Tools
dir. Dan Ireland
Opens Fri Aug 15 at
Lewis & Clark, Meridian 16, Metro. You know this movie is in trouble when the phrase "a bit of Portugal in America" flashes across the scene before the action starts, as if the movie were a restaurant menu, and just in case you didn't catch that, Passionada begins with a scene that indulges every cliché of Mediterranean immigrant life. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a lovely widow attends a dockside seventh-anniversary memorial ritual for fishermen lost at sea, one of whom was her husband. The widow's bosom heaves, her mother-in-law collapses in the arms of the widow's bright, about-to-bloom, utterly American daughter, and a hunky fisherman looks on from the deck of his boat. It gets worse: The widow (Sofia Milos) smolders under her cold exterior; a stuttering, Hugh Grant-style Englishman (Jason Isaacs) fumbles his way to her heart (complete with sensual food scene); and the grandmother (Lupe Ontiveros) offers more food and life lessons whenever possible. This movie leans very hard on the narrative and visual language of sitcoms, such as the reaction shot and the meaningful look, all woven into Three's Company-style hijinks, and a neat tie-up at the end (even Grandma gets a boyfriend). Even the dialogue seems cribbed from TV: "I don't know who you are anymore!" and "For once in your life fight for something!" This is the tripiest tripe in tripetown: at least if it were about an Italian American community, the grandma could have made trippa alla Fiorentina out of it. EMILY HALL
Grind
dir. Casey La Scala
Opens Fri Aug 15 at Factoria, Grand Alderwood, Meridian 16, Woodinville 12. Since it's hard to imagine how a box of rocks like Grind ever made it past the pitching stages, I'll whip up the scenario: A struggling director--let's call him "Casey"--pays his dues in film school and shoots a gripping movie about a Spanish ambassador's secret love affair with a beautiful Basque separatist, but year after year, the studios turn down his ideas--from the one about the Chiapas uprising to the one about a group of intellectuals living in squats in East Berlin. After all else fails, "Casey" is about to give up and become a PA for the next John Grisham thriller when he sees a commercial for Tony Hawk's latest video game. He runs down to the studio and announces that he wants to make a movie about this new "skateboarding trend."
"Skateboarding trend?" the studio execs ask. "What's that?" "Casey" explains: It's when you take a bunch of companies--in the case of this film, SoBe, Pepsi, Butterfinger, Independent, and Slap, to name a few--and write a storyline around their huge banners and products that uses lots of fart and shit jokes, and chicks with big tits in little bikinis, and four dudes with some of those Simple Dreams of making it big. Voila! A product perfect for kids too stupid to know the difference between a terrible movie and a terrible movie about skateboarding. JENNIFER MAERZ
The Magdalene Sisters
dir. Peter Mullan
Opens Fri Aug 15 at Metro, Uptown. Is there a time when it's appropriate for a film to bludgeon you about the head with anger and horror and outrage? Much is sacrificed (narrative continuity, character, plot) in The Magdalene Sisters to the terrible injustice wreaked upon the girls virtually imprisoned in the Magdalene laundries in Ireland--girls sent away by their parents (with the collusion of family priests, relatives, and a priggish society) for getting pregnant, being raped, or just for being dangerously attractive. Effectively the girls were disowned. "You got no ma," a father (played by Mullan himself) hisses at his daughter, who has tried to escape, "and you got no pa." The film is very heavy-handed and obvious, and perhaps too moralizing for a film about the dangers of moralizing. On the other hand, the injustice is stark and terrible; is it possible that subtlety isn't appropriate here? The laundries sound like something out of the Dickensian past, and yet the last one closed only in 1996. But still, Mullan takes a few easy outs. The nuns who run the convent laundry tilt toward the evil rather than the misguided: In the shower they put the girls into a lineup and compare their breasts and pubic hair, chuckling all the while into their habits, and Sister Bernadette's money-love is nearly the stuff of caricature. And one has the sneaking suspicion that the director doesn't quite trust us to understand just how awful the whole thing is. And on yet another hand, there's the great, wonderful, excellent Geraldine McEwan, who takes Sister Bernadette over the top, her voice swooping from a not-so-innocent chirp to a low, dangerous growl. A spectacular performance, but perhaps the wrong movie for it. EMILY HALL
Uptown Girls
dir. Boaz Yakin
Opens Fri Aug 15 at a buttload
of theaters. After seeing Uptown Girls, I am convinced that one of the funniest things in the whole entire world is watching an adorable eight-year-old girl look Brittany Murphy straight in the face and ask, "Are you on crack?" It's funny 'cause it's true; Miss Murphy has never looked more like an overdose victim in high heels than she does in this movie (during some scenes I swear her skin was blue). But I'm sure she'll soon get slaughtered Lara Flynn Boyle-style by countless tabloids, so we'll leave that subject alone and talk about something almost as interesting: the film itself.
The story goes like this: Murphy is a spoiled rock princess named Molly Gunn who inherited a bunch of money from her dead rock-star dad. She's living the high life free of responsibility and reality, until her entire inheritance is stolen and she and her pet pig are left with a stack of "payment overdue" notices. In order to pay rent and buy 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, Gunn's forced to get a job. A friend hooks her up with a gig as a nanny for a very precocious and guarded eight-year-old, Ray. The last thing Ray wants is another incompetent nanny (especially when that nanny is the flighty, goofy Brittany Murphy). Forced to put up with each other, the two girls find that they can learn more from one another than originally thought, and, after broken dishes, bloody noses, and losing and then regaining trust, they eventually come to appreciate their differences.
Uptown Girls is what you'd expect it to be--an embarrassingly enjoyable (kind of), sort of cute feel-good movie that mothers across the nation will take their daughters to. MEGAN SELING
Open Range
dir. Kevin Costner
Opens Fri Aug 15 at Meridian 16, Metro, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12. There are certain sentences one never expects to write. Case in point: The new Kevin Costner picture is not long enough.
Am I high? That depends on just when you're reading this, but as I write this review the answer is no--Kevin Costner's new Western, Open Range (which he directed, mind you), is indeed not long enough.
Still and all, this doesn't mean that the picture is a good one (it's not)--just that one notices while watching it that Costner, after the three-hour debacle that was The Postman, is a little gun-shy when it comes to opus length this time around. Hence Open Range's 110-minute span--a span that is certainly reasonable, but here, given what Costner wishes to show us, comes up rather meager.
The story is big and square and heartfelt: A group of free-grazing ranchers, led by Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charley Waite (Costner), stop their cattle near a dusty town. The town's boss, a corrupt rancher (Michael Gambon) who doesn't like free grazers (since they steal grass from his cattle), takes offense at their presence and attacks two of Spearman and Waite's men, which gives the free grazers no choice but to kill the bastards and get revenge. And kill they will, but not before much brooding about violent pasts has occurred, and Waite, who has tired of life on the prairie, decides he'd like to do a little free grazing on a local nurse named Sue (Annette Bening).
Part standard Western, part attempted romantic epic, Open Range starts patiently and solidly, but ends up rushing through its climax; the romance, such as it is, takes it in the teeth, and what was meant to be big and important is instead messy and clumsy. Which is too bad, because it has one of the best shootouts in years. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
Comments (0)