Movie Review Marlowe

Marlowe (2023)

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by William Monahan 

Starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Danny Huston, Adewale Akinnouye Agbaje, Jessica Lange

Release Date February 15th, 2023 

Published February 24th, 2023 

Marlowe is a stunningly mediocre film. An attempt to bring back the feel of 40s noir detective novels, in the vain of Raymond Chandler, using Chandler's creation, Detective Phillip Marlowe, Marlowe wanders, stumbles, plods and trips over oodles of over pronounced dialogue and a dimwitted 'mystery.' How bad is Marlowe? It made me wonder if I've ever found Liam Neeson entertaining. Seriously, I had to convince myself that I really did like the Taken movies. I think I did. I think... yeah. Neeson could not be more miscast in the role of a 1930s gumshoe in Los Angeles. 

Marlowe opens on a completely meaningless visual. A man is pacing back and forth dictating some odd thing to an attentive secretary. You think the man speaking is Marlowe and the secretary is his Girl Friday, the go-to gal, that reliable female pal from past detective movies. Nope, that's not Marlowe or his secretary. It's also not someone that the actual Phillip Marlowe is peeping in on for a case. So, why did we open on this visual? God help me, I have no idea. It's a completely disconnected visual. It's a seeming recreation from past Marlowe films and novels that I assume director Neil Jordan recreated simply to evoke Marlowe's of the past. 

The reveal of the actual Marlowe comes with the introduction of our Femme Fatale, that dangerous female client with the case that will test our detective's metal. Diane Kruger is our femme fatale in Marlowe and with her platinum blonde hair and tight dress, she certainly has the visual from a Phillip Marlowe mystery down pat. Sadly, she and Marlowe, as played by Liam Neeson, have to eventually speak and when they do, the hired boiled dialogue turns both actors into unintentionally comedic characters. There is a particular cadence to Raymond Chandler mysteries and neither Neeson or Kruger have that kind of cadence. In their mouths, these words come off like people stating written dialogue out loud and not the natural speech of two people who speak like this all the time. 

It's an odd and perhaps labored comparison but Marvel movie fans will understand. If you've seen Guardians of the Galaxy and then see the Guardians as directed by anyone other than James Gunn, they characters just don't sound right. You can tell James Gunn's cadence is missing and it throws off the way the Guardians typically come off on screen. That's especially true in Thor Love and Thunder and kind of true in the two most recent Avengers movies. That's how Neeson and Kruger sound when trying to deliver Raymond Chandler style hardboiled dialogue. It just hits the ear all wrong. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.media 

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 Greta

Greta (2019) 

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Ray Wright, Neil Jordan

Starring Chloe Grace Moretz, Isabelle Huppert, Maika Monroe, Colm Feore, Stephen Rea

Release Date March 1st, 2019

Published March 1st, 2019

Greta has the makings of a very good movie. The film was directed by Neil Jordan, the Irish auteur known for The Crying Game among a varied and daring nearly 30 year career. Greta stars 16 time Cesar nominee (Cesar=French Oscars) Isabelle Huppert and perennial rising star Chloe Grace Moretz, an actress seemingly always on the verge of a breakout role. So how did Greta go so very, very wrong? 

Greta is the name of the character played by Isabelle Huppert as a lonely, French widow living in New York City. One day, Greta leaves her purse on the subway and it is found by Frances (Moretz) who kindly returns the bag and its contents. Frances is treated as some small town hick in New York despite being from the small town of Boston which is like any homey backwater I guess. Is Neil Jordan so up on the New York-Boston rivalry that this portrayal is intentional satire? 

Anyway, my digression aside, Frances returns the bag and finds herself taken by Greta’s sadness and loneliness. She takes pity on the old woman and offers to go dog shopping with her. This turns into repeated dinners at Greta’s home and lengthy, intimate confessions about Greta’s failed relationship with her real life daughter and Frances’ pain over losing her mother and her strained relationship with her father, played by Colm Feore. 

One night, as Frances is helping set up for yet another dinner at Greta’s house, she finds a cabinet filled with purses, each with names and phone numbers attached and the same forms of identification inside. This is a quick indicator that Greta doesn’t just happen to meet people, she leaves these bags places with the intent of having a kind hearted person return them so that she makes a new friend. 

It’s really sad and pathetic but Frances, as if she has read the script ahead of time, reacts as if what Greta did was sinister. Of course, we know that it indeed was sinister but when you look at it just from the information Frances has, it’s merely a pathetic cry for help. Frances acts as if the bags are evidence that Greta is a serial killer. Instead of confronting Greta about what she found she sets about faking an illness and then sets about ghosting the old lady and not returning her calls. 

