Res Ipsa L’Oreal

Legally Blonde is a dangerous movie. It is dangerous in that it is partly true and partly false. It is the tale of Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon, from Election), UCLA coed, sorority president, and Cosmo Girl. When she is jilted by her blockhead boyfriend, she develops the ambition to get into Harvard Law School. (”What?” she asks. “Like it’s hard?”)

It is the first part of Legally Blonde that is so dangerously true. Despite what you might think, it is not all that hard to get into law school. Most, if not all, law schools have a formula that takes your grade point average and adds in your Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) scores, and that’s it. If you can achieve a high enough GPA and high enough LSAT scores, and if you have enough money or are willing to rent your soul to the Student Loan Marketing Association, you, too, can get into a top law school. (Me? 3.5 GPA, 99th percentile LSAT, automatic admit to the University of Texas law school.) Elle has the advantage of a 4.0 GPA in fashion marketing, and a top-notch LSAT score (we see her studying with a tutor for all of twelve seconds) and rich parents; Legally Blonde makes it seem perfectly reasonable for her to get an Ivy League legal education if she wanted one.  (And, no, I don’t know what her LSAT score was; the movie never says.)

As I’ve said, this is dangerous. It’s dangerous because there’s a chance that Legally Blonde, as L.A. Law and Ally McBeal before it, will boost law school enrollment, causing many hundreds of people who otherwise might be living happy, productive lives to enter law school. I am opposed to this like you cannot believe; I happen to be of the opinion that closing down half the nation’s law schools would cause alcoholism and depression rates to drop and lead to an overall steady increase in national productivity. Legally Blonde should not be seen by anyone who has ever even thought about going to law school. I could not be more serious about this.

Worse, Legally Blonde is dangerous because of how it presents law school; the terrors of the Socratic method are minimized, the amount of time Elle spends studying or in the library or reading is next to nonexistent. (She literally spends more time in a beauty parlor than in class in this movie.) None of the depression, confusion, fear, anxiety and dread that mark the law school experience for most ordinary human beings make any visible marks on Elle. Her biggest culture shock is when she realizes that the law school won’t have a formal ball. And yet, she manages to try the biggest murder case in town while still a first-year intern. Legally Blonde is an amazingly unrealistic view of law school (although I admit that a realistic view of law school would send patrons screaming out of the theater, some of them bleeding from their ears). It’s just the sort of movie that will send young, impressionable people scrambling to fill out law school applications. Stop! Stop, all of you! For the love of God, go to ballet camp or language school or join the Peace Corps, but do NOT go to law school!!!

Breathe.

Breathe.

Say to yourself, “It’s just a movie.”

“It’s just a movie.”

“It’s just a movie.”

Relax.

Breathe.

Breathe deeply.

That’s better.

Where was I?

Oh, yes, movie review. Legally Blonde is Reese Witherspoon’s movie, and your enjoyment of it will, like, totally depend on how much you like her as an actress. Like Witherspoon’s character, the movie is bright, bubbly, annoying, cutesy, and fun. It veers from moments that are funny enough to make a cat laugh to moments (especially those involving Elle’s sorority sisters) that are so saccharine as to make your hair stand on end. It is a lightweight, fluffy, meaningless movie that manages sporadic bursts of entertainment. If you are at all susceptible to the charms of intelligent, beautiful California girls, by all means go, and enjoy. Likewise, people who actively can’t stand blonde bombshells who use heart-shaped notepads with pink pencils with powder-puffs attached (like almost all the women in the movie) will find much that will allow them to sneer. (The sight gags in this movie almost alone make it worth seeing). Everyone else should really watch something else.

There’s a fine line between being sweet and charming and being insipid and annoying, and Legally Blonde crosses back and forth over that line continually. It is a movie that, at least, is well advertised; if you think you’ll like it, you probably will, and if you think you’ll hate it, you definitely will. It is a spotty, badly cliched effort that nevertheless has the capacity to be funny and entertaining at times. It is at least worth a look on video, for anyone, that is, except people thinking about going to law school.

There Oughta Be A Law

I don’t know about you, but the scariest scene in Legally Blonde 2: Red White and Blonde was the scene where Elle Woods looks at her tarted-up UCLA sorority sisters and says, “It’s time.” She calls up the Powerpuff Girls Hotline, as it were, and starts a chain reaction of upper-middle class sorority girls, all ready to march on Washington in support of, well, the plot of the movie. (Don’t ask why, just accept it.)

And as I saw her there, leading the march, wearing a snappy pink beret, looking for all the world like Rosa Luxemburg if she had owned a Mary Kay franchise, mobilizing tens of thousands of sorority sisters, I started thinking, You know, this could happen. I mean, if there were some issue, some cause or something to get the sorority sisters of the world together and united behind one strong leader, if there was something like a luxury tax on fingernail polish or a get-tough visa policy on foreign designers and hairstylists, or a nationwide limit on the number of shoes that anyone could own at any one time, well then! It could happen! The sorority sisters of America could march down Pennsylvania Avenue (slowly, because of the high heels, you know) and… well… take over the country!

Frightening, isn’t it?

Fortunately, it’s nothing to worry about. The thing of it is, of course, is that government is dull and uninteresting. (Even Elle Woods her own bad self knows this; “It’s like watching C-SPAN, but I’m not bored!” she exclaims at her first sub-committee meeting on the Hill.) Basically, we’ve got so much government in this country that almost all our political battles are either unimportant or silly. Should we subsidize the mohair industry? Should we let snowmobiles into national forests? Even the more serious debates are almost trivial; should rich people pay 28% of their income in taxes or 26%? (Compare this to, say, Sierra Leone, where the big debate is whether the government should cut the hands off the rebels, or their whole arms.)

Into the steaming mass of idiocy, tedium, and gamesmanship that is official Washington walks Elle Woods, armed with a Harvard Law degree and a French manicure, ready to turn Congress on its ear with a bill that will allow her dog’s mother to escape from a cosmetics research lab in time to attend her dream wedding at Fenway Park, and oh, by the way, end animal testing by the cosmetics industry forever. (Got that? Good.)

The first Legally Blonde movie worked as well as it did because it had at least a veneer of reality, it at least looked possible for Elle Woods to pass the LSATs and get into Harvard and do well once she was there — primarily because she was smart and hard-working and opportunistic as well as being cute and ditsy. This Elle Woods character is none of those things; she’s dumber than a cinderblock and has about the same comic skills. Outside of the occasional sight gag, Legally Blonde 2 is terminally unfunny, without any sort of wit or humor or grace to make up for its dreadfully, horribly earnestness. Reese Witherspoon’s native charm and class all but disappears under a veneer of self-righteous indignation and general annoyingness.

(And this is all the worse, mind you, because, well, we’ve already seen a glimpse of this movie, which was the ending to Election, where Witherspoon’s own Tracey Flick was seen stalking the corridors of power. Tracey Flick would have walked all over Elle Woods six days a week and twice on Sunday.)

And it’s not just Witherspoon, although she’s the chief malefactor. There’s Luke Wilson, who is playing the Perfect Boyfriend, who never gets his character past room temperature, and who really deserves a good beating. There is Jennifer Coolidge as Elle’s hairstylist, who needs to go back to making Christopher Guest mockumentaries, quick. There are Elle’s sorority sisters, who were incredibly funny in the first flick, but who are just wretched here.

