Multi-hyphenate Clark Gregg didn’t have a lot of money for his adaptation of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, opening this week, but that’s OK — his cast was more than game to throw themselves into the somewhat spartan, briskly paced shoot.
“I’ve been able — once in a while, quite thankfully — to go do a big Disney movie and make some dosh, but then you’re faced with something like this, which is interesting and a little warped and strange,” says Anjelica Huston, who plays Sam Rockwell’s memory-stricken, institutionalized mother, Ida, in the movie. “And I brought my own wig to this show, a wig that I wore in a thing called Family Pictures, over 20 years ago. So I brought that wig into the mix for the older character, but we didn’t have any money to go out and have wigs made. My hairdresser on the movie had this wig that she was going to use on my stunt double for some of the younger stuff with my character, but we had no look for me as a younger person. Ida is kind of a mistress of disguise, so I slapped on the stunt girl’s wig, which was some vinyl thing that was bought on a corner in New Jersey, and it was like, ‘Yeah, that kind of works.’ It’s weird, you’re not quite sure if that’s her hair. But for me it kind of works for the part. We weren’t spending thousands of dollars, as one usually does in these movies, but… you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of money to throw at something in order for it to be good or convincing. And I always like scrapping things together a little bit.” For more information on the film, click here.
Most of what one needs to know about Made of Honor can be gleaned by looking at its DVD cover art, which was the same as the film’s theatrical release poster. Patrick Dempsey gazes straight at the viewer, with a wry, welcoming smile. Michelle Monaghan looks longingly at him, lips pursed. And both are air-brushed to a creamy monotone. It’s the perfect metaphor for a movie that has obviously had plenty of the spiky edges of its original conception smoothed down, polished to an agreeable, mass-market tone. It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, it just is what it is — a sign of how Hollywood unfailingly attempts to create, both in actuality and impression, blandly similar product.
Directed by Paul Weiland (a fact that lost me about four or five
minutes, wondering how different the film would have been if directed
by ex-Stone Temple Pilot frontman Scott Weiland), Made of Honor opens with a screwy college meeting of Tom (Dempsey) and Hannah (Monaghan); the former is dressed in a Bill Clinton mask and looking for sexual escapades, the latter gets mistaken for her roommate. A perfume macing ensues, but flash forward 10 years and the pair are best friends. They even have a little every-Sunday routine of dim sum, trolling for antiques at the local market and stopping off for a spot of shared dessert, where they play cutesy games over what will be ordered. Tom still has commitment issues, in no small part because of his father (Sydney Pollack), who’s seen entering into his sixth marriage with a gal (Kelly Carlson) with whom he has his lawyer negotiate bi-monthly blowjobs as part of a clause in their pre-nuptial arrangement.
When a six-week business trip to Scotland nets Hannah a suitor and proposal from the dashing Colin (Kevin McKidd), she asks Tom to be her maid of honor and, advised by a friend (Kadeem Hardison, who if he’s in a movie really should be sporting flip-up glasses) that it’ll be easier to bring down the whole relationship from the inside rather than the outside, Tom accepts. Frou-frou shenanigans follow, with Tom getting heaps of crap from a bridesmaid (Busy Phillips) that hates him, and finding out that Colin is a more formidable romantic rival than he first figured.
A lot of the scenarios, story choices and accompanying production flourishes in Made of Honor
feel lazily nipped from other films — right down to the inclusion of Tomoyasu
Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor or Humanity,” used widely elsewhere, including in the
trailers for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in a slow-motion scene that introduces the
bridesmaids. The banter is slightly above average, but what helps give the movie a small amount of lift is mostly Dempsey, who
brings a nice, light touch to a character who could otherwise easily come across
as too much of a have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too lothario. Ergo, as the saying goes, those who like this sort of thing will find much in this thing to like.
