Fun Facts About Kinsey
While the mainstream press writes off the Kinsey-backlash as merely a sign of paranoia and hysteria from conservatives, those who are paying attention are having quite a chuckle over the facts that the movie ignores.
Thanks to Kathy Shaidle's Relapsed Catholic:
"The Rockefeller Foundation eventually shut off its spigot of financing for the Kinsey Institute during the early 1950s, not because this was the McCarthy era and Kinsey's findings were associated with communism as the movie claims (in fact, Kinsey voted Republican and purged his institute of suspected leftists), but because professional statisticians had by then thoroughly discredited his research."
The thing is, if Christians did scientific research the way Alfred Kinsey did sex research, there would be an uproar about how those Christians are full of crap, how they don't use their brains, how they're breaking all the rules.
But because popular culture WANTS to believe Kinsey's claims, nobody's bothering to challenge his shoddy research.
Here's more on the subject (via Relapsed Catholic):
"Kinsey’s statistics were so seriously flawed that no reputable scientific survey has ever been able to duplicate them. (...) "the December 11, 1949, New York Times, W. Allen Wallis, then chairman of the University of Chicago’s committee on statistics, dismissed 'the entire method of collecting and presenting the statistics which underlie Dr. Kinsey’s conclusions.' Wallis noted, 'There are six major aspects of any statistical research, and Kinsey fails on four.'"
The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)
With amazing performances and some bizarre spectacles, Leos Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge a paints unforgettable (if not exactly admirable) pictures of wild romance.
Plunging us into a the difficult and unpredictable lives of the homeless in Paris, Carax shows us an ugly, cruel world that is full of betrayals. Romantic love and passion are upheld as the best hope for a fulfilling life, and its characters pursue this with a passion, believing it should be attained no matter what.
And what characters: Denis Lavant plays Alex, a homeless man who resembles one of the cavemen from 2001, roaming around Pont-Neuf breathing fire... literally. (He's a fire eater.) He falls into a stormy romance with an artist who is going blind, played by Juliette Binoche, who we are expected to believe could live as an overlooked homeless woman.
Anyone who thinks that romantic love will be the way to satisfaction and fulfillment is setting themselves up for disappointment. Romantic love is a step, an experience that can point the way toward selflessness, compassion, and meaningful sacrifice. But the movie wants our hearts to break for these two lost individuals as they fumble toward ecstasy. For all of its impressive excess, the whole affair feels rather empty. This may come from its failure to offer us a thoughtful exploration of its characters' stories. But everything is staged at such extremes, it hinders thought. It's a performance art slideshow set to music that's turned up to "11."
As Charles Taylor wrote in his review at Salon,
There's no denying that some of [Carax's] images are exquisite, but they aren't tied to anything narratively or emotionally. "I don't really write scripts," Carax told Kehr. "I make notes, and then, when we're at the point of finding the money, I pretend to write a scenario."
And yet, while it's difficult to take seriously, The Lovers on the Bridge is worth a look for the strength of its throw-caution-to-the-wind performances by Lavant and Binoche, who deliver something more along the lines of a stunt exhibition at a circus than acting, and for some truly awe-inspiring cinematography and spectacle. Have you ever been water-skiing at night through a fireworks show? That's just one of the marvels you'll see here, one of the metaphors for the exhilaration of finding someone who loves you.
The folly of its desperate duo may inspire some compassion, helping us see beyond the alarming violence of their romance to the stories behind their pain. As we watch these two desperate, damaged human beings throw themselves at one another, we see recklessness and selfishness. But we also see the beginnings of wisdom as they learn to care for someone besides themselves.
But overall, The Lovers on the Bridge feels like the work of a flamboyant art student who thinks that he can illustrate a profound love story by firing cannonballs of paint at a canvas. The explosions are spectacular, but in service of what, exactly?
My weekend In Good Company in L.A.
I just returned from L.A., where I had an opportunity to participate in a press conference with writer/director Paul Weitz, asking him questions about one of the most enjoyable mainstream comedies of the year, In Good Company, which stars Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and Scarlett Johansson.
I also had the privilege of tossing a couple of questions at Quaid and Grace.
And I had the fantastic, inspiring experience of getting better acquainted with many of my fellow religious-press film critics.
I'll post something more detailed about this soon, but suffice to say that if you liked Weitz's previous film About a Boy, you'll probably like this one. It's an engaging, amusing, and ultimately edifying tale about ethics in business, about the value of a good family, and about investing yourself in what you believe in. Quaid and Grace have good chemistry, and both provide strong performances. If it weren't for an unfortunate twist that takes pre-marital sex as if it's a fun and diverting activity, it would be on my year's best list. As it is, it's a flawed but entirely worthwhile film.
