More pathetic than you realized

 

Who is more pathetic than you realized? Elfin April, of course. See, I get all worked up about movies in the way, basically, that you only get all worked up about . . . well, I was going to say, "your mom," but that's more insulting than I intend this statement to be. Let's reverse. Think about something that you really like. You know, really, really like. You tell everyone you like it, but you try to play down just how much you like it because you don't want to come across as too crazy. In the end, you embarrass yourself when this other person you are talking to has the gall to suggest that there is something wrong with this thing you like, and you end up flipping your basket.

 

That's me and movies. Lots of movies have lots of problems, and I do my best to acknowledge that. I can get behind the fact you don't love everything I love, but I can't always get behind why.

 

So when I come across a nice post/list that seems to defend my point of view, well, I tend to get all worked up about it -- but in a good way. A semi-tearful, someone really gets me, way.

 

See? Told you I was pathetic. It's a good read, though.

 

Yes, I will review a movie again at some point. I plan to carve out some time this very weekend (!) for a stack of DVDs that have been collecting dust for six weeks now.

A pale shadow of democracy

 

Exercise your right to vote . . . by telling Elfin April if you want to read her opinion regarding Superman Returns .

 

Readers, should I see this one or skip it? Any particular reason for either vote?

Finally Figured it Out: A rumination on a certain possibly transgendered harbinger of Armageddon

Emily sent me this article from Slate's Summer Movie Week (an idea which excites me to no end). I immediately fired back that I already read the same thing in The Tyee two years ago.

I can't say I disagree with either one, which basically state, as Chris Rock did at the 2005 Oscars, "If you can't get Russell Crowe, just don't make your stupid epic." Don't get Brad Pitt or Colin Ferrel or, for the love of peace, Orlando Bloom. I'll give Clive Owen a pass because I don't blame him for that mild disaster, and I stand by my belief that Bloomers was at least serviceable as Paris, Eric Bana rocked the hizzouse as Hector, and Gerard Butler is a jack of all trades. It has something to do with a certain fleshy masculinity that allows these actors to transcend time and space.

It was also bizarre that the common link in these articles was Bloomers, as I had been thinking of him recently.* I was having yet another conversation with myself along the lines of, "Have I been him or her an unfairly bum rap?" See, I have been listening to Elton John's "My Father's Gun" a lot lately, which put me in mind of that scene in Elizabethtown where all his relatives are standing around trying to tell Drew what a great man his father was and how much they are going to miss him, and all Drew is doing is standing over his father's coffin, changing the angle of his head, and puzzling out what the look on his father's face is supposed to be. When he finally hits upon it, "whimsical," he sort of lets out this sigh of bittersweet relief. It's well done, to be honest. There's a lot in that movie that isn't nearly as well done (I could begin and end my whole case by asking why Claire was interested in Drew to begin with), but that part is nice.

And that's my problem with Bloomers. Most of the time he's just plain bad, all miscast and adolescent and scant, but sometimes, just sometimes, he's pretty good. So I thought back to when I liked him, if at all, and the answer was Pirates of the Caribbean. In a movie where I detest 2/3 of the stars, it's a wonder that I like it so much. Perhaps Depp is just so good that he rubs wonderfulness off on everyone else, but I think it's a little more than that. I think the problem with Bloomers is that, right now, he's Heath Ledger circa 2001.

Ledger just kind of appeared in 10 Things I Hate About You and magically elevated the movie from flash-in-the-pan to something more lasting. The other stars of that minor hit? David Krumholtz has got his TV show, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is carving out a nice indie scene It-Boy career, and the rest of them stagnated or disappeared outright. But, boy, were people all over Ledger. Soon he was Mel Gibson's tragically heroic son, and then - poof! - a leading man in his own right. Not just leading, in fact, since the whole poster was his face. And that movie went? Nowhere. Because it blew.

In the very same year, he also had a very affecting turn as Billy Bob Thornton's suicidal son, but he was in the movie for maybe twenty minutes, and everyone else was busy focusing on other things.

So Ledger's career goes down the crapper pretty much the instant it starts, and, to be honest with you, I thought that was the end of him. But then Ang Lee decided gay cowboys and New Yorker short stories would translate well to film, and the rest of that story is bound to go down in film history.

And that's the problem with Bloomers, too, I think. Or, rather, that's Bloomers' problem. He's doing this leading man stuff because people think he should be, but he shouldn't. He's just not leading man material. And maybe he could be, but right now he's young and inexperienced and it shows. And maybe, just maybe, if he sort of steps back and gives it time, he could stumble into his very own Brokeback.

