The harsh truth is that kid stars, even fantastically talented ones like Dakota Fanning, Abigail Breslin or Haley Joel Osment, basically get one shot to transition from child roles to adult ones. A few make it, but most don't.
Part of it is looks. (Again, this is tough love time.) The physical features that make for an irresistibly cute kid -- huge liquid eyes, cherubic cheeks, Popeye chin -- don't look so good on an adult face. Part of it is a talent that fails to evolve from simplistic portrayals of a child's emotions to the more nuanced, hidden expressions of grown-ups.
Chloë Grace Moretz would seem to have a leg up, since even as a kid she's usually played characters who seemed much older than their years. I first remember her from "(500) Days of Summer," playing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's younger but world-weary sister. Of course, most people know her as the pint-sized, homicidal Hit Girl from "Kick-Ass."
If "If I Stay," based on the book by Gayle Forman, is to be her jump into more adult roles, then it's a stumble. It's not that she's bad in it -- if anything, she's the best thing in the wobbly romantic supernatural drama.
The problem is the movie around her is not equal to her abilities. It's another one of these stories about people severed from their mortal existence, who must watch on from a ghostly perspective as life turns on without them. Here, as the title implies, her character is trying to decide if she should hang onto a life that she has come to see as meaningless, or return to chase a love that seems lost.
This film contained absolutely no surprises for me. I knew everything that was going to happen before it did, from the very moment Mia Hall (Moretz) first stumbles upon teen heartthrob Adam (Jamie Blackley) to the last glimpse we see of them.
I don't need a movie to constantly throw twists and surprises at me, or labor to keep the audience on edge. But when we know exactly where it's going and are just waiting around for the story to arrive, we feel like the film is just going through the motions.
The set up is that Mia and Adam are musicians from opposite worlds: he's a confident rocker, she's a wallflower cellist. Their initial courtship is almost painful to watch, as if the cocky guitarist feels like he's doing the unpopular girl a favor by wooing her.
The romance gets a little better, but not much. His band starts making a name for itself and doing tours all over the Pacific Northwest, while she's still got another year of high school to finish and an application to Julliard to fret about. The separation strains their relationship, and they're officially quits when Mia's family is involved in a terrible car accident.
I'm not giving anything away by stating that most of her family members are severely injured or killed. Mia herself wakes up next to her body, a wraith who follows herself to the hospital to witness her surgery and subsequent coma. She must decide whether to fight on or (literally) walk into the light.
This is one of those movies where people with life-threatening injuries are depicted with just a hairline cut or two on their face, their hair artfully arranged on a pillow. There's little sense of true peril.
Directed by R.J. Cutler from a script by Shauna Cross, "If I Stay" is tired and uninspired filmmaking. The romance, told entirely through flashbacks, is an uneven jumble of contradictory emotions and motivations. At one point Adam says, "I'm not going to be that a-hole who keeps you from going to Julliard." Then, two scenes later, he is the jerk who doesn't want her to go to Julliard.
I hope that the rule doesn't hold true for Chloë Grace Moretz, and that she gets another shot at a grown-up gig. Some kids deserve mulligans.
"Nebraska" is a movie of pauses and unspoken words. If you were to spell out everything that happens in the film and everything that's said, it wouldn't amount to much. A lot of people might find it rather slow, but they aren't the sort who go to a black-and-white dark comedy/drama from the guy who directed "Sideways" and "The Descendants," anyway.
Their loss.
Although "Nebraska" is a movie of slowness and deliberateness, director Alexander Payne doesn't revel in being so. His takes are long, but don't tarry a second longer than needed. The people speak in few words, the main character in so few he's practically mute. Yet any more dialogue would seem too much.
The plot is ... a non-story. A crotchety old man with some degree of undiagnosed dementia wants to travel from his home in Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim his $1 million prize he received a letter about in the mail.
The "prize" is simply one of those scams where you sign up for some magazine subscriptions and you're entered into a contest. Of course, the letter has dollar signs and says "You are a winner!", so old folks like Woodrow Grant (Bruce Dern) are fooled into handing over their money.
Woody's insistence borders on obsession, to the point he starts walking cross-country to get his money. The police dutifully pick him up and return him safely home every time, but his family's so fed up that younger son Dave (Will Forte) finally agrees to drive him to Lincoln just to put the matter to rest.
