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It's
holiday time, and that means Hollywood is crapping out all of
their "finest" pictures for award consideration.
Unless you live in a big city, some of this stuff isn't going to
make it's way to your neck of the woods for a while, so check
your local listings.
The
Sea Inside opens in limited release today. We saw
it a few months ago at a film festival and are still
pissed off about how overrated it is. And there's also the
super-cool In
the Realms of the Unreal, which beats all of those lame
year-end biopics all to hell.
And, hey
-- check out the 2004 Sickie Award nominees here, and the PSB
Top Ten List here. I mean,
you're already here, and everything.
If you’ve
enjoyed recent reality television programming like Wife
Swap or Trading
Spouses, odds are you won’t be too surprised by the goings
on in James L. Brooks’s Spanglish.
Each art form – and I use that term generously in both
cases – involve the matriarch of a minority family being
uprooted and plopped into the middle of dysfunctional white
suburbia in order to re-prioritize the lives of Cracker
McCrackerson and his fucked up flock.
A year or so ago, this role would have been filled by a
bandana-wearing, pancake-flipping, not-knowing-nuthin’-‘bout-birthin’-no-babies
Jemima who would have used her eye-rolling charm and wide Whoopi
smile to show Whitey the way.
But now, since America is, roughly, 83% Latinos, this is
what we get in place of the frightening black stereotype.
Paz Vega (Sex
and Lucia) is Flor Moreno, a single Mexican mom who
uproots her kid and makes for Southern California, where she
eventually becomes the nanny to a family crazy enough to give
the Mansons a run for their money.
Members include the yin-yang tag team of four-star chef
John Clasky (Adam Sandler, 50
First Dates) and his recently downsized wife, Deborah (Téa
Leoni, Hollywood
Ending). The
latter says everything she’s feeling and thinking, while the
former can barely sputter out anything at all.
When Flor, who speaks only Spanish, is hired, it’s yet
another un-understood voice in the crazy Clasky house.
It’s like Rush Hour 3!
The bulk of
Spanglish is spent
dealing with mothers and daughters and how messed up things can
get between them. Deborah
has nagged her kid (Sarah Steele) into a less-than-ideal state
of mind about her body, while simultaneously hating on her own
mom (Cloris Leachman, Alex
& Emma) for being a shitty role model when she was
growing up. Meanwhile,
Flor is afraid her daughter (Shelbie Bruce) is going to lose
touch with her ethnicity, going so far as to jeopardize the
kid’s education just to keep her tied to the old apron
strings.
While Spanglish is filled with a few noble performances – especially the
maniacally scattered, high-strung Leoni, who seems designed to
be as unlikable as Cruella De Vil – it plays like a rough cut
of film due in theatres next year.
When I saw the movie’s trailer, I thought it seemed a
bit messy and chalked it up to some kind of studio rush job
hastily completed to make some kind of deadline. But it’s not just the trailer; the whole film has the same
unevenness, not to mention more than a little familiarity.
Brooks must have a thing for people with “funny”
mental disorders (see Nicholson in As
Good As It Gets, and dig the near carbon copy lifting of his
“You make me want to be a better man” speech).
Brooks
has received double Oscar nominations (writing and directing)
for three of his first four films.
Unfortunately, his latest is much closer to the non-Oscar
nominated I’ll Do Anything than anything else in his otherwise impressive
filmography. It
reminded me of a “very special” six-episode arc of a
television sitcom, only somebody forgot to tell Brooks that the
American sitcom has gone the way of the dodo bird.
.
Question:
Is it possible to have a big, heavily cross-promoted family film
released during the holidays that isn’t completely ruined by a
ham-fisted, ridiculously over-the-top performance from a
comedian? You know,
like The
Grinch or The
Cat in the Hat?
Answer: Not
really, but the situation is getting a little bit better.
Jim Carrey doesn’t so much ruin Lemony
Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as he does
make it much less dark and threatening than the series of book
upon which the film is based.
Oh, it’s still plenty sinister, but Carrey’s Count
Olaf is too much with the slap-stick and not enough with the
menacing danger. Less
Ace Ventura and more Sideshow Bob, please.
