NEW RELEASES
JERSEY GIRL Where are Jay and Silent Bob when we really need them? Jersey Girl is being promoted as writer-director Kevin Smith’s first “adult” film, the one in which he has finally dropped his juvenile antics and made a story that involves real-world characters and real-life situations. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that this plodding drama could benefit from cameo appearances by the foul-mouthed stoner and his “tubby bitch” sidekick. Besides, Smith did make a movie that featured more than pot and dick jokes: Chasing Amy, which managed to mix the serious and the silly in a wholly ingratiating manner. By contrast, most of Jersey Girl‘s stabs at humor are ham-fisted at best, and the sentimental moments recall John Hughes at his worst. Ben Affleck stars as Ollie Trinke, a New York music biz publicist whose life is shattered when his wife dies during childbirth. (Jennifer Lopez plays the tragic spouse, but her role has been trimmed down to practically nothing.) A temper tantrum causes Ollie to lose his job; he heads back to his modest Jersey hometown to raise his daughter (Raquel Castro) with the help of his dad (George Carlin), and in the process finds himself attracted to a forthright video store clerk (Liv Tyler, appealing in a role that’s pure male fantasy). The earnestness of the actors helps — and young Castro really looks like she could be Lopez’s daughter — but a repeat viewing of Dogma or Clerks will be needed to wash away the taste of mediocrity left by this film. 
TAKING LIVES After writing in recent weeks about the predictability of modern thrillers like Secret Window and Twisted, I figured the Movie Gods would swoop down and make me eat my words — they would present Taking Lives and make my declaration of the death of the suspense flick premature. But no such luck: This is just one more lousy thriller that plods through the tired conventions with all the zest of a grocery store underling taking inventory. Plucky heroine in the Clarice Starling mold? Check. Loving close-ups of gruesome crime scene photos? Check. Several name actors slumming for their paychecks? Check. A “surprise” killer whose identity can be pegged early on by anybody even halfway paying attention? Check, check, double-check. Angelina Jolie, whose post-Oscar career is only slightly less humiliating than that of Cuba Gooding Jr., plays FBI profiler Illeana Scott, who’s been summoned to Montreal to assist in tracking down a serial killer who murders young men and then assumes their identities. Could the psycho be the key witness (Ethan Hawke)? The tough-talking detective (Olivier Martinez)? The guy who simply keeps hanging around for no discernible reason other than to be a suspect (Kiefer Sutherland)? A real cop would have this wrapped up in 20 minutes, but Jolie’s detective, only slightly less dim-witted than Ashley Judd’s boozing cop in Twisted, seems to be merely one more graduate from the Inspector Clouseau Academy. Taking Lives clearly aspires to be another Seven, but a more accurate title would be One-and-a-Half. 1/2
CURRENT RELEASES
DIRTY DANCING: HAVANA NIGHTS Just as Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey infused the 1987 hit Dirty Dancing with their vibrant personalities and swift moves, so do Diego Luna and Romola Garai provide some lift to this otherwise forgettable “re-imagining.” Set in 1958 Cuba, on the eve of Castro’s revolution, the film centers on an American student (Garai) who strikes up a friendship with a local lad (Luna) who shares her passion for dancing. The storyline is trivial in the extreme, and the film never establishes its explosive era in any believable sense — despite some tacked-on moments of chaos, this might as well be set in 1986 Miami as 1958 Havana. Yet Luna and Garai make an appealing couple, while fans of the original Dirty Dancing will be rewarded with an extended cameo by Swayze as a dance instructor.
THE FOG OF WAR Subtitled Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The Fog of War might reasonably be expected to serve as a mea culpa on the part of the former Secretary of Defense for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a plea for forgiveness for his role as one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. Yet Errol Morris’ latest picture, an Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, proves to be an infinitely more comprehensive — not to mention more ambiguous — piece of nonfiction, as McNamara discusses just about every facet of his life yet still remains tantalizingly opaque regarding certain subjects. The film does indeed offer many lessons to mull over, yet the most meaningful one might be the old axiom about history repeating itself: One look at the current mess in Iraq and it’s chilling to note how little has been learned by those in charge.