More to the point, trapped in this movie — no, trapped in this wretched morass of awfulness — are comic veterans Sally Field and Bob Newhart, and watch each of them in their last scenes, if you can get that far through the movie without actually leaving. Poor Sally sits on the front row of the House floor, looking absolutely wretched, and I knew just how she felt. Poor Bob shows up at the end of the movie, carrying a Chihuahua, asking with every acting skill at his command and every line on his face, “Can someone tell me where to go to pick up my paycheck?” These are veteran actors who know a dog when they see it.

Elle Woods gets to address a joint session of Congress at one point (don’t ask) and she tells that one hundredth of one tenth of one percent of Americans (if that) who are actually watching C-SPAN to speak up, to take charge of their government. It’s a pity that Witherspoon didn’t follow her character’s advice and speak up, that she didn’t say the obvious thing that needed to be said, that the screenplay for Legally Blonde 2 was godawful, that the movie didn’t have a chance of being good, that her reputation and, well, her sacred honor as an actress were on the line. But she didn’t do anything, didn’t speak up, didn’t point out just how awful this movie was going to be. She just showed up every day, got dressed in those horrible outfits, stood on her mark, said her insipid and unfunny lines, and went back to her trailer and counted her money, without once ever speaking up for her audience or her agent or herself.

Well, I’m not going to do that. I am going to speak up. I am going to speak truth to power. I am going to say that Legally Blonde 2 is an awful film, far worse than its predecessor, and is an affront to moviegoers everywhere. In fact, I address my fellow moviegoers here, and ask them to stand with me, to march on Hollywood, to demand better movies, and cheaper popcorn, and a ban against cell phones in theaters and Akiva Goldsman and other horrible threats to the American moviegoing way of life. And… wait! Don’t go! Don’t all of you just march off to see Gigli without saying something, without speaking up, for once… oh, it’s too late.

Hmph. There oughta be a law.

Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough

There are two stories worth following in Life as a House, but only one of them is really interesting. Naturally, the movie cares about the wrong one.

The first story is the story of George (Kevin Kline), who starts the movie with a bad day. He wakes up in a dilapidated shack on the Pacific Coast with insufficient indoor plumbing. He argues with his neighbor (Mary Steenburgen, looking smashing at 48). He drives his rusty yellow truck to the train station, where he goes to his office at an architecture firm, where he makes models. He goes to a meeting with his boss, who tells him that he looks sick, that he is too old, and that he is fired. Instead of doing the logical thing (filing complaints under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination and Employment Act), he smashes his old models, stalks out of the office, and faints. We learn later that he has an untreatable form of cancer. A bad day.

George has four months to live, and that’s the setup for the movie, which focuses on regret and tragedy and lost love and tear-jerking. George is determined to rebuild his ramshackle house, and this is an admirable and worthwhile goal. But that’s only one story.

The other story - the really, really interesting story - is the story of George’s son Sam (Hayden Christiansen), and Sam is a mess. He’s a walking, talking - well, not so much talking, if you know what I mean - picture of out-of-control teenage rebellion. He’s got a blue streak in his hair. Multiple piercings, too, and mascara. Marilyn Manson posters on the wall, check. Vicodin, marijuana, inhalants, you name it. Sam is all headphones and resentment; he’s a whining, pouting, self-indulgent brat who specializes in making everyone around him, including himself, miserable.

Having said that, Sam is one of the few Hollywood characters in recent memory who is completely real, who looks and feels authentic. He’s not some generic cookie-cutter refugee from a teen movie. He’s a genuine individual with genuine problems. The really interesting story in Life as a House is whether Sam will manage to grow out of his misery and alienation, and it’s the story the movie doesn’t really care about.

George basically takes Sam as a hostage to his goal and drags him out to the old house to begin the reconstruction - both of the house, and their relationship. Sam wants nothing to do with either. (It says something that Sam is not the kind of sixteen-year-old boy who has to be talked into the opportunity to tear something apart with a chain-saw; he’s more interested in being self-destructive than any other kind of destructive.)

What this should do is set up a huge, ongoing fight between George and Sam. (Director Irwin Winkler was a producer on all five Rocky movies, he ought to know something about fight scenes.) It never quite happens, though. What Life as a House provides instead is a lot of sidebar stories that skirt the father-son conflicts. Life as a House gives Sam an unsavory hobby, a sleazy friend (Ian Somerhalder) and an unlikely girlfriend (Jena Malone). It gives George a chance to feud with his neighbors and a second chance with his ex-wife (Kristen Scott Thomas); it also explores her problems with her new husband. There are also some unnecessary Scott Bakula moments. The worst thing about Life as a House is that its focus is so diffuse. It spends too much time with secondary characters and not enough time on the real issues.

The real issue in Life as a House is Sam, who grows up considerably during the course of the movie. He takes off his silver bangles, he wipes off the mascara, he learns how to use tools and build things. The movie reveals that Sam is changing, but it does little to reveal why and how this happens. Maybe it happens through hard work building a house in the California sunshine, but anyone who is expecting Hollywood to glorify manual labor and physical sacrifice anytime soon will have to keep waiting. Maybe it happens through the love of a good woman, but that doesn’t seem quite right; his relationship with Malone’s character is much more friendly than romantic. Maybe it happens through the restoration of the father-son relationship, but there’s not nearly enough said about how that happens in the movie.

Anyway, Life as a House is quite specific on this point if not on much anything else. In one of the many tear-jerker scenes, Kline tells Thomas that sometimes love just ain’t enough, love in and of itself, by itself, can’t do everything we want it to. Love can’t cure cancer, it can’t build character and integrity, it can’t make up for hurt and anger and pain, it can’t shatter time, banish fear, redeem loss.

If the movie paid as much attention to the construction of Sam’s character as it does to the construction of George’s house, it could have been an outstanding, groundbreaking picture. Instead, the movie is nothing more than a tear-filled, conventional piece of sentiment. Like George, Life as a House has worthy, admirable goals, but not the energy to reach them.

Cause for Optimism

I think in this age optimism like that is a revolutionary act.

 – Dorothy Boyd, “Jerry Maguire”

There was every reason to be pessimistic about Lilo and Stitch going in. The DVD version alone contains a catalogue of nameless horrors, just in the previews. We are informed that, coming soon, we will be treated to The Jungle Book 2, reheated Kipling accompanied by leftover swing music. We must suffer through the horrid trailer for The Country Bears, about which the less said, the better. Some hope abides in the DVD re-release of Sleeping Beauty, a curiously unloved refugee from Disney’s glory days. You have a preview for a prequel to this very movie you are about to watch. Things like this are depressing, naturally, and are bound to test anyone’s faith in Disney, and moviemaking, and human nature itself. And then, thankfully, the movie starts.

No big opening musical number. Instead, we get a science-fiction show trial, copied shamefully from The Phantom Menace. This is something of a bad sign. We are then introduced to “Stitch”, which is a weird genetic construct, designed to wreak gleeful havoc on everything it touches. This is something of a good sign, though; at least we will not be subjected to Jar Jar Binks, apparently. “Stitch” is aggressively not cute or cuddly or likable, which is all to the good. (Although the comic possibilities of, say, an obsessively destructive Hello Kitty character would be ample.)

This is OK, nothing special, up until the moment right after “Stitch” escapes to Earth in an escape pod. (”He took the red one,” a helmsman on the spaceship explains, resignedly.) The head Galactic honcho issues orders to destroy the planet with an X-45 Explosive Space Modulator or some such. But a low-level space functionary intervenes at the critical moment. You can’t destroy Earth, he explains. It’s a wildlife sanctuary, we learn, for the mosquito. “Which is an endangered species!” he splutters.

For a studio as incessantly as politically correct as Disney, a little environmental cynicism is a beautiful thing.

