Reviews by JStone

"Bring 'Em Back Alive" was one of two television attempts to cash in on the success of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, in 1982 ("Tales of the Gold Monkey" was the other), and it was a marvelous escapist adventure that, sadly, only ran a single season. Based, VERY loosely, on the character of real-life hunter/impresario Frank Buck, who enthralled movie audiences in documentary expeditions to capture big game for zoos in the forties, the stocky, middle-aged hunter was transformed into lean, swashbuckling Bruce Boxleitner (complete with a pencil-thin mustache), headquartered in his own private game preserve outside Singapore, in the late 1930s.

The 'Singapore' of the series was no more intended to represent the actual prewar city than CASABLANCA was intended as an accurate representation of the Moroccan city, a fact that some critics have chosen to ignore. Many Asian ports gave Hollywood filmmakers exotic, mysterious locales in which they could introduce shady, multinational characters and stories heavy on intrigue and 'atmosphere'. This was a Singapore of fantasy, a place where a hero straight out of paperbacks and movie serials would feel right at home.

Not that Buck was looking for adventure, in the series. He was content in his life of protecting wildlife, aided by his trusty right-hand man, Ali (the always entertaining Clyde Kusatsu). But his legendary reputation, in a key world trouble spot, made him the logical choice for the U.S. Government to turn to for dangerous assignments. Represented by agent Gloria Marlowe (the breathtakingly beautiful Cindy Morgan, who'd co-starred with Boxleitner in the Disney cult classic, TRON), Buck would be recruited, reluctantly, into missions that only his special skills could accomplish, much to the amusement of fellow adventurer/competitor H.H., the Sultan Of Johore (Ron O'Neal).

Bruce Boxleitner was fabulous as Frank Buck, swaggering and charismatic, obviously enjoying himself, and he was more fun as the adventurer than in his later, more 'traditional' heroic roles in "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" and "Babylon 5". His chemistry with Morgan was reminiscent of Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS; edgy, but with an underlying romantic current always present. Add to this the series' wonderful production values, some fairly decent scripts, and, best of all, a truly magnificent, trumpet-punctuated theme and musical score by Arthur B. Rubinstein, who would also score "Scarecrow and Mrs. King", and you had first-class entertainment!

What a loss it was, that television audiences didn't 'discover' it!


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DETAILS
Release Date: Aug 05, 2011;
Rated: R;
Length: 112 Minutes;
Genre: Comedy;
With: Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde;
Distributor: Universal Picture
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For a comedy like The Change-Up — which is to say, a comedy with a message about as deep as a bowl of beer nuts — familiarity with Shakespeare's disguise plays and Aesop's Fables isn't a prerequisite for getting the picture. On the other hand, familiarity with both body-switch comedies and Judd Apatow laffers is indispensable for understanding just where this raunchy Apatow imitation with a heart of Lipitor goes wrong.

The anatomy swappers here are Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), a swingin', irresponsible single guy, and Dave (Jason Bateman), a driven lawyer/husband/dad. The switcheroo goes down because the two buddies-since-childhood do something stupid during a Guys' Night Out in their hometown of Atlanta: They pee in a fountain. Specifically, they pee in a fountain presided over by a stony statue of the Greek goddess Metis while drunkenly declaring to each other, ''I wish I had your life!'' (For the record, Metis is the goddess of counsel, advice, planning, and cunning.) Dave thinks he envies Mitch's life of free sex and fiscal irresponsibility. Mitch, a wannabe actor, thinks he envies Dave's successful career, his loving home life, and his cute wife (Leslie Mann). Crash, lightning, temporary power outage, Freaky Friday! The deal is done. The next day each guy wakes up in the body of the other. Discovery of genital distinctions follows.

Here's The Change-Up's first mistake: As set up by director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) and writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (The Hangover), the game is rigged. Dave may be burned-out, so much so that he has stopped appreciating his squeaky Leslie Mann of a wife. He may even feel a pang or two of extramarital lust at the sight of his beautiful law associate Sabrina — as played by Olivia Wilde, who wouldn't? But no one would envy Mitch's directionless, idiotic Peter Pan life — even if Peter entertains the ladies in a playpen of an apartment. The early Mitch is so excessively unsocialized and unlikable (I blame the script and direction rather than Reynolds' game performance) that there's no contest: Dave may need a little kick in the khakis to realize that he's got it pretty good at home, but he's clearly the movie's winner.

In fact, early Mitch is so obnoxious that in the end, when the two friends regain their own bodies, having learned lessons in gratitude (oops, did I give something away?), Dave is more or less Dave again. But Mitch 2.0 bears little resemblance to early Mitch. He's still Ryan Reynolds-y, but he's now someone a lot more like Dave — reformed by the traditional values The Change-Up endorses — than like a guy who previously kept a weekly sex date with a lady he described as a tigress.

I won't give away more about the tigress in question; let's just say she bounces and veers from Hangover turf into Farrelly brothers territory. And she also personifies The Change-Up's second mistake: The movie's scenes of id-fueled transgression are alternately desperate, trite, and an off-putting color of ugly — as if the filmmakers were given the ingredients but not the cooking instructions for a successful crude-but-cuddly frittata. Gross-outs involving poop — kids of all ages usually love 'em! — are more humiliating than hilarious. (Really, the old toxic-baby-diaper gag?) Freakish-looking women are easy receptacles for disgust. And when jokes give way to the ''I love you, bro!'' finale, the tone oozes past charming happiness all the way to cloying self-satisfaction.

