30 July 2004

The story of Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno), seventeen years old, and working to strip the leaves from rose stems on a plantation in Colombia. Her household depends on the income but she can’t resist complaining about the work conditions, especially after she experiences the first symptoms of pregnancy. Her boyfriend liked the lovin’ but isn’t so keen on the consequences—his marriage proposal sounds like another service write-up at his motorcycle repair shop. When a new face at a dance proposes a different line of work, Maria is interested. To be a drug mule, she must swallow more than 60 compressed pellets of cocaine wrapped in the cut-off fingers of latex gloves, fly to New York and enter the United States without arousing suspicion despite her ignorance of the language and land, expel her cargo under the twitchy supervision of thugs, and return within a week. Befriending Lucy (Guilied Lopez) who has done the run twice before, and irritated by her clinging pal Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega) who has decided she should be a mule too, Maria embarks on the flight. Nothing goes quite right, but Maria’s fearlessness in the land of full-service gasoline stations and willingness to talk back to people whose report can get her family hurt very badly are her advantages. Not white-knuckle in the way Touching the Void was, but tense enough, and the casting of Moreno is a strong thread that carries the production (which is straightforward but never cheap) far. When Maria walks the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens and spots a rose vendor…

102 minutes.

27 July 2004

I was dragged to this even as I threatened excrutiating retaliation. The movie starts out promisingly enough as meek Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) struggles with her job in the advertising agency for the Hedare cosmetic firm which, ominously to students of design, has a logo looking very much like a pharmaceutical, while her nights are sleepless from the loud parties across the alley she dares not protest. One morning, a cat appears on her upper-story windowsill, and when Patience steps out to retrieve it, detective Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) figures her for a jumper. With feline and fetching citizen seen to safety, her coworkers (including Alex Borstein with accent dialed down way low) encourage her to reciprocate the detective’s interest. But when the head of the firm (Lambert Wilson) gives her a personal dressing-down over her performance in creating a campaign for the company’s newest product and sets a midnight deadline for revisions, her attempt to deliver the latest renderings lands her in a room where she hears things she was not meant to know. Left for dead after passage through the firm’s manufacturing facility’s sewage pipes, Patience is revived by the breath of a cat. The movie’s wobble picks up momentum when the screenplay passes up the opportunity to show a feline behavior in having Patience wake up the next morning all clean. With another limp performance from Bratt following his turns in Abandon and Miss Congeniality, a cinematographic style that evokes all too well a video game’s perspective and character movement, a plain abundance of animation replacing Berry in the action scenes, the movie jumps the rails, satisfying only those starved for glimpses of flesh. How weird is it that the cosmetic firm does its research, manufacturing, advertising, warehousing, and trucking all in-house? And, oh, yeah, freedom is power… just until the next rent payment is due Patience!

About 100 minutes.

25 July 2004

More of the same fights, chases, gunfire, and urgent clacking of keyboards that were featured in 2002’s The Bourne Conspiracy, quickly wasting the one distinction offered by the earlier installment (Franka Potente as Marie Kreutz) and moving on to bureaucratic infighting between new-ish agency mission director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and seen-it-all I retire in a year Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) as a whole variety of assassins from the agency and elsewhere converge on the task of killing Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). The cinematography is jumpy and the rivalries less than compelling, but the signature car chase filmed the old-fashioned way (and transposed to Moscow this time around, yes, the guy driving the Geländewagen is the villain) serves its purpose and, my my my, Nicky (Julia Stiles) not only reappears but manages to survive.

107 minutes.

21 July 2004

Oof. What I need now is another movie about old age and decrepitude. Especially in the form of a biography about a last-century songwriter who composed on the piano. Still, with Kevin Kline as Cole Porter from when he was well-established in his man-seeking ways to his death as a one-legged widower (in 1964, although the film is silent about calendar dates) and Ashley Judd as Linda Porter, the woman who sought him out for marriage and stuck by him as his fame and appetites grew, I can see its appeal for an older generation.

125 minutes.

16 July 2004

On the busy streets of Chicago in 2035 C.E., homicide detective Del Spooner (Will Smith, undressed early in the film) engages in a bit of sentience profiling and chases down an NS-4 robot rushing with a purse in hand. Del is wrong about the robot’s motive, but when the founder of United States Robotics Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) is found dead at the company’s headquarters of an apparently suicidal fall and a prototype of the new NS-5 is found hidden in the supposedly locked room from which Lanning fell, Spooner pushes for an arrest. In a world with no energy worries, in view of the dominance of Audi vehicles on Chicago’s streets and immense underground highways, USR and its abrasive head, Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), cannot permit an inconvenient public relations problem to delay the worldwide deployment of the new model to every household. But with the help of Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan, made up to look like Frances McDormand to indicate her repressed sensibilities as a psychologist assigned to make USR’s robots more human) Del gets closer to the secret behind Lanning’s death and the NS-5 project. Apparently not a direct adaptation of any specific work of Isaac Asimov but rather a screenplay with a few bits here and there fitted in, this summertime thriller spans the decades from Asimov’s first explication of the three fundamental Rules of Robotics (yes, they were rules in 1942’s Runaround ) to Giskard’s formulation of the Zeroth Law in a relatively few minutes with lots of fights, vehicular chases in a suspiciously suddenly deserted and lengthy tunnel highway (some sweet politics going on for USR’s enormous delivery trucks to fit down there), and projectile fire going on in between. Not to mention an irrelevant cat. Completely sufferable entertainment.

115 minutes.

