According to Colwell

I didn’t have much interest in seeing Wild Hogs, but it was funny and diverting fare, and sometimes that’s just what you need. Tim Allen plays a dentist stuck in a rut, William H. Macy is a computer programmer who’s both generally clumsy and especially awkward around women, Martin Lawrence is bossed around by not only his wife but also his daughter and mother, and John Travolta has lost his supermodel wife and million-dollar home. All are in need, they decide, of a road trip on their Harleys. The laughs come from sight-gags and the juxtaposition of four geeky middle-aged suburbanites with a cross-country motorcycle road trip. Feeling cool cruising down the open road one minute, the next they are feeling cold huddled under a plastic sheet for protection from the pouring rain. And of course there is the inevitable encounter with a gang of none-too-friendly bikers led by Ray Liotta. The earnestness of the four buddies and their naive hope in an open-road cure for their mid-life doldrums are endearing.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve gotta go check the motorcycle section of the classified ads.

Every drop of blood gets its own close-up in 300, the stylized war drama inspired by Frank Miller’s (Sin City) graphic novel account of the battle of Thermopylae. Directed by Zach Snyder, 300 has a high-contrast, saturated color palette of golds and reds. The battle scenes use the “bullet-time” of the Matrix movies and the freakish villains and bloody hand-to-hand fighting of the Lord of the Rings movies. But instead of bullets pausing in mid-flight to let agents avoid them, here it is splashes of blood from severed limbs. The effect makes watching the movie reminiscent of reading a graphic novel or comic book, where dramatic images are frozen, albeit briefly, on the screen. Visually, the movie becomes a series of artistically rendered images, like the frames of a comic book. Only these are animated images, with sound, and projected on the big screen. Enough of these images are visually striking enough to make the movie worth watching as a sort of visual picture book, regardless of how engaging one finds the storytelling.

Part of the modern appeal of the story, at least in America, must be how clear-cut and strategically simple were the terms of the war between the Greeks and the Persian army of Xerxes I in contrast to the so-called war the United States currently finds itself fighting. In 300 the bad guys are all gathered together in an endless sea of grotesque, murderous slave-soldiers who come at the good guys (300 Spartans and 700 Thespians (they only act like soldiers)) in a nice organized progression with the intent of killing all the men and enslaving all the women and children of Greece. If only al Qaeda would line up all together like that.

Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas of Sparta, a kingdom where all the men have hairless Bowflex torsos and the boys start training to be soldiers as soon as they can walk. The women of Sparta feel special because they give birth to such awesome fighters. As the group of 300 elite fighters heads off to delay the advancing Persian army, a voice over informs us that there is no place in Sparta for softness. This makes it sound like an interesting place to visit, like Mount Everest, but not particularly homey. His Queen, played by Lena Headey, tries to convince the recalcitrant city council to commit the full Spartan army, but the film is all about the battle at a narrow pass where the valiant and buff 300 of Sparta kill thousands of scary but inept Persians. Occasionally Xerxes, portrayed by Rodrigo Santoro as an 8-foot androgynous demigod, shows up to try to convince Leonidas to stop the fighting and become a big shot general in Xerxes’ army. Leonidas refuses, of course, on the grounds that Xerxes is creepy and has an unpronounceable name. And also that he is fighting for freedom - a sort of model of democracy in the middle east. Okay, I’m being flippant, but the movie is so over the top that it’s hard not to poke a little fun at it. Nevertheless, the visuals are excellent, and the underlying historical events are compelling.

The second DVD in as many movie reviews, this time because the movie for all practical purposes could only be seen on home video anyway. As the title suggests, This Film Is Not Yet Rated has not been rated, meaning it will not be shown in most theater chains. Kirby Dick’s documentary sets out to explore and expose the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the secretive group of supposedly typical Americans who decide whether a movie gets a G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17 rating. The exploration of the ratings process, though, is stymied by the top secret nature of the ratings board. As a result, This Film Is Not Yet Rated ends up being primarily about the identity of the board members and only secondarily about how the process works. This is a shame, because I think it’s much more interesting to look at why vivisection gets a PG-13 and a naked woman gets an R. I would also like to hear about how movie ratings are handled in other countries. Instead, Dick is forced to hire a private investigator to try to identify the members of the ratings board and interview various directors whose films had to be re-edited as a result of the board’s initial ratings. Then he submits a preliminary version of this very film to the board so he can at least have some insight into the secretive process.

