Don’t Mind Me

This actually happened.

I didn’t want to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but I got an advance copy on videotape, and so I had to see it. I have a simple rule of thumb; I don’t go see movies with the words “marriage” or “wedding” or “bride” in the title. This keeps me from seeing a ton of movies that I would not enjoy or appreciate.

These are movies that are, collectively, known as “chick flicks”, of course. I have no brief against chick flicks. They have their place in the great multiplex that is American cinema. I have my place, in the little screening room showing the new David Mamet flicks, on the right aisle, eating a box of Sno-Caps that I snuck into the theater. That is my place, and I feel comfortable there. I don’t watch chick flicks for the primary reason that I have to review every movie I see, just about, and nobody wants me to review chick flicks. It’s that simple.

(I had to explain this rule to a co-worker, someone who likes chick flicks, and she teases me about it all the time. When I went back into the office the Monday after Christmas, she confronted me. “Did you see Maid in Manhattan?” she asked. “I did not,” I said, “and I’ll tell you something else.” I got out a piece of paper, and wrote down the following, “I am NOT going to see Maid in Manhattan, ever, period. Signed, Curtis Douglas Edmonds, 12/30/02, Atlanta, GA.” So there you go.)

But I couldn’t get out of seeing this, mostly because I made the mistake of telling my sister that I had a copy. “You have to see this,” she said.

“It’s a chick flick,” I said.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. If it’s not a chick flick, what is it?”

“It’s the funniest movie that has ever been made,” she said.

Her point is that it wasn’t about romance, it was about families - not just big fat Greek families, but everyone’s family. Her Mexican-American friends who had seen the movie swore that it was just like their families, and they all thought it was hilarious, and if I didn’t think it was the funniest movie ever it was just my own fault.

“Chick flick,” I said.

But, of course, I had to see it anyway.

We saw it at my stepmother’s in Tyler after all the Christmas gifts were unwrapped, and after a very nice dinner at El Chico on the Loop. I didn’t catch a lot of the first part of the movie. My nephew, Trevor, got his first Thomas the Tank Engine video game, and it was like Keats looking at the Grecian Urn, or like my dad looking at the Weather Channel. Complete, total concentration and enrapturement. Of course, the Grecian Urn didn’t make quite so much noise; the video game was full of choo-choo noises and whistles and plummy English accents. Unfortunately, the only way that the sound could be turned down on my sister’s laptop was to stop the game. To my nephew’s credit, this produced only a small bit of whining, swiftly mended by the immediate restart of the game. This ensured that he would remain occupied throughout the movie. (The way things were going when I left for Atlanta, there was every indication that the video game would occupy him completely through, say, high school.)

I was actually splitting my time between the movie (and the cynical Nia Vardalos voice-over, easily the best thing about the film) and watching my nephew maneuver James and Thomas and Gordon and the other engines around the track. So I didn’t notice what my father and stepmother were doing until I heard them. They were sitting on the floor, and my dad had brought out the big box with all the Christmas trash; all the wadded-up wrapping paper and containers and whatnot. They were emptying the box and going through the trash, making all kinds of racket. “What are you doing?” I asked, finally.

“We’re looking for a hundred-dollar bill.”

“Oh,” I said. And I turned the movie off, and I helped look for the money. My stepmother’s mother had put it in one of the packages, had just about hidden it, and nobody realized it was missing until she called and asked if it had been found. So we looked for the hundred, and eventually it was found, ensconsed in a wad of tissue paper.

So that’s my family. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is about Nia Vardalos and her family, and it’s perfectly fine. But it’s a chick flick. That doesn’t diminish the movie in any way, necessarily. People who like chick flicks generally get defensive about the “chick flick” label. There is nothing wrong with chick flicks. I just don’t enjoy them, myself, and won’t write about them if I can help it.

There were some, not many, but some non-chick-flick elements in the movie, and I can talk about that, and they are all well-done. The performance of Nia Varadalos in the first part of the movie is outstanding, and ought to get her an Oscar nod in a weak year like this one for female performances. She’s smart and charming and self-effacing, and she writes a pretty good screenplay on top of that. But she almost disappears in the second half of the movie, ceding the good lines over to her family. This is generous, but wrong. It would have been better to see her turn into a screaming mess by the stress of the wedding. “Bridezilla” is the term that comes to mind. But the most we see her do is stare in shock at the bridesmaid’s dresses; she never breaks loose and throws the screaming fit we want her to throw. She ought to make the proposed TV series memorable and special. (UPDATE: Maybe not so much.)

The groom is played by John Corbett from Northern Exposure, and he’s about as important as any groom at any wedding. That’s it. He is a perfectly fine romantic foil, but he’s not his own person, and he doesn’t get to do any of the “Chris in the Morning” shtick, either. He’s furniture, which is too bad.

The characters I really liked were the dotty Andrea Martin character and the clueless Michael Constantine character. Martin is a SCTV alumna, and she has the sense of the ridiculous that the movie needs. Constantine, though, is the heart of the movie, the butt of most of the jokes, and the one who really makes the movie work. And anybody who has over a hundred guest-star credits in TV deserves to get honored for this kind of role. Constantine has what seems to be the easiest acting job, but he is effective and funny as the oft-manipulated patriarch.

But what I think isn’t important. I am not going to convince one single person that loved the movie that it is less than sublime. I am not going to convince one single skeptic that the movie is worth seeing. If you think you’re going to like it, you’re probably going to love it. If you think you’re going to hate it, you’re probably not going to like it, although you may find that it is better than you think it is. If you’re going to see it because it has been so successful, you’ll probably enjoy it despite the fact that it is not as good as its box-office reciepts.

What I think is that My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a chick flick. But I was overruled in my judgment; my sister still thought it was the funniest movie ever, and my stepmother really liked it, too. And my nephew really, really, really, really liked that we watched the movie and let him play his Thomas the Tank Engine video game. So, for once, I’m going to present their critical judgment rather than mine. Don’t mind me.

