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Dispatches From The Edge: The Silver Fox Sadly Shines

by Luke Goldstein

The guy behind me is staring at me, right? I totally feel it.

Rating: 9 out of 10

It is expected now for any member of the political beltway or those who report on it (and other daily news events) to grace the shelves of our local bookstores (or the front page of our eBook apps) with a tell-all/biography/memoir. Most are pushed on them by overzealous managers and agents trying desperately to cash in on their popularity with various demographics, but every now and again one journal will come to fruition from a much more real and meaningful purpose.

Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disaster, and Survival is a touching remembrance from CNN superstar Anderson Cooper. Covering portions of his childhood and the darker moments of his youth, it also details heart-wrenching details of his reporting on Hurricane Katrina and the wars in the Middle East. Filled with honest and frank recollections from not only the front lines of some of our most recent calamities, Cooper also pushes his investigations internally to find out what drives him to consistently drop himself into some of the worst places on Earth.

The first thing that grabbed me about this book was the random similarities I didn’t expect to share with Anderson Cooper. His father passed away when he was ten years old, mine when I was five. It had a dramatic effect on each of our lives. He mentions his inability to fully process the emotional impact of that event, and the later suicide of his older brother, as key reasons for his apparent addiction to placing himself in the literal and psychological cross-hairs of the worst spots in the world.

Some of the most interesting parts, including those about his personal life, are when Cooper reveals many of the things he saw that never made the news, things deemed unworthy of CNN coverage. One scene talks about when he was in the Middle East passing out over 200 gallons of water to locals with the help of our armed forces. No one died that day, no IEDs went off, so no one ever heard about it. Cooper sadly admits the old adage that still holds sway over all news coverage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Another story mentions gruesome and horrific details about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The utter lawlessness committed not only by the locals taking advantage of the chaos, but law enforcement personnel who devolved just as much into primitive gangs of roving warlords. Some of those stories were snuffed out early on because it was deemed too dangerous in risking a possible backlash against all authority, which very well could have happened, but it doesn’t make the reality of it any easier to swallow.

Cooper also eloquently covers his tenuous balancing act between being an unbiased reporter and an opinionated celebrity. Once he made it out the other end of some incredibly dangerous job hunting tactics, landing in the spotlight of CNN forever altered his ability to reach millions of people and also his struggle to keep his sanity. He now was given access to people and events ranging from awe-inspiring to nightmare-inducing. With great skill and strain he has always come from those places knowing he had to wrap those images into a coherent story meant to inform, educate and enhance the world discussion. The Achilles heel for any reporter is to somehow deliver that information without bias and political overtones, which Cooper has managed to do time and time again, making him one of the most respected in the business.

In the last couple of years, Cooper has begun to step out of the middle ground and reposition himself as a true fact finder in a much more aggressive sense. Under the moniker, “Keeping Them Honest”, Cooper began bringing on politicians and other notable news makers when he felt something they were preaching about was demonstrably false. No longer fulfilled by calmly reporting the facts to his audience, Cooper decided to drive the falsehoods out into the light during live interviews. The only down side is if he brings on someone from the right side of the political spectrum and corrects them, Cooper becomes labeled a liberal activist, and if the guest is more left leaning, Cooper becomes labeled a political tool for the right. It seems like a no-win situation for him, but he is taking it in stride, sticking to what he believes is meaningful for people to know and that is what keeps him cemented as one of the best in the industry. Dispatches tries to ride that thin line as well, pointing out the inequities in the reporting that most of the country saw, while not coming down as an outright attack on the media as a whole.

The End of the Page recommendation: Dispatches From The Edge is a harrowing and heartfelt look in front and behind the lens of one of the most notable newsmen in the business, Anderson Cooper.

The Hurt Locker: Exploding with Power and Passion

I’m from America. I’m here to liberate your country. Why don’t you trust me?

