July 2006 - Shared Darkness

30 Days

documentary Super Size Me, in which he willfully gorged himself on all manner of McDonald’s food (and only
McDonald’s food) for an entire month. But whereas that film gaily used
its self-destruction as a sort of teaching mechanism, Spurlock’s latest
project is a bit more tinged with lamentation and earnestness. 30 Days
finds its subjects — including Spurlock himself — trading in a certain
lifestyle to explore a social or religious issue from another point of
view for a month. While its form and rules are a bit roughhewn and
amorphous, shifting to suit the need of whatever topic is under the
microscope, the short-order summer television series is ultimately an
infinitely better exploration of the sort gulfs between cultural
subsets than FX’s own Black & White.

In the show’s pilot, Spurlock and his girlfriend Alex move from New
York to the Midwest to try to make ends meet on the federal minimum
wage — $5.15 per hour — but face difficulty both when they have to go
to the doctor and Spurlock’s niece and nephew come to visit them. Two
other top episodes send a devout Christian into a Muslim family and a
homophobic youngster to live and work in San Francisco’s largely gay
Castro district, where they experience what it’s like to live as
members of a minority that sometimes still elicit feelings of fear
and/or revulsion from many Americans. Other episodes follow an athlete
who tries to reverse the aging process by going on a controversial
anti-aging drug regimen; a mother concerned about her college-aged
daughter who goes on a month-long drinking binge to experience firsthand the social pressures and physical effects of such partying; and
“Off the Grid,” in which two overly enthusiastic American consumers
repair to a Missouri “eco village,” where they do without many of the
comforts of their material world and live without the use of products
derived from fossil fuels.

Presented in a regular Amray case with a snap-in tray, the double-disc 30 Days
includes audio commentary on four of the six episodes and an abundance
of extra “diary cam” footage for each program. More strictly
educational material could have been included, but these confessionals
form the emotive narrative backbones of each show, and in their honesty
instill a certain hope about the nature of open-mindedness moving
forward. Each episode is presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with optional
subtitles in English and Spanish. B (Show) C+ (Disc)

On Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan

So
I know as a blogger I’m supposed to be all over Mel Gibson’s drunk
driving arrest in Malibu from late last week, his rambling,
anti-Semitic tirade and its alleged quasi-cover-up or suppression
courtesy of a celebrity-friendly police department.

In a way, though, I’m simply just much more intrigued at Lindsay Lohan getting awesomely blasted by Morgan Creek Productions CEO James G. Robinson
for her serial, late-night partying, corresponding habitual tardiness
and its effect on the production of the Garry Marshall film Georgia Rule, co-starring Felicity Huffman and Jane Fonda. That’s a good, old-fashioned Hollywood shaming, folks. I wonder what Hector Elizondo thinks about all this?

Gibson, on the other hand, has been giving off the pungent aroma of
craziness for some time now. I mean, was it possible for the guy to
become any more hermetic, post-The Passion of the Christ? Robert Welkos and John Horn have a great piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times
which examines the potential toll all this will take on Gibson’s
career. The gist of it is that while actors and directors bounce back
from all manner of naughty, idiotic and/or illicit behavior, the bigger
the face, the bigger the necessary mea culpa.

For Gibson, who’s grown out that shoe-bomber’s beard and largely shirked firing-line press obligations for The Passion
while simultaneously eschewing high-profile acting roles, the warm and
fuzzy days of Martin Riggs-style glory may be over. Sure, he could
further play out his latter-day career track as self-financier and
director of far-out historical epics — his latest outing behind the
camera is Apocalypto, set to be released by Disney in
December — but without the experience, infrastructure and clout of a
major distribution partner, he’d face an uphill battle getting his
film(s) in theaters. Gee, I just hope this doesn’t spell doom for Who Killed the Electric Car? On the plus side, it at least means we probably won’t ever have to suffer through Lethal Weapon 5. And I think that’s a win for everyone.

