This weekend, the new Denzel Washington action flick Safe House opens, giving him yet another chance to show the world he really knows how to pick a role. In the film, Washington plays a former Central Intelligence Agency operative who has gone rogue and is trying to take down..well, everybody. In celebration of this CIA-inspired movie, Brett, Dan and I thought it would be good to break down some of the most memorable (not necessary great) movies based on our government’s most secretive agency. It’s a genre that will likely be around for a long time, with This Means War, which features Tom Hardy and Chris Pine as feuding CIA agents, opening next weekend and The Bourne Legacy hitting theaters this summer.

Let’s expose some spies!

BRETT’S PICKS:

Salt (dir. Phillip Noyce, 2010)

Of all the Trained-by-the-CIA-to-Kill-the-CIA movies over the past couple of years, Salt might be the worst. Then again, I haven’t seen Abduction… But I might be willing to give that more of a pass because it’s meant for teens rather than adults. Salt starred a franchise-desperate Angelina Jolie, and, despite its PG-13 rating, was presumably meant for grown-ups who wanted to see a good action movie, not a shirtless werewolf boy.

What makes Salt particularly bad is that it doesn’t feel like a movie. I mean the production values are fine, the actors exist, dialogue is written, scenes flow into one another, but it still doesn’t feel like a film. Put another way, it puts on the facade of having a plot without actually having a plot. People talked in hush tones, there’s an air of a mystery and conspiracy, and there’s action set pieces, but most of the actors in Salt come across as behaving the way they do because they know the tropes of the genre rather than the characters they are supposed to be playing. They can pull off what the scene is supposed to convey without actually having the details to back it up, and the script doesn’t care much either. It’s like the “Generic Greeting” segment in Soderbergh’s Schizopolis.

”So…guess I’m going to be the villain.” “Yep.” “What’s my motivation?” “Penance for X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”

This is most evident in the final fight scene between super spy Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) and the mole/betrayer/colleague Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber). First off, we know that Winter is the bad guy because we know in these movies we need a turncoat, and Winter’s the most obvious choice. Prior to the reveal, nothing he does really makes us question his allegiance, but we also know that this movie needs that character, and he’s the one most likely to fit the role. Through the magic of cinema, director Phillip Noyce makes it appear as though we’ve reach the climactic battle. The fisticuffs between the two certainly seem like the ending fight for a movie like this. But, when viewed as a whole, it does not feel connected to the rest of the film. It’s as if the filmmakers knew we needed such a clash to end the movie, so they threw it in there because the movie needed to end.

Maybe Salt could have worked better as a quasi-experimental film. Instead of trying to thread everything together, make three or four vignettes following this one super spy. We’re not told when the storyline switches over and the movie flows relatively consistently, it’s just that at some point we realize there’s a different pursuer or she’s in a different country or she has different hair. It would make as much narrative sense as Salt, but be a lot more clever.

For those looking for a good woman-led Jason Bourne bastard, I recommend Read more…

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It’s Valentine’s Day-ish At Dunder Mifflin

Love and Business. Tonight’s special Valentine’s Day episode of The Office took on both topics. I’ll go through the business side first, since it was the better of the two subjects.

Robert California selects Dwight to lead a special project that involves him picking a team from the Scranton branch and spending three weeks in Florida setting up a chain of Sabre stores that will compete with The Apple Store. Could that be done in three weeks? I mean, they’re going against Apple, and all we know about Sabre’s products is that its tablet computer was terrible and one of its printers blows up. Anyway, I’ll let it slide because it seems to be a plot with long-term consequences.

Dwight wants his team to be Darryl, Phyllis, Toby, Angela, and Oscar. Realizing that that will eliminate most of the office’s best workers, Andy counters with Darryl, Phyllis, Cathy, Kelly, and Kevin. To “out play” his boss, Dwight leaks the Florida picks to the crew to make the ones not chosen pissed off about their fate. When facing his angry mob, Andy looks flustered and blusters, because that’s all he can do since he has no backbone. Meanwhile, Robert asks Jim personally to come to Florida, and Jim and Pam spend most of the episode trying to compose the exact perfect text message to send back to him since they are boring people who lead boring lives. After allowing the gang to individually present their case on why they deserve to go, Andy assigns Dwight a crew of Cathy, Stanley, Ryan, Erin, and Jim; Dwight audibly curses about the last two. So at the end, Project Leader Dwight gets none of what he wants. HOWEVER, he realizes that, believe it or not, he might have a damned good team anyway. It’s falls under the same “let’s humanize Dwight” category as the end of Doomsday from earlier this season.

The World’s Weakest Boss

Photo by: Byron Cohen/NBC

Every episode, I grow more and more disillusioned with Andy as a boss and as a character. From his constant look of befuddlement and fear to his inability to stand up for himself about anything to his lack of control over his staff, Andy always appears over his head. Whatever flaws previous bosses such as Charles Miner, Michael Scott, and Davis Wallace had, their subordinates followed them (for the most part) with Dwight ever-ready to play second-in-command. Tonight’s episode further showed that Andy doesn’t have authority, he has the title of authority. His rule is law because he received the position of boss, not because he earned the right to dictate. And this works most of the time because he doesn’t cause conflict and his ground crew treats him like an equal. But he is not an equal, he is their commander.

As for The Sabre Store, this was that story’s prologue so it’s too early to fully judge it. Like I said above, it seems like a questionable decision from the company, but we’ll probably learn more about its feasibility as the storyline continues. Dwight’s attempt to wash out his team by setting up a conference room with extreme heat, putting up pictures of bugs and Casey Anthony on the wall, and boot camp sergeant-ing them worked well enough as the mid-episode comedy break. Not hysterical, but competent.

And now, as Valentine’s Day approaches, let’s take a look at love.

A Romance That Worked

NBC Photo: Byron Cohen

The romance aspect of The Office has existed since its start, but tonight, the problems with its current romantic storylines shined ever brightly. In previous seasons, these entanglements followed logically from the characters and their lives. In other words, they were believable. Jim and Pam, Angela and Dwight, and Kelly and Ryan were all based in some level of reality. But now, its current group of parings give the impression that the writers cannot think of anything else for these characters to do.

As far as this complaint goes, I’m willing to give a pass to Erin and Andy. They have a world outside of Andin(?), and there seems to be something genuine between the two, mostly because of Ellie Kemper’s performance. But, as I’ve said before, I don’t like how the show has made them unrequited simply for the sake of being unrequited. The star-crossed lovers angle worked for Jim and Pam; it doesn’t work for Erin and Andy. The boss has expressed that the main reason why he hasn’t acted on his feelings towards Erin is because he has a girlfriend, not because she’s his subordinate. His unwillingness to break-up with a girlfriend he barely cares about comes across as yet another example of his weakness as a human being, which makes him a lousy leader and a character you can’t root for in life or in work.

But the other two main romantic subplots are even worse.

Darryl is still pining for Val, the new warehouse worker, and he spends most of the episode trying to figure out how she feels about him. This has been going on for most of the season, and tonight concludes with him realizing that she probably has feelings for him. He doesn’t act on this conclusion, but he’s confident that she wants to get with him… so this will be dragged out even longer. Varryl, not just in Special Project but throughout the entire year, shows that the writers cannot figure out what to do with Darryl. His courtship keeps him separated from everyone else in the office, it has nothing to do with his actual job, and it doesn’t give significant depth to his character. He’s insecure around a new girl. So what? Furthermore, Val appears to exist simply to be a potential love interest for Darryl. She’s not a character, she’s a plot device, which only serves to show the weakness of this arc.

When You’re Out of Ideas, There’s Always The Homewrecker

Photo by: Chris Haston/NBC

But the worst of the three is easily Cathy and Jim. Even though Pam’s back, Cathy is still working at the office, and she got sent on the super special Florida assignment. I understood them keeping Erin on after Pam returned the first time following the rise and fall of Michael Scott Paper Company. Pam was no longer a secretary, and the office needed one. Moreover, Kemper had a screen presence and ingratiated herself into the show. We saw Erin interact with the characters and befriend some of them. We’ve seen none of that with Cathy, who probably hasn’t had ten lines since she was first hired. And her ultimate goal is to sleep with Jim? Like Val, if her only purpose is to be a romantic interest/foil/villain, which seems to be the case, the character should be eliminated. While Karen might have been a romantic foil, Rashida Jones gave her a likeability and personality that Cathy severely lacks.

And we know that Jim won’t sleep with her with 99.9992% certainty. Jim and Pam has served as the heart of The Office throughout its entire run, and the show won’t break them up. Even though Cathy says on the phone that their marriage seems on the verge of collapse, we’ve seen none of it on the show, even though this would be the perfect time for such a storyline to exist. Jim with the wife he’s always wanted, the house, the kids- disgusted by and fed up with the American dream. But he’s not annoyed with Pam or even exhausted despite having to care for two young children. The show’s perfect couple are still perfectly content with one another. They might be boring to watch, but they don’t appear bored with each other. From the evidence on screen, they seem as close as ever.

