No “Snide Remarks” today, kids, I’m sorry to inform you. I didn’t have enough time this week to develop anything good. Back next week, though.
In the meantime, enjoy this mugshot of actor Rip Torn, taken when he was arrested for drunken driving last Monday afternoon.
This Friday movie round-up thing is becoming obsolete what with the podcast and all, but I suppose it’s still a handy place to glance at this week’s new titles.
“Apocalypto” is a crazy, bloody adventure from America’s favorite raging alcoholic Jew-hater.
“Blood Diamond” makes you feel guilty for buying diamonds, though it does so with solid acting and interesting characters.
“The Holiday” is a romantic comedy in which Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet trade houses and each fall for a local guy.
“Unaccompanied Minors” is about kids stuck in an airport on Christmas Eve. Hilarity ensues.
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Thanks for listening! Enjoy your weekend of movie-going and Christmas shopping and whatnot.
Like most Christmas vacations, “The Holiday” is way too long and a little too cutesy. I’m convinced no formulaic romantic comedy needs to be over 100 minutes, let alone over 130, and surely the adorability of Jack Black diminishes with each successive viewing of him. Yet Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz are the stars, in material tailor-made for them — Winslet’s unorthodox beauty and vulnerability, Diaz’s goofy energy — and they go a long way toward making it work.
It’s from the pastel-colored, softer-side-of-Sears, what-women-want mind of Nancy Meyers, writer-director of “Something’s Gotta Give” and director of, um, “What Women Want.” It gives us two female protagonists with different relationship problems, thus giving female audience members twice as many possible entry points into the story: Amanda (Diaz) had a good boyfriend who cheated on her and got kicked to the curb, sending Amanda into a fit of self-consciousness and righteous indignation; Iris (Winslet) had a lengthy affair with a cad who is now engaged to be married, yet Iris cannot seem to extricate herself from him, no matter how hard she tries.
Amanda lives in L.A., where she edits movie trailers for a living. Amusingly, she keeps imagining what the trailer for her life would sound like, and she doesn’t like it. Iris is a newspaper reporter in Surrey, England, writing obituaries about people whose lives were more full than hers is. Both in need of an escape for their Christmas vacations, Amanda and Iris meet online and swap houses for two weeks.
As Cupid would have it, while the women are trying to get away from men, they each find a local man to fall in love with. Amanda, staying at Iris’ cozy rural cottage, meets Iris’ rakish brother Graham (Jude Law). Iris, at Amanda’s palatial Hollywood home, connects with Miles (Jack Black), a film-score composer who is friends with Amanda’s ex.
If you have noticed that there doesn’t seem to be much of a conflict anywhere in that plot description, then you are one step ahead of Nancy Meyers. The usual romantic-comedy tropes, where the girl lies to the guy about her background/name/job/etc. and is eventually found out, or where the guy and girl hate each other at first, are refreshingly absent. Believe me, I applaud the idea of making a romantic-comedy that does not rely entirely on cliched conflicts. But there needs to be SOME kind of complication.
The best “The Holiday” can muster is the fact that, love or no love, Amanda and Iris both have to return home at some point. Yet even this pseudo-conflict isn’t broached until late in the game, and its resolution is a foregone conclusion.
Iris spends a lot of time with Amanda’s next-door neighbor, an old man named Arthur (Eli Wallach) who was once a screenwriter and is now doddering and forgetful. Their scenes are immensely charming but naggingly irrelevant. It might be interesting to have Iris regain her self-confidence through a non-romantic relationship such as this, but the film gives her Arthur AND a new love interest. She doesn’t need both, and neither does the movie.
The “Shrek” films aside, this is the most likable and funny that Cameron Diaz has been in years. She starts off with some over-the-top fuming and histrionics, but once she settles down, she’s a relatable neurotic mess, and good with the comedy, too. Likewise, Kate Winslet — in her fourth film this year! — is sympathetic, a smart woman who has been unwise in love but who earns our affections, not our judgments.
If the film weren’t so long — more importantly, if it didn’t FEEL so long — I’d be able to give it a more glowing recommendation. It has some laughs, and Winslet’s character is particularly endearing. But it’s too bloated and precious the way it is, a little too adorable even for this adorable time of year.
Mix “The Breakfast Club” with “Home Alone” and you get “Unaccompanied Minors,” an agreeable, not-too-dumb kids’ comedy about a handful of 12-year-olds stranded by a blizzard at an airport on Christmas Eve. It’s a genius move, really: The target audience is too young to remember “Home Alone,” let alone “The Breakfast Club,” so the material might as well be brand-new!
The airport is the fictional Hoover International, set in an unnamed Midwestern state. (The film was shot in Salt Lake City, making it fun for a former Salt Laker such as myself to identify the sites used — the central library and the Salt Palace, mainly.) It’s the layover spot for thousands of last-minute travelers, including quite a few unaccompanied minors — kids flying without a parent or guardian, in layman’s terms. When the weather grounds all the flights, it’s up to the crusty airport manager, Oliver (Lewis Black, always a good choice for a character described as “crusty”), to keep the UMs safe and supervised.
Most of UMs are whisked away to a nearby hotel for the night, but several had escaped the confines of the UM room at the airport (which looks like a daycare center gone mad) when the transport was made. Those several are our heroes: normal kid Spencer (Dyllan Christopher), rich pretty girl Grace (Gina Mantegna), rebel girl Donna (Quinn Shephard), nervous nerd Charlie (Tyler James Williams, star of TV’s “Everybody Hates Chris”), and silent weirdo Beef (Bret Kelly). Having missed the shuttle to the hotel, they’re now forced to stay in the unaccompanied minors room all night, supervised by a young, hapless airport employee named Zach (Wilmer Valderrama).
But there’s a problem: Spencer’s bratty little sister DID go to the hotel, and he can’t leave her alone! He promised their mom he’d take care of her! The hotel is apparently within easy walking distance of the airport, so Spencer and his new friends band together to escape from Zach and Oliver and make their way to it.
(You ask: If the hotel is so close, why can’t someone just drive the kids over to it? Why do they have to stay at the airport? Is it punishment for missing the shuttle? Shh! You ask too many questions!)
The screenplay, by Jacob Meszaros and Mya Stark (the first feature credit for both of them), is nothing special. The kids perpetrate schemes that are increasingly slapsticky and increasingly less believable, and the Christmas schmaltz gets played up a lot near the end. But hey, ’tis the season, right? Besides, the director is Paul Feig, creator of TV’s “Freaks & Geeks” and a regular director of “The Office” and “Arrested Development.” That explains why cast members from those shows pop up all over the place, as do several performers from “Kids in the Hall” and “The Daily Show.” That’s a lot of cool street cred for a formulaic tween comedy, and if Feig is working below his usual cleverness level here (you gotta pay the bills, after all), at least he and the kids seem to be having fun doing it.
This week’s lesson in good citizenship comes from “Blood Diamond,” the unsubtle film (with the unsubtle title) that is meant to make us think twice about buying diamonds. As one of the characters puts it, “People back home wouldn’t buy a ring if they knew it cost someone a hand.” But come on, what if the ring is really pretty and costs the requisite three months’ salary? What’s a girl to do?!
“An Inconvenient Truth” told us not to use so much gasoline, “Fast Food Nation” tried to guilt us into banishing hamburgers, and now diamonds are off the table, too. 2006 has indeed been a banner year for killjoy movies.
There is artistic merit in “Blood Diamond,” though, at least to some extent. Directed by Important Issues filmmaker Edward Zwick (“Glory,” “Courage Under Fire,” “The Last Samurai”), it spotlights the brutality of the “conflict diamond” trade without seeming gratuitous or exploitative, and provides some fairly compelling personal stories to give it dramatic weight (something “Fast Food Nation,” a similar agenda-oriented film, lacked).
It’s set in 1999, with the African nation of Sierra Leone in a state of civil war over its vastly lucrative diamond mines. A radical anti-government group called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) routinely invades villages to acquire new laborers for its diamond mining operations, an invaluable financial resource for its war efforts. They’ll force able-bodied men to work for them, brainwash children into becoming gun-toting terrorists, and kill or maim everybody else.
Since legitimate diamond companies won’t trade in gems with such a blood-soaked history, the RUF illegally transports them across the border into Liberia. (I won’t tell you how they’re smuggled, but the first thing you’ll need is a goat.) That way, the multi-billion-dollar corporations that sell diamonds to the public can do so with a clean conscience: “These diamonds didn’t come from Sierra Leone. They came from Liberia!” Plausible deniability helps everyone sleep better at night.
(All of this is as of 1999, by the way. Some things have changed since then, though conflict diamonds still account for 1 or 2 percent of the worldwide diamond trade.)
That’s the background, all of which is conveyed effectively in Charles Leavitt’s concise screenplay. The story involves Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a Sierra Leone man who is forced into the mining camp by the RUF while his wife and daughters flee and his son, Dia (Kagiso Kuypers), is recruited for training. He escapes from the camp during a government attack, but not before hiding a massive diamond whose finding he neglected to report to his taskmasters.
He and his valuable hidden stone come to the attention of Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Rhodesia-born smuggler and mercenary who longs to get off this continent for good, and Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a do-gooder American journalist who wants to open the world’s eyes to the travesty of the blood diamonds. Solomon wants to find his family and retrieve the diamond to keep it out of evil hands; Danny wants to sell the diamond for serious cash; and Maddy wants to use it as bait to catch one of the hypocritical diamond companies in the act of buying a gem they know is tainted. One stone, three purposes.
The movie finds drama in the conflicting personalities of Solomon and Danny. Solomon is an honest, decent man who can barely find the wherewithal to lie even when his life depends on it, while Danny will say or do anything if it furthers his goals. There’s a nice arc for Danny as he gains some measure of redemption over the course of the film, and DiCaprio acquits himself well enough, even handling the white-African accent better than the film’s advertisements would lead you to believe.
Hounsou, best known for “Amistad” and “In America” (for which he was Oscar-nominated), brings his characteristic intensity to the role of Solomon. Hounsou tends to play men with dignity and gravitas, wounded by the stings of fate but stoic in the face of adversity. “Blood Diamond” has him cry out in anguish a few too many times, I think — one such jarring outburst goes a long way — but it’s an earnest, solid performance.
The relationship between Danny and Maddy is underdeveloped and unnecessary, the fine acting of Jennifer Connelly notwithstanding. Her character plays a vital role in the film’s story, though, highlighting the futility of media exposure when it comes to crises like these. You can wring your hands over the plight of these poor villagers, and maybe you’ll even send a check to some humanitarian organization. But what good will it really do?
That bleak fact renders the film something of a wash. Our eyes are opened to the problem, but what are we supposed to do about it? The only way to be absolutely certain that your diamond didn’t come at the cost of someone’s life is to stop buying diamonds altogether — yet that would have a catastrophic impact on a lot of legitimate (and fragile) world economies. Not all lessons in good citizenship are pleasant, I guess.
“Apocalypto” is a crazy film. It is the work of a crazy person, a raving lunatic whose name is Mel Gibson. Even without his Jew-bashing escapades earlier this year — and honestly, is it possible to TOTALLY disregard that when viewing his work now? — Gibson’s latest would still seem bizarre, almost unique in its mixture of over-the-top bloodletting, ambitious storytelling, and lowbrow slapstick humor.
Slapstick humor? In an action-oriented tale of survival in 15th-century America? How does THAT fit? Well, it doesn’t, really, but that’s part of Gibson’s fascinatingly insane mentality. Gibson likes Three Stooges buffoonery and bawdy sex jokes, and thus so do the Mayans in his movie.
Mel is fond of the violence, too, as his two most recent directorial works — “Braveheart” and “The Passion of the Christ” — have amply demonstrated. Not just violence, either, but torturous, graphic violence, performed by malicious villains who want to see their victims suffer. “Apocalypto” is chockablock with such mayhem, though Gibson is occasionally restrained in the way he shows it, often cutting away rather than depicting it unflinchingly. Still, though: plenty of violence. Make no mistake. In one laughably crude shot, we see things from the point of view of a head that has just been severed and is bouncing away.
Performed in the Mayan tongue (with English subtitles) by mostly non-professional actors, the story’s hero is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young husband and hunter whose wife (Dalia Hernandez) is pregnant with their second child. When their village is ravaged by another tribe, Jaguar Paw hides the missus and their son in a pit and rejoins the fight, only to be captured with his fellow men and dragged back to the opposing tribe’s compound of temples and pyramids, where ritual sacrifices are on the agenda.
The second half of the film has sparse dialogue and focuses on a “Most Dangerous Game”-style hunt through the forest, with Jaguar Paw attempting single-handedly to defeat his enemies and save his family like a pre-Columbian Rambo. These scenes are thrillingly shot, just as the temple sequence is nightmarish and gory, and the ravage of the village is intense and unsettling. No question, it’s an entertaining motion picture, an expensive production with cheap sensibilities (more violence = more fun) that manages to be both artsy-fartsy and just fartsy.
So what’s the point? Who knows. There are hints of parallels to modern times, vague suggestions of things that might have caused the Mayan decline, and some strange sexual metaphors in the playful early scenes involving one of Jaguar Paw’s hapless tribesmen. The violence is repellant, and it’s hard not to become disgusted with Gibson’s arrogance and megalomania: It’s his money, and he’ll by-gum make this historical epic as vulgar and whacked-out as he wants. I say let him. It’s fascinating to see what a millionaire does with his money when he doesn’t care what people think anymore.
“Family Law” is proof that America has not cornered the market on angsty comedy-dramas about twentysomethings who don’t know what to do about adulthood. The film is from Argentina and stars South American actors, but it could just as easily be from Hollywood and star Zach Braff.
It’s the story of Ariel Perelman (Daniel Hendler), a Buenos Aires law professor living in the shadow of his father. Perelman Senior (Arturo Goetz) is a local defender beloved by one and all for his decency, hard work, and general good-naturedness. He demonstrates real concern for his clients. He smiles as he walks down the street, he bounces down the courthouse steps, he is a man in harmony with the world. Wherever he goes, there’s a free lunch or a warm handshake waiting for him.
Those are big shoes to fill, and Perelman Junior (everyone calls him “Perelman,” including his wife) gave up trying years ago. The original plan was for him to become his father’s law partner. Instead he became a professor, which is nice, because one of his students, Sandra (Julieta Diaz), a Pilates instructor, eventually became his wife. They have a little boy named Gaston (Eloy Burman), 3 years old and cute as the dickens. Will Perelman and Gaston’s relationship be like Perelman and Perelman’s is?
That’s the question plaguing Perelman Junior, and I have to say I’d be more interested if it were more clear just what his relationship with his father is. Writer/director Daniel Burman gives us brief glimpses into it — Senior used to take Junior to court, never to the zoo or the park; Junior forgets Senior’s birthday; they are warm and cordial to one another, though — but a fully developed picture never emerges. Does he want to be more like his father? Less like him? Hendler’s performance suggests some of both, a little envy here, a little resentment there, but nothing concrete.
One thing Hendler conveys well, though, is a very funny sense of apathy. With just a look he can amusingly show his disdain for Gaston’s daycare center’s frivolous activities, for the scantily dressed babysitter his wife hires, for the attractive men Sandra comes in contact with as a Pilates instructor.
Overall, it’s a nice film, offering a few smiles and very likable performances by the two Perelmans. It could stand to have its themes fleshed out a little more, maybe tone up some of the flabbier parts, a little nip and tuck here and there. But as far as movies about young people grappling with adulthood go, it’s not bad.
As regular readers will recall, this feature began after I was inexplicably pestered by Raven-Symone fans who wanted her e-mail address, despite there being no earthly reason to think I would have it. Weary of them, I finally registered a fake address — symone.raven@gmail.com — posted it here, and CLEARLY STATED it was not hers. I assumed people would ignore that disclaimer and write to it anyway, and how right I was.
But one unexpected side effect of publishing those letters here has been that now, when Raven-Symone’s stupid fans stumble across these blog entries, they’ve started writing messages to her and posting them as comments. That’s right: At the end of the blog entries mocking people who write fan letters that the celebrity will never, ever read, people are posting comments directed to that same person. Like the e-mail address was phony, but for sure this blog is the REAL way to get in touch with Raven-Symone.
(By the way, those comments get deleted by the moderators, not posted. That’s why you don’t see them, and why writing a fake “funny” one in the hopes of getting it posted won’t work.)
Anyway, here’s another big steamin’ batch of illiteracy.
Two more poems written by Utahns in the days after 9/11, submitted (unsolicited) to the newspaper I was working for at the time.
By the way, we only have two more editions of this feature before the well runs dry. So those who don’t like it only have to be forced at gunpoint to read it twice more after this.
[Note: This poem was apparently meant to be a song, as the word “ballad” in the title suggests. Conveniently, I note that it can be sung to the tune of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. Sing away!]
A bright blue Indian summer morn.
An unexpected jolt.
Hundreds instantly massacred
On day of thunderbolt.
Workers in the tower’s twin
Who gaped in disbelief,
Minutes later too were hit
That day of horror and grief.
By radio and TV show
The news was quickly spread.
The world was left incredulous.
A day for feeling dread.
And still the killing wasn’t done.
Before our nations’ eyes
The Pentagon was next attacked
That day of sad surprise.
Back to the scene in Manhattan,
Some folks were stuck in rooms
of towers with tops obscured by smoke.
That day of shadows and gloom.
And some, choosing not to face the fire,
Jumped to their deaths in fright.
People screamed or averted their eyes.
A day of hideous sights.
But no, the worst wasn’t finished yet.
South Tower did collapse
As people fled down crowded steps.
Oh, day to flabbergast!
Of those on the outskirts looking on,
Many met with the same tragic fate.
Police and firemen who rushed in.
Oh, day to commiserate.
And rendering hope was Father “Mike”,
Unvanquished by helplessness,
Who died will giving a brother last rites.
Oh, day of selflessness.
In the midst of rubble and ash and flame
And calls to evacuate,
The northern tower came crumbling down
On day of hasty escape.
As people spilled out onto the streets,
Their lungs filled with debris,
They sobbed for loves most likely lost.
A day of melancholy.
Meanwhile were martyrs in nearby skies.
We heard with sympathy
How Flight 93 had crashed on ground
On day of infamy.
But striking in difference from other events,
Though all were senselessness,
Strong acts of heroics were doubtless employed
That day of defenselessness.
The terror receded. Our president spoke.
We listened to what he would say.
From home and abroad he rallied support
On a day to ponder and pray.
A might giant has been awoke.
And its hand is beckoning.
Faceless cowards cannot hide long
On this daybreak of reckoning.
* * * * *
[This one’s clearly meant to be a song, too, with a chorus and even a bridge. I don’t know what tune it can be sung to, though. Any suggestions?]
You show your hatred
You give us pain
But we always find a way to love again
You cause destruction
You tear apart
But you’re never gonna stop our beating heart
Cause America
Is built on Love
And the heart of this land will never fail
When all is said and done
We will still be #1
Because Love will always prevail
We’ve been scarred
By you before
And I’m sure America will see some more.
But your hatred
Can not compare
With the love your gonna see this nation share
‘Cause America
Is built on Love
And the heart of this land will never fail
When all is said and done
We will still be #1
Because Love will always prevail
Try to tear us apart and watch us pull together
America’s heart will keep beating forever
Cause America
Is built on Love
And the heart of this land will never fail
When all is said and done
We will still be #1
Because Love will always prevail
This is one of the most baffling angry letters I’ve ever received, and an alarming indictment of our education system. I literally had to read it three times before I could figure out what it meant.
First, the e-mail’s subject line: i thought of little man was wrong!!!
And then the e-mail:
I thought Little Man was pretty funny and well put together.
But I thought your opinion was stupid and unreasonable , because your opinion about scary movies was “While I found myself laughing at quite a bit of “Scary Movie” which I didn’t it was a movies thrown with ignorant comments and scenes. I won’t lie “Little Man” had the same scene with a little ignorants to, but it was well put together.
Now, if the person who wrote this e-mail (“Martha Walker,” according to her return address) were a sentient human being with even modest language skills, here is what she would have written. At least, this is my best guess at an interpretation:
“I thought ‘Little Man’ was pretty funny and well put-together. Your opinions are invalid to me because you liked ‘Scary Movie’ (from the same writers and director as ‘Little Man’), saying in your review, ‘I found myself laughing at quite a bit of “Scary Movie.”‘ I thought ‘Scary Movie’ had a lot of ignorant comments and scenes. [I didn’t know how to translate that.] I admit, ‘Little Man’ had a bit of that, too, but overall it was good.”
I am glad we live in the Internet age. Fifteen years ago, this person could have communicated with me only by writing a letter, and surely that process — writing something by hand, addressing an envelope, mailing it, etc. — would have been beyond her capabilities.
Do you like “Snide Remarks”? Sure, we all do. But sometimes actually READING it can be such a chore. Your eyes have to scan across the page, and then then neurons have to send signals to the brain to interpret the meaning of the letters and symbols and translate them into sentences. Whew! Isn’t there an easier way?
There is now, Hector! Today begins the new “Snide Remarks” podcast, a feature in which I read the text of each week’s column out loud for you, thus saving the wear and tear on your eyes. I’ve always said that if I could, I would come to everyone’s house and just read the column to them. And now I believe that prophecy is being fulfilled. We truly live in a blessed era.
Today’s episode, featuring today’s column, can be heard right here:
To subscribe on iTunes, give it the URL indicated on the right-hand side of this page, where it says “Snide Remarks” Podcast Feed.
Thank you in advance for listening! If you notice any awkward pauses in my delivery, it’s where I was leaving space for laughter. Please accommodate me by laughing at those points.
One of the best ways to get my attention is to be a crazy person standing on the street corner handing out fliers and shouting at people about being saved. No matter how busy I am, I will always pause to take some of your reading material and peruse its contents.
It was by this method that I recently acquired an item in the shape of a piece of paper money, only larger. On the front, it was made to look more or less like a $10,000 bill, with the Mona Lisa’s head in the middle. (When was SHE president?!) On the back, it says this:
“$10,000 DOLLAR OFFER”
At that point, my attention to the flier became undivided.
Then it says this:
“One of the most amazing claims of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and she then became the most important of the apostles. If this is true, then the New Testament cannot be trusted, and its entire inspiration is in question.”
I agree that it’s good to start your sermon with some logical fallacies and hysterical proclamations. But if you always start with, “THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!,” your congregation gets wise to you after a while, so it’s important to vary it up. They’ve done a good job of that here.
First of all, I don’t think anyone, even people who think “The Da Vinci Code” is the best book they’ve ever read (i.e., people who haven’t read any other books since high school), believe it is a work of non-fiction. Yes, it mixes some true history with some speculation and flat-out imagination, but it is ultimately just a novel. I think even the stupidest of readers understand that it is not meant to supersede the Bible.
But more to the point, let’s say Jesus DID marry Mary Magdalene and that she DID become an important adviser to him. So what? Why would that render the New Testament untrustworthy? The New Testament doesn’t say he DIDN’T marry her. It doesn’t say anything about it.
Now, if the Bible said, “And lo, verily, the mother of Jesus said: Jesus, why is it thou art now in thy thirties yet thou hast not married? What is wrong with that lovely Magdalene girl? Why dost thou not marry her? And Jesus sayeth unto her: Woman, the day I am wed to Mary Magdalene is the day I eat a pork chop wrapped in bacon, for verily, I shall never marry her nor any other woman, for lo, that is how I roll” — well, then yes, we’d have a problem if it turned out he actually did marry her. Then we’d have reason to call the New Testament’s believability into question. But since the Bible is silent on the matter of Jesus’ marital status, I think we’re OK.
Then the flier goes on for a while with the usual stuff about being born again and accepting God and so forth, none of which has anything to do with “The Da Vinci Code” or the $10,000. Then it comes back to the subject by saying if you “believe the fantasies of ‘The Da Vinci Code'” instead of the Bible, you’ll go to hell. Which, again, I don’t think is a problem, since people don’t generally take novels to be doctrinal, and since the book doesn’t teach much that contradicts the Bible anyway, unless the Bible forbids outrageous plot devices and weak characterizations.
And then finally, at the very end, there’s this: “By the way, if you want to cash in on the $10,000 offer, go to www.TenThousandDollarOffer.com.”
Grr! Why didn’t you say that to begin with?! You made me read all this claptrap about “The Da Vinci Code” for nothing! WHY DO YOU TAUNT ME, FLIER?!
The Web site is where it gets good. “$10,000 to anyone who has kept the Ten Commandments,” it proclaims!
It continues:
“This is a legitimate offer. If you have kept the Ten Commandments, we will give you $10,000 cash. This is a legally binding contract. In other words, if you can prove you haven’t violated the Ten Commandments, we are legally obligated to give you $10,000.”
Awesome! I could totally use $10,000. And all I have to do is prove I haven’t worshipped any graven images or committed adultery? Not a problem!
So I took the test. It starts with the 10th commandment and works its way backward. “You shall not covet. Have you ever desired something that belonged to someone else?” You check yes or no and continue.
Never mind that “covet” doesn’t just mean to WANT something. I mean, everyone WANTS things, and there’s nothing sinful about it. To covet something means to want it enviously or inordinately or jealously. But I can see why the Web site has taken this exceptionally narrow view. They have to make it harder to collect the $10,000!
Nonetheless, I checked “no,” indicating I had never coveted.
I went through the rest of the questions. Most of them also take very narrow views — e.g., on “thou shalt not commit adultery,” we are reminded that even lusting after someone in your heart counts as adultery. (Read: Sexual desire is evil.) In each case, whether it was true or not, I answered that I had always obeyed the commandment.
Commandment #1 turned out to be the most severe. “You shall have no other gods before Me. That means that God should be first in your affections. Have you always loved God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength? Have you loved Him to a point where all your other affections (for your mom, dad, brothers, sister and you [sic] own life) seemed like hatred compared to the love you have for the One who gave those loved ones and your life to you?”
I have to love God so much that all my other affections seem like HATE in comparison?! Holy crap! That is some hardcore doctrine there, and a rather alarming exaggeration of anything the Bible actually says about it. But still, I answered that indeed, I am so fond of God that by comparison, the sight of my own mother makes me vomit with revulsion.
I submitted all my answers and eagerly awaited the Web site’s instructions on how to collect my $10,000. Boy, did I ever have some plans for that money! But then it took me to a page that said this:
“Perhaps you said that you have kept the first of the Ten Commandments [to have no other gods before God], but the Bible says, ‘There is none that seeks after God’ (Romans 3:11). So no one has kept that Commandment. So one of you is lying — either you or God.”
Busted! The Romans verse says that all humans are imperfect; we all sin. By taking that to mean that everyone puts other gods before Him and thus everyone violates the first of the Ten Commandments, the people at this Web site have ensured that NO ONE can collect the $10,000! Sneaky! And, I have to say, a little dishonest and thus a violation of the ninth commandment. SEE YOU IN HELL, LIARS!!
I don’t know who you are. When people click an Amazon link from this site and subsequently buy something, I get a small kickback. I know what items were purchased, but I have no way of knowing who bought them.
The commission percentage is usually around 6.5 percent. So on a typical DVD, for example, I make maybe a dollar.
But you, pencil-buyer, you needed some Tri-Conderoga Triangular Pencils, No.2, 12/BX. I don’t know what this is. Some sort of pencil, obviously, but one that costs $6.25 for a box of 12. That’s a lot per pencil. Perhaps the pencils have magical powers. Whatever the case, you bought 18 boxes, and I earned a total of $7.28 on the deal, making it most profitable single purchase of the quarter. For this I thank you.
Hey! This bandwagon just pulled up outside my house, and I figured I might as well jump on it! At the bottom of this post is a link to the very first edition of the “In the Dark” movie review podcast!
That’s right, kids, a podcast, just like all the hipsters and fancy-pantses are doing. I’m still sorting out what the content of each Friday’s ‘cast will be, but essentially, it will be an audio version of “In the Dark,” with reviews of the new films and stuff like that.
This first one is 13 minutes long, and it feels too long to me. I’ll probably work on that in the future. (Since I don’t listen to any podcasts regularly, I truly don’t know what a good length is.) I might also try to get some guests with me now and then, just so my voice isn’t the only one you hear. Let me know if you have other ideas for what you think the “In the Dark” podcast should contain.
Click on the link below to listen to this week’s edition. Also, if you click on “‘In the Dark’ Podcast Feed” in the right-hand column of this page, that’s the URL that you can use to subscribe to it in iTunes.
(P.S. Will there someday soon be a podcast of “Snide Remarks,” too? You never know….)
UPDATE: We’ve fixed the problem with the file size. It was huge before, and now it is smaller. Also, it’s now hosted on EricDSnider.com instead of some anonymous third-party site. Not that it matters to you, but still.
Three wide releases open today, this first weekend in the last month of 2006. (Where does the time go?) One is appropriate for the season, and two are not.
The one that fits is “The Nativity Story,” a faithful and modestly uplifting reenactment of, um, the nativity story. You know, from the Bible and stuff. The 16-year-old star of the film, Keisha Castle-Hughes, got pregnant a few months ago in real life, which I think is a fantastic publicity stunt.
Then there’s “Turistas,” a bad horror movie that would be more at home in October or January (the latter because it’s where lousy movies often get shuffled to). I’m actually surprised they screened this at all, since it’s the type of movie the studios have been hiding from us lately. So kudos to Fox for screening it so we can tell everyone in a timely manner how bad it is.
Finally, “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj” opens today. You can probably stop at “National Lampoon” and know it’s lousy, though if that fails to tip you off, surely “Van Wilder” will do the trick. It screened last night (at the last minute, fittingly), and afterward I had two phone calls to make. Both people I talked to, when I told them what I had just seen, said, “Why?” And for a minute I couldn’t think of a good reason. Why HAD I seen “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj”? Then I remembered: because it’s what I do. I see the bad movies so you don’t have to.
Regardless of your expectations of it, I don’t see how “Turistas” can fail to disappoint you. You’re in the mood for some torture porn, a la “Saw” or “Hostel”? Surprise! There isn’t any! You get one scene — ONE SCENE! — of someone being hacked up, and even then, the victim is under anesthesia and the hacking is done antiseptically, even medically.
So maybe instead you’re hoping for a taut psychological thriller, comparable to “Deliverance,” where the actual violence is minimal but the tension is high? Surprise! It fails there, too. The characters are (as they almost always are in these films) one-dimensional stereotypes whose only motivations are to have sex and to avoid being killed. And wouldn’t you know it, most of them fail at that, too.
The film is set in Brazil and was shot on location by director John Stockwell, whose “Blue Crush” and “Into the Blue” also made use of beautiful locations and actors who refuse to wear anything but bathing suits. “Turistas” is infused with Brazilian sights and sounds — the beaches, the music, the friendly people — and actually made me want to go there. Apart from all the killing and the general message of “Never trust a foreigner,” it would make a good travel brochure.
Our heroes are six young people — three Americans, two Brits and an Australian — who have come to Brazil in search of drinking, recreation, and indiscriminate sexual encounters. An American girl (Olivia Wilde) is chaperoned by her worry-wart brother (Josh Duhamel) and accompanied by her trashy best friend (Beau Garrett); the Australian (Melissa George) is a world traveler who speaks fluent Portuguese; the Brits (Max Brown and Desmond Askew) are randy fellows who just want to meet girls.
A bus accident leaves the six stranded, but they join forces and wander onto a hidden beach that evidently isn’t all that hidden after all, since it has a fully stocked bar and raging nightly parties. Then somehow they eventually wind up in a crazy house where crazy people want to do crazy things to them.
I’m skipping a lot, but believe me, you’ll wish the movie had skipped a lot, too. The film’s very first images are a flash-forward to much later, when a female victim is strapped down and apparently about to be eviscerated. It is 60 minutes before the movie actually arrives at that point in the narrative, giving us a full hour to endure the tourists partying, talking, flirting with each other, passing out, arguing, walking, being lost, and taking their shirts off. It’s a 95-minute movie in which 50 minutes are padding.
The screenplay (by previously uncredited writer Michael Ross) further errs by including scenes with the villains as they plot to abduct the tourists. By giving the audience information that the main characters aren’t privy to, much of the mystery and suspense is lost. It would be better if we had no idea what was in store, rather than being teased with it. This is especially true since what we’re teased with — rampant bloody mayhem and terror — never actually materializes.
