Innocent Voices blog

By

David Sterritt

, Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor /
August 2, 2002

An unseen spirit hovers over "Signs," the new M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It's the spirit of "The Birds," which arrived 40 years ago and still looks fresh today.

"Signs" won't look fresh next week. Hollywood has taken quite a nosedive from Alfred Hitchcock's imaginative flight to Shyamalan's self-important summer fluff.

Mel Gibson plays Graham, a former clergyman who's lost his faith after his wife's accidental death. Now he raises crops on a Pennsylvania farm with his slow-witted brother (Joaquin Phoenix) and two young kids.

They blame local hoaxers when mysterious circles ? the kind some attribute to UFO visitations ? show up in their fields one night, but TV reports a spate of similar enigmas in other parts of the world.

It's the first sign of an alien invasion, followed by spacecraft zooming through the skies and sightings of scary-looking extraterrestrials on the ground.

This poses big questions for Graham, who's still undergoing his crisis of faith.

Is human existence a cosmic accident, which means we're on our own when disaster looms? Or does life have deeper significance, which means everything is part of a large, ultimately merciful plan?

The trouble with "Signs" isn't that it raises such important issues, but that it does so in such clumsy and superficial ways.

Every time the story promises to get really thoughtful, Shyamalan douses it with overwrought emotion, family-values clichés, and tepid space-monster suspense.

If the movie fails as philosophy, it's even worse as a thriller, riddled with plot holes big enough to accommodate an entire fleet of flying saucers.

For one sweeping example, how did these aliens manage to arrive on Earth, set up an invisible shield in the sky, and massacre an untold number of humans, when they're so physically weak and mentally mushy that a mild-mannered veterinarian can imprison one in his kitchen cupboard?

Shyamalan launched his career impressively with "The Sixth Sense," then slumped with "Unbreakable," which was too ambitious for its own good.

"Signs" isn't ambitious enough, focusing on a small group of poorly developed characters, while keeping the real action ? humanity fighting for its life ? almost completely off the screen.

"The Birds" did an infinitely better job of linking its isolated main characters with the larger world around them.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

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Rated PG-13; contains violence and vulgar language.

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Havana housewife and innate, textile worker and convener of her factory’s cultural class: Teresa has to evaluate the demands of an strenuous triple day, coping all the while with conspicuous lack of cooperation from her conceal and other Cuban heels. Uncommon among their number is a television interviewer whose oily machismo is an acute indictment of the female concept projected by the media. The archaic attitudes and insulting assumptions that confront working women, even after a cycle, are sketched in with a gifted lightness of access. Vega directs in bright primary colours, and with a fine eye for the minute but revealing moments and movements of daily dazzle.

Man of a Thousand Faces
Movie Re-examination by The Gravedigger
12.31.03

James Cagney portrays the makeup master in this Hollywood biopic, opting to go the melodramatic route in depicting his growing up with deaf parents and his tumultuous personal life. I had heard so much about this movie prior to seeing it that it was somewhat of a let down. It seemed that they tried way to hard to make Chaney a sympathetic character. The scenes where they show him acting on the sets of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME are really cool, though.

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Rating:

10.0

not at home of 10.0 - 1 endorse cast total

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Charmingly reproachful-sweetmeat gossip of the light-hearted jazz musician and the lovey-dovey snitch on-girl he gets pregnant, leading her to a deny hard pressed-street abortionist as a preferable alternative to facing her strict Italo-American kith and kin. Familiar in idea, but gospel a delightfully fresh flavour by Mulligan’s atmospherically low-key direction, excellent performances from Wood and McQueen, and vivid location shooting in New York’s Little Italy (the musician’s union lobby at the birth, the joke park, the sad and nasty row of the abortionist). Edie Adams is outstanding as the quizzically cynical stripper with whom McQueen is shacked up, but who is prearranged a characteristically raw deal by a arrange working its way toward the incumbent happy ending.

Red hair, coarse irrigate, inexperienced hills and yellow teeth create some of the most striking visual images in “An Angel at My Table.” The start and last have a proper place in to hack Janet Frame, whose difficult girlhood and tortured young adulthood the blur recounts; the middle two be attached to Altered Zealand, dwelling-place to both Frame and director Jane Campion.

This simple, bold palette brightens the narrative drone that nearly three hours of biographical vignettes create. In New Zealand, Frame’s reputation — literary success overcomes misdiagnosed schizophrenia — precedes her; each incident is thus a piece of a celebrity’s life. For Americans, the measured accumulation of detail can be frustrating. It’s like listening to a story about someone you barely know and being forced to prompt the teller, “And then? And then?”

