The Element of Surprise

It is surely someone’s little inside joke that the red, white and blue Mini Coopers that are the signature of The Italian Job are parked, at one point, at Hollywood and Highland, right out front of the Kodak Theater, home of the Oscars. The Italian Job, unfortunately, has about as much chance of winning one of the golden statuettes as it does of inspiring a cure for cancer, or getting good critical notices from the French press.

This is too bad. The Italian Job has its drawbacks. It is a remake, first off, of a 1969 Michael Caine film, unseen by me. (That one, we learn from the invaluable Internet Movie Database, featured Noel Coward and Benny Hill, just to give you an idea.) It is just about as predictable as it can be; the audience is moving in lockstep with the characters, never falling behind for a minute. And it’s just the latest entry in what had already become a crowded genre of heist movies. By all rights, it shouldn’t be any good at all — certainly not Kodak Theater material, or even close. And yet, despite all of this, The Italian Job is quite good, surprisingly so.

The first big surprise is that Donald Sutherland isn’t nearly as creepy as he usually is. Sutherland, who’s turned in more than his share of creepy performances (The Dirty Dozen, Backdraft, Outbreak, Space Cowboys, just to name a few) is upbeat and engaging here as the patriarch of a small group of thieves after a safe filled with gold parked in a Venetian townhouse. His protege and surrogate son is Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg) who has planned the heist down to the letter, with the help of his crackerjack crew. Everything goes smoothly right up until the inevitable doublecross, accomplished by Steve (Ed Norton) with nothing more or less than pure brute force. (”No imagination”, as everyone ends up reminding Norton.)

The second big surprise is that Walhberg, who escapes the doublecross with revenge on his mind, is actually playing a grownup character. This is something that he’s never had to do before; all his previous characters were just big overgrown kids. In the opening scenes, he’s still an apprentice to Sutherland, but he comes into his own quickly, authoritative, commanding, and confident, but with enough of a sense of style to keep from seeming grim and humorless.

Which, sadly, we can’t say about ice princess Charlize Theron, playing Sutherland’s daughter, an expert safecracker who is still mourning the loss of her father and (presumably) mentor. Theron is sufficiently easy enough on the eyes that she gets away with a lot, but she looks for all the world as though she’s just graduated from the Lara Croft School of Subtle Acting in Action Movies. Theron’s about as interesting here as a big stack of cold pancakes without butter or syrup.

That this doesn’t matter much is due to the good work of the third surprise in the movie, the excellence of Walhberg’s team. Seth Green is the computer whiz; he brings an anarchic energy to his part borrowed from his gig as Scott Evil from the Austin Powers flicks, and it’s welcome. Jason Statham is Handsome Rob, getaway driver extraordinare, and his scowling counterbalances Green’s clowning. Mos Def is the explosives guy (”Left Ear” after a mishap with M-80s in a toilet) and he has the best physical comedy scene in the movie (outside of maybe the bit with the uncoordinated Green trying to wrestle a motorcycle).

They’re all going up against the understandably paranoid Norton, who — um, surprisingly — is really, really bad in The Italian Job. This is actually a good thing, paradoxically; it makes it a lot easier to root against him, to hope that he gets his comeuppance. Norton is phoning this one in — apparently, there’s something in his contract that requires him to make this movie, and he’s doing so with uncharacteristic bad grace. Nonetheless, his leer, his goofy soul patch, and his smarmy blustering all make him the perfect target for revenge by Walhberg and his crew.

To say much more about The Italian Job would be to spoil it, and there’s not much reason, if any, to do that. The movie talks about this, even, in the scene where Walhberg finally confronts Norton. “You’ve given up the element of surprise,” Norton tells Walhberg, who then punches Norton in the face. (”Surprised?” Walhberg asks.) The one thing that The Italian Job really and truly has going for it is the element of surprise, and I won’t take any more away than I already have. Go see it, and be prepared for a slick, intelligent roller-coaster ride.

Dumb, Crude, Ugly, Thoughtless, Sexist, Self-Destructive Fools

From the first day of this campaign I have talked about the goal of a responsibility era for America. And even before that, it was one of my priorities as governor. For too long our culture has sent this message: if it feels good, do it. And if you’ve got a problem, just go ahead and blame somebody else. Each of us must understand that’s not right. Each of us must understand that we’re responsible for the decisions and choices we make in life.
– George W. Bush, October 26, 2000, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

One of the many inexplicable oddities about Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is how the funniest moments of the movie turn on the theme of responsibility. The best of these moments come when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon confront each other with the details of their careers since their tour de force in Good Will Hunting. Damon calls Affleck “Bounce-Boy”, and Affleck responds by ridiculing Damon a “gay serial killer cowboy playing golf” making touchy-feely movies.

“Have you seen Forces of Nature?” Damon asks. (Affleck has the good grace to look sheepish here, as well he might.)

That’s one scene, another is where Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) breaks his usual reserve and explains to Banky (Jason Lee) how he’s legally responsible for forking over part of the fee he recieved from the producers of the “Adventures of Bluntman and Chronic” movie. This is followed fairly soon (if not soon enough) by a scene where the newly enriched Jay and Silent Bob fly across the country to whack the living snot out of the Internet-based movie critics of the world as a way of asking them to take responsibility for their comments.

(My new fantasy: I run across Kevin Smith in a parking lot, and I say, “My name is Curtis Edmonds, I write movie reviews at www.txreviews.com, and I said that ‘Dogma is a bad movie, no two ways about it, deliberately designed to shock and offend as many people as possible.’” I roll up my sleeves, put up my fists, and ask, “So, you got something to say, Jersey-boy?”)

