Classic Movie Review So I Married an Ax Murderer

So I Married an Ax Murderer (1993) 

Directed by Thomas Schlamme 

Written by Robbie Fox

Starring Mike Myers, Nancy Travis, Anthony LaPaglia, Brenda Fricker, Alan Arkin 

Release Date July 30th, 1993 

Published August 4th, 2023 

I feel like I should like the movie So I Married an Ax Murderer. I have the impression of the movie as a light hearted romp with a true crime twist. It sounds charming in description: Nice guy meets a woman who happens to have a bad history with men who disappear after marrying her. There are things about it that sound like a fun twist on the true crime and rom-com genre. And yet, every time I try watching So I Married an Ax Murderer, the film sets off the pedantic, cranky side of my personality. I like to think of myself as a pretty chill, relatively relaxed guy, but when I watch So I Married an Ax Murderer, my skin crawls and I get easily irritated. 

So I Married an Ax Murderer stars Mike Myers as Charlie. Charlie is a poet in San Francisco. Is being a poet in a coffee shop his job? He doesn't appear to have any other means of support so I guess that's what we are supposed to believe. Through Charlie's poetry, set to the beat of improvised jazz, we learn that Charlie is finicky about women. His most recent break up was dubiously related to his belief that his ex-girlfriend stole his cat. Charlie's best friend, a police detective, Tony (Anthony LaPaglia), believes Charlie is too hard on the women he dates and too picky about minor flaws they may or may not have. He thinks Charlie is simply afraid of commitment. 

This notion will be put to the test when Charlie meets Harriet (Nancy Travis), a beautiful woman who seems to speak his strange comic language. The two vibe over Charlie helping Harriet on a tough and busy day at her family Butcher Shop. Charlie's Dad, also played by Myers, was also a Butcher back in the day so Charlie volunteers to work for Harriet as a way to get the chance to hit on her all day. The two flirt mercilessly, mostly via various cuts of meat, I am in cringing just thinking about this scene. I can't help it. I kept thinking, this is her place of business, she's busy with a line of customers, and this guy is doing meat based schtick. She encourages it, but I only find that equally frustrating. 

The meaty flirtation leads to the two spending the night together and helps Charlie locate the first red flag about this new relationship. Harriet has a habit of talking and moaning in her sleep while talking about someone named Ralph. When confronted about Ralph, Harriet doesn't want to talk about it. Nor does Harriet want to talk about any aspect of her past, especially the number of times she's previously been married. By coincidence, Charlie's mom (Brenda Fricker), shows him a copy of the Weekly World News tabloid which has a story about a marrying serial killer who seduces and kills husbands. The pattern matches with some of Harriet's backstory and Charlie begins to end the relationship. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Eros

Eros (2004) 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar Wai

Written by Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh, Torino Guerra

Starring Gong Li, Chang Chen, Alan Arkin, Robert Downey Jr, Regina Nemni 

Release Date April 8th, 2005 

Published August 18th, 2005 

Three brilliant directors come together for a series of short films under the title Eros. Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michaelangelo Antonioni contribute short films to a trilogy that via the title Eros are about sex... or are they.

The Hand, Mr. Wong's contribution, is sexual in subtext but seems more about an unusual and somewhat disfunctional connection between two strangers. Chang Chen plays a tailor, a mere apprentice when we first meet him, who is assigned to make a dress for a high class prostitute, Ms. Hua played by Gong Li. In their first meeting Li's prostitute sexually humiliates the tailor. She claims it will make him a better tailor and she's right.

Soon he is inspired and continues for a number of years crafting beautiful outfits for the prostitute. The nature of the relationship is mostly business but as time passes and the prostitute falls on hard times she finds that the tailor, though he has never touched her, is the only man who has ever really known her body. The two have an erotic connection through the clothing that is more powerful than other relationship either has ever had.

I love the way Wong Kar Wai uses slow motion. By simply slowing the frames by a fraction and showing his actors moving at just slightly slower rate of speed he gives the impression of a montage without edits. The slow motion marks the slow passage of time. The film covers this relationship over a number of years and they pass in dreamlike fashion.

The Hand is unquestionably the best of the three films in Eros.

Steven Soderbergh's contribution to Eros is called Equilibrium and it stars Robert Downey Jr. as an ad executive and Alan Arkin as his shrink. Shot mostly in black and white the film has the look of a noir detective story with rascotro lighting, Downey wearing the traditional private dick garb, the fedora and trenchcoat and there is a mystery albeit one from a dream.

