Director: John Woo
Bugs: three out of five
Gosh, isn't Castor Troy a great name for a villain?
Its evil comes only partly from sounding like castor oil. Say it really slowly like this – Castoooor Troooy – and you get shivers down the spine, right? Now try this one. Go down to the bathroom, leave the light off, face the mirror with a torch under your chin and say it really, really slowly in a guttural voice, like you're an NBL game caller ushering the players out. I'll wait here.
Back so soon. Bet you ran, for it's kinda spooky, eh?
No wonder Face/Off is getting such rave reviews with Australian mainstream meda critics. And if Nicolas Cage gets another Oscar, I think he should thank the writer who came up with his screen name. It's got sociopath written all over it.
But what makes Face/Off doubly good is that the sex and drug crazed murdering psycho Castor has an equally evil brother called ....wait for it..... Pollux. And Pollux to you too!
Now, what sort of parents give their children names like that? If they'd been named Stephen and Charles, they'd now be mild-mannered accountants working in a respectable downtown firm. Instead, Castor and Pollux are rubbing their knuckles, twisting their pencil thins, laughing hysterically, taking drugs the rest of us can't afford and planning to blow up Los Angeles with a biological time bomb.
Castor and Pollux have come along at just the right time because, frankly, screen villains' names were getting just a little bit twee of recent times. Who was that sociopath computer guy in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory? Travis Dane? Just not quite there is it? Travis T might have worked better. Wasn't DeNiro's character in Taxi Driver a Travis Something-or-other?
In fact, The Bug staff have been coming up with a few screen villain names. There's such a paucity of good ones that we reckon if we register a half-dozen as business names, we could make a killing, so to speak.
How about this one: Brock a-Lie. Get it? The kids would hate him from the word go. We're still workshopping Con Mann, Obi City, Rotor Blade, Acne Scars and, even though it makes no sense at all, Stafford Road. If you've got some ideas for really good crook names, drop us a line.
Meanwhile, back to the review. The critics have heaped praise on Face/Off, one suggesting it has set the benchmark for the action genre film for the next two decades. If this is so, heaven help us. Director John Woo has certainly thrown together state of the art action sequences that get the adrenalin pumping like never before. But enough is enough already! This reviewer lost count of the slow-mo scenes of gunmen hurtling sideways ripping off clips of automatic fire as they fall (is this why they constantly miss?), not to mention the absurd face-downs between Troy and the cop with the good reason to hunt him down, Sean Archer (John Travolta).
Woo fares less well with the mushy stuff that's used to separate the action sequences so the whole project doesn't reach Water World proportions. There's this incredibly emotional scene where Mrs Archer (Joan Allen) is explaining to Castor Troy who's really Sean Archer that she's been living as "man and wife" for the past week with Sean Archer who's really Castor Troy (come to think of it, the guy who thought up this plot must have been off his face)
Troy/Archer: What do you mean?
Mrs Archer: We've been, you know, f.. f...
Troy/Archer: Fighting?
Mrs Archer: No. You know, f.... f....
Troy/Archer: Forgetting each other's anniversaries?
So mainly to act as a balance for all those reviewers who saw no wrong with Face/Off, a few minor criticisms.
1. 20 minutes less time next time, Mr Woo. It might make the pathetic marksmanship of your main protagonists seem a little less laughable.
2. While these action flicks are not supposed to be believable, some script tightening would stop audiences shaking their heads over the more absurd plotting devices. No, we're not talking about the face-swapping at the centre of the story – that's all good fun – just stuff like Archer/Troy jumping off an oilrig jail in the middle of nowhere under the gaze of a helicopter gunship and swimming, presumably, back to LA uncaptured. Phew!
3. Who mistcast Joan Allen as Archer's wife? Wasn't Anne Archer available? and
4. The next time you feel obliged to use the sort of over-the-top symbolism displayed in the townhouse shootout (little boy amid the classical music and shattering household goods) and the church funeral shootout (peace doves in slow mo, etc), take twice as many valium as last time and shoot half as much film.
Review: Don Gordon-Brown
p.s. there's no way I want to sit through Face/Off again to check this out, but there may be a continuity flaw in the movie. Archer/Troy takes a pair of burning boots off just before he jumps off the prison oilrig. Can someone who sees the flick after reading this review let me know whether he had those boots on when he was being given the shock treatment in the cell? The other inmate being treated was definitely bare-footed. Ta.
