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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

You know his opinion of Cars, now here’s mine.

Lightning McQueen is a living, breathing car that lives in a strange alternate universe where cars, not people, are the dominant life form on the planet. They do everything that humans do, except that they’re cars. If I were an amateur film critic in this parallel universe he lives in I’d probably say “Cars is 16 cylinders of fun!”, or “Race on down to it!” or something lame like that, since I would also be a car who loves other cars and other car-related things.

But I’m human and not a car and don’t love all car related things. Most of all, I didn’t love Cars.

Starring:
Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Michael Keaton, Bonnie Hunt, Richard Petty, Cheech Marin
Directed By:
John Lasseter & Joe Ranft
Release Date:
June 9, 2006
MPAA Rating:
G
Distributors:
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
2 Stars

It’s not that I don’t love Pixar films. I usually freaking LOVE Pixar films. God bless Pixar, for they are the only reason that Disney makes money anymore, and honestly, shouldn’t Pixar be making ALL Disney films at this point? A Pixar film is a hallmark of cinematic quality; when you see that little bouncing lamp come out at the beginning of their films, you know you’re in for a great time and you’re also going to be amazed in some way. Not only are you going to get great looking animation, but a storyline that is engaging and funny too.

I love Toy Story, both 1 and 2, and The Incredibles is one of the great films of the past 10 years. My son loves Finding Nemo and every time he sees a clownfish it’s named “Nemo”, never “Fred” or “Biff”, just “Nemo”. I have less admiration for Monsters, Inc. and A Bug’s Life, mainly because I didn’t find them as interesting in the plot department, but they still looked great. If you watch the “making of” bits on each DVD for these films you can see the evolution of the Pixar animation process and they grow exponentionally with each new release.

Cars looks phenomenal. You’d think the opening bit, where Lightning is introduced, was the camera panning over a real car it looks so good. Pixar cares about how their films look, and the detail is great, but before where the plotlines were semi-complex, Cars could have been written by me in 2nd grade. Come on man, who couldn’t have come up with this?

An arrogant race car gets lost on his way to a race. While trying to find his way back to where he got lost in the first place, he comes upon a sleepy out-of-the-way town where time practically stands still. In the process of trying to leave the small town, he will come to understand that being arrogant isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be and he will make new lifelong friends where before he had none. He will also overcome adversity in the final “battle” and be successful without overdoing it the way he did before.

Take out the phrase “race car” from the first sentence of the paragraph and you’ve got a generic movie of the week or even some of your friends’ lives. It’s not a very complex story, but it also isn’t a very interesting story. What the Pixar people try to do with this weak story is make up for it with eye candy, but it’s not enough. The plot just doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain.

We didn’t have to wait long fortunately, or my ADD addled mind may not have stayed in physical form. At the time I really liked Tim Burton’s take on Bruce Wayne/Batman, but I don’t think its aged well. It’s too flashy, too neony (is that a word?), too cartoony and the whole Prince score thing left me a little desensitized to the film. Also, who ok-d the killing of the best bad guy you’ve got from your canon in the first film? Unless Jack Nicholson was only contracted for one film it was an idiotic move that could have fed sequels for years.

Killing off the Joker led to a downward spiral of lesser and lesser bad guys (Bane, Poison Ivy, Two Face), until we hit rock bottom with the embarrassing Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Freeze (“Adam and Evil!”). George Clooney scratching old-school style on the Batmobile’s CD player, Chris O’Donnell’s incessant complaining and whining. Blah, blah, blah. I’m sure that during Batman Forever (wasn’t that a double album by Queen in 1974?) I prayed “make it end, just make it end, dear lord.”

Starring:
Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe
Directed By:
Christopher Nolan
Release Date:
June 15th, 2005
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements.
Distributors:
Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution
3.5 Star

And now all of that garbage that came before has been wiped from my memory hard drive, washed down into the sewer system of the new, grittier, more real-world Gotham in Christopher Nolan’s new film Batman Begins. Gotham is a real city now, not some Tokyoesque-city-of-lights cartoon like in the first film. Wayne Manor is A MANOR where people who loved each other lived and played and watched out for one another. Batman has been made real finally, not a cartoon character that sprang forth from some MTV-addicted commercial director’s brain with flashy style and bright lights and thundering bass. What we’ve had made for us is the story of Batman, with his quirks and faults and guilt and victories; he’s a personas well as an icon.

