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Just say “I don't” to Bride Wars
By Christy Lemire
The clichéd comedy "Bride Wars" tosses out stereotypes about female materialism and cattiness with all the giddy gusto of a newly married woman flinging the bouquet at her single girlfriends.
It's amazing that two of the film's three writers are women: Casey Wilson of "Saturday Night Live" and June Diane Raphael (the third, Greg DePaul, also gets a story-by credit).
But what's just as baffling is the way in which director Gary Winick, who brought the radiant best out of Jennifer Garner in the 2004 charmer "13 Going on 30," manages to squander the appealing screen presence of Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway. (Then again, the shrill material does him no favors.)
Hudson and Hathaway star as Liv and Emma, lifelong best friends who've obsessively fantasized about the ideal wedding since they were children in small-town New Jersey. Because that's what all girls do, right? Lavish nuptials represent the zenith to which we all aspire.
Anyway, when Liv and Emma both get engaged within days of each other, they accidentally book their weddings at New York's Plaza Hotel on the same date. The conflict is the result of a snafu at the office of wedding planner extraordinaire Marion St. Claire (a tart Candice Bergen), whom Liv and Emma gush over during their first appointment as if they were 12-year-olds at a Jonas Brothers concert.
Despite promising to be each other's maid of honor, neither will budge, which leads to an increasingly destructive game of sabotage and one-upmanship. The speed and ease with which they turn on each other is dizzying, and more painful to sit through than Hathaway's rehearsal-dinner toast in "Rachel Getting Married."
Emma, a normally passive schoolteacher, secretly sends Liv, a high-powered lawyer, chocolates and cookies so that she'll be too tubby to squeeze into her Vera Wang gown with its 10 tiers of tulle. (The smorgasbord of sweets leads to the movie's only true laugh-out-loud line. And it's such a relief when it comes.)
Liv, meanwhile, undermines one of Emma's spray-tan sessions and floats the rumor to their mutual girlfriends that - oops! - Emma may be pregnant. And on it goes.
It's unabashedly mean, yes - think of it as "The War of the Roses," and the peonies, and the hydrangeas - but it's also never all that funny. And since this incredibly shallow dilemma is the biggest problem facing these women, it's impossible to root for them to be happy or care whether their friendship survives.
Neither could have picked another date or found another venue? In all of New York, really? But alas, then there would have been no movie.
The climactic battle reveals the absolute worst in both, as they rip each other apart in a screechy frenzy of hair and veils and silk. But then "Bride Wars" wants to have it both ways; besides parodying the wedding industry while simultaneously embracing it, the film wants to wallow in the muck and tug at our hearts. It features one of those awkward moments of confession, apology and reconciliation that always seem to take place in a room full of hundreds of people. Nobody ever steps out to a hallway for these talks.
It's enough to make you wish Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn would crash the party and liven things up.
"Bride Wars," a Fox 2000 release, is rated PG for suggestive content, language and some rude behavior. Running time: 90 minutes. One star out of four.
THE READER
By Theodore Ott
What power there is in a masterfully crafted script! Add to that actors possessing the sweep and depth of Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet and you're going to have one hell of ride.
This is a convoluted love story that began after the end of the Second World War in Germany. A female fare taker working on a tram takes up with a teenage boy and introduces him into manhood. He reciprocates by reading to her. His choices of books range from Homer to Chekhov. It is an idyllic summer and he is unknowingly lost in its impermanence. Suddenly one afternoon when the youth arrives at his lover/instructress' apartment, he finds it abandoned and she is gone without good bye or explanation.
He is devastated, but with the resilience of youth he recovers and ten years later is studying law at a German university from a teacher who, in a manner unexplained, suffered under the Nazi insanity. The instructor takes his class to witness the trial of a group of women who had been SS guards at Auschwitz. One of the women proves to be the now young man's ex lover.
This discovery drives him to do some personal research and visit the cold remains of an unnamed concentration camp. For the first time in his life he confronts the horror that was his homeland before his birth. The other women charged with his lover turn on her, for admitting what they had done, and blame it all on her.
The student has had an epiphany and knows that while she may have been a guard, she, too is a victim and the others are lying. His problem is that rather than admit what she sees as a humiliating fact about herself, the ex lover falsely admits a guilt that was not hers. Now, he is hoist on a petard - he can reveal what he has deduced and hugely mitigate her guilt, revealing her secret in the process or allow her to be, as she is willing to be, convicted and keep her secret.
After a dark night of the soul, the student withdraws and allows his ex lover to live her life as she wishes it. But, she remains on his conscience and in his mind and as his life follows its own track he eventually reaches out to her again. But, in a flawed way.
Fiennes plays the student grown up and living as a lawyer in modern Germany and the incomparable Kate Winslet ages through the film from young womanhood to an old age that is totally believable. The lawyer as a youth is played by eighteen year old German actor David Kross. Kross is an interesting actor to watch, he was totally believable as the young and eventually love-sick swain.
This movie received a Golden Globe nomination, shutting out Doubt to everybody's surprise.
