Italian
For Beginners Italian
For Beginners Italian For Beginners is the latest Dogme95
film to make it to the Chicago arthouses. Rather than go on that rant again,
here's the website. Be sure to read
the "Vow of Chastity", it's a hoot.
It is a romantic comedy, which I only mention as
that would seem to violate rule eight of the Vow of Chastity, but what
do I know. Set in Denmark, it is one of those stories about six single
people who come together in an Italian language class who you know by the
end of the film will pair off into three couples.
There are some nice characters, Andreas (Anders
W. Berthelsen), the temporary local pastor who replaces a man who threw
the organist off the balcony and Hal-Finn (Lars Kaalund), a waiter not
merely rude, but verbally abusive were my favorites. That's the thing with
this movie, the characters don't seem like artificial genre constructs
(like, say, in Kate And Leopold), everyone would probably find someone
they like or identify with.
Grade: B
Diamond
Men Eddie Miller (Robert Forster) is a Pennsylvania diamond
salesman who, after a heart attack, is told by his corporate bosses that
he is no longer insurable to carry around a million dollars worth of merchandise.
He's got a mortgage to pay, so he agrees to help break in his replacement
Bobby Walker (Donnie Wahlberg).
The two hit the road and are instantly incompatible.
Eddie wants to go by unnoticed, eating at quiet restaurants and going to
bed early, while Bobby wants to meet all the local women. If it sounds
familiar, that's because it is. There are certain things you know that
have to happen in this movie. They have to fight, Bobby has to apologize
because, for all of his brashness, he's in over his head. Bobby has to
help Eddie with something totally unrelated to business. There has to be
some sort of crisis with the merchandise, which, in a twisty, roundabout
way, leads to a happy ending for all
But what Diamond Men shows that a fine movie
can emerge from a predictable formula. Forster and Wahlberg have a chemistry
that goes beyond the generation gap warfare. Bobby needs Eddie's help and
Eddie realizes that this may just be the end of the line for him, and these
themes play out in the acting. Along with a strong script and direction
from former diamond salesman Daniel M. Cohen (write what you know), they
show the loneliness of the job. Forster is the master of these every man,
working guy roles, and is someone you instantly like when he pops up in
a movie (I remember thinking "Where did Forster go?" every fifteen minutes
or so after his brief appearance in Mulholland Dr.). It's nice to
see an undeservedly overlooked actor get showcased in a good movie, even
if it is a small piece like this.
Grade: B
Birthday
Girl Studio logic is sometimes beyond me. Why would you
pay to get the rights to distribute a movie (no doubt also kicking in a
few bucks for its production) and then let it sit on the shelf, especially
one with a star like Nicole Kidman? You figure that all you would have
to do is push it out into a modest number of theaters, make a few million,
and get at least some of your investment back. Sure, most of the time projects
left to gather dust aren't all that good, but since when have studios been
in the business of making art? It seems like simple economics, spend a
minimal amount of money in promotion, and a film in release would have
to make more than one not in release, right?
What makes Birthday Girl (a title rusting
in a Mirimax warehouse for nearly two years) different is that it's actually
pretty decent. John Buckingham (Ben Chaplin) goes online to find a mail
order bride. Nadia (Nicole Kidman) arrives. Sure, she's pretty and favors
skimpy clothes, but unlike her letters promised, she smokes and doesn't
speak a word of English, caveat emptor, I guess. She slowly works
her way into his heart, helped along by stumbling on to his pile o' porn
for some pointers on what he likes. Things are going great until her cousin
Yuri (Matthieu Kassovitz) and his friend Alexi (Vincent Cassel) show up.
At this point, the story becomes a dark comedy.