Or he could blow even worse than he already does. Too early to tell.

But, yes, Slate and The Tyee, no one is Russell Crowe. Perhaps you should give another guy a chance before you get too caught up in your self-congratulatory criticism, though.

*Yes, for the record, I sit around thinking about movie stars and their careers. Piss off. You do it, too.

Balance almost restored

This is great. Too bad Network just arrived from Zip.

But then this is the sign and symbol of everything wrong with the world. I'll make it clear: The National = Good. Reality TV = bad. It's lazy and largely unoriginal and, yes, plays into voyeurism. Not every show has to be a stimulating work of art, but there's no need to fill the airwaves with tripe every hour of the day and displace something of value in order to do it.

Of course, this did make me feel a bit better. Shatner rules.

It's not like I don't see the reasoning here

Because I do. I get it. He just "won" on that deplorable show (top rated and one of the worst offerings by far), so putting him on the cover helps keep him and his probably soon to be available debut album in the public mind. But seriously? This guy? Wentworth Miller and Jake Gyllenhaal I get, but this is too much.

It's not like he's one of these two guys. Redford and Newman really aren't ones I typically go in for, although I do appreciate their old-school movie star charisma. But, let's not kid our selves: these two look damn good here.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

Premise: The last performance of an old fashioned radio variety show, hosted by GK (Garrison Keillor) and populated by such characters as 30s-style detective Guy Noir (Kevin Kline); singing sisters Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) and Yolanda (Meryl Streep), and Yolanda's suicidally minded daughter, Lola (Lindsay Lohan); and cowboy duo Dusty (Woody Harrelson) and Lefty (John C. Reilly). All are awaiting the appearance of the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), while Guy pursues the femme fatale (Virginia Madsen) he's been waiting for all these years.

Let it be known that I have never once listened to screenwriter Garrison Keillor's radio show. I hear good things, but, well, I wouldn't even know how to find it here. So, there's that.

But Robert Altman doing what only Robert Altman can? Being perfectly in his element? That's what film-making's about.

Metaphors for Keillor's voice and Altman's style abound, and I am wary of throwing my hat in for either. I will say that Altman excels in creating a feeling of camaraderie, of familiarity, of warmth, of kindness, and of family between everyone that crosses the screen from the bit players to once-rising starlets* to the Greatest Living Actress.**

*Now it's more like the star accidentally hit something and has veered tragically off course. Don't you realize that I wanted to like you?

**of Her Generation. The necessity of the caveat depends on who you ask.

To call the plot secondary to the characters is being generous (at least in this case), but it doesn't really matter when it looks like this much fun. Barely anything "happens," and Altman, through his tremendous cast, can move the viewer from hysterical laughter to tears in a split-second. Everyone seems so natural that even the occasional jar is quickly forgotten, replaced almost instantly by another beautiful memory. A-

P.S. At least one woman in the audience thought she should sing along. Hard to resist joining her. Must get soundtrack.

Oh, Bloomers

There's no love lost between Orlando Bloom and I, to say the least. I think very little of him as an actor and even less of him as an individual human being with feelings, except, of course, to further my theory that Orlando Bloom is a) a woman, b) possibly Keira Knightley, and c) a sign of the Apocalypse. I'd go into the whole thing, but it involves 16th century paintings and Virginia Woolf novels, and I doubt you'd appreciate the genius anyhow.

And yet, somehow, I feel compelled to follow his career. Worse yet, I seem to know an inordinate amount about "his" personal life. So when this story came to my attention, do you know what I did? Laughed. Laughed hysterical and repeatedly, as though I cannot return to the story without laughing again. It all seems so improbable and wrong, and, yet . . . hilarious. And that picture? Not only does one of those people look like he is on spring break and the other like she has been locked away from daylight for the last century, but it looks like Bloomers has thrown his mug up in the lens, unaware of the frightened woodland creature next to him.

So thanks for that, Bloomers. And while I'm in a rare grateful mode, let's all give thanks to those programming geniuses over at the TVtropolis network (formerly Prime). Everyday after work I can enjoy Beverly Hills 90210. Today Dylan threw a vase and a fit on his first date with Brenda, and soon she will have a lump on her breast and a pregnancy scare, and later she and Kelly will become frenemies, but she'll save Kelly when Kelly nearly dies from her diet pill addiction. Oh, I love this show.

