Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Curmudgeons are so rarely appreciated that it is with a bit of relief that we might regard the latest incarnation of the ever-so-curmudgeonly Mr. Darcy in the umpteenth adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. A sarcastic pill with a stick up his butt, Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) has plenty of pride, although it is perhaps just a cover for his cripplingly antisocial shyness. He more than meets his match in Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley), which is, of course, the whole point of Pride & Prejudice -- meeting one's match. Lizzy's as quick with a sharp quip as Darcy, and almost as disinclined to play the match game, although, as a young woman in 18th century England, unable to inherit a penny from her father's estate, she has little choice.

The Bennet family is in a constant tizzy. With five marriageable daughters and no sons, the family's home will pass into the hands of an unpleasant male cousin, Reverend Collins (Tom Hollander), a boring, diminutive parson, and a man of undeserved self-importance, who comes to call at the Bennet home, trolling for a wife. He sets his sights on Lizzy, to the delight of Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn), a woman so desperate to marry off her girls she seems to think of little else. The first line of Austen's book is: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." That notion, that marriage is a business, a pecuniary matter of mergers and acquisitions, is ever on the mind of Mrs. Bennet. That she loves her daughters there can be little doubt, but it is her business to see them all form advantageous alliances, i.e., to marry money. Mr. Bennet (an amused and amusing Donald Sutherland) is a loving and patient husband and father, but he doesn't share his wife's mercenary enthusiasm for business. 

Neither does Lizzy, who finds herself unaccountably attracted to the surly Darcy, not knowing that he is similarly smitten with her. Neither cares about money (he doesn't have to, having plenty of it), or the business of marriage, and neither seems to care for the other, which is, of course, the story's greatest source of tension and delight. When two smart, gorgeous people, born to be together, refuse to fall in love, it's almost unbearable, like watching a bomb being defused -- there will either be an explosion or there won't, a kiss or none at all, but oh, the snipping of all those crossed wires!

The plot, of course, creates plenty of crossed wires, and gives Lizzy ample reason to dislike Darcy: he's filthy rich, there are abundant rumors of caddish behavior, and he interferes in the romance between Lizzy's sister Jane (Rosamund Pike) and eligible, wealthy and willing bachelor Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods). But if circumstance keeps dousing the flames of love, it keeps fanning them at the same time, putting Darcy and Lizzy in frequent, and frequently uncomfortable proximity.

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach work a remarkable amount of Austen's book into the movie, and keep the prejudicial misunderstandings coming quickly enough to hold would-be romance convincingly at bay. The dialogue, much of it taken straight from Austen, is crisp, snappy, and deliciously witty. Knightley and Macfadyen play Lizzy and Darcy like a Tracy-Hepburn pair -- the verbal sparring is smart, fast, and sassy, with a delectable undercurrent of erotic tension. They're equals, in fact and in each other's eyes, even if their social positions could hardly be more unequal. Knightley's performance is fierce, vivid and smart. Macfadyen must face comparison to what is widely viewed as the gold standard of modern Darcys -- Colin Firth's portrayal in the BBC miniseries. He's more than up to the challenge, with a splendid Darcy who is openly churlish, but secretly a dewy-eyed romantic. 

The movie makes the most of the nuanced social criticism and proto-feminism in Austen's work, turning Lizzy's stubborn quest for love and romance, pursued in spite of her sex's utter financial dependence on men, into an almost quixotically heroic undertaking. In her stalwart refusal to settle for a merely convenient union, she strikes a blow for love and self-respect. Lizzy's sisters are another matter. The demure Jane aside, they are a giggling, silly pack, constantly on the prowl for handsome men in uniform. Impish troublemaker Lydia is the sister most likely to bring scandal upon the family, and Jena Malone plays her as a giddy, callow teen, largely oblivious to the social forces at work in her world.

Pride & Prejudice is filled with the usual buzzing dances, elegant drawing rooms, and period costumes, but the settings are as lively and vivid as the sparkling cast. The Bennet home is as shabby as it is warm, and any girl who dares to venture outside (as Lizzy is wont to do) will generally come back with a fair amount of mud on the hem of her dress. The movie breathes life into the period, which is a great relief after so many stuffy, airless, high-minded literary adaptations. Pride & Prejudice is as action-packed as any romantic comedy, and every scene is filled to the brim with meaningful conversation, manners, pomp and circumstance. The director, and cinematographer Roman Osin keep the camera moving, swirling around the characters, creating the sense that country life in the social season is as lively as any city club scene. Everyone is on the prowl, whether they mean to be or not. Georgian England is depicted as a veritable meet market where hearts and minds are equally engaged, although whether the heart should follow the mind, or the mind should follow the heart is really the heart of the matter. Pride & Prejudice, a smart movie that makes the heart leap and skip, is a vote for the latter.

5Dec2005

The Country Bears (2002)

The Country Bear Jamboree has been a Disney theme park attraction for decades. Well, perhaps "attraction" is too strong a word for those corn pone robotic bears, but they're every bit as amusing as It's A Small World, and somewhat less fun than that spinning tea cup ride. But what Hollywood genius saw a cinematic void, a void that could only be filled by a bunch of singing, guitar-picking, thumbless animatronic bears in overalls?

