Mr. Brooks (2007)

Director: Bruce A. Evans

Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I have a vague memory of watching at some point in the last 18 years, and it has been sitting on my DVD shelf for several years, so I really had to have.

For the entire time I’m sitting there during this viewing and thinking that there would be—and indeed, I had even previously seen—a revelation that William Hurt’s Jiminy Cricket character looks like Costner’s father.

But that isn’t really there. What film was I watching way back when?

Did I Like It: It’s a nice—especially in a pre-Dexter world—premise, telling the story of a seemingly respectable man harboring a monster inside.

The problem with a nice premise is that it will only reliably fuel a trailer. I’m sure the trailer for Mr. Brooks is quite nice. Then again, I couldn’t be troubled to watch that trailer on the DVD, so… I don’t know.

Yes, I do, actually, know. If there is a hypothetical limit to the critical mass of subplots, then Demi Moore’s character in this approached it, if she didn’t shatter it. She’s after Kevin Costner (but doesn’t really know it). She’s tangling with Dane Cook, thinking he has some Kevin Costner energy. He doesn’t, but I’ll get to that here in a bit. She’s also got an ex-husband that’s causing problems. Then she also has another case that is haunting her. All of this, and she is not really the protagonist. That’s too much. So much, in fact that it’s inevitable that all of those elements will make up the parts of the third act, and do so pretty awkwardly.

It’s an awkward ungainly way to do a film.

And against all odds, I only get to the end of this review before I note that I have no idea why Dane Cook is in this film, and he never seems to quite know either. It’s not so great when he’s got to be the catalyst for all these plots.

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)

Director: Joel Schumacher

Cast: Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy

Have I Seen It Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: Question before we go any further. How did fully half of <The Breakfast Club (1985)> go from detention to that disaffected first year after college in less than six months? Isn’t that the biggest special effect asking us to leap from our logic in 1985?

If I’m asking those kinds of questions about the movie, I couldn’t have along for the ride, free of any self-consciousness. The reputation of the film is one of general revulsion, countered only by the fact that it appealed and continues to appeal to a certain subset of the population who were that terrible in 1985. As an infant at the time, I was probably terrible, but at least I had an excuse.

I think you would be hard pressed to find a review that isn’t fixated on just how terrible all of the characters. And that’s because they are. Well, everyone except Wendy (Mare Winningham), about whom I spend the entire runtime wondering why she was hanging out with these people. It celebrates their worst impulse not only for far longer than any sane film would have, but as a central, load-bearing element of the entire film’s rationale for existing in the first place.

Several of them ought to be arrested*. Most of them probably ought to not have jobs. I can’t imagine any of them adding value to the universe by marrying and having kids.

You might think I’ve become an old fuddy duddy (or as the movie would have you believe: interested in a quiet place for brunch). You might think I have some unresolved issues with the films of Joel Schumacher. <The Flash (2023)> kinda proved that much, so I’ll cede that point, if nothing else.

Here’s where the problem lies in the film. Much of it rings unnervingly true, making the film all the more frustrating. Have I worked in a job in social services where—if the film had bothered to stay a moment longer in the scene—it would have become the single most preposterous series of events ever captured on film? Maybe… Did I spend any sustained moment of my twenties with a particular opinion about Billy Joel’s The Stranger**? I mean, sure. Didn’t we all? Was I the President of my college’s Young Democrats, only to slowly realize that if I were to have any kind of future in politics, I was really going to have to switch sides? Listen: at least I decided to get out of the game all together. Did I ever (read: usually) try to weird my affection for and knowledge of the films of Woody Allen as my opening line with women?

Damn it, Schumacher. I didn’t come to the movies to get called out like that.

*They are all male, in case you were wondering, and I’m mostly thinking about Kirbo (Estevez), before who you think I’m thinking of, although he should spend some time in a cell, too. Incidentally, I also don’t think there is any way Kirbo ended up successfully finishing a year of law school, to say nothing of becoming a lawyer. Don’t ask me how I know.

**I still don’t quite know what Alec (Judd Nelson) was on about in that scene. If you can explain it to me, please reach out to me on any still-functioning social media platform.

Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996)

Director: Mike Judge

Cast: Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Did anyone have HBO in the 90s and get around seeing this one? I think my parents might have even seen it at some point.

Did I Like It: I’ve been going through a bit of an MTV-renaissance lately. Well, I suppose it can’t be counted as much of a rebirth, when I never really watched the channel in my youth. And yet, between The Real World Homecoming (a show in which I thought I would never have any interest), my HBOMax hunger strike*, and Beavis and Butthead Do The Universe (2022), I’ve been parking it at Paramount + on the regular, and it more often than not feels like its the late 90s early 2000s all over again.

There’s an odd simplicity to this movie, when compared with its much later progeny. Universe felt the need to wrap the affair in a thoroughly meta plot line. That was probably rightly so, in order to bring the two heroes into the weirdness that is the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Here, Beavis and Butthead (both Judge) are content to be what they were at their most pure: Two dimwitted and ultimately malevolent sex maniacs, too stupid to realize they never need to go on the journey insisted on by the road movie int which they have drifted.

That may feel like a complaint, but it isn’t. This is as pure a delivery system for Beavis and Butthead as one is likely to find. The only way to amplify this movie’s primary quality would be to stop the proceedings in the middle to be an unrelated concert film complete with running commentary. That might have worked less as a feature, but I would direct the reader to Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996). It could have worked. We would have watched anything that year.

*They know what they did. Odds are you do, too.

A Few Good Men (1992)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Again, sure. I’ve been watching a lot of film adaptations of stage plays lately, and incidentally the film an television work of Aaron Sorkin as well. Now, the Venn diagram collapse in on itself, and I’m thinking it may be the best of both worlds.

Reiner does the needed work to actually adapt the material for the screen. Far too many plays turned into films never rise above their claustrophobic trappings, but I never feel that way watching this film, even in the courtroom scenes, where it all could have been forgiven. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing a live production of the story, and it’s been several years since I’ve read Sorkin’s original stage play, but my faint memory seems to think there is very little lost in the adaptation, and the scope of the story is somehow increased.

Sorkin’s work here is superlative as well. It’s terrible to say, but I do wonder if the author had ever recovered creatively from gaining sobriety nearly twenty years ago. The TV and movies he has written since then have had a very similar quality, with him even repeating certain turns of phrase as if he’s trying to strike the match of his true genius without poisoning his body at the same time. This effort, however, is Sorkin at his hungriest. While the stage play had enjoyed some positive reviews during its broadway run, he was far from the go-to man for Oscar bait screenplays. He wrote this on cocktail napkins during bar tending stints for La Cage Aux Folles. There was no guarantee of success. No sign of future writing work. He was hungry, and it showed.

It’s probably impossible to make him hungry again. He can run slightly afoul of his glory days in television, but he simply chooses not to write for television anymore. I don’t think he should go back on cocaine, but there’s got to be a better way to harness what he had before.