Payne and screenwriter Bob Nelson slowly peel back the layers of Woody, a guy who at first seems like a walking joke but gradually is revealed as nothing less than an American icon. Woody came from a small farm, went to war and didn't talk about what he did there, got himself a wife and a business, drank too much and lived a life of quotidian repetition.
Now he's old, his mind is going, his wife and sons are exasperated by his erratic behavior, and basically everyone is just waiting for him to die, including Woody himself.
Dern is just terrific as Woody, a total transformation that we don't even question. With his nimbus of scattered white hair, unshaven face and neck, he looks half a step up from homeless. He walks in a hunched, stiff-legged shamble, as if he were a mummified duck.
While Woody wears the mien of a stubborn loner, Dern subtly reveals the yearning inside him. Woody doesn't really have any use for the money, only able to specify "a truck and a compressor" when asked what he'll buy. What he really wants is to be a somebody, instead of the nobody he's become.
Things really ratchet up when Woody and Dave stop in his tiny hometown of Hawthorne, where the social calendar seems to consist of drinking beer and watching TV, then going to the local bar to do the same in the company of others. Woody casually mentions the prize when asked why he's back, and the locals accept the sham as willingly as did he, turning the town joke into the big celebrity.
Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) is the local big man and bully, a former business partner of Woody's, who figures he's owed a slice of the pie because ... well, just because. Worse yet, some of Woody's relatives get the same idea in their noggins.
June Squibb shines as Woody's put-upon wife, who obviously decided long ago to give out as much grief as she's gotten out of life. It's a brassy, showy part, and Squibb milks it for every ounce while still remaining believable as a person. I also enjoyed Bob Odenkirk as their older, more settled offspring.
The best scenes are between Forte and Dern, as the dutiful son tries to puzzle out the inscrutability of his father before he falls into the same trap of passivity and obstinacy himself. Recently split up from his girlfriend, Dave quizzes Woody about getting married and having kids. "You must have been in love at first?" "Never came up," is the laconic reply.
"Nebraska" is not a film for everyone, its rhythms too languorous for people who just want to munch their popcorn and "have a good time." But for those who can appreciate the unhurried unraveling of a mystery, the riddle of the extraordinary ordinary man, it's a delicious dark treat.
It’s not just that “Planes” isn’t a very good movie -- because it isn’t.
The very existence of this movie ends up devaluing the brand of Pixar Animation and Disney. This quasi-sequel to the “Cars” movies, animated largely in India, looks and feels like a straight-to-video quickie that somebody decided to shovel into theaters at the last minute. Unsuspecting parents would dutifully take their kids to see it, expecting the same high level of storytelling they’ve come to expect from the gang behind “Finding Nemo” and such.
Instead they got the tepid tale of Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook), a humble crop-dusting plane who dreams of competing in the Wings Around the Globe race. It’s a familiar litany of just-be-yourself pabulum, goofy sidekicks and whiz-bang action scenes.
Dusty must face off with Ripslinger, the snarly champion, and bond with new friends from Mexico and India. He’s also got a grizzly older military plane (Stacy Keach) offering reluctant advice, and a dim-witted fuel truck (Brad Garrett) to supply comic relief.
The outcome is never really in doubt, and for that matter the beginning and middle are as predictable as a take-off checklist.
“Planes” is a by-the-numbers movie from a studio that once took pride in being the very best.
Video extras are rather slim, perhaps reflecting the down-market ambitions of this picture.
There are deleted scenes, a “Meet the Racers” feature, a brief look at the greatest real-life aviators, a 15-minute documentary following director Klay Hall’s aviation dreams and how they led him to making this movie, and a new music video featuring a minor character.
Pixar Animation has been a wondrous success story, churning out hit after hit that pleased children while stirring the emotions and intellects of grown-ups. "Finding Nemo"? "Wall·E"? Those weren't just great pieces of entertainment for kiddies; they were works of great art.
Lately we've seen the inevitable doldrums period, where ideas are being recycled and productions are being handed over to a new wave of creators. "Cars 2," "Brave" and "Monsters University" were pleasant enough, but missing that spark of creative flourish that had been the Pixar hallmark.
This is the first time, though, that it feels like they just weren't trying very hard.
I suppose "Planes" isn't really a Pixar movie, since it doesn't carry the label and comes out of the larger Disney umbrella corporation -- with an animation arm from Mumbai, India providing much of the heavy lifting.
But it's a direct continuation of the "Cars" universe -- "From Above the World of Cars," to use the poster tagline -- was executive-produced by Pixar kingpin John Lasseter, and features the voice talents of some key Pixar veterans (Brad Garrett, John Cleese, John Ratzenberger).
