30 April 2004

Mean Girls

Another month, another Lindsay Lohan-goes-to-high-school movie, it seems like. This time, she’s Cady Heron, freshly transplanted from an unspecified African location, where she’d been home-schooled by her professorial parents, to the junior class at North Shore High (presumably in some suburb of Chicago) where she must run the gauntlet of Girl World . Cady’s guides are Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), on the outs with the Plastics: the Queen Bee and her Wannabees, Regina (Rachel McAdams), Gretchen (Lacey Chabert), and Karen (Amanda Seyfried). The creators of Heathers would likely give points off for casting the Plastics with actresses well into their twenties (and I even guessed wrong on who was oldest) and as a PG-13 movie, it can hardly compare. Still, it’s witty (screenwriter and U.Va. graduate Tina Fey gives herself a not-so-small role as the math teacher) and fast-paced and not nearly so cruel as the recklessly-driven school buses might suggest. Plus everyone’s so cute!

97 minutes.

09 April 2004

Dogville

Yes, it’s long, and it doesn’t help that John Hurt’s narration is loaded with adjectives that prejudice our ability to make sense of the proceedings independently or which cannot hope to be supported by the evidence on screen. The intertitles (chapter headings) are no less overreaching. A small town (Dogville) at the end of a Canyon Road in the Rocky Mountains is a set of chalk lines labeling the houses of the residents and businesses along Elm Street. When Grace (Nicole Kidman) shows up with the sound of gunfire at her back, the town scold, writer Tom (Paul Bettany), persuades the town to give her a chance at sanctuary. At first suspicious of her fine clothing and mysterious past, the town’s residents are hesitant, but eventually relent and permit her to do the stuff that doesn’t need doing. But when the reward for her return escalates, the town’s bad side comes to the fore, starting with her rape by the farmer (Stellan Skarsgård). American authors have decried the small town for a long time, so the furor when a foreigner does it is overblown. The ending, violent, nasty, vindictive as it is, actually brings to mind The Prisoner. Yeah, go figure. Kidman still has it but oh, dear, whatever happened to Blair Brown? Lauren Bacall, Patricia Clarkson (appearing in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater next month), Ben Gazzara, Chloë Sevigny, Jeremy Davies (playing the slow-witted opposite of his treacherous intellectual in Saving Private Ryan) and others do what they can. I have to wonder, though, how hard it was to maintain composure on the blank soundstage. Tendentious but not boring or exactly bad.

About 181 minutes.

The Girl Next Door (2004)

So… aside from the glorification of drug use, the objectification of women, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the violent fantasies… what’s not to like? Let’s state up front that there is only male nudity in this film. Elisha Cuthbert lacks the maturity that made Michelle Pfeiffer such a hit in The Fabulous Baker Boys but does well enough in the role of the house-sitting new neighbor Daniella who takes a shine to the innocent look and Peeping Tom inclinations of shy and unpopular Student Council President Matthew (Emile Hirsch). Right. While she puts his decision to go to Georgetown University at risk by having him cut classes, and puts his chances of a scholarship based on a speech about moral fiber at risk by leading him on, her old producer Kelly (Timothy Olyphant) is working hard to get her back in the business. I have heard, I don’t remember where, that this plot itself is lifted from a pornographic film, so there’s potential copyright infringement enough for everyone to share! Okay, it really hurts my empathy for Matthew when he blurts out her real name at a Las Vegas adult film convention. And that burned out Cadillac Seville in the back yard of a rival producer? Totally unremarkable in the universe this film inhabits.

About 110 minutes.

02 April 2004

Home on the Range

Somewhere out west in the nineteenth century, a show cow by the name of Maggie (voice of Roseanne Barr) is overlooked when a dastardly act of cattle rustling by one Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) devastates yet another landowner in the area. Maggie is donated to Patch of Heaven, a small farm run by an old woman, Pearl, who has just received a notice of auction for back payments due. Brash Maggie persuades refined Mrs. Calloway (Judi Dench) and slightly out-of-it Grace (Jennifer Tilly) to join her in a scheme to collect the reward for capturing Slim and save the farm. Along the way, they meet a horse Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr.) who’s a legend in his own mind and also wants a piece of the action. A fire alarm interruption aside, a short, diverting, if somewhat murky in its color palette, cartoon.

About 80 minutes.