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Bugs: 3 out of five
The basic idea behind this very enjoyable romp is that aliens are living all around us, more or less peacefully going about human/animal business with the full approval of the secret authority that monitors their time here.
There are several thousand aliens here at any one time, K (Tommy Lee Jones) tells J (Will Smith), most of them in Manhatten. Boom Boom. Taxi drivers? asks J. Not as many as you'd think, replies K. Tischhhh!
While Australian audiences can put up with American movies making American jokes (we've had enough practice) we can take cold comfort in the knowledge that if aliens were living here incognito, Brisbane's Fortitude Valley and a 5km radius around Kings Cross would have more than their fair share.
In some ways, believing that beings from other planets are living beside us is a far more reassuring notion than to have to consider the awesome possibility that Bronwyn Bishop, Jan Power, Jeannie Little, Kerry Packer, Ray Martin and John Singleton really AREN'T aliens!
While Men in Black does not quite match the hype surrounding its release (what modern movies do?), there are enough guess -who's-an-alien jokes, top special effects and father-and-son chemistry between Jones and Smith to make for a very agreeable 98 minutes in the dark.
A worthwhile exercise for anyone who's just seen Men in Black is to rent Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! now out on video. For mine, Mars Attacks! was the better alien flick, if for no other reason than being more off the planet. That and the fact that the ornery green little bastards get to chomp through a stella cast of human support actors.
Yet from memory Mars Attacks! landed here almost unannounced and disappeared again soon after into the night sky - a virtual UFO (unseen filmed object).
Perhaps all Mars Attacks! needed was a good cRAP song? All together now: We are the men from Mars......
Review: Don Gordon-Brown
Writer/Director: Chris Kennedy
Bugs: 3 and a half out of five
Once you've thought up a movie title this good, it would be a crime not to film some scenes to go with it.
So writer/director Chris Kennedy did. In Australia, using Australian actors. The result is a typical, over-the-top, quirky Australian film that has you in some doubt as to its quality and purpose during the watching, but which somehow manages to gell into a complete and satisfying whole in about the time your eyes need to adjust to the sunlight outside.
An interesting phenomenon, considering the basic story of a callow country youth (Matt Day) in his search for musical stardom becoming embroiled during a road trip with a wacky couple (Richard Roxburgh and Mirando Otto) has hairs on it.
Their robust acting - aided by a support cast where you can enjoy playing the game: what TV commercial were they in? - overcomes a few jarring moments early on, like the American tumbleweed blowing across the outback landscape, and the group of farmhands wearing just-out-of-the-box Akubras. At the cattleman's bar at the ekka you'd have trouble finding as many hats that haven't come within a bullsrush of seeing a real live blowie!
The script gets incarcerated along with our male leads midway through their journey and for a while there it looks like no-one's gong to get out of jail - actors or audience alike. But Kennedy finds the key, steps up a pace and throws in a nice twist at the end to explain away all the flash forwards during our trio's travels.
Certainly, no one's career has been harmed by this interesting project.
Review: Don Gordon-Brown
Director: P.J Hogan
Bugs: 2 out of five
This Julia Roberts vehicle is saved from total failure by an Australian connection – its director P. J. (Muriel's Wedding) Hogan.
Hogan hits a high spot – a restaurant scene made very funny by pushing the excess envelope that a non-Aussie hand would probably have avoided – and low spots – ham-fisted slapstick which has Robert's character Julianna Potter falling about constantly, if not the audience.
Everyone tries hard, but can't quite overcome the limitations imposed by a contrived script by Ronald Bass. The rotten, unpleasant things Potter resorts to in a desperate bid to scuttle the marriage of the man she thinks she loves, Michael (Dermot Mulroney) are too out of character to be believable, although women may have no such qualms about Potter's actions, citing the defence that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Maybe Julie Roberts just doesn't do it for me any more, although I've always admired the body of her work I'm not so sure. There's a semicolon missing somewhere there.
Perhaps this movie's biggest mistake was to promote itself as the new Four Weddings and a Funeral. It's not even close.
The only favorable comparison is that both had an excellent gay role – and gay actor Rupert Everett's gay character, George Downes, is the best thing My Best Friend's Wedding has going for it.
- Don Gordon-Brown
