Movie Review: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

Genre: Teen Comedy  

Director: Gil Junger  

Starring: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Allison Janney  

Running Time: 97 minutes  

Synopsis: Anti-social Kat (Julia Stiles) and her younger flirty sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) attend the same Seattle-area high school. Their over-protective father (Larry Miller) stipulates that Bianca can only see boys if Kat is also dating. Classmate Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his rival Joey (Andrew Keegan), a self-absorbed but rich teen model, are both desperate to get close to Bianca. They decide to pay bad-boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) for the trouble of trying to get Kat interested in dating.

What Works Well: This busy reimaging of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew does not lack in ambition: multiple well-drawn characters energetically compete for space and time in pursuit of romance, high-school style. Most of the humour is sharp, Heath Ledger finds a highlight commandeering the public address system at the school's stadium, while Julia Stiles and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are other future stars shining in early roles. The conceited Joey strikes impressive poses in pursuit of oily villainy, and the energetic soundtrack features an eclectic rock mix.

What Does Not Work As Well: The obstacles placed in the path of Kat and Bianca's happiness by their father are contrived mechanisms to activate the plot. Director Gil Junger has trouble finding and maintaining cohesive focus: Cameron is introduced as the initial protagonist, but is eventually sidelined in favour of Patrick, who is late to join the proceedings. Cliques are introduced for no useful purpose, while Allison Janney as the dismissive guidance counselor fades away completely.   

Key Quote:

Patrick (to Cameron): See, first of all, Joey is not half the man you are. Secondly, don't let anyone, ever, make you feel like you don't deserve what you want. Go for it!



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Movie Review: The God Committee (2021)

A medical ethics drama, The God Committee tackles organ transplant dilemmas but insists on a surly tone. 

Events jump between two timelines in 2014 and 2021. In 2014, the romantic relationship between the dour and near-retirement Dr. Andre Boxer (Kelsey Grammer) and the much younger Dr. Jordan Taylor (Julia Stiles) is coming to an end. They are both heart surgeons on the organ transplant committee of New York's St. Augustine Hospital. 

A fatal motor vehicle accident in Baltimore means a donor heart has become available, and the committee has to select from three candidate recipients: an overweight man with a previous suicide attempt, an elderly woman who is ambivalent about receiving a new heart; or a young entitled man with a history of drug addiction.  The young man is the son of business tycoon Emmett Granger (Dan Hedaya), who complicates the committee's work by dangling the potential of a $25 million gift to the hospital.

In 2021, Boxer has retired from the hospital and is leading an ambitious research program that could enable organ harvesting in animals for potential human use. Emmet is one of his main funders, but Boxer's health is deteriorating, jeopardizing the program. Meanwhile, Jordan is a senior doctor at the hospital, and a mother to a six-year-old boy.

An independent production, The God Committee adapts a play by Mark St. Germain, and seeks the intersection of medicine, morality, and money. Director Austin Stark also wrote the screenplay, and enjoys the presence of a talented cast to help overcome the lack of high-budget pizazz. In addition to Kelsey Grammer, Julia Stiles, and Dan Hedaya, Janeane Garofalo (the hospital's chief administrator) and Colman Domingo (a priest with a past and an agenda) have tasty roles.

The source material appears intended as a tense debate-around-the-table in the vein of 12 Angry Men. Stark does well to free the movie from stage origins, the drama visiting multiple locations and never feeling constrained. The twin timeline structure adds narrative tension and a benefit-of-time consequence to the central guessing game of who gets the donor heart.

While the main characters are provocative, they are also weighed down and wrestling with predictable soon-to-be-exposed flaws. Dr. Boxer, Dr. Taylor, and investor Granger all carry a ton of emotional bricks into every scene, nary a smile nor witticism in evidence. The script is a couple of polishes away from a final product, the dialogue lacking zing and the stream of self-satisfied revelations barely making an impression.

The central theme digs into the conundrums of a committee grappling with the God-like power to decide which patient gets a better chance to live. With the best of intentions, personal judgements, subjective assessments, self-interest, and the influence of money contaminate the process. The medical professionals around this table are not above talking themselves into compromising decisions, the big picture and individual patient needs often obscuring each other. 

