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About a Boy, based on the novel by Nick Hornby, is really about two boys, Will (Hugh Grant), a thir­ty­ish sex­ist unem­ployed lout who lives off of song roy­al­ties from his father, and Mar­cus (Nicholas Holt), a twelve-year-old just try­ing to make it through school help his depressed mother Fiona (Toni Col­lette) be happy. Will, who has no job, wan­ders through life know­ing that he’s the coolest per­son in the world. Are nor­mal peo­ple with­out jobs able to live in fab­u­lous apart­ments, drive Audis, and eat out at expen­sive restau­rants? As he might say, not bloody well likely. Will lives off of the prof­its of “Santa’s Super Sleigh”, a Christ­mas song writ­ten by his father decades pre­vi­ous. Will men­tions that his father strug­gled for years to cre­ate another hit, but that all he was remem­bered for was a Christ­mas song. I got the feel­ing that Will was envi­ous of his father, since at the rate Will’s going, at least his father is remembered.

Will stum­bles across the notion that after dat­ing fab­u­lous women for years, that in the end they all want com­mit­ment from him, some­thing that he’s not freely will­ing to give to them. But divorced women with chil­dren just want to date, and if they have to dump you, it’s their child, or their ex-husband, or “it’s not you, it’s me”. How could any­one have missed this untapped font of non-commitment?

He begins attend­ing SPAT, Sin­gle Par­ents Alone Together, and meets a young widow who is friends with Fiona, who’s the mother of Mar­cus, who was also in a film with Kevin Bacon (just kid­ding). After an out­ing to the park with a heavy loaf of bread and liv­ing through a rather hor­ren­dous sit­u­a­tion later the same evening, Mar­cus wants Will to date Fiona so he can “help her be happy again”. Will doesn’t want to help any­one be happy but himself.

Star­ring:
Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Weisz, Toni Col­lette
Directed By:
Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz
Release Date:
May 17, 2002
MPAA Rat­ing:
PG-13 for brief strong lan­guage and some the­matic ele­ments.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures Dis­tri­b­u­tion
3.5 Stars

A dance begins between Will and Mar­cus, with both attempt­ing to make the other a bet­ter per­son. They nat­u­rally suc­ceed (this is Hol­ly­wood, remem­ber), but not in the cutesy Freddy Prinze Jr. way that it could. Will tries to help Mar­cus be cool, and Mar­cus tries to help Will not get trapped in lies. It all, for the most part, works out fairly well.

Hugh Grant bites into the mus­cles of his char­ac­ter and tears them out by the sinews. I think Grant, who was so sweet and nice in Four Wed­dings and a Funeral and Not­ting Hill, has been wait­ing for years to play a role that’s like­able, but not that like­able. He’s rude, dull, arro­gant and pompous, and Grant bull­dozes his squeaky impres­sion. I think he’s employ­ing a lit­tle method act­ing in this film, since deep down inside all men wouldn’t mind the life that Will leads, given the chance.

Nicholas Holt does a pretty good job of stand­ing up to Grant, but unlike the book, his char­ac­ter is a lit­tle more recessed than Grant’s. Mar­cus could whine, but he doesn’t. Bul­lies pick on him, his mother cries all of the time, he sings “Killing Me Softly” out loud in class by acci­dent, but he attempts to take it in stride, know­ing that one day when he gets to Uni­ver­sity that he’ll be bet­ter. I was impressed with his per­for­mance, and his char­ac­ter is well rounded com­pared to other screen teens.

Toni Col­lette plays Fiona as she was writ­ten in the novel; one of the most hor­ren­dous vegan hip­pies that you’ve ever seen with pol­ish and style. This is a far cry from the what could have been cliché poor-but-still-has-her-dignity sin­gle mom that she played in The Sixth Sense so well. Short hair, Army sur­plus clothes, hat knit­ted in Peru, she oozes hip­pie. She cares about Mar­cus more than any­thing, but depres­sion usu­ally wins out in her bat­tle to care for him. It’s heart wrench­ing to watch.

