Review: GLADIATOR

MY NAME IS GLADIATOR…AND I AM AN EPIC DISAPPOINTMENT

(reviewed at the mecca on Friday, May 12th, 2000, with Jack)

    With the release of Dreamworks/Universal’s Gladiator, the summer movie season of 2000 has officially begun. The time when the big guns come out to play. The time when studios put out their huge budgeted, special f/x laden ultra actioneer pictures that are silly and stupid yet fun and popcorn worthy.
    Gladiator, on the other hand, came out expecting Oscar nominations. It is a 2 ½ hour epic about Ancient Rome gladiators laced in with rulers and slaves and blood and guts and amazing special effects shots showcasing Ancient Rome and the Colliseum and how clean and white it really was.
    Gladiator got a lot of extremely favorable reviews, meaning that people actually watched this and took it seriously? Gladiators? Guys in sandals with swords fighting? Okay, I enjoy action. But what about the surrounding epic plot involving the evil Caesar and the Caesar’s wife and the gladiator’s wife and kid? Give me a break. I think I took Wild, Wild, West more seriously.
    Russel Crowe is Maximus, a successful Roman general who defeats the Germanians in Germania in the opening battle scene which is horribly edited in slow motion so the audience has really no sense of what is going on whatsoever.
    Eventually things go awry and Maximus loses his rank and becomes a gladiator slave who must fight in a dusty desert town (North Africa, maybe? The movie is so lackluster it never actually lets us know where the fuck they are) against bigger, meaner guys with swords and scary looking masks.
    Things progess slowly, and he heads to Rome’s Colliseum where the evil Caesar (Joaquim Phoenix who does his best with the awful script’s dialogue) is staging 90 days of Colliseum action so the people admire him.
    Of course Maximus becomes the best gladiator there is, defeating everything the evil Caesar throws at him, including Bengal tigers, people on chariots shooting arrows, and a big brute gladiator who has come out of retirement after boasting the only undefeated streak in gladiator history. Should I even have to spell out to you that his streak is in dire straights?
    The one aspect of the film that is awesome, is the gladiator scenes. They are fucking killer! The chariot battle scene was so damn cool I was sweating that John Woo may not even be able to top that next week with the PG-13 MI:2.
    But alas, the 2 ½ hour film has maybe 25 minutes devoted to action…making me think that maybe the idiot screenwriters should have thrown out the epic storyline and just have made Russel Crowe become a gladiator in the beginning and forget about the entire evil Caesar back story. The surrounding plot only ends up producing a boring sword fight which rips off directly from Rob Roy’s final sword fight between Tim Roth and Liam Neeson anyway.
    In the Zucker brothers/ Jim Abraham’s classic spoof, Airplane!, the pilot asks a little kid a question that defines the reason Gladiator is so silly. “Do you like movies with gladiators?” Gladiators are silly. The movie is ridiculous, yet it plays out dead serious and ends up extremely preposterous and boring. I couldn’t help laughing at the supposed powerful scene where Phoenix asks Crowe what his name is. He turns around with his steel, menacing mask on and says, “My name…(dramatic pause)…is gladiator.”
    Can you take that serious? Me neither. ** (out of ****)

Review: EYES WIDE SHUT

STANLEY KUBRICK’S SWAN SONG

(reviewed on video, Tuesday, March 7th, 2000)

    Eyes Wide Shut received a lot of attention over the span of roughly three years. It got a lot of attention because Stanely Kubrick died a week after handing Warner Brothers the final print. It got a lot of press because Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman played husband and wife on screen. It got a lot of press because the plot of the movie remained elusive until it came out in July ’99. There was a ton of press about the film, and it’s mysterious circumstances. How Tom Cruise developed an ulcer and didn’t tell Stanely about it until he was done filming. How Kubrick had to digitally enhance a few sex scenes so that it would receive an R rating.
    Beyond all of the hype and all of the mysterious rumors and stories and curiosities, Kubrick’s swan song, his final, dream-like, borderline pornographic film, actually turned out to be a pretty good film.
    Tom Cruise plays Dr. Bill, a normal, beer swilling, New York City living husband to Nicole Kidman’s Alice. One night after an elegant, brightly lit dinner party, Alice and Bill get into a heated bedroom conversation about sex and lust. Alice admits one time when they were staying at a hotel she saw a guy dressed up in a military outfit and she had the hots for him. She had sex with Bill but imagined it was the admiral. This story enrages Cruise, and so he goes off in New York City on a sexual excursion to get back at his wife.
    It’s kind of funny that the story of Eyes was so confidential, because the plot is extremely thin, and the movie moves about as slow as any other Kubrick feature.
    The best scene in the entire film is really the core of the flick. Cruise ends up at a masked orgy in an upstate mansion. Kubrick had a knack for filming anything, anywhere, at any time, and making it look downright awesome. The party is shot so well, and the music is dead on, that a feeling of dread and eroticism creeps through the screen with each shot.
    Both Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are decent actors, but nothing special. The plot is thin, and there are too many ridiculous coincidences, but all in all the film works because of one thing: Stanley Kubrick. He had such a knack for making good films that he could probably film a cereal box and make it engaging. The party scene is so well done it puts every other ‘art’ movie to shame. The lighting and the music and the way the steadi-cam follows everyone around every corner, it’s just great to watch and to be involved in. The movie is about dreams and real life and sex and lust and adultery and fucking.
    Stanley Kubrick hasn’t made a masterpiece with Eyes, but he has made an interesting, mysterious, dream-like piece of film that is extremely engaging and beautiful looking.
    We will all miss his Kubrickian style, his magnificent endings and his perfect music and lighting. We’ll remember Jack Nicholson yelling, “Heeeeeere’s…Johnny!” with a crazed look in his eye, we’ll never forget the Droogs out for a midnight stroll, the ape tossing a bone in the air, or Slim Pickens riding the a-bomb.
    We will miss you, Stanley Kubrick. Goodnight sweet prince. *** (out of ****)