Greta doesn’t take this well and the thriller plot begins to kick in with Greta as the motherly version of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and that dog that she and Frances bought together playing the role of the rabbit. Greta begins showing up at Frances’ work and at her apartment and even after Frances calls the cop, Greta keeps upping the crazy by following Frances’s best friend Erica (Maika Monroe) while sending creeper photos to Frances. 

These scenes aren’t entirely ineffective but Isabelle Huppert isn’t exactly Max Cady from Cape Fear. Greta is strange and creepy but not menacing. You feel like she could be mollified with the promise of an occasional phone call and a casual lunch. Again, that’s as portrayed in the movie, only the marketing has given us any indication that Greta is crazier than what is portrayed in the movie. Only the film score attempts to push us toward genuinely fearing Greta but Isabelle Huppert doesn’t do much helping with that with her docile performance. 

Docile until she gets her big “I will not be ignored” moment late in the movie but even that moment isn’t notably energetic. The third act of Greta embraces the crazy a little but not in very convincing fashion. Greta goes predictably where you think it was going from the trailer and abuses the kinds of cliches that movies like this always abuse. There is even a dead meat private detective character played by Stephen Rea who may as well have been named Max Plot Device. 

My biggest issue however, with Greta and Neil Jordan is not so much the thriller cliches of good characters making bad decisions or even annoying plot conveniences. The biggest problem is tone. More than once Greta leans a little toward the high level camp that could make the movie work and then pulls back. If Isabelle Huppert is going to play evil in such a mundane fashion the movie needs to find another way to be entertaining and the movie never finds that. The only believable thing about Greta would be embracing just how silly this all is and leaning into it in a darkly comic fashion and it never quite gets there. 

I’ve made allusions to Fatal Attraction in this review and while I am not a fan of that movie either, that film at least appeared to drift into camp with some intent. Glenn Close was believably batty but she was also unconcerned about how people would take her. There is something close to John Waters’ Divine from Female Troubles in the high level, over the top, that Close plays in that movie. Isabelle Huppert lacks the energy or nerve to really go for the campy, sleazy, silly that Greta needs to be more than cliche riddled, base, thriller. 

Sadly, what we get in Greta is a regrettably straight forward series of overly familiar cliches from similar thrillers about obsessive psychopaths. The only seeming innovation is the lack of a sexual component to the main relationship. Greta is not sexually interested in Frances and the film goes a long way to make sure we get that this is about being a mom and not about a psycho-sexual obsession. The crazy lesbian is the one cliche Greta thankfully avoids. 

Strangely, rather than a movie like Fatal Attraction, Neil Jordan’s own Interview with the Vampire is the movie that best presages Greta in presenting something that should be high camp but is played dreadfully and regrettably straight. That film, quite oddly, also features a strangely bloodless and mannerly approach to a parental psycho-obsession as Tom Cruise, rather than being sexually obsessed with Brad Pitt’s effete and pretty fellow vamp, is more mad that Pitt won’t play along with being his scion. 

Mannerly is a good way to describe Greta. Yes, this is a movie about a psycho stalker but it is going to be decent and respectable about that plot in a way that deflates the movie. Bloodless, for the most part, and with a lead performance with the restraint of a Nun, Greta is a bizarre watch. The score appears to be the only part of the movie that embraces what this movie should be. The film score is filled with moody stabs and atmosphere that is lacking from the performances.  

Movie Review The Brave One

The Brave One (2007) 

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor, Cynthia Mort

Starring Jodie Foster, Naveen Andrews, Terrence Howard

Release Date September 14th, 2007

Published September 13th, 2007

Few actresses alternate strength and vulnerability as well as Jodie Foster. This two time Oscar winner is one of our finest actresses and even in movies as flawed as Flightplan or her latest effort The Brave One, Foster crafts exceptional performances. Both Flightplan and The Brave One stand Ms. Foster in stories that fail to keep up with her lightning intelligence and powerful screen presence.

Erica Bain (Foster) is one of New York City's more unique characters. She can often be seen walking the streets with a microphone hanging just off the ground as she captures the noises of the city. This is for her weekly radio show in which she tells stories about the city. Erica is a free spirited, funky, hippie chick who is also soon to be married.

Erica and her fiance David (Naveen Andrews) are a perfect couple, madly in love. Their lovers' idyll is shattered just days ahead of their wedding. It seemed so mundane, almost romantic. Out walking their dog, Erica and David enter a tunnel in Central Park, it's just past dusk. Inside a group of thugs have captured their dog and begin menacing the couple in a seeming robbery.

