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Director:
Lawrence Kasdan

Starring:
Thomas Jane
Damian Lewis
Tom Sizemore
Morgan Freeman
Jason Lee
Tim Olyphant
Donnie Wahlberg 

Release: Date
IMDb

Until last summer I was oblivious to the acclaim that Stephen King has received from many people. Though I had been a fan of many of his cinematic works -- especially Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Dead Zone -- my only chance reading of one of his novels, The Shining, was especially disappointing. Considering that many King fans believe it to be his finest work, my lackluster reaction to the novel deterred me from returning to him.

And last July, when in need of a quick book and finding a free copy, I decided to take my second stroll with King by reading Misery, the source of my second favorite King adaptation. To my surprise, Misery was the exact level of genius that I was looking for -- within its pages was the suspense he was known for as well as the pretentious self-reflexivity that I constantly look for in a novel. Though I have not had a chance to read any of his work since (I imagine the next will be The Dead Zone), this certainly created an excitement for his work that I had no interest in earlier.

Then something like Dreamcatcher has to come along and screw up what was a nice King love-athon I was enjoying. I had always disregarded his abysmal TV miniseries (The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Needful Things) as his lesser efforts only to find the equivalent (both in quality and in length) in Dreamcatcher.

A year ago, I would be most likely to blame King for the atrocity that Dreamcatcher is. However, the real blame seems to be impossible to place on any sincle person, including the two cinematic semi-icons who created this monster for the screen. William Goldman has been seen as a god among screenwriters since he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, even though his best work since 1978's underrated Magic have been in his books about screenwriting instead of his occasional screenplays. His touch on this film -- coming after successfully adapting Misery for the screen in 1990 -- should have been golden. How, then, did it become such a wretched mess, in which nothing seems to make sense?

Blaming Lawrence Kasdan, the Coppola-Lucas cohort who co-wrote some of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films as well as directing such intolerable baby boomer fare as The Big Chill and Grand Canyon, would seem easy for me considering my low expectations for him anyway. But one gets the impression that he's trying to do something with this film despite the hurdles thrown in his way. The fact that he does it without really letting the seams show does deserve some credit.

Seamless, however, this is not. Kasdan and Goldman make impeccable use of their media by attempting to somehow differentiate their work from the phantasmagoria of clichés, contrivances, overblown effects, and understated moments. There are momentary gems within this train wreck of a picture because the two men most at work on its success are diligent enough to never give up.

And anyone in their right mind would have given up on this project from the very beginning. Integrating childhood memories, telepathy, alien invasion, and fatal gastrointestinal disorders into a single story seems odd, though King was apparently able to pull it off in 800 pages. Working in a horribly paced two-and-a-quarter-hours, none of this makes sense. For moments at a time, the camp cheesiness of an alien attacking a person through a toilet -- something that Kasdan at least succeeds in creating the terror such an invasion would mean unlike Stephen Sommers in Deep Rising -- is enough to make the film seem tolerable. Or, perhaps, there's the wonderfully absurd moment when a Henry (Jane), already poorly trying to convince Army Captain Owen Underhill (Sizemore) of his sanity, begins using a pistol as a telephone. The final, abrupt ending is also successful. But what strings all these moments together feels empty and pointless.

Director:
Chris Rock

Starring:
Chris Rock
Lynn Whitfield
Dylan Baker
Bernie Mac
Tamala Jones
Nick Searcy
James Rebhorn

Release: 28 Mar. 03
IMDb

Possibly the best forum for bipartisan satire in recent years has been Saturday Night Live, which bitingly attacked Al Gore and George W. Bush with the same levels of vitriol (indeed, there was more Bush after 2000 simply because he was the one in the White House). To this day, "strategery" and "lockbox" make me laugh (and wince) at the horrible choices Americans had in the 2000 election.

With a new spate of Democrats lining up to be ridiculed by SNL (Sharpton, Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards have already been mocked; Graham, Kucinich, Dean, and Moseley-Braum are still waiting for their time in the sun) and primaries less than a year away, the 2000 election continues to haunt political punditry with the annoying reiteration of "we wuz robbed" (as Spike Lee titled his short film on the election). For SNL, the future looks bright; for the sanctity of democratic elections, the fear is that we may be headed towards repeating the past.

Chris Rock, seeing the chance to jump on this problem befor Saturday Night Live gets a chance, has written and directed Head of State to speak on the misgivings of both the current electoral system and the status of African Americans in the election process. Unlike SNL, however, Rock doesn't seem to know how to make this funny.

Rock plays Mays Gilliam, a D.C. alderman who finds modestly helps his constituents while being unable to succeed at anything else. When the Democratic nominees for president and vice president suddenly die in a plane crash 10 weeks before the election, power-hungry Senator Bill Arnot (Rebhorn) decides the only way to win in this scenario is to accept a loss in 2004 and win in 2008 against current vice president Brian Lewis (Searcy), a dumb, jingo southerner. Arnot, sensing that he would lose too much face if he ran and lost now, convinces his advisors to put their clout behind a black man who can make the party seem equal-opportunity but will have no chance of winning.

