oliver9184

Johnny Dangerously (1984) 6/10 is a crime comedy starring a cocky young Michael Keaton. Though still young, he's a retired mobster now running a pet store and via flashback he relates the farcial story of his life of crime to a young would-be shoplifter. It's very obvious lowbrow comedy of the sort that gets old quickly, but the prohibition-era setting puts one in mind of the old Warner Bros gangster films from the 30s and Johnny Dangerously shares a sort of quaint old-fashioned innocence with those films which is quite charming. Danny DeVito also stars, and as always he lights up every scene he's in.

Courage Under Fire (1996) 6/10 (SLIGHT SPOILERS) is a very serious mystery drama set in the military starring a stouter than usual Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan. I can't think of any female actor I like less than Meg Ryan. She's never failed to bring down and make worse any film I have seen her in. Here she plays a helicopter pilot in the US Army - Captain Karen Walden, who was killed in action during the Gulf War. With the war now over, Denzel Washington is the Colonel tasked with finding out if she should be awarded the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of her crew - which is a big deal because she'd be the first woman to get the medal. He spends most of the film tramping back and forth across America debriefing Walden's subordinates whose accounts of what happened are shown to us in flashback. Not all of them are reliable so we get differing versions of the same story, Rashomon style. It's not a very interesting story and the people in it are not likeable or engaging. I didn't care what really happened in Iraq - Meg Ryan was dead, thankfully - that much was clear - so it seemed an unnecessary and unfair imposition to have to watch her shitty acting again and again with slight differences. There was a glimmer of hope when a sergeant who was on the chopper (Lou Diamond Phillips) told his version of events, which had it that Walden was a coward and cried like a girl, and so didn't deserve the medal but - this being a large Hollywood war film made by Edward Zwick - that turned out to be a lie and the guilt of what really happened wracked Phillips' character so badly that he's driven - literally - to commit one of the most excellent suicides I've ever seen in a film. Not even Matt Damon, as a shifty Army medic, improves this painfully earnest but completely inconsequential film. Denzel Washington in the lead is pedantic and priggish and I found myself siding with his superior General Hershberg (Michael Moriarty), who tells him: stop beefing and muckraking and just finish the job already.

Valley Girl (1983) 7/10 is a high school comedy starring Nicolas Cage. He plays a boy from Hollywood who starts seeing a girl from the (San Fernando) Valley which is just over the hills from Hollywood but might as well be a whole other country. It seems that Valley girls go out with Valley boys (rich, vapid, preppy and blonde) or else risk ostracization by their friends. The Valley girl in question juggles Cage and Valley boy Tommy for a while before she must make a decision. The more I see Nicolas Cage the more I like him, especially in these early roles. In this film he's incredibly endearing: romantic, willful, compulsive but also vulnerable and wonderfully bashful at times. The film is showing its age much more than the contemporaneous Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) (which Cage also appears in briefly) and won't stand as many repeat viewings as that film but it is a very good-natured, easy to watch fantastical teen romance along the lines of Say Anything (1989), Endless Love (1980) and Can't Buy Me Love (1987).

I Love You Beth Cooper (2009) 5/10. This, on the other hand, is how not to make a high school comedy. To make such a film you need endearing young actors. You need a story premise that doesn't feel fifteen years old and you need a script that's not full of lines that are unfunny and that make no sense in the context of the scene. This is a very poorly written film. The actors are all totally charmless: the protagonist, played by Paul Rust, has gone through high school being a geek and never daring to speak to the girl he's obsessed with (Hayden Panetierre). In a desperate last minute attempt to make her notice him, he declares his love for her in front of the whole school - as well as insulting her frowning gorilla of a boyfriend and a lot of his other classmates. Paul Rust is like an unfunny George McFly - a totally inept, useless damp squib with the aggravating tendency that such characters often have of always saying the most inappropriate thing at the worst possible time. Rust has not a single ounce of charm to counter his many shortcomings, and Panetierre is horrible: she's a non-character, a pretty exterior with nothing beneath it but a fake bad attitude and a moronic 'wild streak' which, I think, is supposed to make her more attractive. It doesn't! Rather it brings to mind the woman terminator out of Terminator 3 (2003). The two of them, accompanied by one of his friends and two of hers, spend the movie fleeing from the gorilla and his buddies. Chaos, destruction, stupidity and other predictable stuff happens but it's not ever funny enough to laugh out loud at. See The Girl Next Door (2004) for this sort of thing done properly: with some edge, and with the essential weight that a decent actor in the lead can bring.

Hotel Chevalier (2007) 8/10
The Darjeeling Limited (2007) 7/10
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 9/10
The Hills Have Eyes (2006) 7/10
Kids (1995) 8/10
High Plains Drifter (1973) 6/10