Week Of July 24, 2006 - Comic-Con Mon / Gossip Wed / Fri

July 28, 2006

John Tucker Must Die seemed like a lost cause going in. Fox had sent a thong in the mail…. and it kinda chafes. There wasn't much advertising. Terrible title. When I did see materials there was that each-girl-says-a-word schtick. Ugh.

But with nothing on the schedule the other night and too many afternoons and early evenings of heat in L.A., I made my way to the Fox lot to see the film.

It didn't suck.

John Tucker Must Die isn't going to win any awards… except maybe at the MTV Movie Awards. Betty Thomas has done little more than a by-the-book job of directing. The actors are pretty TV, though Sophia Bush has something interesting going on and the blonde heroine of the picture, Brittany Snow, signed to play Amber Van Tussle to Michelle Pfeiffer's Velma Van Tussle, making the Van Tussles the only sure bet to work in the movie musical adaptation of Harispray, so she may be on her way.

Basically, it is a low-rent variation on Mean Girls, which is to say, it is not as smart, the performances are not as big, and the twists are not as satisfying. But as silly summer movies for girls go, it makes perfect sense. In many ways, it is Fox's pre-college version of The Devil Wears Prada… though this one has more sexual stuff in it than Prada does.

Jesse Metcalfe is good enough as John Tucker. Penn Badgley, as John Tucker's shy brother is the clear movie star of the two, though the movie doesn't quite turn cleverly enough on that possibility.

In any case, it's easy to see my niece (15) and her friends seeing this two, three, or four times before buying a DVD.

Scoop is a significant disappointment. It's far from being the worst Woody Allen movie ever. It looks like a masterpiece compared to Hollywood Ending. But by not being a disaster, in engages the ennui of being part of the slow decline of Woody Allen, who hasn't written a great script since Small Time Crooks and not delivered one of his really special movies since Bullets Over Broadway in 1994. His apex, it seems, was in 1989 with Crimes & Misdemeanors.

This film is uniquely on the edge of being something special, but the time warp Allen's humor lives in is keeping him from getting there. Manohla Dargis says in her NYT review that Scarlett Johansson plays "the kind of girl reporter who thinks nothing of sleeping with her interviewees to get the story," and gets into the interesting idea of Woody Allen dealing with a new era of female sexuality (his conquests always seemed to be stoned and/or needy, suffering from the pressures of early feminism and the arch realities of New York).

But Allen is incapable of closing the deal, as a writer, on what is really going on with his new era girl. Someone - I am forgetting who - also went into this new femme issue and found some kind of empowerment for Johansson's character in the last scene. Not I. If Allen was better at writing women, perhaps this one would have evolved into the journalist that she flails at being through the film, interested in more than fame and sex, even in a comedic way. Nope.

The best scenes in this movie are in the boat to purgatory. There are a few other assorted laughs. But S.J. doing her very best lean in Woody throughout is not very interesting and might only be - might - if he played off her sexuality even more aggressively. This is a movie in which the girl seduces the guy in the pool in a swimmer's one piece. Maybe that's what she'd really wear to a pool, but when the joke is that Woody's character sees her as a dim girl who's going to have a hard time and that when she throws off the robe, the bod being revealed is going to make someone trip over their own feet, it's just not as funny. It's odd that a man who so objectifies women is so shy about objectifying women.

The best of the movies this weekend not involving drug or gunplay is Little Miss Sunshine, which I fear is getting hyped past the point of people not being disappointed. It is a deeply imperfect, not terribly ambitious film. It is relatively slick, but still looks like a Sundance film.

What is brilliant in the film are the performances. And the result, when it is added up with the story, is a completely unexpected sense of intimacy and warmth.

If you are reading this, you have no excuse for not seeing this film.

Have a great weekend.

READER OF THE DAY: Longtime reader John English wrote this in regarding Thursday's MCN column, 20 Weeks of Summer, about the lack of sex in this summer's movies: "I don’t know if America is getting more private or if more and more nudity is being recognized as gratuitous, but I must admit, I don’t mind the trend. Less and less actresses are being asked to sell their souls to be naked on film so their pictures can be permanently frozen on thousands of porn sites throughout the world. Getting naked used to be a way to get ahead (Joanna Going, Sean Young, Amy Smart, Leslie Stefanson…) but if the talent isn’t there, they disappear, and what’s the point?