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

The one thing that the best of today’s movies do is give the audience an overwhelming sense of place, a feeling that You Are There. These movies let us go places in our imagination that very few of us will ever get to go. No one will ever again sail past the moon in an Apollo capsule or ride the calm waters of the North Atlantic on Titanic. God willing, none of us will have to know what a giant amphibious landing on the French coast is like, or the inside of a Nazi death camp, or even the prisons in Silence of the Lambs or The Shawshank Redemption. And the movies are the only way we have to go to the bleak western town of Big Whiskey or the unnamed gangster town of Miller’s Crossing.

I say that to say that the best thing that Man on the Moon does is give us that You Are There feeling. The best bits in the movie are all recreations of Andy Kaufman’s stage act, as eerily impersonated by Jim Carrey. We get to see Kaufman struggling in Borscht Belt nightclubs, performing on Saturday Night Live, knocking them out (literally) on the college circuit, and really knocking them out as a wrestlemaniac. Man on the Moon is smart enough to know that we’ve all seen lots and lots of Taxi reruns — and that the Taxi cast is getting pretty old — and glides over Kaufman’s Taxi career lightly, focusing on the live stage act.

These are wonderful scenes, all of them, from Kaufman turning in a wicked Presley imitation to his Tony Clifton lounge singer act to his triumphal milk-and-cookies concert in Carnegie Hall. At Carnegie, Kaufman plays one of my favorite songs, the one I used to use to needle my married friends:

I’ve got spurs that jingle jangle jingle
As I go ridin’ merrily along
And they sing, Oh ain’t you glad you’re single
And that song ain’t so very far from wrong.

(Note:  I am married now, and it doesn’t sound so funny anymore.)

Man on the Moon does the You Are There bit incredibly well, but it’s nowhere close to great movie status. The You Are There part of the best movies of the 1990’s is just a small part of their success — with Man on the Moon, it’s the whole show. The part of the movie that is not on stage serves mostly to set up the stage bits.

Towards the end, Man on the Moon turns somber (sort of) as Kaufman develops cancer. But, again, this is just a run-up to another classic performance, as Kaufman performs at his own funeral (and, maybe, beyond).

Man on the Moon is a great achievement for Carrey and for everyone else involved. It’s a great tribute to Andy Kaufman’s work. What it doesn’t have is a great story or characterization or anything like a plot. Probably, you won’t miss it, but it keeps Man on the Moon from being great or anywhere close to it. But should you see it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bring It On

I wasn’t going to write about Napoleon Dynamite, but now I have to.

There isn’t one single reason. Part of it is this CNN story, which explains how (not why, mind you, but how) Napoleon Dynamite action figures will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you. Or this other CNN story, which cited Napoleon Dynamite in an exploration of what it meant to have “dork pride“. And part of it was a concert I went to recently, where a well-known country music artist with Texas roots, who is, say, in the 98th percentile of coolness, said that he’d seen Napoleon Dynamite fifteen times on the tour bus.

I can’t imagine why. Napoleon Dynamite is, not to put too fine a point on it, horrible. It is dull, and vacant, and uncurious, and seemingly uninterested in anything except seeing just how much patience the audience has for witless, pointless behavior. Its central character has such a thoroughgoing contempt for humanity that he has all but separated himself from it, and speaking on behalf of humanity, I say that it’s a good thing, too. And in case you don’t get what a dork the main character is — in case you don’t understand just how hopelessly geeky and strange and clueless he is — the filmmakers constantly nudge you with sight gag after sight gag. Napoleon Dynamite is set in a small Idaho town where the detrius of everything that was remotely on the fringes of trendy ended up — dune buggies, llamas, Tupperware, macrame, pay-by-the-minute dial-up Internet service, VHS breakdance tapes — and it all shows up in the movie, all there to tell us, once again, just how dippy and stupid and out-of-it the Napoleon Dynamite character is.

Napoleon Dynamite is meant to be a comedy, but it has one fatal flaw — it is not funny. There are moments that were meant to be funny — say, Napoleon Dynamite trying to jump a pile of junk on the sidewalk with a bicycle — that simply aren’t. To the extent that someone might find them to be funny — and I do not know, honestly, how one could — they are funny only to the extent that they are cruel. The only way you could laugh at Napoleon Dynamite would be the way that the Biff Tannens of the world laugh at the George McFlys, the way that bullies have forever laughed at the weak and inept. (Tellingly, the only character in Napoleon Dynamite that is effectively played for laughs is a bully — Rex, the local tae kwon do guy, played by the immortal Diedrich Bader.)

I don’t see how anyone can argue with this. I will grant you that the movie was made for next to nothing. The cast is almost completely no-name (the only thing close to a famous name is Haylie Duff, sister of Hillary). Jon Heder has the Napoleon Dynamite role and revels in it, which is not the same thing at all as being good. To the extent that the script is about a student council election, it is lame, unoriginal, and uninspired, and to the extent that it is not, it is lifeless, tedious, and awful. Napoleon Dynamite stinks. It stinks to high heaven. It is pointless, tasteless, and dim. And I really don’t see how anyone can argue with this. The only way a movie like Napoleon Dynamite could have fans — much less the apparently devoted fans that it has — is that people like it and esteem it because of its faults, not in spite of them. There really isn’t any other explanation, because the movie really is that bad.

