Savages

2012 drug movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Successful marijuana growers battle dangerous Mexican drug lords, and unfortunately, the love of both of their lives gets involved. They have to go to drastic measures to save her.

I am having a very difficult time understanding the relationship that drives this story. You've got the two pot guys--Buddhist Ben and war veteran and general badass Chon--and the one girl played by Blake Lively and named after a Hamlet character. And they're all in love, but it's not a love triangle. No, it's this relationship where they all live together and Blake Lively screws them both and everybody's happy with it. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don't see how that works. And if that doesn't work, the whole movie doesn't really work. I didn't like any of the three major characters. Taylor Kitsch played the badass, and he was just your typical movie badass and nothing more--tattoos, haircut, muscles, scowl, and not much else. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was the hippie, another stereotype more than a real human being. And Blake Lively was nothing more than a pretty face and later a damsel in distress. Oh, and she provides some bad narration filled with terrible puns--war-gasms, a play on Buddhist/Baddhist, a joint venture. Those and the Shakespeare references just were a little too cutesy-clever, especially for a character who was completely bland the rest of the time. Travolta's character had potential, kind of an unlikable pussy. And Travolta's not bad, but he's not really in the movie enough to really get the chance to nail down the character. Del Toro, Demian Bichir (who I know as one of the actors who has gotten a chance to fondle Mary-Louise Parker), and Salma Hayek (wearing a terrible wig) all get parts that Mexico can be proud of. Del Toro does his best to make his character completely despicable, but it's nothing we really haven't seen already. And that's probably the biggest problem with Savages--it just doesn't take any chances. There's some of Stone's experimental trickery that you get with his non-historical dramas like Natural Born Killers or U-Turn, but here it just seems mainstream and gratuitous. The biggest trick of all is when Stone provides two separate endings. Unfortunately, neither one of them is satisfying. And neither is this movie. It lacks inspiration, seeming to borrow ideas from television dramas more than anything else, and never develops the edge that it probably would like to have.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #18: World Trade Center

2006 movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Lee Harvey Oswald vacations in New York City and after a wild night on the town, knocks two skyscrapers down. Some policemen get themselves trapped in the rubble and aren't rescued for several days, after somebody watches the Zapruder film and finds out they weren't on the grassy knoll at all and uses the process of elimination to determine that they were being heroes.

Perhaps Oliver Stone should have waited a little more than five years to make a comedy about 9/11. Too soon!
I didn't like this movie much. What I did like was that Oliver Stone avoids recreating any of the more familiar scenes from the "worst tragedy on American soil" (unless you count what white people did to the Native Americans, of course) and gives the point of view of characters who didn't even know what was going on. The collapse scenes were intense and realistic. The rest of the movie where you can barely see the characters trapped in the darkness and chunks of building? Not so much. It seemed endless, possibly the effect that Stone wanted to have, and too often dove into overly-sentimental waters. Nicolas Cage and his mustache were unnecessary; I didn't need any star power to help this story along. And it's impossible to be Nicolas Cage when you're trapped under a bunch of rubble. But anyway, that character didn't need to be played by Nicolas Cage, and it might have been better if he wasn't. This didn't need to be directed by Oliver Stone either. I half-expected to get a scene where Dick Cheney is flying one of the planes or something. World Trade Center is completely unnecessary. It adds nothing new to the day's folklore and says nothing that couldn't have been covered in an editorial that would have taken me five minutes to read.