The Boondock Saints

Your opinion of this movie can probably be determined by your impression of this photoshopped publicity still I googled:


Yes - that's Billy Conolly. The comedian. The one who replaced Howard Hesseman on head of the class.

The Boondock Saints - 1999
Directed by Troy Duffy

Mrs Jones and I watched it last night - or at least until we had to turn it off. This was one of the most god awful movies I have ever seen most of. Really, it comes down to piss poor writing and poor direction of the cast. Neither the plot nor the characters had any sense, authenticity or even remote believability. You know those movies that fill you with embarrassment as you watch them - yup, this is one of those movies. What's worse is that its set in Boston, which is essentially taking the blade of inauthentic dreck and twisting it in my gut, and then snapping the blade off. Oh yeah, Ron Jeremy is in this. And he's not playing himself. Willem Dafoe's portrayal of a flamboyant homosexual is so over the top and poorly conceived, I'm not wondering if somebody at GLAAD had a fatal stroke; I'm wondering how many of them suffered aneurisms.

The insufferable THE BOONDOCK SAINTS gets two middle fingers, way up. My only regret is that I have but two middle fingers to hoist. I'd like to pop some zits and squirt puss at it, too. Or squeeze out some tonsil stones and smear them across the director's tongue. (Tonsil stones or Tonsilloliths are calcified pus. Picture soggy feta cheese that smells strongly of halitosis. That's how much I hate this movie.)

Come to find out - this movie is near-universally regarded as a train wreck. To make things better, there is actually a documentary about how this movie, and it's director's unbelievable hubris and antagonistic vitriol basically wrecked his career before it got started. Here's the trailer for Overnight, which is now sitting atop my Netflix Queue. One quibble: the trailer narration says he's from Boston - I looked it up and he's not. Connecticut. That explains the slanderously negligent role that Boston plays in his movie, which is essentially limited to establishing shots.



And since I mentioned him - when are we going to get some hollywood loving and see Howard Hesseman as bad guy? Or playing Ernest Hemmingway? Or a WKRP remake?

There Will Be Blood & John Adams

There Will Be Blood (2007)
John Adams (HBO Mini Series - 2008)

I finish watching both of these last night, and they seemed to beg some comparison. John Adams, a sprawling 7 part mini-series follows the political and personal life of 2 President John Adams, played by tPaul Giamatti. There Will Be Blood follows the professional and personal life of self proclaimed "Oil Man" Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Both capture a period of Americana, that both shows how different that time was from the present, while shaping it in a way that we can't ignore the impact of that era on our own. The drilling of land and cheating of land owners shows the beginning of the loss of America's pioneer spirit. While in John Adams, we see the movement away from the British Monarchy, and clumsily stumbling into something new. JA represents the initial blastoff of America as a beacon of hope for freedom, and by TWBB, we see that the American dream is already become an cannibalistic monster - feeding one man's dreams at the expense of others.

Both movies also show the struggle of the American's complex relationship with religion. In TWBB, the relationship is very parallel, and not very subtle but evocative symmetry of religion and free enterprise as systems of control. In JA, religion is the heart of America, while being kept separate, but close to democracy, the brain of the new Union.

I have to say that after watching JA, I was pretty unimpressed overall. This was another attempt to breath live into the old colonial oil paintings of the founding fathers, to evoke vitality and counter presumed truths. In the end, it really only solidified the stogy notions. Sure, we find out the JA was a lovable curmudgeon (Giamatti seemed to be channeling his role as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor), and that George Washington had a meek voice and often following questionable advice - but at the end of the day, it was the same portrait of men inexplicably rising above their surroundings to become the gods of government for a brief time. It was all too reverent, and all too "good acting". I love Laura Linney, but came to despise her portrayal of Abigail Adams. I'm sure she played it as directed, but she, like everyone else, became more and more one-dimensional. For a mini-series, it was well produced, but a Hollywood budget, this was not. I can't take points away for that. At the end, this fell prey to the common historical drama fate - accomplished actors playing dress up, serving a director who read a "really good biography".

Flip to There Will Be Blood. The first 20 minutes doesn't even have any dialog. Here we don't so much experience the spiraling downward of an antihero, as much as we come to know a man who was inwardly evil all along, and the changes are the resources that become available to him. What is amazing about Day-Lewis' performance, is not how pitch perfect each scene is, but how naturally he progresses into the monster at the end of the film. He doesn't seem any different at the end, but if you go back and rewatch the early scenes, you see how much he has changed. As the audience, I was unable to watch him grow old and change, much like people are unable to see it in themselves and those close to them. The directing was superb - the imagery and cinematography was lyrical - lyrical in the way that Lawrence of Arabia is lyrical.

Finally, the end of each respective piece might but a fine point around their differences. The final episode of John Adams is the prolonged passing of the founding fathers and their loved ones. It was akin to a studio rock track that repeats the same refrain over and over, fading out to nothing. There Will Be Blood ends in a thunderclap, that cuts to credits before you have time to synthesize it's full meaning. It was akin to a crescendo that is followed by silence, and you only then discover the piece is over.

John Adams: One Middle Finger
There Will Be Blood: No Middle Fingers

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
Rating: One Middle Finger

Okay, I was just expecting there to be more oomph here. In telling the story of Dewey Cox, most of the recent musical biopics get skewered. So there's "Walk the Line" (Johnny Cash), "Ray" (Ray Charles), "The Doors", and... and... Okay, so I guess that's it.

It does a good job of pointing out some of the annoying idiosyncrasies of the genre - insisting on awkwardly inserting dialog to identify side actors playing musical celebrities. Or that cringe inducing moment when they get their shot in the recording studio, and everybody starts head nodding. The performances are good as well. John C Reilly never fails in his acting, and this movie is no exception.

So what went wrong? The jokes didn't have a lot of punch. After some opening dialog that was very amusing, (mostly pertaining to a machete "accident"), it never picks up any more steam. Unlike a Christopher Guest satire, which goes for pitch perfect tone and the skill of his ensemble, this movie was definitely aiming for some below the belt guffaws, and it didn't connect enough. Sure, the musical numbers were well written and it captured the essence of the movies it was sending up - but for a movie designed get people to talk about "wanting cox" - the humor wasn't sharp or frequent enough. Seriously - when you put Tim Meadows in a movie, you better have a damn good reason.

In the end, the movie meanders as it placed Dewey improbably into every cultural/musical back alley between 1953 and the present. Of course that also cuts against trying to keep your story true. Ray Charles didn't drop acid and get into the Disco era. His character dissipates into a cluttered pastiche, and you lose your Cox (sorry, I had to do it). By the end, Cox is everyone, and no one, and you just don't care.

Kudos to Jenna Fischer, who proves she's not a one trick pony on "The Office", and Raymond J Barry as a fantastic as Cox's "Pa". Barry is a consistently awesome background character actor, and it was great to see him get some extra screen time.

Unfortunately, the writing just didn't have the strength to hold the movie up. Enough good stuff to avoid a double eagle, but this flick gets flipped one bird.