Se7en Costner (Review: Mr. Brooks)

Mr. Brooks is a serial-killer thriller starring Kevin Costner, William Hurt and Demi Moore. No, you did not fall asleep and wake up back in 1988—although the film was written by the team of Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, who had a pair of big ’80s hits with Starman and Stand by Me before the fiasco that was Cutthroat Island landed pretty much everyone connected with it in movie jail for the better part of a decade.

As the film opens, Earl Brooks (Costner) has been out of action for a long time too—or at least his true nature has. He’s the CEO of a prosperous box factory in Portland, Oregon whose just been named Man of the Year by the city’s chamber of commerce. But what no one at the fancy dinner honouring him knows, not even his wife (Marg Helgenberger), is that underneath his placid exterior beats the heart of a murderer: the so-called “Thumbprint Killer.” Mr. Brooks takes no joy in killing, however; he thinks of himself as an addict, and even attends AA meetings as a way of tamping down his urges. Okay, he gets a momentary rush whenever he squeezes the trigger, but then he has to put in so many hours of painstaking scrubbing and vacuuming and incinerating of evidence to make sure he doesn’t get caught that it hardly seems worth the hassle.

The movie’s big gimmick is that William Hurt appears throughout the film as “Marshall,” who’s sort of an invisible friend, a partner in crime and a devil on Brooks’ shoulder all wrapped up into one. Marshall isn’t some kind of split personality (he never takes control of Brooks’ body or anything); he just keeps appearing in the back seat of Brooks’ car or taking the chair opposite Brooks in restaurants and asking him when they can start killing again. What Marshall really is, though, is a convenient script device—without Marshall to talk to, half of this movie would consist of Kevin Costner driving around Portland with a blank look on his face.

It’s also a script device that doesn’t go anywhere. Hurt and Costner don’t have much chemistry together, and their relationship stays at the same emotional level throughout the film, even when a cop (Moore) and a blackmailer (Dane Cook) both start breathing down Mr. Brooks’ neck. It’s too bad Evans and Gideon didn’t try to have more fun with the Marshall scenes—to make Marshall’s taunts more cruel and cutting, or to maybe to show the two men wearily bickering with each other, like one of those old married couples who are completely sick of each other’s company but who you know will never get a divorce.

That lack of humour is the film’s biggest problem. The plot is ridiculous, especially when a second serial killer starts running around—it’s as lurid and overstuffed as anything Joe Eszterhas ever wrote in its prime (in one scene, a body is discovered hanging from the ceiling, about a dozen hypodermic needles stuck into it and a note reading “HA HA HA HA” impaled on its chest—and yet it’s acted and directed and shot and scored so solemnly and artily, it’s as if the movie thinks it’s French.

You’ve got to give Costner some respect for taking a role so unlike anything else he’s ever done, but he’s still miscast. Costner just doesn’t know how to convey the tension between Brooks’ placid public face and his homicidal inner urges. Instead, he just falls back on rote, mechanical gestures like Brooks’ constant fiddling with his eyeglasses whenever he wants to suggest Brooks is getting agitated.

Really, William Hurt should have played the lead—it’s perfect for Hurt’s brand of twitchy WASPiness. And Costner? Should he have played Marshall? No, he’s not really right for that part, either. You know what? Maybe he should have stayed out of Mr. Brooks altogether. Maybe I should have too. God knows I’ve seen enough of his naked ass already—believe it or not, he shows it again in this one too. Put some pants on already, Kevin Costner.

Fertile Source of Humour (Review: Knocked Up)

The premise of Knocked Up—a guy and a girl hook up for a one-night stand, except the girl gets pregnant—may not sound like anything special, but it’s actually kind of brilliant.

Most contemporary romantic comedies try as hard as they can to keep their two leads apart, often inventing elaborate, ridiculous and ultimately frustrating contrivances simply to keep them from getting together until the end of the movie. Knocked Up, on the other hand, begins with the couple going to bed—which means the movie can then focus on their attempts to forge a relationship with each other, exactly the messy, agonizing, compromise-filled, non-magical, non-predestined-by-fate part of romance that almost every other movie compulsively avoids dealing with.

And also, most contemporary comedies about pregnancy hinge on the man’s fear that he “won’t be a good father” to his newborn son. There may be a lot of jokes about the torment of crying babies and poopy diapers in these movies, but they all assume a certain inherently noble outlook on the part of the male characters—they recognize the necessity of stepping up to this important social role and worry only about falling short of it despite their very best efforts.

