Dragonfly

Universal Pictures went through so much effort to ask critics “not to reveal any of the plot revelations” of Kevin Costner’s 2002 film, “Dragonfly” – even handing out a paper after the press screening stating specifically what cannot be spoiled.

William Arnold said in his review, “So, in full cooperation with this directive, let me just very carefully say that the film is another new-wave occult thriller, somewhat in the vein of "The Sixth Sense," with a romantic subtext, a character-driven screenplay and a bare minimum of special effects.”

It’s also realistically persuasive, with an interestingly comfortable performance by Costner, however a lot of credit goes to originality and director Tom Shadyac, steering away from the raunchy comedy that made him famous – can’t quite create the proceedings into anything special.

Costner plays a busy Chicago emergency room doctor mourning over the passing of his doctor wife, played by Susanna Thompson, who died in a bus accident when performing her volunteer work for Red Cross in the jungles of Venezuela.

As an M.D., he’s completely doubtful about anything metaphysical. However, after talking to two children cancer patients who have had near-death experiences, he eventually comes to a point that his late wife is trying to contact him spiritually.

Eventually, he’s seeing a bizarre cross symbol everywhere he looks, having visits from dragonflies (his wife’s “personal totem”) and he constantly is called by his friends and co-workers a nutcase as he decides to look into how to reconnect with his late wife.

Arnold noted, “The screenplay by Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson, and polished by old-pro David Seltzer, is agreeably free of exploitative nonsense, but also fairly weak and derivative, rather clumsily borrowing the romantic element of "Ghost" and one of the main plot devices of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."”

Director Shadyac tries hard to make the adjustment to New Age drama, but he can’t really succeed at that. Several of the scenes are strong, but the major delicate romance doesn’t really match with him, and some of the direction is noticeably poor.

The film’s strength is Costner. This wrongfully-hated actor, who has never gotten back his strength after the public-relations disaster of “Waterworld,” nicely drives the movie with his laid-back likability. In his greatest moments, he makes the viewers completely believe his character and feel his pain.

I know that this movie really got a lot of hate from people, but I personally think this is a really emotional film that has a great payoff. Once you see the movie and see what happens at the end, you will feel the weight of the emotions that were in the film the whole time. I won’t spoil it, but you have to see this movie to believe it. Ignore all the hate and bashing that this film has gotten, watch the film and see it for yourself. I honestly think that people should see this movie for themselves and judge it on their own thoughts. You will love the movie and might be left crying at the end.

Well everyone, I want to thank all of you for joining in on “Kevin Costner Month.” I hope all of you enjoyed this month, and I hope that I made some good recommendations of Costner movies that everyone should check out. Also, I hope that everyone will at least not hate on Costner, as he is a good actor and not a boring one that everyone wants to make him out to be.

Thank you for joining in on my reviews this month. Look out next month for more excitement coming your way.

Waterworld

The thought of “Waterworld,” released in 1995, being “Mad Max” in the water is a right one, as both films are set in a post-apocalyptic world with anarchy, strange villains, and machinery chaos. The film would become well-known for being really over budget (becoming the most expensive film at the time), and when everyone heard about the production problems, it became a dud for many critics, while American audiences stayed away, believing its place as one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, despite it would get back its money in foreign releases.

For everything that made it bad, it’s actually not all that bad, and it does have some enjoyment as a simple action movie. Unfortunately, it isn’t really targeting action fans, as it has more in science fiction, adventure, drama and even a little comedy, and with these genres, the entertainment value is just at best, or at worst, almost missing.

The setting of “Waterworld” is a few hundred years from the present (maybe longer), when a time when the Earth is completely covered by water after the polar ice caps have melted away. The idea of dry land is only a myth, and the cost of currency on the trading market is dirt, which is the latest finding that the dusky mariner with no name, played by Kevin Costner, has a weak form of communication. When it’s found out that he has gills and webbed feet, he is called a mutant and is sentenced to die. However, an iron-fisted investor named Deacon (the late Dennis Hopper) attacks the sea village (the Atoll) close to his inevitable death, and in exchange for their safe passage, the mariner brings in two new passengers on his ship – a woman named Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and a young girl named Enola (Tina Majorino). He hears that Enola has a tattoo on her back that is said to be a map to find dry land, and Deacon really wants to get her, stopping at nothing, including killing so many innocents to get that map to dry land.

