Tag Archives: Jeffrey Silver

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991, Stephen Herek)

Posted on 5 September 2012 | Leave a comment

Wait, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead made money? It didn’t make a lot of money, but it probably turned a profit.

The movie’s a star vehicle for Christina Applegate, who clearly doesn’t deserve one. Her performance is laughably awful and amateurish; it’s as though the filmmakers realized she wasn’t likable and just went ahead anyway. Every frame of her performance gives way to a far worse one.

The plot–the titular Babysitter angle quickly gives way to teenage Applegate lying her way into a job–requires a reasonable performance from the lead. Between Applegate and director Herek’s incompetence, it’s not happening here.

There’s a complete disconnect with reality in Babysitter, whether it’s Concetta Tomei being believable as having five kids or Keith Coogan’s stoner being younger than sister Applegate. Herek and the screenwriters also coat over the mean-spirited, reprehensible natural of the characters. Whether it’s Tomei leaving her kids with a babysitter without references, the kids disposing of the body and covering up the death and just the movie’s general apathy.

The audience is supposed to like Applegate because she meets a cute boy (Josh Charles, who’s clearly leagues ahead talent-wise than his costars) and changes outfits and hairstyles every scene.

Poor Joanna Cassidy shows up and humiliates herself as Applegate’s boss.

Between Herek’s unbelievably lousy direction and David Newman’s awful score, the movie doesn’t even have any passable technical qualities.

It’s artistically tragic prints of Babysitter exist. I wish I could forget every millisecond of it.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Stephen Herek; written by Neil Landau and Tara Ison; director of photography, Tim Suhrstedt; edited by Larry Bock; music by David Newman; production designer, Stephen Marsh; produced by Robert F. Newmyer, Julia Phillips, Brian Reilly and Jeffrey Silver; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Christina Applegate (Sue Ellen Crandell), Joanna Cassidy (Rose Lindsey), John Getz (Gus), Josh Charles (Bryan), Keith Coogan (Kenny Crandell), Concetta Tomei (Mom), David Duchovny (Bruce), Kimmy Robertson (Cathy), Jayne Brook (Carolyn), Eda Reiss Merin (Mrs. Sturak), Robert Hy Gorman (Walter Crandell), Danielle Harris (Melissa Crandell) and Christopher Pettiet (Zach Crandell).

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Posted in 1991, ⓏⒺⓇⓄ, Color, Comedy, English, USA, Warner Bros.

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Tron: Legacy (2010, Joseph Kosinski)

Posted on 10 June 2011 | Leave a comment

Tron: Legacy is a little better than the first one (though the first one is so bad, it would be hard not to be). It does, however, share a very common trait–it’s best when the music is blaring. The Daft Punk score is wondrous and when the music’s going, Tron: Legacy works. Another asset is director Kosinski. His sense of composition is excellent and he incorporates the big special effects beautifully.

The smaller CG effect–slapping a young Jeff Bridges face on some stand in–fails. It looks like a rubber mask. They might have been better off with a rubber mask, actually.

Two more strong elements. First, production designer Darren Gilford. The film looks amazing. It might get a little less amazing for the finish, but the last scene has that other strong element. Olivia Wilde is fantastic. Her role is difficult (because it’s silly) but she turns in an easily likable performance while suggesting a lot of depth.

Lead Garrett Hedlund starts weak but gets better once Bridges shows up. Bridges is clearly cashing a paycheck here. Then there’s Michael Sheen… Kosinski apparently told him to play a cartoon character.

Unfortunately, the script’s dumb; the plot twists are idiotic and contrived.

Much of the action is lifted from old blockbusters (lots of Star Wars and even the original Burton Batman). Kosinski might not be original, but he executes his plagiarism effectively.

I’m loathe to say it, but Tron: Legacy is worth seeing. If just to look at it and hear.

CREDITS

Directed by Joseph Kosinski; screenplay by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, based on a story by Kitsis, Horowitz, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal and on characters created by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird; director of photography, Claudio Miranda; edited by James Haygood; music by Daft Punk; production designer, Darren Gilford; produced by Sean Bailey, Lisberger and Jeffrey Silver; released by Walt Disney Pictures.

Starring Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn / Clu), Garrett Hedlund (Sam Flynn), Olivia Wilde (Quorra), Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley), James Frain (Jarvis), Beau Garrett (Gem) and Michael Sheen (Castor).

