Movie Review: Mulholland Falls (1996)

Genre: Neo Noir Crime Drama  

Director: Lee Tamahori  

Starring: Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Connelly, Chazz Palminteri, John Malkovich, Treat Williams, Chris Penn, Andrew McCarthy, Michael Madsen, Daniel Baldwin  

Running Time: 107 minutes  

Synopsis: It's the early 1950s in Los Angeles. A tough squad of police detectives led by Max Hoover (Nick Nolte) and consisting of his partners Ellery (Chazz Palminteri), Eddie (Michael Madsen), and Arthur (Chris Penn) play outside the rules to push back against organized crime. When high-class prostitute Allison Pond (Jennifer Connelly) is found dead, Max is compromised because he was one of her clients. Seedy cameraman Jimmy (Andrew McCarthy) secretly filmed Allison with her illicit lovers, including General Timms (John Malkovich). Max's dogged investigation leads to a Nevada atomic bomb test site, and a tangle with Colonel Nathan Fitzgerald (Treat Williams).

What Works Well: This character-based mood-focused drama rides on the brute charisma of Nick Nolte as Max Hoover, a detective determined to keep his town clear of mob figures. His world is suddenly upended when his trysts with the alluring Allison are exposed, collapsing his stable relationship with his wife (Melanie Griffith). The Peter Dexter script balances expertly-delivered punctuations of violence with interesting characters brought to life by a dream supporting cast, with Andrew McCarthy's opportunistic photographer a stand out. At the heart of this investigation is a strong bond of male friendship, Max's squad a cacophony of barbs united by an ends-justify-the-means ethos.

What Does Not Work As Well: The period set designs, vehicles, and wardrobes leave the conspiracy behind, the sequence of events leading to Allison's death becoming fuzzier, less interesting, and ultimately illogical with every reveal. The resources available to the antagonists should have ensured that she simply disappeared, rather than dumped in plain sight of a construction project. 

Key Quote:

General Timms (talking to Max Hoover): That's the history of the world, Lieutenant. Some people die before their time so that others can live. It's the cornerstone of civilization. War, religion, democracy. A hundred die so that a thousand may live.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Genre: Comedy  

Director: Woody Allen  

Starring: John Cusack, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Tilly, Chazz Palminteri, Jack Warden, Rob Reiner, Mary-Louise Parker  
Running Time: 98 minutes  

Synopsis: In New York City of the late 1920s, up-and-coming writer David Shayne (John Cusack) is desperate to have his latest play funded. His producer Julian Marx (Jack Warden) secures backing from mobster Nick Valenti (Joe Viterelli), on condition that Nick's talentless girlfriend Olive (Jennifer Tilly) lands a meaningful role. When rehearsals start, Nick appoints his goon Cheech (Chazz Palminteri) to keep an eye on Olive, who nevertheless encourages the lustful attention of past-his-prime and overeating actor Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent). Meanwhile, David is falling in love with his leading lady Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), while Cheech starts to make unsolicited suggestions to improve the play. 

What Works Well: Woody Allen's mixture of behind-the-curtain chaos, mobster violence, and artist insecurities is a blast of fun entertainment. The script maintains razor sharpness and consistently finds quirks and twists within personalities and events, including Cheech masterfully gliding from edge-of-the-screen non-entity to a central character. Allen extracts deliciously loquacious performances from both Dianne Wiest (a fading diva desperate for continued relevance) and Jennifer Tilly (a gangster's moll ruthlessly exposing her deficiencies) as diametric opposites exploiting the stage for self-delusion. The clash between civility and crime nurtures commentary about academia and reality, and the separation of art and artist.

What Does Not Work As Well: In a rare example of a movie that could have benefitted from being longer, both Rob Reiner (as Sheldon Flender, a prolific but never-published playwright) and Mary-Louise Parker (as David Shayne's wife) deserved larger roles.

Key Quote:

Nick (to Julian, about Olive): Let's avoid confusion. She'll get some lines, or I'll nail your knee caps to the floor.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Usual Suspects (1995)

A clever caper movie, The Usual Suspects is certainly engaging but ultimately a bit too clever for it's own good. A solid cast enjoys a combination of energetic verbal sparring and old-fashioned heist action infused with more modern blood and violence, but an excess of criminal characters all attempting to outsmart one another causes an imbalance that threatens to overwhelm the movie.

A lot of bad people are lying dead in and around a ship at the San Pedro Harbour in Los Angeles, victims of a full-blown shoot-out between rival gangs. One of only two survivors is Roger Kint (Kevin Spacey), known as Verbal, a small time hood with a pronounced limp, who has survived the carnage without a scratch. US Customs and FBI Agents, including Special Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) round on Verbal, interrogating him to unravel why so many criminals met their bullet-perforated fate at the waterfront. Through flashbacks, Verbal recounts the story of his now-deceased criminal gang colleagues: mastermind and former corrupt cop Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), trigger guy McManus (Stephen Baldwin), the almost incomprehensible Fenster (Benicio del Toro), and Hockney (Kevin Pollack).

After the gang forms in a jail cell, Keaton leads them in holding up a corrupt police taxi service in New York, and then, at the request of a mysterious Mr. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaithe), robbing a Los Angeles jeweler. Kobayashi then reveals that his employer is the legendary criminal Keyser Soze, and asks Keaton to lead an assault on a boat belonging to a Hungarian gang, who are rivals of Soze in the drug trade. The attack would be dangerous, but the pay-off for Keaton and his men is huge: 91 million dollars.

Keaton asks Verbal to sit-out and witness the assault, which goes a bit better than planned, with Keaton and McManus surviving the vicious shoot-out. But a mysterious figure appears from the shadows, eliminates them both and disappears. Kujan needs to decide how much of Verbal's story he can believe, and what to make of some really odd pieces in the convoluted puzzle.

The Usual Suspects climaxes with a double twist ending. but while initially the final revelation appears ingenious, it actually disintegrates under it's own weight: If Keyser Soze is as brilliant and resourceful as the film reveals him to be, he certainly chose a very rudimentary, brute-force method to achieve his ultimate objective. The film is essentially a character study, and while Kevin Spacey and Gabriel Byrne provide Verbal and  Keaton with some depth and interesting texture, the rest of the criminals and cops are vaguely sketched by Christopher McQuarrie's script, and quite forgettable.

Director Bryan Singer maintains a brisk pace and brings out the tension in the dialogue exchanges and narration that underpin the unfolding plot, and just about maintains control of the increasing layers of complexity. The Usual Suspects is enjoyable, mostly for being a quite unusually intelligent movie, but it does chase itself into a corner where the smarts overpower the logic.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.