My reviews of movies in reverse chronological order (i.e. most-recent-first) of date-of-review (which is not necessarily the same as the date-watched).
Title: A Guy Thing
Review written: 15 January 2003
I have written in these august pages about The Sweetest Thing being the ultimate date movie because it combines the best of a guy movie with the worst (according to a guy) of a chick flick---thus allowing the guys to drool over Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate, while the women can still feel happy about weddings dresses and girly talk.
The new movie A Guy Thing attempts to achieve a similar, dual-optimization, but fails. However, the movie itself is very funny and extremely enjoyable.
Jason Lee plays Paul, a to-be-married nice-guy who finds himself on the morning after his bachelor party in bed with a naked hula-girl from the night before. His panic mounts multi-fold when he discovers that the girl is his fiance's cousin, and has to come up with lie after lie to explain his strange behavior as he attempts to: hide the naked girl's panties where his fiance cannot find them, hide in the bathroom complaining of digestive trouble while attempting to not be seen by the cousin, escape from the cousin's psycho boyfriend who is intent on killing him, fending off the accusative attitudes of his neighbors, and navigating the thorny thicket of preparing for marriage.
In his attempt, Paul is aided by his guy friends who lie to the womenfolk with flawless ease, thus preventing the walls of guydom from being breached by females.
Almost every scene has an uproarious laugh, and all of the actors (even Julia Stiles as the cousin) give excellent performances.
Even though the movie ends on a chickory-flickory note (Lee and Stiles discover their "true" love for each other and get together), it is worth watching.
Title: Narc
Review written: 7 January 2003
The movie Narc is rated R for brutal violence, drug content, and pervasive language. It delivers on all 3 promises.
Director Joe Carnahan uses a combination of film-school techniques: split screens, jump-cuts, overlapping dialogues, and hand-held camera work to make an excellent film that sits on par with classics such as Serpico and harks back to the 1970s and the golden age of American cinema.
Narc is a movie about the perils of police undercover work, especially in the area of narcotics trafficking. It is a bit too easy for cops to slide down the slippery slope of becoming drug users, pushers, informants, and traitors, and they need to depend on the vigilance of their partners and family to keep to the straight and narrow.
Disgraced police officer Nick Tellis (Jason Patric in a superbly understated performance) is brought in on the brutal murder investigation of an undercover cop, and gets to work with the dead man's partner and friend Henry Oak (Ray Liotta). The movie is really a 2-man play involving the two policemen trying to solve the case of who murdered the police officer and why. And what Tellis finds out in the end is both surprising and distasteful in the extreme, and plays into his own ambivalence about undercover work.
Although the hand-held camera shots are particularly nauseating, they are mercifully few in number and brief in duration. Narc is a well-acted, well-scripted and directed movie, and worth watching.
Title: Rabbit-Proof Fence
Review written: 24 December 2002
Aussie director Phillip Noyce, after a series of Hollywoodish flicks, goes back to his roots to make Rabbit-Proof Fence, a story about Australia's policy of isolating Aboriginal half-breeds in the hope of "whitening" them.
The real-life story is that of 3 young girls: Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, all the daughters of Aboriginal mothers and a white father, who are marked for re-education at a special camp in Southern Australia. The children break out of the camp and make their way back home, an incredible 1500 miles away, walking along Australia's famous rabbit fences to keep guiding them northwards.
Backed by a great story, excellent performances by all of the actors (especially the 3 child actors), a wonderful soundtrack (by Peter Gabriel), and cinematography that takes full advantage of the depth and breadth of widescreen, Rabbit-Proof Fence has all the characteristics of a good movie.
If the story had been merely about the saga of the 3 children as they make their way back home, it would have been a truly great movie.
However, director Noyce also mixes in rather stilted caricatures of the Australian whites and their own justifications of their "civilizing" policies. In particular, Kenneth Branagh's character of Mr.Neville (referred to by the aboriginal children as Mr.Devil) appears like a complete buffoon. If only the movie had also examined in a serious manner the motivations of the white government's policies, it would have done justice to the clash of cultures that is inevitable when two or more human populations meet and mix.
Still, Rabbit-Proof Fence is a film worth watching, especially in a full-sized theater screen with state-of-the-art sound system.
