Director: Ed Zwick.
Cast: Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Billy Connolly

When we first are introduced to Nathan Algren, he is slumped in a chair in a darkened room taking swigs from a flask of whiskey. We know immediately that he is a good man tortured by a dark past who will be redeemed and find peace by the end of the movie. We also know that director Ed Zwick isn’t going to give us anything very fresh or original. In a bid to reach the widest possible audience, Zwick has opted to tell this epic story through conventions already established in blockbusters like Dances With Wolves and Braveheart. It’s a testament to the underlying power of the story that the movie still works fairly well, but it’s also quite a missed opportunity to do something much grander.

The Last Samurai focuses on Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) who is a suicidal alchoholic former Civil War hero hired by the Japanese government to train their army. The film is sketchy about the historic details, but there is essentially a Samurai rebellion occurring in Japan. There is a movement in the government to Westernize Japan and the Samurai represent those that hold to traditional Japanese beliefs. When Algren’s troops are sent to battle prematurely, they are slaughtered and he is captured. He is taken captive by Katsumoto, leader of the Samurai rebellion. While in captivity, Algren falls in love with the samurai culture and ends up finding the redemption and spiritual healing we knew he would. When all the ***censored*** hits the fan, Algren, no nobody’s surprise decides to fight on the side of the samurai.

The movie is built with reliable elements that have proven themselves to be Hollywood gold. Tom Cruise delivers a perfect Tom Cruise performance. Zwick keeps the action moving at an effective pace and doesn’t introduce enough actual history to complicate things. The cinematography by John Toll is exquisitely beautiful and the Hans Zimmer soundtrack proudly proclaims that “this movie is an epic.”

Aside from the sheer beauty of the film, the real standout is Ken Watanabe as Katsumoto, leader of the Samurai. Watanabe’s screen presence is so powerful that it is almost enough to fill the void left by the weak script and direction. This guy looks like he was born to star in Akira Kurosawa movies but was unfortunately just born too late. Watanabe believably brings Katsumoto to life as a fully fleshed out character, not just a bad-***censored*** warrior. He is, no doubt about it, a bad-***censored***, but he makes you BELIEVE in bushido. He radiates it. It may be the strength and fragility he brings to this role that keeps the whole movie from folding like a deck of cards. 

The Last Samurai wants to have the best of both worlds. It wants to be a big important epic, but it doesn’t want to ask the hard questions or delve very deep into the heart of the characters. It also wants to be a big dumb action film, but it wants to have a serious and important message.

Ultimately, The Last Samurai is a politically correct action movie for privileged white guys. The irony is that the guys who love movies like this and Braveheart are the same guys who are gung-ho about blasting the ***censored*** out of “primitive” civilizations in the middle east. It’s a self-important movie with some great action sequences and a star-making performance by Ken Watanabe. For true cinephiles, it will probably serve as a reminder that it’s time to dust off your Akira Kurosawa movies and watch Ran or The Seven Samurai once again.

Review by Christopher Sharpe.

My first exposure to Ozone director J.R. Bookwalter came from an old issue of Fangoria Magazine. I can’t remember the issue number but this had to be back in the early to mid 1980s. Featured in the issue was a full-color spread about a film called The Dead Next Door. I was immediately captivated by the bloody images of zombies reaching out for chunks of raw flesh. But the thing that really caught my attention was that the film was being shot on Super-8 by some seventeen year old geek with glasses and a mullet. Although it took me years to finally get my hands on a copy of the film, the Fangoria article planted a seed in my fevered movie-obsessed brain: If this geek in Ohio was making his own movies… so could I.

By this time I finally saw The Dead Next Door, it had already developed quite a cult following. Honestly, I was a little disappointed in the film. It had a raw energy, some cool efffects and a unique visual style, but it definitely wasn’t going to give George Romero a run for his money. But it did make me curious about what else J.R. Bookwalter had been up to. I found out he had directly an embarrassing 16mm flick called Robot Ninja, followed by a succession of even more embarrassing shot-on-video flicks.

But then I heard about a soon to be released movie called Ozone. Supposedly, Bookwalter had gathered all his resources had set out to push the envelope of what could be done with a shot-on-video feature. This was his last ditch effort to return to his roots and atone for his previous shot-on-video sins.

