It’s a happy birthday to Eva Mendes, who turns 36 today, much to the delight of Latina Mole Enthusiasts subscribers. Mendes is at her core innately va-voomish, but has also shown flashes of something deeper in movies like Trust the Man and We Own the Night, and even some goofball charm in stuff like Hitch and Stuck on You. (Let’s not talk about Ghost Rider, meanwhile). One senses there could be something meatier and truly substantive out there for her, if she wanted to work for it, though.
Oh, and it’s Aasif Mandvi‘s birthday, too. He turns 44, but looks considerably less interesting in a bikini bottom, so there you have it.
Part murder mystery, part domestic melodrama, part dark comedy, Mother is also a wholly original treat that confirms writer-director Bong Joon-ho’s touch with multiple tonalities, as well as his status as South Korea’s preeminent modern auteur.
Simple peasant Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja, above) is the profoundly devoted single mother of 27-year-old Do-joon (Won Bin), a naïve, memory-impaired man-child whose affability helps mask the fact that something isn’t quite right with him. Walking home drunk and alone one evening, Do-joon encounters a schoolgirl who he follows for a bit before she disappears into a dark alley. The next morning, she’s found dead in an abandoned building. Do-joon is eventually arrested for her murder, and an apathetic police force doesn’t seem much interested in investigating Hye-ja’s insistent refusals that her beloved son could ever possibly be guilty. Embarking on an obsessive quest to prove her son’s innocence, Hye-ja at first focuses her efforts on his scummy friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo), but slowly learns more and more about the victim, which expands her suspect pool.
Like the works of David Lynch or Alexander Payne, Bong’s films unfold in mannered worlds where comedy and drama are hopelessly commingled. Owing to the combination of both this and its innate foreignness, Mother is unnerving — you don’t really know what it wants or expects from you as an audience member. Despite the general dramatic success of its homicidal mystery story strand, Kim’s bravura performance is the glue that holds everything together; with her plaintive eyes, she makes you deeply feel both her character’s mania and sadness, which is crucial to Mother‘s artful navigation of those treacherous pivots in tone. The film’s hold slackens a bit, understandably and almost necessarily, after a great third act shock, but one doesn’t greatly begrudge Bong the privilege of closing things out with an eerie, melancholic denouement. (Magnolia, R, 129 minutes)
Fifteen years ago, Val Kilmer was Batman, and costarred in Michael Mann’s Heat, one of the decade’s top crime dramas. This is worth pointing out because of the nature of work that Kilmer is now doing, which seems to consist solely of supporting roles and bit parts in films for somewhat wonked-out directors (Oliver Stone, Tony Scott, Werner Herzog), and lead roles in fairly undemanding dramas and thrillers — movies that as often as not seem to be cobbled together as some sort of tax shelter for Eastern European businessmen. (I didn’t see his turn as Moses in The Ten Commandments: The Musical, alas.) Decidedly of the latter category, Double Identity has an utterly anonymous title that can’t hold a candle to the strange name of its director (that would be Dennis Dimster-Denk). It also, somewhat unsurprisingly, has a rather silly plot and haphazard execution.
Kilmer stars as Dr. Nicholas Pinter, a physician working for Doctors Beyond Borders who is mistakenly identified as a secret agent by the Russian mafia. After a brush with death and a violent pursuit by a couple of ham-headed thugs, Nicholas is rescued by the British Secret Service and the mysterious and beautiful Katrine (Izabella Miko). The requisite “deadly web of murder of lies” ensues, don’tcha know.
Working from a screenplay co-written by Dimster-Denk and Zvia Dimbort (never thought I’d type that combination), Double Identity (original title… Fake Identity!) unfolds as a sort of wearyingly unselfconscious cross between your standard late-’80s-era straight-to-video actioner (goateed henchmen unloading clips from automatic weapons, while occasionally making accidental eye contact with camera) and a bloated version of NBC’s Chuck. Dimster-Denk doesn’t seem to have much experience filming and cutting together action, and his editing choices only underline the somewhat threadbare production value. Kilmer, meanwhile, floats through this thing pretty much on autopilot; if one was expecting a fascinatingly bewildered and panicky iteration of Gay Perry or, I don’t know, Doc Holliday, this isn’t it. He isn’t particularly believable as either a doctor or someone coming to terms with the crazy new circumstances into which he is thrust.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Double Identity comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Apart from a gallery of preview trailers for other First Look home video releases, there are unfortunately no supplemental extras — not even a small clutch of EPK-style on-set interviews, or a chat with Dimster-Denk about how the hell he got that name. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D- (Disc)
