Archive for November, 2006
291 – Slither
Word to the wise: If you’re a secondary character in a group of people surrounding an icky, alien squid-like creature, you shouldn’t be the one guy who mouths off to the creature, even if you do have a dinky handgun. Because then you might be the victim of a CRACK of one of said creature’s many appendages and find yourself neatly garroted in twain. Don’t be that guy.
That’s just one of the awesomely disgusting scenes in Slither, a yarn about what happens when a malignant alien life form arrives on Earth via an meteorite and turns small-town yokels into flesh-eating zombies, or uses them for a womb. Nathan Fillion of TV’s Firefly stars as Bill Pardy, the jut-jawed, wisecrackin’ sheriff and Elizabeth Banks as the fiesty heroine. Oh, and Gregg Henry as the obnoxious, profane, amusing mayor. Together they must stand, or run screaming like little girls, against the evil interloper.
It all begins when the cleverly named Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) stumbles upon something oogy in the middle of the forest. The oogy thing burrows into Grant’s chest, and he then infects a neighbor with whom he almost had an illicit tryst. Next thing you know, tiny slug-like thingies are crawling all over the town, supplanted by quick-moving (!) zombies.
Yeah, you read that right, quick-moving. How cool is that? Too often we’ve seen movies in which zombies lumbered about aimlessly, shambling to the left and to the right as if auditioning for Thriller. Not so here; they’re not gonna win an all-out sprint, maybe, but they’re a lot faster than your garden-variety zombies.
Sadly, for a movie that would seem to be a perfect setting for gratutious nudity, none was to be found. How unfair is that? Two attractive actresses in a gratutiously bloody movie, and neither of them sheds her clothing, despite many prime opportunities. A darn shame, I tell you.
Fillion is fine as good ol’ boy Bill, essentially playing the same character type as Mal in “Firefly,” although here he gets the luxury of dropping F-bombs and other cusses. Which certainly makes sense; people wouldn’t typically watch their language while being chased by moseying zombies. Henry’s character is repugnant, but the actor is so funny playing the role that he’s almost appealing.
Reminiscent of such cult gems as Re-Animator and Dead Alive, Slither is heavy on grossness and light on subtlety, but that’s all part of its charm. It rises a hair or two above typical low-budget horror gorefests and will have you scared to leave your mouth open and unguarded for too long.
***
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The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Posted by frothy in Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) on November 28, 2006
Although the word “exorcism” features prominently in the title, unavoidably drawing comparisons with the one and only The Exorcist, the exorcism itself comprises only about half of this movie, if that; the rest is pure courtroom drama.
High-powered attorney Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) is assigned a thankless task – defend a parish priest (Tom Wilkinson) who stands accused of allowing a college-age girl under his care to die. Bruner’s in a tough spot; her job might well be on the line, and she’s been told (by the Church via her bosses) not to put the unrepentent on the stand to testify on his own behalf, although he insists he wants his say and refuses any kind of plea bargain. Oh, and on the other side of the judicial coin is a devout lawyer (Campbell Scott) who openly disdains the good father’s actions, if not his beliefs.
The movie is quite harrowing at times. Through the art of flashback, we follow Emily in her final weeks; we see her wake up in her dorm room, terrified, panicking, anxious, unable to control her actions, culminating with an appearance at an on-campus church. Then, of course, there’s the failed exorcism itself, complete with her (the demon within her) breaking free of her bonds and jumping out the second-story window.
Turns out that Emily is possessed by Lucifer himself. How come no one ever seems to be possessed by a lesser demon? It’s always some entity everyone knows and is pretty much all-powerful. But that’s okay, because Emily (and her family) are extremely devout, so this becomes a real test of faith – faith that is, indeed, put on trial in the name and person of Father Moore.
Erin describes herself as an agnostic, she thinks, to which Father Moore tartly replies, “If you’re not sure, you are one.” And to be sure, during the entire ordeal her own beliefs are shaken and stirred; she doesn’t know what to think (and neither does the viewer), which is fine. We’re kept off balance and unsure of ourselves, just as Erin is, making the movie a little less predictable.