Jonah Hill Feeling Accepted Despite Girly Scream

He’s not yet a household name, but Jonah Hill is getting plenty of small screen face time in the weeks leading up to the release of the new teen comedy Accepted, courtesy chiefly of two clips — one in which, clad in a foam hot dog costume, he exhorts passersby to ask him about his wiener, and another in which he lets loose with an ear-piercing, high-pitched scream. The funny thing is, that scream isn’t really his.

Directed by Steve Pink, Accepted centers on an enterprising high school senior, Bartleby (Dodgeball‘s Justin Long), who, after getting rejected by every college he applies to, creates a fake university to serve as a post-graduation refuge for he and some friends. Hill plays Bartleby’s best friend, Sherman, who actually gets into a nearby school but helps his lifelong pal by designing said fictitious school’s Web site, among other things.

The set-up for the in-heavy-rotation scream occurs when Bartleby and his friends scout a condemned mental asylum to serve as the physical location for their mock university, and a skeleton falls from a ceiling panel, frightening Sherman. In an instinctual stroke of improvisational brilliance, Hill conspired with costar Maria Thayer. “When it came time for my close-up,” relates Hill, “I said to Maria, ‘Don’t tell anybody, but you scream and I’ll just mime it. But don’t say anything to anyone else, because it’ll be way funnier that way, if they’re not expecting it.’ So we did it and everyone around us kind of lost it. I totally didn’t expect them to put it in the movie, but they haven’t changed it. And it gets a huge laugh. That’s one of my most proud moments, because if you write or [come up with something on a movie like this] and it goes in, you feel like you really contributed toward making it a little funnier.”

Also co-starring comedian Lewis Black and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants‘ Blake Lively, Accepted now opens in theaters nationwide on August 18, after pushing a week. For more information, visit the movie’s Web site.

Straight-to-Video Dreamin’…

This is just one of those images that first makes you randomly laugh, then piques your interest, then slowly scares the bejesus out of you, because you start to think: “Sweet mother of pearl, wait a second… are they making a movie together?”

Early ’90s ass kicker Steven Seagal last tasted a nominal big screen hit in 2001 with Exit Wounds. Since then he’s tasted many donuts, and is now relegated — and has been for some time, actually — to having various stuntmen run headlong into his fists and feet in a string of straight-to-video re-hashes while he stands around whispering eco-friendly platitudes, and cinematographers, directors and costume designers figure out new ways to mask his corpulence.

Prop comic and disturbingly plastic-faced commercial pitchman Carrot Top, meanwhile, has uncorked really only one headlining movie stinker, the utterly atrocious Chairman of the Board, which is notable for an extended belching scene shared with Courtney Thorne-Smith that, somehow, is still more dignified than any randomly plucked moment of her work on According to Jim.

Seeing this photo, though, has me in terrified stitches. I mean, what would the title of such a pairing be — Laugh Past Dead? Hard to Kielbasa? Out for Just Ice? Enemy of Comedy? The Slimmer Man? Red Yawn? Actually, in my current fog I’m now coming around to the idea, though for what it’s worth I think the photo was taken at one of Seagal’s musical gigs (he’s cut several country/rock albums). Still, that makes you wonder who opened for whom. It also makes you realize that Carrot Top is on the cusp of being one degree away from Tommy Lee Jones in the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. I’m just saying…

Scoop

Regardless of what you ultimately thought of it, part of — scratch that, most of — the buzz surrounding last year’s Match Point
was undeniably a result of writer-director Woody Allen abandoning the
comfortable terrain of New York and lighting out for across the pond,
where he delivered a much darker film than that for which he has been
previously, or at least recently, known. It was the very stark contrast
to the rest of his work that had people outside of his most hardcore
devotees jazzed about seeing an Allen film again. The similarly
London-set Scoop, unfortunately, plays as the lesser film in a
double bill with that thriller, a ramshackle and laboriously whimsical
comedic trifle that falls back on the filmmaker’s increasingly tired
penchant for nattering faux-realism.

Scarlett Johansson), in town visiting friends, gets plucked
from the audience for a trick. She’s then visited by an apparition of
Strombel, who feeds her a series of cryptic clues pointing to British
aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and urges her to pursue the
story.