Those who would like to quibble about me knocking Pixar for the lackluster qualities of a movie that's technically not a Pixar product are missing the point. The very fact that the once-infallible geniuses would be willing to spin out a down-market clone of their intellectual creation is a demonstration of how the studio has lost its stamp of specialness.
"Planes" feels like a made-for-TV flick with a higher-than-average budget for CG animation. Overall the looks of the film are decent, although the humanizing of aircraft doesn't work quite as well as it did with cars. With their windshields as eyes and propellers as noses, their outstretched wings make them seem like they're perpetually telling you how they did something thhhiiiisss muuuuuuuch!
Alas, the storytelling is not on par with the visuals. Screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard and director Klay Hall, who both got their start with Disney "Tinkerbell" videos, approach the material with preadolescent assumptions and mindset.
It plays out as a pretty standard be-who-you-are message, with Dusty Crophopper as a lowly crop-dusting plane who dreams of competing in the Wings Around the Globe race.
He's sort of a diametrical opposite of Lightning McQueen, who suffered from too much confidence. But the familiar roles of curmudgeonly older mentor and humorous truck sidekick are filled by Skipper (Stacy Keach), a brokedown Navy legend, and Chug the goofy fueler (Garrett).
Dusty faces some setbacks, but manages to get into the race and make a serious run at it, impressing the doubting crowds and surprising sneering longtime champ Ripslinger (Roger Craig Smith). He also befriends El Chupacabra (Carlos Alazraqui), a Mexican stunt plane with an outsized personality, and Ishani (Priyanka Chopra), the Far East champion.
Rounding out the cast are Cleese as an unctuous Brit flyer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a French Canadian racer and Teri Hatcher as Dusty's mechanic/coach.
There are few surprises in the plot, including some nefarious schemes by the villain and the facing of fears by the good guys. In Dusty's case, this includes a phobia of heights -- funny stuff for a plane, huh? Right?
Dane Cook, a rather generic comedian and actor, makes for a pretty generic vocal stand-in for Dusty. He doesn't have a particularly memorable voice, and doesn't infuse the character with any distinct inflections or personality.
Bland and too afraid to soar for the heights -- much the same could be said for "Planes." Whether you want to label it Pixar or not, it's like watching a play in which all the stars broke their legs at once, and the audience has to make do with the understudies.
The superspy franchise returns for a fourth outing, but the amnesiac hero played by Matt Damon is nowhere to be found. Instead, it's about a new agent named Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner). Like Bourne, he was an elite member of a CIA assassin squad that the bureaucrats have now decided is too dangerous to exist.
So all of the spook outfit's energies are devoted toward taking out their own spies, with new, even more dangerous wetboys assigned to do the dirty work. Based on the Bourne movies, apparently all the CIA does is kill its own agents, with each new batch taking out the last. It's a wonder they ever found bin Laden.
Director Tony Gilroy, who also co-wrote the screenplay, sets up a movie that is almost nonstop chases. Maybe that's a good thing, because whenever the action stops long enough for the characters to talk to each other, it's pure death.
Rachel Weisz plays a doctor whose job it was to keep Cross and his chums doped up on pills that dramatically boosted their intelligence and physical abilities. He swoops into save her, and soon both are on the run.
"The Bourne Legacy" isn't boring, but it is pretty brain dead.
The video does come nicely stocked with extras. If you choose either the solo DVD or Blu-ray edition, you get deleted scenes, feature-length commentary by Gilroy and his production team, a making-of documentary and a breakdown of the motorbike chase sequence.
Upgrade to the combo pack, and you add a number of cool featurettes, including one about Cross' battle with wolves, and a digital copy of the film.
I had always taken "The Long Riders" to be an overstuffed bit of Hollywood hooey, a sensationalized account of outlaw Jesse James and his gang that, in terms of historical fidelity, landed just this side of "Young Guns."
Turns out it's actually truer to the facts than most Western tales of its ilk.
It certainly has a gimmicky feel, what with the unprecedented in Hollywood history casting of three sets of real-life brothers to play siblings and members of the James-Younger Gang -- the Keaches (James and Stacy) as the Jameses, the Carradines (David, Keith and Robert) as the Youngers and the Quaids (Randy and Dennis) as the Millers.