Knocked Up is so refreshingly different, it’s almost radical. When Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), an unemployed stoner living illegally in L.A. while half-heartedly setting up a nude-celebrities website with his similarly undermotivated buddies, learns that he’s going to become a father, his heart sinks. The last thing he wants to do with his life is take on any kind of responsibility, let alone one as permanent as a child. But at least Alison, the mother (Katherine Heigl, from Grey’s Anatomy), is hot—maybe, Ben figures, he can get her to sleep with him a few more times. After all, he can’t get her any more pregnant.

Like writer/director Judd Apatow’s previous film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up appears to be nothing more a raunchy sex comedy, but is in fact a surprisingly resonant parable about men who must finally, as we all have to eventually, leave their cocoon of prolonged adolescence and enter the first mature romance of their entire lives. It’s no coincidence that the turning point in both movies occurs when the heroes finally sell off all their junky memorabilia: their action figures, their bongs, the crappy, cheaply framed movie posters. And Apatow films both sequences with unusual poignancy—did he have to go through this purging process himself? If so, he came through it all right—his daughters Iris and Maude have small parts in the film, and not only are they cute, but they’ve also got fantastic comic timing.

Knocked Up is a starmaking vehicle for Seth Rogen, who’s sort of like the ideal outcome of an experiment to put Woody Allen’s self-deprecating Jewish humour in the body of a pudgy pothead. But he’s only part of the film’s vast comic ensemble, many of whom worked with Rogen and Apatow on Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared and The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel and Martin Starr play Ben’s buddies and deliver some of the funniest, most natural-sounding dudes-hanging-out insult humour ever put on film; Paul Rudd is Heigl’s brother-in-law, an A&R guy for a record label trapped in a spirit-sucking marriage; Loudon Wainwright III even shows up as Ben and Alison’s gynecologist.

There are so many funny people in the cast that you get the feeling Apatow couldn’t bear to cut any of them out—hence the film’s somewhat bloated more than two-hour running time. But all these bits give the film a texture that most romantic comedies lack, a sense that everyone onscreen has something interesting going on in their lives, not just the two leads. Even the tiny parts get to be funny too—Charlyne Yi and Kirsten Wiig get huge laughs with practically every line of dialogue Apatow hands them.

I wish Apatow had chosen a different job for Alison than doing interviews for the E! channel—all those self-deprecating celebrity cameos seem to belong to another movie. And he can’t quite figure out how to modulate the character of Alison’s shrewish but not unsympathetic sister Debbie. The ending is way too tidy, and the climactic sequence with Alison giving birth at the hospital feels, perhaps inevitably, like something we’ve seen on 100 sitcoms already.

Except, of course, for the three shots of the baby’s head crowning just before the final push. That’s the Apatow touch: sex, plus heart, plus crowning shots. It’s hard to think of a more winning combination.

The Lower Depps (Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End)

I’m going to try to keep this brief, which is more than Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ever does. This movie runs 168 minutes—hell, even the title goes on way too long—and even after you sit through more than six minutes of credits, the damned thing still isn’t over! Director Gore Verbinski throws in an extra scene set 10 years in the future reuniting Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom and which seems to promise at least one more Pirates movie to come.

Please, God, no. Just... no. I don’t want to sail anymore.

I enjoyed the first film in the series, The Curse of the Black Pearl, which had a sprightly sense of humour, a healthy sense of its own ridiculousness and that off-the-wall performance by Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow that was as delightful as watching a child doodling with purple crayons on the walls of a very expensive house.

But the swelling budgets of the two sequels, and especially the increasing reliance on CGI “spectacle,” have crushed pretty much all the joy and spontaneity out of this series. They don’t even stage a simple lighthearted swordfight in these movies anymore; it’s all about giant sea monsters and half-man, half-fish mutants now. Depp’s still around, but now he’s off in the margins of the film, amusing himself and nobody else. At World’s End is full of fantasy sequences set on a boat populated solely by dozens of Captain Jacks. It’s Johnny Depp’s dream cast. (Remember how people used to admire Johnny Depp for his avoidance of the whole soulless Hollywood blockbuster machine?)

