Doom

Doom isn't all doomb, but it runs amok like a mutant with an extra 24th chromosome

Official Doom Site
Sci-Fi/Action
Starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Ben Daniels
Rated R (for language and intense/graphic violence)
Running Time: 100 Minutes
Released:October 21st, 2005



1 Out Of 5 Bites

I remember back in 1993 loading up Doom on my blistering-fast 25 megahertz Packard-Bell, 486SX with 4 megabytes of RAM. Oh...and it had a 2400 speed modem too, but no multimedia. My initial Doom experience with the Imps, Barons and the Spider Mastermind was less than awe-inspiring.....how menacing can they be with only a Piezo speaker? Monster-Barons can't make a decrescendoing chirping/blipping sound and still be, well, monster-ish.

Doom was the game that is widely recognized for its pioneering efforts in the 3D gaming world. Doom is the somewhat forgettable movie that wants to oblige those old-time gamers with a pat on the back in the form of a flat-lined script, much guttural oomphs and an endless barrage of patented, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, in-your-face scowls and another jump-to-my-feet-from-my-back move. You know he can do it and you might have seen it before, but it's still a nifty physical feat. The movie barely tinkers with scintillating moments, but, overall, the aftertaste is much like a cinematic Piezo, rather than high multimedia.

It wasn't a stretch to have cast The Rock as "Sarge," a no-frills hunk of kick-it muscle machine waiting for the word to corral his unit to go smear some alien tail. Though he came and did his job, he was much on the look for a way to cut his action-hero niche a la Schwarzenegger, but there wasn't much to work with. This project may not have hurt his stock in that regard, but it might not propel him much.

In the year 2046 (and some time after the release of PB 486SX), Sarge relays word to his guys that they are leaving on a mission to a Martian scientific outpost to contain a security breach, traveling there via a space portal. Upon arriving, they encounter a lovely young anthropologist (Rosamund Pike), who harbors the key to understanding what and how to handle the crisis (having mainly to do with mutated chromosome pairings). She is also the sister to Reaper (Karl Urban- who reprises the same facial expression from The Lord of the Rings apprearances). (Before they get to that, we witness mutilation number one...or is it two or three??.... by some nasties out of the shadows and witnessed by scientist Dr. Carmack- played by Robert Russell- who's reduced mainly to a blubbering mess). That's pretty much the premise from there on out....a gore-fest by monsters you never really get to see until really late. Much ordering by Sarge, much running and dying by the grunts, and mega-overload on goonies doing their eviscerations from out of the inky blackness.

The picture is mainly a way to honor those game players of yesteryear with a plot ditzy enough to be a simple excuse to whip out your B.F.G. and start blasting away. At one point, the movie adopts the first person point of view as in the game itself, with the cheesy background music. In the game, it really was loopy when you were left with only a chainsaw to do away with the baddies. By the time our hero takes it up during this first person stint, you wonder that it wouldn't be all bad if he sawed his way through the screen and carved you a quick exit out of the theater.

Elizabethtown

Sit down to this Southern love-feast, but there are some bones to avoid chokin' on..

Official Elizabethtown Site
Romantic Drama/Comedy
Starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Judy Greer
Rated PG-13 (for language and sexual situations)
Running Time: 123 Minutes
Released:October 14th, 2005



3 Out Of 5 Bites

What happens when Hollywood- not wanting for the moment to portray Kentuckians as in-bred, carburetor-rebuilding cretins, or as a harbor for greedy, elitist cigarette company criminals- parachutes in upon the state with love on its mind? In this instance, you get Elizabethtown, a heartened attempt to brandish a story of a life and a love found in the final throes of existential desperation.

By director Cameron Crowe's admission, the film is partly autobiographical, but this knowledge only generates a mix-minded sympathy for what must have been a frenetic and jumbled bag of experiences from which to pull, especially if we are: 1) judging by the partial waywardness of the film; 2) dizzy from the plot's multiple dramatic peaks and valleys, or, 3) shaken by the sheer amount we are to consume on our cinematic plate. Already shaved down from the 138-minute version played for several summer film festivals, the 125-minute theatrical release was chock-full of character studies and questions with which to finalize and resolve.

