Reviews for 2010
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Starring Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan, Adam Brody, Kevin Pollak, Guillermo Díaz, Seann William Scott.
Directed by Kevin Smith.
Rating: 4/10
It isn't difficult to see what director Kevin Smith was going for with Cop Out. With its police detective partners -- one white (Bruce Willis), one black (Tracy Morgan) -- its drugs-and-gangs plot, relaxed pace, smart-aleck attitude, and Harold Faltermeyer soundtrack (the man responsible for the soundtrack of Beverly Hills Cop), the movie is a knowing nod to the cop flicks of the '80s. And in case this wasn't going to be clear for you, the movie practically spells it out during Morgan's tirade about paying homage to old cop movies.
Although the idea behind this film may have potential for fun, it's not very compelling. At the most, you might get a harmless valentine of a movie. But Cop Out appears saddled with plenty of other problems, not the least of which involves its hit-and-miss script by brothers Mark and Robb Cullen. Yes, it's the first time Smith isn't directing one of his own scripts, but that doesn't absolve him from culpability. The movie brakes every so often for a dose of Smith's usual juvenile humor, but it gets old pretty quickly when applied to protagonists who are supposed to be seasoned policemen. Speaking of which, one's mileage may also vary regarding Willis and Morgan. Willis looks like he's on auto-pilot, knowing it isn't a serious role (and really nothing more than a straight man) and just kicking it as easily as he can. Meanwhile, Morgan seems on comedy overdrive, which isn't pretty. Basically, he's got the Eddie Murphy role, but Murphy made such parts smart and edgy while Morgan comes across as just whiny, which proves tiring. Eventually, Seann William Scott appears, and the little kid humor reaches a groan-worthy low.
The result? Cop Out feels like a half-baked concept halfheartedly executed. Smith manages to work in some of his warmer trademarks -- the bond between good buddies and the pride of a father -- to go along with the spotty comedy, and that lends the movie an air of good nature, which might be the most one can say for an otherwise underwhelming effort. (added 7/9/2010; this review also appears at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
Creation (2009; 2010, U.S. release)
Starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jim Carter, Martha West.
Directed by Jon Amiel.
Rating: 7/10
The name Charles Darwin has now become synonymous with the Theory of Evolution, and it carries with it all the controversy that scientific view engenders. One of the natural goals of Creation, then, would be to humanize Darwin, while at the same time not shying away from the subject that makes him notorious. This sounds like a tough task, but Jon Amiel's film handles it well by focusing on a tragic event in Darwin's life -- one with a major effect on him even years later as he prepared to write his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species. In summary, Darwin (Paul Bettany) has lost his beloved oldest daughter (Martha West, who's wonderful), which has not only caused him much anguish but also created an unspoken rift between himself and his wife (Jennifer Connelly). Unable to find closure and becoming physically ill, he has difficulty completing his book, one his devout Christian wife would likely disapprove of but which his daughter would have embraced, since she followed her father's teachings devotedly.
Creation does fall back on conventions for its storytelling, from little things -- like the frequent use of flashbacks, the colleagues who hound him and stress the importance of his works, a descent into madness where Darwin continually envisions his dead daughter admonishing him -- to the larger picture that this is mainly a grief movie about people who can't get on with their lives until they make peace with themselves. But the film does have something rather insightful to offer about a subject that, I believe, doesn't get addressed often. In fully accepting and, at times, articulating Darwin's evolutionary point of view, it is unapologetic to the Christian viewer, which is very much the correct approach, but then it takes this a few steps further to show how challenging it is not to simply accept this point of view, but to fully live with it. In the film, Darwin is shown losing his faith in religion and becoming more adamantly assured of the coldness of nature, but to say it's cold and to embrace it are two different things. A few sequences, such as the story of the captive orangutan named Jenny and the very effective time-lapse shot of a dead chick, emphasize the difficulty of being secure in the idea that nature contains no divinity, especially when one is brought up in an environment surrounded by people who believe in a higher power by default. Darwin getting over his daughter's death and seeking the approval of his wife are analogous to gaining the courage to bear convictions that would challenge the beliefs of the majority of society. If Creation might not stand out in other ways, it at least gives a well-approximated glimpse into the self-actuated challenges experienced by atheists and agnostics; popular opinion may see such persons as defiant and mocking, but most likely they were unable to help starting out in a position of doubt. The movie shows that all faith, any faith, is made stronger through questioning and emotional trial. (added 7/9/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
Starring Keith David, Loretta Devine, Peter Dinklage, Ron Glass, Danny Glover, Regina Hall, Kevin Hart, Martin Lawrence, James Marsden, Tracy Morgan, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Columbus Short, Luke Wilson.
