What Matters Most

Dear Trevor,

I hope you won’t mind me telling you, but I already have the books for your Christmas present picked out. I am sure it won’t matter very much either way; you’re still too young to be reading this and you’re still too young to be reading them. I got you the Lemony Snicket books, the first five volumes, which I think are very well done. However, I am afraid that your mother will be a little cross with me. (She may be even more cross with me if she reads them; they are a bit grim, especially for a two-year-old.)

I have been told, via your Nana, that you have “too many” books right now and what you need for Christmas is more videos. I am choosing to disregard this instruction; I know what it really means. It means that your mother has seen the same Barney videos with you a thousand times, and is sick and tired of them, and wants to watch something else, anything else, and I can’t blame her at all, not one bit.

Anyway, I will continue to buy you books as I have done. I am doing this not to annoy your mother (oh, well, maybe a little) but because it makes me happy to give you good books. Mostly, though, I am doing it to pay back an obligation to my grandmother and my godmother. They both died when you were very little, and they both went out of their way to get me good books when I was little, and I never thanked them properly, and the best way I can thank them now is to return the favor to you.

You have the four Harry Potter books so far, and I will get you the fifth one as soon as it comes out, which should be right before your birthday. I am hopeful that you’ve read them and enjoyed them by now. I hope that you’ve enjoyed them as much as I did, although that’s hard to imagine. (The truth is, I gave you those books because I couldn’t put them down; I had to get them out of the house or I’d never get any work done.) I am also hopeful that you’ve read them before you saw the Harry Potter movies, although I guess I would be just as happy if you saw the movies first and they encouraged you to go back and read the books later.

As I write this, the first Harry Potter movie just hit the screens. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is expected to break all the box office records the same way that the book broke onto all the best-seller lists. It has been greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm, and rightfully so.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the kind of movie that Hollywood does well right now. There’s not a lot of original movies coming out of the major studios now; the really original stuff is the low-budget independent movies; Memento is the best example so far this year. (And even these are getting to be somewhat unoriginal at that; Kevin Smith followed up the frighteningly original Dogma with the rehashed Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.)

(I’m sorry, I am sure your mom won’t let you see any of these movies for a good long while. And she’s right, too.)

Independent movies are more original but they are less technically well-done. Hollywood, on the other hand, specializes in movies that are well-done technically but that aren’t particularly original. The really good studio movies, therefore, tend to be adaptations of other works. And the best of those movies use the fearsome technical skills of the moviemakers to turn these adapted works into something special.

Let me give you just a few examples here. A Few Good Men was an unremarkable play by Aaron Sorkin that, through some remarkable casting, became a classic movie. Apollo 13 took a nearly forgotten space mission and turned it into something special; in part by getting good performances out of Hanks, Bacon and Paxton while riding weightlessly in the back of a cargo plane. The gloriously bleak set design of the The Shawshank Redemption helped the movie transcend the Stephen King story. Not to mention that this is what Stephen Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan) has been doing his entire career.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone follows in this tradition; it is an adaptation of a great story done with care, skill, and maybe a little bit of magic. It is a fabulously well-made movie. Every scene shines with a glory that comes from hard work, patience, craftsmanship, and a few hundred million dollars.

All the elements are in place. First, there’s the script, which was done by Steve Kloves, who did the script for the Michael Chabon novel Wonder Boys, which is another one of those movies your mom won’t let you see now. (If you’re, say, in college when you read this, please pick up Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and let me know what you thought.) Kloves tackles the unenviable job of adapting the best-known work of the last ten years, a book that legions of children have memorized, and does an exceptional job. He’s made what I think is a wise choice in sticking closely to the narrative of the story. This leaves out all sorts of the wonderful little nuggets of information that make the Harry Potter books so engaging — how to turn tortoises into teacups, the Hogwarts school song; the proper way to make potions, Hermione Granger’s reading list — but such details would make the movie a complete mystery to the uninitiated.

The script for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is workmanlike, and I hope I can say that in an admiring way. Kloves’s approach works well enough to forestall most criticism; I was disappointed only in that there weren’t more good juicy lines for the bad guys. There wasn’t enough of young Draco Malfoy, and there needed to be many, many more lines from Alan Rickman as Professor Snape. (But then I was a fan of Rickman’s long before I was a fan of Harry Potter.) Also, those pranksters George and Fred Weasley only make a token appearance.

The real problem with the way Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone works as a movie is not Kloves’s script but J.K. Rowling’s novel. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a staggering work of genius, mind you, but it works much less well as a movie than you might think. There is a lot more exposition in the first book and a lot less action; Rowling is more busy building a world than she is in writing action scenes for Harry. This is why you will see other reviewers say that the movie is “plodding” and “dull”. I say no such thing, but I can see where a Muggle might think so.

The other main element is the acting, of course, which is uniformly good. Good acting begins with good casting, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is astonishingly well-cast. The three main roles — Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Emma Watson as Hermione, and Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley — were famously difficult to cast, but all the young actors do a tremendous job. All three look the part, for one thing, and they are all engaging and cute and bright. Watson is easily the most skilled; her Hermione practically leaps off the screen, but Grint is easily able to upstage her at times. Radcliffe is a little tenative and uneasy, but these traits work well in context. (And his long face will be an invaluable asset as things get tough for Harry at Hogwarts in the next movie.)

The adult performances are smaller, but the casting again has impeccable pitch. The adults have smaller parts — except perhaps for Robbie Coltrane’s dead solid perfect Hagrid — but they do brilliant work in incarnating their characters. The aforementioned Alan Rickman is the best of the lot; the one scene where he actually has Harry in a classroom is priceless. Maggie Smith has the showiest role as the head of Gryffindor House; she is prickly when she needs to be but is not when she is not. Richard Harris and John Hurt both have small, showy roles, but it leaves one wondering whether the movie would have been improved if they had switched roles.

