Movie Review The Company

The Company (2003) 

Directed by Robert Altman 

Written by Barbara Turner 

Starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco 

Release Date December 26th, 2003 

Published January 12th, 2004 

The appeal of Robert Altman has always been somewhat esoteric. Not since MASH in 1970 has Altman had a film that could be called a commercial success, yet he continues to work steadily turning out quality work every other year or so. The delightful Gosford Park was Oscar nominated which is one of the reasons why studios and financiers are always willing to take a chance on him. Altman's work always has a prestigious feel as if just because he directed it the film has a shot at an Oscar. Altman's latest work, the ballet drama The Company has that same air of prestige to it but lacks the narrative coherence and sharpness of wit that made Gosford Park an Oscar nominee.

Neve Campbell stars in The Company as Loretta Ryan, Ry to her friends and family. Ry is a rising star at the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago where the manic artistic director Alberto Antonelli or Mr. A as he's called (Malcolm McDowell) runs a somewhat out of control ship. Managing everyday on the edge of financial chaos, and more importantly the ego chaos of his stars, Mr. A must train his dancers and hold financiers at bay all the while flitting in and out rooms to avoid serious confrontations.

Ry has just broken up with one of the dancers in the chorus and is beginning a tentative romance with a chef at a local restaurant, Josh (James Franco). In one of the film's most fascinating scenes, set in a bar around a game of pool, Altman lays out Ry and Josh's courtship without words. The two communicate only with their eyes until the next scene when Ryan and Josh wake up next to each other in Ry's apartment. It's not entirely wordless, it's just that Altman has little interest in what the characters have to say to each other, he just wants it all implied and accepted so that he can get back to the ballet.

Aside from Ry, Josh and Mr. A, the cast is made up of the dancers from the real Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. Not actors by training, Altman smartly gives them little dialogue and defines them thinly as stereotypes and archetypes. There is the aging star who can no longer keep up with the younger dancers. There is the teenager with the superstar attitude, talent and stage father and then there are just members of the chorus who struggle to get by and fill in the background.

Altman's camera simply floats through this film without ever really settling on a story that interests him. This may be why there are so many extra plot strands that are begun and tossed aside. A sign that Altman was searching for a story to carry the plot but just never found one, thus he explores as many as he can and then cuts away to a practice or a performance to get away from the plots that just don't appeal to him. This makes the film feel rudderless, like a documentary without a voiceover narration to fill in the blanks of the plot.

The Company is a difficult film to explain. It has a conventional sound to it but Altman is not interested in any of the conventional elements of the script. He's not interested in the romance plot between Campbell and Franco. He is not interested in Mr. A's struggles to raise money and manage his ego backstage. Really he's not interested in anything that isn't happening on the stage.

I cannot speak for Mr. Altman but I got the feeling that he received a rather conventional drama script with romance and the backstage drama of a ballet troupe and decided to do the film despite not being interested in the script. Altman simply sets up his camera and lets it fall on whatever grabs his eye, meanwhile in the corners of the screen behind overlapping, extraneous dialogue there is a conventional Hollywood film going on with a three act script and average dialogue. Altman sets up his camera on a rolling tripod and then walks away to await the next performance on the stage.

Not being a fan of ballet I am in no position to judge whether the performances in the film are any good. We can assume that since these are real dancers for a real and well respected ballet company that they must be pretty good. I can say that Neve Campbell looked pretty good. Campbell conceived the idea for the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Barbara Turner. Campbell does her own dancing in the film and seems to hold her own opposite the pros. Campbell is particularly good in an outdoor performance early in the film. As rain, lightning and thunder kick up she and her partner continue their performance all the way to the end despite the weather.

In the end Robert Altman comes off as a dilettante whose fan interest in ballet overcame his ability to tell a compelling story. That said, I feel there is something deeper in The Company. Indeed Altman seems to really love ballet to the point of ignoring everything else but there is a unique element of experiment here that is interesting. A risky attempt to make a film with as little plot as possible, a minimalist anti-narrative that is antithetical to anything Hollywood would be willing to make. In that sense I find Altman's approach appealing though not the final product of that approach.