The robbery turns into a murder as David is killed. Erica is left in a coma. When she awakens to find that David is gone she begins a spiral into fear and finally retribution as her journey brings her once again, face to face with David's killers. Along the way she meets Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard) who is investigating David's murder as well as a series of vigilante killings that he feels are related.

Directed by the brilliant Neil Jordan, The Brave One is something of a disappointment. Though Jodie Foster delivers a highly compelling performance, Neil Jordan doesn't seem all that invested in telling this story. Too much of The Brave One is forced by coincidence. The plot has little rhythm, Erica stalks the streets and often finds herself at the wrong place at the wrong time with the right tool and a surprisingly steady hand.

These forced incidents offer Jodie Foster many chances to dig deeper into the psyche of this unique and often spellbinding character. This is a terrific performance that is shamefully at the mercy of a plot that spins an ever more ludicrous yarn all the way to an ending that is false, forced, and terribly unsatisfying unless you are of a simple mind.

Watching Jodie Foster trading acting poses with Terence Howard and Naveen Andrews is nearly enough to overcome the many plot issues of The Brave One. Foster strikes a sexy spark with both actors, though only Andrews gets the intimate scenes, brief glimpses of a sex life that implies this was one truly hot couple. Howard's detective Mercer is as fascinated with the mind of Erica Bain, he listens to her radio show, as he is attracted to her offbeat charms.

The relationship between Erica and Mercer plays out in a series of smoky exchanges in bars and coffee shops. He's clearly hitting on her, she's interested as much in him as she is in getting information on the search for the vigilante killer that is gripping the media. Of course we know who the vigilante is, Erica knows who it is, yet thanks to Terence Howard's terrific performance his detective Mercer is never treated as a fool.

However, Mercer's investigation of the vigilante killer is one of many plot strands that cause the ultimate failure of The Brave One. As scripted by director Neil Jordan and writers Bruce and Roderick Taylor, the investigation culminates with a laughable discovery of evidence that leads to an ending that really is the nail in the coffin of what should be a much better movie

Director Neil Jordan is exceptionally talented but if he is uninspired it really comes out on screen. Jordan is clearly disinterested in The Brave One, though not in capturing his leading lady. Jordan and Foster work well together and Foster really delivers. It is what surrounds Foster, the ever increasingly ludicrous twists and turns of luck and the hand of god, i.e. the director, that keep The Brave One from becoming yet another Jodie Foster classic.

Movie Review Ondine

Ondine (2010) 

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Neil Jordan

Starring Colin Farrell, Stephen Rea

Release Date June 4th, 2010

Published June 12th, 2010

Lethargy in a movie tends to be a bad thing and yet the lethargic feelings induced by Neil Jordan's fable Ondine feels just right. Lingering on the details of a fairy tale while seducing us with the beauty of the Irish coast and unknown star Alicja Bachleda's supple calves, Ondine is a stroll where most other movies are a sprint. Sure, by the time the film's climax arrives, with some attendant threat, we have been relaxed to a near coma state, but who cares when it's all so very pretty.

Colin Ferrell plays Syracuse, a former town drunk now 2 years sober. Unfortunately for Syracuse his drunken antics are so memorable that no one will let him forget it, lashing him permanently to the nickname Circus for his clownish behavior. Syracuse isn't exactly miserable but he is less than content when his life is changed forever.

Casting his fishing net with little plans on catching much, Syracuse pulls up the shivering body of a beautiful young woman. He saves her life but she refuses medical attention or any attention at all to save him. She begs to be hidden and he happens to have just the place, a seaside cottage that once belonged to his late mother.

Thus begins a very unique love story made even more peculiar by Syracuse's 9 year old daughter Annie (Alison Barry. After hearing her dad tell the story of the woman pulled from the water as a fairy tale, she comes to believe that the woman, soon called Ondine or woman from the sea, may be a mythical creature known as the selkie.

A selkie is a half human half sea which sheds its seal coat once out of the water. To stay on land the selkie must fall in love with a landsman and bury its seal coat. It's a wonderful fairy tale and as the romance blossoms you can't help but be drawn to the mysterious Ondine and believe that she is some kind of mythic creature.

Director Neil Jordan has a great eye for quirks that are endearing rather than just odd. Where other writers and directors often merely assign a behavior to a character in order to give them something to do, the veteran Jordan allows the actors to find the quirk along the way and play it almost unconsciously. For Ms. Bachleda the quirks are numerous and charming and never merely for effect. Not bad for an actress better known for being her co-star's arm candy.

Indeed, Mr. Ferrell and Ms. Bachleda were a couple when she got this gig but credit Neil Jordan and Ms. Bachleda for showing this what not merely a favor to a big star but just the right bit of casting. The casting of Ms. Bachleda may be the reason why Mr. Ferrell seems so relaxed and pliable in Ondine. Almost non-existent is any star posing, even with his model ready mane of black hair.