Made of Honor comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover. Its dual-layer disc offers up viewers a choice of 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen or 1.33:1 full screen presentations. An audio commentary track from Weiland serves as the only bonus feature on the disc. On it, he talks up the production’s shifts to various locales (both England and Los Angeles at times substitute for New York), and points out his son in the background of multiple shots. Weiland also mock-apologizes to a test-audience screening member for a scene in which Tom leaves a pair of sunglasses in an open convertible in New York, one of but several scenes in which there’s a sloppy disregard for prop detail. One of my pet peeves also receives more filmic ammunition when Tom carries a pair of very obviously empty coffee cops to his car. Still, who cares, right? After all, these are beautiful people! For a clip from the movie, click here; to purchase the DVD, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles will honor actor and
director Sean Penn with its most prestigious film award, the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film, at the 2008 BAFTA/LA Britannia Awards on Thursday, November 6, at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, it was announced today. “As a celebrated actor, director and producer, Sean has become a film icon over the past three decades,” said BAFTA/LA Chairman Peter Morris in a statement. “The roles and subject matter he chooses to tackle as a filmmaker are both challenging and inspiring to audiences worldwide.”
Penn, who has been nominated four times for the Academy Award as Best Actor, and won the
Oscar in 2003 for his searing performance as a grieving father in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic
River, will next portray gay rights icon Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s biographical drama Milk, which is slated for a November release from Focus Features.
Scripted hour-long American television famously gives the impression that there are maybe two dozen occupations in the entire country, with doctors being investigated by forensic specialists, lawyers suing fashion magazine employees (and perhaps one another), and cops chasing crooked psychologists while desperate housewives sip on spiked coffee behind their picket fences.
Both independent film and their low-budget documentary brethren, however, often offer all sorts of opportunities to explore the great, untilled territory of more off-the-beaten-path jobs. In the past year and a half alone, there have been spotlights thrown on such atypical vocations as topiary gardening, commercial fishing, vacuum cleaner repair and library work, to name a few.
Debut feature director Wayne Price’s The Doorman (Gigantic Pictures, unrated, 73 minutes) spawns similar intrigue as to the make-up and routines of its subject subset. It was, after all, a doorman at the Beverly Hilton Hotel who recently helped rescue former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards from a bathroom and, at 2 a.m., escort him past tabloid reporters seeking corroborative photographic evidence of his presence at the hotel at the same time as his now-confirmed mistress, Rielle Hunter. At trendy clubs, bars and hotels alike, doormen are the first face of the establishment and the image it wants to project — demi-gods, and arbiters of cool who, in certain situations, decide who ends up gaining admittance and who is destined to spend an hour or more standing in line outside.
A New York-set mockumentary about a smooth-talking, high-end gatekeeper, The Doorman follows a film crew who set out to make an insider’s guide to the legendary New York City club scene, using as their host and guide Trevor (Lucas Akoskin), an Argentinian who looks like a cross between Andy Samberg and Aaron Eckhart. Trevor has the power; he knows people. But more importantly (as Trevor frequently points out), he knows people who know him.
Or maybe not. As the film wears on, Trevor seems much less a player and more of a hanger-on. He mysteriously loses his job, struggles to keep up appearances in front of the camera, and gets caught in various lies that undermine his boastful self-presentation. Director Price (also playing himself on camera) becomes more and more exasperated, finally forcing the issue on Trevor, who admits to not being all that he seems.
Despite the fact that it features dozens of cameos by real-life boldface names — including Peter Bogdanovich, Thom Filicia, Denise Quinones, Amy Sacco, members of the band 311 and even lingering background footage of Paris Hilton — the film itself is a mess. If one takes honestly the notion that an outward face is super-important for glamorous, high-end nightclubs, then it makes no sense, I’m sorry, to have as your entrée into this world a smarmy braggart who pronounces Las Vegas as “Bay-gus.” Forgetting for a moment that the reality of Trevor’s grifter-type existence is completely at odds with all the interstitial talking head interviews that tout him as a global sensation (!), the satire here is simply nowhere near sharp enough. The concept is golden, worthy of a Borat-style treatment that skewers club owners and patrons in equal measure. The Doorman, though, comes off as a lazy execution of its distilled, single-sentence pitch line, in every way, shape and form.
Still, I left the movie intrigued. I wondered what kind of interesting glimpses into the lifestyles of privilege, and all the illicitness and rich-bitch fits that might theoretically entail, such occupational proximity would afford. So over the course of a couple weeks, I discreetly approached a couple real-life doormen at various Los Angeles hotels — people that I didn’t know by name, but a couple of whom I’d seen certainly dozens of times after more than a decade of conducting press junket interviews at such locations. Interesting stories about pre-“Brangelina” Brad Pitt and John Travolta ensued, as well as anecdotal bird’s-eye views of infidelity, something few other occupations offer. For the full, original piece, from FilmStew, click here.
