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Video: Cliched 'Hardball' strikes out
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 21, 2002
Hardball (PG-13)
[Photo: Paramoun]
Keanu Reeves becomes a coach for an inner-city youth baseball team to pay off a debt.
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A compulsive gambler and ticket scalper (Keanu Reeves) agrees to pay off a debt by coaching an inner-city youth league baseball team. Diane Lane costars as a schoolteacher impressed by the coach's newfound sensitivity toward a roster of urban-angst cliches.
First impressions: "(Hardball) sounds like a winning formula for a movie, and it might be, if the story told us more about gambling, more about the inner city and more about coaching baseball. But it drifts above the surface of its natural subjects, content to be a genre picture. We're always aware of the formula, and in a picture based on real life, we shouldn't be.
"I doubt the book (Hardball: A Season in the Projects) is as inauthentic as the movie; the screenplay shows signs of having been tilted in the direction of the basic Hollywood workshop story structure in which we get a crisis because it's time for one. And Reeves seems subdued in the role, so glum and distant, we wonder why we should care if he doesn't." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)
Second thoughts: The first box office hit after Sept. 11, when audiences were starved for any kind of entertainment.
Rental audience: Little League coaches seeking inspiration for their players.
Rent it if you enjoy: The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, The Mighty Ducks.
Don't Say a Word (R)
[Photo: Twentieth Century Fox]
Brittany Murphy and Michael Douglas in Don’t Say a Word.
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Michael Douglas sweats out another tight spot, this time playing a psychologist whose catatonic patient (Brittany Murphy) knows something that some nasty characters want to know. The therapist's daughter gets kidnapped in order to force him to unlock the secret. Famke Janssen (X-Men) costars as Douglas' wife, confined to bed with a broken leg for most of the film in a Rear Window-style twist.
First impressions: "Thrillers don't come any less thrilling than Don't Say a Word, a listless mystery without even the decency to make its creepy preview trailer count for anything. This is just another blasphemy of Alfred Hitchcock's legacy. . . . Andrew Klavan's novel probably made the character interesting with details in which (director Gary) Fleder has no interest. The details he prefers have little interest for the rest of us." (Steve Persall, Times film critic)
Second thoughts: Don't pay a dime.
Rental audience: Easy-to-please viewers, Douglas' waning fan base.
Rent it if you enjoy: Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls.
DVD: New and noteworthy for digital players
Give 'O' discs an 'A' for effort
O (Two-disc deluxe edition)
[Photo: Lion’s Gate Films]
Mekhi Phifer, left, plays Odin “O” James, and Julia Stiles stars as his girlfriend Desi in O.
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In his audio commentary for O, director Tim Blake Nelson admits that setting William Shakespeare's Othello in high school surroundings seems crazy. Then he proves that the Bard's concept of envy turned murderous may be centuries old, yet remains as relevant as the Columbine massacre.
Nelson, who played a dumb escaped convict in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is smarter than that movie role made him look. O is a carefully updated version of Othello that moves the action to a basketball court battlefield, barely changing the deceitful dynamics of Shakespeare's play.
Mekhi Phifer plays Odin James ("O," for short), a star African-American athlete rather than a Moorish warrior. Julia Stiles costars as his girlfriend Desi (rather than Desdemona), daughter of a prep school dean and coveted by their classmate Hugo (i.e. Iago), played by Josh Hartnett.
Nelson's film got the bum's rush from theaters since Lion's Gate Films was skittish about trumpeting a story steeped in senseless teen violence. However, this movie doesn't exploit that social condition like, say, Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
O is filled with compelling characters rushing headlong to a bad end, as Shakespeare liked it. One wishes, though, that Nelson had used his audio commentary track on the DVD version to expand his views on the subject, to make sure that his message isn't garbled by pop culture translation.
Instead, we hear the filmmaker repeatedly refer to on-screen action without explaining much of the inspiration behind it. Simply wringing your hands over real-life school violence isn't enough. Nelson's laidback narrative only spots the obvious, with a few perfunctory notes about his creative process.
