SPANGLISH (2004)
Paz Vega, Téa Leoni, Adam Sandler, Cloris Leachman
Directed by James L. Brooks


Spanglish is giving me fits on how to rate it -- obviously, you see I didn't care for the movie. But it's an interesting movie to watch to see a concept just completely fall on its ass any number of times. I want to say, "I need to watch this again to really give a definitive rating," but the problem is, I have absolutely zero desire to ever watch this again.

Adam Sandler is given top billing in another one of his serious roles, and he does a fine job. Unfortunately, he is only rarely in the film in any meaningful way, and screen time is largely taken up by Paz Vega, who does a fine job, and Téa Leoni, who absolutely does not, delivering another of her trademark overacting performances. Maybe it's the point of the character, but this seems like it wants to be more than a flimsy grown up comedy what makes you think, which is all it ends up amounting to, minus the thinking part.

The story is easy: Flor (Vega) moves herself and her daughter Cristina from Mexico to Los Angeles, where eventually she becomes a maid/housekeeper/whatever it's called now for an upper class white suburban family, the Claskys. The poster tagline is, "Every family has a hero." Well who in the hell is the hero here? Is it Flor, who continually gives the impression of doing something but genuinely seems to do almost nothing throughout the film other than learn english and occasionally have almost-flirtations with the husband? Is it John (Sandler), the chef who tries to keep the family together? Is it Deborah, who is so insecure and mildly insane that she clearly needs to be put into a mental hospital for a while? Is it the daughter, whose only purpose seems to be reminding us that overweight girls have feelings, too? Is it the alcoholic grandmother? Is it the son, who is so crucial to the screenplay that he didn't even make it onto the poster?

The movie is narrated by Cristina as she tries to get into an Ivy League school, explaining on her application why her mother is her hero. I don't remember which school it was -- Princeton, I think, maybe Yale. Maybe Harvard. Who cares? Obviously she's going to get in by explaining her four months or so of life-changing experience that resulted in nobody being happy and everybody worse off than they were before, except maybe the son who truly has absolutely no reason to even be in this movie aside from occasionally singing old jazz tunes with the alcoholic grandmother, who herself takes quite some time and a sobering up to become useful to the script in any way.

This movie is so poorly executed and incompetently written that while it is not the worst movie I've ever seen or anything, and really far from it, it may be the single biggest and most utterly comprehensive waste of time I've ever seen commited to film. It is truly pointless and nothing can save it. The movie has no idea if it's the tale of a decaying family, a morality tale, a romantic comedy, or an absurd comedy where the dialogue tries to keep you on your toes. At the end, it's none of those, and you've wasted over two hours, which seem to drag and then just suddenly stop with nothing for you to care about.

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WEDDING CRASHERS (2005)
Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Christopher Walken
Directed by David Dobkin


Wedding Crashers is light on good, solid laughs, particularly in comparison to such contemporary comedy tours de force as Anchorman and The 40-Year Old Virgin. The premise is good -- two guys crash weddings to score one-night stands and, in the case of Jeremy (Vaughn), lots of free food. Vaughn's character is a blast, basically an older, somewhat wiser version of Trent from Swingers.

But of course, Owen Wilson's character, John, has to be having moral conflicts. We couldn't be lucky enough to catch these guys one of the wedding seasons before this one, when they're both just a couple of fun-loving assholes having a ball. No, no, we have to get to them once John is feeling conflicted about everything, and starting to wonder where his life is headed. That's just our luck. We never seem to get the fun parts of anyone's life, just the parts where they start thinking.

The movie starts with a funny Dwight Yoakam/Rebecca De Mornay divorce scene, then goes right into wedding crashing in the form of a 10-minute montage where they hit up several weddings. It's just a music video so we get the idea of what it's all about. At the end, John is having a hard time dealing with it all anymore. But Jeremy has the idea to crash a big one, the wedding of defense secretary William Cleary's daughter, Christina. Cleary is played by Christopher Walken, who does a fine job not overdoing the role but lending his unique talents to it convincingly and with great charm.