Comedy is about incongruities, and the reason why these moments are the funniest in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is because these moments that reference responsibility are set among a backdrop of complete, utter, total, comprehensive irresponsibility. It features Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith as Jersey convenience store slackers and pillars of irresponsibility Jay and Silent Bob, who have migrated from Dogma and Smith’s other movies. This of course means that 90% of the lines in the movie are uttered by Mewes, who is simultaneously the worst actor in the world while being perfect for this part. This is accompanied by twitchy reaction shots from Smith, who rolls his eyes so often that I would recommend he go see an optometrist. What you get is a movie that even the MPAA has to describe as containing “nonstop crude and sexual humor, pervasive strong language, and drug content.”

That’s an admirable summary of the movie, but it doesn’t begin to describe just how stupid, crude, foul, inane and hopelessly irresponsible these characters are. You get to the point in the movie that when Jay and Silent Bob whip out their membership cards for their local New Jersey drug dealer’s union, it’s almost a relief to know that they aren’t completely disconnected from society. And yet, despite all of this, there’s something about these characters — whether it’s their complete cluelessness, our own sense of superiority, or even our recognition of part of ourselves in them — that we don’t reject them. Like the old MTV disclaimer on the “Beavis and Butt-Head” cartoon, Jay and Silent Bob “are dumb, crude, ugly, thoughtless, sexist, self-destructive fools. But for some reason the little wienerheads make us laugh.”

The sense that you get in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is that the movie was meant to appeal only to that narrow portion of society where Kevin Smith fans reside, those people who get the most comic mileage out of these characters, the folks who get the inside jokes and who recognize all the supporting characters. (The only Kevin Smith movie I have seen is Dogma, and I kept waiting for Alan Rickman to show up as the angel Metatron and smite these stoner idiots.) As a result, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is not so much a garden-variety bad movie but a movie that was born to be bad, designed in a movie laboratory out of some contaminated stem-cell line to be as bad as it could be without making the audience recoil in shock and horror. There’s no less than three scenes where the characters make a reference to bad movies and then wink at the audience; the kind of thing you only see in a movie that was bad by design.

Kevin Smith appears to be a bright, talented, smart filmmaker. However, if Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back has any sort of success, he could easily choose to make this same kind of movie over and over again. (Jay and Silent Bob: The Fanboy Menace, say, or Attack of the Jay and Silent Bob Clones.) Or Kevin Smith could choose to put aside the endless parade of sex and fart jokes, could make something of more import than a witless road movie crossed with an interminable series of movie parodies, could try acting instead of reacting for once, could fulfill the considerable promise he displayed in Dogma.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back indicates that he’s not willing to take up such a responsibility, not yet, but then the “responsibility era” is still young. There is still time for Kevin Smith to prove that he can still make movies about something other than dumb, crude, ugly, thoughtless, sexist, self-destructive fools.

Don’t Encourage Them

Thrillers are all variations on a theme. You have a smart, resourceful, and powerful Bad Guy, who has a goal he has to meet. You have a noble and brave Good Guy, who has to protect the innocent, kill the Bad Guy, and not get killed himself in the process. The trick of thriller writing is doing all of this in an interesting and novel manner. This simple formula can lead to classic movies like North by Northwest, High Noon, or Silence of the Lambs, or big summer blockbusters like Men In Black, The Fugitive, or Air Force One, or it can lead to utter dreck like Masterminds, Event Horizon, Kull the Conqueror…. is anyone else getting depressed here?

Point is, it’s not enough to follow the formula. You’ve got to throw in something extra, something good and new and better than the last version. Something to surprise and move all of us people who buy the tickets and the popcorn and the Happy Meals. This is a hard thing to do, but it is absolutely necessary in every way. Without that something extra — whether it’s a great plot or a well-written screenplay, or great special effects or great locations or great casting or great performances or great big hungry dinosaurs — the movie fails. That’s why The Jackal, with all its starpower, with all its budget, with all its hype, gets a big fat F.

Bruce Willis is the Bad Guy, the Jackal, a legendary killer for hire. Richard Gere is the Good Guy, a former IRA assassin with a vendetta against the Jackal. The Jackal is trying to kill someone. Gere is trying to stop him. Will Gere be able to stop the assassination in time and kill the Jackal? (I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count.) There are no surprises awaiting the audience in The Jackal, no moment when you say to yourself, “I wonder what happens next?”

The script for The Jackal isn’t ripped straight from today’s headlines. It’s ripped off, straight from an episode of Millennium. Throughout the movie, we learn what the Jackal’s plans are and how he intends to accomplish them. No surprise. The fun of a movie like this should come from Richard Gere figuring out what the Jackal’s plan is and developing a clever plan to foil the Bad Guy. Instead, we get two (count ‘em, two) scenes where Gere is sitting in an FBI conference room somewhere and instantly divines the Jackal’s plan just as if he’s Frank Black (or more likely, just as if he’s been handed a copy of the script). And we never get more than a superficial clue as to why Gere has had this flash of insight. It’s like Gere’s character is psychic, but neither he nor the FBI (or the screenwriters) seem to know it. And just like in Millennium, the Bad Guy has an overwhelming need to go after the people the Good Guy cares about, whether or not they are important to what he’s trying to do or not. What’s more, in the last half of the movie, the Jackal, supposedly a super-smart professional terrorist who never makes a mistake, comes down with a major case of the stupids.

As for the performances… Bruce Willis manages to get through the whole movie without a wisecrack, which is a major achievement, but not enough reason to see the movie. His disguises are good, but not as good or as interesting as Val Kilmer’s in The Saint. Richard Gere is made to talk the entire movie in an Irish accent, which detracts from his otherwise lifeless and dull performance. Sidney Poitier is probably the most disappointing element in a overwhelmingly disappointing movie — not that his performance is bad or anything, it’s not, but it is sad that Hollywood won’t use this talented actor in any part other than an FBI agent (Shoot to Kill, Sneakers).

