Movie Review: Doom

Doom (2005) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by David Callaham, Wesley Strick 

Starring Karl Urban, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Rosamund Pike 

Release Date October 21st, 2005 

Published October 22nd, 2005 

I am a huge fan of The Rock. The guy is charismatic, he's cool, he's big and surprisingly funny. That talent was on display in both of his previous roles in the action movies The Rundown and Walking Tall. So what happened to Doom?  Director Andrzej Bartkowiak somehow manages to strip The Rock of his charisma, his humor and any of his other appealing qualities for this human vs. aliens video game retread. Doom had little going for it when it was conceived. Take away the only really appealing element it had in Dwayne Johnson and you have one of the worst films of the year.

On Mars a futuristic research facility has sent out a distress signal of unknown origin. Scientists and archaeologists have disappeared and no one in the facility seems to know why. Enter the Sarge (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson) and his team of marine mercenaries. Sent to mars to find the missing scientists and help the corporation recover proprietary data, they soon find themselves up against an enemy that may or may not be human.

Hey wait... isn't that the plot for Resident Evil 2? Remove the trip to outer space and toss in Milla Jovovich in some skimpy ass-kicking outfit and you have essentially the same movie. There are even zombies in Doom and possibly, this point was not all that clear, a virus.

Funny thing, there were no zombies at all in the video game on which Doom is based. Of course there weren't any characters in the game either. Instead of The Sarge or Grimm (Karl Urban) or Destroyer (Deobia Oeparai) or the Kid (Al Weaver) you had the first person point of view of a gun that you used to blast alien monsters.

Creative license, I'm sure, was necessary for adapting Doom to the big screen but this departure is rather extreme and made worse by the fact that it's a near complete rip off of another bad video game adaptation. It's bad enough Hollywood studios cannot resist making video games into movies but do they have to make them knockoffs of other video game movies? UGH! 

We might have predicted the kind of disaster that is Doom considering the director. Polish born director Andrzej Bartkowiak, has the kind of resume that only Uwe Boll could envy. Bartkowiak directed two atrocious Jet Li flicks, Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave and, most egregiously, he brought Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds to the big screen, a cinematic nightmare of incalculable proportions.

Consider ourselves lucky Bartkowiak did not include Mr. Seagal in Doom. The combination of this already bad idea with Seagal might have caused time and space to collapse upon itself in a cosmic gag reflex hurling us all into the ether. Sorry, I'm just saying maybe things could have been worse.

In a nod to gamers Doom retains the first person shooting scenario that is one of the games trademarks. Unfortunately, once we enter the first person mode, which happens for much of the last 20 minutes of the film, watching Doom becomes very much like watching someone else play a videogame and knowing you don't ever get a turn.

The one thing the film had going for it was The Rock. Sadly, cast as taciturn, humorless pseudo cyborg killing machine The Rock loses every last bit of the personality that made him a star. The action genre that The Rock has quickly risen to dominate, in terms of the classic one man against the world Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Van Damme action genre and not the genre as a whole, is built on physicality and personality. Removed from that mold Rock is just another beefcake behemoth with a gun.

Walking Tall was an old school action flick that played to the strengths of Rock's personality while being just different enough from the old school to seem fresh and fun. The Rundown is an out and out buddy comedy that really allowed Rock to cut loose with that fresh charismatic smile and surly but exciting demeanor that I had hoped would become his trademark. Doom is a major step backward for the man once known in the world of professional wrestling as 'the most electrifying man in sports entertainment'.

Just who is the audience for Doom? Teenage boys who loved the videogame might find something to enjoy. But even the least discerning teenage male must have his limit. Doom is an abysmal mess of genre knockoffs and an outright theft of another movies plot and action. And the movie it steals from, Resident Evil 2, isn't very good either so you can imagine how bad a knockoff would be. 

Throw another hack director into the movie marketplace. Andrzej Bartkowiak joins Uwe Boll and the king of all hacks Paul W.S Anderson in the ranks of directors dragging the standards of Hollywood filmmaking to new lows. Where is the justice? Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and other auteurs struggle to find financing for their work, often having to leave the country as Allen did for his latest film Match Point, to find the funding to make one small picture.