This particular wedding is the movie's story, as John falls in love with Claire (the delightful Rachel McAdams) and Jeremy finds himself grabbed by the talons of the insane Gloria (Isla Fisher). After the two Cleary daughters are introduced, you can make the argument -- and you'd be right -- that it is McAdams and Fisher that carry the movie from that point on, with help from Vaughn and little help from Wilson, whose character is written in such a drippy manner that it just gets dull too often. Claire, if you couldn't have made your guess, is already seeing someone, the obnoxious Zack (Bradley Cooper), and John needs time to close the deal, though this time "closing the deal" is a little heavier than just sleeping with the girl.

In addition to all of those characters, you have the sex-starved mother (Jane Semyour), the mean grandmother (Ellen Albertini Dow, who always seems to be playing these characters) and the gay artist brother, Todd (Keir O'Donnell). The Todd character seems like it's there to produce comedy while other parts of the movie start getting sentimental, but unfortunately it is only funny once, and it's not even the character so much as a prop invented by the character. Todd wants to be slapstick relief, but isn't.

Part of how good a movie like Wedding Crashers can be is dependent on how and when the jig is up. It takes a while with this one, and while it's done well, by that point you've almost forgotten what shits these two guys are, so it's not as good as it could have been. The movie proceeds to then drag on for an extra half hour or so before getting to the finale, which seems to disregard the first hour or so of the movie entirely, even while nodding at it.

Did I have fun watching this movie? Sure, it's light and has some laughs and it's pretty decent. But this could have been so much more if it just wasn't so preoccupied with getting sappy. If this had been more of a pure comedy, they might have really had something, but it insisted on filling its shelves with porcelain figurines of doves and dolphins.

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RAISING HELEN (2004)
Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
Directed by Garry Marshall


Presumably, you have seen Garry Marshall's work before -- Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, Overboard, etc. -- and if you have, you know what to expect. It's more fluffy mush from the Garry Marshall factory, with a pretty lead girl anchored by a dependable male actor, and of course the two of them are going to fall in love, and it's going to be at least a little preposterous.

Kate Hudson stars as Helen Harris, a cool aunt who works at a modeling agency and does such rambunctious things as having pre-marital sex and occasionally smoking a tenth of a cigarette before someone helpfully reminds her -- and us -- that smoking is bad for you. Movies treat smokers like they're rapists. After Helen's sister Lindsay (Felicity Huffman) and her husband Paul (Sean O'Bryan) die, they leave their three kids to Helen, a surprise choice over their other sister, Jenny (Joan Cusack), who is a mother of two herself and pregnant with a third child.

We get all the very predictable characterization out of the way pretty quickly. Helen is a free spirit and Jenny is a mother's mother, while the late Lindsay was sort of the middle ground between the two. With her out of the picture, we don't get a balancing party, we just ge Helen and Jenny bouncing off of one another. Of course, the kids end up costing Helen her job, which forces her to move from Manhattan to Queens, get a job as a receptionist at a used car dealership, and put the kids into a Lutheran school, which is where our dependable male actor comes in, in the form of Pastor Dan (John Corbett).

Corbett is as almost-really-good as he always is. He's a fine actor, but he is what he is, and he's not exceptional in any way. 15-year old Audrey rebels, middle child Henry becomes introverted, and the young daughter, Sarah, is just a little girl. The movie dances around the Helen/Pastor Dan romance as much as it can, but of course it's coming.

The most striking thing about this movie is the complete lack of laughs. You might expect more of a romantic comedy out of this, but it's more of a semi-romantic kinda-comedy. It has good intentions, but it's thin and dull. It almost tries to be a little more than what it is, but it can't escape its own limitations, as the actors seem stuck on auto-pilot, even the usually fantastic Cusack. You get nothing you don't expect out of this movie and everything you do. It is not at all bad, but it's not any good. A truly funny secondary character could have helped greatly, as they seemed to try with neighbor Nilma (Sakina Jaffrey), which failed. Everything here is paint-by-numbers in Garry Marshall's familiar style. Even if you expect little, you're not going to get a lot.