Writing a good plot and a good screenplay, like I said, is hard, but it can be done. It wasn’t done here. It is our job as consumers to reward good screenplays and to denounce bad and uninteresting ones. Do not go see this movie. You’ll only encourage the producers to make more just like it. Instead, stay home and rent Day of the Jackal, or In the Line of Fire, or a fire safety video, for crying out loud. Anything other than The Jackal, which lives up to its name by gnawing the dead bones of other, better movies.

Practically Magic

We all know what a John Ford Western looks like, and what an Alfred Hitchcock thriller looks like, and what a Frank Capra drama looks like. And, amazingly enough, we all know what a Quentin Tarantino movie looks like. Amazing, I mean, because he’s only directed three movies. Not that either Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction arise to the level of The Searchers, North by Northwest, or Meet John Doe, by any means, but Tarantino has a style as distinctive as John Wayne’s red bandanna or Jimmy Stewart’s stammer.

But the key to Tarantino movies has always been the dialogue. That’s why True Romance is a “Tarantino movie”, even though Tony Scott directed Tarantino’s screenplay. That’s why Pulp Fiction will be studied in film schools long after films like Buddy and The Jackal have evaporated like the smoke from a Red Apple cigarette. And that’s why Jackie Brown is just a little bit short of being the best movie of the year. (Which would be Titanic.)

QT is working with an Elmore Leonard novel as his source material, and his screenplay has taken pains to remain true to Leonard’s snappy dialogue. Although he’s transplanted the setting from South Florida to the familiar suburban outback of Los Angeles, QT has studiously kept his trademark conversational vignettes out of the movie. Also, the native quirkiness of Tarantino characters is curiously absent — partially because Tarantino’s not working with his regular cast (Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, QT himself). And there’s not a Big Kahuna Burger or a four-way gun confrontation in sight.

And yet, these are minor quibbles, important to only die-hard Tarantino fans. (And QT does add several signature touches — one funny split-screen moment, one Indiana-Jones-type map, and the turning-point of the movie, told in three different segments from three different perspectives.)

Jackie Brown is a fine movie, driven by plot and dialogue rather than car chases and shootouts. At its center, it’s a duel between ghetto arms dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson, in yet another Oscar-worthy performance) and stewardess turned courier Jackie Brown (Pam Grier, making a boffo return to the screen). The winner will get half a million dollars, the loser will die.

Ordell is a man who knows that it’s good to be the king. He rules his large gun business and small harem like an empire, dealing ruthlessly and efficiently with threats — but he’s a classy and smart king. Jackson takes a character that could be instantly repellent and makes us like and respect — and fear — him. The only note that rings false isn’t Jackson’s fault: QT has grafted his musical taste onto Ordell’s character, and has him listening to the durndest music.

Where Ordell is powerful and commanding, Jackie Brown herself is dignified and sharp. Jackie is a 44-year-old stewardess on a cheesy airline, running money for Ordell from Mexico. An arrest by a federal marshal (Michael Keaton, in a surprisingly colorless, Joe Friday role) forces Jackie to try to walk a twisted tightrope to outwit both the feds and Ordell.

Grier is superb. She makes Jackie Brown into a real person, rather than just an older, wiser Foxy Brown. We see Jackie in different moods: quietly desperate in a small interrogation room, shouting down Ordell in a tense confrontation in her apartment, tired yet dignified in getting out of jail, alternately trying to overcome her nerves and then trying to act nervous for the benefit of the cops, and in a wonderful scene, rehearsing her fast-draw.

But the best reason to go see this movie is the one that no one expected, the one that no one had ever even heard from in years: Robert Forster. The veteran of such films as Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence, Satan’s Princess, The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats, and Orgy of the Nymphomaniacs somehow caught QT’s eye, and got the part of bail bondsman Max Cherry. Forster isn’t marquee-idol handsome, and his hair plugs are painfully obvious, but he is… Gary Cooper! Yes! When the menacing Ordell explains that he doesn’t have the money on him for a bail bond, he replies calmly, in his flat, nasal voice: “Is white guilt supposed to make me forget that I run a business?” Tough, smart, and yet vulnerable to Jackie Brown’s charms, Forster is a calm center of gravity amidst the swirling plots and counterplots. Maybe Forster doesn’t get an Oscar, but it’s a crying shame that the Academy doesn’t give out a “Comeback Player of the Year” award.

However, the biggest disappointment in Jackie Brown is the performances turned in by the veterans: Michael Keaton and Robert DeNiro. They’re both wasted in small, supporting roles — Keaton as a hipster federal marshal, DeNiro as a stoner ex-con. DeNiro is primarily a sounding board for Jackson, and for much of the movie, he sits around on the couch with Bridget Fonda’s surfer girl, smoking marijuana out of an improbable statuette. There’s nothing wrong with any of their performances, it’s just that I would have like to have seen more use out of this great cast.

But as good as the cast is, and a good as this movie is, the best thing is this: Jackie Brown makes me want to read more Elmore Leonard novels. That’s a fine tribute to the skills of Jackson, Grier, and Forster — and especially to my main man, Quentin Tarantino. In a Hollywood obsessed with special effects, tiresome sequels, and unfunny bathroom comedies, QT has once again proven that telling great stories in a stylish and original way is magic.

Falling With Style

Johnny English, really, is best understood outside of the James Bond genre. It borrows from them, certainly, and has much in common with the films, but it is not truly a parody. This is important, and decisive.

No. Johnny English is, thank goodness, best understood as the long-awaited continuation of the Blackadder series. If you know what I’m talking about, you’ve probably already seen the movie and enjoyed it thoroughly. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re in for a treat.