Vince Leo said in his review, “Shaky science notwithstanding (many have claimed it an impossibility for the entire Earth to be covered in water even if the entirety of the polar caps melt), Waterworld seems the equivalent of a Roger Corman film if he had almost $200 million at his disposal to make one of his pet projects come to life.   Perhaps as a low-budget film, this sort of idea would have been enough to be passable as cult science fiction fare, but as a major studio attempt at a summer blockbuster, it's woefully inadequate.  The acting, especially by Hopper, is way over the top, with silly shenanigans and half-baked scientific explanations that make it unsuitable as a film to be taken seriously.” A man that is a mutant with gills, who even knows if that will take millions of years to happen, isn’t even worth the dramatic tension to pamper, especially since it doesn’t even fall under being really important to the overall story.

Leo said, “Yes, this was a far-fetched crock just from the first idea, and one can only speculate as to why such a lavish production couldn't have started with securing the rights to a more fully developed screenplay before they even started to engage in their free-spending production.” The only things of the film that work to its credit are the stunts and sword-fighting action scenes. Sadly, those aren’t really enough to hold our attention in a two hour and fifteen minute movie.

“Waterworld” isn’t as bad as the following you have heard about, but it’s also not nearly good enough to be called anything more than a wasteful mindless popcorn movie. Leo suggested, “If you're in the mood for escapist adventure and explosive vehicular carnage, this may suit your needs.  Even so, The Road Warrior did the same but much better at less that 3% of the budget of this overblown, underdeveloped misfire.”

Jack Black is also in this movie, but he doesn’t really leave a big impact. There’s so many plot holes that start to add up and for “the expensive movie at the time,” I would want more out of this as well. However, as a simple action movie, it’s not that bad. The sets are a lot of fun, you really get an atmosphere for this world, Dennis Hopper is enjoyably over the top, and watching the technical of this world is really enjoyable. I liked seeing how everything works and functions as it makes the world feel look a lot more practical and real. As a movie, this just falls right in the middle as an ok, average flick. Check it out if you’d like, but I don’t think this is for everyone. Also, Costner’s acting is not boring in this movie.

Alright everyone, stay tuned next week when I finish off “Kevin Costner Month.”

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Remembering the great romantic action heroes, one instantly locked on their images: Errol Flynn, oddly gaunt and fit, his eyes filled with splendid trouble. Sean Connery as James Bond, his dark black hair balance by bushy eyebrows, leathery tan, white tux. Owen Gleiberman said in his review, “As vital as appearance was to these peerless superstars, though, it was how they sounded that crystallized their personalities. Flynn’s swashbuckling heroes almost seemed to be singing their dialogue. And Connery summoned up all of 007’s egocentric virility through the darting, sensual way he dug into the words “Bond James Bond” (a line none of his successors has ever quite mastered). Where would these actors be without their voices, without the inner, expressive counterpart to their feats of derring-do?” They’d be with Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” released in 1991, stuck in the role of an amazing hero – and, as Gleiberman said, “sounding like he just woke up to answer the phone.”

As Robin of Locksley, Costner says his lines in a relaxed, earnest inactivity. The problem isn’t his American accent, which occasionally comes off as acting-class British. It looks like he is thoughtful, distantly depressed. (Smiling looks like a huge help for him.) When Robin says that he’s just not going to join the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, he’s going to lead them; we don’t get his passion, his enthusiastic desire to hold control. Gleiberman said, “Costner sounds like he’s just decided to run for city council.”

As a work of avoidance, this long, action-filled, 2-hour-and-21-minute “Robin Hood” does its job. You get sucked into the story, production values, and some choice supporting actors. Gleiberman said, “Yet it’s a rouser without a rousing hero.” Costner doesn’t make himself bad – he has the star presence the role asks for. What he’s not is an emotional Robin Hood. Gleiberman said, “And without the sense that Robin is on a humanistic mission (one that’s a pleasure to fulfill), the story has no charge. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves often feels like it was made by committee. The woodland images are robust and organic, yet the shots aren’t edited together to form a consistent point of view.” You have to keep getting your attitudes, and when you look to Costner, what you see – fantastically – is a haze.

