Any Given Sunday

Stone Cold

January 2000

Austin, Texas

Dear Mr. Stone:

I am writing you, well, because I figure I owe you some money. You see, I went to see your new movie,

Any Given Sunday

, the other night. This particular theater shows movies that are in their second or third week of release in this annex on the other side of the parking lot, and there’s usually just one person there who takes tickets and serves popcorn. Anyway, when I walked into the annex, that person wasn’t anywhere to be found. (I confess I didn’t look that hard.) So, I walked right into the theater without paying a dime. I’m hoping that you’ll tell me exactly how much of a fraction you’d receive out of the $7 dollars I didn’t pay to see your movie, so I can send it to you.

I’m not all that worried about reimbursing the actors (especially Barry Switzer), or the theater, or the crew or your investors or whoever else it is that gets pieces of the pie. I do, however, want to salute you, from the bottom of my heart, for your outstanding efforts in creating

Any Given Sunday

— probably the best cinematic practical joke of the year.

It took me a while to figure out what you were doing, of course, as you’d expect. Why, I walked out of

Any Given Sunday

convinced that it was a horrible movie, a cliche-ridden mess with hideous, screeching performances. At first, the whole thing looked like it was edited by a pack of genius high school sophomores anxious to try every bell and whistle on their Ronco Edit-O-Matic. And the apparent lapses of logic and common sense were just so grating. (Not to mention that you managed to put he-men football heroes like Al Pacino and Dennis Quaid in aprons.) How was I to know what you were thinking?

I didn’t figure it out until I started writing this movie review. I started focusing on your portrayal of the head coach, played by Al Pacino. This baffled me no end, Mr. Stone, let me tell you. The media hype you orchestrated had us believe that

Any Given Sunday

would blow the lid of the NFL, that it would be a searing expose of the seamy side of pro football.

And of course, it is, partly. We see all the things we expect to see — drugs, women, letting players pay with potentially life-threatening injuries. But none of this is surprising, not really, and it would be hard for you to outdo the really embarrassing things that have already gone on the NFL’s extensive police blotter this year anyway. (What is really surprising, to me anyway, is that everybody in the movie is really, really unhappy, in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for way.)

Anyway, one part of the seamy side — as made apparent in the firings this week of real life coaches Chan Gailey and Ray Rhodes — is the lack of loyalty shown by owners to hard-working coaches whose talent base has, through no fault of their own, eroded. You explore this quite a bit, but I was having problems with your take. What had me fooled is this: we never see Pacino work. Oh sure, he stands on the sidelines and yells. He talks to players in an avuncular tone when needed and delivers kick-butt sideline pep talks. But — as you know — this is not really what coaches do. Coaches work like dogs all the year ’round — running practices and team meetings and looking at film and working up game strategy and designing plays and dealing with the media and God knows what. Pacino doesn’t do any of that. He hangs out in bars and relaxes in his plush digs and goes to mayoral charity balls and whatnot. The only time he gets to talk football is with the team owner, the whiny Cameron Diaz. (”The running game!’ Diaz complains loudly. “You’re always talking about the boooring running game. Throw some more touchdown passes.”)

Since

Any Given Sunday

begins with a quote from Vince Lombardi, it might be easy to assume that you mean for audiences to identify the Pacino character with Lombardi, or Shula, or Paul Brown, or any of the great coaches of the past. (As a Cowboys fan, I appreciated your having a Landryesque coach on one of the opposing teams.) And then I realized: Pacino’s not supposed to represent these other coaches.

He’s supposed to represent you.

That’s it, isn’t it? I mean, it’s obvious if you think about it. Football head coaches and movie directors are two peas in a pod. You both work too hard and have to deal with burnout. Most of your real work is behind the scenes on the necessary drudgery of your professions. You both have to deal with prima-donna actors/quarterbacks. You both have to deal with team owners/studio bosses who don’t really understand what you do, don’t give you the resources you need, and who scream a you every time you don’t put forth a winning effort. And you have to deal with fans and reporters who don’t really understand what you do, either, but are the first to criticize you about it. (Movie directing must be even worse, what with all the smart-alecks out there who think they’re movie reviewers.)

And… ultimately, you’re the ones that are responsible if things go bad. Just as NFL owners fire the coach instead of firing the team, it’s the director, rather than the actors, who is at fault if the movie fails. (And the actors/players are the ones who get the most credit for victories, aren’t they? Ask Rob Reiner if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

This explains why there’s so much glitz and so little substance to the Pacino character, too. After all, you’re not going to make someone who is playing you less than glamorous, are you? Of course not.