Blackadder is Rowan Atkinson’s chief claim to fame, and it is a worthy one. There are four Blackadder series, all featuring the same main character, a brutal, twisted, conceited genius whose evil schemes are always thwarted by his own incompetence and an ironic twist of fate. The character is dropped into different time periods — medieval, Elizabethan, Edwardian, World War I — with an outstanding supporting cast playing different roles. The Blackadder series was a triumph for British comedy, and is a superlative work, right up there with Fawlty Towers and Yes, Minister in the pantheon of great British series. 

Atkinson, however, stopped making the Blackadder series, and turned to making the dreadful Mr. Bean shows, about which the less said the better. For some perverse reason, Mr. Bean is much better known in the States than Blackadder, and that may have influenced the relatively narrow box office of Johnny English. No matter, though. Johnny English is a triumph in its own right.

Johnny English may or may not be the best comedy of the year, but it’s clearly the best British comedy of the year, and that’s important. Fans of British comedy are usually those of us with a long history of not having dates on Saturday night. This, of course, is when the local PBS stations would show Monty Python reruns and other British comedy programming. British comedy series are something of an acquired taste, admittedly, but if you have a dry enough sense of humour, they can be hysterical. Johnny English is in that tradition, and is hysterically funny, if you’re in the right Brit-com mindset. It’s very much a film for insiders; outsiders simply won’t understand it as well as those of us who’ve been watching these shows all our lives.

For those of you who aren’t insiders, Johnny English is, probably, going to play like a standard spy spoof. Atkinson plays a newly ordained super-spy with all sorts of gadgets and guns and whatnot, and he spends the movie trying to foil a sick, demented evil genius. (Yes, that’s John Malkovich doing a tremendous phony French accent.) And if you go into the movie thinking that the purpose of the movie is the plot — whether or not Atkinson will be able to foil Malkovich’s evil designs — well, you’re just wrong. The plot has little or nothing to do with the movie, and this is a distinct plus.

You see (or maybe you don’t) the point of your basic action movie is to chase your hero up a tree that he can’t climb down, and then see what he does to get out of the perilous situation. The point of Johnny English, to the extent that it has one, is to get Atkinson up a tree and then leave him there, looking completely embarrassed. British comedies — and, arguably, British culture itself — revolve around the principle of the stiff upper lip; that whatever befalls, the one thing that one must never do is to be embarrased in public. This is hard for the Johnny English character, who is full of false bravado, but who at the same time is almost fatally incompetent. This combination dictates that he’s going to be embarrased in public, and often — and Atkinson’s skill as a comic actor ensures that when this happens, it’s going to be hilarious.

The humor in Johnny English is not so much about pratfalls as it is falling from grace, falling into horrible situations, falling into the hands of the enemy. Johnny English succeeds because Atkinson knows how to fall with style, knows how to keep the audience shaking with laughter as he falls and fails and gets up again. Johnny English may only be for aficionados of British comedy, but for those of us who have been waiting for this movie for a long time can attest, it’s been more than worth the wait. Johnny English is brilliant.

Let’s Talk About Sex

You may have missed the story; I just barely saw it myself. It was about the Baker’s larkspur, which is an endangered purple flowery plant that grows in the wild in one spot, along a roadside in Marin County, California. Now, you would think that if any endangered plant would be safe anywhere it would be in famously granola-soaked Marin County, but you would be wrong. A county road crew with a backhoe nearly wiped out the entire plant population last October clearing away debris from a mudslide.

My point isn’t about the larkspur itself, but about botany, and all of science, for that matter. With every different kind of plant out there, with every dizzying variety of grass and tree and leaf, with the new science of genetic manipulation promising — I don’t know what — chocolate-covered cherry trees, we’re drawn to the Baker’s larkspur, this tiny remnant, this outlier in the vast sea of biology, because it’s different, rare, and special, and — growing in Marin County as it does — more than a bit weird.

Put it another way. Let’s say you weren’t a botanist but an entomologist, and you studied the gall wasp — which is what Professor A. Kinsey actually did for years. The gall wasp is tiny, on the order of five millimeters. And they’re common; Kinsey collected untold thousands in his career, we’re told. But let’s say you found a big one. A really big one, say the size of a pigeon. Now — that would be different, wouldn’t it? That would be scientifically significant. More than that, it would be cool.

So let’s say that you moved from entomology to humanism, the study of people, and namely the study of people once they get naked. The study of sex, to be blunt. Where would your interests lie? With the ordinary? The day-to-day (or week-to-week, or, for some of us, the year-to-year) sexual activities of the average couple? Or, instead, do you get caught up in something else… the different, let’s just say.

This is what Kinsey is about, basically. Kinsey, played here by Liam Neeson in a fabulously understated performance, is a tremendously controversial figure, to this day, in some circles. Kinsey does the audience the favor of telling his story without fear or favor, pointing out the different aspects of his life and career and impact. It’s far too easy to either praise or condemn a polarizing figure like Kinsey; the movie does an admirable job in presenting his life in a remarkably fair and nonjudgmental way.

It is far too easy for any social commentator to criticize the sex-soaked nature of our current popular culture; I don’t think that it’s even possible to watch a football game nowadays without seeing six ads about sex pills of whatever sort. But the best scenes in Kinsey show the hazards of the other extreme — the painful ordeal of his wedding night, just for starters. The reliably oleogeaneous Tim Curry shows up as a sex lecturer at the University of Indiana, throwing out the most ridiculous, pious bunk to his young charges. Kinsey, quite sensibly, steps in, and takes over the classes, bringing some scientific rigor to the subject, and (hopefully) allow his young married students to enjoy their relationships that much more.

From there, we see Kinsey developing his theories, conducting his research, taking “sexual histories” of everyone he encounters, trying to determine what, exactly, it is people do when they take their clothes off. Anyone who’s spent any time doing research knows the drill, and can appreciate just how difficult it is to be a pioneer in a new subject area — especially one so intimate and personal.

