The young-lovers-in-crime sub-genre gets another rowdy little entry in the form of Jimmy and Judy, a very familiar and strained conceit that skates by thinly on the strength of its committed performances.
On its packaging, the film bills itself as a modern-day Bonnie & Clyde, and touts blurbs calling it the movie that Natural Born Killers wanted to be, or should have been, and, yes, the whole lusty us-against-the-world theme is there, and ripely explored. Yet a better point of reference might well be Ben Coccio’s 2003 independent flick Zero Day. In that film — an only loosely serialized mock-up of the Columbine tragedy — as here, the real issue under the microscope is teeth-gnashing teen alienation, no matter the gender trap or romanticized obfuscations.
Co-written and directed by Randall Rubin and Jon Schroder, the movie centers on social misfit/amateur video enthusiast Jimmy (Edward Furlong) and the impressionable Judy (The Ring‘s Rachel Bella, above), a young pair of spirited, new teen lovers who leave behind their comfortably numb suburban community in search of a better life in… rural Kentucky? (Bad choice, kids.) Sort of wildly naked in its willful provocation (Judy tonguing a shotgun barrel, for instance, and James Eckhouse cavorting about in S&M gear), Jimmy and Judy doesn’t exert a whole lot of effort in coming up with new triggers and circumstances for our teen antiheroes’ acting out in increasingly criminal fashion, nor does it work psychologically plumb these situations in many new or interesting ways.
So yes, that means on-the-run hair dying and head-shaving ensues, along with diatribes about “conformist crimeless virginity,” and how no one can understand Jimmy and Judy like one another. (William Sadler also costars, in loony cameo fashion.) What sells this well-worn plot to a small degree is Furlong, who gives an unhinged turn. I’d love to say it was darkly mesmerizing or revelatory, but that’s not really the truth about this performance; it works because Furlong, bloated and bleary-eyed, is obviously a young man given to certain excesses in his personal life, and this fact helps blur the line between fact and fiction for Jimmy and Judy. Oh, and though she’s not a great actress, for the prurient, the movie does feature Bella, from behind, running naked in a field, as well as other assorted bits of topless nudity.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Jimmy and Judy comes presented in anamorphic widescreen, with two different versions (rated and unrated) of its trailer, and a feature-length audio commentary track in which co-directors Schroder and Rubin are joined by cinematographer Ben Kufrin. Together, they recount the movie’s hometown location shoot (Schroder and Rubin are Kentucky natives), and shrug off any embarrassment over a scene in which someone in the background is seen taking a picture of Furlong on their camera cell phone. The undeniable high point of the commentary, though, comes when the filmmakers talk about Furlong’s drunken attempt to free lobsters from a local restaurant, and the fact that the police officers who arrested him in real life play cops in the movie, and do the same as extras in an early scene in the film. Thirteen minutes of deleted scenes are also included, the longest of which features the uninterrupted single take of Bella shaving Furlong’s head, replete with all sorts of asides and ad-libs. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)
Daily Archives: February 1, 2008
Stallone, Rambo and the Press Corps
From 1982’s First Blood to its third entry in 1988, Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo films
collectively pulled in $615 million worldwide. The fourth film in the saga, the
forthrightly titled Rambo, opened to
$18.2 million this past weekend, good for second place behind 20th Century
Fox’s latest first-quarter spoof flick, Meet
the Spartans.
For an action franchise out of the public eye for almost two
decades, and starring an actor eligible for AARP solicitations, that’s not
necessarily a bad haul. A lot of box office reportage, though, took potshots at
the cobbled-together, $50 million-plus production, and particularly its
multi-hyphenate leading man, characterizing Stallone as more or less washed up
— a fading analog star in a new digital world. The cruel, hard kernel of that analysis may or may not be true, but what does it say about Stallone and the
press corps?
Though generally (and not incorrectly, it must be stressed) rejected by critics (at
last check, it sported a Rotten Tomatoes fresh score of a dismal 36 percent), this
dismissive response toward Rambo can’t
all be judged by the reaction to the product itself. After all, Meet the Spartans was saddled with a
fresh score of 3, yes 3 percent, and
it’s been generally given the free pass equivalent of a what-are-you-going-to-do? shrug. Similarly, 2006’s Rocky Balboa, Stallone’s final chapter
of the other signature cornerstone franchise of his career, actually won
significant critical approval, with a 75 percent fresh rating.
