Pumpkin

Grade: C+

Talk about lacking the courage of your convictions. The first hour here is one twisted little dark comedy about a sorority girl who falls for a “retard.” So politically incorrect and intentionally offensive, one can’t help but laugh out loud while at the same time looking around the rest of the theater to make sure no one is looking. Christina Ricci is dead on point as a smart airhead who begins to question her own sense of herself and the world she inhabits.
Sadly, what begins as bitingly funny suddenly and without notice turns into a bizarre and confused little fairy tale midway. Vicious commentary turns suddenly cloying and weirdly sentimental, and the second hour (this is way too long at over 2 hours) quickly becomes a tough sit. One can’t help but notice the “challenged” lead is not all that different from everyone else around him, and we can’t help but surmise that the filmmakers lost their guts and decided to cop-out somewhere along the way. First hour: having one’s cake. Second hour: eating it too.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0265591/

The Patriot

Grade: B

Melodramatic, schmaltzy, predictable, yet nevertheless moving tale with Mel Gibson’s best screen performance. True, it should be against film-making law for one enemy to save another who finds new respect for his savior (We just saw “Perfect Storm” do the same thing, for cryin’ out loud), and the old “I’ve shot him, so I drop my weapon ‘cause he must be dead” stupidity (“Mission Impossible”). But the film manages tears and pathos on numerous occasions, and even pulls on one’s patriotic heartstrings. It is indeed “Braveheart” meets “1776” sans songs, but since “Braveheart” won Best Picture and I just love “1776” ….

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0187393/

Notorious C.H.O.

Grade: B

Everyone admit it – for almost ten months now, we’ve all been waiting for something – anything – to find even remotely funny about the World Trade Center disaster. It takes less than a minute onstage before Margaret Cho has us rolling in the aisles about the catastrophic event, and somehow even manages it without being disrespectful to the tremendous loss. It takes a comedic master to accomplish such a feat, and to my knowledge Cho is the first.

Margaret Cho’s first concert film, “I’m the One That I Want,” was a diatribe on her life – being Asian and overweight in Hollywood, discovering her bisexuality, her relationship with her far more traditional parents – it was a ninety minute confessional of sorts, and one left the theater with a new friend. This time around, it’s all about S E X. Lesbian sex, gay sex, straight sex, leather sex, lots and lots of sex. Much of the film is indeed laugh out loud funny and shockingly outrageous. Yet the film is also somewhat one note, and brings about just as many amused smiles as it does outright guffaws. Gone too is much of the vulnerability we loved so much in the first film – here we have one horny lady with a “f&!k the world attitude” that one can’t help but admire, albeit feel somewhat more distanced from.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0300274/

Minority Report

Grade: B

Steven Spielberg is one of our few true visionaries. More than any other filmmaker, he has created worlds unknown, charted heretofore untouched territory, created magic on the screen. Now, if he could only find a truly good screenplay. In his last two films, first in the abysmal “A.I.” of last year and now to a lesser degree here, Spielberg has painted us a breathtaking landscape, but has forgotten how to tell a really terrific story.

On the surface, this has all the elements of yet another Spielberg masterpiece. We are some 50 years into the future, and a “pre-crime” ward imprisons people for murders they were “going” to commit. The moral ambiguity is fascinating, as is the look of a place at once familiar and foreign to us. Advertising has sunk to new lows in our culture, cars now travel forward, backward, upward and downward on sweeping, multidirectional highways, and holographic images take us deeper than ever before inside our own memories. Yet infomercials still strive to convince us to do everything from purchase crap to support acts of Congress, poverty continues to abound, and shopping malls filled with “Gap” stores still thrive. The effects are striking, the cinematography stunning (although the cold and metallic look and feel of the film also have the unintended effect of leaving one emotionally disconnected and distant from the action on screen), and the central conceit is both original and intellectually unnerving.

But at its core, this is still largely a whodunit. While the film doesn’t quite fail on this level, one wishes Spielberg had invested the same loving care on this element of the film than he has on everything else. It’s not a bad yarn – in fact it’s rather complex and multidimensional – but it’s also often fuzzy, spotty and incomplete. Characters appear and disappear in a single scene, written solely to provide a half hour of exposition in 2-3 minutes. Visually cool moments (mechanical spiders taking light beam eye signatures instead of fingerprints to find our man on the run) are often poor storytelling moments as well (how did they know where to look for him in the first place?). There are also some highly implausible gaffs (the way our escapee cop protagonist manages to get back into police headquarters is almost embarrassing – can anyone say “change the combination?”) Worst of all, the real villain of the piece is never much in doubt, and the scene where his treachery is “revealed” is a boldly blatant “LA Confidential” rip-off. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be so thrilled with the auteur’s “vision,” we won’t even notice the plot holes? I noticed.

Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast are fine if uninspired, and there is indeed much eye candy and food for thought. But how I wish Spielberg had delved deeper into the political and societal ramifications the piece evokes, and put the screenplay through a couple more rewrites. This one shoulda’ been breathtaking.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

Sunshine State

Grade: A

See what can happen when you take a beautifully written, character driven screenplay, hand it off to a gorgeously talented group of ensemble actors all working under the auspices of a gifted and thoughtful director? You get an exquisite gem of a film.

