Summer Movies 2001 (Part 5)
(08/22/01)
As
a movie geek, I’ve developed a sizable list of preferences enumerating The
Things I Like, from favorite actors and directors to preferred styles of
storytelling and filmmaking and beyond.
And one of the things I love to see most in a movie is an elaborate,
ever-expanding structure. You know the
kind of movie I mean. These movies
start out quietly and perhaps a little slowly, usually with a lot of characters
and plot elements being introduced and a lot of details and exposition being
thrown around within the first ten minutes.
If you don’t pay attention, you’re sure to get lost. But once they start moving, nothing can stop
them, as the entire movie builds upon this exposition by adding element after
element until it all reaches critical mass and the desired effect smacks you in
the face. Sometimes the desired effect
is comedy, and the filmmakers start with something funny and add more and more
funny things to that situation, until you’re laughing so hard you can’t breathe;
you can see this in classics like “There’s Something About Mary” and “A Fish
Called Wanda.” Other times, the desired
effect is suspense, with each plot twist touching off another until you’re
breathless with confusion; look for this in most of Hitchcock’s films, and more
recent efforts like “The
Usual Suspects.” Of course, just
building a movie around this structure isn’t enough to make it automatically
great; building the right amount of tension, and getting the timing right, is a
precise art that many directors have tried and failed to master. In this column, I give you reviews of three
recent summer movies (two comedies, one horror movie) that use this structure,
to varying effects and degrees of success.
First,
I give you the madcap ensemble comedy “Rat Race.” A modern-day updating, homage, and/or
rip-off of the 1965 classic “It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” “Rat Race” tells
the story of six randomly selected teams of contestants on a race from Las
Vegas to New Mexico for $2 million.
They are a straight-laced businessman (Breckin Meyer) and his volatile
helicopter pilot girlfriend (Amy Smart), a disgraced NFL referee (Cuba Gooding
Jr.), a Hitler-hating compulsive gambler and his family, a narcoleptic Italian (Rowan
Atkinson), two amoral brothers (Seth Green and Vince Vieluf), and a gullible
mother (Whoopi Goldberg) and her neurotic long-lost daughter. They’re using every means of transportation
possible (convertibles, minivans, semis, airplanes, helicopters, buses, trains,
hot-air balloons, Hitler’s car—I could go on, but I won’t), and any means
necessary, to get to that cash. With a
plot summary like that, you’d think this movie couldn’t go wrong. But it can, and it does.
Like
any movie of its type, “Rat Race” is terribly uneven. Some parts of it are hilarious; directors David and Jerry Zucker
of “Airplane!” fame are old hands with the aforementioned ever-building comedy
structure, and when things work for them, they really work. There’s a great scene (unfortunately ruined
by the previews) involving a squirrel vendor, and a very funny situation that
begins when the conniving brothers try to take down a radar tower at the
airport and slow the rest of the group down.
And I’m starting to chuckle just thinking about the drawn-out,
uproariously tasteless sequence where the gambler’s family thinks they’re
visiting a Barbie doll museum, ends up at a museum devoted to Nazi war criminal
Klaus Barbie, escapes by stealing Hitler’s car, and—well, I won’t tell you what
happens next, but let’s just say the term “out of the frying pan and into the
fire” definitely comes to mind. There
are even a few times when unfunny jokes (such as a mostly failed gag where
mother and daughter steal a rocket car and are mistaken for mental patients)
even touch off very funny moments (a corrupt mechanic getting his just desserts). Unfortunately, the unfunny parts are so
blatantly non-humorous that I remember them more than I remember the scenes
where I was laughing uncontrollably. And
far too often, the two mingle and mix into an entirely unpalatable byproduct of
comedy. For example, Atkinson’s
character, with his slightly lunatic eyes and perpetually dazed expression, got
me to giggling every time he walked across the screen; the scene in which he
refers to cocktail wieners as “little cock doggies” made my friend and I miss a
good 5 minutes of the movie rolling on the floor of the theatre. Unfortunately, he is saddled with some of
the movie’s stupidest gags (for one, a drawn-out joke involving a heart being
sent to a transplant center that feels like reject Farrelly brothers material)
and isn’t nearly as funny as he could have been.
And
the ending...for crying out loud, don’t even get me started. Although I’ve hardly seen enough movies to say
the ending of “Rat Race” is the worst ever, I think it would be in anyone’s
bottom 20. A movie like this needs a
quick, surprising, and thoroughly mean-spirited ending, where all the
characters get double-crossed and some deserving yet unexpected minor character
gets the payoff. At first, “Rat Race”
shows signs of doing this. But then,
there’s a senseless cameo by Smash Mouth and an even more senseless “feel-good”
twist at the ending that represents to me everything that is wrong with modern
American film. The entire point of the
movie is to laugh at how greedy these characters are, so what’s the point in
bogging it down with some fake, nauseating, humanitarian crap that’s supposed
to make me feel good but really just makes me want to puke? The bad taste that “Rat Race” left in my
mouth means that, despite how much I laughed at it, I can hardly give it a
glowing review. Too bad, because for
awhile there it was quite a few cuts above the average, one-joke comedies that
keep on oozing their way into theatres.