The film was written—reportedly more or less on the fly—by the team of Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who also worked on the scripts for The Mask of Zorro and the original Shrek. They have a fondness for old-fashioned swashbuckling heroes, but they have a tendency to get way too caught up in the mechanics of all the missions the characters have to complete, all the curses they have to lift, all the magical objects they have to steal, and all the slippery allegiances they have to navigate, all at the expense of emotion, surprise... and, in the case of At World’s End, coherence.

The plot doesn’t even seem worth figuring out. In a world where characters are forever coming back from the dead, who cares if any of them are killed? It really doesn’t seem to make any difference in their ability to participate in the world. And in a movie where practically every image and every performance has been created on a computer, how are we supposed to be thrilled or touched by any of it?

In At World’s End, characters sail around the world, they undergo bizarre physical transformations, they die and live again, and they even capture a goddess, make her mortal and then give her back her divinity. And yet none of them seems awed by any of these miracles, or has their worldview shaken, or even pauses to be moved at the thought of all the sights they’ve been fortunate enough to witness. When you watch interviews with the cast and crew, they seem more impressed by the film’s obscene budget than by any of the ideas contained in the soulless script. It’s enough to make you seasick.

The Lives of Ogres (Review: Shrek the Third)

Hundreds of computer animators worked long, hard hours in their whimsically decorated cubicle dungeons at Dreamworks Animation to put Shrek the Third onscreen, and they’ve produced some startling effects. They’ve really cracked the code on firelight—in the scene set in a dimly lit bar whose clientele consists entire of fairytale villains, the glow on the characters’ faces is pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing. There are shots where you can see the individual fibres on Shrek’s tunic and the individual strands of blond hair swishing around Prince Charming’s head—and when Puss in Boots and Donkey stagger to shore after a shipwreck, well, you’ve never seen a cartoon do wet fur this photorealistically.

And I have to ask: why did they bother? It’s not like any of this stuff makes the movie any funnier. Shrek the Third traffics in the same brand of anachronistic vaudeville humour that Jay Ward achieved in the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segments of the Rocky & Bullwinkle show at roughly 1/250,000 the cost. Can anyone think of a single example where a huge budget actually made a movie funnier? Okay, Back to the Future, maybe. And Ghostbusters.

But Shrek the Third isn’t Ghostbusters (although Shrek does look a little like Slimer)—it’s more like Ghostbusters 2. It’s a movie that exists not because anyone involved with it has an urgent story to tell, but because its predecessor made so much money (Shrek 2 trails only Titanic and Star Wars on the list of the top-grossing films of all time) that the studio would be foolish not to go after more. It seems psychologically telling on the part of the filmmakers that the plot of the movie begins with Shrek trying to figure out how he can retire when everyone around him wants him to work.

With King Harold, the frog monarch from Shrek 2, on his deathbed, Shrek and his ogre bride Fiona are poised to become the rulers of Far Far Away—a job the slovenly Shrek looks upon with horror. The only way Shrek can wriggle out of his responsibilities is to track down Harold’s only other remaining heir: Arthur (Justin Timberlake), a skinny teenager who’s forever getting bullied around by Lancelot, captain of the high school jousting team. The script sets up a wan parallel between Shrek and Arthur—just as Arthur has to find the courage within himself to fulfill his destiny and become king, Shrek has to come to grips with the fact that he’s about to become a father.

There are seven screenwriters credited on Shrek the Third, and the script seems to consist solely of the hackiest contributions from each of them. There’s the bit where a loud noise drowns out a character’s voice just before he lets out a loud swearword; the bit where, following a hugely embarrassingly public disaster, a supporting character cheerfully remarks, “That went well!”; the bit where an ailing character apparently dies, only to come suddenly back to life three or four more times to choke out a few more final words. And whenever a joke needs a little bit more “punch,” you can always have them fall down or have something hit them on their head. Or play an anachronistic rock song. Or make the characters breakdance. Or just mention how much gay guys love musicals!

For a film crammed so full with top-level comic actors, there are very few scenes where you can feel them playing off each other or being given the space to work up any kind of performing rhythm. (Compare this film to the underrated The Emperor’s New Groove and marvel at the difference.) John Cleese and Eric Idle are both in the film, but they never share a scene. Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri, Maya Rudolph and Amy Sedaris all provide the voices for various fairytale princesses, but the producers seem to think the idea of having Larry King play one of the ugly stepsisters is much funnier. Of course, their idea of a great comedy team is Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas.

