treading water in his film career since, well, probably HAIRSPRAY (his hair was more realistic in that too). It also resembles FAMILY BUSINESS in that it deserves to be forgotten.
John Malkovich as the town’s sheriff, and Billy Bob Thornton as Palmer’s father have their suspicions, and a creepy taxidermist who everybody thought was dead (Michael Stuhlbarg) starts looking into the matter as well. It twists and turns through a mess of schemes and scams in the tradition of both the movie and TV show versions of FARGO (Shakman directed two eps of that too), but it never twists and turns itself into anything but a watchable throwaway. Shakman should stick to TV.
The father struggles with how to handle the situation as the country doctor (Jodie Moore) tells him he has three options: take her to quarantine; give her a drug cocktail that leads to a slow, painful death; or “make it quick.” It largely feels like a stand-alone episode of The Walking Dead - one of the uneventful ones on the season set on the farm maybe - but it has a nicely restrained performance by Schwarzenegger in his uncharacteristic role, there’s a lot of genuine effort by Breslin in embodying her infected character, and the eerie grey tone is effective. I got fairly bored in the last half hour, but fans of the genre and of Ahnold will probably be more into it.
There is significant time given to some anti-Obama voices, such as conservative political activist Derrick Grayson and Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, but it’s telling that at the end writer/director Smalls shares with us his poll of all his interviewees and 82% of them approve of Obama. A doc like this can’t help but be biased, but the thesis needs more work. HATING OBAMA is a watchable, well constructed conversation of a video essay, but it has no real conclusion - it just throws the question back at us at the end.
All the film's dialogue comes from the original text, albeit trimmed down to the essentials, and it’s fun to see folks like John Leguizamo (as Badgley’s servant) put such effort into their recitations. The old school manner of speaking is an amusing anachronism in this Brooklyn crime-lord context, but you really have to pay attention to follow it or it can get pretty confusing - especially with all the bloody, layered plotting. I appreciated several of CYMBELINE’s set pieces, particularly one in which Jovovich sings Dylan’s “Dark Eyes” (much in the manner of Patti Smith’s version), but it’s far from an easy, entertaining viewing. Like his HAMLET, Almereyda’s take on the Bard here is initially an interesting experiment but one that’s hardly essential.
More later...