Also, Jim is the audience surrogate. They’re not going to have the show’s “lead” cheat on his wife weeks after she gave birth. Not unless they want the public to completely despise Jim, which would be a fascinating development. Since we can be relatively sure what won’t happen and because we still don’t know why Cathy still has employment with Dunder-Mifflin, this entire storyline comes across as a cheap and lazy way for the writers to waste time and build needless drama. Let’s just hope that we won’t have to deal with Person X catching Jim kissing Cathy when really it was Cathy kissing Jim and he pushed her away less than a second after their lips locked but Person X missed that part. …that is definitely going to happen, isn’t it?

Additional Thoughts:

• I harp on Andy a lot, but after his over-the-top silly faces throughout the episode, especially during the presentations, can you blame me?

• I liked Ryan’s presentation, but I generally like when Ryan does stuff. He is quite good at both corporate and hipster douche, and the show should use him more.

• Meredith asked why Cathy was still on staff. Good for Meredith.

• While I know Angela likes competing against Pam, I still thought her showing her body and baking skills right after giving birth came across as out of character.

• I presume that Erin is not going to kill herself in Florida, even though she said she’s not coming back to Scranton. But if she does, that would be a interesting and dark twist.

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Discussion of what the Academy Awards overlooked has been unusually lively this year. This seems curious with such a respectable list of confirmed nominees, but as it turns out the list of contenders from 2011 could be (and should be) far more impressive. After all the fuss over Steven Spielberg, Michael Fassbender, and Drive, there’s been one collective snub to rule them all this year.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) directed by Lynne Ramsay

At the inducement of lavish critical praise, I made a special trip to see Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name. The film stars Tilda Swinton as Eva, a mother dealing with the fallout of her firstborn child’s unspeakable crime. Okay… it’s not an outrageous SPOILER, since heavy hints begin dropping early on, to reveal that her son Kevin has shot up his high school, leaving Eva not simply shunned but aggressively persecuted by her neighbors and fellow parents in the wake of the incident. She is essentially trapped in hell, and her motives for hanging on and not fleeing are mighty ambiguous for a while. Can she really not escape, or does she view this as penance for having made a bad child? She spends the duration of the film working out the answers, reliving her strained and often terrifying relationship with the boy from his birth to the present day.

On this journey through a grieving parent’s fragmented memories, the revelations grow darker with every new incident we witness. Quiet, painful bitterness pervades almost every encounter between Eva and Kevin from his earliest days. This does not seem to be a factor between the boy and his doting father (John C. Reilly), which only increases Eva’s burden of guilt and frustration.

They’ve got more than they can handle, but Raising Arizona this ain’t.

The evolution of Mommy’s Little Monster is hard enough to watch without the exploitative extremes that a lesser director would embrace, but fortunately Lynne Ramsay goes in for none of that. Some parts are very difficult to watch, but the camera tends to pull away just in time, vividly implying what it would be tasteless to depict onscreen.

Read more…

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Yun-Fat Chow and Danny Lee in John Woo’s The Killer (1989-R)

A “popcorn movie” is, by definition, a fun action flick. Nothing deep or monumental. Just an entertaining waste of time.

There are popcorn movies, and then there is The Killer, director John Woo’s tale of the unlikely friendship between a Hong Kong assassin and the cop pursuing him. “It’s escape-velocity popcorn,” wrote Washington Post critic Hal Hinson. “Popcorn with a slurp of rocket fuel.”

Woo may be the world’s top action film director. Born in China, he learned his craft in Hong Kong, starting with martial arts flicks and making Jackie Chan a star. He has since moved to Hollywood, directing thrillers like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II.

To some fans, The Killer represents the apex of his career—before he went too commercial. It’s got a solid storyline and strong acting. But it’s mostly a lavishly staged ballet of bullets and blood. Guns blaze in slow motion. Bodies fly through the air. This is high-octane violence in a way that makes your typical Sly Stallone or Steven Seagal fare look like Mary Poppins.

The story centers on Ah Jong (Yun-Fat Chow), a hit man for Hong Kong’s underworld, known as The Triad. While gunning down eight enemies at a nightclub, Jong accidentally grazes and blinds the club’s singer, Jennie (played by Sally Yeh, known as “The Celine Dion of Hong Kong”).

For this, he feels great remorse. Jong befriends the pretty singer and she, of course, does not recognize him as the man who shot her. He considers quitting the mob (doesn’t every movie hit man seem to go through that crisis?) but decides to take one last lucrative job so that he can take Jennie to the United States for a corneal transplant.

To remind you again: You are not watching The Killer for any semblance of reality.

In the course of that final assignment (beautifully shot during a dragon boat festival), two bad things happen. First, Jong is spotted by police inspector Li Ying (Danny Lee). And second, he is double-crossed by his own boss—who has set up a deathtrap that Jong barely escapes.

So Jong is on the run. When he goes back to Jennie’s apartment to hide, the clever police inspector isn’t far behind. There’s a great scene where the two men aim guns at each other’s face while the sightless woman, oblivious to their standoff and their enmity, tries to serve them tea. Two guys pointing guns at one another became a trademark shot for Woo and makes its way into most of his films.

Anyway, when two enemies are staring down each other’s gun barrels, the talk tends to get honest. So cop and killer undergo a rapprochement, realizing that they are both jaded men of honor surrounded by corruption. Each recognizes a bit of himself in his foe. They even make up bogus nicknames for each other—Shrimp Head and Little B—all to convince the pathetic Jennie that they are actually old soccer buddies.

The rest of the movie puts the unlikely trio in precarious situations where Jong and Li tumble around firing Berettas with both hands while Jennie cowers in the corner. The plot becomes secondary to a good half-dozen ambushes, escapes and slaughter scenes. We are pulled back to the focal point when Jong, up against the odds, says to his policeman pal, “Promise me one thing. If I don’t make it and my eyes are undamaged, take me to a hospital and have them give my corneas to Jennie. If that’s impossible, send her abroad for surgery with my money.”

Now that’s one honorable mobster.

Together, the new friends face a final confrontation with the gangsters aiming to slaughter them. It occurs in a candlelit church, surrounded by fluttering doves and Virgin Mary statues that explode when hit with gunfire. Again, if you’re a fan of Woo’s work, you’ll recognize many of the visual tricks in his later films.

After Woo went Hollywood in the 1990s, there was talk of an English-language version of The Killer starring Richard Gere and Denzel Washington. That didn’t happen, but in September 2010, Woo announced plans to remake the film, set in Los Angeles.

HIT: If you’re a fan of guns, this is the movie for you. According to the website Internet Movie Firearms Database (imfdb.com), no fewer than 25 different weapons make an appearance in The Killer.

MISS: There are four differently edited versions of The Killer floating around, running from 96 minutes to 124 minutes. In several of those subtitled versions, huge portions of dialogue get mistranslated, including characters’ names and the entire point of the movie’s ending. We recommend the 104-minute version released by a company called Hong Kong Legends.

WHAT THEY WROTE AT THE TIME: “Yun-Fat Chow plays something like a benign Terminator—a wistful, avuncular, superbly tailored murder machine. The Killer starts with over-the-top violence and then, like some non-stop cartoon freak out, blasts through the roof.”—J. Hoberman, Premiere

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: All of those guns had to be imported and were strictly monitored because of Hong Kong’s tough firearms laws. During one shootout scene, local residents, fearing that a real attack was underway, deluged police with emergency calls. The set was shut down until Woo assuaged the area police chief.

PIVOTAL SCENE: It’s that sequence where the two main characters nearly kill each other while their blind hostess tries to serve them tea. Afraid to alarm the young woman, the men pretend to be long-lost buddies, even as their trigger fingers twitch.

If that seems cartoonish, perhaps that’s because Woo was inspired by Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” feature while constructing it. He even dressed one in white and the other in black—a nod, he said, to the yin and yang of cops and gangsters.

GOOF: During an emergency room scene, the road sign outside reads “Scared Heart Hospital.” We would never want to be treated there.

REALITY CHECK: Dozens and dozens of shooters aim at our two lead characters—from sniper’s posts, from hunters’ blinds, from point-blank range. And yet both men go through most of the movie suffering nothing more than a grazing wound. There sure are some lousy marksmen in Hong Kong.

REPEATED WATCHING QUOTIENT: That’s a matter of taste. If you delight in shoot-’em-ups, revisit it. If not, move on.