Actually, four: Christopher Guest and Nicholas Guest have small turns (basically three scenes) as Charlie and Bob Ford, wannabe members of the gang who eventually were allowed by Jesse to join -- after everyone else had quit, been killed or imprisoned.
The Fords, of course, were the ones who betrayed and murdered Jesse James, with Bob shooting him in the back of the head while James was unarmed and had his back turned. This scene is depicted in "The Long Riders" in a curiously flat way, with little visceral impact. It feels more like a tacked-on coda than an essential part of the story.
Narratively, the film seems smaller than its story. At a mere 99 minutes, the movie has to cover a lot of plot spread out over a number of years, with various members of the gangs romancing and marrying women in between robbing banks and trains. Each romantic relationship is essentially given one or two scenes in a fleeting attempt to lend them weight.
The only pairing of any impact is between Cole Younger (David Carradine), who puts on an air of studied nonchalance, and Belle (Pamela Reed), a worldly prostitute who wants him to make an honest woman of her. He's content to let them have their fun whenever their paths cross, and have nothing tying him down. He tells Belle he loves her specifically because she's a whore.
In one of the film's most memorable scenes, she marries a half-Indian named Sam Starr and forces the men to fight over her with cruel-looking oversized knives. Cole wins the duel but abandons Belle in disgust at having to prove himself to her.
This story thread is notable in that, as near as I can determine, it is the only part of "The Long Riders" that is a pure Hollywood concoction. Despite its highly stylized texture, the movie is actually pretty faithful to the historical facts.
I should amend that to say it is faithful to the general narrative of recorded history, though it alters or muddies some details. For example, an 18-year-old brother of the Youngers, John, is killed in a chance meeting with some agents, and it's depicted as a terrible crime because Jim (Keith Carradine) asserts that his kid brother never rode with the gang or committed any crime. In fact, John did do some robbing with them.
Similarly, the battle with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which has been hired to track them down, escalates to tragic heights when the lawmen throw a smoke bomb into the Younger matron's house and it explodes, killing their 15-year-old half-brother. The boy was killed, but he was really only nine years old. Not depicted is that the Youngers' mother was also injured in the attack and had to have her arm amputated.
In that age, I would think that chivalrous Southern gentlemen (at least in their minds) would be more riled about their mother being attacked and maimed than anything else. These changes actually serve to make the assault seem less outrageous than it really was.
Stacy and James Keach made this film as a labor of love, producing and co-writing the screenplay along with Bill Bryden and Steven Smith. James has an intriguing take on Jesse James, playing him as a preternaturally serene leader who sees himself as smarter and more important than the members of his gang.
James Keach later segued away from acting and turned more to directing and producing. Johnny Cash and his wife June were so taken with "The Long Riders" that they befriended Keach, and asked him to produce their biopic "Walk the Line."
I hadn't seen "The Long Riders" in at least 20 years. Despite the film's storytelling flaws, I found myself still admiring it on several levels.
The performances throughout have a terse, organic authenticity -- we never feel like the actors are trying to impersonate a historical identity, but use it as a springboard to draw their own characters. For example, I enjoyed the simmering tension that exists between the Jameses and Youngers, erupting at the worst of times.
"The Jameses ride with the Youngers," one of the latter insists, annoyed by references to the Youngers being part of the Jesse James outfit.
There's also a nice quiet scene aboard a train -- for once, they are traveling inside as passengers rather than riding up on horses outside to rob it -- where Cole confides to Frank that he hopes one day to write a book about his memoirs. Frank scoffs at this idea. This is a nod to Cole's actual later life, where he spent more than 20 years in prison and started a respected newspaper for the inmates. He eventually won parole and spent his final days starring in a wild west show with Frank.
The James-Younger Gang effectively met its end with an ill-advised raid on a bank on Northfield, Minn. Why the former Civil War bushwackers, who confined nearly all their felonious activity to Missouri and surrounding states, decided to travel hundreds of miles north to knock over a bank is unclear.
Things go awry -- the film implies the townsfolk knew they were coming and set a trap for them -- and the outlaws are caught in the street and torn to pieces. Though none of the Jameses or Youngers are actually killed in the conflict, their wounds are missive. I vividly remember Keith Carrradine getting shot through the face, a bullet going in one cheek and exploding out the other. Cole famously was shot 11 times, which the prison doctor dubs a record, but one of dubious distinction.
The town of Northfield still celebrates the bloody event with an annual reenactment -- much the same way my former home of Ocklawaha, Fla., reenacts the Ma Barker shootout every year.
