Ready For Prime Time

Barbershop is the exception that proves the rule. It is almost always a bad idea to remake a popular television show into a movie. I Spy is the most recent example; there are others, too many to go into. Even given the wildly succesful five-year run that Barbershop has enjoyed on the small screen, it is still risky to put it on the big screen. Will the characters that we’ve grown to love translate over from television? Will there be enough story for an hour and a half? Will the events of the movie affect the arc of the story — in other words, can we all go back to watching Barbershop on Tuesday, 9pm (8 Central) as though nothing had happened?

Oh, wait a minute.

Barbershop was never a television show.

Silly me.

But you can see my point here, I hope. Barbershop is a fine movie in its own right, but it is, at heart, a television sitcom waiting to happen. Its heart is on the small screen. Its supporting characters are written very broadly, just as they would be on television (the reforming hoodlum, the Obligatory White Guy, the college kid, the befuddled old barber). It has a affection for low physical comedy as well as absurdist comic riffs (an extended argument about a bottle of apple juice, for example). It cries out from its very center for a nice time slot, maybe after Friends, so it can continue its story.

Whether you could re-assemble this kind of talented cast for a TV show is debtatable. The central character of Calvin, the owner of the South Chicago barbershop where the action takes place, is played by Ice Cube, who has a movie franchise (Friday) going strong, and a career as a rapper, and may not want to continue on the grueling production schedule of a TV comedy. Cedric the Entertainer, who plays the “controversial” character of Eddie the barber, has a sketch comedy series out there somewhere. But so many of the other characters are played by up-and-coming actors, and so many of the characters are not fully realized, that they deserve a big-time network television slot.

This is my perception, of course, but it’s a perception that makes it hard for me to review this movie. Barbershop is not a movie that lends itself to a great deal of analysis or contains a strong core of meaning. Its rambling plot consists of several slight story threads that interweave themselves loosely. But the stories are not anything special; what Barbershop is really about is introducing us to its characters and to a social setting we may not be familiar with. It is meant to entertain, to make the audience laugh. Because it does that supremely well, the movie can be forgiven any number of shortcomings.

The interesting thing about Barbershop is that it is essentially critic-proof and that it has, contrariwise, sparked so much criticism. In reading the reviews and the press clippings, there seem to be two areas of focus. The first is on the botched ATM robbery that begins the action, and the subplot that surrounds the two silly criminals and their attempts to open the ATM. Some people found it distracting; I thought that it was hilarious and inspired, bringing back the kind of physical comedy you don’t see much anymore. Some might have been offended by the portrayal of African Americans as bumbling crooks. But the subplot is handled so deftly that you’d have to be almost completely humorless not to laugh.

Then there is the annoying little mini-controversy surrounding the character of Cedric the Entertainer, and his jabs at African American civil rights icons. The staff of txreviews.com bears no ill-will in this world to anyone who is not Joaquin Phoenix or Richard Gere, but it implores anyone who really sees the portrayal of civil rights leaders in this movie — repeat, movie — as a serious problem to find something better to do with their time, like reading to schoolchildren or donating blood or going to get their hair cut in this kind of barbershop. The character in question who makes these “controversial” statements is clearly portrayed as someone who is completely full of it, and capable of saying all sorts of inane and argumentative remarks. (Sort of like Trent Lott, speaking of someone who needs a new hairstyle.) These comments are not, as they taught us in law school, presented for the truth of the matter stated, but to make a joke, and to illuminate the character. I agree that there were, and are, other ways to show this character’s traits without offending people, but it is funny, and it is the filmmaker’s prerogative to present characters in a certain way, and I hope that the DVD won’t be edited to take out the allegedly offensive conduct.

None of this is important, however, and if it is important to you, Barbershop is so well-made and so funny that it should compensate for any hurt feelings. If you’re really concerned about racism, though, I would suggest contacting NBC, CBS, and ABC and asking them why the Barbershop TV series isn’t on their fall schedules for next year.

Jaw-Droppingly Awful

True-blue sci-fi fans won’t appreciate me mentioning this, but science fiction is primarily written for juvenile tastes.

Now, don’t get your pointy ears in an uproar; it’s true, isn’t it? Most science fiction is not adult literature, it just isn’t. I like Star Trek as much as the next guy, but, like it or not, it is not written on a serious, highbrow, intellectual level. Lots and lots of science fiction is designed for, and marketed to, nine year old boys. The fact that lots of adults read and enjoy science fiction doesn’t automatically make it adult literature, it just means that there are lots of people who never got over being nine years old.

(Having said that, there is nothing wrong with liking science fiction. I like it myself. I mean to cast aspersions on no one, whether author or consumer. I’m only trying to make a point here; please, keep those negative comments to yourselves. Thank you.)

If you’re an adult reviewer, approaching the movie from an educated, sophisticated, mature adult perspective, Battlefield Earth is a putrid mess, no two ways about it. The acting is horrid, enough so that one hopes that John Travolta gets indigestion from all the scenery that he chews. The special effects aren’t up to what twenty-first century audiences expect (the ungrateful little wretches that we are). The story is patently unbelievable and ridiculous. The human characters are wooden and lacking in any interesting qualities. The aliens are scruffy and grungy and walk around on stilts. The dialogue is just wretched; the only high point is hearing Travolta step into his Primary Colors persona and engage in the occasional sophistry; “I said I wouldn’t kill him, I didn’t say that I wouldn’t order someone else to kill him.”

But if you’re a nine-year-old, or if you still have a nine-year-old’s attitude towards sci-fi, Battlefield Earth can be fun.