Big time French actors Kassovitz (Amelie) and Cassel (The
Crimson Rivers, Brotherhood Of The Wolf) steal the show away
from Kidman. Yuri is the fast talking, buddy buddy guy who just seems all
jazzed up that he can speak English. One of his big moments of excitement
comes when he discovers that an arcade in a hotel has the video game Gran
Turismo. Alexi is the quiet one that you just know is going to turn out
to be bad. Kidman gives another solid performance where, for a good part
of the film, she doesn't speak and can only act through reactions. Throw
in a nice story that moves from romance to dark comedy to something-else-that-I-won't-name-as-it-gives-away-too-
much and you've got a film that had no business sitting around unreleased
for so long.
Grade: B-
Slackers It not just that Slackers is aggressively
unfunny, it goes beyond that. It's hard to put into words, but it is obvious
when you see it. The material we are supposed to laugh at is not just merely
unfunny, or uncomfortably funny as in a dark comedy, or maybe funny to
a different demographic, or offensively funny. It's more of a case that
you feel as if you're intelligence has been insulted. You kind of are mad
at the filmmakers for thinking what they were doing is funny.
It's a story you've seen a google of times before,
Male A (Devon Sawa) nice, but entering on false pretenses competes with
Male B (Jason Schwartzman), the bad guy, for the hand of Girl (James King).
Sawa plays Dave who has cheated his way through college. Schwartzman is
Ethan who catches him and blackmails him, threatening to get him kicked
out of school unless Dave helps him to win Angela (King).
The problem is that Ethan is written with no sympathies
whatsoever. Take a funny film (say, Nurse Betty as a completely
random example), the character may be completely insane, but is still presented
with some redeeming values or nicely enough that the whole joke isn't that
the person is crazy. Ethan is scary. Ethan is the kind of person news stories
get written about. There is nothing funny about him or his antics (He's
antisocial. Ha ha ha. He goes to places Angela has been, picks up her hair
and has made a doll out of it. Ha ha ha. His shrine to her takes up most
of his dorm room. Ha ha ha.). This isn't a guy you laugh at, this is a
guy that you feel sorry that Angela doesn't have the courage to call the
police on.
Grade: F
Tuvalu Tuvalu is a wonderful homage to silent films.
Our hero, Anton (Denis Levant) tries to convince his blind father that
the dilapidated public swimming pool he runs is actually popular while
at the same time trying to win over a pretty girl who swims there. The
film is wonderfully absurdist at times. In keeping with the silent film
tribute, there are no more than a few dozen words of dialogue, all of which
seem to be spoken in the actor's own language. The comedy is broad, such
as when Anton's brother Gregor (Terrence Gillespie sporting a full on Eraserhead
hairdo) tries to get the pool to fail inspection so that he can build modern
high rise apartments.
Find this one if you can.
Grade: A-
Monster's
Ball New policy: When a week goes by and I still haven't
thought of a damn thing to say about a movie, I'll do you the favor of
not trying to bullshit something.
Long movie short: Billy Bob Thornton is Hank, a
death ow prison guard who helps to execute Leticia's (Halle Barry) husband.
The two are brought together by further tragedies in both of their lives
and a relationship develops where each needs the other. Both leads are
fabulous, especially Thornton who plays a man of habit and routine who
suddenly has all that swept away from him and doesn't know how to cope.
There.
Grade: B+
This was the film that Javier Bardem made directly
prior to his Oscar nominated performance in Before Night Falls,
it's a wonder what something like that can do to get a two year old film
American distribution.
It is the story of Alberto (Jordi Molla), a guy
who wants his cake and to eat it too. He can't seem to choose between his
wife (Ariadna Gil) and an affair with Diego (Bardem). It is full of the
sort of cheap melodrama you'd expect to see in a soap opera, the only difference
being the subtitles, the nudity, and the excruciating length. Bardem's
histrionics are quite humorous to watch. A good nap was ruined, as each
and every shred of drama was punctuated with, what by my estimation, was
a 5,000 piece orchestra.
Grade: D
Rollerball February is when the major studios dump backlogged
product that they don't want cluttering their shelves. It's an incestuous
little game. People will go see movies no matter what time of year it is.