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THE DEVIL'S REJECTS (2005)
Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, Sid Haig, William Forsythe
Directed by Rob Zombie


If you saw and disliked House of 1,000 Corpses, disregard that and see the sequel anyway. As they always say, sequels rarely equal the original, but this one not only equals but far surpasses its murderous little brother. While House of 1,000 Corpses was, in my opinion, a stylish, fun gore-fest, a true horror movie, Rob Zombie's follow-up to it is a near-perfect thriller of a film. The first was almost a music video advertisement for things that Zombie liked. This time, there's a story. It almost feels like the original was merely a means to getting here, to establish those characters for an hour and a half a few years ago, so that he could hit you with the real thing this time.

The Devil's Rejects is only a horror movie by genre classification. It has plenty in common, again, with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but this time it's also got roots in vigilante justice westerns. Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie and Sid Haig return as Otis B. Driftwood, Baby Firefly and Captain Spaulding. There's a twist at the beginning of the film, which starts off with a brutal gunfight between the Texas State Police, led by Sheriff John Quincy Wydell (the brother of a policeman murdered by Otis in the first movie) and the Firefly clan. Otis and Baby manage to escape, while Mother Firefly is taken into custody. And after that, we get the credits with Otis and Baby escaping, set to the Allman Brothers Band's "Midnight Rider." The soundtrack is something Zombie nailed this time after sort of crapping out in the first movie, which was most unexpected. You'd think he'd have understood before this one that a horror movie set in the 70s should not have music set in the late 90s, but at least he got it right the second time around. It's mostly southern rock, and it works perfectly. More on that later, too.

In House of 1,000 Corpses, the role of Mother Firefly was played by Karen Black, who played it up as much as possible to seem psychotic. This time, the role falls to Leslie Easterbrook, who doesn't do that much better of a job. Both Karen Black and Robert Mukes, who played Rufus Firefly in the first, wanted too much money to be in the sequel, which was again meant to be low-budget. Black is hardly missed, though Easterbrook isn't much better, and Rufus meets a quick demise anyway. Mukes is replaced by former pro wrestler Tyler Mane, who was Sabretooth in X-Men. Oddly, Mukes also trained to be a pro wrestler before becoming an actor, and former actual wrestling star Diamond Dallas Page is in this movie as well, which we're about to get to.

Otis, Baby and Spaulding are the focus of the film, being chased by Wydell (a terrific William Forsythe) who goes more and more mad after Mother Firefly reveals who killed his brother. Eventually, he is no longer an officer of the law, but he is a psychopath himself, completely consumed by murderous rage. Simply put, he wants revenge, and he wants it to be as painful as possible.

In order to not spoil the movie if you haven't seen it, I'll go no further than that other than to say that Zombie does a fantastic job with the psychological element of the film. He eventually has it painted as the villains being the heroes and Wydell being the lunatic you're rooting against. And, since it's fiction, you're more than welcome to root for the bad guys. But that's still not the point, and it is just a painting. The Devil's Rejects, as the media calls them, haven't become less sadistic or insane, merely more human in their presentation to us. Scenes of the three of them riding down the open road and eating ice cream are bound to make us like them a little bit more. We're allowed to laugh with them in moments that have nothing to do with their complete and utter disregard for human life.

And when Wydell flips the switch, we're seeing him not as a man out for the reckoning, but as someone who has gone crazy while his advesaries have softened somewhat, at least image-wise. He goes so far as to enlist his own mercenaries, called The Unholy Two, and played by veteran character actor Danny Trejo and the aforementioned Diamond Dallas Page. Trejo is as effective as always, and Page surprised me with a completely professional performance. He seemed like a real actor enough that I either forgot or just didn't care who he was. I bought the role he played, which didn't contain a ton of screen time or line delivery, but enough to tell that he's probably got a future ahead of him doing what Trejo has generally always done.

It's worth mentioning that Ken Foree is excellent in his role as Charlie, a pimp and old friend of The Devil's Rejects, and that the late Matthew McGrory gets a hell of a good sendoff with the Tiny character.

And back to the music -- Zombie directed a particularly exquisite final scene for these characters. I feel no shame in saying that it is one of the best ending scenes I've ever seen. It perfectly captures the spirit of the film.