Taking a phony name and introducing Sid as her father, Sondra poses
as an actress and romantically snuggles up to Peter. She discovers a
deck of tarot cards in his tucked-away music room, as well as
additional secretive behavior, but has her share of doubts, even as
further visits from Strombel provide more information. Sid wants no
part of the investigation, but feels caught up in it by a need to
protect Sondra.

Allen clearly wants to use Lyman’s positioning within posh English
society as a contrasting backdrop for the movie’s two American
characters — one intrepid, one spineless — and he sets Scoop’s
light narrative gallop to an array of mischievously inquisitive
classical music, including Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake Ballet Suite” and
Johan Strauss’ “Annen-Polka.” But there are a clutch of small
inconsistencies and incongruities within the story, including one scene
in which a newspaper editor relates a piece of secondhand information
that he claims Peter’s father told him, a piece of information that
would directly contradict Sondra’s “front” to the Lyman family. One’s
pulse quickens here, expecting a fresh twist. Instead, it appears to be
merely a narrative flub.

Problems like this — and the manner in which Allen cuts quickly on
certain scenes, obviously trimming lead and trailing dialogue — give
the movie and its headlong dash toward conclusion the feeling of a
series of dopey vignettes. This certainly isn’t enhanced when a smitten
Peter suddenly leaves town on Sondra’s birthday after giving her a
gift, freeing her to dine with Sid. This and other moments like it defy
reasonable plausibility.

If its narrative isn’t one to hook audiences, Scoop at least
allows Johansson a chance to nicely subvert her burgeoning sexpot
image. With her round specs and a somewhat golly-gee persona, Sondra is
part Nancy Drew, part smitten bobbysoxer — and Johansson plays her with
a sunny and believably adolescent mix of aplomb and self-doubt. Even
if, that is, the story early on undermines this by setting Sondra up as
a bit of a floozy. In what is a somewhat uncomfortable window into
Allen’s imagination, Sondra — in an attempt to get an interview —
beds, off-camera, a film director. I’m not quite sure what
Allen’s trying to say about journalism here, and I’m not sure he knows
either. The big scoop on Scoop is that there really isn’t one. (Focus Features, PG-13, 95 mins.)

Miami Vice

With its big-budget flash and style, Miami Vice charted new
ground for episodic television dramas in the 1980s, changing the way
such shows were conceived and staged, and no doubt laying the
groundwork for the directorial careers of folks like, let’s say, Charlie’s Angels’
McG. The big screen re-imagining then, starring Colin Farrell and Jamie
Foxx in the roles made famous by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas,
had many folks atwitter with anticipation. In reality, though, Miami Vice
is an incidentally titled, gritty travelogue and skillfully crafted but
surprisingly insular tale of parallel love stories — in other words, a
film dressed up and masquerading as a summer movie.

At its
center are Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Foxx), and their
faithful band of ever-ready back-up (an underwritten group which
includes Justin Theroux, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Domenick Lombardozzi).
After the identity of an informant (John Hawkes) is leaked and his wife
killed, Crockett and Tubbs go undercover as courier specialists to
assist a high-up FBI agent (Ciaran Hinds) and determine the source of
the leak. This leads them to a shadowy Colombian drug and illicit
merchandise kingpin named Arcángel Jésus de Montoya (Luis Tosar) and —
perhaps to racially balance out the villainy — a homegrown Aryan group
that, for reasons never quite fully illuminated, eventually conspires
with Montoya’s quietly menacing middleman, José Yero (John Ortiz), to
kidnap Tubbs’ girlfriend, Trudy (Naomie Harris). Crockett, meanwhile,
falls for Montoya’s second-in-command, the poker-faced yet still sultry
Isabella (Gong Li), taking her up on her offer, mid-deal, to dash away
to Havana for mojitos. From here the petty incidents of gamesmanship
mount, with José’s perceptive distrust of Crockett and Tubbs eventually
culminating in bloodshed.