It’s clear from the story that Kinsey is qualified in a lot of ways to be that pioneer, but it’s also clear that in a lot of other ways that he was the last person in the world who should have been doing this particular research. It would have been very easy (and snore-inducing) for Neeson to play Kinsey as a kindly old professor, but it wouldn’t have been honest or right, and so we see Neeson show us Kinsey as a thin-skinned, humorless crusader, incapable even of being nice to people who are funding his research. (A vastly underrated research skill, that.)

So you have a biopic of an interesting character, with a great actor in the title role, a wonderful Oscar-nominated performance by Laura Linney as his not-too longsuffering wife, and that ought to be enough to recommend Kinsey to anyone. The only problem is that, like its subject, Kinsey gets a little weird.

Just as the botanist is interested in the Baker’s larkspur, it was perhaps inevitable for Kinsey and his team to become interested in the stranger, more disturbing parts of the human sexual experience. (And, no, I am not engaging in some gratuitous gay-bashing here — you’ll just have to watch the movie.) Kinsey does yeoman’s work in showing the extent of the research, and the emotional impact that the researchers’ preoccupation with sex has on their personal lives. Like everything else, this is very well done, but it’s terribly uncomfortable to watch.

Kinsey is a very well-done movie, it’s a well-acted movie, and it’s undoubtedly an important movie from a historical standpoint. Too it’s credit, it’s deeply honest, and fair. But it’s also deeply, deeply ooky at times. And just like its topic, Kinsey is for consenting adults only.

Take That, You Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys

Who: Jet Li, as a lone-wolf Chinese policeman and martial-arts expert; Bridget Fonda, as a single mom and prostitute with a heroin addiction and inability to deliver convincing dialogue; Tchéky Karyo, that poor man’s Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant mode as a corrupt French police inspector.

What: Kicks the living snot out of a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys; whines and complains and makes a nuisance of herself; keeps a turtle in his desk drawer for no apparent reason.

How: With his flying fists of fury and acupuncture needles; with her slutty wardrobe and wretched eye makeup, with his pretended sincerity and permanent sneer.

Where: Paris; Paris; Paris. (At least I think so, although Kiss of the Dragon does show us the Eiffel Tower, the durn thing could have been shot in Toronto for what it matters.)

When: The upside of his career; the downside of her career; in the midst of his displacement of Depardieu as the only French actor anyone in the States has heard of.

Why: God alone knows.

Kiss of the Dragon could have been a great movie if only they had left it alone. The idea of dropping Jet Li in the middle of Paris and letting him cut loose could have made for a series of brilliant moments. Jet Li could have spent the whole movie busting Frenchmen in the chops and audiences across America and Britain and Germany would have cheered. It could have gone like this:

WAITER: Welcome to Maison Derriere, m’seiur. Could I interest you in some goat cheese fondue with roasted pigeon feet?

LI: No. I would like a steak, please.

WAITER: Steak? Steak? Do not make me laugh at you, m’seiur. Please try the peeled mice in heavy cream, with the Chateau Plopp ‘99.

LI: Steak. And cook it.

WAITER: I am looking down my nose at you, m’seiur. To order the steak would be an act of the most bourgeous order. Infamous! Incroyable!

(WAITER collapses to the floor as LI applies a well-placed karate chop to his solar plexus.)

And it could have gone on like that, with Li administering the ancient art of kung fu to snooty hotel clerks and haughty French bureaucrats and Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Lewis fans and street mimes. And it could have ended with the entire French nation surrendering to Jet Li’s fearsome martial arts skills, and Li driving in triumph down the Champs Elysee, with the keys to the Perrier factory in his hand. (Please send all “Happy Bastille Day” cards to Curtis D. Edmonds, Trenton, New Jersey 08308.)

Jet Li does spend a good portion of Kiss of the Dragon beating up on Frenchmen, but not enough. The kung-fu action scenes are fairly well done, although the best scene has been given away by the trailers. Li himself does about as good of an acting job as you could expect as a stiff-but-brave cop, especially if you weren’t expecting much to begin with.

What makes Kiss of the Dragon a completely awful, substandard film is its plot. It has one. Worse, it is completely nonsensical and contradictory. Instead of wondering at the chopsocky skills of Jet Li, the audience is left wondering what, exactly, is going on with the plot, and why all the people on the screen are doing things that make no sense.

I defy anyone to watch the movie and then explain exactly why the characters act the way they do in the first fifteen minutes of the movie; the plot holes are big enough for Lance Armstrong and the rest of the Tour de France competitors to ride through. Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff when Li shows up at the hotel? Why is Bridget Fonda at the hotel, and what is she supposed to be doing, and does she act that way all the time? Why is Tchéky Karyo recording everything when all it can do is get him into trouble? Why does the other prostitute have those knitting needles in her hair, and why does she use them the way she does? Why doesn’t the movie even try to answer any of these questions? Why do they release movies without letting guys like me watch them first?

As if that wasn’t bad enough (and it is very, very bad) the movie saddles poor Jet Li with the care and feeding of Bridget Fonda. Women in kung-fu movies tend to either be skilled warriors or needy damsels-in-distress, and Fonda is a particularly whiny example of the latter type. Her prostitute character is one step away from being truly bizarre; she is capable of complaining about the number of customers she gets and showing Li a picture of her daughter in the same scene. (She does, however, have the best unintentionally funny line of the movie; she tells Li that “I can’t walk the streets all night!”)

Kiss of the Dragon is a wretchedly bad movie, with a plot incomprehensible even by kung fu movie standards. (It even manages to make Tomb Raider look like a model of sensible plot construction by comparison, if you can imagine such a thing.) It doesn’t deliver either the martial arts action or the French-bashing that it promises. Worst of all, it is representative of the sort of movie they’re throwing up on screens nowadays.