In the film’s climactic sequence, Shrek is in chains, having been kidnapped by the villainous Prince Charming and dragged onstage as part of an evil big-budget extravaganza that the entire kingdom has been forced to attend. It is, in short, a lot like Shrek the Third.

F for Fake

This has nothing to do with movies, but I thought some of the regular visitors to the blog might enjoy this Q&A I did with Yuval Taylor, co-author of the terrific new book "Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music." It's slated to appear in Thursday's edition of SEE Magazine here in Edmonton, but you lucky folks can get a sneak preview...

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“I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.” —Kurt Cobain, addressing his fans in his suicide note

“I’m real, I thought I told you / I’m real, even on Oprah / That’s just me / Nothin’ phony, don’t hate on me / What you get is what you see” —Jennifer Lopez, addressing her fans in “Jenny From the Block”

It’s hard to think of a recent figure in popular music more respected than Kurt Cobain, prized for his raw vocal style, his turbulent songwriting (with many of the lyrics drawn from the most emotional aspects of his personal life), his tortured ambivalence in the face of the corporate marketing machine (most famously evident in his decision to pose for the cover of Rolling Stone while wearing a T-shirt reading “Corporate Magazines Still Suck”), his championing of borderline-unlistenable “outsider” musicians like Jandek and Daniel Johnston, and, of course, his suicide—ultimate proof that the pain he sang about was no exaggeration.

Similarly, it’s hard to think of a recent pop star less respected by the critical establishment than Jennifer Lopez, whose CDs and videos are the pinnacle of glossy, prepackaged, image-conscious record-label “product.” Lopez, despite her claims to the contrary on “Jenny From the Block,” seems unmistakably inauthentic, whereas Cobain is indisputably the real thing. And as any good rock fan knows, real is much, much better than fake.

But as Yuval Taylor points out in his new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (which he co-authored with Hugh Barker), telling real from fake is a much more complicated matter than it first appears. Take Leadbelly, one of Cobain’s favourite artists, whose sparse, elemental recordings of traditional folk songs made him an icon of authenticity to his (mostly white) fans—but whose image was in fact carefully crafted by his manager, John Lomax, who had him perform in a prison uniform and deliberately expunged the “white” pop and jazz songs from his live repertoire.

Actually, though, Taylor and Barker are less interested in tearing down musical myths than in simply figuring out exactly what we mean when we say a record sounds “authentic,” and exploring the effect that the cult of authenticity has had on how music is made and perceived by the public. Their test cases span the history of recorded song, from Mississippi John Hurt and Jimmie Rodgers to Donna Summer, Neil Young and Moby, and there’s nothing fake about the level of intelligence and scholarship they bring to each of their subjects.

Yuval Taylor spoke to SEE Magazine over the phone about Faking It.

SEE: Is there a date where you can see a sea change taking place in music history, when authenticity suddenly became the yardstick music is measured by—or at least when a perceived lack of authenticity became something that made people say a piece of music was bad?

Yuval Taylor: Well, I think there are certainly moments where you can see authenticity suddenly becoming more important. The idea of an authentic musical experience goes at least as far back as the 19th century. But you can see it really flaring up in country music in the late 1940s, for instance, when Hank Williams became the paragon of authenticity. And it happened again in the late 1960s, with the rise of Bob Dylan and the singer/songwriter. Plus I think there was just a general sense of disillusionment then, that people didn’t want to be lied to anymore and were looking for authenticity in all aspects of the culture, even in the pop charts.

SEE: Authenticity in someone like, say, Joni Mitchell is one thing, but what do pop stars like Jennifer Lopez get out of these displays of authenticity? That “Jenny From the Block” song didn’t seem to convince anybody and she was widely derided for it.

YT: Well, people who weren’t her fans derided her, but her audience ate it up. That song wouldn’t have been the huge hit it was if the fans didn’t like it. I don’t think J.Lo ever lost credibility with her core market, but reaffirming her authenticity was an important career move, and I think that was exactly the right song at the right time. Plus, she really is from the block—she’s from a working-class Latino neighbourhood. Hugh would very much disagree with this statement, but I think it’s a really clever and empowering song. She acknowledges that she’s rich, but she does so in a way that says, “Girls, I did it and you can do it too.”