Without lecturing, The God Committee does point to the potential for a better science-enabled future, but other committees in other movies will need to uncork the ethical dilemmas of using animals to harvest organs for humans. 



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Movie Review: Hustlers (2019)

A jaunty crime drama set in the sordid world of strip clubs, Hustlers accentuates a culture of sisterhood but glosses over both victims and accountability.

In 2014, Dorothy (Constance Wu), who uses the stage name "Destiny", is being interviewed by journalist Elizabeth (Julia Stiles) about her career as a stripper. Her story begins in 2007, when Destiny starts working at New York City's Moves Club and meets star performer Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). The two women strike up a friendship and start performing as a duo, entertaining Wall Street executives in the VIP rooms for huge tips. 

Times are good, until the economic crash of 2008. Wall Street hollows out and the easy money stops. Destiny falls on hard times, has a child, but breaks up with the father. Unable to find other work, she returns to stripping. But the industry has changed, with Russian performers dominating and clients expecting explicit sexual favours. Destiny reconnects with Ramona, who has a new plan: target men at bars, drug them, take them back to Moves, maximize their credit card spending, and share in the proceeds.

If Hustlers was about a group of men drugging women and robbing them blind while they are semi-conscious, it would be a lot less celebratory. But here writer and director Lorene Scafaria downplays the criminal behaviour, and allows messages of female empowerment and women enjoying their self-justified chemical assaults to predominate. The energy is palpable and joy crackles from the vibe of underdogs turning the tables, but with the victims all but ignored, the feel-good parties get tiresome.

The film is inspired by real events chronicled in Jessica Pressler's The Hustlers at Scores magazine article. Especially in the opening context-setting 20 minutes, Scafaria adopts a glitzy aesthetic at the strip club, but from the women's perspective. The men fuel the industry, but here they are either bank machines or leaches. Admitting the drudgerous reality beneath the glamour, the strippers are portrayed as good natured and doing a job as best as they can, but also battling fatigue and age, and scrapping for whatever crumpled dollars they accumulate at the end of the night.

The strongest elements evolve from the bond between Destiny and Ramona. Their friendship anchors the narrative, and is a heartfelt portrayal of two different women riding the industry's ups and downs. Jennifer Lopez is a confident force of nature as Ramona, while Constance Wu is more quietly perceptive. The cast also includes Kiki Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Madeline Brewer, and Mercedes Ruehl, while singer Lizzo and singer/ex-stripper Cardi B add a spike of stunt casting in minor roles.

Outside the stripping milieu, Destiny looks after a grandmother then a new child, while Ramona has a teenaged daughter. The family members are little more than expedient props, but more disappointing is an obsession with materiality. Every dollar the women earn seems to be spent on expensive fashions and accessories, concepts of saving for a rainy day or self-improvement discarded in favour of the next shopping spree.

Hustlers provides a welcome voice to performers who are often just the background decoration in other movies. It's unfortunate these characters are only humanized after resorting to criminal behaviour.



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Movie Review: Jason Bourne (2016)

Star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return to the series, and offer more of the same. Jason Bourne teases out a promising story that adds depth to the central character, but is otherwise obsessed with ridiculously over-the-top action set pieces that defy all laws of physics and human endurance while occupying copious amounts of screen time.

Former CIA agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the agency's network and uncovers evidence that Jason Bourne's father Richard Webb (Gregg Henry) was instrumental in instigating the ill-fated Treadstone covert program. Nicky alerts Bourne (Matt Damon), who is in self-imposed off-the-grid hiding, reduced to bare knuckle fighting to make a living. Nicky's hack is detected, and CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) tasks Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), the ambitious new head of the Cyber Ops Division, to clean up. Heather activates a hit man known only as the Asset (Vincent Cassel) to track and kill both Nicky and Bourne, and he almost succeeds in a chaotic Athens.