If everybody puts out their crap at the same time, it's a sure bet that
at least one of the projects will make some of its money back. God help
the maverick studio who breaks with this system and actually puts out something
good worth watching in February, the backlash from everyone else trying
to make a quick buck off of inferior product will be swift and hellacious.
I mention this because I should be used to this
by now, but I'm not. Every time I see a wretched piece of February crap,
I come away somewhat surprised. At least it can't get any worse than Rollerball
(or could it?).
Rollerball is the kind of movie that causes
pain. Not just the metaphorical pain of suffering through a dumb story,
borderline acting, and 100 minutes of your life that you will never get
back, this movie actually gave me a headache. It is full of bright, flashy
scenes, punctuated with loud music. The camera swings back and forth so
violently, that to actually follow it would result in whiplash. Jump cuts
of a mere dozen frames are substituted for actual drama. Most inexplicable
(and most painful), an entire nighttime chase sequence takes place in the
grainy green effect produced by night vision goggles.
Rollerball, the sport, combines motorcycles with
people on rollerblades whose goal is to throw a ball into a target hard
enough to set off some sparklers. It didn't seem all that difficult. The
league, located throughout central Asia, is a diversion for the dirt poor
locals. They come, they cheer for their heroes, they gamble their money
away (I counted four seperate scenes of automatic money counters in action).
Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein) is the latest hero (the crowd is helpfully
told by the Jumbotron to chant "Jon A Ton"). He's there at the invitation
of best buddy Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J), who thoughtfully was there to
get him out of San Francisco Just In Time to avoid the police who, had
they actually caught him, would have been able to charge him with (Gasp!)
at least a misdemeanor. I know whenever I'm staring down the barrel of
a several hundred dollar fine, my first instinct is to flee to Kazakhstan.
Klein is completely miscast, his boyish looks and
gee whiz attitude don't fit the role in the least. But that's okay, he
gets to compete with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (as teammate and...shhhh...secret
girlfriend Aurora) who can't even make it through a scene with a consistent
accent. Jean Reno (either desperate to break into the American market or
seriously slumming it) plays team owner Petrovich. The usually capable
French speaking Reno mangles his English lines as badly as I would mangle
French should I ever make over to Paris to star in a film. His acting is
similar to what mine would be also.
As far as incoherent plots go, this one takes the
cake. Petrovich spends his time schmoozing media bigwigs. Jonathan is one
of those heroes who notices everything, even when it's nothing. There are
endless shots of him glancing sideways and catching sight of something
that doesn't seem quite right to him ("Ohmigod, that guy is wearing a suit
and drinking a beer!"). To pump up ratings, Petrovich has engineered some
blood and guts "accidents" to occur during the games. These ploys work,
because he has a gizmo which gives instant worldwide ratings, and they
always shoot up when something bad happens, for as we all know, television
viewers are psychic ("I have this strange feeling that something is happening
on channel five that I need to see."). Our heroes smell a rat, and try
to expose the whole sordid affair. Petrovich has the upper hand, however,
and foils their plans. He doesn't kill Jonathan, because he's "this close
to a North American cable deal." and needs his star. This revelation into
his motivation comes (and I am not exaggerating) at the very end of a scene
where he tells Jonathan he doesn't need to own mines, or newspapers, or
anything else for that matter because he owns the people that own those
things. I guess the allure of being on TNT or the USA network is too strong
for a man that powerful to resist.
Grade: F
Collateral
Damage The thing that seems to make this otherwise unspectacular,
by the numbers action flick noteworthy is, of course, September 11. If
you read some reviews, the fact that 9-11 happened makes this movie that
was conceived, written, filmed, edited, and in all respects completed before
then bad. I've read some reviewers who go on and on about what happened,
how the movie was delayed, and whether or not releasing it all was appropriate.
They then talk about the movie's artistic merit for two sentences and give
the movie an F. Those types of critics should have their word processors
taken away. These are the same idiots who liked Zoolander because
we all needed something to laugh at.
Here I go complaining about critics who don't actually
write about the movies they're reviewing and I haven't said word one about
the movie I'm reviewing.