Hacks on the other hand are finding ever growing budgets and clout. I know Hollywood is a business but that does not make such practices right. Watch Doom and tell me you disagree.

Movie Review: Crank

Crank (2006) 

Directed by Neveldine and Taylor

Written by Neveldine and Taylor

Starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Dwight Yoakam, Erfren Ramirez 

Release Date September 1st, 2006 

Published August 31st, 2006

Jason Statham is right up there with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in the competition to replace the old guard action hero's; Stallone, Van Damme and Schwarznegger. With his two Transporter flicks; Statham established his badass credentials. All that Statham lacks is the easy charisma and sense of humor that The Rock is gifted with. In his latest flick Crank, Statham delivers yet another badass performance but the highly adrenalized Crank also exposes Statham's weaknesses as much as his strengths.

Hitman Chev Chelios (Statham) is having a truly awful morning. He has awakened from one nightmare into another as he finds that he has been killed in his sleep. A rival hitman, Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo), has dosed Chev with a poison called the Beijing cocktail. This poison will slowly snake through Chev's system until it shuts down his heart.

According to his doctor (Dwight Yoakam); Chev has maybe an hour to live unless he can keep his heart rate very high. What Chev needs are massive amounts of adrenaline in whatever way he can get it. Dying a slow death either way; Chev vows to stay alive long enough to say goodbye to his clueless girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) and to kill Verona and all of his henchman.

Written and directed by the team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, Crank is pure trash, B picture exploitation. Reminiscent of a pair of 2006 chase pictures with similarly lowbrow ambition, Tyrese's Waist Deep and Paul Walker's Running Scared, Crank gets a running start and pauses only for tacky sex scenes and overblown violence.

Crank sets itself apart from the others with a pair of humiliating sex scenes that take the career of poor Amy Smart an flush it down the B movie toilet. In the first of two scenes Smart is raped on the streets of L.A's Chinatown. I say raped, the scene begins as a rape but to make the scene more mortifying she begins to enjoy and participate willingly. Later as Chev's heart begins to slow during a chase scene, Smart's character performs oral sex while Statham drives and shoots bad guys.

Smart is not the only woman treated with little regard in Crank, merely the best known. All other women seen in Crank are dressed in next to nothing and placed in plastic cubes where they are ogled by bad guys. The film also takes time to rip gays and make stereotypical use of its few African American characters. Neveldine and Talyor, I'm sure, would say they are merely being politically incorrect, tweaking the conventions of the masses and other such justifications. That would be interesting if it served a metaphoric purpose; but Crank is just a violent, exploitation chase picture, it lacks the depth to defend its anti-PC attitude.

There is no denying the badass appeal of star Jason Statham. With his bullet shaped head and intense gaze, he is beyond intimidating. Unfortunately, when forced to get to the core of a character -beyond the act of simply killing a man- he is an empty vessel. He is all physicality and no mentality. Statham in Crank is an unstoppable killing machine who takes on an occasional bit of black humor and wit but mostly is just a machine pushed by the plot toward his next violent encounter.

Crank has a visceral power to it that comes from it's propellant plot. That power however, is dissipated by the directors need to be shocking and crude. The two high speed sex scenes in Crank are gratuitous and though the plot tries to makes them seem necessary that does not change their exploitative nature. Watching Amy Smart in these scenes should be titillating; she is a very attractive woman. Rather than titillating however, I felt nothing but pity for Smart who is made to look like an even less willing version of Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny.

Is Jason Statham the next great action hero? The box office will determine that. Myself? I'll take The Rock whose combination of physicality and humor is the perfect combination of action hero violence and wit. Statham is not unappealing; he simply lacks range. Watching Crank you can barely make out any differences between Chev Chelios and the character Statham played in two The Transporter movies. 

