Classic Movie Review The Crying Game

The Crying Game (1992) 

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Neil Jordan 

Starring Stephen Rea, Jaye Davidson, Forrest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson

Release Date November 27th, 1992, February 1993 (Oscar Release) 

Published February 20th, 2023 

What stands out about Neil Jordan's The Crying Game 30 years later is how remarkably sensitive the film is. While the film's lasting legacy in popular culture centers on actor Jaye Davidson's penis, the actual film, The Crying Game centers on sensitivity, intimacy and tenderness while also providing elements of a thriller and a spy movie. Neil Jordan brings forward a gay love story in The Crying Game in a way that had arguably never been explored before in this way. Using a traditional thriller narrative about warring spies, guns, and murder, Jordan tells a love story about people who are struggling to find who they really are. 

Stephen Rea stars in The Crying Game as Fergus, a member of the Irish Republican Army. History, as told by the British, would call the IRA terrorists. I truly have no idea what the actual legacy of the IRA is and I don't see a necessity to unpack the IRA here. The IRA is basically the vehicle that brings Fergus into contact with Jody (Forrest Whitaker), a young British soldier who is captured in Ireland and held for ransom. If the British will release a member of the IRA they are holding prisoner, then Fergus and is his fellow IRA members will release Jody. 

Of course, Jody, and possibly Fergus, knows that Jody is going to die. The British do not negotiate with the IRA, they work to eliminate the IRA. Jody's only glimmer of hope comes in trying to convince Fergus to let him go. Thus begins a lengthy and intimate series of conversation over a three day period from Jody's kidnapping to the day the IRA plans to execute him. In this time, Jody and Fergus bond and writer-director Neil Jordan willfully layers in visual indicators that perhaps there is more than just friendly banter going on between these two seemingly very different men. 

Knowing that his dire fate is approaching, Jody gives Fergus his wallet and with it, a photo of the woman Jody loves. Her name is Dil (Jaye Davidson) and she's a hairdresser back in Jody's home town. Jody begs Fergus to go and look in on Dil if, indeed Jody dies. What happens next will lead Fergus to Dil and the start of another complicated, deeply fraught, but genuine love story. Of course, history tells us what complicates this romance but the movie itself, is far more than that one pop culture footnote. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Panic Room

Panic Room (2002) 

Directed by David Fincher

Written by David Koepp 

Starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forrest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam

Release Date March 29th, 2002 

Published March 28th, 2002 

David Fincher is my favorite director. For the uninitiated, Fincher is the brilliant eye behind the lens of Fight Club and Seven, two stylishly violent, high voltage thrillers that pair catchy visuals with blistering commentary on our consumer culture. Fincher's new film, Panic Room, doesn't aspire to social commentary, it's just a straight edge thriller easy to enjoy as long as you don't expect too much from it.

Panic Room stars Jodie Foster as Meg Altman, a divorcee raising a teen daughter (Kristen Stewart) and looking for a new home. A real estate agent shows Meg a gorgeous New York brownstone. 3-stories, multiple bedrooms, single bath, cable ready, and oh yeah there is this little room built by the ultra-paranoid former tenant. This room is essentially a safe built for a human being, with two feet of cement encasing two feet of steel on each side of the 6 by 10 foot area. 

The panic room is meant to keep the owner safe from a break in. Needless to say Meg and her daughter move in immediately and on their first night there is a break in, forcing Meg and her daughter to put the panic room to use. Unfortunately for Meg, the men behind the break in, Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham (Forest Whitaker) and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam, yes Dwight Yoakam playing a guy named Raoul), need to get into the panic room to get what they came for.

The first half of Panic Room encompasses the character introductions, and explores the space of the panic room and it's very good. Director David Fincher's camera helps build suspense through shadow and light. The props go to Oscar winner Conrad W. Hall's Cinematography as well for giving the apartment and the titular panic room dimension, we want a strong sense of the space and we get that while also ramping up tension between the thieves and our innocent mom and daughter duo. 