But as I said, it’s one’s faith that’s put on trial, really. If one accepts the fact that angels and demons exist, the movie says, then the actions of Father Moore are perfectly plausible; even if one does not, one probably should assume that Father Moore’s own beliefs are not shakable in the least. The main question, then, is: Did Father Moore allow Emily Rose to die by choosing to believe that his and her faith in a higher power would ultimately save her, ignoring medical opinions and treatments, or was he completely powerless to save her, body and soul, from a stronger, evil power?
For a movie that splits its time somewhat evenly between the courtroom and the events directly surrounding the exorcism, the sense of dread never quite leaves you. The court scenes themselves are crisp, even if the duelling attorneys come off somewhat shallow and predictable. In the end, the movie trucks along quite quickly, saving the frights for just the right moment. It’s no Exorcist, certainly, but it’s what you’d get if you crossed The Exorcist with, say, The Verdict.
***
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Rocky Balboa
Posted by frothy in Rocky Balboa, Trailers on November 28, 2006
I’ve seen the trailer for the new Rocky film a few times now. (You can see it here.) And so help me, the thing looks good. It looks very good. It looks, to me, to be in the spirit of the first couple of Rockys.
When you think about it, what else could this movie be about, if not Rocky’s lumbering return to the ring? Sure, he returned in Rocky V, even after taking far too many shots to the head, but it wasn’t the same. Stallone wasn’t quite self-deprecating enough. This one, if the trailer is any indication, does rely on plenty of Rocky’s-an-old-fart jokes, which is fine.
I’m telling you, every time I see this trailer, my heart soars. It’s ROCKY! Why, he’s practically a Balboa Constrictor, and wouldn’t THAT have made a cool ring name?
Sure, the movie could still stink – I wouldn’t be terribly shocked – but on the basis of this one glimpse, it looks damn good. And no Talia Shire to bring down the acting! Also no Sage Stallone as Rocky’s kid, but that’s okay. What we do get is Burt Young as Paulie and Tony Burton as Duke, his cut man, both back for their fifth turn in the ring. I like that Rocky looks pudgy and riddled with oldness. I like that the movie’s about continuing to chase your dream even when those around you say you shouldn’t bother with it.
So if the movie is one-tenth as good as the trailer makes it out to be, I’ll be happy. Opening December 22, in case you didn’t know.
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Stop eating, watch movies
Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday, and if you’re not in the U.S., hope you had a wonderful… uh, past few days. Sorry for the paucity of posting. (Did you just stop and wonder what “paucity” meant? I don’t blame you, but you gotta admit it sounded good.)
Haven’t caught anything in the theaters lately, but I do have thoughts on two older ones I recently saw.
Love and Death on Long Island: ***
John Hurt stars as reclusive British writer Giles De’Ath, a man more or less out of sorts with the modern world. When one day he finds himself accidentally locked out of his house, he wanders into a movie theater to see an adaptation of an E. M. Forster story, only to find that the film he’s watching is really the fictional Hot Pants College II, sort of a teen romp in the spirit of such legends as Porky’s and Losin’ It.
Giles is quite a bit shocked at first at the audacious attitudes on display in the movie, and he’s ready to walk out in a huff when his eyes alight on the visage of the movie’s young, handsome hero, Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley). And suddenly, Giles thinks he’s found the perfect human, in body and in personality.
Giles becomes somewhat obsessed with the actor. He clips and saves articles about Bostock, watches his appearances on television shows, and even goes so far as to join a video store in order to watch Bostock’s oeuvre.
The fascination Giles has with Bostock allows him to ease into modern society a little bit; he even decides to resume lecturing. But when his lecture wanders into a treatise on the Hollywood actor, Giles’ agent asks him if maybe he’d like to take a break for a while. And so Giles does – to Long Island, New York, home of actor Ronnie Bostock, whom he eventually meets and with whom he eventually interacts.
