Moviefone Copyright 2011, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. Moviefone Good old fashioned elbow grease. The Killing of John Lennon, no one asked me the inevitable follow-up question: "What is it about?" It's pretty obvious that the title gives a good indication of what the movie's plot was going to be. But what I found is a movie that starts out as a riveting trip inside the mind of a killer, but ends up being a drawn-out history lesson that needs some re-editing, for more reasons than just length.

In the movie, written and directed by veteran British filmmaker Andrew Piddington, we follow Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman, as he travels from Honolulu to New York, intent on killing a man who he felt was a "phony." Chapman's life in Hawaii isn't great -- while he seems happily married, he has a floozy mom and no seeming direction in his life -- and his psychosis isn't helping; in fact, it's making him withdraw from society. He becomes fascinated with desperate characters and starts to think he's the second coming of Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye. He reads about Lennon's wealth and determines that he needs to kill the former Beatle. The rest of the movie shows his trips to New York to stalk the former Beatle in front of his home at the Dakota, the act, and the aftermath.

Jonas Ball, in his first movie role, plays Chapman in all his massive-aviator-glasses glory, playing the calculating madman as a combination of Napoleon Dynamite and Travis Bickle. He shows Chapman to be as creepily human as the next person in most of the narrative scenes, while in scenes that are more stream-of-consciousness, he effectively conveys the internal meltdown an already unstable Chapman was experiencing.

Piddington, in the Q&A after the movie, said he studied news reports from the time period as well as depositions and other legal reports collected in the conspiracy book Who Killed John Lennon? in order to write the movie (he doesn't believe in the conspiracy, but was impressed with the book's treasure trove of information). He claims that no event made it into the screenplay that wasn't corroborated from three different sources. Indeed, the scenes leading up to and including the killing are well-done, taking the viewer inside Chapman's head and building tension toward an event that everyone knows is coming. He effectively uses home-movie flashbacks and other devices to show what Chapman's thinking at a particular time.

Unfortunately, after the killing is where the movie gets bogged down. We see Chapman give interviews, we see him tell people that he performed the murder in order to promote Catcher, we even see him get a prison exorcism. After the climax of Lennon's murder, the half-hour or so of the aftermath just feels like a long wrap-up. Also, we leave Chapman's head through much of this portion of the film, seeing him from the outside instead of the inside. It makes it feel like there's two different movies, and the product of the two of them together is about twenty minutes too long.

Another big problem with the film is some glaring anachronisms in the scenes where Chapman walks around New York. I was going to harp on this more, but Piddington acknowledged that this was an early cut of the movie; some of the street scenes, which he couldn't really do much about during filming due to budgetary reasons, seemed more glaringly anachronistic on screen than he initially thought during the editing process. It really did look like a lot of the scenes were filmed with no permits on open streets; the film takes place in 1980, yet we see modern cars and street signs throughout.

He may be able to fix some of those scenes digitally, but he's going to have to cut out some of the Times Square scenes in the movie completely; the 2007 version of Times Square Chapman stands is in no way close to the Times Square the real Chapman would have stood in twenty-seven years ago. Instead of big neon banners and Jumbotrons, he would have been standing under peep show signs and grindhouse theater marquees. There's no amount of digital manipulation he could do to fix that.

The anachronisms do take you out of the movie's reality for a bit, but the overall length is really what grinds the viewer down. I'll be curious to see if Piddington's next cut of The Killing of John Lennon is shorter with less obvious mistakes in the period setting. If it is, he'll have one of the best movies of the year. As it is, it's still a worthy viewing, just one that would be midway down your Netflix list.]]> Sat, 5 May 2007 17:51:20 EDT 47751 Before I went to my Friday screening, I decided to stop at the Tribeca/ASCAP Music Lounge. Wendy wrote about the vibe there earlier in the week, and Friday's final edition was no different. It was relaxed, social, and -- unlike most club shows I've been to in the last few years -- brightly lit and easy to get around (must be my middle age creeping in).

Anyway, I wanted to post about it to show you these grainy pictures I took with my cell phone. They're of singer-songwriter Ben Lee, who opened Friday's show, standing on top of the Canal Room's bar, leading the already large crowd in a sing-along. Lee has collaborated with fellow troubadours (and Bens) Ben Folds and Ben Kweller, and his songs have been heard on shows like Grey's Anatomy and Weeds. He had a few goofy songs in his set, like "What Would Jay-Z Do?" and a few others, and the crowd was receptive. But for his finale, he unplugged his acoustic (causing a loud pop that probably meant his amp blew a fuse), hopped on the bar, and asked the crowd to join him.

"It's 4:00 in the afternoon and you're drinking, so there's no shame in your singing along," he said.

