Major League (1989)

*** out of ****

There are great baseball films out there (like “Field of Dreams” or “Bull Durham”), and there are heartwarming baseball films out there (like “The Natural” or “Rookie of the Year”). But there is only one baseball movie that I would say is really and truly “fun” - a baseball movie for baseball fans that makes you cheer, laugh and quote it over and over again.

That movie is 1989's “Major League”. From the opening scenes, which are played to the soulful Randy Newman classic “Burn On”, this is a film that if you don't like it, you just don't like fun.....

It's 1989 and the owner of the Cleveland Indians has passed away, leaving his ex-showgirl widow, Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) with the ownership of the team. One problem – she absolutely hates Cleveland. They haven't made the playoffs in decades, they're still playing in dilapidated Municipal Stadium and low attendance makes profitability a real challenge. Miami has made her an offer to move the team there, and all she needs to do to be able to break the team's lease with Cleveland is draw less than 700,000 in fan attendance for the year. Desperate to get away from the “Mistake by the Lake”, she assembles a team she feels will be so awful that nobody will come to watch them. 

But nobody told the players that they're supposed to lose. Cue “great underdog story” music.....

An ensemble cast, with each character having their own unique storyline, makes this whole thing rock. Tom Berenger is central character Jake Taylor, a broken down former all-star catcher looking for one last shot at a winner. His ex-girlfriend (Rene Russo) is looking to move on from him, but he longs for one last chance. Charlie Sheen is Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughan, an ex-con with a 100 mile-per-hour fastball and few social graces. A very young Wesley Snipes plays speedy leadoff man Willie Mays Hayes, and Corbin Bersen is right at home as superstar jackass third baseman Roger Dorn.  

These players, along with a mishmash of similar characters, make for some really entertaining personality clashes. Like Christian pitcher Eddie Harris (Chelcie Ross) and his holy war with voodoo-practicing slugger Pedro Cerano (Dennis Haysbert). Even manager Lou Brown (James Gammon) is a misfit, seeming at first to care more about selling tires than managing a baseball team.

As the season goes on, the group starts to gel and make some progress. Then, after finding out that the plan was for them to be bad enough to finish last, they come together to try to win the whole thing. It's a fairly predictable, overly macho B-movie story told before, but this time it's told absolutely right. The baseball sequences are great, the cast is spectacular, and the direction and cinematography all get you caught right up in the action.

....and it has, for me, the greatest single sequence in any sports movie – in the last game of the season, when Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughan comes in from the bullpen..... I still grin and get caught right up in it every time I see it. It's a spine-tingler of a scene, especially for a baseball fan.

Laughs over the dialogue and situations are endless, the story is entertaining as hell and the characters are so likeable that you wish they were real so you could see more of them. “Major League” may not be the best sports movie ever made, but I can't imagine one that could be any more fun.

Ted 2 (2015)

* out of ****

I'll be brief....

“Ted” (2012) was a major disappointment to me. I like Marky Mark as an actor and I think Seth MacFarland's TV show is hysterical. I further think MacFarland is a very intelligent and likeable guy. But “Ted” sucked. I mean, really, really sucked. What was most shocking to me was that MacFarland could take such a funny premise and make something so un-funny with it. But I am starting to see a pattern – MacFarland's “A Million Ways to Die in the West” (2014) was better, but even more uneven. Perhaps he just isn't a “movie” guy.....

So why did I see “Ted 2”? Because it was at the back end of a double feature at the drive in. And I will say this – it's better than the first one. It couldn't NOT be better than the first one. But even this one is little more than a waste of celluloid. The funniest thing in it is a cameo from Liam Neeson, and even it isn't that funny. Yes, there are some wisecracks and one-liners that make you laugh, but it is just a big ol' waste of time.

In short, Ted and his wife try to adopt. The state decides Ted isn't a “person” and not only rejects the adoption request, it annuls his marriage. It alleges to take away more rights.... but since Ted does nothing of value for anyone, he never would have known the difference. They take it to court, fight for his rights, and basically waste 2 entire hours of your life that you can never have back.

If you think Jonah Hill and/or Danny McBride are funny, you'll think “Ted 2” is funny. If you think their “humour” could only appeal to a moron of the highest order, you'll hate it. Stay away. Far, far away.

Trainwreck (2015)

** ½ out of ****

I have to admit that walking into “Trainwreck” I wasn't sure what to expect. I generally get a kick out of shock comedy, but shock comedians run very hot and cold. Amy Schumer is someone who when she is funny is really, really funny, but when she isn't she's painful to watch. The trailers looked hilarious but that doesn't always give the most accurate read....

Schumer plays Amy Townsend, a commitment-fearing woman who works at a men's magazine. [Sidebar – her boss is the female version of an old boss of mine, a work-Nazi who, once you are there for a while, you wish a gruesome death upon every single day.] And Amy is, let's be honest, a slut. She uses as many men as possible for sex, doesn't want any actual intimacy, and is completely superficial.  You know.... she's like most guys.