Battlefield Earth is set in the year 3000, in a time where no one is worried about the Y3K bug. The last of the human race lives in caves in the Rockies and eats rats. The world’s soap and shampoo supplies have been liquidated. Things are grim, but in a picturesque, snowcapped kind of way.

Barry Pepper is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, Our Hero, and he rides out of the caves on his white horse looking for adventure. Since the movie’s not called “Stupid Dork Rides Around on His Horse Until He Gets Lost,” he finds it in the form of the Psychlos, the nine-foot-tall alien overlords of the planet who capture him and stuff him in their metal processing plant.

The Psychlos have their home base in Denver. They’ve put a huge roof over it and added central heating, and what a good idea. (If the Department of Justice ever quits hounding Bill Gates, maybe he’ll put a roof on Seattle, make it fit for human habitation.) Inside the dome, the atmosphere is that of Psychlo, which is poisonous for humans. Humans have to use gas masks inside the dome, Psychlos have to use breathing tubes outside, and there is an awful lot of changing from one atmosphere to another.

The Psychlos are in the gold business, mining it out of the Rockies and shipping it back home via teleporter. (Some of the early action takes place in an a abandoned mall, one wonders if the Psychlos have gotten around to looting the local Zales or not.) John Travolta is the head of the Psychlo security division and wants to get into the gold-smuggling business. Unfortunately, the new vein of gold he’s found is in an area with high uranium levels, and Psychlo air explodes in the presence of radiation. (It just does, OK, accept it, and don’t worry about the physics.)

Battlefield Earth is Travolta’s movie, for reasons chronicled elsewhere. Hollywood vanity pieces like this have a well-earned reputation for badness and awfulness. Battlefield Earth is not as good as Hudson Hawk or George Clooney’s Fail-Safe remake, but it’s slightly better than The Last Action Hero or Brenda Starr or Fair Game. However, when you reach those levels of badness, fine distinctions matter little. Travolta doesn’t help matters one little bit; he’s snide, overbearing, hammy, and makes every mistake that evil overlords make in movies.

Travolta and Pepper have to trust each other, just a little, to work together and mine the gold. Everyone, even the nine-year-olds, can see this coming. It doesn’t happen though, not for a long time, as there’s an awful (in both senses of the word) lot of Psychlo corporate infighting nonsense we have to wade through first, not to mention a lot of defiant posing by Pepper to establish his macho leadership credentials. After a convoluted plot twist involving a lot of arrogant sneering on Travolta’s part and a lot of rat-eating on Pepper’s, Travolta hooks Pepper up to a “learning machine” so that he can learn the Psychlo language and the skills he’ll need to mine the gold. The learning machine works by setting off these tiny firefly sparks that zoom towards Pepper’s eyes, sort of like the little sparks that fly off of Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile.

The learning machine turns Pepper into Goodboy Will Hunting, able to figure out the Psychlo language and the mysteries of the equilateral triangle. It also turns him into a master of stitching up plot holes, of which Battlefield Earth has a sufficiency. Pepper (who also gets an hour in the Denver library to learn human-type stuff like the Declaration of Independence and where all the nuclear bombs are hidden) becomes smart enough to lead an insurgent attack designed to break the roof over Denver and set the human race free from Psychlo domination.

I know, I know, this sounds plenty dumb. Fortunately, it is a tiny bit less dumb than the source material, which I believe had more Scottish warriors. If we’d had bagpipes and kilts and claymores and bad imitation Sean Connery accents — or worse, Ewan McGregor — Battlefield Earth would have been the clear favorite for the worst movie of the decade. But, like I said, this is not a grown-up movie.

You may not want your nine-year-old to see Battlefield Earth; it’s a violent movie, although not a gory one. (One of the main characters has his arm severed at one point, but we see nary a drop of blood.) But if you decide to, they’ll get a kick out of it. There’s crumbling buildings and post-apocalyptic nonsense and gross-out moments and things getting broken and explosions and whatnot. It’s no roller-coaster ride, mind you, but at a certain childish level, all of the action and the scenery is kind of neat.

For me, Battlefield Earth is a qualified success on two levels. As a card-carrying ex-nine year old, I enjoyed the explosions and the infinity of shattering glass (no one gets cut, though) and the inherent goofiness of the story. (That, and the scene where the Harriers hide out in the parking garage.) As a cynical, jaded adult movie critic, I enjoy the process of writing a review that skewers the gaping plot holes and relentlessly bad acting. Anyone who is not in either of these two categories will find Battlefield Earth a jaw-droppingly awful excuse for a movie, one that should be avoided at all costs.

The Man With Three Brains Note to readers: I saw the new Brendan Fraser - Elizabeth Hurley movie Bedazzled the night before last, and was completely underwhelmed. In fact, since I had forgotten most of the plot points in the space of time spent walking from the theater to my car, I decided that I would refrain from writing a review. What was the point?Last night, I couldn’t get any sleep. I was tossing and turning all night, and had the strangest dream. I dreamt that I was writing a Bedazzled review. I saw myself staring at the screen, pounding the keyboard, typing away incessantly, untrammeled by word choice or uncertainty or typos. When I awoke, I went over to my computer, and, in fact, I had written a Bedazzled review in my sleep. In fact, I had written three separate Bedazzled reviews in my sleep. Apparently, three different areas of my brain had written three separate, widely divergent reviews of the same movie.