Title: Chicago
Review written: 20 December 2002
While the Blues Brothers may sing nostalgically of taking their honey back to "sweet home Chicago", the new play-turned-Broadway-musical-turned-film Chicago is more of a Thelma and Louise and Baise Moi meets A Chorus Line critique of the fleeting evanescence of fame, celebrity, and media-frenzy.
The movie is set in prohibition-era Chicago, where the booze flows freely, the city's smoky jazz clubs give all indication of being the festering maw of sin and perdition, and where every young woman dreams of becoming a nightclub starlet, or failing that, shooting her way (pun intended) into instant fame (and almost as quick anonymity) by killing her husband/lover.
The stage is all set for sultry singer/dancer Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who offs her sister and husband after catching them in flagrante delicto practising the wrong type of "splits". In contrast, sweet young thang Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) is so desperate to get into showbiz that she readily opens her legs to any man who promises her an audition, never caring for her dumb-yet-sincere husband Amos (John C. Reilly). After being jilted one too many times by a lover, Roxie shoots him dead and finds herself the guest of the state at the Cook County Jail, along with Velma and a host of murderous femme fatales, all ruled with ruthless efficiency by the larger-than-life Mama Morton (Queen Latifah).
Mama Morton promises the girls freedom from the gallows if only they would pay $5000 and hire the legal services of defense lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), a suave, smooth operator whose consummate skills in manipulating the jury and whose utter disregard for law and justice is matched only by his love of money.
In the end, and after many fits and starts, Billy gets Velma and Roxie off the hook, and the two gals have their names up in the lights as the murderous, singing, dancing duo nightclub act.
Since the movie is a musical, and quite faithful to the idioms of the genre, there are no great epiphanies or character arcs. The plot unfolds as the audience would expect it to, and yet Chicago comes across as a very satisfying and enjoyable film.
All of the lead characters perform their roles with superb ease. In particular, both Zellweger and Zeta-Jones pull off the song-and-dance numbers with the confidence of practised professional chorus girls---and both of them are smokin' hot: va va voom!!
Director Rob Marshall, in appropriate homage to the spirit of Bob Fosse (and, let us admit it, who in Hollywood can make a musical without the shadow of Fosse hovering over them), does not mix the songs directly into the rest of the movie, but uses fade-and-dissolve techniques to give the audience the impression that the musical numbers are taking place in the dreamlike imaginations of the movie's characters (quite unlike the break-into-song-right-now technique used by Baz Luhrmann in Moulin Rouge).
Glamorous production design and costumes, excellent choreography, satirical story, great performances by the lead and supporting cast, and tons of sexy babes. All the makings of a great musical movie.
Title: Adaptation
Review written: 16 December 2002
Adaptation is a movie that is a tad too clever for its own good.
Let me give credit where credit is due. Director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman gave us what I consider to be one of the best cinematic representations of recursion and infinite self-reference in Being John Malkovich (when Malkovich enters his own mind-portal). That movie succeeded in simultaneously intriguing and entertaining its audiences because it was tightly scripted, well-paced, and story-focused.
Adaptation, on the other OTOH hand, is a movie about a screenplay that fails on all these grounds. Charlie Kaufman's neuroses and writer's block are analyzed in excruciatingly painful navel-gazing detail. Thrown in for good measure is a bizarre twin brother who is yin to Charlie's yang. Also thrown in are real-life people, books, and incidents: all the focus of the screenplay of a movie-to-be (which is Adaptation). Self-reference quips at this point are no longer clever but a cheap way out of a plot that has gotten stuck. There is also a strange subtext about Charles Darwin and adaptive selection with a voice-over spouting pseudo-epiphanies that seems like a retard's imitation of Angels and Insects.
The good thing about Adaptation is that it is experimental cinema in the best sense of the phrase. We need more attempts like this to explore the power of the medium.
That said, being an experiment does not absolve the creators of all artistic or entertainment responsibility, and while Adaptation's tongue-in-cheek mockery of the inevitability of Hollywood cliches is funny in its ultra-reductionist, post-post-post-modern sort of way, the movie as a whole fails to work.
Better shape up for the next attempt, fellas. Do not cross the line separating clever and cocky.