Once Meg and her daughter are inside the panic room, the film begins to lose steam. There are still a few good moments but the attempts by the gang to get inside the panic room are right out of MacGyver's playbook as are Meg's attempts to thwart them. It is those MacGyver-like logical leaps like Meg's figuring out how to hook up the panic room’s phone line and Burnham’s oh so lucky guess as to what she's doing that border on the ridiculous. That scene, amongst others, undermines the tension and kills some of the suspense.

Still, Panic Room is not a bad movie. Jodie Foster is good in a very difficult role that seems the least defined of all of the characters. Each of the bad guys is able to communicate their motives and personalities in their interaction with each other while Foster's only interaction for most of the film is her daughter, which is confined to being the protective mother. Forest Whitaker and Jared Leto have good chemistry as a team but Dwight Yoakam seems woefully miscast as Raoul, the supposed intimidator who is more laughable than imposing. 

Visually, Fincher is very much on his game, with unique camera work and one of the most visually interesting credit sequences I've ever seen. Be forewarned: if you have a problem with motion sickness you may want to bring some medicine because Fincher's camera rolling through walls and windows and flying through keyholes and air ducts can be somewhat jarring.

Movie Review Phone Booth

Phone Booth (2003) 

Directed by Joel Schumacher 

Written by Larry Cohen 

Starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Katie Holmes, Forrest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell 

Release Date April 4th, 2003 

Published April 3rd, 2003 

Like many fans of the D.C Comics Superhero Batman I have harbored a good deal of resentment toward Director Joel Schumacher for screwing up the Batman movies. However, whether I've become more mature or Schumacher's films have gotten better, that resentment has lessened. As Bat nipples and bat credit cards recede into the past, I find myself not liking Schumacher's take on the blockbuster franchise, but also not caring nearly as much as I once did about Schumacher having made a bad Batman movie. 

Since his Batman debacle Schumacher has done good work. Schumacher's work on Tigerland, for instance, was astonishingly low-tech yet very artful as the director coaxed a star turn out of then unknown actor Colin Farrell. Now with Schumacher's return to the big budget Hollywood machine, he brings Farrell with him in the minimalist action pic Phone Booth. I find myself once again appreciating the artistry of the man who killed Batman.

In Phone Booth, Colin Farrell is shady public relations guy Stu Shepard. Though Stu is married to Kelly, played by Radha Mitchell, he is also romancing a young starlet named Pam, played by Katie Holmes. When Stu decides to use a payphone booth to call Pam rather than one of his three cell phones, he finds himself the target of a crazed assassin (Kiefer Sutherland's voice). If Stu leaves the booth, he will be shot.

Stu's situation is complicated by a group of prostitutes who want the phone booth and are becoming increasingly more agitated. When the prostitutes get a male friend to try and remove Stu from the booth the assassin shoots the guy and Stu is blamed. As cops arrive, led by Forest Whitaker as the police negotiator, so do the media as well as Stu's wife and girlfriend.

This is quite a daring setup and the execution is flawless. When writer Larry Cohen pitched this story he had to have been met with a number of blank stares. So it comes as no surprise that he's been pitching the story for nearly 20 years. It wasn't until Joel Schumacher signed on that studios began to get interested in this challenging premise. Schumacher's involvement brought some interest from big name stars such as Jim Carrey and Will Smith but it's Farrell (admittedly the cheaper alternative to Carrey and Smith's $20 Million dollar price tags), who took the role and proved to be the perfect choice.

Farrell brings just the right combination of smarm and charm to the role of Stu. Farrel recalls a young Al Pacino, with his sweaty, passionate and energetic performance. Farrell melts down like a pro. As Stu slowly melts from cocky confident defiance to contrite good guy, Farrell never panders to the audience, never begs to be liked. Farrell remains true to the character’s nature, attempting to lie and negotiate his way out all the way to the end, always looking for an angle. 

The real star of Phone Booth however is Joel Schumacher, who's sweeping camera ratchets up the tension from beginning to end. Schumacher does a first rate Hitchcock impression taking this difficult premise and wringing every last bit of tension from it. Using the same real time approach that Hitchcock employed in Rope, Schumacher uses dialogue and stellar camerawork to keep the audience constantly off balance and on the edge of their seat.