Farrell melts into the role of an outcast quite well considering he never stops looking like Colin Farrell. His discomfort and sadness is tapped so perfectly that you actually believe that women would avoid him and even a town this small would ostracize him, even if he is the best looking man in town. Farrell's soulfulness, in the hands of the wrong director could become dreary. In the hands of a master of grief, loss and sadness, like Neil Jordan, the soulful qualities are something to cling to amidst the sadness. 

Nevermind what little inconsistencies exist in Ondine. This is a film about tone and beauty. Neil Jordan establishes a tone that ambles from one pretty scene to the next while the story drifts into the heart of the audience almost subconsciously until all are smiling and waiting patiently for a hoped for happy ending for this beautiful couple and the clever young towheaded daughter.

I am sure many will find Ondine boring but that’s their loss. The modern blockbuster has caused many to lose the ability to be patient and get lost in a story. If things aren’t moving a mile a minute they give up and start checking for text messages. Ondine is not for the impatient. It’s for the romantic, the indulgent, those who love a good director leading them on a strange wonderful journey. If that’s not you, skip Ondine.

Movie Review The Good Thief

The Good Thief (2003)

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Neil Jordan 

Starring Nick Nolte, Ralph Fiennes

Release Date April 25th, 2003

Published November 11th, 2003 

You've seen heist movies. Heck, you've seen movies called The Heist. The genre is one of Hollywood's time honored sources of roguishly handsome con men and intricate storytelling. You know that old saying about how familiarity breeds contempt? Well a number of heist movies have bred a number of cliches and repetitious stories that have become shorthand for hack screenwriters. In this era, it takes a lot more than an intricately planned con to make an entertaining heist movie. The modern heist movie needs a little extra something to set itself apart from the genre pack.

In The Good Thief, that something is Nick Nolte in a career best performance. In The Good Thief, Nolte is Bob, a pathetic junkie gambler in some nameless French slum. Despite his weary, decrepit appearance, his reputation as a legendary thief persists in the mind of an obsessive French cop named Roger (Tcheky Karyo). After Bob saves Roger's life in a bar fight, the two share a drink and Roger senses something is up with the aging thief and begins tailing him.

Indeed Bob does have something going on, his drug addiction and gambling have emptied his bank account. A friend, Raoul (Gerard Darmon), has a line on a big score to get Bob back on his feet. In the meantime, Bob decides to help a young Russian girl who had come to France and was going to work as a prostitute until Bob saved her. The girl, Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze), is 17 and obviously attracted to Bob who needs all his will power not to take advantage. Bob also has to overcome his drug addiction in order to pull off the big score.

The heist is no more clever than most heists in similar films. It involves an overly complicated security system and the theft of some classic works of art from Picasso, Degas and others. There are typical scenes of gathering a crew, narrowly avoiding the cops while manipulating them into the right position to work around them. And let us not forget the girl, who like every other girl in the heist movie, complicates things.

Director Neil Jordan gives all of this the polish of professionalism and a real love of French landscape, architecture and an extra special appreciation of the French slums, which he paints with the right mix of menace and “Frenchness.”

The Good Thief is a remake of the Jean Paul Melville film Bob Le Flambeur, the title is referenced in August Le Breton's updated screenplay as one of Nolte's many aliases. It's the type of subtle nudging humor that edges in throughout the film. Having never seen Melville's original, I can't compare the two. However, Le Breton seems to have a good sense of how to update the script, to modernize it without losing what made them want to remake The Good Thief in the first place.

As good as Jordan's direction and Le Breton's script update, The Good Thief belongs to star Nick Nolte. Put aside the tabloid trash that has dominated his recent press clippings and take a close look at Nolte the actor. His weary eyes and weathered face tell us more about the character than pages of dialogue ever could. That classic Nolte growl is tempered and toned to the dialogue that rolls out like a hand of cards. Nolte's Bob is constantly telling stories about his parents, his exploits and his career. His favorite is a story about meeting Pablo Picasso at a bullfight, I could listen to him tell it for hours.

Combining Nolte's awesome performance with some terrific source material and Jordan's steady directorial hand, you get one of the rare heist flicks that skates over its atypical genre and becomes a fascinating exercise in acting and dialogue.

Nolte deserves award consideration for this role. Whether it's eligible for this coming Oscar ceremony is in question, it debuted last year at the Toronto International Film Festival but didn't make its American debut until April of this year. Eligible or not, your chance to pay homage to his performance is now on DVD.