Movies : November 2003

27 November 2003

Bad Santa

Oh, he’s bad all right. Not only is Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton), department store Santa for one month out of the year and unemployed the rest of the year, drunk most of the time (with all the attendant bodily emissions), he also curses incessantly—even in front of the children! It’s all Marcus (Tony Cox), the little person who plays the elf in this North Pole team, can do to keep Willie out of trouble. The scam is that come Christmas Eve, Marcus deactivates the store’s security system (which amazingly arouses no suspicion) and Willie cracks the store’s safe for a cool Yuletide payoff. But Willie has been slipping each year, and now that they’re in Phoenix and the suspicions of the store manager (John Ritter) have been aroused once he’s heard Willie going at it in the Plus Size fitting rooms and the store’s security detective (Bernie Mac) is nosing into their past, the payoff no longer seems so certain. On the other hand, Willie has lucked into a bartender (Lauren Graham) with a Santa fetish. When an 8-year-old boy (Brett Kelly) latches onto this particular department store’s Santa, and Willie apprises the possibilities for loot in the materially well-off household (the only live-in relative a grandmother who’s usually unconscious), he moves in and—as inevitably as may be managed in a film directed by Terry Zwigoff—starts getting emotionally involved in familial way. Aww. Cursing in front of children is unpleasant in a romantic comedy but clearly quantity does matter and in a bitter comedy it feels just right.

91 minutes.

26 November 2003

21 Grams

Somewhere in the American southwest, there are lessons to be learned: brush guards are pedestrian killers, smoking has consequences (on-screen and off-, thank you, patron, for stinking up the entire row of the theater, do you suppose it has anything to do with your coughing through the entire movie?), and befriending a character played by Sean Penn is usually bad news. With its plot lines jumbled up in much the same way as Amores Perros from the same director and scriptwriter, 21 Grams follows the lives of a number of characters connected, directly or indirectly, with a collision: Paul (Penn) whose need for a heart is fulfilled in a way that inspires investigation; Jack (Benicio Del Toro) the ex-convict who preaches Jesus to youth but whose tattoos don’t sit well at the country club where he caddies; Cristina (Naomi Watts) the mother of two whose recovery from rampant drug use is fragile enough that one visit to the club is one too many; Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg) wife of Paul whose desire for a child is a source of conflict. The intercutting of the plot lines with the temporal order of each rearranged is an intriguing approximation of the actor’s burden to create a character when each scene is filmed separately in an order convenient to the production, but the ultimate effect is to highlight the artificiality of the drama—though it’s easy to see that no actor could resist the opportunities afforded by the individual bits of work. Alas, Watts seems to be blond for good.

124 minutes.

23 November 2003

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

A manly adventure with a boyish slant, with but one wistful look at a woman (one of the natives, of course) and lots of cannonballs finding their targets, wooden and human. We join the story in progress with the HMS Surprise at anchor off the coast of Brazil. In the year 1805, war between Britain and France continues by proxy on the world’s seas, and the captain of the Surprise, Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe), has orders to find a French vessel and neutralize its war-making capacity for the enemy. While things do not go so well at first, the crew, stratified as it is with officers, children in training, and able seamen aboard, has faith in Lucky Jack, and they pursue their mission around Cape Horn and to the Galapagos. For, with all the vigor on display, there is still time to indulge the ship’s doctor, Irishman Stephen (Paul Bettany), and his scientific interests. And as much as he is the ship’s strength as leader, the captain also finds time to play the violin. The detail expended on life aboard ship is well appreciated and the battles build to a climax in a satisfying way that The Pirates of the Caribbean The Curse of the Black Pearl was too postmodern to remember. With no major missteps on display (the Eurocentricity of the movie’s title notwithstanding) and full-blooded performances all around, young and older alike, definitely an entertaining time.

138 minutes.

20 November 2003

Love Actually

Call me a curmudgeon, but this romantic comedy in which no stop goes unpulled left me irritated and unmoved, starting with a misjudged (and ahistorical, as far as I know) reference to September 11th. Set in the 5 weeks before Christmas in a Britain where no workplace acquaintance is safe from heterosexual advances, the film follows the entanglements of a wide variety of citizens as they prove, incessantly and to an overinsistent score, that love is all around. How could I warm to any character if no one uses a Macintosh? The only Macs seen are in advertisements lining the set for Heathrow airport, and the promotion for the new iMac suggests a filming schedule many, many months ago, making the casting of Billy Bob Thornton as a randy, unpolished President of the United States a matter of ambiguity. The nudity and cursing (especially in the face of children, even if it is dubbed post-shoot) just add to the wrong notes.

134 minutes.

19 November 2003

Looney Tunes Back in Action

Fitfully amusing but burdened by the familiarity of Brendan Fraser in the starring role (as a famous actor’s son whose work as a security guard on the Warner Bros. lot is terminated when Daffy Duck gets out of control) recalling his work in Monkeybone, the charmless performance by Jenna Elfman (as the Warner Bros. vice president for comedy whose ill-judged firing of Daffy Duck starts off the mayhem), and the exertions of Steve Martin (as the fearless leader of the Acme Corporation). While the extensive parade of animated characters brings some pleasure, some of the human cameos bear the whiff of favors repaid. The attempt to make fun of product placement falls somewhat flat, coming after an extensive sequence which must be considered a giant product placement for Las Vegas as a tourist destination. The travels of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck pursued by Porky Pig through a sequence of paintings from the 19th century has received a fair bit of critical notice, less well publicized is the pop quiz on movie monsters of the ’50s when the group ends up in Area 52 including even a black-and-white Kevin McCarthy still warning that You’re next!

91 minutes.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 27-Mar-2005