Movie Review: Big Fish

Big Fish (2003) 

Directed by Tim Burton 

Written by John August 

Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Steve Buscemi, Alison Lohman, Marion Cotillard, Danny Devito 

Release Date December 10th, 2003 

Published December 9th, 2003 

Tim Burton is a grand storyteller with a painter’s eye for color and depth. His films are often beautifully rendered and smartly written, a very rare combination. When his talent is fully engaged, as it was on his masterpieces Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, he is an auteur that ranks with the all time greats. 

However, there are occasions when Burton seems less than engaged with his material, such as in his blockbuster works Planet Of The Apes and Batman Returns. His latest effort, Big Fish, looks like his kind of material but has moments when Burton doesn't feel fully committed to what is onscreen.

Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney portray Edward Bloom at two very different times in the man’s life. McGregor is the upstart Edward having grand adventures on his way to being something big. Finney's Edward is an old man on his deathbed, endless recalling the exploits of his young self.  Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup) has heard all of his father’s wild tales over and over again since he was a child. Now as his father's life is coming to an end, Will longs to know the truth. Instead, all he gets are more wild stories.

These dream sequences of young Edward Bloom are the kind of wild fantasies that Burton feels perfectly at home in. These stories include a real life giant played by Matthew McGrory, a circus with an eccentric ringleader (Danny Devito) and a city lost in time where there are no streets, just grass, and no one wears shoes. All of the stories are told with a magical veneer and there is slight sheen over the picture in these scenes that add to the dream imagery.

The central story to the flashbacks is Edward's romance with his wife Sandra, played by Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange. The romance is sweet, sincere and lovingly old fashioned and easily the film’s strongest subplot. What surrounds that story however, is somewhat unsatisfying.  We in the audience are like Edward's son, looking for a little bit of the real Edward Bloom. Listening to Albert Finney wheeze through a flashback setup, its not hard to see why Will is so exasperated with his father.

For his part Tim Burton isn't all that invested in his non-flashback scenes, preferring to put his artistic focus on the fantasy elements of the film. He seems to treat the other stuff as filler that give the flashbacks just enough context to get by. This makes for half of a very satisfying film.

The dreamlike fantasy flashbacks are artfully crafted fantasy, eye candy, humor and beauty. Unfortunately the other scenes, the non-fantasy scenes, are unsatisfying melodrama and good deal of screen chewing by Albert Finney. Billy Crudup does his best to ground these scenes, doing so well that he darn near saves the film with a terrific scene that takes place in a hospital room. It's a touching scene but not enough for me to give Big Fish a full recommendation. It’s not bad but this is not Burton at his best.

Movie Review: Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) 

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Sam Harper, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow 

Starring Steve Martin, Paula Marshall, Richard Jenkins, Bonnie Hunt, Tom Welling, Hillary Duff

Release Date December 25th, 2003 

Published December 21st, 2003

I should have seen this coming. The warning signs were there. A preview screening nearly a month before the film’s release. A script adaptation credited to eight--yes, I said eight--writers. And a director who aspires to mediocrity because mediocre would be an improvement over what he's done before. Nevertheless, I still happily attended the screening of Cheaper By The Dozen because I thought Steve Martin can't possibly make a film that bad. I could not have been more wrong.

The plot description for this film is somewhat difficult because it's essentially a series of sub-sitcom level moments of family comedy. Martin stars as a football coach in a small Illinois town. He and his wife, played by Bonnie Hunt (also one of the eight credited writers), are unique because they were high school sweethearts who have been married for 22 years, and they have 12 children. Their family farm house is an absolute mess of toys and small animals and sporting equipment. Meanwhile, each of the kids have a handy little quirk to help us tell them apart. The archetypes are classic ABC TGIF kids: the tomboy, the prissy one, the really smart one, the fat kid and so on and so forth. It saves the time of having to write 12 individual characters.