The movie is what it is. The question is, is it good at being what it is? And the answer is no. I never thought I’d complain that a movie wasn’t violent and awful enough, but when a film sets out to be violent and awful, it really ought to follow through.
You can see why “The Nativity Story” got the blessing of the Vatican and had its world premiere there. It’s a safe, conventional fictionalization of the events leading up to the birth of Christ, with heavy emphasis on Mary as an iconic (read: personality-free) figure. It’s a “nice” movie, good for Christian families who want to attend a nativity pageant without having to stand outside in the cold.
It was written by nice screenwriter Mike Rich, who also wrote the nice “Finding Forrester,” “The Rookie” and “Radio.” You will note that “nice” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” It means pleasant and unassuming. You will not have to think very hard about anything while watching a “nice” movie, nor will your preconceived notions be challenged. There is nothing wrong with most “nice” movies — nor, in many cases, is there anything right with them.
“The Nativity Story” is bland in that way, though it has details that give it some honest respectability. The director, Catherine Hardwicke, has made far edgier films in the past (“Thirteen” and “Lords of Dogtown”), and you can see her wanting to inject realism into this project, too. Little details, like two young boys’ amusing reaction to witnessing a circumcision, or the pain in Elizabeth’s face when she gives birth to John the Baptist, remind you that Hardwicke is accustomed to stories grounded in modern realities rather than glossy religious traditions.
Rich’s screenplay takes what little we know from the New Testament and expands to give Mary, Joseph, and the others backstories. Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) is a young, carefree girl whose parents are cheesemakers. (And as we know from Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian,” blessed are the cheesemakers.) With no input on the decision whatsoever, she is betrothed to Joseph (Oscar Isaac), a decent young man from her village with whom she has had little prior contact. Now they are semi-married, called spouses but forbidden from doing “that which leads to families,” as Mary’s dad puts it, until the marriage is finalized.
This restriction makes things a bit awkward, as you know, when Mary finds herself pregnant. The biblical account is retained (including the dialogue, when possible), with angels visiting Mary and Joseph to explain their roles in God’s plan. Mary goes to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who is miraculously pregnant, too, having conceived despite being old and infertile.
Meanwhile, we get a rather goofy account of the Magi, three Eastern astrologers who see the signs in the sky and follow the star to Bethlehem. They’re portrayed as normal, down-to-earth fellas who kid one another and act like buddies. This is probably accurate enough, but it’s a jarringly different tone from the seriousness of the rest of the movie. Mary acts like a religious icon; these guys act like average joes.
Yes, there’s something about Mary: she’s boring. Keisha Castle-Hughes, just 15 when the film was shot, has trouble hiding her Australian accent (everyone else uses a generic “Middle East” inflection) and renders every line flat and emotionless. Joseph and Elizabeth feel like fully realized characters, but Mary appears just as she does in paintings: two-dimensional, kind of pretty, and entirely without substance.
I think the film serves its purpose well enough, if that purpose is to be a modest, mildly uplifting Christmas story. Considering most Christmas movies have nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever, “The Nativity Story” should be a welcome surprise for Christian families. Which doesn’t mean it’s very good as an expression of art, only that it’s … you know … “nice.”
“Thanksgiving Night,” by Richard Bausch. Bausch is evidently a writer of some renown, but I hadn’t heard of him until his latest novel, “Thanksgiving Night,” was recommended to me. It’s a wonderfully written, marvelously redemptive piece of fiction about several characters in a small Virginia town whose lives intersect in the weeks before Thanksgiving. A married couple find their relationship in trouble; an elderly priest wonders if he’s right for the priesthood; two old ladies argue over the house they share; the man they’ve hired to do some work on it faces his own demons, and his grown-up daughter, a single mom, tentatively embarks on a new relationship. All of these people are looking for love and acceptance, and it’s quite lovely — not to mention sparklingly entertaining — to read.
I want to quote a passage I like a lot. It’s our first introduction to Brother Fire, the old priest. His name is technically pronounced “fear-ay,” but years ago his fiery demeanor earned the more common pronunciation, and it stuck:
Fact is, he likes the name.
He also likes mornings when the sun breaks through the fog, wind that shakes leaves out of the trees, lightning forking across a summer sky, rivers — all waters, really — plants, animals, birdsong, the roar of lions, music of every type, drums, all the kinds of coffee and tea, cats, dogs, horses, paintings of people bustling by on city streets, paintings of flowers, all the sculptures of Bernini, flying buttresses, those great red sequoias in Northern California, Northern California itself (for the wines), wine, white and red but mostly the reds, especially Italian, the Shenandoah Valley, presidential politics, philosophy, the poetry of John Berryman and Gerard Manley Hopkins (he sees the affinity between them), and, of course, all of Shakespeare. But above everything, he likes people. He loves people. The sweetest music to him has always been the sound of another human voice. What for all others would be the most unattractive, nerve-grating accent pleases him for the fact of its contribution to the happy proliferation of human notes. He enjoys others, not in the abstract way of, say, a Lenin or a Trotsky — though he has always been decidedly leftward-leaning in his politics — but in a very specific and direct way. When you talk to him, you have an immediate sense that he is interested in your benefit, and that you can tell him everything, even when, as it is in the confessional, what you have to report is sordid and full of failure and contradiction. He will tell you — and mean it — that the sign of contradiction is the center of Christianity, that the cross itself is the first sign of contradiction, and that the human condition is in its way similar to that of Christ: that contradiction of being both God and man, and alive on the earth; of possessing an eternal soul yet living in a body that dies. It is all meaning. And meaning, for Brother Fire, is what gives a measure of majesty to ordinary lives. He’s uncomplicatedly convinced of his own ordinariness, and so, when he speaks to his parishioners, this simple faith in that fact and in their charity convinces them, brings them forth in a welter of love, a sweet dependency. His gift, above all else — above the humor and the good nature with others and the charm — is acceptance.
Not only do I find that paragraph splendidly written, but its theology and philosophy feel sound, too, reassuring and comforting.
On the next page, we learn that Brother Fire’s upbringing by decent parents “taught the boy that striving for goodness was inherently goodness itself.” Striving for goodness is inherently goodness itself. Isn’t that profoundly true? If you try to be a good person, you are a good person, because only a good person would bother trying.
The book has a lot of that kind of wisdom blended into its stories about common people and their common struggles. I’m glad I read it — and over Thanksgiving weekend, too, coincidentally.
i thought my jokes about congress would kill, but they totally bombed
my dad’s gonna blow up at me when he finds out i helped toilet paper that white house down the street
she kept hijacking the conversation during the whole plane trip! it drove me crazy! i wanted to kill myself and everyone onboard!
my science teacher, mr. alkayda, has farts that are like chemical weapons
i am going to murder president george w bush
It was a traditional Thanksgiving at the Snider house, very similar to the celebration the Pilgrims had in 1621. Almost the whole family was present, we had turkey with all the trimmings, and afterward we dropped off a load of smallpox-infected blankets at the Indian casino. We carried muskets and wore buckled shoes, too, although that was coincidental.
As a family, we Sniders are very big on tradition. This is especially true if “tradition” is extended to mean “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” Things that no one likes — cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, my brother Lane — are included at Thanksgiving just because THAT’S THE WAY IT IS. If our family’s first Thanksgiving had been interrupted by a deadly grease fire, we would still be recreating it every year.
Sports are a significant part of many people’s Thanksgivings. We don’t watch a lot of football on TV at the ancestral Snider homestead in California, but we make up for it by participating in other athletic contests. Video games, for example.
No, for reals! Nintendo has just released a console called Wii, pronounced “We” or “Whee!,” and some of its games involve actual physical activity. My brother Christopher, who is a grown man with a job, waited in line for 10 hours to buy it when it went on sale last Saturday night. He says he was in line with a lot of nerds, though surely he meant to say OTHER nerds, for when the pot waits in line for 10 hours to buy a video game system, it should not call the kettle black.
The Wii has taken the Snider household by storm. First of all, as fans of juvenile double-entendre, we like the name “Wii.” It is used in such statements as, “Christopher, bring your Wii over here” and “I’m exhausted from playing with Christopher’s Wii all day” and “Christopher’s Wii sure has provided hours of entertainment.” THIS WILL NEVER STOP BEING FUNNY.
But as I said, these games are the real deal. One of them is a bowling game. And you’re probably saying, “A bowling video game? That must be boring and stupid! Shut up with your lies, Eric D. Snider! I hate you and I hate your ugly face!” I think that is a hurtful overreaction to the situation, but I do understand your skepticism. But you see, the Wii uses a wireless remote control device to play the games. To bowl, you actually have to hold the controller as if you were holding a bowling ball, and swing your arm. The game responds to the speed at which your arm and wrist move, as well as to the spin you put on it. It’s like being at a bowling alley, only less seedy. (Our house is less seedy than a bowling alley, anyway. Your house may vary.)
What we’ve proved with the Wii is that I’m as bad at imaginary sports as I am at real ones. I bowled very poorly my first few times out, even worse than I bowl in real life. My niece Emily, who is 6, threw a 176 and beat most of us. My mom, who had neither bowled nor played a video game before, scored 210 on her second game. I hovered in the low 100s for a while before finally getting the hang of it and reaching the 160s.
Our activities are not limited to video games, though. My dad and Christopher also play a game called crotchball. They sit on the floor at opposite ends of the family room, about 18 feet apart, with their legs spread. Then they take turns throwing a foam rubber Nerf ball at one another as hard as they can. Players are not allowed to move to get out of the way. The goal is to hit the other person in the groin.
Where’s the fun in that, you ask? I have no idea. But where’s the fun in any sport, really? If you start questioning why grown men would hurl things at one another’s crotches, you have to start questioning why they would throw bouncy balls through netted hoops, too.
A variation on crotchball is a game where instead of aiming for the crotch, they aim for the face. Again, the fun? Nowhere to be found, at least as far as I can tell. But at least it lets Christopher’s Wii rest for a while.
The point of “Bobby” is not to dissect Robert F. Kennedy’s life but to suggest what America lost when he died. To a lot of people, he was the last great hope for the Democratic Party and for America. His death early in the morning of June 6, 1968, 24 hours after he was shot, was a crushing blow. He was on his way to becoming the Democratic candidate for the presidency and likely would have beaten Richard Nixon in November. What if he had lived? How would America be different now?
That’s my best guess as to the film’s message. I arrived at it later, not during the screening. During the film itself, my thoughts were more along the lines of: This is nice and all, but what’s the POINT?
This is a movie written and directed by Emilio Estevez, and I think it’s safe to say that no one on earth thought he had this level of seriousness, depth, and maturity in him. I marvel at the cast he managed to assemble, too: Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Heather Graham, Helen Hunt, Laurence Fishburne, William H. Macy, Christian Slater, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, Joshua Jackson, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood, and Demi Moore. Oh, and Martin Sheen, but getting your dad to be in your movie isn’t very impressive.
It begins like a disaster movie. Many disparate characters are introduced, all sharing a geographical bond (they’re guests or employees at the Ambassador Hotel) but otherwise having no connection to each other. We learn their stories and see what their lives are like. They know it’s a big day — it’s the Democratic Presidential primary in California, and Kennedy’s campaign is headquartered at the Ambassador — but they don’t know just how big it’s going to get.
It’s almost staggering how many stories there are in this sprawling cast. Hopkins and Belafonte are a retired (but still present) doorman and his friend who sit around playing chess and reminiscing. Fishburne is the hotel chef, sagely dispensing advice to his co-workers and engaging in edgy, playful jibes with the Mexican dishwashers and waiters, fending off the blatant racism from the food-services manager (Slater). Graham is a switchboard operator who’s having an affair with the hotel manager (Macy), whose wife (Stone) is a cosmetologist in the hotel’s beauty parlor, where the hotel’s boozy nightclub singer (Moore) comes for her daily touch-up. Lohan plays a young woman about to marry a boy she hardly knows (Wood) in order to keep him out of Vietnam.
Estevez (who plays the nightclub singer’s husband) mostly films these people in and around the hotel with a Steadicam, floating down hallways and through conversations unobtrusively, like a very smooth you-are-there documentary. You get the sense of simply wandering through the hotel, eavesdropping on mini-dramas and getting to know this small cross-section of California in 1968.
The characters are fictional but their hopes and dreams are real enough, and every role is well-acted, even by lightweights like Lohan and Kutcher. (The latter plays a drug dealer who peddles to a couple of young Kennedy campaign volunteers, played amusingly by Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty.)
Estevez very astutely uses news footage at the beginning of the film to remind us of the turmoil America was in at the time, and footage of the real Bobby Kennedy’s final speech at the end of the film to suggest what a charismatic, idealistic candidate he was. You can see why people were excited about him, and why his death was so devastating. What it has to do with the fictional characters who populate the film, that’s not quite as clear.
We’ll have to make this quick, ‘cuz it’s 2 a.m. and I have to get up at 5 to catch a plane to California for Thanksgiving. (You see, I’m in such a hurry that I couldn’t even spell out the word “because.”)
Most of this year’s holiday offerings are actually pretty good, which is always a pleasant change of pace. There is one notable exception, but we’ll deal with that momentarily.
“Deja Vu” is solidly entertaining. Ironically, despite the title, the movie actually DOESN’T seem familiar. It’s quite original.
“The Fountain” is Darren Aronofsky’s long-awaited follow-up to “Requiem for a Dream.” It’s a mesmerizing film, but one without an easy-to-grasp linear plot. People either love it or hate it. I’m more in the “love” category (well, “like a lot”). But I won’t be offended if you see it and hate it.
“Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny” has some hilarious moments and some dead ones, too. Tenacious D is a one-joke band, and the film is a one-joke movie. That joke can be pretty funny sometimes, though.
Finally, there’s “Deck the Halls,” most assuredly the worst Christmas comedy I’ve ever seen and one of the lousiest films of any genre of 2006. I know some of you enjoy my reviews of awful movies, and I have to say, I kinda let “Deck the Halls” have it with both barrels. If “Deck the Halls” were a person, I would probably feel bad now. But then, if “Deck the Halls” were a person, I would have it charged with assault.
Kurt Vonnegut once said: “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” The quote has been applied to movie critics, too, usually by people who have made bad movies and wondered why the critics savaged them. All I can say is that sitting through an awful movie can be sheer TORTURE, especially when you know you CAN’T WALK OUT. You’re stuck there until the stupid thing is over. When that happens, writing a scathing review can be cathartic, a way of getting the poison out and letting the healing begin.
On that note, happy Thanksgiving!
If the rest of “Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny” were as funny as its first 10 minutes, it would be next to “Borat” as one of the year’s most riotous. In full rock-opera mode, a young Jack Black (Troy Gentile) battles with his father (Meat Loaf) over his guitar-playing, culminating in an appearance by Black Sabbath’s Ronnie James Dio. The dialogue is all sung, peppered with mystical allusions and self-serious progressive-rock goofiness. It’s a spot-on parody/homage, and Troy Gentile does a great Jack Black impersonation. (He played a young Jack in “Nacho Libre,” too. This is his destiny.)
The rest of the movie is uneven, ranging from the deliriously funny (like a crazy acid trip taken by one of the characters) to the belabored and overdone (like most of the elements related to a museum break-in). It’s a one-joke movie — sort of how Tenacious D is a one-joke band — but it’s a joke that can be pretty funny sometimes.
It certainly does not lack for energy. Written by Tenacious D (which is Jack Black and Kyle Gass) and Liam Lynch (of TV’s “Sifl & Olly”) and directed by Lynch, it’s an appealingly goofy flick. It seems at once pure-intentioned and filthy-mouthed, the two lead characters being grown-up children whose only desire in all the world is to rock. And I mean rawk!! Oh, and smoke pot. They want to do that, too.
Black and Gass play fictional versions of themselves — they go by JB and KG — who meet in Venice Beach, Calif., when both are aspiring guitarists. They form Tenacious D, a two-man band devoted to the rather obscure genre of acoustic heavy metal. Their songs are a mix of braggadocio, fantasy elements like unicorns and Sasquatch, and over-written metaphors. Like that opening sequence with young JB and his dad, Tenacious D walks the line between adoring the stylings of groups like Rush and Pink Floyd, and mocking them.
The guys have trouble making it big, though, and don’t have any money once Kyle’s mom stops sending him monthly checks. Then they learn of a magical guitar pick used by all the greats, a pick forged from the tooth of Satan himself. They set out to find it.
The film is in many ways a fully integrated musical, with characters bursting into song both onstage and off — which means Jack Black and Kyle Gass, without even trying, have made a rock musical that’s better than “Rent.” That’s gotta hurt.
Cameos by people like John C. Reilly and the Foo Fighters’ David Grohl keep things moving and offer some variety. Everyone seems committed to the silliness of the film, which is nice. A movie that calls itself “the greatest motion picture of all time” deserves at least a smile.
“Deck the Halls” is crap unbridled!
Fa la la la la la la la la
Watching made me suicidal!
Fa la la la la la la la la
Pity Brod’rick and De Vito
Fa la la la la la la la la
Wishing they were incognito.
Fa la la la la la la la la
With all due respect to Bill O’Reilly (which is to say no respect whatsoever), HERE’S your war on Christmas. “Deck the Halls,” which is not just appallingly unfunny but a gag-for-gag rip-off of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” is so bad it makes me want to never celebrate the holiday again. Indeed, it almost makes me renounce Christianity altogether. It is a comedy without mirth, revelry without merriment, action without motivation. Its characters live in a world without logic or reason. As a movie, it offends the senses and insults the intelligence. It causes viewers to despair of ever knowing joy or laughter again. I urge the officials of cities located near waterways to send extra patrols to the bridges nearest where the film is playing, as the number of despondent moviegoers seeking to end their lives will be especially high during the hours immediately following screenings of it.
This is one of those movies where:
– There is a character who is annoying, manipulative and greedy, but the only people who realize that are the protagonist and the viewing audience. Everyone else thinks he’s delightful, and chides the protagonist for not liking him.
– People fall down not because it affects the story or reflects on their personalities, but because the director thought it would be funny to see someone fall down.
– Someone gets his face covered in an animal’s excretion. (Camel spit, in this case.)
– Characters recite punchlines even when there are no other characters nearby to hear them. Witness the scene where a young boy, seeing two hot girls undress through a window, says — out loud, even though he is all alone — “This is going to be the best Christmas ever!” Who are you talking to, Horndog McPeepers? Yourself? The audience? The Lord?
– People do things for no reason whatsoever, no one reacts to anything the way a real person would, and every single situation is implausible or impossible. The story is nothing more than a series of contrivances, as if a screenwriter said, “I don’t care WHY it happens, or what leads to it, I just want the scene to end with the car doors ripped off!” And then, unable to come up with a reasonable series of events that would lead to that situation, he just threw some stuff together and tacked on the conclusion anyway.
Danny De Vito plays Buddy Hall, a tacky freeloader who moves to a quaint Massachusetts town with his wife, Tia (Kristin Chenoweth, 24 years younger than De Vito), and their two trashy teenage daughters. The town is already home to Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick), an upstanding optometrist with a wife, Kelly (Kristin Davis), and two children of his own. The Finches live across the streets from the Halls and try to be good neighbors to the newcomers.
Steve is known to all the townsfolk as the king of Christmastime. He has a private Christmas tree farm the way snooty wine lovers have their own vineyards. Every year he organizes massive Christmas caroling expeditions. He is in charge of the tree in town square and unofficially presides over the annual Winterfest carnival. He is more inextricably connected to Christmas than Santa himself.
Then Buddy decides that HE is going to become the new king of Christmas. He decides this for no reason whatsoever. (See? I told you there’d be some of that.) He wants to decorate his house so brightly that it can be seen from space. Soon the Hall dwelling is a local attraction, with magnificent lights, displays, and music running around the clock. Buddy becomes the new go-to guy for locals who want tips on managing their own Christmas decorations, displacing Steve.
The more Steve tries to show everyone what a jerk Buddy is — and he IS a jerk, make no mistake, a lying, thieving, crass buffoon of a man — the more it backfires, making HIM look bad and making everyone love Buddy all the more.
In a false display of apology for being so obnoxious, Buddy gives Steve a new car from the dealership he works for. Just gives it to him. Steve is flabbergasted by the generosity and repents for having misjudged Buddy. Then it turns out Buddy actually forged Steve’s name on some loan documents, meaning Steve BOUGHT the car and must now pay for it. This is about six different kinds of illegal, but does Steve go to the police? No, instead he and Buddy decide to settle matters by having an ice-skating race at the Winterfest. If Buddy wins, Steve buys the car. If Steve wins, Buddy takes down his Christmas display. Notice that no matter who wins, Buddy doesn’t get charged with fraud, theft, or forgery.
At the Winterfest, there is a talent show in which Buddy’s trampy daughters and Steve’s formerly pristine daughter (Alia Shawkat) dress in skimpy Santa costumes and dance to “Santa Baby.” They come onstage with their backs to the audience, their identities hidden, and Buddy and Steve ogle them. Then they turn around, see their fathers in the audience, and are horrified and embarrassed. A Winterfest carnival in a small town, one attended by every citizen every year, and somehow they’re SURPRISED that their fathers are there? Where did they think they would be?
At long last, after 80 minutes of fakeness and increasingly illogical story progression, each scene less funny than the last, the movie wants to warm our hearts with a merry yuletide ending in which all is forgiven and bonds of friendship are formed. Humbug! I say. Humbug and bullcrap! You can’t spend an hour and a half showing us what a despicable wretch Buddy is and then expect us to start liking him just because Steve is dumb enough to be conned into forgiving him. In a real movie, the Buddy character would be forced to reform, to admit his wrongdoing and pledge to be better. In this twisted wreckage of Hollywood excess and audience-pandering, it is somehow STEVE who needs to change his ways.
You may want to remember the director’s name, John Whitesell, because he’s one of the worst filmmakers currently working. Already on his rap sheet: “See Spot Run” and “Big Momma’s House 2.” The screenplay was written by Matt Corman and Chris Ord, the first Hollywood credit for both of them.
And then there’s a third writer credited: Don Rhymer. He wrote both “Big Momma’s House” movies, “Agent Cody Banks 2,” and the awful “Honeymooners” adaptation. I’m assuming the way it happened was, John Whitesell got the “Deck the Halls” script and said, “OK, this is pretty bad. But I’d like for it to be worse. Who do I know that’s a terrible screenwriter, someone with just no talent whatsoever…? Ah! Don Rhymer, of course! He did bad work for me on ‘Big Momma’s House 2,’ so I’m sure he can do something awful with ‘Deck the Halls’!” Then he called Rhymer and he was like, “Don, it’s John Whitesell! How are you?… Good, good…. How are the kids?…. You don’t say…. That’s fantastic…. Listen, the reason I’m calling — I’ve got this screenplay here, and it’s utterly devoid of all merit, and I’m sure I can make something legendarily bad out of it. But I’d really like your help in making it awful. Take some of the humor out, remove all the characters’ motivations, that sort of thing…. Well, as a bad a director, I like to have bad writers in my Rolodex, you know?… No, I’m not just saying that! I honestly think you’re one of the worst!… Well, thank you, that’s kind of you to say. I’m very proud of the crappy things I’ve done. We’ve done some awful work together, if I may say so!… Yeah, I hate Martin Lawrence, too…. So what do you think, should I have a copy sent over to you?… Fantastic! I’ll send it over right away…. Shouldn’t be too much work, it’s already pretty bad. Just work your magic and suck all the life and wit from it…. Wonderful…. I knew I could count on you. Goodbye, old friend!”
And thus we have “Deck the Halls,” a derivative, sloppy, imbecilic, simple-minded, dim-witted, miserable excuse for entertainment that is on the short list for worst films of the year. Merry Christmas, and pass the Tylenol.
After the seizure-inducing circuses that were “Man on Fire” and (especially) last year’s “Domino,” it is a properly subdued Tony Scott who has made “Deja Vu.” Gone are the jittery editing and the preposterous plotting. This is a smart, fleet-footed action drama — with sci-fi thrown in for good measure — that benefits from Scott’s energy without succumbing to his hyperactivity.
It stars Denzel Washington (Scott’s “Man on Fire” star) as Doug Carlin, an ATF agent called in to investigate the bombing of a ferryboat in New Orleans on Mardi Gras. Carlin is the sort of detective who notices things like tiny bits of plastic washed up on the shore and explosive residue on the underside of a nearby bridge. While the other agencies — local police, FBI, etc. — squabble over whose jurisdiction this is, Carlin looks for clues.
Then a body turns up. Lots of bodies are turning up, of course; the boat was full of passengers when it exploded. But Carlin realizes this particular victim was killed beforehand and dumped in the water so as to LOOK like one of the boat victims. Which means the killer knew the explosion was coming. Which means he’s probably the one responsible for it. Find out who killed this woman, find out who blew up the ferry.
Carlin hooks up with an FBI squad, led by Val Kilmer and featuring a lot of A/V geeks, who have a nifty bit of technology to show off. Using all the surveillance cameras in the city, they’re able to piece together a “movie” of what everyone in town was doing exactly 102 hours ago, in real time. All they have to do is watch this particular victim, a woman named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), and see who she met with prior to her death.
Now, Carlin is a genius, but it doesn’t take one to see that there’s more going on here than just watching surveillance tapes. That’s where the sci-fi comes in, and that’s where I stop talking.
Once the film establishes all the rules and sets the game in motion, it proves to be a jaunty, pulpy good time. It straddles the border between fun and ludicrous rather precariously, and it usually (I do not say always) falls on the fun side. I can’t say the screenplay, by Terry Rossio (“Pirates of the Caribbean”) and Bill Marsilii, completely explains all the paradoxes it introduces, but there is generally much more cleverness in evidence here than you usually get from these cat-and-mouse cop-chasing-killer capers.
Denzel Washington has played a law-enforcement officer about a dozen times now, and there’s a reason for that: He’s good at it. He inspires confidence as a man on the right side of the law, and in “Deja Vu” he’s actually permitted to smile, rave, and be interesting. Not that the film needs carrying — it’s pretty nifty on its own — but Washington injects it with some good old-fashioned charisma, too.
I usually like to know what I’m talking about, or at least give the impression that I do, but I’m going to tell you something about “The Fountain” up front: I don’t know what to make of it. I was utterly absorbed in watching it, yet when it was over I had no idea what had happened.
It has Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz playing Thomas and Isabel in three different time periods: around 1500 (the time of the Spanish Inquisition), present-day, and some point in the distant future. I believe the Thomas of 2006 is the same person, miraculously un-aged, as the Thomas of hundreds of years from now, but I would not stake my reputation on that. He doesn’t seem to be the same Thomas as the Inquisition Thomas, nor is it the same Isabel … but I’m not totally sold on either of those points, either.
Thomas the conquistador (OK, Tomás), working for Queen Isabella of Spain, is searching for the mythical Fountain of Youth when he is attacked by Mayans in one of their holy pyramids. In the present day, Thomas is a medical researcher looking for a way to cure his wife Isabel’s terminal cancer. In the future, he is bald and sitting by a tree that floats through space in a bubble.
These three stories are told simultaneously, cutting from one to another, and while I could probably describe them in a less nonsensical fashion than I have just done, that might defeat the purpose. The enjoyment of the movie is in being caught up in its single-minded devotion to its own vision, not in completely understanding what that vision is.
It’s the work of Darren Aronofsky, whose “Pi” I admire and whose “Requiem for a Dream” I consider one of very best films of the decade. That was in 2000, and “The Fountain” is his first movie since then. It’s taken him that long to get the project together. The special effects make it blockbuster expensive, but it’s not the kind of movie that brings in blockbuster crowds. It features two actors playing multiple characters (or maybe the same character) in three different time periods, with each story overlapping the other two in strange ways. You can see why studios weren’t too eager to fund it.
As in “Pi” and “Requiem,” Aronofsky has an astonishing knack for putting together bizarre, entrancing images, beautifully filmed by cinematographer Matthew Libatique and scored by composer Clint Mansell. (Both men are Aronofsky regulars.) He usually shoots scenes either head-on or exactly in profile, with few three-quarter shots or other jaunty angles. The head-on shots, in particular, give the film an otherworldly feel simply because that angle — with the actors looking directly at the camera — is so rarely used in movies. Even if you knew nothing else about the film, you’d know it was unusual for that reason alone.
“The Fountain” strikes me as a rumination on life and death, and on the latter’s vital role as part of the former. The film has a “plot,” yes, but even if I understood all the details of it, it would be beside the point. The point is how it makes you feel. It’s less a narrative than a tone poem, designed to envelop you in its emotions rather than tell you a story.
At the Internet Movie Database, users are invited to register and post mini-reviews of any film they choose. I was tickled by this one, of the upcoming film “The Fountain.” As you read it, picture James Lipton of “Inside the Actors Studio” (or, if you prefer, Will Ferrell’s “SNL” impersonation of him) reciting it.
“The Fountain will go down in history as being the most poignant film of this Century. Dealing with many thoughts and themes most will be compelled to see this classic again and again. It leaves one with their soul on edge. Cunning in performance and production this masterpiece will certainly be on the short list for Oscar nominees. Hugh and Rachel have taken Life by the Spirit and Ran. Darren Aronofsky has surpassed all those critic’s who have said it could not be done. His creation here will put him in the record books for being the most daring insightful director of our times. The themes that resonate here will shake the being of our younger generation. This film must be seen as soon as it comes out for it will certainly be crowded at the box office.”
I’m still formulating my review of the film (look for it tomorrow), but I’m pretty sure I didn’t love it THAT much. In fact, I can’t think of ANY movie that would inspire that level of praise. (Most poignant film of the CENTURY?! To paraphrase the musical “Ragtime,” it’s only 2006, and there are 94 years to go!)
Sometimes studio shills post favorable reviews on IMDB to generate buzz. Maybe that’s what this person (“playpossum,” of Washington, D.C.) is. Or maybe he or she just really, really, really, really, really loved “The Fountain.” I mean REALLY.
Here’s some momentous scheduling news. Starting Nov. 30, NBC’s Thursday night lineup will be as follows: “My Name Is Earl,” “The Office,” “Scrubs,” and “30 Rock,” with “E.R.” still finishing the night in the 10 p.m. slot.
Take a moment to ponder that two-hour chunk of comedy. If I were to name the 10 funniest shows currently on TV, those would be four of them. A couple of them would be in the top five. These are four consistently funny, smart, and non-condescending comedies. None of them use canned laughter. All of them are sharply written and well-acted.
NBC owned Thursday nights for comedy through the 1980s and ’90s with such monster hits as “Cheers,” “The Cosby Show,” “Seinfeld,” and “Friends.” But the two-hour block hasn’t featured four quality shows since 1987, when the lineup was “Cosby,” “Family Ties,” “Cheers,” and “Night Court.” Since then, there was has always been some crap like “Caroline in the City” or “The Single Guy” wedged in between the good shows. The stellar new lineup is the best block of comedy in 20 years, on NBC or any other network.
Unfortunately, while all four shows are critically beloved, none of them are major ratings hits. The most popular is “My Name Is Earl,” which typically falls around 45th place with about 9 million viewers. In a just world, these four shows would be in the top 20 every week. But we do not live in a just world. Not yet, anyway. If we all watch NBC on Thursdays starting Nov. 30 (and stop watching “Two and a Half Men” altogether), perhaps the world will become just.
(OK, if I were to name the 10 funniest shows currently on TV, they would be, in alphabetical order: “Campus Ladies” [Oxygen], “Curb Your Enthusiasm” [HBO], “Family Guy” [Fox], “Help Me Help You” [ABC], “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” [FX], “My Name Is Earl” [NBC], “The Office” [NBC], “Scrubs” [NBC], “South Park” [Comedy Central], and “30 Rock” [NBC].)
Celebrities! Who doesn’t love ’em? NOBODY, that’s who! We all enjoy reading about their triumphs, their failures, their breasts, and more of their failures. That’s why gossip magazines thrive despite being poorly written and found only at supermarket checkstands, where they are placed among the other items that people only buy unintentionally or on a whim.
But since gossip magazines owe their existence to celebrities, they often have to whitewash their stories. After all, the hottest celebs won’t give you exclusive interviews if you trashed them in last week’s issue. We have to read between the lines to get the full scoop. So here, as a public service, are quotes from the Nov. 20 issues of In Touch Weekly and OK! Weekly, accompanied by my translation of what’s really being said.
What they say: “She’s wearing pregnancy clothes again!”
What they mean: “She’s getting fat!”
What they say: “Britney wants a boob job!”