At the crux of the dismissal is some scorn for and derision
toward the man himself; Stallone has always been a figure of hearty
contradictions — a mumbling, muscle-headed guy’s guy almost as likely to quote
Dickens as give a monosyllabic, rambling reply. Though twice Oscar-nominated,
and embraced early on for the ways in which his own rise to prominence mirrored
that of his pugilistic protagonist in the original Rocky, Stallone still was never taken very seriously in superseding
years because the bulk of his choices were seen as lazy.
Cretinous would be too harsh of a word, but his movies and
characters were all too frequently and undeniably set aside as pandering
populist trash. The rep on Stallone reflected that of a star athlete with a very
dodgy work ethic. (In that regard, he would mirror another adopted son of
Allen “We’re talkin’ about practice?” Iverson.) The disbelief was clamorous when
writer-director James Mangold rolled the dice on Stallone for 1997’s
Jersey
York
raised their head at a recent press conference in advance of the release of Rambo, where sample questions included,
“Are people surprised by your artistic motivations since the characters are so
physical?” and “So how did all the various production companies come in?” The
questions themselves are innocuous enough, but their oblique meaning comes
through.
For Stallone, now 61, Rambo is a bit of a legacy project. “The ponderousness that comes with aging, the
sense of weight, the sense of knowledge, of knowing too much, the lack of
naiveté, which happened in my life — all that sort of set the stage for me,” he
says. “I wanted Rambo to be heavier, bulkier. That’s why his first line in the
movie is pretty negative; he’s given up, he has nothing. The other Rambos I felt had a bit too much energy,
they were a little too spry. I’m not trying to run myself down, but there was
much more vanity involved: tank tops, it was all about body movement rather
than just the ferocity and commitment of what he was doing. This character, to
me, is much more interesting. I like First
Blood and I like this one, just like the first Rocky and the last one, Rocky Balboa. Everything in between was kind of trying to figure out what I should
do.”
For Stallone, that meant setting out to make a movie that
was “just man against man, [about] their intolerance of each other.” He
rejected ideas that put Rambo in the middle of more fanciful conceits,
insisting that real-life strife was the proper backdrop to bring this franchise
full circle. (That’s why Rambo opens
with actual images from the quelled pro-democracy demonstrations in late
September of last year, protests which were met with brutal force.)
That led him, along with a crew of roughly 570, to shoot on
location in
under arduous conditions. “There are 165 different snakes in
90 [of which are] poisonous, so we lived with the constant problem of people
being bit,” says Stallone. “There are centipedes the size of your shoe being
found in your shoes. It was rough,
but welcome to action films. You know what it actually reminded me of? I was just
watching the making of David Lean’s The
Bridge Over the River Kwai, and how much they just had to chuck, and use
brutal manpower to get inland. There’s nothing glamorous about it.”
If there’s little glamour, there is plenty of violence,
however, something that attendees of the press conference were certainly abuzz
about. “I did have a caveat with the MPAA,” explains Stallone. “I said, ‘Guys,
this is happening today. If we’re ever going to do something responsible where
art has the ability to influence people’s awareness and impact the lives of
these people, don’t dilute it, don’t water it down. It’s got to be uncomfortable.
It is uncomfortable — it’s miserable,
it’s distasteful, it’s horrifying. But [to] do violence light, it’s just wrong.
Don’t cut away too soon. Just let it sit in. I want people to feel it.’”
diminishing with his age, but they seem to still feel it.
journalists, on the other hand, are another matter…
For the full, original feature, from FilmStew, click here.
Trailer Watch: Semi-Pro
The trailer for Will Ferrell’s new flick, Semi-Pro, is online, and though Andre Benjamin is definitely underused and I just kind of smiled the first time I saw it, it’s something that’s undeniably growing on me. The absurdity quotient is high (ergo the “tender meat” comment at the end), enough so to summon generally pleasant memories of Anchorman, and the “basketball trance” bit reminds me of the classic Saturday Night Live “Palm Beach” sketch, in which Ferrell’s impression of an attention-deficit-challenged President Bush devolves to the point of him playing with a ball of yarn, like a kitten. Also, I just can’t stop singing/saying, over and over, “Get the funk outta my face… get… the… funk… outta my face!” Again, click here for the full trailer.
On Russ Meyer’s Triple-D Triple Feature
Tomorrow night, February 1, those in the Southern California area can enjoy a triple-D triple feature at Cinefamily’s Silent Movie Theatre, when three Russ Meyer flicks screen.