I stayed at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. It was my third visit to that hotel. And let me tell you, the place is like Disneyland. You walk in and see your favorite characters. I sat down in the restaurant and, lo, there was Liam Neeson chatting with someone across the room. The next day, I was taking an elevator down several floors, and who should step in and share the ride but Adam Sandler. I thanked him for Punch-drunk Love, and he seemed surprised, as if he doesn't often get appreciation for THAT movie.
Shaft (2000)
[These first-impression comments were published when on the opening weekend of the film in 2000.]
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Some actors have the gift of disappearing into a character, so that each role becomes a new revelation. But Hollywood seems to pride itself on developing a different kind of actor, the star that usually play the same role, with a different name and a different hat each time. These actors usually spend their years trying to find the character best suited to their personality.
Samuel Jackson is of that variety, and he's about as good as those actors get, a compelling presence who steals every scene he's in, even if he's a supporting character.
In John Singleton's Shaft, Jackson finally takes center stage, and it's hard to imagine a vehicle more suited to his strengths. Even though he recycles many of the expressions and intonations he gave Jules in Pulp Fiction, Jackson makes John Shaft a much more interesting, entertaining, and compelling character than the original Shaft.
There is one striking difference. The original Shaft (who shows up briefly here, played again by Richard Roundtree) was a ladies' man, and the movies celebrated his sexual exploits with any woman he met. Jackson's Shaft exchanges flirtations with every woman he meets, and we are led to believe that he does, on occasion, do something about it. But the movie doesn't dwell on his sex life. In fact, I almost had the feeling that this dirty wordplay might be only a game. The movie never shows us our hero actually engaging in these promised trysts at all. Nowhere is the movie's disinterest in sex more obvious than in the fact that former Miss America Vanessa Williams is portrayed as Shaft's tough-as-nails partner, and nothing more. She doesn't even wear makeup. I found this restraint refreshing. This has caused a lot of critics to complain... critics who go in wanting something specific, not open to anything new.
Regardless of the details of his lust-life, the new Shaft is a leaner, meaner Dirty Harry of the streets. He's an icon of vigilante justice. Such heroes usually bother me. They disrespect the importance of the law, and thumb their nose at the efforts of those who do try to make the law work for the people. Shaft is indeed overly violent and forceful in his methods. But his efforts did not strike me so much as disrespect for the law so much as a realization that, because he is in the presence of corrupt police officers, he has to do some behind-the-scenes work to lure those evil lawmen into a trap and restore dignity to the badge. He endeavors to expose the evil, to make a crooked system straight. While it compromises the integrity of the law to celebrate heroes who see themselves as "above" the law, Shaft's errors are more well-intentioned, more honorable than most. In a time when minorities are up in arms about prejudice in police forces and in the courts, Shaft's methods aren't hard to understand.
In this episode, Shaft investigates a hate crime and, much to our surprise, finds his man right away. (Fortunately for the audience, the movie doesn't become another guessing game of whodunit.) Walter Wade (Christian Bale) is a sneering, racist rich boy who gets cuffed by Shaft at the scene of a murder. Wade first eludes his punishment with the influence of his famous, wealthy father. But as Shaft closes in, Wade is driven to make connections with dangerous men for his own protection. There's a witness out there, after all, a bartender named Diane (Toni Collette), who could testify against him. Wade has got to put a bullet in her head before Shaft finds her and convinces her to take the stand. So he links up with the local crime lord, Peoples Hernandez (the extraordinary Jeffrey Wright). So the film becomes a race: will Shaft find Diane and draw her out of hiding, or will Wade and Hernandez manage to get there first?
Christian Bale's performance as Wade just might be the role that brings him the attention he has deserved since his astounding introduction in Spielberg's underappreciated Empire of the Sun. He's a seething, arrogant punk who manages to exist as a complicated, believable character instead of a one-dimension bad guy. He seems to be competing with Jeffrey Wright to be the film's central villain, and although Wright's performance is more impressive, Bale's bad boy is the one we most want to see locked up. I found the scenes between Bale and Wright compelling, unpredictable, and intense, a demonstration of just how the pride and selfishness of evil men can cause their conspiracies to collapse from within. And in spite of such dazzling villains, Shaft manages to remain the most interesting character. That is a rare and unusual feat. A James Bond movie is only as good as its secondary characters, but Shaft joins a very short list of heroes who are full of surprises.
Director John Singleton is known for urban dramas about real issues, so I thought him an odd choice for such a mainstream, commercial, cops and robbers game. But he makes a talky, issues-oriented script by Richard Price into a slick, pedal-to-the-metal action movie that avoids gaudy explosions and preposterous stunts. Even though I was on the edge of my seat, I was also well-aware of a very real issue raised by Price's plot: the law has become too complacent and complicated to do much good on the streets, and somebody has got to go out and help the people that are getting hurt. This is never made preachy; the action thunders on, quite an impressive balancing act.
