'Nancy Drew' is a fun and respectful adaptation

Nancy Drew (2007)
Starring: Emma Roberts, Tate Donovan, Max Thieriot, Marshall Bell, and Laura Harring
Director: Andrew Fleming
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Kid detective and all-around genius Nancy Drew (Roberts) temporarily moves with her father (Donovan) to Los Angeles due to his work. Here, she becomes interested in decades-old mysteries swirling around the now-dead actress (Harring) who once lived in house they are renting. But someone wants the past to stay buried, and they'll bury Nancy too if they must.

"Nancy Drew" sat in my "To Watch" pile for at least two years. If I'd known how cute and funny it was, I might have watched it sooner. It's not often these days where a remake/adaptation of some classic bit of pop culture gets treated with the sort of respect that the Nancy Drew property got; filmmakers and owners of intellectual properties now seem far more interested in crapping all over older IPs in the hopes of seeming clever and making a quick buck instead of trying to carry them forward for a new generation... and even more potential riches in the future. Yes, "Nancy Drew" has many funny moments--including some satirical ones--but it never mocked the characters or the idea of Nancy as as the perfect girl that every parent would want and that every intelligent, bookish girl would want to be like. I've never read girl's adventure/mystery fiction, but the plot and activities here hewed close to the sort of material I remember from the kids' mysteries I read that I think this film was perhaps even more faithful to the source material than even the films from the 1930s were (Click here for reviews.)

A great deal of this film's success rests with a great script that, as I mentioned above, captures the essence of classic kids' mystery fiction, but also manages to bring plenty of modern vibes to it. Although Nancy is out of step with her peers--something she acknowledges, is okay with, and even takes a small degree of pride in--the film is very much set among modern teenagers and reflective of modern teenage behavior; cell phones and all that comes with them play a key part in many aspects of the film. The script also provides a cast of likable characters, every one of which you wouldn't having to spend time with (except for the bad guys).

This film also presents Nancy Drew as an ideal role model for young girls. She wants to have friends and to get along with her peers, but she is not willing to sacrifice who she is at the expense of fitting in, and she does not give in to peer pressure. She is interested in learning everything she can, and she invariably turns around and discovers a use for what she has learned. When a task is set before her, she always tries to over-achieve. It's a great movie to watch with your pre-teens and young teens... and it's a movie that all of you will be able to enjoy. The mystery at its center is complex enough that both kids and adults can be entertained by it, and the script is artfully enough crafted that the audience gets the clues as Nancy does so we try to solve the mystery before she does. Other great aspects of the script--which was co-written by director Andrew Flemming--is a touching element in Nancy's back story and psychological make-up that explains her drive to solve mysteries; and a great gag bit that plays around with Hollywood stereotypes and features one of the funniest cameos by a major star playing himself (in this case, Bruce Willis) that I've ever seen.

Fifteen year-old Emma Roberts was perfectly cast in the role. An exceptionally young actress, she has great screen presence, great comedic timing, and enough range to take Nancy from her usual, optimistic and extremely extroverted state to a more subdued emotional state when things go against her at one point in the film. The scene where Nancy talks about why she feels the need to solve mysteries, one of the few emotional moments in this fast-moving and upbeat mystery romp, could easily have fallen flat or come across as sickeningly maudlin in the hands of a lesser actress, and Roberts talent really shined through there.

Roberts also has more charm and grace in her on-screen persona than Bonita Granville exhibited when she played the character in the old black-and-white movies... although in Granville's defense, the script Roberts had behind her is better than anything Granville dealt with. (Interestingly, Nancy's boyfriend is virtually identical between the two versions, with him patiently putting up with the way she is always dragging him into some strange adventure or another, because he knows that she simply can't help herself. The look of the two actors playing the parts--Max Thieriot in this version and Frankie Thomas in the old films--even look similar.)

This is a fun movie that is literally for the entire family, especially if there are lots of girls in the house.

'Kiss Daddy Goodnight' is a movie to sleep through

Kiss Daddy Goodnight (1987)
Starring: Uma Thurman, Paul Dillon, and Paul Richards
Director: Peter Ily Huemer
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

Laura (Thurman) is a teenaged model who augments her meager earnings by picking up wealthy men at gigs and art galleries, drugging them, and then stealing and selling valuable art objects from their homes. It's a nice living until she becomes the love object of a crazy old man (Richards) who will stop at nothing to make her his and his alone.

"Kiss Daddy Goodnight" is one of the dullest movies I've ever sat through. While the characters and acting are appropriate for the film-noir movie the filmmakers were trying to make, the glacial pace and unfocused story is not. It's not until about the halway point that any sort of menace or threat to Laura starts to develope, but what little tension and excietment this generates in the film quickly evaporates when the attention is shifted to the go-nowhere storyline of Laura's small-time thief, wanna-be musician friend's efforts to start a new band. The film would have been slow-moving enough without that pointless, plot, amd it becomes downright glacial in pace when it gets added to the mix.

