She Who Shall Not Be Named and I have been going to the movies a lot recently -- not so much because we are interested in the offerings, but as a diversion from the oppressively hot and humid weather we have been having [up in the mountains we don't have air-conditioning -- back to nature and all that]. The movie becomes part of a trip to a mall, or a farmers' market, or to a restaurant, food store, etc -- a five to seven hour excursion. This is because in and of themselves none of the recent releases, with one possible exception, is sufficiently interesting or entertaining to draw me away from home.
Anyway that has been the case with the last four flicks we have seen.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a mess. It starts well, and the first half hour is delightfully bizarre as we meet and get to know Charlie and his family. But then Willy Wonka appears and we are led into the Chocolate Factory and all the wonder and joy dissipates. Part of the problem is over-production. There is a wierd campiness to the whole thing that I found more than a little irritating. Camp was fresh and interesting thirty or forty years ago. Now it's just cheap and dumb. And then there's Johnny Depp. He is one of our better actors, one who takes interesting chances, but sometimes he goes seriously awry. This is one of those cases. I know Wonka is supposed to be a bit creepy, but this is far too much [and there is the Michael Jackson thing..., shudder]. The appropriate tone would be one of delight and wonder, interrupted from time to time by creepiness [sort of the way Gene Wilder played it], but here there is nothing but creepiness. I found the experience generally unpleasant.
The Wedding Crashers is this season's grossout comedy -- basically adolescent male silliness, and not particularly well-done; certainly not up to the level of the ur-text "There's Something About Mary." It is entirely formulaic -- you can see the plot turns coming miles in advance -- and the acting is perfunctory, the dialogue uninspired, and the direction mediocre. The characters are just plain stupid and shallow and exist only to set up the gags -- it's impossible for anyone who is not a male teen on testosterone overload to identify with any of them.
In short, it is an almost entirely undistinguished effort. The one exception is Isla Fisher, who plays the spoiled brat nympho pervert daughter of Chistopher Walken. She's a hoot and clearly having a ball with her part. In fact, this could be a breakout role for her. And, at a fundamental level, the flick is offensive -- not because of its sexual content (which is more a tease than anything else) or because its depiction of women and gays is insulting (sort of required in a gross-out comedy) but because it is the latest in a long series of films that glorifies dishonesty. Nearly everyone in the film is portrayed either as a con-artist or the victim of one, and by a large margin the cons are the winners. The ending is an unabashed endorsement of life as a con. I know that the put-on or con appeals to marginalized adolescents because it inverts power relationships, and gross-out jokes are a thumb in the eye of PC propriety, but enough is enough. I'm just tired of the whole damn genre. Faugh!
Sky High is another teen flick. It starts with the conceit that super-heroes are family people too and that they have kids, and those kids go to school. The comparison with The Incredibles is inevitable and Sky High suffers by it. Still it is a reasonably amiable teen comedy. Kurt Russell is reliable and Kelly Preston surprisingly good in the semi-adult roles. Michael Angarano is engaging as the lead teen, and Steven Strait is a moody teen icon as the good/bad guy. The girls are nubile and hot, hot, hot..., especially Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the bad girl. It's formulaic, derivative, mildly humorous. It repeats all the tropes of the high school drama, with the twist of super-powers. It has everything necessary to please a teen audience and a couple of moments for adults. Basically it's a reasonably innocuous way to waste a couple of hours of your life.
That brings us to The Island -- a Dreamworks/Michael Bay film. Michael likes to blow things up. Remember The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor? Basically you know what you're getting in a Michael Bay film -- mindless plot; cardboard characters; hyperactive, kinetic boom-boom. Everything a not-very-intelligent teenage boy could want. This is different..., for a while. The first half of the film is a standard Dreamworks SciFi product -- cool, intellectual, high-concept, alienating [like the literary SF of half a century ago -- what was then known as "modern" science-fiction]. Think of AI or Minority Report. The plot is nothing exceptional -- basically Logan's Run meets Coma, with a dash of Bladerunner thrown in. The direction is competent. The characters are starting to get interesting. Scarlett Johansson is reasonably hot. Sean Bean is..., well..., Boromir playing a psychologist/evil entrepreneur.
So far, so good. But in the back of my mind I could hear Bay's voice whining, "Please, please, please..., let me blow something up..., please, pretty please with some plastique on it..., puleeze!" Finally, about an hour into the film someone at SKG said, "Oh, OK..., if you insist." and from then on it's pure Michael Bay -- one long, kinetic, mindless, chase sequence in which lots and lots of things blow up real good. Logic is thrown to the winds, characters with some potential are blown away, boom, boom, boom. Whatever moral or ethical problems had been posed in the first half of the film are simply ignored, and there are a few eye-rollers. The only ethical figure in the film is played by Steve Buscemi and for his goodness he gets blown away. Djimon Hounsou, who through most of the film is an implacable, menacing force of evil, suddenly has a change of heart when he is reminded of his early experience of the oppressed status of blacks and becomes a good guy, just in time to save the day. Good grief! Finally there is the climactic one-on-one struggle between the hero and the bad guy and the boom, boom, BOOM stops, and you are free to leave the theatre, feeling lucky to have escaped the carnage.
That's it for the past couple of weeks. "She" wants to see the "Attack of the Flesh Eating Penguins" or something like that, and I want to see "2046". I'll report back when we have seen them.
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