Lastly, Rachel Weisz plays the object of Will’s affec­tion and the vic­tim of his lies. I haven’t seen any of The Mummy films, but I saw her in Enemy at the Gates, and she seemed lit­tle more than win­dow dress­ing in that film. Unfor­tu­nately, she’s sort of used as win­dow dress­ing here too. If this were a Bog­art film from the 1940’s, she’d be “The Skirt”.

I liked this film a lot and laughed out loud many times when the audi­ence was silent. I felt kind of weird doing that, but it seemed like a pri­vate joke remem­bered fondly between friends who’ve known each other a very long time.

1. INT. STUDY. 8:15 A.M.

Ama­teur Film critic GLENN VANCE is sit­ting in his study on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing attempt­ing to fig­ure out what to say about the hilar­i­ous and out­landishly bizarre movie, ADAPTATION, he and his wife saw yes­ter­day evening. The dif­fi­culty of his task is evi­dent on his face because the film was about so many dis­com­bob­u­lated things that it’s hard to describe it with­out ram­bling. If he could just find the one word that would bring it all together, make every­thing clearer to him and the roughly 10 devoted read­ers of his web­site, it would be per­fect. The one word that when the film is bro­ken down to its basic ele­ments could sum it up.…

2. INT. STUDY. 1 HOUR, 55 MINUTES LATER.

We see a blank com­puter screen. The cur­sor blinks like a metronome.

With Adap­ta­tion, the new film from the writer/director duo of Char­lie Kauf­man and Spike Jonze, this is not easy. At its most basic level it’s about a screen­writer attempt­ing to adapt a book, “The Orchid Thief”, into a screen­play about a man who steals orchids from the swamps of Florida, how­ever it’s also about the author of the book, her rela­tion­ship with the orchid thief him­self, and both of their rela­tion­ships to the screen­play writer. Throw into the mix a film jumps back­ward and for­ward in time and it’s dif­fi­cult to find the one per­fect word that best describes the film, but IRONY is a good place to start.

Star­ring:
Nico­las Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swin­ton, Brian Cox
Directed By:
Spike Jonze
Release Date:
Decem­ber 6th, 2002
MPAA Rat­ing:
R for lan­guage, sex­u­al­ity, some drug use and vio­lent images.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Sony Pic­tures Releas­ing
2.5 Stars

But more about that in a moment.

Spike Jonze, who directed the mind-blowing Being John Malkovich, here jumps feet-first into his sopho­more effort like a para­trooper on D-Day morn­ing and expands upon the odd visual world that he cre­ated with his pre­vi­ous fea­ture. His favorite accom­plice, Char­lie Kauf­man, the screen­writer of Being John Malkovich, mines his own fears, faults and self-loathing to cre­ate a level of inner para­noia rarely seen since Ver­tigo. Kaufman’s script is as fer­tile as the Ten­nessee val­ley, which lit­er­ally cov­ers the entire his­tory of Earth from The Begin­ning to now and how screen­writer Char­lie fits into it. Nicholas Cage plays Char­lie Kauf­man and Charlie’s (fic­ti­tious) twin brother Don­ald. Char­lie has lit­tle self con­fi­dence and is intro­verted while Don­ald is extro­verted to a fault and crass. Cage, who lately has slummed in such films as Windtalk­ers and Gone in Sixty Sec­onds, finally retreats back to ‘Thes­pian Nicholas Cage’, the Cage of Leav­ing Las Vegas, Moon­struck and Rais­ing Ari­zona. He’s so good here that it’s a true joy to see him actu­ally act­ing rather than just star­ring in a film. He is excel­lent as the fat bald­ing fright­ened Kauf­man and has already gar­nered a Golden Globe nom­i­na­tion for the role. Hope­fully this won’t be a fluke.