The plot, such as it is, has Martin's character accepting a new job at a big college. So, the family packs up and moves to a Chicago suburb where they meet their neighbors, played by Alan Ruck and Paula Marshall. (Poor Marshall has the thankless task of playing the only-in-the-movies type of bitch character that says horribly insensitive things and will get her comeuppance by the end of the film.) However Marshall isn't nearly as abused as poor Richard Jenkins. Slumming from his role as the coolest dead guy on TV on HBO's Six Feet Under, Jenkins play Martin's best friend and new boss who is required to be inhumanly stupid. It is poor Mr. Jenkins’ character who forces Martin to choose between his job and his 12 kids. Well golly, what do you think he will choose?

Hunt's character writes a book about her family that lands on the bestseller list, forcing her to leave the family for a few days for a book tour. Golly, do you think dad can handle taking care of all of those kids by himself? I don't know about you, but I think we’re in for hijinks here. The kids trash a neighbor’s birthday party by accidentally releasing a snake in the house. Again it's poor Marshall who takes the brunt of that beating.

Oh it gets worse.

Teen stars Hillary Duff and Tom Welling play the family's two older children. In adjusting to their new high school, these two actors who look like fashion models are required by the script to be outcasts at their new school. It reminded me of the movie She's All That where Rachel Leigh Cook was considered a nerd because she wore glasses and baggy clothes, except that Welling and Duff never look like anything but the Gap models they are in real life.

Martin stretches and strains all over the screen trying to make this forced, stupid material work and the strain shows in every moment of the film. If you thought his Bringing Down The House character was forced, you will be shocked that this character is actually worse.

Director Shawn Levy cut his teeth on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel TV series’ until getting his big break directing 2003's very first worst movie of the year, Just Married. So how fitting that he should bookend 2003 with its final worst movie of the year. Cheaper By The Dozen is an awful movie. A sub-Brady Bunch sitcom, full of forced jokes and cheap contrived melodrama.

In the words of my hero, Roger Ebert, who used this phrase to sum up his feelings about the film North, "I HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED THIS MOVIE".

Movie Review House of Sand and Fog

House of Sand and Fog (2003) 

Directed by Vadim Perelman 

Written by Shawn Lawrence Otto, Vadim Perelman

Starring Ben Kingsley, Shoreh Aghdashloo, Jennifer Connelly, Frances Fisher, Ron Eldard

Release Date December 19th, 2003 

Published December 17th, 2003 

This time of year we hear a lot of talk about so-called prestige pictures. Art films with opulent production design, heavy on the period detail and generally perceived as over the head of the average filmgoer. With a title like House of Sand and Fog, a pedigree that involves the adaptation of a National Book Award finalist and a starring duo of Oscar winners, it's not surprising that the perception of prestige is all over this film. Look deeper however, and you find a surprisingly populist picture. An Oprah Book Club selection and a bestseller. Also, you’ll find a story that is very compelling even if it is over the head of many filmgoers.

Jennifer Connelly stars as Kathy Lazaro, a recovering alcoholic and drug abuser who's only asset in the world is the home left to her by her late father. That however is taken from her when the city government sends cops to her home to evict her over a tax debt. The debt is bogus but unfortunately, Kathy hasn't bothered to open her mail in weeks and thus it will take months to sort out the problem.

In the meantime, her home is quickly sold to an Iranian immigrant, a former Colonel in the Iranian army named Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley). The Colonel and his family, wife Nadi (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and son Esmail (Jonathan Adhout), see the home as a mirror of their home in Iran that was on the coast of the Caspian Sea. Amir also sees it as an investment that, if fixed up, could be resold for three times its worth.

With the help of a legal aid lawyer played by Frances Fisher, Kathy is working to get her house back. After some back and forth wrangling, it's agreed that if Kathy can convince the Behrani's to sell the house back to the city for what he paid, then they can give it back to Kathy. Meanwhile, Kathy is being cared for by one of the cops who helped her move out, Deputy Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard). In a short time, the deputy has fallen for Kathy, has left his wife and family to care for her, and is willing to risk his job to help her get the house back.