Friends With Money (2006)

Brief: Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) doesn't have money or a husband, but her three best friends do. Franny (Joan Cusack) is happily married to Matt (Greg Germann) and sets Olivia up with her trainer, Mike (Scott Caan). Christine (Catherine Keener) is unhappily married to her screenwriting partner David (Jason Isaacs) and assists Olivia in her product sample hoarding scheme. Jane (Frances McDormand) has stopped washing her hair because her arms get tired, and her husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney), may be gay.

Or at least everyone else seems to think he is.

Oh, Nicole Holofcener, I wish I could be you. Seriously. You are not only one of the few female filmmakers I can think of off the top of my head, but you are also unparalleled in the way you deal with women. Women in the Holofverse are complicated mixes of strong, weak, beautiful, and vulnerable. In a word, they are real. More real than most women you see on the screen, far more real that anyone woman you find in a rom-com. There they are always reduced to stereotypes filled out by women so beautiful that suspending disbelief becomes a Herculean feat.

Perhaps the best part of Holofcener's are the way they only follow the bare minimum of a plot. Plot, you see, isn't something that happens in a real person's life, and it doesn't so much happen in her movies. They're more episodic: she gets such lived in performances out of her actors (the combination of her and her staple, Keener, is nothing short of film magic) that you get the feeling that you are being dropped in the middle of something. Holofcener leaves you in there a while, lets you get to know her characters, gives you a feel for the places, the smells, the people, and then she plucks you not at the end but simply further down the middle. Problems aren't so much resolved as pushed along. People don't undergo the seismic changes you see in more "Hollywood" movies, but you do start to see cracks along the fault lines.*

*I know nothing about such things. That metaphor may be even worse than I think.

I think even less of Aniston than you might presume, so I am pleased to report that she holds her own in the face such enviable talent. She almost, almost, almost nearly sheds her perfect pop princess image for long enough for Olivia to resonate. It's actually what the leads do around Olivia that fill in the necessary details of her performance, but it goes a long way to putting her sitcom days behind her. Of course, I understand that The Break Up undid most or all of this good work, but I still regard it as a start.

Right now the comment on IMDb is "So What?" "So what," kid? This is the "so, what" of life. It's the "so what" of being a woman. If this film is bold, the boldness is found in its honesty. Perhaps that's just too much for some. B+

Also, I recently screened I Love Your Work. I'm not sure I should have done that, and I'm not sure anyone else should either. Giovanni Ribisi leads a bizarre cast as a currently hot star married to another currently hot star (Franka Potente), has a sort of mental breakdown, and begins to remember a very different relationship with a very different girl (Christina Ricci). I spent the first 30-45 minute trying to figure out what the hell I was watching, the next half hour or so in a fugue state, and the final 30 wondering where co-writer/director Adam Goldberg was going with all of this and what was up with Rebel Without a Cause refs and red lighting. I'm left with nothing more than a dazed sensation and a generally vague response of "I guess I watched that." I'm still not entirely convinced that I did, but I must have.

The Lake House (2006)

No plot description as I have not seen The Lake House. It doesn't come out until next Friday, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway.

I'm going to tell you that . . . I hate The Lake House. I hate it. Every time I see a TV spot, which contains all I need to know about this monstrosity, I get worked up and yell at the TV.

Forget the fact I neither buy Keanu Reeves as an architect nor Sandra Bullock as a doctor (well, maybe a pediatrician. Is she a pediatrician in this movie?). Forget the fact that, because I am evil, I spent unaccounted-for minutes giggling at the sight of scores of publicity photos of Keanu Reeves sitting around reading letters and Sandra Bullock looking out the window looking pensive/sad, although I guarantee that those two things make up, like, 67% of the movie.

It's the following line that gets me every time: "We're living two years apart."

And Bullock sounds so horrified and sad at the prospect that you would think that she, a lady doctor, just found out that she has prostate cancer.

Because, seriously, if you are both that in love and are aware of this problem, then what is the big deal? Just have him meet up with you at the lake house at some future time after you have already fallen in love and get together in real life. And, you know, run through the obits from the last two years and make sure he doesn't die between now and then. See? Easy-peasy.

I mean, I saw one crappy-ass made-for-TV movie where the couple-in-love exchanging letters lived in the 1860s and the 1990s respectively, so there. That's way harder to reconcile and may have involved killing oneself and time travel. I don't think I watched the end.

So what I'm saying is thus: I know that romances are predictable, but I really shouldn't have been able to a) figure it all out during a commercial and b) come to a solution during that time. Seriously, took me 15-30 seconds, and now the industry wants me to spend ten Jack Trippers and one hundred-odd minutes suffering through more? No.

And, while we're here, Alison Gillmor asks, Whither the rom-com?