You Should Have Left (2/5 Stars)

“You Should Have Left” is one of those ninety-minute movies that are about sixty minutes too long. Given the information that is conveyed on the screen, the movie could have efficiently structured as an episode of the Twilight Zone, which run about thirty minutes long. It stars Kevin Bacon as an ex-banker, Amanda Seyfried, his young wife and actress, and a daughter. I could not figure whether the daughter was Kevin Bacon’s child from a previous marriage, Amanda Seyfried’s daughter from a previous marriage, or their own child from the present marriage. It is very hard to tell, but it also does not matter.

In the first twenty minutes of the movie, the plot hints at a secret from Kevin Bacon’s past. I do not know why it hints at this secret, because the movie does not do anything else with its time except make lame off-plot attempts at humor. So, the audience kind of just waits around for the movie to come out and tell the secret for no reason. The movie could have started at the twenty-minute mark and no one would have been the wiser.

This is a haunted house horror movie. The family Bacon go on vacation at a mansion in the Welsh countryside. After a day, the house starts presenting weird omens and doing horrific things. However, how the house works is never explained. It just does what it wants when it wants to do it. The movie bordered on interesting for a moment when Kevin and his daughter measured a room in the house as twenty-five feet and then went outside the house and measured the same room as twenty feet. Why is there an extra five feet? The movie does not say. It is a magic house.

It is easy to be manipulated by a magic house because there are no rules. Any defeats or victories are completely arbitrary. Thus, Kevin Bacon never stands a chance and there is no suspense. Is it a metaphor? I think such an analysis would be giving this movie too much credit. Why should I put more thought into this than the creator?

The creator is Writer/Director David Koepp. Looking at this guy’s resume, I was kind of blown away. He has worked at a high profile in this industry for decades. Koepp is the screenwriter of Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and War of the Worlds. He also wrote for and directed Kevin Bacon in “Stir of Echoes”, a much better psychological thriller. What he felt he needed to make this movie is anybody’s guess. It does explain how the movie got made in the first place. If any new movie director had pitched this to a producer, there would have been no way it would have been picked up. No one is asking for a horror movie that is solely concerned with the conscience of an aging white male ex-banker. No other character in this movie, the few characters that there are, is developed in any appreciable manner. I think they got that Welsh guy from the store to do the movie’s ending voiceover which helpfully explained the moral of the story in case you were an idiot and/or fallen asleep half way through.

Why is this movie $19.99 to rent? It is a new feature but it is not playing in a movie theater, which would, at the most, charge $17.50. Plenty of smaller movie theaters charge less. There is no theater to pay upkeep for and no theater employees to pay. Why is it more expensive than a movie theater ticket? The experience is less in many obvious ways. My TV screen is smaller, I have more distractions in the room, I don’t have the ability to purchase a wide range of concessions, drinks, and food as I do at Nitehawk, Alamo Drafthouse, or Syndicated. I feel like I got ripped off by this Bacon banker guy.

Frost/Nixon (3/5 Stars) 01/23/09

Frost/Nixon is the name of a award-winning play that recreated the famous post-presidential interview of Richard Nixon and English talk show host David Frost. This movie is an adaptation of that play. So what we have is an adaptation of an adaptation. It’s weird than that this movie has an odd mockumentary vibe to it. By that I mean certain characters that witnessed the interviews interrupt the movie to speak of the events unfolding on the screen as if they already happened. It is used in the beginning and the end, but not during the middle. It’s weird because it throws the whole genre into question. Am I watching a straight up biopic, or a mockumentary of that biopic? And why isn’t it consistent?
I had the opportunity to watch some of the Frost/Nixon interview clips on YouTube before somebody was a real jerk and took them down because of a copyright. Watching those and then watching this movie I witnessed a real difference especially in the final supposedly most dramatic scenes. In the real interviews Frost seems like a perfectly capable interviewer. This is at odds with Michael Sheen’s portrayal of a complete boob. The real Richard Nixon is equally not so dramatic. In the movie the big line is “No I’m saying when the President does it, it’s not illegal.” Frank Langella milks this line for all its worth and it comes as if it some sort of Freudian slip. In the real interviews Richard Frost asks a completely different question (and a better one too) about wiretapping unsuspecting American citizens (In the movie the question is about Watergate.) It is sober and Nixon’s famous answer although still incredible seems at least somewhat thought out. This playing with the dialogue I found a little irresponsible especially when were dealing with an ex-president. Of course you may say, hey it’s just a movie. I would counter that the thing is up for a best picture nomination and people watching it will assume that the dialogue is actually verbatim. Therefore the filmmakers, Ron Howard, should have exercised a little more responsibility in keeping the record straight. I’m somewhat surprised by this because Ron Howard is usually very good at these biopic stories (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man). Anyway it still is an entertaining film. Just give the real interviews a look while you’re at it, just to be objective.
Frank Langella just got a best actor nomination for his portrayal of Richard Nixon. Not really knowing Richard Nixon I don’t know if it is good impression. I know he doesn’t look a thing like the man. If there is a great performance in this movie it doesn’t belong to Langella though. It belongs to Sam Rockwell, who brings a real vitality to his role as one of Frost’s leading investigator of Nixon. He does a very good job of representing the nation’s outrage against Richard Nixon. I looked him up on imdb and found out that I had already seen him in several other movies. (He was that dude in ‘The Green Mile?’) This is the first time I really noticed him though and thought ‘hey I think I’ll look that guy up.’ On the other side of fence is Kevin Bacon who plays the assistant of Richard Nixon. He’s a stalwart army guy. Its kind of nice to see Bacon playing supporting bits in movies with good casts again. Maybe a couple of years of this and we will be able to play his game again. It’s been getting kind of hard since he became a headliner around 1996 and stopped doing those sort of films.