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October 28, 2005
New York Doll
(out of four)
If you were going to make a rockumentary about the short-lived but enormously influential '70s glam band, The New York Dolls, you'd probably choose to follow lead singer David Johansen, who revived his career after the Dolls dissolved by reinventing himself as Buster Poindexter. Or you might catch up with guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, who kept right on rockin', despite the many setbacks that effectively obliterated the Dolls (drummer Billy Murcia drowning in his bath, guitarist Johnny Thunders deserting the Dolls to form The Heartbreakers, and so on). No self-respecting Dolls fan would lead with Arthur "Killer" Kane, the Frankenstein-like bass player (his stone-still stage presence inspired the band's biographer to dub him "the only living statue in rock and roll") who was fired by his own band, defected from New York to La La Land, and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)
The Weather Man
(out of four)
No one can forecast the future. You just have to take life as it comes. That, I suppose, is the message of The Weather Man, a dreary-as-they-come look at middle-aged malaise in the vein of American Beauty and About Schmidt. As directed by Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski, The Weather Man feels like a high-budget independent movie, a disconcerting blend of genres and tones more consistent with Verbinski's impossible-to-categorize debut, The Mexican, than his subsequent studio work. But unlike most indies, The Weather Man has no heart, just a downbeat determination to reveal how "shitty" (the movie's word, not mine) grown-up life can be.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)
Saw II
(out of four)
There are no saws in Saw II. Well, that's not entirely correct. The hacksaw from the first movie makes a cameo late in the game, when Detective Eric Mathews (Donnie Wahlberg) finally locates the grimy bathroom (about six months too late from the state of the corpses he finds chained to its walls) where Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell debated sawing off their limbs to save their lives in the first movie.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
G
(out of four)
A few years ago, you couldn't turn around at the multiplex without running into some movie in which the works of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Fyodor Dostoevsky had been transposed to a modern high school setting. Of course, those books (Romeo & Juliet, Emma, Crime & Punishment) are often assigned in high school, which made the trend that much more familiar to the films' teenage target audiences.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2005
Shopgirl
(out of four)
They say it's impossible to meet people in Los Angeles. They say the traffic, the nightlife, the contagious narcissism of the industry itself all work against meaningful human interaction. Who is this "They," you wonder? Why, "the inimitable collective Them," as Cameron Crowe might say, and as much as I regret referencing Elizabethtown in the context of a Shopgirl review, a quick comparison is in order: Both films offer carefully contrived depictions of "real life" in which an outsider sincerely wants to identify with the deep, beautiful melancholy of how it feels to be young, alone, and desperately in need of something to motivate his/her existence.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)
Cote d'Azur
(out of four)
As far as titles go, Cote d'Azur doesn't quite cut it for this topsy-turvy French comedy, in which an innocent seaside vacation gets really messy once a family full of busybodies starts poking around in one another's business. ''Selfish Among the Shellfish'' probably would've been a better fit, considering all the screwball antics crammed into this salty 93-minute movie, where secrets are meant to be told and sexual tension never goes unchecked for long.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
Doom
(out of four)
Ten years ago, one of the most disappointing movies of my teen years opened with one of the coolest stunts I'd ever seen – and then promptly sank beyond all redemption. I'm talking about Waterworld, and the effect was a twist on the usual Universal logo where shortly after earth came into view, the ice caps melted, the continents disappeared, and the camera swung down into the endless ocean to find Kevin Costner drifting at sea (and drinking his own urine, if memory serves).