Whoever he is, that genius is responsible for The Country Bears. The movie to theme park metamorphosis is commonplace, but this is the first time I can recall the process working in reverse, and try as I might, I just can't see the point. Killer roller coaster movies, sure, but the Country Bear Jamboree? That's a head-scratcher. The Country Bears posits a universe in which humans and animatronic bears coexist peacefully, and it's kind of freaky and hard to accept outside the confines of Disneyland. (Don't get me wrong, I coexist pretty peacefully with the bears in my backyard, but I don't dress them up in Sears Roebuck clothes and sit them down at the dinner table.) Anyway, the movie is not weird enough to be really interesting. It starts off promisingly as a goofy mockumentary riff on The Last Waltz and This is Spinal Tap, only with music by John Hiatt performed by stage-diving animatronic bears and filtered through a Disney sensibility. But that only lasts about five minutes, and then the movie gets goofy in a not so good way.

Beary Barrington (voiced by A.I. robo-boy Haley Joel Osment) is a bear cub, adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Barrington (Stephen Tobolowsky and Meagan Fay), his human parents. He's got a bratty human brother Dex (Eli Marienthal) who, in a fit of sibling rivalry, tells Beary he doesn't belong in the family. Beary, an obsessive fan of the defunct Country Bears, a once legendary country-rock outfit, runs away from home and heads straight for Country Bear Hall, which appears to be fairly close by, as pilgrimage sites go. With the exception of Dex, no one seems to take any notice of the fact that Beary is a bear in kid's clothing, or that he rides a bus, or that his head is three sizes too big and he looks like an escapee from a theme park attraction.

Beary finds that his beloved Country Bears have fallen on hard times, and Country Bear Hall is on the verge of bankruptcy. A mean old banker, Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken), is threatening to demolish the place. Beary persuades Country Bear leader Henry (or maybe it was one of the other bears -- I'll be honest, I couldn't really tell them apart) to reunite the band to play a benefit to save Country Bear Hall. Thus begins a bear odyssey, a musical road trip, a boy bear's journey of self-discovery -- in a bus driven by a man named Roadie (M.C. Gainey) and his faithful chicken. Roadie is the only human member of the Country Bears, and it isn't clear from the movie that bears can do anything other than perform menial tasks and play music, which may or may not be the same thing in their case. Meanwhile, the world's most incompetent police officers, Hamm (Daryl "Chill" Mitchell) and Cheets (Diedrich Bader), thinking Beary has been kidnapped, are in hot pursuit of comic relief, which, sadly, eludes them entirely.

In addition to the fake-furry ursines, The Country Bears features such notable Homo sapiens as Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley (appearing as themselves, and supplying the singing voices for duetting bears Trixie and Tennessee), Brian Setzer, Xzibit, Wyclef Jean, Elton John, Willie Nelson, Queen Latifah and Don Was. They all gamely play along with the joke, which essentially is that these completely unrealistic looking, huge-headed bears were once a highly influential group of popular musicians.

The Country Bears is pretty low octane amusement, although there are a few half-decent musical numbers (notably, Christopher Walken playing the 1812 Overture with his armpits). All in all, this is a movie that is not good. Shoehorned into the promising and could-have-been-funnier mockumentary is the standard Disney adoptee identity crisis, and a feel OK message about the meaning of family (a lesson all them good ol' bears has got to learn). The bears are kind of creepy in their robotic affectlessness, which renders the supposedly heartwarming tale rather less so. The Country Bears bravely swims upstream as it eschews modern, hip, realistic computer animation for a much cruder, ickier, hairier, low-tech kind (courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop), which is to say it stays bafflingly true to its theme park forebears.

29Jul2002

The Newton Boys (1998)

It's traditional in movies to save the biggest bang for the climax, and well it should be. Anti-climactic climaxes just aren't very satisfying, and spilling the beans too early doesn't leave an audience much to anticipate. Director Richard Linklater takes that tradition one step further in *The Newton Boys*, however. He saves the best part of the movie for the closing credits. There, in footage from a documentary film and a 1980 Johnny Carson show, two real-life Newton boys, octogenarians Joe and Willis, show their legendary right stuff, the outlaw spirit that made them the most successful bank robbers in US history.

It's just as well that Linklater, who penned the script with Claude Stanush and Clark Walker, saved the best for last, because those old fellas dull what little shine there is to their bland fictional counterparts in *The Newton Boys*.

What *The Newton Boys* has in spades is a good-looking cast, twinkling mightily for lack of anything better to do. Linklater, whose indie film credits include the charming *Before Sunrise* and the stultifyingly boring *SubUrbia*, specializes in subcultural immersion talkies, films with characters who hang around doing nothing much in particular other than gab all night long. With *The Newton Boys*, he's out of his element, venturing into the action-filled crime spree genre without contributing much in the way of action. There isn't even that much talk in *The Newton Boys*, an episodic tale that features too much whooping and boys-will-be-boys male bonding that always ends up with the fellas piling on top of each other.