When Ozone was finally released by Bookwalter’s Suburban Tempe Home video company, it was like a bomb had been dropped on the low-budget filmmaking scene. On the surface, Ozone was nothing more than an effective little horror film about a designer drug that turns people into liquified corpses. A cop named Eddie Boone (nicely played by James Black) is investigating the death of his partner when he becomes entwined in a plotline that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But who cares about plot when the movie is chock-full of zombies, subterranean gladiator fights, spooky hallucinations and disgusting back-alley birthing scenes. Basically, it contains plenty of all the elements that fans of low-budget horror look for in a movie.

But if you were an aspiring filmmaker at the time, there was an added element of excitement. The really exciting news was that Bookwalter had somehow pulled off a feature length film shot on Super-VHS for a budget of $3,500 and it WORKED. Not only did it work, it was full of cool special effects and even had “morphing”! This is the movie that finally showed aspiring filmmakers that it was POSSIBLE to make a decent movie with their consumer video equipment. And with that realization, the shot-on-video filmmaking movement truly began.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Bookwalter has revisited the film for its DVD release. He has taken advantage of his new state-of-the-art production facilities to completely remaster the video and audio as well as recreating a lot of the special effects. Ozone has never looked or sounded better. However, the latest digital technology can’t help the paper-thin plot, nor can it erase the mullets or some of the extremely dated clothes. But maybe that’s a good thing. After all, too much tinkering around with this underground “classic” would obscure the films original accomplishment. Even with the somewhat hokey special effects of the original version, there was no denying Bookwalter’s visual talent behind the camera. 

As with all Tempe DVDs, the film is supplemented with a slew of great special features including a 30-minute documentary and a commentary track by Bookwalter and lead actor James Black. If you’re an aspiring filmmaker you have no excuse for not buying this film right now. I would consider it an essential.

If on the other hand, you don’t want to make a movie, but just want to see melting junkies and chicks crapping out mutant babies in dirty alleys, give Ozone a spin. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Reviewed by Christopher Sharpe.

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Director:Thomas McCarthy
Cast: Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Williams, Paul Benjamin

Finbar McBride is an ordinary kind of guy who lives a semi-boring life. He is obsessed with trains and works in a tiny shop repairing model trains. He leads a quiet solitary life, and he likes it that way. By the way, he’s a dwarf.

When his good friend dies, he leaves Fin an old train depot in a small New Jersey town. Fin moves into the depot eager for more solitary living. However, he soon finds his new living quarters a hub of activity for some of the small towns residents.

By this point, you’re probably cringing.  A dwarf? A small town? Eccentric characters? An obsession with trains? It sounds like a mish-mash of bad indie movie clichés. That’s pretty much what I thought. However, I was pleasantly surprised by this film.

The Station Agent is actually a refreshingly original and unsentimental movie. Rather than trying to dazzle us with camera tricks or over-the-top emotional scenes, first time director Thomas McCarthy keeps the film focused on the characters. The dialogue, direction and cinematography are cut to the bone. They keep the story moving along gracefully, but stay out of the way of the wonderful performances. This focus probably has a lot to do with McCarthy’s background as an actor.

Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale all deliver pitch perfect performances as the three leads of the film. They inhabit their roles effortlessly and honestly don’t even look like they’re trying.

They portray three very different people who are thrown together by the mundane nature of everyday life and end up forming a cautious friendship. Patricia Clarkson is Olivia, a local woman who has been through hell and is trying to somehow get through the rest of her life. Bobby Cannavale is Joe, a big-hearted lug who you’ll wish was really your best friend. And Peter Dinklage is Finbar, a man who happens to be a dwarf and is gunshy about relationships with other people. As good as everything about this film is, it’s Dinklage that really steals the show. For what is essentially the main character, he has a tiny amount of dialogue, but still delivers a fully fleshed out and complicated performance.

The film is almost defiantly anti-Hollywood in its refusal to deliver overly-emotional moments. The Station Agent will probably work even better on DVD than it does in the theater. If you see this with the wrong crowd, it could easily sink your enjoyment of this film. It’s understated, quiet style could easily be destroyed by an audience with a short attention span an an inability to keep their mouth closed when they chew popcorn.

Tom McCarthy has delivered a fine film with a compelling story, fine direction and some of the best performances you’ll see all year. 

Review by Christopher Sharpe.

Finally, a holiday movie for people who hate the holidays, hate humanity and hate being alive.

Director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World) has crafted a darkly cynical Christmas film that has more in common with 1970’s underground comics than It’s A Wonderful Life. If you thought Ebenezer Scrooge was a ***censored***… just wait until you meet Bad Santa.