Title: The Hot Chick
Review written: 12 December 2002
Rob Schneider, the man behind so many wonderfully tasteless flicks such as Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo and The Animal does it again with The Hot Chick.
In a parody (of The Mummy, Bring It On, Dazed and Confused and a whole lot of other movies), Schneider finds himself, a petty gas-station thief, changing bodies with hot chick Rachel McAdams. The rest of the movie is about the trouble a girl has in a man's body---which immediately conjures to mind a lot of extremely filthy jokes, all of which occur in the movie.
Schneider pal Adam Sandler makes a cameo as a stoned Rasta, and Scary Movie babe Anna Faris provides an able foil to Schneider's tastelessness.
A fun film for Farrelly-flick fans.
Title: Femme Fatale
Review written: 6 November 2002
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos nekkid. I am not talking about a flash of tit, or a slice of butt. I am talking about the gorgeous, luscious Rebecca Romijn-Stamos buck nekkid or almost buck nekkid for more than 70% of the movie. What more could a guy ask for?
Brian De Palma has long been criticized as a hack---unoriginal, and with a tendency to elevate style over substance. While these may be valid criticisms for his other movies, with Femme Fatale all of this becomes moot because it features Rebecca Romijn-Stamos nekkid.
De Palma extrapolates every movie and camera cliche in existence (some even from his own movies) and takes them to such extremes that you forget they are cliches and begin to enjoy the cheeky humor of the director who is having fun making his movie. Remarkable camera angles, extended boom-shots, slick styling, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos nekkid.
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (did I mention that she is nekkid almost throughout this film) is a femme fatale, which in Frenchie means that she is a vicious lesbo-gangster. After a successful jewel heist (in which she seduces a female model in the can at Cannes (haha) and double-crosses almost everyone), she has a weird dream of how her life might unfold hence. This dream, although we do not know it as such till the very end, is the meat of the movie and features Rebecca Romijn-Stamos nekkid. At the very end, in a hyper-cliche ripping of Sliding Doors, It's a Wonderful Life, and even The Untouchables, she gets rid of her criminal colleagues, kisses her girlfriend goodbye, and goes hetero (which, according to Frenchies, marks her departure from femme fatale status) with ex-paparazzi Antonio Banderas.
This movie is not meant to be taken seriously, and anyone who attempts to analyze it that way is far too anal-retentive to enjoy what it really is: a vehile to get Rebecca Romijn-Stamos nekkid. For this alone, I am prepared to build a shrine to honor Brian De Palma.
Title: 8 Mile
Review written: 6 November 2002
M&M is a white wrapper living among black wrappers. In order to get accepted by his piers, he emulates the culturally elevating characteristics of his fellow wrappers, such as: (1) knocking up his teenage girlfriend and abandoning her, (2) using f-words as punctuation, (3) living in a trailer, (4) not going to school or holding a job, (5) having a slut-mother who sleeps with his high-school classmate, (6) getting into gun/fist fights with other wrappers, (7) fucking ho's on the job, and so on.
In the end other wrappers agree that M&M is a genuine wrapper and can be used to wrap candy handed out at Halloween.
What utter shit. Curtis Hanson, whose previous movie L.A.Confidential must now be considered a colossal fluke, directs a huge load of crapola, and casts non-actress Kim Basinger to boot, probably because she agreed to do a full-backal nude scene in this movie. Skip this feces mound.
Title: The Santa Clause 2
Review written: 30 October 2002
Feel-good Christmas stories have a long and rich tradition going back to Dickens and Capra-crapa. While this might initially make it seem that yetta-nudda story of holiday cheer would be unbearably annoying, it is also the case that audiences have been so heavily bombarded with Dickens and It's a Wonderful Life (right down to the point of them projectile-puking from disgust) that anything that is not one of these tales is welcomed with open arms.
The Santa Clause 2 is another mild, inoffensive, unpretentious, and funny Tim Allen offering for this year's festivities. Allen reprises his 1994 role as Scott Calvin, human turned Santa, who realizes that as part of his contract for being the Santa Claus, he needs to find a wife, and fast.
