18 March 2004
by Jasmine Park
An amusing but trifling affair that feels suspiciously like Ghost World Redux with a bit more visual flair; why it has garnered such lavish critical attention is truly baffling. Paul Giametti, previously the most nameless ubiquitous secondary actor in Hollywood, plays Harvey Pekar, the real-life collaborator on the American Splendor comic book series illustrated by R. Crumb. The film has a certain sweetness about it in spite of the relentlessly misanthropic posings of its hero, but in its second half, it succumbs unforgivably to that worst of Hollywood feel-good conventions, the cancer diagnosis. Features several charming performances, including James Urbaniak (of Sex-and-the-City-shoe-fetish-guy fame) as Crumb and Hope Davis as Pekar's wife.
Gillian Anderson's one shot at an Oscar, and a very distant one at that. Anderson plays the doomed heroine, Lily Bart, of Edith Wharton's early, artless novel of the same title. Many of the film's problems are due to the ridiculous casting; it is as if the casting director wanted to make a stiff costume movie with the most unlikely of actors (Anderson, Dan Ackroyd, Anthony LaPaglia, and Eric Stoltz??), and such endeavors can only die a miserable death. The film also suffers from a mawkish premise - a beautiful woman ruined by the rumors of a sex scandal is simply too light an affair for today's jaded audiences. What is left is a film that would be subpar fare for Masterpiece Theatre and is, at best, a poor man's version of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence.
An overblown affair passing for "real" drama. Director Alejandro Inarritu follows up his wildly overrated debut, Amores Perros (2000), by dumping his gritty, tortured, "devastating human tragedy" schtick in some anonymous American town with actors too good for this stuff doing their best Oscar-grubbing. Naomi Watts plays a soccer mom, Cristina, whose husband and two daughters are run over by a drunken ex-convict, Jack (Benecio del Toro). Paul (Sean Penn) gets her husband's transplanted heart and becomes obsessed with helping her gain revenge on her family's killer. 21 Grams is, at best, an amateurish take on themes done far better and more elegantly by Kieslowski, and Watts is seeming increasingly over-hyped. Shot in digital and looking every ugly bit like it.
Paul Giametti and Hope Davis in American Splendor
Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz in House of Mirth
Naomi Watts in 21 Grams
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