The story goes like this: in the 1920s, the Newton brothers, Willis (Matthew McConaughey), Jess (Ethan Hawke), Joe (Skeet Ulrich) and Dock (Vincent D'Onofrio) team up with explosives expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam) to rob a string of 80 banks from Texas to Toronto. They're all charming and cocky, and they never get caught, stealing cash and hearts everywhere they go. Latter day Robin Hoods, they steal from the banks (and bank insurers) and give to themselves. "It's just one thief a-stealin' from another," says the real-life Willis. the Newtons' final, fateful heist is the biggest train robbery in US history, which they almost pull off.

Willis' love interest is Louise Brown (Julianna Margulies). Glasscock's wife Avia (Chloe Webb) shows up from time to time as well, mostly to bat her eyes suggestively at the marital thrills of having nitroglycerine around.

Aside from a few inspired visual moments, and the aforementioned pulchritudinous cast, there just isn't a whole lot to *The Newton Boys*. They rob banks. They get drunk and whoop and holler and pick up girls. They drive a lot and wear big hats because they're from Texas, dagnabbit. the boys do have a few misadventures, thanks to Willis' dangerous tendency to be simultaneously spontaneous and greedy. McConaughey really gleams, flashing pearly white teeth, his eyes bright with passion and mischief. Likewise the rest of the cast, twinkly and charismatic as all get out, but it's all for naught because they might as well be posing for a portrait for all they have to do. Actually, the movie does feature several old-timey shots of the boys posing for portraits, scenes serving as little more than filler and unimaginative movie shorthand for a time period apparently corresponding to the early days of photography. It's unnecessary and redundant since the titles constantly remind, sometimes to the day, exactly when each incident transpires.

The characters are one-note, constant and unchanging from beginning to end, which makes for very little conflict, except the occasional tiff over Willis' reckless ways. They're all wholesome and fresh-faced, without a hint of darkness or rancor -- that's certainly a switch from typical movie outlaws, but it leaves the Newton gang looking blander than white bread. Everybody acts like their lives are fun and adventure-filled, but there is no evidence to support that in the movie, other than a twangy fiddle and banjo music score cued to enhance every heist and getaway. When the boys finally run afoul of the law, at last injecting some potential drama and conflict into the plot, it's every bit dull as the rest of the movie.


The old Newton boys were pretty darn witty and interesting in the clips at the end of the movie, and when a couple of 80 year old geezers are more lively than your movie, it's time to make a different movie. *The Newton Boys* is a case where art imitating life would have improved the art.


30Mar1998

Primary Colors (1998)

After the media feeding frenzy over that certain White House intern, there's something oddly refreshing about *Primary Colors*, which, (wink wink) isn't *really* about our President. Based on the roman a clef by Joe Klein (aka Anonymous), which, in more innocent times (way back in 1996) was considered quite scandalous (before we learned *way* more than we ever wanted to know about the commander-in-chief's alleged poling of the populace) *Primary Colors* follows southern governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta) as he mounts a campaign for the presidential nomination amid rumors of sexual dalliances and draft dodging.

What's refreshing about director Mike Nichols' movie is the sense of unguardedness about the characters, something only achievable because *Primary Colors* is, for all its similarities to reality, a fiction. D.A. Pennebaker's brilliant documentary *The War Room* (1993) was more interesting, more insightful, a true behind the scenes, fly-on-the-wall perspective on political campaigning, but its real life stars could never be as guileless as their fictional counterparts -- fresh and full of ideals as they were, the folks running Clinton's first campaign were still pretty darn smart and wily. You never saw the future first lady throw keys at her husband's head, or swear like a sailor at the very sight of the man who couldn't help but wallow knee deep in the sins of the flesh (too many donuts, too many women).

Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson) embodies what *Primary Colors* is about, and it isn't scandal, or political spinning or unbridled ambition, but about compromise, and settling, about the ethical debate between moral absolutism and a utilitarian consequentialism. As unflattering as *Primary Colors* might be to the Clintons, it gives them (or their fictional counterparts, at least) some credit for trying. It's hard to imagine their Republican opponents engaging in ethical debates at all -- there's still a tiny touch of wide-eyed idealism about the movie and the characters, a recognition that moral choices are only hard for those who have morals to begin with.


Representing the lost cause of moral absolutism is fresh young Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), preppy grandson of a famous civil rights leader. He's shanghaied into the campaign, but he's a true believer, and, for a while at least, believes that Stanton is the real thing, a man of the people, for the people. Henry is mighty bland compared to the colorful characters in Stanton's inner circle: good ol' boy political strategist Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton) and Libby Holden (Kathy Bates), the "Dustbuster," a raging idealist who cleans up the dirt on her friend the candidate, but tries to keep her own hands clean while she does it.

Travolta has the Clinton thing down -- the voice, that throaty, choking-back-emotion tenor with a tremor, the slippery charm and charisma, the sincerity and cynicism, the gleam of purpose in those dewy eyes, the insatiable appetite for attention. It's a fine performance, irritating and ingratiating, promising and disappointing -- so like the real thing. Even Stanton's wife doesn't know when to believe him anymore, and, like everyone else, she's forced to cast her vote based on the man she hopes her husband can be, and throw up her hands when he falls far short of expectations.