Amazingly enough, John Hurt and Jason Priestley are wonderful together. Sure, it’s not earthshaking news to report that Hurt turns in a fine performance, since he’s been a stalwart thespian for four decades and has long been considered an eminent voice in British acting. But Priestley, of 90210 fame? Has anyone ever thought he was anything more than a dreamy hunk who sometimes was confused with Luke Perry by people who never watched the show? (Not that I’m admitting anything.) Priestley’s never been thought of as an actor, exactly, just a face. Emoting was never his strong point. And yet here, he’s dazzling, far better than he’s been in anything else. So bravo, Jason. You’re more than Brandon Walsh, you putz.
Then again, he didn’t exactly get a lot of plum roles after this movie, so it’s tough to tell if this was just a confluence of perfect circumstances or simply an overlooked performance. Whatever, he was darn good. Believable, sympathetic, engaging.
The bittersweet ending is well handled by the two leads, too, proving they had the proper chemistry for such an understated, thoughtful movie. Well done all around.
Three Days of the Condor: **1/2
Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is a reader for the CIA; that is, he reads novels and journals and other sorts of fiction in order to learn devious plots that are then submitted to the CIA as things to look out for – or try themselves. One day he returns from lunch to find everyone at his station office slaughtered. He calls headquarters to alert them, and they want him to come in from the cold. But can he trust them? Can he trust anyone?
In a typical hero-versus-everyone movie, Turner, nicknamed Condor, finds double crosses at every turn. He’s supposed to be this green employee, not wise in the ways of the CIA agent, but he’s, you know, read books, and so he knows how to do unspeakable things just to stay alive. Things like accost and kidnap an innocent woman (Faye Dunaway) for no reason other than that he needs a safe place where he can rest for a bit. So in the name of all that is righteous, he sort of terrorizes the poor woman for a little while with the excuse that he’s tired and has to think about things. I dunno, I found that a little hard to believe; I mean, I know he’s a little frazzled, but his actions were more like those of a crazed killer/rapist than an innocent man on the run from Johnny Law.
But at least it’s Redford, and he looks earnest enough, as he often did in films in the 1970s (see also All the President’s Men, The Sting, The Candidate). Dunaway is appealing as the stereotypical Woman in Peril, but she doesn’t have a lot to work with. There’s an able supporting cast in Cliff Robertson, John Houseman, and the great Max von Sydow (as a hired assassin), and they do their best to prop up a somewhat unfeasible plot that shouldn’t be scrutinized too closely. (In particular, Condor’s closing lines don’t ring true at all, although we’re supposed to believe he’s The Right Man.)
This is right up director Sydney Pollack’s alley, but perhaps the movie just hasn’t aged well. Interestingly, the movie was adapted from a novel called “Seven Days of the Condor”; I can only assume they cut it by four days to save us all from more unbelievable twists.
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290 – Happy Feet
Posted by frothy in Happy Feet on November 19, 2006
Happy Feet, directed by the man who gave us both Babe: Pig in the City and Mad Max, is just the kind of feel-good animated film that works on a few different levels; it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry, and it’ll inevitably, unquestionably, make you tap your toes or bounce your leg, right there in the theater. It’s charming and exquisitely detailed, and it succeeds where it really counts: It makes you really feel for the lovable lead penguin, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood).
Mumble is an unfortunate penguin, you see, because was born with no singing ability, and in his penguin tribe one attracts a mate through the use of song. The poor flightless bird can only look on helplessly as his fellow hatchlings croon their little hearts out. Amazingly, though, Mumble can tap dance, a big no-no in the penguin community. Soon, with no heart song to guide him, Mumble isn’t permitted to graduate from school, to the chagrin of his Elvis-like dad (Hugh Jackman) and his songbird-like mom (Nicole Kidman).
Mumble’s heart belongs to the best singer in his age group, Gloria (Brittany Murphy), but without the gift of song he can’t hope to woo her. Worse, with the penguins’ food supply running out, some of the other birds begin to blame Mumble’s foot-tapping, that somehow he is angering the great god Guin. The sad-sack penguin is then drummed out of the penguin corps, shunned for his lack of song and strength of feet, and he runs into another penguin colony, one that uses pebbles to woo their females instead of song, and makes new friends – a Latino-sounding quartet that’s high on life, full of zest and pizzazz and charisma, everything that Mumble’s old group isn’t.
