WEEKEND PREVIEW

 Here comes the weekend… long live the weekend…

 THE NOT SO GOOD:  You’ve seen a lot of Evolution before.  There are some variations on the theme, but Evolution is, after all is said and done, a new version of Ghostbusters.  Three guys and a girl, college professors who aren’t terribly focused on their work, a government that makes a mess of everything and a threat to the work that has to be stopped by the underdogs.

 So, what went wrong? 

There are two major problems with Evolution.  First, it seems afraid to push its comedy to the limits.  Maybe it’s a self-conscious ratings thing, maybe not.  But when you meet Bill Murray’s Peter Venkmann in Ghostbusters, you know that he’s going to do whatever is necessary to strip that young college hottie from her skivvies and teach her some new tricks.  When Orlando Jones, who plays a very similar role to Venkmann here, has a girl in his office, desperate for an “A” so she can get into nursing school because it will look good on her beauty pageant backgrounder, you see he’s a dog, but David Duchovny’s punchline when he interrupts – “I was coming to pick you up to go eat, but maybe you’ve eaten already.” – gets a laugh, but doesn’t play as real.  There just isn’t a sexual threat.  (And no, it’s not a race thing.  It’s a character thing.)

Likewise, the relationship between Duchovny and Julianne Moore is classic.  She appears uptight, but his charisma unlocks the tiger.  But we really don’t get to see the tiger unleashed until the movie is all but over.  And that takes us to the second problem.  This film has an incredibly inept third act.  The first two acts are a lot of fun and I enjoy all of these actors.  I would only complain that they laid on the effects too heavily.  But that would be okay if the film found a way to twist the third act. 

In Ghostbusters, each of the main four characters takes a significant turn and their character changes as part of the story.  Bill Murray’s charcter starts to care.  Harold Ramis’ becomes more of a man.  Sigourney Weaver’s character becomes the sex goddess of Murray’s fantasy… and beyond.  Only Ackroyd’s character kind of stays the same.  Even secondary characters, like Annie Potts, get to evolve.   On top of that, the third act, which is about the Ghostbusters turning out to be the real heroes, is loaded with gimmicks that work beautifully.  The crossed streams of their ghost catching machines… the Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man… the very specific set-up of actions and consequences.  It all works in Ghostbusters.  And it’s ridiculous.   But it works.  In this regard, Evolution just kind of paints by numbers until it gets where it is going.  Nothing seems sharp enough.  The audience gets the idea and goes for the ride, but Reitman & Co. make us work too hard to keep the movie afloat in our minds for it to be great popcorn entertainment.

And that’s too bad, because the film had so much going for it, elementally.  The performers are solid and likeable.  The effects are cool.  And I’ll go with the premise.  But the film just doesn’t evolve.

THE NOT SO BAD:  The line between Evolution and Swordfish is a thin one.  Neither is a great movie.  Whoever said that Swordfish was a cross between The Matrix and The French Connection should be strung up by his thumbs.  That said, it was not a painful sit.  I really didn’t like Gone in 60 Seconds and found things to irritate me abut it the entire way.  Not so in Swordfish.  This is a simpleminded, solid, bang-bang movie.  The reason why it’s not a great bang-bang movie is because it doesn’t seem to want to be.  Relationships are left razor thin.  Some of the really good ideas in the film are not nearly as clever as they could have been, leaving the depth out and the effects reigning. 

 The great revelation of this film is that Hugh Jackman is apparently Clint Eastwood’s illegitimate son.  (Kidding!)  But man, does he look like a young Eastwood the way he’s shot in this film.  Travolta has lost weight, but he still looks like wardrobe is covering.  Halle Berry’s boobs are… well, I like the fantasy of them better.  Her bare breasted shot is far from her best sexy moment.   She has a shot in some amazing lingerie, legs spread, that is truly breathtaking.  Best effect in the film.  But another set of nipples on a screen?  Yawn.  The fourth member of the team, Don Cheadle, took another career/bank account building role that comes just short of him rousting Huggy Bear.  Cheadle is always great, but more Traffic, less Mission To Mars please.

 In many ways, Swordfish reminds me of last year’s Mission: Impossible 2.  Robert Towne let everyone know that they had given him action sequences and he wrote backwards from there.  Swordfish has two major, never-saw-that-before sequences.  One at the beginning, which we have seen before, but never in the quantity seen here.  It’s basically a block wide BulletTime sequence.  The other is the bus stunt.  That one was not all that impressive to me.  But again, I’d be more willing to take the trip if I was connected with the characters.   I can offer lots of ideas for fixes, but it’s too late for that and 99 percent of you haven’t seen the movie yet anyway.  All I can tell you is, more character, more twists, less CG would be better for me.