I think three things make "The Long Riders" a noteworthy film, or rather three people: director Walter Hill, cinematographer Ric Waite and composer Ry Cooder.
Hill's staging of the violence has a horrifying sort of loveliness. He often resorts to fetishistic slo-mo to capture the impact of bullets ripping through the characters' flesh, or bodies hurtling through the air after impact. The excellent action scenes are aided by Waite's elegiac camera work, which juxtaposes moments of cringe-inducing violence with poetic compositions.
Both filmmakers seem enraptured by the long gray duster coats the gang always wear. This, along with their lack of masks and penchant for calling each other by their real names, often and loudly, makes one wonder why it took the Pinkertons so long to find them.
Cooder's old-timey musical score, mixed with actual songs from the era performed at weddings and saloons, is positively a delight to listen to. It's more at the forefront than most music in movies.
"The Long Riders" is more or less a forgotten Western, made during the artistic valley of the genre between 1969 and 1991, when "Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid" and "The Wild Bunch" made the format seem anachronistic, and Clint Eastwood breathed it back to life with "Unforgiven."
Though hardly deserving to be counted among those films' numbers, it's certainly more memorable than its non-existent reputation suggests.
At 2¼ hours, "The Bourne Legacy" is essentially one big long chase scene that never wants to stop, and with good reason. Because whenever it does, the audience starts thinking about the characters and the plot -- how thinly-drawn the former are, and how the story structure crumbles to ashes with even a cursory examination.
As you probably know, this is the fourth movie in the Bourne super-spy franchise, and it's missing one notable quantity: Jason Bourne. Matt Damon is out, and Jeremy Renner is in, but it's not just a cynical recasting of the same character by a different actor. Instead, it's an entirely different guy, but set in the same universe and caught in the same situation.
Jason Bourne is apparently still around -- at one point, we hear he's spotted in Manhattan. But the CIA spooks cooped up in their now-ubiquitous high-tech control rooms are instead focused on Aaron Cross (Renner) instead. They peer at computer screens, which seem to be wired into every video camera on the planet, plus satellites up above, and shout urgent orders at each other that seem to have no real-world effects whatsoever.
One wonders if across town, another group of spymasters are jammed into another room barking their own orders in pursuit of Bourne.
No matter. Director Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote the screenplay with brother Dan, is less concerned with the whys and wherefores of the story than just keeping the action moving.
Cross first appears in a snowy mountain range, stalked by wolves and other dangers. Why is he stranded out there? Neither he, or we, are ever really sure. But it seems that Outcome, the ultra-secret program of which he was an agent, has been deemed too dangerous to continue to exist. To wit: the CIA is busy killing all the spies, and Cross is the last one left.
It's a bit of a cheap ploy that all the Bourne movies have recycled. Bourne was in a program called Treadstone, but when its cover was blown they initiated another program, Briarpatch, to clean up the mess of Treadstone. Now it's Outcome that is the target and -- yes, you guessed, there's another program beyond that one that's supposed to be even more extreme.
Based on these movies, it seems the CIA doesn't do anything but create and then shut down super-soldier operations, and all of its agents die trying to kill the "dangerous" agents.
The control method the spies have over the Outcome recruits is that they're genetically enhanced, and must continually take drugs to maintain their physical and intellectual boost. Thus Cross and his fellows can jump across mountain ravines, take out drone airplanes with a hunting rifle, and be shot, stabbed and pummeled and keep on going. But only if they keep taking their little blue and green pills.
Rachel Weisz plays Marta Shearing, a doctor who administers the drugs to the agents, but is willfully ignorant of what they do. Until, of course, she becomes a target herself. Cross rides to her rescue, and they're on the run across the Eastern seaboard, and then the action jumps to Manila in the Philippines.
With the original Bourne movies, there at least was the conceit of Jason's amnesia to keep the narrative momentum rolling, as he labored to find out who he was, why people were trying to kill him, and who was behind it all. Here, the chase is the first, and only thing.
The action is engaging and daring, including a motorcycle chase that's positively rousing, as the two-wheeler carrying our heroes skitters and screeches all around the mayhem.
Gilroy, though, has a tendency to place his camera too close to the action, especially the hand-to-hand fight scenes, so we're never quite aware of exactly what's happening. Gilroy's previous credits behind the camera were "Michael Clayton" and "Duplicity," and his lack of action-movie experience is glaring.
"The Bourne Legacy" isn't a bad movie, and those just wanting a couple hours of mindless diversion may find it suits the bill. As spy thrillers go, this one's dumber than the average bear.