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Posted in 2010, Action, Adventure, Color, English, Sci-Fi, Thriller, USA, Walt Disney Pictures

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Terminator Salvation (2009, Joseph McGinty Nichol), the director’s cut

Posted on 20 November 2009 | Leave a comment

Ok, no joke, what idiot thought adding Christian Bale to Terminator 4 was a good idea? Was it McG? Without the dumb connection to the previous films–if it had just been the adventures of Anton Yelchin’s Young Kyle Reese–it might have been fine. Nichol’s direction isn’t anything spectacular (it’s solid enough, surprisingly), but he doesn’t fetishize the Terminator world. The callbacks to the originals are at least amusing, since they’re trying for subtly.

Sure, it’s a knockoff of Road Warrior with a little Return of the Jedi thrown in but whatever, it’s not complete garbage. It’s at least diverting, more than Terminator 3, in fact.

However, then there’s Bale. Oh, wait, no way. Bale’s got the goatee to look tough (and less like a date rapist?).

Sam Worthington’s wasted. If I hadn’t seen Rogue, I’d have no idea he was good. Though he can’t hold his accent.

The script’s awful, but Nichol’s shoots it so large scale (studio franchise pictures with establishing shots, I’d missed those), it’s like Terminator‘s less about its actual content than that content’s presentation. Brancato and Ferris probably don’t have the writing chops of a good “Days of Our Lives” writers’ room and have some of the most lamely predictable “surprises” I can remember. But I suppose the script’s better than their Terminator 3 script, even if the nonsensical items–the Terminator base, the networked machine base, having manual, physical overrides.

If you haven’t been able to tell yet, this post’s going to be double length, just because there’s so much to talk about. Not the content, of course, but the film as an example of the decline of popular filmmaking.

Helena Bonham Carter is really bad. Laughable. She just gets worse and worse, doing some kind of impression of The Emperor from the Star Wars series.

Common’s awful. Michael Ironside’s embarrassing himself here.

Watching Bryce Dallas Howard act opposite Moon Bloodgood is pretty funny too. I’ve never seen Bloodgood in anything before and haven’t seen Howard in years–I figured the former would be bad and the latter okay. I was wrong. Very wrong.

Still, whoever did the special effects went cheap on the big “old” Terminators, which are clearly guys in costumes. And the thing when Worthington’s walking around half-Terminator or whatever, it looks awful, cheaper than a Halloween mask, even if they are doing some idiotic CG composite thing with it.

Terminator Salvation comes after The Matrix, so there are plenty of lifts from it (though the giant Transformer-like robots are not)–the whole prophet thing with Bale feels directly copied and pasted from The Matrix 2.

Unexpectedly first-rate is the Danny Elfman score. As much of a Brad Fiedel fan as I am, Elfman’s pure action score is great. There’s nothing playful to it, which is somewhat non-Elfman (at least the Elfman I know), but it’s such a solid piece of composing, it doesn’t seem at all lacking.

Maybe most offensively, they dedicated this crap to Stan Winston.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Joseph McGinty Nichol; screenplay by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, based on characters created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd; director of photography, Shane Hurlbut; edited by Conrad Bluff IV; music by Danny Elfman; production designer, Martin Laing; produced by Derek Anderson, Moritz Borman, Victor Kubicek and Jeffrey Silver; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Christian Bale (John Connor), Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright), Moon Bloodgood (Blair Williams), Helena Bonham Carter (Dr. Serena Kogan), Anton Yelchin (Kyle Reese), Jadagrace (Star), Bryce Dallas Howard (Kate Connor), Common (Barnes), Jane Alexander (Virginia), Michael Ironside (General Ashdown) and Ivan G’Vera (General Losenko).

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Posted in 2009, Action, ⓏⒺⓇⓄ, Color, Drama, English, Germany, Italian, Italy, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, USA, Warner Bros.

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Mindhunters (2004, Renny Harlin)

Posted on 22 October 2009 | Leave a comment

Want to see an amazing, can’t-believe-I-haven’t-heard-of-him performance by Eion Bailey? See Mindhunters. Want to see a goofy, affable Val Kilmer performance (maybe the first of its kind since Real Genius)? See Mindhunters. Want to see Christian Slater’s possibly best performance since Pump Up the Volume? See Mindhunters.

Want to see a terrible Jonny Lee Miller performance, where he tries a Southern accent? Mindhunters. Or LL Cool J totally failing in a major role (since he established himself as the likable but possibly tough supporting character)? Mindhunters again. Want to see something where you’re shocked to remember Renny Harlin directed Die Hard 2? Not kidding, Mindhunters.

I didn’t fit Clifton Collins Jr. giving a bad performance (the first I’ve seen from him) in that last paragraph. Oops.

Mindhunters appears to be Dimension’s attempt to turn Kathryn Morris into its Julia Roberts (and Patricia Valesquez, in maybe the film’s most absurdly awful performance, into its Angelina Jolie).

