Movie Review Asphalt City

Asphalt City (2024) 

Directed by Jean Stephane Sauvaire 

Written by Ryan King, Ben Mac Brown

Starring Tye Sheridan, Sean Penn, Mike Tyson, Kali Reis, Michael Pitt 

Release Date March 29th, 2024 

Published March 28th, 2024 

Asphalt City is the kind movie that mistakes wallowing in misery for drama. The film about a rookie EMT in New York City wallows in the bleak misery of suffering that, I am sure, will feel like gritty drama to some but felt punishing for this critic. I don't mind a good wallow, I was a big fan of Scorsese's similarly themed Bringing Out the Dead years ago, but I have my limits and Asphalt City pushed well past my limit for desolation that borders on post-apocalyptic. I realize New York City can be an angry and dark place but this borders on pornographic in terms of misery. 

Asphalt City stars Tye Sheridan as Ollie Cross a wide-eyed medical student whose paying his way through med-school by working as an EMT in New York City. Struggling with a terrible partner who hates rookies, Cross's spirits are buoyed when he's reassigned to work with an aging veteran, Gene 'Rut' Rutkovsky. Rut takes pity on the kid and sets about teaching him the job instead of just screaming orders at him. Where his previous partner, played by Michael Pitt, appeared intent on running Cross out of the job, Rut seems to take to being a mentor. 

This doesn't however, give the movie a boost in terms of the pitch black ugliness at play. Even as Rut proves to be kind, the runs they make in their ambulance are unendingly grim. EMT's deal with a lot of horrors but Asphalt City makes the job appear like the seventh circle of hell at all times. It's to the point that I just can't believe anyone would be able to do this job and since we have EMT's currently working in New York City, I can only imagine that they have found some way to preserve their mental health. This movie makes being an EMT akin to trying to survive Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: The Weight of Water

The Weight of Water (2002) 

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Written by Alice Arlen, Christopher Kyle 

Starring Sean Penn, Sarah Polley, Elizabeth Hurley, Catherine McCormack,

Release Date November 1st, 2002 

Published February 23rd, 2002 

On the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire, a murder was committed. Two women are killed and a man stands accused of a crime he did not commit. It was 1873 and though nowadays double murders barely make people blink, in New Hampshire in 1873 this was the OJ trial. The so-called Smuttynose murders became the background to a best-selling novel, "The Weight Of Water," which has now been adapted for the screen starring Sean Penn and Catherine McCormack. Like most books to film, it's a safe bet the book was better.

McCormack is the film's lead, Jean, a photographer who is using a weekend visit to the Isles of Shoals to do a work assignment, but also using the romantic surroundings to reconnect with her Pulitzer Prize-winning poet husband, Thomas. Accompanying them on the boat trip is Thomas's brother Rich (Josh Lucas) and his new girlfriend Addeline (Elizabeth Hurley). Jean is on the Isle to get photographs of the place where the area's most famous murders took place.

As the story goes, a Norwegian immigrant named Maren Hontvet (Sarah Polley) and her husband John (Ulrich Thompson) are a fishing family living on the Isle with Maren's sister Karen (Katrin Cartlidge), their brother Evan (Anders W. Berthelsen), and his wife Anethe (Vinessa Shaw). Also living with them is a boarder named Louis Wagner (Ciaran Hinds). According to the official story, Wagner, in a jealous rage, murdered Karen and Anethe while Maren escaped and hid on the shore to await the return of her brother and husband who had gone for a night of fishing. Wagner was convicted of the crime though, to the day he was hanged, he denied his guilt.

For some reason, the official story doesn't sit well with Jean who, though she is just supposed to take pictures, begins investigating the murders. The story she uncovers vaguely resembles the story unfolding on the boat between her husband, his brother and Addeline. Jealousy, suspicion, and questionable behavior all begin to mirror the story of the murder. You can see where this is leading.

It's not the most original setup, but to the credit of director Kathryn Bigelow the film doesn't go in exactly the direction you think it's heading. We saw a similar setup earlier this year in the dramatic romance Possession, where a pair of historians begin a relationship that mirrors the one they are researching. In The Weight of Water, as Jean investigates what really happened in the Smuttynose murder case, she senses a similar pattern evolving amongst her group leading to a moral situation foreshadowed by the true story of the murders. There is a seemingly supernatural element to the film, in what I believed were Jean's visions of what happened in the past. However this hint of the supernatural never truly plays out, it is merely used to connect the two stories.

Here is the problem with this film, the film switches between the past and present so randomly that we lose the connection between them. The links between the two stories are tenuous at best.

The real story of the murders, as uncovered by Jean, is far more lurid and interesting than the rather dull melodrama unfolding on the boat. Yet, the screenwriter and director seem to want to play up the parallels between the two. The only real parallel is jealousy, and by the time that becomes clear, you're left saying, is that it? Jealousy is a common thread in a lot of murders or potential murders; one would hope after sitting through two hours of this film, one would get something a little more interesting than the green eyed monster.