But really, what can be said. Schwarzenegger plays
firefighter Gordon Brewer. His wife and son are killed by a bomb set by
a terrorist who goes by the name of "The Wolf" (Cliff Curtis). Our boys
in intelligence have been unable to track The Wolf down, and seemed resigned
to the fact that, once again, he'll slip through their fingers. This isn't
good enough for Gordie who decides to track him down and seek vengeance
himself. Lucky that he somehow is granted almost unlimited access to CIA
headquarters and befriends some of the most loose lipped agents our county
has to offer.
Of course, good ol' Gordie makes it into the deepest
heart of rebel controlled Columbia., with the help of some major plot conveniences
which helpfully place the exact characters that he needs to find the wolf
and that the script needs for there to be an exciting twist climax. Even
without the backdrop of current events, this is no more than an average,
seen-it-all-before action movie, slightly elevated by good cameo roles
from John Leguizamo and John Turturro.
Grade: C
Kandahar We move from a movie which was delayed because of
September 11 to a movie which probably only got North American distribution
because of it. Doing some reading, I see it is based on a true story, with
the person whose experiences the script was based on there as an advisor
as the film was made. Even more impressive is the fact that it was filmed
in Afghan border towns, where the lead actress' burqua isn't just a prop.
Those starving refugees aren't just extras, they really were.
In the film, Nafas (Nelofir Pazira), an Afghan born
journalist who fled to Canada as a teenager receives a letter from her
sister who is so desperate at the condition of women living under Taliban
rule that she says she will kill herself on the day of the last eclipse
of the century. By the time the letter reaches Nafas, the eclipse is only
three days away. She decides to travel to Kandahar to try to convince her
sister not to commit suicide. In Afghanistan where women are prohibited
to travel alone, this is no trivial matter.
Entering through Iran, she first bribes a man to
escort her as his fourth wife. They make it as far as the first village
before they get robbed and turn back. She next is accompanied by a boy
who has just been kicked out of school. His mother is distraught because
without school, there is nothing else for him and no way to support themselves.
Later, she travels with an American who has come to Afghanistan to "find
God". After starting off fighting for the various factions, he has become
a doctor, not because he has any sort of training, but because, as he puts
it, even the basic medical knowledge of any Westerner is far beyond what
the people there posses.
The journey is the story. Nafas is determined to
get to Kandahar, fighting against a society determined not to let women
have any rights. It is a film of imagery, the endless, yet beautiful desert,
the airdrop of artificial legs from a Red Cross helicopter and the men
who have lost their legs to land mines chasing after them. It seems petty
to say, but the acting does lack in many places (the camera shy and awkward
Red Cross doctors probably were real Red Cross doctors for all I know).
But this movie serves as an invaluable educational experience.
Grade: B+
Super
Troopers Sad to say, but one of the most disappointing genres
lately has been the dumb comedy. It shouldn't be so hard to make something
that you and your friends can go to and laugh at the stupid antics of juvenile
people. Movie after movie lately tries and fails. Slackers is this
month's example, every month seems to have one. No more dumb comedies that
aren't funny. I guess that's why I enjoyed Super Troopers, it was
a comedy that actually took the time to write a few jokes.
Here's your premise (an aside: A premise isn't enough.
That wears off once you figure it out five minutes in. Again, see Slackers
for an example. Good premise. No jokes to back it up.): there is an age
old war going on between the State Patrol and local police. Set in rural
Vermont, the Troopers are about to become victims of budget cuts. This
won't do, as they take the relative lack of crime as an excuse to screw
around, pull practical jokes, and mess with speeders (each stop is preceded
by a discussion on what game to play: Will one officer see how many times
he can say meow? Will they repeat each other?) The scene shown in the commercial
makes it look like these guys are dumb, that's not the case. They're just
messing around.
The guys are likable, and wisely they included a
father figure captain (Brian Cox in a role 180 degrees from the pedophile
he played in L.I.E.) and a cop with anger issues that no one likes.