There's a certain type of movie that had its heyday in the late 1960s and '70s, in which story and plot were subservient to character and mood. The film really isn't interested in going anywhere in the traditional sense; it just wants to explore a certain setting and group of people.
Sometimes the results are wonderful, such as "Five Easy Pieces" with Jack Nicholson, but just as often these character-driven flicks can be self-indulgent and exasperating. Scenes will just ramble on and on, and it feels like the movie was made for the satisfaction of the actors appearing in it than any audience paying to watch it.
"Fat City" falls toward the former end of the scale. This boxing tale drags at times, but it's still a worthwhile exploration of how men behave in the ring, compared to how they act outside -- most importantly, in their relationships to women.
Director John Huston had one of those careers that is still talked about: Director, writer, even a late turn into acting that made him as iconic onscreen as the work he did behind the camera. His first film was "The Maltese Falcon," and he was still making vibrant movies right up until his death.
The 1972 movie is based on a book by Leonard Gardner, which he adapted for the screen himself. It's essentially about two boxers, one just starting out and the other past his prime, whose lives intersect but whose stories run mostly parallel.
Stacy Keach is Billy Tully, who's been out of boxing for two years and is looking to get back in. Billy is only 29 years old, but the cuts and the blows have whittled him down. He drinks a lot, not quite enough to call him a drunk, but he's on his way.
One day sparring in the gym he runs across Ernie Munger, an 18-year-old whom Billy immediately recognizes as a natural. He sends the kid to his old manager Ruben, played by Nicholas Colasanto, who would go on to be best known as "Coach" on the TV show "Cheers."
Ernie is played by Jeff Bridges, who himself is quietly having one of the great film acting careers. He plays Ernie as an earnest kid who's physically tough as nails, but is "soft in the center," as Billy drunkenly labels him.
Ernie lets other people choose his path for him. If it weren't for Billy's encouragement, he probably would never have walked into a boxing ring. When his girlfriend gets pregnant (Candy Clark), there's a great scene in his car where she steers him into marrying her, without it ever seeming like it was her idea. She also forces him to quit boxing for awhile, although he gets back into it by the film's end.
While basically a decent guy, Ernie is very much like Billy describes him: Tough on the outside, but with no core convictions, goals or even an identity beyond what other people provide for him.
Billy, meanwhile, just wants something solid to hold onto in this world. His wife dumped him when his boxing career petered out, and he's left to taking menial day jobs picking farm crops to get by. At a bar he runs into a woman who continually mouths off to her boyfriend, a black man who abides her verbal abuse stoically. This is Oma, played by Susan Tyrrell, who would earn an Oscar nomination for her abrasive performance.
One of the notable things about "Fat City" is the way people of different races mingle without any seeming static about it. The town of Stockton, California, where the film takes places, is a cornucopia of whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians. But no one looks askance at Oma dating a black man.
When Oma's man is sent to jail, Billy gloms onto her, even though it's clear this is a person whose ambitions end at getting out of bed for a cream sherry. "You can count on me," he tells her repeatedly, and it's obvious that Billy is attracted to the idea of being important to someone, rather than any real connection between them.
Keach and Tyrrell's scenes do tend to ramble a bit. There's one bit where he's cooking her dinner, which she refuses to eat, and then when she does decide to eat he won't allow her to have any, etc. I'm sure this is the sort of scene that actors live for, with an organic texture and lots of big emotions to fling around. As a viewer, I kept waiting for the editor to assert himself.
There's only a few boxing scenes in "Fat City," since as I say I don't think that's where the movie's real heart lies. They're pretty convincing, in that they look real boxing matches where there are a flurry of punches, few of which land cleanly. Billy's big comeback bout is interesting, because it's against a Mexican puncher whom Ruben fears is too good for Billy's first match in two years.
The opponent, Lucero, quietly arrives in town with his hat and small suitcase, and seems to be nursing some kind of serious stomach ailment. Billy immediately senses this in the ring, but Ruben advises him to fight conservatively. After the match -- which Billy wins, barely -- Lucero quietly collects his money and leaves the arena as the lights go out. It's a sad, almost wordless portrait of the journeyman professional athlete, whose body is his currency, carefully rationed and leveraged.
"Fat City" may meander like a lazy river, and sometimes gets stuck in eddies of its own making. But for the most part I enjoyed swirling around with these characters for awhile.