Of course, what really matters to Potter fans (like me, and I hope, like you) is the way things look, and in this we are not disappointed. Take, for example, the scene on Platform 9 3/4 when we first see the Hogwarts Express. Muggle reviewers see this and shrug; there’s a train, big whoop. You and I look at it and are gratified and relieved; they got the look of the thing right, they have successfully transplanted the brilliant imagery of the book into the movie. Everything we see is gorgeous, everything looks right, everything from the battlements at the castle to Hagrid’s hut to the Great Hall at Halloween looks as it should. The set design and costuming were not only done with care and skill but with a deep respect for Rowling’s work, which is how it should be. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is not a perfect movie, but it is the most perfect illustration of the book that could be. Even better, it’s not so much an illustration as it is an illumination; taking the book from black-and-white to glorious color.

I could have said all of this in a standard, ordinary movie review, but I wanted to write you for two specific reasons. First, I want to address the complaint from some quarters that the movie is too close to the book; “slavishly obedient” is one of the terms people use.

I see this in a quite different light, and wanted to share that with you. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a movie only because people loved the book. If the movie had been substantially different from the book, it would have been an act of terrible disloyalty. Harry Potter readers like me (and I hope like you) are wonderfully loyal to the books. We await the publication of each new volume the way that Victorians awaited the serial publication of Dickens’s novels. (Remind me to get you a copy of David Copperfield, and Bleak House.) What’s more, we pass along the word about them with evangelical fervor.

That loyalty is the background of the Harry Potter “franchise”; the movie would not have been possible without our loyalty. Our loyalty has been repaid with the only possible coin; the loyalty of director Chris Columbus to J.K. Rowling’s book. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Harry Potter. The importance of loyalty — to one’s friends, to one’s school, to one’s ideals — is on practically every page of the book, and it is gratifying to see that reflected in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Secondly, there have been complaints that Harry Potter himself is a little dull. I think this is terribly unfair, although perhaps understandable. Harry is, after all, trying to get his feet under him at this point in the saga; he’s not called on to be Indiana Jones just yet.

What Harry does best here is to resist evil. This is a terribly important job, you know. Most people around here thought that evil took a vacation up until just recently. I don’t buy that, of course, but there’s no denying that evil is more prevalent than it was just a few months ago. Our President now talks every day about fighting the “evil people” and everyone knows what he means and what they have to do to help.

You don’t have the same demons to fight as Harry Potter does, of course, but they are out there, and you need to know that. There are lots of evil things in the world (people who put mustard on pork and call it barbecue, e-mail spammers, the San Francisco 49ers) and it takes practice to recognize them. Fighting evil can be difficult and lonely and challenging, and while it may look like a dull task, it’s important, and don’t ever let anyone tell you that it is not important. The good news is that it’ll be a little easier for you than it is for Harry; while you don’t have his magical powers, you have parents who love you very much and will be more than happy to show you the right way to fight evil.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is not a perfect movie by any means, but it does something that most movies don’t even try to do anymore. It focuses on the things that matter most — in this case, acting towards your friends with loyalty and acting towards the evil around us with bravery. In the end, it is these things that matter, far more than the script or the acting or the set design.

I will see you on Thursday, over at your Nana’s, who is cooking Thansgiving dinner. Be well and behave yourself until then. (If you hear me groaning or complaining at some point, it has nothing to do with you or with dinner but everything to do with the Dallas Cowboys in general and Ryan Leaf in particular.)

Love,

Uncle Curt

The Power of Negative Thinking

The New York Times Magazine the other week did a series of articles about new ideas from the last year. One of the stories was from novelist David Rakoff and involved a new book by psychologist Judy Norem called The Positive Power of Negative Thinking that posited that a happy, positive, cheerful outlook on things was bad for some people. For the cynics and curmudgeons of the world, the article said, “sunny, upbeat strategies don’t always work; in fact, for some people they backfire, making them even more anxious than they were in the first place.” The book advocates “defensive pessimism” for such individuals, a mental theory that involves embracing negative outcomes and working hard to overcome them.

Rakoff writes, “Defensive pessimism can be reduced to a three-step mental rehearsal. First, approach the anxiety-producing task with lowered expectations, certain that it will go badly. (Take, for example, public speaking, a common fear: commit yourself to the idea that your next speech will be a disaster.) Then, imagine in detail all the ways in which it will go awry. (You will lose your notes at the 11th hour, you will trip on the way to the podium, you will be pilloried by your colleagues.) Finally, map out ways to avert each catastrophe.”

I don’t have David Mamet’s reading list available, but I would be surprised if he were not familiar with Norem’s book. He’s certainly familiar with the overall premise; his latest movie, Heist, is more or less a tribute to the virtues of defensive pessimism.

Heist features the cynical and curmudgeonly Gene Hackman as Joe Moore, a professional thief. Defensive pessimism for him is not just a philosophy but a necessity. Even the simplest crime, even the smash-and-grab of a jewelry store that opens the movie, is attendant with risk and danger and negative outcomes. Planning can mitigate some of these outcomes but not all of them (and the jewelry store has some planners of its own). Catastrophes (the danger of arrest and capture, the dangers of getting ripped off by the fence, the dangers of having to retire poor and alone) are everywhere lurking, but can be averted by assembling a good team quick-thinking and intelligence and sheer stubborn cussedness.

One of the more clever aspects of Heist is how it doesn’t take up a great deal of our time on the details of the planning. The traditional heist movie (Oceans Eleven is the most recent example) is preoccupied with the assembling of a team to perform the job and explaining exactly how the job will take place. Heist begins in medias res. The team is already together. Rebecca Pidgeon (sporting a truly awful Joan Jett hairdo) is Hackman’s love interest and lookout. The incomparable Ricky Jay handles the sleight-of-hand. The imposing Delroy Lindo (already making a career for himself as the successor to Hackman in the cynical curmudgeon department) is Hackman’s right-hand man and reality check.

The opening heist itself isn’t discussed in any way; it just reveals itself as it goes along. Pidgeon is posing as a waitress at a dead-end diner, where she can drop something-or-other into the coffee to incapacitate the jewelry store staff. (She uses an eyedropper, and it’s possible that she could be using straight Visine here, except that Visine taken orally incapacitates people in quite a different way, and I mention this to remind you that you never, ever want to make food servers angry at you.) Jay creates the distraction that pulls whatever law enforcement professionals are hanging around in the wrong direction, while Lindo and Hackman break down the door and crack the safe.