DON’T FAIL TO NOTICE: Every time someone drinks a beer in this movie, he reaches for a Budweiser. Being fans of Asian beers ourselves, we’d have thought they’d prefer a Tsingtao or Asahi.

VIOLENCE LEVEL: High, but mostly in a comicbook way. There are two moments that will make you cringe—one where a bullet is removed from someone’s back with pliers, and another where a wound is cauterized by pouring gunpowder into it and burning it with a lit cigarette.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU’LL LIKE: Hard Boiled, Woo’s 1992 effort (also starring Yun-Fat Chow) about a detective and an undercover agent who team up to take down a mob crew.

BODY COUNT: We tallied 118. You might get more.

***

Join us as we count down the greatest gangster movies of all time — a new entry every Thursday! Click here to see what you’ve missed so far.

[Reprinted from The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia and Glen Macnow. Available from Running Press, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.]

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Adams and Chase try to control a violent patient (guest star David Anders).
[©2012 Fox Broadcasting Co., Photo: Jennifer Clasen/FOX]

As promised, we get something different this week. We open with the camera panning across a room in the hospital in which something very bad has clearly gone down – blood spatter, a bloody handprint, a cluster of Mylar balloons bobbing ironically against the ceiling. It’s so bad there’s not even any music on the soundtrack until we’ve had a few minutes to take it all in. Finally, there’s a very cinematic cut to House, in dim blue light, staring into the mirror before going out to meet the man who’s conducting a disciplinary hearing on the events of February 3, 2012.

The first two thirds of this episode unfold as flashbacks interspersed with the testimony given by House, Taub, Adams, and Park. The interviewer is Dr. Walter Cofield, one of Foreman’s early mentors, as it turns out. It’s very well done visually – the flashbacks are slightly overexposed, filmed with a jerky, handheld style, while the scenes with Cofield are all bathed in the same dim bluish light, with less movement and more distance on the part of both the camera and the actors. And I have to say I appreciate the frost visible on the windowpanes that dominate the longer shots of House and Cofield facing off across the conference table – one thing I’ve always liked about House is that when it’s winter in New Jersey, it’s winter on the show. Inconsistent weather has been a pet peeve of mine since an early episode of Chicago Hope, in which the characters made constant references to the approach of Christmas, and one wore a Santa hat, but the climactic scene involving a young baseball player took place on a richly green baseball diamond, the John Hancock building clearly visible beyond the leafy treetops.

None of that tonight. There’s a very cinematic long shot of the Patient of the Week collapsing while out jogging, a row of snowy trees in the background. He’s a 32-year-old chemistry teacher, who appears to be recovering until two of his students show up with balloons, flowers, and the news that he was nearly knocked out by an explosion while doing an experiment in class (the student assistant rigged the explosion so he could post the video on Youtube), and the patient starts coughing up blood. (There’s been a lot of that lately.) There’s also a minor prank war between House and Chase, that kicks off when House puts orange dye in Adam’s shampoo, which he knows Chase uses (no, not for that reason, not yet, thank God).

The testimony of House and the others provides narration, and hints of conflicting viewpoints (plus a moment of House in a beam of white light with an angelic chorus on the soundtrack, until Cofield tells him to cut it out). The next symptoms to appear are a rash, and violent paranoia. Adams thinks the rash is important, but not the paranoia. Park takes the opposite view (surprise, surprise). Taub thinks both symptoms are significant, but that both Park and Adams are wrong about why.

One of the pleasures of an episode like this is seeing House and his team through a new pair of eyes (though you could argue that the third party standing in judgment over House and his methods is kind of a throwback to antagonists like Tritter or Vogler back in the early seasons). The writers and the actors do a good job of subtly keeping the characters in character, so to speak, while they testify. The situation brings out the best in Taub; away from the chaos of his personal life, with the least at stake personally, he’s articulate and completely unintimidated by Cofield. Park is at her worst, alternately timid and brash, telegraphing all her (metaphorical) punches. Adams is guilt-ridden (okay, that one’s not so subtle).

Where’s Chase in all this? Well, he takes Adams’s side about the rash (please, no – does anyone want to see them together?). He goes to take a biopsy of the rash, and the patient goes crazy. And stabs Chase in the heart with the scalpel. That’s why we haven’t heard Chase’s testimony – he’s not dead, but he is in intensive care. The dramatic shot of Adams kneeling on a gurney shown in all the promos was Chase being wheeled off to surgery while Adams held the wound shut with her finger. It’s his blood that was splashed all over the room, and the stabbing is the incident under investigation. The patient is pretty much the same as before, only he’s being sent to another hospital for treatment. Not that this stops House obsessing over the diagnosis, even as the team focuses on Chase, who can’t feel his legs when he wakes up. (It’s some kind of clot, correctly diagnosed by House, and next week’s previews show him up and around.) Chase insists to Cofield – who’s come to interview him in the hospital – that House’s intrusiveness was the only House could keep an eye on Chase, without being accused of caring.

In the final act things get a bit more predictable (and it’s raining instead of snowing – I don’t know what that means). Cofield opens his final interview by telling House he “creates an atmosphere that promotes recklessness”; House, putting his feet up on the table, asks if he’s going to be fired for bad manners. He tries to pop a Vicodin but there’s a small explosive in the lid – Chase’s final entry in the prank war – and this triggers the Moment of Realization, so House rushes out of the interview at the worst possible moment. He needs to tell the patient’s wife that her husband has a tumor in a lymph node that burst, releasing toxins, when he hit his head during the explosion in the classroom.

And a good thing, too. Cofield gathers the team to deliver his verdict, and it’s not looking good for House until the patient’s wife bursts in and announces that he’s tactless and uncaring, but totally right, and he’s saved her husband’s life. Cofield then says that he won’t interfere with House or his methods, as they’re effective. House accuses him of cowardice, pointing out the stacks of notes and the paperwork relating to his parole that Cofield put aside as soon as the wife burst in. It’s all a little pat. (The wife’s basically stating the premise of the show). As effective as the first half of the show was, I never really believed that House would go back to jail or that Chase would never walk again (the same as Foreman wasn’t going to stay blind or die back in the second season). His stabbing will result in an emotional crisis next week, according to the previews. I guess I’m up for more personal drama with Chase, though he’s certainly had his fair share. I just hope Wilson will be around — we didn’t see him at all this week.

The relationship between House and Chase moves into new territory, as well. We see House watching Chase from outside the ward while he recovers, and in the final scene, he watches Chase in obvious pain, struggling to walk again, and the meaning of this scene to House is nicely underplayed. Is Chase, who has daddy issues to match House’s own, becoming something of a son figure? House does actually apologize to Chase here, so I guess anything is possible.

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Robert Forster returns to Alcatraz tonight.

CR: Liane Hentscher/FOX

I feel safe in saying that tonight’s episode of Alcatraz was the best episode yet, and it also featured the return of Robert Forster as Madsen’s uncle, Ray. Unfortunately, it seemed to come too early in the schedule. While it’s nice that they gave us an episode that actually gave the impression that the show might be worth sticking with, the emotional high points of the episode fell flat because we hadn’t built up enough of a relationship with these characters.

The main plot revolves around guard Guy Hastings (Jim Parrack) returning to Earth. Angry for reasons left murky, he goes after Madsen’s surrogate uncle Ray Archer, who was also a former guard at Alcatraz, due to his connection with former prisoner Tommy Madsen. Madsen, who escaped from wherever at least three months ago, was Rebecca’s grandfather and, as it turns out, Ray’s actual brother. (Ray accepted the guard position at Alcatraz to watch over his sibling, though, to the best of our knowledge, Guy doesn’t learn that in the past, and I don’t think he figures it out in the present either.)

Guy goes after Ray, tries to discover what happened to Tommy, and eventually Hauser and Rebecca Madsen stop him. (Remember, it’s how the show works.) Afterward, Madsen realizes that Ray knew about Team Alcatraz even before she did (actually 16 years before) due to his lack of freaking out over Guy returning looking the same 50 years later. She also discovers that for some still unknown reason, Tommy holds the key to the entire project. Or at least the key to the first gate of the project. (This seems like the type of show that would adopt an annoying, Burn Notice-esque main villain behind the main villain behind the main villain strategy.)

Robert Forster and Sam Neill might play off each other really well

However, because this was the first time we’ve seen Ray since the pilot, a lot of these reveals didn’t hit. That he lied about his lineage and his history as a guard at Alcatraz meant suffered a lack of impact since the show hadn’t established his character and his relationship with Madsen decently enough for the “real uncle” reveal to carry any weight. His being in on Team Alcatraz might have played better if he acted suspicious around Madsen thus misleading us into thinking that he had something to do with the disappearance.