The rest of the story is about him leaving a robotic version of himself back at the North Pole to take care of day-to-day toymaking while he himself travels back home to meet his son and find love. Naturally enough, robot Santa goes mad with power and plans to deliver coal to the world, while Scott finds romance not quite so easy as stuffing toys into stockings.
As one might expect, everything ends well and Christmas is saved. The movie is 30minutes too long, and could improve with more punchy-humor and less smarmy holiday cheer, but satisfies the goals it seems to have set for itself.
Title: Punch Drunk Love
Review written: 27 October 2002
Jean-Pierre Jeunet almost cast Emily Watson in the role of Amelie. And if Amelie is a love-story for loners, Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love is amore for Aspergers and autists.
The plot of the movie reads like a story by T.C.Boyle---bizarre news stories that we have read (or think we have read) in newspapers are part of the screenplay (as in: a food company mistakenly offers free air miles on its products, but the value of the miles is far greater than the amount one might pay for the food itself).
Adam Sandler plays, quite brilliantly, a socially-awkward sister-harassed guy who is working hard to start up his own business. On a particularly bizarre morning, he witnesses a strange pre-dawn car-crash, finds a harmonium on the street, and meets the woman (played by Emily Watson) of his future obsession. Along the way, he calls up a phone sex line and finds himself being tormented by the sex merchants (cheekily situated by Anderson in Utah, where Boogie Nights must have been a colossal hit), and must find a way to stop them before he feels himself metaphorically clean enough to profess his love for his dream-girl.
As with all of Anderson's movies, the story is not everyone's cup-of-tea. But those who do like offbeat, non-commercial, non-audience-pre-tested films will love this offering. In addition to some excellent acting by both Sandler and Watson, we get to see superb camera-work, soundtrack, and a strangely perplexing and yet satisfying love story.
Title: Bowling for Columbine
Review written: 23 October 2002
If Hunter S. Thompson is the father of gonzo journalism, Michael Moore, as historians will have to write decades from now, may be the father of gonzo movie-making.
In every one of his movies and TV shows, Moore does what most sacks of excuses for humans only wish they could in their deepest fantasies: namely, confront the most egregious criminals and Republican fuckwads with a direct question about why they are raping people's lives.
Bowling for Columbine is Moore's take on the shooting at Columbine school at Littleton, and also, in its broader themes, an examination of the gun-culture and violence in the US as compared to other first-world countries. Along almost every dimension one can choose to measure: exposure to violence on TV and in movies, riotous behavior on the streets, easy availability and possession of firearms, ethnic melting pottery, whatever, many other countries outrank the US. But when it comes to brutal gun-related homicide, the land of the free and the home of the brave outdoes any other nation on the planet.
Without giving answers, without preaching from the pulpit, and yet being sly and satirical, Moore gives us a superb film that shows the fear, violence, consumptive intoxication, blame and finger-pointing, political hypocrisy, and the utter callousness of this society and its leaders to the plight of the populace that does not have the billions of dollars to spend on campaign contributions.
We need more people like Michael Moore making more movies like this. Do not miss this film. It is the best movie of the year, and probably one of the best docu-dramas ever made.
Title: I Spy
Review written: 17 October 2002
Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson reprise the grand-old tradition of buddy movies, and the grand new tradition of Rush Hour movies in the comedy caper I Spy.
Wilson is a hapless US government secret agent, who is asked to work with boxer celebrity Murphy to retrieve a stolen stealth fighter jet. Along the way, Wilson and Murphy hit every cliche in the comedy writers' cliff notes, and at the same time provide for non-stop hilarity and escapist enjoyment.
A summer-movie that warms your winter evenings.
Title: Mostly Martha
Review written: 11 October 2002
German cuisine. Hahaha! What moronic oxygen.
Like many other movies in the foodie genre, Mostly Martha follows the standard story arc: an inflexible food-obsessed chef finds love and pasta.
Martha is the authoritarian stereotypically German head-chef of an upscale German restaurant who runs her kitchen with militaristic precision. Naturally enough, her life changes when: (1) a new Italian chef, with his stereotypically Italian tardiness and chaotic working style, arrives to assist her, and (2) she finds herself having to take care of her rebellious niece after the girl's mother dies in a car accident.
By the end of the movie, after the obligatory twists and turns, pathos and drama, comedy and food-pornography, Martha and Mario (the Italian chef) marry.