Of course, even defensive pessimism can take you only so far, and Hackman’s face is captured on a security camera. Worse, he’s blackmailed by his fence, Danny DeVito, into doing one more job (the closest thing to a cliché in the movie), and DeVito foists Sam Rockwell (Galaxy Quest) onto the team as they plan for the “Swiss thing”.

I won’t go too far into the “Swiss thing” except to say that it is a stage for Mamet to engage in a lot of trademark crafty writing and twisty plotting, creating an arena for crosses and double-crosses where nothing is as it seems. That’s familiar territory for the audience but not necessarily for Hackman. Hackman is making his first appearance in a Mamet film; he’s an outsider surrounded by Mamet regulars. (This includes DeVito, who is right at home in Mamet Country; it’s amazing that their paths haven’t crossed before now.) Outsiders generally don’t fare too well in Mamet movies; they’re generally the victims of his confidence games, the pigeons, the suckers.

The attraction of Heist is not so much the crime itself or the slick, intricate plotting but instead Hackman’s duel with Mamet. The movie plays out as a battle of wits between the crafty director and the veteran actor, with Hackman having to smart himself out of tricky situation after tricky situation. It’s as if Mamet is some kind of malevolent deity, unseen but powerful, putting Hackman in impossible situations just to see if he can make it through the other side.

Hackman is not without recourse in this battle, though. He has, of course, his Method Acting skills, and it’s a delight to see his hard-bitten jewel thief disappear into the character of a blue-collar schlub to fool the police. He’s got his unflappable jet-pilot supercool mojo working. (”When he goes to sleep,” Ricky Jay tells us, “sheep count him.”) And - since, after all, he is robbing the Swiss - he has the audience’s sympathy throughout.

Most importantly, Hackman is at all times channeled into that positive power of negative thinking; using that energy to confound his pursuers and hopefully, to triumph over the forces arrayed against him. Heist is a cynical movie, dark and devious and depressing. But there is a kind of glory in Hackman’s paranoia, a splendor in his wiliness, a nobility in his cunning. In a year where a sturdy and resolute pessimism has been the best defense against the wretched crop of movies, Heist is, finally, cause for optimism.

Be All You Can Be

The single best thing you can say about High Crimes is that it is professional. That may sound like a put-down but it isn’t. It may sound like faint praise, but it is high praise indeed. High Crimes is professional moviemaking at its best. All of the group of things called “production values” are as highly valued as the term implies — which they’re often not. High Crimes knows the mistakes that bad movies make and is determined not to make them, and maybe that is nobility of a sort.

There are any number of ways for a movie to go wrong, but the first and most obvious problem area is the acreenplay. The screenplay is sharp and clever and built on bits and pieces of real life. It recognizes that sometimes we all sit back on the couch and watch Sanford and Son reruns when there is nothing else to do, that creepy people in supermarkets are usually found in the frozen food aisle, that you really can’t wear a suit jacket on a motorcycle.

The directing is also first-rate. Carl Franklin does a glorious job with this movie, following the complex script around its many twists and turns with the style and daring of a Formula One driver. Like Stephen Soderburgh’s ponderous Traffic, High Crimes employs a variety of colors and looks to highlight the impact of its locations. The flashback scenes are shot in a funky pseudodocumentary style that increases their sense of unreality. Sunny San Francisco and glitzy Los Angeles are both shot to their full advantage, while the utilitarian Marine base where most of the action takes place are shot under harsh, unforgiving fluorescent light. Best of all are the dim twilit streets of San Diego — not previously known for its dim twilight — and the profound sense of unease that the photography brings to the table.

High Crimes also has some solid acting going for it. Ashley Judd is the heroine, a criminal defense lawyer practicing in Frisco who ends up trying the one case she never wanted to try, defending her husband against charges of war crimes. Morgan Freeman (fresh off the appallingly bad Along Came A Spider) is her grizzled co-counsel, guiding her through the mysteries of military folkways and taking care of the sleazy side of things. Amanda Peet shows up as Judd’s ne’er-do-well sister, and provides some welcome comic relief from the unrelenting grimness. (I would just absolutely love to see a movie that featured Peet in a dual role as her character here and her character in Changing Lanes.) Only Jim Caviezel, so good in The Count of Monte Cristo as an unjustly imprisoned man, does a poor job here as Judd’s unjustly imprisoned husband.

With all these factors in its favor, it seems almost incredible that High Crimes is not a better movie than it actually is. By all rights, High Crimes should be a superior thriller, mixing in some chills and some courtroom drama and some strained relationships. But the mix of elements never comes together, the pieces don’t coalesce into a believable whole. The excellent work by the parties involved cannot make up for the essential shortcomings of the movie.

Partly this is due to the weaknesses in the movie’s premise. At the start of the movie, the Caviezel character is arrested by FBI agents as a deserter from the Marine Corps, accused of participating in a massacre in El Salvador in the 1980’s. Judd’s character sets aside her doubts and fears (after a very well-fashioned scene where she confronts him with his lies) to defend him against the charges. Of course, the investigation is blocked by the requisite Marine officer who is working on an agenda of his own.

This takes us firmly into the territory of the Aaron Sorkin / Rob Reiner classic A Few Good Men and the emerging genre of the military crime drama. Unfortunately, most of the movies in this category have been major disappointments, with the wretched The General’s Daughter, the misguided Rules of Engagement and the lackluster Hart’s War stinking up the screen within recent memory. High Crimes is aware of its place in this genre, but has no desire or ambition to rise above its self-imposed limitations. All High Crimes really does is put the Tom Cruise character (Caviezel) into the role of the defendant while putting Judd and Freeman in the roles of Demi Moore and Kevin Pollack. And having done that, the movie casts bloodless bogeymen (the repellent Bruce Davison, notably) in the roles of the villains. As you might expect, the result is somewhat flat and uninspiring. And when High Crimes reaches for inspiration, it reaches in odd directions, making poor Ashley Judd recreate scenes from Double Jeopardy, of all things.

It doesn’t help that the plot is so riddled with holes. Most of them become apparent after the end of the movie, but there are a few head-scratchers here and there. Why won’t Judd’s law firm support her in defending her husband? Why is she such a rotten lawyer? What’s all the nonsense about the polygraph? What does she think she’s accomplishing by trying to blackmail the Marine general?