She is given an assignment to write an article about sports doctor Aaron Connors (Bill Hader) that is revolutionizing knee implants for athletes, and who is working with some of the biggest names in sports. His running off the names of a few of his clients at a party gave me my biggest laugh of the film. This theme introduces a running gag in the film, that his client and closest friend Lebron James (playing himself) is actually a very sensitive guy. Believe me, this gag is wildly overused and is tired after the first two iterations.... but it goes on and on and on.

So (to sum up the plot in one further sentence) Amy falls for the doctor, they have a great time together, they argue and break up despite loving each other and eventually get back together. That's a spoiler, but anyone that doesn't see it coming isn't intelligent enough to read, so I am sure I didn't give anything away.... But the humour in the film has to do with Amy's attitudes about relationships; she just doesn't know how to have one. This “she's the guy and Hader's the girl in the relationship” is the one note that the film is based around, and it doesn't deviate from that note. But it's a rom-com, so I wasn't expecting anything deep.

What it all came down to was, “Is it funny?” And there's no denying it is. Hader is a talented guy but he is pretty subdued here to let Schumer go wild. She has a lot of funny lines with a tone that is very familiar from her TV show, and uses some pretty intelligent references in some of them that I'm sure many in the audience wouldn't have understood. Colin Quinn, as Schumer's always belligerent father, is absolutely hysterical as an old-timer in a nursing home - the film could have used much more of him.

“Trainwreck” is a being called “a different kind of rom-com” but really it isn't. The humour is simply more off-colour than most, and the man/woman roles have been reversed (this is hardly the first time THAT has happened in a movie). Good for quite a few laughs consistently throughout, and though it hits a real slow patch in the last half hour it's definitely worth seeing. The laughs you get will be hard and loud, and make up for any slow parts of the film.

Terminator: Genisys (2015)

** out of ****

The original “The Terminator” (1984) was a career-maker. It launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to stardom, radically increased the value of James Cameron's stock and made Linda Hamilton every teenage boy's fantasy about an ass-kicking girl-next-door.  Don't even get me started on the hair....  But not only was it a career maker, it was a bona-fide landmark in science fiction. There had been time travel movies before, but “The Terminator” was the first to give us the idea of going back in time to kill an enemy's relatives in order to prevent their existence. And it was really, really cool.....

But what made it cool? I can think of a couple of things, things that are sadly missing from the latest installment in the series, “Terminator: Genisys”.  First, Arnie's Terminator was terrifying – a cold, merciless, virtually indestructible robot assassin that would stop at nothing to destroy you. And second, the guy sent to stop him (Kyle Reese, played originally by Michael Biehn) was a closet case – so malnourished from the war, shell-shocked and on the edge that his quick-trigger paranoia was as dangerous as the Terminator itself.   In “Terminator: Genisys” we have a Terminator that is positively cuddly (he is called “Pops” by Sarah Connor) and a Kyle Reese that looks like he stepped straight out of a fitness video and has none of the twitchy scariness of Biehn's version.

But the story first. The opening sequences are pretty cool, as we learn about Reese's (Jai Courtney) meeting with humanity's savior, John Connor (Jason Clarke). We follow them through the war and when Skynet falls, into the time-displacement module that they learn has already sent the Terminator (Arnie) back to 1984. Reese volunteers to go after it to save Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), but when he gets there everything is waaaaaay different than what we saw in the original movie.

It turns out that somehow (it's never clearly explained how) another “liquid metal” Terminator was sent back to kill Sarah when she was nine years old, and she was saved by our old buddy Arnie. For those of you counting, that makes seven total Terminators sent back since the start of the franchise. But that's not all, Reese finds more Terminators have been sent back to kill him in 1984. Wasn't the original plan, “Nobody goes back, nobody else comes through.”? Ah well, can't make a bunch of crappy sequels if you follow the rules.

Now the alternate timeline gives us another opportunity to stop Skynet before it comes online, but even this is complicated by the modern-day appearance of John Connor himself. Don't ask me why.... the answer is so completely out there it's almost impossible to describe. But Reese and Sarah are left (along with “Pops”, the "buddy" Terminator) to save the world. Again.

Now this movie doesn't suck. The production values are first rate, the action is dynamic and the special effects blow your mind. On top of that the performances are very good (given what they had to work with) and there's even a pretty decent explanation of why the Terminator looks so old. If you go into this film having never seen a Terminator movie you'll have a great time, and even viewing it as a fan of the franchise I enjoyed watching it despite it's flaws.

