FRIDAY UPDATE

Well, that’s what I get for rushing…

In the Billy Wilder piece, I called Ernst Lubitsch, Charles, as I was thinking about Wilder’s collaborator on the Lubitsch film, Charles Brackett.  Then, I transposed Otto Preminger and Stanley Kramer as the directors of Witness for the Prosecution and Advise and Consent.  Duh.  My apologies.

IN A PANIC:  After battling for a long time to get people to understand that Fight Club was about a whole lot more than violence, here I am, stuck as one of the few to be seriously disappointed by David Fincher’s follow-up, Panic Room.  Forgive me, but as Gladiator was the first Ridley Scott movie that could have been directed by Tony Scott, Panic Room is a movie that has none of Fincher’s intellect and too much of his style.  Here is a movie that could have easily been made without a single second of CG.  As lovely as shots cutting through the interior of the house in this film are, such visual virtuosity strikes directly against the heart of what Fincher seems to have been trying to achieve by picking such a simple, character driven story. 

Almost nothing makes sense in this supposed-to-be-simple thriller.  The entire film turns on the coincidence that the bad guys who have inside information about a hidden treasure wait until the first night that Jodie Foster’s character and her daughter move into this giant, creaky, cold house.  Besides having to stretch to believe the timing, the choice leaves no time for Foster’s character to really inhabit the isolation of her divorce, symbolized by the house.  This is not her house.  She is not defending her turf.  She’s a stranger in a strange land and the only thing that counts is keeping her daughter safe.  Seems to me that if the first attempt by the bad guys ended when they found someone in the house and then, when whatever mostly unspoken pressure is on the Forest Whitaker character built to the breaking point, they could come back.  At that point, whatever coincidences we have to buy into would become choices that Foster actually made.   More to the point, the film seems to ache to be about these two characters, played by Foster and Whitaker, forced to the edge of their emotions, both becoming what they are not.  This is classic Fincher territory.  But that movie never arrives.

So does Panic Room work as a good, old-fashioned drawing room thriller?  Sometimes.  Part of the problem with the house never really working as a character in the film is that it makes the size of the home unacceptably unwieldy.  There is no reason to have a space so big that the audience can never really feel like they know where they are.  We become intimately familiar with the panic room, the stairs and the kitchen.  But this is a three or four (I’m really not sure) story home and the amount of space hurts. 

What about the characters?  I thought Jared Leto did a terrific job as the leader/loser of the bad guys.  Forest Whitaker was his usual earnest self, though some pieces of his character’s puzzle seemed to be missing.  And the masked man - I’ll let his identity remain a surprise – is interesting at first, but has no extra gear to shift to when he becomes a more dominant character in the third act.  Good gal Jodie Foster is fine.  It’s kind of hard to imagine Nicole Kidman doing this slight variation on her The Others character.  Kristen Stewart, as Foster’s daughter, is fine, though she delivers none of the extras that we’ve come to expect from former kid actors like Thora Birch, Christina Ricci or Jena Malone.  None of the other actors really matter, though one of the supporting actors who has just a few minutes with Foster (I don’t want to identify the character, because it would give you a plot point ahead of time) does a really nice job.  I think his name is Paul Schulze. 

It was okay.   It wasn’t as good as What Lies Beneath.  The first act sags (and was probably cut with the influence of the studio, removing some of the characterization that I’m guessing was once there).  The second act moves briskly.  And the third act is pretty good, though the ending disappoints, seeming to want it every which way. 

If this wasn’t Fincher… if this weren’t such a lovely opportunity to revisit the glories of “old fashioned” movies (like 2D animation is now seen as old fashioned, while the best and highest grossing animation still remains the films made in 2D)… it wouldn’t be so disappointing.   But it is Fincher and the idea was delicious.  Sigh…

NO SUCH SUCCESS:  I have never been a big Hal Hartley guy, so take this will a grain of salt, but No Such Thing is a great idea that drags and drags and drags until you can’t remember why the idea was so good in the first place.  Start with the idea that there is a real monster in the world, long thought of as a myth since he lives in a quaint seaside town in Iceland.  Cool.  And Sarah Polley is the Cinderella, somehow drawn to the monster, the only one who can really calm his savage soul.  Cool cool.  Now, let’s give the whole thing a modern twist, with Helen Mirren playing Ann Magnuson playing Tina Brown… okay, we’re losing focus, but maybe it can work. 

