A Few New DVD Review Blurbs

Since the Full Frame Documentary Film Fest in Durham is starting today, I thought we’d kick off these blurbs with a highly recommended new release documentary DVD: 

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS

(Dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2003)

At first, Andrew Jarecki’s debut documentary comes across like a modern reality-TV influenced update of Kurasawa's RASHOMON, but then it unfolds into something completely different to quote a beloved British comedy troop who themselves are quoted in this fascinating film.

Concerning a Long Island family getting torn apart when accusations of child molestation are directed at the patriarch, formally respected teacher Arnold Friedman, this film uses tons of home movie footage and video mostly shot by son David Friedman. It's an endlessly involving myriad of allegations and defenses that lingers long after the film is over.

The DVD's second disc is full of just as involving bonus material, most interestingly the featurette “Altercation at New York Premiere” and the short “Just A Clown,” which was Jarecki’s original film about clowns hired for children's parties. It was while making that film, that Jarecki came across David Freidman - one of New York's most popular clowns for children's parties - and learning the Friedman family's intriguing yet confusing story. 

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS can be seen as an alternate AN AMERICAN FAMILY (the pioneering 1973 PBS reality series about the Loud Family) with a much darker truth within.

GOTHIKA (Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz, 2003) 

For Christ's sake, when is this trend of thrillers in which a supernatural force guides somebody to solving a murder going to freakin' end? Halle Berry heads a great cast (Charles Dutton, Robert Downey Jr, John Carroll Lynch) through a movie nightmare of psycho gibberish. To get the plot, if you could actually call it that, straight - Berry is a prison psychiatrist who wakes up after an automobile accident to find she's accused of murdering her husband and that she's jailed in the same prison she worked at. 

Berry can only remember flashes of imagery surrounding her accident and has no idea what really happened at the scene of the crime. Flashes of imagery and screeched dialogue are the only things I remember after viewing this badly named maze of contrivances. Now, the MONSTER'S BALL Oscar winner is a very talented actress, and a gorgeous woman, so it's easy to get somewhat caught up in this silliness for a bit, but in the end you'll hardly feel this is time spent well.

The darkness of the prison does little to shadow obvious plot points coming, the murky jarring music (sounding a bit like the staccato whale sounds in STAR TREK IV) tells us when we are supposed to be scared or at least pay more attention and when it's stated in the first 10 minutes that the security center's electrical system is faulty with the lights occasionally going out, I don't know anyone anywhere that would not consider that a extremely contrived convenience. 

GOTHIKA is bad as you'd think Limp Bizcuit covering the Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" would be, and that's featured on the soundtrack.

SHATTERED GLASS (Dir. Billy Ray, 2003)

In the true story of New Republic writer Stephen Glass, who had fabricated much information and sometimes entire articles back in the '90s, Hayden Christiansen proves that he actually can act. No joke, Christiansen is way more convincing as a sniveling whiny man-child caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar than a Jedi in 2 (soon to be 3) misguided STAR WARS prequels.

Peter Sarsgaard as Glass's harried editor is the voice of reason in this tale, despite the fact that he barely says anything until the storm really starts a-brewing. When Glass's fraud is found out by way of sources who were quoted proven to be fake, reports of committees holding conferences exposed as false, and a website a non-existent software company is suspected of being created after the fact, true human nature also comes out of hiding.

Although there's great work by the cast (including Steve Zahn and Rosario Dawson as webzine reporters who investigate Glass's work), the story really is the star here, and what a star it is. Funny how a movie about lies is actually one of the most accurate "true stories" to get an run (albeit limited) on the silver screen. Go figure.

Dr. SEUSS' THE CAT IN THE HAT (Dir. Bo Welch, 2003) 

You've probably heard this was awful, but it's far worse than you could possibly imagine. Mike Myers brings nothing new to the the famous Dr. Suess character;  he just shows up with his ratty bag of over used tricks. 

Obviously, this is a cash-in after the success of the Jim Carrey GRINCH movie which was bad as well but still superior to this catastrophe. Pun intended. 

I'm not going to go into the plot or tell you about production values or how painful it is to see talented actors like Alec Baldwin and Sean Hayes humiliated in this brightly colored crap. I'm just going to give you this example of the humor in this movie:

Conrad: (jumping up and down on the couch) It's like being in a circus! 

Cat in the Hat: Yeah, but without those tortured animals or drunken clowns that have hepatitis! 

And that's one of the better one liners. The only good news I have to report here is 1. It's only 78 minutes long. 2. Because it was a massive flop (budget : $109 million. US box office gross: $38 million) it is unlikely we will have to suffer further lame ive action film forays into the work of Dr. Suess. 3. Uh, I guess there's only 2 good things to report. 

As pointless as the Paris Hilton cameo (I mean who in the target audience would that mean anything to?) this is definitely a contender for a list of worse children's movies ever. Do yourself a favor take the kids to a circus. The tortured animals and drunk clowns with hepatitis will surely provide more wit and entertainment than anything under this hat.