The deluxe, 2-disc DVD set spends more time explaining how Nelson constructed the fine basketball sequences in O, immersing his actors in court training until they became a decent scrimmage team, then selecting camera angles and movement to underscore the plot's drama. Interview clips with Nelson and his actors are standard stuff, but another bonus breaks exciting new ground.
Disc 2 also includes a complete version of the 1922 silent film Othello starring Emil Jannings in the title role. Film buffs would probably prefer Laurence Olivier's 1965 version or Laurence Fishburne's 1995 turn. But the fact that Lion's Gate would lend disc space to a vintage production, if only to prove how closely Nelson followed the material, is a smart move that can only make users smarter about cinema history. Wouldn't it be great if every remake showed such respect for the classics they're imitating?
Rewind: Videos worth another look
The poet laureate of men with guns
Sam Peckinpah raised hell and often put it on film. His name forever became an adjective for movie violence when The Wild Bunch exploded its slow-motion gore on screen in 1969.
On the set, Peckinpah's booze and marijuana habits made him so abrasive that Charlton Heston retaliated with a cavalry saber while filming Major Dundee. Off the set, the ex-Marine never lost his taste for fighting rebellious crew members, interfering studio executives and critics of his occasionally bloodthirsty cinematic style.
His heroes really were more elegiac than heroic, men whose best times were behind them. Violence was the result of being backed into one corner too many. Hell for Peckinpah was being overlooked and forgotten. He died in 1984 of a stroke after a fruitless decade of searching for a final blaze of glory.
Peckinpah was born on this date in 1925. We tip our hat to his legacy with these home video suggestions:
Ride the High Country -- A 1962 precursor to The Wild Bunch. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott play aging lawmen guarding a gold shipment against a psychotic band of brothers. Comparable to Shane for its sweeping vistas and Unforgiven for its inevitable tragedy.
Major Dundee -- Heston plays a frontier U.S. Army officer enjoying his duty of Native American genocide a little too much. Peckinpah lost final-cut privileges to the studio and griped about it until his death.
The Wild Bunch -- As vital to describing Westerns as The Godfather is to mobster movies. William Holden, Robert Ryan and Warren Oates lead a pack of doomed outlaws on a last, violent ride. Peckinpah's slo-mo depiction of bullets mangling flesh is still revered (or reviled) as the turning point of cinematic violence.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue -- Jason Robards is terrific as a con man fleecing stagecoach tourists until the automobile comes along. Stella Stevens is memorably sexy as the main attraction. The only comedy Peckinpah ever attempted, bawdy and erratic but interesting.
Straw Dogs -- Peckinpah trimmed a grisly finale to escape an X rating. Dustin Hoffman was Oscar-nominated as a meek American mathematician who moves to rural England with his wife (Susan George). Leering locals, the murder of a child and a mentally deficient scapegoat lead to Hoffman's shocking transformation from mouse to primal man.
Junior Bonner -- Steve McQueen is perfectly cast as a laconic rodeo rider at the end of his rope. Peckinpah relaxed his style to a less violently urgent rhythm and created a small gem about the passing of his kind of era.
The Getaway -- McQueen's last great movie, organizing a robbery alongside Ali McGraw and escaping the clutches of supremely nasty Al Lettieri. Don't let the lame Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger remake stop you from checking this out.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid -- James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson are charismatic foils in a rambling antibuddy flick. Fun to watch for Bob Dylan's first attempt at acting. Don't settle for the clumsily edited TV version.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia -- That's the task assigned to two bounty hunters (Gig Young, Robert Webber), but a craggy piano player (Warren Oates) has other ideas. Grotesquely violent and sometimes incomprehensible, but Peckinpah always took great pride in this one.
The Killer Elite -- James Caan plays a critically injured CIA assassin who recuperates and seeks revenge on the agent (Robert Duvall) who double-crossed him. Looking for a new action angle, Peckinpah included ninjas in a dynamic final shootout aboard an oil tanker.
Cross of Iron -- Peckinpah looked at World War II through Nazi eyes with Soviets as the enemy, an uncomfortable position for American audiences who shied away. Coburn, James Mason and Maximilian Schell added gravity to the graphic battlefield violence.
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