Or it can’t.

Hartley swings hard, but he never gets a solid hit.  Unlike most of his other work, Hartley is working with strong iconography here, which might have given some structure to his ideas.  But he seems to want to fight any such concept.  Every time he finds a groove, he jumps to some other idea, as though being disjointed was being insightful.  Sorry… no.

READERS OF THE DAY:  This from J The H:  “My question reverts to your discussion a few days earlier regarding "The Scorpion King", you mentioned that 150 seems inevitable and to me that number seems incredibly high. I am a senior in college and so I probably miss the central demographic for the film, but everyone I have talked to thinks the movie looks terrible. The Rock's acting in "The Mummy 2" was among the highlights of bad acting in a film plagued by some of the worst acting moments of 2001. Even The Scorpian King preview looks bad, the word of mouth is nowhere near what it was for the Mummy 2, people laughed at loud in the theater when The Rock actually had a line of dialogue. The film's trailer also lacks the grandeur of either Mummy film and looks more like a glorified episode of Hercules set in Egypt. I think the film will be lucky to pass 100M domestically and I am looking for it to bomb completely. I know it seems as though Ice Age's take bodes well for the film, but that was the first computer animated film in the last few months and computer animation is extremely popular right now. Ice Age also had hype building for a lot time, ever since they showed the short teaser with the squirrel and the acorn.

I think the real opening of summer will start with Spiderman, which brings me to my next fear that will hopefully be assuaged, but we seem to be on the same page. The CGI looks horrible and whoever designed the green goblin should be never be allowed to work again. I mean take a good look at the Green Goblin, he looks ridiculous, like someone was playing a practical joke on the audience.

Which after talking about Spiderman leads me to a few more question marks about this summer. Doesn't Hayden Christiansen's delivery look really bad in every preview for attack of the clones. I am not knocking the kid as an actor, he did a good job in Life as a House. But is the audience ready to accept that Darth Vader was nothing but a whiny little pretty boy before the mask. Harry's review of the film did nothing to really dissuade me from this fear, he mentions hating Anakin, which can't be a good thing because all signs point to him being the lead of the film.(Something I think Jeff Wells mentioned in one of his side columns) Wouldn’t the stronger choice have been to make Anakin a dark ominous fellow, instead of whining pretty boy, that way at least the audience would have seen a change in his character. Hopefully I am completely wrong about this suspicion and Hayden does a great job with the part.

Now I will list my final fear about a blockbuster coming this summer, K-19. This could be the college cynic in me talking, but Harrison Ford's russian accent sounds like a boris and natasha parody. When a couple friends and I were watching the preview, we couldn’t help but grin every time he smiled. If the movie takes place on a Russian sub, without any English-speaking crew  embers(correct me if I'm wrong here), why would anyone need to speak English with a Russian accent. I mean they would all speak Russian anyways, so once you eliminate that aspect, just have them all speak their own accent, like the strategy employed in Enemy at the Gates.”

And Jack Strat takes on Fast Jonny:  “So someone once again wants to mock Moulin Rouge.  Well fine, lets now do a little comparison of Moulin Rouge to A Beautiful Mind.

Moulin Rouge: One of the most original movies ever made by a studio. Sure, have problems with where the music comes from.  Have a problem with the first 20 minutes of the film.  You cannot deny that this movie is something never seen in this country or the world.  Heck, the rest of the Western world seemed to get Moulin rouge except for most tight ass Americans.

A Beautiful Mind:  Wow, like this is new.  Ed Harris playing that odd federal agent dude and Jennifer Connelly being loving.  For the love of GOD, Jennifer Connelly was loving in bloody CAREER OPPORTUNITIES!  This movie will most definitely be a movie forgotten to time.  Well, it will be brought up again in a clip reel during the 80th Oscar ceremony to all remind us that a middle of a road film was selected by an Academy that didn’t get Moulin Rouge or a little fantasy destined for greatness.

I could go on and on all day, but I wont.  You can say the votes were tallied and that Moulin lost.  That it was a gimmick movie.  That it sucked, it blew, and it completely put you out.  Fine.  Just don’t act like an ignorant ass and deny that it is one of the most dynamic pieces of art and cinema that you might ever see.  Even if you like it or not.

Have a nice day....”

E ME:  Page Two is the earlier stuff from Friday.  What did you see this weekend and what did you think?

PAGE TWO:  Wilder & Finke, together again for the first (and last) time.