Nevertheless, hopefully with this reveal, plus the end-of-episode-twist that Ray has known that Tommy is alive and that his brother has talked to him on several occasions, we’ll see more Robert Forster on this show. And also hopefully, we’ll see scenes with Robert Forster and Sam Neill since their characters’ apparent past together definitely warrants the show’s two strongest performers to interact. Though Sam Neill does occasionally drift a bit too far into “I know more than you know and I’m sending you on a quest!” mode when talking to Madsen and/or Soto.

Anyone else really not feeling the Doc nickname? Everytime Madsen says it, it feels like she’s trying to sell a catchphrase that no one’s buying.

CR: Liane Hentscher/FOX

The Prisoner-of-The-Week (or should I call it Alcatrazian-of-the-Week now?) subplot worked better tonight than it has in the past. Although the majority of it was the standard chase stuff we’re all too used to, Guy and Ray gave it a emotional core that the others POTWs have lacked. And we do learn that at least the guards don’t remember where they’ve been for the past 50 years. I still presume that they were taught about modern culture, but I still want someone on the show to say something about it.

There were a lot of stupid from Team Alcatraz tonight. Soto asking what they should be looking for in Hastings’ box. Madsen pondering why the people who took the 63ers would be after her grandfather. Soto captain obviousing by saying aloud that Hauser is tracking them. It’s a good thing the flashbacks are getting entertaining because the lazy TV police work is almost getting condescending.

Additional Thoughts:

• Hauser asked Ray to join him 16 years ago? Did it take Hauser that long to get funding for his project or did something happen that made him realize the Alcatrazians were returning? It’s a silly question that doesn’t have an answer yet, but I guess it’s good that the show’s mysteries are getting me more involved than its plot holes.
• Similarly, did Tommy often go to Ray’s bar for a drink and now they’re turning against one another? Ray seemed particularly angry to see him this time, but they also appeared to have something of an on-going relationship. Did Ray know that Tommy killed Madsen’s partner? Did Ray know that Madsen was part of Team Alcatraz for that matter? (I’m going with no, yes.)
• This show has a penchant for just dropping the reveal from the previous week’s episode. I don’t know how I feel about that.
• The Madsens’ nice-looking house in a nice-looking neighborhood has just been abandoned for many years as though it’s a cabin in the woods?
• That was a nice blood squirt when they shot Hastings in the foot.
• Sarah Jones actually showed a spark in her scene at the end with Hauser.
• Still no Parminder Nagra tonight, either in flashbacks or present day; I don’t even think she was mentioned. It’s not that I thought her character was that great, but it seems weird to still have her as part of the main cast.
• Which show has more inches of rain per episode: Alcatraz or The Killing?

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This Sunday brings us the Super Bowl, the year’s biggest sporting contest. As always, this year’s event (the XLVIth) will be loaded with ads for some of the biggest films of the year including 21 Jump Street, The Hunger Games, Ferris Bueller II, John Carter, and The Avengers.

Nothing quite like a 10 second ad for a 30 second ad.

In honor of the football game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, Matthew Newlin and I will present movies featuring Giants and Patriots.

BRETT’S PICKS:

Read more…

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Photo by: Chris Haston/NBC

In case anyone is interested in my thoughts on the potential Dwight Schrute spin-off, you can read my comments here.

Tonight’s episode of The Office was one of the better ones this season. That isn’t to say it was particularly funny, but I thought it was a more-or-less successful half hour of television. We spend a good deal of time in the office, which is a plus, and the stories actually concern the characters rather than the characters’ zany antics.

The main plot involves Jim returning from one week of jury duty, which luckily coincided with the show’s one-week hiatus. As a matter of point, I found it difficult to believe that anyone in the office would care what happened during the trial, but people were actually asking him about it. Nevertheless, the hitch is that Jim was let out of jury duty at noon on the first day and took the rest of the week off to help Pam with the babies. Only Dwight suspects something’s up and strives to out Jim to the rest of the staff in an attempt to get him fired. It’s oft-tread ground by this show, and tonight this storyline dwindles pretty quickly. Dwight tests out one of Jim’s alibis and Andy is willing to lie on Jim’s behalf, but you get the sense that the writers hadn’t the faintest idea of where to take it beyond that. So, they have Jim confess to his wrongdoings by the end of the second break and use the third act for Jim to clean up his mistake. He does so by summoning his wife and two crying kids, and the office soon realizes that his five days off were no vacation. Despite the sense that the writers “bailed” on Dwight’s investigation halfway through, I have to give them credit for not playing it out to the end of the episode as they normally would. Besides, the key instigator in that storyline, Dwight, had far more important things to do in the second plot.

Photo by: Chris Haston/NBC

While Pam was pregnant, Angela was too, and tonight she gave birth to a baby supposedly a month premature. This meant we finally saw the return of supposedly gay State Senator Rob Lipton (Jack Coleman, who still looks weird without glasses), a severely underutilized character in the show. Even though he doesn’t do much tonight, he nevertheless gives off a vibe that he could fit into the show, as though he’s part of its universe rather than just an extra like Pam’s Replacement. Eventually, Dwight eventually visits his former flame where he realizes that the larger-than-average “baby is a Schrute! And unless someone taught Mose sex, that baby is mine!” It’s the best line of the episode (maybe of the season), and the entire sequence shows that Rainn Wilson is the strongest performer on the cast. His interactions with Angela have a spark that’s lacking in the show’s other relationships, his smarminess around Lipton shows his comedic strengths, and his pride is fun to watch. When Dwight tells his possible-child that one day he’ll rule millions, either willingly or as slaves, you realize that letting Dwight loose provides an energy the show sorely lacks. Could that mean success in his own show? I offer my thoughts after Additional Thoughts.

Additional Thoughts:
• Tonight, Andy came across as particularly annoying. The entire cold open featuring him dancing like an ass and making a mess of the warehouse seemed more like something Michael would do. I also hate when people dance goofily.
• More annoying things from Andy in Jury Duty: hugging Jim when he comes back from jury duty, calling details “deets,” the fake chill pill gag, “fire you to Timbuktu,” saying that Jim’s in “deep doo-doo,” and dancing in the warehouse during the cold open. I should note that I did feel a lot of Andy’s actions came from The Michael Scott Playbook tonight.
• Gabe loves maternity wards because it’s a “perfect blend of love and horror. Things can go so wrong or so right.” It took the show awhile to figure out what to do with Gabe, but Creepy Gabe works for me. And Woods gives his character enough distinction to prevent him from becoming Creed II.
• They’ve gotten some mileage out of it this season, but Erin and Kevin have a good rapport.
• Pam returns to the office during the final third, and I never realized how little she offers the show. Her absence has not affected the series at all. Though Creed confusing her for Angela was a good moment.
• This might be my second favorite episode of the year with Lotto as my first. Coincidentally, both don’t feature my favorite character of the season- Robert California.
• Now that the amazing Justified is back on FX, I admit that I don’t get the point of the Timothy Olyphant subplot from Season 7. It still bothers me more than a season later because it seems like such a waste of screen time and of the dryly funny Olyphant. Either way, Justified became a truly terrific show in season 2, and it looks like the show will continue to live up to the standard it set for itself last year.

Midcap: Scrute’s

Welcome to Schrute’s!

Photo by: Chris Haston/NBC

I wanted to comment on this last week, but it didn’t seem worth its own article. Let’s talk about the potential Dwight spin-off being discussed at NBC that involves Schrute’s Farm’s Family Bed and Breakfast.

While I’m mostly down on the current incarnation of The Office, I do think Schrute’s could work. Odds are it won’t, but it could, might, maybe. The biggest problem I can foresee is the need to change Dwight entirely, especially for a “family comedy.” The Office has always presented Dwight a quasi-evil character and a punch line. Tonight, he wanted to best Jim in trial by combat. That type of character cannot serve as the lead of a show (see: Joey), unless they want to make the show entirely offbeat. If you populate Schrute’s with people weirder than Dwight, you’d have a series inhabited by genuinely dangerous people. I would actually like that, but I can’t imagine that being the path it would take considering the “dumbing down” of the The Office over the past few seasons.

The article also discusses how we’d get to see more of the Schrute family, which again could be problematic. I always got the impression that Dwight was the most normal one in the clan, the one who could hold a job and interact in normal society, which should indicate how dysfunctional the rest of his family is. We’ve gotten definite implications that his family had Nazi ties and that they subscribed to arguably torturous concepts of child rearing, not to mention the possible Schrute inbreeding. The humor eked from Dwight’s past is dark and a Marilyn Schrute would take away from his character and screwed up history. Furthermore, if tonight’s episode is meant to set up a Dwight/Angela/Philip family, Angela is an equally unfit character to base a show around since she too was meant as the quasi-evil punch line. She’s the anti-Pam in the same way that Dwight’s the anti-Jim.