Yes, there is a lot of violence here. Yes, the body count climbs fast. But the action scenes are in the longstanding tradition of cops and robbers shows. This isn't realism; it's a world of archetypes, and fairly fresh versions at that. Shaft is the larger-than-life thinking, caring, get-down-to-business good guy, and the bad guys are liars, traitors, drug lords. There's enough tongue-in-cheek humor to the action to toe the line of comic book fantasy.
This film isn't here to portray life on the streets. It does raise interesting questions. And the actors do bring startling dimension to their characters. But the primary focus of the film, and the real reason we're here, is to watch Samuel Jackson sink his teeth into the Shaft's trash-talking dialogue. Shaft is so generous with his brash, disarmingly big smile that if he teamed up with Ethan Hunt from Mission: Impossible it would turn into a contest of pearly whites. But unlike Cruise's Hunt, Jackson's Shaft is more than muscle. He can think fast. He doesn't need big explosions. He doesn't even need martial arts. His gifts lie in compassion for the persecuted, and in the seemingly effortless orchestration of justice, helping villains along their way to the consequences of their own actions. Several times I laughed out loud and cheered to see his cleverness pay off. That's more than I can say about any other summer action movie so far this year.
28 Days Later (2003)
After seeing the preview for 28 Days Later, those who love violent zombie movies rushed to the theatre hoping for chaotic bloodletting and absurd violence. Most others assumed it would be just another icky horror film, and they steered around it as if it were typical roadkill. And who can blame them? Derivative, disposable horror movies show up almost every week these days, and those worth discussing are rarities indeed.
But Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) had a lot on his mind while he assembled this low-budget, high-tension thriller about zombies and the apocalypse. The result is, yes, terrifying, but not just in the "Yikes!" sort of way. It's scary because, while we may never be stalked by slimy zombies, we are coming to know more and more what it is like to live in the midst of an angry, violent, explosive populace.
Like the best horror films, 28 Days Later taps into our primal fears. And like the best science fiction, it reflects things about the present and dares to prophesy about the monsters waiting for us around the corner.
Boyle's troubling tale takes a cue from Stephen King's The Stand, examining the effects of a massive and aggressive virus on a heavily populated city. It opens with a bicycle courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy) waking up in a hospital. He disconnects himself from the abandoned medical equipment that someone had apparently been using to monitor his condition. And then he heads out into a city that has strangely turned to a ghost town.
Or better... a zombie town.
We soon learn that an epidemic has wiped out Jim's world, a plague that began when scientists performed cruel experiments on monkeys, forcing them to watch newsreel highlights of the atrocities that human beings visit upon each other. The tests led to an outbreak of a virus appropriately named "Rage." Rage takes over its host organisms and reduces them to barbaric, beastly behavior.
So Rage victims are not technically zombies... they're not the undead. They are human beings whose higher natures have been overcome by a demonic acceleration of their baser appetites, turning them into murderous, ravenous beasts who mindlessly seek to kill those with more civilized and spiritually mature faculties.
In a panic, Jim hurries to a church for help, only to find the congregation slaughtered and bloodthirsty monsters lying in wait for him. He learns that attacks are not the only danger: contact with a mere drop of blood from the infected can render a man defenseless against the disease. Running for his life, Jim stumbles onto some survivors who teach him how to fight the heartless monsters. Together, they strive to learn the truth behind the rumors of a military outpost that offers refuge for the uninfected.
What they learn is hard to accept — that sin is inescapable. Even if uninfected human beings manage to hold these irrational Rage-monsters at bay, other forms of evil will rise in the human heart and corrupt us in other ways. To resist these forces, Jim and his friends will need more than barricades and weapons. Their resources are running out, and anyone who might be alive and able to help them is probably across the sea. They will need more than humanitarian aid and a Bono-led fundraiser.
Be warned: 28 Days Later is extremely violent and, at times, bloody enough to send the squeamish running for the exits. I am not a fan of the genre, because it seems to exist as an excuse to play upon our fears and to indulge in excessive violence and gore. This zombie movie, however, kept me riveted with its ideas, characterizations, and with the way it accomplishes so much with so little.
Screenwriter Alex Garland's predictions are not too far off the mark. While I doubt there is any virus that can turn us into the bloodseeking, ranting, raving creeps that haunt this thriller, we have certainly seen the public more easily stirred up into violent outbreaks in recent years. And there have been rumors of nasty viruses that are growing stronger as our devices for hindering them get stronger. So the "ghost-town" aspect might not be such an outrageous idea.
