Frida

Grade: C

Where is a painter’s palette when you need one? Who is Frida Kahlo? What does her art say about who she is? What and why are her politics what they are? What does she see in the man she loves so desperately? What does her sexuality tell us about her? This episodic telling of an artist’s life is entirely lacking any sense of character motivation, turning a fascinating life into a rather long-winded and uninteresting blank canvas. Salma Hayek does her level best here, but simply doesn’t possess the acting chops necessary to breathe life into a character unsupported by a compelling screenplay. She plays three different emotions – strident, confident, and occasionally vulnerable – with little divergence as we move through her episode of “This is Your Life.” A woman crippled by a devastating accident in her youth, she tells us of the never-ending pain we virtually never see expressed on her face. Alfred Molina fares a little better here, largely because he is a far better actor, but he also fails to transcend a screenplay that pronounces him a Casanova yet never defines his supposed appeal. Ashley Judd, Geoffrey Rush and Roger Rees are all plagued with terrible accent jobs, and Edward Norton is notably dreadful in a cameo that is more of a line reading than a performance. Visually intriguing to be sure, we learn more here about director July Taymor’s aesthetics than we do about Frida Kahlo’s – it is yet another demonstration of a filmmaker’s ego getting in the way of telling a story.

Numerous screenwriters have been battling over credit for writing this piece, including Ed Norton, who was denied final recognition. I would suggest they should be denying participation rather than embracing responsibility for this paint-by-numbers, thoroughly uninspired rendering of an artist’s life.

More movie info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0120679/

Real Women Have Curves

Grade: B

Not since Camryn Manheim's exquisite gem of a book, "Wake Up, I'm Fat" (Side note: Every friend I have bought this book for has turned around and bought several copies as gifts for other people -- it is a must read), has a work dealt so refreshingly dead-on with body image issues. If this movie is a little too pat and predictable for it's own good, it's also honest and kindhearted in its appraisal of how people judge and scar those they love most. Lupe Ontivera is positively hateful as an emotionally abusive mother who attempts to repress her daughter as she herself has been repressed. The performance is a bitter one that also manages to be filled with overwhelming sadness. One may feel the intense desire to boo out loud at this woman, yet it is an uncompromisingly honest and gutsy performance -- there are no pat Hollywood endings here. America Ferrera is less practiced but fine as a young woman trying to break free from societal molds -- she is strong, strident, smart, and winning. If there is never any doubt the direction her life will take, the film deals with all its characters with charm, sympathy and tenderness.

This is a movie that never aspires to greatness, and the screenplay is fairly simple fare -- but when a group of women strip off their clothes and display their cellulite in an act of ultimate self acceptance, it is a moment that would make Camryn proud. But I must say, I was less than thrilled that my partner felt the need to look my way when our heavy protagonist took a defiant spoonful of dessert -- wassup with that? It's not like I have any food or body image issues.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0296166/

White Oleander

Grade: F

I now understand the true meaning of the phrase “the book was better.” And I never even read the darn book.

As God as my witness, it took every last fiber of my being to refrain from howling out in pain like a wounded animal during this excruciatingly torturous experience. I did not, however, survive without moaning, groaning, silently screaming into my clenched fists, and muttering an incredulous “Oh My God” from time to time. And no, I am not kidding. I truly cannot remember the last movie that has engendered me with such contempt and bile – it is the single most painful sit in recent memory.

Pop Psych 101, Pop Philosophy 101, Pop Human Sexuality 101, Pop Religious Studies 101, Pop Art 101 all meet “Screenwriting for Dummies.”