It seems as if this take on Bruce Wayne’s alter ego was preordained; everyone in the film is as whom they should be. Michael Caine is Alfred, Bruce’s confidant and Butler. Gary Oldman is Captain, then Lieutenant, Gordon. Cillian Murphy is creepy as Dr. Johnathan Crane, magistrate of Arkham Asylum and the future Scarecrow. The other players (Morgan Freeman, Tom Wilkinson, Liam Neeson, Ken Watanabe, Katie Holmes, et al) do good jobs, a combination of both fine acting and an excellent director pulling good performances out of them. Of them I enjoyed Freeman the most for his jolly performance. He forks away from his Million Dollar Baby role as a wealthy man put into a dead-end job but who loves what he does nonetheless.

So, lastly, is Christian Bale any good? Or is he going to be another Val Kilmer? I didn’t have high hopes when I went in. I liked him, as a teen, in Empire of the Sun, but hadn’t had a lot of interest in seeing him in anything else since that film. He did a bunch of films I never saw and then he was in American Psycho, a film I never wanted to see based on a thoroughly reprehensible and revolting book. Then he did some stuff I wanted to see but never got around to (The Machinist and Equilibrium). Will I see them now, based on his performance in this film? Yes. The man nails it. He’s brooding and even funny sometimes. I was impressed by him. He goes from a Chinese prison camp at his lowest to saving the city that his parents attempted to save. Along the way the loner makes some valuable allies as well as some terrifying enemies, but with the panache that someone raised in wealth would have been groomed to have. Of the pre-Nolan Batmans, Michael Keaton was my favorite, mostly because I didn’t feel he was as wooden as his followers. I liked him in a Connery-vs.-Moore kind of way. Keaton is now #2. Bale owns the role.

So, do you think I liked it?

Ha.

My take? None of the film is real. But it’s a movie, so who the hell cares?

Chuck (Sam Rockwell) starts out his career in television as a page at NBC in the early 1960’s, leading tour groups and working his way up the corporate ladder until he gets to pitch the idea for “The Dating Game” to NBC executives. During this time he’s been in contact with Jim Byrd (George Clooney), who eventually becomes Barris’ CIA handler and confidant. Byrd guides Barris through his training and eventually, during the actual production of “The Dating Game,” suggests that the winning couples go on dates to such wonderous and beautiful locales as Berlin and Romania. While the new lovebirds are having their jollies, chaperone Barris is taking care of his true “business” in the shadows. While on one such globe jaunt in Berlin he meets Patricia Watson (Julia Roberts), a fellow contract killer who will eventually be one point in a love triangle with Chuck and Chuck’s live in girlfriend, Penny (Drew Barrymore) and lead to rather dire circumstances for one of its members.

Adapted by Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) from Barris’ own book, the film begs the question: Why hasn’t George Clooney decided to direct a film before now? If all of the leading indicators are correct, he should be winning countless Oscars by this point. He’s got a new one coming out this fall that I’ll probably catch, Goodnight and Good Luck, but the boy has an eye for style, and being a frequent collaborator with pal of Steven Soderbergh can’t hurt. he’s definitely learned from one of the modern masters of visual grandeur. I liked Clooney’s style here, adding just the right amount of goofiness to the game show scenes as well as a dash of malaise as Chuck begins to spiral down into depression.

I’ve liked a lot of movies that Sam Rockwell has had small parts in (In the Soup, Light Sleeper, The Green Mile) and I loved him in Galaxy Quest, probably one of the most underrated comedies of the past ten years. He’s also good at the cagey, slightly off characters, like Jimmy Silk in Heist or Frank Mercer in Matchstick Men. He was a bold choice for a leading man and I think he does a pretty good job of it. He’s not a very good looking guy, but hell, even Woody Allen, who’s a total toad of a guy, still gets the ladies in his films.

The sad truth about this great little flick is that it was a failure at the box office. Miramax has a terrible habit of picking up pictures left and right and then either hanging onto them for eons (see Shaolin Soccer or this fall’s The Great Raid) or releasing them and then not supporting them with any ad campaigns. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind fell into the latter category. They tried to pathetically re-release it to garner some Oscar buzz, but it was simpering and too-little-too-late. Since it’s too late for this one, it’s well worth checking out on DVD.