And yet — and yet — as I write this, Napoleon Dynamite has a 70% “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes, a site to which I used to contribute reviews. 70 percent! Inconcievable! And lest you think that this is all the work of proto-geek online reviewers, I submit to you the following:

I began to enjoy the one-thing-after-anotherness and the minimalist wit of the actors embodying many different species of nerd. — David Edelstein, Slate

It ends up saying, quietly and without strutting, this great American thing: We are each other and we are more alike than different, and we can profit so much from that connection. — Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

Similarities to the work of Wes Anderson may be coincidental, but they are present. — James Berardinelli, REELVIEWS

Mr. Hess turns his meandering assembly of quiet observations and slapstick inventions — which, at their best, suggest a combination of Tod Solondz and Bill Forsyth — into an unconvincingly uplifting fairy tale. — A.O. Scott, The New York Times

The mind reels. And if you look at the full Rotten Tomatoes list, you’ll see that, at last count, a hundred online critics rated this as “fresh” in some way. A hundred!

Therefore, I am going to do something I rarely, if ever, do, because it’s so ill-advised. If you like this movie, I am going to invite you to tell me why. I do so knowing that putting a negative review of a movie that a minority of people like passionately for some weird, twisted reason will, inevitably, lead to hits from people who loved the movie and cannot believe that everyone else doesn’t share their views. If you are such a person, and you have read this far, and you really liked Napoleon Dynamite, and can’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t like the movie, please leave a comment.  (If you hated the movie the way I did, please don’t bother.)

I am doing this in the firm conviction that I am right and that Napoleon Dynamite is the worst movie of 2004, and that anyone who disagrees should not be allowed into a movie, ever again, or at any rate should not sit behind me.

And to quote the great words of our President, “Bring it on.”

A Garland Briefer Than A Girl’s

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

It seems like forever ago, but there was a moment when Juan Gonzalez was the biggest hero the Texas Rangers had ever seen. It was Game One of the 1996 AL division series, and the Rangers were playing their first-ever post-season game in Yankee Stadium. Gonzalez hit a blast down the left field line that gently curled inside the foul pole to clinch the win for the Rangers over the hated Bronx Bombers. The Yankees would come back and win Game Two, despite some more Gonzalez heroics, but with the last three games of the series at the Ballpark, Rangers fans were smelling blood. The slogan was “The Hunt for Red October”, and Gonzalez was “Senor Octubre”.

This lasted for all of two games, as the mighty Yankee steamroller bulldozed the Rangers — who would go on to lose to the Yankees in three straight in ‘98 and ‘99, scoring two runs in six games. Gonzalez, a Detroit Tiger until the trading deadline, is now best known for his refusal to play in the 1999 Hall of Fame Game in Cooperstown because of an ill-fitting uniform. Goodbye, Senor Octubre, hello, Senor Baggypants.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

Robert Redford knows that glory is fleeting, more so that most. By 1984, his once-bright star had faded. He’d had two flops previously, 1980’s forgettable Brubaker and 1979’s The Electric Horseman (although, he’d scored his only Oscar for directing Ordinary People in 1980). The attraction of the Roy Hobbs part in The Natural is obvious; like Hobbs, Redford was looking for one more shot at greatness. And like Hobbs, he finds it.

So set, before the echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

The Natural is the tale of Roy Hobbs, a can’t-miss slugger derailed by a silver bullet who wanders into the big leagues looking for one last shot at glory. He finds his chance with the decrepit New York Knights, who are rattling around Buffalo’s ancient War Memorial Stadium like dice in a cup. Hobbs moves in and begins covering himself in glory, hitting home run after home run to lead the Knights to the brink of the NL championship.

Usually, you’ll say that a complex character in a movie is “many things”. Roy Hobbs is only one thing in this movie; an icon. Fortunately, this plays to Redford’s strong suit, and he handles the role of icon well. (All except for a ludicrous scene, early on, where he foolishly plays the young Roy Hobbs.)

In fact, if you run down the list of characters, mostly what you’ll see is icons. Glenn Close as the Woman in White, certainly has an iconic aspect. So does Kim Basinger as the Woman in Red. Ditto Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth in the dugout. There’s really only one acting performance in the movie, which unsurprisingly goes to the best actor of the lot: Robert Duvall as sportswriter Max Mercy, who we like in spite of ourselves.

No, there’s not much to recommend about the acting. I didn’t think there was much to like about the script, either, until I read the original Malamud novel. The writers did an excellent job of sanding off some of the story’s rougher edges, transporting the story back in time a few decades, for one, and making the slugger’s affair with Close into a wistful romance instead of a cheap rendezvous, and translating the multiple quirky superstitions of the team into a lightning-bolt patch. Their wisest move is to turn the health crisis that faces Hobbs at the end of the movie into a result of his earlier wounding from the silver bullet instead of a run-in with some bad seafood.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

What does recommend The Natural, what transforms it beyond its heritage, is its love of baseball and its devotion to glory. Say what you want about the Malamud novel, but no one can argue that it was written out of love and gratitude to the Great Game. Barry Levinson — a denizen of one of the world’s great baseball towns — has that love and that devotion, and it shines through every frame of The Natural. The Natural picks up every beauty spot of the great green cathedrals of baseball, and everything from the gorgeous Knights uniforms to the breathless newsreel footage bespeaks a passion for the game.

Some of the trendy Hollywood Left theorized (after one of their own, Steven Spielberg, made Saving Private Ryan) that you can’t make a true anti-war movie, that war is so inherently cinematically interesting and exciting and offering so much in the way of love and heroism and courage and sacrifice that all war movies are pro-war. Be that as it may, I don’t think that you can make an anti-baseball movie, either; the greatness of the game transcends all Hollywood efforts to muck it up.

But the real attraction in The Natural is glory. Say what you will about the ending (fans of the book will be disheartened), the towering, climactic scenes of this movie cover themselves in glory. The arc of the ball, the shower of sparks, the Randy Newman crescendoes, the players celebrating in the starlight, all of these things denote glory on a scale that only the big screen can bring us. It is, at last, this glorious firework of joy that ends the movie that cements The Natural’s reputation as one of the great sports films of all time.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find to unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
– A.E. Houseman, “To An Athlete Dying Young”

Not A Moment To Be Lost

I can’t write this review.