A dozen people on a small coastal town in Florida, an island to be precise, reliving open wounds, walking around the outskirts of reconciliation, searching for relationships, letting go of dreams, fighting for what belongs to them, investing heart and soul into mediocrity, seeking approval, justifying behavior, reaching out to those in need, holding on to memories, trying to live life one day at a time….

This is not a Hollywood movie. The happy endings we look for only occur if we choose to project them after we’ve left the theater. We don’t leave satisfied that the full tale has been told and the story is over. The screenplay is so rich and engrossing, we find ourselves writing our own backstories for these characters, inferring so much fullness in their lives by mere implication, through a throwaway sentence, an inflection of delivery, a gesture or a look in an actor’s eyes. While there are admittedly some overly written soliloquies, moments where an actor will practically stand center stage and be hit with a follow spot, there are so many more moments of truth and reality here (not to mention some wonderful one-liners) that it is easy to forgive and forget the occasional flourish. I have little doubt if one were to drive into this town, we would indeed meet our cast living the lives we have briefly visited on the screen.

And what a cast it is. Mary Alice, Angela Bassett, Ralph Waite, and Mary Steenburgen are all particularly splendid, providing the piece with subtleties and nuisances within each performance that make us feel we have known these people their (and our) entire lives. And then there is Edie Falco, who gives one of the best performances of the year – touching, funny, endearing, heartbreaking and yet thoroughly winning and hopeful. We never doubt for a second she has lived in the hot southern sun her entire life, serving early bird specials, marrying and divorcing a dreamer of an alcoholic nutcase, giving up her own dreams out of family obligation and having a string of meaningful yet doomed relationships out of motel rooms. Yet she is just one of so many beautiful stories, sometimes intertwining, often never connecting, but somehow all a part of the fabric of a town being slowly developed out of its very existence.

Director John Sayles has directed without any flourishes that tend to draw attention to the director and away from the actor. Instead, he trusts unobtrusive camerawork and actors working with a great script to tell his story. My major complaint is that at 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film is simply too short – we come to care so deeply for so many of these people, we truly want to know what the future will hold.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0286179/

The Bourne Identity

Grade: B-

If someone wants to make a truly dynamite thriller, they should hire Matt Damon to star in the next Tom Clancy movie. Sorry Ben, but Matt is far more charismatic, fascinating, and thoughtful in his acting choices. The movie itself is a fairly paint-by-numbers CIA spy movie, without all that much there there. A spy with amnesia spends the entire film on the run as he attempts to figure out who he is and why he’s being chased. Real original concept folks. While it is a fun enough summer ride, the explanation for the memory loss and the overall resolution is a bit of a yawn, with the exception of a nice little twist not to be disclosed here. The romance element is also a bit – surprise – forced. There is, however, some fun (if choppy) action scenes, some sumptuous views of Paris, and yet another opportunity to see a terrific and highly underrated actor surprise us with his “against type” versatility.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0258463/

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Grade: D

As our movie opens, four girls sneak out in the middle of the night to perform a secret “Ya Ya” ritual in the woods. And here our problem begins. The woods feel completely phony -- the leaves on the trees plastic, the campfire pre-manufactured, the bird calls canned. Cut to years later, and the daughter of one of our campfire girls is in a Broadway theater, spilling her guts to a reporter from Time Magazine. The theater looks nothing like a real Broadway house (a personal pet peeve of mine). And so our theme develops. We spend two hours on a soundstage, with a plastic story filled with plastic situations, told by plastic characters. The film means well, and desperately wants to be another “Crimes of the Heart” or even “Steel Magnolias.” But all of the charm and grace of the two books on which the film is based has been lost. This is a movie about BIG actresses playing BIG parts, which they play oh so BIGLY. This is all not unlike another Sandra Bullock fiasco, “28 Days,” about a woman who is forced to enter a recovery program where never for a minute do we believe a single character has ever been near a 12-step meeting. Here, we never for a moment believe any of the Ya Yas have ever been south of, say, Chicago. Ellyn Burstyn and Maggie Smith lead the overwrought cast, and prove yet again that without a decent screenplay and strong director, even great talent can run amuck. And what’s with all the flashbacks in sepia and dreadfully misplaced music and song selections? This is pure melodramatic drivel.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0279778/

Whale Rider

Grade: C+

If only the very best of intentions added up to the very best of films.

This is certainly a loving feminist parable about a young girl’s spiritual and cultural ascent, an obvious leader amidst a community in need. Obvious to us, of course, although her stereotypically stubborn grandfather fails to see what is directly in front of him. The girl is nicely understated by newcomer Keisha Castle-Hughes, but the film begins with a mystical whimsy that all too quickly becomes overburdened with deadly pacing and spiritual overkill. We never really come to understand the desperation of the village, the driving need of the grandfather to find “the one” (yes, the theology is a bit heavy handed a la “The Matrix” here) who will restore the soul of his people and therefore revitalize his community. Relationships are all a bit stilted and under-defined, moving in mystical slow motion as we make our way to a rather obvious conclusion – guess who gets to ride a whale? What riding said whale is supposed to signify is not exactly clear, but you just gotta’ know its spiritually significant.

It is all excruciatingly well-meaning, but please, oh please, pick up the pace folks.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0298228/