Movies like Wedding Crashers and 40-Year-Old Virgin worked. They knew their audience, they delivered what they teased, and I’m glad we’re not getting a bunch of rip-offs of those movies flooding the market right now. Remember how huge There’s Something About Mary was? Remember how crappy the rip-offs like Tomcats and Slackers were that came after? (insert Butthead’s laugh)

Hollywood is hedging their bets more and more with the content they’ll put out, and there is a large disconnect between Hollywood and the heartland. Hollywood can appease the art crowd with nudity as much as they want in their smaller films. How many movies made for under $5 get rated R? My guess would be the proportion is vastly more than those movies that cost over $60 million that get rated R.

The R rating in a large studio picture is Hollywood’s way of promising they’re going to deliver what they can’t do in PG-13s. Nudity will probably be here. There won’t be one F-word; there will probably be 50-100. (Or in Jarhead’s case, 251). The violence will be nice and gory.

Ratings nowadays signal what audience Hollywood is seeking. An intelligent film like The Andromeda Strain was rated G in 1971. Remake it today, and I guarantee they’ll throw in an F-word somewhere so they can get the golden goose of PG-13. G movies are for kids or “the whole family” (i.e., The Rookie). PG can occasionally be for adults, like Good Night & Good Luck, but mostly it’s for kids. Maybe one or two swear words, a few fart jokes, and you have Garfield. PG-13 is the melting pot. For my money, Superman Returns would have been PG 20 years ago, but You Me & Dupree would have gone for an R.

You watch R-rated movies from the 1970’s and 1980’s, many weren’t that bad. Usually just for F-words. Prizzi’s Honor had about ten F-words, no real sex, no gory deaths. Remake it today, cut nine F-words, and it’s PG-13. Exact same tone, but a different time. Ironic, since the foulest mouths I’ve been around in my lifetime was when I was 13. My day was rated R every morning by the end of first period.

P.S. http://www.kids-in-mind.com spells out everything in a movie on why it was rated what it was. That’s how I know Jarhead had 251 F-words."

And PR WHOSE NOT A PR GUY writes: "Sure, we can dismiss this all as a disturbing "trend", a "narrowing of ideas", or a symptom of the ongoing PG-13/R back-and-forth, but I think it's just plain bare-butt fatigue-- a state of wanting to escape from a lifetime of sex-and-nudity-permeated imagery, and I wouldn't worry about it persisting for too long. As Alex Cox remarked a few weeks ago, sex and nudity (along with violence) have occupied a familiar place in the movies for over thirty-five years - a third of cinema's lifetime - so maybe it shouldn't surprise us the common filmmaker is retreating from the traditional conventions of movie bawdyness. Nudity's a great little perk of movies (especially if it involves someone like Aniston, or Wilson, if that's your taste), but simply put, it's been done. "Midnight Cowboy" was released back in the Nixon administration, "Last Tango In Paris" came out before Atari introduced Pong, "The Blue Lagoon" preceded Britney Spears' birth by a year; heck, even "The Bad Lieutenant" was over a decade ago. And depictions of nudity and sex aren't strictly a cinematic reserve anymore, and haven't been for some time. (Nevermind "Sex and the City" --try "NYPD Blue", which dates back to the early 90's and wasn't even on a premium channel.) And let's not omit a certain little medium that's cast a world wide web of sexually oriented content the likes of which we've never seen before.

So I sympathize with your longing for a more sexually aware (or just plain nudity-rich) movie menu, but I wouldn't expect a longer wait than one or two more summers before the pendulum swings back to at least a little more gloriously topless, bottomless cinematic debauchery once again. But just how desperately do we truly need it?"

E Me. Tell me about your weekend... and what about all that sex? (There is a discussion on that on The Hot Blog that's already rolling...)

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