The Asset bears a personal grudge against Bourne, but after delving in Jason's files, Heather starts to believe Bourne can be brought back into the fold rather than killed. This puts her on a collision course with Dewey who just wants Bourne terminated for self preservation reasons. Meanwhile, Dewey's newest illicit program has him partnering with technical wizard Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), the CEO of social media giant Deep Dream, to harvest massive amounts of global personal information. Bourne starts to investigate the role his father played in his troubled career, all while evading the Asset and wondering whether he can trust Heather.

The fifth film in the Bourne series, the fourth to feature Damon and the third directed by Greengrass, Jason Bourne is glossy, professional and undoubtedly exciting. But the film also barely brings anything new to the table. The action moves from Athens to Berlin to London and then onto Las Vegas, but all the hyper-kinetic, micro-edited scenes of carnage now fall into familiar territory.

The motorbike chase, the chaotic crowd scene, the narrow escapes, the hand to hand combat to the death and the ridiculous car chase: they are all here, they all go on for too long, and they've all been seen before in this very series. Bourne has a narrow escape or cheats death at the rate of once per five minutes, and has the resilience to routinely survive collisions with fixed and moving objects that would reduce mere mortals to a vegetative state. And most tiresome of all are more retreads of scenes at CIA HQ, with multiple monitors flickering and grim faced operations commanders like Lee and Dewey barking orders and moving assets into position like pawns on a digital chess board.

On the more positive side, the film tries to include some new wrinkles to keep the series relevant and aware of current events. There are nods to the refugee crisis in Europe, and a toe-dipping into the grey world of mass surveillance using back doors within social media apps. The backstory related to the role of Bourne's dad in the agency and a deadly explosion in Beirut add good context to the convoluted Bourne family history.

Damon remains smooth in the role, projecting just enough emotion at the right times to serve as a reminder that there is a person in the middle of all the projectiles. Vikander is a welcome addition to the series. Tommy Lee Jones finds the weathered look of an old man ready to cut to the chase of kill or be killed, Dewey no longer possessing the patience for drawn-out strategic encounters. Vincent Cassel infuses the hitman role with more texture than usual, but further details on his story and background would have been appreciated.

Greengrass stubbornly sticks to his jerky, hand-held, up-close-and-personal style, the action amplified into a million edits none lasting for more than a split second. The eye catches glimpses of what may be going on and leaves it to the brain to try and make some sense of the fractured mosaic. It is undoubtedly artistry in editing, but nevertheless remains an annoying celebration of choppiness gone mad.

Although undoubtedly slick and efficient, Jason Bourne's biggest battle is against familiar motions and seen-before visual tactics.

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Movie Review: Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

A winds-of-change drama set at Wellesley College in 1953, Mona Lisa Smile tackles women's issues as attitudes transition from a post-War focus on domesticity to the initial rumbles of feminism.

Moving from California, Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) joins the faculty of the prestigious all-women Wellesley College near Boston as an Art History teacher. In her early thirties, Katherine is already considered dangerously close to being past the age of marriage. Katherine becomes friends with her landlord Nancy (Marcia Gay Harden), who has grown too old too soon after losing her husband, and roommate Amanda (Juliet Stevenson), the independent minded College nurse. And while she finds her students phenomenally smart and well-educated, the entire focus of their lives is on finding a husband before finishing college.

The students include Joan (Julia Stiles), who has potential to study law at Yale should she choose to look past a future as a housewife; Betty (Kirsten Dunst), the most privileged of a privileged bunch and already planning her wedding; Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a free spirit seeking plenty of sexual adventure and harbouring a deep crush on Professor of Italian Studies Bill Dunbar (Dominic West); and the plain Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin), who is considered least likely to snag a husband.

Katherine tries to instill in her students a greater sense of ambition, urging them to look into futures that could offer something different than husbands, kids and housework. She faces a significant backlash from both the students, who have been raised with predefined expectations, and the College administrators, who do not take kindly to Katherine challenging time-honoured traditions. Katherine also has to sort out her personal life, with Bill taking an interest in her, and her California boyfriend Paul (John Slattery) seeking a commitment.

