Yeh, I hadn’t seen this yet, so sue me And I really have no excuse – never mind that it’s one of those movies that “everyone” has seen … I’d forgotten that it also marked the debut of Gaby Hoffmann, in what would prove ultimately to be one of her biggest parts. Even the fact that this is technically a sports movie shouldn’t have deterred me from watching it so long.

Anyway, as to the sports part – I seem to recall a lot of those “what’s the best sports movie?” type polls listing this high if not at the top, in some cases exactly because it’s not all about the sport (Jerry Maguire is the same). There’s a weird moment where the screenwriter seems to make a case for it being so, when Liotta I think talks about it being all about the game, that baseball is America etc (ah, thank you IMDb: it’s James Earl Jones who says, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”); but it doesn’t really work and the movie is best as a metaphor for a lot of things rather than specifically America “learning to think for itself again”.

Mostly, though, to my pleasant surprise, I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve seen – I laugh too little sometimes in movies but this one really tickled my funny bone the right way. I love Amy Madigan’s reaction to her husband basically going crazy, lol, it’s so atypical of this kind of story. There’s a corny scene where she basically tells him, “go with it if it’s what you really feel you need to do,” etc, but after that, her face is just a wonder as she takes all the strange goings on with this, “sure that makes sense” bemusement. I love when she turns a whole community meeting around to being against censorship early on in the movie, rushing out into the hallway energised giggling, “It’s like the Sixties again!” which connects to a moment with the similarly exuberant James Earl Jones, when he first meets Costner and says with mock enthusiasm, “You’re from the Sixties!” then proceeds to chase him out the room with an ancient bug sprayer yelling, “Go back where you came from!” LOL.

If there’s one moment it really falls down it’s the moment where Hoffmann gets caught in a tussle between Costner and his brother-in-law and is literally dropped off the back of the bleachers, lol. It shouldn’t be funny, but frankly it is, and it’s such an awful set-up for the plot-point that follows that it threatens to magnify and highlight all the other contrivances of the screenplay that would otherwise be completely excusable.

Overall, however, it’s as wonderful as I’d heard; moreso, in fact, for the humour. It bears that rare wonder, a James Horner score that doesn’t sound like a James Horner score, Hoffmann is adorable, and James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan are simply priceless.

The adventures of a girl and her horse? Initiate biased mode

” ... when we’re riding, all I feel is free …”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this production (outside of the bizarre boycotting story concerning apparent animal cruelty on the set? I’ll just leave that one alone …) is that 3 years after her scarily convincing performance as a teenager in Matchstick Men, Alison Lohman was still playing 10 years younger than her actual age, and again rather convincingly, lol.

That quote above pretty much sums it up for me, though. When they’re riding – whether she’s on the horse or it’s just Spirit style aerial shots of wild mustangs galloping across the plains to the main theme music – this movie cannot fail to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It absolutely has the gorgeous moments I want from such a movie. Outside of those moments … not so much. The score definitely owes something to Hans Zimmer’s work on Spirit (to be fair I think it would be hard for any composer to write anything different to horses running after seeing that movie) but outside of the main theme it’s pretty simple melodramatic stuff, as is the story.

Lohman is great – though I’d certainly prefer to see a younger, more age appropriate newcomer given a chance, if they really needed the extra hours on the set then Lohman is probably the best choice there is, and she’s the best thing in the movie. For her and the horses it’s nearly worth watching. And you can’t really argue with a movie whose end credits consist of a sickeningly sweet barrage of pictures of (presumably) real little girls and their horses accompanied to the cheesy but irresistible Tim McGraw song “My Little Girl”, lol. But for all other purposes, I absolutely recommend Spirit. Even if you’ve already seen that movie … see it a fifteenth time, lol, you know you want to It’s that or International Velvet. Or Dreamer. Okay there are lots of them, make a day of it hehe.

Edit: I just realised I forgot to even mention that the movie is directed by none other than Michael Mayer, who made one of my (and I think nobody else’s lol) all-time faves A Home at the End of the World. It was one of the first things I noticed in the credits that really got me more excited than just over the girl-horse thing. I guess that I forgot to even mention it speaks volumes of what a disappointment it ultimately was. While I’m adding to the review, I’ve also gotta say – gorgeous poster ... I really I hope I can find a copy of it sometime.

