Month: September 2006

Rocky Road.

So the second half of the aforementioned weekend double-feature was Woody Allen’s Scoop. (As far as choices go, we were somewhat limited — other members of our party had already seen Little Miss Sunshine and Talladega Nights, and while I may still catch Snakes on a Plane at some point, I’d like to see it with a bigger, rowdier audience than would fill an afternoon matinee on the islands.) At any rate, cringeworthy at first, Scoop is a passable little flick, I suppose — Once it settles into its rhythm, it’s a decent ninety minutes of air-conditioning. When I say it feels like an old-fashioned throwback, I don’t mean in the sense of vintage Allen comedies like Bananas, Love and Death, Take the Money and Run, or Sleeper. It’s nowhere near as funny as those films, even if Allen is once again doing his usual nebbishy schtick here. (It is, however, better than recent Allen bombs like Manhattan Murder Mystery or Small Time Crooks, albeit not by much.) Rather, with its thin characters and gossamer plot line, Scoop is so breezy as to seem weightless — there’s barely a movie here at all, just an opportunity for Woody and new favorite sidekick Scarlett Johannson to play Woody for an hour and a half. This will likely seem either endearing and nostalgic or deeply painful to you, depending on your threshold for Allenisms.

The set-up is this: Sondra Pransky (Johansson) is a verbose, vaguely neurotic, and bespectacled (you do the math) college journalist staying with upper-class friends in London and aiming to break into the journalistic big-time. While serving as an audience volunteer for a third-rate Borscht Belt magic show one evening by the Great Splendini, a.k.a. Sid Waterman (Allen), Pransky is visited by a ghost in the machine: namely, that of former Fleet Street legend Joe Strombel (Ian McShane, carrying Al Swearingen with him whereever he goes right now). Apparently unable to file his story from the grave, Strombel’s spectre offers Pransky the scoop of a lifetime: upper-crust son of privilege Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is in fact the Tarot Card Killer, a lowlife murderer currently haunting the streets of London. Armed with this unearthly knowledge, Pransky and Waterman set out to get enough dirt on the young Lord Lyman to make the story, a plan which is complicated, naturally, by Pransky falling in love with her target.

What this all amounts to is Johansson flirting with Jackman and/or playing Nancy Drew while Allen bumbles his way through various upper-class social gatherings. (Allen’s portrayal of the British class system is as cartoonish here as it was in Match Point, but, hey, that’s ok — for all intent and purposes, Scoop is a cartoon.) When Allen delivers seemingly decade-old groaners or fumbles with a goofy mnemonic for entirely too long, Scoop can be hard to watch without gritting your teeth and just grimacing through it. But, occasionally, Allen falls into a comfort zone or delivers a choice line which suggests there’s still some life in Alvy Singer yet. The former moments outweighs the latter, sure, and perhaps I’m being too lenient on Woody here. But, at the very least, Scoop isn’t flat-out terrible like so many other recent Allen comedies, although I can’t recommend anyone actually rush out and spend money on it. (Although, if you do, Buffy fans, keep a sharp eye out for Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) in a very brief supporting role, as well as — more exciting for my purposes — fanboy stalwarts Julian Glover (Empire, Indy 3) and Charles Dance (Alien 3, The Golden Child).)

RIP GOP?

“‘The environment for the majority party is extremely bad,’ says political scientist David Rohde of Duke University. ‘There’s certainly plenty of time for things to be shaken up … (but) it would take something really huge” to turn around GOP fortunes.'” Don’t count your chickens, but, with nine weeks to go before Election 2006, the Republicans are still floundering, as more and more GOP seats enter into play and a House takeover by the Dems looks increasingly likely. Thanks, Dubya!

Queen Bees and Wanna-Bes.

So, to escape the sun for an afternoon (even while vacationing in paradise, sometimes you need an off-day), the family and I went to catch an impromptu double-feature over the weekend, the first half being Neil LaBute’s muddle-headed update of The Wicker Man. Going in absolutely cold, I suppose Wicker might make for a reasonably tolerable and diverting two hours, although I found the pacing rather stilted in any case. But if you’re at all familiar with the 1973 Edward Woodward/Christopher Lee cult classic, The Wicker Man seems like a pretty egregious misfire. Using some nefarious pagan alchemy, LaBute has stripped out much of the intriguing religious ruminations (as well as the sexiness and sense of humor) from the original Wicker Man and replaced it with a lethal dose of over-the-top LaBute-brand misogyny. In effect, he’s transmuted gold into lead.