Movie Review 12 Rounds

12 Rounds (2009) 

Directed by Renny Harlin

Written by Daniel Kunka 

Starring John Cena, Aiden Gillen, Ashley Scott, Steve Harris, Brian J. White 

Release Date March 27th, 2009 

Published March 27th, 2009 

There is something to say about a movie as energetic and confident as 12 Rounds. Sure, the movie is by few standards a good movie. The plotting is laughable, the performances are wooden, and the screenplay may have been assembled by monkey's with blenders, but the action is kinetic and attention grabbing. Most interestingly, the star is professional wrestling star John Cena, arguably one of the biggest stars on television at the moment. 

WWE superstar John Cena is the star of 12 Rounds as Danny Fischer, a New Orleans police officer about to stumble on a career making bust. He happens to be in the right place at the right moment to bust an international arms dealer, and all around dirt bag named Miles Jackson (Aiden Gillen). Unfortunately, during the bust Jackson's beloved gal Friday is accidentally killed and the baddie vows revenge on Danny.

One year later, Danny and his partner Hank (Brian White) have made detectives thanks to their big bust but they aren't prepared when Miles escapes from federal custody. Soon after his escape, Mile has kidnapped Danny's beloved girlfriend, Molly (Ashley Scott), and has crafted an elaborate series of challenges for Danny to overcome in order to win her safe return. You could say he has 12 Rounds in this fight in order to save his beloved from a cackling mad man bent on revenge. 

12 Rounds of challenges, in fact, that will have Danny racing about like a maniac fighting fires, stealing cars, and rescuing innocent civilians caught unaware that an international arms dealer has made them pawns in an overly complicated revenge scheme. To say that 12 Rounds is derivative of Die Hard and about a dozen other similar trope heavy action flicks would be an understatement. Aside from John Cena's confidently amateurish performance, 12 Rounds would have nothing going for it that wasn't based on nostalgia for the movies that director Renny Harlin is blatantly ripping off. 

If all of this sounds pretty goofball, well it is. It is goofy and that's ok. That really is what 12 Rounds should be. To attempt to take seriously a movie starring a former WWE champion, whose name isn't Dwayne Johnson, and is directed by schlockmeister Renny Harlin, is a fool's errand. 12 Rounds is silly and perhaps not even silly enough. The film is a little up its own backside in the notion of what we are asked to buy into, but with a bar set so low it's more dimwitted than it is egregious or wholly unwatchable. 

The makers of 12 Rounds know they are not making Shakespeare here, they are barely recreating the glory years of Sly Stallone. Renny Harlin and John Cena fully accept their place in the filmmaking world and that gives 12 Rounds a freewheeling air that is almost cheesy enough to be fun. ALMOST. Sadly, the film overstays its welcome by a good 20 minutes or so and by the time that the big helicopter set finale arrives, the cheese has gone cold. 12 Rounds is a bad movie that sadly fails to transcend into full camp potential. Minus that, it's just merely bad and therefore not something I can fully endorse.

Can John Cena act? By the evidence of his first starring role, no, not really, he's got a lot to learn. That said, Cena appears very confident. Cena radiates confidence, not arrogance, genuine confidence. Cena has self-assurance even as he's trapped in a derivative idiot plot. He's giving this role his all and he has an energy to match the intended spirit of 12 Rounds, if not the actual, dreary, final product of 12 Rounds.

Movie Review: Abandon

Abandon (2002) 

Directed by Stephen Gaghan

Written by Stephen Gaghan 

Starring Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, Charlie Hunnam, Zoey Deschanel, Gabrielle Union 

Release Date October 18th, 2002 

Published October 17th, 2002 

The cast of Dawson’s Creek is going to have a tough time shaking their TV characters. As James Van Der Beek showed in Rules OF Attraction, even working with a great filmmaker doesn't allow him to him escape from his TV alter ego. Roger Avery appeared to enjoy using set pieces that traded on the Dawson persona in little winks to the audience that practically screamed "you wouldn’t see Dawson do this!" 

Katie Holmes has a similar problem, her Joey Potter is the picture of cherubic teenage innocence and even stripping in The Gift or going Goth in Disturbing Behavior hasn't separated her from the character that made her famous.  In the new movie Abandon, writer director Stephen Gaghan uses Holmes' TV persona in ways that bring the character a little more depth and makes the film's surprises a little more effective.