Okay for a budget visit.
Title: Tuck Everlasting
Review written: 3 October 2002
Immortality: simultaneously tantalizing and frightening. The power to live forever, free of disease and invulnerable to pain or injury, and yet, a life of plodding slowness when everything else around changes.
It is surprising to a see a Disney movie, Tuck Everlasting deal with this topic, and deal with it quite well. A Scottish immigrant family Tuck that comes to the US in the early 19th century finds the spring of youth and, unknowingly drink from it. Soon, they realize that they are immortal, and that everlasting life is not all it might be romanticized as. They are unable to form relationships with anyone since their partners would age and die before their eyes. They move from place to place forever to keep their secret from being discovered.
In the early 20th century, comes young Winnifred into their placid lives. She falls in love with one of the Tuck boys, and discovers their secret. When the time comes to choose, she decided to live and die a normal life rather than seek eternal youth.
A combination of veteran (Sissy Spacek, William Hurt, and Ben Kingsley) and teen cast deliver excellent performances in a well made movie.
Title: Red Dragon
Review written: 3 October 2002
| Manhunter | Red Dragon |
| William Petersen | Edward Norton |
| Brian Cox | Anthony Hopkins |
| Dennis Farina | Harvey Keitel |
| Tom Noonan | Ralphe Fiennes |
| Joan Allen | Emily Watson |
| Michael Mann | Brett Ratner |
| Dante Spinotti | Dante Spinotti |
| Highly stylized visuals | Standard Hollywood look |
| Will Graham's descent into the depths of depravity | The Tooth Fairy's ascent from the maws of perdition |
Fans of the 1986 Michael Mann cult-classic Manhunter will need no more of a review.
However, let us give credit to Brett Ratner. Not only is he working against his own record in comedy (coming fresh from the Rush Hour series), but also against the myth of Michael Mann.
Even though Dante Spinotti is the cinematographer in both movies, the look-and-feel of Manhunter is decidedly European and highly stylized. So is its soundtrack---sedate and subordinate to the story, so that when we finally brust into Inna Gadda da Vida for the climax, it gets the adrenaline pumping like nobody's business.
Red Dragon is an almost scene-for-scene remake of Manhunter, and both films take their inspiration from the first of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lector trilogy. Rattner places slightly different emphases on his characters and this helps make his film not only a good one, but also prevents it from the accusation of ripoff or mere remake.
Watch both Manhunter and Red Dragon back to back, and enjoy.
Title: Sweet Home Alabama
Review written: 24 September 2002
Y'all.
Reese Candybar plays a dumb-blonde Dixie chick who, at the age of 10, gets pregnant by her brother, while her parents, who are also brother and sister, look on with approval. The family, needless to say, is Republican.
Candybar then goes off to big, bad Nyawk for a few years but finally decides that "incest is best" and comes back to sweet home Alabami to fuck her brother again.
The story of the Bush clan.
What a piece of utter shit.
Y'all.
Title: Igby Goes Down
Review written: 18 September 2002
Igby Goes Down is a Wes Andersonian, Rushmoric comedy. Which is to say:
A large ensemble cast delivers fairly good performances in a movie that starts out well and funny, and descends into greater and greater moodiness (although the transition was better done in Ghost World).
Igby is a troubled teenager who comes from a family of extremely wealthy (and extremely mentally disturbed) East Coast socialites, and, given the safety net of his family's money and connections, finds himself free to act out his teen rebellion by being the black sheep of the family. In so far as one can, in today's world, feel sorry for a poor little rich kid whose "parents do not appreciate" him, I suppose we could feel sorry for Igby. Otherwise, the behavior of every person in this movie is smarmy and infuriating in its self-absorption.
The only good thing about this movie was that it showed suicide as a noble and dignified exit from a life of pain and suffering. Even there, the option is open only to the very wealthy who can do it without the heavy hand of the law attempting to stop them.
And oh. Amanda Peet's twin peaks make an appearance in this movie, but I thought their performance in The Whole Nine Yards were far better.
Title: The Transporter
Review written: 15 September 2002
The Hongkong action genre of films has more or less failed to take hold in Hollywood. But the Frenchies seem to be providing a home to these directors of post-martial-arts movies.
