Movie Review: Breaking News In Yuba County (2021)

Genre: Dark Comedy  

Director: Tate Taylor  
Starring: Allison Janney, Mila Kunis, Regina Hall, Juliette Lewis, Ellen Barkin, Matthew Modine, Awkwafina  

Running Time: 96 minutes  

Synopsis: In Kentucky, timid Sue Buttons (Allison Janney) is married to banker Karl (Matthew Modine), who is not only ignoring her and having an affair, but also laundering money for a local mobster. Sue is impressed by television personality Gloria Michaels (Juliette Lewis), who is covering the story of a missing teenager. When Karl drops dead, Sue senses an opportunity to finally get the world to notice her: she secretly buries Karl and reports him missing. Soon she is basking in the media spotlight as the distraught wife, but also attracting the attention of Karl's criminal associates and police detective Harris (Regina Hall).

What Works Well: In a breezy opening act, Sue is introduced as drifting through life with an unwanted cloak of invisibility, her birthday forgotten by all including her half-sister (Mila Kunis). Hubby Karl's mid-thrust death is funny.

What Does Not Work As Well: The rest of the movie flounders into unoriginal silliness derived from To Die For and the Coens, but with neither zest nor wit. The clutter of secondary characters (including a couple of goons and their boss, Karl's lover, ex-con brother, the brother's ditzy boss, her lover, detective Harris, and her partner) stumble over each other, some carrying unearned attitudes but all of them lacking substance. Recognizing the congested narrative dead-end, writer Amanda Idoko rushes into a mad killing spree, chasing the misguided notion that every additional murder relieves the burden of coherence.

Key Quote:

Detective Harris: Mrs. Buttons, usually in a missing persons case, people call the police before calling the media.

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Movie Review: Retribution (2023)

Genre: Thriller  

Director: Nimród Antal  

Starring: Liam Neeson, Matthew Modine, Embeth Davidtz  

Running Time: 90 minutes  

Synopsis: In Berlin, hedge fund manager Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is distracted by work and ignoring his wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz). While driving his two kids to school, a mysterious caller informs him there is a bomb under his seat. With other car bombs targeting associates of his business partner Anders Muller (Matthew Modine), Matt needs to keep driving and follow instructions to stay alive, while Europol agent Angela Brickmann (Noma Dumezweni) leads the police response.

What Works Well: This mash-up of Speed and Phone Booth benefits from picturesque Berlin locations, rational action scene editing, and Liam Neeson wringing every bit of regret from a preoccupied father and husband suddenly facing mortality. The Mercedes SUV where most of the movie takes places competes with Neeson for the central starring role.

What Does Not Work As Well: None of the plot details make any sense or survive scrutiny, starting with a villain who opts for the most convoluted body-littered path to riches. The laws of physics apply only intermittently, police chases and interventions are irrational, and key characters often side-step the most obvious action in favour of script requirements.

Conclusion: Displays some vigour, but mostly drives in all the wrong directions.



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Movie Review: Pacific Heights (1990)

Genre: Thriller  

Director: John Schlesinger  

Starring: Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine, Michael Keaton  

Running Time: 102 minutes  

Synopsis: In San Francisco, couple Patty and Drake (Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine) buy an expensive Victorian house, counting on rent income from two ground-level apartments to afford the mortgage. Con artist Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) fast-talks his way into one of the units without paying a deposit. Patty and Drake are plunged into a financial hole and a living nightmare, unable to get rid of a delinquent tenant now responsible for loud hammering and a cockroach infestation. They turn to a lawyer (Laurie Metcalf) for help, but Carter is also an expert at manipulating tenancy laws to his advantage.

What Works Well: This competent and compact landlord cautionary tale enjoys high production values, moments of mild suspense, a menacing Michael Keaton as an antagonist thinking five steps ahead, and in the opposite corner, a grounded Melanie Griffith. Director John Schlesinger and writer Daniel Pyne expertly allow all the walls (financial, emotional, and physical) to close-in on Patty and Drake, while the cockroaches make for effective co-stars.