The normally invigorating Kevin Kline plays William Hundert, a by-the-book professor of Classics at St. Benedicts School for Boys. Lectures focus on the works of Aristotle, Socrates and other ancient writers and philosophers. Interesting when discussing scholarly topics, Hundert is privately dull. Unmarried and lonely, he rows daily on the lake near the school for exercise. He is engaging in class yet dull and distant in personal relationships and he seems to think that that’s just fine. Kline, I suppose, given the script, plays Hundert expertly here, but the man is so lifeless that it seems that Kline just phones in the role of a zombie. It’s a pity because he’s a great actor and could have made Hundert’s dull character far more interesting.

Hundert hosts a yearly contest at St. Benedicts’ known as “The Mr. Julius Caesar” contest. The top Classics students at the school square off in a Jeopardy!-like setting answering minutia regarding the ancient world. The film’s conflict arises when one of the contestants attempts to cheat and Hundert catches him in the act. It will become a lifelong obsession of the cheater to rectify his blemished record through any academic means necessary.

T his film is supposed to answer the big questions like, “should a man be allowed to succeed through dishonesty?” but it came off as preachy and aloof. Why should we care about William Hundert? His character seems conceited and self righteous. Is it reason enough to care about what happens to Hundert simply because he’s an honest man? And if I don’t what does that say about me as a person? Does that make me a dishonest schmuck or just critical of this film? Should I even attempt to care since the film makes even that so difficult to do?

Kline, who’s work I’ve admired going on 15 years, does not shine in this film. The role of Hundert seems like a role that Oscar-whore Kevin Spacey would have considered and then declined with a sneer. “There just isn’t much to work with,” he might say, and strangely enough I would agree with him. What passes for substance here is little more than grown men crying about lost opportunities and their innocent days of school.  Kline’s performance, and the whole film for that matter seem more suited to the likes of a movie-of-the-week on a second-rate network rather than a feature film.

It all comes down to the point that Bond is fun, not serious or realistic, and it wouldn’t take a genius to figure that out. James Bond is Superman without super powers, and therefore someone men can easily relate to. He’s gets to play with guns and electronics, he beds many beautiful women, and he always wins regardless of the odds against him. What man would not want this life?

Everyone knows who James Bond is, so what’s the point of discussing character? The Bond franchise is all situation and periphery characters at this point in the game anyway, and that situation involves North Korea , double agents and as many double entendres as can fit into 123 minutes of screen time. Our story begins in North Korea where Bond is attempting to purchase weaponry from soldiers using diamonds that just happen to have a bomb hidden with them. Tipped off, the North Koreans capture him after a protracted opening sequence with explosions so big that you might mistake it for a preemptive nuclear strike. Bond knows there is a traitor who set him up and he spends the rest of the film trying to find that person and stop a war between North and South Korea .

Die Another Day is the fourth outing for Pierce Brosnan, and by this point in the series he has the Bond persona down as well as Connery did in his heyday. He is relaxed and witty, making even the dumbest sounding lines roll off his tongue as if he were performing Shakespeare. Gunplay is second nature to the man at this point. He isn’t as cool as Connery was, but he is better than either Roger Moore, George Lazenby or Timothy Dalton.

Here the plot is somewhat secondary to the sometimes silly action taking place on the screen. And then the biggest Bond fan will not care if it makes logical sense, but will have questions such as Are the explosions big enough? What types of cool new gadgets does he get to play with? What sexualized names will the women in the film have? How many times will someone wait to kill an enemy, thereby allowing long fight sequences? All of these questions are points in an outline that Bond fans have come to recognize and smile at knowingly as they take place.
This year marks the 40 th anniversary of the James Bond film franchise, the most profitable in British film history. Is it high art? Could it win Best Picture? Who the hell am I kidding? The answer is obvious, but for 40 years the collaborators on this mammoth series have pounded out answers to the above questions that keep the audiences cheering for more.

She has dreams of leaving her small Texas town and doing something else, anything else, it’s just that she doesn’t know what that something is or anything else it might entail. Like many people stuck in failing marriages, she thinks a baby will help, but she can’t get pregnant. A possible one way ticket out comes in the form of a new clerk at the Retail Rodeo, Holden Worther (Jake Gyllenhaal), a dark and mysterious wannabe writer, former alcoholic and college dropout who lives with his parents. He’s so different that Justine finds him fascinating.  To have some change and excitement in her life she begins an affair with Holden that naturally expands into a wider net, enveloping people and creating lies, thievery and death where there would not have been before. She lays awake at night, staring at the backyard and thinks about leaving him since she believes his being high is the reason they can’t have children. What she really is sad about is her life and wants to change it but doesn’t know how.

