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Please forgive me! I have not yet paid homage to that greatest of all movies of our era — The Matrix Reloaded. I hope you overlook my sacrilege towards the Gods of CGI. Perhaps I will eventually review that holiest of all films . . . or perhaps not. In any case, I have committed the heresy of ignoring The Matrix Reloaded in favor of The Dancer Upstairs. Now I know what you are thinking — With a title like that it must be some sort of gay film. Is that Dancer Upstairs Richard Simmons or Peter Allen or Truman Capote? Actually he is none of these. In fact he is not even gay. It is some guy with a really bad case of psoriasis who attracts lots of hot Latin chicks via the Revolutionary Leader shtick. The guy with the lousy skin is none other than terrorist leader Abimael Guzman of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas. Oops! I mean it is El Presidente Ezequiel as he is called in the movie but we know it is really Guzman and the unnamed country is Peru. The Dancer Upstairs was directed by actor John Malkovich and he did a pretty good job in his first stint in the director's seat. Not all actors can make the transition to directorial duties. A case in point was John Wayne. Yeah, I know Wayne starred in some stinkers such as the infamous The Conqueror but overall Wayne, despite his detractors, was a damn good actor although he had those unfortunate right-wing tendencies that my friends and I frown upon. After all, The Searchers was probably the best Western ever made, rivaled only by Stagecoach which the Duke also starred in. However, when Wayne switched to directing duties things went awry. Take the first flick he directed, The Alamo. When Wayne merely acted in a movie he would relax between takes and drink whiskey and play poker with Ward Bond or John Ford. Making movies in such circumstances was fun. On the set of The Alamo Wayne was a nervous wreck. He chain-smoked cigarettes by lighting up one with the tip of another as it was burning down. Was it any wonder that Wayne got "The Big C" soon after production ended on The Alamo? Not only did Wayne's health deteriorate during the filming of The Alamo but he had problems getting along with the crew. Gone was all the joking and drinking between takes to be replaced by a surly John Wayne approaching a nervous breakdown over the rising production costs he was facing. Wayne even came close to getting into a fistfight with co-star Richard Widmark. Too bad John Wayne is dead because I would really love to ask him why in hell he cast Frankie Avalon as a Tennessee frontiersman named Smitty. Avalon came off as the most urban looking and sounding frontiersman in history. No matter how many times I see The Alamo, I can't keep the image of Smitty, with his Frankie Avalon South Philly haircut underneath his coonskin cap, out of my mind. When I see the Mexicans storming the Alamo, I think Frankie Avalon haircut. When I see Jim Bowie fighting with his famous knife, I think Frankie Avalon haircut. When I see Davy Crockett's last stand, I think Frankie Avalon haircut. As far as I am concerned the Alamo and Frankie Avalon's haircut are now forever linked because of the Duke's incredibly lousy casting decision. As we see, making the switch from actor to director isn't always so easy so kudos to John Malkovich for making the transition with relative ease. Although The Dancer Upstairs was far from perfect, it was a damn good first effort by Malkovich. The choice of Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the soft-spoken incorruptible police inspector, Agostin Rejas, was a good casting decision. Bardem's acting was really superb. My only problem with Bardem is the fact that this European-looking actor was portraying a character that was part Indian. This disparity was highlighted when inspector Rejas was ordered to go out into the countryside to mix in with the general population in order to find out information about Presidente Ezequiel. I didn't know whether I was watching a drama or a comedy while watching the very European and refined Bardem reclining in the back of a pickup truck packed with indigenous Indians and "casually" asking questions about El Presidente Ezequiel and his group. Of course, Bardem looked no more out of place than Arnold Schwarzenegger infiltrating a Columbian guerrilla camp in Collateral Damage. Remember that? Of course, since it was an Ahnold movie, he wiped out half the guerrillas in a dazzling display of pyrotechnics. Even though The Dancer Upstairs was a thriller involving guerrillas, there is very little such pyrotechnic feats in this movie. The biggest such display (other than the frequent fireworks which the guerrillas used to send signals) was during an audience participation event during a theatrical play. Several audience members were called to the stage by the actors. Once the audience members were carefully seated on the stage, they were shot all at once by the actors. Of course, the rest of the audience just sat there admiring the "performance." What they didn't realize was that the actors were really guerrillas and that the participating audience members were NOT pretending to be shot. They really were shot. So the next time you are in a theater and asked to participate in a performance, better think twice. The best thing about The Dancer Upstairs was its unglamorous portrayal of the police work involved in detecting the hideout of El Presidente Ezequiel. An example was gathering all of the garbage in a neighborhood and then carefully sifting through the smelly mess. Think you'll ever see Ahnold picking through a huge pile of stinking garbage? No way. But it was this method that did yield results when empty tubes of bad skin salve prescribed to El Presidente Ezequiel were discovered. Unfortunately for Rejas it turned out that Ezequiel was hiding just upstairs from where his almost girlfriend, a ballet teacher, lived. I say "almost girlfriend" because although Rejas has the hots for his daughter's ballet teacher, he never even gets close to banging her. A James Bond he isn't. The one guy who seemed to be getting a lot of nookie in this movie (although the sex is never actually seen on the screen) was the guerrilla leader Ezequiel. This I found even less credible than the European looking Rejas trying to pass himself off as an Indian. Not only did Ezequiel get lots of hot chicks, he even got them to act as his fanatical followers in guerrilla warfare. One such woman was even a magazine fashion model. Have you ever talked to fashion models? They have absolutely NO INTEREST in politics (or almost everything else). Models are only interested in themselves. If you've ever seen radical women guerrilla fighters in real life, they are almost all ugly as hell. And yet most of Ezequiel's female followers looked like Latina versions of Britney Spears. As we can see, The Dancer Upstairs was very uneven in the credibility department. Scenes of dull but realistic police work contrasted sharply with shots of Ezequiel's fashion model female followers wreaking havoc on Peru while screaming, "VIVA EL PRESIDENTE EZEQUIEL!" Overall I really liked The Dancer Upstairs despite a couple of lapses in realism plus its unfortunate title which is sure to keep audiences away in droves. Therefore, on my Chad Rating Scale of one to ten chads with ten chads being best, I give The Dancer Upstairs eight chads. This is the NEW Al Gore keepin' it real with this review and leaving you with this humble thought . . . VIVA EL PRESIDENTE GORE!!! P.J. Gladnick may be reached at pjglad@gate.net. Other articles by P.J. may be found in the Writer Index. |