31 May 2004

Don’t tell me that Democrats have tied their fortunes to the writings of Art Bell and Whitley Strieber! Based at least in part on their book The Coming Global Superstorm (as acknowledged at the end of the movie as everyone rushes for the exits) and displaying all the restraint that Independence Day was known for, a disaster movie that relishes in destroying Los Angeles landmarks with enormous tornadoes and sinks New York City’s Manhattan beneath four stories of water but relegates the suffering at other longitudes to views from the ISS. The creators must have gotten Show, don’t tell backwards somewhere along the way. Jack (Dennis Quaid, fulfilling the quota for that surname in a Roland Emmerich film) has been studying cores from very old ice under Antarctica and developed a theory of sudden climatic change based on shifts in the balance between fresh and salt water in the oceans. When a research station in Scotland run by Terry (Ian Holm) starts to report plummeting temperatures in the North Atlantic, Jack tries to warn the Vice President (Kenneth Welsh) but makes little headway with his alarmism. As the storm gathers power all around the Northern hemisphere, and a wall of water heads for New York City, even alarmism is too late. Meanwhile, Jack’s assistant Jason (Dash Misok, who looks so much like the Super Size Me guy, it’s uncanny) finds time to hit on the NASA liaison (Tamlyn Tomita). The end of civilization as we know it is ably covered with wall-to-wall coverage by Fox’s affiliate in Washington, eliciting snickers of recognition in a local audience (which also responded very favorably to the appearance of the Wendy’s logo later in the movie). Wouldn’t you know it? Jack’s son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, looking and sounding way too old for his role as a high school senior) is stuck in New York City just as Jack has figured out that the entire northern latitudes will experience a tremendous fall in temperature that will freeze exposed people in mid-stride! What will Jack do? And so on and so on… Not strictly speaking excruciating, but still, consider it a heaping serving of kitchen logic. Touching the Void suggests to me that the fall was survivable…

122 minutes.

30 May 2004

Melissa Sagemiller (derided in my review of Soul Survivors as the bland object of affection in Get Over It, a complaint I renewed regarding her appearance in Sorority Boys but all that is forgotten and forgiven now that she’s matured) provides the only humanity in a horror story of sexual impulses gone wrong. She’s Lisa, the new and markedly temporary member of the typing pool at a publisher of technical manuals. Rip Torn is looking fairly cadaverous as the gruff boss petrified at the prospect of a sexual harassment suit. The company’s fortunes are in the hands of their most impressive writer, Kenneth (Desmond Harrington), but his libido is limited to listening to the bedroom antics of his neighbor, the apartment manager (Udo Kier). Ken’s prankster colleagues slip him a postcard depicting Nikki, an expensive sex doll made of silicone, and it’s only a matter of hours before Ken has overdrawn his bank account ordering one built to his specifications—which match in detail Lisa’s appearance. The user experience in ordering the product is a multimedia extravaganza, but Ken is surprised by the arrival of the crate at his door. Did the little detail of the company’s notification of an expected shipping date not fit in with the screenplay’s attempt to build foreboding? Slip in a little Vertigo as Ken continues to modify Nikki to echo Lisa’s taste in nail polish even as he warms up to Lisa at work, where they make a good team completing the important assignment. Descend even further, though, as we find out how handy a full set of power tools can be in an apartment in which the philosophy is, anything is possible if you read the instruction manual. Not as much blood as ran in Audition, certainly, though there is a murder here and there, and hardly believable as a psychological study. Too low budget to be really creepy (the same walls show up over and over in the curiously windowless workspace) and it is a low blow indeed that Kenneth drives a Focus!

92 minutes.