The Transporter is one such Frenchiefied Hongkong action flick. Jason Statham plays his trademark constipatedly laconic rendition of an ex-military (illegal) package transporter living in France. When one of his packages turns out to be the utterly gorgeous Shu Qi being "sent away" to keep her from disrupting her father's slave smuggling operations, Jason finds himself becoming a hero for loooove.
Okay. The plot, such as it is, is silly. Continuity and consistency are given very, very short shrift. The melodrama and motivation are classic Hongkong. But forget about all that. The booming soundtrack, the sick wet thud of Statham's blows landing on his opponents and breaking their bones, the firepower, the stunts, the kickboxing action, the violence, all come together to make this a superb escapist movie---something to watch with glee and take one's mind off the worries of the real world.
Luc Besson, aka Mr.Milla, wrote the screenplay and presumably had some role to play in getting this movie made. If so, score one for the Frenchies---they have a few spots of light in the vast blackness of their so-called culture.
Title: Stealing Harvard
Review written: 11 September 2002
It is a tribute to the long reach of Monty Python that dada has become mainstream. It is no longer strange, and perhaps even expected, to see sketch comedy in a movie, where the minutest semblance of a plot is merely a canvas for interlocked stream-of-consciousness sketches that each stand alone.
There are few actors today who better embody dada than Tom Green---Freddy Got Fingered is a mind-blowing masterpiece that I still marvel ever got made, let alone released and marketed, by a major Hollywood studio.
In Stealing Harvard, directed by Kids in the Hall's Bruce McCulloch, Green is just one component of an ensemble of some of the finest and zaniest comedic performances I have seen in a long time. In fact, Green and co-star Jason Lee play more-or-less straight men opposite Dennis Farina, Richard Jenkins, and John C. McGinley. I was constantly cackling like a deranged hyena when I watched this movie, and almost none of the mirth came from outright tastelessness---the humor was in the situations that the hapless protagonists Green and Lee found themselves in in their quest for a quick $30,000 to enable Lee to send his niece to Harvard (and that is the so-called plot for this movie).
If at all you have ever found Monty Python and Seinfeld funny, don't miss this movie. And wait till the very end of the credits to watch some great outtakes as well. A superb comedy.
Title: Swimfan
Review written: 6 September 2002
99% of all human literature, drama, and pathos would be eliminated from existence if only humans learn to keep their sex drive under control. 99% of the remaining human literature, drama, and pathos would be further eliminated from existence if only humans, after having failed to keep their sex drive under control, confess to their errors immediately and get on with their lives as well as they can (instead to attempting to play the deception game).
Swimfan is a moronic teen-movie that tries to update the femme fatale genre of movies, and fails miserably at it.
Erika Christensen demonstrates that she is the next Julia Stiles: ugly and unable to act except as an annoying bitch. She stalks a highschool senior in a moronic movie that takes 1hour to get to the first important plot point, and then spends the next 30minutes in cliches that are better handled in the Halloween movies.
Skip this shit.
Title: One Hour Photo
Review written: 29 August 2002
Robin Williams clean-shaven. So it must be a comedy, right? Contrary to expectations, One Hour Photo is a superb film that examines the dark recesses of loneliness in today's world, where it has become possible (in a manner that never was even perhaps a 100 years ago) for humans to survive by themselves, but their minds, having evolved over millions of years to be social creatures, are unable to cope with the solitude in the midst of the teeming multitudes.
Robin Williams plays Seymour, a meek photo-shop employee at a department store whose life is so empty that he "adopts" as his own a family that he knows through the film rolls they bring to him for processing. Seymour finds himself so taken with the gorgeous Connie Nielsen that she becomes the quite unobscure and rather obvious object of his affection---he fantasises about working himself into the good graces of her husband, being a friend and counsel to her, an uncle to her son, and an all-round protector of the family.
Then the axe of the guillotine drops: Seymour finds himself fired from his job. Worse, he also finds that Connie's husband is having an affair.
The rage of betrayal climaxes into the last 30 minutes of the film where Seymour shames the wayward philanderer into mending his ways and going back to his family.