Gleiberman said, “The classic Errol Flynn version, made in 1938, isn’t a great movie, yet there’s magic — an ethereal jubilance and ease — in Flynn’s performance. He convinces you he’s having the party of his life out there in the greenwood.” At first, the makers of “Prince of Thieves” look to be making the story dark. Robin, having going through years of prison and torture during the Crusades, escapes his defeaters in Jerusalem and returns to the mountains of England. Joined by his trusted friend Azeem, played by Morgan Freeman, a religious Muslim Moor with a triangle of religious symbols tattooed on each cheek, he finds out that his loving home is under the rule of fear. Among other crimes, the fascist Sherriff of Nottingham, played by the late Alan Rickman, has murdered Robin’s nobleman father. Robin promises, “I will not rest until my father is avenged.” Then he cuts his hand open to show that he means it.

Gleiberman notes, “For a while, the movie looks like it’s going to follow in the mold of 1989’s Batman — adding a bedeviled element to the crime-fighting romanticism, turning the hero into a man who battles evil in the name of vengeance. Yet all this gets dropped pretty quickly.” Robin’s father is barely mentioned again, and the movie becomes the familiar story of Robin and his joking peasant comrades struggling to bring down the evil sheriff. There are some intense action scenes. Gleiberman said, “The director, Kevin Reynolds, gives them a contemporary brutality and zap, especially when the men unsheath their clanking broadswords, which are so heavy they hardly need to be sharp to kill you. But for all the rousing sequences of Robin and his men shooting off flaming arrows and combatting the sheriff’s forces, there aren’t enough occasions when they triumph through their wits. Robin Hood, after all, is meant to be a trickster, a rogue. But we don’t see enough of his charming guile. What’s more, except for a couple of whiz-bang camera effects devoted to the spectacle of arrows in flight, we’re barely invited to take pleasure in his prowess as an archer.”

Gleiberman continues, “The live-wire excitement that is missing from Costner’s performance is there in Alan Rickman as the twisted sheriff. Rickman, who was the terrorist in Die Hard, has a gift for playing villains who are made physically itchy by their thwarted ambitions. He’s got great Silly Putty features: His mouth, crammed with bad English teeth, contorts into pretzels of disgust and rage — yet above it, his big schnoz and pleading eyes recall Ringo Starr’s soft-edged melancholy. (He’s a psycho who’s crying on the inside.) Sporting a jet-black, ’60s-heavy-metal do, his Sheriff of Nottingham is like a skinny rat who can’t stop gnawing. There’s a comic impatience to this gimlet-eyed dictator, who wenches to relieve his anxiety. Rickman, coating every line in sarcastic venom, makes the character a perverse, modern fiend, yet he’s also in the tradition of British-ham megalomaniacs who, going back to Shakespeare’s Richard III, express their love of evil through words.”

People probably say that Costner is dominated by Rickman. However, the truth is that he’s dominated by just about every actor who has been in a scene with him. Christian Slater (who looks like he’s Jack Nicholson’s son) as the noisy, fight-loving Will Scarlett, Nick Brimble as funny Little John, Freeman as the stoic Azeem, who looks at “civilized” England with, as Gleiberman says, “a quizzically cocked eyebrow — each of these actors has a spark, and you end up wanting to see more of them.” It’s only their boss who doesn’t deserve to be called merry.

Yes, I did mention Connery at the beginning, but that’s because he makes a cameo near the end of the movie. Other than that, this is a good movie that everyone should see. If you liked Walt Disney’s “Robin Hood” and want a more serious, but likable, version of the famous character, than this one is for you. Give it a watch because you will love it. Morgan Freeman definitely played a great Muslim character, one of the best I have ever seen in movie history.

Stay tuned next week when he continue “Kevin Costner Month” with one of the biggest box office bombs in movie history.

