Tag: Naomi Watts

Under the Sea and Over the Top.

In the trailer bin, Bill Murray dives into Cousteau for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (I’m looking forward to the Henry Selick stop-motion stuff, which unfortunately isn’t in this preview), Jude Law gets increasingly overexposed in David Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (Can’t say I think much of this trailer, for some reason, nor of the “existential comedy” billing) and Chris Cooper channels Dubya for John Sayles’s political caper Silver City (Looks solid, but Richard Dreyfuss strikes warning bells…he can get real hammy when doing satire.)

Sprockets, the Movie.


So I finally decided to make an end run around the January movie slump and catch up on some of the Oscar contenders of last year, and lo! I stumbled upon the most “Emperor has no Clothes” film experience I’ve had in a good long while. To wit, I have yet to see Amores Perros, but 21 Grams, despite pretty solid performances by its three leads, was a ridiculously ponderous and pretentious piece of work and, worse, just a flat-out dull film. It’s hard to talk about without going into major spoilers, so, if that’s a problem, I’ll leave you at this: Elvis Mitchell, who just went screaming down the Murphometer with this “film of the year” rave, owes me $10.25.

Still here? Ok, well, 21 Grams looks very nice, I’ll give it that. And the acting is universally good…poor Naomi Watts comes off rather shrill, but I don’t really blame her. That being said, Grams is a relentlessly downbeat, oh-so-sudsy soap opera for the arthouse crowd. And I do mean downbeat — there’s no joy in Mudville here. These three characters are basically stuck in the last twenty minutes of Requiem for a Dream for two and a half hours. Ok, sure, horrible things happen to good people all the time, even symbolic and portentous hit-and-runs. But the way bad mojo just piles up on these three souls throughout the movie is so deadening and ham-handed that it eventually becomes laugh-out-loud funny. (Seriously, there was a sequence near the end just after Naomi Watts wails about her child dying with (gasp) red – not blue – shoelaces on, and just before she’s simultaneously scolded by a nurse for her drug addiction and told she’s pregnant, where I finally turned on this soap opera of a film, and had to double over in convulsions to stop from breaking out into loud peals of awkward giggling.)

Yes, I know it’s horrible to titter at the tragic intertwining of a drug-addicted woman’s family wiped out in a tragic truck accident, her dying, infertile, heart-transplant lover, and the star-crossed ex-alcoholic jesus-freak recidivist who can’t hold down a job, maintain familial harmony, or drive home without Bad Stuff Happening. But, you know, it’s even worse for a film to milk grotesque amounts of tragedy to try to substitute for honest characterization or real human emotion. As I believe someone mentioned in the Slate movie club this year, it’s a wonder they didn’t bring a puppy onscreen at some point and start kicking the hell out of it.

Finally, just to add to the Sprockets-ness of the whole enterprise, the film’s narrative is completely splintered, with the story flipping back, forth, back, and forth again. For the first fifteen minutes or so, this made for an interesting viewing experience. But, by the end, (a) it adds nothing — you get to realize that there was absolutely no point in telling the film this way other than sheer artistic license — and (b) it’s detracting and distracting: you’re waiting desperately to see the two or three scenes that you know have been coming for an hour, just so the movie will end already. When these scenes finally do happen, of course, they’ve been foreshadowed for so long that they have no power left but the power to annoy.

In sum, 21 Grams was a pretty atrocious swing-and-a-miss. Sean Penn’s other movie last year, Mystic River, did a much better job of rooting tragic events in interconnected lives, mainly because it was grounded by a strong sense of place and a more realistic balance between light and dark moments. But, like its characters, this film just ambles around in its terminally depressed jag for so long that it loses any sense of perspective, and instead becomes just a vehicle for indulging the arthouse fallacy that misery is a substitute for character. By the end of this dull, implausible, flick, I had only one word on my mind: ANTS!

Clobbering Time?

Lots of fanboy speculation on the web today…The Fantastic Four is still looking for a director after losing Peyton (“Bring It On“) Reed, and apparently the short list includes Steven Soderbergh and Sean Astin. According to this Astin Q&A, both could bring George Clooney to the table as Reed Richards, which is great casting. I like Naomi Watts as the Invisible Woman, but she’s going to be busy with PJ’s Kong, and I could see Soderbergh going for one of his regulars, like Mary McCormack. Orlando Bloom as The Human Torch also works, although it could just as easily be Paul Walker or some other pretty-boy. And The Thing…well, I’d expect he’d be CGI, but you’ll need a Ben Grimm. Vin Diesel? Gary Sinise? I always thought the space-ship sequences in Brian DePalma’s otherwise-terrible Mission to Mars would’ve made a great intro to FF, with Tim Robbins (Reed Richards), Connie Nielsen (Sue Richards), Jerry O’Connell (Johnny Storm), and Sinise (Ben Grimm). At any rate, if FF does go to Soderbergh, let’s just hope he doesn’t pull an Ang-Lee.