Then Mumble hears from some predator birds of mysterious “aliens” who probe and attach tags to their victims. Mumble thinks these aliens might have something to do with the lack of fishies for everyone to munch on, so he and his new pals head off on a Quest to find these aliens and ask them to stop stealing all the fish.
Some of the scenes are beautifully imagined, including attacks by sea lions (quite harrowing, actually, until its denoument), vultures, and killer whales, not to mention every time Mumble and/or his posse leap off a cliff and slide down the side like avian sleds. Or through ice tunnels. Or through the water itself, shooting like streaming jetliners with mile-long contrails. Gorgeous animation.
At its heart, the movie is about how it’s okay to Be Different. It’s about how older folks sometimes hold prejudices that are as illogical as they are insulting, and how they’ll often pass along those prejudices to their children, sometimes through direct actions and sometimes by dint of their inaction when wrongs are being perpetuated.
Robin Williams takes on four roles in this movie: the Narrator (where he’s excellent and not at all hammy), Ramon and Cletus (two of the feisty new penguins), and Lovelace, a self-professed penguin guru to whom penguins go to have their problems solved. On the one hand, Williams is delightful doing what he does best, improvising rapid-fire comic patter to get laughs; on the other hand, he’s Robin Williams, and although there are differences between his voice characterizations, they all bear a strong resemblence to one another. As with most animated films, the movie is well-cast; Jackman is particular has an appealing Southern drawl (ironically, he and Kidman are Aussies playing penguins with southern accents).
In the wake of the phenomenal, surprise success of March of the Penguins, Happy Feet makes your heart soar from start to finish. It’ll be very difficult not to shed a tear at the mistreatment of Mumble by his peers and his elders, and it’ll be near impossible to thoroughly enjoy this dazzling animated offering.
***1/2
PS: I should mention, too, that making each of the main penguins look different is definitely no small feat. In the real world, you see, they all look alike; here, the differences were subtle enough to make them distinguishable without being distracting.
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289 – Casino Royale
Posted by frothy in Casino Royale on November 18, 2006
The first thing to consider about this twenty-first Bond screen foray is that it’s not a continuation of the first twenty. In fact, it doesn’t even take place in the same virtual universe – it’s as if those other twenty Bonds never existed. The film takes place in the present day, but it’s about Bond’s beginnings as a 00. So scratch the 1962-2002 Bond adventures, obliterate them from your memory banks, because they just plain never happened.
The film begins with a black and white scene that shows the two kills Bond (Daniel Craig) must make in order to attain 00 status. The two deaths starkly illustrate the types of killing Bond will need to do: One is a brutal drowning in a men’s room, and the other is a subtle shooting.
Then the real action kicks in, as Bond, in deepest, darkest Uganda, is tipped off about a rogue bomb dealer and winds up blowing up part of an embassy. Oops. He’s exiled by an unforgiving M (Judi Dench, reprising the role she’s had for five films, now), told to take some time off. Because, you see, he’s a loose cannon, a ticking time bomb, an egotist who just can’t separate emotion from his work. At any rate, we know that this setback won’t last long, and sure enough Bond’s traced his bomb dealer to a Greek magnate who looks like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, and from there he’s led to Miami and a thrilling scene at the airport involving a fuel truck and (of course) the world’s newest, largest airplane in, like, forever.
All of this leads up to the casino of the title, as Bond must play Texas Hold ‘Em (replacing baccarat from the 1967 version of Casino Royale) against high rollers, including the Bond Bad Guy, Le Chiffre, an odd-looking Eurocreep who weeps tears of blood. Other than the blood thing, he’s kind of bland, but his icy disregard of, well, everything lends a distinct air of haughtiness against which Bond can play. Accompanying Bond is Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), the typical smart/pretty Bond Girl we’ve seen in the last several films in the series. She’s supposed to watch over Bond and all the money he’s been staked in the game, but naturally she must keep emotional distance from the Lothario. Can she do that? My gosh, I do wonder.
