If you thought a killer VHS tape was laughable, wait ’till you check out the killer reindeer. Or the scary water, a ceiling-wide chunk that crashes menacingly to the floor. And hey, did you know that when a haunted videotape gets burned, it lets out a little scream like a lobster? Yes, The Ring Two actually manages to match the stupidity of the 2002 original’s film-production-from-the-grave premise with details that are equally silly and often nonsensical. But at least it dispenses with the evil-rental thing early on to better  focus on the freaky ghost girl, Samara (Daveigh Chase).

Samara still climbs out of TVs and floods floors, but now the world’s scariest carpet-ruiner is just looking for a mom. Naomi Watts and David Dorfman are back, too, as Rachel, the journalist who “let the dead get in,” and her terrorized son, Aidan, who still has the demeanor of a little old man  but now looks like one who’s been on a bender. The storylines from both The Ring and its sequel are taken from the Japanese Ringu series, and this time the American version even borrowed the Ringus’ director, Hideo Nakata. The result, awfully similar to last fall’s Americanized J-horror flick, The Grudge, is a monotonous pace you can set your watch to: Quiet setup after quiet setup, weak payoff after weak payoff. (And what is it with Japanese and hairy dead girls, by the way?)

Sure, most of our crappy slasher flicks are predictable, too, but at least they usually evenly distribute the dumbassery, with a myriad of goners tiptoeing around dark basements and such. But here, if there’s a dead body, empty house, or recently ghost-occupied bathtub to be found, it’s guaranteed Rachel will be mouth-breathing for an eternity nearby. Like any thriller with good sound effects, The Ring Two does offer its share of jumps, and Chase’s drowned-corpse look is admittedly creepy. (A cameo by Sissy Spacek as Samara’s mom shows where the darling got her hairstyle from.) But better to save this follow-up for a rental, when you can choose to do what Samara’s victims never bothered to try: Turn off the TV.

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

From smack addicts and zombies to…little kids and saints? Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle seems to have traded underworlds for puppy dogs’ tails with Millions, a PG-rated parable centered on a freckled tyke whose hobby is Christianity’s canonized. Wee Damian not only knows all the saints’ biographies and wants to be good like his heroes, he also sees them. Such as St. Clare, who smokes. And a Ugandan martyr, whose decapitated-but-reattached head hasn’t quite healed, so excuse his blood-soaked handshake, please.

Guess Boyle couldn’t completely abandon his dark side. And really,
the Manchester-born director’s first go at family entertainment
couldn’t be more fitting: Millions, adapted by Frank Cottrell Boyce
from his own 2004 children’s book, may at times be strenuously
feel-good, but it’s ultimately nothing more than a cheerier version of
Shallow Grave.

After the mother of 7-year-old Damian (Alex Etel) and 9-year-old
Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) dies, their dad (James Nesbitt) moves the
family to a new neighborhood. While playing one day in a cardboard home
he fashioned near some railroad tracks, Damian is nearly flattened when
a sack of bank notes is thrown from a train. Damian thinks it’s a gift
from God and wants to use it to help the poor, but the financially
savvy Anthony is thinking real estate and exchange rates. See, besides
whom to tell (as few people as possible) and how to spend it (no needy
live locally, Anthony reasons, because housing prices are too high),
the boys have another consideration: England is on the verge of
switching to the euro, which means their pound-denominated booty will
soon be worthless.

Like the Lemony Snicket series, Boyce’s story highlights its
protagonists’ beyond-their-years savviness, from Damian’s encyclopedic
knowledge of the saints—he excitedly greets each of his visions by name
and dates of birth and death: “Francis of Assisi, 1181 to 1226!”—to
Anthony’s constant calculations of how much of what their money could
buy. Although the corruptive power of wealth is one of the more obvious
themes here, Millions also provides perspectives on losing a parent,
single-fatherhood, the downside of charity, and, above all, balancing a
desire to “be good” with self-preservation. Boyce’s slew of
life-affirming messages never feel preachy, however, because they’re
all delivered with wry humor. A hippieish St. Peter (Alun Armstrong)
even tells Damian not to fill in his address on donation envelopes
because he’ll “be besieged, man, I’m telling ya.”

Etel and McGibbon, both freshman film actors, are cute without being
precious and intelligent without seeming too adult, especially when the
story introduces a bad guy and Boyle has a little who’s-in-the-attic
fun. The director, in fact, sprinkles spooky touches throughout, such
as the whispering voices Dad hears before closing the door on the old
house or the shadows of bicycle policemen that whoosh past like ghosts.
Mostly, though, Boyle’s rendering of the boys’ world is one of playful,
often hyper-realistic wonder: a schoolyard punctuated by giant red
balls, a Jenga tower of money that cartoonishly quivers and creaks, an
accelerated-motion shot of the construction of the family’s new home
with wood panels that thwack together and roof tiles that tink.

