TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'The Longest Yard,' 'Kontroll' and 'Happy Hour'


Reviews by yours truly in today's (and Saturday's) Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print verisons.




The Longest Yard
(dir. Peter Segal)

Okay, so let's get the tedious "but the original was so much better!" whinging out of the way right up front:

If you haven't seen the original 1974 "The Longest Yard," you should. It's one of the great Sunday-afternoon-with-Dad matinees, and it's tied with "Breaking Away" and "Slap Shot" as perhaps the greatest sports movie ever. And, like most great sports movies, it's about a guy who loses as much as he wins.

Burt Reynolds, never funnier or tougher, plays Paul "Wrecking" Crewe -- a disgraced former quarterback who ends up in a Florida prison after he drunkenly shoves his girlfriend, destroys her Maserati and punches a couple of police officers. Once Crewe's in the clink, the nasty warden (Eddie Albert) forces him to assemble and lead an all-inmate team in a football game against the prison guards.

The original's director, Robert Aldrich, revisits many of the same ideas he explored in 1967's "The Dirty Dozen." Like "Dozen," "The Longest Yard" is about horrible men finding a little redemption as they bond on a hopeless mission -- with Reynolds in the Lee Marvin role as the cynical, mordantly funny leader who thinks rules are for sissies. It's a particular kind of nasty, funny and deeply humane tough-guy movie that mainstream Hollywood doesn't really try and make anymore (though you see flashes of it pop up in Quentin Tarantino's better moments).

(BTW, my pal and colleague Kim Morgan makes a stirring case for the '74 "Yard" right here.)

Now, with that out of the way:

The brand-new remake of "The Longest Yard" is no "Longest Yard," if that makes any sense, but it's a definite crowd-pleaser and a perfectly fun night at the movies. Putting an amiable but sort-of-toothless Adam Sandler in the Reynolds role (and a frail-looking Reynolds in the role of veteran prisoner Nate Scarborough), the remake shaves most of the raw edges off the original to create an almost family-friendly PG-13 entertainment.

For fans of the original, here are the sort of changes I'm talking about:

1. There are fewer curse words and racial slurs.

2. Sandler's Paul Crewe isn't nearly as nasty in the opening scenes.

3. The prisoners no longer kill or paralyze guards during the climactic match.

4. Reynolds' sexual tryst with the prison secretary (Bernadette Peters) has been "re-imagined" as Sandler's erotic photo shoot with an elderly horndog (Cloris Leachman).

5. The racist edge found in '74's segregated prison population has been reduced to relatively tame posturing, backed by a corporate-friendly rap soundtrack.

6. Where the original was full of lumpy, interesting-looking meat-eaters, nearly everyone in the remake is as gym-cut as an MTV dancer.

7. And where the original was more or less grounded in a gritty reality, with a game that felt like real football, the remake features plenty of the wacky, over-the-top Adam Sandler antics you'd expect -- up to and including hijinks with a player whose steroid pills are secretly replaced with estrogen.

All that said, the remake is remarkably faithful to the original in the broad strokes. There are long passages of dialogue that are nearly word-for-word. And if you're going to put new actors in these classic roles, you could do a lot worse than casting Chris Rock as Caretaker, James Cromwell as the warden, David Patrick Kelly as the nutty pyromaniac and William Fichtner as Captain Knauer -- not to mention casting a host of NFL and pro-wrestling personalities as guards and linebackers.

Anyone who thinks Sandler's an underrated talent who's made two minor absurdist masterpieces ("Billy Madison" and "Happy Gilmore") and done some wonderful work as an actor ("Punch Drunk Love") will be pleased to hear that this film falls solidly into the "mainstream-good" section of his film catalog, somewhere near "The Wedding Singer." If I hadn't watched the original the day before -- thus condemning myself to create a mental play-by-play comparison chart throughout the remake screening -- I'd probably have enjoyed myself more than I did.
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Kontroll
(dir. Nimród Antal)

"Kontroll" is misleading.