EGO:

Bedazzled is a perfectly average, forgettable movie starring Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley. Fraser plays a luckless, lovelorn schlump, slaving away at a tech-support center in San Francisco, slowly watching his sad, depressing life slip away one moment at a time. Hurley comes into his life as the Devil, offering him three wishes for his immortal soul. “You won’t miss it,” she promises. “It’s like your appendix.”

The meager script plays to the strengths of both characters. Fraser has gotten by with being a likeable, sympathetic comic hunk for years now. Hurley is characteristically both sexy and unapproachable in her diabolical role; she’s at her best when she can convince the audience that she’s above their petty wants and desires.

Bedazzled is a dumb, predictable, lifeless piece of bland cinematic fare, but nothing that American audiences haven’t come to expect in recent years. However, it is enlivened by Fraser’s Everyman appeal in a wide range of roles and Hurley’s sultry charms. Bedazzled works hard at being average, and mostly succeeds.

SUPEREGO:

One can only look in shock and horror at the way that the new movie Bedazzled presents the important metaphysical issues of our day. Instead of wrestling with the contrast between the Nietzchean and Manichean concepts of evil, Bedazzled presents a puerile — if not overwhelmingly infantile — view of man’s struggle with desire.

One only has to examine Dante’s Inferno for a more neoclassical look at the reality of eternal damnation:

S’oi credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fimma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

If Bedazzled has any similar thoughts, it keeps them to itself. There is no room here for the inventions of Dante, for the cold arrogance of Milton’s Lucifer, for the worldly countenance of Mephistopheles. The only power displayed by the Devil in this particular movie is the power to make seamless costume changes, and the pre-Raphaelite beauty of the chanteuse playing the Devil only detracts from the message.

The Devil here seeks not to ruin mankind, or even to tempt him into worldly greatness, but to tease and annoy him. By skirting the metaphysical questions of wrongdoing, Bedazzled yet again displays the astounding ignorance inherent in the American concept of evil. The only sin committed in this movie is avarice, committed by the producers, the studio, and even by the popcorn-sellers in the adjacent refreshment area.

ID:

Man, oh, man, what a fantastic movie this was! Oh, sure, that idiot Brendan Fraser was in it, you know (he wasn’t funny or anything) but Liz Hurley was just awesome! She played this wicked evil chick that everybody thought was the Devil or something. So she got to say all this really cool, evil stuff the whole movie, in that super-sexy accent she’s got. Way cool.

The best thing about the movie was her outfits. She got to wear all these really neat clothes, and she changed outfits like two or three times a scene, even. Most of the time, she wore these really low-cut red outfits, but then she’d change into something like a policeman’s uniform with a really tight miniskirt. And she was in this one scene where she was like, this teacher, and she had on this really short plaid skirt, and she was teaching this class and telling them not to do their homework and stuff. Where were the teachers like that when I was in school, dude?

And the best thing was, right at the end, they made like there was going to be a sequel or something. I usually hate when they do that, because most movies these days totally suck. But Liz Hurley was just so cool and wicked and sexy that I hope they do make a sequel, especially if that dimwit Brendan Fraser isn’t in it. I don’t get what women see in him.

Liz Hurley is so hot. And she dropped that dweeb Hugh Grant, you know, so she’s like maybe available or something. I mean, I don’t think I’ll get to meet her or anything, but a reptile brain can dream, can’t he? Especially that one red outfit she was wearing in her office… man, that was worth the price of admission all by itself. They need to make more cool movies like this one, dude. It was awesome.

Well, there you have it. Any comments, suggestions, or psychological referrals will be more than welcome.

Surreality Bites

In 1992, actor John Malkovich appeared as a clown in a Woody Allen movie called Shadows and Fog. Veteran British actor Donald Pleasence, best known for his role in The Great Escape, played a doctor in that movie. Pleasence played a preacher in a 1968 movie called Will Penny, with Charlton Heston in the title role. (With me so far?) In 1995, your humble reviewer met Charlton Heston at a Republican fundraiser in Dallas. This, therefore, gives me three degrees of separation from John Malkovich. (Your mileage may vary.)

The conceit of Being John Malkovich is that you can reduce that “Six Degrees of Separation” we’re all supposed to have down to one. For two hundred dollars, we’re told, you can enter a portal leading into the brain (consciousness?) (soul?) of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. You are with him as he eats breakfast, or rehearses a play, or catches a cab. After your time is up, you fall into a drainage ditch on the New Jersey Turnpike and have to hitchhike back to New York.

Now this… this is a brilliant idea, no mistake. In our fantasies about writing the Great American Screenplay, this is the kind of idea we wish we all had. It’s an idea that’s just beyond the cutting edge of reality while still being instantly comprehensible to everyone. It gives you a lead character that everyone knows and recognizes. And its one sentence summary — evoked by John Cusack as “You see the world through John Malkovich’s eyes, then after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike!” — may be the best pitch since “Arnold Schwartzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins.”

And, of course, with this wonderful, creative idea as the backbone, you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can assemble all sorts of characters, put them in almost any setting you want, slide them through the portal, and see what they’re like on the other side. You can, literally, do anything with this idea.

This is the promise of Being John Malkovich, but it is also the danger. C.S. Lewis noted that the problem with great ideas like this is that they exploit themselves spontaneously. Lewis, talking about his big idea in The Screwtape Letters, said that his demonic correspondence, like a runaway horse, “would run away with you for a thousand pages if you gave it its head.”