Kicking things off is 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, penned by Roger Ebert (above left). Next up is Up!, a maniacal film featuring a perverse Hitler look-alike, many elephantine prosthetic penii, a moonlit chainsaw fight and Meyer’s last great muse, Kitten Natividad — featured as a kind of crazed Greek Chorus, shaking her moneymakers, hanging from trees and spouting imagist poetry paraphrased from H.D. Hilda Doolittle. More Kitten action follows, with 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Supervixens, a film whose experimental excess makes all of Meyer’s previous work look as straight-laced and staid as a British comedy of manners. For more information, click here.
Over Her Dead Body
A languid, thinly sketched and habitually
unfunny supernatural comedy that never scratches beyond the surface of its
conceit, Over Her Dead Body quickly
wears out its welcome in both this world and the next. Delving into a love
triangle comprised of a pleasant guy, the psychic who falls for him and the
former’s vengeful, deceased fiancé trying to keep them apart, the movie works
neither in the vein of an exaggerated, farcical romantic rivalry, a la Death Becomes Her, or a more traditional
romantic comedy.
high-profile pairing of Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson swooping in the
following weekend in the adventure comedy Fool’s Gold, anything beyond a final
haul of $30-40 million domestically would represent Over Her Dead Body
drastically outperforming its worth.
A year after his tightly wound bride, Kate
(Eva Longoria Parker), is crushed by a falling ice sculpture on their wedding day,
veterinarian Henry (Paul Rudd) gets roped into seeing a psychic by his well-meaning
younger sister Chloe (Lindsay Sloane), who just wants to restore some easygoing
normalcy to her mopey brother’s life.
who also runs a catering company with her gay best friend, Dan (Jason Biggs),
doesn’t reveal anything, leaving Henry more skeptical than ever. Not easily
deterred, though, Chloe steals the late Kate’s diary and gives it to Ashley, so
she can use the private information to pretend to communicate with Kate’s
ghost, and thus “release” Henry from obligation.
and vice versa, a disgruntled Kate reveals herself, and stakes a possessive
claim on her former fiancé. Gamesmanship ensues, as Ashley — the only one who
can see and hear Kate — alternately fights for and considers ceding Henry to
the spectre of his vengeful ex.
The directorial debut of Jeff Lowell, an
episodic television writer who also penned 2006’s John Tucker Must Die, Over
Her Dead Body is a movie of phony raucousness. Owing to the small screen roots
of its creator, the tone veers wildly from scene to scene; comedy writ large
and obvious (hapless Dan creating a mess in the kitchen in slapstick fashion,
Kate making sounds of mock-flatulence that she believes Ashley will mistake for
Henry) rules the day. Absent a laugh-track, though, the staleness of these gags
reveals itself.
The staging is frequently awkward, from the
opening scene of Chloe and Henry’s introduction to Ashley (in which Dan implausibly
remains in the kitchen, in order to lamely conceal his identity for a joke
later in the film) to a hallway-set scene involving the revelation of Kate’s
diary. Dialogue, too, is frequently stilted and wooden; many scenes seem
comprised of placeholder jokes, given no sort of additional subtlety or
shading.
Despite the film’s billing,
the female lead. Yet the “combative spat” portion of the conceit — potentially
the richest comedic terrain — is hazily defined, and Longoria Parker’s Kate
isn’t very well integrated into the movie as a whole. She comes and goes,
haphazardly. Additionally, there’s no soft side to Kate to make us see she and
Henry as a legitimate couple in the first place.
Points go to Lowell and the film’s makers
for rounding up capable comedic actors (Sloane, Stephen Root, et al) for some
of the movie’s bit supporting parts, but the script consistently lets them
down. It takes ill-conceived, cardboard-thin stereotypes and somehow makes them
worse. Even a big story reversal at the end of the second act fails to give the
film any punch. Because nothing about the characters or any of their
relationships is in the least way believable, even in any world of heightened
affect, the ludicrous twist falls painfully flat.
Longoria Parker trades on the broadly
conveyed arch indignation that serves her well on the small screen, but
otherwise brings nothing new to her character. Similarly, Rudd is left to
define Henry solely through sardonic parrying.
parts — opposite Colin Farrell and Edward Norton in Pride and Glory, and
Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas — looming on the
horizon. Here she displays affability and an admirable willingness to indulge
in pratfall hijinks, but there’s absolutely no palpable romantic chemistry with
Rudd, and her canted, slightly off-center interpretation seems more ideally
suited to secondary lead roles.
For the full, original, slightly longer review, from Screen International, click here.