All of this mundanely sets the table for some very compelling drama well strung together by Writer-Director Vadim Perelman. Having adapted a book by Andre Dubus, Perelman lends the story a visual style that evokes the title of the film without being heavy handed. The title is a double metaphor that ties the story together.

The performances of Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly are the strong points of the film and the Oscar winners are once again award-worthy. Kingsley is especially powerful as the deposed Colonel. Prone to violent outbursts and amazing compassion all brought about by his deep, religious faith. For a good portion of the film, he seems to be the villain but as the film winds to it's inevitably tragic conclusion, Kingsley's performance becomes the emotional center of the film and draws tears without forcing them.

As for Connelly, she is every bit as strong as Kingsley is, She infuses Kathy with the sadness and longing that wins our sympathy even as she acts in less than likable fashion. Her performance is all the stronger for having to carry the lunkheaded Ron Eldard as her love interest. Eldard plays Lester as the dumbest cop on the force. His performance is the weakest of the film and unfortunately, somewhat pivotal near the end. Thankfully, the film does not collapse because of him. Props to Director Perelman for getting the film to its astonishing and powerful finale even as Eldard's performance sinks.

Be sure to bring your antidepressants because as one of my fellow critics said after the screening, House of Sand and Fog may be the most depressing film of the year. Indeed, there is very little light in the film. It works because even depressing emotion can be cathartic and House earns it's awesomely cathartic and emotional ending. The label prestige picture is well earned by this emotional film.

Movie Review Stuck on You

Stuck on You (2003) 

Directed by The Farrelly Brothers 

Written by The Farrelly Brothers

Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Cher, Eva Mendes, Seymour Cassell, Dane Cook, Lin Shaye, Bella Thorne 

Release Date December 12th, 2003

Published December 11th, 2003 

The Farrelly Brothers signature had always been juvenile grossout humor tinged with sweetness. With Shallow Hal, they seemed somewhat tame in the gross stuff. Now with their latest film Stuck On You, they seem to have moved beyond the grossout humor completely. What's really surprising however is that they prove just how much they don't need it anymore. This funny, sweet and unusual comedy about conjoined twins is some of the best work the Brothers have done since There's Something About Mary.

Walt (Greg Kinnear) and Bob (Matt Damon) were born attached by a single liver so dangerously small that doctors don't believe they can be separated. Thus the two have gone through life together playing sports, dating and running a restaurant on Martha's Vineyard where friends and family have come to completely accept the boys as they are.

Walt has recently become restless. His ambition has always been to be an actor and his one man shows at the community theater have all been well reviewed, even as poor Bob suffered from severe stage fright. Walt wishes to go to Hollywood and despite his reservations, Bob finally relents. The two leave behind their comfortable surroundings for the big city and Walt's shot at the big time.

Once in Hollywood it's not long until Walt hits the big time with a role opposite Cher on a CSI-esque show. All is not as it seems however, as Cher has hand selected Walt to be on the show in hopes that his being a conjoined twin will get the show canceled. Much to Cher's dismay, Walt turns out to be a hit and the producers find it easy to hide Bob behind props and with special effects. Even after their secret gets out, Walt becomes an even bigger hit.

As for Walt, moving to Los Angeles offers him the chance to meet his internet pen pal May (Wenn Yann Shih) who does not know he is conjoined. This leads to rather obvious jokes as Walt and Bob date May, with the help of an actress friend from their apartment complex April (Eva Mendes) coming along as Walt's date. The joke is obvious but the actors play it so well that it's easy to overlook that.

Naturally the subjects of surgery to separate themselves come up and these scenes are really terrific. I love how the film explains the age difference between Kinnear and Damon along with various other physiological complications. All of it handled without falling back on grossout humor but with the Farrelly Brothers other signature, sweet-natured ridiculousness. Both Bob and Walt are typical, delightfully clueless Farrelly characters who can't imagine why anyone would find them unusual.