In Abandon, Holmes plays Caty Burke an ambitious college senior with a big money job waiting for her when she graduates. Things are not that simple however. Caty is still longing for an ex-boyfriend who disappeared two years previous. The boyfriend, Embry (Charlie Hunnam), vanished without a trace and now is being investigated as a missing person. The company that holds Embry’s million dollar trust wants him to be declared dead so they can move in on his millions. 

The investigation into Embry's disappearance is turned over to a recovering alcoholic cop named Wade (Benjamin Bratt). Wade’s investigation immediately leads him to Caty, the last person to have seen Embry alive. While she isn’t considered a suspect, Wade is suspicious of what she isn’t telling him. The investigation is bringing back a lot of memories for Caty, memories that are keeping her up at night and are beginning to effect her work. Caty is convinced that she has seen Embry recently, and that he is following her with intent to harm her. Not surprisingly she turns to Wade.

It’s not difficult to see where this is going, but director Stephen Gaghan has a few tricks up his sleeve, tossing out red herrings right and left and a brilliant clue early on that makes you feel stupid when it pays off later in the film. Though one too many flashbacks makes the film a little tedious, Gaghan develops enough mystery to keep your attention.

Embry, as played by Charlie Hunnam (best known for TV’s short lived and underappreciated "Undeclared") is such a great character. Embry is this totally self involved artist, the kind of guy every college woman dated for a semester despite the fact that he treated them terribly. Embry is the type of guy who picks up girls by promising to paint their portrait. Hunnam does a fantastic job of portraying the horrible qualities that every woman knows they shouldn’t want but can’t resist. 

Holmes and Bratt don’t have much chemistry, but it was interesting to see a male character as a functionary to a female. Normally in Hollywood it is the female character that is thrown in as a plot point. In Abandon however it is Bratt’s Detective who is the plot point. This is Katie Holmes’s show and while I still can’t get past Joey Potter on the big screen, I’m sure others will be able to put aside the Dawson’s Creek association and enjoy this popcorn thriller. 

Writer-Director Stephen Gaghan, an Oscar winner for his screenplay for Traffic, steps behind the camera for the first time with Abandon and delivers a first-rate Brian De Palma impression, and I mean that in a good way. Abandon is the kind of trashy popcorn flick DePalma made in the 80s with movies like Dressed To Kill, Body Heat and Obsession. While it may not be as memorable as those films, Abandon is nearly as skillfully made and a sign of good things to come from this first-time director.

Movie Review: Batman Begins

Batman Begins (2005) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan 

Written by Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer

Starring Christian Bale, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman

Release Date June 15th, 2005 

Published June 14th, 2005 

Joel Schumacher has committed a number of cinematic sins. His destruction of Andrew Kevin Walker's darkly brilliant script for 8mm or last years 3 hour tin-eared musical Phantom Of the Opera come immediately to mind. But without a doubt Schumacher's most damnable sin is his destruction of the Batman film series. Batman Forever and Batman and Robin are atrocious examples of a director completely bent to the will of marketing executives. A director more interested in creating synergistic toy products and fast food tie-ins than in making entertaining movies.

Eight years after Schumacher killed it, and through three years of torturous development Batman has risen from the ashes once again and in the hands of director Christopher Nolan, an artist and auteur of the highest regard, Batman is not merely back, the D.C Comics franchise is better than ever. Rivaling Raimi's Spiderman and Singer's X-Men, Nolan's Batman Begins is a visionary comic book film worthy of the icon status of the character.

Batman Begins is an origin story that brings fans into the mind of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) before Batman and shows us why a millionaire playboy would put on a bat suit and fight crime. Locked away in some far off Asian prison a scruffy but handsome American certainly sticks out. Battered and bruised Bruce Wayne has fought everyday he's been in this prison but his latest battle against several large thugs at once brings him to the attention of another handsome westerner, Henri Ducard played by Liam Neeson.