Thompson's Susan is dynamic, ferocious, foul-mouthed, ambitious and frustrated at having hitched her wagon to such an inconstant star. Whether it's the American accent or the characterization, Susan speaks through clenched teeth, as if those teeth were the last barricade to be breached by the cynicism and political practicality that she's forced to spit out because she can't quite swallow it herself. Elaine May's witty script saves some of the best zingers for the embattled, cuckolded Susan -- when she lashes out, it's satisfying, and evident just who is the better, smarter half of this political, marital union.

The ethical crisis (following an assortment of bimbo crises) that sparks the soul-searching Henry to question his involvement in the campaign is almost an afterthought -- little more than a resolution to the character's narrative arc. The more interesting ethical debates are sprinkled throughout the movie as sneaky little occasions that turn out to be quite momentous from a personal, rather than political, perspective -- situations when ideals are compromised with seemingly little thought, as if the sheer momentum of the political campaign swept away all morals, negated all character and soul, dragging the candidate and his operatives so close to the goal that they hardly remember why they wanted to get there in the first place. But *Primary Colors* is never unremittingly cynical -- Stanton, despite his flaws, does remember: when he has a heart to heart with the counterman at a donut shop, when he gets swept away in a reverie of unforgotten purpose, when he regrets his own moral lapses but forges ahead, unapologetically, anyway.

In the end, *Primary Colors* is entertaining but insubstantial: it doesn't have much to say that the American people don't already know about politics, or our weirdly dysfunctional style of celebrity democracy, or moral compromise. The movie doesn't shatter any illusions that were still intact, nor does it lean especially hard on the pres, the press, or the people. That scandals buzz around Jack Stanton like flies says something either about the candidate or about the flies, but *Primary Colors* doesn't really want to commit to saying much about either. Like Robert Bennett said about that legal brief (you know the one), it's like cotton candy -- when you bite into it, there's nothing there.


23Mar1998

The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)

Some movies get made because a writer or director has a personal vision, a story that wants to be told. Some movies get made for money. Then there are the movies in which neither art nor commerce are apparent motivators. They're made just because they can be, because the effects technology exists. With relatively new digital effects technology now widely available, we're in a period in which a lot of these latter movies are being made, with results that are generally as uninspiring as the movie is uninspired. *The Man In The Iron Mask* is just such a movie.

Writer-director Randall Wallace adds enough soap to drown the oft-told Alexandre Dumas pere tale in suds. Wallace postulates that the man in the mask is the twin brother of King Louis XIV (Leonardo DiCaprio), an unfortunate lad named Phillippe (also DiCaprio, of course) who had the misfortune to be born second. Whisked away at birth, Phillippe is imprisoned while still a tender, dewy young teen, locked in the horrible mask and forced to live in wretched conditions in an island prison. Naturally, the experience only strengthens his native nobility, while Louis, spoiled young king that he is, spends his days chasing tail, and being imperious and uncaring.


The movie is far more interested in Musketeers than the titular man in the mask, however, since inner torment and all that don't require a lot of swashbuckling and special effects. *The Man In The Iron Mask* plays like a literal sequel to The Three Musketeers, a sort of where-are-they-now followup that allows the old boys one last moment of glory -- and provides numerous opportunities, none of which are wasted, to say "One for all and all for one." D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne), now the top Musketeer, watches his king with disdain, but undying loyalty. The three musketeers, meanwhile, have all retired from the king's service. Aramis (Jeremy Irons) is a devout Jesuit priest; Porthos (Gerard Depardieu, broadly buffoonish) spends his days wenching (there is no shortage of pouty wenches in 1662 Paris, apparently) and lamenting his lost virility; Athos (John Malkovich) plays Mr Mom to Raoul (Peter Sarsgaard, executing a hilarious, pitch-perfect vocal impersonation of Malkovich), the fine young son who is about to join the Musketeers. This France abounds with different accents -- English, French, American (although the USA didn't exist for another 120 years) -- but consistency and authenticity are secondary concerns in *The Man In The Iron Mask*, as are character and drama. Secret passageways, gruesome tombs, flatulent Musketeers and hokey speeches take center stage, along with a supremely corny take on knee-jerk nobility and patriotism.

After establishing that Louis is a vain womanizer and a very bad king, the plot slowly lurches forward. The filthy peasants of Paris riot because they are starving and the king distributes rotten food. Louis orders them shot. Then Louis sends Raoul to the front so he can make time with his comely fiancee Christine (Judith Godreche), with whom Louis appears to be genuinely in love. Will the king's treachery never end? It's all too much for the disillusioned Musketeers, who plot to switch Louis with Phillippe, busting the poor boy out of prison with surprisingly little effort.

Phillippe emerges from the mask looking like wolf boy, but after a shave, a bath, and a bit of lip balm, he's a beautifully androgynous, milky-skinned young thing who, aside from the tenderness in his eyes, is a dead ringer for the king. DiCaprio is much more convincing as the wounded bird Phillippe than as bad boy Louis -- the imperious bed hopper seems more an imposter than the timid, confused prisoner. The cumbersome dialogue doesn't help -- Louis' come ons include such absurdities as "I hope you realize there is more of me to love... than a crown." Phillippe doesn't fare much better, forced to utter such inanities as "I wear the mask, it does not wear me."