Part of the fun of watching the original 70s-era Wicker Man is figuring out what the hell it is in the first place. Between song-and-dance numbers and the landlord’s daughter (Britt Ekland) famously in dishabile, Wicker swings wildly to and fro in a pagan delirium of genres…well, until it all starts to go horribly wrong (and even then Chris Lee is rocking that ridiculous turtleneck.) But in LaBute’s version, we’re in dour thriller mode from the get-go, as we watch well-meaning, earnest California highway patrolman Edward Malus (Nicholas Cage) experience a truly horrible day at the office. (Between this and World Trade Center, cop-Cage has been having a really tough week on screen, the kind martyriffic Mel Gibson probably dreams about.) As Malus recuperates from his harrowing (and ultimately somewhat nonsensical) day, he receives a letter from an old flame, Willow (Kate Beahan), begging him to visit her home — here an island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest — to help her locate her missing daughter Rowan. Soon, Malus absconds to the Verizonless village of Summersisle to chat up the bizarre town elders, which include Deadwood‘s Molly Parker, Six Feet Under‘s Frances Conroy, and the Queen Bee of Summersisle herself, Ellen Burstyn (still looking radiant and still deserving better), about the possible abduction. But, as he ventures deeper into this strange realm, Malus unearths not only an elaborate conspiracy of silence but a dark plot to put ancient pagan magic to the service of the island’s foundering fortunes…

Not to give the game away, but the trick in the original film (penned by Anthony Shaffer, brother of Amadeus writer Peter) is that the visiting cop (Edward Woodward) is a devout Christian who finds himself alternately horrified and tempted by the ritualistic seductions of the island’s pagans (His religiosity also provides grist for various disquisitions on martyrdom, crucifixion, and sacrifice by that island’s leading citizen, Christopher Lee.) But, LaBute’s conceit here, as you might expect if you’ve ever seen anything else he’s done (and I’ll admit to actually quite liking In the Company of Men), is that Summersisle is a radical matriarchy, with women holding all positions of power, girls the only students in the local schoolhouse, and men either killed at birth — courtesy of Ruth Fisher — or kept as docile, tongue-less workers and “breeders.” Explained another way, Summersisle’s cash crop in the original film is apples, the fruit of temptation, knowledge, and disobedience to divine will. Here’s it’s honey, which LaBute uses instead to make all kinds of unwieldy queen bee and drone bee metaphors (“The drone must die!,” women scream at Cage in one scene), to say nothing of the dangers of, um, honeypots.

Put simply, LaBute has basically chosen to use The Wicker Man as a cartoonish vehicle for his woman-hating issues, and the result is not only a serious diminishment of the original film, but also more than a little childish and embarrassing. [Note: From now herein, I’ll be talking about major, end-of-movie type spoilers — Quit reading if you don’t want to know.] In the end, look closely, and you find that there wasn’t a single sympathetic female character in the film, even folks who have no business being involved in the conspiracy. (LaBute ultimately even sinks so low as to have Cage gratuitously beat the crap out of a few “evil” chicks, including Leelee Sobieski, who’s inexplicably turned into a ravenous vampire or somesuch for this one scene, all accompanied with John Wayne-type punch sound editing.) And, perhaps worst of all, LaBute ends this version not with the climax of Cage’s story but a woefully misguided coda involving James Franco at a singles bar, thus turning the whole enterprise into basically one long, unnecessary remix of the kidney thieves story.

In sum, this Wicker Man at best feels akin to a middling episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes on TNT. At worst, it’s a seriously wrong-headed remake and a mortifying enterprise for Cage, Burstyn, and co. to have been a part of. Do yourself a favor: Burn this sucker down and rent the original.

Trailer Convoy.

Several items for the trailer bin:

* Diane Lane and Thomas Jane go on the lam to escape hitmen Mickey Rourke and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in this glimpse at John Madden’s Tarantino’ed-up version of Elmore Leonard’s Killshot. (Johnny Knoxville and Rosario Dawson are involved in some fashion as well.)

* Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li gear up for some trademark Zhang Yimou wire-fu (a la Hero and House of Flying Daggers) in the new teaser for Curse of the Golden Flower.

* Nicole Kidman ventures through the photographic looking-glass as Diane Arbus in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, the new film by Secretary‘s Steven Shainberg, also with Robert Downey Jr. (Mirrored here.)

* Helen Mirren jumps from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II in this look at Stephen Frears’ The Queen, concerning Buckingham Palace’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana. (I have zero interest in the subject matter, frankly, but I do like Mirren, Frears, and James Cromwell, and there’s an iffy Tony Blair impression here by Michael Sheen, to say nothing of the guy playing Prince Charles.)

* Finally, Guillermo del Toro returns to the faerie Spain of The Devil’s Backbone in this rapid-edit teaser for Pan’s Labyrinth. (Being on a lousy hotel connection, I couldn’t get this link to work, but I believe the same teaser is mirrored here.)

Ragged & Dirty.

“I hate to break it to Justin Timberlake, but a wheezy old man has recorded the best make-out songs of 2006. Put Modern Times in the CD player, pull your sweetheart close, and — as a young man advised a lifetime or so ago — shut the light, shut the shade.” Also in Slate, Jody Rosen swoons over Bob Dylan’s new album, which I’m listening to for the first time right this minute. So far, it sounds like a more accessible version of Love and Theft…I think I kinda dig it.