Movie Review: The Whale (2022)

Genre: Drama

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton

Running Time: 117 minutes

Synopsis: Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is a morbidly obese home bound on-line college teacher. Eight years prior he had abandoned his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) and daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) to pursue a gay love affair. His eating disorder was triggered when his lover committed suicide. Now nurse Liz (Hong Chau) is his only friend, and warns him he has just days to live due to exceptionally high blood pressure. Ellie has grown into a deeply resentful teenager and comes to visit, while missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins) knocks on Charlie's door at an opportune moment.

What Works Well: Writer Samuel D. Hunter adapts his own play, and goes searching for the emotionally wounded individual hiding within fleshy layers of disgust and trauma-induced gluttony. The drama is potent as director Aronofsky sequentially introduces the characters who will orbit Charlie as the end draws near. Gradually the outline of a pathetic man's portrait comes into relief, and Brendan Fraser's evocative performance fills in the humanity. The Moby Dick references land just on the right side of the line separating poignant from corny.

What Does Not Work As Well: The theatrical origins are obvious, including dialogue, blocking, and performances that work better on stage than on film. The middle act interactions between daughter Ellie and missionary Thomas are a momentum-sapping distraction, while the third act sentimentality threatens to drip off the screen.

Conclusion: Tumultuous emotions revealed through impressive blubber.

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Movie Review: Crash (2004)

An ensemble multi-story drama about race relations in Los Angeles, Crash sizzles first with the tension generated by fear, and then the warmth of the irrevocable interdependencies required for a complex society to function.

The film consists of several loosely connected stories. Detective Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) and his partner Ria (Jennifer Esposito) are involved in a car crash as they arrive at a crime scene by the side of the highway, where a dead body has been discovered. Events from the previous 24 hours are then recounted, including:

• Persian shop owner Farhad (Shaun Toub) insists on buying a handgun to protect his store from break-ins, despite the protestations of his daughter Dorri (Bahar Soomekh). 
• District Attorney Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Jean (Sandra Bullock) are victims of a carjacking, perpetrated by black hoodlums Anthony (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate). 
• Police officer John Ryan (Matt Dillon) is resentful of blacks, and takes an opportunity to pull-over and humiliate a successful black couple, television director Cameron (Terrence Howard) and his wife Christine (Thandie Newton). 
• Ryan's partner Officer Tom Hansen (Ryan Phillippe) is horrified by Ryan's behaviour and demands a different partner, while Christine is furious with Cameron's inaction in the face of Ryan molesting her.
• Meanwhile, Ryan is trying to care for his ailing father, but finds his health insurance provider agent Shaniqua (Loretta Devine) difficult to deal with.
• Hispanic locksmith Daniel Ruiz (Michael Peña) re-keys the Cabot's household, and replaces the lock on the store of Farhad's door. Jean suspects Daniel of being a gang member, while Farhad is furious when Daniel informs him that the ill-fitting door, not the lock, is the security problem. Daniel's young daughter is afraid of stray bullets, and he comforts her by placing an invisible magical cloak around her shoulders.
• Waters and Ria start to investigate a shooting in which a white police detective killed a black detective, seemingly in self defence. Waters also tries to take care of his mother, a helpless abuser of hard drugs. In her brief lucid moments, she insists that he find his brother, who is in trouble with the law.

As the hours tick back towards that dead body by the side of the highway, the lives of these characters intertwine, collide, and veer off again in different and unexpected directions.

A brilliant exploration of the human propensity to first mistrust and then learn through the pain of mistakes, Crash is a magnetic achievement. Directed, co-written and co-produced by Paul Haggis, The film unfolds as a low key series of unfortunate events, all revolving around overt or covert clashes between people of difference races. In a Los Angeles filled with desperate people looking for evidence of the American dream or just trying to survive its wreckage, skin colour is an immediate reason for knee-jerk hostility and either passive or naked aggression.

Racism's ugly face appears in different disguises. Police officer John Ryan and street thug Anthony harbour resentments as a result of deep-seated convictions and personal experience. Poor shop owner Farhad and rich housewife Jean both turn on locksmith Daniel due to ignorance and superficial stereotypes. And in other cases, racist actions are triggered for all the wrong reasons. In complaining about Ryan, officer Tom Hansen gets no relief from the black police chief who refuses to rock the boat against a white officer. And Waters has to face a twisted inquiry into a trigger-happy white detective with an apparent vendetta against black cops, where the facts about his latest black victim may matter less than the need to mop up the mess as conveniently as possible.

Crash emerges as a masterpiece rather than a message movie by delving into the intricate, interdependent wiring that holds a society together, despite the worst of human intentions. Before the 24 hours are out, all the key characters will experience how much they depend on others of a different colour to simply function, for better or for worse and whether they want to or not.

