What I've Been Watching, Episode 3

As promised, the link to the first episode of The Epic sequel: The Interdimensional Travels of the Triforce 20 - Episode One: The Edge of the Universe. Until next time...

The River Wild

Welcome back to March Madness at Ben's Movie Reviews. We got off to a slow start, but things are starting to pick up around here. After the cinematic disaster known as City Hall, I went back and re-watched The River Wild, a 1994 movie starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. I know - it's hard to believe I would watch a Meryl Streep film on purpose once, let alone multiple times. Shockingly, she's actually watchable in this one - in fact she's more than watchable, she is the heart that keeps this movie pumping.

The River Wild

Director: Curtis Hanson

Starring: Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, John C. Reilly, David Strathairn

Director Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential) does a great job of building suspense in this movie, which mostly takes place on a river. Streep plays Gail, a former river guide who now lives miles away in Boston with her estranged workaholic husband Tom (Strathairn) and their two children. They decide to take their oldest, Rourke (Joseph Mazello, the kid from Jurassic Park), across the country for a trip down the river for his birthday. But when they run into a couple of other campers on the trip (Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly), things slowly start to get interesting. I'm not going to spell out any more of the plot, because I think this one is worth watching and recommend that you check it out.

Barring some astonishingly stupid occurances (a guy punches someone under water, then later that same guy literally falls off a cliff face into the water and survives), The River Wild delivers a pretty realistic account of a white water rafting trip gone wrong. The camerawork was impressive, getting right in the boat with the travelers as they tear through waves and churn over small waterfalls to dazzling effect. While having a decidedly "90's" feel, the film holds up easily to today's standards and deftly balances the familial aspect with the menacing treachery featured later in the story.

What really makes The River Wild worth watching (besides Streep, as much as it pains me to say that) is the fantastic supporting cast. David Strathairn (who you'd recognize, but probably won't know by name) was great as the meek but resiliant father, reminding me of how much I enjoy his work. Kevin Bacon was exceptional, and John C. Reilly turned in a passable performance before he gained the star power he has today. Even Benjamin Bratt shows up in a small role as a Forest Ranger.

Much can be said about Streep's character Gail: she represents a positive step for women in action films since she's the protagonist and main character. Her strong personality, especially paired opposite her docile husband, is brought to the forefront of this film and gives the audience someone to root for over the course of the movie. Gail's complete dominance over all of the men in this film borders on the indulgant, but her history with the river provides all the leverage she needs to exert her authority. She even grabs the ultimate phallic representation, a gun, and symbolically "fires one off," something that none of the men in the movie seemed to be able to do - physically or metaphorically. Denis O'Neill, the writer, makes damn sure we know this is a woman's world, and Mother Gail is the only one equipped to handle Mother Nature.

I think most people will enjoy this film - it's a good blend of action, thriller, romance, and suspense. The feminist agenda is handled smoothly, and shouldn't be a turn-off to any Rambo-loving action junkies out there. Until next time...

City Hall

I had never heard of City Hall until this weekend when I was perusing the free On-Demand movies from Comcast. Made in 1996, the plot synopsis sounded vaguely interesting: the story follows New York City's Deputy Mayor as he digs deep to discover the truth behind the death of a six-year-old boy in a shootout gone bad.

City Hall
Director: Harold Becker
Starring: John Cusack, Al Pacino


To keep this short (since I'm confident most of you have never seen it), this movie was terrible. Pacino and Cusack were mediocre at best, and the storyline was so boring and asinine that I fell asleep the first time through. I can count on one hand the amount of times that has happened to me, so that speaks volumes about the quality of the film in question. Nevertheless, I surged onward; I finished the film the next night and very nearly fell asleep again because the last hour was no better than the first.


Director Harold Becker has only made one good film in his career as far as I can tell: the 1993 Alec Baldwin-starrer Malice. That earlier film has the suspense, characters, music, and emotional drive that City Hall yearns for, but fails so miserably to achieve. The whole time I was watching, I kept thinking to myself, "I would have been furious had I paid for this in a theater." The cinematography felt like it was done by a child - there were absolutely zero interesting shots in the whole film. The most complicated shot was a small crane lift straight up, and about 98% of the rest was filmed from a tripod. This type of style can work with the right material (a la No Country For Old Men), but in this movie billed by Comcast as a "fast paced thriller," they should have done at least one thing to keep audiences interested.


Cusack plays his sniveling sidekick to Pacino's overbearing Mayor of New York, and Al gives a lacking performance that is down there with the worst of his career. There's one scene where he approaches the "Pacino level" that we all know; he gives a fiery speech at the slain child's funeral. But even this scene is so over the top that it can't be taken seriously within the context of the rest of the film.



