Last week:
Formula 51 (2001) (a.k.a. "The 51st State")
Been threatening to show this movie to my wife for aaaages, finally did so last week. Never did manage to track down a physical copy (never tried very hard, either), but it is available on Crackle, so we watched it there (with soooo maaany aaads!). This was also my first time seeing the FULL movie, since the last time I saw it was when it came out on cable television after its theater run, and when I found it, it was already something like 15-20min into the film. For anyone who hasn't seen it (which I imagine is most everyone who reads this post), it is the story of Elmo McElroy (Samuel L. Jackson), a chemistry genius who, hamstrung by a mistake he makes early in his chosen career, decides to give the middle finger to his employer and make a load of quick cash through the creation and sale of a special blue drug of his own design, a drug 51x stronger than any other, and...what? You've heard that song before? Well, not like
this, you haven't. Spoiler alert: McElroy's employer, "The Lizard" (Meat Loaf), survives the attempt on his life (ok not
much of a spoiler since it happens in the first 15min or so) and sends Dakota Parker (Emily Mortimer) to go send his copper-jacketed regards to McElroy in England, where McElroy has gone to meet Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle) to set up his deal. But of course that's when hijinks ensue. Because, among other things, now The Lizard wants McElroy
alive.
And there are
plenty of hijinks. We have McElroy being a fish (and chips) out of water in England. We have DeSouza working for (and with) some of THE dumbest criminals EVAR. We have a love-business triangle. We have an
extremely casual attitude towards property value and certain human lives. We meet DeSouza's mom. And then there are the skinheads. Did I mention the skinheads? There's a lot of really ridiculous stuff going on in this movie, which I generally describe to people as an absurd Black Comedy/Heist hybrid. Because that's literally what it is, and by the time the third act rolls around and everyone has gotten done double-crossing each other, your inner 13yr-old will still be
hurr-hurring at watching Samuel L. Jackson run around an otherwise ordinary-looking Liverpool while wearing a kilt (commando or not? He never tells...) and schlepping a bag of golf clubs. There are even what I assume are references to
The Warriors (1979) and
The Matrix (1999) that I didn't catch the first time through. Word is that it didn't do very well at the box office, but I'll still sing its praises to ya if you're a fan of movies like
Hudson Hawk (1991
),
Drop Zone (1994), or
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). Also Emily Mortimer's character is hot*.
This week:
The Full Monty (1997)
"If you're going to make me watch Robert Carlyle in this, then it's only fitting next week we continue this trend and I make
you watch Robert Carlyle in
The Full Monty." These were my wife's last words regarding the above movie. Well, I'd never seen it (big surprise, I know), and so I had an entire week to, er, prepare myself to watch what I assumed was a 90min AAA-grade chick flick. And while it absolutely
is something I would put in that column (because at its heart it's all about "relationships" and "feelings" and "family" and there's not a single explosion to be had through the whole thing), if I had to sum up the entire movie in one word, that word would be "adorable." Gaz (Carlyle) is a dad who has lost his job. He's not a particularly good nor responsible dad, but he definitely knows that he is a dad, and he tries to do dad things with his son (which go poorly), until his ex, tired of Gaz' halfassery, files for sole custody unless Gaz can come up with the £700 for his half of the child support payments or whatever. Gaz now needs money in a hurry, and he remembers how a bunch of Chippendales' dancers filled a club with eager women, so he gets the brilliant idea to put on a show, a show where their ace in the hole is that, unlike those dancing dandies, they will give their audience the "full monty" (i.e., total nudity) and proceeds to sell that idea to a handful of his former coworkers, plus some others recruited
Mystery Men-/
The Commitments-style with the promise of their own share of this "easy money."
Now most of you are deeply rooted in Western cinema tradition, with movies like
The Bad News Bears,
Major League, or
Necessary Roughness, where our plucky heroes overcome their individual differences and train hard for about a month and somehow pull together to beat Evil Team Smugface through a combination of sheer grit and whimsical bumblefuckery, but this movie is...not that. And, to its credit, it is "not that" in what eventually becomes the most humble, genuine way possible. I will not spoil the ending for you, but by the time we learn how the movie earned its title (accompanied by the most appropriate song for the situation, I might add), the victory condition is no longer about the money, it is about the people we met along the way. Y'see, while we were watching Gaz' machinations unfold, we were also being introduced to people...people whose lives we got to peek into, people who might've started out as merely "Gaz' mates" but who develop into distinct characters of their own by the end of the movie, people who all end up having their own reasons for completing their journey. The
Wikipedia article on this movie states: "Despite being a comedy, the film also touches on serious subjects such as unemployment, fathers' rights, depression, impotence, homosexuality, body image, working class culture and suicide," and, in typical British understatement, this sentence is
absolutely 1000% correct. You go into this movie thinking it's going to be about Gaz getting his son back, but that's like expecting a(n American) Thanksgiving dinner to be about getting some cranberry sauce.
It's a "chick flick," sure. And the dialogue is difficult to understand at times if you're not used to the accent. But the acting is rock solid, the soundtrack is killer, and IMO the underlying message(s) completely justify sitting through the entire picture, alone or with friends.
--Patrick
*This sentence included for bhamv3's benefit.