The movie is very funny, but most often laughter in film doesn’t necessarily come from humorous situations but rather pathos, which is showcased here well. You’re not laughing at Justine because what she’s doing is funny, but rather that’s all one can do when faced with a pathetic situation like this. Whether it’s Phil’s drug-addled ramblings or Justine dropping off a seriously ill coworker who needs to get to the emergency room of the hospital and then driving away, you laugh, but what keeps coming back is that these people are just sad little people drifting through life. The moral of the this story seems to be that people should be open with each other about their wants and dreams, which Justine doesn’t do a good job of communicating. But an alternate moral be that someone’s life could have been saved if Phil just didn’t do drugs all the time?

Jennifer Aniston, who has been fighting her Friends /Rachel Greene image ever since she started doing films seems to be taking the first steps in creating a different character here. Maybe she’s taking career advice  from hubby Brad Pitt (“Don’t do the mainstream film. Go indie, baby, like me in Snatch . The critics will love you.”). The Good Girl is worth one hundred Rock Stars or The Object of My Affection for acting credibility and she does well as the lost girl who doesn’t know which way to go. Only when the fit hits the shan does she try to do the right thing, and doing the right thing doesn’t always end all sweet and sugary.

Although it sets itself up to be a run-of-the-mill action flick, The Bourne Identity hurdled my expectations and managed to grow a brain along the way thanks to the whip-smart direction of indie fave Doug Liman. The gas pedal on this thriller is depressed slowly, and begins by showing Italian fishermen off the southern coast of France spotting a dead man (Matt Damon) floating in the water. When they pull him aboard they realize that he’s not dead, just unconscious, with two bullet holes in his back. The ship’s doctor goes to work on him, removing the bullets and finding a small laser pointer with a Swiss bank account in it. The unconscious man comes back to the world of the living and can’t remember anything that happened to him previous to his being pulled from the Mediterranean. As soon his boat reaches port he speeds to the bank in Zurich where he finds a safety deposit box loaded with information he hopes will solve many of his life’s riddles. The first passport he picks up shows his name is Jason Bourne and that he lives in Paris, but the box is loaded with passports showing him with different names and nationalities. It also contains thousands of dollars in different denominations and a pistol. At this point he doesn’t know who he really is or where he lives, but at least he’s wealthy.

Unlike his character in Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon really isn’t stretched too much in the acting department here. Since he doesn’t know who he can trust all he needs to do is kick ass and look confused. He finds that he’s fluent in several languages and that he can go toe-to-toe in several fighting styles. Not knowing why he knows these things, he adapts to his situation and keeps moving, trying to make his way to Paris.

Starring:
Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox
Directed By:
Doug Liman
Release Date:
June 14, 2002
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for violence and some language.
Distributors:
Universal Pictures
3 Stars

The authorities are pursuing him like hungry dogs chasing a raw steak, so he pays a woman $10,000 to drive him to Paris. The woman, Maria (Franka Potente from Run Lola Run ) becomes his most trusted ally in his quest to find out who he really is. The body count starts climbing as hired killers from all over Europe converge upon Bourne to help him take the eternal dirt nap and keep him from obtaining this knowledge. The authorities are led by Chris Cooper, who played the ethically torn sheriff in Lone Star . His job here is to find out what Bourne knows and take him out by any means necessary if it’s required. He’s not evil, per se, but rather a government man who needs to clean up a fouled up job before a Senate subcommittee finds out about the trouble.

As the token female/love interest Franka Potente was my favorite in this film as the student getting the screw job from the American embassy on a visa application. Naïve and confused, she’s the audience’s representative in the film. Finding herself helping a man she doesn’t know and slowly (as in all movies) realizing that she has feelings for him, her character was the perfect foil for Bourne since she knew only slightly less about the situation than she did. Her strong female character is refreshing to see in a Hollywood movie, and she helps the audience learn more by not knowing anything about the situation.

The thrills in this film are exhilarating. Whether it’s a car plunging down a staircase, a man jumping seven stories while firing a gun or two assassins pursuing each other in an open field, it’s engrossing. What Bourne is learning for the first time the audience is also learning for the first time and his confusion and shock at the chase makes it invigorating to see.