What happens to Being John Malkovich is that writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze give their imaginations free rein, and the movie runs away on them. Being John Malkovich is less like a runaway horse than it is like a runaway carousel, with horses and bodies flying around at top speed in dizzying arcs. But there’s no centripetal force to keep the movie from spinning wildly out of control. Being John Malkovich spits out eccentric, inventive ideas at a mile a minute. Each of the ideas isn’t really bad, in and of itself, but there are so many of them, piled one on top of the other, that the whole movie is a walk through Bizarro World.

Take the characters, for instance. John Cusack is a quirky puppeteer whose idea of puppet shows is Heloise and Abelard instead of Punch and Judy. Early on, he gets beat up by a critic, which apparently happens often. Cameron Diaz plays his wife, who’s sort of a cross between a young Geena Davis and Dr. Doolittle. (She’s got the funniest line in the movie, which I won’t share with you, as it changes the course of the movie.) Catherine Keener plays his co-worker and partner in the burgeoning business of sharing slices of Malkovich’s life. She seems perfectly normal for a while until she becomes a walking icon of lust. (Really.) It says something about Being John Malkovich that the only character who looks and acts normal the whole way through is Charlie Sheen.

But despite all of the layers of self indulgent weirdness, Being John Malkovich has three fantastic, wonderful elements that make it a must see. The first, and most obvious, is the performance of Malkovich himself. Malkovich may not win Best Actor, but he’s the Best Sport of the year for even agreeing to participate in this project. It’s easy to imagine what would have happened had he said no — we might have gotten something skin-crawlingly godawful like “Being Fran Drescher” — but Malkovich shows us all why this movie is only possible with an undeniably great actor in the title role. Part of the role is an inspired self-parody, part of the role shows off the best possession scenes since Steve Martin in All of Me, and part of the role is his participation in two of the weirdest sequences ever shot on film.

These are the other two reasons to see the movie. Twice, we’re transported into John Malkovich’s subconscious, and these two scenes completely redeem the movie. All of the bizarre and odd things that infest the movie come together in two thrilling, jaw dropping moments that are completely original while being completely unlike each other.

The key thing to remember about Being John Malkovich is that the whole concept of the portal is a misdirection. The audience isn’t really being sucked into Malkovich’s brain, it’s being sucked into the imagination of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. This is not a comfortable place for everyone, and when you get dumped out of the theater, you may feel disoriented and dizzy. But the high points of this thrill ride are well worth the price of admission.

Whatever Makes You Happy

Lots of people read the reviews on this website, and for that I am grateful. But I have no doubts what it is that people really want to know. That’s simple. People want to know whether a given movie is a good movie or a bad movie. Even an easy proposition, like how Identity is a good movie because it includes a lot of elements we’ve seen too many times in bad movies is too much information. This is why Roger Ebert does the thumbs-up or thumbs-down thingy, and it is why Rotten Tomatoes has “fresh” and “rotten” ratings. Simple.

(Note: I have not had one single movie review on my site ever get more hits than my top-ten list from 2002; the next-closest review has half again as many hits. Why? People want to know where the good movies are. Simple.)

For the last month, when people have asked me, in my high-and-mighty role as a Film Critic, what movies out now they should see, I have given them a very simple answer. “Go see Bend It Like Beckham“, I say.

“What?” they say.

“Bend It Like Beckham,” I reply. I usually say it very slowly, enunciating every word clearly, so I know they’ve heard it right, so I know they understand.

I usually get two responses. “What’s Bend It Like Beckham?” some say. If they say this, I explain. “Well, ‘Beckham’ is the name of a famous soccer player from England. The movie is about a young Indian girl from London who wants to play soccer, but her parents won’t let her.”

Generally, as soon as people hear the word “soccer”, their eyes glaze over, and they say, “Oh,”, and then tell me how much they liked Phone Booth. Fine.

But, sometimes, people will tell me, “Oh, yeah, my friend/cousin/mother/significant other saw that, and liked it a lot. Maybe I’ll go see it.” That’s more like it.

Bend It Like Beckham is a hard sell in this country. Think about it for a minute.

• The title is unhelpful. The word “Beckham” is the problem; nobody in this country knows who he is. Heck, I’ve seen the movie and I’m still not sure. He appears to be married to a member of the “Spice Girls”, whatever they were or are. He is ostensibly a player on a British soccer team; from what I can make out, he plays for the Manchester Vodaphones. He is famous because he can kick the soccer ball so that it “bends” around the goalie on its way to the net, thereby allowing his team to “score”. Unless there’s a scoreless tie, which seems to happen a lot.

   

(Note: This review will be halted for one minute so that fans of Manchester United can e-mail me to express their feelings about poking fun at the name of their team and their sport. Thank you.)

• The movie is about soccer. I will be the first one to tell you that I don’t get soccer. Period. I am a proud American, and a Dallas Cowboys fan, and I am constitutionally obligated to point out that soccer is low-scoring, dull to watch on television, and thereby un-American in every way. But that doesn’t detract, in any way, from the charm of Bend It Like Beckham. You don’t have to care about soccer, or even recognize its existence as a competitive sport, to enjoy Bend It Like Beckham.
• The movie is about the Indian community in England. First off, this makes it a foreign movie, and American audiences don’t watch many foreign movies, even though everyone speaks English. (Bend It Like Beckham closely resembles the underrated Billy Elliot, which never got a tithe of the audience it deserved.) Second, there’s the suspicion that this might be a “Bollywood” movie, where everyone sings and dances and such. Third, there isn’t a huge appreciation for Indian culture in this country as maybe there should be. (I love Indian food, but I have to put up with my dad teasing me about liking tandoori and naan bread. “Non-bread?” he says. “I’m not eating any non-bread. If it’s not bread, what is it?”) But this is irrelevant. If you liked the Greek family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you’ll like the Indian families in Bend It Like Beckham. (And given the audience that the former film got, that should be recommendation enough for the lot of you.)
• There aren’t any name-brand actors. True enough as far as it goes. Parminder K. Nagra has the lead role as Jes, and she’s not exactly what you would call a household name. Keira Knightley, playing the top player on Jes’s soccer team, is still a couple movies away from starlet-hood. There’s a crackerjack team of Indian and British actors backing them up, but none of them have done anything significant in America. (The big undiscovered talent, for my money, is Frank Harper as Knightley’s soccer-loving dad.)

