Every week the marquees change, and the choking surfeit
of trash we are boggled in gets replaced by … more trash! One look at the movie
ads clogging your newspaper can make you wonder if your brain is coming
derailed from your body. The Whole Ten
Yards , Johnson Family Vacation , Hellboy , Starsky and Hutch , 13 Going
On 30 , Mean Girls , and various
and sundry Kill Bill s and knockoffs
thereof-the list gets longer every time I turn the page. Who cares about The Alamo , that interminable bore that
makes Billy Bob Thornton, Dennis Quaid and Jason Patric look like the faces on
a box of Smith Brothers cough drops? I’m sure I’ve seen movies I have hated as
much as Dogville , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
and About Adam , but I just can’t
remember what they are. Sadder still, what does it say about the state of
so-called criticism today when these movies nobody wants to see blast forth ads
full of thumbs-up-”way up”? What does it say about the public when the more
money dogs like Scooby-Doo 2 drag in
at the box office, the worse they seem to be? And the summer, when they save
the worst movies for the brain-dead, hasn’t even started. I should have
listened to my mother and opened a revival house. Then I could at least go
broke in style, knowing I pleased one person-myself.
And so it is with some relief when a movie comes along
like Laws of Attraction , a slick,
lushly appointed romantic comedy which will not appeal to tattooed freaks,
violence-craving kids, prison inmates or critics desperately trying to prove
how young and hip they are, but which does provide an element of the one word
that has disappeared from the world of movies. Remember the word
“entertainment”? It went the way of Vincente Minnelli. So is Laws of Attraction a great comedy? Get
real. What was the last great comedy you saw, or the last great anything? No,
in essence, Laws of Attraction is
about only two things: (1) how pretty Julianne Moore is, and (2) how pretty
Pierce Brosnan is. O.K., it’s not Billy Wilder. But compared to all of the
films I’ve suffered through lately about killing and war and dope fiends and
pedophiles and suicide, I’ll take pretty. Pretty is good.
The two stars are battling New York divorce lawyers who
fall in love hating each other. We just saw the same plot with George Clooney
and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the godawful Coen Brothers fiasco Intolerable Cruelty , but so what?
Everything is a copy of something else these days; inspired originality is as
hard to come by as one of Mr. Brosnan’s 007 Maseratis at a half-price sale. And
even with its plodding tempo and dull padding, Laws of Attraction is a better, edgier movie. The adversarial
Moore-Brosnan duo is rich, beautiful and successful, but they never go
anywhere. They do not date, or end up on Page Six. They don’t seem to have any
friends or lovers or get any bang for their bucks. What is wrong with this
picture? She is Audrey Miller, a crack attorney who is not beyond framing the
husbands of her female clients to get them better settlements. Now she’s up to
her Palm Pilot fighting off the toughest opponent she’s ever faced in a
courtroom. He is Daniel Rafferty, new in town, smart, ruthless, a GQ cover who has never lost a case. From
their opening arguments on, it’s open war in the divorce-court trenches, using
every strategy from apology to insult as they thrust and parry their way
through New York, drinking lethal Mexican cocktails, landing in bed in a moment
of horny weakness with him showing up in court dangling her panties. Two pit
bulls whose battles in one divorce trial after another become fodder for the
tabloid-news channels. Ridiculous, of course, but it’s the same stuff they
print every day in the New York Post .
Things boil over with the latest boldface divorce war between two instant
celebs, a fried-brains-a-flaky designer named Serena (Parker Posey) and her
rock-star husband, Thorne (Michael Sheen), the lead singer for a group called
the Needles. Each of them is fighting over a castle in Ireland, so it’s off to
the land of leprechauns to depose the household staff. Among the fiddles, clog
dances and shamrocks, the movie takes a detour, and the two very charming stars
get a chance to display how much charm they really have, getting married in a
drunken Guinness stout stupor. Back in Manhattan, when he wins the divorce case
because of a piece of evidence he finds accidentally in her garbage bin, it’s
time for them to hit the judge’s chambers for their own divorce. By this time,
the movie has collapsed along with every attempt at artificial respiration-but
they’re so pretty to look at, and this movie isn’t over yet. If you haven’t
dozed off, there are more surprises on the way.
