Cradle 2 The Grave (2003)

Straight to the grave
A poor excuse for a movie. Not only did famed martial artist & movie star Jet Li take a backseat in the screenplay, despite having first billing (or at least 'left' billing on the movie poster), but the tone of the movie was lethargic. I blame the casting and performance of a Earl Simmons, also known as Dark Man X or the abbreviation DMX. His acting ability as a small-time crook & doting father, Fait, falls short in substance & credibility. Had he persuaded the audience with an angry bark here & an expressive growl there, and had the filmmakers made a final cut with a sense of humour, "Cradle 2 The Grave" would have amused. If this warning of imminent sleep-inducement proves inadequate, do read on.

The plot: Fait, a fellow henchman, a stripper (Gabrille Union), and a semi-getaway man (Anthony Anderson) attempt a diamond heist &, in the process, lifted a bag of black stones that look like really expensive licorice candy. The dark gems spell trouble & our team of supposedly likeable robbers get caught in a triangle of made-in-Taiwan predicament; a Chinese supercop, Su (Jet Li) deployed on search & retrieve, a former Chinese guy (literally, since he looks rather half-Caucasian), Ling (Mark Dacascos), who's bumped into Su in the past, with black-market auction in mind, & a kingpin-like mobster are all after the stones in this contrived, over-cooked noodle plot. Eventually, the supercop teams up with Fait & his band of "mean-streeters" and together they battle dogs, men in cages, expendable crewmen and attempt to rip-off selected members of the underworld. A subplot involves a rather cheesy & sugary relationship between Fait & his pre-teen daughter who vexes her kidnappers with stereotypical "rugrats" antics. Further, Tom Arnold was used as a character actor who manufactures stale jokes using his fumbling sidekick persona so effectively employed in Cameron's "True Lies".

To sum up, "Cradle 2 The Grave" is a disappointing Jet Li actioner that doesn't live up to the promise of hip-hop intensity suggested in the title. 2 bad. Anthony Anderson did steal the show with his on-the-job comical turns as a team member who goes to over-the-top lengths as a professional con-man. He should have been the lead character "buddy" to Jet Li's stoic Su.
DMX's protagonist of Fait is more minimal than minimalist; the filmmakers allowed him to get away with acting & mumbling like the average heroic fellow. Kelly Hu's catty female sidekick to the villain has the appropriate mean, razor-sharp looks, but, unfortunately, the screenplay eventually furnishes her character with dialogue. Jet Li still delivers some entertaining moves, particularly his signature "offensive blocks" where he would strike an enemy's blow, either punch or kick, with its equivalent. Ultimately, the film that takes itself seriously, could have been saved had the director made it into a very marketable comedy action flick like the Tucker-Chan "Rush Hour" series. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0306685/

Who's That Knocking At My Door? (1967)

Marty from NYU
Martin Scorsese's debut film is a black & white portrait of a young city dweller named J.R. (Keitel). The project started out as a graduate student film. With gradual funding & piecing together of scenes shot & edited years apart, Marty created the story of a flawed character defined by his religion & social circle. There are two striking scenes in the picture, both involving the actors Harvey Keitel & Zina Bethune. In the first scene, the two met & J.R. spoke passionately about westerns as though Scorsese were expounding through Keitel on a favourite subject of his, John Ford. In the later scene, a complex argument takes place between a man & a woman whose mutual love could not overcome the stigma of the woman's sexual trauma.

In the middle of the film, the narrative suddenly pauses, after J.R. began talking about women as "broads", to include a footnote on J.R.'s thoughts about what he would generally consider as loose women. This side reference about sex turns out to be a 5 minute stylized sequence of him rolling around a small bed in the middle of a studio apartment with the type of women he would not consider "marriage-material". According to an interview with Mardik Martin, an early Scorsese collaborator, this sequence was insisted upon by an investor & the sex scenes were filmed in Europe; Holland, I believe. Marty uses frequent cuts, pans, flash transitions & circling movements to imply snippets of memory over gratuitous sex sequence.

All in all, the film has Scorsese's signature written on it, particularly the observation of the imperfect character who lives, stumbles, cries & hurts those who care for him. He did nail the complexities of a heterosexual relationship in a sequence where the couple argues in harsh tones, unable to reconcile their social & personal biases. http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0063803/

Red Eye (2005)

I wish Wes Craven would make more pure-thrillers like "Red Eye". Perhaps the credit should be given to the screenwriter, Carl Ellsworth, who constructed an efficient script that, in the first two acts, brought forth relentless character/action and incisive dialogue that translated a psychological hijacking of great intensity onto the screen. A simple three act structure governs a plot of which Syd Field would approve. Two major plot points catapult the main action - a male professional killer mastermind (or manager as he likes to call himself) coerces a female hotel manager to assist him in the assasination of a political figure who frequents her hotel - into and out of Act 2 where most of the action takes place.