DiCaprio really sinks his teeth into the role of king once Phillippe arrives in the palace, however, playing against himself with zest. Unfortunately, this, and all the other interesting parts of the movie are saved for the last ten minutes. Louis loses his kingly cool, lapsing into screaming hissy fits, his voice rising an octave as he shrieks at the pretender who, maddeningly, oozes nobility, royalty and loyalty with moist, puppy dog eyes which, although she won't admit it, makes the Queen Mother (Anne Parillaud) like Phillippe better. A few dozen more "One for alls," a bit of swordplay, a wowser of a soapy twist and a lot of straining for emotional effect, and everything is right in France again.

This is the umpteenth screen version of *The Man In The Iron Mask*, and the only justification for this inane adaptation is to take advantage of special effects that put the twin DiCaprios together onscreen. It's a perfectly executed effect, but not enough to justify the rest of this dreary, ridiculous movie.

16Mar1998

The Big Lebowski (1998)

In the opening minutes of *The Big Lebowski*, a tumbleweed bounces through scrubgrass and greasewood on its way to the Pacific Ocean while The Sons of the Pioneers yodel a mournful "Tumbling Tumbleweeds." And that pretty much sums up *The Big Lebowski*, a drifting, staggering, windblown shaggy dog story. The shaggy dog at the center of this comic tale of crime and mistaken identity is The Dude (Jeff Bridges), a perpetually stoned bowling bum whose given name, Jeff Lebowski, is just one of his problems.

Jeff Lebowski is also the name of a certain millionaire (David Huddleston) whose trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reed) causes no end of trouble for the big Lebowski and the Dude. When thugs, employed by pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzarra) come looking for the millionaire, they find the Dude instead, and soil his rug in an unspeakable manner. "The rug really tied the room together," laments the Dude. His bowling buddies, Walter (John Goodman), a volatile Vietnam vet and observant Jew who totes a gun to the bowling alley and refuses to roll on Shabbes, and Donny (Steve Buscemi), perpetually three steps behind in every conversation, convince the Dude that the millionaire Lebowski should compensate him for the loss of his finely aged rug. Before long, the Dude is acting as bag man for Lebowski when Bunny is kidnapped by German nihilists (Peter Stormare and Flea). The Dude loses the money in a poorly planned scam conceived by Walter, which leads to complications that include being menaced by nihilists, thugs, pornographers, cops, VW Beetles, and Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), artiste daughter of the big L.

All of which makes the Dude just a tiny bit uptight, despite his strict regimen of weed and White Russians. The secret to the Dude's limited success, however, is that nothing sticks to him, or sticks with him, for long -- he is literally a roll-with-the-punches kinda dude, drug-addled synapses sputtering, leisurely cruising from crisis to crisis, perpetually, intentionally, constitutionally off-kilter.

This being a Joel and Ethan Coen film, the Dude isn't the only off-kilter element. The whole movie is permeated by the Dude's shambling, drug-addled perspective, bouncing willy nilly like a tumbleweed that touches solid, middle America ground ever so briefly before vaulting back into the giddy heights of fantasy and criminal ineptitude. Thus, the Dude's hallucinations, prompted by frequent blows to the head: a Busby Berkeley-style dance routine, featuring a bowling Valkyrie and Kenny Rogers singing "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)," and a flying carpet sequence with Dylan droning "A Man Like Me." Thus bowling arch-nemesis Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), a hair-netted, lavender-clad conquistador freak of the lanes. Thus The Stranger (Sam Elliott), cowboy and sometime narrator of the Dude's tale, postulating that by his very lackadaisical nature the Dude is some kind of new American hero, a gutterball paragon of stability, steady, grounded, and fixed in his laid back, spacey, intoxicated way, while everyone around him is impermanent, changeable, reactive, and all worked up about large sums of cash and the whole Byzantine kidnapping business. The bowling, booze-guzzling, long-haired Dude is Homer Simpson without a job, a wife and kids, a happily slow-witted ubermensch for whom success is the occasionally achievable combination of the right song, the right drink and three strikes in a row. And if the Dude is a lot like Homer, *The Big Lebowski* is a lot like a live action episode of *The Simpsons* (minus TV censorship), both visually and narratively, which is to say that there's a lot to like about this perversely familiar slice of Americana.


*The Big Lebowski* is hardly the masterpiece that the Coen's *Fargo* is. It is more a throwback to their earlier films, especially *Raising Arizona* -- broad, comically loopy, stylized tales of crime and stupidity, with no discernible center of gravity, filled with chatty oddballs, narrative nonsequitors and a freeform plot that spins around no particular axis. The pace of *The Big Lebowski* is laid back and leisurely, but unlike the Dude, the movie is also sharp and witty, purposefully aimless in its narrative wandering. The Coens look at American life like two giggling kids turning over rocks to see what creepy crawlies are underneath -- that they always find something strangely fascinating, familiar and darkly funny says something either about America or about their particular, peculiar outlook, or both. In *The Big Lebowski*, the Coens turn over some rocks, then perform the film equivalent of juggling bowling balls: they manage to keep a lot of dense balls in the air most of the time, and every now and then, they throw in a hatchet just to keeps things lively.