Field of Dreams

The farmer is standing in the middle of a cornfield when he hears the voice for the first time: “If you build it, he will come.” He looks around and doesn’t see anyone. The voice once again says, soft and hush-hush: “If you build it, he will come.” Roger Ebert said in his review, “Sometimes you can get too much sun, out there in a hot Iowa cornfield in the middle of the season. But this isn’t a case of sunstroke.”

Right to the part when the farmer starts hearing these whispers, “Field of Dreams,” released in 1989, is a completely reasonable film about a young couple who want to run a family farm in Iowa. Ray and Annie Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan, have tested the fast track and can’t do that anymore, and they enjoy sitting on the porch and watching their grass grow. Ebert said, “When the voice speaks for the first time, the farmer is baffled, and so was I: Could this be one of those religious pictures where a voice tells the humble farmer where to build the cathedral?”

Yes, this is a religious movie, but the religion is baseball. When he doesn’t understand the voice, Ray is given a vision of a baseball diamond, right on his cornfield.

If he builds it, the voice sounds clairvoyant, Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) will come and play on it – Shoeless Joe, who was a team player on the infamous 1919 Black Sox team but protested until the day he died that he played the best he could.

Ebert said, “As “Field of Dreams” developed this fantasy, I found myself being willingly drawn into it.” Movies are really fearful nowadays, so afraid to take on these imaginations, that there is something huge and courageous about a movie where a voice tells a farmer to build a baseball diamond so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can appear in the cornfield and start playing ball. Ebert makes the right description, “This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in -- a movie about dreams.”

The best thing to do is not give a lot of the plot away. (Ebert admitted, “I’m grateful I knew nothing about the movie when I went to see it, but the ads give away the Shoeless Joe angle.”) It’s best that Annie supports Ray’s vision, and how he sees it’s needed to drive to Boston so that he can get the help of a famous writer (James Earl Jones) who has disappeared, and north to Minnesota to talk to the spirit of a doctor (the great Burt Lancaster) who never got the chance to play with the pros.

The movie wisely never tries to make the smallest explanation for the strange events that happen after the diamond is made.

Of course, the usual business happens about how the bank thinks Ray has lost his mind and wants to foreclose on his mortgage (the Capra and Stewart movies always had evil bankers in them). However, there is not a corny, stupid payoff at the end. Instead, the movie relies on a poetic look to make its point.

The director, Phil Alden Robinson, and the writer, W.P. Kinsella, are dealing with a story that’s close to the heart (it can’t be a concurrence that the author and the protagonist share a last name).

They love baseball, and they think it stands for a nicer time in the past when professional sports were still games and not business.

There is a speech in this movie about baseball that is so nice and true that it is motivating. The behavior toward the players reflects the attitude. Ebert asks, “Why do they come back from the great beyond and play in this cornfield? Not to make any kind of vast, earthshattering statement, but simply to hit a few and field a few, and remind us of a good and innocent time.”

It is a difficult task to do in a movie like this. There is always the risk of being ridiculous. Costner and Madigan make a really relatable, realistic married couple that one of the themes of the movie is the way love means sharing your partner’s dreams. Jones and Lancaster cream small, great character pictures – two older men who have taken the paths life gave them, but never forgotten what baseball represented to them when they were young.

Ebert said, ““Field of Dreams” will not appeal to grinches and grouches and realists. It is a delicate movie, a fragile construction of one goofy fantasy after another. But it has the courage to be about exactly what it promises. “If you build it, he will come.” And he does. In a baseball movie named “The Natural,” the hero seemed almost messianic.”

“Field of Dreams” has a more modest take. The spirit of Shoeless Joe does not return to save the world. He just wants to answer that sad call that has become a baseball legend: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” And the answer is it ain’t.

My dad and I both say this is one of our favorite movies of all time. We really love how this movie is showing the nicer time of baseball and how all the spirits of baseball players in the past come back to just play a simple sport. My dad was really young when his dad passed away, so seeing this movie makes him wish that something like this could happen so that the spirit of his dad could come back. It’s an emotional film, so if you cry while watching it, I won’t be surprised. However, this is a movie that you should not miss out on because it’s a classic that needs to be seen. Afterwards, you will be saying the famous lines, “If you build it, he will come,” “Go the distance” and “Ease his pain.”