The movie is not without its flaws, though. There is one completely silly and pointless death that serves only to up the body count, and a scene between Wydell and a movie reviewer who is an expert on Groucho Marx that is absolutely awful.

In the DVD liner notes, Zombie writes, "While making this film the cast, crew and I all felt like we were onto something unique that we could all feel proud of at the end of each long day. After viewing the final cut of the film...we are all sure of it." He's 100% right. It's an instant horror classic that, like many of the great horror films before it, goes outside of the genre's trappings and becomes a lot more than just another slasher/serial killer movie.

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PROZAC NATION (2001)
Christina Ricci, Jason Biggs, Jessica Lange, Anne Heche
Directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg


If you're a best-seller of a book and you're made into a movie with somewhat famous people and said movie is completely ignored for four years besides the rush on still photos of Christina Ricci's finally-bared breasts at celebrity porn web sites, you probably suck.

Guess what? You're Prozac Nation, and you suck bad.

This movie is dreadfully boring. Viewers will be decidedly split on Ricci's performance -- either you're going to think, as I did, that it's the same predictable, cliche shit for an hour and a half, or you're going to be tricked with enough crying, mood swings, bitchiness, drugs and everything else you might possibly expect (up to and including the gratuitous and tacked-on nude scene) to think she did a wonderful job. It's not her fault, though. The acting was OK. It was the character that sucked. This movie is 90 minutes long and at 40 I just wanted her to kill herself.

Combine Ricci's terrible character with the grand intrusion of her obnoxious mother (Jessica Lange, another polarizing performance and I'll stick with what I thought of Ricci for her, too) every twenty minutes or so to do the same fucking routine over and over again until she mercifully gets mugged and shuts up some before going into the long-overdue "you don't have to be perfect for me, sweetheart!" speech, and you've got a winner.

But wait! Holy shit, it's Anne Heche! As a therapist! Terrific!

Jason Biggs and Michelle Williams and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers are all pretty good as acquaintances of Ricci's Elizabeth Wurtzel, but they're written in such a half-assed manner that they could suck and it would make no difference to this movie whatsoever. You're allowed no real glimpse into anything about Wurtzel. She's going to Harvard, she's boning this guy, she's getting fucked up, she's writing obscenely stupid articles about Lou Reed and failing to do the same for Springsteen, she's got a problem, it gets worse, it gets better, it gets worse. There is absolutely nothing new to any of this. There is no profound statement, which maybe is the point, but you know what? Fuck the point. It's a dull story in the first place and it's an even worse movie. Don't be stupid like me and think, "Hmm, I like Christina Ricci, maybe she can make this good!" She can't.

Pumpkin was five times better than this movie. I would much rather watch 200 Cigarettes four times than watch this again. Even The Opposite of Sex and Buffalo '66 were better than this. It is truly unfortunate that Ricci is so horribly typecast and allows herself to be so that the best movie she ever makes may well end up being Anything Else, where she actually had chemistry with Biggs and Woody Allen got something out of the same type of kinda-weirdo character that Ricci always plays.

Auuuuuuuuuuugh.

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X2 (2003)
Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Famke Janssen, Ian McKellen
Directed by Bryan Singer


Right quick: It's a very good movie, probably my favorite "comic book movie," and has some gripping action scenes and enough comic relief to make it easy to deal with what is a bit of a dull story. Now don't get me wrong, I liked it, but it could've been better, and it all centers on the characters and how they used them. The main offender is that Cyclops (James Marsden) is almost completely cut out of this in favor of the incoming Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) who isn't a member of the X-Men in the movie but is merely a mutant who was put under the mind control drug of William Stryker (a suitably villainous Brian Cox), this movie's Government Person Who Hates Mutants.

Instead of Senator Kelly wanting the mutant registration act and the X-Men having to save everything from Magneto, Mystique, Toad and Sabretooth, we've got Stryker trying to eliminate mutants with the help of a controlled Professor Xavier. Magneto is able to free himself from the plastic prison the government is holding him in, and yaaay, Magneto and Mystique (the two Brotherhood mutants that made X2's cut) alert the X-Men -- namely, Wolverine, Jean Grey and Storm, along with Nightcrawler, Rogue, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Pyro (a superbly conflicted Aaron Stanford) -- to the dangers they all face.