Recently Joel Schumacher admitted that he screwed up Batman. That admission and a few more excellent films like Tigerland and Phone Booth and maybe I can forgive him. Of course, there is still 8MM to apologize for but let's leave that for another day. -

Movie Review The Last King of Scotland

The Last King of Scotland (2006) 

Directed by Kevin MacDonald 

Written by Jeremy Brock, Peter Morgan 

Starring Forrest Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington, Simon McBurney, Gillian Anderson 

Release Date September 27th, 2006 

Published September 26th, 2006 

Forest Whitaker has long been one of our most respected actors. And yet, the big prize, that signature role, has always eluded him. That gives a little extra juice to his role in Last King Of Scotland. Hollywood has wanted to find a way to honor Whitaker and now they have a good reason for it. As the evil Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, Whitaker is a powerful presence who dominates the screen even when offscreen. The Last King of Scotland overall is a flawed, somewhat messy movie that without Whitaker's mesmerizing performance would have never made it to the screen.

In 1970 Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) graduated medical school and seemed destined to join his father's family practice in Glasgow Scotland. Seeing his life laid out before him, Nicholas decided to shake things up. Taking on a missionary role in Uganda Africa, Nicholas thought he would spend a year treating the locals, building his karma and then head home. He wound up staying for nine eventful years.

Nicholas's arrival in Uganda coincided with a coup that brought the country a new leader. His name was Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) and his man of the people schtick worked because of his huge personality and the tacit backing of the British government who had trained him for leadership for years. Nicholas and Amin met by chance when the dictator was injured in a minor car accident. The two bonded over Scotland where Nicholas was born and where Amin was trained as a younger man.

Amin, liking Nicholas's heritage and brash spirit invites him to come to the capital where he is to become the dictator's personal physician. At first he resists, but after being promised the opportunity to shape Uganda's health care industry and advise his friend on all matters, health as well as political and social issues, the offer of power is too much for Nicholas to turn down. His decision is a fateful deal with the devil as Amin's wild mood swings have Nicholas watching people killed and worrying for his own life.

The Last King of Scotland was the inventive idea of fiction writer Giles Foden who got the idea to chronicle the life and crimes of Idi Amin through a fictional character, Nicholas Garrigan. Nicholas is a composite of several different men who held favor with the real life dictator throughout his 9 year reign. It works as a shorthand way of trying to tell the story of Idi Amin. However, as a dramatic device in this movie it's distracting.

Too often the fictional character of Nicholas Garrigan pushes the real life Idi Amin off stage. So much time is spent establishing the stakes for this fictional composite character that we lose focus on the story hof Idi Amin that is the supposed driving force of this movie. The scenes with Garrigan are strong enough but because Forrest Whitaker's Idi Amin is so powerful that when he's not on screen we want to know where he is and what he's doing. 

Director Kevin MacDonald directed the exceptional documentary Touching The Void, one of the ten best films of 2003. That film combined documentary style interviews with dramatic recreations of the events that took place. Macdonald's documentary style approach is often well used in Last King of Scotland, however there are a few too many instances when McDonald's documentary look is at odds with his melodramatic storytelling.

Forest Whitaker nails the role of bloodthirsty paranoid dictator. Unfortunately, the film too often lurches away from his performance for more time with Nicolas Garrigan and we are left wondering what Idi Amin is doing. Granted, a movie that focused more directly on the evil dictator would likely be oppressive and dark given Amin's well chronicled crimes, however it would be more interesting than much of what made up the final cut of The Last King Of Scotland.

The problems with The Last King Of Scotland stem from the Nicolas Garrigan character and not from anything done by Forest Whitaker in the film. The Garrigan character is weak and far less interesting than Idi Amin. Moreover, Garrigan never develops much beyond being a plot device. He is a manufactured character in place so this story could be told. That might be okay if the character were more interesting but as written Garrigan is lightweight and forgettable where Amin is at once horrifying and fascinating.

Forest Whitaker nails every aspect of this role. His Idi Amin is monstrous yet charismatic. He is a horror film character made real. This is a remarkable, transformative performance and yet not surprising. People have been waiting for Forrest Whitaker to find this kind of role and make it his signature and he finally has. That his performance is far better than the film in which it exists is all that holds it back from being the best performance of any actor in the last year.

See The Last King of Scotland for Forest Whitaker