You have to understand. I have been working on this one, really and truly, for days now. But I can’t do it. I can’t make myself write the review. And it’s not my fault.

This is a movie review site, but my first love is books, always has been, always will be. I don’t do book reviews here, of course, I do them over at Epinions and BookReporter.com, where I can score free review copies. But this is not a book review, it’s a movie review. And I can’t do it.

The best movie of 2003 is Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and it’s impossible for me to do a review. I love the movie, but I am not the guy you want to see it with, probably not the guy you want reviewing it, either. Not at all. I am going to be the guy to point out exactly how and how not the movie is faithful to the Patrick O’Brian canon. I am going to be the guy who will let you know that the real name of the Max Pirkis character is William Babbington, and not Lord Blakeney. I can tell you what parts of the movie were drawn from Master and Commander, the first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, and what parts of the movie were drawn from The Far Side of the World, the tenth book in the series, and what else comes from the rest of the books.

I have all twenty books in my bookcase; I am looking at them right now. I bought my first copy of Master and Commander when I was in my second year of law school, over ten years ago. I have been reading and rereading the books ever since, and do not have the space here to tell you how excellent they are. Besides that, you’d never believe me anyway. You have to read the books — make the long-term committment to read all of them, to understand a minimum of the sea-going jargon, to comprehend the supreme importance of the weather-gauge, of course, but mostly to get to know, and to love, the characters of Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin.

Or, you can just watch the movie.

I could spend, literally, hours of your time and reams of print explaining things about the movie — who Barrett Bonden (Billy Boyd, still looking very hobbit-like) is and why Aubrey trusts him, how trepanning works, what weight of metal HMS SURPRISE was carrying, and what the heck the deal is with all the smoke in the last battle scene. This is just for starters, you understand. I could go on.

{87,408 words omitted from original draft of review, discussing ways in which the movie deviates, or follows, the O’Brian canon}

However, this is a movie review, first and foremost, and what a movie this is to review, especially for those who love the O’Brian books. The centerpiece of the movie is the character of Captain Jack Aubrey, and Russell Crowe plays him as boldly and fearlessly as ever anyone could. The Far Side of the World is a near-perfect stage for Crowe, more than in his element here as an action star. His character here is that lion afloat, Jack Aubrey, sent to take or destroy a French frigate on a mission to prey on British whalers in the South Pacific. The wooden frame of HMS SURPRISE is a small world, but it has plenty of heroic scope for a man with enterprise, daring, and a bit of luck, and Crowe has all of this in spades. Crowe even manages to wink at that other side of the Aubrey character in a brief scene where he catches the eye of a fair Brazilian maiden.) Crowe’s incarnation of the Aubrey character is his best work to date, and should put him high up in the running for Oscar consideration.

The rest of the actors are primarily there to support their Captain, as they should. Paul Bettany is Stephen Maturin, Aubrey’s best friend and confidant; as ship’s surgeon and resident polymath, he has a degree of freedom to speak his mind around Crowe that the ship’s officers do not. He is not here in the movie as much a presence as he is in the books, where his friendship with Aubrey is the linchpin for the entire series. The books…

OK, wait. Wait. Just wait.

I can’t do this. I swear I can’t. The greatest thing — the best thing — about The Far Side of the World is that everyone involved, Weir, Crowe, Bettany, all the way down to the youngest ship’s boy, obviously loved the books and used them as their guide. Everything I love about the books — the archaic language, the devotion to honor, the exacting historical research, the conflicted and conflicting relationship between Aubrey and Maturin, the courage of the lower deck, the boom of the cannons, the roar of the typhoons around Cape Horn — it’s all in the movie. Every bit of it, and if the movie takes bits and pieces out of the different books, so be it.

But The Far Side of the World does more than that. It illustrates and illuminates the books. It shows us, rather than tells us, what it’s like to be on a gun crew getting hammered by a French frigate. It makes clear the complexities of rigging, as well as those of shipboard society. It takes us into Maturin’s cockpit, the hammock-deck, the topmasts - everyplace we’ve been in the books comes to us in magical, living color.

If you haven’t read the books, The Far Side of the World may be no more or less than a great movie; the story of a strong captain leading a questioning crew on a sea chase in the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean. If that’s all it is for you, it’s good enough. But if you know the books, love the books, you will be sailing on an ocean of delight all the way through. Seeing glories such as Maturin exploring on remote Pacific islands, being invited to a drunken dinner in Aubrey’s cabin, seeing the inimitable Preserved Killick (David Threlfall, nailing the character) preparing toasted cheese as the Captain and the Doctor sit down for a little Corelli duet — well then! What more could you possibly want, except perhaps to join them?

For me, The Far Side of the World was a transcendent experience. It is the best adaptation of O’Brian’s work there could ever be, or could hope to be. Thank you to Peter Weir and to Russell Crowe for giving me the opportunity to share in your great work.

I just wish I could write the review it deserves. But I can’t.

A Night on Macho Mountain

They didn’t have a lot of the scenes I wanted to see in The Negotiator, but there was one scene I particularly missed. It was the scene where Chief Deputy United States Marshal Samuel Gerard is sitting on his couch, watching the mayhem of the movie on WGN. I envision Gerard putting his feet up, taking a puff on a confiscated Cuban cigar, and intoning: “What a bunch of amateurs.”

The way this movie was advertised was as a cat-and-mouse game between two professional hostage negotiators. Samuel L. Jackson as framed cop Danny Roman versus Kevin Spacey as outside negotiator Chris Sabian. It all looked so promising, with two of Hollywood’s best actors going mano-a-mano in a Chicago-themed action flick, just like in Jeb Stuart’s script for The Fugitive. And throw in a bit of Stuart’s Die Hard script, with Jackson as the lone hero cop trapped in a tall building… it looked very, very promising. What a shame that The Negotiator is in the hands of amateurs.

