Sex, drugs and rock & roll all manage to make appearances in either one or both of this month’s two best bets. As for the other new releases. . .well, not even the promise of sex, drugs or rock & roll can make these turkeys any more appetizing.
It’s been noted that familiarity breeds contempt, but that maxim hardly applies when it comes to the music of our memories. Our favorite songs those we were raised with, those that stir something elemental deep inside us rarely outgrow their appeal, and the best of them can be counted on to lift our spirits and make us temporarily forget our present ailments. In that respect, director Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (***out of four) managed to bust our quaint notion of the movie musical wide open. The conceit behind this sumptuous picture is so simple, you wonder why filmmakers don’t use it more often: Make a full-scale musical employing not some spanking new score or some Broadway toss-off, but rather a smorgasbord of beloved pop songs that have long taken up residence in our collective consciousness. Such a musical mish-mash would seem like a stunt if the movie had no emotional vibrancy, but in the case of Moulin Rouge, the central love story is palpable and believable, and it further benefits from glorious production numbers, award-worthy sets, and the casting of Ewan McGregor (never more appealing) and Nicole Kidman as, respectively, a penniless writer and the courtesan who captures his heart. Luhrmann’s direction is often needlessly busy, and I suspect his often frenetic approach is the primary reason this emerged as one of the most polarizing films of last year. The Best Picture selection by the National Board of Review, as well as the recipient of a field-leading six Golden Globe nominations (tied with A Beautiful Mind), Moulin Rouge also earned its share of scathing reviews and only broke even at the box office. Then again, such rampant head-scratching may be the price to pay for a motion picture that finds its characters belting out modern pop tunes in 1899 Paris as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The beautiful two-disc DVD, advertised as “the first ever DVD created, directed and produced by the director of the film,” is crammed with extra features, including audio commentaries by Luhrmann and crew members, extended scenes, countless making-of shorts, music videos for “Lady Marmalade” and “Come What May,” and much more.
Thanks to Jack Valenti and his MPAA goons, the cowardice of most Hollywood studios, and the mock-prudishness of many Americans, this country’s cinema has been transformed into a sterile frontier in which honest displays of sexuality are, if not outright banned, at least discouraged at every turn. The Center of the World (***), a startling departure for director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club), attempts to generate an honest dialogue about the subject; the result is a welcome alternative for adults who’d like to see a film that doesn’t pander to teens. Released unrated during its theatrical run rather than be hampered by the MPAA’s worthless NC-17 (it arrives on video and DVD also sans rating), this takes a frank look at a relationship that has echoes to those showcased in Last Tango In Paris and Leaving Las Vegas in other words, it’s about two lonely people who get together and end up revealing more about themselves than they had planned. Peter Sarsgaard, one of the killers in Boys Don’t Cry, stars as Richard, a computer genius whose online isolation leaves him longing for human contact; Molly Parker, the inquisitive necrophiliac in Kissed, plays Florence, a drummer who works as a stripper in order to pay the bills. Richard hires Florence to spend a weekend with him in Vegas, a situation that gets sticky when emotions start overflowing. Wang and his writers use this framework to touch upon the sense of isolation that comes with our technologically oriented world; while this is hardly a revelatory theme, it’s presented in an intelligent manner that avoids degenerating into cheap sensationalism. DVD features include audio commentary by Wang and alternate endings.
Talk about the Great Divide: When Scary Movie was released during the summer of 2000, it equally split critics between those who loathed its tastelessness and those (including me) who enjoyed its letter-perfect spoofing of all those awful slasher flicks. The instant sequel Scary Movie 2 (*1/2), a no-brainer considering the original cost $19 million and grossed $156 million, didn’t have to worry about causing similar discord, since everyone (critics and audiences) dumped on it. The first film may be vile and even mean-spirited, but its raunchy humor would have been right at home on the pages of Mad magazine during its vintage years; this sorry follow-up, on the other hand, is so sophomoric, only folks who find armpit noises uproarious will find themselves falling off the couch. After an 8-minute prologue that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the picture it’s a disgusting but modestly amusing takeoff on The Exorcist, with James Woods in a bastardization of the Max von Snydow role the story proper finds a smarmy professor (Tim Curry) inviting a group of college students (including several returning cast members) to spend a weekend in a haunted house. While there, gay Ray (Shawn Wayans) turns the tables on a demonic clown, pothead Shorty (Marlon Wayans) gets smoked by a monstrous marijuana plant, and dopey Alex (Tori Spelling) gives an invisible entity a blowjob. If all this sounds rather desperate, you don’t know the half of it. DVD features include a behind-the-scene short, deleted and alternate scenes, and looks at the film’s special effects and makeup designs.