This weird, meandering action/comedy/thriller/allegory follows a raggedy pack of ticket inspectors working the Hungarian subway system. (Stay with me: This is funnier and more action-packed than it sounds.) It opens with a deadpan introduction by a real-life Hungarian subway official -- who assures us we're heading to a fantasy world that in no way defames Hungarian transit.

It's hard to tell if this is a joke or not. Because, in the very next scene, "Kontroll" turns into a semi-supernatural thriller about a killer who pushes people under trains.

Then, just as suddenly, it turns into an action-packed dramedy about a bunch of dopey misfits who'd fit nicely in a '70s cop movie. This long middle passage is a real crowd-pleaser for a certain brand of film geek: The ticket inspectors -- who dress like homeless people and are identified only by their armbands -- are a bickering, grimy bunch of dorks who have quite possibly the least popular job on earth. They're beaten and berated by riders. They get in long, beautifully shot foot-chases as they try to catch the punk tagging their trains with graffiti. They grouse and get puked on and fight with a meaner pack of rival inspectors who've purchased their own black jackets.

And then, finally, "Kontroll" gets downright strange.

The film slows down to focus on the leader of the misfits, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) -- a burnout ticket inspector who works and sleeps in the subway and seems, for mysterious reasons, afraid of the world above the escalators. By the time he meets a fetching young woman in a bear suit (don't ask) and starts exploring the ominous underworld of the subway, "Kontroll" is spinning its own hip, vaguely fantastic mythology, and kind of stops bothering to spin a conventional narrative.

It doesn't matter. The movie is insanely cool -- full of rough humanity, rocking chases, thumping music and fantastic visuals. Making gorgeous use of grimy tunnels, writer-director Nimród Antal frustrates expectations in the best possible sense.
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Happy Hour
(dir. Mike Bencivenga)

Appropriately enough, "Happy Hour" opens on a cliché. We pan across the New York skyline, jazz sax a-blaring, as a voiceover starts in with the faux world-weary patter you've heard from every "writer" who wishes he was a hybrid of Jimmy Breslin and Charles Bukowski:

"Let me think -- where to begin?" the voiceover intones. "New York City ... Tuesday ... and I once again found myself sitting in a bar ... my bar...."

Oh, for Pete Hamill's sake.

We soon learn that this tired prattle comes from the typewriter of one "drinker with a writing problem" named Ryan Tulley, Jr. (Anthony LaPaglia). Tulley was apparently named "Most Promising Writer of 1980" by the New York Review of Books.

Unfortunately, "Promising" is not the same as "Accomplished."

"I'm a total coward when it comes to pain," he tells his new girlfriend Natalie (Caroleen Feeney). "I'm built solely for pleasure." But writing is not always pleasant, and so Tulley has become one of those tedious never-beens -- a fraud who squandered his talent while surfing a wave of dwindling charm, ad-agency revenue and way too much booze.

"Happy Hour" is about what happens when that wave comes crashing on the rocks.

Tulley gets kneed in the gut during a bar-fight, and his life (and bowels) crumple like old wallpaper. After he's diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and intestinal necrosis and fitted with a colostomy bag, Tulley desperately tries to finish his novel before he dies, while his new girlfriend and the co-worker who worships him (Eric Stoltz) absorb his insults and inherit what little legacy he has to offer.

LaPaglia and Feeney give terrific performances in what is, ultimately, a tiny character study. But one's enjoyment of "Happy Hour" depends almost entirely on whether one thinks co-writer/director Mike Bencivenga regards Tully as a tragic hero or a cautionary study in human waste.

Tulley's novel, unfortunately, turns out to be a compilation of his voice-overs, and all the characters talk like normal people -- i.e., in a series of pat phrases and boring jokes. This may be Bencivenga's point; he's surprisingly ambivalent about whether he considers Tulley a genuine rapier wit or a puffy-faced old fool. But it makes "Happy Hour," and its characters, hard to like. And the filmmaking itself -- filled with two-dimensional characterizations on the supporting-actor level -- isn't strong enough to elevate that ambivalence to the level of art.

Still a winner
Making a merry muddle
'Happy Hour' serves mixed drink on rocks
(The Oregonian, May 27-28, 2005)


Posted: Fri - May 27, 2005 at 12:00 AM        

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