Anyway! There's one consolation, and that's in watching the stars play opposite what is 
 often their type of guy. Bateman, in particular, is enjoyably nimble and unbuttoned when he sheds his usual persona of responsible-and-exasperated guy and lets some devil out. Quick-witted and a pro at physical shifts, he finds more subtleties in his Dave Gone Wild than actually appear in his dialogue. And that resourcefulness rubs off on Reynolds, a pleasant if less complex performer. Acting here as if he were a vaguely disgruntled but resigned grown-up, Reynolds gets to escape the tonal confines of his boyish smile. Too bad The Change-Up has little use for such interestingness. Soon enough it's back to stale jokes about spousal date nights, the sight of moldy fast-food leftovers in a bachelor's refrigerator, and the timeless male joys of sharing a whiz in an outdoor fountain after a night of drinking and bulls---. C

Sid and Nancy (1986)
111 min. Embassy Home Entertainment. Director: Alex Cox. Cast: Gary Oldman, David Hayman, Xander Berkeley, Perry Benson, Sy Richardson.

The great cinematic surrealist Luis Buñuel remarked in his autobiography My Last Sigh about a double suicide: "perhaps a truly passionate love, a sublime love that's reached a certain peak of intensity, is simply incompatible with life itself. Perhaps it's too great, too powerful. Perhaps it can exist only in death." Alex Cox's 1986 film Sid and Nancy cemented the iconic view of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his groupie lover Nancy Spungen as the Romeo and Juliet of the punk scene..

Told in a succession of vignettes, Sid and Nancy walks a tightrope between realism and expressionism in its attempt to capture the thrust of punk. Wisely, writer-director Cox and his co-screenwriter Abbe Wool don't concern themselves with doing justice to the full range of personality of Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten (Andrew Schofield) or the band's impresario Malcolm McLaren (David Hayman). Though they're larger-than-life, complex characters in their own rights, this is the story of Sid (Gary Oldman) and Nancy (Chloe Webb), and there's not a scene in the film that isn't there directly to reflect some aspect of their relationship, a meeting of like-minded but prickly personalities. The film begins at the end, with Sid arrested on suspicion of murder, then swiftly flashes back to the first encounter of the titular couple. When Johnny proves a cold fish, Nancy shifts her attention to Sid, with the film depicting her as his vessel into a sex life and death-defying heroin addiction (she not-so-fairly warns him, "Never trust a junkie": words to live by).As the Sex Pistols rise in prominence, they increasingly live their lyrics, from "Anarchy in the U.K." to "God Save the Queen" ("We mean it man./There is no future/In England's dreamland...When there's no future/How can there be sin?/We're the flowers/In the dustbin"). As an all-but-accidental rock star, Sid shows little interest in craft and his performances under the influence are barely sustainable. Part of his magnetism and mystique as a performer was his literally staggering unpredictablity, his naked self-destruction in his drug and alcohol use and in his ritualistic cutting (those who followed Vicious would turn these blazing burnouts into conventional shock-value showmanship, stage managed for effect). Sid gave greater attention to his unhinged "home" life with Nancy, largely played out in squalid rooms like those in New York's infamous Chelsea Hotel (where Cox films on location, to great effect). The couple endures a downward spiral through sustained "what day is it?" hazes and brief bursts of domestic abuse on the way to the fatal bender of the film's opening and closing movements.

The necessary roughness of a punk couple on smack isn't the whole story: both Sid and Nancy act out, in part, to mask vulnerabilities. Oldman and Webb throw themselves into their roles. True to life, Webb's Nancy is an aggressively abrasive, downright irritating force of nature, but also sympathetically needy of love and wounded by the rejection of her middle-class family (in fairness, she rejected them first to run away and join the punk circus). Oldman's work is even more impressive. Apart from recreating Vicious performances, including vocals, he soulfully embodies Vicious, especially in startling glimpses of the little boy lost beneath the man's off-putting exterior. Oldman's mid-film music-video performance of “My Way” before a neon staircase compares favorably—as a revelation of character through performance—to Robert De Niro's framing monologues in Raging Bull.

Cox injects his own surreal touches to the larger-than-life plane of existence Sid and Nancy share, dada moments like MacLaren firing an audible shot from a gun gesture or dreamlike moments of grace between the lovers, like the punk poetry of garbage raining down on them as they kiss in a NYC alley. The great cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men) traffics just as easily in these moments as the realistically grotty ones (Cox adds verisimilitude by shooting in London, Paris, Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as New York). Music by men who were there—Joe Strummer, The Pogues, and Pray for Rain—adds immeasurably to the mood, as do Cox's usual suspects in quirky supporting roles (Xander Berkeley as a pivotal drug dealer and Miguel Sandoval delivering the immortally bad rock-song pitch "I Wanna Job").

Sid and Nancy is superficially a story of (kinky) sex, (hard) drugs, and (punk) rock and roll, but Cox and Wool also take care to reach for some meaning in a seemingly senseless tragedy. No aspect of the film better encapsulates the meaning of punk than the scene in which Nancy takes Sid home to meet her bourgeois family, resulting in an absurdist culture clash (Nancy's grandpa turns to a bleary, topless Sid and asks, "So, are you going to make an honest woman out of our Nancy...?"). And Sy Richardson's methadone caseworker speaks for the filmmakers and the audience when he scolds the heroes, “You could be selling healthy anarchy. But as long as you're addicts, you’ll be full of shit.” The film acknowledges the strange glamor of punk amid its ugliness, without underselling in the least the brutal existential horror of Sid and Nancy's diseased "no exit" lifestyle. It's an age-old story of achieving immortality by paying thr ultimate price.