In other shows about innkeepers such as Newhart and Fawlty Towers, the main character was usually the straight man surrounded by a gang of idiots. Dwight, on the other hand, is the misfit, and we’ve known him as in that role for close to a decade. Then again, most of the comedy from Basil Fawlty came from watching him try to be a model of respectability as he slowly lost his composure. So maybe Dwight trying to put on a public face for the guests and probably the camera crew could allow him to fall more into the Fawlty mold, but I don’t think it would work nearly as well because we’re too accustomed to Dwight as the weird guy. Also, both the hotels were decent places in nice locations whereas Schrute’s Farm is a sty. Though I guess he can pay for renovations.

And, of course, will there be anything more embarrassing than the eventual “Jim and Pam, what are you doing here?” episode.

Either way, as part of The Office Spin-Off Showcase, it ranks above The Boring Lives of the Halperts and Andy Bernard Tours With His A Capella Group, but below Florida Corporate and Ryan Does Something.

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Gena Rowlands in Gloria (1980-PG)

This is a gangster movie without a memorable gangster. But it has one of the all-time great underworld molls in film history.

Gena Rowlands, in the title role, is the movie. And that’s both a blessing and a curse.

Her depiction of Gloria, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress (Sissy Spacek won for Coal Miner’s Daughter), is the best thing going here.

That may be by design.

Gloria was written and directed by Rowlands’ husband, John Cassavetes. He did the film, a departure from the less-commercial, cerebral and artsy work he was noted for, as a favor to his wife, according to Ray Carney in his biography Cassavetes on Cassavetes.

“The role deeply appealed to her,” Carney wrote. “It tapped into a side of her that captured the way she sometimes thought of herself—the ‘sexy but tough woman who doesn’t need a man.’ “

Critics had mixed reactions to the movie, which didn’t do much at the box office.

Most correctly described it as a thin narrative that was designed to provide a stage for Rowlands. She appears in nearly every scene surrounded by a supporting cast that is just so-so.

Buck Henry is Jack Dawn, the nebbish mob accountant whose decision to cooperate with the Feds provides the violent jumping-off point for what amounts to a two-hour game of hide-and-seek. But his portrayal of the panicked FBI informant seems forced.

And the film’s young costar, John Adames, gives a stiff performance as Phil Dawn—the overly precocious six-year-old boy Gloria has to save. If you want to see how this should have been done, check out Natalie Portman’s performance as a 12-year-old underworld waif in Léon: The Professional, a film built around a similar storyline.

Gloria is the ex-mistress of Mafia don Tony Tanzini (Basilio Franchina). She lives comfortably with her memories and her cat in a shabby apartment building in the Bronx. She knocks on a neighbor’s door to borrow some coffee and walks out with Phil in her care.

The rest of the family (Jack, his wife, their teenage daughter and her grandmother) have waited—for reasons that are not entirely clear—too long to flee and are about to be visited by a group of angry hit men.

Carnage ensues.

Gloria then goes on the run with Phil and the book his father has entrusted to him. It’s a ledger containing all the details of the mob’s financial wheeling and dealing—a book that could bury, as it turns out, Tanzini and several of Gloria’s other former mob friends.

Using buses, subways and taxis, the intrepid couple traverses the Bronx, often just steps ahead of the mobsters looking to kill the boy and get the book. Bill Conti’s jazz score adds just the right mood changes as the chase ebbs and flows.

The late Cassavetes, whose more intense work included Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence (which also starred Rowlands) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, described Gloria as “an adult fairy tale” with a message for women.

“I wanted to tell women that they don’t have to like children—but there’s still something deep in them that relates to children, and this separates them from men in a good way,” he said in his biography. “This inner understanding of kids is something very deep and instinctive, in a way, it’s the other side of insanity.”

That’s the instinct roiling beneath the surface as Gloria blows away several gangsters and, despite her protestations, develops a fondness for the boy in her care.

Phil, in turn, goes from angry to sad to belligerent and back again while falling in love with the gun-toting mama who has become the surrogate for all he has lost—mother, father, sister, family.

But his wisecracks, while meant to show a street-smart toughness, ring hollow and often sound like a second-rate Damon Runyan. When a desk clerk at a fancy hotel refuses to give Gloria a room because she is with a Puerto Rican boy, Phil explodes at the slight.

“He don’t know the score,” he says as Gloria hustles him out of the hotel lobby. “He sees a dame like you and a guy like me. He don’t know.”

At another point, when Phil says that he wants to go home, Gloria gives him a verbal slap, telling him, “Don’t be stupid. You got no home. You got me.”

Their goal is to get to Pittsburgh, which from the New York-centric perspective of a Bronx bomber like Gloria, sits at the edge of the earth—a place where the mob won’t go.

HIT: The movie’s depiction of New York is real. This is not Woody Allen’s Manhattan. It’s the Bronx—chaotic, pulsating and never at rest.

MISS: Not one mobster says anything worth remembering. They are one-dimensional stereotypes.

PIVOTAL SCENE: Shortly after fleeing an apartment ahead of the mob, Gloria has second thoughts about what she is doing and tells Phil to take off on his own. Just then, a car containing four mobsters pulls up. One of the gangsters tells Gloria to walk away, that they just want the boy.

“Frank, what are you gonna do, shoot a six-year-old Puerto Rican kid in the street?” she asks. “He don’t know nothing. He don’t even speak English.”

With that she reaches into her purse, pulls out a gun and opens fire.

After that, there’s no turning back.

BEST LINE: In the climatic scene when Tanzini and his associates have a sit-down with Gloria, they tell her that her maternal instincts have kicked in. She denies it.

“I was always a broad,” she says. “Can’t stand the sight of milk.”

WHAT THEY WROTE AT THE TIME: “While the script pitches a series of wildly improbable events, the direction remains disruptively attuned to the dark, arrhythmic poetry of anticlimax. Heightened emotion and nagging banal reality fight each other for screen space, doing final battle in a daringly ambiguous ending.”—Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

DON’T FAIL TO NOTICE: After one lengthy cab ride, Gloria hands the driver a five-dollar bill and emphasizes, “That’s a five!” implying that his tip is included. Today, five dollars in a cab in New York will get you about six blocks.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Cassavetes, according to his biography, got street people and real gangsters for the scene in Tanzini’s apartment. In fact, one of the gangsters, a “professional hit man,” argued with Cassavetes about the way the scene would play out in real life.

BODY COUNT: Ten.

***

Join us as we count down the greatest gangster movies of all time — a new entry every Thursday! Click here to see what you’ve missed so far.

[Reprinted from The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia and Glen Macnow. Available from Running Press, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.]

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House enjoys his newfound freedom without an ankle monitor.
©2012 Fox Broadcasting Co. Photo: Adam Taylor/FOX

This week’s premise – “A Different House,” in which we see House caring for a patient as he never has before – is a bit oversold. Pretty much, House stands up for a teenage runaway’s right to hate her pill-popping mother and make a life without her. Though, to the writers’ credit, the parallels with House’s own father issues aren’t pushed too hard. An enjoyable episode, but no new ground is broken.

We start with House seeing a teenage girl who’s been having trouble breathing. House figures out fairly quickly that she and her “dad” are in no way related, and are both homeless. He sends “Dad” on his way, but not before the girl hands “Dad” two beers as payment for his services. Her cover blown, she just wants to get out of there, but the blood leaking from her ear says otherwise. (Hmm – second hemorrhagic patient-of-the-week reveal in as many episodes. As I said, no new ground.)

The Scoobies discuss the case in a restaurant across town from the hospital. Why are they meeting here? Because Foreman’s about to walk in with Yaya (his married lover) on his arm. “Hi, Dean Foreman!” House yells across the room as he snaps photos of the two.

We get three subplots this week, one in the clinic, one involving Taub, and one involving Foreman and his fling. In the clinic, House sees two men dressed as Confederate officers. They’re re-enactors, but “the General” has “the green-apple two step” — dysentery, which until fairly recently killed more soldiers than bullets did. House provides medication, commenting that he can add some mercury if they’re really concerned with authenticity. Ah, nineteenth-century medicine. Did you know that when Florence Nightingale brought her own nurses to the Crimean War, one of the changes she insisted on was using a fresh cloth for each soldier’s wounds, instead of just using the same sponge dipped into the same bucket, patient after patient?

Back on topic. Combining two subplots, the doctors are discussing Foreman’s situation and Taub comes out in favor of cheating, as it brought him his daughters. But then a confession – they’re coming over this weekend, and part of his baby-proofing routine is to remove all magazines from his apartment. It’s not a porn thing, as Chase believes, it’s just that – he knows he needs to pay attention to them but “they’re just so … boring.” Nice job on Peter Jacobson’s part of seeming genuinely ashamed and conflicted.