So — if I’m right, and this is just a practical-jokey way of making a biopic about yourself, then it really doesn’t matter that the rest of the movie stinks. The horrible editing, the annoying, whiny performances, (excepting Jim Brown as the defensive coordinator and Jamie Foxx as the young QB) and the wretchedly cliched final game sequence — all of these things are extraneous. We shouldn’t worry about them. We should just understand the code and enjoy the movie from there, right? Right?

Because… well… if I’m wrong, and this is not some sort of joke you’re pulling, that means that this is a really, really bad film with nothing to redeem it, and… well… that just isn’t possible.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this letter, and thank you once again for filming part of your movie in Texas. The film industry is very important ot the Lone Star State, and your movies like

Born on the Fourth of July

and

JFK

have been milestones in our state’s cinematic history. Good luck on your next picture.

Sincerely,

Curtis D. Edmonds

P.S. Oswald acted alone.

Download movies

The Arcane is a well-constructed thriller, directed with swift assurance by Jack Sholder, brought down by an utterly conventional sci-fi ending.

Just as LA homicide detective Tom Beck (Michael Nouri) is prepared to close the books on a businessman who went on a crime spree, he’s approached by taciturn FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan) from Seattle, who’s searching for the same man, Jack DeVries (Chris Mulkey).

Gallagher is unsatisfied when Beck informs him DeVries is about to die in an LA hospital, and the plot begins to unfold when the dying man forcefeeds a reptilian alien down the throat of a fellow patient. A few minutes later the mild-mannered accountant bolts out of bed, escapes the hospital, murders a record store clerk and heads on another crime spree. This leads to a series of calamitous, well-shot chase scenes in which Beck and Gallagher are trying to catch up with the possessed human before the alien goes mouth to mouth into another life form.

Nouri finally shakes off his Flashdance shadow by turning in the best performance of his career.

How things have changed. In 1950, Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy played the parents of 12 children whose most worrisome acts of insurrection were confined to bobbing their hair and wearing lipstick.

In Shawn Levy’s current adaptation of “Cheaper by the Dozen,” Ernestine Gilbreth Carey’s best-selling memoir, Tom and Kate Baker (Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt) are contending with a daughter who wants to sleep with her boyfriend; their youngest kids execute diabolical pranks with military precision. Even Tom and Kate themselves still evince a certain friskiness. “I couldn’t keep her off me,” Tom explains to new neighbors appalled at the size of the Bakers’ brood.

But that’s about as racy as it gets in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” a genial, strenuously hip comedy aimed straight at families looking for ways to enliven holiday longueurs. It’s the height of ersatz Hollywood Americana (the Bakers’ suburban Illinois house is of the architectural type known as Evanston-by-way-of-Melrose Avenue), but Martin and Hunt give the production a mellow warmth. And Levy has cast an appealingly diverse bunch of kids to play the young Bakers, from the burgeoning stars Tom Welling and Hilary Duff as two slightly snarky teenagers to a passel of refreshingly off-kilter youngsters whose edgy quirks give spike and flavor to an otherwise vanilla enterprise. (And watch for a funny cameo from Ashton Kutcher playing a fatuous young actor.)

In the 1950 movie, Frank Gilbreth used his kids as subjects in his motion-study experiments; here, Tom and Kate are both dedicated to their careers, Tom as a football coach and Kate as a writer. Although she left her newspaper job midway through her maternal journey, she has just written a memoir that is going to be published. Meanwhile, Tom has been offered a job coaching the team at his alma mater. Dramatic tension ensues when the Bakers try to balance a huge family while pursuing their youthful dreams.

Of course, such a project has to entail a pet frog plopping into a dish of scrambled eggs, a bout of tag-team vomiting, a recurring set piece with a crashing chandelier and a grand finale involving a birthday party, a trampoline and a live snake. “Cheaper by the Dozen” hits all the compulsory beats of a movie that depends for its laughs on carefully choreographed mayhem.

But Hunt and Martin manage to inject their signature brands of low-key humor where they can, despite the movie’s broadest efforts. (The lack of subtlety extends to its parent studio’s insistently dropping its own name, even on one of Tom’s team’s jerseys.) “Cheaper by the Dozen” is an unobjectionable if uninspired updating of a classic family story for the minivan generation. If anything, it’s encouraging to see a movie that hinges on a man wondering whether he can have it all. The movie’s answer might be predictably pat, but it still deserves a little credit for asking the question.

Cheaper by the Dozen (90 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for language and some thematic elements.