Gilliam seems to be the perfect person for Arnot's lackeys, Martin Geller (Baker) and Debra Lassiter (Whitfield), to use as a marionette -- without any knowledge of the world he has entered, Gilliam is all too willing to let them control his campaign. But, when polls look horrendous and his older brother Mitch (Mac) gives him some advice, Gilliam decides to take over the campaign and to make it more personal. Suddenly, he trades his tailored suits for Fubu jackets and Kangol caps. The real campaign has begun and, miraculously, Gilliam might just have enough momentum to win.

Head of State is predominately clichés, though this is not why the film fails to ever reach its potential as a great political comedy like Bulworth or Dave. The real problem is that Rock and co-writer Ali LeRoi have no real interest in taking a dramatic step beyond the conventions they wallow in. Though the use of the clichés can establish the mock nature of the subject, the inability to make a statement beyond this leaves the film clipped and impotent in its worth as any form of political commentary.

Even when Rock et al. are attacking the lack of minority voices in politics, they are failing to differentiate this voice from the hegemonic white clamor beyond some diversity in clothing and music. Certainly there are some defining cultural differences made clear (including a rapping elderly sequence that instantly brings to mind Bringing Down the House, which is never a good thing), but the value of candidacy on either side is vague. Gilliam stands up for better education, transportation, and work. How is this different from the platform of Arnot or Lewis?

The only way to tell them from each other beyond skin color is in their corruptibility quotient, which could be a good statement to make about modern politicians, even if that's surely not intended (after all, Gilliam is meant to be a deity to the common man). Maybe Rock is trying to make a statement about the worthlessness of the 2000 candidates and setting it in the 2004 election. But I doubt it -- there's no old lady rap humor in that.

Director:
John McTiernan

Starring:
John Travolta
Connie Nielsen
Brian Van Holt
Samuel L. Jackson
Giovanni Ribisi
Taye Diggs
Tim Daly
Harry Connick, Jr.

Release: 28 Mar. 03
IMDb

The basic premise of John McTiernan's Basic is that of an interrogation in which the speaker is meant to recount every nook and cranny of a mysterious event that boggles the mind of the investigators. Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie did wonders with this scenario in The Usual Suspects, where they posed the reliability of any narrator (including themselves) as questionable. The Usual Suspects was my top film of 1995, in a year that also included such stunners as Nixon and Dead Man Walking.

Basic, however, will be lucky to keep out of my bottom ten list for 2003. While much of its razzle dazzle comes directly from the Suspects camp, all the ingenuity is long gone, deluded by a love for constant double-crossings, red herrings, and annoyances. The screenplay by James Vanderbilt seems so proud of itself that it fails to notice that (a) nothing makes sense, and (b) nobody cares.

The story is mostly told through flashbacks coming from two U.S. Army Rangers who went into the Panamanian jungles in a troop of seven and came out alone. The stories being told by Raymond Dunbar (Van Holt) and Levi Kendall (Ribisi) do not sit well with Pete Wilmer (Daly), the commander of the base they have been brought to. With mere hours before the two are to be sent out of his jurisdiction, Wilmer calls on the help of army investigator Julia Osborne (Nielsen; using a horrendous southern accent) and former Army Ranger Tom Hardy (Travolta).

The story that they get out of the two begins to piece together the sadistic power of thier late commander Nathan West (Jackson) and the underground drug trade within the barracks that reaches as far back as the hospital supervisor (Connick, Jr.). As the two stalwart detectives attempt to understand who is lying and who is telling the truth (while all the while fighting the sexual tension between them) they become embroiled in the type of army corruption spider web that dissolved into idiocy when Travolta played the same role in The General's Daughter.

This should be a great film, the first re-teaming of Travolta and Jackson since Pulp Fiction and the return to form for McTiernan. The director, who is still feeling the shame of Rollerball, needs something to remind people that his style of action film -- namely the Die Hard trilogy -- is still important to the breakneck blockbuster world that has passed him by. Watching the film, one gets the impression that he wants to convince the audience that there is more to his film beyond the flaccid script, but fails to generate enough steam (especially when the situation is overshadowed by its unctuous nature) to convince anyone that the film is any less shallow.

Perhaps his downfall -- other than the screenplay Vanderbilt gave him -- is in the obsessive compulsiveness he has created within himself to return to form. He surely knows the importance of Jackson and Travolta to the film and thusly presents them in a form that defeats anything within the drama. Jackson is so over-the-top (both in his performance and his presentation) that he becomes more cartoon than person. For an army officer, he makes R. Lee Ermey look positively genial.

Travolta, an actor who may never live off Battlefield Earth, is presented even worse. McTiernan shows him in this muscle-bound black t-shirt and close-cropped hair as if he is the Adonis male stuck in Panama. Travolta, with all his histrionics, isn't the best actor to portray emotions, relying more on a presence within the frame. But that isn't the way the screenplay or the direction takes him, instead trying desperately to push him into a type of resounding character much like his painful Phenomenon performance. For Travolta's part, he does work his scenes with enough brawn and bravura to fill an International Male catalog, but his acting style seems in direct competition with the people who are presented it.

Regardless of my vocalized problems with the film, I cannot put into words the absolute disdain for the audience the film shows in its final fifteen minutes, most of which moves from twist to twist to twist as if the audience is meant to gasp at the genius of it all. By this point, though, most of the audience has lost interest in the film and will miss just how much contempt the film has for them.