A high school’s queen bee has her classmates desperate for validation, but the slightest step off the straight and narrow leads to grief, and as for everyone else who doesn’t measure up, woe betide them, too. Didn’t we just see this? (Mmm, yes. More than once.) Strangely enough, the sense of redemption was much stronger in the secularly oriented entertainment. Of course, the setting at an American Eagle Christian High School and the displacement of food and fashion talk with God and Jesus aside, this is a secular entertainment as well. The conveniently named Mary (Jena Malone, which makes my missing The United States of Leland a mistake—she was the ferry boat girl in Cold Mountain) is told by her boyfriend that he might be gay (her puzzlement garners far fewer laughs than similar scenes in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion or Scotland, Pa.) and drawing a dubious conclusion from the advice of the queen bee Hilary Faye herself (Mandy Moore, cute and earnest, but… that’s some shiny lip gloss she has on—ow! the glare!—and is blue eye shadow ever in vogue?) while at the target range, offers herself up to Dean (Chad Faust) as a cure. Things don’t work out the way the rising high school senior planned (Dean is off to Mercy House for re-education) and it takes a late-night movie on Lifetime shared with single Mom (Mary-Louise Parker) to realize she’s pregnant. Unlike Africa Girl in that other movie, Mary’s parenting has been poor, and Mom’s designs on the school principal, Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), aren’t helping any. Doomed to clichés as soon as Mary charts her due date to be the night of prom and ultimately far less satisfying.

93 minutes.

28 May 2004

A brisk entertainment with some of the goofy energy of A Knight’s Tale in which the baby Ella is given the gift of obedience by a vain fairy (Vivica A. Fox) and grows up, after her mother’s death and her father’s marriage to a money-grubbing socialite (Joanna Lumley), the pretty daughter (Anne Hathaway) beset by jealous stepsisters. She’s more concerned with the slavery of giants and the exclusionary laws against elves than with how dreamy the prince (Hugh Dancy) is, protesting a local appearance of the prince at a mall opening with her friend (Parminder Nagra). But her stepsisters Hattie (Lucy Punch) and Olive (Jennifer Higham) discover the gift, and the ambition of the regent (Cary Elwes), goaded by his serpent pal Heston, knows no bounds. Narrated onscreen by Eric Idle in rhyme, and featuring the lead from The Guru (Jimi Mistry) as a magical book and Heidi Klum as a hottie giant and Irish scenery (heavily massaged in the computer as it might be), an amusing diversion I almost missed.

About 93 minutes.

25 May 2004

Boring.

137 minutes.

23 May 2004

A strange roiling in the sea presages sinking ships, a fierce wind devastates a coastal village, Geiger counter readings find the new, large depressions in the mud to be radioactive, an old man speaks of the folk legend of a monster which must be appeased with girls… unexpected survivor of H-bomb tests and relic of the Jurassic age, it’s Gojira! I’d never seen this movie in any form, so the opportunity to see this moody, conflicted tale of post-war Japan (with all the silliness confined to the audience) in its 1954 domestic release edition is a treat.

96 minutes.

21 May 2004

Rachael Leigh Cook is still adorable as ever in this personal valentine which took its time reaching theaters (copyright date of 2003). The writer and director, and writer of some of the music too if I read the credits right, fictionalizes his relationship with an actress who developed schizophrenia at a young age. Coddled teenager Mark (Jonathan Tucker) attends private school and the confluence of a driver’s license and alcohol leads to an automotive collision that injures classmate Sue (Agnes Bruckner—I remember her now!) and the school’s head priest (Ed Begley, Jr.). Sue’s mother (Carrie Fisher) files suit against Mark’s family and his well-off father (Joseph Mantegna) fixes things to send Mark into the Marines, but not before he visits the mental institution in Connecticut where Sue has been sent because of her mother’s appalled reaction to Sue’s promiscuity and is smitten with actress-rock star Dori (Cook). (I skipped Josie and the Pussycats so I last saw Cook in Antitrust.) That one look is enough (that, and the written correspondence) to sustain him in boot camp while the drill instructor (Val Kilmer) makes it his mission to get this justice-evading punk to drop out of training. But Dori’s prognosis is not improved by her romantic attachment to a soldier, whose mission eventually leads him to Beirut in 1983. A time before the HMMWV. On the edge of believability with Mark’s persistence in the face of medical advice. Did I mention Cook remained adorable? Adorable is good, but insanity in the family is bad… er, so I’ve heard.