What they mean: “Getting rid of one boob wasn’t enough.”
What they say: “Jessica Simpson … re-created her sexy scene from ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ for DirecTV’s new ad campaign.”
What they mean: “Jessica Simpson will do more or less anything for a few dollars.”
What they say: “It’s clear by the way [Madonna] cuddled [her new adopted son] at the JFK airport in NYC that she already feels a close bond with the 13-month-old.”
What they mean: “It’s clear Madonna knows a good photo opportunity when she sees one.”
What they say: “Ever since he and wife Reese Witherspoon announced their separation, Ryan Phillippe has been fighting rumors that he — and he alone — was to blame.”
What they mean: “There was another culprit besides Ryan: Ryan’s dullness.”
What they say: “[Ryan Phillippe] would never do anything to embarrass Reese or his family.”
What they mean: “Except appear in ‘Cruel Intentions.'”
What they say: “Britney Spears is noticing some changes in her body — and she’s not happy about it.”
What they mean: “‘Squeezin’ out babies done made me fatter, y’all!'”
What they say: “Nicole Ritchie’s skeletal appearance made heads turn at a recent party.”
What they mean: “Among the heads that turned: Nicole’s own, 360 degrees.”
What they say: “Courteney Cox and husband David Arquette … spent almost two hours enjoying each other’s company over dinner and wine.”
What they mean: “We’ve discovered the maximum length of time that someone can enjoy David Arquette: almost two hours.”
What they say: “Sure, Ashton Kutcher is gorgeous, but it’s his love for his family that makes us swoon.”
What they mean: “If by ‘love of his family’ we mean ‘abs.'”
What they say: “Ashton still likes to open doors for Demi. ‘I try to impress her every day,’ he admits.”
What they mean: “This just in: Demi Moore is impressed by seeing people open doors.”
What they say: “The man accused of stalking Hilary Duff was charged with making criminal threats and … told a private investigator he planned to kill the 19-year-old star.”
What they mean: “Through some loophole in the criminal code, it is illegal to kill Hilary Duff.”
What they say: “Katie [Holmes]’s last-minute wedding jitters.”
What they mean: “The drugs are wearing off.”
What they say: “Paris Hilton … says that when she’s at home, she’d ‘rather watch a movie … or eat.'”
What they mean: “From the looks of her, Paris Hilton has not been at home in several months.”
What they say: “Jennifer Aniston’s whirlwind trip to London to visit boyfriend Vince Vaughn has, it seems, left her a changed woman, glowing with love.”
What they mean: “Despite our efforts to the contrary, Jennifer Aniston appears to be happy.”
What they say: “Pamela Anderson … says she’d even one day consider adopting…. She says, ‘Any time a child gets a chance at a better life, it’s a good thing.'”
What they mean: “It is sobering to realize that there are situations over which being adopted by Pamela Anderson would be an improvement.”
What they say: “Lindsay Lohan has finally moved into the $2 million condo she bought in 2005 and has been renovating ever since.”
What they mean: “She’s been installing cocaine dispensers in every bathroom.”
What they say: “Now that it’s over with ex Chad Lowe, Hilary Swank has a new companion in her life — Karoo, her Jack Russell-and-Corgi-mix puppy!”
What they mean: “That’s Hilary on the right.”
A cartoon that’s different from most other cartoons this year, plus a new entry in a series that had previously become too cartoonish. It’s cartoon week at the movies!
First up, Daniel Craig is in as the new James Bond in “Casino Royale.” People who care too much about this sort of thing were FREAKING OUT about Craig, saying he was too a) blond, b) wimpy, c) short, or d) something else to play the part. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less, but let me just say that while there’s no denying Daniel Craig has blond hair and is not particularly tall, he is by far the meanest, grittiest, toughest Bond EVER. In other words, the best.
The movie is pretty good, too, though not as good as Craig himself. I was ready to give it an “A” for about the first hour, and then it lost steam. Overall, though, the franchise feels refreshed and invigorated. And the inevitable scene where Bond gets captured and tortured … WOW. I’m still feelin’ that one.
Far less full of torture and mayhem is “Happy Feet,” a cartoon about a dancing penguin. It’s daft Australian humor from the man behind “Mad Max” and the “Babe” movies, and it’s a curious blend of music, comedy and surrealism. Me likey.
Me don’t know if me likey “Let’s Go to Prison,” because they didn’t screen it for critics. That usually means it’s awful, but this one has a good cast, a good director, and a trailer that makes me laugh. So we’ll see.
Since next week is Thanksgiving, the new films will open on Wednesday instead of Friday. There’s a metric buttload of them, too, so put your movie-going hat on! To accommodate that, next week’s “In the Dark” — your weekly e-mail of reviews, DVD releases and other movie stuff — will be sent out on Wednesday, returning to the regular schedule the following week.
The most successful and long-lived character in movie history gets a makeover and a restart in “Casino Royale,” and it’s all for the better. This is the best James Bond film in at least 17 years, and Daniel Craig might be the best 007 … ever.
I know, I know, it’s sacrilege to suggest anyone is better than Sean Connery/Roger Moore/whoever you think was best. But Craig is more dangerous, more menacing, and more convincing than his predecessors. The recent Bond films have been self-parodies, with groan-worthy one-liners and increasingly absurd action sequences that threatened to turn the whole thing into a cartoon. “Casino Royale” returns to the gritty, intense feel of Ian Fleming’s novels and positions Bond not as a winking, womanizing old dinosaur but as a cool, brooding hero — Batman, without the cape.
It is a prequel of sorts, returning to Bond’s first mission (though, in the tradition of the series, it’s set in the present and more or less pretends the other films didn’t happen). A pre-titles black-and-white sequence, shot like a film noir and liable to induce giddy goosebumps with its sheer coolness, shows Bond attaining his Double-0 status — and then, after the credits, he almost blows it in a highly public shoot-out in Madagascar.
His MI6 handler, M (Judi Dench), is already weary of his antics. “In the old days, if an agent did something that embarrassing, he’d at least have the good sense to defect,” she complains to an underling. “[Expletive], I miss the Cold War.” Bond must prove himself a capable agent by learning to keep his emotions out of his work. There’s a reason an agent must have two kills on his record, not just one, before becoming Double-0: Anybody can take one life. Taking two shows you can do it consistently.
Bond’s mission involves pursuing a villain called Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), whose bizarre Bond Villain Physical Attribute(TM) is that he cries tears of blood. Le Chiffre works as a financial adviser to terrorists (yeah, it doesn’t sound very scary to me, either), investing their money in the stock market or, when the mood strikes him, trying to double it by playing high-stakes poker with it.
That mood strikes him midway through “Casino Royale,” when he organizes a tournament at the titular gambling hall, located in scenic Montenegro (it’s next to Serbia and Bosnia; book your tickets now!). M sets Bond up with a British treasury hottie named Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) who grants Bond $10 million of playing money. The idea is that he’ll be so good at cards, he’ll clean Le Chiffre’s out. If he loses, of course, then the British government has contributed $10 million to terrorism. So, um, try not to lose.
It’s here that the film, directed by Martin Campbell (“GoldenEye”) and written by 007 veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade with input from Paul Haggis, loses steam. The first hour is as good as any Bond film before it, alive with action and energy. The second hour is bogged down by the seemingly endless poker tournament, which occasionally breaks up for a few hours to give the players time to eat, shower, and, at least in Bond’s case, get into fights and stave off assassination attempts. When you have to keep taking breaks from something in order to insert some action scenes into your action movie, maybe that’s a sign that the thing you’re taking breaks from should be drastically shortened.
Overall, though, my complaints about the film are few. From the breathless chase scene through an under-construction high-rise in the opening minutes to the destruction of a different building at the end, the movie mostly remains potent and sure-footed. It’s sly and funny when necessary, harrowing and violent when the situation calls for it. If there are characters and sequences that seem irrelevant to the basic story, I’ll overlook them.
We see more of Bond’s psychology than normal, too — not so much that he becomes introspective and talkative, but enough to appreciate his situation as a man who has to repress many of his natural feelings for the sake of his job. Craig handles the action, the humor, and the drama perfectly. If his performance doesn’t quiet the naysayers who said he was too soft to play Bond, they’re not paying attention.
The star of “For Your Consideration” is Catherine O’Hara, and if you have not paused lately to appreciate her, please take this opportunity to do so. The “SCTV” veteran has a knack for giving zest even to mediocre-to-bad material (see “Surviving Christmas” — well, don’t, but take my word for it), and among people who love Christopher Guest’s semi-improvised mockumentaries like “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show,” she is something of a goddess. Sure, Fred Willard and Eugene Levy and Parker Posey are funny. But Catherine O’Hara — you don’t just laugh at her. You love her.
I love her a little more after seeing “For Your Consideration,” which is a good but unfortunately not quite great new film from the Christopher Guest crew. O’Hara plays Marilyn Hack, a faded beauty and moderately talented actress who has worked for 30 years without ever getting beyond B-list status. Now Marilyn is starring as a terminally ill woman in “Home for Purim,” a 1940s-set drama about Southern Jews, and buzz on the Internet says she might get an Oscar nomination for it.
The film’s publicist, Corey (John Michael Higgins), is delirious with joy. Oscar buzz means more ticket sales! Marilyn’s co-stars — Parker Posey as her “Home for Purim” daughter, Christopher Moynihan as her son, Harry Shearer as her husband — are genuinely happy for her rather than jealous. Marilyn is the type who inspires that kind of affection, you see. She’s simple, dowdy, and endearingly self-doubting. On a chirpy morning talk show, she’s like a deer in the headlights. She can’t believe there would be Oscar buzz for little ol’ her!
But then she starts to believe it. And then she starts to hope for it. And then she starts to campaign for it. In typical Guest fashion (he directed, as always, and co-wrote the mostly improvised treatment with Eugene Levy), there is a darkness to the comedy. He uses the characters to cruelly mock the absurdities of the Hollywood film industry when we see how Marilyn and her co-stars — who start to become the subject of Oscar buzz, too — whore themselves out to get the vote. Marilyn’s aging but lovely face is Botoxed into a Joker-esque grin, and the Shearer character, theater-trained C-list celebrity Victor Allan Miller, lightens his hair and shows up on an MTV program called “Chillaxin'” to freak-dance with hotties.
All the regular players are on hand (plus some new ones; the troupe gets bigger each time), but Guest has changed it up a bit since “A Mighty Wind.” The film is still semi-improvised, but it’s no longer in the shape of a documentary. Thus, the actors don’t talk to the camera (or to the off-screen interviewer) in brilliantly funny ad-libbed monologues the way they once did, and the movie doesn’t have quite the same spontaneity of the previous entries.
It’s still hilarious, though, with running jokes, nutty characters and subtle (and not-so-subtle) satire to beat most of this year’s comedies. Some of the standouts are John Michael Higgins as the one-eighth Indian publicist, Jennifer Coolidge as the narcissistic producer (“What about me?!” she declares in the middle of an argument that has nothing to do with her), and Fred Willard and Jane Lynch as a pair of vapid “Entertainment Tonight”-style reporters. Those two, in particular, execute their parody with such sharp ferocity that you can feel their catharsis as they ridicule the inanity of the Hollywood machine.
The slight disappointment of the film is that it feels incomplete. There are character arcs begun that go unfinished. I get what they’re going for with the Marilyn Hack character, and I love the idea of it — she’s played so winningly by O’Hara — but they don’t quite pull it off. Some scenes are needed between the climactic Oscar announcements and the epilogue, I think, to flesh out Marilyn’s and some of the other characters’ stories. But it’s nice to see a comedy that leaves you wanting more instead of making you wish it had ended 20 minutes sooner.
Australians! Is there anything they can’t do? “Happy Feet” has an Australian director and writers, several Aussie cast members, and a peppy, upbeat, wacky sensibility that is distinctive of comedies from Down Under. It’s about penguins who sing, and one penguin who dances. KOOKY!
This surreal, toe-tappin’ animated musical combines “March of the Penguins” zoological trivia (the males care for the eggs!) with “Moulin Rouge”-style integration of pop songs (they sing while they’re doing it!). Memphis (voice of Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) are an emperor penguin couple who, like most of their kind, express themselves through song. Not original Broadway-style tunes, but songs you’ve heard before, like Prince’s “Kiss” and Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel.” Their voices are beautiful, and they harmonize like they were made for each other.
Along comes their adorable hatchling, Mumble (voiced in childhood by Elizabeth Daily and in adolescence by Elijah Wood), who can’t carry a tune to save his life. While the other children are learning to find their “heart songs,” their true inner singing voices, Mumble can only squawk out an earnest but ugly honk.
Even more embarrassing: Mumble is an extraordinarily good tap-dancer, something none of his fellow ‘guins are good at, nor even approve of it. “A pagan display!” is what one of the elders calls it. If being unable to sing weren’t enough to make him a misfit, being a feathered version of Savion Glover does the trick.
Mumble leaves his colony, with his father embarrassed (and feeling guilty for dropping the egg while Mumble was incubating) and his mother still defending him. After some wandering, Mumble finds a place where the penguins are smaller than him and speak, inexplicably, with Hispanic accents. The five pals he runs into first (led by Robin Williams, doing that flamboyant Puerto Rican thing he does) find his dancing delightful and want him to teach them how it’s done.
The plot, in a screenplay written by Warren Coleman, John Collee, Judy Morris and George Miller (who’s also the director), is admirably weird and unpredictable, taking Mumble on a journey back to his own colony, into the world of humans, and back to Antarctica again. The film’s eventual “just be yourself” message is pretty standard for a kiddie flick, but everything else about it surprisingly fresh.
Miller previously produced both “Babe” movies (and directed the second) and directed the “Mad Max” films. So talking animals and hero’s journeys, he’s familiar with. The attention to detail in the animation is outstanding, with the penguins cutely anthropomorphic and the song-and-dance numbers all impeccably choreographed. The jokes are loopy, the energy is infectious, the songs are hummable. In a year that’s had a glut of animated films, it’s nice to see one so different from the norm.
So Richard Linklater read “Fast Food Nation,” Eric Schlosser’s bestselling exposé on the junk food industry, and decided the way to turn it into a movie was to fictionalize it. Rather than shining the spotlight on McDonald’s and Burger King, he’d go behind the scenes at a fictional chain, trusting the audience to understand that while the names have been changed, the basic details are true.
The result doesn’t work, but I can see why Linklater tried it. A director who has generally stayed outside the mainstream (“Dazed and Confused,” “Waking Life,” “A Scanner Darkly”), Linklater is given to experimentation anyway. If we had to guess which filmmakers were likely to do something as unusual as making a fictional movie out of a nonfiction book, Linklater’s name would certainly be on the short list.
What’s more, people don’t generally go to documentaries in great numbers. By making a “regular” movie instead of a doc, Linklater (who co-scripted with Schlosser) guarantees a wider audience and thus a greater potential for spreading the word about the evils of the fast-food industry. It’s the rare time in his career that Linklater WANTS mass exposure for his film.
Unfortunately, “Fast Food Nation” the movie is as weak and bland as a McDonald’s hamburger patty. It’s overloaded with characters, has too many subplots, and lacks enough smoking-gun revelations to justify itself. Its main points are that fast-food chains use heavily processed meat (which requires the slaughtering of cows), and that they take advantage of their employees. Well, duh. We needed a movie to tell us this?
There are too many characters with equal screen time and comparable importance to single one out as a “protagonist,” but the closest thing to it is Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), a marketing vice-president for Mickey’s, the fictional burger chain that stands in for the real ones described in the book. Someone has discovered traces of cow manure in Mickey’s hamburger patties, and while the information isn’t public because no one has gotten sick yet, the bigwigs want to solve the problem before a profit-crippling scandal emerges.
Don is dispatched to Cody, Colo., where Mickey’s cows live, die, and are processed at a giant meat-packing plant. A tour of the plant shows sterile conditions and a thoroughly professional workplace. So how is cow poop getting into the hamburgers? Could it be that the plant managers are hiding things from him?
Meanwhile, we meet a band of illegal Mexican immigrants who are transported to Cody and given jobs at Mickey’s meat factory. The work is grueling, disgusting, and low-paying. In fact, it’s so bad that one worker, Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), quits and gets hired as a hotel maid instead. It seems to me that when even the illegal aliens consider your business too exploitative and degrading, maybe that’s the time to rethink your human resources policies.
Sylvia’s husband (Wilmer Valderrama) stays at the plant, as does her sister (Ana Claudia Talancón). The latter finds herself prey to Mike (Bobby Cannavale), an abusive bilingual plant manager who makes a habit of having sex with his prettier female employees.
Meanwhile, the local Mickey’s restaurant is home to the usual assortment of teenage employees, including Amber (Ashley Johnson), a smart girl with a good head on her shoulders who starts to question her relationship with Mickey’s after meeting up with a college environmentalist group.
Those three prongs — the corporate guy, the factory workers, and the local-level employees — comprise the film’s plan of action. But it’s too much. There are too many people who are introduced as a means of adding flavor to the stew but who just get in the way. There’s Ashley’s idiot co-worker (Paul Dano) and their middle-aged boss (Esai Morales), for example, and the coyote (Luis Guzmán) who helps the illegals with their border-crossings, and the Mexican who gets separated from his group in the desert and whose boot is eventually found by another group, and Ashley’s mom (Patricia Arquette), and her post-hippie, sophistry-spouting uncle (Ethan Hawke). The cast is so large that Don Henderson — the closest thing we have to a main character, remember — disappears altogether for the entire second half of the film. There’s just too much going on.
And, in a lot of ways, too little. Linklater wants us to be appalled at the warts-and-all depiction of the fast-food industry, and while it is compelling to see how meat is ACTUALLY produced (it’s not for the squeamish), it’s not particularly revelatory. Low-grade meat? Artificial flavors? Underpaid employees? Well, yeah. Is there anyone in America who thought otherwise? What’s next, an exposé about how sometimes used-car salesmen are dishonest?
Maybe Linklater knows he’s not revealing anything we weren’t already aware of and is instead trying to make us think about things we usually avoid contemplating. Morgan Spurlock’s superlative documentary “Super Size Me” did exactly that, showing how fast food can destroy your health — something we already knew, but which his shocking experimentation made us pay attention to. I don’t find “Fast Food Nation” to be in the same league. Not to go all retro on you, but where’s the beef?
Universal’s decision not to show “Let’s Go to Prison” to critics is a little puzzling, considering the movies they have screened that were far, far worse. “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” for example. Now THERE’S a bad movie. “Let’s Go to Prison”? Eh. It has laughs, it has some cleverness, and it has a lot of problems. But it’s not “bad,” exactly. “Dysfunctional” is more like it.
It’s based loosely on “You Are Going to Prison,” a 1994 non-fiction book written by several inmates under the collective pen name Jim Hogshire in which they give practical, realistic advice about what prison is like. The movie, adapted by “Reno 911” performers Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant and “Reno 911” director Michael Patrick Jann, incorporates some of the book’s sobering facts early on — it costs $54 a day to keep a man in prison; there are more than 2 million people in American prisons — then loses interest and gets back to its primary task, which is to tell a ludicrous and juvenile story and make jokes about male rape.
Our, um, “hero” is John Lyshitski (Dax Shepard), a dirtbag repeat offender recently released from prison who tells us, “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been in prison, I’d have 15 cents.” He blames the judge for all three of his incarcerations (despite his being guilty every time) and wants revenge on him. Alas, the judge is dead now, so John turns his attention to the old man’s son: Nelson Biederman IV (Will Arnett).
Nelson is an arrogant, oblivious jerk, not far removed from the character Arnett played on “Arrested Development.” He winds up in prison over a misunderstanding and John sees his opportunity: He’ll get himself thrown back into prison so he can torment Nelson personally.
No, I don’t know why anyone would do that, either. Just go with it.
It is not a particularly well-constructed movie, plot-wise. John’s whole point in getting himself arrested again is to make Nelson miserable in prison, yet he doesn’t do much in the furtherance of that goal once he arrives and arranges to be Nelson’s cellmate. Instead, he grows frustrated as the prissy, soft Nelson, through no fault of his own, comes to be top dog in the cellblock and actually adjusts to prison life.
Shepard and Arnett are moderately funny as the leads, but Chi McBride steals the show as Nelson’s wooer, Barry. Evidently deciding it’s funnier to see a man seduced in prison than to see him raped (and I guess I’d have to agree), the film presents Barry as a suave, Barry White-style lover who wants to win Nelson’s affection with romance and tenderness rather than force. The thread is so insane — he’s not just a one-scene, one-joke character, but an integral part of the plot — that it’s hard not to laugh at the sheer weirdness of it.
The director is Bob Odenkirk, half of the brilliant “Mr. Show” team and a funny writer and performer in his own right. (He has a small role here as Nelson’s ineffectual lawyer.) He has only a little experience in the director’s chair, though (this is his first wide-release feature), and the film suffers from inelegant pacing, and from violence that’s a bit stronger than you’d expect in a raucous comedy. It’s a dark, strange comedy that should probably be funnier than it is. But then, who ever said prison was going to be funny?
A couple more poems written by Utahns in the days after 9/11, submitted to the newspaper I was working for at the time.
Just like a normal day,
I felt the sun arise me with it’s rays.
And from my heart, I felt such joy to be
-a father of 3-
With little time I rushed to catch my flight,
Oh! how could I have known, natures tender call would take me from this life!
…My pregnant wife
Oh! to hold her just once more and feel her love!
Dear God above…
My life can save so many from this fate,
If it’s not too late,
Oh, please hear me now
Before I take this fatal call;
Send strength to those called after me to fight
FOR FREEDOM’S LIGHT
(CHORUS)
A light that’s shined for us this long
It bares the song
Of those who died to keep this country strong
For generations, their sacrifice has been this countries joy.
And now they call out from the dust to re-employ…
It’s time again to fight
FOR FREEDOM’S LIGHT
(end of chorus)
May our deaths bring out the soldier part
Inside every true American heart
That as this Plane steers down to it’s tragic final blow,
May American resolve with heavens wings aglow
Find justice still in this different war
And rekindle Freedoms flame, each time we see our dear flag soar.
That bravery will abound and courage will take root
And through Liberty’s aim our soldiers will shoot
At the heart of terror till it bleeds it’s last drop
Proving God is on FREEDOM’S side and the American heartbeat can NEVER stop.
Let terror be warned by the down of this flight,
you CANNOT dim our FREEDOM’S LIGHT!
(CHORUS)
For our children, God, please send them peace
As we fight for freedoms heavenly goal
That regardless of race, religion or sex,
Each soul can chose which direction they go
Be with our future generations
To calm their fears and answer their questions
Give them faith to believe
Good will triumph over evil
And courage to keep their dreams alive,
As we fight to pay for Freedom’s bill
Help keep laughter in their song
And heavens promise in their sight
Let this flight go down in victory
To strengthen FREEDOM’S LIGHT
[The designation of “CHORUS” leads me to believe these are song lyrics and not a poem, but the author did not submit music to accompany them, and it would be a strange song indeed that used the verb “re-employ” in its chorus. I would propose singing the lyrics to an already-written, familiar tune, but the fact that each line is a different number of syllables and the stanzas are randomly composed of anywhere from one to 10 lines makes me suspect no such tune exists.]
* * * * *
[This note accompanied the poem.] Written on September 11, 2001, the day the World Trade Twin Towers in New York City were attacked by two hijacked airliners and destroyed. This was an act of Terrorism where many thousands of people were killed or injured.
It is a quiet day,
For there is nothing to say.
Our country is in silence
Because of such violence.
So many people
Have lost their lives,
Such as Grandparents, children,
Husbands and wives.
I wonder so deeply
Way down in my heart
Why would those people
Tear families apart?
Why did it happen?
Nobody knows.
Who in this world
Would stoop so low?
We have been attacked
But it did not break our backs.
We will find who did this
And bring them to justice.
Now is the time
To come together.
We must remember
This day forever.
[I appreciate the author’s explanatory note at the beginning. Often, we would receive poems about 9/11, read them, and then go, “What the heck was 9/11?!? Was it some kind of big important day or something??”
Also, note the clever rhyming of “did this” and “justice.” It’s hard to get away with that, but I think he pulled it off.]
On their very first date at the beginning of “Flannel Pajamas,” Stuart tells Nicole that he thinks her best friend is evil. He may have a point — the woman in question is dating several men at once and is dishonest about it — but is that really the sort of thing you tell someone you’ve just met about her closest friend?
The fact that Nicole lets Stuart get away with the comment foreshadows how their life together will be, and “Flannel Pajamas” is all about that relationship. Written and directed by Jeff Lipsky (his only film besides 1997’s unseen “Childhood’s End”), it’s a verbose indie drama composed of little more than scene after scene of Nicole and Stuart talking. They date, they get engaged, they get married; sometimes they’re clothed and sometimes they’re naked; but always they are talking.
The couple, played by Julianne Nicholson and Justin Kirk, start out happy enough. Stuart, a Manhattan theater publicist, is confident and unhesitant, with subtle powers of persuasion that ensure he’s always the decision-maker — and that you’re always glad to let him be. Nicole is more fragile, easily embarrassed.
They’ve been together a year before she starts to realize how in-charge he is, and how she rarely gets to decide anything on her own. He isn’t mean or commandeering; he just knows what he wants and strives to get it. Stuart has had one steady, lucrative job for years, while Nicole is frequently fired for under-performance. Their differences complement each other at first: He likes to be in control; she likes to be controlled. But over time — and with the advice of that evil best friend (Chelsea Altman) — Nicole becomes dissatisfied with the arrangement.
And, yes, that means more talking. These “anatomy of a relationship” films (think “Before Sunrise”) rely on the central couple to keep the audience engaged, and while Kirk and Nicholson show bravery in their frequent stark nudity, they seldom show much in the way of emotion. Nicole calls him on it once, saying he needs to let out his tears after a family tragedy occurs. What’s funny is that for all her crying, she never really opens up, either. She’s as flatly uninteresting as he is.
Yet Lipsky (who has called the film semi-autobiographical) achieves several scenes of honesty and insight. Most notable is an exchange between Nicole’s mother Elizabeth (Rebecca Schull) and Stuart. She lays everything out: her feelings about her daughter, her feelings about him, and why she doesn’t think they should be together. Stuart sincerely wants to protect the people he loves; Elizabeth sees that Nicole needs a strong partner, not someone to smother her.
The film aims for emotional and sexual frankness, and the camera does not shy away from the characters’ nudity. No carefully composed shots or strategic lighting here! They let is all hang out. That’s all well and good, but then we get things that are a little too frank, as when, after having sex on the floor, Nicole says, “I’m dripping.” Then, when Stuart gets up to grab a towel, she says, “Stop. I’m marking my territory.”
Really, movie? Is that what we need? Does that make you all mature and edgy? It made me laugh, but I don’t think that’s what you were going for.
It isn’t a bad movie, but it is overlong and over-talkative. It has 20 minutes of Mars-and-Venus insight, stretched out over two hours. They ought to have cut both the film and the marriage a little shorter.
Because I was tired of people asking me for celebrities’ e-mail addresses — even though nothing on my site implies I would have them — I put a warning on my e-mail page saying this:
STOP: If you are going to ask Eric how to contact a celebrity, DON’T. Eric has no such information for ANY famous person. If you ask him anyway, despite this warning, Eric will write back and tell you how stupid you are. And he’ll be right to do so.
There has been a distinct drop-off in e-mail-address requests since then, but I do still get one occasionally. And when I get one, I do indeed respond and tell the person how stupid he or she is.
Here is the latest:
Hi! I just want to know the e-mai adress of elizabeth winstead. Plaese! Can I have it?? I promise I will not give it to anyone because I also care for her privacy.. Please reply! She is really beautiful and I like her very much. I just want her to be my friend. I’m one of her biggest fans!! I would really appreciate your kindness!!
From,
Angel
I replied:
The page you just e-mailed me from says this:
[I repeat the above-quoted warning.]
So: You’re a very stupid person. It says specifically that I don’t have contact info for any celebrity, and yet you asked me anyway. That is stupid.
Eric
Angel replied:
Oh!!! I’m sorry and CHILL!!!! Don’t call me stupid bcoz i’m not been raised as a stupid one bcoz im studying and im a scholar and also a valedectorian!!!!! So please be careful of your words!!! Bcoz some1 is being hurt!!!! Thank u, anyways!! For your politeness!! And remember that im not stupid! its just a simple question though!!! I asked only for the e-mailadd of mary elizabeth! You can reply Nicely!!DUH!!! Who are you anyway and are you close to mary elizabeth winstead???
Sigh. All that, and she STILL thinks I know Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s e-mail address. I don’t even know who she is! (An actress, apparently. I’m guessing she was in a movie I reviewed, but I don’t feel like looking her up.)
Like all writers, I would love to write only what I want and never take on an assignment that isn’t interesting to me personally. Unfortunately, writers who insist on being that selective usually starve to death, which is actually good for the rest of us because it thins out the competition, and also because writers are pretentious and we need fewer of them.
So I’m often called upon to write things I consider boring or stupid but that will pay the bills, similar to the way prostitutes must sometimes engage customers they don’t find attractive. All professions require this kind of compromise, really. A plumber may not like the particular kind of problem you have with your toilet, but he’s obligated to fix it anyway if he wants to get paid. Or a mathematician may have certain numbers he doesn’t care for. 1,482, for example, or 6. Maybe those numbers strike him as inelegant, or maybe they were responsible for the death of a family member. Maybe he considers the loop on the “6” to be obscene. But if his boss puts a series of figures into his inbox and declares, “Johnson! I need these numbers added ASAP!,” the mathematician has no choice but to add them, no matter how many 1,482’s or 6’s they contain.
One recent job I had involved writing copy for a jewelry Web site. Specifically, the owner wanted the bland, just-the-facts descriptions of his engagement rings to be rewritten so they’d be more appealing to potential buyers. There were 90 engagement rings. I only had to write 30-40 words for each one. But it was sheer torture.
The first hindrance to my success in writing advertising copy for 90 different engagement rings is that all engagement rings look exactly the same to me. This was often a problem when I was a student at Brigham Young University, which has more newly engaged women than it has Asians. Every other day some female acquaintance would be showing off her new engagement ring, and I’d have to admire it and remark on its beauty when in fact I thought it looked just like all the other rings I’d seen, including the ones she’d gotten the previous times she was engaged.
The second hindrance in writing about these 90 rings is that there are only so many different ways to say something is pretty and sparkly. The English language is vast, but it only has a few synonyms for “pretty” that can really be applied to rings. You wouldn’t call a ring “hot,” for example, or “doable.”
But I slogged through it, and then had to contend with a final requirement: The client wanted me to come up with NAMES for each of the rings. All these rings that look the same and are appalling wastes of money, they need to have individual names, like “Eternal Promise” or “Precious Memories.” The cheesier, the better. I came up with all the sickening names I could think of, then branched out into less viable monikers:
The Cheek-Gouger
Ostentatious Display
Desperate Measures
The Judge
The Glassy Stare
The B****slapper
Sweater-Snag
Tequila Hangover
The Pawn Shop
Furtive Glances
Then I hit on the idea of geography: “The Morocco,” “The Parisian,” etc. The rings looked nothing like Morocco or Paris, but how could they? Morocco and Paris are huge metropolitan centers with streets, sewer systems, buildings and people. Rings are round and go on your finger. An engagement ring has little in common with Morocco or Paris, though I guess you could say they’re all overpriced.
Then someone suggested using geography combined with nouns, like “Egyptian Sunrise,” or “Hawaiian Beachcomber.” Along those lines, I came up with these entries:
Lebanese Breakfast
Albuquerque Bloodbath
Turkish Prison
New Jersey Turnpike
Personally, I would love to wear a ring called “Albuquerque Bloodbath.” But I’m not a starry-eyed young bride-to-be, am I? (No.)
Probably the worst kind of writing I or anyone else ever has to do is something that is new with the Internet Age. It’s called search engine optimization, or SEO. The way it works is, let’s say you have a Web site that sells knee-length shorts. Your product is aimed at people who want to be modest in the summer months, but who want to look dorky and unfashionable while they do it. There are dozens of Web sites competing with yours to sell these products. How do you get people to come to your site?
The cheapest way is to make it so that when people search for “knee-length shorts” on their favorite search engines, your site is among the first results. And how do you do that? Pay someone to write an “informative” article that uses the phrase “knee-length shorts” a bunch of times, then post it on your site.