One other incredibly odd thing about High Crimes is the way it treats Judd’s character. Somewhere along the line, someone has developed the idea that female characters in leading roles in movies should be resilient. Judd here is more resilient than a Titelist golf ball; she just keeps bouncing back, over and over again, putting aside unendurable pain and loss and betrayal while keeping her motor humming right along. Judd clearly has the ability to play a character of great emotional depth, and it’s a pity she didn’t get to do that here.

At one point in High Crimes, one character misquotes the Marine Corps advertising slogan, confusing it with the Army slogan, “Be All You Can Be”. High Crimes is not all it can be, or anything close to it.

Me, Myself, and John Cusack

There are three great things about the ending of High Fidelity, and they all happen right on top of one another. The first is a small joke about a garage band with a horrible name (”Sonic Death Monkeys”) changing into a garage band with a great name (”Kathleen Turner Overdrive”). The second is a long-threatened, long-dreaded singing performance from one of the principal characters which turns out to be the biggest surprise of the movie.

And the third great thing about the ending of High Fidelity? It is the fact that it finally, finally ends.

I wanted to like High Fidelity, God help me. I had good feelings about it going into the theater. I believed that this would be a movie with cutting comic insight about the plight of the single thirtysomething male. I hoped it would be funny and charming and true, a When Harry Met Sally for whatever the hell we end up calling this decade.

I thought this because, based on all I’d read or seen, that it was going to be about… well… me. Not in some weird way, like Al Gore claiming that Love Story was about his own personal life, but about people like me and the kind of people I like. And I wasn’t all that far off. Here, in no special order, are some of the similarities between John Cusack’s character, Rob Gordon, and yours truly.

Rob: Is over thirty, single, lives in a crummy Chicago apartment with noisy neighbors.

Me: Is over thirty, single, lives in a crummy Austin apartment with noisy neighbors.

Rob: Runs a small, struggling record store dedicated to obscure vinyl albums.

Me: Runs a small, struggling movie website dedicated to obscure movie reviews.

Rob: Obsesses constantly over this smart, attractive blonde chick who dumped him at the start of the movie.

Me: Still obsessing constantly over this smart, attractive blonde chick who decided that she didn’t want to go out with me last year.

Rob: Friends with co-workers that are complete movie geeks.

Me: Online friends with movie geeks around the country.

Rob: Had a close, intimate relationship with Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Me: Has rented Entrapment seven times.

Rob: Is possessed of a vast, arcane wealth of knowledge about popular music.

Me: Is possessed of a vast, arcane wealth of knowledge about popular movies.

Rob: Consistently torpedoes his romantic life by saying exactly the wrong thing to women.

Me: Consistently torpedoes his romantic life by stammering incoherently around women.

Rob: Spends a lot of time talking directly into the camera.

Me: Doesn’t own a camera, but spends a lot of time talking to himself anyway.

Rob: Is a self-pitying, whining loser.

Me: Can’t stand movies about self-pitying, whining losers.

Most of this list is comic exaggeration on my part, of course, but I did see parts of myself in Rob Gordon (not the dating Catherine Zeta-Jones part, sadly). Unfortunately, they were the parts about myself that I don’t like all that much. For me, at least, watching High Fidelity was painfully irritating, like being trapped in a room with my own worst qualities for an hour and a half. Worse, because the Rob Gordon character does some pretty nasty and stupid things that (I hope, anyway) I wouldn’t do. (Even worse, you have to endure the antics of Rob’s pals at the record store, the mousy Todd Louiso and the overwhelmingly obnoxious Jack Black.)

Mostly, my reasons for intensely disliking High Fidelity are very personal and idiosyncratic, and if you saw the movie and enjoyed it, I’m glad. However, I think I have two valid, objective criticisms to make, both of them directed at Cusack.

First, there’s the whole issue of camera time. This is Cusack’s movie, it’s centered around him, and he’s on camera just about every moment. However, in my view, there is too much reliance on Cusack to carry the movie and not enough smart use of the supporting characters. The characters I liked best about the first part of High Fidelity all but vanish towards the end. Joan Cusack is her usual hilarious self as Rob’s sister, and she’s got one of the movie’s great lines, but nothing is really done with her character. Lisa Bonet plays a cute soul singer who stops the show dead with a cover of a Peter Frampton song, but she’s MIA halfway through the movie. Bruce Springsteen shows up as Rob’s spirit guide — like Elvis in True Romance — but he’s just in one scene, and I wished he’d have shown up again. Tim Robbins, America’s Greatest Communist Actor, plays Rob’s neo-hippie romantic rival, but he dematerializes after an ill-advised visit to the record store. All we’re left with is Cusack.

And Cusack himself is a problem. He’s perfect for the Rob Gordon part, in fact, the only way this movie works for anyone is if Cusack can make it happen. The movie didn’t work for me, primarily, because I felt Cusack didn’t quite manage to leaven Rob’s self-pitying depression with charm. Cusack is charming, it’s his best talent as an actor. But even a charmer like Cusack can’t fully counteract the crushing weight of all the monologues into the camera about Gordon’s romantic disappointments and his ensuing depression. (It’s almost like Ferris Bueller’s Trip to the Therapist.) Cusack is a great actor, but even his considerable skills aren’t enough to make Rob Gordon all that likeable.

Setting these objections aside for a moment, I fully understand that my complaints about High Fidelity are deeply rooted in my own personal life, and that it is more than possible that you’ll enjoy it and like it far more than I did. High Fidelity is one of those movies where the ending should make everybody happy. You’ll probably be happy because you saw a good movie. I was just happy that it was over.

Smooth Operator

Hitch quotes the scene from Jerry Maguire, so I might as well, too. It’s the bit in the living room, towards the end, where Tom Terrific tells Renee Zellwegger, “You complete me,” and she says, “You had me at hello,” and that’s the movie, there. But what you don’t see, and maybe what you don’t remember, is what he says before that, the bit about living in a cynical world, and being in a business with tough competitors. There’s a technical name for that, and it’s called “babbling”, and it is traditionally what men do around women when they’re nervous, when they’re not smooth.