Some of the dependencies are blatant and spectacular, such as Ryan and Christine meeting again at a crash site. Others, as in Jean and her Hispanic housekeeper, are more subtle, relationships that sustain the soul through sheer presence and loyalty. And when the altruistic police officer Tom Hansen finds himself in the same car with the happy go lucky criminal Peter, they face a most unlikely outcome, far removed from their best intentions.

Most of the mini-stories featured in the film end with open questions and unresolved issues, Haggis resisting any pressure to tidy up the narrative with pat conclusions. Crash is an observer of jarring human encounters between strangers, and after the angry release of energy, the flying pieces can land anywhere.

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Movie Review: The Mummy (1999)

A rollicking adventure in the style of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, The Mummy ditches any serious pretenses and just focuses on delivering large doses of mindless fun.

In ancient Egypt, High Priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) commits the ultimate betrayal by falling in love with Ankh-sun-Namun (Patricia Velásquez), who belongs solely to the Pharaoh. When the sin is revealed, Namun commits suicide, while Imhotep receives the worst possible fate: he is mummified alive and entombed with flesh eating bugs. They are buried in Hamunaptra, the city of the dead. Imhotep has the powers to dominate the world and resurrect his lover, if he himself is revived with readings from the book of the dead.

In the mid 1920s, adventurer Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) is part of garrison that stumbles onto the ruins of the now lost city of Hamunaptra, where he is abandoned in battle by the coward Beni (Kevin J. O'Connor). Back in Cairo, spunky librarian and amateur Egyptologist Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) is clumsy enough to wreck a library room, much to the disgust of head librarian Dr Terrence Bay (Erick Avari). Evelyn saves Rick from hanging, and they team up with Evelyn's brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and go in search of the treasures of Hamunaptra. But they are not alone: Beni is leading another expedition to the same city, while a tribe of warriors under the leadership of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr) is entrusted with ensuring that no-one revives the mummy.

Rick: Is he supposed to look like that?
Evelyn: No – no, I've never seen a mummy look like this before, he's still – still –
Jonathan and Rick: Juicy.

The Mummy hints at, rather than fleshes out, anything that may get into the way of the non-stop action. The characters of O'Connell, Evelyn and Jonathan are barely provided with any sort of a backstory. O'Connell is the American adventurer, Evelyn the clumsy librarian, and Jonathan the haughty Brit abroad, and that's all that the script, by director Stephen Sommers, is willing to offer. And in Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz (in 1999) and John Hannah, the film is not exactly radiating with star power.

As for the story, it matters even less. A pre-credit sequence introduces Imhotep, his lover Ankh-sun-Namun, and their miserable fate, but that's where the history and science end. Sommers is keen to get to the ancient flesh-eating bugs, the reanimated mummies, and all sorts of dead rising to rumble, leaving the whys, wherefores, and what-abouts for other movies to ponder.

Rick: Well, if it ain't my little buddy Beni! I think I'll kill you.(readies gun)
Beni: Think of my children!
Rick: You don't have any children.
Beni: ... Some day I might.

What The Mummy lacks in star talent, charisma, and story depth, it makes up for in pure effort, a steady stream of sharp humour, and good special effects. There are some excellent one-liners and dialogue exchanges, and the action scenes are delivered with joyful bombast. The Mummy generates a strong, uninterrupted current of kinetic energy, the reservoir of suspended disbelief put to good use in powering two hours of tongue-in-cheek shoot-outs, sword fights, chases, dark magic throughout Egypt, and the obligatory romance-with-rough-beginnings between Evelyn and Rick. The special effects are enjoyable for the era, the revived mummy suitably disgusting, the flesh eating insects yucky, and Imhotep's army of skeletal guards funny in the most rickety way.

Dr. Bey: We are part of an ancient secret society. For over three thousand years we have guarded the City of the Dead. We are sworn at manhood to do any and all in our power to stop the High Priest Imhotep from being reborn into this world.
Ardeth Bay: Now, because of you, we have failed.
Evelyn: And you think this justifies the killing of innocent people?
Dr. Bey: To stop this creature? Let me think...
Ardeth Bay, Dr. Bey: YES!

Fraser dives into the role of Rick O'Connell with no hesitation, all-in to create a more robust, less intellectual Indiana Jones-type character. Weisz struggles a bit to find a line on the resourceful yet clumsy librarian who turns into a desert adventuress, Evelyn written more as a mish-mash from other characters without a defining quality of her own. John Hannah has plenty of fun as Jonathan, and gets to play the role of romance observer, in over his head when it comes to violence but helpful in spite of himself.

Evie: You swear?
Rick: Every damn day.

Lacking a sharp brain but otherwise full of vigour, The Mummy unwraps dollops of amusing silliness.

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