The film begins ten years after The Phantom Menace left off; Anakin Skywalker, now nineteen and a Jedi apprentice, has been pining away for Padmé Amidala since he last saw her on Naboo. She hasn’t been sitting at home dreaming about his pre-pubescent bod however, but instead has served out her remaining time as Queen and is now a Senator in the Galactic Senate. Obi-Wan Kenobi, last seen telling Yoda that he would train Anakin in the ways of the Jedi, is still trying to rein in Anakin’s mercurial impulses — proving that he’s up to the challenge of taking on his former master’s charge. All of this takes place while hundreds of member systems of the Galactic Senate are considering seceding from the Republic; the Jedi are having a hard time containing threats to its existence; and a vote is being considered to allow for the creation of an army to help create a bastion of peace and tranquility. Whew.
Enter Hayden Christensen as young Skywalker, ordered to protect Senator Amidala on her home planet from would-be assassins leaving plenty of time for what I and all Star Wars geeks have hoped for: space lovin’. Throughout the “love” scenes (which amount to no more than bare-backed dresses and frolicking in luscious fields), Christensen is believable as he makes the moves on a Scarlet O’Hara like Portman. However, his overall dialogue delivery left me turning to my wife and remarking, “You can sure tell where Luke got his whining from.” On the other hand, I thought he did quite well with what he was given and it will be interesting to see how he takes the dark side of the Force and kicks it up a notch in the third picture.

Natalie Portman, however, was a serious disappointment as she delivers her lines in a wooden monotone most of the film. She starts this one though as a snobby ex-queen turned senator who finally softens to the advances of Anakin, but the dialogue that comes out of her mouth remains stilted and forced. I laughed at serious moments where she was pouring her heart out and found it hard to watch during her scenes because I kept cringing.

Ewan McGregor is growing into the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi quite nicely, as is evidenced in his speech patterns mimicking those of the late Sir Alec Guinness. He has a presence and style that I don’t think he showed off in The Phantom Menace and is the true star of the series thus far.

The film does have its high points. I loved the water planet of Kamino, Anakin exacting his revenge on a tribe of Sand People, and the clone troopers were excellent foreshadowing to the future stormtroopers. The highlight, definitely, for any Star Wars fan though was when Yoda finally showed us that he was a true Jedi master in combat. I would see the film again just for that sequence (I don’t want to give away the circumstances, though).
Overall, the film struggled to be mediocre, which is sad to say since I’m sure a great deal of effort and tenacity went into its creation. The computer-generated characters and creatures seem flat, whereas even puppets, like the Rancor in Return of the Jedi, seemed real enough to kill you. Some of the action sequences were bordering on dull and about half of the jokes needed a rim shot.

The Star Wars franchise seems to be suffering under the digital age. What once had weight and texture now seems to be a cartoon and a shadow of its former self. Fans have been saying ever since The Phantom Menace that “the next one will be better.” We’ll have to wait for that next one and see.

Into this season of filmic filth comes Brotherhood of the Wolf, a ‘based-upon-actual-events’ pre-French Revolution period piece that tries way too hard to be all things to all audiences. Do you like scary movies? It’s got a bloodthirsty creature hunting women in the French countryside! Did you like Basic Instinct? Well then, we’ve got the gratuitous brothel scenes with plenty of topless prostitutes for you! How about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? We’ve got kung-fu fighting! Shakespeare in Love? It’s got filthy peasants and radiant bourgeoisie! How about JFK? Let us ram these conspiracies down your throat! It becomes tedious and tiresome as the filmmakers throw one genre after another into the melting pot.

The film begins at the beginning of the French Revolution as peasants prepare to storm the estate of Thomas d’Apcher (Jacques Perrin). His servants are scurrying about in fear, but Thomas sits at his writing table, taking down thoughts of long ago adventures he took part in. Since, he says, he is the last person known alive to have had a hand in these adventures, he is putting his thoughts on paper before he is executed by the guillotine.