Directed by Mike Newell, Mona Lisa Smile delves into the status of women as they see themselves. With plenty of intelligent characters at interesting crossroads in life, the film never lacks for variety, opposing viewpoints and conflict.  The script (by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal) manages to create an academic environment where minds are free to explore big questions about the future, the value of education, and the ambitions of women relative to society's expectations. There is no shortage of perspectives, and the film does a fine job of challenging both old and new attitudes.

Katherine Watson is a catalyst for change, holding on to her principles and not afraid to shake the established structure. Some branches will fall on her head and she will learn as much as she will teach. Mona Lisa Smile gets the pacing of history right, and Katherine discovers that grand societal changes do not come easily or quickly and for every two steps forward there is at least one step back.

The film also has a couple of neat tricks up its sleeve, with a couple of curves in the road ahead for the students over the course of their one year interaction with Katherine. Betty and Joan in particular will find their trajectories disrupted by Katherine, and not in the way that they could have expected. With her mother represent the prevailing feminine power elite, Betty will have the most heated clashes with Katherine, encounters that will change them both. Joan holds the most promise as being open and able to disrupt the status quo, but Katherine will learn the most about the pace of change from Joan's journey.

The film engages because Katherine and her students are women worth knowing in any era, and it is refreshing for a film to feature a cast of uniformly smart women, elevating their discourse and sparring to a refreshingly educated level. They still poke and needle each other and push each other's buttons, but within a context of striving to achieve either the aspirations of the past or the promise of the future.

Filmed on the Wellesley College campus, Mona Lisa Smile tries hard to recapture the 1950s at a New England campus for the elite. But there is a lingering sense of slightly modernized setting and attitudes. Julia Roberts contributes to this by not trying too hard to change a pre-established persona that is strongly linked with a more recent era. Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ginnifer Goodwin represent some of the best young acting talent assembled into one film, but they also go only so far in being convincing as 1950s daughters of what would become the Greatest Generation.

The tension between a woman's outward smile and her internal dissatisfaction gives the film it's name. Mona Lisa Smile does not necessarily provide all the answers, but does perceptively ask some of the questions at the heart of modern social evolution.

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The Movies Of Julia Stiles

All movies starring Julia Stiles and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Devil's Own (1997)

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

The Bourne Identity (2002)

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Jason Bourne (2016)

Hustlers (2019)

The God Committee (2021)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

The conclusion to the Jason Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum does not disappoint. An action-packed joy ride filled with breathless chases and ruthless violence in international settings, the film places an exclamation mark at the end of a high calibre modern spy story.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is still on a mission to understand his own past, reclaim his identity, and confront the CIA superiors who turned him into a ruthless assassin engaged in black operations. Equally determined to stop him are CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) and CIA Director Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn), who just want Bourne to be terminated to tie up the one remaining loose end with the illicit Treadstone and Blackbriar operations. CIA Deputy Director Pam Landy (Joan Allen) is also brought in to try and snare Bourne, but she is more sympathetic to his cause.

Bourne keys in on British journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) who is receiving information about Blackbriar from a source within the CIA. Bourne connects with Ross in London in a meeting that ends with a CIA sharpshooter taking out Ross in a crowded train station. The trail leads to Madrid, where Bourne reconnects with agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), who sides with him as they make their way onto Tangiers to track down the CIA source. There are more merciless assassins in wait, but Bourne doggedly makes his way to New York, to confront his past once and for all.

The Bourne Ultimatum sticks closely to the formula established for the franchise. Plenty of grim action, spies mercilessly chasing spies, hitmen galore, incredible stunts and feats of human durability, and the shortest possible narrative scenes to provide the action some structure to hang on. It's predictable, highly kinetic, and for this series, it works.

Almost everything in Ultimatum was seen before in Identity and Supremacy. The car chases, foot chases, motorbike chases, close-quarters combat, surveillance and panic in the streets are all here. Supremacy director Paul Greengrass returns for the third installment and polishes everything to a shine, the tension always high, the stakes for Bourne and his CIA controllers a matter of life and death, or for the higher ups at least a matter of saving a career and avoiding Congressional hearings.