The film’s a considerable disaster, if only because the pacing is so idiotic–it didn’t get a theatrical release and it’s easy to see why. Unlike some of the other atrocious (but theatrically released) Dimension efforts, Mindhunters doesn’t even have a compelling cast. While there are good actors and good performances (the two are not corollary, however), Mindhunters would have been better served as a network miniseries. The script’s weak characterizations and Harlin’s laughable direction do the film no favors.

Though, I suppose, Charles Wood’s production design is good.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Renny Harlin; screenplay by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin, based on a story by Kramer; director of photography, Robert Gantz; edited by Neil Farrell and Paul Martin Smith; music by Tuomas Kantelinen; production designer, Charles Wood; produced by Cary Brokaw, Akiva Goldsman, Jeffrey Silver and Rebecca Spikings; released by Dimension Films.

Starring Eion Bailey (Bobby Whitman), Clifton Collins Jr. (Vince Sherman), Will Kemp (Rafe Perry), Val Kilmer (Jake Harris), Jonny Lee Miller (Lucas Harper), Kathryn Morris (Sara Moore), Christian Slater (J.D. Reston), LL Cool J (Gabe Jensen) and Patricia Velasquez (Nicole Willis).

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Posted in 2004, Action, ⓏⒺⓇⓄ, Color, Crime, Dimension Films, Drama, English, Finland, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, UK, USA

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Traitor (2008, Jeffrey Nachmanoff)

Posted on 18 December 2008 | 1 Comment

Traitor is the Superman IV of terrorism movies. I suppose I need to explain. I think Tom Mankiewicz once told Christopher Reeve you couldn’t have Superman messing around with the real world. Traitor is a Hollywood terrorism movie–in the vein of Telefon, The Assignment, Nighthawks or even The Jackal–except it takes 9/11 into account. The result is a goofy concoction–one I’m sure the filmmakers think is well-intentioned, but comes off as one of the most xenophobic things I’ve seen in a long time.

Simply put, in the world of Traitor, all Muslims–except one or two–are terrorists ready to kill innocent children, even if they have innocent children of their own. These Muslims tend to be Middle Eastern–Traitor has a ludicrous sleeper cell plot point with a female suicide bomber who would have been inserted long before women became suicide bombers–but there’s also a couple Africans. Not African-Americans, who the film has an awkward relationship with, but African immigrants. Not to be pointing fingers at writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, but I think Louis Farrakhan would have done a much more even-handed tale of a black American Muslim who discovers himself (working for the U.S. in Afghanistan in the 1980s with Osama Bin Laden no less) and finds his Middle Eastern brothers a little confused when it comes to the articles of faith.

As for the film’s approach to religion… another pitfall. It really tries hard in some ways, but it can’t escape its active contention (i.e. ninety-three percent of Muslims are heartless, unthinking mass murderers–worse, they all dream of some day getting to be mass murderers), so it’s laughable in the end. But there’s a lot to laugh at in Traitor, starting with its handling of the FBI.

Since 9/11, common knowledge of what American intelligence agencies do has skyrocketed. So when FBI agents Guy Pearce (he’s an Arabic languages PhD who couldn’t find another job… really) and Neal McDonough (he’s a big tough mean agent, who doesn’t know his partner is a PhD) wing around the world–Yemen, France, Canada, maybe England–it seems somewhat unrealistic. They don’t appear to have a boss, either.

Pearce’s performance is somehow good and somehow not. Technically, it’s a great performance, but the character’s so insanely stupid it’s hard to take him seriously. McDonough is bad. Cheadle’s decent–I kept wondering what the filmmakers would have done if they hadn’t signed him–if bland. As the only Arab terrorist with any elements of humanity, Saïd Taghmaoui is amazing–he gives the film’s best performance and if it’d been about him, it would have been something. As the heartless terrorist–who doesn’t even follow Islam’s basic tenets–Alyy Khan is awful. The rest of the cast is, generally, fine.

The first twenty or thirty minutes of Traitor is good. Until the last couple scenes, it’s on a steady decline but it takes a huge plunge at the end.

Nachmanoff’s direction is better than his writing–it’s fun to see them work cross-purpose. Nachmanoff goes the steady-cam route here (for realism, I’m sure), but he’s got tons of goofy Hollywood dialogue.

And Mark Kilian’s music is good. So good I’m surprised I don’t know his name.

CREDITS

Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff; screenplay by Nachmanoff, based on a story by Steve Martin and Jeffrey Nachmanoff; director of photography, J. Michael Muro; edited by Billy Fox; music by Mark Kilian; production designer, Laurence Bennett; produced by Don Cheadle, David Hoberman, Kay Liberman, Todd Lieberman, Chris McGurk, Danny Rosett and Jeffrey Silver; released by Overture Films.