96 minutes.

Two words: pepper spray. Okay, a few more: That’s not mine! A direct sequel to the 2001 hit picks up with the honeymoon of the ogre Shrek and his princess bride (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz again) and their first argument, her desire to visit her parents in Far Far Away Land. Oh, Shrek sees nothing but disaster ahead, yet with Donkey (Eddie Murphy) on the tailgate of their covered wagon they are soon enough on the long trip. Far Far Away Land is Hollywood and Beverly Hills rolled into one and Shrek’s assessment of the reaction of the king (John Cleese) and queen (Julie Andrews) was sound. Complications build up as Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders) promotes the cause of her son, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), and a hit man—that is, hit cat, Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas)—is hired to do away with Shrek. Consistently amusing, but I reserve the most laughs to the too-brief allusion to Cops. How scary is it that I might miss a joke if I hadn’t ever seen Flashdance?

92 minutes.

16 May 2004

In and around Glasgow at a time when the memory of wartime rationing remains fresh, barges ply the waterways delivering coal and other goods. Joe (Ewan McGregor) is topside one morning on the Atlantic Eve when a body floats alongside. There’s something familiar about the slip the corpse is wearing and in the curves of her back, too, but having assisted in fishing the body out of the water Joe just resumes smoking, reading a paperback novel, and staring at the wife, Ella (Tilda Swinton). Her husband Les (Peter Mullan) and their young son have taken Joe on as a boarder, and it’s not long before Joe is begging off a trip to the pub for a game of darts in favor of some rough coupling on the canal’s bank. Then there’s Ella’s sister, whose husband just died falling off a lorry, she’s content with an alleyway, and a new landlord’s wife once Les figures out what’s going on. Turns out (in flashback) that Joe knows exactly who the corpse is: Cathie (Emily Mortimer, last seen fully naked in Lovely & Amazing) with whom he’d had several sexual liaisons. Say, if the lotteries in Scotland want to fund a film that says our system of justice was so bad, we’d hang the wrong person, more power to ’em. Even better that the novel first published in 1954 was written by a heroin addict.

100 minutes.

14 May 2004

A Buddhist parable wrapped in the beauty of a national park in South Korea which features animal cruelty, premarital sex, a murder, a suicide attempt, a completed suicide by immolation, child abandonment, a drowning… On a lake nestled improbably in the side of a mountain floats a small structure with more doors than walls, where a monk instructs a young boy. As the seasons change, the decades inexorably pass. The practically-minded might join me in asking such questions as if the boy took the only boat to the shore to collect herbs in the forest, how does the monk shadow his moves? and what happened to the dog, anyway? and does the cat appreciate its tail used as a paintbrush for writing? Once again, only male nudity.

104 minutes.

11 May 2004

How could I pass up a film set in New York? If you can put up with the antics of two short, scrawny girls with mostly ligament for necks without cringing too much, eh… it might work for you. A touch too much backlot work and shooting in Toronto.

90 minutes.

07 May 2004

With his ex-wife’s insurance paying for the expenses of three medical professionals, and a preternaturally understanding vegan chef as a girlfriend, Morgan Spurlock endures the assessment that his physique is top-notch and resolves to consume exclusively from the menu board at McDonald’s for a month. Spurlock has plenty of outlets to choose from in Manhattan, including Chinatown and far uptown where working conditions are finely calibrated to prevent a sustainable life, but Morgan’s concern is the immediate deleterious effects on the body of the high-fat, high-sugar products on the menu. He also travels the country to eat at McDonald’s locations to see how many times it’s suggested that he supersize his order. His doctors are shocked just how quickly he deteriorates. Spurlock is preaching to the choir with me, perhaps his weight gain (which tooks months to reverse) and near liver failure can be a lesson to others.

100 minutes.