Directed by Neil LaBute.
Rating: 4/10
Neil LaBute's American remake of Frank Oz's 2007 British comedy doesn't change much from the original -- it swaps a largely African-American cast (which includes names like Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, and Tracy Morgan) in place of neurotic Brits (played by a cast of lesser-knowns), but otherwise follows almost the exact same narrative path. This means the component that stayed mostly the same is the writing, which is bad news to me, since my main beef with the original movie was exactly that. Yes, the cast delivers their moments with a different comic sensibility and different cultural flavor, but in the end the main plot points and big gags rely on the same lazy devices -- a mistaken drug, a homophobic revelation, and, worst of all, a really disgusting toilet gag. Looking for LaBute's trademark misanthropy, I couldn't really detect it outside of the way he utilizes the only returning cast member, Peter Dinklage, playing the same part -- he's a bit more aggressively mean here, which is amusing. Otherwise, this really is mostly the same movie, and I don't want to waste anymore words on it -- please read my review of the original because most of what I said there applies here. (added 8/17/2010)
Starring Brendan Fraser, Harrison Ford, Keri Russell.
Directed by Tom Vaughan.
Rating: 5/10
I originally did not plan to see Extraordinary Measures. Ads for the film made it look like a run-of-the-mill "disease-of-the-week" TV movie, and I didn't give it much thought. But after its theatrical release, I found out it concerned a father and businessman, John Crowley (played by Brendan Fraser), teaming up with a scientist, Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), to speed the development of a cure for Pompe disease, an enzyme deficiency condition that kills infants. I suddenly had a personal interest in what the movie was about because, as it happens, my uncle, Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, was a leading researcher for treatment of Pompe Disease during his time at Duke University.
This very fact about my uncle's involvement actually made minor waves on the internet about the "Hollywoodizing" of true stories. The "Dr. Stonehill" of the movie is a fictional character -- a composite of various scientists and researchers that the real John Crowley worked with. Somehow, the word had gotten out that the real scientist who should have gotten credit was Dr. Chen, and, to make things worse, a Chinese man of importance had been changed to Dr. Stonehill, a generically gruff white scientist played by Ford. The man who originally brought this information to attention was Roger Ebert, who in his review of the movie gives credit to my uncle for the development of the Pompe cure (Ebert, bless his heart, even included a nice photo of him). A few other sites, particularly ones about the representation of Asians in the media, picked up on this tidbit to express outrage.
By doing some further digging, I came upon an article I assume was one of Ebert's sources of information concerning the story of the Pompe cure. It's an informative piece spotlighting the work of Dr. Chen and his associates at Duke, and I recommend giving it a look. Digging even further, I discovered that the story of the search for the cure for Pompe disease is a sprawling epic, and to give my uncle main credit would be misleading -- the research was begun in the 1990s by Dutch scientists, Arnold Reuser and Ans van der Ploeg at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Dr. Chen's work at Duke ran concurrent to their ongoing work, so effectively there were two fronts fighting against this disease. A biotech company called Genzyme eventually got involved and helped fund the clinical trials in both fronts of the study; using all the information gathered, they engineered a medicine called Myozyme that successfully counteracts the effects of Pompe disease.
Based on Geeta Anand's The Cure, Extraordinary Measures doesn't really care about any of this. It would rather have you believe the research for the treatment of Pompe disease was going nowhere fast until Crowley got desperately involved. Crowley has two children diagnosed with the disease. In the movie, the elder one, Megan (Meredith Droeger), has reached the age of 9 but her condition won't give her more than a year to live. Crowley then seeks out Dr. Stonehill of the University of Nebraska, who has a radical approach to the solution but can't get anywhere because of lousy funding. They team up to start a biotech company dedicated to working off of Stonehill's research; eventually, their work is worthy enough to gain the attention of Zymagen, a large biotech corporation, who buys them out and places Crowley in charge of their Pompe division.
That last part is mostly true, except that Zymagen was really Genzyme. Buying Crowley's company, Novazyme, in order to incorporate their third-party research, they did place Crowley in charge of their Pompe efforts for about a year. Dr. Stonehill's primary analogue would not be Dr. Chen but more likely Dr. William Canfield of the University of Oklahoma, who founded Novazyme and partnered with Crowley.