Reflections in a Wary Eye

Politicians are interested in people. This is not always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
– P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores

 

K-Pax is interested in things, which is not the same as being interesting. You’ve no doubt experienced the same thing yourself. Everyone knows someone who is interested in soccer or ballroom dancing or potato growing or some other harmless pursuit that she uses as a club to beat those around her into conversational submission. After a while, repeated conversations about the fortunes of Puddlemere United or the intricacies of the mazurka or the latest in Russet Gold cross-pollenization techniques can be enough to drive even the most sane, normal, level-headed person completely around the bend.

K-Pax is interested in optics, which is not at all a bad thing for a movie to be interested in, necessarily. It is interested in the crenellated edges of the glass award on Jeff Bridges’s desk and the miniature rainbows that reflect off his office walls. It is interested in Kevin Spacey’s wraparound mirror sunglasses and the reflections they cast. It is interested in dappled sunlight on water, in neon lights in car windows, in planetariums and Venetian blinds and sunrises and other means of correcting and refracting light. This is a fine and noble interest for a movie to have, and that interest sustains the movie through some dull and lifeless passages. If K-Pax does one thing well, its imagery manages to keep the audience’s interest focused. (A little optics humor there.)

Unfortunately, K-Pax is also interested in space aliens.

K-Pax is interested in space aliens in that strange, geeky, obsessive way that only those who have truly mastered the arcana of space travel can achieve. There isn’t this much level of detail about distant planets at the Klingon Empire information booth at the Springfield Bimonthly Science Fiction Convention. (Motto: Be There, And Be Square.) K-Pax would like us to believe that it is a movie about Prot (Spacey), a drifter who claims to be from the eponymous planet K-Pax. This claim predictably gets Prot delivered into the New York City mental health system, albeit in an alarmingly quick manner. Here, he meets Dr. Mark Powell (Bridges) who takes an interest in his case. “I hope extraterrestrials are eligible for Medicaid,” Powell says, in the funniest health-care policy line of the year.

The planet K-Pax, we’re told, has two stars, purple moons, pink hearts, green clovers, and blue diamonds, unless that’s Lucky Charms cereal and I’m just confused. The script requires Spacey to provide us with a primer of life on K-Pax, which combines incredibly high-speed space travel with incredibly dull (or incredibly painful) Saturday nights. Spacey delivers all this interplanetary nonsense - going so far as to stumping a panel of astronomers with a complex orbital map of some sort - with total confidence and matter-of-factness. This is enough to convince his fellow psychiatric patients that he really, truly is from K-Pax, and it may be enough to convince the audience at times.

However, the real story here is not Prot and the ultimate question of his immigration status. It is certainly not the story of Dr. Powell and his estrangement from his second wife and his grown son, although it pretends to be that, too. Unlike the vastly superior Vanilla Sky, which references the family of psychiatrist Kurt Russell but never introduces them, there are too many references to Bridges’s family, most of which could have been deleted with little loss.

The real story is not even the attempts by Dr. Powell to treat Prot. Dr. Powell may be the World’s Worst Psychiatrist. If he’s not, he’s either very subtle, or maybe he specializes in dumb patients, who knows? He is fond of the trick where you turn everything the patient says into a question; this works for all of five seconds with Prot. His next big strategy is to try to overturn the structure of Prot’s dream world through logic. But using logic and sweet reason on a delusional patient is like trying to sell Jimmy Buffett a winter getaway in Minnesota, or setting Jonathan Frantzen up on a blind date with Oprah. It just won’t work.

What finally does work is hypnosis, and here is where K-Pax finally gains momentum. Powell finally hits on the idea of hypnotizing Prot to reveal his true identity. This has the unfortunate effect of leading to the worst-acted scenes in the movie, as the hypnotic trance finally allows Spacey to overact and chew some scenery. It also brings in a false element of danger; we’re told that the stress of hypnosis is driving up Spacey’s heart rate, which makes him writhe on the floor in pretended agony. (Any day now, someone’s going to come up with the idea of hypnosis as an exercise-free cardiovascular workout, you watch.)

The hypnosis schtick works better than you might think, though. K-Pax works best as a detective story, with Bridges trying to piece together the clues of Spacey’s past. When Bridges starts investigating (complete with a flag-filled map stolen from Meet John Doe), the movie stops being interested in things and starts being interesting.

However, this only lasts for awhile. K-Pax, unfortunately, backtracks from its interest in the details of what exactly is causing Spacey to act as he does (and, not incidentally, why Bridges acts as he does) in favor of returning to the question of whether Spacey is really an alien or not. This is a mistake, mostly because it serves only to advance the movie’s semi-profound notions about life and the human condition and whatnot, which are rot. At its best, K-Pax would like to be Awakenings, at its worst, it plays like the fiftieth bad remake of E.T..

This is not to say that K-Pax is not entirely bad. It is worth seeing for its interest in lighting and reflection and cinematography. But anyone expecting anything more should approach K-Pax with a wary eye.

Chamber Music

The villains in The Ladykillers play Renaissance chamber music to cover up their nefarious activities, and there you have it. But more on that in a minute.

The focus of the movie is where it rightly should be, on its stars, and the most luminous of these is of course Tom Hanks. This is something of a departure for him. Outside of the joyous, anarchic Toy Story voiceovers, Hanks has been relegated to serious roles for the better part of the last decade. He hasn’t been in a real non-Meg-Ryan comedy since 1989, with his role as a straight-arrow policeman playing second fiddle to a slobbering dog in the under-rated Turner & Hooch. It’s as if he’s been dying for this kind of role after years spent as a steely-eyed missile man, and there’s a certain — and entirely welcome — sense of glee about the proceedings.