Moreover, as I watched Jim and his companions fight for survival, I thought of the plight of African natives, who live today in fear of the forces that are butchering their communities. Even now, Sudan's native population is crying out for help while their own Arab-dominated government funds this century's first genocide.
I'm not just "reading into it." Despite its disturbing visions and fantastic premise, Boyle's film has critics examining it as a relevant tale for the era of SARS, AIDS, the West Nile Virus, and epidemics of civil unrest. Charles Mudede of the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger writes,
No book or painting could have captured the late '90s better than The Matrix; no sonata or sculpture could have better captured the post-Iraq War 2 mood than X2. If X2 got to the terrifying heart of the days leading to our most recent war, then 28 Days Later got to the heart of SARS. True, SARS came about after 28 Days Later was made (2002), but the environment that made the disease all the rage for the better part of the first half of 2003 is the very same environment that makes 28 Days Later the best horror film of our time.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the film is this: A response to evil that is merely rational and forceful, lacking love and compassion, will lead to whole new atrocities. Evil thrives within the hearts of human beings, and it excels at corrupting any devices we design.
Danny Boyle may have meant to write off religion by showing the bloodied church and the monstrous clergy at the beginning of the film. If so, he subverts his own anti-religious prejudice... for 28 Days Later is often punctuated with flourishes of sacred music, which seem to suggest that we may have to look beyond military might and appeal to the powers of heaven if we want to survive our own corruption.
Shrek 2 (2004)
This review was originally published at Christianity Today.
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When we bade farewell to the happily honeymooning ogres Shrek (Mike Myers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz), it seemed like a "happily ever after" ending. True love had saved Fiona from the curse that bound her in the guise of a human being during the daylight. At last she was free to be her ogre-ly self, 24-7. She had learned to accept who she was, and she had discovered someone who loved her that way. Shrek had overcome his antisocial attitude and become a local hero. Donkey (Eddie Murphy) seemed happy to have found friends who would tolerate his nonstop talk.
Viewers cheered for Shrek's triumph, but it was Donkey who stole the show. So, sure enough, we get an extra helping of donkey's braying nonsense in Shrek 2. We also get more of everything we liked about the first film, and less of the things that didn't work.
In Shrek 2, Shrek begrudgingly accepts an invitation to travel with Fiona to the land of Far Far Away. Fiona's parents (John Cleese and Julie Andrews) are expecting to meet a charming new son-in-law … literally. They think Fiona's rescuer was Prince Charming himself.
But Charming (Rupert Everett), who was indeed dispatched to rescue Fiona from captivity in a dragon cave, got there too late. Shrek had already done the job. Apparently, Shrek never played theater in the land of Far Far Away-the king and queen know nothing of Fiona's marriage to the jolly green giant from the swamp. Thus, it's not just Shrek that will surprise them. They'll be shocked to see their daughter looking ogre-ish in the daylight.
When Charming learns that Fiona's already made her marital vows, he returns home to plot Plan B with his mother, the infamous Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders). While Far Far Away is governed by royalty, Godmother's the one who really runs the show, ruling the kingdom with a dangerous magic wand and a pantry full o' potions.
Shrek and Fiona are welcomed to the castle by a crowd of astonished and appalled locals. The people of Far Far Away, like their reigning monarchs, judge others by their appearance—and Shrek's not their idea of admirable. For a while, it looks like a storybook retelling of Meet the Parents—when Shrek and the king trade insults over dinner, he looks likely to "Hulk out." While Fiona consoles her fuming husband behind closed doors, the king becomes an easy subject for the manipulative Godmother. He determines to take Shrek out of the picture—first, by the hiring of a notorious assassin, and then by the influence of enchanted beverages that promise more than your daily dose of antioxidants.
The first threat, a feisty feline in famous footwear, is played by Antonio Banderas with panache and personality—Puss-in-Boots nearly steals the show. If there's a Shrek 3, there will be at least as much expectation of more Puss as there is of more Donkey. And the way things look, we may as well speculate about Shrek 4, 5 and 6. Banderas' exuberant contributions and some animation brilliance make this one of the all-time great cartoon cats. He deserves his own franchise.
Director Andrew Adamson and his team of co-writers keep the story moving at a quick clip, packing the screen with cleverness that will reward repeated viewings. He also guides the characters with more confidence; Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey interact as comfortably as if they'd starred in a sitcom together for decades. The DreamWorks animation team serves up another dazzling show of animation that raises the bar yet again for Pixar and Disney studios, but there's no "showoff" factor this time. The look of the film supports the story instead of drawing attention to itself.
