The Ten
dir. David Wain
If David Wain’s name isn’t immediately familiar to you, his face
most likely is. After establishing his place in the comedy scene via
MTV’s sketch-comedy show The State, Wain gained fame as the
diminutive, bespectacled member of the comedy trio Stella and as a
ubiquitous talking-head wisecracker on various VH1 pop-culture shows.
In 2001, Wain directed, cowrote, and coproduced Wet Hot American
Summer, a Meatballs-flavored parody of
horny-teens-at-camp comedies, which premiered at Sundance and maintains
a loyal cult following on DVD. Six years after Summer, Wain’s
back with his second venture as a film director: The Ten,
cowritten with Ken Marino and hyped in its press pack as “a series of
interconnected comic sketches designed to reinterpret—and
reinvent—the Ten Commandments.”
Like Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten boasts a
cast packed with names, including Paul Rudd, Adam Brody, Winona Ryder,
Justin Theroux, Oliver Platt, Jessica Alba, Liev Schreiber, and Janeane
Garofalo. Like me, these names were undoubtedly enticed by the vast
comedic potential of the Ten Commandments, that ancient hit parade of
thou shalt nots bursting with lust, murder, and illicit
coveting of oxen. With such rich source material and a modicum of
comedic insight, The Ten seemed destined for… something.
Unfortunately, The Ten‘s not much of anything. Hopes for
wittiness are promptly dashed, first by the achingly klutzy narration
(provided by the typically unimpeachable Paul Rudd), then by the
sketches themselves, which are shockingly dumb, flat, and boring. The
Ten Commandments are packed with enough bloody life to fuel a hundred
deep comedies; not one but two of Wain’s Commandment stories hinge on
debasing homosexual prison sex (zing!). The whole thing slogs by like
The Worst of Mad TV, with an oddly star-packed cast. If God
were alive today, He’d certainly agree: Thou shalt not see The
Ten. DAVID SCHMADER
Becoming Jane
dir. Julian Jarrold
There isn’t one irritating thing about Becoming Jane, there
are about fifty. Even if you don’t care that Anne Hathaway is way too
pretty to play Jane Austen—who in the most flattering of her
alleged portraits is shown with squinty little eyes—there is the
fact that the erstwhile star of The Princess Diaries is
grating. You may find it disturbing that Jane wears empire-waisted
styles not yet popularized; it is also possible that you will
disapprove when Jane Austen’s chumpish father performs oral sex on her
unimpressed mother. (No, I’m not kidding.) And if you’ve seen a single
other Austen adaptation in the last 10 years, particularly 2005’s
Pride & Prejudice, you’ll be appalled at director Julian
Jarrold’s shameless pilfering—shots, situations… The very plot
of Pride & Prejudice is lifted wholesale and wedged
between the known facts of Jane Austen’s life. Of course, that
dimwitted strategy is stolen too, from 1998’s Shakespeare in
Love. Thanks, Tom Stoppard.
Why do we need to believe that authors lived their own stories? Are
we so envious of their towering talents that we have to deny their
ability to fabricate plot? (It’s especially ridiculous that we’ve done
this to Jane Austen and William Shakespeare—of all writers in the
English language, they are perhaps least known for simply devising
plotlines.) Whatever the motivation, the result is dull. And if you can
imagine Jane Austen falling in love with a man who seduces her with a
description of mating chickadees—well, let me put it this way:
You must be thinking of the other Brontë. ANNIE WAGNER
Hot Rod
dir. Akiva Schaffer
One pet peeve of mine (in addition to the phrase “pet peeve”) is
when people—mostly eighth-grade girls and anyone who is
stupid—use the word “random” to mean “weird.” Sometimes it refers
to a person (“He is totally random”) or becomes an adverb (“I randomly
ate some frozen yogurt”). Sorry, what? Your words mean
nothing. Stop talking to me, please.
At the screening of Hot Rod, a loud idiot sat behind me. He
declared the movie to be “so random” at least five times. He
loved it.
A cheerful collection of pratfalls, goofy ’80s kitsch, and stiff non
sequiturs, Hot Rod is what would happen if Saturday Night
Live tried to make Napoleon Dynamite. Whatever your
opinion of Napoleon, at least it’s cohesive. The silly parts
advance the plot. The aesthetic is consistent. Hot Rod, by
contrast, is like a weak sketch-comedy show: disjointed, forced,
shallow, screaming with wasted talent, and only kind of funny.
Rod (Andy Samberg), aspiring stuntman, yearns to win the respect of
his stepdad, Frank (Ian McShane), through hand-to-hand combat
(“Ultimate punch!”). When he finds out that Frank is on death’s door,
Rod is enraged at the prospect of never proving himself.