Rating: 9 out of 10

In the years since we proved the motto “these colors never run” don’t include instances of running into other people’s countries under wildly false pretenses; we’ve seen the theaters filled with film after film dealing with the incredibly varied viewpoints of the Iraq War. Some are for the war, many are against, but all deal with the stresses and toil that it takes on the soldiers sent over there to protect us from afar and protect the civilians in that country from themselves. The biggest fear for any film covering this topic now is whether the audiences have seen it all. What more could possibly be brought to light after the 24-hour news cycle has been raking this story over the coals for nearly eight years? The answer coming from Hollywood seems to be making the stories more and more personal, connect them to individual soldiers and stories, whether they are true or based on true situations. We know why they are fighting, but we don’t always know who they are and that’s what still intrigues audiences.

The Hurt Locker centers around a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, dealing with car bombs, IEDs and any variety of homemade roadside explosive device. A new unit leader, Staff Sergeant James, finds himself trying to keep unit cohesion while not letting go of his unorthodox style of bomb defusing. Tempers flare, egos are tested, but the whole group must find a way to work together in order to keep themselves alive in their constantly hostile surroundings.

“Rare” is the first word that comes to mind when I describe this movie. In a project filled with so much inherent tension, very few are able to walk the hair thin line between too much tension, which would shut your audience down in some numb coma-type state, or too little tension, which would leave your audience bored and feeling as if the subject matter was taken too lightly. The story, the pacing and the intensity is handled beautifully by director Kathryn Bigelow, who really has had a intensely varied style of filmmaking ranging from the epitome of surfer action flicks, Point Break, to the turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi acid trip, Strange Days. No matter where she brings her vision, it always results in something unique to the current filmic landscape. With Hurt Locker, Bigelow paints a picture of three soldiers with completely different outlooks on their situation and she manages to give them all equal weight, which is an accomplishment in itself. She also is very specific with her use of camera tricks, like slow motion, so when they do appear in the film they don’t get lost in a sea of quick cuts, lens flares or unnecessary explosions. Overall it was a great effort from Bigelow and should keep her in the good graces of the Hollywood system for years to come.

Taking on the stresses of the bomb-busting trio are Jeremy Renner (Staff Sergeant James), Anthony Mackie (Sergeant Sandborn) and Brian Geraghty (Specialist Eldridge). Renner takes the point position here and leads the trio through the film with a wildcat mentality and seemingly careless attitude towards death on the job. This might have come off as a one note performance for Renner were it not for the brilliant script and the arc which his character travels. Mackie and Geragthy both show their initial discomfort with working for their new unit leader in different fashions. Mackie does a great job keeping the strong face and trying to remind Renner that they are all a team and must work together, but Geragthy has a more youthful persona and he becomes an endearing soul to the audience, swinging back and forth between emotionally shell-shocked and frantically fighting for his own freedom. Truly toned performances all around.

The Hurt Locker feels a great deal like what The Kingdom wanted to be. A balanced social commentary about life on the ground in the war zone balanced with action and tension to keep the audiences involved and attuned to the fact they weren’t watching  a documentary.

Recommendation: If it is still playing in a theater near you, check it out. The sound design alone is reason enough to not wait for DVD. If you can’t catch it on the big screen, don’t worry, the performances and poignancy of the film still carries through. Plus, you could just turn up your TV really loud.

Crank – High Voltage: High Style, Low Content

OK, who’s the funny bloke who told me to stick my tongue to this thing?

Rating: 3 out of 10

“Just go in, shut your brain off and watch the pretty colors.” I’ve used this statement many times before to friends of mine who might take a film too seriously: I was incredibly prepared to follow my own advice while walking into this inevitable sequel. The original movie, Crank, ends in a fashion defying anything resembling logic. By the closing moments in that film you’ve left logic sitting at a bus stop forty miles out of town, lonely and holding an empty popcorn tub. You could say that Crank: High Voltage doesn’t disappoint in faithfully keeping the trend going, but then again, it all depends on what you find disappointing.