In any case, the movie's main concern is to show that Pompe research and its path to clinical trials faced speedbump after speedbump, and that Crowley was the driver determined to push through all of them. He nabbed the ignored genius researcher, he brought his work to a giant biotech firm, he made the executives there more patient-aware, and he continually questioned a corporate system that, due to its commercial nature, put on an objective, cold face on the research it did to help real living, sick people. Admittedly, it's easy to root for a loving father fighting through the system, but Extraordinary Measures shamelessly piles on the sentimentality and disregards the real work of the many scientists dedicated to fighting this disease for years.
The movie plays up most of the regular clichés in the screenwriting playbook, starting with the loving, sad, and determined Crowley and his adorable family. His quest is sincere in the face of all obstacles thrown at him, and there are a lot of them, all designed to make his determination look better in the process, of course. But the most ridiculous cliché involves the character of Dr. Stonehill, who's one of those old guys so beaten by the futility of working at a university that he's become an irascible old crank. What a maverick -- he works with loud rock 'n roll music blaring, and if that annoys the youngsters, that's even better. He righteously takes every setback and criticism personally, and spends half his time yelling. At one point, he shouts, "Get out of my lab!" I'd like to see the standoff that would occur if he stepped on Clint Eastwood's lawn while Eastwood stepped in Ford's lab.
Although Extraordinary Measures milks all the drama it can, I wouldn't call it wholly unsuccessful. It does give attention to a lesser-known deadly disease. And any parent has that spot which gets hit when he or she sees a sick child whose father and mother are willing to do anything in the universe for (really, though, it's not that hard to draw up such a scenario and get instant tearjerking). The movie perhaps provides some insight into how public health research must accomodate a marriage to the corporate biotech world in order to make any kind of progress, but while doing so it glosses over the very real efforts of academics who are doing their best to work within this existing system and succeeding.
The film's major crimes, though, are that it's just corny and mawkish. To play up the efforts of one man (to whom I would wish the best in real life) and his off-the-cuff pluck, the barriers placed in his path are the stuff of screenwriting contrivance and cartoonish coldhearted villainy from skeptical venture capitalists and protocol-pushing execs. There are many people who worked together on the real fight, including Mr. Crowley, including Dr. Chen, including the people at Genzyme and the folks "Dr. Stonehill" is supposed to represent -- so the only real villain needs to be the disease. (added 5/22/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
(For further interest, here's a FAQ from Genzyme about the accuracy of the movie and Myozyme.)
Starring James Van Der Beek, Wendy Crewson, John Heard, Will Tiao, Tzi Ma, Leslie Hope, Kenneth Tsang.
Directed by Adam Kane.
Rating: 6/10
Let's cut straight to the point: Formosa Betrayed is one of those public conscience movies about an international injustice disguised as a crime thriller. It's almost shameless in the way it presents itself -- there's a murder, yes, on U.S. soil, which leads FBI Agent Jake Kelly (James Van Der Beek) to Taiwan, and once he's more or less settled in, out come the dissidents from the woodwork to educate him about the atrocities committed by the ruling government against the original native citizens of the country. The main person of sympathy who helps Agent Kelly is a man named Ming, played by Will Tiao, who also shares story credit and producer credit for the film. There's no question about the political motivations of this production, which seeks to bring awareness to Westerners about the internal turmoil of Taiwan that has lasted for decades. The murder mystery plot is purely perfunctory, though functional -- it's effective enough, but the story's weakness comes from its transparency. Obviously, the film wants to outrage you for political sympathy.
Once I figured this out, though, I honestly didn't mind so much, and since I already have some background in this subject, it held my attention. I found it fascinating that anyone bothered to produce this film -- its subject isn't as urgent as, say, Darfur or Tibet, and frankly after viewing Formosa Betrayed most Westerners will probably only hold the information within the margins of their memory. Still, it's interesting to me that the filmmakers gave it this honest shot. Most Westerners probably aren't even aware of Taiwan's history being full of strife, which boils down to the native Taiwanese population's fight for independence from rule by either the Kuomintang party (aka the KMT) or the Communists on the mainland. Long story short -- during World War II, the Communists won China, and the losing side, the KMT, fled to Taiwan and took it over (from Japanese occupation, as it happens). The KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, ran the island under martial law, which is where this story, set in the '80s, steps in, showing us crackdowns on demonstrations and the outright torture and murder of any suspected dissenting citizens. Because my lineage has direct ties to this history, I'd say Formosa Betrayed is worth a look for the history lesson. Just remember it is a history lesson, one naturally colored with a strong Taiwanese perspective (it would have no place, for example, for the innocent KMT-affiliated families who had to flee the mainland in order to escape Communism and just stay alive) -- but if its ultimate goal at heart is awareness, it's a goal I would advocate. (added 7/18/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
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©Jeffrey Chen, 2010
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