Ducard is a representative of Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), leader of the League Of Shadows, a thousand year-old order dedicated to vigilantism. The League Of Shadows fancy themselves ninja crime fighters and in Bruce Wayne they see an asset both physically and otherwise. The League is preparing to raze Gotham City, purging the city of its criminality and anything else that might be in the way. Bruce has a choice: join the League and destroy Gotham or return alone to defend the innocent people of the city.

Returning to his home in Gotham City (Chicago standing in, not New York in this version) Wayne finds the metropolis in ruinous poverty. Crime rules the streets led by mob boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). Among the few good people of Gotham are Bruce's butler, Alfred (the superb Michael Caine), and his childhood friend, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), who works as an assistant prosecutor fighting a losing battle with corruption.

Bruce's fortune is intact, the family business is under the control of a corrupt executive played by Rutger Hauer and working in the shadows is a former family friend, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), whose work on various military projects for the company will certainly come in handy when Bruce Wayne is ready to transform into the caped crusader. It is Lucius Fox who creates the suit, the gadgets and the new military style Batmobile, even cooler than the sports car version from Tim Burton's Batman.

The film plumbs the depths of Bruce's past, the biggest factor to his becoming Batman. A childhood accident bred in him a fear of bats. It's a fear that is also linked to the death of his parents in a mugging outside a theater when Bruce was eight years old. A taste for vengeance is what led Bruce to his Asian adventure and the teachings of Ducard are what lead to his taking his fear of the bat as his symbol when he finally decides to take a stand against crime.

It's an extraordinarily detailed and logical story that fits perfectly into the dark atmospheric universe that director Christopher Nolan and writer David S. Goyer, of Blade fame, have created. This Gotham City is in part the vision of Frank Miller's Year One graphic novel balanced with the Auteurist vision of Nolan who nods to Miller but makes the look and feel of the film his own.

Christian Bale is the perfect blend of movie star handsome and brooding maniac, the essence of the Bruce Wayne-Batman dichotomy. Though Batman holds the typical moral values of a superhero-- he captures but does not kill-- he has a definite weird streak.  As Bruce himself points out, "A guy who dresses up as a bat clearly has issues". Those 'issues' are given a thorough and complete examination in Batman Begins and as played by Mr. Bale, they are given the depth and emotionality that the character has lacked in his former movie incarnations.

The supporting cast is exemplary, especially Gary Oldman as "Sgt." Gordon who we all know will someday be Police Commissioner Gordon. This is his origin as well and, with Oldman in this pivotal role, we have a solid basis for further great stories to be told. Katie Holmes is much better than expected in the role of Bruce's childhood friend and adult love interest. She looks too young and innocent for the position of District Attorney fighting the worst of the worst criminals but she has an unexpected steeliness to her that sells the character.

The villains, the most obvious weakness from the Schumacher films, are given a similar comic book realism to that of Batman. Based more in the reality and logic of the story, the villains in Batman Begins are not super villains with grand schemes of mass murder or world domination but logical extensions of the established corruption of Gotham City. Cillian Murphy is terrific as Dr. Jonathan Crane whose alter ego, the Scarecrow, is no psycho du jour but a functionary of a larger, more logical and ordered plot.

Obviously Nolan's Batman Begins cannot help but be compared with the lofty achievements of Bryan Singer's X-Men and Sam Raimi's Spiderman and it is without a doubt worthy of the comparisons. Batman Begins ranks only behind Raimi's Spiderman 2 as the best comic book adaptation I have seen. An awesomely entertaining and involving action packed feature, Batman is back and better than ever in Batman Begins.

Movie Review: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011) 

Directed by Troy Nixey 

Written by Guillermo Del Toro, Matthew Robbins 

Starring Katie Holmes, Bailee Madison, Guy Pearce 

Release Date August 26th, 2011

Published August 25th, 2011 

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is a fraud. The marketing of the film, starring child actress Bailee Madison and Katie Holmes, was promoted heavily on the name of director Guillermo Del Toro with allusions to Del Toro's wildly imaginative masterwork "Pan's Labyrinth." "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" however, was not directed by Guillermo Del Toro but rather by first time pretender Troy Nixey.