9Mar1998

The Wedding Singer (1998)

Ah, the wedding. Is there any more fertile comedic ground? Momuments to unrestrained emotion and poor taste, awash in tacky music, adorned in frou frou fashion, family conflict laid bare and lubricated with booze, and all displayed, shamelessly, in public -- that is the wedding in movies, as in life.

So what could be funnier than the life of a wedding singer? Professional cheesiness, emotional ups and downs, career crisis and bad music against a backdrop of multiple weddings suggests surefire laughs. Throw in a rappin' granny, a Madonna wannabe, a Don Johnson devotee, a Michael Jackson acolyte and a jukebox full of nostalgic 80s hits (anybody remember "Pass the Dutchie"?) and you've got *The Wedding Singer*, an episodic, hit and miss potpourri of gags squeezed into a romantic comedy, set in those heady, lost-innocence, mid-Reagan-era days of 1985.

Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) is the titular wedding singer, an all-around nice guy who not only sings and schmoozes, but smooths over family discord, shepherds drunks to the dumpster, provides newlywed counseling, and comforts co-workers all without wrinkling his shiny pink lame [MIK - accent on the e] tux. In his spare time, Robbie gives singing lessons to cute little old ladies who pay him in meatballs. Robbie's life is just dandy, until he is left at the altar by his fashion-victim fiancee Linda (Angela Featherstone), who decides that she doesn't want to be the wife of a mere wedding singer. Robbie falls apart. He mopes. He listens to The Cure (a sure sign of depression) and decides he hates weddings. Meanwhile, his pal Julia (Drew Barrymore), a perpetually chipper naif, finally gets her smarmy fiance Glen (Matthew Glave) to set a wedding date, but because the cad is busy womanizing, he doesn't have time to help her plan the wedding. So Julia enlists Robbie's help, and being a big brotherly sort, he agrees despite his misery, which inevitably leads to Robbie and Julia falling in love.

The plot is loaded with contrivances, conveniences and cliches (not to mention anachronisms), all designed to push Robbie and Julia together, pull them apart, push them together again, and so on. It's a mechanical, paper-thin, oh-so-sweet-and-innocent romance, and not a minute of it is believable or surprising, while the dialogue is even clunkier than the plot, serving primarily to drag the story along between musical set pieces that are too few and far between.

The real drive behind *The Wedding Singer* is providing narrative contexts for 80s alterna-pop songs, and given that MTV already existed in the 80s, that makes the movie something of a redundancy. What should have driven *The Wedding Singer* is Sandler singing -- he's hilarious every time he digs into 80s gold with the unabashed glee of a karaoke addict, and his own vicious paean to lovesick misery, "Somebody Kill Me," (penned by Sandler) is a hoot. Only in those all too infrequent moments does Sandler come alive in the role -- there's a snarly, goofy edge to the singer that is always just under the surface, even when he's crooning a treacly love ditty. That gleam of mischief is a welcome relief from the sweet, hangdog puppy love innocence of Robbie Hart, a character even Sandler doesn't seem to get.

Barrymore's Julia doesn't have any edge at all. She's all puppy dog, and never shows any teeth, even when Glen is kicking her around. The rest of the characters in *The Wedding Singer* are one-gag wonders: Julia's sister Holly (Christine Taylor) is a Material Girl groupie, Glen is all *Miami Vice*, right down to the Delorean and sockless loafers. Robbie's backup singer (Alexis Arquette) is a dead ringer for Boy George, and knows only one song ("Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?"), which doesn't go over well at weddings. There are movie-stealing cameos by Billy Idol, Jon Lovitz and, especially, Steve Buscemi in *The Wedding Singer* -- performances that are devilishly funny, a little bit mean, and a gratifying, sour counterpoint to the idealized, sentimental love story.

Come to think of it, *The Wedding Singer* is a lot like a wedding: everybody suffers the pinching shoes, pastel dresses, lousy food and the saccharine romance, all for the possibility that Uncle Leo will get shellacked and broadcast a few juicy family secrets before passing out in the champagne punch. It's those fleeting Uncle Leo moments, noisily ripping through the trifle and treacle like a chainsaw, that make *The Wedding Singer* worthwhile.

2Mar1998

Spice World (1998)

Before *Spice World*, the faux film about the faux fab five Spice Girls, started, I was having a fairly enjoyable time at the movies. The theatre was buzzing with excitement as the audience, composed primarily of squealing pre-adolescent girls, eagerly awaited their next "Girl power" fix. The gaggle of little women sitting behind me had a major crisis when it became apparent that one of them would have to sit next to a *boy*. A strange boy. Luckily, their chaperone interceded, and the transmission of cooties was avoided.