Samberg’s faux-stache and shaggy bravado are charming, and his
cronies have their moments. The promising presence of Will Arnett, as a
total jerk, is squandered—oh, heartbreak!—with only about
15 seconds of screen time (his best line: “I’m gonna get a Vitamin
Water. Should I make that dos?”).
But the silly kills the funny. Every time things get rolling, some
guy starts doing a ridiculous dance for no reason. Or Rod and his
brother incessantly repeat the words “cool beans.” Or Ebenezer Scrooge
appears, inexplicably. “What the fuck is Ebenezer Scrooge?” yelled the
loud idiot behind me, “That is SO RANDOM!” Ugh. Shut up. (But I can’t
disagree.) LINDY WEST
Arctic Tale
dir. Sarah Robertson
At first, Arctic Tale looks like a down-market March of
the Penguins retread, with indifferent cinematography and a cheesy
pop soundtrack. While the emperor penguins in MoP looked
somewhat respectable in their anthropomorphic tuxedos, the fluffy polar
bear cubs in Arctic Tale are nothing but adorable. And where
the penguin movie featured the solemn diction of Morgan Freeman, best
known for Driving Miss Daisy, the producers of Arctic
Tale went with Queen Latifah, who indulges in quite a bit of
sass.
But once Arctic Tale gets around to introducing its next
set of protagonists—a walrus baby guarded by her mother and
another adult female Latifah dubs an “auntie”—you start to see
the point of yet another inspiring movie set on the shrinking polar
ice. There is no way a social conservative could borrow the
reproductive cycle of a polar bear or walrus for a pious lesson about
everlasting monogamy—which happened with March of the
Penguins. With some over-the-top assistance from Sister Sledge’s
gay-friendly feminist anthem “We Are Family,” Arctic Tale actually celebrates alternative parenting structures. In fact, the most
heroic moment in Arctic Tale is also its most “unnatural”: The
walrus “auntie” risks her life to save someone else’s calf. From an
evolutionary standpoint—which, again, March of the
Penguins was loath to embrace—that act ranks as a
heartwarming instance of altruism.
More importantly, Arctic Tale is frank about the danger
posed by global warming to the lives of arctic creatures. While the
complacent March of the Penguins encouraged us to see the
difficulties encountered by the penguins on their trek across the snow
as ancient, timeless trials, Arctic Tale doesn’t go in for
wishful thinking. These animals “will face challenges never before
encountered by their species,” Latifah says. Climate change “disrupts
the ancient rhythm of the seasons… turning its rightful masters into
refugees.” When Arctic Tale invokes tradition, it’s only to
make you fear for the next, unfailingly cute generation. ANNIE
WAGNER
Flanders
dir. Bruno Dumont
Against the gunmetal-gray landscape of rural France, childhood
friends André (Samuel Boidin, a thick-torsoed man with
Neanderthal physiognomy) and Barbe (another nonactor, the pretty
Adélaïde Leroux) keep each other company. Their
relationship is explained in a few furtive scenes: They fuck in a stand
of trees, they hang out while André finishes tilling his fields.
At a pub with another couple, André denies they’re dating. Barbe
immediately gets up from their table, flirts with another guy at the
bar, and leaves with him. Her expression doesn’t change. André’s
does.
Films like Dumont’s L’Humanité and The Life of
Jesus (and the work of fellow Bresson acolytes the Dardenne
Brothers) have accustomed us to thinking of this gruff style of
filmmaking, this remedial account of human emotion, as strict
naturalism. The nonsensical next section of Flanders, in which
André and his countrymen ship off to an unnamed war in North
Africa, will convince you otherwise. This is a war movie reduced to
shorthand: The ridiculously tiny regiment fans out across the desert,
where they engage in urban skirmishes, discover children acting as
snipers, and brutally rape a woman, who is almost immediately avenged.
The soldiers are picked off one by one.
In the war zone, we realize the movie is detached from reality: It’s
just a condensed emotional landscape, where people satisfy physical
needs as a means of deadening emotional ones. When the movie returns to
its small-town minimalism, it has lost its pretense of naturalism and,
therefore, its credibility. (The major crisis that has transpired since
André left for war is so convenient it’s almost funny.) But then
something odd happens: The strangled emotions of Dumont’s
pseudonaturalism start to work their stubby magic. You may not believe
in their world, but André and Barbe are there in front of you,
the need for love and safety radiating off their bodies like an
invisible sheen. ANNIE WAGNER
Bratz
dir. Sean McNamara
What is it that makes Bratz, as a cultural phenomenon, great? For
one, they conquered the long and seemingly invincible Barbie dynasty.