Sarah Polley gives yet another beautifully layered performance, using her big round eyes to communicate her character's conflicted nature. Looking at her sparse surroundings and her extremely dull husband, it's no wonder she would entertain psychotic thoughts, anything to distract from her life must have been welcome.

The Smuttynose Murders are a true story of lust, incest, and ax murders; of lies and deceit; and a cover up that may have sent an innocent man to the gallows. The story would be sensational if it weren't true and should have been an easy fit on the big screen. However, when combined with the dramatized modern story, it doesn't get the treatment it deserved.

Movie Review: All the King's Men

All the King's Men (2006) 

Directed by Steven Zaillian

Written by Steven Zaillian 

Starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earl Haley

Release Date September 22nd, 2006

Published September 22nd, 2006 

In late 1930's Louisiana writer Robert Penn Warren fell under the spell of the charismatic, larger than life Governor, Huey P. Long. Long's passionate, man of the people rhetoric, his complicated almost amoral lifestyle and his tragic death, were all the inspiration Warren needed to write his masterpiece novel All The Kings Men.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted to the big screen in 1949 where it went on to win Best Picture. More than 50 years later All The Kings Men has once again been adapted to the big screen and while it features a fiery performance from Sean Penn, the film is a catastrophic failure. Made with the intention of winning an Oscar, the film could be a parody of the corruption of its own creation with Sean Penn's Willie Stark character standing in for greedy producers eager for awards glory.

Willie Stark (Sean Penn) was a true man of the people. His first foray into politics was fighting to make sure the local school was built by the best contractors with the best materials and not by friends of the local politicians in his small corner of Louisiana. When his fight failed his career as a politician seemed to have ended with it but when the school collapsed and four kids were killed, Willie Stark went from down on his luck salesman to crusader for truth and justuce and soon a potential candidate for Governor.

Reporter Jack Burden (Jude Law) was among the first to see Willie's man of the people earnestness and be struck by the rarity of an honest politician. He first met Willie during the fight for the school but became forever entwined with Willie after the school collapse and the beginning of Willie's improbable run for Governor.

Willie's political education began on that first run for governor when he finds that he is merely a patsy candidate meant to divide the electorate and help a more prominent candidate win office. His disillusionment turns to determination and by the time of the next election Willie knows how this corrupt game is played and sweeps into office a conquering hero of incorruptibility.

Of course, Willie was quite corrupt by this time and once in office with the mandate of his people his corruption comes to full flower. Jack Burden, having given up journalism, joins Willie's staff as a top political fire fighter and while he is hurt by Willie's fall from grace, he is merely a witness. That begins to change when politics calls for Jack to use his influence on an old friend of his family, Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins). Willie needs Judge Irwin on his side to avoid impeachment and it falls to Jack to find dirt on the man he once considered a father figure.

Jack's conflicting loyalty to Willie and to Judge Irwin is the thrust of the final act of All The Kings Men a surprisingly lackluster drama from writer-director Steven Zaillian. With pretensions of greatness, Zaillian crafts All The Kings Men as if just making the movie were enough to warrant huzzahs all around. The film is so full of its own value that James Horner's score is like a thundering Greek chorus of 'see how important we all are' hyperbole.

The problems with All The Kings Men extend from Zaillian's lackadaisical direction to the cast of all stars who are often just not suited for the material. The most glaring example is Jude Law who, as Jack Burden the movie's narrator and dramatic center, struggles with keeping his natural good looks and charm out of the role of a burnout cynic and struggles, far more mightily, with a brutal Louisiana drawl. Law's Jack Burden is a cypher, milling about the movie searching for a purpose beyond merely providing exposition.

Jack is the audience's eyes and ears and yet he seems to miss so much. As Willie Stark is becoming more and more corrupt we want to see the smoky back rooms and the shady deals. Instead we are stuck with Jack and his dull subplot involving old friends played by Kate Winslet, also poorly cast as a Louisiana aristocrat, and Mark Ruffalo. Though the subplot becomes important late in the film, its relevance early on is poorly established and distracting.

Regardless of the films many flaws Sean Penn is electrifying in All The Kings Men. His fiery passion explodes in fits of righteous rage that are at times inspiring and lamentable. As he was on the rise Willie Stark's outrage made him seem as if he indeed could end corruption in all government. However, once elected and educated in how the gears of politics turn, Willie's inflammatory rhetoric became cover for his own corruption. This is the one effective element of an otherwise disappointing melodrama.

All The Kings Men boasts a cast of respected actors and Oscar winners, including writer-director Zaillian himself, yet somehow all the starpower on the screen and behind the scenes never manages to turn the movie into anything more than an extravagant demonstration of how much a studio will pay to win an Oscar. All The Kings Men is like a machine crafted to win awards with little regard to whether it was deserving of any honor.