A listless affair for fans of the lead actress only that mostly plays as a weak episode of her now-ended television series. Hilary Duff plays Samantha Montgomery, a resident of the San Fernando Valley, whose dream of attending Princeton University is dashed when her father dies in the Northridge earthquake and her stepmother, Jennifer Coolidge (the manicurist from the original Legally Blonde), treats her abysmally in favor of her two daughters. It may serve as a measure of the desperation a viewer may feel, that I started various calculations based on the date of that earthquake. However, Sam has been text-messaging with another aspirant to admission at Princeton, but she doesn’t know it’s her high school’s quarterback, Austin (Chad Michael Murray). I already know Austin is no good because he drives a Geländewagen, but the rest of the class thinks he’s hot stuff even though he’s as inexpressive as a board. Anyway, there’s a costume ball around Hallowe’en, and the two meet, and Austin can’t figure out who the short blonde in the tiny mask might be. To the extent that the character of Austin’s girlfriend and lead cheerleader Shelby (Julie Gonzalo) is well established as vain, self-centered, shallow, and vindictive (she’s the one at the diner asking for something with no carbs, no sugar, and no fat in the trailer) I judge it to be poor screenwriting to make out her change of boyfriend to be a prize. So sad, but my advice remains: psst, play brunettes!

97 minutes.

10 July 2004

My better judgment, from having found Will Ferrell one of the least funny elements in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, was weakened by favorable reviews locally. I needn’t have bothered. Ferrell plays San Diego’s Channel 4 anchorman in an indeterminate year of a weakly evoked seventies who espies a new target for his manly magnetism at a rowdy pool party. But Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) turns out to be a new member of the on-air talent at the television station. That only encourages Ron and the other members of the News Team (Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Steve Carell) to further pursue a sexual relationship in the crudest and lamest ways. Veronica falls for Ron even as the station manager (Fred Willard) assigns her demeaning assignments like a cat fashion show. When Veronica is encouraged by the other female employees to play a prank on Burgundy’s well-known reliance on the TelePrompTer, the news team lineup is shaken. There’s stuff to laugh at, no doubt, but the parade of cameos is distracting, and the characters are largely unredeemed.

95 minutes.

09 July 2004

I saw Before Sunrise on the Tuesday of its first week of release at the AMC Skyline Center. The film directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy was distributed by Columbia Pictures. All very mainstream. Amidst all the blather from the two characters as they met cute and wandered around Vienna in the course of one night, I remember a trolley and few indistinct buildings. It says a little something about the state of independent filmmaking that the sequel is distributed by Warner Independent Pictures (which cannot even manage to evoke a p in its logo) and the film is released only in art theaters. Sure, it’s more of the same, with differences. Jesse (Hawke) is in Paris on the last day of a tour promoting his book, a loosely disguised recounting of his overnight encounter with a young French woman. Celine (Delpy) has shown up at the bookstore having finally put two and two together and realizing that the author at the book signing is the man she promised to meet again after six months. (What are we to make of their conversation in Waking Life?) Life circumstances in the intervening 9 years have led to less hopeful, more burdened characters. At least the Peugeot minivan is lovingly photographed.

78 minutes.

05 July 2004

Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) has lost his job delivering pizza from a moped, he’s falling behind in his college studies, and his childhood sweetheart is getting famous and he’s torn because he dare not tell her why they can’t be together… I would have been happy had the whole movie continued in this anguished vein, but the genre demands otherwise. In a Manhattan that lacks a Central Park but has a tabloid publisher (J. K. Simmons) with enough time to chew out a stringer, a fusion scientist has created a set of four robotic arms controllable by a human consciousness (and protected from overload by a little thimble of wiring) to manipulate the sun-like object at the center of his project for a self-renewing energy source. Of course, the first demonstration goes horribly wrong and Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) is now at the mercy of the mechanical miniature Dune worms now stuck to his back, and he’s mad. While in the who cares department, Harry Osborn (James Franco) is upset that Spider-Man has shown him up again and has started to see his father in the mirror. Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) is appearing off-Broadway in The Importance of Being Earnest and is engaged to the publisher’s son, but she still remembers her kiss with Spider-Man and realizes something is missing from her life. Yet Dunst plays M. J. with a physical sloth and mental fog which is weird. An elevated section of the subway that runs down a long avenue and ends abruptly and perpendicularly to the shoreline with no turns in the meantime? Maybe it wouldn’t bother many others, but… and are you telling me no one in that subway car had a camera in a wireless phone? Yet, even with the repeated visit to a building engulfed in smokeless flame, Maguire’s sympathetic hero balances the comic-book excesses.

128 minutes.

02 July 2004

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know the setup—an old man (James Garner) reads to an old woman (Gena Rowlands) a story from a notebook of the romance between a society girl from Charleston, South Carolina and the lumber mill worker she meets over the summer in Seabrook. With Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia all under the heel of the Third Reich by the summer of 1940, Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) spots Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams) at the carnival and pursues her relentlessly. Allie abandons her music lessons and tutoring to be with Noah all the time, but of course it is only a matter of time before her parents (David Thornton and Joan Allen) make the situation most schematic and Allie is packed off early to prepare for college at Sarah Lawrence. With time, the war catches up with them in their divergent lives—Noah loses his best friend in the fighting in Europe and his father sells the family home so Noah can pursue his dream of renovating a riverside plantation house, Allie works as a nurses’ assistant and meets a wounded soldier who fixes up real pretty and rich and promptly proposes—but a stray human interest story in the Charleston newspaper about the poor boy who single-handedly fixed up the old place draws Allie back. There is crying a-plenty, a PG-13 sex scene, family secrets mechanically revealed, the old woman’s Alzheimer’s, and a manipulative ending. But a salute to the team that said, sure, we’ll produce a story that absolutely depends on a young actress to carry it for 2 hours, for Rachel McAdams manages handily. She fits into the historical setting in a way that has tripped up many others.

123 minutes.