Hanks is given the role here of a down-at-the-heels Southern gentleman, a classicist university professor on sabbatical. (Hanks tells us he teaches at the nonexistent “University of Mississippi at Hattiesburg”; Hattiesburg is the home of the University of Southern Mississippi.) The role, however, is a complete caricature — Foghorn Leghorn by way of Edward Albee. The only place that this role might fit in is a community-theater presentation of a Tennessee Williams play. It is an open invitation for the actor to overact, to drown the entire proceedings in a suffocating layer of molasses syrup. Hanks gives into this temptation — anybody would — but does so in such a charming, ingratiating, and discriminating way that it’s hard to rap his knuckles for it. (In fact, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, don’t be surprised if you — yes, you yourself! — aren’t, at some point, telling some Waffle House waitress that you “must have waffles, forthwith”, in just the way that Hanks orders them here.)

The interesting thing about Hanks’s portrayal of the unflappable Professor Goldthwait H. Dorr, Ph.D., is that we see him for most of the movie trying to charm his way around Irma P. Hall — about whom more later. But for the rest of the movie, he’s the leader of a band of criminals trying to break into the lightly-guarded vault of a riverboat casino somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. (Or, better yet, “heavily-guarded”, considering the physique of the lone security guard, played by Walter Jordan.) It would have been very easy — almost natural — for Hanks to drop the phony Southern accent and elaborate mannerisms and baroque turns of speech that define the character as soon as he’s in the root cellar, supervising the construction of the tunnelling process. The character of Professor Dorr is so oppressive, so unnatural, so downright weird that it would have been only fitting for the audience to get a break from his antics. But that never happens. Instead, Hanks stays in character, and that itself is something of an achievement.

Irma Hall, too, stays in character, and it’s also one we’ve seen before. She plays the Little Old Black Church-Going Lady here, and the Coen Brothers — not content with the stereotype — have saddled her with her fair share of quirks as well. Her Marva Munson starts off the proceedings by barging into the sheriff’s office, complaining about the modern “hippity-hop” music. “It don’t make me want to hippity-hop,” she says, and we believe her. Her character, too, is completely and totally overdrawn, skirting the boundaries of satire, and occasionally disregarding them altogether. Her scenes with Hanks are not really the best in the movie, but you won’t see two actors having more fun doing their work anywhere else. And it may be that because their characters are so overdrawn that Hanks and Hall work so well together. Despite their differences, they understand each other, even when they’re trying to outguess the other. Both characters are given to a certain floridity of speech and gesture, both are supremely self-confident in themselves, and both are completely unaware of their foibles.

If The Ladykillers can be seen in musical terms — and given the potent gospel soundtrack, it’s hard to see it in any other way — Hanks has the baroque melody of the piece, and Hall has the sweet Southern harmony. That in and of itself might be sufficient to drive the movie, but the Coen Brothers know better. It’s the supporting instruments in chamber music that make the work come alive, and this particular bit of Coen Brothers composition depends on its supporting cast for a good share of its laughter and charm.

It would be easy to dismiss Hanks’s merry band of thieves as being one-note characters, but that totally misses the point. Of course they’re one-note characters! So, too, were Moe, Larry and Curly, and these characters continue in that tradition. We have, for example, Ryan Hurst as Lump, the traditional musclebound henchman, who calls Hanks “Coach” and draws a laugh every time he opens his mouth. (One wonders if Hanks, who played a similar, but much more nuanced, character in Forrest Gump, might have passed along some pointers.) We have The General, played by Tzi Ma, who knows something about tunneling from his days with the Viet Cong, and whose chain-smoking is as big as a laugh as anything else in the movie. The underappreciated Marlon Wayans plays MacSam, the inside man, who takes care of the hippity-hop side of the comedy. His foil is the hangdog Garth Pancake, played by J.K. Simmons, who all but steals the movie as the dangerously flatulent explosives expert. They all have their notes to play in the score, and they play them right on time, deftly, and with a minimum of fuss.

The problem with The Ladykillers — to the extent that there is a problem — is that their reputation greatly precedes them. The Ladykillers is not Fargo, and it is not Miller’s Crossing, and that is, of course, regrettable. It is what it is; a chicken-fried romp, a silly, goofy black comedy that gives its stars a chance to exercise their formidable comic gifts. It is not much more than that — it could be more than that, and perhaps it should be more than that. But given what passes for comedy in the American cinema these days, it seems that gratitude is more in order than sorrow.

Side Order of Snark

Hello! My name is Curtis Edmonds, and I’ll be your movie reviewer tonight. Our entree this evening is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, served with an appetizer of contempt, a side order of snark, and a heaping pile of sarcasm for dessert. Our special will be served in several courses, as follows:

The Part of the Review Where I Give You A General Idea of What The Movie Is About

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is not so much a movie but a fossil assemblage. It operates in an overheated World-As-Myth where all the characters from late-Victorian adventure classics still walk the earth, at least in Cliff’s Notes form, and do good. Of course, there aren’t really all that many of them around, not that modern movie audiences would recognize, so the movie has to explain who all of them are and what all of them are doing and suchlike. You have Allan Quartermain (King Solomon’s Mines) summoned from Kenya, Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) and his pirate submarine Nautilus dispatched from the inky depths, Mina Harker (Dracula) recalled from Transylvania, the Invisible Man (oh, forget it), Dorian Grey (The Picture of Dorian Grey) wrenched out of his London drawing-room, and, for some reason, Tom Sawyer gets dragged into all this nonsense.

(Never mind that this particular fossil assemblage couldn’t possibly exist — Tom Sawyer, for example, would be in his early fifties in the movie’s 1899 timeline — you’ll have to suspend a lot more disbelief than that before you’re done.)