None of this, though, is important, or that important. That Bend It Like Beckham is a hard sell in this country says a lot more about our taste, or lack thereof, than it does about the movie. And the movie is just fabulous, full of life and spirit and conflict and love.

Most, if not all American movies are about exceptionalism. (I am writing this in the time frame between the releases of X2 and The Matrix Reloaded, both hymns to exceptionalism.) Bend It Like Beckham is exceptional, but it is not about exceptionalism per se. It is, instead, about middle-class life and middle-class values and middle-class goals — chiefly that most elusive of goals: happiness.

Nagra plays Jes, an Indian teenager and certified tomboy who has to sneak out of the house to play soccer with the local girl’s team. She’s not playing in order to rebel against her parents, or to show society that she can, but because she’s good at it, she has fun, and it makes her happy. Her parents (Anupam Kher and Shaheen Khan) disapprove of her playing soccer — not because they’re overly strict or anything like that, but because they want her to be happy, and think that the way for her to be happy is to learn how to cook, and marry a nice Indian boy. (The climax of the movie is a huge, colorful Indian wedding involving Jes’s sister, played by Archie Panjabi.)

Bend It Like Beckham thrives on the idea that what makes children happy won’t necessarily make their parents happy. (This is portrayed in the Indian family as a conflict over tradition and culture, but is nicely counterpointed in Knightley’s ordinary British family. Fortunately, the result of all this striving for happiness is, as translated by writer-director Gurinder Chadha, is to make the audience very happy, as you will find shortly after you buy your ticket and take your seat.

I could say more. I probably should say more. But I won’t. All I will tell you here is what I’ve been telling everyone. Go see Bend It Like Beckham. Simple.

Annoying and Tacky Beyond Belief

All in all, taking everything into consideration, weighing all the variables, and reviewing all the facts admitted into evidence, I can honestly say there is not a movie in recent memory that I have disliked more than Best in Show.

Best in Show is Christopher Guest’s acclaimed “mockumentary” spoof of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. I watched it after seeing parts of the real thing on cable, an experience that engendered a feeling of absolute incredulous moral outrage. After watching all the splendid collies and German shepherds and spaniels and beagles parade through Madison Square Garden, I was incensed to find that the winner of the coveted Best in Show prize was not a glossy-coated Irish setter or a brave Siberian husky but a transcendently annoying little squeak-toy of a bichon frise, a dog with the intelligence and usefulness of a throw pillow. I couldn’t have been more shocked if my mother’s vicious, yappy Shi-Tzu — a dog that barks at anything and everything, including falling leaves — had won. I spent the rest of the week questioning where our national values had gone. How could we ignore the essential canine goodness of a sturdy Labrador retriever or a loyal Dalmatian in favor of a spoiled lapdog that wouldn’t chase a Frisbee on a bet and had been subjected to more hairspray than a Miss Texas pageant winner? There was just something deeply, deeply wrong about the whole thing, and I went to see Best in Show hoping to see a comic expose of this national disgrace.

The main targets of Best in Show’s satiric jabs are not the dog show judges; oddly enough, they’re treated with a great deal of respect. The institution of the dog show itself doesn’t even draw a lot of ironic commentary. (Unless you count Fred Willard’s inspired spoof of TV commentator Joe Garagiola, which is somewhat akin to hunting dairy cows with assault rifles equipped with laser scopes.) No, Best in Show focuses exclusively on the dog owners and dog handlers and their relationships to each other, and doesn’t spend a lot of time making fun of much else. In fact, Best in Show is written such that the dogs almost disappear into the background; this could have been a movie about stamp collectors, Civil War reenactors, Hell’s Angels, Bill Clinton apologists, or just anything, any kind of weird association or convention that you want to think about. Best in Show is about dogs the way that Casablanca was about the Moroccan exit-visa process.

Best in Show tracks five contestants to the prestigious Mayflower dog show; four of whom are in more or less dysfunctional relationships. (The fifth is Guest himself, playing a lonely North Carolinian bloodhound owner; it’s almost impossible to remember him as Count Rugen in The Princess Bride after watching this role.) Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock play a consumer-class Illinois couple; the movie begins and ends with them and their Weimaraner in canine psychotherapy. John Michael Higgins and Michael McKean play a pair of swishy New York hairdressers with two elaborately coiffed Shi-Tzus. (The horror, the horror.) Jennifer Coolidge and Jane Lynch play the owner and trainer of the favorite, a stuck-up standard poodle. And co-writer Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara play a painfully geeky Florida couple besotted with their Norwich terrier.

Best in Show takes enormous glee in pointing out all the various dysfunctionalities of all these relationships. Posey and Hitchcock are the most troubled, their anxieties are at a quick simmer that proceeds to a full rolling boil. Higgins and McKean seem to be the most stable, but they’re quietly bit(c)hy to each other; “Are you sure you need eight kimonos? We’ll only be there 48 hours.” Spoiled society wife Coolidge has an unstated crush on Lynch’s character that finds a surprising expression. Levy and O’Hara have the most difficult time of all, with Levy trying to deal with the fact that his wife seems to have slept with every man on the Eastern Seaboard.