The film is fun and inter­est­ing and engag­ing; you actu­ally care about these three lit­tle peo­ple. You really do care, a rar­ity in this mod­ern world of dis­pos­able cel­lu­loid. You care about the book’s author and her sham mar­riage and you care about Kauf­man as he sweats bul­lets over a pos­si­ble sopho­more slump on his hands. Chris Cooper’s thief has such a pas­sion for plants that you amaze at the fact that he’s only stud­ied them for sev­eral years, not his entire life. The laughs in the film come out of the dia­logue like machine gun bul­lets belch­ing from an AK-47, but most of the laughs come from the IRONY of the sit­u­a­tions, not cheap one-liners. The casual film­goer (the lovers of such films as Gone in Sixty Sec­onds) will prob­a­bly not real­ize that most of the third act of the film is played out for laughs rather than pathos and for that one could fault Jonze’s some­times arro­gant direc­tion. Kaufman’s screen­play (the real one, not the film-within-a-film one) tries hard to show that Char­lie doesn’t want to fall back on stan­dard clichés like car chases, gun fights, buddy-film clichés and the like but in the end can’t decide how to end the film. Jonze unfor­tu­nately doesn’t remind his audi­ence that these con­ven­tions are all an in-joke and I ended up laugh­ing at the chase through the Florida swamp with three other peo­ple in the the­ater while the rest sat in rapt atten­tion at the “sad­ness” that was unfold­ing on the screen. Jonze is good with the irony here, but he for­gets to let the audi­ence in on the joke. Ironic, no?

My wife and I rented this flick the other night, and it’s not good nor is it bad. It’s just kind of aver­age, hence the two stars. I couldn’t really tell if it wanted to be one of those light­hearted roman­tic Euro­pean romps like Cin­ema Par­adiso or a screw­ball kind of com­edy the likes of Jerry Lewis. I mean, it was alright, but that’s all it was. Licia Magli­etta plays Ros­alba Bar­letta, an Ital­ian house­wife who lives in a small town tak­ing care of her fam­ily, a lovely bunch that includes her hus­band (Anto­nio Cata­nia) who has been cheat­ing on her for years and her pot-smoking kids.

She seems to exist in their world to feed them and clean up after them. Ros­alba is so naive about life that she doesn’t sus­pect a thing is wrong with it until she takes a fam­ily vaca­tion and while try­ing to fish her wed­ding ring out of a rest stop toi­let bowl she is left behind by the tour bus and sub­se­quently has an epiphany. (Unre­lated side note: Maybe my wife and I are dif­fer­ent, but I think we would notice if one of the other was miss­ing from a bus while on vaca­tion together. Ah movies, sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief and all that.) Ros­alba calls her hus­band (Anto­nio Cata­nia) on the bus, and he nat­u­rally goes bal­lis­tic because she’s thrown the group off sched­ule by get­ting left behind. This is when Ros­alba dis­cov­ers that she’s lit­tle more than a door­mat for her hubby, so she takes off for Venice — which she has never seen — for a per­sonal “vacation”.

Enter the screwi­ness. Quickly Ros­abla meets soft-spoken and elu­sive waiter Fer­nando Gira­soli (Bruno Ganz) who, after a brief encounter at the restau­rant where he works, takes pity on her pen­ni­less state (she some­how has no money of her own on her) and lets her stay the night at an extra room in his apart­ment. Fast for­ward, Fer­nando has a sad past that he doesn’t speak of, but Ros­alba learns by spy­ing on him. She quickly decides to extend her “vaca­tion” by find­ing a job with a crazy florist, befriend­ing Girasoli’s kooky (and I don’t use that word lightly) next door neigh­bor, a holis­tic masseuse (Marina Mas­sironi) who wears jew­els in the mid­dle of her fore­head and has plumb­ing prob­lems, and per­ma­nently mov­ing into Girasoli’s place on a strictly pla­tonic basis.