Look out next week where we look at a nice movie on a famous fantasy character in the continuation of “Kevin Costner Month.”

The Untouchables

This is a nice month that I have planned out because I will be looking at the famous movies that starred Kevin Costner, an underrated and wrongfully hated actor, in my opinion. People might find his acting boring, but I don’t. However, I don’t want to spend the entire time defending him, but instead taking a look at films that he starred in. To kick off this month, I will be looking at the 1987 classic and one of my favorite films, “The Untouchables.”

You’re never sure what you’re watching in “The Untouchables.” Desson Howe said in his review, “There's an entertaining but incongruous mix of class and pulp. Director Brian De Palma gives you an esoteric tribute to "Battleship Potemkin" -- a Russian film of the 1920s -- as well as a dip into the pulp-lore of the old Warner Brothers gangster flicks. He gives you "The Magnificent Seven Wear Armani," and then a period "Roadrunner."”

Howe continues, “De Palma and screenwriter David Mamet have doctored Eliot Ness's true account of his battle against Al Capone's empire into a facile Hollywood pantomime, where you hiss and boo at the Mob and cheer the four Fearless Cops just doin' their job. The gritty story of 1930s Chicago becomes grist for the 1980s Lite-legend mill. Just the heroics, please, Ma'am.”

The true story definitely gives this treatment. Al Capone really did control Chicago, his violent nature in everything – even had a scarred face. On top of being played by the incomparable (and fat to depiction) Robert De Niro, he’s a smirking suave with a Mussolini walk. Howe noted, “In a scene cribbed from the baptismal murders in "The Godfather," he orders an assassination while crying ethnically at the opera. He's a bum in expensive clothing -- slugs his lawyer when his trial goes awry and beats a flunkie's brains out at an elegant dinner party.” You didn’t think De Palma would exclude any of this detail did you?

Howe noted, “Eliot Ness, as portrayed in his 1957 book "The Untouchables," was American Gothic-straight, determined to wipe out crime with a near-messianic sense of purpose. He was America's straitlaced Gordon of the Nile, or Robert Baden-Powell. For Ness, if it was the law -- good law or bad law -- it had to be obeyed.”

As a result, it’s unnecessary to criticize Kevin Costner’s Ness for being a stick-in-the-mud. However, there’s little about this novel character to understand with. Despite there being a storm of murdering crimes around him, he’s calm, boring eye of the crime. Mamet gives Ness a wife and children, guessing to make his character humane. However, as a husband and father, Ness is only halfway – an explosive person. “Sure is nice to be married,” he keeps saying. You wonder why.

Howe notes, “As a Treasury Department agent assigned to break Capone, he sleepwalks into a palm-greasy town, naive as a Boy Scout.” However, he assigns veteran Irish cop Jimmy Malone, played by Sean Connery, as a generous Svengali, to show him the ways of Windy Hades. They also get a street-smart, quick with a gun Italian cop (Andy Garcia) and a disabled, bespectacled accountant (Charles Martin Smith) to their team and they become a type of foursome who can’t be bought – hence “the Untouchables.” This is where the guns start firing.

While Mamet gives the four characters some moments of funny friend fights – the underrated Connery gives the human force here – his characters are melodramatic plot points (mother of murdered child, dishonest cop, and cover). Howe ended his review by saying, “And some of De Palma's shoot 'em up and chase scenes, while initially exciting, wear out their welcomes because De Palma tends to render everything into movie-brat rhapsody. Things seem to drag lushly on forever. And although he can make a scene explosive with dynamic editing and overhead camera angles, after a while you may start to think you're a voyeuristic -- and very dizzy -- seagull.”

If you haven’t seen this movie, don’t read the review and go out and watch this. This is one of those movies you have to see because it is a classic. You will absolutely love the characters, the look, the sets, the design, the costumes, the actors, the dialogue, the action, everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a good adaptation of the novel that does it justice and really follows the history right. Do not miss your chance to see this movie; it’s one of those that I have a high recommendation to that has to be seen to be believed.

Look out next week where I look at another classic movie in “Kevin Costner Month.”