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| The Return of Movie Guru |
I am often asked "Whatever happened to the Movie Guru?" The answer is simple. "Brooklyn's Finest."
Three Brooklyn cops. Ethan Hawke is a narcotics detective who robs and kills drug dealers in order to save enough for a down payment on a new house. His current house has mold, which is making his pregnant wife and their kids sick.
Richard Gere is an alcoholic, suicidal patrolman coming up on retirement, waiting to collect his pension before asking a prostitute to move with him to Connecticut.
Don Cheadle is an undercover cop who is sick of being an undercover cop and can get a promotion out of undercover if he sets up for a fall his friend Wesley Snipes.
Let us jump to the end of the movie. Each of the three cops' stories end at the same time and place, a Brooklyn tenement building after midnight. Ethan Hawke is there to rob and kill drug dealers. Don Cheadle is there to kill the drug dealer who killed Wesley Snipes. Richard Gere is there to save kidnapped sex slaves.
For all intents and purposes, each of the three cops are off the clock. In Richard Gere's case he is actually retired since at midnight his retirement became official. The prostitute has just celebrated this occasion by turning down his offer to move with him to Connecticut. Gere is sitting in his car, loading his gun, preparing to kill himself, when he notices a missing person being dragged into a van. Gere follows the van to the tenement building.
Ethan Hawke goes to one floor of the building, jimmies a door, shoots three bullets in three different directions, and three drug dealers meet instantaneous death.
On another floor Don Cheadle finds the gansta who shot Wesley Snipes, shoots three bullets in three different directions, wounds three drug dealers, chases the gansta who killed Wesley Snipes into the street and shoots him dead.
On a different floor Richard Gere sneaks into an apartment where three naked sex slaves are being held, subdues the first bad guy, shoots the second bad guy in the heart (which really pisses the bad guy off), and in a life and death struggle with this fighting zombie, Gere manages to choke him to death with a zip tie.
Ethan Hawke is filling his pockets with money for the down payment when he is shot three times in the back. Hawke spends several minutes gurgling blood while the bad guy gets away.
Don Cheadle is standing over the dead guy in the street, savoring his revenge, when by mistake he is shot three times in the back by Ethan Hawke's best buddy cop partner who happens to be there looking for Hawke.
Richard Gere walks away from the carnage without getting shot in the back. I assume he is on his way to Connecticut.
In March of 2010 I sat through "Brooklyn's Finest." It was like getting shot in the back three times. I am only now recovering. |
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| Senior Ticket Special |
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| Recent Movies That Made My Head Explode |
 1. Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Brilliant scientist James Franco battles authority at every opportunity. From his company's laboratory he sneaks home his braniac serum discovery and tests it on his father who has Alzheimers. From his company's laboratory he sneaks home a braniac baby ape, who he raises as his son. He goes out with his girlfriend for years and never has sex, too busy playing with his ape. James Franco does what he wants, when he wants, however he wants. Then the authorities take away his ape child and places the animal in a solitary confinement camp for bad simians. All of a sudden the boy genius Franco transforms into milquetoast and cannot figure a way to recover his ape child either legally or illegally. It is pathetic to watch. Franco lets his ape child suffer and change because the animal warden says "Boo." The angry ape, no longer a child, leads the other apes to sanctuary in Muir Woods Redwood Forest, north of San Francisco, where they plot the overthrow of earthlings.
 2. Warrior - Two estranged brothers end up fighting for $5 million in a winner take all Mixed Martial Arts Tournament in Atlantic City. Nick Nolte is their father. What a mess. Thomas Hardy is the bad son. He gives the performance of a lifetime. Joel Edgerton is the good son. He is a school teacher whose house is going into foreclosure. Here is what makes my head explode. The schoolteacher is a midget among monsters. Since it is only a movie, I can accept him making it to the semi-final match against the unbeatable Russian. But there is absolutely no way in a million years that the school teacher is going to be able to beat the Russian, let alone the next day breaking his brother's arm while beating his brother in the finals. Yet this is what happens in the movie. You would think that with all the time and money spent making the movie, someone would have stood up and said, "Hey. I know you want the good brother to win, but how about this? The bad brother beats the unbeatable Russian in the semi-finals. In the battle royale his arm gets broken. Then the good brother can believably beat his super human bad brother in the finals the next day because the bad brother is fighting with only one arm." Case closed.
 3. Contagion - This Stephen Soderbergh movie starts with a terrific premise: a cheating wife starts a worldwide epidemic which leads to the end of humankind as we know it. But the premise and the movie collapses when humankind fights back and wins, celebrating with a living room Prom night. After seeing what Katrina did to New Orleans in days, are we suppose to believe for a minute that months after the world begins reeling out of control, there is still electricity, running water, food, and television? Instead of Stephen King's "The Stand," we get a Walt Disney fairy tale. What a letdown.
 4. The Debt - Just because a movie tackles a serious subject using excellent actors and actresses; that does not mean it cannot contain head-exploding moments. In The Debt I will never accept that a highly-trained Mossad team can disintegrate to the point where the female is left alone with the mass murderer and spends her time placing empty pots and pans around the apartment catching rainwater from the leaky roof. And the movie's finish, Helen Mirren wrestling to the death with the 80ish fiend, is as silly as any of a thousand other incredulous movie endings.
5. Columbiana/Straw Dogs - Even though both of these movies include head exploding moments: in Straw Dogs the sexy Hollywood actress undresses in an open window while slobbering extras left over from Deliverance look on; in Columbiana the grown up professional assassin loses a second set of loving parents as if that is needed to continue motivating her revenge. However, despite these scenes, neither movie makes my head explode. They are each successful, mindless B-movie entertainments.
 Straw Dogs - When the hulking ex-boyfriend rebukes the clueless Hollywood screenwriter for walking out of the church sermon, and later when he looks at the wall-size storyline for the screenwriter's next script and says about the Battle of Stalingrad, "This should be 1943, not 1944," that intelligence presages the key moment when he stops his friend from a second rape. A mindless movie with these kinds of touches is a mindless movie I want to see.
 Columbiana - The female killer escapes from impossible circumstances several times, once as a little girl, and later as a grownup. These scenes are full of terrific action and imagination, in what has been described by Manny Farber as "termite art." When you chew your way through the surface mindlessness and find something vibrant and appealing, that is termite art.
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| XD - Extreme Digital Cinema only at South Point |
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| The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 |
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