This is a beautifully realized portrayal of agonized love and the wounds love can leave. I can heartily recommend it.
'GRAN TORINO'
DETROIT CLINT'S STREET JUSTICE
By Sean Chavel
Actor-director veteran Clint Eastwood's first line of dialogue in Gran Torino is delivered with a growl. Perpetually crotchety and pissed, Eastwood's Walt Kowalski is the most profane-strewn grumpy old man you've met in some time. But when he pulls out his rifle on some squabbling gangbangers that roll onto his lawn ("Get. Off. My. Lawn.") Eastwood reminds you of his laconic Dirty Harry, or his William Munny, from his classic movie roles. In his crumbled homestead of Detroit, Kowalski is like McGruff the neighborhood watch dog. And he's out to take a bite out of anybody that trespasses his territory. He's a Korean War veteran, for Christ's sake.
The picture opens with Kowalski hosting his wife's funeral. He keeps a distance from his two sons and a further distance with his grandchildren. He is a motor mouth racist, especially peeved by the Korean family that lives next door to him. But surprise to him, he gets involved. He saves Sue (Ahney Her), the older teen girl of the family, from some local turf badasses groping her around. The troubled kid Thao (Bee Vang) is down on himself because he's a wuss - he tries to stay clear of his machine-gun toting cousins that want to initiate him into their gang. Thao is thrown in against his better defenses and his challenge is to steal the old man's car next door - a classic 1972 Gran Torino Ford.
Clint cocks his gun and growls all the more, now determined to fend off his no-good neighbors. But Sue acts as peacemaker following her rescue, and before long, the entire Hmong family is sending flowers and dumplings as thank you gifts. To eradicate family dishonor, Thao is indebted to two weeks labor on behalf of Kowalski as a form of apology. "Get me some more of that gook food," Kowalski implores. On merit of marinade, the get-togethers with Kowalski the widower become more frequent. "Get me another beer, dragon lady," Kowalski huffs to Sue. Kowalski uses insults as a shield to his ego, but Sue and Thao eventually figure that he's just joking - an old man whose racist sneers are hard to shed when he now means better.
The most telling line as to the character's loneliness: "I have more in common with these gooks than I do with my own family," Kowalski mutters. His kids are dopes to believe that this very agile and still brawling codger a ready to move into a retirement home. Gr-r-r-r. Eastwood must go Gr-r-r-r as many times in this movie as Homer Simpson goes D'oh in an entire season on "The Simpsons." The Gr-r-r-r goes well with his legendary squint, but while the inherent self-parody is in repetitive effect, the cranky old man redemption theme of making amends with the very culture that rankles him is fittingly poignant.
Sinking deep into neighborhood poverty, Eastwood is showing a very common slum neighborhood that often is not seen in the movies. The gangbanger language has a contemporary edge, and Sue in particular has a streetwise fortitude when defending herself from thugs - this Ahney Her actress is one surprisingly good performance and she is missed when she is absent from screen. The less proficient brother Thao, on the other hand, needs a job, needs some carpentry skills, needs some verbal skills, needs a life. Kowalski bec-omes mentor to a kid that's not going to survive in this world unless he gets some hair on his chest.
Unfortunately Thao's cousins continue to break the peace, and Kowalski has to gear up to teach these boys a lesson old school style. While at times low-key once the script's key friendships are established, the final act goes into vendetta mode. Eastwood, in his career twilight, is more thoughtful than the mythical heroes of his young career, and kicks all clichés off to the side. "Gran Torino" is contemplative and touching, albeit blatant when it gets to Kowalski confessing all his sins. Eastwood, 78 years old, announced that this is probably his last acting role, preferring to stick behind the camera. If so, this vehicle is a worthy summation of his grizzled badass screen image. The movie progresses with the same cool, unhurried stride as Eastwood
himself.
My Name Is Bruce
By Jonathan Weichsel
My Name Is Bruce, although not a direct sequel to Bruce Campbell's cult favorite Army of Darkness, is that film's spiritual successor. Both films use B movie horror motifs not to scare, but to make us laugh. And My Name Is Bruce does make us laugh. The humor ranges from extremely bizarre but emotionally grounded character driven jokes involving alcoholism and alimony payments, to outrageous sight gags involving dismembered body parts, unusual deaths, and a crazy looking Chinese god of war.
Jeff (Taylor Sharpe) is a teenager from a small mining town in Oregon, who is completely obsessed with B movie actor Bruce Campbell. He owns DVD's of all of Campbell's movies, and talks about Campbell constantly. Jeff's bedroom is a shrine to Bruce Campbell, with posters, cardboard cutouts, action figures, etc.
Jeff, while vandalizing a graveyard with his punk friends in a hilarious opening scene, unwittingly unleashes Guan-Di, the Chinese God of war, who seeks revenge against the town for the deaths of a hundred Chinese miners about one hundred years ago. Guan-Di kills Jeff's friends and chases Jeff out of the graveyard. Naturally, Jeff decides to go to Hollywood, kidnap Bruce Campbell, and bring him back to rid the town of Guan-Di. Somehow, he is able to convince the rest of the town that Campbell is their only hope.