United (X-Men United!), they go do the thing with the thing and I don't want to give the movie away.

A small list of qualms I have:

1. Too much Storm, as Halle Berry has kind of mailed this character in two movies in a row, although Storm isn't that interesting to begin with
2. Not enough Rogue
3. Rebecca Romijn makes Mystique about as interesting as a beach towel

But the things they did very well:

1. Nightcrawler's introduction was tremendous
2. Kelly Hu was about as intimidating as a 115-pound Chinese woman can be as Deathstrike
3. McKellen, Jackman, Stewart, Janssen, Paquin, Stanford, Hu, Cumming, and Cox deliver excellent performances
4. Jubilee returning for more cameos
5. Remy LeBeau's name on the mutant prisoner list
6. The awesome cameos of Colossus, Siryn, Sebastien Shaw and Hank McCoy (particularly Colossus)
7. Pyro's side story was fantastic

There's not a lot to say about this movie that I can't just list - it's a good superhero/action movie, and that's that.

As for the third movie, I'm looking forward to it. Still no Gambit and Nightcrawler won't be returning because Alan Cumming bitched endlessly about the makeup process, so basically you wasted a lot of time in this movie developing Nightcrawler and making him very likeable and useful, all for no real good at the end of the day. Judging by what I can tell of the X-Men 3 plot, I think this might be the end of the line for these movies as far as them being true blockbusters goes. That said, considering FOX didn't have a lot of faith in the movies to begin with, getting two huge hits is no small feat.

Can there be less Storm in the third one? Goddamn.

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BRIAN'S SONG (1971)
James Caan, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Warden, Shelly Fabares
Directed by Buzz Kulik


The original Brian's Song, a film about the friendship between Chicago Bears Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, is generally regarded as the best TV movie of all-time and one of the best sports movies ever made. I'd never seen it before, it was on yesterday, and I figured I might as well watch it.

Here is a list of the reasons Brian's Song is generally so well-regarded:

1. The Actors
Billy Dee Williams is effective as Gale Sayers, who was the star player of the two. Caan is merely OK as Piccolo, the inspirational story. The acting is very TV movie - sometimes wooden, generally a smidge overdramatic. Jack Warden is horrible as George Halas, the legendarily tough-nosed head coach of the Bears. Warden was probably better as the grandfather in the Problem Child movies than he was here. Shelly Fabares stole most of her scenes with a careful and delicate sincerity that most of them didn't bring to their roles. The scene where Piccolo dies is particularly awful on Caan's part, rivaling the guy in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid that was "gut shot for sure," only this wasn't unprofessionally bad, it was professionally terrible.

2. The Score
Lots of people seem to really love Michael Legrand's music. I thought it was annoying and pervasive, generally overshadowing the scenes and lending them a sack of cheese. I hated it.

3. The Story
It's a good story. It's a feel-good while feeling bad story. But it's not remarkable or anything. It's a couple of friends that played football together. I like football a lot, I should've liked this movie. I would have if it was better.

The movie flows awfully and all of the scenes designed to tug at your heart are overdone, besides Billy Dee's famous "I love Brian Piccolo" speech, which really is done very well. It doesn't break down the boundaries or overcome the cliches and trappings of the TV movie, it really just magnifies them with a better script than usual. Most of Brian's Song is community theatre-level forcing of the story. It's no Rudy, which was basically everything this movie is applauded for, an inspirational sports story with drama, a beautiful score that accentuates the film's high and low points, and fantastic acting.

To watch Brian's Song for the first time is to take the Pepsi Challenge from its supporters and try not to cry. Well, I'm a Coca-Cola man. I failed to connect with it on the emotional level so many people have, but it wasn't that I don't like the story or that I couldn't get involved with something like this, because I lose a tear or two every time I watch Rudy, and I fucking hate Notre Dame football. It was the film's own flaws in just about every manner possible outside of Fabares and Williams. When the best scene of a drama is Brian Piccolo "trying to call Gale Sayers a nigger" and they both just laugh hysterically, you may have mucked up the attempts to pull my heart out with the frailty and fleetingness of human life.