HIDALGO A sprawling mess of a movie, Hidalgo is also the sort of old-fashioned popcorn entertainment that has become increasingly rare on the current movie scene — and in this case, the pro far outweighs the con. Viggo Mortensen stars as a cowboy who, along with his trusty horse Hidalgo, is invited to take part in a grueling 3,000 mile race across the Arabian Desert, a contest in which most participants perish under the merciless sun and the few survivors must contend with duplicity and double-crosses at every turn. What follows is a rousing adventure yarn that includes breathtaking vistas, worthy comic relief, occasionally terrible CGI effects, a supporting role for Omar Sharif (as the Sheik overseeing the race), and plenty of exciting derring-do in the grand tradition of Indiana Jones.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST Many of Mel Gibson’s movies have displayed a fetishistic fascination with blood and guts, and this one’s no exception. In relating the saga of Jesus from his betrayal by Judas through the crucifixion, Gibson has taken the greatest story ever told and turned it into a snuff film. The pacifist teachings aren’t even allowed to take a back seat to the beatings suffered by Christ (played by Jim Caviezel) — they’re locked away in the trunk, with Gibson paying them fleeting lip service. The emphasis is squarely on employing the best visual effects, makeup designs and slo-mo camerawork that money can buy to lovingly reveal every whip mark slashed across Christ’s back, every thorn driven into His head, every nail hammered into His flesh. It’s Kill Bill for the churchgoing crowd, an unrelenting orgy of evangelical ire that’s sorely missing any type of meaningful context.
SECRET WINDOW This dum-dum drama is about an author (Johnny Depp) who’s accused of plagiarism, and one has to wonder whether this irony was lost on writer-director David Koepp and author Stephen King (on whose novella this is based). Secret Window is nothing if not a pastiche of past big-screen thrillers, recycling most of its elements from The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half and just about every other King project this side of The Mangler. Yet even such a lazy dependence on been-there-done-that material might have been overlooked had the film managed to trick us with its climactic plot twist; instead, figuring out the “shocking” twist requires even less brain power than completing a word search puzzle in a children’s magazine. 1/2
STARSKY & HUTCH Having now appeared together in several films, it might be time to regard Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as Hollywood’s latest certified comedy team, a tradition that’s included such twofers as Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby, and Lemmon and Matthau. Like their predecessors, these guys are able to bring out the best in each other, a vital ingredient in making this more tolerable than most movies based on past TV shows. Wilson’s Hutch, a rascally bad-boy cop, serves as the perfect counterpoint to Stiller’s Starsky, a bungling, by-the-book detective, and this disheveled knock-off of the 70s series works best when the sheer force of their personalities overcomes the shoddy writing. Snoop Dogg is aptly cast as informant Huggy Bear. 1/2
TOUCHING THE VOID Everest Meets The Eiger Sanction in this “docudrama” about a 1985 climbing expedition in which Joe Simpson and Simon Yates attempted to scale a 21,000-foot mountain located in the Peruvian Andes, only to be thrust into a life-or-death situation. Director Kevin Macdonald decided that the best way to bring this riveting story to the screen was to combine fiction and nonfiction moviemaking, by having “talking head” interludes with the real Simpson and Yates interspersed with two actors (Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron) cast as the pair and reenacting their mountain climbing misadventures. Purists of the documentary form may carp, but Macdonald’s approach brings an immediacy to the tale that otherwise might not have been possible.
TWISTED Ashley Judd has made more than her fair share of dum-dum thrillers (Double Jeopardy, High Crimes, etc.), yet Twisted stands out through the sheer fact that it’s the worst one yet, a preposterous yarn about a detective who becomes a leading suspect in her own investigation when the victims all turn out to be her former lovers. Accounting for the risible dialogue, the gaping plotholes and the utter predictability of the killer’s identity isn’t too difficult — after all, this is scripter Sarah Thorp’s first produced credit — but it’s almost inconceivable that the director of this total misfire is Philip Kaufman, the immense talent behind The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2004.
