137 - Is Butters Crazy?

136 - Home Alone review

Susan and I watched this on Christmas Eve, and another of my wacky experiements in movie reviewing was born.





Adulthood comes with many terrible realizations. You realize that one day you and everyone you know will be dead, that Santa Claus isn’t real, that nice things cost a lot of money, and that every woman on earth is morbidly obsessed with making a damn fool out of you. But an important one for a burgeoning film critic comes with watching beloved films from your childhood and realizing they aren’t quite as great as they seemed at the time.

Thus begins my bittersweet review of "Home Alone", a film I first saw at age 6 on a military base in Spain. I couldn’t have been more amused, and my VHS copy would see dozens of replays over the years. The ridiculous story essentially embodies two fantasies of harried children and childish adults everywhere.

The first fantasy: 8 year old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin, launching his super-stardom and eventual arrest for lobster theft) finds himself left in charge of a upper-middle class Chicago home after his large nuclear family mistakenly takes a Christmas trip to Paris without him. Kevin indulges in giant ice-cream sundaes, watches sleazy noir films, rides the sleigh down the stairs, checks out a Playboy ("No clothes on anybody. Sickening!"), shoots baseball figures with a BB gun, and terrorizes the pizza boy. With the obvious exception of the last example, the simple pleasures of solitude he partakes actually illustrate great restraint on the filmmaker’s part, as most kids in Children Without Adult Supervision films are written to run around screaming and vandalizing everything in sight.

The second fantasy: When holiday burglars Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) attempt to loot Kevin’s stronghold, he sets an elaborate series of traps to thwart their movements. Although earlier on Kevin expresses an inability to pack his own suitcase and has a severe case of gerontophobia, he appears to be a child prodigy when it comes to brutalizing wrongdoers. We can only hope that in the world of the film, Kevin has grown up to be an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay.

Rewatching the film through the lens of both an adult (in theory) and film critic (by self-granted title), it becomes exponentially more difficult to revel in the atmosphere as the plot progresses. Can Kevin’s family really not find one person in all of Chicago to check on their son? Why does the family reunite at the close and then have virtually nothing to say? Does the social services department in Illinois take a month long Christmas vacation? I remember wondering about a few of these points as a child, so perhaps the greatest compliment I can issue it as a family film is that it abuses plausibility to kids and adults alike.

Another grown-up realization; the deadly lattice of traps Kevin sets for the burglars are truly sadistic. If Kevin had simply obtained his father’s pistol and shot them both in the head, he would be in the right, brazenly ignoring that he neglected to call the police. After he burns the family name into Harry’s hand and drops an iron onto Marv’s head, I perversely root for the criminals to disembowel this little bastard before he tortures someone else. If Pesci and Stern didn’t do such a good job of playing the battered crooks, I might not have been able to laugh at their suffering.

But I did. Maybe in a few years I won’t, but I apparently still have enough kid in me that I can extract serious joy out of the misery of others. Though my hopes of being completely enthralled by what I had hoped was a timeless family classic flickered away, the film’s fantastical appeal remained largely intact. Largely.

3.5 out of 5

135 - Rocky Balboa review

What a comeback. I'm not only referring to Rocky Balboa, who at sixty years of age stands toe to toe with an undefeated heavyweight champion, but his portrayer and creator, Sylvester Stallone. After years of big-budget bombs and straight to video embarrassments, Stallone has returned to the character that made him famous with "Rocky Balboa", and although it moves at a slow pace through familiar territory, he has never given a more powerful performance.

We are reintroduced to Rocky, who runs a restaurant where the crowds come to hear fight stories and get a picture with the boxing legend. He takes a remembrance tour of his past; the gym he trained in, the pet store where he met his late wife Adrian, the ruins of the ice skating rink where they went on their first date. Cantankerous brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) bitterly chastises him for dwelling in years past, but as an athlete, aging is doubly painful for Rocky. Not only does he see the world he knew leaving him in the dust, but his viability as a fighter, his very identity, does as well.

At least it does until an ESPN computer simulation predicts a Rocky in his prime the winner in a match versus Mason "The Line" Dixon (Antonio Tarver), the undefeated reigning champ. Dixon, a man much hated amongst boxing fans for always smashing his opponents to pieces in the first few rounds, is propelled by his publicity starved managers to fight Rocky in an exhibition (or as an announcer calls it, an execution).

Rocky knows the odds are more stacked against him than ever, and that he has again become the butt of the sports world’s joke. During a recent Q&A on Ain’t It Cool News, Stallone remarked that the maturity of entering old age granted him the wisdom to pen "Rocky Balboa", and it shows. The skepticism directed towards Stallone appears in the story, Rocky’s determination to prove himself undoubtedly imitating life. Can Rocky really step into the ring one last time, and can Stallone resurrect his faltering film legacy?

Stallone tackles these questions head on. While the film never does quite convince us that this match would be realistic in either setup or result, it wisely addresses the improbabilities at hand. Rocky’s training focuses on building strength, as his body has long past the point of being quick enough to match a much younger man. He has to plead with the boxing commission simply to obtain his license. When the fight finally rolls around, Rocky doesn’t improbably use his fighting prowess to mop the ring with Dixon, but holds firm and waits for his chance to score solid hits. Dixon may be the competition, but Rocky’s real fight is with life itself.

Stylistically, "Rocky Balboa" bears resemblance to the first film more than any of the four sequels. A newcomer to the series could easily watch the first film and skip to this one and have little trouble following along. The sequels that turned the underdog Rocky into a comic book superhero are virtually ignored altogether (particularly the truly crappy "Rocky V"), except for the somewhat stale scenes involving Rocky Jr. (Milo Ventimiglia), who idiotically whines about having a famous father (he should imagine how OJ Simpson’s children must feel). Even the haymaker-laden matches of the preceding films, the ones that would likely render a prime athlete brain-dead after one round, are traded for a more realistic form that would only achieve the same result in about six rounds.

In a throwback to the original, Rocky strikes up a friendship with Marie (Geraldine Hughes), the little girl who repaid his attempted good deed with an insult in the first installment. And yes, there is a montage, and yes, it is just as effective of a blatant manipulation as an audience could hope for.

Both character and creator make a statement about standing proudly against the flow of time and pursuing one’s goals regardless of what others say. Not everyone gets a second chance, or even a first, but a film like this argues that determination and willpower are what is really needed. Coming in late in the year amidst a host of Christmas tripe, "Rocky Balboa" emerges as the best crowd pleaser of 2006.

4 out of 5