The Verdict: I liked it more than I thought I would, but not as much
as I wanted to. Does that make any
sense? 2.5 out of 5.
While
“Rat Race” pretends to be a classic comedy and ends up in the same puddle of
filth as the movies it was trying to avoid being associated with, “American
Pie 2” pretends to be a silly teen comedy and actually rises above those
modest aspirations—to a certain extent.
The four teenage heroes of the first film, who were once obsessed with
losing their virginity before graduation, have had a whole year of college to
enjoy their newfound manhood but haven’t matured all that much. Reunited for the summer, they rent a beach
house in the hopes of getting more of what they so desperately wanted in the
first movie. You don’t have to be a
rocket scientist to figure out that they do.
Despite
the lowbrow subject matter, “American Pie 2” actually makes a few (admittedly
clumsy) attempts at using that more sophisticated, escalating joke structure. Sometimes it works (a scene in which super
glue is mistaken for lubricant will surely go down as one of the funnier things
on screen this summer), other times it doesn’t (an interminable, and not very
funny, sequence involving two suspected lesbians), but the movie gets props
from me for at least trying. Character-wise,
the two best things about this movie were Stifler, the perpetually horny frat
boy perfectly portrayed by Seann William Scott, and Jim (Jason Biggs), the guy
who got busy with an apple pie in the first movie and who is now trying to
score with foreign exchange student Nadia, under the tutelage of the band nerd
who deflowered him (Alyson Hannigan).
Their romance was funny, honest, sweet, and one of the better things
about this movie that didn’t involve too many bodily fluids.
The more you can
identify with the heroes of this movie, the more you will enjoy it. I’m exactly the same age as these
characters, and I will admit to liking this movie, mostly because I couldn’t
help seeing my friends and neighbors in many of them. If your high school memories are at least as fresh as mine, and
if your maturity level isn’t terribly high to begin with, this is probably good
for a few laughs. The Verdict: Worth
a matinee, if you liked the first one and don’t mind essentially seeing the
same movie over again. 3 out of 5.
And finally, we come to
a very different movie from the preceding two: noted Spanish director Alejandro
Amenábar’s English-language debut, “The Others.” This is a good old-fashioned
ghost story that would be more at home having been made in the 1940s than
floating into today’s multiplexes. But
it’s here, and it’s more than worth your time.
Nicole Kidman stars as
Grace, the not-terribly-mentally-stable owner of a stupendously Gothic creepy
old house in Britain’s isolated Channel Islands. Within the first 10 minutes of the movie, we enter the house, get
to know Grace, learn that her husband is presumed dead in World War II, witness
the arrival of three new servants who might have wandered out of “Village of
the Damned,” meet Grace’s eerie children who will die if they are exposed to
sunlight, and get our first taste of the dread-filled atmosphere that permeates
the entire film. The elaborate,
twisting plot that unfolds from this is something I really can’t talk about
without giving too much away. Suffice
it to say, there is something strange and ghostly inhabiting Grace’s house, and
the point of the entire movie is to find out what that something really is.
This is not a film for
those with short attention spans. Amenábar’s
plot takes time to unfold, and builds even more slowly than the setting’s
ghostly atmosphere permeates your mind.
A lot of critics have taken issue with this, saying the film has too
little payoff, but I disagree. The
twist ending was, for me, so utterly mind-blowing that everything else was
validated by it, no matter how long it took to get there. Just when I thought I had this movie figured
out, something new came along to pull me in an entirely different direction,
and frankly, I loved that. It just took
a little longer than it might in your average action movie. And if you’re impatient, rest assured that
there are plenty of other things to occupy your mind while you wait for the
plot to get in gear. The shadowy
cinematography is absolutely gorgeous and creates a perfect, terrifying mood. There’s not a single bad performance in the
movie, either, but Kidman and the actors playing her children particularly
shine.
I can’t tell you more about what to expect; if I do, I’ll give too much away and dull the experience for you. The less you know about particulars of plot and dialogue, the better. Go to this movie with your brain in gear, prepared to pay attention and be scared out of your wits. If you liked “The Sixth Sense,” and I know most people did, then you are almost guaranteed to like it. And even if you didn’t, this fine, creepy film still gets my strongest recommendation. The Verdict: Guaranteed to chill you to the bone—the perfect treat for hot August afternoons. One of the best movies of the summer. 4.5 out of 5.
Copyright (c) 2001 by Beth Kinderman. This is my original work, so please respect it.