But that isn’t really the point. The movie goes from there to a musical number — annoying, but short. There are scenes that feature Lilo (about eight years old, give or take) swimming in the ocean with friendly fish, and a class full of young Hawaiian girls dancing. Lilo leaves the water, heads to her dance class, and takes her place dancing, but soon manages to ruin the entire show.

What hooked me was the explanation.

You see, Lilo had to go to the ocean to feed Pudge the fish, and Pudge the fish likes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and all that was in the house was tuna (which was, of course, completely unacceptable), so she had to go to the store to get the peanut butter, so that was why she was late. All this, practically, told at the top of her lungs.

The predictable response: Why is this so important?

The answer: “Pudge controls the weather.”

So what we have here in a Disney picture is a child, a real, live, authentic child, with childish illogic and fantasies, and a stubborn and contrary streak a mile long. You just don’t get this kind of thing in Disney movies, usually, if ever. Lilo and Stitch dares to be different, and that, too, from Disney, is a revolutionary act.

It turns out that Lilo is an orphan, you see, which is normal in the Disney pantheon. The child in your basic Disney movie is an orphan, well, because that’s the way it is, and because being an orphan teaches you to be resourceful and independent and plucky and cute, like all Disney heroes. But the dead parents here are not some cinematic conceit. They were real people, and their loss shake’s Lilo’s world every day in some way or another, and their spirit pervades the film. The movie’s motto is “No one gets left behind or forgotten,” and that includes Lilo’s parents.

It includes Stitch, too, who is soon adopted by Lilo and her older sister. Stitch soon ruins everything, gleefully, and costs Lilo’s sister her job and a shot at several other jobs. It also leads to the possible breakup of her family due to a menacing social worker (voiced by Ving Rhames). Stitch is also being pursued by a pair of mismatched comic villains, who could have been eliminated without much trouble. But the real trick is not how the family will stay together; it is how the family can manage to integrate Stitch.

This could have been done by Lilo’s sister accepting Stitch, as though this were some sort of shaggy-dog movie. But Lilo and Stitch just doesn’t worth that way. It refuses to take the easy route. Instead, Stitch is the one who has to adapt, and this is done the way it is done in every family, with great big steaming mounds of guilt. Disney usually presents the world in such rose-colored hues that showing a normal family dynamic like guilt is, like optimism itself, revolutionary. (So, for that matter, is the copious — and welcome — use of Elvis songs on the soundtrack.)

Lilo and Stitch would be worthwhile if for no other reason than it helps break the rigid mold of Disney animated features. But it works on its own, too. Lilo and Stitch are both excellent, well-thought-out characters, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with them. Although the story is more than a little thin, and closes with an unnecessary (but well-done and entertaining) action scene, the shortcomings of the movie are more than made up for by the excellence of its characterizations, the quality of its animation, and the imagination of its story. If not for the excellence of Spirited Away, Lilo and Stitch would be the runaway choice for best animated picture of the year.

Hell of a Ride

I’ll admit to you, right now, that I went to go see Little Nicky with every intention of knifing it. I walked into the theater with the express mission of writing a scathing, searing, truthful review of what I fully expected would be a truly horrible movie. “Be honest, and be ruthless,” rock journalist Phillip Seymour Hoffman tells his young critic protege in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, and I was prepared to be both.

The problem with Little Nicky is, if I’m honest, then I can’t be ruthless.

Little Nicky is the kind of movie that critics attack the way that a leopard attacks a wounded antelope. Its deficiencies are manifold and obvious. It is, to begin with, a Saturday Night Live movie, which have been, since Wayne’s World, a byword for badness in film. It stars Adam Sandler, who consistently belies his great comic talents in favor of potty jokes. The characters are all broadly drawn caricatures; the plot is a thin tissue of contrivances. And the trailers give away lots of the funny bits.

None of this augurs well for the movie, and yet Little Nicky still manages to pull off some slick comic surprises. For example; there’s a scene early in the movie where Satan (Harvey Keitel, who is more relaxed than usual) announces his plans to stay on as Lord of Hell for another ten thousand years. His three sons leave the throne room; Sandler (who a cruel pediatrician might label an FLK: Funny Looking Kid) is relieved; Tiny Lister is aggravated; Rhys Ifans is conniving. But the business of running Hell isn’t over; the Devil has an immediate audience with Dan Marino, of all people. Keitel refuses to give Marino another shot at a Super Bowl ring. “But you gave one to Namath,” Marino pleads.

“Yeah, but Joe was coming here anyway.”

Little Nicky works as a (marginally) funny movie because there are enough of these kinds of gags to counterbalance the omnipresent stupid potty jokes. If Little Nicky were a completely unintelligent movie — and Lord knows, Sandler’s made enough of those — it would be absolutely unbearable. But there’s enough smart comedy here to make things enjoyable — like the decision of Satan’s smarter sons to leave hell and set up shop in New York. “Grandfather left heaven because he decided it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven,” Ifans explains. “Maybe it’s better to rule on Earth than to serve in hell.” See, there you go; how can a movie that quotes Milton be all bad?

Nicky is dispatched to New York to return his brothers to Hell (there’s a lot of celestial mechanics involved that you can safely ignore) and has to cope with a world he doesn’t quite get and “Mr. Beefy”, a small talking bulldog, for a guide. (Mr. Beefy turns in the best acting performance in the movie; probably thanks to some CGI help, I expect.) They clatter aimlessly around New York — with Sandler dressed in a series of polyester parkas, it being colder in New York than it is in Hell — interacting with a random set of New Yorkers. In the meantime, his brothers (Ifans mostly; Lister is swiftly dispatched) raise all kinds of mayhem and ruckus, lowering the drinking age to ten, and legalizing prostitution. (”I love hookers” becomes the new city motto.)

Some of this is funny; the celebrity cameos are pretty good, with Regis Philbin going on a spree of venegance, Reese Witherspoon as a Material Girl angel, Rodney Dangerfield as the ex-boss of Hell, and Henry Winkler as himself. (How did Henry Winkler turn into Fred McMurray all of a sudden?) Much of it will only be funny to die-hard Sandler fans and anyone who has an emotional age of twelve or under. But there are a couple of the unfunny gags — the Popeye’s Fried Chicken product placement; Kevin Nealon’s hapless Gatekeeper of Hell, the ways that Sandler finds to return to hell, Ifans’s preference for peppermint schnapps — that have payoffs down the line. An example of this is Nicky’s lame joke that he’s not a New Yorker; he’s from the South. “The Deep South, huh-huh-huh.” Later on, he flies up to his girlfriend’s (Patricia Arquette) window and reveals himself to be the Spawn of Satan.

“Oh,” she says. “Now I get that Deep South joke.” And the two fly away across New York, in homage to Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in Superman.

Little Nicky ends (after a series of clever little plot twists) where it should end, with a climactic battle in Central Park between Nicky and his brother, between good (after Nicky learns to release the good side of his angelic heritage) and evil. And it was at this point that it struck me; the ubiquitous Popeye’s ads had a purpose. Little Nicky is really just a Popeye The Sailor Man cartoon writ large; Sandler’s even got a speech impediment like Popeye does. And like Popeye, Sandler is a nice guy who has to trigger his inner strength to battle evil. (How did Patricia Arquette turn into Olive Oyl all of a sudden?) And he does win, and we’re happy, and the movie ends.

I wish I could have found it in myself to give Little Nicky the critical beating it deserves; but I just couldn’t. (The fact that I snuck into the movie without paying probably has something to do with it.) Much of it is unfunny, tasteless drivel, but it has just enough surprisingly funny material to offset the movie’s weaknesses. One can only hope that Sandler’s better angels will one day vanquish his creative demons so he can come up with a truly great comedy.