Missing from Casino Royale are gadgetry (including Q) and bon mots typical of action heroes. Well, wait, the former’s not completely; we do see a nifty tracking device implanted in Bond’s arm, but that’s not as exciting as, perhaps, the invisible car in Die Another Day, or killer shoes, or something. Also gone, sort of, is Bond’s womanizing attitude. Well, it’s toned down, anyway; at one point, Bond tells Vesper that she’s not his type. What type? she wonders. “Single,” says the spy. Ah, so that’s how it’s gonna be.
Craig was pretty good, actually. It’s got to be monumentally tough for an actor to play James Bond nowadays; with each film, there’s more for the next guy to live up to. Roger Moore’s first entry was pretty darn good (Live and Let Die), but it still took him a little while to fully grow into the role. Timothy Dalton never did. Pierce Brosnan’s work improved as the quality of the movies themselves declined. Craig’s ice-blue eyes – those have to be contacts! – say a lot, from a character that plays his cards very, very close to his chest. I think the best thing to be said about Craig’s work here is that he acquitted himself rather nicely, and that if he does indeed continue with the role, he’ll get even better as he reaches his comfort zone.
And, for the first time in recent memory, the plot’s not too convoluted. Several of the Brosnan Bond movies were overplotted to the point of hilarity; there were so many exotic locations and minor characters that it was easier to sit back and wait for people to get killed so you could sort out who was, indeed, good. It’s a little easier this time around, although there are a couple of good twists in the final reel of the film.
As new Bond Girl Vesper Lynd, Green is appropriately alluring and clever, innocent but corruptible. Will she fall for Bond? Yes, probably. Will he fall for her, though? Ah, that’s a much tougher question. Regardless of how it turns out, though, you get a sense that Green is a good match for Craig; she’s not taller than him, at least, and they just plain look good together. They do seem to have a palpable chemistry on screen, which is more than one could say for, say, Brosnan and Denise Richards in The World Is Not Enough. At least the makers of this one had the smarts to cast someone who could act against someone who could act.
There are two ways to judge a James Bond movie: against other Bond films, and against other action films; after all, Dr. No practically reinvented the action movie, and the subsequent Connery Bonds transcended run-of-the-mill action movies. Casino Royale is an excellent action movie, and it’s a highly entertaining Bond film in its own right; a fine first effort by Craig and better than several of those that came before it.
***
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288 – Over the Hedge
Posted by frothy in Over the Hedge on November 18, 2006
Based on the popular comic strip by Michael Fry, Over the Hedge is sweet, innocent fun with just enough wry humor and chicanery to keep adults amused. I wasn’t a fan of the bland musical interludes, but the voice characterizations were dead on, and the storyline was charming.
The story begins with a battle: a raccoon, named RJ (Bruce Willis), versus a tenacious vending machine. We can all relate to RJ’s anguish when the snack just won’t come out of the machine, no matter what method he tries. Soon he’s bounding up a hill to ransack the cave of a hibernating bear (voiced by Nick Nolte). Who, of course wakes up (early) as RJ is making his escape. Long story short, the bear’s wagon of food winds up being decimated by a tractor-trailer in the highway. As a result, Vincent the Bear tells RJ that when he (Vincent) wakes up from hibernation in two weeks’ time, RJ had better have returned ALL of the food, plus the wagon and a cooler – or else.
Next, a heterogeneous group of woodland creatures wakes up in a hollowed log. Led by the organized Verne the Turtle (Gary Shandling), the various critters must now assemble enough food to last them through the next winter as well. Ah, but then they discover The Hedge. It seems that during their long slumber, their beloved forest has been encroached by Suburbia. Gasp!
Luckily, new friend RJ is there to explain it all to them and to tell them of his plan to replenish their food supply – raid the houses over the hedge, of course!
There are a couple of themes here to teach the kidlets: trust and friendship. As a loner raccoon, RJ has no friends and no one to trust, so he tries to bamboozle the other animals into scrounging up enough food for him to pay off Vincent the Bear. Meanwhile, Verne (who’s the smartest of his bunch and the most suspicious) doesn’t really trust RJ and thinks his plan will wind up getting some or more of them killed.
But this is a cartoon, after all, so wacky hijinks surely win out over maudlin Lessons Learned, although, as with the best cartoon, your younger set will surely take away good, positive themes. Well, that and some great physical comedy, including a scene in which RJ and Verne wind up in an airborne child’s wagon.