Starring Don Cheadle (Samir Horn), Guy Pearce (Roy Clayton), Saïd Taghmaoui (Omar), Neal McDonough (Max Archer), Alyy Khan (Fareed Mansour), Archie Panjabi (Chandra Dawkin) and Jeff Daniels (Carter).

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Posted in 2008, Arabic, Color, Crime, Drama, English, Overture Films, Thriller, USA

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Assault on Precinct 13 (2005, Jean-François Richet)

Posted on 1 July 2008 | Leave a comment

Assault on Precinct 13 doesn’t remind of an early 1990s action movie because of Dorian Harewood, Kim Coates or Brian Dennehy showing up–or even because of the movie specific end credits song (by KRS-One no less). It doesn’t even remind of that genre because it lifts the icicle shamelessly from Die Hard 2. Even the presence of Matt Craven–in a theatrical release–doesn’t do it. I guess it’s because, even with all these identifiable similarities, Assault on Precinct 13 is a both traditionally solid action movie, as well as very self-aware. The casting is peculiar and I’d like to think the familiar faces were supposed to illicit the warm recognition they did. Assault on Precinct 13 feels like an action movie for people who won’t just recognize the icicle, but Coates as well. It’s a peanut butter and jelly movie.

As a remake of John Carpenter–one of Carpenter’s most distinctive features no less–Assault on Precinct 13 feels like they got the idea from a TV Guide description. With the exception of Laurence Fishburne’s character’s name, there isn’t any reference, isn’t any homage. There’s no urban uncanny here, the villains are all clearly defined (it’s Gabriel Byrne no less)–dirty cops instead of a street gang. Ethan Hawke (who would have thought, Hawke’s greatest commercial success comes from being an action guy) is a tormented cop who doesn’t know if he can make it. The psychological ramifications are trite and time wasters (the remake runs twenty minutes longer than the original), but they do allow for Maria Bello to be in the cast so I can’t complain too much. From her first scene, Bello and her acting quality seem rather out of place in Precinct 13, which is sturdily performed and all… but most of the cast members get about half their goofy dialogue out without it sounding cheesy. Bello gets it all out (to be fair to screenwriter DeMonaco, all of Bello’s scenes are the best written in the film). Hawke’s fine, but any acting ambitions he seemed to once have are very clearly gone. Fishburne’s fine too, but I was expecting more (he often just goes cheap with a Matrix delivery). Byrne’s lousy, but Currie Graham’s good as his sidekick. Dennehy’s good. John Leguizamo, in what should have just been a repeat of his annoying characters, adds some real texture to his performance. Drea De Matteo runs real hot and real cold.

But it’d be hard for Precinct 13 not to work. It’s a siege action movie and, as such, it’d have to be incompetently made to be bad. Director Richet is anything but incompetent. His composition isn’t startling, but it’s quite good and there isn’t a scene–even the poorly written first few–he doesn’t make compelling.

There’s one obvious, but not bad, CG shot. In the opening, Hawke’s at his desk (tortured, of course) and the camera pulls through the window and out into the sky until the precinct building becomes small. It reminded me of Curtiz’s use of miniatures in the 1930s. It’s a cool shot, sets the mood and all, but it’s nowhere near as interesting as it should be.

Anyway. The film’s certainly got me looking for more of Richet’s work.

But they never use the music. Carpenter’s theme to the original is one of his more recognizable compositions and it’d have made a great closing number… apologies to KRS-One.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Directed by Jean-François Richet; written by James DeMonaco, based on the film by John Carpenter; director of photography, Robert Gantz; edited by Bill Pankow; music by Graeme Revell; production designer, Paul D. Austerberry; produced by Pascal Caucheteux, Stephane Sperry and Jeffrey Silver; released by Rogue Pictures.

Starring Ethan Hawke (Sgt. Jake Roenick), Laurence Fishburne (Marion Bishop), Gabriel Byrne (Capt. Marcus Duvall), Maria Bello (Dr. Alex Sabian), Drea de Matteo (Iris Ferry), John Leguizamo (Beck), Brian Dennehy (Sgt. Jasper O’Shea), Ja Rule (Smiley), Currie Graham (Mike Kahane), Aisha Hinds (Anna), Matt Craven (Officer Kevin Capra), Fulvio Cecere (Ray Portnow), Peter Bryant (Lt. Holloway), Kim Coates (Officer Rosen), Hugh Dillon (Tony), Tig Fong (Danny Barbero), Jasmin Geljo (Marko), Jessica Greco (Coral) and Dorian Harewood (Gil).

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Posted in 2005, Action, ★★, Color, Crime, Drama, English, France, Rogue Pictures, Serbian, Thriller, USA

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