Park and Adams visit the derelict house the patient lives in. One guess as to who likes the girl’s independence, and who wants to heal a broken life. Sigh. Did I mention that I have to look up Adams’s name every week, that’s how little of an impression she makes on me?

It doesn’t quite count as a subplot on its own, but one of this week’s themes is House doing things he couldn’t do while he had the ankle bracelet on (like stalking his boss). One patient conference takes place at a skeet-shooting range, and another at a tortoise race. Adams gets to call social services, because she can shoot better than House, but when the “social worker” shows up, her heels are suspiciously high. It’s one of House’s hookers.

We see Taub doing his best to entertain his babies with animal puppets, making the requisite quacking and mooing noises, but his heart isn’t in it, and it only lasts until he sees a magazine he missed in his pre-baby sweep. Later, we see Adams telling him that he just needs to “log more hours” and he’ll find himself bonding, “kind of like Stockholm syndrome.” Which is a great line, but it doesn’t sound much like Adams, and almost any other character on the show could have given it more of a twist.

The real social worker and the patient’s mom show up just in time for her to begin coughing blood. House thinks it’s an aneurysm, Adams thinks it’s secret alcoholism. It’s now the mom’s choice whether to operate on the patient or just start her on rehab. I, personally, would be inclined to explore and eliminate the truly life-threatening possibility put forward by the doctor in charge, before going with the option presented by a junior colleague on circumstantial evidence, but Mom goes with rehab.

House tries to use photos of Foreman and Yaya to blackmail his way out of punishment for getting a hooker to pose as a social worker (does anyone besides me find House’s regular patronage of hookers kind of gross?). So Foreman decides to break it off. But Yaya explains this isn’t necessary – she told her husband about him, after he commented on how happy she’s been lately. He’s not thrilled, but neither of them wants to give up on the marriage just yet. In the meantime… Foreman looks less than happy about his demotion from forbidden love to unpaid marriage counselor.

The non-diarrhea-stricken Confederate returns, to explain that “the General” is a “progressive.” “Compared to Rupert Murdoch?” asks House. No, it just means he won’t break character while in uniform. The two are brothers, and this guy is just along for the ride because it saved their relationship after a nasty fight. He makes a passing reference to numbness in his hands he attributes to the rigors of re-enactment.

Foreman talks over his relationship issues with Taub and Chase, which may not be the best idea. Chase keeps the babies expertly entertained, punctuating his comments about commitment-free sex with coos and gasps. Taub asks in desperation how Chase manages it. “First, you have to be a decent and empathetic human being,” says Chase. Now that’s how to deliver a line.

Speaking of which, Wilson hasn’t been around this week, until Taub corners him in his office, demanding empathy lessons. Surely boring people get cancer too? Wilson says the secret is finding common ground, shared loves or hates. “John Woo movies, romance novels, kale.” Surely at least a couple of those are hates. Next time a magazine catches Taub’s eye as he’s playing with the babies, he starts showing them pictures of NFL players, with appropriate growls, whines, or hisses. Bonding accomplished.

Not so much in our other storylines. Just as mom and daughter are bonding over muffins, the daughter collapses. House was right! No, he wasn’t — no sign of an aneurysm. But he figures out she picked up a parasitic worm swimming in a polluted canal on a trip to Florida (her one pleasant memory). House: “Family vacations kill.” As always with worm storylines, some pills and she’ll be fine, but worms freak me out. I almost never watched the show again after they found a tapeworm in Robin Tunney’s brain way back in the pilot. Things go, um, swimmingly (sorry), until the daughter gets well enough to disappear again. Adams is crushed, House is still furious with her for interfering – please let this be the beginning of her getting fired.

Foreman tells Yaya he’d like her to tell her husband they broke up, so they can start sneaking around again. This doesn’t go over so well. House tells Foreman he’ll seek the same adrenaline fix elsewhere, until he gets bored and escalates.

Our two Confederate soldiers return, vomiting profusely into House’s wastebasket. Turns out General Authenticity cheaped out and got them polyester uniforms so low-quality they’re permeated with antimony used in processing the fabric. By wearing them around the clock in authentic unwashed squalor, they’ve managed to give themselves antimony poisoning, cause of all their symptoms. And that’s it for another week. Again, enjoyable if not exactly fresh – but looks like something heavy is going down next week.

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Smallville’s Eric Johnson as Cal Sweeney, the POTW on this week’s Alcatraz.

There actually might be a good show in Alcatraz. Unfortunately, it takes place in 1960. The flashbacks, which tonight featured a dinner party held by the Warden for top members of his staff with two prisoners serving as waiters, actually worked well tonight. Alcatraz came across as its own little universe with its own rules and only style. The Alcatrazians- prisoners and prison staff alike- generated some level of interest in me, and they even seemed to have some depth and complexity. Plots and characters reflected a possible continuity from both onscreen and off screen. There’s an attempt to give definite vibe to these scenes, for which I have to give the show credit.

Unfortunately, the flashbacks make up a small percentage of Alcatraz. The majority of the show has to do with the present, which is still a startlingly lifeless police procedural, and one more like a low rent version of The Inside than Law and Order. I know, I should give the show time to figure itself out, but you can’t help but feel that it should be smarter. Even if they still decided to do the procedural route until they get their feet wet, there’s a way to make the cases of the week interesting. Criminals from the 1960s aren’t interesting simply because they’re from the 1960s.

Maybe my issue has mostly to do with the lack of personalities exhibited by both Madsen and Soto both apart and together. In more successful shows featuring a couple investigating bizarre crimes, the relationship between the two main characters serves as the heart of the show. We need to want to see the core duo solve the crime more than we want to see the crime solved, and Alcatraz does not pull that off. There’s no chemistry, either friendship or sexual, between Madsen and Soto, and if the show is just about wasting time between flashbacks, then that’s very disappointing. While Hauser might have a greater screen presence than those two, he’s more a boss than a partner, and even he just seems to be coasting on Sam Neill’s professionalism. Lucy only appears in the flashbacks. At this point, I think it would have made more sense to kill her in the second episode.

Not Mulder, Scully, and Skinner

The Prisoner-of-the-Week is Cal Sweeney (Eric Johnson), a bank robber. He breaks into safety deposit boxes, takes stuff from them, visits the owner, asks about the items’ history, and presumably kills them. In the show’s simplistic view of the criminal mind, it’s because his family and everything they owned burn when he was a child except for a tin box.

While the show’s ridiculous idea of criminality annoys me, apparently it’s a genuine subplot to the series as a whole. In the past, we learn that Lucille’s theory behind the criminal mind is that all criminals are hardwired to act the way they do because of a bad memory, and if she can replace that bad memory with a good one, everything would be hunky dory. While that belief seems a bit outdated and especially flimsy in 2012, I am looking forward to Groovy Inception.

Back to the show. One of Sweeney’s modern day robbery attempts fails, so he takes a bank hostage. To keep Team Alcatraz alive, Madsen sneaks in and breaks him out in a very cheap, television-y way. See, luckily she apparently had a SWAT team uniform in Soto’s car so that Sweeney could wear it to blend in with the cops. After causing a distraction that leads to the police tossing tear gas into the bank, they walk out nonchalantly, seemingly unaffected by the gas, enter a cop car, and just drive away. Eventually, she knocks him out by driving really fast and slightly tapping a car on her passenger side.

The big plot “movement” happens at the end of every episode, and tonight it takes place in Alcatraz I. After capturing Cal, Madsen finds a key like the two in the first two episodes. Hauser asks for it back, and she initially refuses. I have no idea why she wouldn’t trust him, especially considering he has access to all the technology and could kick her out of Team Alcatraz and he has done nothing to warrant her not to trust him, but we need to build suspense cheaply. She relents when Soto tells Hauser that they’ll give him the key, but only if he tells them what it’s for. He agrees. After taking the key, Hauser says he will…but not yet, and he walks away.

Seeing this picture makes me imagine Ray Wise in the role, and how he’d most certainly raise the entertainment value of the series. Because that’s what he does. #Shrim

Here’s where the show got a bit odd for me. When Hauser leaves, Soto says, “Guess he trusts the scientists more than us.” I thought that was a joke about how Hauser is so mysterious, but the boss actually walks into an adjacent room and visits a team of scientists whom, to the best of my memory, we’ve never seen or even heard of before, and hands them the key to analyze. So were they working there the whole time and we never learned about them? What’s their relationship with Soto and Madsen? Are they ever let out of the room?

Anyway, in the past, we see that the three keys open a special cell, which might as well be another hatch. You’d think Hauser would have uncovered the door by now.