There's some plot about drug smuggling and a love interest for one of the
cops, but those just serve as an excuse for there to be a movie. This film
won't cure cancer, but it's pretty funny, which is something you can't
say about a lot of comedies these days.
Grade: B-
Scotland,
PA Yet Another Shakespeare Update, this one of "Macbeth"
is set in early 1970s Pennsylvania and concerns the McBeths, Joe (James
LeGros), the should-be manager of a diner and his scheming wife Pat (Maura
Tierney). The owner Norm (James Rebhorn) has some ideas to make the place
more profitable, some of which mirror Joe's own. After being passed over
yet again for the manager's position, Joe and Pat break into the restaurant
after hours to rob the place. There's an accident with the fryolator, which
gives us the film's first corpse. The locals are ill equipped to handle
the situation, so Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) is bought in.
This is a comedy, and indeed, there are some very
funny darkly comic moments, but they are too few and far between. Most
of the best bits belong to Walken, and they are funny because they are
things that are funny because Christopher Walken is saying them and doing
them in that often imitated, never bettered style of his. What's left in
between are long, slow stretches where we're waiting for his next bit of
screen time.
Grade: C+
ShiriIf you're in the mood for a blood-soaked, political thriller, with an element of romance, this is the film for you. Set in Korea, two government agents must stop an agent of a radical political organization from scuttling an effort at reconciliation between the North and the South. This is what an action movie should be, plenty of gunfire and explosions, yes, but also political intrigue and a love story that doesn't just feel grafted on for the sake of giving us a breather, but which are well integrated into the story.
Grade: B+
Storytelling Todd Solondz's two previous films (Welcome To
The Dollhouse, and Happiness both unseen by me) are known as
in-your-face, squirm-in-your-seat efforts where, depending on who you listen
to, he is either mercilessly making fun of his characters or lovingly satirizing
them.
Storytelling comes in two parts. The first
is "Fiction" and feels like it has come from a man become complacent. The
elements are there to shock, but are just kind of tossed off as if their
presence were enough. Vi (Selma Blair) is a college student whose boyfriend
has cerebral palsy. He writes a cliched story about her, which the mean
spirited, Pulitzer Prize winning, black professor (Robert Wisdom) rips
to shreds. The two break up, and Vi, whose own work was ridiculed, meets
the professor in a bar, and ends up having a one night stand that she wanted
to have, but finds isn't at all what she wanted. She comes back to class
and writes a story about it, which the class attacks as racist and misogynist.
Part two "Non Fiction" plays almost like an apology.
Toby (Paul Giamatti) is a really bad documentary filmmaker. His new project
concerns what it is like being a teenager and his subject is Scooby (Mark
Webber). Toby is constantly in the wrong place (such as talking to Scooby's
brother while Scooby is upstairs having a sexual revelation). The house
is lorded over by the father (John Goodman) who delights in expelling people
from the dinner table. The youngest son (Jonathon Osser) has conversations
with the maid (Lupe Ontiveras) that are designed to make us uncomfortable,
but only serve to give us another child character (there's a switch, the
acting was good, the character sucked) that we want to murder. The documentary
really doesn't come together until it is edited for laughs. Toby doesn't
want this to happen, he starts out with a genuine love of his characters.
This rarely funny segment has a petty silly ending.
Grade: C+
A
Matter Of Taste Frederic Delamont (Bernard Giraudeau) is this year's
first entry for best psychologically twisted character. He's a rich man
whose paranoia has left him a lonely man. He surrounds himself with employees
he trusts, manipulating them masterfully. His latest employee is Nicolas
(Jean-Pierre Lorit) who becomes his food taster. He is somewhat worried
about being poisoned accidentally, but is more frightened of being served
food containing fish or cheese.
Nicolas stays through some bizarre and borderline
illegal training not only because of the generous salary, but also out
of a sense of curiosity. He figures he can leave any time. By the end of
the training, he has had his tastes developed to perfectly match Frederic's.