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THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (2005)
Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen
Directed by Judd Apatow


It doesn't even take fifteen minutes to realize that Steve Carell has the ability to carry a feature comedy, and Carell holds his commanding and hilarious performance in The 40 Year-Old Virgin for the full two hours the movie runs. Supported excellently by Paul Rudd, Romany Malco and an emerging Seth Rogen, Carell and Judd Apatow's first big film is an instant comedy classic that even has some heart to it.

Andy (Carell) is the title - he's a 40 year-old virgin, a loner who watches Survivor with his elderly neighbors, works at an electronics store, plays a lot of Halo and collects action figures. After co-workers David (Rudd), Jay (Malco) and Cal (Rogen) randomly invite him to play poker after work one night, they find out he's a virgin and decide that they have to get him laid.

It goes exactly as you'd expect, with enough mishaps and fuck-ups along the way to keep the laughs coming at a rate that rivals Anchorman, where Carell really broke out as a film actor. After wonderfully funny failures with Nicky (Leslie Mann) and Beth (Elizabeth Banks, the girl who tasted like a burger in Wet Hot American Summer), Andy finds a connection with Trish (Catherine Keener), which is the start of the movie going from slapstick comedy to one with an actual story involved.

The slapstick comedy is the seller, though. The dialogue is fast and hard, and all four of the main players hold up their end of the bargain with distinct personality. Carell is fantastic delivering bawdy lines with a complete indifference to attitude, which bounces off of Rogen and Malco to great effect. Rudd is, as usual, a superb comedic second banana.

This is a one-joke movie, more or less, that doesn't overstay its welcome despite a rather long run-time. The best thing is the characters are human despite that the movie is only loosely based in reality. It's one of those endlessly quotable movies that's good (Anchorman, Tommy Boy) instead of a piece of shit (Clerks, Napoleon Dynamite).

Could Paul Rudd be next in line for his own breakout starring role? These type of comedies are pretty hot right now, and hopefully Ben Stiller will be taking time off from them in the next, oh, lifetime or so. With Carell acing his shot here, Rudd might be on deck. Or maybe not, but I really like Paul Rudd. I just can't figure out if he'd be good as the go-to guy or not.

Anyway, see this movie, you'll laugh at it.

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13 GOING ON 30 (2004)
Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Judy Greer, Andy Serkis
Directed by Gary Winick


Let's get this out of the way: It's Big for girls. Also, it's better than Big. Much better, in fact, because Big kind of sucked, and featured Elizabeth Perkins fornicating with a nine-year old.

13 Going On 30 - or Suddenly 30 as they called it in Australia, where they don't speak English - is a delightful little romantic comedy with Jennifer Garner as the 30-year old version of a girl who was embarrassed on her 13th birthday to the point where she wished she was 30 and magic pixie dust fell on her head and BAM!, she woke up the next day at age 30 with a naked hockey player in her house.

Jenna (Garner, in a role that required her to really focus on what her name was) is so bewildered by it all that she tracks down Matt (Mark Ruffalo), an old friend of hers. When she finds Matt, she discovers that the two haven't been friends in the 17 years she's unaware of. She became popular, and of course because she became popular, she also became a bitch. Jenna becomes progressively more aware of the person she's become - someone who sleeps with the husbands of women she works with, doesn't speak to her parents, and has no real friends, all thanks to the drastically awful predicament she was tied to when she became popular - and decides to change all of this as quickly as she can. Which, of course, she does, eating Razzles and rekindling her friendship with Matt, who is engaged to someone else.

Jenna's co-worker, Lucy, was introduced as a 13-year old antagonist. The similarity in appearance between Judy Greer, the grown Lucy, and Alexandra Kyle, the child Lucy known as "Tom-Tom," is stunning. Kyle may very well grow up to look almost exactly like Greer. It's a wonderful bit of casting.