The cast is terrific from top to bottom. Kinnear and Damon have a terrific chemistry with Damon really surprising us with his comic talent. You expect Kinnear to have great comic timing as he showed on TV's Talk Soup and the movie Sabrina. For Damon however, though he showed terrific humility in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, this is his first full-length comedic performance and I was surprised how well he pulled it off.

The supporting cast is every bit the equal of the leads with Eva Mendes really standing out. Her bubble-headed actress April provides some of the biggest laughs of the film with her ditzy reactions to the twins’ condition. The way she just thinks that the twins being connected is totally natural is priceless and part of the film’s charm. Cher is also good, perfectly willing to make herself the joke in what is her biggest acting role in a while. Watch out for a pair of terrific cameos as well, Meryl Streep shows up near the end and brings the house down.

The film is not as funny as Kingpin or as sweet as There's Something About Mary but Stuck On You proves that with or without shocking the audience with sight gags, the Farrelly brothers are just plain funny.

Movie Review Something's Gotta Give

Something's Gotta Give (2003) 

Directed by Nancy Meyers

Written by Nancy Meyers 

Starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Keanu Reeves, Frances McDormand, Amanda Peet, Jon Favreau

Release Date December 12th, 2003 

Published December 11th, 2003 

A strange thing can happen to an actor when they get almost too good at what they do. Audiences no longer perceive what they do as a performance. Jack Nicholson is one of those actors with that wonderful problem. After years of showing off that roguish, untamable charm, many people believe that is the man in real Life. Nicholson's personal life, from a tabloid perspective, does nothing to change that perception. Nicholson's new film Something's Gotta Give, co-starring Diane Keaton, and directed by Nancy Meyers, slyly plays to Jack's perception and then against it to terrific romantic and comedic effect.

Nicholson stars as Harry Sanborn, a record company owner with a fetish for younger woman. Specifically, Harry only goes for woman under 30. His latest little twinkie is Marin Berry (Amanda Peet) who brings Harry to her mother's beach house in the Hamptons for a romantic weekend. Unfortunately, she didn't know her mother, Erica (Keaton), would be there, leading to an awkward meeting in the kitchen between Erica and Harry in his underwear.

From there, things go from bad to worse after a disastrous dinner. Harry and Marin retire to the bedroom and Harry has a heart attack. On the orders of doctors, Harry can't travel and must stay at the beach house, even though Marin is returning to the city. Left alone, Harry and Erica bicker in your traditional romantic comedy fashion until they find a little common ground, and after Harry accidentally catches Erica in the nude. This begins a romantic series of events that aren't what you expect.

This being a romantic comedy, there must be arbitrary roadblocks to keep the lovers apart. One of those is Harry's doctor, played by Keanu Reeves, who takes an interest in Erica. Others are less obvious and are played as emotional roadblocks but are really choices that are made according to the needs of the script.

Director Nancy Meyers knows her chick flicks, having directed Mel Gibson in the blockbuster What Woman Want. Meyers knows the right comic beats to hit and how to get what she wants from her actors. That said, she brings little else to the table as a director. Meyers must rely heavily on the skill of her actors to carry off the material and lucky for her, she is truly blessed in Something's Gotta Give.

To watch a pair of pro's like Nicholson and Keaton fall in love onscreen is a true joy and while not all of the situations the characters find themselves in work, these two brilliant actors make a good deal of them work. Most of the best comedic moments in the film are played with merely a sideways glance, a skill that you just can't teach.

The first half of Something's Gotta Give plays off of what you expect of Jack Nicholson, that free swinging playboy reputation that will follow him for the rest of his life. However, once the two leads are left alone, the film becomes more about Keaton's wonderfully neurotic Erica. A playwright, Erica begins writing her moments with Harry into her latest play leading up to one of the film’s great gags on the set of the play just before it opens.

Something's Gotta Give has elements of your typical romantic comedy, a few too many of those elements for my taste. It wants to be insightful about romance in the later years of life and aging in general but its tone is a little too light for any real insight. What the film has going for it is two terrific actors who never seem to have peaked even as they get older. For that reason, I recommend Something's Gotta Give.