Events,
based on the first three of a series of books penned by Daniel
Handler (under the nom de
plume Lemony Snicket), is about a three siblings who, after
their parents die in a mysterious fire, are shipped off to live
with their nearest living relative, Count Olaf (Carrey, Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Because the Baudelaire children have also inherited a
great deal of money from their parents, and because Olaf is the
embodiment of all things evil, he decides to kill his wards to
have at their cash.
The murder
attempt is foiled, at which point the Baudelaires are sent to
relative after relative, who each meet mysterious fates after
rubbing elbows with strange characters who always turn out to be
Olaf in an elaborate disguise (there’s a nice tip to Lon
Chaney in one scene). I’ve
read the first three Snicket books, and found them to get rather
repetitive after a while, which is probably why director Brad
Silberling (Moonlight Mile) and screenwriter
Robert Gordon (Men
in Black II) jumbled up some of the books, and left a
lot of their material out completely.
Comparisons
to the Harry
Potter films are inevitable, since both deal with
orphans, parents who were killed, and a great malevolent force
trying to murder children.
Both are also filled with intricate sets, snapping visual
effects, and nice performances from adults and urchins alike.
Unlike Potter,
however, Snicket features way more “big picture” foreshadowing.
The
ball was dropped a little with Carrey’s tomfoolery (he’s
half-Max Schreck-as-Nosferatu and half-Reverend Jim Ignatowski),
as well as the portrayal of little Sunny Baudelaire, whose
subtitled lines are a little too cutesy for the subject matter.
One can’t help but wonder how much better Events
might have been in the hands of a Tim Burton or a Terry Gilliam,
though. Like the
first two Potter films, Events is
helmed by a…uh…story-driven (read: less visual) director.
Here’s to hoping it doesn’t take three Snicket
pictures to turn the reins over to that franchise’s version of
Alfonso Cuarón.
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Everyone is
talking about Martin Scorsese winning the Oscar this year
(he’s never won) for The
Aviator, even though it’s not even close to being the
greatest film he’s ever made.
You know, the same people who made the same claims two
years ago when Scorsese’s Gangs
of New York hit theatres.
The Aviator –
a biopic about the early years of Howard Hughes (pre-Melvin & Howard) – isn’t nearly as enjoyable as Gangs,
though it is flawed in many of the same ways (namely in the
rambling running time). Leonardo DiCaprio returns to the Scorsese fold, playing
Hughes in what I’m confident would have been a head-turning
performance were it not opposite Cate Blanchett’s positively
mesmerizing turn as Katherine Hepburn.
The Aviator takes a big hit when her C/Kate disappears.
Worth viewing just for her, and the spectacular plane
crash scene, which made me stop thinking about Howard Hughes and
start thinking about Lost.
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Not to be
confused with the Ronald Reagan film from the ‘40s, Clint
Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby might
be the best boxing movie since Scorsese’s Raging
Bull. At one
point, while thoroughly engrossed in Baby’s
story, I said to myself, “There hasn’t been one artful,
slow-motion shot inside the ring.”
Then, Eastwood made with the film’s sole slo-mo shot,
and boy, it’s a
doozy.
Baby,
adapted by too-often-neglected television writer/producer Paul
Haggis (EZ Streets, Michael Hayes)
from a story by former “cut man” F.X. Toole, is about a
grizzled trainer named Frankie Dunn (Eastwood, Blood
Work) who reluctantly takes on a 31-year-old female
boxer (Hilary Swank, The
Core) with no formal schooling in the art of the ring.
Their relationship, as well as the trajectory of her
career, doesn’t exactly break any ground, but under
Eastwood’s tutelage, the familiar story blossoms in ways you
won’t quite expect (and, thankfully, I don’t mean a
May-December romance).
I
had minor issues with Baby’s
surprising third act, but the first two more than make up for
it. Swank, cut like
she’s Linda Hamilton in Terminator
2, logs in what is easily her best performance since taping
her boobs down in Boys Don’t Cry (admittedly, that’s
not much of a statement) Eastwood
has been walking through films since 1992’s Unforgiven,
but is very effective here, as is Morgan Freeman, Baby’s
Shawshank-ish
narrator, who finally shows a bit of range.
