Category: Cinema

Return of the King.


Well, I really wish I could report that Bubba Ho-Tep, in which Elvis Presley [Bruce Campbell (!)] and JFK [Ossie Davis (?!)] team up to save their East Texas retirement home from an ancient soul-sucking mummy, is as hilarious as the premise. But, sadly, once you get past the high-concept comedy, you’re left with a bunch of low-brow buffoonery and a stalled story that moves slower than even these aging convalescents. For his part, Campbell swings for the fences, and does a surprisingly wistful turn on the King, but unfortunately he has very little to work with here. It seems the writers never got very far past the founding conceit of having these two icons team up, so neither do we.

As a comedy, Bubba Ho-Tep is only intermittently funny. The best two scenes both involve Reservoir Dogs-style slo-mo hero shots – you’ll know ’em when you see ’em. The rest of the jokes are scattershot and many, particularly the ones involving the two undertakers, are just D.O.A. As a horror movie…well, this isn’t scary at all. Ho-tep and his flock of giant scarabs are played for laughs. (So, of course, was all of Evil Dead 2, — Campbell’s finest hour — but I’ll submit that the mother-zombie singing the Mockingbird song at the basement door is genuinely creepy.) Surprisingly, Bubba Ho-Tep probably works best as a meditation on aging. Entirely too much of the narrative is propelled by an Elvis/Campbell voiceover, but his twilight ruminations do occasionally add a touch of poignancy to this story of legends laid low by the ravages of time. Not enough, sadly, to recommend the film, though. Campbell is good, but Bubba Ho-Tep is all set-up and no follow-through.

Immigrant Song.


So, in my abortive attempt to catch the RotK trailer Friday night — Sony Lincoln Square wisely put Secondhand Lions in the basement theater to stop people like me from sneaking in for the previews…well played, y’all — I ended up seeing Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou. Worth seeing (although I preferred Lost in Translation), DPT is a tale of immigrant woe that starts very strong and gets weaker as it goes along. Holding down a number of dead-end jobs and chewing qat to stay awake at all hours of the day, a Nigerian-born doctor in London (Ejiofor, in a captivating, star-making performance) finds a hotel toilet clogged by a human heart. While this grisly discovery is never satisfactorily explained, it nevertheless propels him into an underworld organ-selling network that thrives on London’s most desperate new arrivals.

Ejiofor is great throughout the film, and DPT strikingly portrays how his character Okwe can get pretty much anywhere just by acting like the help. That being said, I thought the narrative lost its considerable momentum when the denouement becomes obvious, and when Frears made the implicit “invisible immigrant” theme too explicit. (He gives Ejiofor some pithy bon mots near the end about the plight of the unseen, just in case you’ve somehow missed the point thus far.) Plus, once you get past Okwe and arguably Tautou’s Senay, you basically end up with a lot of stereotyped characters straight out of Central Casting — the drunk and fun-loving Russian, the hooker with the heart of gold, the Asian morgue-worker who plays chess and ruminates on the Afterlife, the two INS guys who inexplicably take an interest in Tautou (and equally inexplicably follow her from job to job – How exactly did they find her at the sweatshop, and why did they care so much? Just a sentence or two of explanation would’ve satisfied me.) Still, while the film may never deliver on its early promise, it is enjoyable and thought-provoking throughout, and Ejiofor is very, very good – I hope to see more from him in the future.

She’s got legs,

and She knows how to use them. The hour is finally at hand…Tomorrow the RotK trailer appears in front of Secondhand Lions (online Monday), and here’s what we’ll see. (Some screencaps here.) Update: Snippets of footage here, including an ethereal and jaw-dropping look at Minas Morgul. Come, Master, come to Smeagol… Update 2: The Wachowskis get in the game with the full Matrix: Revolutions trailer…A sci-fi sorbet before the fanboy main course. Update 3: A bootleg version of the trailer is now available, and it should hold ya until Monday.

Blind man’s bluff.

Another new Matrix: Revolutions ad makes it online, with two more to follow tomorrow. What with the ponderous epic music and all, it takes itself way too seriously as usual…but there is some new and intriguing footage in here. Update: The other two spots are now online, and be warned – they’re starting to get spoilerific.

Beckinsale Bites.

So as membership dues for the fanboy nation, I went to go see Len Wiseman’s Underworld last night…woo boy. Kate Beckinsale literally vamping in a tight-fitting leather catsuit — what’s to screw up, right? A lot, apparently. The lack of imagination that went into this flick is embarrassing. Instead of playing with their own founding conceit of vampires vs. werewolves, the movie just happily, stupidly rides along in its faux-Matrix groove. The lycans don’t find any inventive uses for garlic, crosses, or wooden stakes – they just shoot ridiculous amounts of tricked-up ammo at the bloodsuckers, and vice versa. There’s entirely too many laugh-out-loud moments and most of the film makes no sense. Characters keep getting shot with the same weaponry to different effect (Does silver heal, kill, wound, or what?) And then there’s this fellow Shane Brolly — who plays Kraven, nominal head of the vampires until an elder awakens — who may just be the worst actor I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture. (The problem might have been the American accent – I got the sense it wasn’t his.) At any rate, I had grievously low expectations for this flick, and they were not met. To make the obligatory vampire pun, Underworld sucked.