The movie’s voices are amusingly cast; in addition to Willis, Nolte, and Shandling, we hear from Steve Carell, Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, and Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, who are wonderful as porcupine spouses.
Even the brief, listless musical numbers won’t turn off many people, as the movie manages to bring forth the funny while remaining true to the spirit of its predecessor comic strip.
***
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Some lawsuits suck.
So we all know by now that two of the racist, sexist frat boys from the not-so-Deep South in the Borat film are suing Sacha Baron Cohen because he made them look bad. And we know that the tiny Romanian town that’s featured in Borat is also suing, because he made them look bad, too. And so on and so on.
Well, now word comes via E!Online that someone else is pissed. But the story seems to be inaccurate.
The article says, “At a news conference Thursday in Los Angeles, etiquette teacher Cindy Streit announced that she has filed a complaint with the California Attorney General’s Office, requesting an investigation into the methods that were used to get her to participate in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
…
“‘I had taught him to excuse himself,” she told the Associated Press. “He did that correctly and went upstairs. The next thing that happened is that he came down the stairs holding this plastic bag with whatever was in it.
“My horror was that he had brought a bag of feces to my dinner table.’”
Now, I have seen the movie, but perhaps someone out there can clarify for me. The woman who hosted the dinner party at which Borat presented his poop wasn’t the same woman who was instructing him in etiquette; that woman was the one to whom Borat showed naked pictures of his son.
In other words, I believe the story is misidentifying this complaintant.
As for the content of the complaint, I’m of two minds. I understand how people must feel a little violated. They thought one thing, based on what they were told, and it turned out to be incorrect. That might rankle me, too. But it’s important to note that those who come off worst in the film (the people from the rodeo, the kindly Jewish couple, to name a few) aren’t complaining; indeed, the kindly Jewish people liked the movie. Even the guy in the antiques shop wasn’t mad. The humor coach was fine with it. The driving instructor, too.
The suit by the Romanian village is almost funny. They’re complaining not just that they were made to look bad, but that they weren’t paid enough. They didn’t do anything in the movie, you know, like, say, act. Just be on camera, for the most part.
So why are these people pitching a fit? Is it really because they felt they were lied to? How much of their outrage stems from the fact that the movie has already made $26 million? (And you have to figure there was a low, low production budget.) Are people merely trying to cash in on Cohen’s comic tour de force under the guise of being peeved?
It’s been said that Cohen’s Borat makes places like Kazahkstan look bad, as if he were representative of the entire country. That’s fair to some degree, because most people in the West don’t get much exposure to Eastern Europe. However, let’s look at American-made films that are shown overseas. How many of them make Americans look like boorish louts? How about TV shows? What about countries that see Americans on The Amazing Race or Survivor? Do they think we’re all like that?
Pee, pee, pee on a movie
Defamer has an interesting post about a mad scary trend: advertisements at the bottom of urinals. Oh, but not only are there ads, they TALK. They speaketh at you whilst you whizz on them – go see our film, they whine. And you stand there, whizzing away, because you have no choice – those Coronas went right through you.
Read the post there and you’ll see there are plans to put the talking ads in toilet seats, too. That’s right, ladies, you’re not getting away that easy.
But, see, this is only the beginning. Movie ads? Pfft. Old news already. Next, you’ll see ads for all kinds of products. Imagine sitting there, doing your bidness, and you hear a voice telling you to buy Charmin brand toilet paper. Or a pleasant lil imploring you to switch to their brand of douche. Hey, it’s possible. It’s more than possible. It’s coming.
287 – Stranger than Fiction
Posted by frothy in Stranger than Fiction on November 11, 2006
It’s been said that when an comedic actor decides to take a turn at dramatic emoting, the results usually veer more toward the cloying, oversentimental than toward the sincere. (Think Bill Murray in The Razor’s Edge, not two decades later in Lost in Translation.) And Will Ferrell, star of such wacky fun as Anchorman and Ricky Bobby, wouldn’t at first glance seem to be the type of actor with the necessary range to carry a dramatic role. But Ferrell, miraculously, pulls it off.