Sean Penn is passionate to the point of almost eating the scenery but his fiery oratory skills are the only reason to see All The Kings Men an otherwise lifeless excercise in failure. Remakes are often mere reflections of the original and this new version of All The Kings Men is a perfect example of reflected glory. The movie takes the shine of the respected work of writer Robert Penn Warren and the Oscar winning 1949 film and simply mirrors it.

The cache of the original glory and an all star cast cannot hide the slapdash quality of Steven Zaillian's All The Kings Men, a movie machine cynically crafted for critical applause.

Movie Review: Fair Game

Fair Game (2010) 

Directed by Doug Liman

Written by Jez Butterworth, Jon Butterworth

Starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Noah Emmerich, Ty Burrell, Michael Kelly 

Release Date October 1st, 2010

Published October 2nd, 2010 

Is it just me or does the American left wing love remembering their failures? Whether it's Paul Greengrass in “Green Zone” relieving many of the massive intelligence failures that slipped past us during the Iraq war or Doug Liman building a lovely monument to our ignorance of the truths uncovered by Ambassador Joe Wilson in “Fair Game,” we cannot seem to get enough of reminding ourselves how powerless and ignorant we were.

The left loves mulling over it's failures and “Fair Game” is nothing short of a commemorative plaque to failure, a paean to blithe ignorance and a testament to the left's love of pointlessly re-living the past while ignoring the present and failing the future. Oh and I haven't even yet mentioned director Doug Liman who apparently must have been made quite ill by what he found in the story of Valerie Plame as his camera whips and sways about like vertigo patient off of his meds.

Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), for those who are somehow still ignorant, was a CIA agent working on intelligence in the run up to the war with Iraq. We pick up her story in that brief respite from September 11th, the bombing of Afghanistan and the rather bizarre decision to attack Iraq. Plame was working around the globe all the while returning home on weekends for dinners with friends and nights with her former Ambassador husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) and two children.

When the White House made the attention shift to Iraq Plame was among the working class analysts who looked at the data with zero agenda and offered sane sound evidence. Among the many intelligence gathering tasks Plame's group was assigned were allegations that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy Yellow Cake Uranium from the tiny African nation of Niger, not to be confused with Nigeria; two different places.

Knowing that her husband had contacts and experience in the region from his time in the Ambassador corps; Plame recommended Joe be sent to meet with a group put together by the Vice President who then sent Wilson to Niger on a fact finding mission. That mission revealed that Niger had almost zero capability of transporting the alleged materials if indeed they ever had such things.

Meanwhile, Valerie's own intelligence gathering seemed to uncover that Iraq barely had the weapons to rub two sticks together let alone create a working nuclear program. The greatest danger in the country lay with the scientists from the long defunct nuke program whose knowledge and capability might be valuable to another more viable enemy such as neighboring Iran or even North Korea.

Valerie was on task to gather many of these scientists to bring to the US when all hell broke loose. Watching helplessly as the White House ignored and distorted evidence he had gathered, Joe Wilson took to the op-ed pages and the Sunday talk shows to reveal the lies of the Bush Administration. In retaliation a coterie of Bush henchman including Richard Armitage, Karl Rove and fall guy Scooter Libby leaked the name of Joe's wife and set off a tidal wave of lies that likely lead to more death and future instability in the Middle East.

Sounds like a wonderful narrative for the American left doesn't it? Well, it's not so much a narrative, that's what truly happened. Wilson, Plame and numerous others told us this was happening as it was happening and have since written comprehensive non-fiction accounts of it all. We simply were not listening. Now, Doug Liman offers “Fair Game” and because it is such a lazy, slipshod effort we will continue not listening.

”Fair Game” offers nothing new to the story of Valerie Plame, nothing that those already interested in her story don't already know and nothing that anyone opposed to the Plame 'version' will willingly listen to. It's great to have yet another pop cultural recording of our failure to stop the war in Iraq but like Paul Greengrass's “Green Zone,” we needed this movie five years ago.

We needed movies like “Fair Game” when John Kerry was being beaten in a must win 2004 election. We needed movies like “Fair Game” when people on our side of the argument like then Senator Hillary Clinton voted to send us to Iraq.

We knew then, even before Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were being dragged through the mud that we were being lied to and we did little to nothing to oppose it. “Fair Game” would be worthy now if it offered some object lesson for us to learn from. This would be a worthy effort if it gave us something useful to carry forward. Instead, “Fair Game” is merely a checklist of our failures recounted with tremendous historical accuracy.

And then there is the bizarre direction of Doug Liman, one of our finest action directors (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum) who battles the straight drama of “Fair Game” with an action directors eye. Using a handheld camera, Liman acted as his own Cinematographer and attempts to give us a firsthand point of view of the events inside the Plame-Wilson household.