Watch Polar opposites online

Download Nothing like the holidays movie online

While choking down his original pain in the neck as the round-the-clock watch in a creepy, eerily lit morgue, a squeamish law apprentice finds himself targeted as a imagine in the serial killings of prostitutes. Long on designate, with solid technical pursuance of the requisite alone-with-corpses scenes. Danish executive Bornedal’s American-audience remake of his own 1994 ‘Nattevagten.’

Vanity Fair
: Mira Nair
: Matthew Faulk, Julian Fellows, & Mark Skeet (based on the romance by William Makepeace Thackery)
: Reese Witherspoon (Becky Sharp), Romola Garai (Amelia Sedley), Gabriel Byrne (The Marquess of Steyne), James Purefoy (Rawdon Crawley), Eileen Atkins (Miss Matilda Crawley), Bob Hoskins (Sir Pitt Crawley), Douglas Hodge (Pitt Crawley), Meg Wynn Owen (Lady Crawley), Rhys Ifans (William Dobbin), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (George Osborne), Tony Maudsley (Joseph Sedley), Deborah Findlay (Mrs. Sedley), John Franklyn-Robbins (Mr. Sedley),
: PG-13
: U.K. / U.S.

In the last hardly years, Reese Witherspoon has come to manifest the essence of stylish feminine pluck. In her roles in the two
Legally Blonde
movies and

Sweet Home Alabama

, she played brains, determined young women who also happened to be extremely adroit and demand great fashion sense. This is what we've come to expect from her, and it's exactly what she brings to the role of Becky Pointed, the anti-diva of William Makepeace Thackery's scalding 19th-century social satire

Vanity Fair

.

Unfortunately, while Witherspoon's cinematic persona makes Becky immediately modern and imminently watchable, it robs the story of some of its sharper edges, turning Thackery's greedy, avarice-ridden social climber into an updated rags-to-riches romantic fantasy. The difference between the film and the novel can be neatly summarized by their respective taglines: The movie poster promises that "a heroine will rise," whereas the novel's title pages declares that it is "A novel without a hero."

Thackery's spawling, sometimes rambling 800-page epic has been neatly pared down by screenwriters Matthew Faulk, Julian Fellows, and Mark Skeet, who keep the basic plot points and major characters, but allow director Mira Nair (

Monsoon Wedding

) to give it her own stamp. The story follows the social rise of Becky Sharp, who starts as an orphan and, through the only means available to her-marriage-works her way into the upper crust of British society.

Her first brush with the higher rungs of the social ladder is when she goes to work as a governess for the Crawley family, which is headed by the scruffy Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins), but is truly lorded over by the no-nonsense matriarchal aunt, Miss Matilda Crawley (Eileen Atkins at her scenery-chewing best). Becky enters the family by marrying Pitt's gambler/soldier son Rawdon (James Purefoy). Unfortunately, Matilda, despite singing Becky's praises, doesn't want a member of her family marrying a mere governess, so Rawdon is cut out of the will. He and Becky manage to scrape by on their own, making ends meet in London, until Becky meets up with their neighbor, the extremely wealthy and extremely bored Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne). This is the point at which Becky truly begins to sell herself for upward mobility, leaving her husband in the dust as she falls deeper and deeper into Steyne's web.

Meanwhile, Becky's story is inversely paralleled by her friend Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai), who starts off the heiress to a wealthy family and winds up poor. Her family falls deep into debt, and when she marries the arrogant George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), he is disowned by his scheming father (Jim Broadbent), in whose debt the Sedleys are wallowing. George is a self-absorbed prick who married Amelia not for love, but simply to spite his father out of stubbornness. Amelia, however, is too stubborn herself (or, more probably, stupid) to see what a cad he really is, even as George's utterly decent friend, William Dobbin (Rhys Ifans), pines away for her.

That is in the final analysis rightful the tip of the narrative iceberg, and Mira Nair should be given due credit benefit of not only keeping the audience involved with more than a dozen main characters, but also giving the film a animated, sprightly pace that so often escapes adaptations of weighty Victorian novels (she had already evidenced this talent very much admirably in

Monsoon Wedding

). Nair, who was born in India and educated at Harvard, takes every opportunity to infuse the damned British story with every bit of colonized Indian ethnic color that is so usually relegated to the corners, all of which is delightfully rendered by Declan Quinn's charming cinematography.

One could debate that Nair overdoes it a bit, particularly in an amusingly salacious sequence in which Becky metaphorically prostitutes herself by taking the lead in a scandalous, skin-baring belly-dance for Steyne's lark. However, the cultural color Nair brings to the story not on the contrary gives it a visual boost, but also works as an effective, if pronounced, critique of British colonialism, as for all practical purposes everything in the film of any sincere beauty is imported. The British costumes are certainly regal and beautiful, but they smack of popular rigidity. The dance set, which many leave look to as simply superfluous, is actually a crucial flash in which Becky is allowed to surface from beneath the heavy Victorian garments demanded by British high the public and fully engage the corresponding poles of her common and sexual desires. It's a moment of fake liberation that supplants even the film's happy ending.