The Part of the Review Where I Mention That The Movie Was Based On A Comic Book

If you’re about the same age as I am, and this reminds you of anything, well, it should. The two things I always watched on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, in between the cereal commercials, over my bowl of Froot Loops, was the old Warner Brothers cartoons on ABC, and the Justice League cartoons that were either before or after them, I can’t remember. The Justice League was Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman and Aquaman, with other politically-correct characters like Black Thunder and Big Chief and what-have-you. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is just the 1899 version of the Justice League. And naturally, like just about every other movie these days, it’s based on a comic book. (”Graphic novel”, whatever.)

I don’t read comic books, or at least I haven’t since I got caught reading an Iron Man comic in fifth grade when I should have been studying fractions. (I still can’t tell you the difference between a numerator and a denominator.) Comic books have their place in the world, and I have mine (lying on the sofa with a Dr Pepper and a can of honey-roasted peanuts, dozing off to the Falcons game). Comic books only intersect my world when they show up as movies. And outside of the truly inspired efforts (Spider-Man, Road To Perdition), I wish they’d stay away. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is more-or-less why.

The Part of the Review Where I Complain That the Movie Doesn’t Make a Lick of Sense

Most of the ground here has been covered by Roger Ebert’s review, which points out the manifest sillinesses of the movie’s detour through Venice. He’s been to Venice, I haven’t, so I can’t comment here except to say that he’s absolutely right, of course. However, I have read the remarkable Memoirs of an Invisible Man by the brilliant H.F. Saint, which gives you all the rules for being invisible if you should ever to happen to become so yourself. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen follows this rulebook fairly well (except for some scenes where its Invisible Man shows up as a bald albino for lack of CGI funding) during the scenes where he’s on screen. And yet, we’re asked to believe that the Invisible Man could be a stowaway on what amounts to a two-man escape pod on a voyage from Venice to Mongolia, without anyone bumping his elbow, or seeing him after he’s eaten, or hearing him cough or talk in his sleep or anything like that, just because, you know, they can’t see him and stuff. (Which they would, eventually, if he got spinach in his teeth.)

This is minor, a little nitpicky point. But there are, no kidding, hundreds of these little nitpicky points, spread all throughout the movie, one on top of the other. You could choke on any one of them just as easily as you could choke on any one of your popcorn kernels. What’s the vampire doing out on the deck of the submarine in broad daylight? you’ll ask yourself, and from that moment on, there isn’t any way to enjoy the movie.

The Part of the Review Where I Condemn the Director, Screenwriter, Producers, and Their Flacks, Sycophants, and To a Life of Eternal Shame, Suffering, and Ignominy

Why is this the case? I don’t have a good reason for this, but this is what I am thinking. Everyone is used to having Hollywood condescend to our intelligence, asking us to believe that — let’s look at just this year, shall we — that you can steal three tons of gold in three Mini Coopers and drive them through Los Angeles without once stopping for gas or new shocks (The Italian Job), Adam Sandler is such a big Yankees fan that he would turn away a beautiful and wanton Heather Graham because she was wearing a Red Sox bra-and-panties set (Anger Management), or Keanu Reeves actually has an IQ over room temperature (The Matrix Reloaded). Everyone is used to having this kind of thing happen. But it’s not that often that you can pick out hundreds of plot points in a movie and say to yourself, “Dear God, the people who made this movie must have a lower IQ than Keanu Reeves.” For once, the contempt that Hollywood has for its audience is reciprocated, with interest.

What makes The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so horrible, so bad, so putrid is that nobody involved with the movie seems to have realized certain basic rules of moviemaking, such as the need to have a plot and interesting characters and situations and stuff. Instead, the thinking seems to have been that average CGI effects and casual Connery one-liners would be enough to get the summertime audience in the door. So basically, you have director Stephen Norrington (who, by trade, is a makeup artist, and it shows, really it does) directing a bad movie. You have screenwriter James Robinson (in his first effort, and who seems to have his head jammed totally up his ass) writing a bad movie. You have Lucinda Syson (who cast Swept Away, which tells you all you need to know) and Donna Isaacson (who cast Miller’s Crossing and should know better) casting a bad movie. You even have Sean Connery (about whom more later) and others producing a bad movie. In short, you have a whole Rogue’s Gallery of moviemakers who, from their efforts, would seem to have been doing nothing for the past year except making a movie so bad that it defies the limits of the thesaurus to describe it. And yet, they have not been publicly named and shamed, they have not been ousted from the profession, they have not been chased down the street by an angry, outraged crowd. Why I can’t imagine. Everyone in this movie, everyone from director Stephen Norrington to second assistant accountant Michele Wright, should be barred from ever making another movie until they write “I will not make bad movies ever again” on the blackboard a thousand times.

The Part of the Review Where I Give Sean Connery His Due Honor and Respect For Just Being Who He Is

And yet, there is Sean Connery, who for all of his swagger and bluster and ham-handed scene stealing, is still a wonderful actor, can still carry even the worst movie, can save the weakest scene, can spout even the worst, most nonsensical dialogue. Even in incredibly stupid scenes (like the one where he plays staredown with one of Siegfried and Roy’s tigers) he has a commanding presence. That Connery as an actor cannot redeem the utter failure of Connery as a producer is not entirely his fault; he is certainly doing the best he can, and he keeps The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from being quite as bad as, say, Gods and Generals.

The Part of the Review Where I Recapitulate How Bad the Movie Actually Is, and Refer Back to the First Paragraph of the Review to Kind of Bring Everything Full Circle

But The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is still a bad movie. Bad bad bad bad bad. Not “so bad it’s good”, either. Just plain bad. This is Mystery Science Theater 3000 bad. If it were any worse, it would be proscribed by the Geneva Convention so that it couldn’t be used to torture terrorists.

My advice to you is to order anything else on the menu. Hell, order off the menu. Or go to another restaurant. And, hey! HEY! Don’t forget to leave a tip, willya?