Bruce Campbell, who directs as well as stars, plays a warped version of himself. In the film, Bruce Campbell is a Hollywood loser. He is hated by his co-stars and assistants, deemed unnecessary by his director, and not taken seriously by his agent. Although he is a working actor, he must resort to living in a trailer in the woods because all his money goes to paying alimony to his ex-wife. He is also an alcoholic who likes to get drunk with his dog, and a pornography addict.
When Bruce Campbell first arrives at the mining town, he assumes that the whole thing is an elaborate birthday present from his agent. He goes along with what he thinks is a ruse, and soon grows to enjoy the free booze and food plied on him by the town's inhabitants, who by now see him as their savior. He also falls for Jeff's hot mom Kelly (Grace Thorsen), the only town member who does not believe Bruce Campbell can rid them of the curse of Guan-Di.
When Bruce Campbell brings them all on a gun toting expedition to the graveyard to confront Guan-Di he sees that the monster is real and high tails it out of town, inadvertently shooting many of the town's inhabitants, and leaving many more to be slaughtered by Guan-Di.
Bruce goes back to his old life of crummy sequels and alimony payments, but when he receives a phone call from Jeff, who plans on going after Guan-Di himself, he knows he has to do the right thing and returns to the mining town to face the monster, as well as all the people he has pissed off.
My Name Is Bruce is a film that is designed to be a cult classic, not a blockbuster. The bizarre humor that runs throughout My Name Is Bruce will appeal to fans of Army of Darkness. Some outsiders may be warmed up by the film's story of a loser who defeats the odds, but many more will be turned off by the film's strangeness.
Although Bruce Campbell has spent his career as a big chinned leading man of low budget horror, his few comedies demonstrate a rare comedic gift. Campbell is a genuinely funny guy, and although he goes for the cheap laugh whenever he can, he is also able to elicit that rare kind of guffaw that bursts upward from somewhere deep down in the belly.
Adam Resurrected
By Sean Chavel
1961. In a cosmopolitan mental institution in the Israeli desert, the brilliant and unstable Adam Stein (Goldblum) receives a hearty homecoming from his fellow Holocaust survivors. Stein immediately resumes his asylum routine, which consists of banging his head nurse (when she isn't too busy barking like a dog for him), using his inexplicable and irrelevant telekinesis to casually outsmart his chum, the institution's administrator (Jacobi), sharing glib and predictable banter with other mental cases, and spontaneously experiencing "profuse bleeding fits" feasibly caused by slips in Stein's superhuman control of his own body - which, trust me, sounds more interesting than it is. A series of forced flashbacks over the course of the film juxtaposes Stein's pre-war career - impresario, magician & all-around Vaudevillian performer - with his wartime career - an endless one-dog-show under the supervision of a trademark Nazi kook, Commandant Klein (Dafoe) - and his post-war "career" of degenerating into a crippled alcoholic survivor, poor fictional fellow. And back at the institution, Stein's redemptive journey finds its true shape when a young boy shows up who woof-woofs and crawls around on all fours just like Stein did in his heyday. To no great surprise they form an unlikely friendship - unlikely because it, like most else in the film, is forced - and save each other's souls.
'Creative paralysis' occurs when an artist has belabored a project for so long that the original purpose is muddled and likely forgotten, and it occurs all the time. The apparently schlocky German producer Ehud Bleiburg read Yoram Kaniuk's Adam novel 20 years ago and has wanted to make a film of it ever since... and he should've (what struck a man at 20 is considerably different than what strikes him at 40). Eventually Bleiburg found a for-hire director in Paul Schrader. Adam marks Schrader's 30th year directing films and all I can think is that he should know better than to make a film like this; Adam isn't a disaster but is so inconsequential that it practically feels like one. Schrader really seems to not have a clear idea of what to do with the script he's got as he tells the story in a conventional, dated manner. The cinematography is of mostly that typical handheld 'whatever' milieu and there is very little aesthetic crafting. Goldblum does well but even as a brilliant and lighthearted performer he cannot elevate the film's somber, dreary tone. Dafoe? Oh, who doesn't get Dafoe, and who doesn't get a nice little Dafoe performance? In retrospect, I must say that there was not a moment in the film that excited me out of apathy. It's a curious surprise that the product feels slapdashed and forgettable considering how long it was stewing in Bleiburg's pot. Adam Resurrected was once, perhaps, an impressive and heartfelt story, but... there's simply nothing left to talk about. It's too late, why force anything? As a dynamic between the filmmakers and the audience, two doctors in the film touch on this position rather aptly... One doctor complains to the head doctor that Stein is undisciplined, unmedicated, has free reign of the institution... frustrated, he muses, "Maybe we should just let the patients cure each other, and we can sit around all day in our pajamas and play cards?" The other doctor warmly responds, "That's the best thing you've said all day."