But most of the cast is really well-chosen. Garner plays an innocent and charming fish out of water with child sensibilities perfectly, and Gollum is excellent as her extremely gay boss. There is one subtly hilarious scene where Garner asks him, after he asks if Matt is gay, "Are you gay?" The look of total innocence on her face is adorable. Mark Ruffalo's performance is totally unremarkable, other than to remark how bored Mark Ruffalo always seems in every movie. Mark Ruffalo should read bedtime stories on tape. Busy parents would never need to read their child to sleep again.

Other than that and the fact that this won't test the brain power of the majority of the internet and one utterly forced line about Wang Chung, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this movie. It's bright and cheerful and happy-looking, a feel-good story that looks like it feels good. Even the cast dancing to "Thriller" isn't annoying enough to hurt this one. It's an enjoyable enough movie that you kind of forget you're watching a fantasy, which I believe is a very positive thing.

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MIRACLE (2004)
Kurt Russell, Noah Emmerich, Patrick O'Brien Dempsey, Eddie Cahill
Directed by Gavin O'Connor


Disney's take on the amazing story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team should have been a lot better than it is. When I first saw this movie, I thought Kurt Russell was part of what left me feeling like I wanted (and deserved) more from Miracle. Upon further viewings, none of this is Russell's fault at all. He's very good as Herb Brooks, a methodical and hard-nosed-yet-affable coach. The writing occasionally fails him, but he's not alone. The writing fails all of the characters, and is the ultimate downfall that takes this from a should've-been classic to merely a grown-up Mighty Ducks.

The story itself is great -- you can't really make a clunker out of one of the greatest moments in sports history. The U.S. beating the Russians and then winning the gold medal is one of the biggest upsets and most triumphant moments in the entire history of not just hockey, but any sport. But the movie adaptation is given no depth, no real feeling. It's just someone saying something with the illusion of emotion and greatness, failing to actually achieve it itself.

But back to the characters, because this is a huge issue for me. You've got Mike Eruzione (Patrick O'Brien Dempsey), who goes from nearly being cut because of his shooting troubles (Eruzione scored 21 goals in 50 games for the U.S. team in 1979-80) to suddenly being the team captain. Goaltender Jim Craig (Eddie Cahill) dips in and out of having a story -- he's got mental issues, then he sort of doesn't, then he does. So many of the characters suffer from having the film's story go from paying attention to them to completely ignoring their existence that it becomes hard to buy into anything they're telling you about any of the players.

As for the technical aspects, it's shot well and the hockey action is pain-stakingly put together so that the goals look like the actual goals scored in the '80 Olympics. Everything on the ice is crisp and given great attention and detail. It's a real testament to that side of the filmmaking process. Unfortunately, it's about the only thing given that level of care.

Like the Mighty Ducks, the U.S. Olympic team, according to this movie, went from a gang of rag-tags to a formidable team nearly overnight. Emilio Estevez had the Ducks use eggs for pucks and Kurt Russell has the American Olympians skate a lot. We're told they're changing the entire way they play, but the only way we see this is through montages that could have been set to "Holding Out For a Hero" for as good as they were.

I don't really get down on Disney like a lot of people do, but this movie was just totally half-assed in comparison to what it absolutely should have been. Even the great moment of victory over the Russians feels lazy. A good movie should be able to reasonably recreate that thing that you know is going to happen and make you swell with emotion. Miracle fails there. They beat the Russians. It happens.

The casting is also curious. Obviously you can't line up stars to play young hockey players, the budget would be ridiculous and it would be overall pointless. But looking at guys like Nathan West and Michael Mantenuto and Eric Peter-Kaiser, it again feels like a Ducks movie, where they seem to be looking for the cutest guys they can find for half of the roles, envisioning Tiger Beat covers for West or Mantenuto where they describe what would be -- if they had a girlfriend who was, oh, about 14 and had braces -- "Their MIRACLE Girl!"

Mostly I just think it's a shame that this movie isn't better than it is, because I wanted to see it from the moment I heard about it. You can't completely recreate what's real, and that's not what it's about. That's not my problem. The real story will always be better. If this had been a bona fide five-star movie, the real story would be better, because it was real. It's just too bad that Disney obviously felt too much of what I thought when I first saw the trailer: "That couldn't possibly be screwed up."

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