Mann’s world here is one of dark maneuvering and clenched, stubbled
jaws. He’s not interested in crafting a pop masterpiece, and there are
several types of truth with which he is wholly unconcerned — the
comfortable emotional track of narrative movie truth, certainly, but
also the truth of the mundanities of law enforcement. In Mann’s
idealized, stylized world of alpha male wolves on the prowl, police
work isn’t constrained by the necessity of paperwork, logistics or even
sleep — it’s a 24/7, multi-national hall-crawl, captured by
cinematographer Dion Beebe’s inscrutable, dirty frames and powered by
the lightly throbbing pulse of John Murphy’s score and lowly mixed
sonic offerings from Audioslave, Moby and Mogwai.

But for whom is Miami Vice made, precisely? Certainly not
hardcore devotees of the television show who have some nostalgic jones
for pastel blazers and Phil Collins tunes. (But then again, what sort
of these in-name-only adaptations of old small screen product typically
are?) Neither does it have the moral clarity of Saving Private Ryan, Seabiscuit or Cinderella Man, other adult-skewing films of recent summers. And Miami Vice
isn’t suffuse enough with staged conflict to sate the appetite of
general action audiences. An exciting and exactingly staged final
shootout punctures the movie’s mostly languid mood, but as the hearty
grosses of the mindless Pirates of the Caribbean sequel prove, casual summer audiences don’t go to the movies for
ruminative parables on violence and the difficulties inherent in
balancing dangerous, undercover investigative work with romance. Collateral,
which two years ago crawled across the $100 million mark only due to
Tom Cruise’s pre-couch jumping star power, had at its core the hook of
an Everyman thrown into a violent world with which he has no
familiarity or ease. If that film was Mann’s concessionary power play
in the direction of commercial relevance, Miami Vice comes
across on several important levels as a flippant clutch of the balls,
so densely atmospheric and deeply plotted is the film.

Ever since Heat, Mann’s films of the past decade — even a finely charted biopic like Ali — have been as much about the creation and sustenance of mood as anything else. (Maybe this is why he abandoned The Aviator, which in its hermetic subject didn’t have the inherent, sustained, hypnotic allure of Muhammad Ali.) Miami Vice
is no exception. While Mann’s visual and aural mastery of the cinematic
form and in particular Farrell’s laser-eyed intensity get you engaged,
one keeps waiting for a deeper sense of intrigue to set in — my mind
kicked around several interesting twists or narrative avenues that
never came to fruition or were explored.

I like that the film doesn’t conform to hackneyed clichés in service
of an attempted franchise launch, but can’t help feeling a bit
disappointed at Miami Vice’s deliberate murkiness, and the fact
that Farrell and Foxx are so divided and free of the bristling
masculine chemistry we want to see from them for much of the movie.
Drained of the juice that first made it such a visceral, cathartic
thrill, this film is Miami Vice in name only. Perhaps some deep undercover work is needed to find its mojo. (Universal, R, 132 mins.)

Tsotsi

Born of both a long-standing affection for the works of author Athol Fugard, upon whose novel this film is based, and an intimate familiarity with the shantytowns of his native South Africa, writer-director Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi is, when boiled down to its most basic elements, a coming-of-age story set in an extreme environment — and a searingly memorable one at that.

Free Screening of Pulse

the Weinstein Company’s Pulse in Los Angeles.

A remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 Japanese film — which is entitled Kairo and screened theatrically late last year in limited release from Magnolia — Pulse details a series of increasingly horrifying supernatural events that consume the life of Mattie Webber (Veronica Mars‘
Kristen Bell, above) after she receives an e-mail from her boyfriend
begging for help beyond the grave. Her investigation of the mysterious
e-mail leads to unexpected answers and terrifying conclusions.

The screening is scheduled for tonight, Thursday, July 27, at 9:30
p.m. at the Harmony Gold Theater, 7655 Sunset Blvd. As an added bonus, free
pizza and beer are also being served beforehand, thus necessitating the
21-year-old age requirement for all attendees. Ample parking is
available directly behind the theater and in the surrounding
residential neighborhood, but be sure to arrive early to guarantee
admittance, as seats will be doled out on a first-come, first-served
basis. Pulse releases in theaters on August 11.