Doom opens with a shot like that (the globe trick, not the urine), only this time we see the Universal logo wrapping around the Red Planet before zooming in to the Martian surface, where dead-meat doctors in soon-to-be-bloodstained lab coats demonstrate how genetically altering convicted killers to accept a 24th chromosome that makes them "super-strong, super-fit, and super-intelligent" more or less proves Darwin's point.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2005
Domino
(out of four)
"This is a true story. Sort of." So begins Domino, which ranks alongside Confessions of a Dangerous Mind as one of the least trustworthy biopics of all time. Yes, The Manchurian Candidate star Laurence Harvey had a daughter named Domino who went on to become a bounty hunter, but that's basically where the truth ends and the Hollywood hokum begins.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
The Matador
(out of four)
When Pierce Brosnan isn't playing James Bond, he likes to swing as far in the opposite direction as possible. It's as if the world's smoothest secret agent wanted to set the record straight about the type of men who kill other men for a living. Where Bond was a classy ladies man who took his martinis shaken-not-stirred, The Matador's Julian Noble is a smarmy hired gun -- a ''facilitator of fatalities,'' in his own words -- who gets blitzed on Mexican margaritas and makes lewd passes at women.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
Garçon Stupide
(out of four)
Regret is a funny thing. Half of us regret the things we never should have done, while the other half regret the things we never actually had the nerve to try. Garçon Stupide is a film for both camps. Like an explicit gay "Alfie," this existential coming-of-age story shows how one selfish young man's headlong plunge into the world of no-strings-attached sex eventually leaves him asking, "What's it all about?''
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2005
Elizabethtown
(out of four)
What do you do when the voice of a generation stops speaking your language? There was a time when Cameron Crowe was that person, when the man responsible for Say Anything... and Jerry Maguire wrote characters who sounded and behaved like real people – like us (and by "us," I mean middle-class, Middle American white folks). Hell, Crowe's characters were better than real people because they could take an awkward situation and find exactly the right thing to say.
Which brings us to Elizabethtown. It's the most personal project to date from a director who's made a career of personal pictures, and yet somehow, it just doesn't connect. The movie stars Orlando Bloom as Drew Baylor, a successful young shoe designer who's just spearheaded the biggest corporate flop since New Coke, a winged shoe called the "Spasmotica" that will lose the Nike-like company he works for nearly $1 billion.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2005
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
(out of four)
The magic of the movies is never more evident than with stop-motion animation, and nobody does it better than Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park (better known in the States as the director of Chicken Run). Acting, car chases, even computer-generated special effects have never been specific to the medium, but stop-motion only works on screen. There's nothing like watching the mysterious process through which a series of still photos spring to life before your eyes, and no matter how absorbing the story, the how-they-did-that factor always remains.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
Nick Park interview
What kind of man names his dog Gromit? (The word itself -- ''grommet'' -- describes the rubber thingamahoo that lines a whatzit to keep electrical wires from fraying.) It's certainly not the kind of name your ordinary, run-of-the-mill pet owner would dream up, but then that's hardly the way to describe British animator and three-time Oscar winner Nick Park, whose Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opens in theaters today. As it turns out, the man responsible for creating Britain's most lovable clay canine has never owned a dog.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
Two for the Money
(out of four)
Ever get the feeling when you're watching a movie that the whole thing was made just to set up one supreme groaner of a pun? (Incidentally, the same applies when reading most Anthony Lane reviews.) In the case of Two for the Money, which basically amounts to The Devil's Advocate set in the world of high-stakes sports betting, the final scene finds Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) coaching a pee-wee football team. One of Brandon's players asks, "Do you think we can win tonight?" and suddenly there's McConaughey grinning with the answer you just knew was coming: "I'd bet on it." Roll eyes, roll credits.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
Waiting...
(out of four)
Stop me if you've heard this one before: An unknown filmmaker sets out to make a name for himself with a filthy day-in-the-life comedy in which a bunch of listless minimum wage earners grouse about life, sex, and how much they hate their jobs. Yep, 11 years ago this month, a Jersey boy named Kevin Smith upset the Hollywood order with a little movie called Clerks. Clerks was a breakthrough, so much so that you could easily forgive the fact that Smith shot his movie in black-and-white on low-grade digital video. Smith had a knack for capturing the way real people talk, giving voice to potheads and slackers everywhere.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)