Star­ring:
Licia Magli­etta, Bruno Ganz, Giuseppe Bat­tis­ton, Marina Mas­sironi, Anto­nio Cata­nia
Directed By:
Sil­vio Sol­dini
Release Date:
July 27, 2001
MPAA Rat­ing:
PG-13 for brief lan­guage, some sen­su­al­ity and drug ref­er­ences.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
First Look Pic­tures
2 Stars

Every­thing comes to a head when Rosalba’s hus­band tires of his shirts being wrin­kled and steps up his quest to bring her home by hir­ing a plumber/private detec­tive named Costan­tino (Giuseppe Bat­tis­ton) to find her. The man is a com­edy of errors. He attempts to get into char­ac­ter with a trench coat and clip-on sun­glasses, but he’s still a bum­bling plumber. Costan­tino was my favorite char­ac­ter in this uneven film if only because he rose the level of humor here from aver­age to just a tenth of a point above aver­age. I pulled for him because even though he’s in a city of 60,000 peo­ple he knows he can find Ros­alba, even if he’s got to look at the other 59,999 peo­ple first. He was the high point.

In the end, I have no strong feel­ings about this film. I’m only puz­zled by ques­tions like:

Why did the writ­ers feel com­pelled to make a man named Fer­nando Gira­soli a native of Ice­land? “Hi, I’m Fer­nando and I’m from Ice­land.” No won­der he moved to Italy.

Why did there have to be a scene where we are forced to see the sweaty man-boobs of the over­weight plumber/private eye? And why would a decent look­ing woman like the kooky masseuse think that was hot?

But you shouldn’t try too hard to answers to these ques­tions. Even with the added knowl­edge you’d still end up feel­ing nei­ther good nor bad about the film.

I saw my first Jim Jar­musch film, Stranger Than Par­adise, my 2nd junior year at Bay­lor in 1993. I was a film major at the time, and the stark cin­e­matog­ra­phy and edit­ing (the cam­era never moves in a scene and each scene is played from begin­ning to end with no cuts) was cool. I had always been a fan of those unsung actors, those, “Hey, it’s that guy that was in fill-in-the-blank” movies, and I orig­i­nally watched it because it had Richard Edson (if you saw him, you’d prob­a­bly rec­og­nize him), but the film drew me in, kind of like A Clock­work Orange. It was hyp­notic and auteur cool. After that, nat­u­rally, I wanted to see more Jar­musch films.

Up to a point. Yes, I tried to see all of his films. Down by Law, Mys­tery Train, etc. Then came Night on Earth, what with its 5 cab­bies dri­ving around the world on one night and what hap­pens to them, and I just plain lost inter­est. Maybe it was Winona Ryder and her “it girl” sta­tus at the time. Maybe I just didn’t care. Pulp Fic­tion had just come out, cin­ema was chang­ing and more excit­ing, and the Euro­peanesque­ness (is that a word?) of Jarmusch’s ethos just kinda bored me at that point in my filmic development.

It only got worse later. I didn’t care about see­ing Dead Man, even though it paired the amaz­ing Crispin Glover and ver­i­fi­able screen leg­end Robert Mitchum, or Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samu­rai or any of those Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes films he’s been doing for almost 20 years. I was bored with Jimmy’s work. I didn’t care for his way of doing The Busi­ness anymore.

Star­ring:
Bill Mur­ray, Jef­frey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Con­roy, Tilda Swin­ton, Julie Delpy, Chloe Sevi­gny, Jes­sica Lange
Directed By:
Jim Jar­musch
Release Date:
August 5th, 2005
MPAA Rat­ing:
R for lan­guage, some graphic nudity, and brief drug use.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Focus Fea­tures
2 Stars

Bill Mur­ray, on the other hand, had and has never fol­lowed the auteur path. He started out as an overt comic on “Sat­ur­day Night Live”, moved on to Meat­balls, Cad­dyshack, Stripes and Ghost­busters. Then out of the blue came The Razor’s Edge and it hit peo­ple like a brick wall at the time : How could Bill Mur­ray do drama? Is that even pos­si­ble?