That's when Nicolas learns that food isn't the only thing he's meant to
taste, and his real job is to live life vicariously for Frederic.
These scenes are shown in flashback while Nicolas
and Frederic's other employees are questioned by a judge. Even though you
know the story isn't going to end well, Frederic is so out there, you can't
guess the "why" of what happened until the end.
Grade: B
Queen
Of The Damned It's kind of difficult to figure out exactly why
this movie is so bad. Nothing leaps out at you while you watch it (other
than minor things, such as the inept job that was done in looping just
about every line of dialogue), but as the credits roll, you whisper a silent
prayer of thanks that the end has arrived and walk out of the theater with
an unclean feeling.
First off, for a movie called Queen Of The Damned,
the actual queen of the damned, Akasha (Aaliyah) doesn't play all that
major of a role. She's a fleeting reference about halfway through, and
then a badass that needs to be dealt with in the final ten minutes, kind
of like a video game.
The movie is really about the vampire Lestat
(Stuart Townsend), who after a nice long rest decides he wants to have
some fun, so he becomes the rock star Lestat, living out in the open, giving
away vampire secrets, and generally pissing off the vampire establishment.
Hot on his heels is Jesse (Wet Hot American Summer's Marguerite
Moreau), an apprentice at a vampire research think tank in London. She
becomes obsessed with Lestat and chases after him, all the way to the climactic
outdoor concert in Los Angeles.
The obvious comparison is with Interview With
A Vampire, the other movie based on Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles".
That one actually had the feel of a real movie. Apart from the infinitely
more A-list cast, there was a sense of effort. Remember, the big controversy
was whether or not Tom Cruise was the right person to play Lestat. That
implied that the work meant something. Queen Of The Damned has nothing
that gives anything near that level of credibility. Someone got the rights
and slapped together a glitzy, flashy, loud, MTV video.
Grade: D
Dragonfly I wonder who Kevin Costner pissed off. He doesn't
appear to be stupid. He's a solid enough actor, not great, but certainly
better than me. The only thing that I can think of to explain his recent
string of terrible movies is some sort of cosmic karmic payback. at least
at the premise stage, it seemed like Dragonfly might break the streak.
Costner plays Joe Darrow, an emergency room doctor whose recently deceased
wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) is trying to contact him from the other side.
Good idea, bad follow through.
Things start out on the wrong foot in an early scene
set at Emily's funeral. The speech is one of those "...we were all the
richer for knowing her..." jobs that has never been used at any funeral,
anywhere, ever. This scene spotlights the movie's largest flaw. It takes
itself so-o-o-o-o-o seriously, dealing with weighty issues of life and
death and the existence of an afterlife, and the characters walk around
with serious faces, delivering their lines with suitable gravitas, but
the lines themselves are so ridiculous, you can't help but laugh. Kind
of knocks the wind out of the sails. Take the hard nosed hospital administrator
who tries to get Joe to take a few weeks off with the line "I'm concerned,
Joe. And so is the rest of the staff." Or Joe who justifies the workaholic
20 hour shifts with "I'm needed there, and I'm going."
And then you get into the mechanics of Emily's contact
attempts. She uses those who have a near death experience to transmit her
messages to the land of the living. Of course, Joe is the only one to hear
them, so he just looks like an obsessed grieving widower in need of a straight
jacket and a padded cell.
Emily had a thing for dragonflies, even wanting
to come back as one in the next life (There's an idea, come back as an
animal whose life span is measured in days. Brilliant.) Her messages to
Joe, of course, can't be direct, otherwise it would be a very short movie.
She has to send back cryptic clues that drive Joe to the brink of madness
in their obscurity. She wants him to go somewhere. Every idiot watching
the movie figures out that she wants him to go to the scene of her utterly
survivable bus crash in Venezuela (aside: notice how often and how insistently
the movie tries to nudge us in the direction of her still being alive.