SEE: But it’s not a song that many critics would want to be caught praising. Can you give some examples of artists whose reputation has suffered unfairly because they didn’t seem authentic enough? How about the reverse: are there artists whose perceived authenticity has artificially inflated their reputation?

YT: I think Donna Summer’s reputation has suffered greatly because of these concerns. She is one of the great musical innovators and performers and she is definitely not seen that way. As for overrated musicians, I’d say John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins are both pretty limited talents whose output has been overpraised for its supposed authenticity and where the praise far exceeds the music’s value. I also feel that the whole metal scene has suffered greatly because of the pursuit of authenticity. Metal used to be a great, theatrical, inauthentic genre, and the personal, confessional mode of all these pop-metal bands like Staind and Evanescence is nowhere near as much fun.

SEE: Throughout the book you’ll play off a supposedly authentic artist against a supposedly inauthentic one—Neil Young vs. Billy Joel, Michael Nesmith vs. John Lennon—and often the inauthentic one will come off looking pretty good. Did you take some pleasure in making these contrarian arguments, knowing you’d tick off a lot of rock fans?

YT: Well, it’s always fun outraging rock fans. But we’re not just trying to get people’s goats; hopefully, we’re making comparisons that bring out some nuances in the music. For instance, the comparison between Neil Young and Billy Joel is a really interesting one, especially when you consider that they both recorded well-known songs about the search for authenticity: Neil Young recorded “Heart of Gold,” Billy Joel recorded “Honesty.” And we ask, well, where’s the difference? And the difference, I think, is that Joel is simply being earnest and talking about telling the truth, whereas Young is slipperier. He’s more interested in exploring himself and being honest in his own way, in being honest to himself at any given moment.

SEE: Could a case be made that authenticity is “out” these days? Look at American Idol, which is pretty much the epitome of inauthenticity, but which is also one of the biggest popular music phenomena of the last 25 years.

YT: Well, I think American Idol is a very old idea—it’s basically just an update of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts from the 1940s and ’50s. But interestingly, American Idol is careful to put signifiers of authenticity in there that Arthur Godfrey never would—the backstage moments with the performers, the way the judges are always urging the performers to “be themselves.” No, if anything, I think our culture is more aware of authenticity than ever. You see Alicia Keys recording an album called The Diary of Alicia Keys or Ashlee Simpson recording an album called Autobiography, and you see displays of authenticity in genres like pop-metal which never tried to be authentic before, or even in Broadway shows like Rent.

SEE: You suggest in your final chapter that a truly mature music fan will have “grown beyond” worrying so much about the realness of a song or a performer. Have your own tastes changed and evolved over the years?

YT: Well, I still find myself intrigued by questions of authenticity and wondering how true a song is to a performer’s life. But when I was young, I’d dismiss a lot of songs for being too theatrical and fake—I hated Van Halen, for instance. Now I like all kinds of music that make no pretense toward being real. At the same time, however, there’s no getting away from the fact that a Neil Young album will go up in my estimation in direct proportion to how real it seems.

Review: Waitress

No matter how dim or unprepossessing, every human being is a genius at something. Jenna (Keri Russell), the heroine of Waitress, is a genius at pie. She often likes to close her eyes as she sits on the bench waiting for the bus to bring her home from her job at Joe’s Pie Diner and dream up fanciful but irresistible new recipes. She may be the only person in the world who invents autobiographical pies—for instance, when she discovers that she’s pregnant, she creates a blend of ham, eggs and brie and calls it “I Don’t Want to Have My Husband Earl’s Baby Pie” (“Bad Baby Pie” for short).

Jenna doesn’t need a baby—Earl (Jeremy Sisto) is enough of a baby already. He’s selfish, controlling and a lousy lover into the bargain. Weeks later, when Jenna finally tells him about her condition, he makes her swear a solemn oath that she’ll never love the baby more than she loves him. He’d be utterly pathetic if it weren’t for the feeling Jenna gets that if he ever caught her trying to leave him, he’d beat her senseless.

Waitress gets off to a wobbly start. Everything from the small-town setting to the cast of secondary characters seems too self-consciously quirky by half, like one of those episodes from the final season of Gilmore Girls, after Amy Sherman-Palladino stopped running things. And the whole business about Jenna and her magical pies is such a dubious, whimsical conceit that you can’t quite believe the film is asking you to take it seriously.