I’m not sure that the word “smooth” actually appears anywhere in Hitch, although it wouldn’t be out of place. This is because Will Smith is smooth — or that he is what smooth is. Smith’s onscreen persona is slicker than a sack of buttered eels, and never more so than in Hitch, where he plays something of a smoothness consultant to the unsmooth.

The basic conceit in Hitch is that women respond to smooth. Whether this is true or not, nobody knows — or at least nobody male — and Hitch itself has its doubts on the issue. What is true beyond peradventure is that women don’t respond to unsmooth, at least as far as first impressions go. This is what keeps Will Smith’s character, Alex Hitchens, in business, and business is good. He gives his clients the direction they need to arrange the first three dates; if they can manage that, then they’re on their own.

What makes this work — if it does, really — is secrecy. Every man knows why this is so. If, for example, you were to go home to your wife, and kiss her, and compliment her shoes, and cook her a nice dinner, and wash the dishes, and then tell her that she’s the most special woman in the world while the end of An Affair to Remember comes up, she’s going to look at you and say, “You got all that off the txreviews.com website,” and — just like that! — it wouldn’t count. And if you’d hired the likes of Alex Hitchens to plan your evening… well, you can imagine.

Hitch is just that cynical about relationships, and shows it by putting Smith in situation after situation where his smoothness backfires. So we get Smith trying to get laughs by not being smooth, which robs him of his ace trump card, and the harder he tries, the further behind he gets.

What saves and redeems Hitch is Kevin James, who is Smith’s newest client; an accountant with a huge crush on a millionaire celebrity socialite model (Amber Valetta, looking fetching and vulnerable). James knows what Oliver Hardy knew: a big man is funnier when he’s overly delicate about things than when he’s being just a fat slob. James isn’t totally consistent in this — he has a couple of really bad scenery-chewing scenes — but he’s got enough comic grace and charm to outsmooth the Fresh Prince himself.

There isn’t much to Hitch, but it’s smart and funny and ultimately hard to dislike. It tends to the cynical, in a shallow way, and to the shallow, in a cynical way, but it has a good heart and is essentially unserious about itself. And it shows that Will Smith’s script-reading faculties are working again (see — or don’t — Wild Wild West, Men in Black II, I, Robot, etc.

Having said that, are you better off watching Hitch or Jerry Maguire with your sweetie next movie night? Well, if you have to ask that question, you’ll never be smooth enough to make it in Hollywood.

Gratitude

“Gratitude,” Joseph Stalin said, “is a disease of dogs.” I confess that I don’t know what that means, exactly, mostly because I like dogs and dislike Stalin. But enough about that. Whatever gratitude is, it is not exactly what you would call a common virtue among movie reviewers like me. We are not creatures whose mind easily turns to gratitude. The website to which I used to belong (and hundreds of other online reviewers still belong) is called “Rotten Tomatoes” for a reason.

And looking at — watching, on the big screen, for the first time — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not exactly what you would call a gratitude-inspiring event. Certainly not among critics in general, for whom every movie that comes out is an opportunity to test the sharpness of their critical fangs, the depth of their critical bite. I speak as one, myself, who found deep and sincere flaws in both The Matrix and Fight Club — the two reviews that have, to date, gotten the most hits off my website. There is no movie so good, so excellent, so sacrosanct that some critic, somewhere — especially given the world-girdling scope of the Internet — will search out its flaws and find them and publish them, forever to be made known. And in a movie like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has several obvious and penetrating flaws, the critical reception is bound to be ferocious.

And then, on top of that, you have the problem of the book, which most of your online movie reviewers, geeks that we are, have read. And some of us came across Douglas Adams at a very impressionable age, young enough where we have in many ways adopted some of his style as our very own. (The same exact thing happened with The Fellowship of the Ring, when legions of critics and would-be critics cried out due to the omission of the Tom Bombadil bit.) You have here a well-loved and influential work, just now — after fits and starts on the grand and epic scale — making its way into the theaters, as a movie, and the movie… well… isn’t that great… and this is just a complete recipe for critical mayhem and madness, on that grand and epic scale I mentioned earlier in this sentence. (Not to mention that the urge to imitate the inimitable but eminently spoofable Douglas Adams style is not sufficiently resistable for many, I would imagine.)

I say all that to say this. I would have done The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy much differently. I would have cast a blonde as Trillian, or gotten Zooey Deschanel (who I remember fondly from Almost Famous) to bleach her hair. I would have put a realistic-looking second head on Zaphod Beeblebrox, not that horrid Russian-doll thing that they have going on. I would have waited to get Johnny Depp to play Beeblebrox, even if all he did was rehash the Keith Richards imitation he did in Pirates of the Caribbean — or, basically, I would have done all I can to make sure that Sam Rockwell never came within ten megaparsecs of the film. I would have gotten Mos Def something else to make him less narcoleptic, like a nice cup of espresso or a ferret down his pants. I would have taken out all the cheeky-monkey references to Star Wars and Star Trek, and made the Heart of Gold look much less like either the Death Star or the ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would have taken out the bit about Madagascar if that was, as I suspect, a reference to the forthcoming Disney kid’s flick.

These are the flaws I see in the movie. Your mileage may vary. And I think that I can justify each and every one of these criticisms as being fair, and deserved.

Having said that, the appearance of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in our theaters, after all this time, is cause for joy and celebration. Where the movie does its thing — when Martin Freeman is schlubbing it up as Arthur Dent, when Alan Rickman is doing the bring-down as Marvin the Paranoid Android, when the too-cool-for-school animation thing is happening — then it works, then it’s entertaining, then it’s living up to its heritage. On the rare occasions when the movie excels — the yarn scene, the bits with Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, on the surface of Vogsphere — it’s silly and imaginitive and brilliant enough for anyone’s taste. And when it doesn’t, well, it’s mostly harmless anyway.

On the great cosmic scale of things, one has to balance out the (obvious, glaring, preventable) problems with the movie with the much-deserved feelings of pleasure and satisfaction and gratitude of having the silly old thing up on the screen, and it’s a balance that mostly works out in favor of the audience. See it, accept it for what it is, and make sure you stay past the credits.