By the time the film gets focused and gets interesting--in the last 15 or so minutes--most viewers will already have noddded off.

"Kiss Daddy Goodnight" is a film that can safely be ignored by everyone but Uma Thurman fans on the magnitude of the stalker who persues her character in the film; it marks Thurman's first film appearance. I promise you, watching the shadows creep across the sidewalk as the sun moves in the sky is more interesting than this film. It's obscurity is well deserved.

'Hostage': One of Bruce Willis' best

Hostage (2005)
Starring: Bruce Willis, Ben Foster, Jimmy Bennett, and Kevin Pollack
Director: Florent Siri
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

The sad existence of Jake Talley, a burned-out police hostage negotiator (Willis) who has retreated to life as a small-town police chief is jarred when three hapless small-time thugs decide to engage in a little home-invasion/robbery. One of them, Mars (Foster), is a through-and-through psychopath and after he kills one of the town's police officers, the situation evolves into a hostage stand-off, with the home-owner, William Smith (Pollack), and his two children at the mercy of the killer. Unfortunately, Smith has something in his possession that a powerful international cartel of criminals need badly, and they take Talley's family hostage to force him into cooperating with them so they can retrieve their property. Will Talley manage to keep control and save all the hostages?

"Hostage" is a fantastic police thriller that features excellent acting, some really nice camerawork, and a near-flawless pace. I was particularly impressed with the way Smith's secrets are revealed, and then later the way they end up spilling over into Talley's life. Along similar lines, the gradual revealing of the depths of Mars' psychopathy is also expertly played... and his final rampage should earn him the respect of Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers!

The film gets a little far-fetched toward the end--basically, I'm not sure Talley would be able to pull off the final "negotiation", even given the way he has his officers running interference for him--but I don't think it's enough to ruin it. (I was also momentarily miffed that the film ends with no revelation of who or what the distant bad guys that were pulling Smith's strings were all about... but then I decided that it really didn't matter; the story wasn't about them anyway.)

"Hostage" was one of 2005's best thrillers. Check it out if you haven't already.

'Terror of the Tongs': Yellow Peril ala Hammer

The Terror of the Tongs (aka "Terror of the Hatchet Men") (1961)
Starring: Geoffrey Toone, Christopher Lee, Roger Delgado, and Yvonne Monlaur
Director: Anthony Bushell
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

After his daughter is killed by vicious members of Hong Kong's Red Dragon Tong, Captain Sale (Toone) goes on a rampage intent on destroying his daughter's killer and entirety of the secretive crime syndicate.

"The Terror of the Tong" is a well-made example of an adventure fiction sub-genre that has fallen completely out of favor due to changing climates in geo-politics and cultural attitudes in the West: Yellow Peril Tales. In these stories, mysterious Asian crime figures held entire populations in their power through fear and supposedly mystical abilities... until some two-fisted, stiff-necked Anglo-American hero came along and put a stop to his nefarious ways. The genre was dying its last gasp when I was a kid--relegated mostly to awful Kung Fu movies and comic books where Nick Fury battled the Yellow Claw, Iron Man squared off against The Mandarin, and Shang Chi fought a dogged battle to bring down the criminal empire of his father, Fu Manchu, the most famous and respectable of all Yellow Peril villains.

The Yellow Peril tales grew out of the same impulses that gave birth to the gothic fiction genre--a British discomfort and perhaps even fear of outsiders and their alien culture, and was further fueled by straight-forward racism among Americans--although, frankly, aside from the WW2 years, many Yellow Peril tales actually put Westerners in as bad a light as their Oriental foes. This is especially true of the Fu Manchu tales.

That, however, is not the case with "The Terror of the Tongs". The Chinese gangsters in this picture are vicious psychopaths through-and-through, with no motivations beyond feeding their own sadism and hunger for loot and power. Although evil, Fu Manchu at least believed he was fighting the good fight to restore his people's honor and save them from the corrupting influences of the West.

A curious artifact of film industry standards long gone is the fact that most of the Asian characters in the film are played by Caucasian actors in heavy make-up. It was a long-standing tradition to have whites play these roles in Yellow Peril movies, something which seems a bit odd to many viewers today, and which has been mocked in more recent times with Peter Sellars and Nicolas Cage both taking comedic turns as Fu Manchu.

In this film, Christopher Lee plays Chung King, the head of the Red Dragon Tong. He does a great job sitting around looking sinister and spouting weird sayings and sending out opium- and sex-crazed killers to slay his enemies and terrorize city neighborhoods. Roger Delgado is similarly excellent as a Eurasian who serves as Lee's top lieutenant. Wisely, the director has neither of these actors put on fake accents, instead allowing them to speak the Queen's English perfectly and thus taking advantage of the full capacity of both actors to bombastically sinister.

Meanwhile, on the good side of the equation, we have are treated to some fine performances by Geoffrey Toone, the bullish sea captain who prove that the British stiff upper-lip can be backed up with a strong right hook, and Yvonne Monlaur, another Eurasian character for whom the brave captain opens horizons free from the servitude to the Tong her mixed blood had forced upon her.