But Adrienne Shelly, who wrote and directed the film and gives herself a fun supporting role as a lovelorn waitress named Dawn, turns out to be kind of a genius herself—at least when it comes to drawing you into this not-quite-believable world and making you hope everything works out okay for the people who populate it. Shelly started out as an actress, and there was a period in the early ’90s when she was more or less the indie-movie “it” girl, thanks to her iconic performances as a pair of brassy yet sullen teenagers in Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. She stopped acting for a while to concentrate on directing; not many people got to see her first two features, but there was every indication that the crowd-pleasing Waitress, which had been accepted to Sundance, would be her breakthrough film. That still might happen—Waitress is a real charmer—but sadly, Shelly won’t be around to see it happen. She was accidentally killed in her apartment last November by a young construction worker under circumstances too dumb, tragic and pointless to be worth explaining.

Those movies Shelly made with Hal Hartley were so dry and deadpan that the cheerfully cornball tone of Waitress comes as a bit of a surprise. At one point, a character named Ogie (Eddie Jemison) strolls eagerly into Joe’s—he’s a tiny, twitchy, eager-to-please nerd who’s fallen head over heels in love with Dawn. He’s the kind of would-be boyfriend who brings girls giant bouquets of flowers and recites “spontaneous poetry” in their honour, and he’s so smitten with her that when Dawn tells him to get lost, he actually bursts into tears. But he doesn’t give up: “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll grow on you!”

Waitress is a lot like Ogie. It’s full of cockeyed, overly earnest “spontaneous poetry” too but at a certain point you realize you’ve stopped rolling your eyes at it and can’t wait to hear the next line. Shelly gets winning performances from her entire cast, especially Andy Griffith as Old Joe, the diner’s irascible owner, who has a soft spot in his heart for plucky Jenna; and Edmonton’s own Nathan Fillion as Dr. Pomatter, the handsome, easily flustered OB-GYN with whom Jenna embarks on a torrid secret affair. Fillion is so effortlessly appealing here that you wonder why he doesn’t get offered more romantic comedies—when a flustered Jenna tells him, after their first kiss, to shut up for a second because she can’t think straight “when you do that nice-guy talking thing you do,” every woman at the screening I attended laughed in lustful recognition.

Shelly doesn’t quite have the skill to bring off some of her more ambitious ideas—especially a montage set to Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket”—but there’s such a big-hearted spirit to this film and such a genuine affection for her characters that it’s heartbreaking to think she won’t get to make any more of them. The tragic circumstances surrounding Waitress’ release make it an oddity: it’s the saddest feel-good movie around.

Review: Georgia Rule

Back in 1981, Jane Fonda starred in On Golden Pond, playing a woman who forces her 13-year-old son to live with her parents—she needs someone to take care of him while she and her husband take a trip to Europe, but she also obviously hopes that the grandparents will teach the kid some respect for his elders.

Now, a quarter of a century later, Fonda is starring in Georgia Rule, a movie with the same basic plot—only this time, Fonda is playing the crusty grandma (she’s like Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn’s characters from On Golden Pond all wrapped up in one), and Felicity Huffman is her self-involved, hard-drinking daughter Lilly.

And how times have changed: the worst thing that could be said about the kid in On Golden Pond was that he swore too much; the problem child in Georgia Rule, on the other hand, is Rachel, a promiscuous, drug-using, skimpily dressed California nymphet played by Lindsay Lohan. Barely a week into her exile in small-town Idaho, Rachel has already put the moves on the local veterinarian, given a cute, virginal Mormon boy a blowjob and accused her stepfather Arnold of molesting her when she was 12. This girl doesn’t need a grandmother; she needs Samuel L. Jackson to chain her to the radiator.

Lohan’s hard-partying tabloid antics haven’t done her critical reputation any favours—which is too bad, because she’s actually a terrific, spontaneous actress. She was wonderful, cast against type as Meryl Streep’s sullen daughter in A Prairie Home Companion, and in tween-targeted movies like Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, her unaffected, sunny presence and droll line readings were worthy of Ginger Rogers (also a dancer with a knack for comedy).

Georgia Rule requires Lohan to take on a more “serious” role, and she acts circles around both Fonda and Huffman, whose mawkish drunk scenes are especially embarrassing. Lohan’s performance is practically the only thing in this movie that rings true—especially the way she plays the scenes in which Rachel keeps backtracking on her story about her stepfather, claiming variously that she made it all up just to prove a point in an argument or to test the limits of her mother’s trust in her. It seems exactly the way a smart, fucked-up girl like Rachel would choose to reveal this information—obliquely, self-defeatingly, as if to confirm her own worst suspicions that no one would believe her story anyway.