The premise of the movie is that it’s a duel between the hostage negotiators. Jackson, wrongfully accused of theft and murder, snaps and takes the police department’s internal affairs department hostage. He calls on Spacey to serve as his personal negotiator (after a very funny scene where he pokes holes in the confidence of the poor schmuck originally designed to talk him down). So, this ought to be a great battle of wits, right? Right?

The Negotiator would have us believe that the most important skill of a good hostage negotiator is lying. You can make a good movie about lying — say, House of Games or The Sting — but it’s hard to make a good action movie about lying. And especially here, where all the lying concerns finding the evidence that will free Roman of the charges against him. We already know he’s telling the truth, and we don’t much care about the scandal, so that’s just not interesting.

What I would have like to have seen is a little more of the tricks of the trade being displayed. The only time we really see the Chicago PD being sneaky is when they try to snake mini-cameras to view the hostages — Jackson sees them, as any reasonably observant person would, and yanks them out. There’s nothing really improvisational or imaginitive about the whole setup. (Contrast the imaginitive hostage negotiation between Bill Murray and Jason Robards in Quick Change.) Throw in a couple of unrealistic plot twists (totally unworthy of Sam Gerard or any other law enforcement professional) and what you end up with is a mess of a movie.

Jackson’s best performances have always come when he has a character to play that’s basically unappealing. For example, both Jules in Pulp Fiction, and Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown were both very bad, very unlikable dudes — but the audience was sympathetic to both of them, in a way, because Jackson’s sheer force of talent makes them magnetic. Danny Roman is meant to be appealing — the audience has to be on his side the whole movie — but he’s never magnetic. There’s only one little scene where Jackson is allowed to go over the edge into unlikability — and it’s a cheat. Not a great performance, although it’s many, many fathoms better than what we saw when he was at the bottom of the ocean in Sphere.

If Jackson doesn’t live up to his potential in The Negotiator, Spacey steps all over his and grinds it into the mud. Spacey is a great actor, capable of a wide range of parts, and what they’ve done here is put him on Macho Mountain without any rope. Other than a too-long cutesy scene between his wife and daughter that’s completely contrived to establish his credentials as a negotiator, Spacey is made to participate in scene after scene of macho posturing. He’s consistently in screaming matches with Jackson and the cops. His voice must have been really, really hoarse after production was completed.

The rest of the cast is a tribute to the majesty and power of typecasting. John Spencer, so good as Harrison Ford’s cop friend in Presumed Innocent, is the chief of police here. The late, great J.T. Walsh plays an oily creep who knows more than he’s saying. Ron Rifkin plays a devious-but-bland cop in the same manner as his guest turn on ER not too long ago.

(Speaking of ER, here’s a memo for Anthony Edwards: make sure your agent sees this movie, because you don’t want to end up like David Morse. Remember him? He was the sensitive-yet-tough doctor who led the ensemble cast on the hospital drama St. Elsewhere. Unfortunately, he’s only able now to get parts as mindless toughs for some reason. Something to think about, OK?)

There really isn’t much that wrong with The Negotiator, and I don’t want to talk you down from your stadium seat. It’s perfectly servicable, mindless summer movie entertainment. But it could have been so much better, and that’s a shame.

Theatricality

There is quite a bit of Shakespeare in Nicholas Nickleby, which is all to the good. Shakespeare and Dickens are the pillars of our language. Their works may seem remote and dusty on first glance — the Battle of Agincourt and the madness of King Lear certainly seem about as far away to us today as do the streets of Dickens’s London — but there is a timeless quality there, too, one that stretches throughout the generations. And seeing Nicholas Nickleby pull off not one, but two scenes involving performances of Romeo and Juliet is a rare treat, like seeing Roger Clemens throw at Alex Rodriguez.

The focus on the theater, and theatricality in general, pays off hugely in the two-hour movie version of Nicholas Nickleby. (Yes, it’s two hours, and if you’d like to try paring a Dickens novel down to an hour and a half, be my guest.) Nicholas Nickleby is theatrical, through and through, even to the point of showcasing noted Broadway ham Nathan Lane. It’s got a huge, talented ensemble cast, letter-perfect costuming, and just the right note of Dickensian squalor; everything you’d want in a fun, frothy piece of theater.

Since the movie is really no more and no less than a fine piece of theater, recounting the plot here would just give you and me a headache. And it’s just one of those Dickens specials, with a young man finding his way in the world, although without all that disgusting stuff about the moldy old wedding cake. Let us confine ourselves, then, with a discussion of the players:

• Charlie Hunnam, as Nicholas Nickleby: Without ever seeing this young man act before, I will say here that I doubt that the lively art of hairstyling had quite gotten this far in the Dickensian era. Mr. Hunnam’s hair is big and blonde and wavy and does the signal job of distracting the audience from the fact that the person underneath cannot act his way out of a barber’s chair. Nicholas Nickleby is worth seeing for this one sight alone. His hair manages to convey the character’s goodness, integrity, and innocence all by itself. If Mr. Hunnam expects to have a long and successful acting career independent of his hairstylist, he had better take a cue from Brad Pitt (see Twelve Monkeys and Se7en) and try to minimize its impact. I mean, whoa.