Crank: High Voltage begins three months after the final moment of the first film. Our fearless anti-hero, Chev Chelios, has his miraculously still beating heart harvested and replaced with an artificial one that only runs with the constant intake of electricity. Chev wakes up before the rest of him is picked apart and goes on a multi-million volt tirade in search of the people behind his involuntary organ donorship. Banding together once again with the strangest people in the underworld of Los Angeles, Chev unleashes constant mayhem on all who stand in his way.

Coming from a long standing love of brainless action films (Demolition Man, Showdown in Little Tokyo and Gymkata, just to name a few), I am one of the first to jump up for something that barely resembles a plot and takes in no consideration for performances or tone as long as the action is true and holds together. This one tiny thing is something co-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor seemingly did not know how to do. These two loudly broke down the walls of Hollywood with the original Crank and many regarded them as the new, fresh faces of the indie-action genre. Yet the failure here is that beyond the inclusion of 8-bit video game graphics, there is nothing new to their style. Crank: High Voltage pulsates off the screen like a mixture of Guy Ritchie (circa Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Danny Boyle (circa Trainspotting) and a massive overdose of Adderall. The whole thing ends up as a collage of scenes strung together by the running thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this happened here?” I’m usually a big fan of that question, but only when this next question is successfully answered: “But does it make any sense at all?” Strident, frenetic and unapologetically overdone, this movie only shows what a freshman student filmmaker could do with a little cash and some famous friends.

Jason Statham, reprising his role as the unstoppable Chelios, shows up and does what is required of him, but unfortunately that’s not much. He gives the stare, gets beat and tortured mercilessly, then breaks through everything with pure rage. He’s the main draw for this because without a doubt he is the most underrated action star on screen today. He is also the action genre’s version of Samuel L. Jackson, who will do just about any movie attached to a paycheck. The only difference is Statham is not getting offered the big budget flicks that will elevate him to where he deserves to be. Many actors get to a point when they do one studio film for the check and one indie film for the credit, but Statham seems to be hovering on a see-saw of bad versus good choices. He stunned people in his debut in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, followed nicely by Snatch (see the Guy Ritchie connection forming?), but just as he was riding the wave of stardom up the action movie totem pole, he starred in The One, his first pairing with legendary kung-fu icon, Jet Li, which left a lot to be desired. Their second time out together in War tumbled even farther down the hole. Statham also followed his bank account to the set of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, directed by the infamous Uwe Boll, where Statham was a random Renaissance-era farmer who just happened to know martial arts. Yet, on the other side of the resume, keeping people interested was a handful of stand out performances in The Italian Job, The Bank Job (no relation) and the original Transporter (the franchise has slipped a bit in quality since then). I’m still keeping my hopes up for his upcoming projects: 13, The Brazilian Job (this one actually is related) and the Sylvester Stallone directed uber-explosion flick, The Expendables. Statham is better than this particular franchise and I look forward to him getting to prove it.

Now, not that these types of movies really get a whole lot of acting critiquing going on, I can’t let this go without mentioning the painfully terrible visual caricature of Bai Ling. Bordering on offensive, her turn as a hooker who gets psychotically attached to Statham brought groans from all over the audience. She trots over the line between comical and tragically bad taste in a pair of trampy stiletto heels. I can’t add anything positive under the realm of Amy Smart (who plays Chev’s girlfriend, Eve) or any of the random cameos that litter this movie. The only person who actually gets away with a believable character is Dwight Yoakam as the brilliant and depraved friend-cum-heart surgeon. The filmmakers actually gained a point for having his character laughably stop himself halfway through the picture while telling Chev, “You should be dead already. Doesn’t matter. Anyway…” It was a nice admission from behind the silver screen that they knew none of this really worked as a story of any value, instead relying on my old turn of phrase, “Just go in, shut your brain off and watch the pretty colors.”.

Recommendation: The main failure here is that the whole film is one big joke, but it felt like the filmmakers weren’t letting anyone else in on it. It’s more like something made by a bunch of friends who all made each other laugh on set without ever thinking if it would work on anyone else. Watch at home while drinking, but not if you have any history of epileptic seizures.