Yikes. I thought this would turn out to be the best of the three movies I watched last night, I love Rebecca Miller’s Angela which I mentioned in the Ripe review, I must watch that again and review it some time – but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I normally love this kind of thing – Nine Lives springs to mind, obviously Short Cuts ... I love strong independent female characters like this, and I love all three of the actresses playing the parts. Even the Little Children style voiceover didn’t bug me so much at the start, in retrospect because I figured it was going to be a Little Children style voiceover.

Well, let’s focus on the voiceover. It basically ruins the movie and is best summarised by one of the lines in it at the end following Fairuza Balk’s character spotting cuts and bruises on the arm of a hitchhiker she picked up – “She saw the edge of a wound, bruises …” he says … yes, thank you, we just saw that. It just bugged the hell out of me all the way and that was the last straw. I’ve read a couple of reviews, including Roger Ebert’s, that singles out the Balk story as the most engaging, and it’s true, but honestly even there I just wasn’t grabbed by this movie at all as much as I expected to be. The subtitle reads “Three Portraits” and I’d honestly rather see three beautiful photographs of the actresses – or even blown up stills from the movie, they all certainly have their standalone moments – hanging on the wall of an art gallery. The 90 minute blessing really doesn’t apply here, I’m afraid.

From giggly teens to a sultry (hey, not my word, it’s on the DVD cover! lol) barely-teen … I’ll admit, sometimes I have to be fairly predictable to get myself back in the movie-watching habit. This movie is gorgeous from the get go, cooling water you can practically feel on your skin in every scene, and I fall for New Zealand accents even when they don’t belong to a pair of eyes like those on Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, who pretty much carries the movie on her own. Again it’s a 90 minute wonder, and it has a wonderful soundtrack, most if not all of it by Neil Finn, I didn’t realise until I saw his name in the end credits, all I knew was I was loving it.

It’s fairly uneventful and ultimately fairly predictable – though there is a great twist on the old, “older guy with a camera alone in the woods with an underage girl” scene while the slightly disappointing bulk of the ending transpires in the background. It’s another movie I don’t imagine falling over myself to see again, but for Wierzbicki it’s more than worth the time.

The first thing I noticed about this movie – I know it’s not the greatest way to approach a review but you’ve gotta start somewhere – is its weirdly low score of 2.8 on the IMDb. It’s an odd, randomly pointless kind of movie, but it’s the kind of odd, randomly pointless kind of movie I can easily get behind. It’s 90 minutes long, it’s got 2 giggly teenagers, they find themselves free from their parents following a car crash, and take refuge in a military base where they get up to all kinds of kinky shenanigans. What’s not to like? lol.

OK. I can see where the low scores are coming from. But I just feel too comfortable and at home with this one to pick at its failings. It reminded me at turns of Rebecca Miller’s Angela only with older girls walking the world alone together; of Manny & Lo, Niagara Niagara and ultimately a little of Thelma and Louise. The chain of events is far from believable – these girls truly look their age yet far too many of the army guys seem deluded into thinking they’re much older. The older (well, taller at least) of the two has a peach-colored top that makes her look topless in long and even some medium shots which is bound to upset some people. There’s a great moment where the long-haired caretaker-ish guy they first latch onto interrupts their constant giggling by telling them to leave, yelling, “Now!” and the way their eyes pop like schoolkids being told off by teacher immediately hammers home how young they are.

I don’t know. Like I said, it’s odd, random, pointless … but it seems to me the film makers got exactly what they set out to get and I found it perfectly watchable with an ending that really lifts it higher than it deserves.

I watched this a while ago now – before Indy IV, to be honest, I had to break a personal rule and push that review through first though. And it’s really hard to know what to say about this. It would’ve been a tough watch even before Heath Ledger’s death but obviously that adds a whole new dimension – more in the case of this movie, a movie about the destructive nature of drugs, than any other – to the impact it has.

To veer off on a wild tangent, it kind of reminded me of a gag in The Simpsons where Marge is walking around an independent movie festival. She says something along the lines of “all the movies with nice titles are nasty! That means I’ll like the ones with nasty titles,” and she emerges from one such movie and says, beaten, “I didn’t like it.” The title here might be Candy but it is not a sweet treat in any way, shape, or form. It’s a gruelling watch, a procedural look at a relationship reaching its inevitable end through the rise and inevitable collapse of a shared drug habit. You see it all, from an admittedly anomalously fun sequence of Ledger conning a man out of the entire contents of his bank accounts, through the movie’s most difficult to watch slog of cold turkey on the discovery that the girl is pregnant, to complete mental collapse and recovery only to come to the realisation, hey babe, we’re bad for each other.

