Cassandra’s Dream
dir. Woody Allen
In this blast of gloom from Woody Allen, Ewan McGregor and Colin
Farrell are the brothers Blaine, two working-class lads from London
mired in unremarkable lives. Ian (McGregor) dreams of making millions
while he toils away in the family’s failing restaurant; Terry (Farrell)
is a grease monkey prone to heavy drinking and gambling. Both men are
minor scammers who revere their rich uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson),
whose largesse has bailed out the Blaine brood on a number of
occasions.
From the first oppressive strains of the Philip Glass score,
Cassandra’s Dream (the title refers to both a dog and a boat
the brothers restore) hammers home dread. Terry loses a bundle at the
poker table, Ian finds himself pretending to be wealthy in order to bed
an actress of dubious talent (Hayley Atwell), and soon Uncle Howard is
asked a favor of once again. This time, however, their uncle asks a
favor in return. A bloody favor.
Moving matters along at a frantic clip, Allen piles on the
bleakness, daring to make his two brothers alternately pathetic and
unlikable. Unfortunately, the gamble fails. Many scenes in the film are
just plain off. Some are left to drift well past their natural
conclusion, while others—especially in the blunt third
act—end just as they get cooking. And this unevenness is only
exacerbated by the two leads, who, try as they might, are never fully
able to make the brothers believable as siblings—or as anything
more than props in Allen’s blandly sleazy plot. “You’ve never had a
conscience,” the brothers’ mother tells Terry at one point. Seeing as
how neither man is anything beyond a cipher, it’s hard to argue with
her. BRADLEY
STEINBACHER
Mad Money
dir. Callie Khouri
“The truth is we’re all capable of anything. We don’t realize it.
But it’s true.” These untrue words are spoken by Diane Keaton at the
beginning of Mad Money, and though they are not meant to make
you think back on Diane Keaton’s career, you cannot help it. Watching
Diane Keaton try to appease a neighbor’s dog by throwing it a slab of
meat so she can make a getaway in the opening sequence, you cannot
prevent your mind from recalling the Diane Keaton of Love and
Death and Sleeper and Manhattan and Annie
Hall and wondering, grimly, what happened in the intervening
decades. Outwardly, she hasn’t changed much, but something serious is
afoot. Brain leak? Body snatching? Shape shifting? Robot replacement?
Could she just be gassy? We would all like to think that Diane Keaton
is more than just hats and belts and Woody Allen jokes, that she’s a
person with dignity, a person who’s learned from herself, a person who
wouldn’t subject herself, and the audience she’s built, to flaming
piles of crap, but Mad Money is a flaming pile of crap.
It begins with cash—piles and piles of cash—being set on
fire and flushed down a toilet. As an ur-metaphor for the creation of
Mad Money itself this is hard to beat; however the ur-metaphor
is unintentional. The burning/flushing of money is actually a
flash-forward from the basic narrative, which begins with Keaton and
Ted Danson fighting about how they’re going to pay the bills and
proceeds directly to Keaton drably dressed and pushing a janitor’s cart
through the corridors of the Federal Reserve. At long last she and
Queen Latifah (same as always) and Katie Holmes (twitchy and permed)
are shoving bricks of discarded bills into their underwear. Not that
you didn’t know that was coming, what with the end of the movie at the
beginning. I fear I have made this sound better than it is. CHRISTOPHER
FRIZZELLE
27 Dresses
dir. Anne Fletcher
“Always, always, always a bridesmaid,” reads the headline of a
New York Journal society column about a plain Jane (the
flawlessly pretty Katherine Heigl) and her obsession with organizing
weddings for her friends. She has been a bridesmaid at 26 separate
weddings, and as her stuffed closet attests, it hasn’t always been
pretty. Taking into account both the fluorescent Gone with the
Wind frock and parasol she had to don for a certain themed wedding
and the one remaining girlfriend Jane still hangs out with (the
defiantly single Casey, played by a tired-looking Judy Greer), you
might be led to believe that each of the new brides abandoned Jane, or
vice versa, once her services were rendered.
But then you wouldn’t believe in the essential likeability of
Katherine Heigl. Jane is, from all the evidence, a deeply annoying
character—controlling, superficial, jealous, vindictive—but
Heigl is grounded. She makes even deeply stupid scenes like a
mid-yoga-class argument and a mid-cab-ride striptease seem tolerable.
Even so, 27 Dresses is so sugary it made my jaw ache. Or maybe
I was just clenching my teeth.
Jane’s awful sister Tess (Malin Akerman) comes to New York and
promptly steals the love of Jane’s life—who happens to be Jane’s
boss, the ecologically concerned George (Edward Burns). There is no
reason for ecological concern to enter into this movie, but it is there
nonetheless, presumably to demonstrate that Tess (who likes CHILI DOGS
and RIBS) and George (who prefers TOFU) are temperamentally unsuited to
each other. Meanwhile, a pesky society reporter named Kevin (James
Marsden) tries to get a date with Jane. Jane believes Kevin to be
“creepy” and “cynical” and “dark,” but this is blatantly untrue. When
he smiles, which he does constantly, his beatific grin takes up half
his face. Don’t worry, soon they will make drunken karaoke together and
then the movie will be almost over. ANNIE WAGNER
Deep End
dir. Jerzy Skolimowski
Deep End is Harold & Maude‘s evil
twin—both were released in 1971, both concern a boy’s sentimental
education at the hands of an older woman, both feature cars sabotaged
for symbolic purposes and songs by Cat Stevens. (Both, obviously, are
grandparents to Rushmore.) But the boy in Harold &
Maude is saved by his older paramour; the boy in Deep End is driven mad.
Little fresh-faced Mike gets a job as an attendant at a city pool
and bathhouse, where he falls in pure, sweet, 15-year-old love with his
coworker Susan: a sexy slattern with a fiancé, a lover, and a
couple of regular clients at the bathhouse. Worse, the lover is Mike’s
old PE teacher, a nasty, leering old man. Susan also introduces Mike to
some light prostitution in the changing room, where older women press
his young body to theirs and shudder and moan. Deep End isn’t
kind to any of its female characters (the older women are pathetic and
Susan is a selfish, grasping liar), but it isn’t kind to anyone.
Susan’s fiancé is a pasty bully and her lover molests his female
students. Caught in a vice of jealousy and lust, little Mike starts to
unravel and then the bleak, sadistic comedy begins.
Mike follows Susan around town, chases her onto a subway, gropes her
from behind while she and her fiancé are sitting in a cinema
watching a dirty movie. (That movie is hilarious: hammy, softcore porn
masquerading as some kind of educational film.) Deep End gets
a little ridiculous when Mike finds a life-size cutout of Susan, naked,
in front of a strip club—she’s a pool attendant and minor-league
hooker and porn model?—but it remains funny and, as it
must, ends badly.
Deep End isn’t as amusing as Harold & Maude nor as smart and rich as Rushmore, but its dark chronicle of
young sexual frustration is, perhaps, more memorable. BRENDAN KILEY