As Millions draws to a conclusion, the boys learn bittersweet
lessons about, naturally, what’s truly valuable in life. But Boyce’s
smart script and Boyle’s imaginative direction put the film in a
universe far, far beyond such recent woeful children’s fare as The
Pacifier and Racing Stripes—indeed, the film trumps a whole lot of what
passes for grown-up entertainment these days, too. When Millions
elegantly closes as it began—with its tiny title tucked into the lower
right-hand corner of a black screen—the only message that really
matters is this: A film can be childlike without being childish.

Ice Princess, on the other hand, is all sugar and spice and…well,
so everything nice your eyes will glaze over. A straightforward story of a high-school physics nerd who discovers she has a talent for figure skating, Disney’s latest doesn’t exactly fall on its ass, but its bland sunniness feels as forced as some male skaters’ claims of heterosexuality. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Michelle Trachtenberg stars as Casey, a
studious senior who has her eyes on Harvard, a goal that her feminist
mother (Joan Cusack) has had a big hand in steering her toward. When
Casey has to think up a project for a chance at a physics scholarship,
she decides to mesh her passion, science, with her hobby, ice skating.
She initially studies the movements of her school’s competitive
skaters, including the bitchy Gen (Hayden Panettiere), whose mother,
Tina (Kim Cattrall), ruthlessly coaches the girls. But she then decides
to test her theories herself and joins Tina’s beginner class—and is
soon replacing her Ivy League dreams with fantasies of toe loops,
sparkly dresses, and Teddy (Trevor Blumas) the Zamboni driver.

Based on a story by The Princess Diaries author Meg Cabot and
scripted by television writer Hadley Davis, Ice Princess isn’t terribly
subtle in its construction. Characters continually switch from nasty to
nice and back again, and the popular-chicks/smart-chicks divide is
underlined, italicized, and highlighted throughout, such as in the
painfully predictable scene in which Casey turns off a potential
admirer the second she mentions science. (And when Casey then defends
herself to her cool new friends by saying that when she’s nervous, she
starts to babble, our hero Teddy swoops in to say, “I think babbling is
cool!”) Director Tim Fywell (I Capture the Castle) doesn’t help the
obviousness much, at one point cueing a scene of the pretty girls’
skating practice with a song that trills, “We are what everyone wants
to be!”

A more obvious flaw is the script’s lack of humor—which is odd given
that Davis’ TV credits include Scrubs and Spin City. With the possible
exception of Casey’s frump of a mom—her idea of celebration involves
making pancakes “with white flour”—Davis’ characters are blah: Nobody’s
too awkward, nobody’s too mean, and for certain, nobody’s intentionally
funny. The actors, therefore, hardly resonate: Bratty Ally McBeal and
Raising Helen vet Panettiere doesn’t get to be the bad girl for long,
and Trachtenberg simply alternates between open-mouthed gawking and
gee-whiz beaming. Cattrall’s icy coach isn’t a far throw from her
heartless Sex and the City character, and Cusack—well, it seems she’s
no longer interested in playing up the family wryness.

Even Casey’s supposedly gasp-inducing talent isn’t all that
thrilling. When the girls finally get to the Superexciting Regional
Competition, the action is amped up a few notches, thanks in large part
to the inclusion of real figure skaters such as Kirsten Olson and
Juliana Cannarozzo. But that’s small compensation for a largely
yawn-inducing affair. In the end, Tina’s apology for figure skating’s
ugly side seems pretty apt: “I’m sorry. It is what it is.”

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Fish are fucking creepy. That may be the strongest impression you get from the IMAX presentation of Into the Deep 3D, Howard Hall’s 35-minute journey under the waters off California’s southern coast. Luckily, the movie is bookended by gorgeous images — a “forest” of kelp opens Into the Deep; a synchronized school of what appears to be thousands of silver Spanish mackerels closes it — and soothing music is provided during scenes in which fish seem to circle your head or towers of seaweed threaten to smack you in the face. (Some of the 3D is a bit headache-inducing, but most of it will have you giggling like a 5-year-old.) And it’s fascinating to witness the rituals that rule this foreign world, such as the mating routine of the male Garibaldi fish, whose swift loop-de-loops while clucking seem more ambitious than most guys’ approaches on land — but when the narrator informs that the male chases the female away “as soon as the laying [of eggs] is done,” the couplings don’t seem so different after all. Into the Deep is certainly educational and eye-opening, but it’s also a bit unsettling to view footage of, say, bat rays — stealth-plane-like creatures “who shun the light of day” — or stuff that looks like shag carpet but which you realize, after it devours something, is actually alive. And after watching freaky-looking crabs stumbling the ocean floor or a spindly lobster tediously extracting its body out of a too-small exoskeleton — well, you may never eat shellfish  again.

