Movies : May 2002

23 May 2002

Hollywood Ending

A production meeting at Galaxy Pictures has Ellie (Téa Leoni) suggesting her ex-husband Val Waxman to direct a film set in the Manhattan of the last century. Waxman (Woody Allen) has two Oscars® but has been sliding downhill since then—currently he is in Canada filming a deodorant commercial and complaining about the moose (clearly, a Canada from an even earlier century). Studio boss Hal (Treat Williams), who got Ellie to dump Val for him, is suspicious but agrees. Except for Val’s persistent badgering of Ellie for dumping him 10 years ago (When did they marry? When she was 12?) production is set to proceed (Val’s current girlfriend gets a role unsuited to her strengths) when Val goes psychosomatically blind. Val and his agent soldier on, however, with the assistance of the interpreter hired to translate for the Chinese cinematographer and, later, of Ellie herself. <—> Call Dr. Kevorkian indeed. (When Val regains his sight and see the dailies he’s been directing in the meantime, this is what he says.) As a satire of the moviemaking business, there are so many others which are sharper and funnier (Griffin Dunne’s Lisa Picard is Famous being only the most recent). Shots with a planted camera desperate for something to happen in front of it, a son who comes out of nowhere, a Hollywood Ending that fits the clues but is unsympathetic to anyone but Val, all add up to a production which garnered but one laugh from me. As the producers read the cards from a preview screening, and the answers to the question, how would you improve this film, they come across this answer: arson. Another screening where I am grateful for free passes.

112 minutes.

19 May 2002

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos, who wrote the script) is 30, living with her parents still, working at her father’s restaurant, and the object of urgings to marry, and marry Greek, and breed Greek, and feed Greek, before it’s too late. Even though Toula won’t ever stray that far from the family, she does manage to get a job at her aunt’s travel agency (after going to college for computer lessons and finding she fits in at school better now than she ever did), attract the attention of a hopelessly non-Greek teacher, Ian Miller (John Corbett), and follow through to the marriage and beyond. <—> It’s pretty much a laugh a minute when two worlds collide and there are 27 cousins (first, at least) on her side all clamoring for a piece of Toula’s life. Yet I seem to be the only one to regret that the plain Toula from the beginning of the movie is never seen again. Her life without makeup and hairdressing was a lot cheaper than the lifetime of artifice and posing that the new Toula has chosen.

95 minutes.

18 May 2002

Enigma

A burned out mathematician is recalled to Bletchley Park. Seems the German armed forces changed their weather code a few days earlier. Can Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) save the Allied shipping in the Atlantic in 4 days? Mostly no. Tom is still mooning over file clerk Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows) to whom he pledged his love (mostly because she was thin and blonde and could dance and in spite of her sexual availability) and now she has disappeared in circumstances sufficiently suspicious that counterintelligence officer Wigram (Jeremy Northam) is bouncing around, asking impertinent questions. Claire’s roommate, Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet), agrees to help Tom in investigating the circumstances of Claire’s employment and disappearance. There’s still a war on, though, remember? <—> A Kate Winslet movie where she doesn’t take at least her top off? I feel vaguely… cheated somehow. Still, she’s fooling no one behind the eyeglasses and under the generously proportioned clothing. The implausibilities of Tom and Hester’s adventure begin to pile up, though. Why would the Enigma machine in the museum still have a battery in it, and why does it last so long? How does Tom manage to drive from 60 miles north of London to Scotland, any part of Scotland, in what looks like half a day at most? Still, with a pretty and handsome cast (Scott was the prince in Ever After) and bucolic settings with some suspense and a war atrocity (the massacre in the Katyn forest) thrown in to keep things hopping, it’s diverting enough. Every character is intended to be safely heterosexually oriented, too.

119 minutes.

17 May 2002

About a Boy

Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) is sufficiently well off that he doesn’t do anything. Well, there’s baths, shooting pool, shopping for CDs and DVDs, watching game shows on satellite television, but when he’s asked (as the women he’s trying to bed inevitably do) what he does, there’s a blank. Then, at 38, Will discovers the world of single women with children. His facility for lying faster than his ability to control his mouth, Will is soon caught up in the less-than-idyllic world of Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) and his depressed mother, Fiona (Toni Collette). Then he meets another, prettier single mother (Rachel Weisz) and life gets more complicated. <—> Funny and not too sentimental. Definitely a crowd-pleaser.