But that doesn’t make the film’s long third act—in which Rachel keeps switching her story and Lilly keeps bouncing back and forth between believing Rachel and believing Arnold—any less tedious to watch, especially when you know the only way a movie like this can possibly end is with the three generations of women coming together, making peace as a family and running the male villain out of town in his symbolically evil cherry-red Ferrari, never to return. (The Mormon virgin and the nurturing, sensitive veterinarian, who’s still in love with his dead wife, are allowed to stay.)

Director Garry Marshall, as always, seems uncomfortable fully committing to dramatic scenes, and whenever Georgia Rule threatens to get “too dark,” he’ll throw in an awkward bit of comic relief. Right in the middle of Huffman’s angry confrontation with Arnold, for instance, Marshall actually has Fonda rush in and chase him around the lawn with a bar of soap, trying to wash his mouth out for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

It’s wonderful to have Jane Fonda back onscreen after such a prolonged absence, but are Georgia Rule and 2005’s Monster-in-Law really the best scripts being offered to her? I can’t help but wonder what the young Jane Fonda, the firebrand from Klute and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, would think if she could see the ghastly poster for Georgia Rule, the three actresses’ faces so heavily Photoshopped that they all look embalmed. She probably wouldn’t know whether to vomit, kill herself or burn down the theatre.

Look Homeward, Moviegoer

My apologies to all regular readers of this blog (if indeed there are such creatures) for not having posted any new content for the last three weeks. But I have an excellent explanation! I’ve been busy this month preparing to move from Key West (where I’ve been editing Key West Magazine) back home to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (where I’ve taken a job editing the film and arts sections of an alt-weekly called SEE Magazine).

The logistics of the move left me without reliable access to the internet—and in fact, even now I’m largely cut off from the web. My furniture hasn’t even arrived from Florida yet—I’m living in a barren loft in downtown Edmonton much like the one what’s-his-name owned in Diva, except I don’t have an underaged Vietnamese “girlfriend” living with me. I don’t even have a desk; I’m writing this on my laptop as I lay on my stomach on an air mattress. Hell, I don’t even have a pillow—I’m making do with a comforter bunched up underneath my chin.

But once the place is furnished, it should look pretty nice. It’s certainly a damn sight better than the apartment I originally arranged to move into when I was back in Florida. I found the place through an ad on the internet, and although there were no photos to inspect, I was so desperate to line up a place to live that I decided to take it and hope that luck would be on my side.

I arrived at my new home at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning after a long, mostly sleepless all-night flight, complete with stopovers in Miami and Las Vegas. I was exhausted, but even if I’d come fresh from a nap and a shower, I don’t think I would have been able to muster much enthusiasm for the building that the taxi dropped me off in front of. It was a dingy building in a glum neighbourhood, a long walk away from supermarkets, stores and cultural activities. When the landlord showed up (half an hour late) and took me downstairs to the basement suite where I was going to live, I was even less impressed. The only view showed you a sliver of the barren parking lot behind the building. You could just make out the entrance to a seedy-looking corner liquor store beyond the chainlink fence.

I sighed. Maybe I could live here for a month or two while I looked for something better, I thought. The landlord whipped out the lease and the assorted paperwork. “Do you have a pen?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t.”

“No problem,” he replied. “Let me just run out to my car and I’ll get one.”

Alone, I toured the apartment, trying to talk myself into liking it. At least the appliances were brand-new—that was something. I entered the bathroom and played with the taps. I checked out the hall closet. I wished it were bigger. I went into the bedroom to see how much storage space was in there.

You’ll never believe what I saw next. There was a homeless woman hiding in the bedroom closet.

Let me repeat that: A HOMELESS WOMAN. HIDING IN THE CLOSET.

I let out a small scream of surprise, and she repeated pretty much the same noise back at me. She was short and squat, with unnaturally yellow hair and wearing a toque and a powder-blue down-filled jacket. “Is he coming back?” she hissed at me.

“What?” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

“I snuck in through the window!” she said. Then, with new urgency: “Is he coming back?”

“Yes, he’s coming back! He’s just getting something from his car!”