To Live Is To Fly

We all got holes to fill
Them holes are all that’s real
Some fall on you like a storm
Sometimes you dig your own
But choice is yours to make
And time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea
Some toil upon the stone
To live is to fly
Low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the tears out of your eyes

– Townes Van Zandt

As it turns out, Newbery Award-winning author Louis Sachar, who wrote Holes in the first place, actually lives in Austin, Texas. So it’s not completely unreasonable, you see, that he’s heard the late great Townes Van Zandt, maybe even on KGSR radio. I don’t know for sure one way or another, any more than I’m sure that Sachar enjoys the garlic cheese grits at Threadgills, or watches classic movies at the Paramount. But I believe this to be the case, and am willing to act on that belief.

The hero of Holes, Stanley Yelnats IV, has holes to dig, both literally and metaphorically. The holes literally fall on top of him to start with; a pair of shoes land right in his lap, which turn out to belong to a Texas Rangers star, which turn out to have been donated to the local orphanage. (Stanley is, apparently, a fan of the Rangers, which would introduce him to the sweet uses of adversity from an early age.) Stanley is sentenced to 18 months at Camp Green Lake, way out in the desert territory of West Texas, where he and his bunkmates are tasked to dig holes in a dry lake bed, five feet deep, five feet in diameter. (Random Math Question: What would the volume of the hole be? Show your work.)

There is more to the plot than this. Truth be told, there is a lot more to the plot than this. And, in fact, if you read a lot of the other reviews, they go into details about the plot, and who the characters are, and outline the three different stories, told in flashback, that wind around the main story like a creeper vine. In fact, the plot of the movie is so complex that the people next to me — people I did not know — literally would not let me out of my seat until I explained one of the minor plot points. This is a very plot-heavy movie, and if you’re not paying close attention, you’re going to miss key information. Watching Holes is like literature class; you shouldn’t miss any of it, because everything’s liable to be on the final.

The problem with Holes is the same problem that the two Harry Potter books have had. (I’ve read all the Harry Potter books; I have not read the Holes book.) In all three movies, there is an awful lot of plot for the audience to digest at one sitting. What happens is that other elements — most notably characterization — get left out of the movie. Holes and the Potter flicks assume that you’re familiar with the minor characters in the movie and does little to illustrate them or bring them to life. The focus on plot and the dimunition of the characters works in the Harry Potter flicks for me, personally, because I’ve read the books and am familiar with the universe. But, having not read Holes, it’s frustrating to see a well-beloved novel boiled down to the bare bones of its story.

This is not to say that the acting isn’t splendid, because it is. We’ve seen Sigourney Weaver before as a villainess, but she adds a touch of Texas twang and a fair amount of venom to her portrayal of the camp warden. Jon Voight gets to chew a lot of scenery as her sideburn-wearing, pistol-packing deputy. And Tim Blake Nelson is alternatively pleasant and sullen as the camp counselor. They all seem to be having a lot of fun in their parts — so do the younger actors, who are uniformly good — but they’re as much a hostage to the serpentine plot as anyone else, including the audience.

Holes does everything that it should do, probably; it certainly seems to do everything that its target audience wants it to do. But it somehow manages to lose sight of everything else in the process. Townes Van Zandt said it best; to live is to fly. Holes never makes it off the ground.

Diminished Capacity

There are some movies that you don’t figure out until the very last shot. There are some movies that you don’t figure out until you’re on the way out of the theater, or sitting at a red light on the way home, or in the middle of the night, jolted from a sound sleep. There are some movies you don’t figure out until three days later over a bowl of cereal watching SportsCenter in the quiet early morning hours. There are some movies that you never figure out at all.

And then there are some movies you figure out in the middle of the second reel, when it’s too late to go and try and get your money back, and all you can do is watch the rest of the movie and hope that the inside of your brain doesn’t curdle.

Hollywood Ending is just that brain-curdling bad, bad enough to make one wonder whether it is bad by accident or design. Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending is a Woody Allen picture, starring Woody Allen as a Woody Allen surrogate named Val Waxman who is signed to direct a Woody Allen picture in Woody Allen territory in Manhattan, home of Woody Allen, and it chronicles his Woody Allen-esque attempts to make this Woody Allen movie the way that Woody Allen would have wanted it to be directed by Woody Allen Woody Allen Woody Allen Woody Allen. Hollywood Ending gives the viewer a two-hour portal into Woody Allen’s brain, and the only thing in the movie that is interesting or provocative or alarming is the fact that there isn’t anything much rattling around in there anymore.

The “Val Waxman” character is a formerly-successful movie director consigned to the Fifth Circle of Hell for the Former A-List Celebrity; making a cheesy television commercial in the far-off wilds of Canada. Whatever skills or talents or gifts he may once have had leaked away long ago. The only job he can wangle was arranged by his ex-wife out of pure saintly pity. Worse, seemingly as a metaphor for his own diminishing artistic capacity, he loses his vision the weekend before principal photography is to begin on his comeback picture, launching him into a recursive spiral of lies, deceit and self-pity. The rest of the film is given over to underlining that poor “Val Waxman” is a hopeless, whiny, incompetent excuse for a director.

“Val Waxman” is meant, of course, to be a metaphor for Woody Allen’s own decline, and that metaphor is the only thing about Hollywood Ending that actually works. Hollywood Ending is nothing but a testimony to Allen’s own shortcomings. Despite the occasional insightful wisecrack or interesting New York location, Hollywood Ending is a wretchedly bad movie, substandard in every way. Although Allen keeps his command of the language, the concepts of plot and characterization and even basic good storytelling go missing. Although the set design and art direction are impeccable (and the source of a good laugh or two), having most of the film take place in a studio shoot strikes one as being a little lazy. The impeccable casting of a goddess-like Tea Leoni as Allen’s ex-wife is undercut by the casting of Debra Messing as the requisite seriously underaged Woody Allen girlfriend, not to mention empty suits like Treat Williams and George Hamilton.

