29 May 2014

Beautiful, Savages

What follows is an attempt at a simple movie review capped at about 300 words, which is hard for me as I am in love with my own words. I am in talks to start writing a weekly feature column on movies for my local newspaper, so I am practicing.

Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Oliver Stone's Savages.

by Kevin Powers

Oliver Stone is a hit-and-miss director. His last movie was the 2008 George W. Bush biopic W. It was pretty good, but only in its controversy. Stone is most famous for his realistic Vietnam epic Platoon, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1986. His latest outing, 2012’s Savages, is a different kind of movie for Mr. Stone. And that much I appreciate.

Savages is a violent, sexually-charged crime drama about a duo of California pot-growers, who happen to have “the best cannabis in the world.” This is what our narrator O (Blake Lively) tells us early on. The pot-dealing duo is the hotheaded former Marine Chon (Taylor Kitsch, TV’s Friday Night Lights) and the free-spirited, Zen master Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Godzilla). They love their business and each other and their woman, the lovely blond O.

When a Mexican drug cartel, led by the evil Elena (Salma Hayek) and enforced by the equally evil and crazy Lado (Benicio Del Toro), wants in on the product and are denied, all turns to bloody action-violence. That is pretty much all there is in the way of plot: an open love-triangle of young, beautiful beach people run-in with some bad, bad people and the stuff hits the fan.

Oliver Stone is a technically sound filmmaker. His camera is constantly moving creating a frantic, fast pace. Savages is alive and vibrant in its bright ocean blues and white sands as well as its blood-red soaked Mexican deserts. This is a dark movie in a bright, sunny world. The violence is sometimes over-the-top and certainly not for everybody, but if you’re looking for a fun ride through the crime-riddled, present-day West, then I fully recommend it for a late Saturday night piece of entertainment.

Reviewer’s Note: Oliver Stone’s Savages is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. It deserves every bit of its R-rating and is certainly an adults-only title.

Missed Masterpieces: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Kevin Powers

As a middle school English teacher, I always find it difficult to enjoy the same books as the kids I teach. I like realism. They like fantasy. I worship Irving and Steinbeck. They worship Collins and Riordan. Young adult literature, especially for young men, is usually more on the fantasy, zombie, action, sci-fi spectrum. I never liked that sort of thing even when I was their age.

Every once in a while, there is a game-changing YA title. None more so than Stephen Chbosky's 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It tells the story, in personal letters, of a freshmen named Charlie and his coming-of-age through mix-tapes, new friendships (with a couple of artsy seniors and a great English teacher), love, sex, drugs, death, and mental illness. It is a powerful, beautiful story. Its film adaptation is next in my series of essays on movies I wanted to see in theaters but missed for one reason or another.






Directed by Stephen Chbosky

Screenplay by Stephen Chbosky, based on his novel

Starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Paul Rudd, Dylan McDermott, and Kate Walsh









The most striking thing about Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (apart from the fact that he wrote and directed his own novel himself) is how the characters are just the best people ever. I actually wrote that in my notes during my second viewing. They are. They are flawed. They are hurt. They are emotional. They are real. In fact, this is the most realistic depiction of high school life I have ever seen. Other "teen movies" should see this one and feel ashamed.


The casting of actors couldn't be more perfect, especially having read the book. Logan Lerman plays the perennial wallflower Charlie. He is starting high school. He is nervous. People think he's weird as he had a sort of break down the previous year after his best friend committed suicide. His father (Dylan McDermott) is a nice, yet serious man. His mother (Kate Walsh) is supportive, yet oblivious to many of his problems. His sister (Nina Dobrev), a senior, isn't really willing to include him. His middle school friends avoid him. When he happens upon Patrick (Ezra Miller), a senior in his freshmen shop class, he sees a potential friend. He's right. At the first Friday night football game, he cautiously approaches Patrick and, where most "teen movies" would have him struggle or initiated in some sort of hazing, is welcomed with open arms. Then Patrick's step-sister Sam (the beautiful Emma Watson) joins them, and Charlie is welcomed even more...and infatuated. His first real crush.


Over the course of this film, Charlie will experience in one way or another many of those "challenging" young adult novel issues. He finds himself embroiled in his own depression and loneliness, which is somehow connected to his relationship with and the death of his Aunt Helen (Melanie Lynskey), who was a victim of sexual abuse and domestic violence, a theme which is continued in the abusive relationship between his older sister, Candace, and her boyfriend Ponytail Derek (Nicholas Braun) and with Sam, who experienced abuse as a young girl and became promiscuous as a young teen. There is also Patrick's homosexuality and experimentation with drugs and alcohol. All of this is tastefully done, even at its most shocking, under the backdrop of early 1990s suburban Pittsburgh.


There is a scene in this movie that literally made my heart pound. And it doesn't contain any violence or action or a psycho killer behind a door. No, it is a first kiss. Stephen Chbosky directs this scene to perfection. This is a man who knows how powerful a first kiss, a first love can be, and I applaud him as a writer/director for crafting such power.


The soundtrack is perfectly on point with tunes ranging from Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen" to The Smiths' "Asleep". In fact, one of this movies charms is the aging idea of the mix-tape. These are people who spend hours making mix-tapes for each other. How personal and satisfying to both parties. A lost art. But I digress...


For me, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a masterpiece because it is a labor of love. Novelists never get to take their own material and become screenwriters AND directors. That Chbosky was given this opportunity makes it that much better. A troubled young man's seemingly damned freshmen year becomes the best year of his life. He goes to dances and parties and live performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, exchanges Christmas presents, has a first date, a first love, a first girlfriend, a first kiss, reads great literature provided by a caring, charming, and just plain sweet English teacher (Paul Rudd) and ends up getting a taste of what life has to offer and what they future may hold. That last half hour of this movie contains revelations that will shock anyone, and then it comes back around with doses of love straight to your heart. At the end of this movie, I felt haunted...and healed. 