The Princess Bride

Screenwriter
William Goldman and director Rob Reiner’s beloved fairy tale adventure
is one of those rare movies of whimsy that appeals across gender lines,
and in near-equal fashion. Full of well-choreographed swashbuckling,
lively character interplay and pithy, irreverent dialogue, it’s an
adventurous treat, plain and simple. Satire can so frequently seem
malicious and kind of jaded because there’s no lively appreciation of
the genre(s) being aped, but 1987’s The Princess Bride, is
lovingly framed as a rousing bedtime story, and wears its affection —
and thus its emotional honesty — refreshingly on its sleeve.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men)
brings his shrewd eye for detail and ear for whipsmart dialogue to bear
on this eminently quotable (to this day, “Have fun storming the castle”
ranks as my all-time favorite flippantly pleasant tiding of futility)
adaptation of his own cult tome, but the movie is just as notable for
its discernment in casting. Billy Crystal and Carol Kane are perfect as
Miracle Max and Valerie, and Peter Falk anchors the movie’s wraparound
segments as the kindly grandfather relating the story to his grandson
(a wee Fred Savage).

Released concurrently in “Dread Pirate” and “Buttercup” editions, which might best be described as his-and-hers versions, The Princess Bride
is presented here in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that
preserves the aspect ratio of its theatrical distribution and is billed
as a high-definition re-mastering. For those already owning the movie’s
previous special edition release, though, the difference is negligible,
with perhaps slightly more attention paid to color consistency in
cinematographer Adrian Biddle’s backgrounds.

Spread out over two discs in a regular Amray case with snap-in tray,
the film imports all the previous, vintage featurettes and
mini-documentaries from the aforementioned release, including separate
audio-commentary tracks from Goldman and Reiner. Among the bits new to
this release are a 10-minute mockumentary on the “real” Dread Pirate
Roberts, with historian’s recollections and other edifying information;
a make-up featurette that nicely showcases Crystal’s transformation via
new footage and interview information; a trivia game; and more.
Rounding things out are a mock-tour booklet (“Fezzik’s Guide to Florin”
— now, with the location of the Pit of Despair!) which offers up some
fun for diehard fans of the film. Don’t allow neophytes to do more than
flip quickly through it before watching the film, though, lest spoilers
dampen their enjoyment of the main attraction. A- (Movie) A- (Disc)

Screenings: Get Short-y/The Music Man

In two other tidbits for SoCal natives and/or traveling left-coasters, the Alex Film Society will present a special screening of 1962’s The Music Man,
at which co-star Shirley Jones will be present, on Saturday, July 29 at
8 p.m. For more information, phone (818) 754-8250 or visit alexfilmsociety.org.
Also, the 10th annual Los Angeles International Short Film Festival
will be held September 5-13 at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood. For
more information, visit the festival’s semi-eponymous web site by clicking here.

Road House

What’s not to love about an action movie whose story is as big and over-the-top as its hairdos? Starring Patrick Swayze as zen bouncer James Dalton, who “cools” the rowdiest club in Jasper, Missouri, and eventually triumphs, at great personal cost, over crooked small town kingpin Brad Wesley (a growling, glowering Ben Gazzarra), 1989’s Road House is perhaps the best and most unapologetically honest B-movie of its decade, and certainly the highbrow blueprint for the classic era, early ’90s canon of Steven Seagal that would follow in the wake of this movie’s tremendous word-of-mouth VHS success.

Kevin Smith and his producing pal Scott Mosier, self-professed fans of the movie, who nonetheless evidence no greater grasp of minutiae (or even plot, actually) than anyone who’s glimpsed even part the film on TBS in the past decade. Instead, this entertaining track devolves into a series of read jokes in which the pair takes the famously viral list of “man’s man” attributes credited to ass-kicker Chuck Norris (e.g., “He invented the cesarean section when he roundhouse-kicked his way out of his mother’s stomach”) and substitute the names of Dalton and producer Joel Silver. Along with this bit of juvenilia, Smith and Mosier offer up a rapid-fire blend of random, often only tangentially related observations, most of which are still funny — especially during the sex scene between Dalton and Elizabeth, which has Smith bemoaning his sexual prowess and technique.