Starring:
Samuel Le Bihan, Vincent Cassel, Emilie Dequenne, Monica Bellucci, Jeremie Renier
Directed By:
Christophe Gans
Release Date:
January 11, 2002
MPAA Rating:
R for strong violence and gore, and sexuality/nudity.
Distributors:
Universal Focus
1.5 Stars

His writings tell the tale of Gregoire de Fronsac and Mani, men who hunted a terrifying wolf-beast with him when he was a young nobleman. Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) is a naturalist, botanist, libertine and world explorer. On one of his trips to the Americas he came across Mani (Mark Dacascos), an Indian that he became blood brothers with and in this film, form the Brotherhood of Asskickers. A the start of his tale with two peasants, one accused of witchcraft and the other thievery, being chased and beaten when Mani comes to the aide of the peasants and kung-fu’s their pursuers. How an American Indian at the beginning of the 19 century knows martial arts is extraneous to the plot; all that matters is that he knows it.

Fronsac and Mani have another purpose in this debacle: they are to help find the wolf-beast that has been hunting lone women and eating them. They receive help from a creepy nobleman (Vincent Cassel), his sister (Emilie Dequenne) and various others of the wealthy class. They consider the hunt sport, but as is revealed later, there is a deeper meaning to the wolf-creature that reaches beyond caste and wealth.

The official story, according to the bourgeoisie, is that the beast was slain, but d’Apcher purports to know the truth, and he writes of it at length; the ups and downs, the love life of Fronsac, the bigotry facing Mani, the weird obsessions of Vincent Cassel, prostitutes that practice witchcraft, dog fights, and so on and so forth.

Mixed into this are conspiracies concerning the Catholic church, the Knights Templar and anarchists versus monarchists along with heavy doses of gunplay, racism, fascism, incest and melodrama too. The performances are alright, with Samuel Le Bihan giving it the old college try as Fronsac. Mark Dacascos plays the stereotypical quiet, mystical Indian with a streak of bloodlust running through him. The goofiest comes from Monica Bellucci as the prostitute/medium that plays a part in the conspiracy too silly to mention other than to say that it must be witnessed to be believed.

You can probably tell that I didn’t really enjoy this film. It has a running time of just over 140 minutes, but seems to drag for days. There were several times, just like Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, where the film could have ended and been better. Oliver Stone’s JFK also dealt with a multitude of conspiracy theories, but Stone at least attempted to make it all interesting to the audience with a protagonist that you cared about.

FYI — This film is not yet available on DVD or VHS. Not that you should care, though…

Gosford Park is excellent. The treasure here is the upper crust of English society and the trash are the people that serve the treasure’s every whim and fancy. The man of affluence in this film is Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) who is married to the much younger Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas). The McCordle’s are hosting a hunting weekend at their English countryside estate and all manner of the bold and the beautiful are invited.

The biggest problem is that Sir William is a jerk and not well liked by most of the people attending the hunting weekend, both privileged and non-privileged alike. They include such British film and stage luminaries as Maggie Smith (Constance, Countess of Trentham), Richard E. Grant (George), Clive Owen (Robert Parks), Alan Bates (Jennings, the butler), Derek Jacobi (Probert), Helen Mirren (Mrs. Wilson) and Emily Watson (Elsie). Almost all of the attendees have one problem or another with their host and over the course of the weekend some will attempt to show their displeasure in the gravest way possible.

The Haves in the film reside upstairs away from the Have-Nots and Altman does a fine job of juggling both the rich and their poor help. It’s all tuxedos and caviar above ground-level, while the groundlings that serve them eat at a plain wooden table. The best part of the film is what Altman does with the mingling of the two social classes and how they interact.

The only problem that I had with the film was that the cast was a little to huge for your average viewer to pay attention to. The majority of the time the Haves are referred to by their last names or their title while sometimes they refer to each other by first names. A connect-the-dots game could be played with all of the characters.

Other than that one small problem, I liked the film. Altman is a fine craftsman and it shows brightly here that he truly loves his subject (and like a king, his subjects) and gives them rich enough parts to show that all of them, regardless of social strata, are humans.

Well, there’s one man, Carl Hanratty, who doesn’t think any of this malarkey is funny, not one bit, and is the party pooper FBI agents who’s going to bring Frank to justice. He is also one of the most cheerless and miserable FBI agents in the history of cinema. Yeah, his men may not like him very much, but Carl couldn’t care less what they think because he has the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation at his disposal. One thing can be said for Carl, he’ll get his man, even if it takes him four years and criss-crossing between two continents to do it.