It used to be that webmasters would publish a lot of gobbledegook, or occasionally even mumbo-jumbo, with their keywords thrown in. Then the search engines started getting smarter, and the webmasters had to use content that actually made sense.
That’s where SEO comes in. An SEO article might begin like this:
Knee-length shorts are a very popular item in many parts of the country. Many people enjoy wearing knee-length shorts in the summer months. When they are knee-length, shorts are more comfortable than long pants, yet more modest than shorts that are not knee-length shorts. Are knee-length shorts right for you? You can learn more about knee-length shorts on several knee-length shorts-related Web sites. (Also: knee-length shorts.)
As you can see, SEO writing is probably the worst writing anyone could ever do. It’s really, really easy, but it’s also really, really boring. It’s no wonder so many writers are alcoholics, though I do wonder how they can afford it. I can barely keep up with my Pop-Tart habit.
Roger Ebert speaks of the Idiot Plot. It is “any plot containing problems which would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots.” The most egregious Idiot Plots hang the entire film on them, as in most cross-dressing comedies, where the protagonists look nothing like the gender they are impersonating, yet no one notices. Why does no one notice? Because if they did, the movie would be over. Hence, it’s an Idiot Plot: Everyone has to be stupid for the movie to exist.
In less conspicuous examples, the overall plot is fine; it’s only some of the details that require the characters to be idiots. Usually this involves characters making their situations worse through poor decisions of their own, yet failing to realize that their problems are now their own fault. Nearly all horror movies suffer from this, of course. Idiots go into dark basements alone and are terrorized, yet never seem to say, “Shoot! I KNEW I shouldn’t have gone into that dark basement alone!”
I bring up the Idiot Plot because two of this week’s new releases made me think of it — one because it has an Idiot Plot, and the other because it does not.
“Babel” is an overlong, overinflated film from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores Perros”). It has four interconnecting stories set all over the world, and two of them have developments late in the film that are the direct result of the characters making one stupid decision after another.
This is a problem because it makes you lose sympathy for them. Their actions are so outrageously foolish that you think, “Even in the heat of the moment, I would never do something that dumb.” You don’t feel sorry for them as the victims of circumstance anymore.
Meanwhile, “Stranger Than Fiction” is notable for having characters who are all smart, all the time, and who behave the way real people would behave under these circumstances. What’s interesting is that the plot — in which a man discovers that he is the main character in a novel someone is writing — is obviously not realistic. It works, though, because the movie treats it like a legitimate story, not like a goofy premise that requires no effort.
The other new wide release is “A Good Year,” which is a bad movie. It features Russell Crowe doing comedy, and by “doing” I mean “failing at.”
“Borat” goes wide today after opening on about 1,000 screens last week, so if it wasn’t playing where you live before, it probably is now. Go see it, unless you’re certain you will be offended by it.
“Harsh Times,” starring Christian Bale as an L.A. gangster (wait, what?), opens in semi-wide release today, about as many screens as “Borat” had last week. It is not reviewed today because the one screening of it was opposite the “Babel” screening, and I had to choose. (Both were Tuesday. Monday was wide open, no screenings. But when a studio gets it into its head to screen a film on a certain day, it never budges, no matter what. You’d be surprised how often this happens.)
I’ll try to review “Harsh Times” — along with “The Return,” a PG-13 horror film that they didn’t bother screening at all — this weekend.
Oh, and regarding “Babel”: Isn’t that a Paramount film? How did I see it? Ah, but it’s actually Paramount Vantage, Paramount’s wing for arthouse-style films. And believe it or not, Paramount and Paramount Vantage have different publicists in the Seattle/Portland area, so the Paramount ban did not affect me. It’s an example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, for surely if Paramount wanted me banned from all its screenings, they probably meant that to include Paramount Vantage releases, too. Whoops!
In that plain brown wrapper over there, behind the name-brand stuff, you’ll find “Come Early Morning.” It’s a generic drama that has good performances but no substance. We keep it on the shelf behind “North Country.”
Actress Joey Lauren Adams makes her writing and directing debut with this feature, and she has cast Ashley Judd as the lead, a small-town Arkansas gal named Lucy. Lucy is a barfly, a fighter, a slut and a drunk, and that’s just what’s on her business card. She prefers one-night stands to dating; “emotionally closed off” is what a therapist would call her, and then she would flip the therapist off and possibly sleep with him.
Now, a woman who looks like Ashley Judd and would rather skip the date and get right to the sex could be very, very popular in certain circles, i.e., with every straight man in America. But she is unhappy with her drunken, wanton ways. Estranged from her father Lowell (Scott Wilson), she shows up at his new apartment to announce she’ll be going to church with him on Sunday morning. He doesn’t say much, but he says OK.
Coincidental with this step forward, Lucy meets a man named Cal (Jeffrey Donovan), who treats her like a lady and doesn’t try to jump her bones the minute he meets her. Unaccustomed to such treatment, Lucy backs away. But gradually, Cal helps her appreciate her own worth.
I’d have to re-watch “Double Jeopardy” again, but I think Judd’s performance in “Come Early Morning” is probably the best of her career. Her eyes are weary and cynical, giving Lucy the look of a woman with a past, a woman who drags baggage with her everywhere she goes. Jeffrey Donovan, an under-noticed TV actor, deserves praise for his charming performance as Cal, too, and Scott Wilson — recently re-discovered as the taciturn father in “Junebug” — plays a similar role here as Lucy’s father, also to great effect.
It’s Ms. Adams’ work as writer and director that I take issue with. For one thing, Lucy’s relationship to several other characters is fuzzy and confusing: Is the woman she calls “Nana” (Diane Ladd) supposed to be her grandmother? If so, why is does she look the same age as Lucy’s father and mother (Candyce Hinkle)? And why is Uncle Tim (Tim Blake Nelson) about the same age as Lucy herself? I suppose an uncle the same age as his niece is not unheard of — but there’s no way Tim is the brother of Lucy’s mother or father, not with that 30-year age difference. I know family trees can get knotty down Arkansas way, but throw us a bone here.
More importantly, the film just doesn’t have anything TO it. Its story of a woman’s quest for personal fulfillment is not new, and it’s told in a perfunctory manner, complete with the backslide/relapse at the end of the second act. The performances are admirable all around, but they’re in the service of a film that doesn’t otherwise merit much attention.
Watching “A Good Year” is like spending two hours with someone who is tiresome but who thinks you should find him exceedingly charming. “Aren’t I droll?” he seems to say with his smug smile and his semi-amusing quips. “Don’t you think I’m ever-so-pleasant?” But all you want to do is smack him.
Russell Crowe’s off-screen behavior makes a lot of people want to smack him, but his reputation doesn’t even figure in to the botched Guy Learns What’s Really Important comedy that is “A Good Year.” The character of Max Skinner — a rich London stockbroker who’s as much a rogue on the trading floor as he is with the ladies — would be insufferable no matter who played him. He’s a pompous, wine-swilling, sweater-vest-wearing, falsely humble fake-stutterer. He’s Hugh Grant, if Hugh Grant were a humorless, black-souled golem.
Based on the novel by Peter Mayle and adapted by Marc Klein (“Serendipity”), “A Good Year” tells us of Max Skinner’s old Uncle Henry (Albert Finney), a winemaker and gadabout living on a vineyard in Provence, France. The two had a close relationship when Max was young. Now Henry has died and left the estate to Max, who spends his days terrorizing London’s economic community with his barely legal stock-trading techniques. Max figures to sell the old place and get it off his hands, but when he visits it, the memories come flooding back.
The memories are the film’s highlights, actually. The young Max is played by Freddie Highmore (already a star from his performances in “Finding Neverland” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), and Albert Finney gives Uncle Henry infectious life and energy. He’s exactly as charming as the rest of the movie thinks it is.
While in Provence getting the house ready for sale, Max develops a crush on a local girl named, improbably, Fanny Chenal (Marion Cotillard), a waitress at a local bistro. (In one of the film’s more aggressively cute sequences, Max dons an apron and helps Fanny wait tables during a busy dinner rush!) He also meets Christie Roberts (Abbie Cornish), a young American woman who might have a claim of ownership to the property.
The film’s director is Crowe’s old “Gladiator” pal Ridley Scott, whose output (“Alien,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Hannibal”) is generally of a more action-oriented nature. Scott’s lack of experience with light comedies shines brightly in “A Good Year”: The parts that are supposed to be funny look like they were executed by people who don’t know how to be funny. A dog pees on a man’s leg; a man falls face-first into a pile of manure; a careless driver accidentally runs a bicyclist off a road — this is what passes for mirth around here.
The images of the French countryside are gorgeous, though. More Albert Finney and Freddie Highmore, more pretty pictures of French places, less Russell Crowe, that’s what I say.
Many things stand out about “Stranger Than Fiction,” so I’ll first mention one that may not be as readily apparent as the others: Every character in the movie is smart. This is a rare treat in 2006, when the jackassification of American cinema is nearly complete and when comedies about stupid people comprise about 70 percent of all comedies. If we expand the category to include movies where the characters aren’t labeled as stupid but who, based on their actions, clearly ARE stupid, the percentage rises to about 90.
No one is dumb in “Stranger Than Fiction.” Even the ancillary characters are smart and grown-up, and the plot doesn’t rely on people missing the point or jumping to the wrong conclusion or doing any of the other dumb things that drive a lot of plots. The characters are witty in a natural way, not as wise-cracking joke machines but in the way real people are witty.
I appreciate the intelligence and realism particularly because the story itself is decidedly non-real and could very easily have turned into an overdone farce. It involves a dull IRS agent named Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who starts hearing a voice in his head — the voice of a narrator, specifically, describing his actions as though he were a character in a novel and mentioning to the reader that later in the story, Harold will die.
It’s one thing to have voices in your head telling you to kill people; there’s a name for that (schizophrenia) and it’s often treatable. It’s something else to have a voice that doesn’t give instructions, but simply narrates. When Harold brushes his teeth, the voice says, “Harold brushed his teeth.” “It’s telling me what I’ve already done,” Harold tells a psychiatrist. “Accurately, but with a better vocabulary.”
Harold is a matter-of-fact type, focused on numbers and efficiency and viewing the world as a series of patterns, equations and measurements. (Just for fun, the movie sometimes shows us Harold’s point of view, with labels on everything and the distances between objects marked like a draftsman’s blueprint.) His life is boring, which makes the fact of it being narrated all the more unusual. He does not adjust well to change, and this latest development constitutes a significant shift from the norm. He suspects, as anyone would, that he is either the victim of an elaborate prank, or going crazy.
The voice belongs to Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a writer who is indeed currently working on a novel in which Harold is the main character. When she types something on the page, it happens to Harold. The trouble is, she’s a bit blocked lately, neurotically drinking and chain-smoking as her publisher’s deadline looms ever larger and as she becomes increasingly frustrated with the progress of her novel. An assistant named Penny (Queen Latifah) is sent in to help her (and, probably, to serve as the publisher’s spy), but an assistant is no cure for writer’s block.
Meanwhile, unable to do anything about the narrator in his head, Harold tries to go about his work, which includes auditing a tax-evading baker named Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal) whose attitude toward Harold personally runs hot and cold. Thanks to the narrator in his head, he can sometimes divine which mood she’s in.
He also meets with a scatterbrained literature professor named Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) in the hopes that Hilbert can help him figure out which book he’s a character in (if the book already exists), or which current author is writing him (if the book has yet to be published). This leads to a scene that is both hysterically funny and representative of the film as a whole. Harold is in Prof. Hilbert’s office, and Hilbert is asking him questions about the nature of the narration so far. “Are you the king of anything?” “Do you have magical powers?” Silly questions, sure, but since the answer to both is no, that rules out a huge chunk of existing English literature.
What’s hilarious about the scene is the way it’s played. Ferrell is deadpan, as he is throughout the movie, never giving in to hysteria or mania. He is, of all things, the straight man in this film. That gives Hoffman the opportunity to be the “funny” one in this scene, to clown around and milk the punchlines — but he doesn’t do it. He plays the scene as seriously as Ferrell does. To the characters, this is a real situation that really needs to be dealt with. Think of the many films where “quirky” premises are turned into nothing more than a series of skits, with no honest character development, and you appreciate the sophistication of this one all the more.
But an even better reason for this approach: Treating a “quirky” premise seriously just makes it funnier. The more deadpan Ferrell is, the funnier the scene is. He’s truly doing in this film what many have claimed Jim Carrey was doing in others, and that is suppressing his tendency to be Wild & Crazy and just being a Normal Person. I never really bought it with Carrey, who always seems to have a manic gleam in his eye even when he’s being “serious.” With Ferrell, for the first time, I buy it. He’s genuinely acting here, delivering a funny, soft-hearted performance.
The film is also a bit of a first for director Marc Forster, whose “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland” (and his little-seen 2005 effort “Stay”) barely hinted at his knack for the smooth, effortless invention and whimsy at the heart of “Stranger Than Fiction.” And the film is in every way a first for the screenwriter, Zach Helm, a playwright making his initial foray into the movie business. (He’s obviously been reading up on his Charlie Kaufman, though. You could watch the brain-twisting “Stranger Than Fiction” and easily assume it comes from the same odd mind as “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich.”)
There are some flaws in the film that are minor but worth noting. We must ultimately deal with the fact that Harold doesn’t know how he can be real AND a figure in Karen Eiffel’s novel, and frankly, the movie doesn’t know, either. It sort of ignores the specifics and leaves it at “that’s just how it is, OK?” And if Maggie Gyllenhaal sounds like an unlikely love interest for Will Ferrell, well, she is. It doesn’t appear any more reasonable in the film than it does on paper.
Yet as the movie shifts from the predictable “you don’t appreciate life until you think you’re going to die” angle to more sublime themes, it becomes surprisingly touching. Do we control our own fate? Can we change the outcome of our lives? What constitutes truly “living,” anyway? Never self-consciously wacky or cloyingly sentimental, “Stranger Than Fiction” is instead a breezy, sweet comedy. You walk out of it feeling better about life than you did going in.
Long ago, Sarah Michelle Gellar made a career decision. On television, she would star in one brilliant cult hit, impressing people with both her dramatic range and her butt-kicking abilities. In movies, meanwhile, she would only star in complete crap.
“The Return” is a bleak, listless horror film that hews so closely in plot and tone to Gellar’s “The Grudge” that it might as well be a sequel — except that we just had a “Grudge” sequel. In which Gellar also appeared. Clearly, the former Buffy the Vampire Slayer is sticking to her principles.
Gellar plays Joanna Mills, a sales representative for a St. Louis shipping company who goes to Texas in pursuit of a big account and decides, hey, as long as she’s here, she might as well exorcise some old demons. You see, when Joanna was 11, something weird happened in La Salle, Texas, and she hasn’t been the same since. She has occasional hallucinations about a man chasing her. She hears his voice in telephone static. Sometimes she goes into bathroom stalls in seedy bars and cuts herself.
Sure, you’re thinking, that’s all pretty typical behavior for a teenage girl. But Joanna isn’t a teenage girl! She’s like 25 or something.
So she heads to La Salle, where her jealous co-worker Kurt (Adam Scott) shows up just so he can try to rape her. Why he had to follow her for hundreds of miles instead of doing it back in St. Louis, where they both live, I don’t know. I also don’t know why Kurt then disappears. Heck, I don’t know why Kurt was in the movie to begin with.
Anyway, Joanna meets a guy in La Salle named Terry (Peter O’Brien), a brooding loner outcast whose farmhouse inflames Joanna’s hallucinations even further. She seems to be channeling a murder victim. But who killed her? And when? And why? And who cares?
Director Asif Kapadia is not interested in shocking revelations or scary scenarios. He focuses instead on spooky music and jarring sound effects — you know, the tricks filmmakers use to hide the fact that there’s nothing that is actually scary about their movies.
Even more bizarre is the story’s insistence on setting up Joanna and Terry as potential love interests. Their somber, whispery romance is the very picture of blandness, just two gloomy souls boring each other. I get drowsy just remembering them.
The screenwriter, Adam Sussman, also had a credit on the short-lived “Night Stalker” series from last fall. I’m not surprised: My thoughts as I watched the mystery unfold in “The Return” were that the mystery is not substantial enough for a movie. It should be a single episode in some supernaturally themed TV show, where it occupies only 45 minutes of time and can be followed the next week by something better. Unfortunately, “The Return” will probably be followed only by another cheap, unimaginative PG-13 horror flick, accompanied by increasing sadness for Sarah Michelle Gellar’s career.
As Shakespeare wrote in “Henry IV Part II,” “‘Tis needful that the most immodest word be looked upon and learned.” That is the stated agenda of “F***,” a ribald and riotous documentary about the word I just bleeped, a word so notorious that all I had to do was give you the first letter and you knew which one I meant.
Because I don’t like asterisks but I do like fudge, I’m going to replace the word in question with the word “fudge” throughout this review, except when I’m talking about the title of the film. Many of the figures interviewed in the film indicate that, while they avoid blue language in mixed company, there are certain times when That Word is simply all that will do. They may have a point, but still, I’m keepin’ it clean here.
We begin with some of “fudge’s” etymology, although we can only go so far. We know it first appeared in print in 1475, but we don’t know for certain what language it was derived from. We know that, no matter how many urban legends you hear to the contrary, it is NOT an acronym for anything.
I knew all of that, more or less. (I can sniff out an urban legend a mile away, so quit forwarding me all your stupid e-mails, OK?) I was not aware that it wasn’t until the 20th century that “fudge” came to have as many varied uses — verb, noun, adjective, etc. — as it does today. The two World Wars are attributed with popularizing those diverse meanings, which makes sense. If anyone has a reason to swear and to swear creatively, it’s soldiers.
Then we move on to the word’s impact on society. Comedians Lenny Bruce and George Carlin — the former a legendary provocateur, the latter an insightful wordsmith — are discussed at length, particularly their battles with decency laws and censorship. It’s hard to imagine someone today being put in jail just for talking dirty in a nightclub full of adults, but that’s what happened to Bruce.
I love this quote from Tom Lehrer, not heard in “F***” but applicable to the discussion: “When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl.'”
Times have changed, no question. We’ve become quite permissive in a lot of ways, yet remain puritanical in others. The film extends its discussion of “fudge” to include commentary on swearing and “indecency” in general. For example, that unexpected peek at Janet Jackson’s nipple had tremendous ramifications in the television industry. A watchdog group called the Parents Television Council constantly floods the FCC with complaints about “indecent” programming. The film points out that the FCC had 111 such complaints in 2000. In 2004, there were over a million — 99.9 percent of them from the Parents Television Council.
For as permissive as we’ve become, you still can’t say “fudge” on prime-time network TV, although the way the FCC enforces that is arbitrary and strange. When U2’s Bono let it slip at an awards show, the FCC ruled that since it was being used as an adjective (“fudging brilliant”) rather than a verb, it wasn’t indecent. But then Nipplegate happened, everyone got skittish, and the FCC reversed its decision and levied a fine against NBC for Bono’s language. A year later, ABC aired “Saving Private Ryan” complete and uncensored, including all 21 uses of “fudge,” and the FCC did nothing. See, it’s OK to say it on TV if it’s in a movie that is really serious and won Oscars.
“F***,” directed by Steve Anderson, includes conservatives like Alan Keyes and Pat Boone talking about “fudge” in harsh, disapproving terms, while people like Hunter S. Thompson, Ice-T, and Janeane Garofalo speak of it glowingly. They like its uses as an expletive, yes, but they also consider it a matter of free speech. It is, after all, Only A Word. What harm can a word do? “F***” observes that it’s because no one says it that “fudge” has so much power. It’s only offensive because people let it offend them.
Anderson keeps a buoyant tone and a fast pace, flitting from one angle to another rapidly and including a lot of raucous humor along the way. Some misspelled and poorly punctuated captions suggest a lapse in professionalism, but you get the sense this was sort of a one-man project. I’m impressed at the number of people Anderson was able to interview.
One angle that ought to have been covered in more detail is this: Why do we choose certain words to be offended by? Why is “fudge” considered “bad”? What makes it any worse than any other part of the vocabulary? As Shakespeare would say, ay, there’s the frickin’ rub.
I know you’ve been jonesin’ for more Children’s Letters to Raven-Symone, so here’s another batch of them. I’ll try to post them more often so we can get caught up.
Basic background: I registered symone.raven@gmail.com and posted it on this blog, specifically saying it is NOT Raven-Symone’s e-mail address and that it IS my e-mail address. I was working under the assumption that people would ignore the disclaimer and use the address to write to Raven anyway. I was right.
Deeper background: Click the “Children’s Letters to Raven-Symone” category and read the earliest entry.
NON-PARTISAN MODERATOR: I’d like to thank my guests, Liberal and Conservative, for joining us today for this debate. Hopefully you can illuminate some key points in your separate philosophies, with the ultimate goal of finding common ground as Americans.
LIBERAL: Yes, exactly. We all want to make America better.
CONSERVATIVE: Quite so. I am pleased to be here.
MODERATOR: OK, then. Our first topic is the economy. It has gone up and down since George W. Bush was elected in 2000, and has suffered setbacks and enjoyed rebounds. What road is it on now? Improving? Worsening? What should be done next? Liberal, we start with you.
LIBERAL: Thank you. First, I want to make it clear that anything negative that has happened to the economy is Bush’s fault, while anything positive is the result of things Clinton set in motion when he was in office.
MODERATOR: Interesting. Conservative, rebuttal?
CONSERVATIVE: I believe my esteemed opponent has it exactly backwards. The economy’s successes have been because of Bush and in spite of Clinton, while the downturns have been entirely due to the liberal media’s influence on the American people.
LIBERAL: Fair enough. But I should point out that Rush Limbaugh is fat.
CONSERVATIVE: I hardly think that’s relevant. Not nearly as relevant as the fact that Michael Moore is fat.
LIBERAL: I believe Limbaugh’s girth is of major importance in this debate and that Moore’s is wholly immaterial. You evidently feel the opposite.
CONSERVATIVE: I do.
LIBERAL: Let us agree to disagree on this point, then.
CONSERVATIVE: Agreed.
MODERATOR: Gentlemen, we need to wrap up this topic and move on.
LIBERAL: OK. I’d say the biggest reason for the sluggishness of the economy is that Ann Coulter is a shrill harpie with bony knees.
MODERATOR: Conservative, rebuttal?
CONSERVATIVE: Your point is well taken. But need I point out that Keith Olbermann’s ratings on MSNBC are very low when compared to those of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News?
LIBERAL: I concede that point.
MODERATOR: Excellent points, gentlemen. Now, let’s move on to another thorny subject: Iraq. What should be our next move in that very sensitive part of the world? Conservative?
CONSERVATIVE: What we need in Iraq are leaders who understand that Al Gore is crazy when he says the Earth is melting.
LIBERAL: I think you’re forgetting the very crucial fact that Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face, and that President Bush can’t pronounce “nuclear.”
CONSERVATIVE: John F. Kennedy couldn’t say “Cuba,” either. He pronounced it “Cuber.”
LIBERAL: That’s an accent, not a mispronunciation!
CONSERVATIVE: Beside the point. You’re dodging the real issue here: We need an amendment banning flag-burning, and we need it NOW.
LIBERAL: No we don’t. What we need is for everyone to realize that since Bush stole the election in 2000, nothing he’s done since then is valid.
MODERATOR: OK, we’ve covered the Iraq situation pretty well, and you’ve both raised some thought-provoking issues. Let’s move on to our final topic: Social Security. Some say the program is in trouble, others say it’s doing OK. What do you say, Liberal?
LIBERAL: Conservatives are supposed to be the moral watchdogs, yet Republican congressman Mark Foley sexually harassed teenage boys.
CONSERVATIVE: But Clinton had sex in the Oval Office.
LIBERAL: Yes, with a consenting adult, not a teenage boy.
CONSERVATIVE: Yes, but Clinton was president, while Foley was merely a congressman.
LIBERAL: Yes, but Foley’s sins involved teenagers while Clinton’s involved adults.
CONSERVATIVE: Yes, but Foley never actually touched anyone, whereas Clinton did.
LIBERAL: Yes, but Foley is unappealing while Clinton is charismatic.
CONSERVATIVE: Yes, but Clinton is chubby while Foley is slender.
LIBERAL: Touché.
MODERATOR: Thank you, gentlemen. This has been a stimulating debate. For your final thoughts, you may each recite one bumper sticker. Liberal?
LIBERAL: “No one died when Clinton lied!”
MODERATOR: Conservative?
CONSERVATIVE: “Annoy a liberal: Work hard and be happy!”
MODERATOR: Thank you both. To our viewing audience, good night, and good luck. Seriously, I mean it. Good luck.
The funniest movie this week, or any week so far this year, is “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” though you can just call it “Borat” for short. I saw it at a MySpace screening several weeks ago, and my review has been posted since then. But today’s the day the review becomes official. There’s no turning back now! This movie really is being released.
Actually, Fox decided a few weeks ago to open it in only about 900 theaters today and the rest next week. They thought that while the Internet is ripe with Borat buzz, and though Borat has been showing up all over pop culture the last few weeks, there might not be enough awareness of the film in “middle America” (i.e., everything between the coasts).
They might be right about that, and it’s interesting to see a studio being thoughtful about these things. I suspect the failure of “Snakes on a Plane” was sobering. That film SEEMED to have huge buzz, but it turned out all that excitement was only on the Internet. Regular people — people who use the Internet to check e-mail and maybe glance at a couple favorite sites — either didn’t know or didn’t care about the movie. Fox seems to think that might be the case with “Borat,” so they’re being cautious.
I have no idea how “Borat” will play in middle America. The MySpace screening audience loved every minute of it, but who’s to say they’re a barometer of public tastes? These are people who spend all their time on the worst-looking, least-functional Web site ever built. What do they know?
The widest release this weekend is “Flushed Away,” a cartoon from Aardman Animations, the people behind “Wallace & Gromit.” This one is computer animated, though, rather than being made with clay. (The reason: Much of it takes place in water, and water is ridiculously hard to convey with stop-motion photography of clay figures.) The writers and directors are not the same staff from “Wallace & Gromit,” though the directors did work on “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
Anyway, it’s about a fancy-pants rat who winds up living in the sewer with the common rodents, and I couldn’t see it because it is being distributed by Paramount Pictures.
You know, I always include that link whenever I mention Paramount, so you can see the story of why they banned me from their press screenings. But I’m not giving enough credit. Allied Advertising is responsible, too. They’re a national advertising and P.R. firm, headquartered in Boston with offices all over North America. The Seattle office handles Portland affairs. I mention it because I’m not 100 percent certain that the decision to ban me wasn’t entirely Allied’s, with no input from Paramount at all. Certainly no one from Paramount ever contacted me; it was all Allied, claiming the decision came from above, but who knows? And it was definitely Allied who made the decision to ban me from screenings for the other studios they handle (Weinstein Company, Dimension and Miramax) — allegedly because Paramount asked them to, but again, how do I know that?
Anywhich, the other wide release today — also a children’s film — is “The Santa Clause 3,” in which Tim Allen falls off some more roofs and some more reindeer break wind. ‘Tis the season! Apparently!
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The blokes at Aardman Animation are responsible for the delightful “Wallace & Gromit” films, which are lovingly rendered in Claymation. But for the studio’s latest flick, they have done the unthinkable: They have abandoned stop-motion animation for that newfangled computer animation!
The result, “Flushed Away,” proves what has always been clear to people with common sense but which has eluded many studio executives, which is that the audience doesn’t care whether the film was made with hand drawings, computers, clay models, or puppets, as long as it tells a good story. The story in “Flushed Away” is simple and not particularly original, but it’s told cleverly (with a screenplay by five writers and direction by animation veterans David Bowers and Sam Fell), with daffy British humor, split-second sight gags and smart dialogue.
Roddy (voice of Hugh Jackman), a pet mouse in an upscale London apartment has his life interrupted by the arrival of a sewer rat named Sid (Shane Richie). Adding to his vexation: While trying to flush Sid down the toilet, Roddy gets himself flushed instead. I guess if it isn’t one thing, it’s another, when you’re a pet mouse.
The upper-class Roddy now finds himself mingling with the common mouse, rat, and other subterranean creatures in an underground city built specifically for mouse-sized animals and made from trash and debris cast away by the humans. He wants only to get back to his home in Kensington, of course, but he must rely on a mouse named Rita (Kate Winslet), an adventuresome mercenary who pilots a boat through the sewers, to help him.
Rita, meanwhile, is being pursued by goons working for The Toad (Ian McKellen), a Bond-style villain whose goal is the eradication of all rodents. She has something he needs, and he’ll stop at nothing — NOTHING! — to get it.
It’s a pretty uncomplicated plot, which is fine, because the story’s sparseness leaves more room for silly, fast-paced jokes. There’s Rita’s grandmother mistaking Roddy for Tom Jones. There’s a cockroach reading Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” There’s Le Frog (Jean Reno), The Toad’s French cousin who brings a team of frog ninjas (and, for some reason, a mime) to help capture Rita and Roddy. And there’s a group of slugs who pop up often to sing songs and provide general amusement.
The film is no classic, sure. It doesn’t tug the heartstrings the way the very best animated films do, nor are the characters timeless. But they are funny and lovable, and the jokes fly so fast that there’s barely time to appreciate them all. Plus, there are singing slugs, and I don’t know what else you could want.
Has it been four long years since we were last favored with a “Santa Clause” movie? Four Christmases since we got to watch Tim Allen fall off a roof, or listen to an animatronic reindeer fart? During this yuletide season — and by yuletide season of course I mean three days after Halloween — we should gather with our families and loved ones and recall our cherished memories from times past. Ah, farting reindeer! How I’ve missed you.
These movies — the 1994 original and the 2002 sequel, both starring Tim Allen as an ordinary guy who inherits the job of Santa Claus — have never been the highest-quality family entertainment, but they’ve always been passable. This one feels strained, like a troupe of actors being forced at gunpoint to perform comedy. The musical score is relentlessly jaunty, underlining every potential joke, but the jokes themselves are halfhearted.
The story this time is that Santa is being harassed by Jack Frost (Martin Short), a hyperactive troublemaker who is jealous that he doesn’t get his own holiday that way Cupid and the Easter Bunny and Santa do. He sets out to sabotage Santa’s holiday preparations in the hopes that St. Nick will exercise his contract’s escape clause and leave the door open for Jack to take over. He wants to call it “Frostmas,” which doesn’t make any sense, since it’s not called “Clausmas” now.
Santa’s life is pretty hectic even without Jack’s meddling. His wife, Carol (Elizabeth Mitchell), is expected to give birth any day, and her parents having been nagging her to let them come visit. They don’t know she’s married to Santa Claus; they think “Scott” is a toymaker in Canada. Santa’s solution is to decorate the North Pole to look like Canada and fly the in-laws in for a visit.
You have to wonder how a man this dumb manages to handle the delivery of millions of toys every year. First of all, changing the signage on the buildings in Santa’s Village is useless when the place is still crawling with elves. Secondly, if you’re Santa Claus, why would you invite the in-laws to visit the DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS? Isn’t there maybe a slightly less chaotic day they could come? Like, I don’t know, ANY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR?
The in-laws are played by Alan Arkin and Ann-Margret, who are only seven years apart in age. I mention it because seeing them on the big screen, you’ll think he’s 90 and she’s 60. There’s a creepy/weird scene where Jack hits on Ann-Margret by making her sing the line “Jack Frost nipping at your nose” over and over again. Then he asks if she wants to be his elf, which sounds naughty, except that earlier he asked a little girl the same thing. So it’s just weird, which is sort of Jack’s M.O.
Tim Allen, who owes Disney another 25 movies before his soul is freed from bondage and he can die in peace, is damnably likable — as in, no matter how bad the movie is, you always kinda like him, dammit. Still, he’s phoning this one in. You play Santa Claus once with enthusiasm, twice with affection, three times for a paycheck.
The one doing all the work is Martin Short. He’s a loopy presence wherever he goes, and he’s just right to play Jack Frost: pesky, over-caffeinated and full of himself. The film’s brightest sequence is the one in which he succeeds at becoming Santa and turns the North Pole into a crass, commercialized tourist trap — an ironic turn of events for a Disney film — with activities like “shave a reindeer for five dollars.”
Again directed by Michael Lembeck and written by two of the six guys responsible for the last one, “The Santa Clause 3” is by far the weakest of the trilogy. The good ideas are gone; now we’re left with the crumbs. Fortunately, there’s still seven weeks of Christmastime left. Plenty of time to wash the taste out of your mouth.
