May 13, 2005

I've been getting the strong vibe that this has been coming for the last week or two... critics are going after Monster-In-Law not with a hammer, but with nuclear weaponry. One Stars.. 1.5 Stars... No Stars. Having seen the film and gotten the joke - and every single report I have heard from screenings, many from the critics on attack, has been that the audience was 100% with the film - I had to scratch my head.

Roger Ebert was kind enough to quote me in his review of another film today (Kicking & Screaming... one of the worst films of the year and a 3 star, thumbs up for him), so I will do the same. The second and third paragraph of his one-star review of Monster-In-Law:

"I hated it above all because it wasted an opportunity. You do not keep Jane Fonda offscreen for 15 years, only to bring her back as a specimen of rabid Momism. You write a role for her. It makes sense. It fits her. You like her in it. It gives her a relationship with Jennifer Lopez that could plausibly exist in our time and space. It gives her a son who has not wandered over after the 'E.R.' auditions. And it doesn't supply a supporting character who undercuts every scene she's in by being more on-topic than any of the leads.

No, you don't get rid of the supporting character, whose name is Ruby and who is played by Wanda Sykes. What you do it lift the whole plot up on rollers, and use heavy equipment to relocate it in Ruby's universe, which is a lot more promising than the rabbit hole this movie falls into. Monster-in-Law fails the Gene Siskel Test: 'Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?'"

And thus, Roger clarifies at least one half of the mystery. Pretty much every critic I have read about this film goes into a reverie about Ms. Fonda and then somehow the film is a disaster because she doesn't come back in a role that would make them comfortable.

Jack Mathews' opening: "What did Ted Turner do to Jane Fonda, anyway?

After a 15-year marriage to the mogul and her accompanying career hiatus, the liberated 67-year-old actress slashes, sparks and flops around the screen in Monster-in-Law like a severed power line."

Could it be that she is in a role that calls for it... and pretty much steals the movie in the process?

Stephen Holden writes: "Ravenously biting into her first screen role in 15 years, Ms. Fonda plays Viola in the only way that makes sense, as a self-mocking, comic caricature of the same conflicted personality the actress reveals in her autobiography, "My Life So Far." The role throws crumbs to Ms. Fonda's fans (Viola is a serious, venerated journalist, staunch feminist and ageless beauty on a first-name basis with many world leaders), and slices of cake to her detractors (professionally unmoored, Viola morphs into a bitter, psychopathic control freak and vicious snob)."

Are these guys publicists or movie critics????

I want to be really clear. This movie is very, very funny. It is very, very broad. It is, in many ways, very very silly. But it is light summer entertainment that should be hugely successful because it speaks to a relationship that has been an evergreen in the comedy repertoire forever. If Adam had a mother, no doubt she would be complaining about that woman who took his rib. Just because it is an old riff does not mean that these conflicts aren't real... on a much smaller scale.

So enraged are the defenders of the Jane, I haven't seen anyone mention how stupid it is that Ms. Lopez plays a dogwalker who walks the dogs almost exclusively on the beach. Imagine the beach covered in dog excrement and urine and just how unpopular (and illegal on most public beaches) she would be, regardless of how bodacious her booty.

I can already imagine a sequel to Monster In Law - The Ongoing Adventures Of Viola & Ruby - getting raves as "Fonda Taking Charge" and taking this very same character - perhaps with the very same director - someplace a little less slapsticky. Sign up Streisand as her rival today and start getting a room ready for all of the money.

Robert Luketic, who gets better as a director every time out, is eating much of the dirt here... unfairly. He is not a complete director yet. His visual style is still developing. But this is the first film he's made - including Legally Blonde - in which I didn't get the sense that the editors wished they had a little more coverage. He also takes better care of his actresses with lighting (care of Russell Carpenter) than in the past.

And as a matter of pure structure, the film actually does build as the acts go along. There are certainly missteps along the way. But there are at least six or seven set pieces that really work... in a broad comic, laugh out loud way. And that is a rarity at the movies these days. The biggest laugh in Kicking & Screaming is a confrontation between Ferrell and a Mad TV performer at the coffee shop. It has no underpinnings... jut the laugh of sheer energy. Fonda and Lopez work as well together and are each as compelling as Michael Vartan is boring. And Wanda Sykes is a top notch button woman.

One more review. Michael Wilmington writes: ""This isn't a very smart movie, rattling along as it does in the bright, superficial, meaninglessly expert way of too many modern romantic comedies -- and definitely of too many Jennifer Lopez comedies."

This brings me to the second half of my theory on this film...

They were angry from the last movie.

(This comment is actually a steal from a cousin of mine who used it to refer to the Indians who were always so angry.... so angry they had to be angry from the last movie. It was always amusing to me, but as we have become more aware of the realities of the old west, the anger seemed subdued.... but enough of Poli-Sci 101.)

Every year, the first stupid, audience friendly movie that arrives seems to be a sitting duck for the critics.

Last year, it was Soul Plane... 16% on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer. The year before, Daddy Day Care... 28% on the Tomatometer. In 2002, The New Guy got a 5% rating. There was no major comedy release in May of 2001, but on June 1, The Animal ate it with 29%. 2000's Road Trip got off fairly lightly with a 58% Tomatometer rating.

Monster-In-Law is currently at 19%.

It's almost as though the same long-built-up habit that has audiences primed to go to the movies in May affects critics in reverse with the first dumb summer comedy of each year.

I never watched The New Guy or The Animal, even on cable. And I was not a big fan of Road Trip. But I laughed a lot at Soul Plane and Daddy Day Care. Daddy Day Care was a hit. And Soul Plane suffered the same ghetoization as Undercover Brother, though U.C. was a lot smarter, much less intentional offensive a film.

But my tastes - and yours - are not the point of the discussion. I'm not trying to rationalize the reaction to movies in which I am a minority opinion. The flip side of this trend is

Dodgeball - 69%
Undercover Brother - 76%
Legally Blonde - 66%

But I will say, as I have tried to prove my hypothesis (to myself as well), the Tomatometer makes one thing clear. Film critics have no sense of humor.

So maybe it's as simple as that.

But my sense of it is still that critics are a bit overly generous to the first movie they think is going to be wildly popular each summer and are a bit over the top in attacking the first dumb comedy.

E-ME. Do you think critics have cycles?