The eternally debonair Brosnan, who is more underrated
than he should be, mixes some of his celebrated sardonic James Bond wit with
the sensitivity he showed in the marvelous film Evelyn . The delectable Ms. Moore is clearly having a rest from her
usual tense and demanding assignments. Famous for roles that are usually one
step away from depression, danger and death, they both look like they are
having a swell time playing a sexy, relaxed, contemporary and self-confident
rivalry in the Tracy and Hepburn mold. And there is a crisp, appealing and
hilarious contribution by Frances Fisher, who plays Ms. Moore’s rich, vain
mother. This ageless logarithm with the face lifts and the Eve Arden wisecracks
is, in real life, almost the same age as Julianne Moore. When Mr. Brosnan meets
her for the first time, he asks, “Are you really 56?” She purrs girlishly,
“Parts of me are.” She’s got all the best lines-or maybe it’s just that they’re
the only lines in the picture that don’t sound like they’ve been rewritten a
dozen times. Depending on which credits you read, several screenwriters have
been listed. Sometimes two and sometimes three-Aline Brosh McKenna, Karey
Kilpatrick and Robert Harling-are credited, which is never a good sign. The
dialogue is so muddled it’s hard to know who wrote what, but Mr. Harling ( Steel Magnolias , The First Wives Club ) has such a talent for clever zingers you can
almost place bets on which lines are his. The movie’s weak stab at making some
kind of statement on the divorce issue doesn’t ring true at all, and although
the British director, Peter Howitt, proved with the Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors that he can juggle styles
and tempos without confusing excess, he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with
American comedy. Thank you, Jesus, for the two stars. It’s their movie all the
way, and Mr. Howitt has the wisdom to just get out of the way and let them go
at each other like chinchillas in heat. I liked Laws of Attraction , but it doesn’t really add up to much more than
a fun date flick-for folks who are still dating after 50.
Douse That Fire
For relentless, mean-spirited, stomach-heaving violence,
look no further than a depressing horror called Man On Fire . Everything is incoherent about this mess, from the
unbelievable plot to the mixed-up geography. It starts in El Paso, then moves
across the Mexican border to Juarez, although the locations look like Mexico
City. Occasionally one of the many cars loaded with killers and kidnappers will
pass the famous scenic volcano Popocatepetl, near Cuernavaca. Suffice it to say
nothing about this pumped-up, hyperthyroidal Tony Scott revenge flick makes
sense, but it takes two hours to kill off as many people and demolish as many
vehicles as Charles Bronson used to do in 30 minutes. Denzel Washington plays
Creasy, a scruffy, drunken tough guy who has seen better days fighting
terrorists. Desperate for money to feed his Jack Daniels habit, he cleans up
and go to work as a bodyguard for a Mexican millionaire with a pretty blond
wife (Radha Mitchell) and a cute, blond and thoroughly precocious little
daughter (played by cute, blond and thoroughly precocious child star Dakota
Fanning). She adores the big, black former counterterrorist who specializes in
bone-crunching violence in two languages, with subtitles. To him, it’s a job.
He’s paid to protect the kid, not be her pal or playmate. Overwritten by Brian
Helgeland, who seems to be writing half of the brainless blockbusters coming
out of Hollywood these days, the film tries to delve beneath the hard exterior
of this killing machine. He’s sullen, depressed and guilty about his past (“Do
you think God will ever forgive us?” he asks his retired buddy, Christopher
Walken, who is totally wasted in the movie but at least doesn’t play the
villain for a change). The movie never explains what it is that Creasy is
guilty about. He once tried to commit suicide, but the gun jammed. He considers
that his lucky bullet. You flunk Formula Film Class 101 if you don’t know (1)
that cute little moppet will be kidnapped, (2) that lucky bullet will find a
purpose in a crucial moment in the screenplay, and (3) Creasy will find his own
humanity and heart. She buys him a medal of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost
causes. He teaches her to swim. But first there are about 2,000 Mexicans to
kill. The little girl disappears, Denzel is riddled with enough burning iron to
incinerate a mere mortal, and instead of heading for San Diego or Pizmo Beach, he
takes on the case all by himself, dispensing advice to the rats and hoods of
the barrio like: “Revenge is a meal best served cold.” Man On Fire piles on every blood-splattering Latino cliché from
Anthony Mann’s Border Incident to
Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic , with
tortures even the Punisher never thought about. I can’t tell you how dismaying
it is to watch a great actor like Denzel Washington ripping off one man’s
fingers and ears, one by one, with a carving knife, then sealing the bloody
stumps with a hot cigarette lighter. The audience screams for more. So he
inserts a remote-control time bomb into another victim’s alimentary canal and
pushes the death button. I am amazed the Mexican government hasn’t found a way
to seek revenge against Tony Scott for the damage he has done to the Mexican
tourist industry. No wonder the movie is so addled about where it takes place.
By the time Denzel takes on the entire country, blowing up everything in sight,
the movie’s opening crawl (“There’s a new kidnapping every 60 minutes, and 70%
of the victims never survive”) has become a reality illustrated with arty
camera angles, pretentious jump cuts, noisy explosions, fast-forward speed
projection, and all manner of annoying and distracting camera tricks that make
the movie impossible to follow-and who cares, anyway? Man On Fire turns one of the most beautiful countries in the world
into a hopeless dump of rotting immorality and crime where nobody is safe.
According to this cynical movie, the government officials, the businessmen, the
peasants, the children, even the cops are corrupt and dangerous, and there is
no authority figure in the entire country trustworthy enough to turn to for
help. It’s up to a man like Denzel/Creasy to smash skulls together, even if it
costs him his own life. Preparing for the throw-up violence in the final reel,
Christopher Walken surveys the corpses and says, “Creasy’s art is death-he’s
about to paint his masterpiece.” In today’s cinematic pathology, garbage comes
in many forms. In the long, incomprehensible and preposterous Man On Fire , you get all of them in the
same movie.
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