This victory in the doll war is no small matter. It marked a major
shift in the American ideal—or more precisely, it brought to an
end the American ideal as one type of beauty, color, class, size,
education, worldview, lips, eyes, hair. Bratz brought into the toy
world that Barbie once dominated the possibilities and beauty of
diversity. And we must never forget that the person who brought these
urban, brown and mixed dolls into the billion-dollar toy market was an
immigrant, an Iranian Jew, Isaac Larian.
The live-action movie is a celebration of what generates the
cultural power of Bratz: imperfection. The movie begins with the four
girls (one Asian, one black, one white, one Latino) entering their
sophomore year in high school. They are friends to the end, and the
other students (cheerleaders, jocks, geeks, goths) recognize the
strength and beauty of their friendship. The other students also
recognize the Bratz as the new order, the coming future that will
confront the approaching past: a rich, blond, white girl named
Meredith.
The movie basically pits the four girls and their differences
against Meredith’s dictatorship of perfection. Meredith lives in a
palace and is a pampered princess. But all of her Aryan beauty and
white wealth eventually crumble, and the movie ends with students and
parents embracing their differences and confessing their imperfections,
poverty, addictions, and broken marriages. No one can be, and should
not try to be, pure. Impurity, mixture, diversity,
miscegenation—these are no longer setbacks but simply a fact of
21st-century American life. My daughter and her friend—both are
racially mixed—absolutely loved the movie. CHARLES MUDEDE
Vitus
dir. Fredi M. Murer
Six-year-old Vitus (played by Fabrizio Borsani and later Teo
Gheorghiu) is a boy genius: He calculates compounded interest in his
head, is a piano prodigy, and can even persuade his babysitter to
uncork a nice bottle of wine to share. (If you think that’s unsettling,
just wait until tween Vitus starts stalking his ex-babysitter.) His
parents are thrilled with his prowess, and they push him to become a
professional pianist. Vitus likes playing, but he doesn’t appreciate
being shown off like a cheap party trick, so he flees to his kindly
grandfather (Bruno Ganz) in the Swiss countryside, where he can do kid
stuff and have adult conversations. So far, so palatable.
Sadly, Vitus is still shunned by his less gifted peers at school. So
when he has a little accident involving a rooftop and a pair of
homemade wings (apparently aeronautical engineering is not his strong
suit), he hits upon his best idea yet: faking head trauma that kicks
his IQ back down to normal. Having finally achieved his dream of being
treated like an average kid, the closeted minigenius promptly reverts
to criminal behavior, stealing small aircraft for joyrides and
orchestrating stock fraud on a massive scale.
You’d think a movie about a pint-size sociopath would be dark, but
director Fredi M. Murer insists on framing Vitus’s later escapades with
the same cloying cuteness that characterized his babyhood. In this
candy-coated world, stealing a plane is roughly equivalent to studying
up on the amazing hearing abilities of bats. Vitus isn’t a full-fledged
character, with beliefs and motivations and desires. He hardly
resembles a person at all, except for his affection for his
grandfather. The more implausible and amoral his schemes get, the less
you care how they’ll end. ANNIE WAGNER
El Cantante
dir. Leon Ichaso
El Cantante tells the story of Hector Lavoe (Marc Anthony),
a Puerto Rico–born salsa singer, and his wife, Puchi (Jennifer
Lopez). The film was coproduced by Lopez, and it’s clearly something of
a vanity project for the couple. Their characters are striking analogs
to their real-life celebrity personae—Lavoe is a public performer
but a withdrawn person; Puchi is an effervescent but demanding diva.
There’s even a scene paying tribute to J.Lo’s bizarrely famous ass.
Anthony occasionally dissolves into his character, especially behind
his vintage shades, but Lopez never really does, even with a
conspicuous “Puchi” necklace reminding us who she’s supposed to be.
El Cantante relies on the audience already having some
affection for either its stars or its subjects, and never bothers to
develop Lavoe and Puchi into real, sympathetic characters.
Lavoe’s rise to fame is charted in shorthand with musical montages
of live performances, concert posters, album covers, and newspaper
headlines. Heavy-handed slow motion kicks in any time a scene is meant
to have serious emotional weight. An early shot contrasting Puchi’s
wealth with NYC’s homeless? Slow mo. The couple’s first encounter at a
Latin music club? Slow mo. Lavoe’s first exposure to heroin? You better
believe that’s in slow mo. And his descent into drug abuse is rote,
something like The Basketball Diaries for salsa
enthusiasts.
The Spanish musical numbers feature equally cheap-looking subtitles
that won’t stay where they belong at the bottom of the screen. The
dialogue is often mechanical, and the narration—based on a 2001
interview with the real-life Puchi, and delivered by a miraculously
unaged Lopez—does little to add to the story or the depth of its
characters. El Cantante is fairly stylish, well costumed, and
boasts a fine soundtrack, but beyond that it’s about as artless and
clichéd as musician biopics come. ERIC GRANDY
