February 20, 2004

Even though the weekend at the movies looks like it will come up limping, only one of the four wide releases is an actual studio dump, Paramount’s Against The Ropes. The other three are clearly targeted films that could do fairly well inside of their demos.

I didn’t have a chance to catch Disney’s Confessions of a Drama Queen. But my sister and her daughter, my 13-year-old niece both had a really good time. From what they said, the ad campaign, which features Freaky Friday’s Lindsey Lohan in an endless array of outfits is pretty indicative of the film. Or to quote my sister, “The costumer had a great time on this one!” (She also said, “That Lindsay Lohan sure is stacked!” My sister is a funny one.)

With all the hoopla around The Passion of the Christ, I haven’t gotten a real sense of how much traction the movie is getting. But without anything really targeting girls until March 12th’s Cody Banks 2, there is a good chance that a soft opening this week will not be the end of this one, which could play with soft drops for a month.

Welcome To Mooseport is chasing bigger fish. And it should have been the great comedy of this spring. But it is not. It is a failure in the face of a very funny conceit. A hugely popular president retires to a small New England town and ends up being dragged into a mayoral race with a local good guy that could cost him all of his big-money, high-profile retirement “benefits.”

Once you have that great idea, you have to make hard decisions. And these are exactly the development decisions that make the difference between a not-unpleasant experience and a great comedy. If the well-liked ex-president is secretly a vain, arrogant prick, you have to go for it. Every degree you try to soften him up is a degree less funny. Comedy is conflict.

Likewise, if the local good guy is a schlub who just doesn’t get it and needs a massive wake-up call, you need to really make him a loser and a rube. Every degree you to try to let the audience know that he’s not so dumb or silly is a degree less funny.

To this central conflict, you add the spice. All the spice in this movie is spice we’ve seen before. We saw it in Runaway Bride and In-n-Out and even in The Family Man. Welcome To Mooseport is filled with these walking clichés… though when they work as clichés, they are forgiven and the movie tends to work. This tends to require brilliant casting.

The classic “horny local who wants to do someone that everyone wants to be close to” character was brilliantly done by Lisa Thornhill in The Family Man and by Bridget Fonda in Doc Hollywood. They are both sexy, but you can see the edge of desperation that the male character sees and is ultimately turned off by… and each got really nice speeches that allowed them to round off the emotional life of these tertiary characters.

Mooseport has one of these characters and she is left hanging. The wandering barbershop quartet of town councilmen has good actors in the group, but neither the screenplay or director Donald Petrie figures out how to make them magical. Christine Baranski turns up in a what should have been a great scenery chewing role… but never gets the chance to be truly malicious or given an arc where she changes her mind or has a clever enough turn trying to destroy her ex that she really surprises us. Maura Tierney as “The Girl” is attractive, as always, but we never quite get why men are drawn to her, as opposed to, say, the horny-presenting blonde. It’s one of those Bonnie Hunt roles, where the woman is somehow a walking missing link to men’s idea of themselves. But Ms. Tierney is not that. There is a hint of the idea that her character is an emotional sister to Marcia Gay Harden’s character, which would work. But the script just doesn’t bring it together.

There are a bunch of ways to go with a comedy premise like this. Ray Romano could have been (and really is) just fine and Gene Hackman can make this stuff look perfect in his sleep. Billy Wilder might make the president really evil and the local guy secretly evil, so when the local guy we’re rooting for wins in the end, it turns out that the town was worse off for it. Preston Sturges might make the ex-president all façade and the local guy so desperate to win that he cheats and in the end, the president really becomes the façade and the local guy becomes his sidekick. Mike Nichols would male the movie about the underdog guy and turn the politics of the ex-president into an amazing carnival that is so amazing to watch that no one in the town even realizes what’s going on… except the underdog guy.

Welcome to Mooseport is a movie that takes 10 minutes of screen time to have a competition between the two lead characters that is then made completely irrelevant by a last minute gag… not a very good one… and one we basically saw in a Ron Shelton movie a couple of years ago. That is the frustration of this film. Set-up, set-up, set-up… no punchline… jut a gentle slap. It shoulda been a contender.

Euro-Trip, soon to be called “Euro-Trash” or “Euro-Tripe” or “Euro-Nalysis” by critics everywhere is a series of gags looking for a movie. The film, although billed differently (a la the Coens) is the first film co-written and co-directed by Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, a trio of Harvard grads who are going to be around for a while… so get used to them and look for artistic growth in each of their next projects.