Aside from this brief moment of quasi-acceptable movie watching, the rest of the movie plummets to depths normally reserved for direct-to-DVD garbage. For your own sanity, I would suggest staying away from this one at all costs. This is one that I truly regret watching. Until next time...

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Hello all, and welcome to this year's edition of March Madness. I'm kicking it off with a film that had a lot of buzz around it back in '08 that I never had a chance to see until the other night: Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Since we're just a couple weeks removed from the Academy Awards, I figured the timing would be decent to check this one out.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Writer/Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz

Note: For many years, I had never seen a Woody Allen movie. It wasn't that I discounted his work as unworthy of my attention, or even that I actively avoided his films - I just hadn't seen them. All that changed last year, when I finally decided to watch Annie Hall (from what I understand, the most "Woody Allen-ish" of all his films). I enjoyed the movie, with Allen himself giving an engaging, if quasi-annoyingly neurotic, performance. Since then, I have seen 2005's Match Point (suspenseful and tense), 2006's Scoop (genuine and funny), and Cassandra's Dream (number 10 on my Top 10 of 2008 list).

Woody's career has undergone a mini-renaissance since he started making his films overseas about five years ago. Vicky Cristina Barcelona falls nicely into this rejuvenated filmography as a reflective tale of love, longing, and that ineffable feeling we all get when we try to figure out what we want in life. The story follows two friends, Vicky (Hall) and Cristina (Johansson) as they take a summer vacation in Spain. Soon after arriving, they meet the charming painter Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Bardem); his forthcoming approach to seducing them draws in the impetuous Cristina but shocks the uptight Vicky. They both develop feelings for him as he re-enters into a relationship with his ex-wife Maria Elena (Cruz), a woman whose insanity and passion have kept him thinking of her for years. But when Cristina moves in with the former couple and Vicky has her own emotional connection with Juan Antonio, things become more complicated than any of them predicted.

As per the usual Woody style, VCB is very reliant on dialogue, tone, and character; this has both positive and negative impact on the film as a whole. An omniscient, detached narrator (whom we never see) dictates the inner thoughts of the main characters to the audience in a manner that is both matter-of-fact and strangely out of place at the same time. The storyline is fairly simple (this isn't a murder mystery or a winding tale of intrigue) and allows room for the characters to shine, some of which succeed far more than others.

Bardem was the best of the bunch by far, showing a drastic difference from his evil-personified Oscar winning role in 2007's No Country For Old Men and thereby establishing range - one of my preeminent qualities for respecting/appreciating an actor. Pacino, take note. I thought Johansson was the second best (I normally don't care for her as an actress), balancing a thoughtful innocence with a carefree spirit. Juan Antonio's nihilistic tendencies meld with Cristina's in the beginning, but she soon realizes that she isn't quite ready to devote herself as fully to that school of thought as her lover.

Penelope Cruz gave an Oscar-winning performance as Maria Elena, the suicidal loon, and while she was solid, I thought her screen time may have been a little short to warrant her win. (If Javy told her to "speak English" one more time, I was going to wreck somebody.) Apparently many others disagreed with my assesment since she's won at least 10 different awards for her performance. Nicely done. Rebecca Hall worked with ScarJo on 2006's The Prestige (one of my favorites), but plays Vicky with an unfortunate lack of zeal that brings the whole movie down a little bit. I found her character to be pretty one-dimensional and kind of annoying, since she spends most of the movie obsessing about one particular event and never really doing anything about it.

One of the aspects I enjoyed most besides the foreign setting was the incorporation of mostly indigenous music. There were multiple scenes featuring Spanish guitar, and repetition of a song aptly titled "Barcelona" that was beautifully melodic and a perfect match for the movie. It truly seems as if Woody Allen, a famous New Yorker, has found new inspiration from working overseas after making films in (mostly) one city for almost 50 years. The cinematography was gorgeous, aided drastically by the locations themselves (architechture, gardens, etc). The camerawork was straightforward and intimate, allowing the actors the ability to use the whole frame to manifest their performances without worrying about excessive dolly moves or crane shots. This, plus the unaffected narrator reading as if the film is a page in a diary, gave the film a wispy quality that is hard to define; it's a movie about one summer in the lives of two best friends as they evolve and try to find out what they really want in life.

A successful mix of hope, passion, melancholy, and yearning for the unknown pushes Vicky Cristina Barcelona above others in its genre. If you're an Allen fan, this is a must see. If you're not, use this film to ease your way into his distinctive style without overdosing on neuroticism. Until next time...