Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my man Capone. He's got some things to tell ya' about Russell Crowe and Ron Howard's CINDERELLA MAN. I personally don't think Ron Howard has done better than SPLASH... OK, APOLLO 13 was pretty good, but did it have John Candy? No. Did it have gratuitous '80s PG nudity? No. However, he did do WILLOW and we all know that midgets are movie gold... And I'd also argue that the best nudity Howard ever filmed was in COCOON...
Okay... now that we're all clear on that... ah... oh yeah. Capone also has a review of Greg Araki's MYSTERIOUS SKIN for you to enjoy. Have fun!
Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here for two reviews that should satisfy both sides of your fractured personality.
Cinderella Man
You can be as cynical a moviegoer as they come, and you'd still be helpless to resist the sentimental tug of a Ron Howard film. It is, quite literally, impossible. No one knows how to masterfully manipulate and massage the heartstrings quite like Howard, which is kind of amazing considering the guy almost never makes love stories or kids movies (I choose to forget his take on The Grinch). He even manages to forge these emotional ties in stories that have no business being gushy. The best example of this would be his previous pairing with Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind, which won a boatload of Oscars and showed American audiences that Crowe was something more than just an action star (those of us who followed his career in Australia already knew this). As it should be, Howard, Crowe, and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have joined forces again to create a perfect piece of American hero worship. Check your cynicism at the door, folks; you will be powerless to resist.
Crowe plays real-life Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock, who had a promising career just before Wall Street's big crash, and a downright miraculous one in the years following. Braddock's skills as a boxer had gotten so pathetic that the boxing commission actually revoked his license after one fight, because it thought he was only showing up for the minimal payday and not putting forth anything that resembled boxing. This may not have been far from the truth. He was desperate to put food on the table for his wife Mae (a decidedly understated Renee Zellweger) and their three kids. When other families were sending their kids away to live with better-off relatives, the Braddocks were determined to keep their family together. Like many men in New Jersey, they tried getting pick-up work at the docks for near-slave wages.
After breaking his right hand during a bought, Braddock is not only forced out of boxing, he finds himself having to disguise his injury at the docks be favoring his left hand (his left hooks were apparently always his weak spot). When his friend and cornerman Joe Gould (the triumphant Paul Giamatti) gets him a mercy gig for one night only at Madison Square Garden for a great purse, Braddock is grateful. What nobody knows is that months on the dock have made him stronger than he ever was. He wins the fight and is set on a path to take on heavyweight champ and Class-A asshole Max Baer (Craig Bierko in a particularly scaly performance). As with every boxing movie in the history of cinema (excluding, perhaps, Million Dollar Baby), everything comes down to the big fight. In Cinderella Man, Howard devotes about 30 of the film's 150 minutes to the 15-round bloodbath versus Baer.
As he did in Beautiful Mind, Howard really shows us how the brain works (or doesn't work). In the case of that film, the mind was demented and saw patterns and codes where there weren't any. Here, maybe better than any other boxing film I've ever seen, Howard shows us how a boxer sees the match, how he spots a pattern in his opponent's swings, how he sees an opening or a sore spot that he needs to exploit. And somehow these fighters see these things through blurred vision and gallons of stinging sweat in their eyes. Howard also goes a terrific job of capturing the relationship between a boxer and his cornerman. When Giamatti shouts out instructions, Crowe hears him and adjusts. As much as Howard relies on tried and true techniques when showing Braddock the loving father and husband or Braddock the down-and-out man begging for money from his former friends at the boxing commission so he can pay his electric bill. But Howard's view of and in the ring is unique. He's not reinventing the wheel, but it looks shiner than I've seen it in a long, long time.
Howard also spends a great deal of time showing the relationship between Braddock and his neighbor and would-be union organizer Mike Wilson (In America's Paddy Considine). I kept thinking that storyline was going to amount to something in the end, but they it occurred to be that Howard was actually daring to add another layer to Braddock's character: the good friend to the working man. You see, Americans knew Braddock's story as well as he did thanks to the sports writers that hounded him constantly once his comeback began. They knew he was one of them: disenfranchised, hurting, but never giving up. He was them, and he inspired them to not give up. I probably don't even need to tell you that Howard goes to town with that metaphor, but damn it, the guy makes it work.
As good as Crowe's physique and New Jersey accent are, as much as you might actually not be annoyed by Zellweger, the star of this show is (big surprise) Giamatti. The man is on a monster winning streak. He's playing second fiddle here, and there are stretches of Cinderella Man in which he doesn't appear, but every time he and Crowe are in a scene together, the movie is simply better. He's not hamming it up; he's just playing to part exactly how it should be. And that sums up my feelings on this film. Go to see a solid inspirational tale, stay to see Paul Giamatti work his magic.
Mysterious Skin
Gregg Araki is an aggressive confrontational writer-director whose works are not designed to be watched passively. He throws his works, images, and ideas in your face so brutally sometimes that you almost want to swat them away. Sometimes this will result in you disliking his work, but most of the time his films leave you with a bad taste in your mouth that stays with you long after the lights go up. His style of filmmaking (and it has become a sub-genre at this point) is called New Queer Cinema. It began in the early 1990s with powerful The Living End, almost died with the lame Totally F*cked Up, came back strong with The Doom Generation, and was left in limbo with the star-studded but ultimately empty-headed Nowhere. Mysterious Skin puts Araki back on track.
Taking a page from the Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) storybook, Araki's film follows the death-defying life of gay hustler Neil (Joseph Gordon Levitt), living in a small Kansas town. The film also introduces us to Brian (Brady Corbet), a withdrawn boy in the same town who has suffered for years from horrible nightmares that may actually be repressed memories. They two 18-year-olds don't know each as adults, but they shared an experience as 8-year olds at the hands of their little league coach (Bill Sage) that each has processed and changed from in vastly different ways. Brian ultimately convinces himself that the gaping void in his memory of the experience was, in fact, an alien abduction. Neil, on the other end, remembers the events perfectly and even fondly. I told you Araki was challenging.
Brian commits himself to filling in the blanks in his memory, and that path leads him ultimately to Neil. Unfortunately when he arrives at Neil's house, his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and best friend Eric (Jeff Licon) inform Brian that Neil has just moved to New York City to live with his oldest friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg). As expected, Neil goes on a hustling binge in the Big Apple and pays a hefty price. All roads in Mysterious Skin (which marks Araki's first time adapting someone else's work, in this case Scott Helm's novel) lead to a painful meeting between Neil and Brian, two virtual strangers in all kinds of emotional pain.
Mysterious Skin is graphic (more in terms of the language than what's actually shown), raw, sleazy, discomforting, and the mark of a maturing filmmaker. The sequences involving the boys' memories are very difficult to sit through, but Araki wants you to be disgusted by it. He doesn't want it glossed over as it was in The Woodsman or Mystic River, to name two recent examples. His mission is make you sick to your stomach at the very thought of what happened to these kids. His spares us the visuals but not the descriptions as Neil describes in graphic detail the abuse. This decidedly unrated and extremely powerful film opens in Chicago at the Landmark Century Center Cinema this Friday, and it's well worth seeing if you have the fortitude.
Capone
email: Capone has something he wants to tell you about this time when he was 8 years old. It involves aliens, probes, peanut butter and rubber crackers...
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