At a Rhode Island mansion Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) has been left by her mother in the care of her distant father Alex (Guy Pearce) and his kindhearted girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes). Sally's discomfort with her new surroundings is made worse when she discovers monsters in the basement. From there "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" devolves into a series of teasing set pieces in which Sally narrowly escapes capture while the adults around her question why she has made up a story about monsters. The first adult to discover the truth is, of course, attacked and left unable to warn others until it is too late.

The story is based, not surprisingly, on a TV movie from the 1970's; something you might have intuited from the low rent plotting. With the focus on Guillermo Del Toro in the marketing it's fair to assume that the visual elements of "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" are supposed to be the film's draw. Sadly, the visuals are only slightly more appealing than the plot.

The one bright spot in "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is young Bailee Madison. As Sally Draper on "Mad Men" Madison is the picture of despairing 60's youth, too young for revolution but young enough for post revolution ennui. Madison was also the sad, compelling face of the long forgotten drama "Brothers" in 2010. In "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" Madison is compelling and sympathetic; something that can't be said of her wooden adult co-stars.

Troy Nixey isn't a bad director. His work in "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is competent for a first time director. The problem is that Troy Nixey is not Guillermo Del Toro. Nixey can't overcome a thin plot with sumptuous visual pleasures in the way Del Toro did in his otherwise blasé 'Hellboy' sequel. "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is one of those mediocre movies that you forget moments after seeing it. It's not so bad that you're angry you spent money on a rental but bad enough that if you can be warned away from it you will appreciate the warning.

Movie Review The Extra Man

The Extra Man (2010) 

Directed by Sherri Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini 

Written by Sherri Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini 

Starring Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, Katie Holmes, John C. Reilly 

Release Date July 30th, 2010 

Published August 14th, 2010

The thrill of watching Kevin Kline work has never ceased for me. When Kevin Kline is on he is arguably the most compelling actor of his era. In his latest effort, “The Extra Man,” Kline is on like gangbusters in a role that is beyond quirky and into a realm of peculiarity that few actors could sustain and remain believable.

The Extra Man stars Kevin Kline as a gentleman of leisure, a man about town. Kline's Henry Harrison is a failed playwright living in semi-squalor off of the kindness of wealthy friends. Into Henry's life comes Louis (Paul Dano) a kindred soul with a literary heart who fancies himself the modern incarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby.

That is if Nick Carraway liked to dress in drag. Yes, Louis has an issue with wanting to dress as a woman, a fetish opposed vehemently by Henry but indulged by Louis with the help of an understanding prostitute played by Patti D'Arbanville. Is Louis gay? He's not sure; he may or may not have feelings for a co-worker at his new job, Mary played by Katie Holmes.

What is Henry's orientation? A gentleman would never discuss such a thing. Henry's job, such as it is, and the field that he introduces Louis to is as an extra man. What is an extra man you wonder? He is a gentleman who squires older women about town to the opera or a dinner party or a fancy restaurant. Henry lives for his work but whether he performs the duties of a gigolo is yet another thing a gentleman never tells.

No doubt your quirk-ometer is on overload just from my description. What makes “The Extra Man” all the more odd and wonderful is how the characters and indeed the filmmakers play as if nothing were odd about this at all. Director's Sherri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini direct “The Extra Man” with such quiet dignity and self seriousness that the oddity is tamed into something resembling an existent reality.

”The Extra Man” is weirdly warm, humorous if not laugh out loud funny and has a wealth of charm. Kevin Kline relishes playing Henry Harrison and the life he gives this character leaps off of the screen. Young Paul Dano remains the most quirky of all modern actors. There is a certain pre-destiny in his becoming an Oscar winner yet stardom seems to be something he will fight against with all of his quirky will.

Berman and Pulcini too will likely never become blockbuster, a-list directing talents. They are too independent, too in their own heads to ever compromise enough to create a hit. Like the best of auteurs they will succeed despite their instinct for art over commerce. “The Extra Man” is certainly art over commerce. There was never any hope this would be a hit and never any attempt to make it so. In that sense the movie is as wonderfully quirk ridden as its main character.