Movies : March 2005

30 March 2005

Beauty Shop

I skipped the sequel to the original so the character of Gina (Queen Latifah) is new to me. She has moved from Chicago to Atlanta where her pianist daughter is attending a school for the performing arts and rents a booth at the hair salon of self-infatuated Jorge Christophe (Kevin Bacon). Gina’s personality is too big to be an employee for long and soon she is in her own shop where she is joined by a co-worker, shampoo girl Lynn (Alicia Silverstone) making the move to stylist, and her clientele, dizzy but open to suggestion Terri (Andie McDowell). She meets the tenant above the shop, Joe (Djimon Hounsou), and a more perfect character there is not: self-reliant (an electrician), artistic (also a pianist), studious (books piled everywhere)… An undemanding comedy that nevertheless keeps the laughs coming. It’s a shame that Silverstone has had to return to her roots, as it were (if I had been reviewing at this site in July of 2000, I would have savaged her appearance in Love’s Labour’s Lost), but she’s game to throw herself into a Southern accent.

106 minutes.

27 March 2005

D.E.B.S.

Babes with guns would be a reliable combination, one might think, but too often the execution is lacking. A refugee with a 2004 copyright date and a limited release offers a different take, proposing that the right answers to certain questions on the SAT lead to invitations to a secret collegiate academy for the training of intelligence operatives. Sharing a force-field protected house is the squad of captain Max (Meagan Good): Amy of the perfect score (Sara Foster), chain-smoking, French-accented Dominique (Devon Aoki), and Janet (Jill Ritchie) still looking for her stripes. The Headmistress (Holland Taylor, pitch perfect in every one of her scenes) takes a special interest in their next mission: arch-villain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster, looking very much like Anita Pallenberg did in Barbarella) of the bank robberies and plans to sink Australia is in town (this might be the last film that gets to shoot at the Toluca Tunnel and its adjoining substation) to meet a Russian assassin. What no one other than Lucy’s long-suffering henchman Scud (Jimmi Simpson) knows is exactly why Lucy is meeting the assassin… but when the assault on the restaurant by Max’s squad (assisted by agents of every other federal agency around, including Bobby from Homeland Security who’s just been dumped by Amy) finds Lucy and Amy alone in a stand-off, well… romance is in the air. They’re cute, the performances aren’t embarrassing, the plot keeps everything hopping, the movie’s sprightly, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

92 minutes.

25 March 2005

Miss Congeniality 2 Armed & Fabulous

Quite a number of sequels have passed by without notice on these pages, and my luck with the others has been hit-and-miss, and while Shatner’s I’m not as old as I look is no match for his dramatic reading of I’m confused in the original, Diedrich Bader has nothing with which to make up for the absence of the time-worn dignity which Michael Caine brought, and no villain can hope to match the energy of Candace Bergen, with a love interest conspicuously absent, the action can focus on the fighting and stuff. Curiously bereft of a sense of time (10 months from the original is when again?) and making nothing of the height disparity between Sandra Bullock (as the FBI agent Hart forced by celebrity into public relations work) and Regina King (as the FBI agent Fuller with attitude to spare assigned to be the bodyguard when Hart travels to Las Vegas after the remnants of the original’s cast are kidnapped) it’s no classic. There isn’t even any suspense, really.

114 minutes.

23 March 2005

The Jacket

What to make of the life of Jack Starks (Adrien Brody)? In quick succession we jump from his mortal wounding in the first Gulf War to his inexplicable revival in the tent hospital to a chance encounter as he hitchhikes through Vermont with a seriously messed-up mother (Kelly Lynch) and an adorable daughter to the ill-fated acceptance of a ride to the shooting of a state trooper and the courthouse railroading that lands him in an institute for the criminally insane. There the unorthodox medical practices of Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson) lead to Jack’s being wrapped in a straightjacket, injected with drugs, and slammed into a morgue drawer. What tricks of the mind might play upon him in the dark? For a movie where Scotland impersonates New England under a constant blanket of snow and Keira Knightley is the down-and-out diner waitress, drowning in eyeliner, who encounters Jack in what she says is the year 2007, it’s not too terrible. Seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh (as another doctor in the institute) made up to look like Elisabeth Shue is a little weird.

103 minutes.

21 March 2005

The Upside of Anger

A family melodrama with a good Scanners moment in which Joan Allen plays the abandoned wife who turns to drink and Kevin Costner is the beer-swilling ex-baseball player neighbor who drops by every chance he gets. But what a cast! Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, and Alicia Witt! So it gets to coast a long time on their starpower.

117 minutes.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 01-Apr-2005