In the dream there is a beautiful naked stranger, a nondescript hotel room and a ringing phone. Dream analysts I'm sure could have a field day with this scenario however neither we nor Mr. Soderbergh is as interested in the dream as we are in the bizarre behavior of Arkin as the shrink. While Downey lays on the couch with his back turned and his eyes closed, Arkin is frantically trying to get the attention of someone outside his office window. What was the point of this film? I have no idea. I know it's exceptionally well shot. The look is beautiful and every angle Soderbergh chooses is very eye catching, often distracting from the somewhat meandering plot.

Equilibrium is an interesting exercise in filmmaking technique and maybe if you are more observant than me you can glean some hidden meaning from it. On that basis I recommend checking it out.

You however might as well skip Michaelangelo Antonioni's contribution to Eros, an Italian exercise in softcore porn called  The Dangerous Thread. The film is a pointless and painfully protracted exercise in female exploitation. As a couple argues about the end of their relationship, they pass a beautiful woman in a restaurant. The man asks if his soon to be ex knows the woman and she does. The woman lives in a castle just a few miles away. The man visits this beautiful stranger and with a few words they are in bed. Then the beautiful woman and the ex girlfriend each go for a walk on the beach in the nude. They meet somewhere in the middle and simply regard each other for a moment and the film ends.

I must say that Mr. Antonioni is a legend. I have seen his L'Avventurra and was blown away by its beauty. But now at more than 90 years old the master has become nothing more than an ogling old man. That is fine in private but on film it's rather tedious.

Movie Review Sunshine Cleaning

Sunshine Cleaning (2009) 

Directed by Christine Jeffs

Written by Megan Holley 

Starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Jason Spevack, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Clifton Collins Jr, Eric Christian Olson, Alan Arkin

Release Date March 13th, 2009 

Published March 13th, 2009 

The opening scene of the dramatic comedy Sunshine Cleaning involves a man walking into a gun store, picking up a shotgun, placing a shell inside that he had brought with him and in the end this man shooting himself. The scene is contentiously at odds with the rest of the movie which attempts to make the cleaning up after such an incident a quirky romp. It's not.

Oscar nominee Amy Adams stars in Sunshine Cleaning as Rose Lorkowski, the head cheerleader turned maid for hire. Life hasn't worked out as Rose planned. She had planned on being with her high school sweetheart Mac (Steve Zahn), especially after he went and knocked her up. The two are still sleeping together but Mac is married to someone else.

Now, Rose works wherever she can to make money to raise her slightly odd son Oscar (Jason Spevack). Then there is Rose's sister, Norah (Emily Blunt) who's like having a second child. Norah cannot hold a job, cannot stand authority and is generally a drag on her big sister.

Then, an opportunity arises. Mac informs Rose that the guys who clean up after crimes make  really good money, more than enough for Rose to put Oscar in a private school. Rose enlists Norah's help and, after some brief whining by little sis, Sunshine Cleaning is born.

Director Christine Jeffs elicits strong performances from Adams and Blunt while getting solid supporting turns from Zahn and Oscar Winner Alan Arkin. The characters played by each are believable in the context of the film and each has that just slightly off center quality that fascinates an audience.

Unfortunately, the actors are often overshadowed by the film's wildly gyrating tone which bounces from an almost slapstick approach to Rose and Norah's early business going to deathly serious as Rose and Norah's past with their mother is revealed. Norah's ark becomes bizarre and awkward when she becomes determined to inform the daughter of a dead woman (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of her mom's death and finds the woman taking an interest in her.

Meanwhile Rose develops a platonic friendship with a cleaning supply store owner played by Clifton Collins Jr. The relationship doesn't really develop beyond her using him for his knowledge and eventually as a babysitter. These subplots fail to reveal much about either sister aside from their own helpless self involvement.

There are good things about Sunshine Cleaning from the cast to the few laughs elicited to the demonstration of a career that holds a morbid fascination for more than a few people. Sadly, the film never finds the right tone to unite the characters, the humor and the morbidity and thus Sunshine Cleaning feels unsatisfying in the end.

