Retro Review: Virtuosity

 This is going to be the shortest Retro Review in the history of the Blogorium, because I have but one and only one memory to impart about the film Virtuosity. Forget The Towering Inferno. Forget The Poseidon Adventure. Forget Earthquake. There is but one movie of dubious merit that is, pound-for-pound, the most stacked with people who SHOULD KNOW BETTER: Academy Award Winners Denzel Washington (Training Day), Russell Crowe (Gladiator), and Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) join UFC and WWF Champion Ken Shamrock (Scarecrow Gone Wild) in what was the second sci-fi bomb of 1995 (after Johnny Mnemonic).

 I remember almost nothing about Virtuosity. It's easily been ten years since I last saw it, and other than knowing that Denzel is the good guy and Russell Crowe is the virtual reality serial killer who gets loose, I couldn't tell you anything about the movie. Nothing. Instead, I pulled up the cast list on IMDB and discovered that Virtuosity is a treasure trove of "that guy"'s, many of whom I would clearly recognize if I saw the film again today*. Let's have a look, shall we?

 A quick glimpse shows me William Fichtner (Drive Angry), William Forsythe (Dick Tracy), Kelly Lynch (Cocktail), Cotas Mandylor (Saw VII), Kevin J. O'Connor (Lord of Illusions), Christopher Murray (Smokin' Aces), Traci Lords (Cry Baby), Dustin Ngyuen (Rapid Fire), Anthony Winters (Sneakers), and last but not least Michael "Let's Get Ready to RUMMMMMMBLLLLLLE!" Buffer (Rocky V).

 All this talent in one movie, along with three people (and Ken Shamrock) who ought to have known better. I guess I could give Russel Crowe a pass, but Denzel Washington was in Malcolm X. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Malcolm X, for crying out loud. The man didn't need to slum - that's what Ricochet was for, and Ricochet is GREAT!

 Since I can't tell you much more about the movie, or even how we saw it (it must have been on VHS), let's take a look at the creative team, shall we? Director Brett Leonard cut his teeth with The Dead Pit, The Lanwmower Man, and Hideaway (with Jeff Goldlum) before moving on to make Virtuosity. After that, he made Man-Thing, Highlander: The Source, and Sigfried & Roy: The Magic Box. Writer Eric Bernt wrote Surviving the Game (good job!), Romeo Must Die, Highlander: Endgame (bad job!), Bachelor Party Vegas, and the remake of The Hitcher for Platinum Dunes. Now I suppose you could argue that each peaked before Virtuosity, but I like to pretend it was their "high water mark" before an inexorable decline.

 So, uh, what have we learned? That if I wanted to Spoil this movie, I'd have to look it up? Yep. That sometimes you really can totally forget about a movie you see until it pops up somewhere? Check. That maybe you should put a trailer at the bottom of a Retro Review to help convince yourself the film exists? Why, look at that!

 



* At the time, Crowe would be in that list too, as I hadn't seen Romper Stomper or The Quick and the Dead to that point.

Retro Review: The Siege, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Rush Hour

 This is a little bit different take on the Retro Review, less about the specific films listed in the title and more about the reason WHY I sat through two movies I'll never watch again and a movie I haven't seen in nearly a twelve years and vaguely remember. The connective tissue between these three disparate, otherwise wholly unrelated films, has everything to do with George Lucas and May of 1999*.

 Although Star Wars doesn't receive the level of attention at the Blogorium that it might have ten years ago, I was once a fanatic of George Lucas' sci-fi / fantasy series. These days, in the wake of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, The Clone Wars movie and subsequent series (which I have not and do not plan on seeing), and the impending Blu-Ray release / 3-D re-release of the "saga," I just don't feel the need to write about Star Wars that much anymore. I'm not one of those hyperbolic "Lucas raped my childhood" idiots**, and I do sometimes smile or chuckle at a well placed SW reference, but most of the time I just don't think about the movies. Any of them, even if I'm more inclined to watch A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back than the other four.

 That was not always the case; from the announcement of the Star Wars prequels (some time after the 1997 Special Editions) until the release of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, I was a rabid fanatic. You can ask anyone I knew in college freshman year, when I undoubtedly drove them nuts with taped trailers from Entertainment Tonight or the latest rumors from TheForce.net.More to the point, I was insufferable when it came to seeing the teaser trailer, and I had a habit of dragging very reasonable friends to movies we wouldn't see otherwise because the teaser was "rumored" to be attached. I was home from school on three occasions, and I think you can figure out what the first two movies were.


I'm sure you've all seen Rush Hour at this point; you've probably seen Rush Hour 2 and not Rush Hour 3 (at least, that's my level of interaction with the series). I heard that The Phantom Menace's teaser ran before the film, and that Rush Hour might be funny. I suppose we enjoyed it, although I'd be pressed to tell you much about Rush Hour. Thinking back, it seems like I remember as much about Rush Hour as I do Shanghai Noon (anybody see that movie?). It's an amiable comedy, notable (at the time) for featuring Tom Wilkinson, who I had seen in The Full Monty the year before. I can't honestly remember if the trailer was attached or not, but it seems like it wasn't.



  Skip two months later to Thanksgiving break of 1998, when a similar situation unfolded for The Siege.
Driving to the theatre, I swore up and down we wouldn't be as "let down" this time, and by "we," I meant "me" because compared to The Siege, Rush Hour was a walk in the park. Other than hating the movie, here are the things I remember about The Siege: Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, and Tony Shalhoub were in the film. It had something to do with a terrorist attack or the threat of terrorism or something, and Willis declared marshal law in New York. That's it. I never saw The Siege again, don't recall enjoying it, and have no plans to revisit the film. Considering that we (I) only went to see The Siege to watch that trailer, and the trailer wasn't there, I was doubly disappointed.