In short, it’s undeniably great at doing what it does and documenting this kind of story – Ledger’s not alone in his great performance as Abbie Cornish is more than a match for him, Geoffrey Rush is perfect as the all too kind Uncle who arguably starts the whole thing, and the casting of Cornish’s mother I found incredible, their fight in the kitchen is jawdroppingly true. I just don’t see myself watching it ever again …

The best way of summing up this is simply to say … they do make ‘em like they used to afterall. Having refreshed myself with the first three movies this week, I (along with I’m sure dozens others in the audience) got a nostalgic thrill simply from the familiar opening credits style to John Williams’ imminent strings (the Paramount logo, I won’t go into; nor the catalog of other spoilers I could let slip – normally I don’t care about such things, but this is one that would be too cruel to spoil … I won’t even add certain tags to this post until a few months time). We’re taken to a familiar location – familiar to us, but not to Jones, who appears in those iconic fragments you’ve seen in the trailer. This opening sequence ultimately leads to a classic Indy escape involving, of all things, a refridgerator. Oh, and a gopher.

Sure, the plot at times beggars belief: even when you’ve suspended your disbelief sufficiently as to enjoy these movies (watching the original trilogy in preparation is definitely recommended). In fact, I found it quite strange that even Jones – having witnessed the wrath of God, a man’s heart removed by supernatural means, and the Holy Grail in previous installments – is found saying such things as, “That’s just a legend!” in skeptical tones … maybe it’s an age thing.

But for all of its flaws – and there are plenty – as a sequel, this has everything even demanding moi hoped/expected. There are creepy crawlies (an eye-watering, itch-fit-inducing amount, beware!), waterfalls (count ‘em), car chases, quicksand, vineswinging, snakes (of course), skeletons, cobwebbed caves, and more. There’s a little old-age lamenting, Last Crusade themes slipping into John Williams’ score, which is admittedly the least original of the whole series, and the ending owes something to that unforgettable face-melting finale to Raiders (I must admit, I wish this had been a bit more graphic). You even get a little peak of something in that familiar location at the start (I’ve probably said too much now – oh well). I’m not sure if that shot was slight overkill. I’m not sure if a lot of it was overkill, lol.

All told, however, I couldn’t take the inner child grin off my wide-eyed face for the duration. The visual effects are at once nostalgic in their rear-projected glory, but startling in their modern sensibility. There’s a moment with Shia LaBeouf astride two speeding vehicles that literally took my breath away. Janusz Kaminski apparently studied the work of the earlier movies’ cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, and it paid off, from those wonderful opening credits on it really looks like an Indy movie, but again, there’s the modern touch, Kaminski’s visceral jittercam slipping in where it’s needed. It’s like everything else about the movie – it’s all the best parts of all that came before and then something extra. It’s bound to please fans and newcomers, in the fans’ case no matter what their favourite installment has been to date, but I don’t think it will displace that fave in most cases. Likewise, as expected, it’s the best film I’ve seen so far this year; though I would hope it doesn’t stay that way. All in all, it’s a helluva ride if you’re prepared to go with it.

“I’ve got something to tell you -”
“Don’t get sentimental now, dad -”
“The floor’s on fire. And the chair!”

The opening of this one is a clunky, cheesy, bitter disappointment after Temple and even after that it takes a while to get going, but I think once I got a severe case of the giggles over the old man/rubber stamp scene I found myself back in the mood that these movies require (it was definitely a good idea to re-acquaint myself with them before seeing the fourth tonight: I’m sure it’ll be awesome but you certainly need to be in the right frame of mind to get the most out of this franchise). Once Sean Connery shows up, of course, the movie enters a league all its own.

It’s a little clinical and clunky in production quality for me in the end, with as many duff notes as there are sweet ones. It feels a lot more like an Indy movie once they get inside the Holy Grail place at the end, and that “Let it go,” line from Connery really caught me offguard, I hope there’s something “deep” like that in the new movie (as well as the insanity of the end of Raiders and the whole of Temple). I’d really take the more iconic original or the joyous second over this any day, but in the end it’s still all good.