The details vary from tragic to tragicomic. We meet the young Janet (Alexia Keogh) and her large railway worker’s family during the Depression. Her hair is a mushroom cloud of red curls and she’s very stout. She gets into scrapes at school and home, but shows signs of poetic genius. The teenage Janet (Karen Fergusson), nicknamed “Fuzzy” by schoolmates, seems headed for a solitary life as a teacher. By the time she’s a young woman (Kerry Fox), two of her siblings have died in separate drowning incidents and her teeth have decayed. Her hair is still ludicrous (no one seems to have tried cutting it), and pathological shyness only adds to her spiritual and sexual loneliness. Surprisingly, Campion flits over what many would consider the crux of Frame’s life. The suicide attempt that leads to her institutionalization is mentioned indirectly; a voiceover in a brief, cruel scene tells of her 200-plus electroshock treatments, “each one equal in fear to an execution.” She underwent such therapy for eight years, but Campion prefers to linger over the merely awkward moments — uncomfortable tea parties and social snubs — in Frame’s life. (Campion, who won acclaim for her provocative film “Sweetie,” and screenwriter Laura Jones also slight the author’s writing throughout. We see Frame typing but can never read what.)

The last third covers Frame’s awakening in all aspects. Although still morbidly bashful, she goes to England on her own and ends up in Spain. She loses her luggage but finds a boyfriend. More of her works get published and her English agent encourages her to write bestsellers. When her father’s death impels Frame to return to New Zealand, reporters clamber up a hillside to see the famous writer: She’s finally arrived. The movie, alas, is a few hours behind.

Friendly High jinks

Adam Hakari

I wish I could be a fly on the wall whenever Peter and Bobby Farrelly pitch their latest project. Wouldn't you love to have seen the look on the face of the exec who had to decide whether or not 

Dumb and Dumber 

should get the greenlight? But by the time the filmmaking brothers concocted 

Stuck on You

, Fox probably gave them a budget and told them "just make the movie already." Their latest opus mixes good laughs and a meaningful story, much like their previous film


Shallow Hal


attempted, only this picture is more successful. Instead of a comedy with stilted jokes and a hackneyed story,

Stuck on You 

is sweet, honest, and amusing.

The Farrelly Brothers make you laugh at the main characters' plights but never at the leads themselves — two siblings who are the full-fledged heroes of the film. Although these brothers share a medical condition that gets them into comedic scrapes,

Stuck on You 

doesn't point and laugh at their unusual physical condition.

Bob (Matt Damon) and Walt (Greg Kinnear) have grown up extremely close to one another. They'd have to be, since the guys are conjoined twins, and since their shared liver is mostly on Bob's side, they've spent their whole lives together. Yet they still lead normal lives, having excelled in high school sports and opened their own fast food joint in Martha's Vineyard. But lately, Walt has been yearning to stretch his acting talents beyond the stage and into the movies. Bob, on the other hand, enjoys his simple life of flipping burgers, but he eventually agrees to help his brother realize his dream by moving out to Hollywood.

Once in Tinseltown, though, the relationship between Bob, who wants to romance an online pen pal (Wen Yann Shih), and Walt, who lands a gig on a show co-starring Cher (playing the worst version of herself possible), becomes tested, as one brother tries to break into showbiz, the other searches for love, and both overcome the nine-inch chunk of flesh connecting them to show the world what they can do.

Now don't go rolling your eyes yet.

Stuck on You 

might sound like a particularly awkward TV movie of the week, but in actuality it's a light, fun romp that stays true to its characters, their spirit, and a promise never to let them be the butt of a joke. The fact that Bob and Walt are conjoined twins is taken seriously, allowing the filmmakers to surround them with a sense of humor about the things they can do despite their condition. A lesser comedy would probably throw a number of tasteless gags onto the plate without bothering to feature a couple of likable guys as the lead characters.

Stuck on You 

knows better and injects quite a bit of charm into its premise.

The film is never really laugh-out-loud funny, at least in comparison to

Dumb and Dumber

, but the script is peppered with good-natured humor and little jokes here and there. I enjoyed watching how Bob and Walt manage to land jobs in Hollywood, work together to rule in a barroom brawl, deal with a sleazy agent/retirement home inhabitant (Seymour Cassel), and carry on their own respective romantic relationships, all while they remain literally at each others' side.