The incredibly awful thing about Hollywood Ending is how it completely mishandles its central conceit. Allen’s hysterical blindnes is supposed to be the major source of yuks during the interminable middle of the film, yet all the scenes are utterly humorless when they are not aggressively idiotic. I say “idiotic” for a very specific reason; it is blatantly obvious that Allen has never been around a person who is actually blind for any significant length of time, or at any rate never paid any attention. If he had, he might have learned that — contrary to every scene in the movie that would have you believe otherwise — people who are blind can actually hear people when they talk and know enough to look in that general direction in order to make eye contact. There’s a scene where Allen is in a small room with Treat Williams; Williams is sitting two feet in front of him, talking to him, but Allen insists on speaking to Williams as if he were somewhere off to his left. When Williams shifts to Allen’s left, Allen starts talking to where Williams was sitting.

Later in that same scene, Williams askes Allen to look at some movie posters. The posters are printed on glossy paper with green cardboard backing. Allen picks up one of the posters, and looks intently at the cardboard backing. Anybody with the sense that God gave donkeys, much less anyone who has been blind for any significant period of time, would be able to tell by touch which side was the poster and which side was the backing. (All Allen had to do was hold the poster upside down; it’s the same exact joke that way.) It is one thing to use blindness to tell jokes, quite another thing to use blindness to tell stupid jokes.)

“Diminished capacity”, in case you didn’t know, is a legal term; it’s used when the defendant has a mental illness that affects his ability to know right from wrong, enough so that he cannot be held responsible for his actions. Woody Allen’s directorial capacities have diminished appreciably, but not enough so that he doesn’t know, or at least suspect the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, comedy and tragedy. More than anyone else involved, Woody Allen is responsible for Hollywood Ending and it’s terrible, awful, epochal badness. There is no possible excuse for the movie to be as horribly, willfuly, miserably bad as it is. Hollywood Ending is a dreadful movie, and it shouldn’t take anyone very long to figure that out.

I’ve Got Sunshine On A Cloudy Day

Hollywood Homicide deserves credit, if for nothing else, than pointing out the overwhelming control that the cellular telephone has on the lives of those who carry one. I used to complain every time a cell phone went off in a movie theater; now it’s like complaining about the weather. (I still treasure the moment when, at the Austin premiere of Shadow of the Vampire, director E. Elias Merhage turned to a luckless cell-phone user in the audience and yelled, “Turn that thing off!”)

Both Harrison Ford and Josh Harnett have cell-phones in Hollywood Homicide, and they go off all the time. I mean, all the time. You remember in the Austin Powers movies how the plot (or conspicuous lack thereof) would move along whenever the “Basil Exposition” character was on the screen? The cell-phones play that role here. They ring, and we learn things about the characters and about the progress of the investigation. Ford and Hartnett spend so much time on one-sided telephone conversations that you have to check and make sure that Bob Newhart didn’t write the screenplay. Fortunately, Ford’s cell-phone ring is so annoying that it gets funnier every time it goes off. Which, thankfully, is a Good Thing, otherwise the movie would be irredeemably awful.

That it is not is something of a triumph in its own way. Hollywood Homicide really ought to be awful; it has no real reason to be good. It is, first of all, a buddy-cop movie, the last wretched remnant of a once-mighty genre. The buddy-cop movie faces a double-pronged onslaught. On one hand, the genre has been satirized almost to death, enough so that making a buddy-cop movie is sort of like making a Western after Blazing Saddles. On the other hand, the buddy-cop genre lives a long and interesting life on television, with countless Law and Order episodes and wannabees populating the nation’s airwaves with grisly crime scenes ripped from today’s headlines. Hollywood Homicide has to navigate the path between these two paradigms, and does so honorably.

Hollywood Homicide can’t be as gritty as a Law and Order episode, and doesn’t even try to be. It can’t be as funny as Lethal Weapon and isn’t, quite. But it still manages to be enjoyable, witty, and fun, which, given the quality of movies this year, is saying something. That it is so much fun is largely due to Harrison Ford, who is obviously having a terrific time making the movie, and is probably just as pleased as punch to be making a movie in Los Angeles and not in some far-flung land doing an Indiana Jones sequel.

Ford is not blessed with great comic talent, but (as he proved in Raiders of the Lost Ark) he has great comic timing, and that accounts for a lot. He has one memorable comic line in the movie (”If I take my ginkgo, I can remember where I put my Viagra”) but he’s not here to tell jokes. Instead, he has the opportunity to do a lot of great comic reactions — whenever his partner does something stupid, or whenever that damned cell-phone rings — and a lot of great comic situations, mostly driven by his second job. Ford’s character is, in his other life, a struggling real estate broker, and he keeps running into people in the investigation who are looking to buy or sell houses. (One of these is rapper and sports agent Master P, who gets snookered by a Hollywood producer selling his house in just the same way that he let Ricky Williams get snookered by the New Orleans Saints in his rookie contract.) You would think that there would be nothing else you could do to the standard Los Angeles high-speed car chase; doing real estate transactions in the process actually adds an interesting new dimension.

Then there is Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor) who started his movie career in Pearl Harbor and at least arguably ended his movie career in Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was so awful that there was a hope that something awful would happen to everyone involved. So far, it’s happened; Alec Baldwin is doing cheesy TV movies and was embarrassed by his failure to single-handedly defeat George W. Bush by threatening to move to France. (Baldwin never followed through, which is a pity, as he might have raised the collective IQ of both countries.) Kate Beckinsale got roped into making the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie, and that’s just sad. Cuba Gooding Jr. had to make Snow Dogs to pay the bills. And worst of all, so far, Ben Affleck, somehow, lost what was left of his mind and started in on inexplicable, self-destructive behavior - that is to say, dating Jennifer Lopez. You could almost expect that something terrible, horrible, and miserable would happen to poor Josh Hartnett, and given how teeth-grindingly bad Pearl Harbor was, it would be hard to say that he didn’t deserve whatever was coming to him.

Josh Hartnett here, fortunately, is not as bad as I would have expected based on his past track record. He is the junior cop in this relationship, and defers a lot to Harrison Ford, as you might expect. But he has more interesting work on the side than Ford does. First of all, he’s an aspiring actor, and a bad one. (Casting Josh Hartnett as a bad actor is so mind-blisteringly obvious that it’s almost inspired, sort of like casting Angelina Jolie as a mindless video game character, or casting Mariah Carey as a spoiled, obnoxious celebrity diva, or casting Tom Green as a blithering moron.)