Sure enough, when he got to the refrain of his song, "we're all in this together," just about everyone joined him. It was a rousing end to a fun set. I wanted to see more, but I had to hotfoot it downtown to see The Killing of John Lennon at Pace University. But I'm sure none of the other acts used the bar as an alternate stage. Here's another pic:



]]> Sat, 5 May 2007 16:58:15 EDT 47748 Chasing 3000, and I was rewarded for my patience.

I've never been much for family films, but as a baseball fan, this story intrigued me. Not many people outside of baseball fandom know much about Roberto Clemente, even though he was arguably among the best to ever play the game. He was a true five-tool player who not only became a legend around Pittsburgh (he played for the Pirates), but also become known as a humanitarian; a few months after getting his 3000th hit on the last day of the 1972 season, he died in a plane crash while transporting relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. This film, directed by Greg Lanesey from an original story by Bill Mikita, pays loving tribute to Clemente via passages from his autobiography and archival footage from late in his career.

But this is mostly a story of two brothers and a road trip neither would forget. Mickey (Trevor Morgan) and Roger (Rory Culkin) are children of Pittsburgh and Clemente admirers. But halfway through the 1972 season, their mother (Lauren Holly - has she gotten to the "mom roles" stage of her career already?) moves them out to Los Angeles so Roger, who has respiratory problems brought on by muscular dystrophy, won't get sick as much. Mickey especially feels out of sorts; he's slumping on his high school baseball team and feels that he's disappearing within his own family. So, while the mother is away on a business trip he decides to drive back to Pittsburgh during the last week of the baseball season, hoping to witness Clemente's 3000th hit in person. Despite a worsening cough, Roger decides to join them.

Of course, as in most road movies, the trip doesn't go smoothly. And that's where most movies like this are made or broken: are the adventures the two people go through plausible and entertaining, and how does the relationship between the "buddies" on the trip help carry them through? This movie succeeds on both points. Yes, there are a few points along the journey that would make an adult roll their eyes -- namely the motorcycle gang with a heart of gold -- but the kids that were in the audience seemed engaged with the story, which is the movie's aim. But there is an easygoing chemistry between Morgan and Culkin that makes you really believe that they're brothers. Culkin should be especially commended for playing a physically difficult role; he effectively conveys both the emotional difficulty and stoic determination a kid who's in his condition -- Roger learns that most people with his form of MD don't graduate high school -- usually displays, just trying to live his life as normally as possible.

The movie has plenty of good performances, especially M. Emmet Walsh as nutty farmer, Tania Raymonde as a Reds-hat-wearing runaway, and Seymour Cassel as the brothers' Old World grandfather back in Pittsburgh.

Ray Liotta plays a grown-up version of Mickey in present-day segments that wrap around the story, and in the Q&A after the screening, both Lanesey and Mikita acknowledged that Liotta's interest in the project helped get the movie a bigger budget. "The money without Liotta was a lot different than the money with Liotta," said Lanesey. It allowed them to afford the license fees Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association charged for the archival footage and imagery of Clemente. There were also over 200 special effects, so the period aspect of the movie could be preserved; they're fairly successful, as I only spotted one or two minor anachronistic details. According to Lanesey, both MLB and the Clemente family were very happy with the resulting product.

Mikita wrote the story back in 1999, based on the love he and his brother Steve, who has the same rare form of MD, had for Clemente and the Pirates. They took a similar trip from their home in Steubenville, Ohio to Pittsburgh to see Clemente play, and during the rewrite stage, the story became a cross-country trip. According to Mikita, his brother is a medical miracle, the only person with his form of MD to survive into his fifties. Jay Karnes of The Shield plays the adult version of Roger in the movie, and he called up Steve and talked to him to get an idea of how he lives now. It comes through in his brief performance; he may only be able to move a finger, but he's just happy to still be alive and see the Pirates at their new home in PNC Park (I've been there; it's my favorite ballpark in the country and deserved the lush cinematic treatment Lanesey gave it).

Chasing 3000 is one of the rare family movies that effectively engages both adults and kids. One warning for parents: there's more swearing than I expected in a movie like this. While the script takes pains to insert curse substitutes like "jagoff," the s-word seems to be liberally sprinkled through the movie. It's nothing that a ten year old (the recommended minimum age the festival has for this movie) hasn't heard before, and it gives the movie a more realistic feel. But any parent thinking there will be nothing more severe than a random "damn" or "hell" in this flick will be in for a surprise.

The entire premiere of Chasing 3000 was an enjoyable experience: a fine movie, a creative team passionate about the story, and fairly well-behaved kids. It was a good way to end a long day at Tribeca.

For more HuffPost coverage of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, go here.

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