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DVD Review: SEA OF LOVE (Collector's Edition)

The golden age of the “erotic thriller” genre was undoubtedly the '80s with the glossy ilk of such hits as FATAL ATTRACTION, NO WAY OUT, and the immortal BODY HEAT, but it became a joke in the '90s with such embarrassments as BASIC INSTINCT, BODY OF EVIDENCE, and well just about everything that has Joe Eszterhaus's name on it. My personal favorite of the genre was:

SEA OF LOVE (Dir. Harold Becker, 1988)

This was originally embraced as a return to form for Al Pacino after such forgetful fare as AUTHOR, AUTHOR and REVOLUTION in the first half of the '80s. It was indeed great to see him in a gritty sometimes even pathetic part as a hard drinking police detective dealing with divorce and obsessed with tracking a serial killer. The schlubby Pacino compares notes with partner John Goodman and they drunkenly decide to set up a sting operation through meetings with possible suspects made from personal ad connections. 

Ellen Barkin's character is the outgoing as Hell is-she-a-vixen?-is-she-not? parable that the plot hinges on. A lot of this is predictable and at times can be awfully generic plotting, but the amount of well placed and well paced humor, good acting, and sharp dialogue makes this still in 2004 a good watch. 

Also just about everyone in it is somebody you will surely know from something else: Samuel L. Jackson has a small part at the beginning, The West Wing actors John Spencer and Michael O'Neill, Six Feet Under's Richard Jenkins, and the always intensely creepy Michael Rooker from JFK and HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER all add to the must-see value of this mostly overlooked time-killer. Available on a Universal special edition DVD with Special Features including a commentary by director Becker and a few scratchy deleted scenes.

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THE LADYKILLERS: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today in the Triangle:

THE LADYKILLERS 
(Dirs. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, 2004) 

The Coen Brothers’ remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s beloved 1955 Ealing Studios comedy sorely lacks the wit of their previous comedic work (even their previous under par movie, 2003’s INTOLERABLE CRUELTY was funnier), but at least it doesn’t omit the ironic conclusion of the original like the 2001 OCEAN’S 11 remake did. So at least there’s that. 

The Coens take many liberties with the plot-points and characters of the British original, which starred Alec Guiness and Peter Sellers (in his first full length feature role), but very few of their alterations work in the film’s favor.

Decked out in Colonel Sanders-ish attire, Tom Hanks plays Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, who shares with past Coen characters H.I. McDonnough (Nicholas Cage in RAISING ARIZONA) and Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney in O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU) a distinctive trait: his diction and command of the English language far exceeds any other skill or ambition.

The pretentious Professor’s plan here is to rent a room in an unassuming elderly Marva Munson's (Irma P. Hall) house in the small sleepy town of Saucier, Mississippi, and with an assembled gang of cronies including Marlon Wayans and J.K. Simmons (from the HBO series Oz) tunnel through the basement to pull off a heist of the Riverside Casino's vault.

They con their landlord by masquerading as musicians who need a place to practice by playing classical music on a portable stereo to simulate their performance and cover the sound of tunneling. This is one of many comic conventions on display that has been done to death.

Hall’s Marva Munson is a Bob Jones University praising church going figure of reason who regularly converses with a painting of her late husband. Her deceased spouse’s expression changes in reaction to the twists in the farce, an effect not in the original but in far too many comedies since. With contrived lines like “Two thousand years after Jesus, thirty years after Martin Luther King, the age of Montel; sweet Lord of mercy is that where we at?” Marva is far from one of the Coens’ best concoctions.

Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans) gets a few laughs as the inside connection at the Casino speaking what Munson condemns as “hippity hop” talk. Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) also amuses as a explosives expert who loses a finger at one point, bickers with everyone, and constantly says “it's the easiest thing in the world” about everything. Unfortunately Simmons’ irritable bowel syndrome suffering makes for some of the un-funniest material in the Coens’ entire canon.

The General played by Tzi Ma seems to exist in the story to fill a smoking gag - when Munson enters the room he hides his cigarette in his mouth perfectly restoring it with his tongue when she leaves. Again a slight variation on a gag in too many comedies, much like a lot of the throwaway attempts to draw humor here.

Hanks does a good job with Prof. Dorr's ticks - his nervous laughter, his pristine babble, and the faces he makes when frantically scheming, but he never made me forget Alec Guiness’ Professor Marcus in the 1955 version. A little of Hanks’ shtick goes a long way too.

The original was a classic comedy that wickedly mixed black humor with silliness, which are two things the Coen brothers usually excel at. But here they fall way short of what they are capable of by being too loose and broad. They’ve been cartoonish before (see RAISING ARIZONA), but this time the strained situations that surround their clunky cast of caricatures fail to generate any big laughs. Unnecessary on nearly every front - as a remake, a farcical retread, as an ensemble piece, THE LADYKILLERS just goes through the motions and never quite hits any stride.

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