Pedro Almodovar is gay, but he loves the ladies. The Spanish writer/director has focused on women or transsexual men in most of his best films, from “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” to “Talk to Her.” In fact his latest, “Volver” (“to return”), has almost no men in it at all, not even for the heavy lifting of freezers and the burying of bodies. The guy you think is going to turn out to be the love interest? Doesn’t happen. Who needs him?!
Has there been a resurgence in Hitchcock appreciation in Spain lately? Last year’s “El Crimen Perfecto” had sequences that paid homage to the master of suspense, and “Volver” could have been made by old Alfred himself. There is a murder, a cover-up, and a disposal, along with visits from beyond the grave and a bevy of unresolved mother issues. Almodovar’s regular composer, Alberto Iglesias, has even produced a score that recalls, where appropriate, the tense agitation of a score by Hitchcock favorite Bernard Hermann.
“Volver” isn’t really a suspense film, though. It’s a comedy and a drama about an assortment of Spanish women of several generations — Almodovar’s favorite subject. At the center are Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas), grown women and best friends whose parents died in a fire a few years ago. Their dotty aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) rattles around the house alone now and still talks to her departed sister (the women’s mother) as though she were there.
Raimunda and Sole have a good friend, Augustina (Blanca Portillo), who lives next door to Aunt Paula and checks in on her now and then. Augustina’s own mother disappeared without a trace three years ago, and Augustina grieves continually over it.
Then a couple of things happen that are better left as surprises. Someone dies messily (and deservedly), leaving Raimunda and her 14-year-old daughter (Yohana Cobo) to deal with the aftermath. And then someone returns to Sole’s life, someone she thought she’d never see again, apparently to finish unfinished business. Raimunda and Sole are thus hiding things from one another for much of the film, each madly trying to sort out her affairs without the other catching on.
All of this, even the darker material, is handled wryly, whimsically, with Almodovar’s usual pixie-ish humor and amazing insight into women’s minds. The women work on patching up their fractured relationships while hiding fugitives and disposing of bodies, managing the mundane along with the extraordinary. Today’s single woman is a multi-tasker, you see.
“Volver” doesn’t have quite the emotional impact of Almodovar’s best films, nor the whacked-out lunacy of his most outrageous. It doesn’t resonate as deeply. Yet with a sweet stand-out performance by Penelope Cruz and able turns by her co-stars, it’s a satisfying and enjoyable film nonetheless.
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Quiz: Is this my niece Lindsay from a few days ago, or is it Courtney Love at age 2?
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I sampled most of the season’s new offerings last month and wound up adding several to my regular roster. With some, the luster faded after a few episodes.
For example, “The Class” started out funny and emotionally involving — rare for a sitcom — then quickly became formulaic and only mildly funny, very much like every other sitcom.
I was thrilled with the first few episodes of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” then realized I’m only interested in the behind-the-scenes TV stuff, NOT the characters. Last week’s episode, which didn’t deal with the production of their TV show at all, is what made me realize it. In the first few minutes there was an exchange between the director and one of the cast members right after a show — “Your sketch ran 15 seconds long! We had to steal it from ‘News 60’!” “Sorry, people laughed. I wasn’t expecting it either” — and that was more fascinating to me, as a TV junkie, than anything that followed. “Studio 60” is still amusing and full of cracking good dialogue, but I’m not nearly as engaged as I was at first.
And then there are some that started out good — good enough to put on the TiVo list — and only got better. Here are three.
“Heroes.” Yeah, everyone’s talking about “Heroes.” As well they should! I liked the premise, thought the pilot was solid but not spectacular … and have then been increasingly blown away with each subsequent episode. There are enough answers given to keep us satisfied, yet tantalizing mysteries remain, too. It’s a plot-oriented series, with twists and turns and surprises every week, yet the characters are intriguing, too.
“Friday Night Lights.” I know, it’s about a high school football team, and you don’t care about football. NEITHER DO I! Each of the episodes so far has brought a tear to my eye, or almost, anyway. It’s a sophisticated, funny, emotional look at a small Texas town where high school football rules, and where the people are mostly honest, good, decent folks. In the first episode, the golden boy quarterback broke his back during a game. Subsequently, we’ve followed his progress in the hospital while also seeing the team (and the town) deal with it. The second-string QB, a good kid who cares for his senile grandmother while his father’s in Iraq, is in over his head as the new starting QB. The team is close to mutiny, wanting to win but needing to support their coach. The coach juggles his wife and daughter with his responsibilities to the team. There’s so much going on, so many characters and so many emotions, that I look forward to the show every week. The ratings have been lackluster, however. Find it on NBC on Tuesdays (not this week, though; it aired on Monday this week).
“Help Me Help You.” This new sitcom has done pretty well in the ratings, so apparently people are watching it, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about. It’s funny! It stars Ted Danson as a shrink who runs a weekly group-therapy session for five people of varying nutcase-ness. Each episode focuses on Danson’s personal life (trying to get back with his ex-wife, being a vain and pompous Sam Malone type, etc.) with secondary plots involving a couple of his patients in their own lives. The writing is peppy and smart, the delivery impeccable, the timing similar to the rhythm “Arrested Development” had. (Not having a laugh track to get in the way certainly helps.) A couple weeks ago we saw Danson’s character in a group therapy session with other group therapists. One of them was played by Jonathan Katz — aka “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.” Perfect casting! The next week had Danson with some of his psychiatrist buddies trying to start their own little rock band. (One of them was Michael McKean.) Some of the names they came up with for the band were Shoq Therapy, Id Sync, Free Association, The Jungbloods, Flock of Egos, Couch, and Pink Freud. I don’t care where you’re from, that’s comedy.
About five years ago, some Mormon writers banded together to create The Sugar Beet, an LDS-culture version of The Onion, featuring satirical fake news stories. I was one of the writers in that first crew, but then I wandered off after a few months to pursue other interests. The project continued, both as a Web site and briefly as a print publication.
Some of the best material from The Sugar Beet’s entire run has now been collected in a book, “The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer,” available at fine retailers such as Amazon.com or directly from the distributor, Zarahemla Books.
I got my copy in the mail today, and it’s very funny. Anyone with an LDS background (and especially those who have lived in Utah) who also has a sense of humor should find it highly amusing, dancing right on the edge of light-heartedness and light-mindedness.
Some of the articles don’t entirely work because they’re not written in the style of real news stories, and some of the ideas are kinda lame to begin with. But the other 90 percent of the book is a hoot, with headlines like these:
“Area Man’s Mission Years Really Were His Best”
“Cereal and Cheddar Fish Miracle Occurs in Nursery”
“Missionary Now Curses with Near-Native Proficiency”
“BYU-Idaho Students Relieved Austin Powers Movies Aren’t R-Rated”
“Man’s Addiction to Wife Destroying Relationship with Porn”
“Poll Reveals Majority of Men ‘Highly Satisfied’ with Patriarchy”
“Inner Child Found, Baptized”
For me, some of the most laugh-out-loud stuff is in the form of Onion-style “man on the street” interviews and statistical charts. For example:
What phrases do you not want to hear in a patriarchal blessing?
“Morning of the third resurrection”
“Flesh-eating”
“Lazy, shiftless rat-bastard”
“Unfortunate series of events”
Or this:
Brigham Young University has renewed its emphasis against bare midriffs. What do you think?
“It’s a woman’s responsibility not to tempt men, while being sexy enough to make me want to marry her and have babies.”
“I think we should just start pretending that none of us have any naked parts, ever, anywhere.”
“If the girls all cover up, who are we going to blame for our impure thoughts and actions?”
“Well, it makes more sense than the rule against beards. After all, Brigham Young never appeared in public with a bare midriff.”
My one contribution to the book appears on page 72: “Name Withheld Takes Own Life,” in which it is imagined that those inspirational Ensign articles written by “Name Withheld” are the work of the same person, whose name really is Name Withheld, and that all the personal traumas she wrote about finally cracked her. I’m told The Sugar Beet got angry letters as the result of this article when it was first printed, which makes me happy.
So go buy the book. Approximately 1/330th of it was written by me, so I think that means I get royalties. For occasional updates and more samples, visit The Sugar Beet’s blog.
Election Day is still a week away, yet I have already voted. HOW IS IT DONE????? you ask, though why you speak in all-caps and use five question marks, I do not know. Am I a time-traveler? Have I committed a grievous act of voter fraud? Both are plausible and consistent with my character, but neither is correct. I have already voted because I live in Oregon, and Oregon allows people to vote by mail.
Oregonians are blasé about it now, but as a newcomer to the Beaver State (motto: “Please Don’t Call Us ‘the Beaver State'”), I am delighted by this wonderful idea. You see, voting is usually a chore. That’s why no one does it. You have to find out where you’re supposed to go, then you have to GO there, then you have to actually CHOOSE somebody in like 50 categories, all the while hoping some retard with exactly the opposite opinions doesn’t cancel you out.
But with mail-based voting, all the hassle is gone. They send you booklets in the days leading up to the election, telling you about all the candidates and measures and bonds and so forth. You sit down with the intention of reading them carefully so you can make informed choices, and then your eyes glaze over after a couple pages and you throw them away. Then the ballot arrives about 2 1/2 weeks before Election Day. You vote whenever you feel like it, put the ballot in a Secrecy Envelope, sign the back of the envelope (which they compare to your voter registration card to make sure it’s really you), put the Secrecy Envelope in a regular envelope, and mail it off. As long as it arrives by Election Day, you’re good.
The envelope isn’t postage-paid, so you have to provide your own stamp, and that’s my one critique of the program. Other than that, it’s so absurdly convenient to vote that I’m perplexed as to why Oregon doesn’t have noticeably higher voter turnout rates than other states do. Come on, you lazy, fur-trapping, Lewis-and-Clark-worshipping potheads! If mailing the ballot to your house and letting you take 20 days to decide who to vote for isn’t easy enough, then you don’t deserve democracy.
Also, in many areas, bars are closed on Election Day to prevent people from voting while intoxicated. But when the voting is done by mail, you can get as drunk as you want in the comfort of your own living room or at your neighborhood tavern, then vote for whomever your drunken heart desires. (Note: I did not do this.)
So anyway, I’ve already cast my ballot in this crucial mid-term election. If it should come out this week that the candidates I voted for are Nazi white supremacist back-alley abortionists, oh well! I already voted. No take-backs.
I bring the whole thing up partially because I want to brag about being a good citizen, but also because I want to talk about my very favorite subject: crazy people and the crazy things they do.
Some background first. As you know, the typical ballot has several measures and propositions on it. Some of these have no obvious “right” answer; a reasonable person could justifiably vote either way. For example, if there were a measure that said:
Shall the state constitution be amended to allow the hunting for sport of twentysomethings who wear T-shirts with ironic slogans?
… you could logically argue both sides. On the one hand, everyone is tired of hipsters who wear T-shirts with ironic slogans. But on the other hand, some would call hunting them for sport “murder.”
To help voters decide, the voter booklet features paid statements from people and organizations on both sides of the issue. Anyone with $500 can buy half a page and say whatever they want to about the measure, either for it or against it. Some measures have several of these statements from each side.
But then there are other measures that are no-brainers, where it is obvious that every sane person will vote the same way, where putting it on the ballot is just a formality. The no-brainer this year in Multnomah County (i.e., Portland) is to renew the levy that uses part of your property taxes to pay for the public libraries. It has to be renewed every five years, and it covers 50 percent of the libraries’ operating costs. Without the levy, the libraries close down. With the levy, the libraries stay open, and in fact two new branches will open next year.
So basically, if you vote YES on this measure, you are voting for Portland to continue to have libraries. If you vote NO, you are saying Portland shouldn’t have libraries. And who could possibly be against libraries?! Who in the world is anti-literacy?! NO ONE! you say. But again, you are mistaken, and I don’t know why you keep shouting.
I’m flipping through the voter booklet, and I see nine “ARGUMENT IN FAVOR” articles, and I’m chuckling because really, did we need NINE different paid endorsements from people saying that yeah, we should have libraries? Seems like overkill, I thought, especially since each one was basically repeating the same thing: “They’re LIBRARIES. There are BOOKS there. We NEED them. WHY WOULDN’T YOU WANT LIBRARIES?!”
And then I got to the last one: “ARGUMENT IN OPPOSITION.”
What? Someone paid $500 to come out AGAINST libraries? The hell?
Her name is Toni Manning. She is the executive director of an organization called Friends for Safer Libraries. (Visit the Web site here.) She is the executive director of this organization because she is also its founder and, as far as I can tell, its only member. She and her 10-year-old daughter, Heidi, were at one of the county’s library branches one day when a man using one of the library’s computers accessed pornography on the Internet, which Heidi happened to accidentally see when she was standing near him. Toni Manning decided that because of this, Multnomah County should not have libraries.
Well, first she decided that the libraries should use a filter to prevent patrons from accessing pornography. But since those filters have not been deployed, she’s decided the people’s tax dollars should not support the libraries. The libraries can stay open for all she cares; she just doesn’t think citizens should pay for them. If that means the libraries will have to close, then SO BE IT! She will throw that baby RIGHT out with the bathwater! DON’T THINK SHE WON’T!!
Toni’s belief that the libraries should employ a filter on the Internet is certainly a defensible one. If it appeared as a measure on the ballot, you could argue both sides convincingly. (The “con” argument, if you’re wondering, is that filters are almost always TOO restrictive, thus limiting the Internet’s — and the library’s — usefulness.) But since it isn’t, Toni hopes you will take up her position that if the library wants to offer unrestricted Internet access, it should do so without a tax levy.
I brainstormed some ways that the libraries could stay open without relying on tax dollars. Here are some options:
– Raise the fine for overdue books from 25 cents per day to $1,000 per day.
– Rather than lending the books, which is absurd from a business standpoint, require patrons to buy them.
– Sell a “Naughty Librarians” pin-up calendar.
– Persuade the county to levy a “self-righteous lunatic” tax and draw income from that instead.
Anyway, since I like the library and use it often to borrow books and to look at Internet pornography, I hope you will vote YES on Multnomah County Measure 26-81. Also, please vote YES on Measure 39-24, which would prohibit parents from using their children as political pawns. Also, please don’t call us the Beaver State.
Here are some more e-mails sent to symone.raven@gmail.com, an address that does NOT belong to Raven-Symone, but because Raven’s fans are dumb (i.e., they are children), they think it does. So they write to it all the time. This entry has more details on how this phenomenon came to be.
Dec. 30, 2005:
Hi Raven!! I’m so happy I got your e-mail address! Well my name is Meg and I’m 10 years old! I live in Minnesota. I’m such a big fan! I love thats so raven on disney channel! you are so pretty and nice. you are my role model! and your hilarious!! I hope you had a great christmas and have a happy new year! If you have time can you PLEASE e-mail me back! i know your busy with your acting and singing but i am your BIGGEST fan! so please try to e-mail me back! and my e-amil is [e-amil address withheld]
[I think Meg went to the comic strip school of punctuation! That’s why every sentence must end with an exclamation point!]
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This week’s edition of “In the Dark” is packed with reviews of movies you should definitely see, but none of them are in wide release. The films that are in wide release … meh.
First in the “meh” category is “Saw III,” the requisite last-Friday-before-Halloween bloodbath that is an annual tradition in American cinema. In fact, the last two years, it was “Saw” and “Saw II.” I’m a little frightened at how fast these things are replicating.
They wouldn’t pre-screen this one for critics, but one of the local theaters had a midnight showing last night, so a friend and I attended. It’s better than “Saw II,” and just good enough (for what it is) to be recommendable, but not as good as “Saw.” You know, now that I think about it, I saw “Saw” at a midnight screening, too. Huh. I don’t know what that means, but there you go.
The other new wide release is “Catch a Fire,” a well-intentioned but ineffective film, based on a true story, about South African apartheid and the radicals who fought against it. That’s an uphill battle right there, and with no major-league stars (Derek Luke and Tim Robbins are as good as it gets) and few ecstatic reviews, I can’t imagine people flocking to see this. Especially not when they could watch people being eviscerated in the next theater over.
Getting a mid-size expansion is “Running with Scissors,” an ultra-quirky adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ bestselling memoir. Now, you have to wonder how true a “memoir” is when the guy won’t even use his OWN real name, let alone anyone else’s, but never mind. The film is well-acted but just too self-consciously loopy for my tastes. I note that my C+ is one of the better marks it’s getting from critics. Yikes.
HOWEVER! All is not lost. Now playing in select theaters across this great land of ours are some truly outstanding films. Are they playing near you? Maybe not. But maybe! If they aren’t, keep an eye out for ’em! You’ll want to see these.
First and foremost is “The Queen,” starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II in the days following Princess Diana’s death in 1997. Read my review for more raving about Mirren’s performance, but it’s absolutely wonderful, one of those roles that makes you fall in love with the performer and wonder why you never paid attention to his or her career before. Where have you been all my life, Helen Mirren?!
Since Helen Mirren will be nominated for an Oscar (you can take that to the bank) (is there an Oscar bank?), you’ll want to see “The Queen” now and beat the rush.
In the documentary department, “Deliver Us from Evil” is an enraging film about sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. It’s the most damning evidence I’ve seen so far. I’m glad I’m not Catholic — in general, yes, but particularly right now, because I would be disgusted with my church’s leadership if I were. It’s a powerful movie, though I admit it’s not very “fun.” But hey, you all went and saw “Passion of the Christ,” and THAT was no picnic. So go see this one, too.
Also dealing just a li’l bit with pedophilia is “Little Children,” a sardonic satire of suburban tranquility that, its title notwithstanding, is about adults more than kids. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson play bored parents, each married to someone else, who become friends during the day while their spouses work. It’s based on a novel by the guy who wrote the book on which “Election” (the Matthew Broderick/Reese Witherspoon movie) was based, if that gives you any clues about the dark comedy at play here. It is well worth seeking out.
But wait, there’s more! Two political films, one a documentary and one a “documentary,” are also making the rounds in a few theaters. Both are from a liberal perspective, so proceed with caution.
“Al Franken: God Spoke” is a good but not great account of Franken’s efforts to start Air America Radio and to campaign for John Kerry in the 2004 election. (Not really a happy ending on either front, is there?) The film could use more focus, but Franken is a smart, quick-witted comedian, so it has some very funny moments.
The “documentary” is “Death of a President,” which raised eyebrows when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last month. It purports to be a doc from 2009, telling of the fateful 2007 day when George W. Bush was assassinated. The point is not to say, “Hooray! We want Bush to die!,” but rather to imagine the scenario and then imagine what would happen next. Would the Patriot Act be hastily rewritten to become even more wide-ranging? Would Dick Cheney be a paranoid, Nixon-like replacement president? Would all the Muslims within a three-mile radius of where Bush was killed be rounded up and interrogated? The film isn’t entirely successful, but a lot of it plausible.
So there you go. Plenty of good options this weekend if you know where to look. Good night, and good luck.
“Catch a Fire” tells a true story, and that might be its downfall. Not all true stories are created equal, after all. Some are more dazzling, more interesting or simply more cinematic than others. “Catch a Fire” deals with a theme ripe for filmic representation — South Africa’s system of apartheid — but the specific story it chooses is weak.
The year is 1980, and South Africa is a land divided. Blacks comprise a majority of the population yet have no political power and are relegated to a grossly inhumane level of second-class citizenry.
Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke) has managed to rise above his circumstances, somewhat, and is a foreman at an oil refinery, one of the few blacks to achieve such a position. In his spare time he coaches a youth soccer team. He has a wife, Precious (Bonnie Henna), and two beautiful young daughters. No life is perfect in such an oppressive society, but Patrick’s is better than many.
Yet he has a secret: In another town, he has a lover by whom he also has a son. He is with them on the night that his oil refinery is attacked, apparently by the freedom-fighting militant wing of the African Nation Congress. A government detective named Nic Vos (Tim Robbins) fingers Patrick as a suspect, as he had access to the plant after hours and, as a black man, had a motive to lash out against the white-run government. Of course, when your society is intent on subjugating an entire race, you’re sort of GIVING them motive to fight back, aren’t you?
Patrick had nothing to do with the bombing, but since his alibi is his mistress and love child, he is hesitant to confess where he was when the explosion occurred. He is interrogated and tortured. Finally his wife, Precious, gets the same treatment. That’s Patrick’s breaking point, and he seeks out the ANC so he can join their movement. The accusations of terrorism have turned him into a terrorist.
Here’s the problem with all this: You know how some films have two heroes on opposite sides of the law? Think of Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in “The Fugitive” — both good men with equally defensible positions who just happen to be in opposition to each other. “Catch a Fire” is a perverse twist of that formula: We have two main characters on opposite sides of the law who are equally un-heroic. Neither Patrick nor Nic is especially noble or good, nor are either man’s motivations entirely pure.
Whom should we root for? Patrick, who’s fighting a corrupt system but only as a knee-jerk reaction to being treated unjustly, who leaves his wife and daughters behind so he can join a radical movement? Or Nic, whose persecution of Patrick as a potential terrorist was perfectly justified given the evidence, yet who is a racist cog in a racist system?
The film was written by Shawn Slovo, the daughter of anti-apartheid activists from back in the day, and directed by Phillip Noyce, who has made political thrillers both large (“Clear and Present Danger”) and small (“Rabbit-Proof Fence,” “The Quiet American”). Clearly we are meant to side exclusively with Patrick and consider Nic Vos a villain, but going solely by what the film shows us, I don’t see it as being that black-and-white (as it were). I see both men as ordinary, flawed characters, neither of them grand or outsize enough to warrant biopic treatment.
I will say this, though: Derek Luke’s performance as Patrick Chamusso is quite impressive. Luke is a New Jersey native whose prior work in middling films such as “Antwone Fisher” and “Glory Road” never suggested he was destined for anything particular great. Yet in “Catch a Fire,” he speaks with the dialect of a native South African and infuses Patrick with a fiery, combustible passion. I wish I could somehow cut his performance out of this mediocre film and paste it into a better, richer, more deserving one.
Movie critics use the word “quirky” often (maybe too often) to describe films about odd or eccentric characters. The novelty of such movies is usually appreciated … until you get something like “Running with Scissors,” where the quirkiness feels forced and self-conscious, as if the movie is saying, “Hey, get a load of how unusual these people are!”
Much of the wackiness no doubt comes from the bestseller it’s based on, in which author Augusten Burroughs recounts what supposedly was his true and factual childhood, albeit with some of the names changed (like, um, his own). I haven’t read the book, though I gather the movie is largely faithful to it. Still, we are reviewing the movie, not the book. If the movie has flaws, it doesn’t matter whose fault they are.
We begin in 1972 in a cartoonishly sunny house decorated in yellows and whites. It’s the home of Deidre Burroughs (Annette Bening), part-time alcoholic and chain-smoker, would-be celebrity poet, and mother to 6-year-old Augusten (Jack Kaeding). Deidre and Augusten are excessively attached to one another, making up silly excuses for him to miss school and conspiring against Dad (Alec Baldwin), himself a champion-level drinker who has no idea what to make of his dotty wife and their precocious son.
Jump ahead to 1978. Dad is even less involved than before, Augusten (now played by Joseph Cross) has stopped going to school altogether, and Deidre’s competence as a mother is ever-slipping. She starts seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who, like everyone in the film, is insane. Inexplicably, when Deidre finds she must have some time alone to collect herself, she leaves Augusten in the care of Dr. Finch himself.
Finch lives in a cluttered and filthy Pepto-Bismol-colored house with his wildly dysfunctional family. His wife, Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), eats dog food and stares at the TV all day, seemingly oblivious to her environment. They have two daughters, one a prim, gingham-clad future spinster named Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), the other a slutty, rebellious teen named Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood, playing a slutty, rebellious teen for the 1,482th time in her young life). The good doctor openly adores Hope and openly rejects Natalie.
There is also, living out back in a shed, a sort of adopted Finch family member named Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes). He’s 35, gay, crazy (of course; you can assume that of every character I mention, whether I specify it or not), and evidently fond of younger men. Augusten has already announced his own gayness, and he and Neil start a relationship.
I don’t know how the book handles this, but I know how the movie handles it: badly. Neil is 35, Augusten is 14. In no possible way is their relationship healthy, legal, non-predatory or non-creepy. Yet the film, adapted and directed by Ryan Murphy (creator of TV’s “Nip/Tuck”), treats it as just another one of those “quirky” things. The cluttered house, the goofy psychiatrist, the kibble-eating mom, the pedophile who lives out back — just another loopy night at the movies, folks!
Aiding this is the casting of Joseph Cross as Augusten. Cross was 19 when the film was shot and, while youthful, doesn’t look any younger than maybe 17. Hence, we forget how young the character is supposed to be. Our minds say, “Here’s a 17-year-old with an older boyfriend.” Had Murphy cast someone who looked 14 — or, heaven forbid, an actual 14-year-old — we’d be having the appropriate reaction, which is, “Here’s a 14-year-old being molested.”
The film’s cavalier attitude toward that situation is not encouraging, but that’s not to say there aren’t a lot of redeeming factors. All of the acting is top-notch, and a general sense of humor pervades even the more melodramatic moments. Augusten’s relationship with Agnes Finch — insane, but more of a mother than Deidre ever was — is sweet, too, and the lovely Jill Clayburgh is to be admired for making herself look so dowdy.
This cavalcade of kooky souls, all boundary-less yet full of unexpressed rage and fear, is palatable, even enjoyable, for a while, but not for two hours. A two-hour film needs characters we believe, like, and feel connected to, not freaks from a sideshow. I mean, when you go to the carnival, how long do you stand looking at the freaks? Five minutes, tops?
There are some heartwarming lessons to be learned in “Saw III,” the latest blood-soaked installment in the increasingly implausible horror franchise. First, that good help is hard to find. Second, that it is important to forgive your enemies and not become trapped in a quagmire of vengeance-seeking, for that way lies bitterness, anger, and possibly seeing someone’s head blow up.
The elusive killer called Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is up to his old tricks again, putting people he deems worthy of scorn in elaborate traps from which they can only escape by torturing themselves. Except these latest schemes, the police notice with some degree of disappointment as they sift through the charred remains of Jigsaw’s latest failed pupil, lack a certain je ne sais quoi. They don’t bear the marks of Jigsaw’s usual discipline and to-the-letter fairness. What’s more, we know from “Saw II” that Jigsaw is dying of brain cancer, so he’s not apt to be up and about setting up torture chambers anyway.
Yep, ol’ Jig’s got himself an apprentice now, a former victim named Amanda (Shawnee Smith) who survived her test and is now learning to continue Jigsaw’s work. The current project: Teach a man named Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), consumed with hatred for his son’s killer, to move on with his life. The methodology: Put Jeff in situations where he can either watch the responsible parties die or forgive them and save them.
Meanwhile, Jigsaw himself is determined to survive long enough to see whether Jeff passes his tests or not. Weak and decrepit in a makeshift hospital room in his secret lair, he drafts an E.R. doctor named Lynn (Bahar Soomekh) to keep him alive at least until Jeff’s outcome is determined. The trick? If Jigsaw’s heart stops beating, a device rigged to Lynn’s body will kill her, too. Talk about the high cost of malpractice insurance!
The original “Saw” creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell are back as screenwriters (Wan was absent for part 2), and they’ve apparently caught “Lost” fever along with the rest of America. Every major character in the film gets flashback scenes, including a few that add a bit of texture to the events of parts 1 and 2. While not particularly relevant to the current proceedings, it is a nifty little present for the fans.
Also gift-wrapped and delivered free of charge to the fans? Lots and lots of pain, torture, blood and mayhem. Why, there’s even an instance of an electric saw being applied to the exposed skull of a living person — and it’s not even important to the plot! That one’s purely a freebie!
As an evil villain, Jigsaw stopped being scary as soon as they showed him to us. (I believe that’s actually Lesson 1 in Horror Films 101: Don’t put your “monster” in every single scene.) Now that he’s unequivocally the focus of the story, bedridden yet still remarkably lucid, continuing to ramble on about his elaborate “games,” he’s downright laughable. I remember the chills of his pre-recorded messages in the first film. Part 3 has nothing like that.
Part 3 also lacks a real protagonist. Jigsaw will die sooner or later, either from the brain cancer or from less natural means, so there’s no point worrying about him. Lynn doesn’t give us much to work with, and Jeff’s situation is so improbable — I don’t care how mad you are at the judge who let your son’s killer off the hook, you’re not going to just sit there and watch him die — that his “tests” lack any suspense whatsoever.
That leaves Amanda, whose attachment to Jigsaw is, you’ll pardon the pun, puzzling. I don’t understand her motivation for doing his bidding, much less why she seems to be in love with him. And a character you don’t understand is a character you don’t care about.
Like part 2, “Saw III” has been hyper-directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and over-edited by “Saw” regular Kevin Greutert. Even the non-torture scenes feel moody and depressed, all over-saturated in dark colors and scored with harsh, dour music. It’s a feel-bad film, for sure.
But is it an enjoyable feel-bad film? I guess. Is “enjoyable” even the right word? The whole stupid Jeff story aside, Wan and Whannell have a few clever ideas up their sleeves, and there is a bit more ingenuity in this chapter than there was in the last one. They’ve hacked out this audacious little niche for themselves, and I say more power to ’em. This is dark, superficially unsettling stuff (superficial in that the images won’t haunt you for any longer than the movie lasts), but if that’s what the kids want nowadays, “Saw III” more or less delivers it.
Are the Brits really so much better at dissecting American culture than we are? Between the hilarious satire of “Borat” and now the provocative political analysis of “Death of a President,” the English are doing a more thorough job of criticizing us than many of our own comedians and pundits can manage.
Not that “Death of a President” is flawless. It has some things fundamentally wrong with it. Some people wonder if it was made solely to be controversial — it’s about the assassination of George W. Bush, after all — and those people may have a point. But it goes further than just being sensationalistic, and it takes a position on America’s current state of affairs that, while not new, has not been presented in quite this way before.
The film is in the form of a documentary set sometime in 2009. On Oct. 19, 2007, President Bush was assassinated outside a Chicago hotel where he’d been speaking, and Islamic radicals were quickly blamed for the murder. The film shows clips from his speech and even the assassination itself (created through some nifty CGI manipulation of existing Bush footage), then moves on to the aftermath: the manhunt, the arrests, the trials.
The “documentarians” interview FBI personnel, Secret Service agents, a Bush speechwriter and other concerned parties — all fictional and played by actors, of course, but the actors do a stellar job of seeming natural, their lines sounding like real testimonials and not pre-scripted dialogue. Director Gabriel Range, who once made a set-in-the-future mock-doc about the breakdown of the UK’s transportation system, has the look and feel of a documentary down pat. If the dates weren’t all set in the future, you’d find only a handful of giveaways that the film isn’t a real documentary.
Except for one crucial mistake in the way it is structured: It’s presented as a mystery, the way a fictional film would be, with us not knowing for sure who killed Bush until near the end. There are red herrings, false leads, and then finally arrests and revelations. But think about it. If the president had really been shot and the culprit had really been identified, a documentary on the subject would assume the viewer knew that going in. Can you imagine a documentary about Lincoln’s death NOT mentioning John Wilkes Booth within the first five minutes? Wouldn’t you be frustrated and bored if it waited until the end to “reveal” who Lincoln’s killer was?
“Death of a President” isn’t frustrating or boring, of course, because we DON’T know who killed Bush, because Bush hasn’t actually been killed. But it’s a serious crack in the basic conceit of the film. Great pains are taken to make it look and sound like a documentary, yet it is ultimately not plausible as one.
Laying aside the structural problems, however, the film’s ideas are worth listening to. No, the film is not calling for the assassination of George W. Bush. The actual murder is seen only obscurely and never re-shown; certainly the movie does not revel in Bush’s demise, the way some of the film’s detractors (who haven’t seen it) assume it must. Bush’s fictional death turns out to be the result of his own Iraq policies, but while the movie is critical of Bush, it shows his death as leading to a worse fate: the ascendency of Dick Cheney to the Oval Office.
Much of what happens after Bush’s death is plausible given the administration’s real-life track record so far. If Bush were assassinated, Muslim names would indeed be the first ones the FBI looked at, and you can bet the Patriot Act would have some quick (some might say knee-jerk) new additions put into effect. Would our rush to judgment and the administration’s need for a scapegoat prevent true justice from being done? Maybe. The film is a neat little experiment and an alarming “what if?” scenario. I’m just glad it’s fiction, not prophecy.
