Movies : July 2005

27 July 2005

Bad News Bears

Allegedly a remake (I never saw the 1976 original) about an exterminator with some non-zero experience in major league baseball persuaded by talk of payment to coach a team of middle schoolers. Billy Bob Thornton draws on the crude-tongued, heavy-drinking character he played in Bad Santa to present Morris Buttermaker, the Cadillac Eldorado convertible driving man who finds a basement full of rats to be less than an urgent situation. Of course, the children he is asked to coach are those no other team wanted but somehow his sense of pride is revived and he manages to recuit the throwing arm of his less than impressed daughter and the team begins to work together. There is an uptight rival coach (Greg Kinnear) who finds Buttermaker’s presence in the league to be an affront. No major missteps on the part of director Richard Linklater, but even I (as someone outside the sports movie market) was finding the sequence of innings hard to follow.

109 minutes.

26 July 2005

Wedding Crashers

It’s one of those comedies that asks you to believe six impossible things… but anyway John (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) are mediators whose fast prattle gets divorces settled quickly and whose major outlet for fun is to crash weddings for the easy beddings amongst the romance-besotted guests. But one wrong name the morning after too many and the questions set in: is this all that there is? is there nothing more? Yes, there is. One more Washington area high society do to infiltrate, the wedding of the daughter of a cabinet member (Christopher Walken). Their practiced shtick attracts the attention of the secretary’s other daughters, immature sexual aggressor Gloria (Isla Fisher) and collected but sensitive Claire (Rachel McAdams), and the lying duo are invited for a weekend on the Maryland shore with the family which includes a sexually conflicted mother (Jane Seymour) and other assorted unbalanced personalities. Since I’ve seen the end credits of Mr. & Mrs. Smith I’m better able to recognize the camera set-ups which have been included to let Vaughn loose, and he and Wilson can be funny indeed. As worthy as a darkly brunette McAdams might be, though, John never changes his hair when he grows up (you knew that was coming) and the movie comes to a dead stop with its cameo appearance of someone I find distinctly unfunny (the theater got silent, too).

120 minutes.

22 July 2005

Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City)

A (school) year in the life of the young woman Caterina (Alice Teghil) whose father has been transferred from the coastal town of Montaldo Di Castro to teach elementary school in Rome itself. Are you alternative or preppy? she is asked on her first day and indeed her big problem will be which clique she fits into best: the scraggly brunettes whose parents are known for their left-wing protests, or the sleek blondes whose parents are known for their wealth and support of the right-wing government? Hmm… the naive new girl in school… cliques… hmm… brunettes v. blondes… hmm… the 2003 copyright date frustrates the shallow analysis I am reaching for, and of course local critics are enraptured by the intellectual and political posturing instead of the blatant comment on the mean girl problem in Italian schools. Although episodic, with little justification for Caterina’s shift from one clique to the other, and so schematic that each clique is seated in class on a side appropriate to their politics , the father Giancarlo Iacovini (Sergio Castellitto) is hysterical in his forthright disgust with his former charges in the old neighborhood (known in Rome for its deactivated nuclear power plant), his transparent jealousy of the parents of his daughter’s new classmates, and his desperate attempts to get himself noticed by them. Both Caterina and her father will experience further insults at the hands of the powers-that-be and react to them distinctlively. Her mother Agata (Margherita Buy) might be too dense to understand what playing for the other side means but will find her own solace for the family turmoil. The bad girl Margherita (Carolina Iaquaniello) has that Katie Holmes in Disturbing Behavior look down. Yes, she does.

109 minutes.

09 July 2005

Me and You and Everyone You Know

Quirkiness, California-style as opposed to products of Idaho, apparently means sexual activities between children and poor parental supervision (or is that the other way around). Richard (John Hawkes) passes for a central character in this choppy succession of off-kilter scenes among characters one might normally look away from and scoot past quickly. Richard is a shoe salesman in a department store but he has chosen to emulate the grooming example of Vincent Cassel (a French actor whose seedy look in Sur mes Lèvres was classic) and there’s nowhere to go in that situation but down. Separated from his wife and retaining custody of the two sons, Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff), he moves in next door to his co-worker in the shoe department, the target of sexually charged teasing from teens Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend). The neighbor on the other side has a younger daughter (Carlie Westerman) whose plans are preternaturally long-range. The unsupervised sons frequent a chat room and engage a subscriber in scatalogical online repartée. Some people in the audience laughed. The writer-director Miranda July plays Christine, a would-be multimedia performance artist who pays the bills by driving a taxi service for eldery people. The Sundance Institute threw away its money on this consequence-free creepiness.

91 minutes.

08 July 2005

Heights

To have called it Local Maxima might not have gone over well, but this tale of a group of tightly bound people (not all of whom know yet how close they are) undergoing a bit of stress one day in Manhattan is too low-key to deserve anything more. Isabel (Elizabeth Banks, a pale imitation of Parker Posey) is the (Nikon-using) photographer who plans to marry Jonathan (James Marsden) in a month. Her mother Diana (Glenn Close) berates her acting students for a lack of passion during the day but cannot confront her philandering husband even when she finds him in the lighting booth with his mistress. Alec (Jesse Bradford, in a role where his facial hair suits him) catches Diana’s eye at an audition but resists her eagerness to mentor him. Meanwhile, a researcher (John Light) for prominently-identified Vanity Fair, asked to locate all of the ex-lovers of a photographer artist who shoots only male nudes, keeps leaving messages for Jonathan. Sprinkled with cameos (Isabella Rossellini as an editor at the magazine, George Segal as a rabbi) but otherwise not compelling.

99 minutes.

01 July 2005

March of the Penguins

Annually, as summer ends in March, the older emperor penguins leave the Dumont d'Urville Sea and head to the Terre Adéle, walking and body-surfing, far enough inland that the thickness of the ice will survive the next spring. Once there, the birds will pair off, mate, and take turns (which last for weeks) protecting the single egg while the other returns to the sea to feed—all while the daylight diminishes, the temperature falls, and the wind picks up. Reliably sentimental and anthropormophic, with narration for the local market by Morgan Freeman. I kept wishing for a second commentary track or trivia subtitles. But it’s hard to go wrong with such distinctive creatures in their own environment.

81 minutes.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 09-Nov-2007