It is certainly easy to understand why movie ratings sometimes seem inconsistent after seeing this movie. Eight or nine raters screen movies and discuss what rating should be given, and then vote. The vote is not binding however, as the chair, Joan Graves, apparently can intercede and change the rating. Feedback to studio movies gives explicit guidance on what should be cut to ensure the desired rating, while independent movies get no such guidance and are forced to cut in the dark. At least this is the conclusion one draws from the anecdotal evidence of directors who have been involved in both types of movie. It is clearly a broken system, and it is one that is essentially impossible to penetrate, or even describe, as this movie shows. This is in large part because of the near-monopoly of the handful of companies that control all aspects of movie production and distribution, a fact that I frankly found more frightening than ratings system (if one can call it a system) itself.

I’ve restricted my movie posts to movies I’ve seen in a theater up to this point, but because I haven’t been getting to the theater often lately and because this particular DVD is an advance “screener” for members of the Screen Actors Guild (membership has its privileges) and because I liked it, here it is.

Peter O’Toole earned his eighth Oscar nomination for his portrayal of senior actor Maurice Russell who gets a final whiff of youth through the daughter of his best friend’s niece in Venus. When Ian finds Jessie, whom he was expecting to cook and clean and generally tend to him, to be an unbearably loud and rude presence in his London flat, Maurice is delighted to take her off his hands. Jessie, thrust into the situation by an uncaring mother in the country and adrift in London, welcomes Maurice’s attention, if for nothing more than the company and change of scenery, at first. But it quickly grows into a more complex and symbiotic relationship. Maurice is not shocked by Jessie’s youthful behavior that Ian found so vulgar. Maurice is kind to her and at the same time makes no secret about his fruitless sexual longing for her. Faced with prostate cancer and, worse, an “old man smell”, there is never any doubt that his desire will only be satisfied by the caresses and glimpses that Jessie carefully rations to him.

When Maurice finds her work as a nude model for painters, she is reluctant to show any skin as long as he is in the room for the simple reason that he wants to see her. At the same time, she appreciates his desire and admiration for her; for a girl whose mother wished she’d never been born, it may well be the first time she’s experienced the kind of praise Maurice bestows on her. It is certainly the first time she’s been made to feel beautiful by someone who knows he doesn’t have a chance in hell of getting into bed with her. And it is not just her youthful beauty and sexuality that Maurice is drawn to. His existence has shrunk from former moderately famous actor to an ever-shrinking circle of friends, clipping Ian’s toenails, and the occasional role as a dying man. Jessie is not just young, for Maurice she is youth.

While Maurice rediscovers youth, or perhaps recaptures a bit of it, through Jessie, she matures into an adult through her friendship with him. O’Toole came home empty-handed once again from the Academy Awards, but both he and Jodie Whittaker as Jessie create a believable and touching relationship between two characters who superficially have nothing in common.

Pan’s Labyrinth could have been subtitled “The Spanish Civil War”. In fact, despite the heavy attention paid to the surrealistic and frightening images of the fantasy underworld in the movie, it is primarily about the horrors of a very real war. Set in 1944, the last remnants of the communist resistance continue a futile fight against the fascist government somewhere in the remote mountains of Spain. 11-year-old Ofelia, and her mother, Carmen, a seamstress pregnant with the child of the sadistic Captain charged with eliminating the communist rebels, join the Captain in the remote camp of soldiers where Carmen is expected to bear the Captain a son.

To the Captain, Ofelia is a nuisance and Carmen is merely a vessel. His brutality pervades the camp and Ofelia longs to leave, but her mother is ill and has latched onto the Captain as a means of support and survival in post-war Spain. Ofelia becomes increasingly drawn into the bizarre fantasy underworld she is led to by fairies masquerading as praying mantises. Through an old abandoned stone labyrinth near the camp she enters a dark and damp underground world where a rather gruesome “fawn” (Pan, of the title) informs her that she is the long lost princess of the underground kingdom. To prove that she can shed the bonds of mortal surface living she must complete three dangerous tasks. As gruesome as these are, they pale in comparison to the murder and torture in the realm of men. Down below, Ofelia confronts a slimy three-foot toad with pluck and courage, while above captured soldiers are tortured and Carmen flirts with death and miscarriage. In spite of his frightening visage and generally suspicious nature, the fawn presents a clearly attractive alternative to life among people simply because it is not life among people.

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is visually fascinating and gripping storytelling. Ivana Baquero is convincing and endearing as Ofelia. Ultimately, though, I think the movie works better on a simple narrative level than it does as a metaphorical fable. Ofelia’s tasks have no particular significance in and of themselves, and the nature of the underworld kingdom is not developed enough to have a real character in comparison to mortal life on Earth. Still, this is a movie with powerful images that remains with you long after you leave the theater.