But on the strictly “how does it compare” side, “Terminator: Genisys” flat-out blows. JJ Abrams tried to ruin “Star Trek” by creating a movie-series timeline that negated everything about the original Star Trek TV series, and Alan Taylor tries to do the same thing here. But unlike Abrams, who at least gave us all the things that made the original series great but in a different way, everything about this version is weaker. Except the special effects (which in the original are pretty bad by modern standards....).

A Terminator needs to be terrifying, not loveable. Reese needs to be a man on the edge, not a superhero sans cape. Sarah Connor needs to be a damsel in distress who learns how to be tough, not a rugged, type-A munitions expert with a chip on her shoulder. I don't have any real argument with a series reboot, but one that sucks in comparison really bothers me. This one isn't even rated R – they even edit out Arnie's bare ass from the original. Obviously the lines like, “He'll find her and rip her fucking heart out,” are absent. Has the Governator gone so far to milquetoast that even his most badass villain is now a puss?

I'm not even going to get into the ridiculously convoluted time paradoxes that are in this movie – while they bother me from a logic point of view I didn't find they detracted too much from the film as a whole. And I won't even say don't go see it, because I did and I'm glad I did. But you'll need to try to watch it outside of the context of the original. Because it simply doesn't measure up.

The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

*** ½ out of ****

Teen fiction is bigger today than it ever has been, and I think that's a good thing. Anything that will get young people reading instead of looking at a screen is a good thing. It's SUCH a good thing that I am not even bothered by relatively pulpy tripe like “The Maze Runner”, “Insurgent” or “Twilight”. But I will admit that that style of novel has made me pretty confident of what to expect from a movie made from them. Some of them (particularly the “Hunger Games” films) are really quite good, but nothing earth shattering or close to "great". I expected the same thing from “The Fault in Our Stars”.

I could not have been more wrong.

The readership of my movie review blog isn't large enough for this sentence to be a big risk, but it's still a bit of a limb to go out on: if this film wasn't an adaptation of a “teen novel” it would have been more than a fixture at the Teen Choice Awards - it would have received a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Some fabulous performances, including an enchanting one from Shailene Woodley, lead the way.  Add to it a heart-wrenching plot (that manages to avoid the “I was designed to make you cry” feeling many tear-jerkers have) and some really brilliant dialogue and end up what I think of as the best weeper in years.

But it isn't about loss or sadness – it's about love.

Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) hasn't had it easy. She's sixteen years old and has been suffering for years with thyroid and lung cancer that will eventually kill her. She's lasted as long as she has because of “the miracle” - a drug trial that has put her in a lengthy remission, though everyone knows it won't last forever. She deals with her fate as well as anyone her age could be expected to, and she has the corresponding teen angst and fatalist attitude to go with it. That is, until she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort).

Augustus is an eighteen year old cancer survivor. He lost his foot and part of his leg a while back to the disease, but is now cancer free and virtually unaffected thanks to his prosthetic. He first meets Hazel when attending a cancer support group with a friend of his that is suffering from ocular cancer, and the sight of her hits him like a thunderbolt. He can't take his eyes off her. Hazel likes Gus and finds him intriguing, but for Gus it's clearly love at first sight.

I'm not going to go too far into the details of their love story, as like all love stories it's just a matter of how they discover each other. But I can't say enough about some of the dialogue in the film – this is where I realized that the writer must be something considerably more than a teen-pulp author. With just a few words he makes you understand what the characters are feeling so clearly it's amazing. Lines like, “I fell in love with him the way you fall asleep – slowly... and then all at once.” Wow.

I'm sure it's no secret that (spoiler alert – stop here if you don't want to know the sad secret of the film's second half) while Hazel hesitates to enter a relationship with Gus due to her impending doom, it is Gus that suffers a remission and slides toward his death before her. And the way these two young characters deal with this fate that really floored me. Anger, courage, regret, fear.... you feel everything they feel. But it is their devotion to each other that really tweaks your heart. At one point Gus asks Hazel to write a elegy for him, and once she does he asks her to read it so he can hear what she'll say at his funeral. The scene where she reads it to him, the beauty of the words, the strength of the sentiment, an the unique description she uses to define her feelings for him..... if you don't struggle not to dissolve into a puddle of tears you have no heart at all.....

But this film is more than just a tear-jerker – it's a movie about young people and their feelings. Decades ago, films like “The Breakfast Club” (1986), “The Sure Thing” (1985) and “Pump Up The Volume” (1990) were ground-breaking because it showed that you could have youthful leads in movies that dealt with real issues, real feelings and very realistic characters. “The Fault in Our Stars” has the same impact, but framed in a setting that made their real feelings that much more potent. And eventually that much more heart-breaking.

This movie has been out for about 9 months on DVD so I assume most people that were interested in the source material have already seen it. But for any reader that has not bothered because it's “just another movie from a teen novel”, you should reconsider. The final sequence of the film was a little too “Hollywood” for my taste, which is the only reason I didn't give it four stars. It is a lovely film filled with terrific performances. You'll love it.