“Jeepers Creepers” composers Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren must have been spinning in their graves with the release of Jeepers Creepers (*1/2), an absurd horror yarn in which a cannibalistic winged demon goes on a murderous rampage whenever he hears the title tune (personally, Phil Collins’ “Sussudio” is the only song that could make me take a hatchet to someone’s head, but never mind). Adding a slick contempo sheen to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre template (thereby ignoring the grimy, low-budget look that made that 1974 classic so disturbing), this finds two college-age siblings (well-played by Gina Philips and Justin Long), stranded in the middle of Nowhere, USA, stopping to investigate when they spot a menacing figure dropping bodies down a pipe (their reasons for not calling the police are witless even beyond the low-ebb demands of the slasher genre). They find a basement full of corpses, but, even worse, they learn that the Creeper (a cross between Freddy Krueger and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) is now after them. Lapses in plotting and logic are tossed out at such a breakneck speed, you wonder if writer-director Victor Salva (Powder) was going for some sort of world record. (My favorites: Why does a being with the ability to fly at incredible speeds spend most of his time driving around in a beat-up truck? And how on earth did he acquire a personalized license plate?) The sick ending, by the way, exists only to justify the title and sets things up for a sequel I’ll be sure to avoid. DVD features include audio commentary by Salva, six making-of shorts, and deleted scenes.
As far as campy melodramas set during World War II are concerned, The Man Who Cried (*1/2) is almost on a par with 1992’s Shining Through the one in which secretary Melanie Griffith joins the war effort by letting spy Michael Douglas taste her strudel. Christina Ricci, almost as badly miscast as Griffith was in that earlier effort, stars as a Jewish girl who, after being separated from her father at a young age, tries to hook up with him years later in America. For now, she’s stranded in Paris, where she hangs out with a gold-digging Russian (Cate Blanchett), verbally spars with an egocentric opera star (John Turturro), and falls in love with a sensitive gypsy (Johnny Depp, apparently unable to shake the identical character he played in Chocolat). Writer-director Sally Potter’s reach clearly exceeds her grasp here: Striving to fashion an epic love story against the backdrop of a major world event, she instead ends up with a gnat of a film that feels about as intimate as an episode of Wheel of Fortune. This is the sort of movie in which shots of jackbooted Germans pounding on people are interspersed with peaceful moments of a singer belting out a haunting aria; such visual cliches can be found throughout the picture, serving to fuel the story’s cornball developments. The title, incidentally, might refer to either one of a couple of different characters, although I imagine it ultimately should be applied to Christopher Sheppard: He’s the poor guy who produced this financial sinkhole. DVD features include theatrical trailer.
Must-See DVDs
Ocean’s Eleven Actually, it’s not my must-see, but those who enjoyed Steven Soderbergh’s current star-packed remake might be interested to learn that the 1960 original just came out on DVD. Instead of George, Brad, Matt and Julia, you get Rat Pack players Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, joshing their way through an inconsequential lark about a group of former World War II paratroopers who plot to simultaneously knock off five Las Vegas casinos. The large cast also includes George Raft, Angie Dickinson, Norman Fell (way before his stint as Mr. Roper on Three’s Company) and an unbilled Shirley MacLaine, but except for an amusing twist ending (which was unwisely scrapped in the remake), this is about as fluffy and forgettable as movies get. DVD features include audio commentaries with Dickinson and Frank Sinatra Jr., a making-of short, an interactive map of Vegas, and archived photos and footage of Sinatra.
Seconds A colossal flop upon its original 1966 release, this absorbing oddity from director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) has picked up quite a cult following over the ensuing years. A heady experience, this finds middle-aged bank executive Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) electing to chuck away his entire boring existence by accepting a mysterious organization’s offer to be “reborn” that is, to allow his old “self” to be killed in an accident and to undergo plastic surgery so that he may be given a new face, a new identity and a new life. Hamilton emerges from surgery as handsome Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), but he quickly discovers that it’s not easy to mentally suppress 50 years of one’s life. Aided by James Wong Howe’s Oscar-nominated, black-and-white cinematography, Frankenheimer fashioned a trippy motion picture that was clearly ahead of its time: Among other things, the film works as a bold morality tale that suggests we should make the most of our lives, no matter how sterile or mundane they may seem. DVD features include audio commentary by Frankenheimer and theatrical trailer. *
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2001.