Alongside an amusing trivia track, the highly enjoyable “What Would Dalton Do?,” running 13 minutes, takes a look at real-life bouncers and shares stories from their occupational lives (one dude ripped off a guy’s prosthetic arm) along with their thoughts on the movie, while the 17-minute documentary “On the Road House” includes interviews with Swayze, Lynch, Herrington, bit player Jeff Healey, villain Marshall Teague, fight choreographer Benny Urquidez and — disclosure alert! — yours truly. While my face time is dispiritingly limited, and my insights thus perhaps rather pedestrian, Lynch talks about the task of getting her hair blonde enough (“almost white”) and her skin dark enough (“mahogany, actually”) for the role, while Herrington notes the movie — his undeniable career high point — was “the most fun [he’s] ever had with [his] clothes on.” B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Bill Lawrence Scrubs in for Fletch Won Duty

In what might signal the eventual realization of Zach Braff’s rumored starring attachment to the prequel reboot of the Fletch series, the Weinstein Company announced yesterday that Bill Lawrence — creator and show runner of the Emmy-nominated Scrubs — has signed on to adapt and direct Fletch Won, based on the book of the same name from the successful 1980s franchise of mystery/comedy novels written by Gregory McDonald.

Fletch Won predates the first seven books in the series — two
of which, of course, were turned into movies starring Chevy Chase — and
follows the early days of the oblivious title character’s journalism
career as a junior reporter in his 20s. Fletch Won will be the
first feature film Lawrence (above) will direct, and is expected to
shoot in April 2007, following his work on the final season of Scrubs. No cast is yet attached; David List will serve as producer.

Even though production is a ways off, Lawrence is already looking forward to the challenge. “The coolest thing about the Fletch Won book is that it’s an origin story,” he says. “Like Batman Begins, I think people will enjoy seeing how Irwin Fletcher became Fletch. And not only can I recite the original Fletch
line for line, I actually read all the Greg McDonald books as a kid, so
consider me obsessed. I’m going to try as hard as I can not to screw
this up.” I can see this working, and a re-teaming with Braff might
well serve both of their burgeoning film careers. Stay tuned.

Little Miss Sunshine

Paul Dano), who has
taken an oath of silence until he achieves his goal of entering the Air
Force Academy. Living with them is Richard’s irascible father (Alan
Arkin), a foul-mouthed heroin junkie who heartily advises Dwayne to
bang all the chicks that he can.

When we first meet the dysfunctional Hoover clan, Sheryl’s suicidal
brother Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar despondent over a
recent breakup, has joined them as well, only further upping the
awkwardness quotient of dinner-table conversation. A call about the
titular California beauty pageant sends Olive into an ecstatic tizzy —
she’s a last-minute replacement — and so the Hoovers, unable to afford
airfare or leave Frank alone, all pile into an untrustworthy,
rusted-out VW Bus to head west. The bulk of the film then charts their
bickering misadventures on the road before arriving at the garish and
creepy but not too overplayed beauty pageant finale.

Penned by debut screenwriter Michael Arndt, the film is funny in
piecemeal fashion, charting various cathartic highs and crushing lows
enjoyed by its characters, but if only these bits felt more strongly
tethered to something emotionally substantive. Perhaps I’m a bit too
inured by hegemonic comedic formula, but Little Miss Sunshine’s
characters almost all feel like willfully colorful responses to the
sort of stale, cardboard characters we see in many broadly pitched,
mainstream comedies — atypical, therefore, but just as flatly
two-dimensional and in blind service to the contrivances of plot as
their less original contemporaries. Sheryl, for instance, has to go
from beleagueredly supportive to a harridan at a moment’s notice, all
in order to generate momentary drama, and Dwayne’s eventual breakdown
similarly leaves a sour taste of fleeting — and thus false — pathos.
The seams of this story all show.