How much you want to bet it's a red herring?). Instead of being direct,
she has the kids who come back from the dead draw this squiggly cross thing
that turns out to be a map symbol for a waterfall (oops, maybe I should
have given a spoiler warning), a clue that only pays off because the Venezuelan
postal service took six months to deliver a small package.
I like Kevin Costner, I really do. I hope something
better falls in his lap soon, or he's going to stop getting sent scripts
altogether.
Grade: D
Crossroads Opening, post flashback, present day scene: Britney
Spears in her underwear dancing around her room, lip syncing to Madonna's
"Open Your Heart", using a spoon for a microphone. And who says this movie
was made for twelve year old girls. As far as her acting goes, she certainly
did a better job than Mariah Carey in Glitter. Insidiously enough,
no one else in the film can dance as well or as has flat a stomach.
When they were, I dunno, eight, Lucy (Spears), Mimi
(Taryn Manning), and Kit (Zoe Saldana) made a pact to bestest friends forever,
buried a box containing representations of their dreams, and pledged to
come back to that spot the night of high school graduation. Time passes,
infatuations fade. Lucy is the class valedictorian, Mimi is knocked up
trailer trash, and Kit is miss popularity. They don't like each other much
anymore, but all return to dig up the time capsule. One thing leads to
another, and they're off on A Road Trip That Will Change Their Lives to
California. Lucy wants to see the mother that abandoned her (who hasn't
contacted Lucy in all these years because she's "scared". Uh huh. Right.)
Kit wants to drop in on her fiancé (who really loves her but is
just busy with school. Uh huh. Right.) Mimi is going to get a record contract
at an open audition (Uh huh. Right.) Their driver is twentyish, nondescript,
mysterious hot guy Ben (Anson Mount) that none of the girls really knows.
Word is, he just got of jail on a murder rap (they must have some lenient
sentencing laws down south).
They take off in an old beater of a car that you
know is going to break down somewhere along the way. Conveniently, it beaks
down in New Orleans so that the girls, who have just run out of cash anyway,
a mere day into their trip, can take part in a karaoke contest where they
get to keep whatever tips they can get from the crowd. Fortune smiles on
Lucy and company as they not only earn enough cash to fix the car and get
to California, but also to stay in a four star hotel and order room service.
The story plays out like every other bad road movie
ever. There's some plot about the girls coming back together as friends,
but mostly the middle section of the movie is an excuse for some teenage
histrionics and for the girls to sing along to songs on the radio as the
wind blows through their hair.
The end comes, and we are treated to plot overload
(don't pretend to be upset, you weren't going to go see it). Turns out
Lucy's mom wants nothing to do with her, Kit's fiancé is not only
shacking up with someone else but is also the one who raped Mimi who falls
down the stairs and has a miscarriage. But all of this is quickly forgotten
as Lucy is the one who hops on stage for the open audition, where she gets
to sing a song and win a record contract.
In short, high school. Just as you remember it.
Grade: D+
Hart's
War To say that Hart's War peaks early would be
an understatement.
It starts off as a pretty decent POW story. A train
convoy is mistakenly attacked by Allied planes because the POW painted
on the cars is covered with snow. Our hero, Lt. Hart (Colin Farrell) is
captured and interrogated. Upon arrival at the POW camp, he is quartered
with enlisted men, because Col. McNamara (Bruce Willis) sees right through
his story that he didn't give up any information and instantly doesn't
trust him.
Two black officers are sent to the camp and placed
in Hart's barracks. One is framed by hatefully racist Staff Sgt. Bedford
(Cole Hauser) and executed, the other, Lt. Scott (Terrence Dashon Howard)
is put on trial when Bedford ends up dead. This turns into a boring courtroom
drama as Hart is appointed as Scott's counsel and spends his time making
one discovery after another leading to the conclusion that things aren't
what they seem. He crawls through the evidence in his search for the real
killer, who turns out to be pretty much the only person it could be.
The ending reveals the murderer's hidden motivation,
bringing up themes of honor and sacrifice, all leading up to an ending
that makes little sense, as if everyone involved suddenly lost their minds.
Grade: C+