What Does Not Work As Well: Matthew Modine is saddled with a character who picks the worst option at every opportunity. Carter's backstory remains blurry, and a gaggle of tertiary characters (including none other than Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith's mom) make late appearances to little effect. Carter's malevolent acts are a really convoluted means to a living for a supposedly wickedly intelligent man.

Conclusion: Don't skip any steps when selecting a tenant.



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Movie Review: Private School (1983)

A teen sex comedy, Private School adheres closely to the lowbrow formula of mixing predictable hormonal-driven humour with superfluous nudity.

At the private Cherryvale all-girls school, Chris (Phoebe Cates) is plotting to finally have sex with long-time boyfriend Jim (Matthew Modine), a student at the nearby all-boys school. Chris' nemesis Jordan (Betsy Russell) sets out to seduce Jim. Meanwhile, Jim's friend Bubba (Michael Zorek) is obsessed with peeping at girls in various stages of undress, although he does have a steady girlfriend in Betsy (Kathleen Wilhoite), who is Chris' roommate. Headmistress Miss Dutchbok (Fran Ryan) tries to keep a lid on all the raging hormones.

Notable for a cast featuring Phoebe Cates after her breakout success in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a pre-stardom Matthew Modine and a post-Emmanuelle Sylvia Kristel as the sex education teacher, Private School does not stray far from the lowest possible expectations. Joining the numerous films stampeding into theatres after Porky's crashed open the door to the commercial viability of movies targeting male teens most interested in ogling nude women, Private School is a low-budget, witless, formulaic exercise in imbecility on both sides of the camera.

The humour is rarely funny, the behaviour of the teens is uniformly dumb, and the entirety of what passes as fragments of plot revolves around chasing after sex or voyeurism. Typical for films of the era, this is a primarily male teen fantasy view of the world, and for the most part the girls are subjects to be exploited, both by the filmmakers (Noel Black is the director) and the characters.

If the film has one morsel of redemption, it resides in Jordan displaying sexual fortitude of her own to manipulate the boys (although she is made to suffer for her aggressiveness), and Chris deciding for herself on the right time to have sex with Jim.

To ensure that the film is fully consigned to the scrapheap, Private School plays out to an excruciatingly bad soundtrack of hideous early 1980s by-the-numbers pop, the quality of the music matching the on-screen material, equal opportunity garbage for both the eyes and the ears.

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Movie Review: Married To The Mob (1988)

A mobster comedy for adults, Married To The Mob mixes violence with laughs. The film achieves a steady level of caricaturish entertainment but is generally overbaked.

In New Jersey, Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer) is getting tired of life as the wife of mob contract killer Frank "The Cucumber" de Marco  (Alec Baldwin). She demands a divorce, but Frank laughs it off. Everything changes when mob boss Tony "The Tiger" Russo (Dean Stockwell) kills Frank because he dared to share the same mistress. Tony immediately turns his attention to seducing Angela, much to the disgust of Tony's wife Connie (Mercedes Ruehl).

FBI Agents Michael Downey (Matthew Modine) and Ed Benitez (Oliver Platt) are tailing Tony and spot an opportunity to get to him through Angela. She moves with her young son to a derelict New York City apartment to try and start a new life, but Angela can't shake off the attentions of Tony, the FBI, or a furious Connie.

Directed by Jonathan Demme, Married To The Mob hits the notes it aims for, but this is a film that goes for dissonance. Roughly equivalent to Gloria on dubious amounts of laughing gas, Married To The Mob tries to do too much, but also does enough to generate occasionally satisfying madcap energy.

Demme often appears to be working from a hodgepodge script with too many ideas and not enough focus. Cold blooded assassinations and shootouts, a human story about a woman and child seeking a new start, a satirical look at the garish styles of the wives of gang goons, a tentative romance between the widow Angela and the agent Downey, an unexplained war between rival mob gangs, and finally over the top comedy mainly driven by Connie's rage are all thrown together into one mixing bowl. The result cannot be taken seriously in any context, and the film survives on the strength of committed performances.