The fun ended as the movie began. The Spice Girls themselves aren't really to blame. *Spice World* is in the same mold as *Hard Day's Night*, a slight, slice of life bit o' fluff about British rock stars on a concert tour which climaxes with a frantic effort to reach Albert Hall in time for the big show. The five Spices work their rather limited talents with charm and energy, but are wholly undone by a virtually nonexistent script (by Kim Fuller) and Bob Spiers' utterly inert, leaden directing. *Spice World* is little more than an extended music video, with surprisingly little music. What scant plot there is would have about filled a three minute video, but the movie stretches it too far, and then stretches it some more.

If you're older than 13, the Spice Girls phenomenon may have escaped your notice. Scary (Melanie Brown), Baby (Emma Bunton), Sporty (Melanie Chisholm), Ginger (Geri Halliwell) and Posh Spice (Victoria Addams) are a Monkees-type manufactured singing group of scantily clad, anatomically gifted lasses. They were overnight sensations when their first album, *Spice*, became a huge hit. Britain's princes Harry, William and Charles, and Nelson Mandela are among their fans. Then the Girls had a not-so-big hit record, and were booed off a stage in Spain. They fired their manager/creator (aka Svengali Spice), and are rumored to be on the verge of breaking up. Now that's a movie! A real *Truth or Dare* type documentary about the Girls could have been pretty spicy, and far more interesting than this bland, half-hearted roman a clef which has them riding around London in their Union Jack-decorated Spice bus (driven by Meat Loaf) and shouting "Girl power!" in between mildly interesting encounters with space aliens, assorted genuine musicians (Elton John, Bob Geldof, Elvis Costello) and sneaky tabloid spies.

The little snippets of plot in *Spice World* concern the Spices' tribulations with their overbearing, artery-popping manager Clifford (Richard E. Grant), a pregnant single mom friend (Naoko Mori), a pretentious documentary filmmaker (Alan Cumming, deliciously affected) and a villainous tabloid publisher (Barry Humphries) who so hates the Girls that he engineers the group's break-up. Clifford, meanwhile, contends with a pair of movie producers (George Wendt and Mark McKinney) who pitch an assortment of lame ideas for a Spice movie (some of which were at least as good as *this* movie), and the mysterious Chief (Roger Moore), the behind-the-scenes Spice master (modeled after a James Bond villain) who is seen shaking martinis and petting a variety of small animals while babbling incoherent aphorisms.

As for the Girls themselves, they're given little to do other than talk about clothes, wear clothes, change clothes, tease each other, contemplate superstardom, drift off into the occasional fantasy, frolic and dance about and lip synch (badly), while wearing vertiginously tall shoes. Spice Girls music is strangely downplayed in *Spice World*, and, while there is surely better music than the Spice Girls brand of candy pop, isn't music the point of a movie like this? Missing an opportunity to give their fans a dose of girl empowerment, Girl power doesn't get much of a workout in *Spice World* either, and even when it does (as when Sporty Spice leaps from a speedboat to rescue Posh and two little Fan Spices), the results are laughably inane.

The controlled and contrived Spice personalities are not elaborated upon at all in the movie, each consisting of one prominent characteristic plus a lollipop: Scary is the wild one with the biggest hair, Sporty exercises, Posh is bored unless considering makeup, Ginger is glamorously blowsy, and Baby Spice is sweetly childish. The girls do engage in a fair amount of self-aware humor, a recognition, for example, that the Wonderbra deserves at least some of the credit for their success, and an acknowledgment that their cultural influence far exceeds their cultural contribution (when Ginger sarcastically says "Is the Pope Catholic?" it sets off a crisis in the Vatican). Given the pulchritudinousness and energy of the Spice Girls, and the number of talented actors who make appearances in *Spice World* (to the abovementioned add Stephen Fry, Bob Hoskins and Jennifer Saunders, among others), *Spice World* should have been at least as good as a Spice Girls record, which is a fairly low standard, but one this movie never approaches.


26Jan1998

Palmetto (1998)

"There's nothing worse than a writer who doesn't have anything to say," drones Harry Barber at the beginning of *Palmetto*. Harry just hasn't seen this movie yet. While *Palmetto* doesn't really have anything new to say, it goes on at great, tedious length in telling the tale of how Barber is double-, triple- and quadruple-crossed by a pair of luscious vixens in the steamy seaside town of Palmetto, Florida.

Harry (Woody Harrelson) is an ex con and ex-journalist, fresh out of prison after spending two years in the clink on trumped-up charges. Harry looks for a job by hanging out in a bar, proving that he is something of a low-watt bulb. T'is in that bar that Harry meets Rhea Malroux (Elisabeth Shue), vampy trophy wife of a local millionaire. Rhea squeezes into a dress like a sausage in a casing, but her teenage stepdaughter Odette (Chloe Sevigny) is less subtle, and Harry falls like a rotten apple for both scantily clad, overripe chippies. Rhea and Odette, for their parts, delight in the wriggly exercise of their feminine wiles, and sucker Harry into a scheme that the ex con, embittered by his time in prison, is just stupid and bilious enough to fall for. The devious plan cooked up by the Malroux women is a feigned kidnapping designed to coax a half mil out of miserly old Malroux. In exchange for ten percent, Harry acts as the beard and bag man in their scheme. Just how dumb is Harry to fall for this? He's so dumb that he takes a job as the local prosecutor's press liaison on the same kidnapping case.