A Deep Movie For Shallow People

I should probably explain.

I saw Lost in Translation in the theater some months ago and was less than thrilled. The movie left me speechless, and I do not mean that in a good way. I had exactly one thing to say about the movie, and it didn’t seem like it was that inspired a thing to say. At least not inspired enough to write a full-length review over. What I mean to say, is, there’s only so many times you can point out that a) the movie is boring and b) nothing happens in the movie and c) yes, it really is that boring, and d) no, I’m serious, nothing happens, and e) no, I’m not kidding.

You see, I hope, that this is not the stuff from which great reviews are written.

There were several factors that convinced me that I should give Lost in Translation another chance. The first is personal. I am not, by profession (lawyer/movie critic) or by persuasion (Republican Party, Atilla-the-Hun Wing) or by personality (take my word for it) inclined to be what you would call charitable at all times. I recognize this is something I need to work on, and re-looking at Lost in Translation through a more charitable mindset seemed like good practice. The second is collegial; at least one of my movie-review associates has chided me for not reviewing Lost in Translation, and challenged me to look at it again and write a real review. And the third is introspective; maybe I’m wrong about this. Lost in Translation did, after all, win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Sofia Coppola. It has been honored time and again with laurels, taking home the Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Awards. Might I be wrong? Could my critical skills be lapsing? Was it possible that this was, in fact, a great movie? And I just didn’t get it for some reason?

And then there was the stack. 2003 was, of course, the worst year for screeners that there has ever been, no thanks to Handsome Jack Valenti and the MPAA Legion of Doom. But I had a few (thanks largely to the fine, upstanding people at Focus Films) stacked up on my TV, and Lost in Translation was at the top of that particular stack. The stack had been there since December — I’ve been busy getting my novel finished, too busy to see a lot of flicks lately, as you may have noticed — and if I was ever to get through it, I’d have to start with Lost in Translation.

And so this is what I did. I went to the gym. I did the lat pulldown and the chest press and the leg curl and the back extender and the arm curl and the shoulder press. (I hate the shoulder press; I have weak shoulders for some reason.) I came home and changed clothes. I got in my car and drove to Decatur, where I went to a barbecue restaurant I’d heard of. I ordered the baby back ribs with baked beans and potato salad. The ribs were very good but a little dry. The baked beans were horrible. The potato salad needed a little mustard but was OK once I had put some salt on it. I paid my bill and realized that I wasn’t quite sure how to get from the restaurant to where I was going, so I backtracked and ended up back home. It was 7:30. It was too late to make the 7:35 showing of David Mamet’s Spartan at the UA Tara on Cheshire Bridge. It was also too late to make the 7:45 showing of Spartan at the Madstone theater in Sandy Springs. I drove over to the Landmark Midtown theater, but all the shows had started already, unless I wanted to see The Triplets of Belleville,, which I was not too crazy about.

Time to see Lost in Translation.

And since I was seeing it at home, this meant that I could take notes for once, and write the review from the notes. This sounded like a promising approach, so I got my legal pad and my trusty Bic Clic pen and put the tape (yes, they sent me a tape and not a DVD; the piracy thing) in the VCR/DVD.

8:00 pm - The famous opening bit, where we’re treated to a long, lush view of Scarlett Johansson’s butt behind a diaphonous pair of sheer pink panties. I liked this a lot for prurient reasons but that’s about it. I had remembered this particular scene (obviously) and had remembered thinking that the way to start the review was to talk about Scarlett Johansson’s butt in and of itself, as a thing of beauty, but to metaphorically imply that what we were seeing was really (in a metaphysical sense) Sofia Coppola’s butt, and that she needed a spanking, but good. (All things considered, I think it’s best that we don’t know what Sofia Coppola’s butt looks like up close.)

8:01 pm - The first spoken words of the movie, a heavily-accented female Japanese voice, welcoming us to Narita airport. We then see Bill Murray, asleep in the back of a cab, being driven down some street or other in Tokyo. (Is this the Ginza? I am not sure that is what the Ginza looks like, but I suppose it could be.) It’s nighttime, and all the garish neon lights are on, bright enough to wake Murray up from his slumber, and he stares slack-jawed at the incomprehensible Japanese symbols.

10:44 pm - Parenthetical retrospective bit here. I was curious just exactly what time Murray’s plane landed. This involved a bit of research on Orbitz - which research revealed that Delta’s idea of flying first-class from LAX to Tokyo Narita involves stops in Cincinnati and New York, and which having seen the Cincinnati airport, I cannot recommend. Anyway, Singapore Airlines will take you to Tokyo for (when I checked) $857, round-trip, with a flight which leaves at 2:40 PM Pacific time and arrives at 6:00 PM the next day, Tokyo time, which sounds about right for when Murray arrives, once you take baggage claim and customs into account, and it turns out that the Hyatt is 90 minutes away from Narita airport.

8:03 pm - What kind of music is that playing when Murray is being driven through town? Is it Japanese? Some of the music in the film is Japanese, but this repetitive techno-thingy could be from just about anywhere. I don’t think much of it. It’s terribly annoying.

8:04 pm - Murray in his green Japanese robe, staring mutely at the strangeness of Japanese television. This gets referenced a lot, but I’m surprised to see it so early in the film.

8:05 pm - We’re in the hotel bar now. The lounge singer makes her first appearance, and we notice that her hair is dyed the same color as her dress. (She wears black throughout the rest of the movie, which matches much better with her hair.)

11:25 pm - Parenthetical retrospective thingy here, too. It turns out that the lounge singer (we never learn her name in the movie) is named Catherine Lambert, and that she is really a singer, and that she is from — who knew? — Quebec, and she recorded an album of medieval French folk songs in 1998 that is ranked 145,792th on Amazon at the moment.

8:05 pm - So Murray was in his robe, trying to get to sleep, and he got dressed, went to the bar, and got a whiskey, and now he is dressed in a gray T-shirt. He’s still not asleep, after an enormously long flight, and a huge time change; I would be totally flaked out by now. But I can’t sleep on airplanes, or at least not very well.

8:07 pm - Murray is awakened at the crack of dawn by automatic curtains which open and let in the light at some pre-arranged hour. Who wants this? Who would ever want this? I have no clue. It is very strange. I mean, if I had this in my apartment… well, better not think about it. I don’t have curtains anyway, I have… well, this is getting too personal here.

8:09 pm - One of the funny scenes in the movie, where Murray is shooting his Suntory commercial. He is wearing a tuxedo, although he wasn’t wearing one previously. We don’t see him carrying any bags to the studio, so the tuxedo must have been waiting for him. Is it a rental? Is it just something in someone’s costume department? Are Japanese suit sizes metric?

8:12 pm - The bit where the director gives Murray a big harangue in Japanese on what he is supposed to do, and the translator tells Murray, “more intensity”. Cute. I didn’t really wonder what the director was saying, I was assuming — as Murray was — that it was just bullshit. But I am wondering if Coppola knew what he was saying, or if it wasn’t in the script. How much Japanese does Sofia Coppola know, anyway? Maybe the Academy should have found that out before they gave her the Oscar.

8:14 pm - Scarlett Johansson on the Tokyo subway. She sees a “salaryman” reading a “manga” comic book. Is the Tokyo subway system safe for unattached women? I seem to remember reading an article that suggested that women riding on the subways tended to get groped on a semi-regular basis, and that there were supposed to be “grope-free” cars on some subways. Would this happen to a Western woman or not? I don’t know. The scene isn’t long enough for me to wonder, though, and Johansson makes it to her Buddhist shrine unmolested, apparently.