Some more Bad 9/11 Poetry for you to enjoy. The basic background is that average citizens wrote poems and submitted them to the Utah newspaper I worked for after Sept. 11, 2001, evidently hoping we would publish them. We did not. I am publishing them here, now. This is probably not what they wanted.
Today is such a tragic day
For now we all will stop and pray
For those who lost their lives without warning
We now must face another morning
With blood on our faces and hearts full of sorrow
We know the sun will rise tomorrow
To you evil souls be not mistaken
Because the “sleeping giant” has been reawakened
We will stand and fight for those who died
You cannot kill our American Pride.
[Why is there blood on our faces?!!??!]
* * * * *
Dastardly faceless phantom,
Cravenly skulking foe;
Slithering as the viper,
Your venomous act to bestow.
Infamy, your crowning glory,
Black as the pit whence you’ve sprung,
Spawned by the father of darkness
Whose praises your foul soul has sung.
Cloaked in his veil you have ventured,
Unbidden and secreted here,
To prey upon the innocent;
Exacting your ransom most dear.
By no noble cause may you stand forth,
For nobleness has no place in you,
To lay claim of justification,
There is no excusing the evil you do.
Pure hatred alone must inspire it,
Replete with blood-thirsty desire.
These are that essence, rather,
Of the spark which ignited your fire.
You’ve waylayed this maiden in chambers,
Invaded her privacy there,
With basest intent to maul and maim,
Disfigure her countenance fair.
Indeed, she reels bloodied and wounded,
Suff’ring your onslaught and pained;
Shocked and dismayed and shaken,
Yet, no greater advantage you’ve gained.
For beneath her visage so comely
Lays substance unapparent to you,
The heart of a lion, ferocious,
Draped in a lambskin to view.
She may appear docile and helpless,
Exposed to your ravening jaws,
But she lacks only just motivation
To unsheath her razor-sharp claws.
You’ve supplied this ad infinitum,
Her wrath be prepared to receive
When she’ll soon sniff you out of hiding
Her suff’ring and grief to relieve.
For the moment you lurk, form and faceless;
Savoring the evil you’ve done.
Be assured you’ll not go unrewarded,
No vic’try at all have you won.
Your days on their earth, now, are numbered,
God’s scales have been readied and stored
To weigh you in judgment, on passing,
When you come cow’ring before the Lord.
[If my reading of the poem’s metaphors is correct, in the second stanza America is compared to a woman who has been raped by evil-doers but who will now reap bloody vengeance on them. I’m pretty sure I have seen horror movies based on exactly that plot.]
We have a very special angry letter to discuss today. It comes from Robert Mackey, a 40-something who runs “Amanda Bynes NOW!,” a Web site obsessively devoted to the 20-year-old actress.
If the name Robert Mackey rings a bell, it’s because he has written two previous angry letters. The first came when I reviewed Amanda Bynes’ film “She’s the Man” and described it (and I’m paraphrasing here) as a putrescent, horrifically unfunny comedy made all the worse by Bynes’ embarrassing performance.
A few months later, I reviewed Lindsay Lohan’s “Just My Luck” and mentioned that it was the worst movie I’d seen since, well, “She’s the Man.” This struck Robert Mackey as an unjustified attack on his beloved Amanda Bynes, so he wrote me again to say so.
Well, then the DVD of Lohan’s “Just My Luck” came out, and I screened it for DVD Talk. The “movie review” portion of the DVD review was essentially the same as the theatrical review had been, including the Amanda Bynes reference. Obviously, Robert Mackey could not let this grievance pass unremarked. He sent me this e-mail:
I read your review of “Just My Luck,” and in the future, leave “She’s the Man” out of it. Again, you have this problem that Amanda Bynes is a punchline whenever you need to refer to a bad movie. You review films and DVDs on their own merits, don’t you?
In the future, when you hate a movie, just speak your piece, allow me to slam you for it, and move on to the next thing. Kapiche, a-hole?
Now, before we go any further, I urge you to look over Mackey’s previous e-mails, and to peruse his site, too. It really is a hilarious site. His devotion to Amanda Bynes is impressive in its fervency and creepiness. What’s more, he HATES anyone in Bynes’ demographic, seeing them all as competition. Lindsay Lohan, Mandy Moore, Hilary Duff — all grievously untalented trainwrecks in Mackey’s view. Amanda Bynes is the only teen queen worthy of adoration!
He also hates the TV show “Ghost Whisperer” and its star, Jennifer Love Hewitt. Why? Because it was on at the same time as Bynes’ “What I Like About You” last season, and its vastly superior ratings were, in Mackey’s estimation, one of the reasons “What I Like About You” got canceled. Somehow, that means “Ghost Whisperer” must be a terrible, evil show, and Jennifer Love Hewitt the spawn of Satan himself.
Oh, and when teen- or TV-focused magazines have someone on the cover who is not Amanda Bynes, they have exercised terribly poor judgment. When they have someone like Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff on the cover, you can practically feel Mackey’s rage surging across the Internet.
Anyway, upon receiving this latest angry e-mail from him, I replied with this:
Hooray! I was hoping for another e-mail from the crazy Amanda Bynes-obsessed middle-aged man!
As I was editing my theatrical review of “Just My Luck” for the DVD review, I noticed the Bynes reference (which you chided me for back in May, too). I thought: If I leave this in, will it elicit another response from creepy ol’ Robert Mackey? And sure enough, you did not disappoint me. I thank you for that.
“She’s the Man” is the worst movie I’ve seen all year (followed just barely by “Just My Luck”), and Bynes’ goggle-eyed performance is one of the worst things about it. It is only natural, then, that I should refer to it when the subject of awful movies arises. If your odd, disquieting love for Bynes is so vast that you cannot fathom such a reaction to her work, then I would say that is your problem, not mine.
Here’s to more petty and childish obsessions with teen queens!
Eric
He did not reply. Indeed, though I have replied every time he has e-mailed me, he has never replied back.
I’ve recorded a new song parody for your listening pleasure (?). It’s called “Not Fooling Anyone,” and it’s a parody of Daniel Powter’s ubiquitous pop hit “Bad Day.” Please to be visiting the song player and listening to it there.
The recording was done here in my apartment with my electric piano keyboard and Mac’s Garage Band software. I’m pretty impressed with what Garage Band can do with regard to recording MIDI instruments. I only had to play the song once, and all the minor fixes of wrong notes, etc., were done easily and electronically with that one recording. The vocals were limited by my very poor-quality microphone and poor-quality singing voice, but I added some reverb and distortion to make it sound more radio-y (i.e., as if the flaws were on purpose).
Anyway, there it is. If you’re wondering why I called it “Not Fooling Anyone” instead of the more obvious title that would be closer to the original title (“Bad Day”), it’s because I didn’t want to give away the joke.
Things are heating up on the cereal aisle at the grocery store, and I don’t mean that literally, except in the case of instant oatmeal and I guess Pop-Tarts, which can be eaten warm but are fine without being heated, too. But the heating up I refer to is the fiery pace at which the major brands are introducing variations on their established products, everyone trying to destroy the competition and become the dominant force in the cutthroat cereal industry.
The sugar cereals are the most popular, of course, partly because children like sugar and partly because children like commercials that feature cartoon characters. I really think that’s half the battle right there. You get an animated spokesperson, the kids will want whatever you’re selling. Little packs of sugar-sweetened goat hair? Those things will fly off the shelves once kids see commercials starring Butty the Hairless Goat!
So because sugar cereals are the most popular, the more ordinary cereals have to find ways to compete. Cheerios, in particular, has gone just insane with the new varieties. I tolerated Honey Nut Cheerios when it came out in 1979, largely because I don’t like honey or nuts and hence had no interest in trying Honey Nut Cheerios. I was a little envious that the Honey Nut variety had an animated spokesperson while the original, superior version did not, but what could I do? I was 5 years old, for crying out loud. Cut me some slack.
In 1988, the next variety came out: Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. Everyone liked them better the first time, when they were called Apple Jacks. Next!
In 1995 the people at General Mills decided that they should take the one good thing Cheerios had going for them — a very low sugar content — and ruin it, just completely poop all over it. Hence, Frosted Cheerios, which are ordinary healthy Cheerios smothered in sugar. In 2003 we got four different incarnations of Berry Burst Cheerios (strawberry, strawberry banana, cherry vanilla and triple berry, and I’m sure I don’t need to point out that bananas and vanilla are not berries); 2005 brought Yogurt Burst Cheerios (vanilla or strawberry “yogurt” slathered onto the O’s); and now the very latest, Fruity Cheerios.
Fruity Cheerios are little rings in several different colors. They look suspiciously familiar. The front of the box makes this declarative statement: “25% less sugar than the leading fruity cereal.” And I’m thinking: Oh, SNAP, Froot Loops! They totally just called you out! What a passive-aggressive slogan! It’s like, “We’re not naming any names here, but, um, we have 25 percent less sugar than a certain other fruity cereal we could mention. We’re just sayin’.” And the people at Kellogg’s are like, “B****es did NOT just diss us!” And General Mills is all, “Don’t be hatin’, we just keepin’ it real,” and Kellogg’s is like, “Whateva. Maybe if you put MORE sugar if yo nasty-a** fruity cereal, people might be BUYIN’ it,” and then Post is totally on the floor laughing, and General Mills is like, “Whatchoo laughin’ at, Fruity Pebbles? Ain’t you got some Flintstones to go be watchin’?,” and then Quaker Oats pulls out a gun.
And thus the battle escalates. Because the non-sugar cereals are getting better at competing with the sugar cereals, the sugar cereals have to amp up their own products, too. Take Cookie Crisp, for example. This is already a joke of a cereal, made exclusively for unhealthful adults and unsupervised children. It has the word “cookie” RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME. No mother buys this for her children unless she likes seeing them bounce off the walls on a sugar high. (Fathers, on the other hand, probably buy it when they get sent to do the grocery shopping. “Cookies!” they say. “For breakfast!”)
Now, when your breakfast cereal consists of nothing more than tiny chocolate chip cookies, I would think you’ve gone about as far as you can go in the field of delivering unhealthy food to children. But that’s why I am not a cereal manufacturer. Because now General Mills has unveiled Double Chocolate Cookie Crisp, with twice as much artificial chocolate flavor as before! On the box is a cartoon drawing of a wolf who is licking his lips at the prospect of enjoying some Double Chocolate Cookie Crisp. Considering most children’s knowledge of wolves is that they are sinister creatures who try to devour red-hooded girls in fairy tales, I’d say this is a pretty accurate cartoon spokesperson for this particular cereal.
The cereals that really amuse me are the generic brands that try to compete with the real ones. It’s like they figured out how to duplicate the good cereals, and then figured out a way to do it so it would be cheaper and not taste as good. You have the generic store brands, there on the shelves next to the real brands, hoping to lure you away with the lower prices; and then you also have the REALLY generic cereals, the ones that are so cheap they can’t even afford to put them in boxes. They just dump them into big plastic bags, slap a label on them, and pray somebody buys them.
The funny part is the names they come up with. It’s always something that suggests the cereal it’s an imitation of, without being so close as to be trademark infringement. For example, one of the Apple Jacks rip-offs is called Apple Dapples, and a Cheerios knock-off is Tasteeos.
I say, Why stop there? Why not get as close to the real cereal’s name as you possibly can? The Apple Jacks rip-off shouldn’t be called Apple Dapples. It should be called Shmapple Shmacks. The imitation Cheerios should be called Shmeerios. The Cocoa Puffs rip-off? Mocoa Muffs. That’s right, Mocoa Muffs. Part of this malanced meakfast. Thank you and good night.
The release of Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” two weeks ago was a hint of it, but the Oscar season truly begins today. No fewer than three movies with Oscar potential are opening in wide release this weekend, and no, one of them is not “Flicka.”
“The Prestige” is the most entertaining of the three, all full of twists and turns, good old-fashioned entertainment, and solid performances by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman — two very likable, very popular, very well-respected actors. They aren’t the kind of roles that get Oscar nominations, but the film’s screenplay or direction (by Christopher Nolan, of “Memento” and “Batman Begins”) might get some attention.
Then there’s “Marie Antoinette,” Sofia Coppola’s (“Lost in Translation”) anachronistic interpretation of French history. This is a curious, strange movie, and I was put off by it overall, though I also liked a lot of things about it. I can almost recommend it for sheer curiosity value, but not quite.
Finally, Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” tells of the battle of Iwo Jima, the famous photo of six soldiers raising the flag, and the aftermath. Since it’s a Paramount product, however, I won’t be able to post a review until about 3 p.m. today. [And here it is.] The point, as it relates to this discussion, is that Eastwood is an Oscar favorite, the subject matter (World War II), is an Oscar favorite, and one of the screenwriters is Paul Haggis, who wrote and directed “Crash” last year.
The fourth wide release this weekend is “Flicka,” based loosely on the old young adult novel “My Friend Flicka.” Flicka is still the main character’s friend; I guess they just didn’t want to give that away in the title. The movie’s rather mediocre, though it does have my new favorite line of dialogue. (Mild spoiler ahead.) There comes a moment when they fear it may be necessary to “put down” wild Flicka, and they worry how her friend, played by Alison Lohman, will take it. She comes downstairs and says, “It’s OK, Dad. You can shoot us.” Us. Because she and Flicka are soulmates, you see. It made me laugh.
Something else that’s been making me laugh all week, and for no good reason, is saying the word “Flicka” in a high-pitched, creepy child/teddy bear voice. I’m thinking approximately the voice of the Talky Tina doll in that old “Twilight Zone” episode. It’s even better if you say it as a question, with the second syllable going up higher in pitch. (“Flick-A?”) Although it’s possible that if you aren’t me, you won’t be able to amuse yourself with it at all.
Think of your most embarrassing secret. Now multiply the embarrassment by 10. Now recast the secret to somehow involve a dog. Do all that and you’re approaching the humiliation felt by the central character in “Stay” (renamed “Sleeping Dogs Lie” for theatrical release), a perverse and funny movie written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite.
The poor girl is named Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton), and one time when she was in college, out of boredom and curiosity and goodness knows what else, she did something sexual and naughty with a male of a different species. I know! It’s awful! But it happened, and now, several years later, she retains the shame of this secret, as well she should.
The question is whether she can ever tell anyone, and that question becomes relevant when she falls in love with John (Bryce Johnson), a handsome and perfect man whom she hopes to marry. While the two are visiting her parents — her sheltered, innocent mother (Bonita Friedericy) and her no-nonsense father (Geoff Pierson) — Amy finally reveals her secret to John. Couples in love want to be able to share EVERYTHING with each other, right? No secrets, right?
Goldthwait’s warped comic imagination takes flight at that point, and the revelation scene is just one of several squirm-inducing sequences, the sort of uncomfortable humor often mined on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Office.” My hat’s off to Melinda Page Hamilton, who carries the entire film, with all her character’s ups and downs, with charm and good humor. It must be exhausting playing a woman so oppressed by her own hilariously filthy past.
Also worthy of note is Jack Plotnick as Amy’s meth-addict brother Dougie. Comedian Brian Posehn has a memorable scene, too, as one of Dougie’s friends.
So is it funny? I think people will probably either love it or hate it. Either you think Amy’s secret is preposterously funny, or you think it’s creepy and disgusting and you won’t enjoy a movie that refers to it over and over and over again. Because make no mistake: This is a one-joke movie. Imagine if “There’s Something About Mary” had been centered around the hair-gel scene, instead of just including that as one comic element. “Stay” has its one outrageous idea, and it keeps coming back to it for laughs for 90 minutes.
About 60 minutes into the film, there is an abrupt change in tone, when things suddenly become serious for a while. Now, I admire Goldthwaite for trying to give his deliriously filthy movie some thematic weight, to have it be more than just a mindless sex comedy, but I don’t think he handles the shift very well. It’s an awkward fit, and not in the amusing way that other things in the film are awkward.
But then again, the fact that someone made this movie at all intrigues me. Here’s bestiality, the last taboo on the frontier, being played for laughs, and being used as a metaphor for openness in relationships. Not that I necessarily want to see more comedies on this specific subject, and certainly this one could have been shot and edited better (it looks like a student film), but let’s be honest: The premise alone is more interesting than 90 percent of what comes out of Hollywood. I’m willing to give Goldthwaite a pass for taking such an idea and not totally screwing the pooch with it.
It might be hard to assess the true value of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” until we see “Letters from Iwo Jima,” the companion piece that addresses the World War II battle from the Japanese perspective. The opening narration in “Flags” says we tend to want our war stories simple, with clear-cut heroes and villains, but “most of the time they are not who we think they are.” You get the impression “Letters” will flesh out that theme more than “Flags” does by itself.
“Flags of Our Fathers” stands alone fairly well, though, as a self-contained behind-the-scenes story that’s equal parts patriotism and skepticism (and don’t listen to people who tell you those things are mutually exclusive). It’s emotionally stirring in some places, eye-opening in others, and a well-told story all the way through.
The subject is the iconic photo of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima — or more specifically, the aftermath of that photo. What those of us under the age of 70 may not realize is that the picture did not become iconic over time; it was touted as one for the ages less than a day after it was snapped and was an immediate sensation. And while it may seem like a modern practice, manipulation of public sentiment by the government and the media was an oft-deployed tactic in 1945, too.
There are six men in that photo, five Marines and a Navy corpsman, raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, after four days of heavy fighting. Securing the mountain was key to the Allies’ success, though it was another 31 days and thousands more casualties before the entire island was officially secure and the Japanese conclusively repelled.
Three of the six soldiers were subsequently killed in battle. The remaining three were taken out of combat and sent on a press tour, a trio of American idols who could boost homeland morale and maybe sell some war bonds while they were at it.
Based on the book by James Bradley (son of the Navy corpsman in the photo) and Ron Powers, the screenplay was adapted by Hollywood darlings William Broyles Jr. (“Jarhead,” “Cast Away”) and Paul Haggis (“Crash,” “Million Dollar Baby”). It has a modern-set framing story in which Bradley searches for details about his father’s life, and frequent lengthy flashbacks to the battle itself, but the thrust of the story is in the months after the photo was taken, in the final days of World War II.
John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) are the surviving members of the six-man flag-raising team, recruited by no less an authority than President Roosevelt to help in the upcoming war bond drive. The photo itself is a grand image for the drive, and to have three of the men depicted in it live and in person will surely get people to open their checkbooks. Some $14 billion is needed to finish the war, and at this point the U.S. government is practically bankrupt.
Bradley and Hayes are embarrassed to be making cheesy public appearances and riding on parade floats while their countrymen are still being killed overseas, but they recognize the need for money to keep those countrymen’s guns firing and planes flying. Gagnon, meanwhile, was a slacker to begin with. His laziness and ineptitude earned him secondary positions in battle — helping raise the flag was about the most dangerous thing he did on Iwo Jima — and he’s only too happy to get out of active duty altogether and soak up his 15 minutes of fame back home.
And so these three, these fellow soldiers who knew each other in battle but weren’t particularly close until now, tour the country as a team. They’re given heroes’ welcomes wherever they go. They appear at receptions and in stadiums and at statue unveilings. They make speeches urging Americans to support the war effort and to remember that “the real heroes are the ones who didn’t come back.”
But other details trouble them. All three are aware that they were participating in the SECOND flag-raising on Iwo Jima, that the first flag was taken down because the Secretary of the Navy wanted it as a souvenir. The men who raised the first flag, the one that actually meant something? Completely forgotten.
What’s more, one of the men in the famous photograph was misidentified. The real boy’s mother swears she recognizes her own son’s backside, but the official record says it’s not him. To come forward with the truth, either about the misidentified soldier or the fact that it was a second, unnecessary flag-raising, would ruin the perfectness of the iconic photo and the war bond drive it’s helping to promote. What’s more patriotic: telling the truth and damaging the P.R. effort, or shutting up and helping America win the war? If that question doesn’t resonate in 2006, I don’t know what does.
“Flags of Our Fathers” is unusual as a war film because its focus is more on the battle’s aftermath than on the fighting itself (though the combat flashbacks are graphic and gruesome enough, Eastwood having taken a few pages from co-producer Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” strategy book). In other ways, though, the film is representative of how war films have been in the past 30 years: less rah-rah and more questioning, less superficial and more aware of how politics, pettiness and good ol’ human nature come into play even in the midst of war. It humanizes the war, which is something a lot of older films, with their protagonists who were combination superhero and Boy Scout, often failed to do.
Doc Bradley is a calm moral center for the film, played stoically (if not memorably) by Ryan Phillippe, and providing a good-hearted balance to Jesse Bradford’s flawed, in-over-his-head Rene Gagnon.
But special praise is due to Adam Beach as Ira Hayes. Hayes is an alcoholic after the war, never able to deal with his survivor’s guilt and the half-truths surrounding the publicity tour. He’s also a Pima Indian, making him subject to humiliating jokes and patronizing remarks even as he’s being lauded as a hero. (“Did you scalp them?” asks one politician of Hayes’ success on the battlefield, thinking he’s making a perfectly respectful and good-natured joke.)
Beach had a surprisingly solid turn in the 2002 WWII drama “Windtalkers” and is impressive again here in similar territory. Where Phillippe is dutiful and rigid and Bradford is loose and charismatic, Beach is a storm of emotions. He holds it together in one scene and falls to pieces in the next, constantly fighting in his head the battle that should have ended weeks ago. Phillippe, Bradford, and the actors who play their fellow soldiers in the war scenes give the film weight and depth. Beach gives the film its heart.
In case you’re not sure what “Flicka” is all about, the main character spells it out in the opening narration as she describes the Wyoming mountains where she lives. “I can see in them an expression of my own restless spirit,” she says floridly.
AAAAAhhhhh. She has a restless spirit, you see, and she’s smart and mature enough to recognize it and put it into words. Good for her.
The girl is a teenager named Katy McLaughlin (Alison Lohman), and when she’s not flunking out of her expensive boarding school, she lives on a rural ranch with her father (Tim McGraw), mother (Maria Bello) and older brother (Ryan Kwanten). She finds a wild mustang whose spirit is as restless as hers (in this case “restless” meaning “violent and insane”), and thus girl and horse become friends.
If the story and title sound vaguely familiar yet strangely modified, it’s because this is an ever-so-loose adaptation of the 1941 young adult novel “My Friend Flicka,” in which the main character was 9 years old and a boy and the horse came from Dad’s corral, not the wild. And the rest of the story is more or less completely different. But still! Based on the book.
Katy’s dad hates hates HATES mustangs and refuses to let Katy try to tame Flicka, much less ride her. Plus, he’s upset with her for the aforementioned out-of-boarding-school-flunking, which occurred as a result of Katy’s ill-defined rebelliousness and possible attention deficit disorder. Thus barred from interacting with Flicka, Katy has no choice but to sneak out to the pen at night to train her.
The director, Michael Mayer, doesn’t bring a lot to the table beyond basic competence, and the screenplay (by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, the duo who brought you “Mona Lisa Smile”) leaves a lot of things blank. For example, we’re supposed to see Dad as some kind of misguided semi-villain who doesn’t understand his own daughter, and the major evidence of this comes when he sells Flicka to a rodeo man. Katy sobs and wails at the injustice, and we’re meant to sob and wail with her — but selling the horse is actually perfectly reasonable. They need the money, the rodeo man needs mustangs, and Katy isn’t allowed near the horse anyway. What’s the problem here?
But you see, I’m not a 14-year-old girl. My view of the world has not been colored by a love for horses and a central philosophy that life is, like, so unfair ‘n’ crap. Perhaps the film’s timeless message of kids being wiser than their parents will hit home with the tweenage audience. For the rest of us, the movie is inoffensive and forgettable, which is probably what they were going for.
Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” has already gained notoriety for being booed when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival — though as its star, Kirsten Dunst, has pointed out, it was mostly the locals who booed it, and you can hardly blame them. If a French director made a film about George Washington and cast a Frenchman in the lead, American audiences probably wouldn’t be very happy with it either.
The film isn’t worthy of boos. What it is worthy of, I’m not entirely sure. Coppola has jammed it with contradictions and anachronisms, apparently wanting us to take it seriously while simultaneously not taking it seriously. Some parts are funny. Other parts are also funny, but unintentionally so. There are outstanding elements, such as the lavish costumes and production design, and ludicrous elements, like how every time the characters speak formally — “Your majesty! The peasants are staging a revolt; you must return at the castle at once!” — they sound like high school students doing a Shakespeare play.
Coppola wasn’t trying to make a historical epic, but the basics of history are adhered to: Marie Antoinette leaves her native Austria in 1768 to marry the king’s son (Jason Schwartzman); she and hubby Louis XVI become the king and queen, live sumptuous lives of empty frivolity, and are eventually deposed by the starving populace. But the details — well, none of the principals are doing French or even European accents; there’s Rip Torn as King Louis XV, with his very American growl, and Valley Girl Kirsten Dunst as Marie herself. In her spare time (which is pretty much all her time), Marie goes shopping and gets her hair done with her girlfriends, the way a modern woman her age would. The only difference is that because it’s 18th-century France, “shopping” means bringing in the royal tailor to show you his latest creations, and “getting your hair done” means having the royal wigmaker see how tall he can pile it up before it tips over.
The music is as contradictory as the rest of the picture, with period-appropriate Mozart mixed in with vintage punk rock and New Wave pop. It matches Marie herself: young and girlie (she was 14 when she married Louis) and modern for her time, yet also centuries removed from what the audience considers “modern” to be.
As she has done in her previous films “The Virgin Suicides” (which also starred Dunst) and “Lost in Translation,” Coppola focuses much of her attention here on her characters’ melancholy boredom. Marie is surprised at how much foolish protocol is involved in being the dauphin and later the queen; there is an elaborate ritual requiring a dozen attendants just to get her dressed in the morning. Royal life is vacuous and dull.
The film sometimes slips into doldrums, too — it’s hard to depict boredom without being boring — but that is not its chief problem. The trouble here is that while many of the characters are quaintly amusing, they are not full-bodied individuals. They don’t seem real (which is ironic, considering they WERE real), and so we don’t feel connected to them. Asked to care when things started to go south for Marie and Louis at the end of the film, I’m afraid I couldn’t manage it.
It’s almost irrelevant to talk about performances in a movie as queerly stylized as this one. Kirsten Dunst isn’t the least bit believable as the queen of France, but I don’t get the impression she was meant to be. One of Coppola’s themes is that these were just young kids, far too inexperienced to be monarchs and completely unsuited to the task. Likewise, Dunst and Jason Schwartzman don’t belong in the roles of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. I get the point, but so what? The film is better as a curiosity than as entertainment.
Forget “The Illusionist”! The preeminent twisty-plotted European-magicians-at-the-turn-of-the-last-century movie of 2006 is “The Prestige”! “The Prestige” is “A Bug’s Life” to “The Illusionist’s” “Antz,” the intelligent “Deep Impact” to its silly “Armageddon.”
But we will not be comparing movies, ladies and gentlemen, because it is not fair. It is coincidence, and nothing more, that two such similar films have come out in the same calendar year. Let me just point out that I thought “The Illusionist” was nothing special to begin with, and that “The Prestige” is 10 times smarter and deeper. Oh, and that Edward Norton’s accent in “The Illusionist” is hilariously bad. So there.
“The Prestige” is directed by Christopher Nolan and co-written by him and his brother Jonathan, adapted from a novel by Christopher Priest. The remake “Insomnia” and the franchise-rejuvenator “Batman Begins” notwithstanding, this is the Nolan brothers’ true follow-up to their 2001 masterpiece “Memento.” Like that film, “The Prestige” tells its story out of sequence, with details hinting at things that have already happened but that we have not seen yet (why does Hugh Jackman have a limp?), and with surprises and reversals popping up madly in the last act.
Set in London circa 1900, the film shows us the end first (one of the Nolans’ favorite tricks), with one of the two central characters dying and the other going on trial for his murder. From there time becomes fractured (though not confusingly so) as we bounce back and forth over the course of a couple years, gradually piecing together the story.
At issue are two magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). They began as friends, working together as another illusionist’s assistants, but were driven apart when Angier’s wife was killed during a trick. Angier blames Borden for it and subsequently makes an attempt on Borden’s life during one of Borden’s own stage shows. Borden retaliates during an Angier performance. And so on and so forth. The nice thing about two magicians fighting each other is that you know their methods of sabotage will always be entertaining to watch.
Borden becomes the more famous of the two magicians, working under the name The Professor and stunning audiences with an illusion called “The Transported Man.” In it, he seems to walk through a door at one end of the stage, disappear, and instantly re-enter through another door at the other end. It cannot literally be done without defying the laws of physics.
Angier’s faithful, level-headed assistant, Cutter (Michael Caine), calmly explains that Borden must be using a double, a look-alike. He points out, quite rightly, that all magic tricks are disappointingly simple once you know how they’re done. But Angier is obsessed with Borden, first for that fatal accident involving his wife, and now for one-upping him as a magician. There MUST be more to it than a simple body double! Something more ingenious and clever!
Angier heads to Colorado, where Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) has been experimenting with electricity. (Yes, you read that right: This film features David Bowie as Nikola Tesla.) Angier believes Tesla devised a machine for Borden’s “Transported Man” trick, and he wants him to do the same for him. But could a machine that ACTUALLY does what Borden’s trick suggests really be built? Can Tesla really perform magic? To someone unfamiliar with the marvels of modern science, wouldn’t even something as simple as electricity be “magical”?
Meanwhile, there is intrigue in Borden’s personal life. He is married to Sarah (Rebecca Hall), from whom he has declared he will keep no secrets. But his lovely stage assistant, Olivia (Scarlett Johansson), has become his mistress — and, what’s more, he wants her to spy on Angier for him, to learn what he’s up to so he can stay one step ahead.
Bale and Jackman, a Brit and an Aussie who have never worked together but who seem like they should have, are at the top of their game, both working magic in their turns as magicians. Sometimes a showman is flashy and loud; other times he uses subtlety to attract your attention. Borden and Angier are certainly aware of this, and so are Bale and Jackman. You can tell a good actor from a mediocre one because the good actor will give even “just for fun” movies like “The Prestige” their full measure of energy and commitment. That’s Bale and Jackman to a T: completely hard-working and devoted.
Early in the film, Cutter lays out how an illusion works. First the magician shows you something ordinary. Then he makes it do something impossible, like disappear. Then he puts everything right again (brings the vanished item back), but usually with a flourish (the item is in an audience member’s pocket).
The genius of the film is that it is about magic tricks and is also a magic trick itself, following the pattern just described and using misdirection as much as a stage illusionist would. Details you ignored because they seemed like mere window-dressing turn out to be pivotal. Nothing is as it appears to be, and all the clues are right there in front of you.
Unfortunately, the film adheres to one of the other laws of magic, one I referred to earlier: When you find out how it’s done, it’s always disappointing. The film’s big reveal — the moment where Nolan yanks the handkerchief away and says, “Ta-da!” — well, you’ll probably spot it long before he wants you to. The thing is, it doesn’t matter much. Where some films lean on their “surprises” like crutches, “The Prestige” doesn’t live or die by the shockingness of its finale. I saw it coming a mile away and here I am, still recommending the film to you as a brilliantly plotted, smartly directed, fiendishly entertaining merry-go-round.
When I read that legendary “Jeopardy!” nerd-millionaire Ken Jennings was going to be in Portland last week for a book signing, I thought: I bet he would like to have dinner with me while he’s in town. I mean, who wouldn’t?! I’m a perfectly suitable dinner companion. I exercise proper table etiquette, I don’t talk with my mouth full, and there are many restaurants from which I have not been banned.
Ken Jennings and I both graduated from Brigham Young University (motto: “Resistance Is Futile”) and were there at the same time, but we didn’t know each other. He knew who I was, though, because he read my “Snide Remarks” column in the campus paper every week, and subsequently in the local rag that I worked for. He also figures he must have seen me perform with the Garrens Comedy Troupe once or twice. In other words, KEN JENNINGS WAS A HUGE ERIC D. SNIDER FAN.