Frank is a man who’s wrestled life to the ground by its horns and claimed it for himself. After his parents (Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye) divorce, Frank flees his familial problems and heads for the Big Apple to find his fortune. Boy meets world and before you know it he’s broke, homeless and it attempting to kite checks. He quickly realizes that portraying the broke student fails to gain the trust of wary bank tellers, and after an epiphany hits him he takes on the appearance of a Pan-Am airline pilot, because, as everybody knows, you can trust a pilot! Soon he’s swimming in cash and flying the jump seat of airliners across the country, all the while cashing bogus checks. Each time Hanratty is close to capturing him, Frank deftly moves on to a new, cooler job.

Starring:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye
Directed By:
Steven Spielberg
Release Date:
December 25, 2002
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for for some sexual content and brief language.
Distributors:
DreamWorks SKG
3.5 Stars

The major flaw with this film is surprisingly enough Tom Hanks’ character Hanratty. The writing, not the portrayal that is. The FBI man is so cardboard and two– dimensional that it could have been played by literally anyone else. Hanratty isn’t the main focus of the story, but it would have been nice to see a more rounded adversary for the dapper Abagnale to pit wits against, rather than the stereotypical hard-ass cop who sits alone at the office, expecting phone calls from his prey, anticipating moves like in a game of chess.

Spielberg however makes up for this by keeping the film’s mood light, allowing the bubbly personality of DiCaprio to carry the film through points that would have been dull in the hands of others. He handles the comedy well, staying at a shallow level, rarely delving into the mechanics of the forgeries. In the hands of other directors this might have become tedious but Spielberg keeps things moving at a speedy pace. The camera work of Janusz Kaminski is bright and alive, primary colors jumping off of the screen, swimming around in a big old pool of nostalgia and accentuating the upbeat times of the early 1960’s. In the end, it’s almost hard to turn away, the film is so watchable it’s infectious.

She yelled at me and called me names and she cried. She made me feel bad (rightly so, since I was dumping her) so after the mess was sorted out and I was alone again I went over to my best friend’s apartment and told him what had happened. “Why are you upset?” he asked. “You got what you wanted. Why should you feel bad?” And he was right.

Of course, this all works wonderfully when you’re not on the other side of the coin. In High Fidelity Rob Gordon (John Cusack) has two loves in his life — music and his live-in girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle). At the beginning of the film he’s just felt the stinging rebuke that my ex-girlfriend felt that night so long ago. Laura is moving out because she’s tired of Rob’s hipster-dufus quirks and his inability to grow up. He runs a record store in Chicago and lives out his adolescent fantasies of maybe someday producing a great rock-n-roll record. As Laura puts it, “You’re the same person you were, and I’m not.” Rob is suddenly alone and attempts to discover what is going on and why he can’t make it work with women.

While on his quest for inner fulfillment, Rob seeks out the other half of his top five (a common phrase in this flick) worst breakups and attempt to find out why they went the way they did. The women range from sweet to disturbed to aloof, and Rob, in his infinite dopiness, never seems to be able to hit the nail on the head as to why things go so wrong for him. But something happens inside of Rob’s head near the end of the flick where he suddenly seems to grow up and become the kind of man that makes you start rooting for him where before he seemed like a leech in search of a host. In the process he naturally learns important tidbits about himself and will possibly come to realize that monogamous commitment and love aren’t such bad things after all.

I like John Cusack. He’s been in many films I’ve enjoyed immensely (Bob Roberts, Bullets Over Broadway, Being John Malkovich). Like many actors, he’s also been in several pieces of complete garbage (Con Air, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Cradle Will Rock). This is one film he obviously loved making as it’s tailor-made for his style of acting. Here he’s th Loser Everyman, the Bizarro World version of Truman Burbank from The Truman Show. Cusack was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, but he lost out to George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I would agree with. His portrayal here of a Gen-X slacker is probably the best work he’s done in the past 5 years. He’s nuanced and funny and easy to identify with (at least he was for me).

I haven’t really talked a lot about the actual movie in this review I realize. My wife loves this movie (we saw it twice in two days when it was in the theaters) and I love it too, but probably with differing reasons behind our mutual love. She loves the funny parts; I love the funny parts too, but all guys at some point in their lives have been in the same boat as Rob. I likened him above to the Loser Everyman. He’s the doppelganger half of our personalities that want to stay the little boy forever, playing with Star Wars figures and video games while the grown-up world waits for us outside, looking in. I like this movie because of that.