8:16 pm - Johansson makes a panicky phone call to her sister. The phone call doesn’t make a lick of sense — certainly the sister feels that way, because from what we can hear of what she says, she’s dismissive. Johansson seems to be upset that her husband is using hair products. I would think that she should be concerned what kind of phone bill she’s running up. (This is based on painful personal experience which I’ll explain a bit later.)

8:16 pm - Scarlett is bored at this point. She is running around the room wearing those pink panties again, which is not a good sign. Her husband, Giovanni Ribisi, wanders in at that point, and we see them talking, and Scarlett points out a long blue scarf around her neck. We see that there are knitting needles in the scarf, and that it is very long. How long has she been in that hotel room, and how much knitting has she gotten done in that time? Long enough for anyone to go stir-crazy, seems to me.

8:18 pm - In the meantime, Murray is checking out the television again. Some kind of exercise show. Some kind of hard-bitten cop drama. An old Bill Murray SNL rerun. Uh-oh.

8:19 pm - This is the scene where the prostitute shows up, asking Murray to “lip her stockings”. Ha-ha! Japanese people can’t pronounce certain English words well! Isn’t that hilarious? I found myself wondering who the actress was — IMDb isn’t overly helpful — and if she was a good comic actress, the Carol Burnett of Japan, or who she was. Interesting. I probably should have recruited someone with some serious Japan experience and had them watch the movie with me — there has to be someone on campus, you’d think. Maybe I am just not getting this. Maybe if they had set the movie in Grand Prairie, Texas, I’d be rolling on the floor laughing.

8:22 pm - The commercial bit again, this time with a photographer, this time with Murray doing his understated Rat Pack / Roger Moore impression. This is probably the funniest scene in the movie, and probably a good bit of what got Murray the Oscar nod. But we still have a long way to go.

8:25 pm - This is the payoff of the tuxedo bit. We’re back in the bar of the Hilton, and Murray is wearing his tuxedo; he hasn’t changed since the photo shoot. He gets up from the bar, and we get the great sight gag of him still wearing the binder clips in the back of the tuxedo (to keep the front from wrinkling in the photo shoot, presumably). But this doesn’t answer the question from before. Is it his tuxedo? Is it the same one from before? Did he steal it?

8:27 pm - Murray on the out-of-control elliptical trainer. This was really funny when George Jetson did it the first time; not so much now.

8:28 pm - A key scene in the movie. Scarlett and Giovanni meet starlet Anna Faris in the lobby of the hotel. Ribisi is wearing a godawful green-and-gold polo. We learn that Scarlett went to Yale, and is a bit of a snob about it, and that she can’t stand airhead blonde starlets when they hit on her husband. More about this later.

8:30 pm - Scarlett is wandering around the hotel. She walks by the concierge. If she’s bored, you would think that she would, perhaps, ask the concierge just what there is to do in this town. Maybe he might have a suggestion or something. You never know.

8:31 pm - The press conference for Anna Faris’s movie, “Midnight Velocity”. You get the impression Sofia Coppola really doesn’t like blonde actresses. But it’s more than that. The Anna Faris character has only one role in this movie, and that is to make the Scarlett Johansson character look smart in comparison. The only way to do this is to make Faris’s character shallow — shallow enough that you could use her to breed mosquitoes. But the dirty little secret of Lost in Translation is just how shallow the Johansson character is — and, by extension, how shallow Sofia Coppola is. (Lost in Translation is a deep movie for shallow people, which explains the Oscar nominations and all that.)

8:33 pm - There is a lot of wacky television in Japan, apparently. But Coppola, coming from a country that has shown “The Simple Life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie”, shouldn’t throw stones.

8:35 pm - We are thirty-five minutes into the movie before the first meaningful conversation between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. This is bad. What is worse that it is only about a minute or two before Johansson tells Murray that he must be going through a mid-life crisis. Keep in mind that Murray is supposed to be some sort of celebrity, and think about how you might think twice before going up to a celebrity in a bar, much less telling him he has a midlife crisis, which is about the most foolish and trite comment you can make to a middle-aged anybody. Keep in mind also that this movie won the Best Original Screenplay this year, which I would argue is a feat considering there isn’t one original line of dialogue in the whole movie.

11:48 pm - We are told that Scarlett Johansson’s character got a degree in philosophy from Yale. I am quoting from the curriculum of the Yale Philosophy Department website:

• A technical exposition of Gödel’s first and second incompleteness theorems and of some of their main consequences in proof theory and model theory, such as Löb’s theorem, Tarski’s undefinability of truth, provability logic and nonstandard models of arithmetic.
• Discussion of the relevance of the science of color vision and color illusions to the metaphysics of color. Topics include opponent process theory, metamerism, spectrum inversion, phenomenal sorites, sense data theory, dispositionalism, type-identity theory, and eliminativism.
• This seminar explores different views of the concept of analyticity and a priority since Kant. After understanding Carnap’s project for the analytic/synthetic distinction, we will focus on the Carnap-Quine debate on the issue.

Scarlett Johansson’s character admits at one point in the movie that she has taken photographs of her feet. I will leave it to the individual reader to determine whether she studied very hard at Yale or not.

8:37 pm - I would like to try the air-guitar video game.

8:43 pm - I think part of what makes people really like Lost in Translation is its value as a travelogue. The scene where Johansson stares for what seems like hours out of the Park Hyatt window out at the Tokyo skyline is lovely. But it would be lovely anyway, and the Japanese shrines that she visits in the movie would still be lovely. Coppola is fortunate primarily in her choice of settings, but filming pretty vistas is no substitute for, you know, making an interesting movie where things happen.

12:05 am - The Park Hyatt Hotel in Japan is 52K yen a night, which is about $483 U.S. The regular Crowne Plaza is more like $130. I thought you should know.

8:45 pm - The note I have written down here asks, “Does Scarlett Johansson say one intelligent thing in this movie?” She reminds us that Evelyn Waugh is a man at one point, but everyone knows that, you’d think. One intelligent thing? Anything? I wrote this down, I think, at the point where she tells Murray that the hotel has a nice pool.

8:46 pm - Murray and Johansson go out on the town. Johansson is meeting some friends. I wonder what would happen if I went to New York and met some of my friends there, but I brought Bill Murray along for the evening, because he was feeling kind of lonely. I’d kind of like to find out, although I don’t think it would involve karaoke, or I hope not.

8:50 pm - We have celebrity poker, why not celebrity karaoke? I really want to know. We have American Idol, which is basically karaoke pros trying to become famous; I want to see famous people doing karaoke. Don’t make me keep talking about this until it happens. Because it’s going to happen. You watch.

8:54 pm - I really should have gone to the store and gotten some popcorn. Or some pudding. I forgot to get the fat-free tapioca when I went to the store. It would taste good right now. Or some butterscotch. Yeah.

8:55 pm - Hey, I never said I wasn’t shallow.

8:56 pm - Murray must be working out a lot to carry Scarlett Johansson back to the hotel like that; she’s asleep and must be a dead weight. I bet his back is really going to hurt in the morning.

8:58 pm - Another one-sided phone conversation. The good thing about watching the movie at home is that you don’t have to sit through one-sided phone conversations to the audience. The bad thing is that I’m too cheap to buy good speakers for my TV, so I can’t hear as well what Murray’s wife is trying to tell him. I wonder if I can get better speakers on ebay. Maybe I should get up and check.

9:03 pm - Scarlett is giggling a lot at this point in the movie. She shouldn’t do that. It sounds horrible, and underscores how shallow her character is.