As mentioned before,

Stuck on You 

doesn't concentrate so much on what the brothers can't do as a result of being biologically bound together but rather what they can do, how they rise above obstacles with a smile on their faces and without leaving the audience with a dreadfully corny aftertaste.

Stuck on You 

respects the characters, but it still remembers to have a little fun, laced with a toned-down dose of the Farrellys' trademark irreverent humor (a running bit with a man and a buddy who gets hit by a dart is hilarious).

The movie may be disappointing in terms of delivering truly hearty laughs, but

Stuck on You 

compensates by displaying an ensemble cast of actors whose charm helps carry the film for its two-hour running time. Damon and Kinnear represent combined personalities, the former a shy guy who wants a simple life and the latter a womanizer who wants to see his name in lights. They form a fun comedic tag-team, admirable not only for how well they work together but how they've put up being harnessed together for a two-hour film. Bright supporting players highlight the action, especially Cassel as the two-bit, scooter-driving agent, the talented Eva Mendes as a hopeful actress the brothers befriend, Wen Yann Shih as Bob's equally shy girlfriend, and Cher herself, who has a ball poking fun at her own diva image in playing a character who hires the brothers for the sole purpose of wanting her show to fail. Even director Griffin Dunne appears, giving his own Hollywood career a good ribbing.

Overall, my complaints are few, but some things do drag this flick down a bit. The Farrellys always have a problem with good premises matched up with overlong running times, and

Stuck on You 

is no exception. At a little over two hours, the humor seems spread quite thin, and the energy of the jokes winds down before the picture's corny but surprisingly effective climax. There simply isn't much to cover here about Siamese twins (or, as Bob would say, "We're American!"), and

Stuck on You 

uses up that material in about 90 of the movie's 120 minutes. Nevertheless, the film leaves you with a good feeling without beating you over the head about morals and values. Fortunately, the charm of the performers brings this project to life, especially the teaming of Damon and Kinnear as two guys who would be funny whether or not they were joined together. 

MY RATING: *** (out of ****)

(Released by 20th Century Fox and rated "PG-13" for crude and sexual humor and some language.)

Review also posted at 

www.ajhakari.com

. 

The devious Professor Oldman (Tim Curry) plans to prove the fact of life after eradication.
His scheme involves placing a group of unsuspecting students from his university class in
a haunted house and observing the results. The students involve the naïve Cindy (Anna
Faris), the toked-up Shorty (Marlon Wayans), the voluptuous Theo (Kathleen Robertson), the
randy Buddy (Christopher Masterson) and the air-headed Alice (Tori Spelling). They’re
greeted at the remote mansion by the Professor’s join Dwight (David Cross) and
the repulsive butler Hanson (Chris Elliott).

British auteur Mike Leigh’s films are inherently humanist; one of the medium’s great observers of the human condition, his oeuvre is patently voyeuristic in its willingness to dispense with cinematic conventions and get in the faces of his fascinating and occasionally maddening characters. The follow-up to his Oscar-nominated 1996 film Secrets & Lies is certainly no exception to this rule – Career Girls is a funny, poignant dissection of a rejuvenated friendship between two former college roommates.

Annie (Lynda Steadman) and Hannah (the late Katrin Cartlidge) become unlikely friends and roommates in college, weathering a whirlwind of boyfriends, personal baggage and boozy nights. During a tentative reunion six years after having bade farewell to one another, the two, who are now professionals, discover that some emotional residue remains from their days in school. Over the course of the ensuing weekend, they rekindle their dormant friendship as they meet new friends and encounter old ones.

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On the surface, Career Girls would appear to have all the makings of a world-class yawn-a-thon: Leigh indulges his characters in extended scenes of dialogue, often letting them reminisce for several minutes at a time, cutting between static shots of the pair. In doing so, Leigh forces you at first to listen, then when it’s revealed that the conversation is nothing special, focus on what the actors are doing. Wholly believable and engaging, Cartlidge and Steadman sketch a pair of characters who travel a compelling arc; Cartlidge is hyper and borderline annoying in college and quietly cynical post-graduation while Steadman is shy and twitchy as an undergrad, politely perky as a professional. The high caliber performances are what fuels Leigh’s film, making Career Girls a minor-key character study worth tracking down.

Thrill-longing filmgoers in 1967 were curious enough to sit utterly 121 minutes of Vilgot Sjoman's numbingly unoriginal political philosophizing for the sake of a few naked bodies. Today we can get our going to bed with less punishment, which is upgrade of a make. In Swedish with subtitles. Rated X, bankroll b reverse in the daylight.

Dave Kehr

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