Additional Thoughts:
• What’s with this show’s antiquated view towards comic books and comic book fans? At the beginning of the episode, Madsen questions Soto about how a guy with two PhDs ended up owning a comic book store. Why is it so hard to believe that he might enjoy the medium or see the shop as a business opportunity?
• Soto also explains that he was blacklisted from criminology after the National Journal of Criminology published his groundbreaking article that used Gotham City as a statistical model. Being laughed out of the Criminology Academy for a piece like that seems a bit over-the-top. After all, a number of academic papers use pop culture as a jumping off point. Secondly, the NJC published it, so they must have seen some value in it? Unless he lied about all his data, in which case does the NJC believe in peer review? (He claimed he did it so he could stop being a criminologist, the field his parents pushed him into. It’s all very stupid.)
• When Cal was asking future victim Will about the history of the items, he reminded me of Bill Hader’s Dateline‘s Keith Morrison on Saturday Night Live.
• Does Detective Madsen come across as a sub-average cop to anyone else?
• When Madsen enters the bank, she actually crawls in through an air duct.
• I don’t know how police actually function, but the handling of the entire hostage situation came across as really false to me.
• I don’t care so much about solving the mysteries, but the criminals really need to express some amazement with the 21st century, or we need to learn why they don’t, or someone needs to ask, “why don’t they?” Similarly, I was bothered when Madsen explains to Cal that she knows him, and he doesn’t bat an eye.

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Listen closely, and you can hear murmuring in the village. Discontented whispers about the Academy Award nominees. It’s a very hip village, don’t you know.

As in any healthy Oscars race, fans are making much of the various glaring omissions from this year’s nominee list. Nobody wants to give Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, or Steven Spielberg a trophy, despite the fact that they worked their tails off in just about every film released last year. No gracious nods to Mia Wasikowska, Michael Shannon, or Albert Brooks. The lovable Brooks even re-invented himself as a cold-blooded killer, but as Sir Ben Kingsley (of Sexy Beast) should have warned him, that doesn’t always work.

Acting, directing, and writing awards are the most popular targets for this kind of discussion, but there were more very creative folks left off the roll this year. Consider, for example, the rather drab selection of Best Music nominees. Don’t get me wrong – the original song from The Muppets deserves to win, but what happened to She And Him’s “So Long” from Winnie The Pooh? It’s probably going to win a Grammy, but as we can probably all agree… who the hell cares?

Meanwhile, two aggressively original outsiders are out in the rain, peeping in at the Best Original Score category without so much as an acknowledgment. Cliff Martinez, veteran film composer for the likes of Steven Soderbergh, and former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer, put together a fabulously moody soundtrack for the beautiful nightmare that is Drive. In addition, the Chemical Brothers summoned a tremendous amount of playful, mischievous energy to accompany Joe Wright’s high-speed revenge drama Hanna.

Not only are these two soundtracks excellently matched to the pace and tone of their respective films, they both are completely out of left field. They embody the term “original soundtrack” far more accurately than at least half of the successful nominees.

We all love John Williams, and we always will. But does he need to be nominated twice in the same year? Howard Shore is filling the traditional spot reserved for himself, Hans Zimmer, or James Horner. In a just world, the contest would be strictly between The Artist and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but neither has anything like a lock on the prize. The safe money will be bet on Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but this year’s entry has not broken much ground since their superior work in The Social Network.

NOTE: I do not deny a small personal bias – I would give Trent Reznor an award for the sound he makes brushing his teeth. But until I get the Brushies telecast up and running, let’s return briefly to the point.

Rather than pitting one or two eccentric visionaries like Reznor/Ross against the sweeping orchestral masters like Williams, Shore, Horner, Zimmer and so on every year, why can’t we have more bizarre composer supergroups? To challenge these fearsome incumbents, Cliff Martinez should band together with Angelo Badalamenti, who produced original music for Twin Peaks, and almost all of David Lynch’s other projects to date. For good measure, they could give Barry Adamson a call. Adamson, formerly of Magazine and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, has built a fascinating solo career on film soundtracks and concept albums posing as film soundtracks.

To be fair, Barry Adamson and Angelo Badalamenti should be winning Oscars without anyone’s help by now — for proof, check their respective entries on the Lost Highway soundtrack, along with Reznor’s — but a three-composer team would look mighty intimidating on the ballot.

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Consuelo Gomez stars in El Mariachi (1992-R)

Fewer people probably saw El Mariachi during its run in theaters than any other film in our countdown. And it was, without a doubt, the lowest-budget movie you’ll find in our coverage.

The film was written, directed, photographed and edited by Robert Rodriguez, who shot it over the course of two weeks in the Mexican border town of Acuña, across from Del Rio, Texas. You may recognize Rodriguez now as the director of schlock classics Sin City and From Dusk Till Dawn. But when he made El Mariachi, he was a 23-year-old unknown from San Antonio working with a budget of $7,000—or as critic Roger Ebert put it, “about what it costs to cater lunch for a day on a Schwarzenegger picture.”

The actors are unpaid volunteers and friends. The sets are whatever street or dusty bar Rodriguez could commandeer for an hour or two. There are no special effects or notable actors or expensive cars that get destroyed in high-speed crashes.

But you know what? This cult movie works in an unpolished way. And the setting—given the increased power of Mexican drug cartels—seems more relevant now that it did when El Mariachi was made.

The plot centers on the title character (played by Carlos Gallardo), a wandering guitarist who drifts into a small Mexican town looking for a gig. He dresses in black and, naturally, carries a guitar case.

His timing could not be worse. That same day, a revenge-crazed drug dealer named Azul breaks out of a local jail with the aim of killing his traitorous crime boss, who tried to have him assassinated. Azul, too, dresses in black and carries a guitar case—except that his is loaded with items like automatic pistols and brass knuckles.

That crime boss, named Moco, gives his goons a description of the dealer coming after him. “Don’t worry, Moco,” says one. “We will find him, kill him and feed him to the dogs.”

Thus begins the case of mistaken identity. As the naïve mariachi wanders from tavern to tavern looking for work, an armed hit squad gets on his trail. Soon enough, he is forced to put down his guitar and pick up a gun to defend himself—even though he has no idea why killers are pursuing him.

The transformation is a little abrupt. In one scene, he’s the wimpy guitar player bellying up to the bar to order a soda pop; in the next he eludes the posse by riding an electrical wire down from a second-story roof like Tarzan. Trapped on two sides by bad guys, he leaps over a truck, prompting the shooters to kill each other while aiming for him. Where did he learn that? In music school?

That’s basically the entire plot. There’s a doomed love interest with the mob boss’s ex-girlfriend, a half-dozen chase scenes and lots of carnage. Rodriguez doesn’t spend much time on character development. You quickly realize, because of his soulful eyes and mellow singing voice, that El Mariachi is a romantic. And you realize as well that Moco is evil because he wears white suits, orders a bikini-clad girlfriend to file his fingernails and enjoys lighting matches off his henchmen’s faces.

It all sets up for a great climactic showdown. Reminiscent of The Departed, half of the cast gets blown away in the final five minutes.

This is engaging stuff, and you may appreciate it more—rather than less—for the unsophisticated nature of the production. Yes, you sometimes see blood squibs pasted to characters before they explode, and yes, at least a few actors are clearly reading their lines off of cue cards. (You likely won’t hear those lines since the current DVD release is dubbed from Spanish to English. See if you don’t think the character of Azul sounds exactly like Joe Mantegna with a Mexican accent.)

But there’s a lot of energy and creativity in El Mariachi. Rodriguez has gone on to become a popular and successful director. Watching this film gives you the sense of watching a rock star back when he was in a neighborhood garage band.

Rodriguez later wrote of his adventures making this movie in the book, Rebel Without a Crew. He raised the money to buy film and the one handheld 16mm camera by working as a guinea pig for medical school experiments, most notably taking medication designed to lower cholesterol. That’s where he met one of the principal performers, Peter Marquardt, who plays Moco the kingpin. Marquardt’s a terrible actor, but we hear his triglyceride level is outstanding.

Rodriguez put the movie on VCR tape and sent it around Hollywood, just hoping to get a foot in the door. Executives at Columbia Pictures liked it so much they bought the rights and spent many times the original budget to convert it to 35mm and add Dolby sound. The movie won several awards, including the Audience Award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

HIT: There’s actually a lot of humor in this little gem. Watch for the scene where our hero loses a music gig to a one-man band whose electronic keyboard only plays polkas.

MISS: For no apparent reason, El Mariachi is interspersed with dream sequences, most of which involve a young boy playing soccer with a ball that morphs into a severed head. In his book, Rodriguez conceded that the scenes were meaningless, but said he included them for three reasons: to get the movie up to its 81-minute length, to show some of the beautiful scenery around Mexico, and, in his words, “When in doubt, have dream sequences.”

