Daily Archives: September 15, 2007

Mr. Woodcock

Film Reviews

When it was first announced in the trades, Mr. Woodcock had
the undeniable ring of truth on its side. After all, if one couldn’t
directly relate to being tormented by a school gym teacher, then
certainly there were memories of another kid — some pudgy,
huffing, out-of-shape wallflower — serving as the constant whipping
post of a cruelly hyper-vigilant instructor. The movie’s pairing, too,
seemed an inspired one, with Billy Bob Thornton playing the titular
unrepentant jackass and Seann William Scott starring as the now-adult
object of his psychological persecution, a self-help author who returns
to his small, Midwestern hometown to find his mom dating his former
nemesis. Sadly, a post-mortem reveals nothing to the distracted,
scattershot-vision Mr. Woodcock but shattered hopes and expectations, and lots of uncomfortable silences. This just isn’t a very funny movie.

Though its faults don’t really lie with him, Mr. Woodcock is still most interesting when viewed through the prism of Thornton’s career. Despite possessing a genuine chameleonic quality (see The Man Who Wasn’t There, in addition to Sling Blade),
Thornton frequently finds a way to make parts bend more naturally to
him without it coming off as crass or lazy. Five times married and five
times divorced, he wears his troubles, mania and insecurities (like his
genuine, perhaps only slightly overstated phobia of antique furniture,
let’s say) on his sleeve, and this somehow makes him more endearing.
It’s interesting, then, that Thornton would become embraced for playing
assertive, caustic types, when in reality he’s so little like that.

1999’s Pushing Tin actually presaged greater successes to come, because
it showcased so nicely the playful naughtiness of Thornton’s
hollow-cheeked, arch-browed deviousness. Films following clearly in
that vein were the mid-sized, foul-mouthed cult hit Bad Santa, and subsequent remakes of Bad News Bears and School for Scoundrels, though each was rightly judged by the marketplace, and grossed less than its predecessor.
Mr. Woodcock, unfortunately, continues that downward qualitative
trend, and will likely do the same at the box office after lethal
word-of-mouth spreads.

A troubled production that saw original director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) booted, and Wedding Crashers
helmer David Dobkins come in for re-shoots (he takes a producer’s
credit on the final product), Mr. Woodcock is a mish-mashed affair that
never cultivates a cogent comedic point-of-view. Is the movie essentially about Scott’s character, John Farley, and his inner demons, however
colorful and writ large? Is it a crude, enthusiastically broad
slapstick comedy, as the poster and some TV advertisements would
suggest? Or is it a combative story of masculine competition, with a
young buck rising to physically take on and figuratively slay the
twisted inspiration of his personal makeover? In servicing each of
these strands in elementary, hopscotch fashion, no satisfying depth is
developed. Woodcock’s SOB father (Bill Macy) is trotted out but left
mostly unexplored as the root cause of his son’s bitterness, while Amy Poehler — as John’s voluble, alcoholic
literary agent — is left to amuse only herself. Abandoned as he is here by the material, meanwhile, one has to wonder if it isn’t
time for Thornton to hang up the high-beam glare and snappish guise for
a while. An extended layover might further whet audience appetites, making a bitter screen return eight or 10 years hence even sweeter. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Happy Birthday, Tommy Lee Jones

Birthdays

It’s a happy birthday to Tommy Lee Jones, who turns 61 today and probably celebrates, wherever he is, by conducting a hard-target
search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse,
outhouse and doghouse in that area… for Twinkies.

True story: I was riding down an elevator with Jones and Susan Sarandon recently at the press day for In the Valley of Elah, and there was some pleasant, back-and-forth, catch-up chit-chat about the domestic preparations of sending kids off to school. Jones said he had just gotten back from dropping off his daughter at boarding school in Asheville. Then, he added pointedly, “She’s down there with her idiot mother.” (I guess this would be Kimberlea Gayle Cloughley, his second wife.) Oooh, tangential, pointless denigration! Kind of awkward, really…

Diane Lane: One Fierce Talent

Interviews

At its core, director Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People
is largely a movie about class and cultural clash, so it’s no wonder
that a conversation with Diane Lane about the predominant themes under
the microscope in the film — the collision of haves and have-nots, with
almost everyone screwed up in their own way — revolves largely around
the sociological differences, real and perceived, between the rich and
the rest of us. “I think people tend to group together with whoever
makes them feel more accepted, and water does seek its own level,” Lane
says during a recent interview,
decked out in a fashionable red dress, accentuated with a smattering of
gold jewelry. “So within any level you’re going to find subgroups; the
self-destructive types, the philanthropic types, the types who are
obsessed with other people or people obsessed with themselves.”

the cover of Time, emblematic of Hollywood’s younger generation of so-called “Whiz Kids.” After the one-two punch of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish in 1983, Lane appeared poised to write her own ticket for pretty much the rest of the decade.
But then, Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club bombed, she turned down Splash, and suddenly Lane’s rising star took a hit. Apart from the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award,
Lane spent the better part of the next 15 years working in mostly
forgettable fare. “I always was working, but never in things that were
necessarily aiming high in terms of the money they would make,” Lane
says. “No expectation was attached to me, I was just allowed to work,
which was fine with me, because then there was no burden on me to
deliver.” It wasn’t until 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, opposite Eastern Promises star Viggo Mortensen, that people remembered she could act, Lane says. “That was good,
because then I was afforded movies that people would see,” she recalls.