All of this is done very well; Best in Show has a solid ensemble cast of comic character actors and a sharp script. And yet, I could not bring myself to love it.

The whole way through Best in Show, I couldn’t help thinking about a line from another movie; something that Helen Hunt said to Jack Nicholson’s obsessive-compulsive novelist in As Good as It Gets. “Do you have any control over how weird you allow yourself to get?” Practically every attempt at humor in Best in Show is based on the character’s inability to control their weirdnesses on camera; the various manifestations of their obsessions spill over uncontrollably and spontaneously.

Best in Show is cruel to its characters, which it actually needs to be, a little. Comedy is always cruel to someone, although that cruelty is usually leavened by grace or timing or surprise. Sometimes Best in Show has these elements; the way that Eugene Levy inquires about room service is priceless, and the discovery of Guest’s other hobby is a scream. But the overall tone of Best in Show is merciless and mean-spirited. It tries to wring every last possible drop of humor from the most pathetic aspects of the lives of its characters. And the characters are all oblivious to their quirks; they’re so self-obsessed and strange that they don’t realize they’ve lost control over how they appear to the audience. What should have been the funniest moments in the picture — Posey’s attempt to buy a certain type of dog toy in a pet store, to name one example — come off in a way that is shrill and forced and essentially unfunny. And things don’t get better as the movie goes along; the overlong epilogue contains the most painful moments of the movie.

The characters I liked best in Best in Show were the supporting characters, all of whom were suffering various indignities at the hands of the dog owners; Jim Piddock (Lethal Weapon 2, “But… you’re black!) as Willard’s Limey co-announcer, Don S. Davis (Twin Peaks) as one of the judges, Ed Begley, Jr. (St. Elsewhere) as the supremely patient hotel manager. They all looked as though they felt trapped in a situation they couldn’t control, and I sympathized with them like you couldn’t believe.

Best in Show is not a bad film from anyone’s perspective. If this is the kind of movie you like, you’ll undoubtedly think it’s brilliant. As for me, though, I found it annoying and tacky beyond belief. I would rather spend two hours trapped in an elevator with a yappy little bichon frise than ever watch Best in Show again, and you can put that down in your datebook and sign my name to it.

Fantasy Life

I don’t know if you watch sports — specifically NBA basketball — enough to get this, but maybe you have. Nike is running these commercials — most of them animated cartoons — starring Cleveland Cavaliers phenom LeBron James. (If you don’t know from LeBron James, you can skip this paragraph with no loss.) The commercials show LeBron as a basketball samurai, fighting ninjas and Shao-Lin masters in the “Chamber of Fear”, whatever that is. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, until you think about it. Here’s LeBron James, 20 years old as of this writing, a millionaire several times order, a God-given talent to play NBA hoops, the best player in the league as soon as Shaq retires, and it isn’t enough, he has to be Bruce Lee on top of that.

Well, that’s his fantasy, and unlike most of us, he has the ability to live it (at least in cartoon form). Kevin Spacey has his fantasy, too, and despite two Oscars and whatever money he’s made doing movies, he wants to live it out, too, and good for him. That’s basically what Beyond The Sea is, really, Kevin Spacey’s fantasy life, in a theater near you.

Kevin Spacey wants to be Bobby Darin. And if you’re young enough to know who LeBron James is, you may want to know who Bobby Darin was. Basically, he was Frank Sinatra at a 40% markdown. (Spacey’s Darin spends a lot of time staring at Sinatra posters.) He was a teen idol, briefly (with a silly song called “Splish-Splash” that shows up in dishwasher commercials and suchlike to this day), and married Sandra Dee, who was the Jessica Simpson of her day, except that Sandra Dee knows the difference between tuna fish and chicken, or at least I hope so.

Anyway, so that’s Bobby Darin, and if you don’t know anything about him going in, you’ll probably like Beyond The Sea more than you otherwise might have. It helps to like early rock ‘n’ roll, and late swing music, and to know what the Copacabana was before Barry Manilow got a hold of it. Anyone who is really a Bobby Darin purist (I don’t know any of these people, but they might be out there) is going to be a bit off-put by the proceedings, because Beyond The Sea is not what you would call realistic. (Not least because it’s Spacey’s voice, not Darin’s, that you hear.)

The unreality of Beyond The Sea is illustrated early on; there’s a conversation between Darin and the young boy who is playing his younger self in the movie (there’s some foolishness concerning a movie-within-a-movie that you can ignore). Darin walks us through his early childhood illness (which would kill him at a young age) and shows how his love of music carried him through, which ends with Spacey/Darin doing a nice MGM musical moment, dancing in the streets of the Bronx with a cavalcade of extras. The little boy interrupts him, pointing out that this couldn’t have happened. “Memories are like moonbeams,” Spacey/Darin explains. “You make of them what you will.”

Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. What follows is not the life of Bobby Darin, but a fantasia on Bobby Darin themes, which is really just an excuse for Kevin Spacey to trot out his lounge act. And this is — well, it’s outstanding, probably the best performance of the year by an actor. Heck, I might actually pay a cover charge and order a watered down Maker’s Mark to see him do it live, in person, in a nightclub somewhere, if that could be arranged. Whenever Spacey’s on stage, Beyond The Sea swings with energy, rhythm, and flair.