9:05 pm - This is the scene in the strip club.

12:15 am - I learn that the person singing the song that we hear in the strip club is named “Peaches”, but I will not release any further information, including the name of her CD, because, eeeewwwww.

9:09 pm - I have been looking at my watch a lot. Come to think of it, that’s what I thought when I saw this the first time. I wonder when something interesting will happen.

9:11 pm - I do not have long to wait. We have the scene where Murray and Johansson are sipping sake out of those weird wooden boxes. We have the scene where they’re shot from above, lying in bed together, separated from each other by an invisible wall of fidelity and fear, talking about marriage and children and experience. Johansson tells us that she tried to be a writer, but she doesn’t like what she writes, and so she quit, the same way she quit taking photographs of her feet. This is my chief objection to the movie other than the fact that it is so boring.

You see, it’s like this. I had the same experience that these characters had last summer. I wasn’t in Tokyo, mind you, but I was in Vancouver, which is still a foreign country, and I was stuck in a big hotel downtown where I didn’t know anyone. I ran up a big phone bill, for one thing, and spent a lot of time wandering the streets, shopping, and eating a lot of really good Chinese food. I had a great time, but I was jet-lagged, and I couldn’t sleep. But I had my laptop with me, and when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote. I got through four chapters of my novel, and sketched out the next twelve. I don’t know that I could have finished the first draft of the novel (four months later) if I hadn’t been to Vancouver. I wasn’t lost in translation or anything (unless you count the occasional French bilingual signage) but I was in a different place, and it sparked my creativity.

But being in Japan doesn’t do much of anything for Murray and Johansson; it drains them, ennervates them, makes them acutely aware of what they lack in their own lives. Japan, for Murray and Johansson, does nothing more than serve to highlight just how unhappy they are, as though an entire culture and people exist only to provide the proper existential background for their private, personal pain.

R. Ebert, in answering a question about why so many people actively dislike Lost in Translation suggests that the fault is not in the movie, but somewhere in the makeup of the critic — in other words, if you don’t like the movie, something must be wrong with you. In other instances, I might dispute this blithe assertion, might point out the inherent smugness and condescension in this position, except with me it happens to be true. What I’m feeling when I watch the movie is stark, staring envy. You probably feel it too. I’d like to go to Japan; I’ve never been any closer to Japan than the Point Loma park in San Diego. More than that, I’d like to have somebody else pay for it; round-trip airfare is only about $725, but that’s more than my rent payment, and double what I have budgeted for groceries this month, and let’s not even talk about what I’d spend to eat in Japan. I’d like to be a movie star, and if I couldn’t do that, I’d love to have a degree in philosophy from Yale and not needing to work to pay for it. I’d like to visit ancient shrines and hang out and drink Suntory whiskey in hotel bars, or at least get to watch Scarlett Johansson parade around in those flimsy pink panties. Instead, I’m in a basement apartment in Atlanta, writing movie reviews, and R. Ebert is telling me that I’m a “a passive receptor for mindless sensation”. Lovely.

Am I envious? You bet. But the message of Lost in Translation isn’t the instigation of envy. It’s worse than that. It is that all the things its characters have — everything that makes me envious — doesn’t make them happy. And the idea that material goods don’t insulate you from depression is more depressing than the movie itself. What you have here is what scholar Gregg Easterbrook called The Progress Paradox, about why people in the West are so unhappy despite having so much material wealth. The Murray and Johansson characters aren’t happy, despite material comfort, if not wealth. (Murray is making two million for one commercial, and we never hear Johansson complain about student loans.) Travel and experiencing new cultures aren’t enough. (Murray and Johansson seem to eat at some really bad restaurants; haven’t they seen Iron Chef?) Their relationships aren’t making them happy, and may be causing them more unhappiness than they’re worth.

9:23 pm For that matter, luxury hotels aren’t making them happy. We see Murray on a cell phone, talking to his wife, unhappiness written on each line of his face, but he’s sinking into a large, heated, luxurious bath, which he doesn’t seem to be enjoying. This is the movie in a nutshell, and I will leave it up to the reader at this point to determine whether he or she should watch any farther. (Hint: not much else happens.)

Dumb, Not Dumber

It wasn’t all that long ago, you’ll remember, when they announced the casting for The Bonfire of the Vanities. Those of us who were fans of the Tom Wolfe novel cringed: Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy? It was clear to me, at least, that William Hurt was the best choice — the only logical choice — to play the part of the antihero stockbroker. Fortunately, the casting gods were on watch when Hurt was cast in the Macon Leary part in The Accidental Tourist.

I mention this to say that Lost in Space would be a much, much better movie if they had cast someone else as Professor Robinson instead of William Hurt. William Shatner, maybe. Lost in Space is not a William Hurt movie, it’s a Matt LeBlanc movie — nonserious and superficial. By casting the serious and laconic Hurt in the lead, the movie makers do Hurt and themselves a disservice.

Hurt is not the only thing wrong with Lost in Space, but he’s a good starting point. I can see William Hurt in an intelligent, well scripted movie about space travel — like Contact, let’s say. Unfortunately, that’s not what Lost in Space is. This is a strictly for fun movie — a silly, over-the-top sci-fi effects fest, with very little in the way of plot or storyline or coherence. The movie is at its best when it’s at its dippiest — when the crew is fighting evil mechanical spiders or hurtling through hyperspace. Most of the performaces add to the overall silliness: Lacy Chabert as a pouting teenager, LeBlanc as the gung-ho Tom Cruise wannabe figher pilot, Gary Oldman as the cowardly-yet-evil Dr. Smith. All these people are guilty of overacting, yes, but at least they’ve picked a movie where overacting is an asset rather than a problem. (The other two main actors, Mimi Rogers and the luminous Heather Graham, have characters that are so underwritten that they don’t get a chance to overact.)

The problem with Lost in Space is that it’s not consistenly silly. The plot is simple enough: Robinson family gets lost in space and encounters wacky adventures. But apparently the scriptwriter felt guilty about writing such silliness and decided to add some depth — exploring the relationship of Hurt’s Professor Robinson character to his dead father and brilliant son. There’s entirely too much time spent on these irrelevant subplots and not enough time on action and wackiness. And the action and wackiness sort of bog down in the last reel as it is, as the plot throws in some meaningless mumbo-jumbo about time travel.

The last thing we see in Lost in Space (before the horrid seizure-inducing end credits, the worst thing about the movie) is the image of eight-year old Will Robinson on the bridge of the Jupiter 2 saying, “Cool.” Lost in Space works when it’s cool, when it speaks to the inner eight-year-old in all of us that likes explosions and mechanical spiders and eye candy. I know it sounds weird to be criticizing a movie for not being completely superficial and mindless, but there you go. Lost in Space is Dumb, but it should be Dumber.

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

In reading this review, there’s every possibility that you might come across some typographical errors, and for that I am sorry. I can’t help it, though. I can barely type because I just got back from seeing The Majestic and ny hands are shaking out of pure rage and frustration. (See! See!) But I can’t stop typing; if I don’t say just how phony and artificial and manipulative the whole sorry mess is, I’ll burst out screaming. And if that means there are a few typos here and there, so be it.

Just about every movie has a target audience, which is a sorry phrase but it gets the point across; I walked into the theater with a great big bulls-eye on my chest. It starts with the title; “The Majestic” refers to an old movie-house in a sleepy California town. I love old movie theaters; the old Paramount Theater in Austin is one of the joys of my life, and I love how they run old movies there in the summertime. It is one of my life’s ambitions to do what Jim Carrey does in the movie, to restore an old movie theater back to its original glory, show classic films, and charge reasonable prices for popcorn and candy. Also, the movie was directed by Frank Darabont, who did The Shawshank Redemption, which is one of those movies I can’t talk about intelligently because I love it so much. Finally, the unstated ambition of The Majestic was to bring back the glory days of Frank Capra, and there was no way in the world I could have resisted that.

