Movies : April 2002

24 April 2002

High Crimes

Claire Kubik (Ashley Judd) has it all—the just-short-of-being-partner job in a San Francisco law firm (with a Herman Miller Aeron chair behind her desk, no less), the big house and adjoining structures (never bothered with a security system, though), and the handsome husband Tom (Jim Caviezel) with no discernible employment but ready to comply with the consequences of her ovulation. A brutal curbside takedown one evening out Christmas gift shopping, though, lands Tom in a military prison charged with the execution of nine citizens in El Salvador over a decade earlier. Unimpressed with the counsel assigned to the case (Adam Scott, I’m older than I look, ma’am ) she seeks out someone with experience, and finds it in the 452-days sober form of Charlie Grimes (Morgan Freeman). What a time for her ditzy sister (Amanda Peet) to show up, begging for money, and not too proud to hop in the sack with said defense counsel. All is not what it seems in a world of black ops, Marine camaraderie, dead and disappearing witnesses, and a highly decorated general who’s just not talking. <> Judd just seems to go for these movies where life just gets worse and worse (remember Double Jeopardy?). There’s a goofy energy to the way Claire keeps going as everything that matters collapses around her (such a shame she’s said she’ll be playing [only] a cameo in the tenth Star Trek movie) and her hair just gives up. Trust no one, after all.

114 minutes.

21 April 2002

Murder by Numbers

Cassie Mayweather (Sandra Bullock) is the homicide detective in a fictionally named oceanside community in California saddled with a nickname (the hyena), a troubled past (she’s gotten a letter from the parole board), and a new partner in the shape of Sam Kennedy (Ben Chaplin) transferring from vice on his first visit to a crime scene. Who could have murdered the woman lying wrapped in plastic in the woods? Could it be the poetry spouting high school seniors (Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt) playing with guns at an abandoned cliffside dwelling at the beginning of the movie? Or their marijuana salesman (Chris Penn) who works as a janitor at their high school? <> At least the shoreline was playing itself and not trying to pass itself off as North Carolina like in I Know What You Did Last Summer. Sandra Bullock, the it girl of 8 years ago, plays a character who’s a bit more troubled than her FBI agent in Miss Congeniality but can still charm when she puts the move on Sam (only to kick him out of bed and off her houseboat when it’s time to sleep). Interestingly enough, none of the sexually agressive women are victims (I sure figured the classmate who needed help with her physics exam was a goner). Director Barbet Schroeder still hasn’t met a goofy ending he could resist (Single White Female). And the trailers in front of this stank.

120 minutes.

12 April 2002

The Sweetest Thing

Christine Walters (Cameron Diaz), a San Francisco resident with no discernible employment, spends her days chatting with her roommates Courtney (Christina Applegate) and Jane (Selma Blair) and her nights hitting the clubs and making the boys miserable. When one particular boy, Peter (Thomas Jane), gets under her skin by not being particularly interested in her, Courtney takes the initiative for the two of them to crash the wedding Peter is attending the next Saturday. (Courtney makes some noises like she’s an attorney, and Jane exhibits poor management-labor relationship skills when she’s left in charge of a men’s clothing store.) There’s always time for a movie montage that curiously seeks to evoke Dumb and Dumber, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Grease. <> Grr. Diaz (or her agent) must think that the ditz she played in Charlie’s Angels is a more interesting direction than the adult we know she can play from Being John Malkovich. Applegate does nothing to justify her placement on the cover of the April 2002 issue of Vanity Fair. Blair must rue that her co-stars are not as short as Reese Witherspoon. While the dialogue and situations are NC-17 material, the flesh on display is strictly PG quality. How dare the local glandularly-driven critic slobber metaphorically over the three leads and not mention Parker Posey even once? She carried a movie all by herself (Party Girl) once upon a time (well, so did Applegate in Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead) but she gets cast as the older woman these days. At least I got to see some swell trailers.

84 minutes.

03 April 2002

The Time Machine (2002)

An instructor at Columbia University, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), is also an inventor, and has been in correspondence with a patent clerk in Europe. When his intended, Emma, is murdered by a common robber in Central Park, he throws his energies into a secret project. It is a machine to move back and forth in time, but his first use, to get Emma out of the park and away from danger comes to naught when she is run over by a horse drawn carriage. Puzzled and frustrated, he sends the machine forward, first to 2030, then 2037, then to 802701 where he discovers that Manhattan, once home to a glittering skyline and friendly bicycle riders, then an evacuation zone after the moon was blown apart, has become a grand canyon of sorts populated by dark skinned people of whom only a few remember the stone language. They are slowly being eaten by large, fast bipedal predators. <> What a disaster. Where to start? First, I am totally unfamiliar with the 1960 version (tactlessly mentioned in the course of the film by the 2030 personification of the New York Public Library, played by Orlando Jones—say, that’s one mean MTBF his archival storage technology experiences over the course of the film—as if, in the world of The Time Machine, one H. G. Wells had written a novel of that name 8 years before Alexander managed to build one). Secondly, the utterly unflappable protagonist considers the twice-witnessed death of his intended merely a problem in temporal physics and also harbors no apparent distress at being separated from his machine by the Eloi (which, as much as it can move through time with all those digits on the odometer—how did he solve the mechanical advantage problem that would make turning that left-most place value a bear? The film is not really all that interested in mechanics of the ordinary sort, either—is absolutely rooted in space). Third, there is the linguistic nonsense of the stone language being English as spoken in our century (considering that only a few millenia separate us, now, from Proto-Indo-European). If this is an example of how John Logan writes (notice his nod to The City on the Edge of Forever just before Emma dies) then the outlook for Star Trek Nemesis is not good. Why have I not mentioned who plays Emma? She is barely on screen as it is (fans of the old movie have a few seconds to recognize Alan Young) as the movie hurtles along. Fourth, the usual time travel difficulties: when in 1903 (four years later, the title says) he decides to return to 1899 to save Emma, where is the 1899 Alexander? Still on his way to Central Park? How’s he going to feel when he doesn’t find Emma? Will he take up the offer of the steam driven automobile driver and start up a new friendship? That advice I gave myself about colleagues is still valid. It’s a good thing I paid nothing to see this.

96 minutes.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 12-Sep-2004