Spacey, of course, can’t completely whitewash his subject, and so you get the dark side of his idol; the breakup of his marriage to Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth, looking smashing), a shattering revelation about his mother (the always-welcome Brenda Blethyn) and an embarrassing slide into radical 60’s politics. All of these are depressing, but necessary, and it’s reasonable to put up with it in the spirit of the biopic, and move on until the next music scene.

It would be all too easy to dismiss Beyond The Sea as a vanity project, even though that’s exactly what it is. Anybody can make a movie that’s a vanity project, if they want to spend the money badly enough. But Spacey is doing more than puffing himself up. He’s living his dream, and he’s generous enough to share that with us. Even though Beyond The Sea is more than a bit spotty, and weird in places, seeing Spacey go through Bobby Darin Fantasy Camp is a real pleasure, not one to be missed.

Seinfeld West

The Big Lebowski opens with a wonderful sequence. We see a bleak nighttime Western vista, we hear the distinctive voice of Sam Elliott over the cool Western harmonies of the Sons of the Pioneers singing “Drifting along with the Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” And then we see a tumbleweed, rolling gently along the desert plains, slowly moving this way and that. And then, all of a sudden, pow! The perspective shifts, and we see the lights of the Los Angeles basin below.

And if the whole movie were like that — which it is not — we would, again, be standing in reverent awe at the talents of the Coen Brothers, Ethan and Joel, creators of Raising Arizona, Millers Crossing, and Fargo, and two of our great nation’s national treasures. Unfortunately, the tumbleweed that opens The Big Lebowski is more than just an arresting visual image, it’s a metaphor for its lead character, and ultimately, a metaphor for this shaggy, meandering movie..

The tumbleweed in question is known as The Dude. The Dude is described as the “laziest man in Los Angeles County” — and therefore a leading contender for laziest man in the world. The Dude is a walking, talking piece of Woodstock Nation twenty-five years past its shelf life. He’s got no job, no money, and the ability to smoke more pot, bowl more frames, and drink more White Russians than any six men.

The Dude spends the movie trapped inside a complex and twisty plot involving the kidnapped trophy wife of a crippled millionaire. It’s the sort of plot that you’ll enjoy watching much more than I’ll enjoy trying to explain it, so I won’t. Let’s just say that The Dude is blown by chance all around Los Angeles, bumping into a stream of warped characters the same way that the wind bumps a tumbleweed across the Western prairies.

The plot structure is loosely akin to a Raymond Chandler noir thriller, with The Dude roaming Los Angeles in the Phillip Marlowe role. There’s even a cute little vignette where Coen Brothers veteran Jon Polito shows up, playing a hard-boiled private eye, and assumes that The Dude is also a detective. The Dude is utterly bewildered by this comment, as well he should be — he takes a passive role throughout the movie, acting only when necessary. And in this fashion, he wanders through the movie — the entire movie, let me add — wandering around aimlessly, hardly ever picking up speed.

At first glance, watching this movie circle around the screen like a big shaggy dog looking for a place to lie down, I thought that The Big Lebowski was the Coens subtly poking fun at Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles. Then I decided that they were just poking fun at themselves and their movies. And then — in the car, on the way home — I figured it out. The Big Lebowski — and I mean this as praise, not criticism — is a two-hour Seinfeld episode. It’s a movie about nothing.

The Dude, of course, is the Cosmo Kramer of this ensemble. Jeff Bridges is The Dude, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job. Bridges owns this movie. Where a lesser actor could have made The Dude nothing more than a hippie dufus, Bridges brings a certain depth of character to the role. Since we’re with The Dude the whole movie, it’s important that he be offbeat without being annoying, eccentric without being inane. Bridges is convincing throughout, whether he’s delivering simple truths (”The car is stolen.”) or confused blather.

John Goodman is Walter Sobchak, the George Costanza of the group. Walter’s a rageaholic loser who is capable of simultaneously caring for his ex-wife’s Pomeranian and pulling a firearm on an erring bowling opponent. Goodman is the source of many of the film’s best lines and funniest belly laughs, and The Big Lebowski is his best film in years. In contrast, Steve Buscemi is almost the opposite of Jerry Seinfeld. Whereas Seinfeld is a sharp observational comedian, Buscemi’s character is a dim-witted bowler who has to be reminded every so often what is going on. It’s a slight part, and Buscemi does only a slight acting job. Rounding out the ensemble is Julianne Moore as Maude Lebowski. Moore is the best reason to see this movie. She’s only in three scenes — if you don’t count one of the two dream sequences — but she steals the show as an embarrassingly frank performance artist with a Katherine Hepburn accent.

Like in any Seinfeld episode, the plot is almost an afterthought. What’s important about The Big Lebowski isn’t the wandering plot, it’s the little vignettes and character and jokes along the way. This is a comedy, full of sharp observational humor, a ton of the weird supporting characters that is the Coen Brothers hallmark, and a couple of astonishingly well-crafted shots. As long as you don’t go expecting Fargo — or The Hudsucker Proxy, for that matter — The Big Lebowski is a fun time at the movies. Pity we don’t get to say that too often.

Black Smoke Rising Against That Blue Sky

Black Hawk Down may not be the best war movie ever made, but it is hands-down the most realistic. Black Hawk Down is determined to show us the details of war; it is all about the persistent hail of bullets and the dangers that lurk from the rooftops and alleyways of Mogadishu. It is interested in the way men in combat communicate, from the terse radio commands of the American forces to the towering columns of black smoke that rise against the blue sky, tire fires lit by locals to warn the Somali warlords that American helicopters have left their base. Black Hawk Down puts us into the midst of the action, places us inside the helicopters racing down the African coastline, puts us on the streets of Mogadishu where reckless Somali militiamen race into enemy fire, puts us in the driver’s seat of a Humm-Vee through hostile territory.