If you like Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain, you can expect that Euro-Trip’s drinks will be full of hallucinogens and that the rain will really be the urine of a hundred naked ugly guys. What’s odd is that the Pina Coladas are not, in the tradition of American Pie and the Farrellys, loaded with semen, human or other animal. Mandel, Schaffer & Berg are after a slightly different, albeit not quite fresh, tone. So while Michelle Tractenberg will be seen in a series of outfits that offer Maxim-like see-through breasts exposure, she never takes off the bikini top. It’s an odd line of delineation. But it is there.

It’s a movie where a guy ends up being penetrated by a five pronged instrument in an S&M setting, but spends the rest of the movie complaining that he hasn’t gotten any. He may not have gotten what he wanted, but he got something.

Euro-Trip is somewhere between the raw edge of Animal House and the benign farce of National Lampoon’s European Vacation. It lives in much the same place as the Farrelly movies that haven’t done much business. The middle is never a very safe place to be.

For example, if you are going to have “the worst twins ever” end up having some ultimately awkward sexual contact, you gotta give it to me baby, uh ha, ah ha, ah ha. The big joke is if they actually have sex. Don’t spare the characters. John Belushi was peeping in women’s windows and we were watching from his point of view and we still loved him. Of course, if you get a brother and sister into bed, the audience has to believe that they really don’t know. (Same if they are just kissing.) And the topper is when they find out and freak out that they find a way to rationalize a way to finishing the deal and sharing a familial orgasm. Yes, it is horrible and disgusting. But if you’re going to do a comedy with Vandersexxx.com, you either have to go PG-13 or really go for it… because the laughs are in the shocks.

One last note. The tracking on Club Dredd is apparently in the toilet, unable to get any traction in light of Crucifixion Boy. (I’d be worried about offending Christians with the smart-ass name for Jesus, but none of the easily offended really got back after Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen, did they?) What do you do when you are walking in to a buzzsaw and you’re already a few million into your advertising budget? I’m not sure. I guess Fox Searchlight will have to figure that one out.

READER OF THE DAY: THE FOURTH BEE GEE writes: “Yes, Bowman sucks…. but you are SOOOO wrong about him sucking more than Mark Steven Johnson. DAREDEVIL sucked so bad I’m pretty sure it ripped a hole in the time/space continuum. It’s been playing on cable this month, and instead of a bill Comcast sent me an apology. Plus, Affleck was doing his Alec Baldwin-Yes-I-Really-Am-Getting-Fat imitation.

On a bigger issue, forget top directing talent being interested in comic book movies – the boom is about to go bust. Let me be the first to jump on this particular bandwagon: Summer 2004 will sound the death knell. First up, we have THE PUNISHER (yes, it’s coming out during Spring…blow me, Hollywood keeps expanding their Summer movie season to encompass the preceding Spring…Winter, Fall, and the August of the previous Summer). The film looks like it combines all the worst elements of crappy action movies, crappy comic book movies, and John Travolta.

Batter up, HELLBOY. I’m as excited as anyone that Ron Perlman is headlining a mid-size studio film that should get decent media coverage…but…well…it IS fucking HELLBOY. Nobody outside of a few fat guys and people who play DOOM even know what a “Hellboy” is supposed to be. Additionally, Del Toro falls a bit in the “overrated” camp as far as I’m concerned – BLADE II was NOT as good as everyone remembers it, and featured one of the most painfully stupid kung-fu fights in recent memory (you CANNOT have a Randy “Macho Man” Savage elbow drop make an appearance during the climactic battle between good and evil).

Finally, we have SPIDER-MAN 2. I DARE anyone to tell me there is even one cool shot in that teaser. The car going through the coffee shop window? Okay…MAYBE. I love Molina, but it looks like Raimi has employed the same visionary imagination towards Doc Ock’s character design as he did with Willem Dafoe’s sinister Green Can-Opener in the first film. Poor Molina…man-boobies are not the most intimidating feature on a bad guy. (Anyone wanting to smack me upside the head with their ARMY OF DARKNESS Special Limited Dork Edition just relax. This is not your teenager’s Sam Raimi). The first SPIDER-MAN became an event because it dealt with an iconic character and promised to show us something we haven’t seen before, namely aforementioned iconic character in a LIVE ACTION FILM. Unfortunately, the worst parts of SPIDER-MAN actually involved Spider-man, so this time around Raimi needed to ramp it up and it sure doesn’t look like he did.”

E ME: ROTD Comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions of… you get it. I love Del Toro, etc. But interesting. Anyway… what will YOU see this weekend?