For Lane, it was the cracked characters and some unanticipated narrative twists that made her want
to sign on for Fierce People in the first place. “It reminds me a little bit in my most enthusiastic, hopeful way, of Little Miss Sunshine,
in that you visit all these characters, you see all these
points-of-view, and it’s not a feel-good movie, but it’s a complete
journey. Every character has an arc, more or less.” For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Anton Yelchin: Beaming Up to the Stars

Interviews

Eighteen-year-old Anton Yelchin immigrated to the United States from Russia with his figure skater parents before he was even a toddler. Even though he’s grown up here, though, it’s that latent outsider’s perspective that has informed his own personal sociological curiosity, and helped him establish an occupational beachhead playing a variety of wide-eyed innocents, including in 2001’s Along Came a Spider and Hearts in Atlantis; in David Duchovny’s 2005 directorial debut, House of D; and in last year’s sweaty teen kidnapping tale, Alpha Dog.

Fierce People, with Donald Sutherland, Diane Lane and Chris Evans — felt an affinity for his character. “He’s 15 (too), I get what he’s feeling — he’s undergoing emotions natural to somebody that age,” says Yelchin, whose genial speech is peppered with copious “likes” and wide smiles. “I think the type of kid Finn is existed 100 years ago, he exists now; he’s kind of a smart-ass kid who has to take care of this mother, who he loves. It didn’t seem like anything that wouldn’t be relevant today. I suppose if it were of a story about some hippie kid in the summer of love, dropping acid, then I’d have to do more research about the time period and everything, but this is just a regular guy.”

Spanning time, though, will soon become second nature to Yelchin. After all, he’s set to bring to life the role of Pavel Checkov in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise, which starts filming in November. “I’m waiting to read the script, actually,” says Yelchin. “I guess they’re withholding that until they get casting done or whatever. I plan on… becoming as much of a Trekkie as a I can in the couple weeks before we start shooting — just renting all the box sets, not going outside, not seeing the sun rise, just having the shades drawn.” For the full interview/feature, from Reelz, click here.

Fierce People

Film Reviews

Directed by Griffin Dunne — who, as the son of jet-setting Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne, knows a thing or two about rubbing elbows with the wealthy — the 1980-set Fierce People is chiefly about the collision of classes, and how even affluent factions result to primitive behavior. A collection of wildly colorful characters in search of some sort of narrative cohesiveness, though, the movie — adapted by screenwriter Dirk Wittenborn from his own novel — never gels into something more than the occasional, piecemeal entertainment of its fractured parts.

Anton Yelchin (above right) stars as 15-year-old Finn, a well-intentioned kid pinched buying drugs for his junkie masseuse mother, Liz (Diane Lane). This bust wrecks Finn’s plans of spending the summer with his estranged anthropologist father, studying the remote jungle Ishkanani tribe. Instead, Liz drags Finn out to the rural New Jersey enclave of Vlyvalle, to spend the summer with her eccentric sugar daddy, Ogden Osborne (Donald Sutherland). While Liz begins attending AA meetings and strikes up a dubious relationship with Osborne’s physician (Christopher Shyer), observant, hoi polloi gate-crasher Finn, meanwhile, settles into life with the “tribe” of wealthy country-clubbers that inhabit his new home.

He finds a brazen flirt in maid Jilly (Paz de la Huerta), a kinda-sorta girlfriend in Osborne’s granddaughter, Maya (Kristen Stewart), and a strange mentor and advocate in Maya’s older brother Bryce (Chris Evans, above left), a rakish college washout. Unfortunately, just as Finn thinks he’s found his way, things begin to spiral out of control. Sexual awakenings both pleasant and quite rude then ensue, and Finn begins to see that wealth can be a mask for some nasty deeds.

Yes, one might be surprised to learn that Fierce People, in its third act, essentially becomes a whodunit about Finn’s ass-rape at the hands of a mysterious assailant. Or perhaps that’s not a surprise. After all, that seems to make about as much sense as some of the arbitrariness on display here. It’s not necessarily the consistent collision of wackiness and earnest symbolism that hamstrings Fierce People. After all, a film need only unfold in a world that makes sense within the parameters of its own devising. But the tucked away cul-de-sac of exclusivity in which Fierce People unfolds never quite feels fully sketched out. The end result feels like a grouping of potentially interesting, if sometimes thinly drawn, characters in service of an undercooked narrative premise we see reflected more starkly every day in tabloid celebrity misbehavior. It’s just too contrived to be taken seriously, and too burdened with sometimes thought-provoking parallel imagery to be enjoyed as a trashy, turn-off-your-brain delight. (After Dark Films, R, 107 minutes)