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

It’s not often these days that you watch a movie and are disappointed when the final credits begin to roll. But that’s exactly what happens in “Cinema: A Program of Academy Award Nominated Shorts 2005.” And happens again—and again. A program of seven of the short films that were up for Oscars this year in either the live-action or animated categories, “Shorts 2005” includes only one pretty trifle: Gopher Broke, a 5-minute cartoon about a luckless gopher scheming for farmers’-market vegetables. The rest of these exercises in brevity are mini masterpieces.

The winner of the Oscar for animation, Ryan, is a documentary of sorts, with director Chris Landreth essentially illustrating his interviews with once-celebrated but now destitute Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Landreth’s images are bizarre, harsh, and entirely effective as he portrays men literally hollowed, shackled, or flattened by their demons. Of course, there’s also some plain ol’ good storytelling: Two Cars, One Night shows a dryly funny and touching friendship that blossoms when a couple of kids are waiting for their parents in a parking lot, and the winner of the Oscar for live action, Wasp, is a heartbreaking portrait of a trashy 23-year-old mother who puts her four children at risk when she’s asked out on a date. And the topic of war is shared by the animated Birthday Boy, a quiet, devastating depiction of a Korean child who, in 1951, happily fights pretend battles while his father is off facing a real one, and the slightly less effective Little Terrorist, a tense story of a Pakistani boy who dares retrieve his ball from across the Indian border. But the strangest and most beguiling film of the lot is 7:35 in the Morning, which takes place in a diner a woman visits every day. One morning, she walks in to find the customers and staff silent, though they soon burst into the catchiest song you’ll ever hear—orchestrated by the woman’s apparent stalker. You’ll want to listen to a few more bars when the film comes to an abrupt close, but as the lyrics say, “Don’t forget that the best things in life must be allowed to begin and allowed to end.”

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The only thing worse than real depression is movie depression.
Because for every Garden State or Girl, Interrupted, there are twice as
many supposedly nuanced portraits of melancholia that just take a
couple of walking wounded and slap on a big ol’ frowny face or two.
Both Campbell Scott’s Off the Map and Dan Harris’ Imaginary Heroes opt
for this approach, and although their central depressives couldn’t be
more different, neither is anything more than a cartoon.

In Off the Map, a cowboy gets the blues. Sam Elliott plays Charley
Groden, a ’70s-style family man living off a patch of New Mexican
desert with his hippie wife, Arlene (Joan Allen), and Blossomesque
daughter, Bo (Valentina de Angelis). Besides receiving a small VA
stipend, the clan is entirely self-sufficient—and entirely annoying:
Mom sells the flowers that she cultivates, naked, in the garden, while
11-year-old Bo happily home-schools herself with big, fat books on
economics and Spanish history. Bo contributes to the Grodens’
sustenance by hunting for supper squirrel, careful to acknowledge her
bounty with a pert “Bless you and thank you for nourishing us.”
Meanwhile, Dad—well, he’s depressed, so he just stares off into space,
occasionally shedding a single tear as his kin go about their
preciousness.

It doesn’t take long before Off the Map, written by Joan Ackermann
and based on her play of the same title, starts to veer all over it.
With three characters vying for focus, the story belongs to no one: The
purple narration of the adult Bo (Amy Brenneman) introduces her
father’s despair as the dominating force of one summer—“It was
inescapable, my father’s depression”—and, sure enough, Charley is shown
mopey and unresponsive as his family tiptoes around him in every early
scene. Soon, however, it’s precocious little Bo who takes center stage,
busying herself with too-cute projects such as applying for a
MasterCard or writing haughty letters of complaint to snack companies,
resulting in caseloads of apologetic product being sent to their
middle-of-nowhere home.

And by the second half of Off the Map we’re introduced to William
(Jim True-Frost), a young IRS agent who becomes ill while auditing the
Grodens. Though William at first doesn’t quite know what to make of the
husband and wife who greet him au naturel, he quickly falls in love
with their quirky, isolated way of life. He’s so damn inspired by it,
in fact, that he goes on to become a famous artist.

Hello? Anyone remember Dad’s inescapable depression?

Unfortunately, it’s still there, apparently reanimated (albeit
overshadowed) by the melodrama of William’s childhood. As infuriating
as Catatonic Charley was, Ackermann’s dialogue makes Chatty Charley
even worse: “I am a damn crying machine,” Elliott implausibly growls
with the tough-guy ’tude of his former roles. Allen fares better as the
easygoing Arlene, but True-Frost vies with de Angelis for the most
irritating of them all. At least his dopey William gets one of
Ackermann’s only funny (and unaffected) lines when he responds to the
question of whether he’s ever gone through depression with an offhand
“I’ve never been not depressed.”