Although Harry Gregson-Williams's pitch-perfect soundtrack is again punctuated by somewhat intrusive pop songs (I still wince when I remember the appalling abuse of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in the first film), this time the selections are better suited to the material. Even such superlative artists such as Tom Waits and Nick Cave fit right in. While I prefer the pure storytelling style of Finding Nemo and The Iron Giant, Shrek 2's relentless parodies of other movies work better here than they did last time. Spoofs of Mission: Impossible and TV's "COPs" earn big laughs while buoying the characters along toward an adrenalin-rush conclusion, one of the fastest and most frenzied action climaxes ever.
Shrek 2 ends up not so much an extension of Shrek's story as an improved retelling. The theme remains the same—we should not judge a book by its cover, even if that cover is lime green and covered in warts. The first Shrek declared open season on Disney clichés, throwing not-so-subtle jabs at the way Mickey Mouse's house has become preoccupied with stories of characters who long to be something they're not.
In defense of those "transformation stories," such fairy tales as Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella speak to our deep suspicion that we are not what we were meant to be. It's no accident that such stories recur throughout history and cultures. They strike chords that resonate within us because we are, indeed, flawed, "asleep," incomplete. On some level, we're waiting for the day that our Creator will redeem us from our "cursed" state, purge us of our sins, save us from a wicked world, and raise us up to the ideal existence he intended.
Nevertheless, Disney deserved a critique. It's not Disney's focus on fairy tales that is the problem; it's the way their versions of fairy tales eliminate the complexity of the source material, and the way they have inclined generations toward the idea that a true happy ending involves the blessing of Barbie-like good looks.
This time around, it's not Disney that's the butt of the joke (although there are few more unmistakable potshots taken at the studio giant along the way). Shrek 2 has the "beauties" of Beverly Hills in its sights. With a red carpet welcome party hosted by a Joan Rivers look-alike, the filmmakers make a mockery of Oscar glitz and glamour. Through the Fairy Godmother's exultation in the power of her potions, we see a media-wise perspective on the culture of cosmetic surgery.
Celebrity culture has polluted popular imaginations with poor definitions of beauty. On "reality" TV, women and men give up their natural appearances for artificial beauty in order to gain acceptance and temporary happiness. One such show is called The Swan, a reference to the famous fairy tale of the ugly duckling. These shows only reinforce the insecurities of viewers who have been sold a lie. They tell us that we have to change our exterior in order to be truly satisfied. The Shrek movies remind us that it is not our appearance that needs changing, but our hearts. Further, it affirms that no matter what we look like, we all have value, gifts, and the potential to truly make a difference.
But the implications go as far as viewers care to take them. Shrek 2's critique applies to any culture that has its codes of behavior and appearance. The land of Far Far Away might be reflecting playground ethics or high school culture. But it might also be your political party. It might be your health club. It could be your neighborhood, or your nation. It might sometimes even be the church.
Yes, even Christian "culture" has its prejudices, tending to jump to unflattering conclusions about those who are "different." They may not be green-skinned or smelly. But they might have colorful language, an audacious sense of jewelry, or some ideas about love, politics, sexuality, or even diet that is dissonant with our own. How often do we wish we could change a stranger's vocabulary, appearance, or manners so that we can feel more comfortable with them? Certainly we have room to be concerned about inappropriate behavior, because choices can lead to serious consequences. But if we approach others with an aim to change them rather than an aim to know them, to love them, and to exemplify a better life for them, we make ourselves ugly with arrogance in the process.
Will Shrek give in to the pressure, and conform to the Far Far Away idea of beautiful? Will he and Donkey succumb to Fairy Godmother's tempting offer of an extreme makeover? Moviegoers can rest easy. A saint is known by his response to temptations, and in the land of fairy tales, Shrek and Fiona are holy fools.
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)
I walked into The Emperor's New Groove expecting another formulaic Disney movie. I came out giddy with joy.
For all of the craftsmanship of this year's smash family movie Chicken Run, The Emperor's New Groove is ten times funnier and more creative. It's one of the year's... uh... the year's best... NO! I can't make myself say it! It's a Disney movie! Aren't Disney movies just predictable, made-for-marketing, and drenched in sentiment?
Sentimentality has slowly swallowed storytelling in Disney animated features since The Little Mermaid. It hasn't been all bad. Aladdin had some inspired sequences. Tarzan had some dizzying animation. The Lion King had strong mythic backbone, but stumbled into touchy-feely sermons on "the circle of life". And Pocahontas had... uh... nothing at all.
Disney's remarkable tradition has been dying a slow death. Think back to the glory days. 101 Dalmatians. Pinocchio. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The focus there was on classic storytelling told with imagination and skill. But in the 90s, Disney movies were more about an Elton John theme song or a Robin Williams vocal performance than about a good story.
Well, surprise surprise surprise. Miracles can still happen at Disney studios.