 How I eventually saw the teaser trailer or what it was playing in front of is lost to the ages, so I'm just going to assume I saw it online over and over in some horrible quality QuickTime on a loop, obsessing over the minutiae until the next trailer came along. Maybe it's even on a cd-r or a floppy disc somewhere, lost in the shuffle of the following decade.

  Star Trek: Insurrection is more of an appendix to the story, a movie I saw with my Dad for Christmas or possibly even early in 1999 for his birthday. The film itself is a elongated, mostly pointless episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I'd largely forgotten until watching Mr. Plinkett's review of the film***. It's only really worth noting because I do know that the Episode 1 trailer played before Insurrection, and was arguably the highlight of the afternoon.

 This is not a Retro Review for The Phantom Menace (although I might do one of those down the line), so there's no need to get into whether the film lived up to the teaser or not. I just thought you might chuckled at the lengths to which a young and silly Star Wars fan would go to see a trailer. Not the movie, a trailer. Laugh it up, fuzzballs.

* You could also consider The Mummy to fit into this rubric, although its release was much closer to Episode 1. For whatever reason, I gave The Mummy's crappy visual effects a pass because, as I reasoned, "ILM put most of their effort towards Star Wars."
** If you don't understand why using a rape metaphor to describe your reaction to three shitty movies, you are an idiot. Period.
*** Appropriately, the reason I knew Mr. Plinkett existed was because of his now famous Episode 1 review.

Blogorium Review: The Book of Eli

Welcome to day one of Post-Apocalypto-Rama-Rama at the Blogorium! Today I'll be looking at Albert and Allen Hughes' The Book of Eli, written by Gary Whitta and starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, and Jennifer Beals.

Let's do the Post-Apocalyptic Scenario Rundown:

What Caused the Apocalypse: Nuclear War ("they punched a hole in the sky," says Eli [Washington]). Religion is blamed for the war, so following the return of society, all religious texts are burned.

Adverse Effects on the Population: It seems that some of the adults were blinded by the sun's rays, and everybody in post-apocalyptia needs to wear sunglasses at all times. Lack of power, books, and general loss of simple creatures comforts. Money has pretty much disappeared, and trading is based on things like lighters, oil, water, and in one case, a valuable bottle of shampoo. Eli trades with Engineer (Tom Waits) to recharge an iPod, which presumably represents some of the last music available in this world.

How Is Society Adapting: On the roads, there are scavengers, travelers, and people who set up traps, usually involving a woman who pretends to have a broken down shopping cart (this trick appears twice in the film). There are a handful of towns where civilization is slowly rebuilding, such as the one run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Elsewhere, there are small dwellings that families have refused to abandon, like the home of George (Michael Gambon) and Martha (Frances de la Tour). You want to avoid the latter, as there's a good chance that kindly old couple might be cannibals.

Our Hero(es): Eli (Denzel Washington), a warrior-monk type traveling from the East coast to the West coast, carrying a book that may or may not be the last surviving copy of the King James Bible, which he protects from any attacker. Something's off about Eli, but it's unclear what until just before the end.

Who's Standing in the Way: Carnegie and his henchmen (including Rome and Punisher: War Zone's Ray Stevenson). When Carnegie gets word about the book from Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), he wants it to help rebuild society ("This book is a weapon!" he tells his men). Carnegie is well read, cunning, and resourceful, and poses such a threat that he forces Eli and Solara to forge a temporary alliance with George and Martha the cannibals in order to stay alive.

So What's so Important About Where He's Headed: There may or may not be a group of people trying to rebuild society without controlling them through fear that Eli wants to deliver the book to. It's been his life's mission to get there, and Carnegie is only the last obstacle for Eli to clear.

How Well is the Post-Apocalyptic World Conveyed: It's pretty solid. Eli and Solara sleep inside of the cooling tower for a Nuclear Power Plant, the rules of how society operates are conveyed clearly by Eli and Carnegie's town structure makes sense. Cars are used sparingly and with everything at a premium, none of the characters are too wasteful with what they have. Food seems to be in short supply, so the film opens with Eli hunting a feral cat (hairless, presumably as a result of the radiation). (Spoiler) The outpost in Alcatraz designed to collect the remnants of the "old world" from 30 years ago also is appropriate considering how difficult rebuilding must be, and I like little touches about younger survivors asking elders what life was like "before."

Visually, I like that the Hughes brothers went with a sun-bleached palette. It always feels totally appropriate that everyone is wearing sunglasses, as the world seems just a little bit brighter than it ought to be. Even though most of the movie takes place in the desert, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the country looked like the backgrounds of The Book of Eli.

So, Glass Half Full Post-Apocalypse, or Glass Half Empty?: This is definitely a "glass half full" kind of movie, one that embraces a positivist role of religion in society. Without spoiling too much, Carnegie does and doesn't get what he wants, and Eli and Solara make it out west. There's the potential for sequel-izing if they wanted to, based on the very end, but either way it's the kind of movie that reaffirms your faith in mankind to rebuild.

The Hughes brothers have constructed a great looking post-apocalyptic vision of the western U.S., with solid acting across the board and some interesting ideas about where faith fits into a world that forgot it long ago. The Book of Eli is certainly a more action oriented, western-based take on the genre, but that's not such a bad thing at all. In fact, I'd dare say you'll find a lot to enjoy about the movie. Regarding the "twist": I'd rather not spoil it for you, but I will say that I knew what it was going in and was able to follow the visual clues. Save for one scene, I think they kept to it pretty well, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Join me tomorrow for The Road.