The movie’s extraordinary sense of reality and verisimilitude reaches beyond the sharp edges of combat. Black Hawk Down manages to capture the sheer insanity of war - not just the loss of life or the heroic deeds but all the absurdity of combat. The Bakara Market battle was absurd on many levels, essentially it involves untrained, barefoot Somali militia shooting at well-trained, better armed American forces so that they can continue to shoot at unarmed civilians who are starving to death all around them. Black Hawk Down doesn’t even try to pretend that the politics of the area are anything but nonsense. From the unrelenting, iron logic of the increasing American involvement (and its bleak absurdist revelation that someone needs to go rescue the soldiers who were sent to rescue the Rangers who were sent to rescue the helicopter crew) to the near-comic presence of the Pakistani peace-keeping forces to the occasional macabre juxtaposition of battleground and playground, the insane unreality of combat is as much a part of Black Hawk Down as the helicopters and the bullets and the clouds of dust that permeate its landscape.

It is that absurdist quality that separates Black Hawk Down from other American war movies. For example, you get the sense that the Somalis are not the enemy; we don’t have the same gut reaction to them we would have seeing a line of Nazi infantry. There’s almost a sense that they’re not an enemy force - they just happen to be shooting at our soldiers. As a result, there’s a conspicuous absence of flag-waving or patriotic fervor or even simple honor in our feat of arms. Black Hawk Down is about maintaining courage and pride in the wake of an awful disaster; it’s about survival, and counting on the men in your unit, and holding out bravely until help comes. It is about the vivid and graphic portrayal of bravery and bloodletting and butchery and brotherhood.

The quality of the acting is high, with a few outstanding performances. William Fitchner is at his least twitchy as a dedicated Delta Force sergeant, Josh Hartnett rescues his career as an introspective Ranger troop leader, Sam Shepard is impressive as the tenacious major general, and Tom Sizemore was born to make war movies. But it’s not the acting that you’ll remember from this movie; the savage imagery is what counts.

Black Hawk Down is a splendid, almost unprecedented, piece of filmmaking that yanks you out of your comfortable seat and drops you into the danger zone of Mogadishu and never lets go. More than any other movie this year, it deserves to be seen on the big screen. It is a stunning, praiseworthy achievement, and Ridley Scott deserves the Oscar for Best Director for making the story immediate, graphic, personal, and real.

Hong Kong Phooey

Of the major horror sub-genres, vampire movies are easily the most adaptable. Think about it. Frankenstein movies haven’t changed all that much because they still need that mad-scientist-in-Bavarian-castle setting. If you made a Frankenstein movie today, you’d have to have the monster be a virus or something — and outside of Michael J. Fox, there aren’t any actors that could play a virus convincingly. Movies about mummies would still have to be set in Egypt. There’s not much you can do with werewolves except take them to London or Paris, unless you want to have a teenage werewolf or something. (And there’s that Michael J. Fox thing again.)

But you can have vampires do anything, and you can place them in any genre you want, just about. You can have traditional vampire movies (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) or have the Anne Rice version (Interview with the Vampire), or play it for laughs (Vampire in Brooklyn). You can put vampires in locales from sunny Southern California (The Lost Boys) to squalid Mexican dives (From Dusk Till Dawn) to your local high school (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer). Were it not redundant, you could have a movie about a law firm full of vampires. Any day now, I expect we’ll see a movie about a vampire third baseman who has to decide whether to play a day game in order to break the home run record.

Or, you can insert the vampire legend into a Hong Kong action movie — and when you do that, you get Blade. Wesley Snipes has the Chow Yun Fat role in this movie — the silent, expressionless hit man who destroys everything in his path. In this case, the everything happens to be vampires that explode into CGI shards instead of dead, bleeding corpses.

Snipes has less to say here than as the fugitive in U.S. Marshals, but does a demonstrably better job here as a half-vampire wreaking vengeance on the bloodsuckers. Blade is a silent, brooding presence, laying waste to vampires without a shred of remorse. He is as cold as his silver-bladed sword, as single minded as his garlic-filled bullets. Yet, he’s not without quirks: Blade drives a battered muscle car and has to glean Rolex watches from his vampire victims in order to stay solvent.

Like any good Hong Kong movie, Blade is heavy on the chopsocky action. For some reason, Blade spends a lot more time using his kung fu artistry than using the traditional anti-vampire weapons of garlic and silver. (Blade dismisses a man-portable arc lamp as being too heavy, although it looks to be a more efficient tool to dispatch vampires.) Unfortunately, the guiding hand of John Woo is absent from this film, relegating Blade to the status of The Replacement Killers, which it most strongly resembles.

The Replacement Killers is the last movie I saw that I didn’t review — mostly because it made no impression on me, and I couldn’t remember anything other than noise, violence, and the intensity of Fat’s performance. Blade has a little more going for it, and has the vampire myth to draw from — but other than that, it’s the same kind of movie — exciting, with well choreographed action scenes, but with no resonance.

With a stronger villain (Stephen Dorff is (pardon the pun) curiously bloodless as the head vampire, leaving us to wonder what Denis Leary might have done with the role), a wittier script, and a strong supporting cast, Blade might have been able to rise beyond the level of commonplace summer entertainment. As it is, Blade is an average action movie that serves to do nothing but remind us that the summer movies just keep getting dumber and the vampire movies just keep multiplying.