Disney's least-promoted, least-marketable movie in years has arrived... The Emperor's New Groove. Early buzz was bad, as word got out that it was a barely-salvaged movie that had originally been intended as a major epic along the lines of The Lion King. Lo and behold, it's the most entertaining, perhaps the best, Disney movie in more than a decade. And there's barely a shred of sentimentality in the whole thing.
Director Mark Dindal keeps this movie moving at an exhilarating pace. Groove introduces us to Emperor Kuzco (David Spade), a sarcastic, prideful emperor who likes to flaunt his power and outrage his peasant workers. Soon after he decides to build a swimming pool on the site of a loyal peasant family's home, he finds himself the victim of a revenge plot enacted by a former employee, the nasty villain Yzma (Eartha Kitt). Yzma, with the help of her boneheaded bodyguard Kronk (the booming voice of Patrick Warburton), plants a potion in the king's drink in hopes of killing him. The potion goes wrong, and the Emperor is now a llama.
Kronk tries to dispose of the Emperor Llama, but loses track of him, and soon the llama's life is in the hands of the peasant family that he was about to displace. Pacha (John Goodman) is a lumbering good-hearted shepherd who wants to teach the Emperor some humbling lessons before helping him find the cure to his curse. When evil Yzma finds out the Emperor is still alive, the chase is on.
Plot is almost secondary in this movie. Comic timing is its masterstroke. Lickety-split banter between brilliantly conceived characters, chase scenes that leave you breathless with laughter and surprise, and how-will-they-get-out-of-this-one predicaments that pay off in the end... this is a whole new ballgame for Disney.
The characters are all unforgettable, thanks to their designers and voice talents. Kuzco is the most worthwhile thing David Spade's ever done. He's mean-spirited and cynical, but you can sense a likable guy under all that guff (and all that hair.) Eartha Kitt's superhuman vocal performance as the villain is a hoot. Yzma may resemble Cruella DeVille and Madame Medusa, but she's more fun to watch than either of them, and where she ends up in the end...well I won't tell, but it's NOT where the villain usually goes in a Disney movie. Kronk is the movie's unintentional center, a man of baffling moral dilemmas that are fought by his "shoulder angel" and "shoulder devil". His astounding stupidity is equaled only by his self-confidence and charm. Kronk is my favorite Disney character since...uh...Evinrude of The Rescuers.
The animators seem determined to keep the audience guessing. You never know what you'll find around any particular corner. Lost in the jungle, the llama-king must obviously avoid jaguars and quicksand, but who knew that the greatest threat of all is a temperamental squirrel? Occasionally the movie freeze-frames so the llama can make some remarks about the progress of the story. And conventions, like tracking the progress of characters' travel across a map, are cleverly altered for good laughs.
Best of all, there is not a single sappy Oscar-begging pop song. There's only a Tom Jones show tune that firmly establishes Kuzco's character. Disney studios finally had mercy on us. Apparently this was a last-minute decision. Poor poor Sting, who wrote five or six songs for the film, saw them cut from the final product. That was unfortunate for him, and he has every right to go after Disney for unfair play, but it's good news for us that the movie is so mercifully uninterrupted. I like Sting's music, but I'm glad it didn't trip up the pace of this film. Besides, he does get to sing the end-credits anthem, and it's a pleasant soundtrack for those who stay to read the names of the people who made this film such a shockingly fun time at the movies.
Some may find that Groove is so in-your-face outrageous, so over-the-top, that it falls short of oldies like Lady and the Tramp. They're right. The Emperor's New Groove feels more like a movie-length Ren and Stimpy episode than it does Lady and the Tramp. But I'd rather see Kuzco the half-crazed llama than another uninteresting lovesick hero whose parents have died and who must find his place in the circle of life and then throw the villain from a high place to his death. We've suffered that tired old story enough. No more independent young heroines yearning for love, no more baby animals lost in the woods. This time, for the first time in ages, Disney has sung a new song. Rejoice.
I am astonished to find myself calling this... okay, I'm going to say it... one of my favorite films of the year.
A Mighty Wind (2003)
Christopher Guest’s commitment to “mockumentaries” about community events is a curious thing.
All three of his semi-improvisational films — Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and now A Mighty Wind — have explored and celebrated the strange behaviors of human beings as they prepare for a public spectacle. He choreographs comical collisions of ego and inanity, and the results usually cause us to wince, laugh, and groan. And somehow, in the midst of inspired improvisation, he strikes resonant notes of insight regarding ambition, dreams, and the ugliness behind the deceiving facade of show business.
In Guffman, it was a small community theatre fumbling their way through a mediocre pageant, convinced of their excellence and admirable in their dedication.
Best in Show drew dog enthusiasts to display their pride and joy on the runway of a dog show, only to reveal that the owners were stranger by far than their dogs, rather blind to their own ugly egos and curious affectations.