“Oh, he’ll throw me in jail for sure!” she said, whereupon she hurriedly gathered up her things and dashed out the front door.

A few minutes later, the landlord returned. “Listen,” I told him. “I don’t think this is going to work out...”

Anyway, that’s how I came to be living here instead, 15 floors above street level instead of in the apartment whose lax security system was apparently an open secret among Edmonton’s homeless community. None of which has much to do with cinema, except that there’s so little to do here in my new place that I’ve been compulsively going out to the movies all week long, just as an excuse to get out of the apartment.


I saw Fracture. I saw Hot Fuzz. I saw Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and I saw Blades of Glory. I haven’t caught up with Year of the Dog yet, but I did see Spider-Man 3 and Lucky You and I even caught a matinee screening of Vacancy, the aptly-named thriller starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale as an estranged married couple who wind up trapped in a remote motel where the creepy owner kills his guests and uses the footage from the surveillance cameras he’s hidden around the room to make his own snuff movies. (Vacancy riffs on Psycho the way Disturbia riffs on Rear Window—if Alfred Hitchcock were alive, would he be upset by these crass modern takes on two of his most masterful creations? Or would he be too busy trying to find work, and directing studio-mandated product like Fracture to notice?)

Somewhat to my surprise, the movie I liked the best in that group was Lucky You. As I say in my SEE review of the film, which appears below, it’s not a great movie, but it has a nice texture and I liked the way it stayed true to its modest but honourable ambitions. It was comforting. Edmonton is not as glamourous as Key West, but it feels more like my home. I’m glad I decided to come back here. Already I can feel the stress leaving my body. Hooray: I’m a moviegoer again!

Review: Lucky You

There’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through Lucky You where lounge singer Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore) finally loses patience with Huck Cheever (Eric Bana), her professional poker-player boyfriend. He’s cute, he’s a charmer and, as someone new to Las Vegas, she was caught up in the romance of someone living on his own terms, getting by on his wits and able to make tens of thousands of dollars in a single session at the table. But it doesn’t take long for her to see Huck’s downside—not only does he have a ton of unresolved daddy issues with his father, a foxy old poker legend apparently inspired by A. Alvarez and played by Robert Duvall—but he’s tight with his emotions, reckless and unreliable with money and constitutionally unable to put anyone else’s needs ahead of his own. So she walks away from him. “Where are you going?” he asks.

She gives him a weary, impatient wave of her hand. “I’m making a good fold,” she replies.

Your reaction to Lucky You will likely depend on whether you think that line is smart and snappy and stylish or whether you roll your eyes at how “written” and on the nose it is. Myself, I went with it. Lucky You may not be the greatest movie ever made about the gambling subculture—that honour goes to Robert Altman’s California Split—but it’s a well-executed little picture that’s content to play for low stakes and slowly grind out a profit.

It’s directed and co-written by Curtis Hanson, who also made the overrated L.A. Confidential and the underrated In Her Shoes. Hanson often likes setting his movies in underexplored American cities, and here he evokes the texture of off-the-Strip Las Vegas the way he captured Pittsburgh in Wonder Boys. There’s a nicely observed sequence in Lucky You, for instance, where Huck tries to earn the $10,000 he needs to enter the World Series of Poker on a gimmicky golf bet with a friend. The golf course is an island of green surrounded by barren sand and gravel, and there’s a team of bulldozers working just a few dozen yards away, preparing the way for a fancy new housing development. The future is on its way, and it looks even more artificial than the old Vegas.

Lucky You is set, pointedly, at the 2003 World Series of Poker, the year when ESPN installed cameras in the table that let you see the players’ hole cards, and the year when Chris Moneymaker, an amateur who’d learned to play poker on the internet, won the tournament—and with it, the richest prize in all of sports. It caused a sensation. For the next couple of years, anyway, you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing a poker game.

Lucky You exudes a palpable nostalgia for the days before poker became a blockbuster event, and so it’s ironic that Warner Bros. has chosen to release it—after many delays—the same weekend as Spider-Man 3, a noisy, overproduced mess of a film with all the soul of a video poker machine that will doubtlessly crush it at the box office. It doesn’t seem fair. Lucky You has much better cards—a coherent story, a script that celebrates maturity instead of adolescent thrills, a joker-in-the-pack cameo by Robert Downey Jr. and a lovely closing song by Bob Dylan—and yet it’s still doomed to defeat.