With a story, style and characters that were never going to be blessed with the gift of originality, Greengrass pushes all the elements to the edge of credibility, and sometimes beyond. With each successive brush with death Jason Bourne appears to take on indestructible qualities, shrugging off his bone rattling injuries, instantaneously losing his scars and proceeding to travel effortlessly between countries and infiltrate the most secure of secretive buildings.

In one frantic foot sequence through Tangiers, Bourne jumps three or four times off of balconies and through apartment across the street, seemingly equipped with the ability to sense his enemy's movements through buildings several blocks away. The climactic carnage of the now mandatory car chase should be enough to a least send Bourne to the hospital for an extended stay. Instead he emerges from the wreck of what used to be his car unscathed, pointing his gun, ready for the next round.

Stylistically Greengrass finds the limit of his love for micro-edits, shoving the hand-held camera wherever it will shake the most and closest to the action, and then editing every chase and fight with the sharpest possible cutting. Greengrass doesn't so much capture the action as allow his cameras to be pummeled by the brute forces in every confrontation, challenging the eye and the brain to keep up. The effect walks the line between heart-pounding exhilaration and stomach-turning nausea.

The cast of veterans get on with the job with minimum deviation from the standard "this is serious" emoting. Matt Damon glides through the film fending off bad guys with the cold efficiency that comes with the certainty that the story only ends when the lion's den is infiltrated.  David Strathairn, Scott Glenn and, late in the game, Albert Finney form the triangle of men with secrets that need to be defended at all costs. Interestingly, Bourne is only ever helped by women during his Ultimatum adventure, with Julia Stiles and Joan Allen reprising roles from earlier installments and lending a more sympathetic ear to the man searching for the solution to his own mystery.

A suitable ending to a thrilling trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum tidies up the story with another jolt of frenzied excitement.

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Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

A high velocity thriller, The Bourne Supremacy delivers bone-jarring stunts and highly kinetic chase scenes from within an intellectual premise. The human story of Jason Bourne still governs, and while the action is unstoppable, the characters dominate.

CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) runs a dangerous mission in Berlin to try and reveal the identity of a mole within the agency. The mission is disrupted by rogue Russian agent Kirill (Karl Urban) and turns into a disaster for Landy, with two men killed and a fingerprint left behind to implicate Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), the former black ops agent now living off the grid in India. Kirill is working on behalf of Russian oil tycoon Yuri Gretkov (Karel Roden), the beneficiary of $20 million in dirty CIA money. Deputy Director Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) and operations technician Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) join the effort to find and capture Bourne.

Kirill tries to dispatch Bourne but only succeeds in killing his girlfriend Marie (Franka Potente), spurring Bourne back into action. With Landy hot on his trail, Bourne has to clear his name, expose the mole, convince Landy that he had nothing to do with the Berlin killings, and survive Kirill's dogged attempts to eliminate him.

Director Paul Greengrass sprinkles mesmerizing action scenes at all the right moments throughout The Bourne Supremacy, none more effective than a superbly edited and violent car chase through the streets of Moscow. It is difficult to imagine that cinematic car chases can still offer something new, but parking the realities of occupant injuries aside for just a few minutes, Greengrass allows Bourne's taxi to get clattered, swiped and spun around repeatedly and brutally as the chase hurtles towards its climax, Bourne deliberately bouncing his vehicle off other cars and obstacles to abruptly change direction and seize the upper hand.

The other action set-pieces are not as eye-popping, but they are never less than professional.

The dangerous cat and mouse game between Bourne and Landy is managed well, as they take turns in gaining the initiative and gradually build an understanding in a high stakes game where careers and lives are threatened at every decision. Matt Damon puts on his stone face and bulldozes his way through the movie, leaving Joan Allen to play the more expressive Pamela Landy. The barely concealed strain on Allen's face conveys both the risks she is forced to take and the unspoken tension of a woman ordering men around in the most masculine of covert activities.

Franka Potente, Brian Cox and Julia Stiles lend strong support in small but pivotal roles, Cox particularly memorable as the senior CIA presence who has hatched and weathered more conspiracies than he cares to remember.

The Bourne Supremacy mixes all the ingredients of the action genre in almost exactly the right proportions. Some originality may be lacking, but the tried and tested elements are polished to an impressive shine.

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