And then, it turns out that the Carrey character is a Hollywood writer who drives a Mercedes convertible and is in love with a smart blonde and can play jazz piano. I just happen to love German cars and smart blondes (although I haven’t had much success with either) and would love to be either a screenwriter or a jazz pianist if I had the time and energy and ambition. In The Majestic, Jim Carrey’s character has the skills I want to have and lives a life I’d like to lead. And Carrey himself is acting in a movie that, by all rights, I should have loved.

But I didn’t love it.

I hated it with the white-hot flaming passion of ten thousand suns.

This is why.

The Majestic is whited sepulcher of a movie, filled with corruption and rot. And the more decorative that an empty vessel is the more useless and offensive it is. The Majestic, if you can separate out the words and actions and thoughts and philosophies, has some beautiful imagery. The best thing about The Majestic (and I use that word very advisedly) is its photography; the scenic coastal lighthouses and intricate movie marquees and somber cemeteries and sparkling small-town diners and vintage cars and trains look gorgeous and resplendent. But it’s not enough, and the effect is ruined by constant repetition. There are just too many slow-motion pans past The Majestic marquee and too many soulful shots of Main Street for anyone’s taste. The overall effect is like being beaten with a sack of antique doorknobs for two hours.

The plot is, if anything, less subtle than the cinematography. Carrey starts out the movie as a two-bit 1951 Hollywood screenwriter who is promptly blacklisted for alleged Communist leanings. He gets drunk, manages to drive that splendid Mercedes off a rickety bridge, bangs his head against a piling, and winds up with the damnedest case of cinematic amnesia you never saw. He is picked up by a local (national treasure James Whitmore), taken into town, and immediately mistaken for the long-lost Luke Trimble, MIA in Normandy since 1944. He gets a hero’s welcome, helps his supposed father (national treasure Martin Landau) rebuild the town’s movie theater, and kindles romantic sparks with Luke’s fiancé.

All this is well and good; it’s not even that out of step with the Capra tradition, which specialized in putting its heroes in knotty, no-win situations. Again, though, The Majestic shamelessly piles on the schmaltz. Carrey’s not just a small fish in the big net cast by McCarthyism; he’s personally hunted down by the movie’s Roy Cohn surrogate, who considers him the leader of the Communist cell on the West Coast. Carrey’s doppelganger isn’t just a war hero but a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and the town itself is nationally recognized for the number of its young men killed in the war. (The town itself is resplendently perfect in almost a Stepford Wives sense; the decrepit movie theater is the only building that even needs paint. All the cars are showroom-new. Not to mention that - even at the height of the Baby Boom - there don’t seem to be any small children in town.)

All of the above nonsense could be excused, even justified, if the rest of the movie was any good. But the phoniness and insincerity of The Majestic goes even deeper, the rot is more widespread. The first and most obvious culprit is Jim Carrey himself. Carrey delivers a horribly weak and spineless performance here, easily the worst acting he’s ever done. I made a joke the other day about Dylan McDermott in Texas Rangers; I said he wasn’t Jimmy Stewart, or even Patrick Stewart. Carrey isn’t even Stewart Smalley. His entire characterization is based on being nice and inoffensive and a bit confused, which is exactly the worst possible way to handle this sort of material. He doesn’t even flash any of his trademark energy; the only thing he does with any kind of style at all is work the ticket booth at the theater. (The only thing The Majestic is good for, maybe, is training modern-day ticket-takers in how to at least pretend to care about their jobs.)

It isn’t all Carrey’s fault, though. The Majestic makes Carrey’s character innocent and idealistic, but overlooks the reality of Capra heroes entirely. Part of their appeal is that they are flawed, but manage the strength of character to overcome their flaws. The Majestic doesn’t give Carrey any flaws or any character to speak of. This not only entirely misses the point; it makes his ultimate redemption insincere and phony. Carrey just isn’t the kind of actor who could overcome such mistakes. The only way The Majestic could have succeeded was to cast a better actor in the part, one with more of a built-in dark side. Tim Robbins would have been dead solid perfect in this role; he’s worked with Darabont before and can handle the innocent and idealistic side of things as well as the darker, cynical part of the Capra zeitgeist. And since Robbins is a Communist anyway, he would make that part of the movie that much more convincing.

To make matters worse, there really isn’t any place in The Majestic for cynics. Cynics play an important role in the Capra movie, but their voices are almost silenced here. (I say “almost” because of two marginally funny bookend scenes featuring the disembodied voices of Garry Marshall, Rob and Carl Reiner, and Sydney Pollack tearing Carrey’s script to bits.) There’s one bitter character in the town, but he comes around quickly enough. The Roy Cohn character is a threat, but he’s not properly cynical enough to counterbalance things; there isn’t enough darkness to cast a shadow on the Technicolor sunshine; not enough cigar smoke to blur the neon lights of the marquee. Without any credible forces of darkness - Claude Rains surrendering his honor in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the Presidential schemes of the tycoon in Meet John Doe, Mr. Potter skulking in his basement office in It’s A Wonderful Life — there’s nothing for the Capra hero to stand up against.

The worst thing about The Majestic is that there’s nothing to stand up for, either. The Majestic takes its principled stand not against evil or greed or corruption but against the House Un-American Activities Committee, of all things. Say what you want about Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, but he’s as dead as Julius Caesar. The Majestic’s bold and principled stand against McCarthyism is as archaic as a crusade against yellow fever or a philippic against the unlimited coinage of silver at sixteen-to-one. (Any ACLU liberals out there who really think that Hollywood today faces a legitimate threat to its freedom of speech should really go rent Freddy Got Fingered before they go and open their pie-holes.)

The Capra movie is at its heart an exhortation, an encouragement to love your neighbor and fight for your country and count your blessings. The Majestic doesn’t exhort anyone to do anything other than go to more movies. It is not a testament to shared values but to Hollywood narcissism; it finds what strength it has not in the virtues of the common man but in its own shallow self-interest.

The indictment against Capra movies has always been that they are needlessly manipulative. Unfortunately, the willingness to manipulate the audience is the only thing that The Majestic really has in common with Capra. But The Majestic is just manipulating the audience for the hell of it, not because it believes in anything or wants the audience to feel a certain way or even to do anything other than spend more money in theaters. That’s not just manipulative, that’s evil and wrong, and more than anything else, that’s what makes The Majestic the most disappointing movie of the yaer. (Yes, that’s a typo, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The Music of Chance

Magnolia professes to be a movie about coincidence and chance, so I’ll give you a coincidence. Saturday evening, a day in the life. Do I go catch the nine o’clock Magnolia showing at the Lincoln 6 or find some other form of harmless entertainment at home?

Then the noise starts. Boom Boom Boom BOOM. Boom Boom Boom BOOM. The noise of my reprobate neighbor playing his stereo too loudly again. All I can hear is the bass line coming right through the wall, but that’s enough — especially because he always plays the same song, with the same monotonous beat. I could bang on his door (yet again) or complain to the apartment complex folks (yet again) or call the cops (which I haven’t done yet, but may have to) or go see Magnolia. Magnolia seemed, at the time, to be the lesser of the four evils.

Boy, was I wrong.