Dayton and Faris — an experienced husband-and-wife team making the
leap from commercials and music videos to features with this, their
film debut — coax terrifically enthusiastic performances out of their
cast, and it’s here that Little Miss Sunshine most succeeds.
Arkin tears into his role with glee. Carell gets to showcase another
side of his talents. Dano is a gifted young actor with impeccable
instincts, and Breslin, meanwhile, is a smart choice upon which to hang
the film. In a story that’s rooted somewhat in the real world but
requires big gestures and acting out from a lot of its cast, she is the
underplayed nexus of what marginal, to-scale poignancy the movie does
achieve, for in her wide, blinking eyes and boldly indifferent Little
Miss Sunshine final performance one can clearly recall the tension of
adolescent realization at being judged, and how that judgment will
continue into perpetuity in adulthood.

Little Miss Sunshine isn’t for everyone — its R rating,
albeit a “light” one, assures us of that — but one can appreciate, in
fits and starts, the chord that it strikes in highlighting familial
extremes. Ultimately the Hoover clan achieves that pinch of momentary
togetherness that assures us all these characters really love one
another and belong together, but it feels synthetically attained in my
opinion. (Fox Searchlight, R, 101 mins.)

Can I Get a Hot Beverage?

I caught a screening of Pulse, the
Weinstein Company’s new J-horror remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film of the
same name, last night at the ArcLight in Hollywood, and while I’ll reserve sum
total judgment on the movie until a later date, one brief scene tangentially
stirred my ire, and got me wondering.

In said scene, Christina Milian, who plays star Kristen Bell’s best friend
and a fellow college student, wanders into class late, books cradled in one arm
and a takeout coffee cup — presumably just grabbed, en route — in the opposite
hand. She holds it, though, not carefully, as with a full, hot beverage, or even
as one would an almost empty cup of cold coffee. No, she holds it as it is: an
empty cup.

Now, Pulse is hardly the first or most egregious example of this
rapidly increasing and annoying phenomenon. It’s seemingly everywhere, including
in this summer’s The Devil Wear’s Prada, in which, as I recall, Anne
Hathaway’s put-upon fashion magazine assistant awkwardly balances a tray with
four very obviously empty cups of special-order Starbucks. In fact, whenever
movies want to show us a character juggling the myriad, whirlwind, crazy demands
of modern day life, they generally put a beverage in their hand, and more often
than not ostensibly a hot one.

The thing is, many times said cup will be clearly empty, as minutely
evidenced by its weight upon pick up, the complete disregard the actor/character
has for item, and/or some combination thereof. Is this some sort of goddamned,
ridiculous, arcane production rule or something? I know we don’t want “the
talent” scalded, but can we not have actors handle full cups of water or any
other room-temperature beverage? I’m not sure, but what was once just a minor
irritation has stirred in me a vitriolic rage matched offscreen by those that
ride around obliviously with their turn signals on.

Let me know of any examples you spot and/or remember, and together we’ll
make up a list to hopefully shame studios and filmmakers into paying attention
to this sort of piddling detail that, when botched, really pulls you out of a
scene.

Final Destination 3

It’s appropriate that a doomed roller coaster serves as the narrative leaping-off point in Final Destination 3, for the third installment of the teen-skewing (and teen-skewering) horror series about gory fate and unseen Death and all that squirmingly unnerving stuff is itself an exercise in cathartic goosing, in many of the best senses of the phrase.

On the eve of her high school graduation, Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) joins her fellow seniors for a night of celebration at a local amusement park. In line for a roller coaster, a premonition of the death of she and some friends causes her to freak out, and in the ensuing fracas, classmate Kevin (Ryan Merriman, below left) disembarks with Wendy, along with football jock Lewis (Texas Battle), sardonic Ian (Kris Lemche, quite good), goth chick Erin (Alexz Johnson), camera-toting lothario Frankie (Sam Easton) and others. These kids soon discover, though, that fate’s reach is hard to escape, and a series of grisly deaths follows.

As I’ve commented on before, there’s a lot of bad
independent cinema these days that just sort of floats by hazily, its attempts
at courting more overt commerciality ironically rendering it indistinct. Then
there’s something like Shadowboxer,
the directorial debut of Lee Daniels — producer of the Academy Award-winning Monster’s Ball — and a movie that makes
you appreciate independent films, if in no doubt wholly unintended ways. Yes,
if you’re going to do bad, you might as well close your eyes and swing for the
fences like Shadowboxer, in the hopes
that someone mistakes all that effort and intensity for insightfulness.

