TONY PORCO’S MOVIE REVIEW NEWSLETTER–I’M TIRED OF WINTER 2007 EDITION

ON SCREEN:

MUSIC AND LYRICS: The George Michael-like leader of an 80's pop group (Hugh Grant) hopes to break out of his nostalgia-tour life by writing a big hit for an annoying, Britney Spears-like pop sensation (Haley Bennett). The trouble is, he's never been good at coming up with song lyrics, so he enlists help from an unlikely source, a young aspiring writer who happens to keep his house plants (Drew Barrymore). While it is formulaic, this classic romantic comedy really is quite clever and funny (sometimes it's too clever and funny), mostly because the two stars really do a good job doing two very different things. Hugh Grant basically plays a Hugh Grant character (or a slightly older version of one), while Barrymore, who has never been a favorite actress of mine, reveals some strength as a comic actress. She surprised and impressed me, much as she did with her dramatic role in Riding in Cars With Boys. Brad Garrett (whom I last saw in Suicide Kings, although he is best known for the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond) is also quite good as Grant's character's hard-working, pragmatic manager, as is Campbell Scott in a rare bad-guy role. The New York location is used evocatively, if not as creatively as in Woody Allen's movies or Kissing Jessica Stein. The best camera work is actually on a hilarious re-creation of an old-style MTV video (by the 80's group of which Grant’s character used to be the leader) that had me rolling on the floor, especially since it came complete with dumb VH-1 style trivia pop-up balloons. RATING: 8.

ON TAPE:

AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD: One of my favorite things about The Blair Witch Project was the way that the photography director, Neal Fredericks, made the Maryland woods look so dry and dead on film. The appearance helped tell the story in a very real way. In Aguirre, Wrath of God, director Walter Herzog and his crew acheived a very similar thing in what is in some ways a similar movie. The first thing you see is an Andes mountain view, with a tree-covered hillside shrouded in fog; it's lovely in a National Geographic way. Then, in an amazing sequence, the characters of the plot--a group of Spanish conquistadors, fresh from conquering the Inca empire, in search of a lost city of gold somewhere in the Amazon rainforest--descend one by one down the mountainside, accompanied by Inca slaves, women, and livestock. At first, they seem like apparitions in the mist, but then you see their feet slogging through the mud or slipping on the stairs, their hands gripping cages with chickens in them, sedan chairs for the women, or cannons. Finally, they reach the rainforest, wading through knee-deep swamp, swatting leaves and shoots the size of small trees out of their way, and building rafts to sail on an unforgiving Amazon that consists solely of brown, turbulent rapids. This is when you realize that the forest, the mountains, and the river aren't lush, but garish and hellish, and that they are telling you that there is something deeply sinister and insane about the whole enterprise--or, we soon learn, about one of its leaders.

At this point, the plot begins in earnest. Gonzalo Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru (Alejandro Repulles, whose character comes off as one of the stabler men in charge, something that says a lot), realizes the futility of continuing the expedition, and orders a detachment to travel ahead on the rafts, led by his practical assistant Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) and by the crafty and ambitious Don Lupe de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski). They are supposed to row down the river and report back in a week, but Aguirre, inspired by Cortez and his unauthorized conquest of Mexico a generation earlier, has other plans.

Kinski got a critical assignment here to make the film work with his acting, and his performance is a masterpiece. He is by turns brooding, acerbic, cynical, explosive, conniving--and just magnetic enough to convince you that he would attract men to his side. The excellent acting is not limited to him, by any means; Mexican actress Helena Rojo, as Inez, Ursua's paramour, wins the audience's admiration, and Del Negro portrays a complicated priest and chaplain to the expedition, erudite and realistic, but also too willing to look the other way while Aguirre assumes more and more power. Edward Roland and Justo Gonzalez portray slaves that often seem more intelligent and observant than the men who enslaved them. Even the music is suited well for its task, being as haunting and mesmerizing as the expedition, the land through which it travels, and Aguirre's increasingly disconnected mind. (Much of it was apparently made with an electric guitar's tone pedal, like the one that the rock group Rush used in the opening of their song "Xanadu," accompanied by a mellotron-like synthesizer that plays back taped sounds of instruments and human voices.)

The movie, I should caution, isn't perfect. There are some attempts at dark humor, especially near the end, that fall flat, and some lines (many involving Del Negro's character) that are meant more to make a point in the Twentieth Century than to tell a story set in the Sixteenth. Like The Blair Witch Project, this is not the best movie I have ever seen, but in its ruthless use of every tool to tell a story of greed and madness, it is definitely one of the scariest. RATING: 9.