Pfeiffer, Stockwell and Ruehl play it loud, which is the only way to compete with the sound of material splattering all over the screen. The big 1980s era hair gives the ladies licence to crash through all lines of subtlety. While Pfeiffer tries to maintain some level of serious drama, Ruehl just abandons all pretense and fully invests in wild antics and wide-eyed fury. Stockwell contributes the best moments as he fluctuates between oily mob boss and smarmy lecher pursuing the one woman who dares to resist him. Matthew Modine is just too blank to register, despite several disguises.

Married To The Mob reaches an appropriately wild and bloody climax in Miami, the vivid seaside colours adding a final flourish to the pop-off-the-screen intentions.

 




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Movie Review: Full Metal Jacket (1987)

American Marine recruits undergo a brutal training camp and then experience harrowing combat in Vietnam. In his penultimate film, director Stanley Kubrick goes to the front lines of war for the first time since Paths Of Glory (1957), with mixed results.

It's 1967, and at the Parris Island, South Carolina military centre, raw recruits hoping to become Marines meet their drill instructor, the strict disciplinarian Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). Loud, foul-mouthed, uncompromising, and in-your-face, Hartman begins the arduous process of transforming young men into killing machines. The soldiers include thoughtful leader (and film narrator) James "Joker" Davis (Matthew Modine), the overweight and dim Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio), and Robert "Cowboy" Evans (Arliss Howard). Despite Joker's attempts to mentor him, Lawrence's incompetence marks him for reprehensible mental and physical abuse from Hartman and, eventually, also from the rest of the men.

Lawrence does, however, prove to be an ace shot with a rifle, and begins to earn Hartman's respect. But the damage is done, and Gomer Pyle does not make it out of boot camp. Joker does graduate and is assigned a military journalism role, eventually deployed to Vietnam to write morale boosting tripe for Stars and Stripes. Joker develops anti-war tendencies, participates in repelling the Tet offensive, reconnects with Cowboy, and finds plenty of trouble on patrol with a squad including Sergeant "Animal Mother" (Adam Baldwin), a kill'em all M60 machine gunner.

Half of a great movie, Full Metal Jacket enjoys a stunning opening hour before dropping into good but fairly routine war territory for its back end. The film is simply unable to overcome the loss of its two most compelling characters at the end of the boot camp sequence, and hard as Matthew Modine tries to carry the Vietnam-based scenes and embody the conflict between peace activists and hardened soldiers, it is all just too close to average, an unusual place for Kubrick to land.

The Vietnam scenes are also somewhat disorienting due to their context. The battles here occur in a concrete, steel, and built-up environment. Kubrick may have been faithful to some elements of the source material from The Short-Timers book by Gustav Hasford, but the outcome is urban street warfare that could occur in any war-torn city; the Vietnam-defining dense, damp insect-infested jungle and rural village frame of reference is missing. And the attempts to introduce conflict between Joker's anti-war tendencies and the field commanders remain benign.

Kubrick's fluid cameras do help to elevate the combat sequences above the ordinary, the nimble camera becoming another soldier's eye on the chaos of the battlefield, moving as one with the troops amongst the ruins and fires, dodging deadly sniper shots.

But the opening hour of Full Metal Jacket is a monumental achievement built around R. Lee Ermey's performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. A retired Marine drill sergeant, Ermey's undoubted, if exaggerated, authenticity creates a bravura achievement. Ad libbing great chunks of profanity-propelled dialogue to humiliate, embarrass and  tear-down men who need to be reconstructed into killers, Ermey's Hartman is a frightful creation of military culture, and an unforgettable screen presence.

Every drill sergeant needs a floundering recruit to bring out the best in both, and Vincent D'Onofrio gained 32 kilograms to give Hartman everything he can handle in Leonard Lawrence. D'Onofrio captures the overweight, uncoordinated dullard who cannot do anything right, until he stumbles on target shooting as a latent talent. Hartman does his job well in turning even Lawrence into a killer, although once aware of his abilities, Lawrence spirals into another domain altogether. Full Metal Jacket finds victims of war everywhere, none more memorable than Gomer Pyle, on the toilet seat, stumbling onto his courage and the end of his rope at the same instant.

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