Both of these revealed a glow of heroism in the most humble of characters, a stench of wickedness in the most narrow-mindedly driven. Show business is on everybody's mind, but what about their hearts? Their hearts can be found where their treasure is.
A Mighty Wind “documents” the revivals of a few folk music acts from the late '60s for a nostalgia-fest prepared for public television. They gather to honor the memory of a pioneering folk musician, Irving Steinbloom, who has recently passed away. His children, three contentious adults with a feeble appreciation for their father’s work, see an opportunity to honor him, and so they strike up a deal with public television and New York’s Town Hall to put on a “Down from the Mountain”-like program.
Of course, this is Christopher Guest-land, a world as quirky as the Coen Brothers’, where blind spots, handicaps, and weaknesses are exaggerated to make us see ourselves in them, so we can laugh... not in a mean-spirited, superior way but in a way that highlights our common flaws.
Unfortunately, Guest’s impressive improvisational cast go for the easy punchline too often this time. There’s nothing wrong with a good bawdy joke… but that’s just the problem. Much of Mighty Wind's humor is not particularly clever; it descends too quickly and too frequently into revelations of promiscuity, pornographic dalliances, and other crass misbehavior. Where Guffman and Best found hilarious comedy in chaotic collisions of fractured personalities, in accidents, capers, and outrageous stories, Mighty Wind boasts only a few moments of inspired chaos.
Nevertheless, when Mighty Wind gusts, it leaves the viewer unexpectedly shaken. The songs are all wonderful, tongue-in-cheek and yet performed with passion and skill. (Look for the soundtrack, produced by the great T-Bone Burnett, on DMZ records.)
Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara stand apart from a cast of goofy personalities, creating a folk music duo who actually win our hearts. We care about them and want them to succeed and rediscover some of the "magic" they reminisce about. Levy has never been so wacky and O'Hara turns in what may be the best performance of her career, showing off far more range and depth than the rest of the cast have opportunity to demonstrate.
Levy and O'Hara play Mitch and Mickey, a pair who supposedly struck a chord with audiences in the late 60s by personifying romance in their lovey-dovey harmonized duets. After their breakup, Mitch spiraled downward into a mental catastrophe. He now stares out blankly from his mop of tousled hair, looking as if he is subjected to hourly blows to the head. He stammers as if it requires severe effort to complete a coherent thought, as if speaking gives him abdominal cramps. Likewise, Mickey is a shadow of her former self, prone to waxing nostalgic as she stares into the past and that long-lost, brief-but-passionate relationship she and Mitch once shared. She has deteriorated into the bored, sad, fidgety wife of a man who sells bladder-control equipment to elderly people by day and fiddles with his model trains by night. Their marriage is the antithesis of the romantic ideal manifested in the Mitch and Mickey tunes now available only on dusty old vinyl.
Levy and O’Hara steal the show as suspense builds for their onstage reunion, and the question rises of whether their moments in the spotlight will spark any of their old fire. What I anticipated would become some sort of culminating catastrophe becomes instead a moment of surprising grace and sadness.
The rest of the cast is fun but frivolous. Ed Begley, Jr. earns some laughs as Lars Olfen, a folk-music-loving Norwegian with a fondness for Yiddish who uses his clout as a public television executive to get the festival on the air. Bob Balaban is hilariously annoying as Steinbloom’s anal-retentive son, the “idea man” behind the event. Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard deliver the movie's sharpest zingers during brief but inspired performances. Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest who made such a memorable noise in This is Spinal Tap! earn some grins as “The Folksmen.” Parker Posey positively glows as the overly enthusiastic new life in an anachronistic supergroup. And in what amounts to a cameo, Michael Hitchcock makes the Town Hall manager a memorable loony.
Unfortunately, several characters that show great promise remain undeveloped. Guest, who is usually the highlight of his own films, holds himself back. Other familiar faces like Larry Miller (Best in Show) and Bill Cobbs (Sunshine State, The Hudsucker Proxy) are introduced and then promptly disappear for the remainder of the film. Were their scenes just so flat that they ended up cut from the final film?
I have great admiration for Guest’s insistence on improvisation. He works with such inspired comics that their on-the-spot interactions are often funnier and more convincing than the best scripted comedy. But even the most talented artists have an off day, and you can feel that for all of the effort put forth in A Mighty Wind, they just never struck the comic gold that dominated the earlier films. The comedy engine is humming, but it stays at a low idle and never fully kicks into gear.
I come away wondering what it is that draws Guest to this theme again and again, from This is Spinal Tap to this, its folky cousin. They explore such a familiar theme — the glory of youthful days, when talent flourished, dreams were big, when hard work led to something memorable, when romance and passion ran hot.