Still, despite the film's successes in translating the familiarity of

Vanity Fair

to the screen in a way that feels at times fresh and even invigorating, we have to return to the problematic character of Becky Sharp, who embodies a host of contradictory characteristics that never quite work themselves out. Granted, this is part of the intent-Becky is too interesting a character to be pinned down with simply labels. Yet, the film tries to make up for her contrary actions by making her overly sympathetic. The satirical edge of Thackery's story is dulled by Becky's likability-Witherspoon's spunkiness immediately puts us on Becky's side, even when we should be questioning her motives and decisions. This gives us an easy form of identification, one that makes the film rush along like any good story should, but it also robs it of the complexity that has made Thackery's novel an enduring classic.

Overall Rating:



(2.5)
All images copyright ©2004 Focus Features

Lady in the waterdownload

Ned Kelly is basically an outback western in which director and coscripter Tony Richardson’s simplicity becomes a pretension of its own. It is a murkiness to which undivided applies the damning word ‘interesting’.

In the 1870s Australia was a brutal frontier, settled by Irish, English and Scots convicts and their descendants.

In the film, the convict stock are continually harassed by the English police troopers and the settlers’ ranging cattle and horses impounded by the authorities on the slightest pretext. Unable to exist otherwise, Kelly and the other Irishmen turn to rustling.

Mick Jagger is a natural actor and performer with a wide range of expressions and postures at his instinctive command. Given whiskers, that gaunt, tough pop hero face takes on a classic hard bitten frontier look that is totally believable for the role. However he has no one to play to. Jagger’s Clyde has no Bonnie, his Sundance Kid has no Butch Cassidy.

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /stories/389/19001.html
on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) PHP/5.0.5 Server at

ww2.startribune.com

Port 80

Watch The gunman online

In 2021, the great is contend by massive corporations which keep themselves protected from the seditionaries movement, the Loteks, by hiring the Japanese Yakuza. In this conditions of unrest, valuable tidings must be entrusted to mnemonic couriers who smuggle data in effet wired brain implants. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is an individual such courier who is hired by a belt of traitor scientists to transport a large amount of info on a world wide aggravation known as NAS, Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. Unfortunately Johnny’s brain capacity is from extended and the NAS info as well as Johnny’s own obsession could both be lost if he doesn’t make it to his destination within 24 hours and download it.

Alien trespass watch

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

 

A stylish giallo that sheds its suspenseful skin long before the
story climaxes, but leaves enough visually stunning shots of dreams, tits,
lesbian love, madness, eviscerated dogs, a bat attack, a chase through
the catacombs of a church and, of course, the gruesome slashings to most
likely sate those who get off on cheapie gross-out shock/horror flicks
that also set a deliriously trippy psychedelic plate to feast on. Filmmaker
Lucio Fulci (”The Black Cat”/”White Fang”/”A Cat In the Brain”) keeps it
gory and exploitative, and after turning out such nasty films in Italy
for many years finally has his first one released in good ole America and
hits it big with this money-maker cult film.

It tells about the psychological problems of a moody London wealthy
and happily married woman Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan, Brazilian-born
actress), whose concerned father Edmond Brighton (Leo Genn) is a prominent
politician and lawyer who took her philandering enigmatic husband Frank
(Jean Sorel) in as partner in his prestigious law firm. Carol is acting
strange lately and tells her shrink Dr. Kerr (George Rigaud) about a dream
she has of murdering her slutty libertine druggie neighbor Julia Durer
(Anita Strindberg) by slashing her nude body three times with a letter
cutter. Her dad receives a blackmail threat and soon after Julia is found
butchered just as Carol described in her dream, and we’re left wondering
did Carol unwittingly carry out for real the murders in her dream or is
she being set up. It’s up to smarty-pants whistling investigator Corvin
(Stanley Baker) to sort things out, like separate fantasy from reality,
and with a few surprising developments and red herrings along the road
is able to sort things out by thinking outside the box. 

Watch Winged creatures online

Though things do get sorted out by the end, this is one muddled mystery
story that remains about as lucid as a bad acid trip a mental midget might
have. But despite its narrative let downs, the acting from the leads is
decent, the pacing is good, the direction is creative and the screen always
looks alarmingly pretty–even when knives with red paint are thrown against
a canvas for fun.