Magnolia not only features a scene where a cop is called to check on a noisy neighbor with an overloud stereo (there’s your coincidence) but it’s got to be a contender for some Worst Use of a Soundtrack Award. Magnolia has the obligatory rock-and-roll soundtrack, played at full screech, of course. That in itself is not so bad, but director Paul Thomas Anderson frequently lets the soundtrack bleed over into the conversation, making the audience strain to understand what’s going on. And that wouldn’t be so bad without the opera music (inserted, seemingly, to make critics characterize the movie as “operatic”), which is followed by the classical harmonica trio. And that wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t a laughable moment — straight out of one of those Gap commercials — where all the characters sing the same song, one after the other. And that wouldn’t be so bad… if… if…

(UPDATE:  I am reposting this in 2006, and I can’t believe I wrote this, especially because it so disrespects the Aimee Mann soundtrack, which is transcendent.  Go figure.)

If it wasn’t for the second-worst thing about Magnolia, which is the incidental music. It’s the kind of music we’ve heard ever since Psycho: the monotonous repeating tones that signal a big emotional climax. Except, in Magnolia, the tones go on for ever… for hours… and overlay overlapping scene after overlapping scene… and don’t ever lead to anything. The overall effect is like a trip to the dentist. It’s just bad, no two ways about it, and the fact that this endlessly mind-numbing music overlays several equally mind-numbing sequences of boring, overlong exposition. Magnolia explores many types of negative emotion — hate, resentment, anger, bitterness, guilt — but I wasn’t feeling any of those, just an increasing sense of enervation that bordered on actual physical pain.

The story of Magnolia is a mismatched jumble of seven or eight different stories, like a prime time TV soap opera but less coherent. Magnolia is one of those movies where it’s hard to tell the players without a scorecard — especially because they’re introduced quickly, over one of those overloud rock songs I was telling you about — so here goes:

• Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), television producer with lung cancer
• Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore), Earl’s wife, dealing with guilt and depression
• Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Earl’s male nurse
• Frank “T.J.” Mackey (Tom Cruise), Earl’s estranged son and wildly over-the-top misogynistic self-help guru
• Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), host of a game show produced by Earl
• Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a young contestant on the game show in 1968
• Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), a current game show contestant
• Cynthia (Felicity Huffman), game show producer who probably shouldn’t be in this list except that you should watch Sports Night and complain when ABC takes it off the air
• Claudia Gator (Melora Waters), Jimmy Gator’s troubled daughter
• Officer Jim (John C. “Chest Rockwell” Reilly), LAPD trooper who tells Claudia to turn her music down and then stays for coffee

You would think that it would take a long time to tell all these stories and find out all the varied ways that people interact with each other, and you would be right. You would think that there would be some good acting with this collection of actors, and you would be right again. And you would also think that this would take less than three hours. You would be wrong.

There are any number of good things to recommend Magnolia, from the lewd, hyperactive antics of Cruise to the gut-wrenching deathbed scene of Robards to the touching way that Hoffman lights Robards’s cigarette, to the endearingly goofy way that Reilly talks to himself while he’s alone in the police car. The worst thing about Magnolia is that they are spread out over three excruciatingly long hours, and that all these moments take so long to develop.

For example, there’s a wonderful scene where Julianne Moore walks into a pharmacy to pick up an armload of prescriptions. The pharmacists are suspicious and let Moore know of their suspicions in an annoying, patronizing manner, causing Moore to scream at them in helpless rage. It’s a neat scene, but it’s actually three or four tiny scenes that are interspersed with tiny scenes from the other stories. The final effect is similar to reading five different James Patterson books serially, one tiny chapter from one book followed by a chapter from another book, over and over again.

So, is Magnolia worth seeing? I didn’t think so, not for awhile, until I remembered another coincidence.

You see, I saw Magnolia on Saturday, January 8, 2000, the same day of the Tennessee Titans - Buffalo Bills playoff game. Both Magnolia and the game ran a little over three hours. The game was mostly dull, a tight defensive struggle, but the Bills managed to score a go-ahead field goal with twenty ticks left on the clock. As the world knows, the Titans took the ensuing kickoff back for the winning score on a completely improbable, unexpected play. The “Music City Miracle”, they’re calling it in the papers today. That one shattering, heartbreaking play transformed an otherwise blah game into something that will be remembered for years. And, coincidentally, there is a shattering, completely unexpected moment towards the end of Magnolia that you won’t see coming. It’s not quite in the same league as a kickoff return for a touchdown, mind you, but it’s the most audacious plot twist of the year.

In fact, I enjoyed the ending so much that I’m buying my neighbor a ticket. (If nothing else, I may get three hours of peace and quiet for a change.)

Quantum Moviemaking

I don’t remember exactly, but I think the topic of the day on one of my e-mail lists was the continuing, annoying, dominance of the New York Yankees. I was trying to make the point that one of the strengths of the Yankees was their huge cable TV viewing audience (well, before the current tiff with the NYC cable companies). Someone else was trying to make the point that the cable TV audience couldn’t affect the way the Yankees played on the field. “Of course the cable TV audience plays a role,” I said, or something like that. The TV viewers observe the Yankees, and the observers interact with the observed through the process of observation. “It’s the Heisenberg theory applied to baseball,” I said.

(The Heisenberg theory - the basis for modern quantum physics - is that you can’t predict the location of a subatomic particle because the light you need to make the observation changes the energy level of the particle. There is much more to it than that, including a complicated mathematical explanation, but that’s at the level I can understand.)

This flip little comment earned me a stinging rebuke from a colleague with a scientific bent, who insisted that you couldn’t apply the Heisenberg theory that way. His point was that the theory was strictly tied to quantum physics and wasn’t applicable - even by analogy - to situations on the molecular level and higher. The theory was perfectly sound in one aspect of physical reality but not particularly helpful in another.

This, of course, doesn’t stop Joel and Ethan Coen from using - or misusing - the Heisenberg theory in their latest, The Man Who Wasn’t There. The Coens put the Heisenberg theory into the mouth of Tony Shalhoub, a greasy, nasty, oily lawyer from Sacramento who shows up in a small postwar California town to defend Frances McDormand from an unjust murder charge. We see Shalhoub in an interrogation room, trying out his opening speech for the jury, explaining to them how the Heisenberg theory applies to the case. “The more you see,” Shalhoub says, “the less you know.”

That kind of speech may or may not work in the courtroom, but it does a pretty good job of summarizing The Man Who Wasn’t There. The Man Who Wasn’t There is a minimalist film, mostly existing at the quantum level. It features a flat, emotionless, detached performance from Billy Bob Thornton that borders on the narcoleptic. Its film noir femme fatale is Frances McDormand, who barely says a word in the second half of the movie. Its black-and-white style is bare, sparse, and simple, although quietly brilliant in its use of light and shadow playing across the Southern California bungalows and storefronts and jail cells and hotels where the story unfolds.

The Man Who Wasn’t There stands athwart mainstream Hollywood, crying, “Stop!” It is filmed in black-and-white and almost silent. It is literary and intellectual, with a soundtrack of Beethoven piano sonatas. It has no big stars or high concepts or major lessons, and no one will ever make its sequel. It is the polar opposite of every other movie out in theaters now, and is almost worth seeing on that basis alone.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is the Coen Brothers at their most restrained, although they cannot keep themselves from throwing in some quirky sci-fi conceits. It also features Billy Bob Thornton at his most restrained, playing a barber who is almost invisible, existing primarily in retroactive voice-overs. However, restraint for the Coens and for Thornton is an unfortunate choice. The film’s minimalism provides for a minimalist entertainment - and, here, a minimalist review, there being little or nothing else to say.