100 minutes.

14 May 2002

The Cat’s Meow

A yacht trip. Famous people gathering together for drinking, smoking, and adultery. A shooting. A lingering mystery for the outside world. <—> Eh, how sympathetic can rich people breaking laws be? If there was any doubt as to Kirsten Dunst’s talent based on her previous roles in genre films, this must be dispelled.

118 minutes.

05 May 2002

Spider-Man

Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) lives with his aunt and uncle (Cliff Robertson lending his venerable face for those who remember him to a role that must engender instant sympathy before being cut short as a moral lesson) in an indeterminate borough east of Manhattan and just cannot get a break. He’s forever missing the bus to high school and getting harassed by just about everybody while mooning over next-door neighbor Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). On a school trip just before graduation to an arachnid genetic engineering laboratory at Columbia University, Peter is bitten by an escaped spider and doesn’t feel so well. In the first of several curiosities of editing, he wakes up only the next morning, and he finds then that he no longer needs eyeglasses and seems to have just a bit more muscle mass. Discovering new capabilities within himself almost by the hour, Peter struggles to find some outlet, and first tries amateur wrestling. When his uncle is killed by the robber he let escape from the wrestling promoter’s office (and there is no funeral in another one of those lapses in the screenplay), he decides to embark on fighting street crime. There is a scene devoted to Peter discovering net-slinging, but not a scene where he figures out how to let go which I figure is just as important for swinging through the city (or at least that part of Manhattan below Central Park). Meanwhile, the rich military contractor father of a classmate (seems Harry Osborn flunked every private academy he and father Norman tried) has, distraught over losing a contract to another company and being thrown off the board of directors, used a performance enhancer the company was developing and, from time to time, metamorphoses into a vengeful creature the editor of the Daily Bugle dubs the Green Goblin. Eventually, everyone Peter loves will face danger and there will be a face-off and Harry will threaten a sequel. <—> Actually, I pretty much liked it. The net-slinging is far too disorienting for my tired eyes (and I suspect the camera spins are there to disguise any unreality in the swing points Spider-Man creates on his way around town) but the melancholy of growing up a loser is exquisitely detailed, not least in the scene where he engenders massive indifference from the receptionist at the Bugle. How Peter and Norman (Willem Dafoe) do not end up with bruises from crown to heel is left unexplained.

121 minutes.

04 May 2002

Y Tu Mamá También (2001) [ And Your Mother Too ]

The sons of the well-off in Mexico City—make that the very well off—are having unprotected sex with their high school classmate girlfriends, smoking pot, and dropping Ecstacy (specially imported from San Francisco) without a care. But when the girlfriends of Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garciá Bernal) leave after graduation for a summer in Europe (and all the temptations that men in Italy will pose), the two friends do not know where to focus next. They meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú) at a fancy wedding reception attended by the President of the Republic himself, and her marriage has taken a downturn, and she unexpectedly takes them up on their offer of a weekend at a beautiful secluded beach called Heaven’s Mouth, and they must scramble to find a car (a militant left-wing sister’s Dodge Diplomat station wagon) and plausible directions to some shore, any shore, from their even more stoned pal Sabo. Tenoch and Julio are looking for sex, of course, even if their style of unlubricated thrusting barely offers a clock’s minute hand the chance to flip to the next, but Luisa’s motivations are more of a mystery. Periodically, a narrator makes comment on the characters, their situation, and some of what goes unsaid between the good friends and their equally trash-talking, slightly older companion as they drive through a vast state to a destination unknown. <—> While just shy of the explicitness of Baise Moi, this film from Mexico has enough male nudity and unrestrained sexual situations to render suspicious the idea that there is some redeeming social commentary at the fringes. Yet the obliviousness of the two high school graduates, whose own social levels are not exactly co-equal, to the inequities around them, as la policia searches the cars of random travelers and machine-gun-toting officers pounce on peasants at the roadside, or as fishermen try to make a living when the beach is about to be closed off for a new hotel for the superrich, is palpable. Scenes and activities which induced a cringe in American Pie 2 for their artificiality and pandering, when shot with a handheld camera and actors who are not trying so hard to underplay their age, are not so objectionable here. The sharp-eyed are offered Beetle taxis in Mexico City and a bag from Tower Records that plays no part in the plot.

105 minutes.

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