MAN ON THE MOON: So who was Andy Kaufman, anyway? Was he an actor who played a cute guy from some made-up Eastern European country on the TV show Taxi? Was he the guy that lip-synched to the Mighty Mouse cartoon theme on Saturday Night Live? Was he a comedian, a performance artist, an idiot who was full of himself? Was he some combination of all of those things? The biopic Man on the Moon tries to answer those questions, and in the process, raises many more. It's a fantastically-made movie, without a doubt; Jim Carrey utterly immerses himself in the role of Andy, leaving no doubt as to his acting talent (although anybody who has seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had no doubt about that talent anyway). Danny Devito, as Kaufman's discoverer and agent, and the late Vincent Schiavelli, as a studio executive who tried hard to understand him, are almost as good. The script tells the story well for the most part, and doesn't idealize Kaufman (he could be maddeningly frustrating) or despise him, either (he could be hilariously funny in a childlike way, as he certainly was in the Mighty Mouse bit, which is reproduced well here). The trouble is that so many more questions are raised than answered, which might be inevitable in any movie treatment of Kaufman's life. For instance, we learn that Kaufman performed for his younger sister (at the insistence of their father, who said that his son should have an audience if he wanted to perform), and then took the child-friendly entertainments he made up for her to a comedy club stage with little or no changes. That's fascinating, but what happened in the meantime that made him so determined to follow his own course, and who influenced him? We learn that he hated to do "blue" or drug humor (an admirable stance that many of today's comics could stand to emulate), but then why did he create a separate persona for himself--the world's most obnoxious lounge singer, Tony Clifton--in order to work blue? (Granted, it is impressive to see Carrey playing Kaufman playing Clifton.) What attracted people like his girlfriend Lynne (Courtney Love) and co-writer/best friend Bob Zmuda (Paul Giamatti) to this thoroughly individual person, and made them want to be a part of such a private world? If he took himself seriously enough to not want to appear on Taxi, why did he trivialize himself so thoroughly with activities like wrestling women? For that matter, why did he appear so much on television, the medium least likely to reward unique and individual artistry? (It may not be a coincidence that the scenes depicting Kaufman in front of live audiences are so telling; the director does an excellent job of showing the interaction between performer and audience in these scenes.) There are a thousand questions here, and maybe that's just the way the late Kaufman, whose comedy often seemed to be about raising questions, would have wanted it. RATING: 8.

HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS: In the early 1970's, Dell Yearling published a terrific juvenile-fiction book by Thomas Rockwell, called How to Eat Fried Worms. In mid-2006, a movie was released with the same title. Both the book and the movie concern an almost-adolescent boy, Billy Forrester, who, because of a bet, has to consume a certain number of the eponymous terrestrial invertebrates in a specific period of time. And that, dear readers, is the sum total of what they have in common. Writer/director Bob Dolman and New Line Cinema, the Hollywood concern for which he works, have mutilated a great children's book without producing much of a movie (and since they make a big deal about how the movie is based on the book, I don't think it's unfair to compare them). Instead of a competitive friend, the other bettor is a bully; instead of a kid that likes to eat and is (perhaps too) eager for a new challenge, Billy is a new-at-school kid with a weak stomach (imagine the limitless possibilities for humor there), and so on. Perhaps most offensively at all, the original Billy, who was a bit on the fat side, is played here by a thin kid named Luke Benward, meaning that yet again, Hollywood has decided (as they did with Holes, as I complained when I reviewed that

<>movie) that it is simply not acceptable to have an overweight hero in a kids' movie. Of course, if I'd never read the book, I probably still wouldn't like the movie, what with its cardboard characters (the teacher and principal are the worst, of course), distinct American Pie influence (yes, I’m sad to have to report that that movie is having an impact even on movies aimed at children), and tiresome silliness that's supposed to be out-loud funny. The movie even manages to be sexist, with a girl character (played by the cute Hallie Kate Eisenberg) whose sole functions are to be a female character that girls can "relate to" (since there were no major female characters in the original book) and to babysit the main character's annoying little brother. Billy's parents, who are integrated well into the original book, don't fare much better. In the movie, they're played by the attractive-but-wasted Thomas Cavanagh and Kimberley Williams, and spend much of their time in a strange, irrelevant subplot about being asked to play tennis by a co-worker (and yes, it really is that exciting) that makes me wonder if anybody was even bothering to edit this. Granted, the movie isn't the worst I've ever seen in my whole life; there are a few witty moments, and the child-acting is true to life for that age. However, the book manages to be more witty and more true-to-life, and does it with much more likable and interesting characters, and without constant use of the word “puke,” yet another annoying thing about this movie. Do yourself a favor and read the book, instead of renting the lousy movie. It's still in print, and Amazon has it in stock. RATING: 3.

Until next time.....

TONY

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