DON’T FAIL TO NOTICE: The head in those scenes is modeled after Rodriguez himself. In keeping with the low-budget theme, the cheesy skull looks as much like something taken off an inflatable doll as it looks like the director.

REALITY CHECK: Even after the guitarist learns that armed killers are hunting him, he’s out at the town’s most popular nightclub, leading a crowd in song. For a guy with a price on his neck, he’s either too brave or too stupid.

WHAT THEY WROTE AT THE TIME: “In a way, the unpolished look of El Mariachi and its players is what makes it so refreshing from the standard Hollywood action flick. . . . El Mariachi is nowhere near as extravagant as its successors, yet it remains a constant simple pleasure, best enjoyed with a shot of Patron and a cold Corona.”—Brian McKay, efilmcritic.com

BODY COUNT: Fourteen, plus one poor guy’s hand.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Some media members in Acuña were critical when Rodriguez showed up in town to film his movie. To win them over, the director gave small acting roles to two of them—a TV newsman and a newspaper columnist.

GOOF: We’re lenient with such a low-budget film, but Rodriguez would have been wise to spend a few bucks in one particular scene. The room where the sympathetic barmaid hides El Mariachi from the posse has a transparent glass door that would conceal no one.

VIOLENCE LEVEL: Extremely high. Of that original $7,000 budget, we suspect that half of the money went for fake blood.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU’LL LIKE: Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico—the second and third parts of the trilogy Rodriguez opens with this movie. Antonio Banderas replaces Gallardo (the director’s buddy) as El Mariachi. The sequels have superior sound, multiple cameras, Salma Hayek as eye candy and everything else a studio budget can buy. Still, we’ll take this little movie over those two for its heart.

***

Join us as we count down the greatest gangster movies of all time — a new entry every Thursday! Click here to see what you’ve missed so far.

[Reprinted from The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia and Glen Macnow. Available from Running Press, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.]

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As my co-writer Dan Fields expressed in our Best And Worst Movies Of the Year article, “2011 was a year of disheartening mediocrity, but at least a few films managed to be significantly better (or worse) than average.” And it shows with this year’s Academy Awards. While there were snubs and surprises, I don’t think people feel particularly strongly about most of the movies or the performances. We might have our personal favorites, but I’m hard-pressed to think of that one film or role that everyone will unite behind (or against). Looking at all of the nominations, it’s difficult to pick out the film or films that inspire a genuine passion in people. It certainly makes for a more challenging Oscar pool (really, at this point it seems like anyone’s game), but it also shows that there wasn’t really one standout film this year.

With the Oscar nominations announced today, myself, Dan Fields, and Matthew Newlin will offer our thoughts on the Oscar picks along with our picks for the top categories.

BRETT’S THOUGHTS:

I would like to begin by Read more…

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Rain makes things atmospheric!

We enter week three, and if this represents the typical Alcatraz episode, it’s going to be hard to get excited for the show.

For starters, we make absolutely no headway on the cliffhanger from last week. In fact, I don’t think we get any answers to or additional questions towards the overall mystery of the show. An old doctor from Alcatraz is now working in Alcatraz II and he seemingly conducts questionable medical experiments, but it doesn’t really provide any oomph.

Secondly, flashbacks. I was never a huge fan of the Lost flashbacks. I didn’t mind them at first, but by the second half of the first season, they already seemed to be spinning their wheels. Alcatraz uses the flashback structure to show what it’s like for the prisoners in prison in the 1960s, but they too lack a punch, not the least reason being that each bad guy will probably only get one episode to themselves. The insights into the prisoners are mediocre-at-best since the show weighs pretty heavily on the Black/White version of morality for its criminals. No matter what they did in the past, they’re compelled to do it again in the same exact way in the present, and we get the motives behind the criminals’ actions from the present day investigation. While these flashbacks might build the 1960s universe, they’re not doing a particularly good job with it now. I simply don’t care about 1960s Alcatraz and probably won’t until we learn a) how they disappeared and b) the cover-up. This could change in time, but right now, I would be happier with them gone.

Third, and this is the most important complaint, this show really does come across like a very average procedural. We have okay-but-not-super cops tracking down an escaped convict, and that’s it. They use dime store psychology and rescue the potential next victim(s) in the nick of time. The Cause-and-Effect version of criminal mischief tonight involved Prisoner-of-the-Week Kit Nelson (Michael Eklund) kidnapping and killing 11-year-old boys because his brother died when he was 11 years old. (Turns out he killed him and the family lied about it being consumption.) It’s easy and sloppy, and the show used a similar idea in the preceding episode, where Prisoner-of-the-Week Ernest Cobb targeted his victims based on his younger sister.

Soto conducts his own investigation based on diners with cherry pie. That actually happened.

I guess the show tries to go “off book” by making it so Team Alcatraz cannot use police reinforcements. This raises a number of questions, including does Hauser work for the feds? He was able to call off an Amber Alert pretty quickly, and if he does, why couldn’t they use reinforcements? And if he doesn’t, he does has a guards working at Alcatraz II so why can’t his private army assist? I know the “official” reason is that it’ll call attention to Team Alcatraz, but that is a lazy excuse to make capturing the villain harder than it needs to be. Yes, the criminal is from the 1960s, but if you pass around a mug shot of a guy, I doubt people will wonder what decade he came from. Even if someone else catches him, who would believe him if he said he was actually from Alcatraz? And even so, Hauser probably has the power to get the body once it’s in custody.

This idea of being isolated from the rest of law enforcement can work. Take a look at The X-Files where even though Mulder and Scully were officially sanctioned by the FBI, you always got the sense that it was essentially them alone against the world. This show is not pulling off that sense of solitude in the slightest.

Another thing that separates this show from typical cop shows is its super computer, which I will call I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. after the one in Team America: World Police. After the expected mid-episode “they find the POTW but he escapes with the victim,” they discover his lair by realizing that his father owned a company that made bomb shelters, and I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. can pinpoint the exact location of one of those bomb shelters in a mess of woods, even though Shelter Corp. has been out of business since the 1960s. My question is this, if I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. can do that, why can’t they program it to monitor crime stories and police bands from across the country and alert them when a crime matches the MO of an Alcatrazian? After all, these guys follow their old playbook to a T.

I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. from Team America: World Police, my inspiration for Alcamputer.

To give the episode its emotional hook, Soto takes the case so personally that it’s obvious that something similar happened to him when he was younger. It’s a stock storyline, not particularly poorly done, but not well done either. Nevertheless, my biggest issue came at the end. Hauser gives a speech to Soto about arrested development and how children who suffer a traumatic incident remain trapped in that age even when they enter adulthood. Seeing Soto’s reaction to the case makes Hauser tell him that he wants adult Soto and not child Soto, to which Soto replies that he will behave like a grown up from now on.

But this arrested development idea does not apply to Soto, as he does not appear stuck with a child’s mind. Yes, he likes comic books, but so do a lot of adults. What a lot of adults don’t have are two PhDs (including one in the Civil War, which will come in handy when this show becomes Andersonville) and four books to their name on Alcatraz. Soto’s not a guy who is really into The Rock in the same way that a kid can be really into dinosaurs. He’s dedicated a portion of his life to the subject and engaged it in a scholarly way. While he might enjoy comic books, he a) works at if not owns a comic book store and b) he draws comic books. This is a business for him, not a hobby. Maybe it’s just Hauser’s old school way of thinking, but geeky proclivities do not indicate arrested development.

Additional Thoughts:
• We already know that an Alcatrazian from the 1960s killed Madsen’s partner, but are they going after people who are laying low or are they just waiting for people to begin their crime spree?
• I’m still using “they were trained during the lost years” as the reason why the criminals are so comfortable in 2012 America.
• Why were Hauser and Madsen shocked that Soto has a police scanner?
• Still hate the cell door closing sound effect to indicate flashback.
• The dialogue between the POTW’s father and the POTW was terrible. As was Soto’s “Only Al Capone or Machine Gun Kelly could buy these!” Garcia’s delivery sounded awkward and forced, but it’s probably really hard to pull off one of those “See! He knows history! He mentions (read: shoehorns) historical names!” lines.
• The Evil Warden’s menace is undercut by him looking like an oily Bob Hoskins. The fourth match burned a pretty long time, didn’t it?
• Although I want Lucy back (she didn’t appear this week), I did like how she wasn’t back to work immediately following a serious shooting.
• For a comparison to flashbacks working in a situation like this, let me reference Oz. Also set in prison, Oz used flashbacks to show how the inmates ended up in jail. Sometimes surprising, sometimes tragic, they added an element of depth to the characters that is missing when all we get is “I’m an evil guy who did evil things and now I’m going to do more evil things.”

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