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.

In The Anniversary Party, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cummings (co-writers and directors) try to update the classic Hollywood line, “Hey everybody, let’s go out to the old barn and put on a show!” Sadly, the barn is not burned with them in it. Not that I really want them to die, but if they had been dead, this exercise in vanity would not have been made, and that wouldn’t have been a shame.

Jennifer and Alan play Sally and Joe, a Hollywood power couple who have been having marital problems for their entire marriage. To commemorate the fifth anniversary of their nuptials they have decided to have an anniversary party rather than spend the day alone with each other (which might have made a better film), and the film encompasses this one day.

And what a day it is! What an overblown, bloated, fat, stinking, pretentious day! The main thing that the film wants you, the viewer, to realize from that one day is that these are just plain ol’ ordinary people just like you and me with problems and arguments and philandering and drug use and lost dogs, too. Sally and Joe’s really great group of friends allow all of this to go on and they even join in, just to show Sally and Joe that their lifestyle is regular and average. It makes these people look pathetic.

Starring:
Alan Cumming, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gwyneth Paltrow, John C. Reilly, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates
Directed By:
Jennifer Jason Leigh & Alan Cumming
Release Date:
June 8, 2001
MPAA Rating:
R for language, drug use and nudity.
Distributors:
Fine Line Features
1 Star

Standouts in the group: Kevin Kline as an arrogant leading man trying to break his stereotypical mold and John C. Reilly as his director, who’s life is a train wreck waiting to happen. Reilly’s scene after almost drowning in Sally and Joe’s pool tore me up and was the high point of the film, even if it was a low point for him. One of the few times I smiled during this film was when Kline danced an impromptu ballet with his real life daughter. Seeing such a small simple thing in this two hour piece of tripe was light-hearted and wonderful.

Pans: Can I blame anyone besides the two people that started this whole thing? I think not. Where’s my hammer? Let the bashing begin.

Is there anyone more annoying than Alan Cummings? Jesus! He was annoying in Circle of Friends, he was annoying with his fake Russian accent in Goldeneye and I’m sure untold more films that I haven’t wanted to see. The only time I’ve really liked him was in Spy Kids where he played the naïve children’s television host Fegan Floop. But then again, he did have a director that wasn’t himself. He plays a man who is little more than an eight year old boy with the mental clarity of an four year old. He likes to be bad and he hates it when he gets caught. Well, Alan, we caught you again, in a case of BAD ACTING!

Jennifer Jason Leigh can do spaced-out, and she can do introspective loner, but a self-centered diva she can’t very well do. Her whining and complaining put me over the edge and made me wonder why Sally loved Joe or if she loved the idea of loving Joe? She should have left his ass ages ago, instead of sticking around for five years so we could have the story of their anniversary party.

If a time machine actually existed, I would have traveled back to stop myself from renting this. Please take my advice and get something else.