Movie Review Marley & Me

Marley & Me (2008) 

Directed by David Frankel

Written by Scott Frank and Don Roos

Starring Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Alan Arkin

Release Date December 25th, 2008

Published December 24th, 2008

I haven't had a dog since I was a kid. His name was Rusty. I have this painting that someone bought at goodwill or a garage sale that just happens to be of a dog that looks exactly like Rusty. I cannot walk past it without smiling. Rusty was the dumbest dog in history. He would answer to any name shouted loud enough and he chased parked cars. But he was my dog and I loved him. The new movie Marley & Me with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston inspires that sort of pet related introspection. The movie based on John Grogan's bestselling book is filled with spot on recreations of the kinds of memories dogs leave behind.

John Grogan wanted to be a globetrotting journalist who wrote the stories that changed the world. Instead, he went to work at the Sun Sentinel in Florida and covered city council meetings and wrote the occasional obituary. When he got his big break it wasn't going to Columbia to track the drug trade like his pal Sebastian (Dr. McSteamy, Eric Dane).

Nope, John Grogan's big break came when a columnist quit the Sentinel on short notice and his editor (Alan Arkin, in all his cantankerous glory) needed someone to fill 600 words in the lifestyle section. That was when John wrote his first article on his dog Marley, aka the world's worst dog, and launched himself to national syndication.

Marley was the world's worst dog. He ate everything from shoes to drywall. If there was a thunderstorm he might do more damage than the storm itself. John and his wife Jenn, also a journalist, got Marley when Jenn began talking about having a baby and John decided, behind her back, that he wasn't ready. Sebastian suggested getting the dog as a way of putting her off and it worked for a while. Eventually however, the Grogan's did have a baby and the family and Marley continued to grow.

Directed by David Frankel, the movie made from John Grogan's bestseller is filled with heart and humor in a most earnest fashion. It's something unlikely in the age of irony and disaffection for a movie to be so bravely serious about the day to day life of a family. The risk is being labeled cheesy, sentimental or cornball. Director David Frankel doesn't seem to care about the labels and in not caring the film is almost heroic.

There is nothing wrong with irony but once in a while a movie like Marley & Me is a welcome respite from the modern form of humor all detached and 'meta' and weird for the sake of weird, or awkward for the sake of awkward. Marley & Me treats the family life of John and Jenn Grogan with a seriousness that keeps the movie from becoming the Beethoven sequel so many of us imagined.

If Frankel and writers Scott Frank and Don Roos had given the same care to John Grogan's work life I might have a lot more nice things to say about Marley & Me. Unfortunately, the filmmakers give such a strange and distorted idea of how journalism works that it becomes distracting. Trust me when I tell you that no journalist has ever shown hesitation about being promoted and been handed double his pay as an enticement. Even if there were an ounce of truth to this story, the movie doesn't make it remotely believable by playing it as Arkin and Wilson play out the scene in Marley & Me. 

It's a little thing but it irritated me.

Aside from the job stuff, Marley & Me is a fun, thoughtful, well crafted family movie that gets right every aspect of owning and loving a dog. Even if you don't own or love dogs you will appreciate the way Director David Frankel and stars Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston never condescend to the audience. The film is serious about the way it treats the Grogan family and the humor emanates from a place of truth because of that seriousness.

Movie Review Rendition

Rendition (2007)

Directed by Gavin Hood

Written by Kelly Sane 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgard, Alan Arkin

Release Date October 19th, 2007

Published October 18th, 2007 

Those who advocate intelligence gathering techniques that extend beyond our constitution have a compelling argument. They cite intelligence gathered by extraordinary measures that have saved lives and how men who are truly bad guys have received the treatment they deserve for the things they did. This argument holds sway until you hear from Arizona Senator John McCain, a real life torture victim.

Senator McCain, a right wing, pro-war hawk opposes any action that associates America and torture. McCain's point is that torture simply doesn't work. That a tortured man will tell you anything you want to hear. The movie Rendition makes McCain's point in dramatic fashion as it tells the interlocking story of how torture effects the lives of so many different people in so many different ways.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Rendition as Douglas Freeman a CIA pencil pusher who finds himself thrust into the job of case worker in northern Africa following a terrorist attack. His new job will be to observe the tactics of a man named Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), tactics that are considered torture under American law. It will be Abasi who will attempt to glean information from the latest subject of what American law refers to as Extraordinary Rendition.

On his way home from a business trip in South Africa, Anwar Al Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is detained by police and then the CIA. It seems that he has received calls on numerous occasions from a terrorist named Rashid, calls he claims to be unaware of. Al Ibrahimi was returning home to Chicago where his very pregnant wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) and his six year old, American born son are waiting for him.