The following discussion will contain spoilers, so do watch the film before reading on.

The film's set-up is quick & involved much expositional editing. Editing is made frequently to depict Lisa (Rachel McAdams), her work, shots of her childhood photographs, her retired father (Brian Cox), and shots of expendable crewmen noisily opening crates of fish containing mysterious boxes. At the speed in which these bits of information are edited into a sequence, one may conclude the following: Lisa is a professional, a workaholic (problem solving via cellphone), a former victim (father's frequent phone calls & references to sel-help books), and those mystery boxes aren't leftover freebies from a tradeshow...

best sequence: the momentary fugitive escapes from the plane.

least effective: the final act dominated by a competently edited but cliched genre action sequence.

A good example of the standard screenplay structure for the novice student of film.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0421239/

RAM #001

Sirk; melodrama. I like melodrama. I; like melodrama.

I now live in constant fear that my life emulates a Douglas Sirk Technicolor film. Example: a friend's friend has a cat that misbehaves, causing tempers to flare, heightened senses, followed by a dramatic delivery & declaration of principles against the feline population.

film idea #001

A new screenplay based on the "short-term memory" device from Nolan's "Memento" (2000); the thriller plot is expanded into a historical narrative that comments on the cyclical inevitability of mortality and with it the wisdom of a "thinking singularity". Perhaps one of the main theme could be evolution & adaptation. Its protagonist could be the analog of a historian.

The thought came to me after listening to a radio analysis of Britain's former colonization of Iraq through the 1950s. History, as we know it from secondary school, is the re-learning of temporal events prior to one's memory on the basis of tangible (mostly physically) evidence. If time were compressed & the process of re-learning repeated, one would have the gimmick to Nolan's film. The new film would be the "Doctor Zhivago" (1965)-version of "Memento".

Wag The Dog (1997)

Brainstorm an old shoe
Barry Levinson's political satire is an incisive observation of improvization and brainstorming. In the beginning of what I believe to be Act 3 of the screenplay, the hot-shot movie producer (Dustin Hoffman) orders his "I'm going to get drunk" songwriter (Willie Nelson) to write an advertisement jingle, a tune that refers to an old shoe. After a few indignant mumblings, the songwriter picks up a guitar, a fellow musician & begins to jam out a new anthem. Playing off of one another the two musicians gradually construct the melody to the theme song of the movie producer's next device - his follow up to the fake war engineered for TV & propagated via the US media - that will continue the theatrical wool pulled over the eyes of the American public. This scene of music composition summarizes the main theme in "Wag The Dog".

"Wag The Dog" was released during my sojourn of undergraduate college, but my first viewing occured 8 years later in a time history will remember as the post Cold War & post Berlin Wall age of terrorism & the politics of fear. The film, however intuitive or serendipitous depending on one's viewpoint of the filmmakers' insight or luck, is still relevant to news headlines today and its humor, very much alive. The plot revolves around a high-level US government problem solver (Robert De Niro) who hires a movie producer to create fake footage of a foreign conflict that will, with the coordinated assistance of the US press secretary and spokespersons, distract the American viewing public from the President's apparent indiscretion with a young female performer. According to the production notes on the DVD, the film's release virtually coincided with the publication of the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal that mirrors the film's over-arching plot. So, with the help of these skillful spin-doctors, the government declared war on alleged Albanian terrorists forcing yesterday's news headlines into the obscurity of page 21 or so.

The film does not expose the American public as media fetishists, but instead focuses on the adept organization and creativity of a political machine. De Niro & Hoffman play the multimedia equivalent of the "Taylor machine" from Capra's "Mr Smith Goes to Washington". Whereas Capra shows both sides of the political arena, via James Stewart's righteous rookie doing battle with crooked conspirators sustained by Claude Rains' dishonest senator, Levinson's cynical behind-the-scenes spoof has no boyscout in sight. There are no external forces capable of stopping these 21st Century media manipulators, except themselves.

Though the film is an undisguised contrivance with a resolution that is consistent with the screenplay's narrative structure, the quick ending will probably keep the film from it's potential for greatness along the same veins of Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove". Without revealing the plot, it is sufficient to say that our morally uninhibited twosome ends quite suddenly in self-destruction. Still, its humour & wit is undeniably sharp in a film that often boils down to a dynamic 2-character play; the narrative does not take off until the initial interview upon De Niro's "Connie" arriving at the tanning-bed wing in the mansion-palace of Hoffman's Stanley Motss. The twosome had an agreeable exchange that went something like this: "a movie producer... it's like a plumber: if you do it OK, nobody notices, if you fuck up, it gets full of shit". The most alluring aspect of "Wag The Dog" lies not in its realistic portrait of a political back-room, but in the realism of logical conclusions made as a result of intelligent problem-solving.
IMBD Link - http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120885/