VIDEODRONE

By only

Monday February 11, 2008

NEW MOVIE MONDAYS
We Own the Night
The title here refers to the insignia on the badge of the NYC street crime division, but could equally refer to the mentality of the city’s up and coming drug dealing, cop killing Russian mafia. Essentially a family drama about how an individualistic son gets dragged in to the violent drug war waged by the cops (his brother and father) against those who own the club he runs and how he is forced to choose sides when his cop father and brother are shot down in cold blood. It’s an amazingly dull and heavy handed effort with little going for it except for a singular car chase. But wow… what a car chase. Speeding cars smashing into each other, crossing medians back and forth in a torrential down pour. Guns out windows, bumpers bumping, windshield wipers totally wiping hard. By far the most exciting part of the movie it lasts a whole spine-tingling 4 minutes. If this movie owns the night, we’re moving.


Gone Baby Gone
Turns out Ben Affleck isn’t as humongous an idiot as everyone imagined. When it came time for him to Writer/Director his first feature film, he made a smart decision: he didn’t act in it. Watching Bennifer put on another fake Boston townie accent would have been insanely unbearable, which in turn would have probably been amazing, which in turn would have actually made this movie good, but not for good reasons. Yup, even with no Ben this movie still blows. It takes it’s title from a snippet of dialog delivered by a Dominican gangster named Cheese, which is apparently a popular thug name these days. Cheese is telling Casey that he doesn’t know where the kidnapped little girl Casey and his GF are looking for, and says something along the lines of “blah blah blah because she’s gone baby, gone.” Horrible, but… if Ben had played the part of Cheese it would have been a different story.


Becoming Jane
Ever wonder how Jane Austen the woman became Jane Austen the writer? Apparently there is a secret society where people meet in secret to discuss their most primal impulses. They dress in cloaks and masks and listen to chamber music and get all Victorian in hopes of raising an erotic demon named Ulvar who will dictate tales of passion and eroticism to the eager scribes. So with Ulvar whispering in her ear, Jane the woman became Jane the lauded authorette and her books have gone on to be made and remade into movies literally hundreds of times. If you have ever read one of her books or seen a movie version of one of her stories and felt swept up by the magic of it all, don’t worry, it’s not you. It’s actually the actual magic of the stories, woven into the very fabric of the tales by a real life erotic demon as raised by Jane Austen. Now that’s team work.