All that said, Swordfish was okay for me.  Which probably means that a lot of you will love it with capital “L.”  Cool.

THE KINDA UGLY:  Legal battles continue to be the only real story in town this side of David Manning.   On one side of town, MGM’s announcement that they were pulling out of Basic Instinct 2 came seconds before Sharon Stone’s lawsuit to collect on her play-or-pay oral contract for the film was served.  The deal was $14 million against 15 percent of the worldwide gross.  Thing is, as public as all this was, Stone apparently never signed even a deal memo with the producers-to-be, Mario Kassar and Andy Vanja.  Oy!

On a happier, but more ominous note, Inside.com reports that  Miramax has settled their suit with the producers of O to the tune of $1 million.  The story has been around for a while, as Miramax bought the film’s distribution rights in March 2000 and was supposed to release it within a year… and failed to do so.  The studio was worried about the high school-based violence of the modern day Othello, directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Miramax finally sold the film to Lion’s Gate for release, but Miramax apparently would stil be the supplier of P&A dollars.  The producers say that Harvey Weinstein threatened them in various you’ll-never-work-in-this-town-again ways. 

Whatever happened, Miramax agreed to pay the producers $1 million to push this thing out of court.  The potentially ominous note is that this could encourage legal action between producers and studios over how movies were handled.  And while I don’t support Miramax’s actions here in any way, there is something strange about these relationships ending up in court.  On the other hand, if Miramax settled for $1 million, they probably deserved to pay $2 million for whatever they did do.  I’m sure that part of the settlement was that we would never – or at least not this decade – find out what really went down.

BAD AD WATCH:  Halle Berry at the MTV Movie Awards: “If you pay $8.50 and go see Swordfish, you get to see these.”  Nice.

JUST WONDERING:  If Shannon Elizabeth wants to be seen as more than a pair of boobs, why was she the only woman at the MTV Movie Awards to wear a completely see-through top?

READER OF THE DAY:  The Welder writes:  “Responding to "The Single One."  As an opera buff and knowing that Baz Luhrzman once directed opera, the opera sensibilities and parallels were obvious to me.  I would say that La Traviata handles its dramatic moments better.  I have two in mind.  The first is the throwing of money at the courtesan, and the second is the death scene.  Baz should have eliminated the "paying of my whore" scene.  It didn't have the plot behind it to have impact.  In La Traviata, the courtesan, Violetta, has been supporting the couple in the country where her health, which she knows about, improves.

She leaves her young lover for his family's honor and gives up her chance at a longer life.  His smallness in jealousy contrasts with her extreme sacrifice. And he insults her in front of all of "society". 

In Moulin Rouge, who of Satine's friends would have been insulted?  It just didn't play.  For the death scene, Baz should have just copied La Traviata exactly.  At the return of her love, Violetta, thinks she has a chance, feels a surge of energy, gets up, starts singing with hope and a smile, then drops stone dead.  Much better than Kidman's "write our story".  My suggestions come because I hated to see these flaws after the brilliance of the first 2/3rds of the film. 

Because I'm used to opera, mixing artificiality with earnest singing doesn't confuse.  I thought the use of pop songs most brilliant.  I loved the whole postmodernist sensibility, so conscious of itself and yet going for sincerity anyway.  In tone it reminded me of Blake Edward's 1965 The Great Race.  That movie came to mind the second time I saw Moulin Rouge (and you have to see it more than once) during Satine's big opening scene of Diamond's Are A Girl's Best Friend, which had striking similarities to The Great Race's show song by the courtesan in the western bar, who was also on a swing.   Does anyone else recall this scene and care to comment? 

Last comment/question?  Was Nicole Kidman cast because of her uncanny resemblance to the redhaired courtesan in Lautrec's posters?  I'm thinking of one in particular, where her head is tilted back.  Satine was shot like that many times.  Her performance, especially the comedic aspects, was quite good. But along with the rest of the females, it was Ewan McGregor whom I couldn't take my eyes off of.”

(S)Hockey adds:  “I've been reading everyone's comments about Moulin Rouge with great interest, and hoping that someone would address the biblical/Judeo-Christian mythology on the story.  I mean, we have a main character named CHRISTian, who is a champion of LOVE.  On the other hand, you have SATINe, self confessed "queen of the underworld."  When you watch the film from this perspective, the story becomes an interesting interpretation of the gospels, with Christian's miraculous love essentially being destroyed/sacrificed/betrayed for the sake of the "sinners" (inhabitants of the Moulin Rouge, the "underworld").  The death of love at first saves the sinners, and so it is therefore justified. But the ultimate triumph over evil comes in the end when Christian's love is "resurrected."

E ME:  Hmmmmm… whaddya think?  And what did you think of the movies you saw/will see this weekend?  Let us know!