20 September 2004
by Jasmine Park
Jonathan Demme's surprisingly entertaining remake of the 1962 classic. Denzel Washington stars as the paranoid veteran Major Marco, who becomes convinced that he and his Gulf-War platoon-mates were kidnapped and brainwashed by a sinister corporation bent on getting a sleeper agent elected to the White House. The film succeeds in spite of a painfully earnest afterthought of an ending, largely by mixing suspense with twisted, tongue-in-cheek camp. With Liev Schreiber as the automaton Presidential candidate Raymond Shaw and Meryl Streep as his bitchy mother.
An unnecessary addition to the annals of average Hollywood romantic-comedy fare - which is to say, predictable, shallow, and insincere. Adam Sandler plays Henry, a vet who falls in love with brain-damaged Lucy (Drew Barrymore), whose memory is reset each day as a result of a car accident involving a cow and a tree. Set in Hawaii for no apparent reason, with a host of cutesy aquatic beasts, overweight, smack-talking, Polynesian locals, and a relentless soundtrack of terrible pop-song covers. Dana Carvey did it better in the trifling Clean Slate (1994), and Bill Murray did it best in the now-classic Groundhog Day (1993). Lacking either of these actors' nuance or talent, Sandler comes off as the trite phoney he is. With Sean Astin as Lucy's loathsome, lispy toady of a brother, and Rob Schneider as Henry's coarse island-native cousin.
An exceptionally eloquent documentary about the life of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense to Kennedy and Johnson. The film is composed of director Errol Morris's Interrotron interview of McNamara, now age 88, intercut with archival footage and audio. McNamara gives brazenly honest responses to questions about his life and career, which was marked throughout by brilliance, ambition, and moral ambiguity. The film's direction and editing display Morris's distinctive elegance. He delivers the most accurate portrait of a person that a film like this can - which is, heartfelt and elusive.
Ultimately an unsuccessful effort, but is nearly redeemed by some truly impressive performances. Rachel Evan Wood is astonishingly good as Tracy, a sweet but impressionable thirteen-year-old who strikes up a dangerous friendship with bad-girl Evie (Nikki Reed, who also co-wrote the script). Holly Hunter plays Melanie, Tracy's loving but inept mother, who can only look on with horror as her daughter becomes a monster. The film displays an admirable sympathy for even its most blameworthy characters, but it rushes through key points with the frenzy of an overly ambitious afterschool special and eventually undermines its credibility by fucking up Tracy just a bit too much. The world must really be going to shit if it's this easy for thirteen-year-olds to lie, cheat, steal, take drugs, self-mutilate, and engage in promiscuous sex.
The latest of Ron Howard's contributions to my growing movies-that-I-love-to-hate collection, which contains such previous winners as A Beautiful Mind (2001) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). The Missing is a shameless knock-off of the 1956 John Ford classic, The Searchers, that replaces the original's depth of feeling with insipid proselytizing. Cate Blanchett (shame on her) stars as Maggie, an independent frontier mother of two whose eldest daughter, Lily (Rachel Evan Wood), is kidnapped by evil Indians engaged in white-girl sex slavery. To rescue Lily, Maggie reluctantly enlists the help of her estanged father, played by Tommy Lee Jones, whose character is named Samuel Jones, a.k.a. - I shit you not - Chaa-duu-ba-its-iidan. With Eric Schweig - bloated and ugly-as-sin since his Last of the Mohican days - as the head-honcho Indian witchdoctor.
A film that epitomizes Hollywood's idea of 'artful': 90 minutes of drawing-room cinematography with mediocre actors speaking in ambiguously 'international' accents and feigning unrequited amorousness. In other words, a pretentious bore. The film is pretty in only the shallowest sense, and utterly lacking in substance or dramatic weight. Colin Firth - sporting a limp and greasy hairdo - plays the painter Jan Vermeer, who, in recent years, has joined the hallowed ranks of Van Gogh and Monet in the most-popular-artists-to-be-canonized-on-umbrellas-and-coffee-mugs Hall-of-Fame. Scarlett Johansson goes through the motions as his housemaid and muse with typical lips-half-parted spaciness.
Denzel Washington in The Manchurian Candidate
Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler in 50 First Dates
Robert McNamara in The Fog of War
Nikki Reed and Rachel Evan Wood in Thirteen
Cate Blanchett in The Missing
Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth in Girl with a Pearl Earring
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