I was unaware of any of this until last fall, when I auditioned for “Jeopardy!” and wrote a column about it. The column somehow came to Ken Jennings’ attention — Ken Jennings is all-knowing and all-seeing — and he e-mailed me to say hello and good luck with getting on the show and all that. I replied to say thank you and to point out that THAT VERY NIGHT I was going to be doing a show in Provo in which I would debut my new song ABOUT KEN JENNINGS! How magical it would be, I said, if he attended the show and heard the song with his own nerd ears as I performed it live! Alas, he was flying somewhere for a speaking engagement, so he couldn’t come. He said he was flattered, though, with something to the effect of, “This makes up for all the times I could have impressed a date by being mentioned in a Garrens sketch.”
So now it’s almost a year later, and I see he’s going to be in Portland, where I live. I e-mail him, ask if he wants to have lunch or something, he suggests a post-signing dinner instead, and the arrangements are made. I had cheered for him during his historic “Jeopardy!” run, and of course (as mentioned) he was a devoted, almost rabid Eric D. Snider fan. Our first in-person meeting promised to be a joyous affair of mutual fawning, gushing and admiration.
He was speaking and signing books at the Barnes & Noble at Clackamas Town Center, in the southeastern corner of Portland. It’s part of his tour to promote “Brainiac,” his new book that tells his “Jeopardy!” story, addresses America’s love with trivia in general, offers tips to would-be contestants, and reveals the source of Alex Trebek’s absurdly high level of smugness. (Steroids.)
I showed up at the end of Ken Jennings’ presentation and observed as he chatted with well-wishers, took pictures with them, and signed their books (“Who is Ken Jennings?” is how he signs them). He was amiable and friendly, even with the people who were clearly insane. I asked later if this had been a good turnout for one of his appearances, and he said it was average. It’s hard to gauge where the crowds will be. I said I figured Salt Lake City would be a good one for him, since he’s a Mormon and used to live there, but he said his last appearance there, at the Barnes & Noble in the Sugarhouse neighborhood, was actually rather sparse.
“Well, that’s Sugarhouse,” I said. “It’s a very hip, trendy part of town. If you’d been a lesbian, there would have been a lot of people there.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, I do like women….”
“See? You’re halfway there.”
We left the mall and walked across the street to Red Robin, the nearest eatery that was not in the mall and not called Chevy’s.
Here are the answers to some things you are probably wondering about:
1. Yes, Ken Jennings paid for dinner. Actually, since he was on the book tour, Random House paid for it. I asked him if people always expect him to pick up the check now that he’s rich, and he said some do. Others offer to pay, “as a point of pride,” perhaps hoping he’ll say no. He doesn’t, though: “If they want to pay, I let them pay.” And that’s how Ken Jennings will STAY rich.
2. No, Ken Jennings was not wearing a suit made of $100 bills. They were 50s.
3. Yes, Ken Jennings drives a 1999 Toyota Corolla.
4. No, Ken Jennings did not slip the Red Robin hostess a 20 in order to get us a better table.
5. Yes, there is a woman out there who has kissed both Ken Jennings and me. While we were trying to figure out if we had any BYU friends in common, he named a particular girl whom I had indeed been friends with, and whom I’d even dated briefly in 1998. Turns out he went to high school with her and dated her back then. Seeking to brag, I said, “Sure, but did you kiss her?” He said, “Yes — why, have we kissed?!” And the answer is that yes, since I kissed a girl who had previously kissed him, in a way Ken Jennings and I have kissed each other. Considering the list of women I have kissed is not lengthy, this is a profound coincidence.
I was pleased to discover that in person Ken Jennings is extremely chatty and funny, very much at ease with his crazy new life and apparently unaffected by it. His humor is self-deprecating — we discussed the issue of his 15 minutes of fame, which he said he’s hoping “Brainiac” will extend — and there was much laughter and merriment as we ate our giant Red Robin burgers and used $100 bills to light cigars.
Aside from the girl we both kissed and our basic LDS, BYU backgrounds, we have a few things in common:
1. We both love movies, pop culture and trivia.
2. We both have had periods of fame where people on the street recognized us. His is waning now, and mine waned a long time ago and was only ever in effect at BYU and in Provo, but still.
3. We both grew up elsewhere, moved to Utah to go to school, stuck around longer than we had planned, woke up one day and said, “Holy crap! I’ve lived in Utah for 10 years!,” and then finally fled to the Pacific Northwest.
4. Sometimes people ask us stupid things. He said a fan e-mailed him wondering if he had contact information for a contestant who had appeared on “Jeopardy!” in 1999, five years before Ken Jennings himself appeared, as if getting on the show entitled you to a copy of some huge “Jeopardy!” contestant directory. In response, I told him about the torment I’ve suffered at the hands of Raven-Symone’s all-idiot fanbase, who believe that since I have mentioned Raven-Symone in a movie review, surely I must also have her e-mail address.
Ken Jennings still had to drive back home to Seattle that night, so we could not linger at Red Robin for hours and hours, nor could we move on to the second phase of my plan for the evening, which was to go to some strip clubs, get drunk, and have Ken Jennings co-sign a car loan for me. We walked back to the Barnes & Noble parking lot and parted ways. I called some friends to tell them that I’d met Ken Jennings, and I’m pretty sure he called his friends to do some bragging, too. He was a pretty big fan of mine, after all.
We enabled comments on this blog a few weeks back, and now the process has been implemented throughout the entire site. That means you can now post a comment on any “Snide Remarks” column or movie review, old or new. Heck, you could go back and post comments on very old, pre-“Snide Remarks” columns or theater reviews if you wanted to. Any article on the site! The world is your oyster!
Note that this is a reversal of our previous position, which was that we didn’t care what you thought. Now we care, deeply.
Kudos to my li’l bro Jeff for doing the geek work involved in making this happen. Also, kudos to me for writing big piles of words for people to comment on.
Comment away!
(Standard rules apply: No cussing, no vulgarity, no fighting. Comments from first-time contributors are subject to approval before they are posted. Spammers will be hunted and killed by mercenaries. If symptoms persist, discontinue use and consult a physician. Apply directly to the forehead.)
I’m not very enthusiastic about any of this week’s new releases, so I don’t expect you to be, either. Let’s run them down quickly and never speak of them again, shall we?
The biggest release (at least in terms of number of theaters) is “The Grudge 2,” the sequel to the 2004 hit, which was itself a remake of a Japanese film. The original Japanese film spawned a sequel, too, but this is not a remake of it, because the Japanese sequel had a completely different story from this one. Although I don’t know how different it could have been, considering all of these movies focus exclusively on Japanese ghosts who pop up unexpectedly and frighten you. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with that.
“The Grudge 2” wasn’t screened until last night at 10 p.m., thus ensuring there would be no reviews in the papers today. If you’re a savvy moviegoer and/or a regular reader of this Web site, you know what that means: It blows, and the studio knows it.
The screening was populated almost entirely by teenagers, so the theater was perpetually aglow from the light of their cell phones. I submit that any text message sent to a teenager is, by definition, not urgent enough to require being read during a movie. If the message were urgent, it would have been sent to a grown-up.
Anyway, speaking of things that blow, next up is “Man of the Year,” a lame, toothless comedy starring Robin Williams as a Jon Stewart-esque comedian who gets elected president. The fundamental problem with the film is that its main character is supposed to be hilariously funny, yet every example of his humor that is shown to us is, in fact, NOT FUNNY. Note to people who make movies: If you want them to be funny, you should not let Robin Williams write his own material.
This one screened a few weeks ago — very early, for some reason — and I remember two things about it. One, the only people in the theater who laughed at Williams’ bland brand of humor were old people. Two, Mike Russell, Dawn Taylor and I got shushed for laughing too much at Christopher Walken. The problem, you see, is that we think everything he says is funny; ergo, every time he spoke, we laughed. Hey, sometimes you gotta make your own fun. At least we weren’t checking our G.D. text messages.
The other wide release today is “The Marine,” in which WWE star John Cena plays, um, a Marine, I guess. I quote from the trailer: “Meet a one-man strike force that never surrenders!” If you’re wondering why that line sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it in every action-movie trailer ever made. Anyway, Cena’s wife gets kidnapped and he has to rescue her, or something. Twentieth Century Fox didn’t screen it at all, not even last night at 10 p.m., so you know it’s extra-special. I’m guessing it will appeal most to fans of professional wrestling, which means if you can read this, you’re probably not interested. KA-ZING!
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If there’s anything more pointless than a sequel that simply duplicates its predecessor’s story and characters, it’s a review of that sequel. Welcome to Pointless Town, population “The Grudge 2” and me.
Again directed by Takashi Shimizu and again written by Stephen Susco, this sequel to the 2004 hit (which was a remake of a Japanese hit) continues to believe that the scariest thing a movie could possibly feature is a ghostly Japanese woman or little boy appearing suddenly on the screen. Shimizu further believes that if the event is accompanied by a shriek of violins on the soundtrack, then you have perpetrated the most frightening thing ever committed to film.
By those standards, “The Grudge 2” must surely be a terrifying experience, for hardly five minutes can pass without some pale, bug-eyed ghost appearing. Ninety percent of the time, all these ghosts do is appear, usually with the effect of terrifying whoever sees them. The 10 other percent of the time, the ghosts actually attack their victims, though what they actually DO to them is never made clear.
After a while, these jump scares become predictable and obvious, and you start to think, hey, wait a minute, maybe this movie isn’t scary after all! Maybe the movie has just been using gimmicks and tricks to make us THINK it’s scary, to distract us from its complete lack of original content! As this realization dawns on you, you feel stupid for not having spotted it earlier — like, say, when you saw the ads on TV.
The film follows three storylines, two of which seem irrelevant until the end, when the loose ends are gathered and the master plan is revealed (sort of). First of all, Aubrey Davis (Amber Tamblyn) is sent to Tokyo to check on her sister, Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who in the first film was terrorized by the ghosts and eventually set their house on fire in an attempt to destroy them. Karen’s in the hospital now, a little worse for wear and completely insane.
Meanwhile (or maybe later, or maybe before), three high school girls go into the haunted house, which we know is a bad idea because everyone who enters the house winds up being pestered by the ghosts. Sure enough, that’s what happens.
Thirdly, an American family in Chicago is disturbed by weird noises coming from their neighbors’ apartment.
What does it all mean?! you ask. It means “The Grudge” made $187 million worldwide, thus assuring a sequel would be made whether anyone had a good idea for one or not. (Shimizu made a sequel to his Japanese original, too, but this is not a remake of it.) “The Grudge 2” brims with bad dialogue badly delivered, and there’s very little suspense for the simple reason that too often, we have no idea what the heck’s going on. It’s hard to be scared and baffled at the same time.
Professional wrestling hero John Cena probably said to himself one day, “You know what? I’m a big dumb guy. I bet I could play a big dumb guy in a movie.” He mashed his fist on a telephone keypad, his agent answered, and thus was born “The Marine,” a WWE-produced “Rambo” rip-off that allows Cena to flex his muscles. (His physical muscles, I mean. His acting muscles remain dormant.)
In this clumsy, dim-witted generic action caper, Cena plays John Triton, a Marine with cartoonishly large biceps who is discharged after single-handedly saving three soldiers from a cell of nine al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. Seems he recklessly disobeyed orders when he saved those guys, so the Marines want nothing to do with him. Back home in South Carolina, he takes a job as a security guard in an office high-rise but immediately loses it due to being a thuggish hothead.
(I am given to understand that in the wrestling world, being a thuggish hothead is one of Cena’s most popular characteristics. I believe his fans will therefore find his “Marine” character quite to their liking.)
Then John and his wife, Kate (Kelly Carlson), are taking a road trip when Kate is accidentally kidnapped by a quintet of diamond thieves. (It’s hard to explain.) John spends the rest of the movie pursuing them through a swampy river and its surrounding shacks and cabins, engaging in hand-to-hand combat where possible and only occasionally deploying such distasteful weapons as knives or guns.
The chief villain is a well-dressed psychopath named Rome. Played by Robert Patrick (and the movie does squeeze in a “Terminator” reference), he’s the only enjoyable character in the film, simply because Patrick doesn’t take himself seriously. He’s actually enjoying himself, while everyone else is trudging through it laboriously.
Rome’s accomplices include a hot woman (Abigail Bianca), on hand so the captive Kate can fight with her — folks love a good chick-on-chick fight, you know — a couple of all-purpose Movie Bad Guys, and a crazy, explosive-happy guy intended as comic relief. Unfortunately, the movie’s idea of comic relief is for him to tell a story about when he was 13 years old and a camp counselor molested him. (Seriously.) He’s one of the most singularly bizarre and ill-conceived movie characters I’ve seen all year, and I saw the Amanda Bynes movie.
John Triton, as burly as a gorilla but with less emotional range, has the following superpowers:
1. He can be inside a building when it gets blown up, yet emerge unharmed. This happens three times in the movie, with three different buildings.
2. He can be driving a car whose top half has been sheared off, leaving him with no protection whatsoever, and be shot at hundreds of times, riddling the hood and doors with bullet holes, yet sustain no injuries himself. The car’s tires enjoy a similar bulletproofness.
But all superheroes have weaknesses, and John’s is that if you hit him in the head with a fire extinguisher or a plank of wood, he will be rendered unconscious for as long as it takes you to escape.
The director, a first-timer named John Bonito, has allowed the fight scenes to be shot so darkly and edited so frantically that they’re nearly incomprehensible. This method is usually employed to hide an actor’s lack of fighting ability — but John Cena IS a fighter. So why not let us see him actually, you know, fight?
It may be that the fight scenes were so choppily edited in order to avoid showing graphic violence and getting an R rating. Indeed, there are many instances throughout the film where it’s obvious they’ve cut away from something before they wanted to. For as violent as the movie is, it’s curiously blood-free.
Also, I like how John Triton runs and blows things up in slow-motion, but when he shifts gears in his car, it’s sped up like it’s the most exciting thing he’s ever done.
Given wrestling’s popularity, I’m sure there are people who will see “The Marine” just because it features John Cena. And those people will not be disappointed: The movie does, in fact, feature John Cena. John Cena is visible in nearly every scene. The one thing you can count on is that “The Marine,” starring WWE titan John Cena, has ample quantities of John Cena in it. If you’re looking for anything else, though, you might walk away a little unsatisfied.
(P.S. If you want to hear John Cena rap — and I’m pretty sure you do — stick around for the closing credits.)
My heart goes out to Douglas McGrath. The writer, director and occasional actor was hard at work on “Infamous,” telling the story of how Truman Capote researched “In Cold Blood,” when he learned someone else was making a movie on the same subject. A movie called “Capote.” A movie that would go on to win one Oscar and be nominated for four others, including Best Picture.
Even if “Infamous” turned out to be an outstanding motion picture, it could not possibly compare with “Capote.” Coming out a year later and covering the same material, it would look like a copycat. Worse, the public wouldn’t be interested. One Truman Capote biopic is enough, thank you very much.
So I feel bad for Douglas McGrath that his movie is overshadowed by “Capote.” I feel bad also that even without the comparisons, “Infamous” is not particularly good. Turns out its runner-up status is deserved, regardless of timing.
We begin with an inexplicable scene. It’s 1959, and author/celebrity/bon vivant Truman Capote (Toby Jones) is in a swanky nightclub surrounded by other swanky famous types. The singer is called Kitty Dean, though clearly she is meant to be Peggy Lee. She is played by Gwyneth Paltrow. She sings Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” at first enthusiastically and then suddenly having some sort of emotional turmoil in the middle of it. She stops, clearly distressed, falters a moment, then hops back into the song as though nothing ever happened. Paltrow’s performance is riveting. But here’s the thing: The scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The singer’s torment is not explained. She is never seen or referred to again.
My best guess is that the incident foreshadows the inner turmoil Truman will face over the course of the film. The fey, diminutive gay man — often mistaken for a woman, in one of the movie’s running jokes — heads to rural Kansas after a gruesome quadruple homicide there, angling for a story for The New Yorker about how such a grisly crime affects a small town. Accompanied by best friend Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock), whose “To Kill a Mockingbird” is just being released, Truman becomes friendly with the imprisoned killers, publicly declaring his devotion to the truth while privately rewriting quotations and manipulating facts to make his book spicier.
This is an angle “Capote” didn’t really explore: How much of “In Cold Blood” is accurate and how much is exaggerated? “Infamous” shows Truman recounting his interviews with the killers to his prissy New York socialite pals, reveling in how aghast they are to hear the details, and changing the wording of the murderers’ quotations every time. For the book, he chooses the one that sounds best.
He displays a similarly cavalier attitude toward the facts when he gossips with his friends about other friends. Everybody loves him, but does anyone trust him?
This is an intriguing facet of Truman’s personality, but the irony is that Truman doesn’t seem very conflicted about it. It’s just what he does. There’s certainly nothing to indicate introspection like Paltrow shows in that opening number.
Toby Jones looks enough like Truman Capote, but his voice sounds like an impersonation, not a performance. It’s impossible not to compare: Philip Seymour Hoffman imitated the voice, too, but fleshed out the performance so well that it seemed natural. Hoffman could have not done the voice at all and the character still would have seemed fully realized. With Jones, the voice is all he has.
Far more compelling is the supporting cast, which is impressive in its size and scope. There’s Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Juliet Stevenson and Peter Bogdanovich, all playing Truman’s wealthy New York friends. Jeff Daniels is endearingly even-keeled as the Kansas sheriff Truman must befriend in order to get access to the killers, and Lee Pace and Daniel Craig are solid as the villains themselves.
The best thing about the movie? Sandra Bullock, believe it or not. Her Harper Lee is intelligent, friendly, full of common sense and gracious manners, instantly likable to all she meets. There are several tantalizing lines about her “next book,” which we all know never came to be; “Mockingbird” was it. Bullock’s warm portrayal of the reclusive author back before she was a recluse makes me think I’d rather be watching a different movie: a biopic of Harper Lee.
There are two villains in “Deliver Us from Evil,” an enraging documentary about sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. One, of course, is Father Oliver O’Grady, the saintly looking old Irish priest who molested dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children in central California in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The other is Cardinal Roger Mahony, now the archbishop of Los Angeles, who consistently and repeatedly let O’Grady get away with it.
This isn’t a fun movie, no, but it sure is compelling, having been expertly put together by first-time filmmaker Amy Berg. Her style is restrained, eschewing sensationalism and leaving herself out of the story. There is no narrator, no guerrilla-style ambushes of unsuspecting subjects, and no off-screen interviewers heard asking questions. Though the people involved are emotional, the movie itself is admirably dispassionate, Berg’s directorial choices subtle. I smiled when I noticed that we don’t actually see O’Grady’s face until the fifth or sixth time he appears onscreen, which any horror-film director will tell you is the best way to underscore the monster’s scariness.
O’Grady is a genuinely spine-tingling figure. Now defrocked, he openly admits his numerous crimes against children — mostly young girls, not boys, which makes his case particularly interesting — committed over the course of three decades. What’s chilling is that while he repeatedly expresses remorse, he doesn’t SEEM sorry. He remains disconnected from his crimes, even glib about them, apparently unable or unwilling to grasp their enormity.
He writes letters of apology to his victims, which could be admirable — yet he is almost jolly in the writing of them, going so far as to invite the now-adult victims to come visit him and share their feelings face-to-face, like he’s holding a tea party or something. He genuinely believes that writing a letter should be all that’s needed to make everything better. He acts like his streak of nearly unpardonable atrocities makes him nothing more than a mischievous kid, a Bugs Bunny “ain’t I a stinker?” sort of miscreant.
Interspersed with O’Grady’s testimony are interviews with some of his victims and their families, which make clear the deep and lasting scars that O’Grady left on their psyches. As craven as O’Grady is, these fractured Catholics are inspiringly courageous, willing to discuss what happened to them and to publicly fight for reform in the way the church deals with deviant priests.
In each case, the families were devout Catholics who opened their homes to O’Grady and trusted their children with him. Now, years later, they feel devastated at how their faith in the church has been shattered. One observer points out that to Catholics, when a priest consecrates the holy communion, he is one with Jesus Christ. To have such a man then commit the crimes O’Grady is guilty of is understandably disillusioning.
Maybe the most heartbreaking family in the film are the Jyonos, parents Bob and Maria and daughter Ann. Bob and Maria were ardent defenders of O’Grady when accusations began to emerge, having known and loved him years earlier when he was in their parish. Then Bob asked Ann, now an adult, if O’Grady ever had this kind of contact with her when she was young. She finally broke her silence and confessed that he had. Recounting this now, years later, Bob Jyono’s interview is rawly emotional. He’s angry at O’Grady for raping his 10-year-old daughter, angry at the church for enabling him, heartsick at how his own faith has lapsed. It’s wrenching to watch. It should be used in court when Cardinal Mahony goes on trial for covering up O’Grady’s crimes.
Ah, yes. Cardinal Mahony. O’Grady is an unsettling sociopath with a shaky grasp on reality. Mahony, meanwhile, is a scheming, duplicitous liar who understands reality very well and has sought to obfuscate it. You come out of the film shaking your head in disbelief at O’Grady, but fully enraged at Mahony.
Mahony became bishop of the Stockton, Calif., diocese in 1980, making him O’Grady’s superior. Mahony’s late predecessor, Merlin Guilfoyle, had several years earlier covered up an O’Grady-related scandal by promising to put the errant priest in a monastery. Instead, he simply moved him to a new parish.
Mahony took Guilfoyle’s policy of deceit and denial to a whole new level. In 1984, a Stockton family went to the police over their daughter’s allegations that O’Grady had molested her. Mahony kept O’Grady out of jail and the story out of the papers by promising the police department that O’Grady would never preside over a parish or have contact with children again. Mahony’s next step? He transferred O’Grady to a city 50 miles away, putting him in charge of a parish with lots of kids in it. In fact, while O’Grady had only been an associate pastor before, he was now a full pastor: Mahony PROMOTED him. And in his new parish, O’Grady continued to harm the children in his care.
In videotape of a 2004 deposition, Mahony is asked whether a priest’s confessing he has sexual urges for children is grounds for booting him from the priesthood. Mahony says no.
Berg, who has a background in TV news production, evidently tried to get the Catholic Church’s side of the O’Grady and Mahony story. Not surprisingly, the church declined comment. O’Grady speaks for himself, and quite candidly, though the euphemisms he uses — “overly affectionate,” and so forth — are stunning understatements of the truth. The victims make it much clearer: He didn’t just touch or fondle them; he had sexual intercourse with them.
Experts in the film make some insightful points about the church’s adherence to the non-biblical doctrine of celibacy and how it fosters this kind of deviance in priests. In the minds of some priests, with all sex considered bad, pedophilia is just another kind of “bad sex.” There’s also the point that many of these men began their seminary training when they were 14 or 15 — no wonder, then, that their sexual development seems to have stopped there.
I don’t know what the Catholic Church will do to root out the devils in its ministry. I don’t know what will happen to O’Grady and Mahony, at least not in this life. (I have some theories about the afterlife.) But “Deliver Us from Evil” is the most damning piece of evidence I’ve seen, irrefutable proof that something must be done. Every Catholic leader should see this movie.
Some people on a certain message board were making mix CDs for each other in a flagrant violation of copyright laws, and I got to thinking what I would include if I were to make a mix CD to send to all my friends. It should have a particular theme, I thought, and the theme I chose was: Happy Songs.
These are songs that make me happy. In most cases, it’s because they’re just so darn peppy that I always feel like dancing when I hear them. (Please note that I seldom dance in public. But I often WANT to.) Some of them even go a little beyond that, with moods and melodies that actually inspire me, in addition to being toe-tappers.
So here’s the track list for my mix CD. I’ve uploaded it as an iMix at iTunes (follow this link), where you can hear 30-second samples and download songs if you want to.
What tunes would you put on your Happy Songs iMix? Discuss.
1. “Bizarre Love Triangle,” New Order (1986). This is probably my favorite song from the 1980s New Wave movement. The mix of drums (OK, drum machines) and strings (OK, synthesized strings) is the very definition of dance-floor happiness. (There are extended versions, but I prefer the 3:51 original.)
2. “Hey Julie,” Fountains of Wayne (2003). One of the few songs on this list whose lyrics matter. (In most cases, it’s just the music I love.) Not only is the tune catchy and cute, but the lyrics are sweet and heartfelt, about this swell gal who helps make the guy’s life livable.
3. “Hey Ya,” Outkast (2003). Man, did this thing get overplayed in 2003 and 2004. But man, is it ever a fun song.
4. “All of Me,” Jon Schmidt (1991). This is a piano solo by Jon Schmidt, a Utah native whose music is somewhere between pop-rock and Mannheim Steamroller. Some of his compositions could be considered schmaltzy, but “All of Me” is a brilliant piece of work. After a tranquil opening, it launches into a rapid-fire barrage of harmonies and counter-rhythms, as catchy and energizing a song as I’ve ever heard. Every time I hear it, I catch some new rhythm or melody I hadn’t noticed before.
5. “Hourglass,” Squeeze (1987). I defy you not to tap your toes or bob your head. Oh, and sing along with the patter-y chorus.
6. “Starry Eyed Surprise,” Paul Oakenfold, vocals by Shifty Shellshock (2002). In this case, it’s not that the song makes me “happy,” exactly, but that it’s impossible for me not to boogie just a little when I hear it. When I used to do music for ComedySportz in Provo, I would often play this song as exit music after a show. As the audience filed out, I would always see many of them dancing as they did.
7. “Best of My Love,” the Emotions (1977). One year at the Sundance Film Festival’s low-key, super-fun awards ceremony, a technical glitch caused a delay in starting the show. To keep the energy up and everyone happy, they told us to stand up at our seats and dance (“Sun-dance,” get it?). This is the song they played, and sure enough, everyone danced, including Roger Ebert.
8. “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Benny Goodman (1937). You’ve definitely heard this swing tune, whether you know the name or not. It has lyrics, but the best recordings don’t use ’em. Not only do I want to dance when I hear Goodman’s version, I want to be a bandleader, too.
9. “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” Wilco (2002). A little bluesy (what with all those 7th chords and the general structure), a little rock ‘n’ roll, even a little country. It feels groovy, you know? Oh, and the words are about a guy who is trying to put his feelings into a letter, but he can’t seem to do it. “If I could, you know I would just hold your hand and you’d understand I’m the man who loves you.” Beautiful.
10. “Walking on Sunshine,” Katrina and the Waves (1985). Overused? Overplayed? Yes. Ridiculously upbeat and shiny? You betcha!
11. “New York City,” They Might Be Giants (1996). I could put one of about 30 different TMBG songs on this list; the band is practically synonymous with fun, catchy tunes. But this one (a cover of a song by the defunct girl group Cub) is one of my favorites, with happy and sentimental lyrics about one of my favorite places in the world.
12. “In Between Days,” Ben Folds (2003). Another cover, this time of a song by the Cure. I like the original, but I love Ben Folds’ piano-tastic version. The syncopated rhythm of the main piano riff played against the steady beat of the drums is great.
13. “Do Your Thing,” Basement Jaxx (2003). Some of the best dance songs are about dancing. (See also: “Starry Eyed Surprise.”) This one says the best way to get happy is to shake your money-maker (or words to that effect). It’s the piano-heavy sample that makes it a stand-out, though.
14. “Right Back Where We Started From,” Maxine Nightingale (1976). You hear this one a lot in movies. It’s a good all-purpose feel-good happy song.
15. “We Close Our Eyes,” Oingo Boingo (1987). I’m not a huge fan of Oingo Boingo’s particular brand of ’80s synthesized merriment, but this song’s hummable tune and earnest lyrics always put a smile on my face.
16. “You Got It,” Roy Orbison (1988). Orbison’s career spanned 30 years, and this was one of the last songs he recorded. The lyrics are simply sweet (“Anything you want, you got it”), and the chord progression in the chorus gives the song an added plaintiveness.
17. “Friday I’m in Love,” The Cure (1992). The Cure is most famous, and rightfully so, for being depressing. But this song is just the opposite: One of the things I like best about it is that the upbeat tempo never stops, not for a bridge, not for a coda, never. It starts happy, and it’s happy for the whole 3 1/2 minutes. It perfectly captures the thrilling feeling of being in love.
18. “Endicott,” Kid Creole & the Coconuts (1985). This delightful island-tinged dance tune came to my attention when the video for it was featured in a Dr. Demento TV special many years ago. (It’s not a particularly “funny” song, but it is lighthearted.) It’s the bass line that makes your bootie shake.
19. “Murder (or a Heart Attack),” Old 97s (1999). More relentlessly peppy music. Just fun.
20. “Mr. Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont’s Thin White Duke Mix),” The Killers (2005). Jacques Lu Cont is a producer and DJ whose real name is Stuart Price. The Killers’ album version of this song is great, but this 9-minute remix expands on it in amazing ways, somehow making it feel introspective, anthemic and hopeful all at once. (The 30-second sample iTunes uses doesn’t accurately represent the song, though, because the drums haven’t kicked in yet.)
“30 Rock” (Wednesdays, NBC): This is the other new series set backstage at a live sketch comedy show, written by and starring Tina Fey, who until May was the head writer at “Saturday Night Live.” Unlike “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” “30 Rock” is a half-hour comedy (not dramedy), and the pilot got quite a few laughs from me. Fey plays the head writer at “The Girlie Show,” and a new executive (Alec Baldwin) has convinced her to hire insane movie star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) as a cast member. Alec Baldwin is perfect for this role, and I’ve always liked Fey and Morgan. This one’s a keeper. TiVo verdict: Season Pass.
“Twenty Good Years” (Wednesdays, NBC): Wow. Of all the derivative, unfunny, insulting, dim-witted sitcoms I’ve ever seen, this one’s right up there. Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow — both funny in other series — play two old friends who, at age 60, decide to start living every day to the fullest. The jokes in the pilot JUST. WEREN’T. FUNNY. As in, not a single laugh the entire episode (though that didn’t stop the editors from inserting rampant amounts of grating canned laughter). Tambor went from “Arrested Development” to this. It makes me sad to think how embarrassed he must feel. TiVo verdict: It isn’t just one of the worst TV shows I’ve ever seen. It’s one of the worst THINGS I’ve ever seen.
“Ugly Betty” (Thursdays, ABC): Among new series this fall, this one is the most popular, its first two episodes drawing enough viewers to put it in the top 20. I’m afraid I don’t share America’s sentiments on this one. It’s a cute, campy dramedy about a frumpy, unattractive Latina girl who gets a job at a fashion magazine. (Yes, it’s just like “The Devil Wears Prada,” although “Ugly Betty” is based on a Colombian series that pre-dates “Prada.”) I found the pilot just too precious and whimsical, with a cartoonish musical score and big, broad acting. TiVo verdict: I will continue to enforce my “no ugly chicks” policy.
“Friday Night Lights” (Tuesdays, NBC): I greatly admired the film that inspired this series, about a small Texas town where high school football is king, and the pilot episode — written and directed by Peter Berg, who wrote and directed the film, too — was among the best two or three pilots of any show this season. The drama, passion and intensity of the sport were powerfully conveyed, along with the humanity of the players and the coach. Don’t care about sports? ME EITHER! But I still found it gripping. TiVo verdict: Season Pass.
“The Nine” (Wednesdays, ABC): I’m intrigued, but I’m wary. The premise is that nine people were held hostage during a bank robbery for 52 hours before the ordeal ended. They bonded during that time, and of course now their lives are forever changed. What we don’t know, yet, is exactly what happened in those 52 hours. The first episode hinted tantalizingly at a few things — an off-duty cop wound up handcuffed to a pillar; the bad guys cut off locks of two women’s hair — but mostly the focus is on the aftermath, not on the crisis itself. Will it become an emotional melodrama, or a creepy mystery? TiVo verdict: I’m going to give it another couple episodes.
If you had ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters” in the office betting pool for which new series would be canceled first — and most people did — surprise! You’re wrong!
Turns out it’s CBS’s “Smith” that has the dubious honor of being the first axing of the fall season, having been yanked after just three airings. Ray Liotta’s a great actor, and it would be swell to see him on TV every week, but I guess we’ll have to wait. In the meantime, he’ll presumably go back to beating in people’s heads with baseball bats on the silver screen.
Of course, over at Fox there’s a chance some shows have been canceled without the next of kin being informed yet. See, everything on Fox is on hiatus right now because of post-season baseball coverage, and there’s some speculation that, much like the father who went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back, “Justice” and “Happy Hour” won’t return when the hiatus is over.
It’s a pretty nice arrangement for Fox, really. By covering baseball in October, they have a way of quietly murdering some of their underperforming series. Who’s gonna notice if one or two shows don’t actually come back after the World Series?