   

• Christopher Plummer, Ralph Nickleby: It’s worth pointing out that Plummer has played Hamlet, and both Sherlock Holmes and Rudyard Kipling; adding on Dickens here means that he’s hit for the career cycle in adaptations of Great English Literature. Of course, Plummer’s career also hits for the cycle in not-so-great American literature; he’s been in adaptations of the classic works of Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steele, and Colleen McCullough. Not to mention starring in adaptations of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, just to cover all the bases. And he was in a Star Trek flick. Talk about range! He’s the villain here, and a crackling good one; vindictive, but in a subtle way. And he reminds us that not all Dickens villains are Scrooges, and redemption is possible, but not always likely. Good stuff, this, and might have been worthy of better notice if there hadn’t been other good performances out there.
• Jim Broadbent, Squeers: The sub-villain, but the showier role. Squeers is the headmaster of a boy’s school in Yorkshire that will forever put off any child who’s seen too many Harry Potter movies from the boarding school experience. Young Nickleby is shanghaied into serving as a teacher in this grim, sullen place, where children are not only starved and beaten, but made to learn Latin as well. But it’s great fun to see Broadbent, as always, and he has the meaty role of the hypocritical Squeers down absolutely pat. He’s greasy, slimy, holier-than-though, and a dab hand with the cane on the back of the defenseless. Broadbent already has his Oscar — a minor miracle, that, if you like — but it was earned, and earned for small, chewy roles like this one. Nicholas Nickleby is lucky to have him on board.
• Tom Courtenay, Newman Noggs: Courtenay is the butler here, the only other person in Plummer’s household, and as such is able to get away with a lot. He’s the comic relief here — and in a movie that borders on the self-serious, he’s more than welcome. But it is his character that carries much of the movie’s poignancy, and makes some of the biggest sacrifices. No small parts, only small actors.
• The Women: Outside of a small, vinegary performance by Juliet Stevenson (who had the classic “Get your lesbian feet out of my daughter’s shoes!” line in Bend It Like Beckham), not much to see here. And that’s too bad. Both Romola Garai and Anne Hathaway are little more or less than window-dressed symbols of Victorian respectability; the fact that they are well-dressed, and pleasant, and inoffensive does little to make them memorable.
• Jamie Bell, Smike: This is the young actor who starred in the memorable Billy Elliot, although he’s so downtrodden and quiet that you never quite make the connection, even if you loved the movie (as I did). The movie’s only real chemistry between any two characters is between Bell and Hunnam; characters that are linked by friendship, and by suffering, and perhaps by a bit more than that.

And here we get to the meat of the issue. We are told, several times, that the relationship between Nicholas and Smike is a friendship, that Nicholas is sweet on the Anne Hathaway character, and that Smike cherishes a tender unrequited passion for the Romola Garai character. We never see them in anything like a compromising position. But the way they look at each other, the way they’re photographed, the places they go to, the risks that Nicholas takes in the relationship… well, if a good ol’ boy from East Texas like your friend here picks up on the gay subtext, it’s pretty blatantly obvious.

Not that this detracts from the quality of the movie in any way, of course, and it certainly enhances the theatricality (if it’s not merely a byproduct of said theatricality and I’m imagining things, which I’m not). It’s more at a wink-and-a-nod level, a celluloid-closet homage than anything else. Dickens purists not given to revisionism will find it out of place, perhaps. Everyone else should sit back, relax, and watch the show for its two-hour length, appreciating both the majestic substance and ineffable style of the work. Nicholas Nickleby is a fine showcase for some classic literature married to some great performances, imbued with a fine sense of theatricality that buoys the movie immensely.

This Magic Moment

There is a moment in every David Mamet movie (and Nine Queens, despite its Argentinian accent, is very much a David Mamet movie) where things just click. In House of Games, it is the moment just after Joe Mantegna loses his briefcase. In State and Main, it is the moment when Philip Seymour Hoffman walks into the courtroom for the second time. In The Spanish Prisoner, it is the moment when the police remind Campbell Scott about that numbered Swiss bank account. In Glengarry Glen Ross, it is the moment when Jack Lemmon realizes the truth about his latest customers. In Heist, it is the moment when Gene Hackman goes to the stranded plane on the airport runway the second time. These are the moments when the curtain is revealed, when the con is exposed, when the audience (if they have been paying attention) is let in on the trick.

Nine Queens borrows this device, and does it one better. The con men here are Juan and Marco, two small-time grifters who get involved in a risky scheme involving a special issue of nine stamps (the Nine Queens of the title). One of them makes a suggestion to the other involving a very specific sum of money — as it happens, a direct reference to one of the movies listed above. However, unlike most marks or supposed marks, the other man knows a con when he hears one, and is immediately suspicious. For the first time, we have a character in a David Mamet movie who acts as if he has seen a David Mamet movie before.

The fun of the Mamet movie — the Mamet genre, we now can say — is that it rewards the intelligent viewer. You are almost invariably dealing with a set of very smart characters, but the audience is expected to be smarter, to figure out things before the characters do, the better to understand their situation, and ultimately, their plight. The less-intelligent members of the audience are not following so closely and are frequently baffled and frustrated by the structure of the plot and the motives of the characters. For better or for worse, this means that the Mamet movie has a smaller audience, almost a cult following, but that the movies are invariably more interesting and worthwhile than the filler thrown out by Hollywood on a weekly basis.

Nine Queens is at least the second movie in recent years to wholly embrace the Mamet style without actually having the master’s involvement. (The other is the unjustly ignored Boiler Room, and there may be others to come.) As stated, it is from Argentina, of all the unlikely places. (The movie begins in an Exxon/Esso convenience store that is as American as Cheez Doodles, and most of the action takes place in a Hilton in Buenos Aires that could just have easily been in Boston or Belgium or Bahrain.) It is directed by first-time helmer Fabián Bielinsky, who wrote the brilliant, twisty script.

It features Gastón Pauls as Juan, the apprentice con man, seen first trying to scam a cashier out of a good-sized chunk of change. (The movie is set after the “dollarization” of the Argentinian peso but (just) before the current collapse of the Argentine economy.) Nine Queens does not describe how this particular con game works, but leaves it as an exercise for the viewer. (When the amount that is stolen is revealed, it is relatively easy to go through the steps and figure out how the trick works.) Unfortunately, Pauls tries the trick twice in succession, and is nabbed by Ricardo Darín as Marco, who claims to be an undercover cop at first but soon reveals himself to be a fellow con artist. The two men agree to a temporary partnership, just for the day, with Marco teaching Juan some of the advanced tricks of the trade.