But he is also preoccupied with characters past their prime, doomed to dream of days gone by. I do not sense the films leading us to any insights about how such a sorry fate can be avoided. But I think we can discern hints of wisdom about how we can avoid trudging into regrets and empty nostalgia.
Sure, we all experience memorable and wonderful things in our youth that fade with time and experience. But to spend one's latter days looking backward is to admit that one's passions were misplaced. These characters seem lost in nostalgia, unable to cope with aging, with the demands of committed marriages and relationships. They seem to have lost their devotion to singing a new song and now dwell on what has become stale. One character boasts about her superficial singing group, and you can see why she found it so fulfilling when you learn her previous experience was in the making of pornographic films. That is bitterly amusing, but it is rather frustrating to see that Guest includes no characters who have found anything truly fulfilling.
Perhaps the angst and sadness at the heart of these characters lies in the folly of their self-centeredness. They celebrate only the outer fringes of beauty and meaning. They like the spotlight. They like the attention. They like the rush of amorous love. But none of them are drawn to a compelling vision that draws them into selflessness, into sacrifice or service. The loves remain focused on rushes of hormones and emotions, not dedication and devotion. Marriages are dead, both spouses looking elsewhere with longing. The musicians hit bottom, focusing on crowdpleasing instead of art. Only "The Folksmen" seem somewhat balanced and focused in their work, spending some energy on craftsmanship and integrity and the joy of performance. Guest’s film, for all of its frenzy and frivolity, can serve as an inadvertent caution against ego, mediocrity, and redundancy.
“Nostalgia,” says Bob Dylan, “is death.” And he should know -- he's the most admirable champion of the folk music scene, and he remains a relevant artist by always breaking new ground, intent upon vision, beauty, truth, poetry, excellence, and authenticity. I think he's probably laughed his way through this movie several times.
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
2012 Update: It's been fifteen years since I posted these first-impressions on Jean-Pierre Jeunet's chapter in the Alien saga. At the time, it was a disappointment. But now that the preposterous Alien v. Predator series had trivialized these creatures and reduced the imaginings of Ridley Scott, H.R. Giger, and James Cameron to juvenile video-game fare, Alien: Resurrection looks like a movie from the good old days. I might even find myself talked into watching it again. I mean, surely a movie that features Sigourney Weaver, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya, Brad Dourif, and Winona Ryder is worth some Saturday night attention now and again, right?
It's time they quit killing the aliens, and just killed the Alien series altogether. Perhaps a director will come along with enough originality to inject new life into the idea, but will anybody care anymore?
Jean-Pierre Jeunet — he who brought us Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children — is one of the world's most inventive directors, but even he, with his acrobatic cinematography, can't find anything new to show us about these monsters, or the bone-headed human beings who stumble into their clutches, in Alien: Resurrection.
Alien was scary because director Ridley Scott subscribed to the Jaws school of scare-making: We didn't see what was stalking us until the very end of the movie. Scott also understood that horror stories can be substantial, and his movie became a fascinating exploration of what makes humans different from mere beasts.
James Cameron's sequel, Aliens, was a more conventional scare-fest, as we watched the characters get knocked off one by one. But it took us into new territory, and introduced us to characters who made us care deeply about the outcome.
Alien 3 was one of the most frustrating sequels ever made, filled with pretentious and empty religiosity, as well as killing off characters we'd come to know and love in the previous film. And now we were so well acquainted with the aliens' ugliness that director David Fincher was challenged to try and scare us with something new. But the script he had in front of him worked too hard to disturb us, and focused far more on "gross-out" than "think about it."
Now, there's Alien: Resurrection, which brings back our heroine Ripley from the dead through, of course, cloning technology, and gives her a bizarre cast of sidekicks, including a brutish Ron Perlman, the stout and strange Dominique Pinon of Delicatessen, and Winona Ryder as a wide-eyed android having a faith crisis.
Even these extreme measures fail to rejuvenate the franchise. And when an experimental genetic experiment births a new alien/Ripley mutant, the result is the most ridiculous creature I've seen in several years of monster movies. The creature's role in the story should kindle the same sympathies that made us care about the classic Frankenstein monster: The poor, pathetic monster, produced by the evils of humankind, wreaking havoc because it can't help itself! But alas, this monster fails utterly to make us care. What began as the most menacing movie monster of all has evolved into a whining oaf that looks its been dipped in a vat of Cream of Wheat.
How the mighty have fallen.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)
[This review was first published at the original Looking Closer website in 2002.]
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Director Kevin Reynolds, responsible for the bloated Waterworld and the misguided Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, has chosen a strong cast and a solid script for his adaptation of Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. The result is not a great film, by any means, but it reveals that Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line, Frequency) can be a compelling big screen hero and Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential) can be an effective villain.
And as action movies go, it's surprisingly thought-provoking.Read more