None of these characters are exactly complex, but the actors give each of them their all and infuse them with the larger-than-life quality that this sort of story needs to work.

Director Anthony Bushell also tries his best to bring that sense of grandness to the film's sound-stage bound environment, with the Hong Kong docks and neighborhoods being represented by re-dressed standing sets left over from other Hammer productions. While he mostly fails at this, he does manage to draw some very sharp lines between the villains and heroes, and he also manages to work in some of the horror qualities that we've come to know and love from movies like "Curse of Frankenstein".

Unfortunately, that horror was blunted, and remains so to this very day; the DVD edition appears to have been made from a print of the film that has been butchered by censors. There are numerous time when fight scenes or other scenes of violence have been sloppily edited, to the point where even the music soundtrack seems to jerk. The worst example of this is the scene where Tong thugs invade the bedroom of Captain Sales' daughter; there seem to be at least two instances where the scene was too intense for censors, and their cuts have left the scene disjointed and a little confused. (The implication is that the Tong cut off three of the girl's fingers, as is their habit, but as it plays out, she is struggling one moment and completely unconscious a split-second later, with no apparent cause. And yet somehow her ring is dropped on the floor and stained with blood...)

Still, this is a fairly minor blemish, and it's more than made up for with the climax where the down-trodden citizens rise up against the Tong. And, as mentioned, Christopher Lee is quite good in the film. He would later go onto play the grandest of Oriental villains--Fu Manchu--but he is actually better here than he was in the Fu Manchu movies I've seen. (Of course, I've only seen a couple craptacular Harry Towers/Jess Franco ones, so maybe I'm not judging him fairly.)

For more examples of the Yellow Peril genre, click here to read film reviews at Shades of Grey.

'Matchstick Men' is a fun tale of a con man's redemption

Matchstick Men (2003)
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Alison Lohman, Sam Rockwell, Bruce Altman, and Bruce McGill
Director: Ridley Scott
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

When professional (and deeply neurotic and obsessive compulsive) con artist Roy (Cage) finds himself connecting with Angela (Lohman), the 14-year-old daughter he never knew he had, he decides to leave behind his life of crime, get a real job, and become a real father. However, when the last job with his partner (Rockwell) goes horribly wrong, Roy finds himself sacrificing far more for fatherhood than he had evern intended.

"Matchstick Men" is part con-artist caper film and part redemption story. It's also a movie that features a twist-ending that makes perfect sense, is genre appropriate, and still manages to surprise viewers. The fact it features a twist ending that actually works makes this a remarkable film in the light of the crap writers and directors have been foisting on us the past couple of decades, but the film is well-acted, beautifully filmed, and the editing techniques used to illustrate Roy's psychological episodes when he's under too much pressure is fabulously creative. The twist isn't the only good thing about the script, as the dialogue is sharp throughout and the characters well-drawn and believable.

Check this one out, if you liked films like "The Sting", or if you enjoy movies that are first-and-foremost about human relationships and that manage to deliver endings that pull off a fate for the the main characters that's holds both happy-sappy and poetic justice qualities.

And the winners are...

The winners in the Movie411 Blog Awards were announced today. My little blog had been nominated, but it was not among them. In fact, it was utterly crushed in the voting! (But thank you to the dozen or so readers who DID vote for Watching the Detectives. :) )

Congrats to all the winners! Click on the logo to be taken to the awards page and check out all great blogs.

Paycheck: Both the film's title and why it exists

Paycheck (2003)
Starring: Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, and Colm Feore
Director: John Woo
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Industrial spy and computer engineer Michael Jennings (Affleck) agrees to work on a project so elaborate and top secret he'll have three entire years "cooked" from his brain by his partner (Giamatti) once he's done. However, instead of a big paycheck, Jennings finds assassins trying to kill him at the other end. Now, he has to recover what he's forgotten before it's too late, piecing together three years with only the minutes of clues.

I think that's a pretty accurate summary of this totally, utterly forgettable movie. I watched just three days ago, and I feel like it's been erased from my mind. I remember Affleck woefully inadequate acting talents being even more clearly on display when playing against real actors like Thurman and Giamatti (even though the latter had limited screen time). I remember a story so messy and full of holes that it resembled a block of swiss cheese being melted in the "brain cooker" device. I also remember John Woo (who once made the so-very-excellent action films "Hard Target" and "Hard Boiled") and feel a bit sad that he's reduced here to aping Hitchcock (in a way that's about as skillful as the way a chimp might mimick a person) and to desperately cramming his "signature visuals" into the film so it feels like he's almost parodying himself.

There's no doubt that everyone involved made this movie for no reason other than its title... they were looking for a paycheck, and they were hoping this messy pile would be forgotten as fast as one of Michael Jennings' special projects. It deserves to be forgotten, because its only saving grace is that it moves so fast that it's not until afterwards the audience fully realizes how awful a movie it is.