It’s a bold experiment except that Liman’s idea of a firsthand account is a whipsaw move of the camera from one character to the next as if we were strapped to the back of a fly on the wall. Bring your sea-sickness meds, especially for the dinner party scenes where Liman attempts to take on the perspective of every character at the table in very short order.

Late in the movie, in a quiet scene between Penn's Joe Wilson and Watt's Valerie Plame, Liman's camera can barely stay still to keep Ms. Watts in frame. Yet, in the next moment it is trained almost perfectly on Mr. Penn as if the actor, who is a fine director in his own right, demanded Mr. Liman pauses while filming him.

There is a scene between Watts and Sam Shepard who plays Valerie Plame's father where the director actually seems to have left in a frame where someone off screen bumped the camera knocking both actors almost completely out of frame. Whether this is some sort of cinema verite experiment or just plain laziness is anyone's guess.

I truly despise much of “Fair Game.” As someone who opposed the war in Iraq from day one I am tired of reliving our failure to prevent this massive screw up. It's done, millions of Iraqis are dead, hundreds of thousands of our soldiers are dead and no one, not even the beloved President Obama, can give us a reason why or voice any kind of proper outrage about it.

Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame have tired of the topic. Having moved from Washington after writing their books they are content to leave it all behind. Their approach is my approach. Unless you can show me something new, a lesson that we can pass on from this devastating, destructive, nearly decade long failure that is Iraq, I am simply not interested. “Fair Game” is irrelevance in film form.

Movie Review Milk

Milk (2008) 

Directed by Gus Van Sant

Written by Dustin Lance Black 

Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, Diego Luna

Release Date November 26th, 2008 

Published November 25th, 2008 

The life of Harvey Milk is an inspiration. The first openly gay elected official in the country was a bold, brave and brilliant man. He was a fighter and a politician and a flawed soul. A movie about his life needs to capture these aspects of Harvey Milk and the Gus Van Sant movie Milk comes up just short. It's not that Milk is poorly made or even that it fails to honor the man. It's just that such an atypical hero deserves something far more than a very typical biopic.

Sean Penn takes on the role of Harvey Milk picking up his life story in the early 1970's when a fully closeted Harvey cruised a young gay man in a New York subway. That young man was Scott Smith (James Franco) and he drew Harvey out of the closet and into the life he had always longed for. The two moved to San Francisco and opened a camera shop in the Castro District. That area of San Francisco is now a famously gay enclave but when Harvey and Scott arrived that wasn't the case. Milk slowly but surely ingratiated himself in the community, he drew people to him and eventually as the community changed with him, he became its leader.

His rise from community organizer to politician was filled with potholes and roadblocks but eventually Harvey was elected to the City Board of Supervisors where an alliance with Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) would make history and repeated run-ins with fellow supervisor Dan White (Brolin) would lead to tragedy. To tell the story of Harvey Milk's life Gus Van Sant has Harvey narrate his own story in flashback. As he sits at a table alone in his apartment Sean Penn as Harvey recalls the incidents of his life into a tape recorder. The device frames the film but it's one of many signs of just how typical the movie is.

The flashbacks unfold in predictable fashion recalling all of the well known moments of Harvey's life that shine a positive light on him. Leaving out a few of the less flattering moments, generally celebrating the things that Harvey Milk accomplished in the all too short time he was in public service. There is nothing terribly devastatingly wrong with Milk. It just shouldn't be so typical. This is the same biographical formula applied to every life from Ray Charles to Johnny Cash to any famous person you can think of whose life has been brought to film in the last decade.

The movie suffers from what I like to call Van Sant-itis. This is a malady that affects movies directed by but not written by Gus Van Sant. Movies like Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting and To Die For are all enjoyable movies but each lacks the director's full engagement. Watch Elephant, Gerry, Last Days or Paranoid Park and you can see a fiercely committed director dedicated to bringing his vision to the screen. There is an almost visceral difference in the directors engagement with his filmmaking in these films, especially when compared to the often soft focused laziness of his non-writing credited films.

Milk is as close as Van Sant has come to committing to another writer's vision, he seems to really care about Dustin Lance Black's work, but as the film goes along you sense the drift in Van Sant's attention. As the movie goes on, after brief early love scenes, the film drifts into conventional biopic mode and rolls to its tragic finish on a wave of typicality. The only truly outstanding thing about Milk is Sean Penn. He embodies Harvey Milk mind, body and soul and his commitment almost overcomes the strict adherence to biographical formula. Penn's performance is as brave and bold as the man he plays but he is hemmed in by the numbers biopic recipe.

Milk is a disappointment only because I was expecting something more from it. The film suffers from building expectations. It suffers from our expectation of something better than your average Hollywood biopic.