Harold Crick (Ferrell) is an IRS auditor who’s, shall we say, fastidious. He has routines, you see, from the number of brushstrokes his teeth get to the number of steps he takes to get to his bus stop. A place for everything, and everything in its place. In short, the sort of punctual, detail-oriented soul that an entity such as the IRS love to have on its side.
Everything’s moving along smoothly for Harold, at least as much as it’s moving at all. He lives a solitary life both in and out of work and has no dreams or ambitions. But everything changes when he’s brushing his teeth one morning and hears a British woman’s voice narrating his actions.
Bearing in mind that Harold’s well-ordered life could hardly stand even the slightest deviance, it’s easy to see how he might completely wig out over this, and that’s about what happens. The HR department wants to talk to him, and then he’s shuffled over to an in-house doctor (Tom Hulce) and then finally to a college professor (Dustin Hoffman), who tries to figure out the identity of Harold’s mysterious novelist through literary means.
So now things aren’t moving along smoothly, although they are moving along. Until Harold hears some ominous words in his head that suggest that he’ll soon be killed off.
In the hands of a comedic actor who lacks range, this would have been a maudlin, treacly pile of goo. But because Ferrell is so wonderfully understated, you instantly empathize with Harold. And that’s no small feat, considering the wild implausibility of hearing someone’s voice in your head; the movie ran the real risk of alienating its audience when it desperately needed it to identify with the main character.
Another highlight is the sweet, caring relationship that develops between Harold and Gyllenhaal’s character, Ana. Physically, they’re an oddball couple – he’s quite tall, she’s quite not – and personality-wise the two actors seem kind of a mismatch. But although their characters suffer through some necessary awkwardness, the two actors are able to make their union believable and desirable. In other words, they look great together.
As Kay Eiffel, the novelist in Harold’s head, Emma Thompson brings a coffee-and-cigarettes nihilism to the role; she’s supposed to kill Harold off, but she doesn’t know quite how to do that; her publisher has sent her an assistant (the always solid Queen Latifah) to encourage things so Eiffel meets her deadline.
Thanks to beautiful performances by Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, an exceptional supporting cast, and a script that doesn’t nosedive into oversentimentality but does sprinkle in some genuine laughs, Stranger than Fiction is an exuberant, charming film.
***
Gaslight (1940)
Posted by frothy in Gaslight (1940) on November 11, 2006
In 1944, MGM released a movie about a thief who slowly tries to drive his wife insane in order to find out the location of some jewels. The movie was called Gaslight, and it starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. But the movie wasn’t an MGM original by any means; its antecedent was a much-lesser-known 1940 British film by the same name. (Apparently, when MGM bought the rights to the story, based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, the studio attempted to destroy all existing prints of the earlier version, but they weren’t successful.)
In the opening scene, an old woman is strangled to death, and her killer ransacks her apartment in search of… well, something. His search is apparently fruitless. Years later, Paul Mallen (Anton Walbrook), a debonair society lord in London, moves with his wife Bella (Diana Wynyard) to the posh Pimlico Square, directly below the apartment of the murdered. Mrs. Mallen is quickly the talk of the neighborhood – she’s a little off, they say. Something’s not quite right with her. And those wags are right; Bella is constantly accused by her husband of stealing things from him, although she has no recollection of the events.
Mallen uses trick after psychological trick against his wife, although it’s unclear to the audience what his motives are. Is he just playing with her? Does he merely delight in her anguish? He even deliberately keeps her from her cousin, a man who’d stood against their marriage at the wedding ceremony. What’s Mallen’s angle?
Unlike its remake, this earlier version is delightfully understated – and bereft of stars whose names would be recognizable in the United States. It’s remarkably well lit, too, typical for movies of the period. But where it draws most of its strength is from the two leads. Walbrook, who by that time had been in motion pictures for 25 years, is perfect as the sly, debonair, and viciously evil Mallen; Wynyard exudes vulnerability and panic; her Bella is terrified that she might be quite sincerely insane, vascillating from dignified serrenity to sheer panic.
This movie is highly recommended to fans of noir film, particularly those who’ve seen the more-famous 1944 Hollywood version.
***1/2
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