He was slammed for it and quickly got back into com­edy. It was sort of down­hill for him from there. Ghost­busters II, Quick Change, Larger Than Life, The Man Who Knew Too Lit­tle. He inter­spersed small gems, and some out­right clas­sics, in between these fes­ter­ing steam­ing turds of cel­lu­loid — Ground­hog Day, Mad Dog and Glory, and the fab­u­lous Ed Wood, but the ver­dict was in on Mur­ray by 1997, and his career was DOA.

Then out of the blue Wes Ander­son wanted Mur­ray for the part of Her­man Blume in his lit­tle film Rush­more, and the rest is his­tory. Murray’s career since that touch­stone has been one of highs (The Royal Tenen­baums, Lost in Trans­la­tion) and lows (Osmo­sis Jones, Garfield) but he is now at the point in his act­ing career that he’s widely respected as an excel­lent and depend­able char­ac­ter actor.

Put the two pre­vi­ously talked about peo­ple together, though, and it’s like watch­ing water evap­o­rate off of the sidewalk.

Mur­ray, usu­ally kinetic to a fault, plays Don John­ston, aged wom­an­izer who made a killing in com­put­ers and now lives in retire­ment doing noth­ing but watch TV and have his ex-girlfriends walk out on him. On the same day that his cur­rent flame (Julie Delpy) is leav­ing him, he receives a let­ter typed on pink sta­tion­ary let­ting him know that he and an unnamed ex-flame had a son 20 years pre­vi­ous and that the boy may be look­ing for Don. Enter Win­ston (Jef­frey Wright), Don’s neigh­bor and an ama­teur sleuth who takes up the quest to find the letter’s sender with a zealot’s zeal. “You have a son out there. Don’t you want to know who he is?” Don’s ini­tial answer? No. Prob­a­bly in in his mind it would be Hell No. Unde­terred, Win­ston plunges in, demand­ing a list of women Don would have known in the Bib­li­cal sense roughly 20 years hence. Win­ston pro­duces an itin­er­ary, dri­ving direc­tions and hotel reser­va­tions for Don.

Tired of bore­dom, or I would hope, out of curios­ity, Don takes off to unnamed locales across the US of A search­ing for his past and, as you can prob­a­bly guess, some­thing about him­self that shows him that he mat­ters in this world. Along the way he gets to see what hap­pened to these women that he knew inti­mately and how they turned out, and pos­si­bly what might hap­pened to him­self in a par­al­lel uni­verse. They range from bizarre (Jes­sica Lange) to funny (Sharon Stone) to pathetic (Tilda Swin­ton). His­tory comes back to bite Don again and again, but he con­tin­ues on his quest for rea­sons, through Jar­muschian logic, that are his alone.

Really, Bro­ken Flow­ers is not a bad movie, it just isn’t ful­fill­ing. I under­stand the Jar­muschian logic that the out­come means less than the jour­ney (Movie Trailer Guy Voice — “One Man…Alone…A Quest…of Par­ent­hood.…”), but after invest­ing 2 hours of your life, and a hard-earned $16, you might be want­ing a lit­tle more than is given to you. I won’t give away the end of the film, since I hate peo­ple who do that, but yes, you will prob­a­bly be dis­ap­pointed unless you’re one of those peo­ple that likes to go to a late night cof­fee shop in the Beat­nik part of town after see­ing your film and be snarky about what you’ve just wit­nessed ad nau­se­aum until late into the night. Bill Mur­ray is really good in his min­i­mal­ist way here, and I don’t fault him at all for my belief that the film fails. It’s just that I should have looked back to what inter­ested that 21-year-old boy at Bay­lor and see if that was applic­a­ble to my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Matu­rity should guide us in our choices, so here is a mes­sage to you, Glenn Vance, “What would Don John­ston have done here? Would he have gone along with Win­ston to see a Bergmanesque film about a man search­ing for his son? Don’s ini­tial answer? No. Prob­a­bly in his mind it would be Hell No.