Movie Review Love Don't Cost a Thing

Love Don't Cost A Thing (2003) 

Directed by Troy Beyer 

Written by Troy Beyer 

Starring Nick Cannon, Christina Milian, Steve Harvey, Kenan Thompson, Kal Penn

Release Date December 12th, 2003 

Published December 12th, 2003  

Of all of the movies that I thought deserved another take, the dopey Patrick Dempsey teen comedy Can’t Buy Me Love never occurred to me. Despite being an iconic 80’s film for many, to me its a slight comedy about a nerd who buys his way into high school popularity had overtones of outright prostitution. I would have preferred to welcome its fall into 80’s obscurity. The ever unoriginal Hollywood swill factory however disagreed with my assessment and thus we have Love Don’t Cost A Thing, a cynical “urban” (read black) take on the story.

Nick Cannon, star of last year’s drumming drama Drumline, stars as Alvin Johnson. Alvin is a high school nerd who spends his time with his nerdy friends rebuilding cars and dreaming of what it would be like to have access to the popular kid’s hallway of their high school. Yes, the high school has a hallway where the rich, popular bullies and their hot girlfriends are separated from the rabble, indicating that even the high school teachers are in on this anti-nerd conspiracy.

Alvin’s dream girl is a popular cheerleader named Paris Morgan (Christina Milian) whose current boyfriend is an NBA star who jumped directly from high school to the NBA. Paris has no occasion to ever speak to Alvin until one night when she borrows her mother’s car and crashes it while arguing on the phone with her boyfriend. While getting the car looked at Paris finds that her mother will find out about the accident unless the car is fixed immediately. Enter Alvin with his car expertise and just enough of his own money to pay for the parts. In exchange for fixing the car, Paris will be Alvin’s girl and in the process help him become popular.

What a shock it is then when the plan succeeds and popularity goes to young Alvin’s head. Alvin drops his nerdy friends, begins wearing trendy clothes and a new hairstyle and before long, Alvin surpasses Paris in his high school stature. Do you think he has a comeuppance in his future? For his part, Nick Cannon affects a nerdy black kid better than I expected. That said, the part as written has him changing rather unconvincingly from Urkel to Puff Daddy and only the Urkel part works. Cannon is a charisma-challenged actor who has yet to show a spark of the stardom that has seemed thrust upon him in the past year since the debut of his Nickelodeon kids show in 2002.

Pop starlet Christina Milian equates herself better than expected, though expectations place her just ahead of Britney Spears on the pop-tart-turned-actress-chart well behind the far more accomplished Mandy Moore. The part as written by director Troy Miller affects depth by having Paris write bad poetry and play the guitar. She also bemoans popularity as a job rather than a mere social status, an interesting idea that goes nowhere.

Director Troy Beyer adapted the screenplay of Can’t Buy Me Love, written by Michael Swerdlick. The word adaptation is used loosely. She essentially just traces within the lines of the original film, changing only minor plot points and the ethnicity of the characters.

Therein lies the most insidious problem of the film. The retrofitting of this unoriginal idea for African American audiences is a sad cynical attempt to capitalize on the paucity of films with African-American lead characters. Because there are so few films with black, lead characters, African-American audiences are prone to support any film that features a black face. This has caused Hollywood’s cynical mass marketing machine to continue to limit opportunities for African-Americans in order to maintain them as a niche market. Assuming they are willing to accept cheap, easy to market trash like Love Don’t Cost A Thing at the expense of more challenging, artistic films with African-American lead casts.

Such cynicism is nothing new from Hollywood but when it deals with race, it becomes far more serious. A film as slight as Love Don’t Cost A Thing doesn’t have any kind of social agenda in its creation. Rather, it has one thrust upon it because there are so few films with predominantly African American casts and even fewer good ones. That is not due to a lack of talented African-American filmmakers but rather due to cheap knock offs and shortsighted money grubbing of the kind that creates movies like Love Don't Cost A Thing.