NBC, meanwhile, has moved its underperforming “Kidnapped” to Saturday night (starting Oct. 21). SATURDAY?! If you weren’t aware, Saturday is the graveyard. The networks have openly and without any attempt to spin it otherwise GIVEN UP on Saturday night programming. They air repeats, sports and news programs in that block. The most-viewed show on a Saturday usually gets no more than about 5 million viewers, and it’s mostly people age 50 and over.
Which means putting “Kidnapped” there is actually very magnanimous on NBC’s part. It’s an ongoing mystery show, so the few million viewers who are watching are highly invested in it. NBC has told the producers to wrap everything up in 13 episodes, and apparently the plan is to air them on Saturdays. Viewers still get to see how things turn out, and NBC frees up space on the other nights to air less-feeble shows.
Guess what, kids! It’s time for another edition of “Ask Eric Stuff,” the Nobel Prize-winning feature in which people ask Eric stuff and he plumbs the depths of his wisdom to give responses. You — yes, YOU — can submit questions to be used in future “Ask Eric Stuff” columns by clicking this link right here and following the easy-to-follow instructions. Also, please note that when we called you “kids” a minute ago, we meant it metaphorically. We assume you are 18 years old and that the inappropriate advances we make toward you are only distasteful, not illegal. Let the questions and answers and instant messaging begin!
Dear Eric: When I eat in a public setting, is it impolite to rest my arm on the table? — Worried About Manners
Dear Mann: Only if the arm is not attached to anything. Severed limbs should be put under the table or left with the coats in the closet.
Dear Eric: I recently got married and my new hubby leaves his dirty socks all over the house. How can I get him to put them in the hamper? — Laundry Lady
Dear L.L.: Tell him that’s where you keep the sex.
Dear Eric: My baby is 18 months old and she has 16 teeth already. Is it good or bad for a baby to get its teeth early? — Mother of Toothy
Dear Tooth: It’s good! Look at it this way: A shark is born with 42 teeth already grown in. You want your baby to be able to shred its prey to pieces, don’t you?
Dear Eric: I’m going to finally meet someone I got to know online, and I’m a bit nervous because I’m worried that I won’t have anything to say. Can you give me some good conversational advice? — Afraid of Reality
Dear Fraidy: Making the transition from online chats to real-life conversations can be easy. Just start every sentence with 🙂 , and be sure to always LOL at his jokes.
Dear Eric: What would you do if you found out that you only had three months to live? — Hospitalized in Huntsville
Dear Hospy: Sign up for a credit card that had zero interest for the first four months.
Dear Eric: I am a strict vegan. When my family gets together, they make no attempt to cook anything I can eat, so I end up starving until I can go to the store. I have offered to help prepare the food and menu, but they reject the idea. What should I do? — Starving in Sandwich, N.H.
Dear Starvy: Vegans have to go to the store? What, you can’t just go outside and peel some bark off a tree or something? Stupid whiny vegans.
Dear Eric: Why do so many Mormons live in Las Vegas? — Sin City Cyndi
Dear Cyn: Because the local temple is open 24 hours, and baptisms are half-off on weeknights.
Dear Eric: My lawn keeps getting patchy brown dead spots. What can I do about this? — Confused in Cleveland
Dear Cleve: A simple mixture of bleach and vinegar should eliminate the patches by making the entire lawn brown.
Dear Eric: Do you plan to ever run for public office? — Looking for Leadership.
Dear Looky: Ha. Please. The word “run” is right there in the job description.
Dear Eric: Who should win more seats in Congress this November? — Politically Challenged in Utah
Dear Utahrd: Whoever has the most butt cheeks.
Dear Eric: Is it true that elephants really never forget? — Animal Lover
Dear Annie: Ask the one I’m still paying alimony to all these years later!
Dear Eric: Where did it all go wrong? — Pondering in Poughkeepsie
Dear Poughboy: The day your parents met. (Oh, SNAP!)
Dear Eric: If you were stranded alone on a small desert island and could only have one movie to watch for the rest of your life, which one would you pick? — Woodrow
Dear Woody: I would choose the 1953 Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedy, “How to Build a Boat from Items Commonly Found on Island Beaches.”
In case you’re still getting used to how we roll here at EricDSnider.com, this is your reminder that since it’s Monday, and since I didn’t get distracted by a shiny object over the weekend, there is a new “Snide Remarks” column posted for your enjoyment.
We have a backlog of Angry Letters to sort through, so put on your asbestos gloves and protective goggles and let’s get to reading!
First a quick one from someone who used the form on the E-mail Eric page. He marked “general” as the subject, so I don’t know what his letter is in response to. In the “name” field, he put “SNIDERHATER.” For “e-mail address,” he put “sniderhater@yahoo.com.” (I checked; this is not a real e-mail address, sadly.) He writes:
Try to talk yourself out of this…
YOU’RE A [nickname for RICHARD]!
SNIDERHATER makes a lot of good points here and I will not attempt to refute them. Sure, he’s an anonymous coward — I may be a Richard, but at least I sign my name to my work and tell people how to contact me — but he’s an anonymous coward who speaks the truth. I am cut to the quick. Touché, SNIDERHATER. Touché.
The stupidity of this next writer was affirmed before I even read her letter: She had sent the e-mail not through my e-mail page, but through the “Ask Eric Stuff” page, which is quite clearly labeled as a place that is ONLY for non-serious questions that you intend as setups for “Snide Remarks” jokes. If you have an ACTUAL comment or question, the “Ask Eric Stuff” page is not the place to send it. There’s not even a spot on the “Ask Eric Stuff” page for you to include your e-mail address, so how would I reply?
Anyway, the person signed her name “Gertrude Irvingale,” which clearly is not real. But here’s what she had to say:
I just have a teensy question. I read the movie reviews for Channing Tatum and I think that you rated all the movies wrongly… or at least most of them. I realize that this is just your opinion but I think you desperately need to reevaluate your movie reviews if you wish to look cool and stuff like that, u no?
Ha Ha
Ha ha indeed! I’m sure Gertrude Irvingale is right, actually. If I wish to look cool to 15-year-old girls (which I assume she is), then yes, I should probably start evaluating Channing Tatum’s movies differently, i.e., I should give them all A+ grades because Channing Tatum is SUPA FIIIIINNNE! DAYUMN!!!
He’s actually not a bad actor at all. In “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” (just now being released in select theaters), he plays a conflicted Italian-American kid (!) and is pretty impressive in the role. I think it may be a breakthrough for him after paying his dues with crap like “Supercross” and “She’s the Man.” I suspect “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” is the film Gertrude thinks I got “right” (I gave it a B, the highest of any Channing Tatum film), yet ironically, I doubt she would enjoy it, what with the serious plot and believable characters and intelligent dialogue and so forth. He does have his shirt off a couple times, though, so maybe it would win her over.
But it is foolish to spend time belittling pseudonymous teenagers when there are grown-ups to harass. Here’s what a fellow named Bill had to say about my review of the current Will Ferrell opus:
You have lost your mind and should not be allowed a forum to review any more movies. That was the worst movie of all time (or tied with some others). What a useless waste of film production and distribution. Not funny, entertaining, or amusing, with some very twisted gender bending, not to mention JUST BAD ACTING. THE FILM STUNK.
Even my daughter hated it. Did somebody pay you to give this pile of crap a good review? Go back to film school and work on your studies a bit more before you review anything again. Thank you. Bill
It happened to be my birthday the day I got this, and I was feeling playful. So I sent this reply:
You have lost your mind and should not be allowed a forum to send any more e-mails. That was the worst response to a review I’ve ever read. What a waste of time. Did someone pay you to send me that e-mail? Go back to e-mail school and work on your studies a bit more before you respond to any more reviews. Thank you.
I’m thinking of using that as a form letter, actually.
Next up: An e-mail from someone whose “From” line says Sean, though his e-mail address is john811416usa@netscape.net. Maybe his name is Sean John. He didn’t sign it at all, so it’s hard to say. In fact, the e-mail itself was vague. It reads:
What do you base your reviews on? Are you, or were you an actor at anytime? How long have you been doing this? You seem to be a real punk, who loves attention and needs a swift kick in the [donkey]. YOUR website is boring, kind of like your reviews. Your writing has no creativity and needs a lot of work. And by the way, who in the hell would buy your crap anyway? My advice, go back to starbucks, if you really apply yourself, you just might make assistant manager in about 7-years! You’re Pathetic
Actually, now that I look at it, the capitalization of “You’re Pathetic” and the fact that it occurs at the end of the e-mail makes me think maybe that’s his name. Hmm.
My response to You’re Pathetic was as follows:
Thank you for your mature, well-reasoned e-mail.
To answer your questions, I am not an actor, and I have been reviewing movies since 1999.
Was there a particular review that angered you? Or just life in general?
He did not reply. Once again I fail to understand how someone can become so enraged by a mere movie review. Oh well. Back to Starbucks with me!
Martin Scorsese makes films often enough that a new one isn’t an “event,” exactly, but it does pique a film lover’s interest, especially in an otherwise dry season. “The Departed” is a great movie, nearly as good (but not quite) as Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” and “Taxi Driver.”
Even better: It’s set in Boston, with lots of thick, juicy Boston accents. The title itself is actually pronounced “The De-pah-ted.” Say it! It’s fun!
Among the wide releases, that’s the only good news I have for you, unless a confirmation of your suspicions is considered good news. If it is, then you’ll be pleased to know that “Employee of the Month” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” are, in fact, as bad as you thought they would be.
The latter was not screened until last night, to avoid opening-day reviews while also avoiding the stigma of not having a screening at all. This is standard operating procedure these days for horror films. In fact, plenty of horror films DON’T have screenings, or when they do, they don’t tell critics about them. But we were actually invited to last night’s last-minute screening, so kudos to New Line for that.
As for “Employee of the Month,” well, interesting story. I e-mailed the publicist last week to see when screenings would be, and she said there weren’t going to be any. It turns out this is what we in the business call a “lie,” because in fact there were two screenings, one last Thursday and one this past Wednesday. I knew about the Wednesday one because there was an ad in one of the local weekly papers telling people where they could pick up their free passes to it.
Note to publicists: If you tell us there isn’t a screening, we’ll be more likely to believe you if you don’t also take out an ad in the paper saying there is.
Anyway, now that I’ve seen the film, I can understand why they tried to hide its existence from critics, the same way poor Leatherface’s mama tossed him in a trash bin after birthing him on the floor of a slaughterhouse (sorry for the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” spoilers there).
Among smaller releases, there is a documentary you should be aware of called “Jesus Camp,” about evangelical Christians and their children. One of my fellow critics was raised in such a family — Pentecostal, “holy roller,” whatever your preferred terminology is — and he said watching the film definitely hit home. (He has since left the faith.) He speculated beforehand that I, having been raised Mormon, might see some of my own childhood in the movie. I said, “From what I know of the movie, I think it’s the way people think Mormons are, but not how they actually are.”
That turned out to be fairly accurate. I saw a few parallels in the way the evangelicals teach their children and the way Mormons do, but not many. The film depicts the kids, all under age 12, as being awfully intense about their faith, weeping and hollering and speaking in tongues at prayer meetings the way their parents do. In interviews, they talk as seriously as any grown-up would. I kept thinking: Where is the FUN in this childhood?
For as weird as people think Mormons are, the children’s programs in the church are pretty normal. You sing songs teaching very basic ideas (God loves you, be more like Jesus, be nice to others, etc.), you sing other songs just for fun, and you learn child-sized bits of doctrine (see previous: God, Jesus, nice, etc.).
The youth minister in the movie preaches against the evils of most popular culture, saying “had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been PUT TO DEATH!” The only real parallel to my childhood that I could think of was a woman telling us that arcade games (this was the era of Pac-Man) were of the devil — but this was a woman everyone, our parents included, thought was a fanatical crazy person.
Then there’s a scene where a bunch of the boys, about 10 years old, are in their cabin at Bible camp, laughing and telling ghost stories and just being boys. One of the adult counselors comes in and says he doesn’t think ghost stories “honor God” and maybe they shouldn’t tell them. I thought of the camp-outs I went on as a kid. Did anyone ever tell us not to tell ghost stories? Or did they JUST LEAVE US ALONE AND LET US BE KIDS, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD?! I believe it was the latter.
There’s an article in today’s New York Times (free registration might be required) about how evangelical Christians fear they’re losing their teenagers. What’s interesting is that as my aforementioned critic friend and I left the screening of “Jesus Camp,” he said, “You know, those kids are gonna grow up, and they’re going to be mad, and they’re going to leave the church.” I could see what he meant, and the Times story seems to confirm it. Creating such an intense, un-fun atmosphere for kids when they’re supposed to be enjoying their childhood could make them turn bitter later on. I understand wanting to teach them good Christian principles, but maybe there is such a thing as over-doing it.
Anyway, anyone with a Christian background will probably find the film interesting and provocative. Keep an eye out for when it opens in your area.
As always, you’ll find these reviews and much, much more fabulous information in this week’s “In the Dark,” a weekly e-zine chock-full of such things. Do sign up, won’t you?
A flag-waving, war-loving Texas family full of religious zealots who praise God while overseeing the slaughter of innocents. A documentary about the Bushes? No, silly! It’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,” a graphically unlikable prequel to 2003’s remake of the 1974 horror classic.
Having seen either the original or the remake, you probably wondered where Leatherface came from, what drove him to chase people through forests while wielding a chainsaw, why his face is all effed up like that. And guess what: The prequel doesn’t tell you much. Turns out he was born deformed and vaguely retarded, was raised by a normal-seeming family, and then started killing people when the slaughterhouse he worked in got closed down by the health department. End of backstory.
But whoops, we learn all that in the first 10 minutes. To pass the remaining 80, the film tells us about Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey) instead, the loathsome and foul-mouthed sadist who aided and abetted ol’ Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) in the remake. Turns out he’s not really the sheriff; he just murdered the guy who was and took his uniform. Then he helped Leatherface kill people and occasionally eat them. Why? JUST BECAUSE.
Yes, turns out Sheriff Hoyt is pure evil, but the boring kind. He has no dimension, no motivation. The best villains in moviedom, even the cruelest ones, have SOME reason to do what they do. Hoyt? Not so much. He was a P.O.W. during the Korean War. That’s as much explanation as we get.
Hoyt and Leatherface (and their family of down-home crackers and torturers, about whom the less said, the better) shouldn’t be the film’s main characters, but here they are, front and center. Ostensibly, though, our heroes are four pretty young people (one of them is Jordana Brewster; you haven’t heard of the others), two brothers and their girlfriends, driving through Texas as the boys prepare to head off to Vietnam. A car accident puts them into Hoyt’s clutches — again, no explanation whatsoever as to what he has against them — and the rest is torture, mayhem, screaming, almost escaping, escaping, coming back, being tortured, some more screaming, a little revenge, and finally some death.
Since we know all the bad guys will still be alive at the end (it’s a prequel, remember?), there’s not much suspense over the outcome. I get tired of saying this about splattery horror films, but I get even more tired of it being true: The film has no wit, imagination, creativity or ingenuity. It’s wearisome and dull, offering plenty of gore but no brains to back it up.
Two dozen films under his belt, and Martin Scorsese can still crank out a gem worthy of comparison with “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas” and “Raging Bull.” “The Departed” doesn’t have quite the same air of brilliance about it as those classics did, but it sure comes close.
It’s a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong action flick called “Infernal Affairs,” which was an hour shorter and several fathoms shallower. It was a devilishly clever story about a police department and an organized-crime ring battling each other, both unaware that they had rats in their midst — i.e., an undercover cop had infiltrated the gangsters, and a gangster had managed to become a cop. It’s a great little movie with a great premise.
Scorsese, with screenwriter William Monahan (“Kingdom of Heaven”), has taken that caper’s basic framework and injected some humanity into it. Where the original was concerned primarily with the mechanics of the plot, “The Departed,” set now on the mean streets of Boston, gives real weight to the characters. It examines the two double agents’ conflicted emotions. It allows the gravity of the situation to sink in, refusing to let it be just a cool crime flick.
Yet it’s also a pretty cool crime flick. Just think of the intricate possibilities in such a twisted set-up: Billy Costigan (new Scorsese favorite Leonardo DiCaprio) is a screw-up from the wrong side of the tracks who, against all odds, becomes a state police officer. Given Costigan’s unsavory background, Chief Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his abusive right-hand man Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) figure he’d make a believable undercover agent, so they send him into the bowels of a mafia operation run by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, Costello long ago took a fatherless boy under his wing and taught him the family business of extortion and violence. The boy is Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), and he’s just graduated from the academy to become a state police officer, upholding the law while continuing to keep Costello informed of any police activity that relates to him.
Consider what will happen when the police department suspects they’ve got a rat in their midst and Sullivan — who IS the rat — is assigned to figure out who it is. He can’t confess, obviously, but he can’t report back and say he came up empty, either. He has to finger someone.
Imagine the parallel scenario in Costello’s camp. He thinks one of his guys is disloyal to him. But how does a gangster run background checks on his thugs? How do you ferret out a snitch when your whole operation is based on deceit and corruption?
The plot is a work of beauty in its own right, for which most of the credit goes to the Hong Kong filmmakers who originated it. Scorsese brings out subtle themes, though, effortlessly creating this hostile world of casual racism and casual violence and making it seem both extraordinary and believable.
The film is all about communication, or the lack of it. One side of the law-enforcement team doesn’t know what the other side is doing, Sullivan doesn’t know one of his fellow cops has been sent into Costello’s den, the Feds who know who the undercover officers are won’t tell anyone else. Both Sullivan and Costigan must send furtive text messages to their secret bosses to keep them apprised, all the while trying not to be discovered by the people around them.
And like a lot of Scorsese’s movies, “The Departed” is ultimately about masculinity, too. Crime and crime-abatement are both boys’ clubs, and there’s barely a female character to be found in the film. The only significant one, a police shrink played by Vera Farmiga, gives Costigan and Sullivan an outlet to do something they can’t do with other men: communicate. Even within the police department there are figurative pissing matches and actual fist-fights between guys who are supposed to be on the same team yet who let pride and machismo determine their behavior.
The acting is sharp all around. Your skepticism of “Titanic” pretty boy Leonardo DiCaprio will hopefully have worn off by now so you can appreciate Costigan’s increasing horror at the things he sees while in Costello’s employ, his commitment to police work wavering as he fears he may never get out of this undercover operation. Note also how Matt Damon’s unflinching two-facedness starts to crack as things get hairy in the film’s last act. Admire Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg as two good cops, and Alec Baldwin as a tart-tongued fast-talking federal agent, able to be funny and menacing simultaneously.
And then dish yourself up a huge helping of Jack Nicholson as Costello. Viewed at first only in shadows, often shot from low angles to emphasize his power, sporting a goatee that makes his waggling eyebrows seem all the more satanic, Costello is the devil himself. He lives a life of pure debauchery (money, drugs, women, murder), enjoying evil for all it’s worth. Nicholson plays the role to the hilt, reveling in the character’s monstrosity without ever going over the top. Like Scorsese, Nicholson is a senior citizen who proves occasionally that he’s still got the touch.
“The Departed” is the rare Hollywood feature that appears to have been made by someone who actually understands the language of film, who can do things with light and shadows, with camera positioning, with sound and music, to create feelings. That’s to say nothing of Scorsese’s knack for drawing pitch-perfect performances from his actors, as already noted. This is an excellent film, a throwback to the grittier, more substantial crime dramas of the ’70s, and a reminder that movies can have weight to them and still be enjoyable as entertainment.
“Employee of the Month” takes place in a parallel universe. It’s a universe where customers have favorite cashiers at their neighborhood Costco and will literally cheer as they ring up their purchases in a flamboyant fashion. A universe where an employee’s personnel file lists the people she has slept with. A universe where Andy Dick is funny.
I have a hard time accepting any of these ideas, though I have to say that while “Employee of the Month” is not funny or good, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of offensiveness, either. It’s benign and flaccid, like a neutered dog’s penis.
Speaking of which, I would be surprised if the three guys who wrote the film — it took three guys to write this film — turned out not to be 15-year-old boys. Testicles, farts, gay sex and hits in the crotch comprise a noticeably high percentage of the film’s jokes. Even with Jessica Simpson as the female lead, they can only muster one half-hearted breast reference. But MALE genitalia! The film can’t stop talking about it!
Dane Cook, a once-hilarious stand-up comedian who has recently become too popular and complacent and is about to suffer a major backlash, stars as Zack, a lowly box-boy at SuperClub (which is definitely NOT Costco, so don’t even suggest it). Zack skates through his job lazily, hanging out with a trio of fellow slackers (including Andy Dick, enemy of all comedy) instead of working. Why exert yourself if you can avoid it, right?
Zack’s nemesis and polar opposite is Vince (Dax Shepard), the lead cashier and employee of the month 17 months running. (I can accept that Vince is a go-getter. But does NO ONE else at this store do ANY work to provide him with competition?) He wins it one more time and he gets a car as a bonus prize, an act of corporate magnanimity that takes us even further into bizarro world. Vince loathes Zack for his poor work ethic, and Zack hates Vince for being such a goody two-shoes.
Along comes Amy (Jessica Simpson), a non-descript but beautiful transfer from another store who is rumored to have a “thing” for employees of the month. She starts leaning toward Vince, of course, and that drives Zack to get his own act together and compete with Vince for this month’s title. If he wins, not only will he prevent Vince from getting that car, but he’ll win Amy’s heart, too.
I know what you’re thinking: This is the stupidest idea for a movie you’ve ever heard. I hear what you’re saying, and I do not disagree. The directorial debut from Greg Coolidge, writer of “Sorority Boys,” it’s marked by general carelessness and ineptitude, with an extraordinary amount of padding to fill out the run time. Why do we waste 10 minutes on a company softball game in the third act? And why even bother with the motif of Zack forgetting his slacker friends on the way to being an up-and-comer?
Vince is patterned after Michael Scott from “The Office”: cocky, insecure, boastful and delusional. He even has a Dwight-like sidekick, Jorge (Efren Ramirez), whose affection for him runs the risk of being funny before retreating comfortably back into the shadows of stupidity.
Oh, something else the movie thinks is funny: little children and old people swearing. I’m not saying it’s NOT funny; I’m just saying it’s not AUTOMATICALLY funny, every time, no matter what.
If you’ve already seen “Jackass: Number Two” twice and re-watched your Adam Sandler DVD collection recently, then “Employee of the Month” may be just what you need to tide you over until your next batch of weed comes through. Just keep staring at Jessica Simpson’s breasts, dude, and try not to dwell on the inordinate number of gay jokes you’re being pummeled with. TRY NOT TO DWELL.
As “Little Children” begins, the tranquility of the upper-class suburban town of Wyndam, Mass., has been disturbed. A skinny, middle-aged pedophile has moved into the neighborhood, fresh out of a two-year prison stint for exposing himself to little boys. Already, the town’s parents are posting fliers on telephone poles, warning their neighbors about the man’s presence.
But this isn’t a movie about sexual predators. The little children of the title are involved only tangentially, mostly as a way of connecting the adults to each other. The irony, missed by all of Wyndam’s anxious, indignant citizens, is that the ex-con doesn’t pose nearly as great a threat to their peace of mind as their other neighbors do.
This is the second feature from “In the Bedroom” director Todd Fields, and it’s a markedly more satiric, more visually interesting affair than the somber (but spectacularly well-acted) downer that “In the Bedroom” was. The way Fields tells this story, which he adapted with Tom Perrotta from Perrotta’s book, is unflaggingly engaging, like a novel that gets more audacious with each chapter.
The most noticeably unusual feature is the film’s use of a narrator who is not also a character in the story. With the authoritative, detached, and slightly wry voice of Will Lyman (who voices PBS’s “Frontline” series), the narrator is omniscient, and the film surprises us by constantly expanding the story to include new characters, always introduced and explained in Lyman’s comforting tones.
We first meet a bevy of housewives who gather at the park every morning with their children. Three of them are more or less interchangeable; the fourth, Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), is different from them, and all four know it. Sarah, the wife of a workaholic husband and mother of an adorable little girl, isn’t as pristinely efficient as her robotic counterparts. Sometimes she forgets to bring a snack for young Lucy. She feels unfulfilled, something her fellow moms can’t relate to, or at least not that they could admit.
The other three giggle and swoon over Brad (Patrick Wilson), a handsome househusband they’ve dubbed “Prom King” who occasionally visits the same park with his little boy. They’ve never spoken to him, a fact that encourages Sarah to finally break the ice and prove she’s different from these silly-minded housewives. Brad and Sarah start a friendship together, ostensibly so their kids can play, but really because they enjoy one another’s daytime company.
Brad’s wife, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), is supportive but emotionally cold. She sends him out to the library every night so he can study for the bar exam (he’s already failed it twice). Every night on his way to the library he passes a skate park where teenage boys spend hours perfecting their skateboard tricks, and he winds up stopping to watch them instead of studying. There is nothing untoward or sexual in his admiration of them; it’s his own youth he’s recalling. These guys are the age he was when he was a football hero, young and virile and full of potential. He was so happy then. What happened?
Brad and Sarah’s friendship goes further than it ought to, and one of the film’s minor disappointments is how predictable that is, and that is happens for the usual reasons: their spouses are distant, they don’t understand them, etc., etc. (The other minor disappointment is the use of the old trope where characters read a novel — in this case “Madame Bovary” — that parallels their lives. Don’t people in movies ever read books that have nothing to do with anything?)
While Sarah and Brad are the main focus, we also learn the stories, sad, funny, or both, of their friends and neighbors. That includes some scenes with the pedophile, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), whose aged mother (Phyllis Somerville) thinks he’s a good boy who just needs a girlfriend to help settle him down. They are constantly harassed by Larry (Noah Emmerich), an acquaintance of Brad’s who has made it his duty to make life a living hell for Ronnie and his mom.
Fields has grown as a director since his auspicious debut film. “Little Children” is superbly handled all the way through, but one scene sticks out in particular. In the midst of a heat wave, parents have their children at a public pool when Ronnie the sicko suddenly shows up to take a dip. Fields gives the scene the full “Jaws” treatment (without the music), using little dialogue and only a perverse, subtle sense of humor to make the sequence look like a shark attack.
The point, ultimately, seems to be that dangers, both physical and emotional, lurk everywhere. Presenting sunny suburbia as having a dark side is not a new tactic, of course, but Fields and company present this grim, smirking fable with refreshing ingenuity. It combines sardonic humor with a piercing glance at the soul-crushing blandness of daily life.
The funniest movie I’ve seen all year is “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” If something funnier happens between now and Dec. 31, I will be greatly surprised. It’s the sort of film for which the word “riotous” was invented. It’s crazy, anarchic, clever, brilliantly composed satire/sketch/scatalogical humor. It has at least one scene that people will be talking about for years, the way they talk about “the hair gel scene” in “There’s Something About Mary” or “the campfire farting scene” in “Blazing Saddles.” For “Borat,” they’ll be talking about “the naked hotel room fight scene.”
Borat is a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British comic whose “Da Ali G Show” has aired on HBO and who was recently seen as Will Ferrell’s French opponent in “Talladega Nights.” I’ve always thought his Ali G persona gets old fast, while Borat is the standout character, so I was delighted to learn Baron Cohen had made a film based on him. (There was an Ali G film a few years ago, but it was never released stateside.)
The deal with Borat is he’s a Kazakhstan TV news reporter who visits America to learn about our culture. His English is hilariously fractured, and he’s portrayed as a misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic homophobe, the joke being that that’s just how people ARE in Kazakhstan. (Oh, they hate/fear Gypsies and Uzbekistanis, too.) Borat speaks of his native country in terms that paint it as a hopelessly backward, cruel, poverty-stricken wasteland. Among Kazakhstan’s favorite hobbies: “disco dancing, archery, rape, and table tennis.”
And yet Borat himself is endearing. He’s an enthusiastic, friendly guy. He comes by his prejudices innocently, with no hate or ill will behind them.
I saw the Borat film a couple weeks ago at a MySpace screening. They had them in 20 cities around the country on the same night, with invitations issued only through MySpace. You had to make the Borat movie page one of your “friends,” and then you were given instructions on how to attend. That’s why I felt comfortable posting the review so long before the film actually opens, which is usually a no-no: I found out about the screening, and got into the screening, not as a member of the press but as a MySpace user.
Being a MySpace-only event, everyone in the crowd was between the ages of 17 and about 30. At 32, I was literally one of the oldest people there. I’m certain there was no one over 40. The few people of that age group who do use MySpace probably were not interested in this film, I’m guessing. That, or they didn’t want to “out” themselves as creepy over-40 MySpace users. (You have my word that I will delete my account the day I turn 35.)
Subsequently, I got an invitation to the official press screening of the movie, and it was amusing, so I want to share it with you. Invitations to press screenings usually come by way of a letter that reads like this:
Monkeyshines Pictures cordially invites you to a screening of its forthcoming release:
“NINETY MINUTES OF COMPLETE CRAP”
(date)
(time)
(location)
(paragraph describing the film)
You must arrive at the theater at least 35 minutes prior to showtime to ensure seating. Note: This letter is non-transferrable.
There is very little variation in this format. However, the announcement I got for “Borat” was different. It’s made to look like it was printed with an ancient dot-matrix printer, and it reads as follows:
Kazakhstan Ministry of Information
Present You and Guest Invite to special screening of:
BORAT
Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Please you will come to this.
Thursday, 5 October
(time)
(location)
You must arrive at movie place thirty-five minutes early for seat. Invite present to you — no trade to others.
This is an example of how you can take something mundane and ordinary and do something fun with it every now and then. All the pertinent information is still conveyed. Plus, it’s actually FUNNY, and not just some corporate desk jockey’s idea of “funny.” We all have a chuckle, and no one gets hurt. Well, except the nation of Kazakhstan, whose leaders are apparently upset with Borat’s portrayal of their country. But whatever.
A few months back I asked whether “Snide Remarks” readers enjoy the “Ask Eric Stuff” columns that appear every now and then. The question was prompted by a reader who said she didn’t like them, and being a man of the people, I wanted to see what the consensus was.
Of the people who e-mailed me, only two said they thought I should discontinue the feature. The rest said they liked it, or at least tolerated it and could see its value in the world. So the feature continues! Which is good, because I was totally going to keep doing it anyway.
I mention it now because I need you creative readers to submit some questions for use as fodder in future columns. Go to this page for the submission form. That page also has links to past “Ask Eric Stuff” columns, for your perusing pleasure.
Please do NOT submit questions by posting them as comments on this blog. Also, note that “funny” questions don’t work, comedy-wise. They need to be straightforward, normal questions — such as someone might actually ask an advice columnist — in order to work as set-ups for my awesomely hilarious punchlines.
I thank you in advance.
“Six Degrees” (Thursdays, ABC): There are these six strangers, see, and they all live in New York, and they don’t know each other at first but their lives sort of intersect. And then some of them meet each other. And, um, stuff happens. This is essentially a Generic TV Drama with no premise. It’s not about a particular family or business or place. It’s about six people who sort of know each other, and the things that happen in their lives. I like Hope Davis and Campbell Scott and would watch them in almost anything. But this show is boring. TiVo verdict: zzzzzzzknkk- Wha? Huh? What happened?
“Runaway” (Mondays, The CW): One of the new CW network’s few brand-new series is this drama in which a man is wrongfully accused of murder and goes on the lam — taking his wife and three children with him. They arrive in a small Iowa town in the pilot episode, with new names for everyone and fake backstories to throw off curious locals, while the FBI scours the country looking for them. The idea of a family version of “The Fugitive” is interesting, and I like the characters well enough. (Donnie Wahlberg and Leslie Hope — Jack Bauer’s wife on “24” — are the parents.) But I don’t really BUY it. Jumping bail and fleeing the jurisdiction are not things innocent people do, and bringing the wife and kids along seems even more dubious. How long can this go on? They’re apparently going to be in this Iowa town at least for a little while. So what will happen? Every week someone will ALMOST find out who they are, and then not? TiVo verdict: It’s a nice show. I won’t personally be committing myself to it, but you might give it a whirl if you have room in your schedule.
“The Game” (Sundays, The CW): Another new show on The CW. It’s a sitcom about the wives and girlfriends of the players for a fictional NFL team. I watched for 10 minutes before realizing that I’d known within five minutes that it wasn’t any good. TiVo verdict: If you love “Girlfriends” and other crappy “urban” sitcoms left over from UPN, then this is the show for you.