I Heart the 80s!

by Kevin Powers


The most memorable movie scene of my life contains three classic songs from the 1980s, each one unique and from a different genre. The scene I'm talking about is from Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 ode to the porn industry circa '77 - '85 Boogie Nights. At a certain point, Anderson shifts from his starting point as a glitzy Robert Altman into a crazy Marty Scorsese. Not to say that Anderson was overly derivative. He was just trying stuff out and whippin' that camera around.

In the scene, a high-end drug kingpin named Rahad Jackson played to sweaty perfection by Alfred Molina invites the star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) and his entourage, co-star Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) and exotic dancer Todd Parker (Thomas Jane), to his home for a bit of a drug deal...a fake kilo of cocaine for cash. This is an homage to the famous incident in which John Holmes aided in the robbery of a drug dealer, and Anderson throws it all in there: slow-motion, whip-pans, zoom-ins, perfect sound mixing and editing as there is a Chinese kid in the background lighting Black Cats one after the other and tossing them in the air while the following mix-tape plays in the background:

1. "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger
2. "Jesse's Girl" by Rick Springfield
3. "99 Luftballoons" by Nena

I'll let you see for yourself:


I heart the 80s!

Last night, I watched the pilot episode of AMC's new drama series Halt and Catch Fire. It features a really great cast, including the incredibly charming Lee Pace (ABC's Pushing Daisies) and a look and feel that screams realistic early 80s. Pace plays Joe McMillan, a former IBM salesman, who makes his way to a fictional Dallas company with the grand scheme of reinventing the personal computer. He recruits a down-and-out computer engineer (Scoot McNairy) and a software prodigy (Mackenzie Davis) to help him.

Halt and Catch Fire offers a sort of cool for me. I love period pieces, and I especially love origin stories. In this case, the nerdery of the beginnings of the personal computer boom is sure to be plenty enough to hold my interest, and, after viewing the pilot episode, it has. I love it when movies and TV shows live up to their trailers and thank the marketing people at AMC for bringing The Eurythmic's "Sweet Dreams" back into my life. I invite you to see for yourself and watch the series premiere this Sunday night at 10 PM on AMC.

Here's the trailer:


I heart the 80s!

Which brings me to this morning, when my best friend emailed me from work and asked for some upbeat 80s tunes to request on the office jambox, I obliged him. Here is the playlist I offered:







I heart the 80s!

22 May 2014

The Place Where Dreams Come True

by Kevin Powers


"It's the game my father taught me how to play." - Billy Crystal (in an interview for Ken Burns' Baseball)


Baseball is the game every boy's father taught him how to play. Even if your father is, say, more of a football fan, you know the game. We all know the game. We know it because, more than any other game, baseball is inside us. To be very clear: I haven't played catch with my Dad in I don't know how long, yet every time I toss a ball to someone else and that person tosses it back, I feel nurtured. Baseball, after all, is a nurturing sport. In the mid-1800s, before baseball became Baseball, Walt Whitman, in all his grand poetic glory, described it as a way to overcome the trials of adulthood and encouraged all to "fill their lungs with oxygen" in a field with a glove and a ball. Baseball is one of our forefathers, the ultimate father figure. Phil Alden Robinson's Capra-esque 1989 film Field of Dreams is the best baseball movie ever made. Why? It is because it has nothing to do with winning or losing or underdogs or pennant races. No. It's about how baseball defines us as Americans, as fathers and sons.


The audience knows instantly, from the opening shot of that Iowa cornfield at dusk, that this is no ordinary "baseball movie." No. This movie has something to say, something to say about faith and redemption. That first shot says it all. Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) works in his cornfield, wind slightly swaying the stalks, a voice from above whispers, "If you build it, he will come." The camera glides just above the field on a crane establishing a tone that will lead to a dark, heavy mood, almost one of dread. It's all a bit creepy. Then, this movie lightens up. Its magic seeping through nearly every perfect frame as a man masters the ultimate test of faith and comes to eventually understand the true nature of our country's greatest game.


The voice leads him to plow under his corn and build a baseball field. The first phase of his test. This, of course, brings a visitor to his field..."Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), the long-dead ballplayer, one of the greatest ever, who had his dream of playing baseball cut short by a scandal many believe he had little to do with. The voice arrives again. "Ease his pain," it says. "Who's pain? What pain?" Ray pleads. Maybe it's Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones), a J.D. Salinger-type writer from the '60s, who is haunted by his former success and a hidden passion for baseball. "Go the distance," the voice says. Go where? To a small town in Minnesota where a man by the name of "Moonlight" Graham (Burt Lancaster) lives. He played one inning of one game for the New York Giants 50 years before and never played again. Can Ray help him? Is Ray's little baseball diamond in Iowa supposed to bring him back? Is this field "Heaven?" Ray's belief, his faith that something is supposed to come of this journey is what makes this movie great. That he is supported by his wife, Annie (Amy Madigan), only strengthens this, even in light of the fact that, well, he cut into his crop and could lose everything.


Field of Dreams is a beautiful movie. One the perfect movies of my movie life. It is such, not only in its breathtaking zoom-ins and pastoral color palette of greens and golds or even the masterful speech delivered to perfection by James Earl Jones as Terrence Mann, but also at its core. A man follows an illogical path bent on taking everything away, and, in return, the man gains everything and more. He gets that chance to feel like a good husband to his wife, a father to his daughter, a friend to the heartbroken 1919 White Sox and to his favorite writer as a young man, and, most importantly, a son to his father. That's what baseball does. It makes us all, man or woman, boy or girl, fathers and sons.