Movies : June 2004 : Constantine Hannaher : Content

25 June 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11

As I suspected from watching the trailer… a softball. Michael Moore’s latest takes easy aim at how people who want money try to meet people who have money, a lot, to show the Bushes clasping hands with Saudis and make something sinister of a flight of bin Laden’s relatives out of the United States while the rest of the airlines were grounded. When I think of how many airplane flights, especially on the day of the attack, still have unanswered questions about them… but it’s easier to go for the cheap laughs about how public personalities look goofy before the red light goes on. More examples of contradictory statements pre- and post-9/11 would have been interesting… and was including Britney Spears really necessary? Still, despite a long downer of a sequence accompanying a mother whose son has died in Iraq on her journey to Washington to confront the house of Bush (where a local wouldn’t have paid any attention to the crazy lady camped out in Lafayette Square), my audience at an afternoon matinee (at three o’clock, all the evening’s shows were already sold out) showed that if you’re in the mood for it, this film energizes.

122 minutes.

20 June 2004

Napoleon Dynamite

There’s something about Idaho that can bring the spirit down, it seems, and the existence of Napoleon (Jon Heder) denizen of Preston is bleak. He looks goofy, he lacks any physical grace, he’s saddled with an older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who spends the day trolling chat rooms, and no one takes him seriously. When Grandma has an accident in her all-terrain vehicle, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is assigned to move in and take care of the household. While Rico denies that he’s stuck in the past (even as he spends his days videotaping himself throwing a football as proof that he could have taken State in 1982) and comes up with a plan of door-to-door sales for himself and Kip, Napoleon bonds with Pedro (Efren Ramirez) recently from Mexico and they consider the possibilities for a date to the dance. The very blonde and bored cashier at the grocery store is Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff) and big surprise on her answer. Deb (Tina Majorino) is a photographer who tried door-to-door sales herself and is more approachable. The narrative arcs are tightly curled (nothing much happens) and much seems ill-judged (Napoleon must feed the family llama cooked food, Rico hands out flyers for breast enhancement pills to the girls still juniors in high school) but how can I not find endearing a screenplay that includes the thrift store experience?

90 minutes.

19 June 2004

The Terminal

If ever there was a movie where production design was a star, this ranks right up there. Only loosely based on an ongoing situation at a Paris airport, the action is transposed to John F. Kennedy International Airport’s international arrivals terminal, where Victor Navorski (Tom Hanks) is headed for the Ramada Inn at 106 Lexington, but doesn’t know enough English to say whether it’s for business or pleasure. Trouble is, his homeland Krakozhia (which if you will forgive a pedantic aside should probably be more properly transliterated as Krakožia if it weren’t for the inadequacies of domestic typography in preparing the crawls on the cable news channels inordinately devoted to the happenings over there—the fictional country is a Cyrillic-using nation) has been shaken by a violent coup, and the humorless, promotion-hungry supervisor of the airport (Stanley Tucci) refuses, for complicated bureaucratic reasons (the best kind, no?), to permit Victor to enter America and insists he must remain in the terminal. Unless he’d like to walk out and become someone else’s problem. Wouldn’t you know it, under the direction of Steven Spielberg, Victor is far too honorable to disobey the command to stay, and sets out to make do as best he can in what is essentially a mall with a very transient clientele. As such he gets to know the employees, including the officer who denies his application for a visa every day (Zoë Saldana, who, I’m sorry to say, does the Vulcan salute wrong, snif) in a sequence which feels too much like Groundhog Day, the catering company driver (Diego Luna) with a crush on her, the luggage handler (Chi McBride), the janitor (Kumar Pallana) who takes glee in travellers slipping on freshly mopped floors, and yes, the adulterous, history-reading flight attendant Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones, who if the IMDb is to be believed is playing older than she really is). Filled with cute moments and physical, emotional, legal, and logistical implausibilities, and probably just a bit more resonant if one likes jazz, a pleasant-enough homage to… waiting.

130 minutes.

18 June 2004

Control Room

From the co-director of Startup.com comes a look at the satellite television channel Al-Jazeera, following reporter Hassan Ibrahim, formerly with the BBC, in the run-up and aftermath of the major combat operations in Iraq last year. Somewhat scattered for the praise it’s getting.

90 minutes.

16 June 2004

The Stepford Wives (2004)

An escapist fantasy… but whose? When Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) makes her presentation as president to the EBS television network affiliates about the new reality shows for next season, there’s a gun-toting interruption, and before you can say You’re fired! she is out the door. Milquetoast husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) resigns his own vice-president position with the network and moves the family to the gated town of Stepford, Connecticut. Their bored children don’t know enough about the rest of the world to recognize the utter enormity of the houses, and no one is suspicious of the robotic dog which conveys with the house, but they’re soon packed off to camp. As Joanna and Walter get to know their neighbors, including the real estate agent Claire (Glenn Close) and statuesque Sarah (Faith Hill), they can’t shake the feeling that there’s something odd about the women in town. While Walter finds the men’s association very congenial, Joanna finds an author (Bette Midler) and an architect (Roger Bart) share her suspicions. What is the secret of Stepford? Um, the filmmakers can’t make up their collective mind on that question—or is it just me? I never saw the 1975 original, although the advertising image of Katharine Ross’s head broken like an eggshell was indelible, so I can’t compare. But not only does Stepford not have any African-Americans, as the author points out at the July 4th picnic, but they’ve gone beyond making the Mexicans disappear—no character who isn’t hyperrich appears in this movie at all (that I could tell). So the attempt to be funny about a massive conspiracy to replace the women (and femme men) in town by whatever means is creepier than respecting the inherent horror. And Paramount-DreamWorks can crack a joke about how slow AOL is, but not one word about Microsoft’s reputation?

93 minutes.

11 June 2004

Baadasssss!

Mario Van Peebles plays his father Melvin in a story of anti-establishment filmmaking in the hopeful era after Easy Rider based on the true story of the elder Van Peebles’s violent follow-up to the comedy Watermelon Man. Nothing too surprising for anyone who’s read Spike Lee’s book on making She’s Gotta Have It but as a tribute to another era it delivers the goods.

109 minutes.

10 June 2004

Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d’enfants)

Rarely does one comes across a film with such a relentless indifference for consequences that the characters must be judged non-human. Ostensibly the story of a French boy and a Polish girl who meet at age 8 when she dares him to release the handbrake on the school bus—the driver has stepped out to pick up her school books scattered to the pavement by bullies—we never find out what happened to the children in the bus as it rolled down the street to the T intersection. Their games of dare escalate through a sequence of eras (from elementary school to college and beyond) that, in the length of the gaps between them, don’t quite match the Peugeots helpfully provided by the manufacturer… The boy’s mother dies somewhat less violently than the mother died in Amélie and the cinematography aspires to the same zoomy energy that film had but really—people are getting hurt and no one notices. The final cementing of their eternal devotion to each other, well, ew… they deserve each other. Guillaume Canet’s resemblance to Patrick Dempsey helps him not at all. Yuk.