There are some great acheivements. For one, Kentuckians are spared "goon" status as Crowe somewhat tactfully manages to steer clear of stereotyping Southern culture and magnifies the primacy of enduring, tight-knit relationships and the ever-present stronghold of Southern hospitality. As a displaced Southerner in the Midwest, I know these are not mere condenscending cinematic inclusions.

Elizabethtown emerged fairly strong and generated interest as the young-buck shoe designer Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) overlays a running commentary in a diary-styled set of visual vignettes that colorfully lay out the setting of what is one of the grandest failures in all of the shoe world. His design, the Spasmotica, nose-dives to the tune of $972 million dollars and so does his job, girl and joie de vivre, concurrently. It is here where the potentially annoying Alec Baldwin renders a rather funny, sassy and short-lived stint as Drew's boss, president of Mercury Shoes. Heap onto the growing garbage pile that is Drew's life the sudden death of his father, of such he learns while attempting to deal with his grief in a just-as-sudden way.

Onward Drew goes to Kentucky, at the request of his desperate sister (Judy Greer) and mother (the equally potentially annoying, yet, talented, Susan Sarandon). Not eager to manage the family's wishes after the debacle in Oregon, Drew hopes to slink into a temporary oblivion on an empty flight. That would have occurred had in not been for the delightfully pushy lone stewardess on the flight, Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). At the hands of what must be her Southern lady's intuition, the two strike up a friendship.

While warmly received on the ground in Kentucky and feeling more alone than ever, he finally phones Claire and they embark on an all-night conversation that persists until morning. The effect of the burgeoning relationship at this juncture has a magical and endearing quality. But there's more than just a sweet-tea, Southern gal to court....he has to discover the family he doesn't really know, including his dad- and you know for sure somewhere soon- himself too.

We could have done without the sister for sure, and maybe much of Sarandon's histrionic comic relief, some of which comes off as pushy. But her ten-minute ditty at the memorial is basically overkill. The somewhat implausibe wedding celebration/memorial with attendant rock ballads and incendiary avian replicas begged too much. This is not to mention whether or not a Kentucky-fried memorial would have been so risque, so burlesque without so much an obligatory mention of God. Even secular Kentuckians for the most part pay such homage in the face of their own finitude. In all, we needed to arrive at the resolution of Claire's and Drew's relationship earlier, because somewhere short of this present product lies a film greater that what it is now......just good.

Crowe touches on some issues sure to strike an emotional note with twenty, thirty and even forty-somethings: emotional estrangement between parent/child. Here, he excels at exploring the romantic bonds we forge in the presence of and in spite of our real or imagined failures and the way we can discover the impetus to simply live again.

The disturbing double mindedness of Elizabethtown is its ability to drift us away to something else, once Drew and Claire's relationship arrived at a new level. It seemed as if Crowe wanted to simultaneously extol the worth of the Southern charm he's undoubtedly found appealing while fervently nurturing the story of Drew and Claire. When the story abandoned the latter, the infusion of the extraneous relationships caused the picture to flounder a bit.

Orlando Bloom obliged the Drew's character rather than shone through it. Sometimes flat....rarely charged and riveting, but overall just a bit above plain. Perhaps there was the interpretation of numbness, given the plethora of stressors assigned to him. This might explain some things a bit.

Meanwhile Dunst, as the attractably inviting and cute aggressor, waxes desperate and tenaciously mysterious if not a tad bit loony. Having said that, she is not hard to side with. Deep inside is a hurt begging for realtional salve, but we aren't more privy to the source of that pain as we are with Drew.

Another note of mention is the bombardment of track after track of interpretive music, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The effect of a great track interspersed throughout a motion picture is a cause worth taking because the great songs get stuck forever with the great cinematic moments (remember "Tiny Dancer" in Almost Famous and "In Your Eyes" in Say Anything?). In E-Town, one doesn't know which one to remember and for what reason because there are so many. The road trip at the end of the movie warranted a sequential flow of track after track for reasons I won't give away here. The only song I came away with was one that boasted some mildly repulsive lyrics in one of the movie's innumerable ballads. This is not a naively prudish critique....it seemed to be more of an overly-ambitious experiment to garner attention for attention's sake, as if to shock us into the giddiness of their emerging relationship.

E-town is not a failure by any means. It is just not exceptional. Still yet, so far this year, not much has rivaled it in the depth for which it strives and there is still enough that does work within it to secure some satisfaction.