Strident, domineering, never-endingly irritating, psychotic mother murders boyfriend, sending daughter on a journey from one stereotyped and cliché-ridden foster care experience after another. Along the way, daughter, mother, and every other cast member meet repeatedly with the screenwriter of the TV series “Kung Foo.” The platitudes are tormenting in their abundance grasshopper -- the dialogue is so appallingly mortifying, so embarrassingly devoid of anything even remotely genuine, that the filmmakers must have determined the only way to camouflage what was coming out of the actor’s mouths was by creating situations even more outlandish than the actual dialogue. From a Christ-thumping, gun-toting, trailer trash, alcoholic foster mother dressed in head to toe pink and replete with lecherous boyfriend to the foster home of a loving, wealthy, yet thoroughly unstable and suicidal replacement to that of a high-heeled slave laborer, we are only “relieved” of these interludes when 1) daughter intermittently visits mother in jail, where we have to survive Michele Pfeiffer in the most nails on a chalkboard performance of the year; or 2) when daughter is forced (as are we) to survive in a juvenile detention center, complete with the obligatory knife fight, falling in love with fellow inmate, and moment of deep torment where said teenager saws off her hair with said knife while watching herself in a bathroom mirror (her “Yentl” moment, and apparently my loudest “Oh My God” during the course of the movie).

This is the kind of dreck even Lifetime for Women (and gay men), bastion of such masterworks as “The Girl on the Milk Carton” and countless Joan van Ark tear jerkers, would take a pass on for being too pretentious, cloying, manipulative and over-the-top melodramatic. I don’t simply want my money back or a letter of formal apology from the studio that distributed this loathsome thing – I want them to pay for my exorcist. My sensibilities are so offended they may never ever recover. The single worst movie of the year (dear god, please).

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0283139/

Bowling for Columbine

Grade: B+

As we were leaving this documentary about gun violence in the United States, who should be leaving the theater in front of us but James Gandolfini – Tony Soprano himself. Only in New York.

It is to my great shame and embarrassment to admit that Charlton Heston was a childhood hero of mine. As a teenager, I read his autobiography and was enthralled to read about my matinee idol’s activism against the Vietnam war and the many requests people made of him to run for office on the Democratic ticket. How this man turned to the NRA dark side is truly up there with Anakin Skywalker turning against Obi-Wan Kenobi and ending up as Darth Vader. Heston is equal parts sick, twisted, scared, and just plain evil. It’s a sad and pathetic thing to see.

Filmmaker Michael Moore does a fascinating and upsetting, if often incomplete and not totally convincing job of outlining and analyzing the staggering rates of gun-related violence in this country. The numbers of gun homicides in the United States as compared to every other nation in the free world is nothing short of shameful, and Moore appropriately mixes his own brand of acerbic humor and righteous indignation in an attempt to uncover what makes us Americans so damn prone to violence. While he does a gripping and often quite moving job of laying out the problem and its devastating impact on individual lives and our society as a whole, his analysis is often faulty and a bit too lopsidedly left wing for even this left-winger. Poverty and racism as root causes are mixed in with our international policy of building up dictators in some countries, providing foreign aid in other countries, while bombing the hell out of still others which is mixed in with the overabundance of violence covered on our evening news which is then mixed in with discussions about our general “culture of fear and violence” – all at the same time that Moore gives a free pass to the somewhat more conservative notion that violence in our movies, on our televisions, and in our music is in any way responsible for anything. Moore blasts our news channels for always being at the ready to cover anything bloody. Yet, in one of the film’s most powerful moments -- when injured Columbine students manage to convince a store chain to stop carrying bullets -- it is those very same news channels that are there to cover the event as well. A little too much having and eating of one’s cake permeates the movie’s muddy analysis.

It is also surprising that Moore never gets around to a closer indictment of our lawmakers, who are so busy accepting big checks from the NRA and debating the differences between semi-automatic weaponry and hunting rifles that effective handgun legislation never seems to get passed anywhere.

But this is a film of ideas, and Moore takes us on a real American journey of personal stories told, questions posed, ideas contributed, and insights provided. It is blurry to be sure, but it is also incredibly passionate, provocative, and intensely thought-provoking. We need more Michael Moores around to spotlight our failures and our hypocrisy.

And still, a gun toting sniper terrifies Maryland. And still, Heston’s henchman pontificate about the constitutional right to bear arms. It is an often sick nation indeed.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0310793/