Hartnett has some good moments here, but they’re not really his fault. The script has him not only as an aspiring actor but as a vegetarian (naturally), a compliant boy-toy (of course) and a yoga instructor (hey, it’s California). The cross-cultural shift between his outside pursuits and his police career is a source for some situational laughs, as is his essential dimness. (Think of Hartnett as the poor man’s Keanu Reeves. Or better yet, don’t.)

Then there is the plot, which I haven’t mentioned, and for good reason. The plot is thinner than a silk chemise from Victoria’s Secret, and has something to do with a smooth-talking rap impressario who arranges for the contract killings of his of his artists when they wish to leave his employ. (Actually, this is sort of ripped-from-today’s-headlines; my understanding is that Tupac Shakur, among others, has been about as successful on the other side of the grass as he was on this one.) But the plot is more of a nuisance than anything else; certainly the characters see it that way. It is primarily an excuse for Bruce Greenwood to chew the scenery, and for Dwight Yoakum to play the bad guy yet again.

The single best thing about Hollywood Homicide, if I had to pick something, is that it has absolutely the right attitude. It doesn’t take itself seriously, which is the smart thing to do here. It doesn’t ask us to rack our brains about the plot, or to think very much about the characters and why they do what they do. It’s not gritty or angry or angst-filled. In its own way, it is perfectly Southern California; pleasant, optimistic, diverse, and impressively laid-back. Hollywood Homicide is a welcome relief from the depressing summer movie season, like sunshine on a cloudy day, which is all it aspires to be anyway.

(Note: Keep in mind that, despite whatever Harrison Ford does in this movie, this does not allow you, or anyone you know, to have their cell phone turned on during a movie. You have been warned.)

Eight Mistakes

The worst movie of 2002, by a wide margin, is Mike Figgis’s Hotel

I say that in full faith. I say that knowing that I have not seen all the bad movies of 2002 and that I probably won’t. I say that knowing that there are movies out there with worse scripts or plots. I say that knowing that there are movies out there with worse acting and directing. But taking all that into account, weighing all the facts in evidence, Hotel is the worst movie of 2002, and you can put that down in your datebook and sign my name to it.

I say that Hotel is the worst movie of 2002 because there is no other movie out there that will make mistakes on the level and magnitude of this movie. Movies make mistakes, everyone knows that; even the best movies have an error or two. Hotel has all sorts of errors, most of them at least arguably deliberate, if not completely mean-spirited. And these are not small errors, like cigarettes jumping from one hand to another by telekinesis, or a song from 1955 playing in a movie set in 1954. I am talking about big, huge, deadly, completely avoidable mistakes, the kind of things that get movies terrible reviews, the kind of things that kill careers, and rightfully so. Hotel makes every mistake it can make and then some, to the point that the conscientious reviewer can do little more than list them.

Choose good source material. If you can’t come up with an original screenplay, your best alternative is to come up with source material that is capable of being made into an interesting movie. Figgis here chooses “The Duchess of Malfi”, an obscure play from a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. (Salma Hayek’s character asks whether the playwright will be on the set; one almost wishes that he could.) I have never heard of “The Duchess of Malfi”, but as presented by Figgis it seems to be a very bad play indeed.

Don’t make a movie within a movie unless you know what you’re doing. This can work, mind you. Singin’ In The Rainis maybe the best example. I liked State and Main and Shadow of the Vampire from 2000. It can be done, and it can be done well. But here, the making of “Malfi”, the cinematic version of this intensely stupid play, detracts from the proceedings significantly. Nothing makes a bad movie worse than having bad actors deliver bad lines in iambic pentameter. Nothing.

Don’t make a Dogme movie. If you don’t know what Dogme 95 movies are, I am not about to enlighten you; I believe that there are some things that the world is better off not knowing. Suffice it to say that it’s this incredibly inane set of rules for filmmaking that attract people who are somehow physiologically incapable or making good movies. Hotel is not a Dogme movie, but the movie-within-a-movie is, and Figgis uses a lot of the Dogme conceits (nonexistent set design, handheld cameras, doing things on the cheap). I say “conceit” in the previous sentence as in “a conceited film-school piece of offal”, which Hotel is.

Don’t show John Malkovich eating human flesh in the first reel. Self-explanatory.

Don’t use stupid filming techniques. The common dig about modern art is, “My three-year-old could do better than that”. Well, if your three-year-old had a decent enough camera, she could probably make a better-looking movie than Hotel. The movie looks terrible. Herky-jerky handheld cameras predominate, to the point that the images are terribly-but-purposefully blurred. (If Figgis wants to be an Impressionist, he can buy a paintbrush.) The few scenes shot on a digital camera are horribly-yet-purposefully blurred, too, with just blocks of color streaming across the screen. The whole effect is amateurish in that pretentious way that only really skilled people can achieve. The movie is godawful enough as it is without looking godawful, too.

Don’t use that split-screen thingy again. Figgis’s last movie was something called Timecode, I think, that featured the screen cut into four quadrants, and you have to follow the action in all of them at the same time. It is used here, although not that extensively. It is a meanspirited thing to do to a nice film-festival audience who have already watched one too many movies. Stop. Please, for the love of God.

Cut it out with the “mock-umentary” stuff unless your name is Christopher Guest. Not only is there a movie-within-a-movie, Salma Hayek is making a documentary of the making of the movie-within-a-movie. Seriously.

Don’t cast a member of the cast of “Friends”. David Schwimmer is here, and he’s dreadful. Lucy Liu is here in a small part, but she is criminally underused. (A little catfight between Hayek and Liu is the movie’s highlight, unfortunately, it is broken up quickly before hair-pulling ensues.) The rest of the overly-large ensemble (including Burt Reynolds, for some bizarre reason) turn in unmemorable performances, or at least I hope to God that I can forget them.

However, as bad as Hotel is, and it is plenty bad, it ends on a note of hope. That is to say, I hope it never gets released. However, if I am wrong, and if this movie is released, and you happen to wander into a theater where it is playing, I have one bit of advice for you. Do not try to induce vomiting, and leave the theater as quickly as you can.