Willie Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) is a booze swilling, ***censored*** sex loving con man with one skill in life: he can crack safes. Willie is lazy, foul-mouthed and unmotivated. Luckily, the vision is supplied by his pint-sized partner, Marcus.  Marcus has has stumbled across a scam that will allow the duo to pull just one job a year… thus freeing up the rest of the year for Willie to wallow in alcoholic misery.

The scam is this: WIllie and Marcus advertise themselves as a bargain basement Santa and elf to suburban shopping malls and department stores.  They travel from city to city and work for a few days in costume, gathering insider knowledge about the security situation at each store. Then, they spring into action after hours, crack the safe and go their separate ways until the next holiday season.

The only real problem with this plan is Willie himself. He hates kids, he’s uses the f-word compulsively and he drinks until he urinates all over his Santa trousers. They have pulled the scam for many years, but this year Willie is slipping even deeper into his self-destructive habits and is raising the suspicions of the nervous shopping mall manager (played to snivelling perfection by John Ritter). 

Marcus struggles to keep Willie on track until they can pull the heist. In the mean time Willie befriends a seemingly dim-witted fat kid who actually believes that Willie is the real Santa Claus. When Willie finds out the kid lives in a big house with a clueless grandmother who loves making sandwiches, he decides he should move in to their nice suburban house with them. To complete his new domestic situation, he picks up a cute bartender (Lauren Graham) with a fetish for banging alcoholic men dressed up as Santa Claus because they remind her of “daddy.”

Once the premise is set up, Bad Santa works as more of a character study than a comedy or crime caper. Writers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra ruthlessly peel the layers and show us the pitch-black heart of this character. These guys are best know for their screenplays for kiddie flicks Cats and Dogs and the recent Looney Tunes movie, so it’s obvious that they had some venom to get out of their systems.

Zwigoff is the perfect accomplice, because he obviously relishes shredding all the conventions of Christmas movies. From Santa Claus to advent calendars, Zwigoff puts it all on the chopping block. Willie is vomited and urinated on by a procession of annoying brats until he ends up urinating on himself. And in what would be the “cute kid” role in a normal holiday movie, Zwigoff casts a chubby, dim-witted looking kid and encrusts his pudgy face with snot to erase any trace of cute-ness the audience might find in him.

The film does fall apart a bit in the final third as a few new plot threads are introduced and hurriedly tied-up. But the first two thirds of the movie are so caustically funny that it doesn’t matter. I have no idea how Dimension thinks they can market this film to a general audience, but you’ve got to give everybody involved credit for creating this highly original holiday film.

Review by Christopher Sharpe.

"Somebody pull up the Anchor...this thing is dragging”

With a laboriously sluggish story line and vaguely developed characters, high hopes for Master and Commander as the next epic blocbuster may sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Master and Commander is based on the historical novel by Author Patrick O Brian, a relatively undiscovered, author of the twentieth century whose naval adventure novels in recent years have been acclaimed as the best historical novels ever written. Certainly the great praise paid to this
writer is warranted, however not all stories translate well from paper to film, this movie being a good example.

The only reason I can determine the film makers would make this book into a film would be to somehow feed the non-History informed, reality TV watching populace a spoon sized, unseasoned piece of what it was to live and fight among a 19th-century British ship in the times of the Napoleanic Wars.

In that attempt they do deliver what would seem to be historical accuracy, some of the most interesting being the crude surgeries the ship’s Doctor, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) would perform on the seamen after battle. But, other than a few interesting glimpses into the daily lives of these men, the film grossly fails to provide any real character development. The storyline sinks and bobs in and out of the audiences interest for almost the whole of the movie.

Russell Crowe, does deliver faithfully the role of Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey, the arrogant but loveable tyrant of the Naval ship, who stops every 15 minutes in the movie to give one of his lesser cohorts a pat on the back and a reminder of his run-ins with great politicians and warriors. However, there is little real definition as to the motives and or real relationships with Aubrey and his crew. Sadly, just as we are revealed an ever so slight glimpse into one of the supporting cast’s characters they are promptly killed off.

Not until the last 30 minutes of the movie is there a feeling of engagement between the crew and continuity to the story, which really is too little too late.

Master and Commander isn’t bad, but it isn’t great. And with all of the great movies made in the history of cinema, and the few spare hours that you have to sit and watch them in your life, you may be wasting precious time viewing this one.

Olivia Frisbie is a graphic designer currently living in Oklahoma City. Check out her website and pay her lots of money to design stuff for you.