Baby is, in a
year of fairly disappointing year-end pictures, the pick of the
litter.
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Nearly as
warm of a holiday release as The
Assassination of Richard Nixon, Nicole Kassell’s
debut, The
Woodsman, stars Kevin Bacon (Mystic
River) as a recently paroled pedophile who moves in
across the street from a grammar school and tries to control the
urges to have little kids sit on his lap.
He tries to keep his wood busy by getting a menial job at
the local lumber yard, where he meets and begins a strange
affair with everyone-thinks-she’s-a-lesbo Vickie (Kyra
Sedgwick, Secondhand Lions).
“It’s
like the whole world has gotten younger,” Walter (Bacon), says
to his brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt) shortly after getting
released from his 12-year-sentence, obviously unaware of the faux
pas he’s made concerning his previous predilection for the
kids.
The Woodsman is
very well directed for a debut (it’s photographed by classy
Mexican cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet, who shot half of Deadwood’s first season), and it’s also packed full of great
performances from the top to the bottom.
Dig the surprisingly dour turn by David Alan Grier.
Dig the surprisingly low-key performance from Eve, and
the surprisingly fantastic one from Mos Def as a local cop
making it very clear
that he’s keeping a close eye on Walter.
And prepare to have your socks knocked off by little
Hannah Pilkes, who plays one of the film’s potential victims.
It’s unsettling and without resolution, but if you’re
already taking your children to see Lemony
Snicket, you may as well make it a double-feature and really
scare the shit out of them.
.
Terry
George, former cohort of In America
filmmaker Jim Sheridan, tells the story of Africa’s version of
Oskar Schindler in Hotel Rwanda, winner of the
audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival this
past fall. The
audiences in Toronto are usually deft at picking Oscar
contenders from the hundreds of pictures in that festival’s
lineup (Shine, American
Beauty, Life
is Beautiful, Crouching
Tiger), but lately, their tastes have parted with those
of the Academy voters (Whale Rider,
Blind Swordsman:
Zatoichi, and now, Hotel).
Hotel
is one of those films that, if a critic doesn’t think it walks
on water, will receive nasty backlash because of the importance
of the movie’s subject matter: The bloody 1994 genocide in
Rwanda. So, for the
record, I am not for genocide, even though I don’t think Hotel
is a particularly good picture.
Don
Cheadle, sporting a flimsier accent than in Ocean’s
Twelve, stars as Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who
successfully saved the lives of over a thousand Tutsi civilians
at a time when, left to their own devices, they would have been
slaughtered by marauding Hutu militia. George and co-writer Keir Peaeron gloss over the big picture
history of the region, making Hotel a slightly better,
slightly more expensive version of something you’d see as a
television movie of the week.
.
Meet the Fockers
is about would you should expect from a sequel:
More of the same jokes, and little else.
Like gags about Greg Focker (Ben Stiller, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) being
a nurse? You’ll
be in hog heaven. Think
there’s nothing funnier than the not-so-nice teasing of the
Focker moniker? Line
up, you cretins because there’s plenty to go around.
More than two hours worth of it.
Ugh.
This time
around, we get to see the planning of impending nuptials between
Greg and Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo, Beyond
Borders). Enter
Greg’s parents – two wacky, free-spirited Jews (Barbra
Streisand and Dustin Hoffman) who offer every single imaginable
comedic juxtaposition to the uptight Byrnes’ clan (Robert
DeNiro and Blythe Danner).
And when I saw “comedic,” I don’t really mean funny
unless you’re a big fan of bad television sitcoms (Dharma
& Greg, anyone?) and/or bad stereotypes of Jewish
behavior. Look out – I might plotz
over here.
In
addition to featuring three of the most frightening noses in the
business (Streisand, Hoffman and Owen Wilson, who briefly
reprises his role of WASP high commander Kevin Rawley), Fockers
also has…well, that’s about it.
Merry Christmas, wankers!
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Next
week:
You
won't hear from us again until '05, suckas.
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