More than this, I cannot reveal in good conscience. Nor does it matter much, because anything I could reveal would not necessarily be helpful to you in interpreting the twisty, meandering plot. Suffice it to say that Nine Queens has all the necessary elements for the success of the Mamet movie. It’s a dark, gritty film, accentuated here by the moody handheld camerawork. Its plot is simple enough, but involves wheels within wheels that the audience must puzzle out. It features a female romantic interest (Leticia Brédice) who may or may not be everything that she seems. Most importantly, it features amazingly good acting by all involved, especially Darín, who has a career all cut out for him as a smooth-talking villain in Hollywood if he so wishes. Most importantly, it has more than one of those Mamet magic moments where the whole world wobbles on its axis, revealing the shape of the con and the nature of the characters, and is in this way as satisfying as any other of Mamet’s films.

Nine Queens swept the Argentinian film awards, and deservedly so. It got only a limited release in the U.S. — in fact, it’s no longer playing here in Atlanta. It is a must-see for the David Mamet enthusiast and for anyone who appreciates intelligent, stylish moviemaking.

Don’t Be Cruel

I saw Nurse Betty on a Friday night at a larger-than-usual multiplex in suburban Houston with a smaller-than-usual parking lot. I ended up parking behind the building, and got my first surprise of the evening when I rounded the corner and headed towards the ticket window. There were teenagers everywhere, it was like we’d been invaded by Planet 90210. There, right in front of me, in droves, was the audience for all of the bad, dismal, mindless movies of the summer of 2000, lined up to shell out cash for God-knows-what horrible movies.

It is tempting, then, to give Nurse Betty a pass, if for no other reason that the fact that it dares to be a grown-up movie in a summer jam-packed with juvenile entertainment. It’s got a sly sense of humor and a needle-sharp sense of satire, along with two of the biggest laughs of the summer. However, Nurse Betty works at cross purposes. It is a sweet, happy-ending comedy with a thinly-disguised mean streak, and it has a seemingly original screenplay that ends up seeking to redefine the word “derivative”.

And it also has Texas actress Renee “You had me at hello” Zellweger, who must carry a movie by herself for the first time. Zellweger plays Betty Sizemore, who works behind the counter at the Tip-Top Cafe in Fair Oaks, Kansas. We learn three things about Betty: she’s a real sweetie-pie; she’s married to a no-good louse (Aaron Eckhart); and she’s a fan of the soap opera “A Reason To Love” — so much so that she’s mastered the art of pouring coffee while giving her full attention to the TV screen. When her husband is killed right before her eyes, however, the latter element takes over her personality. Betty’s post-traumatic stress manifests itself in a conviction that she is a character in her soap opera, and she takes off for Hollywood to find the man she believes to be her lost love.

That’s the original story, sort of, if you don’t count the backhanded Wizard of Oz references. The derivative story is the story of the killers, played by Chris Rock and Morgan Freeman. It’s depressing, in a way. You have America’s Finest Actor and one of its funniest comedians playing hitmen in a dark comedy, and all that Nurse Betty’s screenplay has to offer them is some warmed-over Quentin Tarantino dialogue. Actually, what’s really depressing is that Tarantino, apparently, doesn’t have anything on the front burner except acting in the next Adam Sandler movie. The good news is that Freeman is making another Alex Cross movie. (Note: I wrote this before Along Came A Spider was released; Freeman’s performance was anything but “good news”. Bleah.)

Freeman and Rock torture and kill Eckhart, who has stolen something of value to them and hidden it in the trunk of a Buick LeSabre. (We find out, later in the movie, that the mysterious object in the trunk is ten kilograms of drugs and not a briefcase with an eerie golden glow or something like that.) The Buick, however, is being driven by Betty to Southern California, and so we have a road movie and a chase movie.

If Freeman’s side of the story is a Quentin Tarantino movie, Zellweger’s experiences in California play like a John Waters movie. (I came this close to titling the review “Reservoir Flamingos”.) Nurse Betty is deranged, of course, but in a cheerful way that no one has quite managed since Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom. She arrives at a Los Angeles county hospital, confidently asking the personnel department where she can find “Dr. David Ravel”. “Of course, he’s only here two days a week,” she tells a bewildered nurse, who can’t find any record of the famous, compassionate heart surgeon anywhere.

This is where the movie’s mean streak begins to manifest itself. The script has to find Betty a job, a place to live, and a sympathetic friend right at this point, and contrives to do so in a particularly cruel, pointless way. The sympathetic friend (Tia Texada, who has the kind of role Marisa Tomei had before she won that Oscar) finds out that the object of Betty’s affection is a soap-opera star, and tries to play a mean trick on her in public. (It backfires, of course, and the expression on Texada’s face creates one of the movie’s genuine laughs.)

This places Betty in the path of soap opera actor George McCord, who is played by Greg Kinnear, Hollywood’s foremost non-actor. Kinnear is at his best when he has a part that lets him play to his strengths, and the charming, insincere, and shallow George is right up his alley. George is so insincere, in fact, that he assumes that the completely sincere Betty is insincerely engaging in an audition when she declares her love for him… which turns out to be a horribly, though indirectly, cruel thing to do.

The script is also cruel to the pair of hitmen. First, it requires Chris Rock to be restrained most of the time (although he has an outburst towards the end of the movie that provides the other genuine laugh). Second, it requires Morgan Freeman to stumble through the second half of the movie all moony-eyed over Nurse Betty. R. Ebert tells us that this is the key to the movie, that it’s a parallel shared fantasy between Freeman’s character and Zellweger’s character. Zellweger, however, at least has the excuse of post-traumatic stress disorder; there’s no reason for Freeman to go all loopy and weird. But he does, and it’s painful to watch.