Four-Color Casting Call.

Eager to catch up with Marvel in the summer blockbuster dept., Warner Brothers and DC plan to screentest a bevy of young stars for Christopher (Memento) Nolan’s new Batman film. (Of these choices, I’d go with Christian Bale.) Also is comic casting news, it turns out cut-rate chanteuse/Newlywed Jessica Simpson will be playing the lead in Mort the Dead Teenager. Normally, this’d be a non-story, but she had been rumored to play Sue Storm (Invisible Girl) in the upcoming Fantastic Four flick, which — if true — would have instantly erased any interest I might have in the project. Now, Naomi Watts, on the other hand…

Blockbuster Friday.

So this Friday, I finally caught up with a number of films I’ve been meaning to see, among them:

The Ring (US): A very scary premise, and after the teenage sleepover setpiece I thought this might be one for the ages. But, although the ending somewhat redeems it, this film feels like a missed opportunity. I haven’t yet seen Ringu, so I don’t know how it measures up, but turning the bulk of the film into a Nancy Drew mystery was a straight-up horrible call. After a truly frightening intro, the movie then spends most of its running time lining up all the images on the tape with the ghost story at hand, with all-too-frequent flashbacks in case you’re a short-term amnesiac or something. What everybody involved seems to have missed is that the movie would’ve been much scarier, at least to my mind, if some portions of the tape had just been left unexplained. Instead, the powers-that-be left unexplained key plot elements in the story, such as how little boy Watts sees dead people. I think in another director’s hands – a director unafraid to take risks and one who has a little more faith in her audience to put two and two together – this could’ve been very, very scary. (Although it’s not as bad a swing-and-a-miss as the US version of the The Vanishing.) So, with that in mind, I’m looking forward to seeing Ringu.

Igby Goes Down: I’m really not a big fan of the “unrealistically erudite young NY sophisticate” genre – I liked Rushmore a lot less than most people I know and I find Whit Stillman films to be absolutely insufferable. So when Igby suggests his brother’s a pedantic bore for liking Rilke and later wryly namedrops “The Island of Lost Toys,” I visibly shuddered. But, all in all, Kieran Culkin is rather appealing in the title role, and – with solid support from Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Amanda Peet, Bill Pullman, and Jared Harris – this one turned out to be more enjoyable than I had earlier feared. Claire Danes seems miscast, and I just don’t get what it is about the one-note “clipped and distant” monotone of Ryan Phillipe’s delivery in every film that anyone finds appealing (he’s got less range than Keanu), but, in the end, this one made for a decent rental.

Far From Heaven: I’m hit-and-miss with Todd Haynes films – I thought Safe was splendid and bizarre, but didn’t vibe into the puzzling Velvet Goldmine at all (I am looking forward to his Dylan biopic project.) And, to be honest, this one suffered a bit from being the middle child in my Friday triple feature – I found my attention flagging quite a bit in the early going. Which is a shame, because in the end this turned out to be quite a good film, if a little on the slow side. I thought the retro look and feel started out rather gimmicky (for example, in the lime green police station where Julianne Moore picks up her husband), but settled down as the story took over. And I think I probably would have liked it more if (a) I hadn’t just sat through Igby and (b) if I were more well-versed in the films of Douglas Sirk. But, worth seeing, and Dennis Quaid and Patricia Clarkson were particularly good.

The Core: Without a doubt a poor, poor film, and yet I enjoyed myself much more than at the drab and slow-moving Dreamcatcher. It helped that this film is stocked with actors I generally root for – Aaron Eckhart, Bruce Greenwood, Delroy Lindo, and Stanley Tucci. (As for Hilary Swank…well, I haven’t yet seen Boys Don’t Cry, but I gotta believe she’s much better in that than she was in this, although Halle Berry won recently too and – frankly – she’s rarely any good either.) To be sure, the special effects are well on this side of lame – for example, when the crew get stopped somewhere in the center of the Earth and find themselves inexplicably on the Star Trek: TNG Away Team set…I half-expected Morlocks or Cave Trolls or something to show up. And the story makes very limited sense (as a friend of mine pointed out, how does gravity work on this ship? Everybody’s standing around normally while this bird is digging straight down.) But, as a popcorn film, The Core was reasonably entertaining for two hours, even though I really can’t recommend it.

Next up, I’d like to catch The Good Thief and Ghosts of the Abyss before the fanboy films start flying fast and furious on May 2, with the so-far-well-received X2.