While the movie does seem to imply a happy ending, its power comes from its non-sugarcoated look into the pain and anguish of a lonely man. Superb viewing and a great performance by Williams.
Title: Serving Sara
Review written: 21 August 2002
Serving Sara (as opposed to, I suppose, Clienting Clara) demonstrates that there is indeed life beyond Friends (although not for Mrs.B.Pitt). Matthew Perry (the funniest and most successful of the lot) plays a process server looking to get out of tracking down scumbags and getting into viticulture.
In a rather convoluted plotline involving the intricacies of US divorce law, he meets up with Elizabeth Hurley (the titular Sara), a soon to-be-divorced wife who promises him 1 million bucks if only he would withdraw the annulment papers he is serving her and instead serve her two-timing husband, Mr.Evil Dead himself, first. Apparently, the first one to declare a divorce and the state they declare it in gets a better deal in divvying up the property.
Forget the plot twist needed to get this story to work. Watch this movie instead for both Perry's fine comedic sense, and for Liz who prances around in breathtakingly tight T-shirts and unbelievably short skirts while speaking in those dulcet British tones---makes me go weak in the knees and drool at the mouth.
There is only one thing that pissed me off about the movie. Why does Jerry Stiller have to talk about his inflamed prostate in every single one of his movie appearances?
A good, enjoyable, light comedy.
Title: The Good Girl
Review written: 15 August 2002
Is there life after sitcoms? Apparently not for the friendly Mrs.B.Pitt.
The movie The Good Girl shows us why the country is so fucked up. Each of the redneck retards in the film is a veritable genius compared to the mofo-moron thief-in-chief who is raping the country, and they all come from Texas.
I fail to see any point whatsoever to the story in this film, and whatever little entertainment it offers comes from the same mental state one gets into while watching a freak show where the midget throws poop at the bearded lady.
Skip this piece of stinking garbage.
Title: Possession
Review written: 14 August 2002
Tom Stoppard, in his play Arcadia, made fun of those who build castles on the literary exegesis of minutiae, only to have their entire life's work come crashing down because of the discovery of even the most harmless letter or artifact (compared with the inexorable progress of science towards the discovery of timeless truths, and thus highlighting the vast, insuperable gulf between science and everything else).
That said, Neil LaBute's Possession is a placid, lush, Merchant-Ivoric tale of literary sleuthing that provides for an couple of hours of good movie-watching.
LaBute favorite Aaron Eckhardt plays Roland Michell, a literary scholar working in London cataloging and analysing the works of a Victorian poet Randolph Ash (played by Jeremy Northam), whose works are being celebrated in a year-long centennial function. During the course of his work, Michell discovers a heretofore unknown letter sent by Ash to another Victorian poet: Christabel LaMotte. He teams up with LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey (Da Gwyneth) and the two of them retrace the steps of the Victorians, the unfolding mystery of their secret relationship, and the fact that what these modern scholars find has the potential to change not merely the academic landscape, but also their own lives.
When it comes to portraying male-female inter-personal relationships, there are few modern film directors better than LaBute (starting from his classic In the Company of Men and his later Your Friends and Neighbors). The storyline of this film moves back and forth between 1859 and the present day, and provides a striking contrast between the unexpectedly smoldering passion of the supposedly repressed Victorian era, against the over-analytical, emotionally warped, stunted relationships of people in today's supposedly liberated world.
The movie is based on a story by A.S.Byatt (whose other post-Darwinian, mid-Victorian novel Angels and Insects has also been made into a fine movie), and certainly makes up for the fact that Da Gwyneth does not get her head chopped off in the end.
A superb film.
Title: Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
Review written: 29 July 2002
Martin Lawrence is a much, much better standup comedian than he is an actor. Runteldat (as in Run Tell That) is a live-show movie of a performance by Lawrence, and is chock-full of jokes (most of them quite tasteless) and very enjoyable.
Mixed in with the jokes are Martin's own self-deprecating take on his recent "troubles"---arrests, hospital visits, and behavioral problems, along with some silly platitudes about life. But mercifully, one can ignore these attempts at profundity and just laugh one's guts off at Lawrence's love of titties---that bit alone was worth the time spent in the movie theater.
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Last updated: Sun Aug 29 17:59:30 PDT 2004
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