It isn't long before everything starts to go wrong, and Harry is driving around with a body in the trunk of his girlfriend's car. The girlfriend Nina (Gina Gershon) gets suspicious, the cops get suspicious -- in fact, everyone except Harry gets suspicious. Several plot twists later, Harry is still as stupid and unenlightened as a sack of hammers, and *Palmetto* has turned into a messy self-parody, a desperate neo-noir in which chatty villains blather endlessly, a churning tub of acid is the weapon of choice and Rhea's relentless, butt-waggling vamping starts to look like the most subtle thing this movie has going for it.

*Palmetto* certainly has atmosphere. The sweaty tropical air all but steams up the lens, and there are nifty close-ups of brown palmetto bugs and an abundance of noir elements: rain, typewriters, hard liquor, fedoras, broken men and the women who broke them, and, of course, shadowy rooms sliced by shafts of light. Director Volker Schlondorff certainly gets the look right, but the story spins out of control early on, forcing the actors to work ever so hard for so little result.

Based on James Hadley Chase's novel *Just Another Sucker*, *Palmetto* is tiresome and overworked, a sweat-soaked Southern noir melodrama stewing in pheremones. Nobody does anything predictable in *Palmetto*, but neither do they do anything remotely believable, thus blunting the element of surprise with the element of indifference. The climax of this overwrought escapade features a bizarrely brazen performance by Shue (mimicking Gloria Swanson in *Sunset Boulevard*) followed by a supremely corny ending. *Palmetto* is as enervating as a heat wave, and leaves one longing for a truly cool movie (like *Sunset Boulevard*) instead of this microwaved noir knock-off.

23Feb1998

The Borrowers (1998)

Borrowers are the reason things tend to disappear. A race of pocket-sized people with wild red hair and big teeth, they live within the walls and beneath the floorboards of homes, borrowing things from humans (aka Beans). Borrowers have charming names like Dustbunny, Minty and Swag, and they are stealthy, clever and brave beyond their size. A box of dental floss and a cup hook, in the hands of a Borrower, is rapelling gear for a borrowing mission in the kitchen, a sugar spoon is a shovel, a birthday candle a torch. Refrigerator magnets can be scaled like a rocky cliff face.

Based on the novels by Mary Norton, *The Borrowers* is a clever, charming and entertaining film that, like so many other tales for little people, proves that size really doesn't matter. As directed by Peter Hewitt, with outstanding production design by Gemma Jackson, *The Borrowers* creates an abundant, visually seamless and wonderfully convincing world of big and small, old and new.

The Clock family, Pod, Homily, Arrietty and Peagreen, are all alone, the last of the Borrowers living in the Lender home. They are menaced by vacuum cleaners, but otherwise co-exist secretly and peacefully with the Lenders, although young Pete Lender (Bradley Pierce) is determined to find out why things are forever disappearing. When the two families are forced from their home by Ocious P. Potter (John Goodman), an evil real estate developer, Arrietty (Flora Newbigin) and Peagreen (Tom Felton) are separated from their parents. Suddenly home alone, they discover Potter's pernicious plan to purloin the old homestead, but Potter discovers them too. Aided by Exterminator Jeff (Mark Williams), who promises "death for every bug and every budget," Potter menaces the clever Borrower kinder while Pete, Pod (Jim Broadbent) and Homily (Celia Imrie) race to the rescue. In the wild chase that ensues, Arrietty will encounter a cute Borrower boy with a hot rod roller skate, Potter will be harassed by a helpful police officer (Hugh Laurie) and drenched in molten cheese, and little Peagreen will be bottled. Luckily for the Borrowers, Potter is the sort of evil villain who inclines toward protracted perils, allowing for hair-raising knick-of-time rescues by intrepid Bean boys and brave Borrowers.

The visual effects in *The Borrowers* are perfectly executed, calling attention not to themselves, but to the story and characters. The flow between the big world of Beans and the tiny world of Borrowers is so casual and ingenious that it achieves a perfect realism that is as delightful as the story itself. *The Borrowers* rewards vigilance, but doesn't beg for it: there are no 'Look at me, I'm really small' moments in the film, just a witty, absorbing naturalism in which a Cheerio is a meal unto itself and an inch of spaghetti is sliced up for dinner. Old and new cultural artifacts and old and new cultures blend together in *The Borrowers*: the Clocks and their unwitting, flawlessly polite accomplices are Brits, while the Lenders and their nemesis Potter are Americans; the Lender house, situated in a circa 1950s London, is a grandmotherly Victorian, full of dark corners where Borrowers can hide, where lace curtains filter shafts of golden light, decorative crown moldings conceal tiny, secret doorways, and an old coal stove squats next to a modern refrigerator complete with a shockingly dangerous ice dispenser.

With its wee heroes and oversized villain, *The Borrowers* slyly pokes a bit of fun at movies in which bigger is better -- the clever climax is both stirring and giddily funny, a fitting finale to a crafty, ingeniously entertaining little film.


16Feb1998