An emotionally over-dialed drama, Shadowboxer centers on the warped, intertwined lives of a pair of
live-in assassins — preternaturally quiet Mikey (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his
mentor/lover, Rose (Helen Mirren), who years ago rescued him from an abusive
household as a child. Theirs is a relationship that recalls a pet and pet
owner as much as anything else — Rose bathes Mikey, and he sleeps curled up at
her feet. To add, though, to the… intrigue? well, let’s say convolution, Rose
has now been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leading to a bit of a shift in
their traditional caregiver arrangement.

The pair’s latest assignment finds them carrying out a
contract, sight unseen, for crime boss Clayton (Stephen Dorff), an out-there
club owner whose villainous motivations are less recondite than purely
baffling. After offing a lippy subordinate himself, Clayton includes his
pregnant wife Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito) in a series of in-house hits just on the
off chance that she may be cheating on him (“We’ll never know,” he says with a
shrug and a smirk). Rose and Mikey coldly dispatch a group of Clayton’s
henchmen, but Rose has a change of heart when she sees a panicked Vickie’s
water break. So begins a harrowing life on the run for this ultimate odd
quartet — Rose, Mikey, a bewigged Vickie and baby. A year passes, and while Rose
looks to redeem their tragic past in her remaining time on Earth, a reticent Mikey
dutifully if dispassionately protects their new adopted family.

Penned by William Lipz (perhaps a pseudonym?) and credited
with 15 producers on the project, Shadowboxer
keeps you guessing, all right, but never in a really good way. Though one
hardly ever knows what is about to follow, the accrued litany of garish,
puzzling and/or silly elements reads like a random grab-bag of stylized clichés
and truncated impov exercises, from Rose and Mikey’s wheelchair-bound contact
and bizarrely operatic and baroque score by Mario Grigorov to a zonked-out
supporting turn by Macy Gray and not one, but two sex scenes between Gooding
and Mirren — one preceded by a striptease set to rapper Nas’ “The Cross,”
allowing this reviewer to unfortunately spend an inordinate amount of time
contemplating just how deep-set Gooding’s ass crack is.

Independent of its execution the film scores a few, scant
points for its off-kilter, multi-ethnic casting and blind eye toward
conventionality. But eccentricity in place of substance and psychological
perspicacity in the end doesn’t fly any more than rote formula. Directorially,
Daniels substitutes slow-motion for meaning, and the performances are wildly
uneven (Ferlito in particular is awful), sometimes seemingly cobbled together
from tonally different films. Only Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a shady doctor who
aids Rose and Mikey but then must deal with Clayton as well, escapes with his
dignity more or less intact.

Shadowboxer is
ostensibly a picture about colliding damaged souls, the legacy of sadism and
the toll and endless cycle of psychological abuse. But A History of Violence this ain’t. Lacking any natural flow or
cohesion, it instead becomes an unintentional comedy of unfortunate choices,
not the least of which is on the part of erstwhile Oscar winner Gooding, to
whom Chill Factor 2 must now be
looking pretty good. (Teton Films, R, 91 mins.)

Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Monthly Archives: July 2006

30 Days

On Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan

Jonah Hill Feeling Accepted Despite Girly Scream

Straight-to-Video Dreamin’…

Scoop

Miami Vice

Tsotsi

Free Screening of Pulse

The Princess Bride

Screenings: Get Short-y/The Music Man

Road House

Bill Lawrence Scrubs in for Fletch Won Duty

Little Miss Sunshine

Can I Get a Hot Beverage?

Final Destination 3

Shockheaded

Justin Theroux on David Lynch’s Inland Empire

The American Experience: MacArthur

Joe Dirt

Gil Kenan on Monster House

Kevin Smith on The Green Hornet

Covert One: The Hades Factor

Clerks II

Shark Attack!/Kingdom of the Seahorse

Shadowboxer