When he doesn't return and somehow disappears from the flight log, Isabella travels to Washington where an ex-boyfriend, Alan (Peter Sarsgard) works for a Senator (Alan Arkin). Using his connections, Alan finds out as much as he can about Anwar's disappearance. The trail leads all the way to the head of the CI, Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep).

Those are the main players in Rendition and their relative positions. Where director Gavin Hood moves them from there is quite compelling and heart rending. Running parallel to this main story is the modest love story of Khalid (Moa Khouas) and Fatima (Zineb Oukach), the daughter of Abasi Fawal, the lead torture expert.

The melding of these two stories is where Rendition struggles and becomes sluggish and where director Gavin Hood employs a narrative trick that will irritate many in the audience as much as it did me. There is a moment, and I won't go into detail, late in the film where the timeline shifts and what we get is a scene that lets the air out of what was an electrically charged and tense series of scenes.

From this point on the films dueling stories become fractured and I was left struggling to connect these stories at all beyond the most tenuous of bonds.

A man, if tortured long enough, will tell you anything you want to hear. Whether what he says is true or not, doesn't matter to the torturers whose reward is for information. The truth is someone else's business. Rendition is extraordinarily powerful in bringing home the same message that Senator John McCain has always talked of, how torture simply doesn't work. Indeed, as the film states plainly, if you torture one man you create ten more who will rise up to fight back to protect them, or rescue them.

According to the Bush administration, Americans don't torture. No, we don't. By laws installed during the Clinton Administration, we hire less reputable countries to torture on our behalf. Ah, but Rendition doesn't let us off so easily that a liberal like myself can be satisfied with the answer that our policy of rendition is simply wrong. The lead torture expert in the film is portrayed as a good man who loves his family and believes he is doing the right thing.

Meryl Streep's CIA agent may be cold hearted and portrayed as something of a monster but her point about the lives she believes have been saved by information gathered through extraordinary rendition is powerful and logical. With the blinding certainty of a zealot, not unlike a certain President of the United States, she sees only the possibilities of this practice, not the collateral damage to our national conscience.

The love story between Khalid and Fatima is used to illustrate what some experts would call blowback. Militarized by the torture death of his brother, Khalid is enticed to become a suicide bomber. Fatima becomes his reason to live and there is a good deal of emotion invested in this subplot. It might have been more powerful without director Gavin Hood's narrative cheat late in the film that sucks all of the suspense out of the movie.

Yet another film in this early Oscar season, like The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, like Michael Clayton, Across The Universe or Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Rendition is a film with Oscar pretensions that falls just short of expectations. A grand cast of Oscar nominees and winners, compel us from beginning to end but narrative trickery and a strung together plot; let the air out of what should have been a potboiler of real emotion and suspense.

Movie Review Get Smart

Get Smart (2008) 

Directed by Peter Segal 

Written by Tom Astle, Matt Ember 

Starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Alan Arkin, James Caan, Terrence Stamp

Release Date June 20th, 2008 

Published June 19th, 2008 

Steve Carell's clueless guy act is beginning to wear thin. But, one last big shot of that persona isn't so bad. The cluelessness of this Carell character happens to be a necessity for the legendary character Carell is playing in Get Smart. In Get Smart, Steve Carell is playing Maxwell Smart the fictional center of the 60's TV show Get Smart whose best known for his bumbling, oblivious, cluelessness. So, one last time Steve Carell, throw on that blank mug, that beatific smile, and that air of unearned confidence and we will laugh along with you.

Maxwell Smart is Control's top analyst. His assessment of terrorist activities is beyond detailed. He knows what major terrorists take in their coffee. He hopes this attention to detail and hard work will earn him a promotion to field agent for Control in their continuing battle with CHAOS, the international terror group bent on global domination. Unfortunately for Max his promotion is denied until a CHAOS attack on Control leaves much of the agent roster dead. Now Max will have to go into the field and with the aid of Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), he will be asked to track down the nuclear weapons obtained by CHAOS head Siegfried (Terrence Stamp), and his number 2 man Shtarker (Ken Davitan).

That Max and Agent 99 develop a flirtation and eventually a little romance is something you may initially reject, Carell and Hathaway don't look like a great match, but by the end of Get Smart I was not only believing in the romance, but actively rooting for it. It's one of a surprising many things that director Peter Segal gets right in Get Smart. Segal, a veteran of Adam Sandler features, has never shown much skill for good storytelling. In Get Smart however, Segal seems more assured, mature, and prepared. It helps to have strong special effects and a great cast that also includesAlan Arkin, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and David Koechner, but Segal really does quite a good job directing this remarkable collection of talent. 