Nurse Betty is nobody’s idea of a feel-good movie, and it’s not really funny enough to qualify as a dark comedy. (The one really funny performance is Eckhardt’s, though I doubt if he could have carried it off through the whole movie had he been spared.) However, it’s an intelligent, grown-up movie that challenges the audience and has some really good performances. In a summer like this, you take what you can get.

Stone Cold

January 2000

Austin, Texas

Dear Mr. Stone:

I am writing you, well, because I figure I owe you some money. You see, I went to see your new movie, Any Given Sunday, the other night. This particular theater shows movies that are in their second or third week of release in this annex on the other side of the parking lot, and there’s usually just one person there who takes tickets and serves popcorn. Anyway, when I walked into the annex, that person wasn’t anywhere to be found. (I confess I didn’t look that hard.) So, I walked right into the theater without paying a dime. I’m hoping that you’ll tell me exactly how much of a fraction you’d receive out of the $7 dollars I didn’t pay to see your movie, so I can send it to you.

I’m not all that worried about reimbursing the actors (especially Barry Switzer), or the theater, or the crew or your investors or whoever else it is that gets pieces of the pie. I do, however, want to salute you, from the bottom of my heart, for your outstanding efforts in creating Any Given Sunday — probably the best cinematic practical joke of the year.

It took me a while to figure out what you were doing, of course, as you’d expect. Why, I walked out of Any Given Sunday convinced that it was a horrible movie, a cliche-ridden mess with hideous, screeching performances. At first, the whole thing looked like it was edited by a pack of genius high school sophomores anxious to try every bell and whistle on their Ronco Edit-O-Matic. And the apparent lapses of logic and common sense were just so grating. (Not to mention that you managed to put he-men football heroes like Al Pacino and Dennis Quaid in aprons.) How was I to know what you were thinking?

I didn’t figure it out until I started writing this movie review. I started focusing on your portrayal of the head coach, played by Al Pacino. This baffled me no end, Mr. Stone, let me tell you. The media hype you orchestrated had us believe that Any Given Sunday would blow the lid of the NFL, that it would be a searing expose of the seamy side of pro football.

And of course, it is, partly. We see all the things we expect to see — drugs, women, letting players pay with potentially life-threatening injuries. But none of this is surprising, not really, and it would be hard for you to outdo the really embarrassing things that have already gone on the NFL’s extensive police blotter this year anyway. (What is really surprising, to me anyway, is that everybody in the movie is really, really unhappy, in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for way.)

Anyway, one part of the seamy side — as made apparent in the firings this week of real life coaches Chan Gailey and Ray Rhodes — is the lack of loyalty shown by owners to hard-working coaches whose talent base has, through no fault of their own, eroded. You explore this quite a bit, but I was having problems with your take. What had me fooled is this: we never see Pacino work. Oh sure, he stands on the sidelines and yells. He talks to players in an avuncular tone when needed and delivers kick-butt sideline pep talks. But — as you know — this is not really what coaches do. Coaches work like dogs all the year ’round — running practices and team meetings and looking at film and working up game strategy and designing plays and dealing with the media and God knows what. Pacino doesn’t do any of that. He hangs out in bars and relaxes in his plush digs and goes to mayoral charity balls and whatnot. The only time he gets to talk football is with the team owner, the whiny Cameron Diaz. (”The running game!’ Diaz complains loudly. “You’re always talking about the boooring running game. Throw some more touchdown passes.”)

Since Any Given Sunday begins with a quote from Vince Lombardi, it might be easy to assume that you mean for audiences to identify the Pacino character with Lombardi, or Shula, or Paul Brown, or any of the great coaches of the past. (As a Cowboys fan, I appreciated your having a Landryesque coach on one of the opposing teams.) And then I realized: Pacino’s not supposed to represent these other coaches.

He’s supposed to represent you.

That’s it, isn’t it? I mean, it’s obvious if you think about it. Football head coaches and movie directors are two peas in a pod. You both work too hard and have to deal with burnout. Most of your real work is behind the scenes on the necessary drudgery of your professions. You both have to deal with prima-donna actors/quarterbacks. You both have to deal with team owners/studio bosses who don’t really understand what you do, don’t give you the resources you need, and who scream a you every time you don’t put forth a winning effort. And you have to deal with fans and reporters who don’t really understand what you do, either, but are the first to criticize you about it. (Movie directing must be even worse, what with all the smart-alecks out there who think they’re movie reviewers.)

And… ultimately, you’re the ones that are responsible if things go bad. Just as NFL owners fire the coach instead of firing the team, it’s the director, rather than the actors, who is at fault if the movie fails. (And the actors/players are the ones who get the most credit for victories, aren’t they? Ask Rob Reiner if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

This explains why there’s so much glitz and so little substance to the Pacino character, too. After all, you’re not going to make someone who is playing you less than glamorous, are you? Of course not.

So — if I’m right, and this is just a practical-jokey way of making a biopic about yourself, then it really doesn’t matter that the rest of the movie stinks. The horrible editing, the annoying, whiny performances, (excepting Jim Brown as the defensive coordinator and Jamie Foxx as the young QB) and the wretchedly cliched final game sequence — all of these things are extraneous. We shouldn’t worry about them. We should just understand the code and enjoy the movie from there, right? Right?

Because… well… if I’m wrong, and this is not some sort of joke you’re pulling, that means that this is a really, really bad film with nothing to redeem it, and… well… that just isn’t possible.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this letter, and thank you once again for filming part of your movie in Texas. The film industry is very important ot the Lone Star State, and your movies like Born on the Fourth of July and JFK have been milestones in our state’s cinematic history. Good luck on your next picture.

Sincerely,

Curtis D. Edmonds

P.S. Oswald acted alone.