Having only seen a few reruns of Get Smart over the years I cannot claim to know the series in anything but the most vague terms. That said, of what I know of the show the new Get Smart hits a few of the right notes. Carell's Max hits the catchphrases, "Missed It By That Much" and "Sorry Chief", with precision. If Carell's Max is slightly less bumbling than Don Adams' original it's likely a necessity given the complex stunts and effects that far outstrip the far smaller scale TV show

Alright Steve Carell, now it's time for you to show us something. Get Smart was a lot of fun. Now let's find a new comic persona and do something different. It was a good run as the genial doofus, now I want to see something closer to your Little Miss Sunshine character, though less suicidal. It doesn't have to be too radical a departure, just something slightly less doofus. You've done well with the doofus thing, but now you can effectively leave it behind. 

At Least on the big screen, a couple more seasons on The Office is fine with me.

Movie Review: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)

Directed by Rebecca Miller 

Written by Rebecca Miller

Starring Robin Wright, Mike Binder, Alan Arkin, Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, Keanu Reeves, Blake Lively

Release Date: November 27th, 2009

Published November 26th, 2009 

One woman re-traces the story of her life as she worries her mind is slipping away in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.” Robin Wright stars as Pippa Lee, a wife and mother whose life is defined by those roles. As a very young lost soul, Pippa met and fell in love with the much older Herb Lee (Alan Arkin).When we meet Pippa Lee, she and Herb have moved into a retirement community in Connecticut. While Herb says they moved in order to protect assets from his life as a publishing magnate from taxes, both are concerned that Herb's mind has begun to slip. 

In the middle of the night someone has been wandering the house leaving a major mess. It turns out not to be Herb but Pippa who has been sleepwalking and that isn't all. She is sleep-driving and sleep-smoking, driving in the night to a local 24-hour shop to buy cigarettes. Afraid she is losing her mind, Pippa tracks back in her mind to her mother, Suky (Maria Bello), a woman addicted to amphetamines who didn't merely dote on her daughter but overwhelmed her as a living doll plaything.

Pippa's mother's addiction and massive mood swings lead to Pippa's own drug experimentation and eventually to her running off to New York to live with her lesbian aunt and her girlfriend, Kat (Julian Moore). Blake Lively plays teenage Pippa with a constantly dazed expression and sad eyes. It is teenage Pippa who meets and falls for Herb. 

Though I recount the plot to you in a somewhat linear fashion, writer-director Rebecca Miller, tells the story in a flashback style, cutting between Pippa's life in the retirement community and her life before and during the early parts of her marriage to Herb. The storytelling doesn't really jibe; the past doesn't comment on the present or really explain it. Pippa's memories are sort of random. That's not necessarily a criticism, Pippa is searching her memory for a meaning that is missing from her life and it makes sense that her search is futile.

The story deepens when Pippa meets Chris, the son of one of the other retirees. He has just ended a long relationship and now lives with his mother while working at the 24-hour shop where Pippa sleepwalks. To say what happens between Pippa and Chris would go too far, but I can tell you, it's not entirely what you might expect. That is the wonderful thing about Rebecca Miller's direction in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” she and star Robin Wright Penn avoid typical choices. Penn's performance begins as off-puttingly thin. It grows to an irksome sort of oddity and then blossoms into something strangely, hypnotically fascinating.

If I had walked out half way through “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” I would say Robin Wright was terrifically awful. However, I stuck with it and eventually I found that even the irritating qualities had an odd fascination. As I got used to Pippa's irritating qualities they began to reveal things about her and I was slowly won over. By the time Pippa makes her dramatic final decision I was totally with her and shocked by how much I was willing to join up for more of her journey.

The movie ends as if it could have gone on for another half hour and been just as intriguing. It's just the right hopeful note and if you can make it to the end, as I did you  will be surprised how satisfying yet abrupt the ending is.

“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” is a strange and wonderful little movie with a performance by Robin Wright at its center that will divide people in hatred and glowing praise. It's a risky performance and one that will, in the long run, come to define the odd career of Ms. Wright who never quite blossomed into the leading lady so many expected her to be. Instead she is a working actress who’s made daring choices. Daring is the least of what can be said of Robin Wright's performance in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.”