Mostly, though, Ackermann tamps down any levity with Bo’s narration,
which has all the ponderousness of a brooding teenager’s journal
entries as it ascribes deep meaning to the family story’s every turn.
Scott, meanwhile, tries to amp up the purported mysticism of a land
that can turn accountants into artistes, his camera zooming into the
eyes of the Grodens’ coyote neighbors and leisurely taking in New
Mexico’s barren skyline as tribal music accentuates the primitiveness
of it all. It’s clear that the filmmakers wish to present this story of
life in the desert as so natural, so enchanting, that normally sensible
audience members will want to drop out themselves—or at least visit.
More likely, though, their most lasting impression of the way-out West
will come from William: “Are you all on mushrooms or something?”

No one’s on ’shrooms in Imaginary Heroes, though that seems to be
the only drug the pill-happy characters don’t ingest. When a champion
teenage swimmer and jewel of the family commits suicide, what else is a
messed-up upper-class household to do?

The craziest of the crazies here is Sandy Travis (Sigourney Weaver),
a woman so bitter that when her neighbor Marge (Deirdre O’Connell)
“dares” to have a cigarette outside on the day of Sandy’s son’s
funeral, she seethes, “She’s blowing the smoke in my face!” Of course,
there’s a reason the women hate each other, though it’s a long time
coming—just like the stories behind why Dad (Jeff Daniels) dislikes
sullen younger son Tim (Emile Hirsch), or how Tim got those cuts on his
back, or what’s really causing Sandy’s cough. Wait, that last one’s not
exactly resolved—call it a case of Movie Disease, as abruptly forgotten
about as it is brought up.

Clearly, the Travises have a lot more to worry about than the messy
death of Matt (Kip Pardue), whom Tim tiresomely describes in the film’s
opening narration as being “greater at swimming than anyone I knew was
great at whatever they were good at,” yet who “hated it more than
anyone I knew hated,” etc. This verbiage comes courtesy of
writer-director Harris, who, though a first-time helmer, counts the
estimable X2 among his previous screenwriting credits. Given the
disastrous script of Imaginary Heroes—one in which a teenage brother
and sister have the exchange, “Is there such a thing as a human
heart?”/“If you listen closely, you can hear them breaking”—it seems
likely that Harris was in charge of, say, copy-editing while the other
credited writers supplied all the wit, intelligence, and fun.

The only fun Imaginary Heroes’ characters have is of the
drug-induced kind, including an E-fueled holiday encounter between Tim
and his neighbor Kyle (the appropriately named Ryan Donowho) that caps
an endless montage of straight couples kissing to the strains of “Have
Yourself a Mary”—er—“Merry Little Christmas.” Hirsch, at least, with
hair in eyes and pout on lips, is believable as a moping stoner whose
demeanor was just as sullen before he lost his brother. Weaver,
however, as a sudden pot enthusiast, reacting to the wacky weed as if
she had just dropped acid? Well, the only thing more ridiculous is her
husband locking himself in the family sedan and soothing his sorrows
with Pure Prairie League’s “Let Me Love You Tonight.” (Be forewarned:
Eddie Money gets a lot of play, too.)

Even before the Yuletide experimenting, it feels as if Imaginary
Heroes should be winding to a merciful close. But then a placard
announcing “WINTER” fills the screen, and you realize that there’s
probably also going to be a spring and a summer—with, of course, the
revelation of more secrets and the unleashing of more dialogue such as
“I will fuck with everything you hold dear!” The long-awaited moral
seems to be, as Sandy tells Tim, “Things fall apart, and you put them
back together.” Or you could just walk out of the theater.

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

In The Simpsons’ episode “Homerpalooza,” Marge has the following exchange with her family:

Marge: Am I cool, kids?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Good. I’m glad. And that’s what makes me cool, not caring, right?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we’ve tried everything here.

Funny, so have the creators of Be Cool, the sequel to 1995’s infinitely more entertaining Get Shorty. A self-satisfied bore, Be Cool strains to live up to its name, taken from the follow-up novel Elmore Leonard wrote after the success Get Shorty (also based on a Leonard best-seller). John Travolta reprises his role as shylock-turned-movie-producer Chili Palmer, who is tiring of Hollywood (and, ho ho, digs on lame sequels) and decides   to get involved in the music business when he sees a fledgling Janet Jackson named Linda Moon (Christina Milian) perform. Luckily, Chili was taking a meeting with label owner Tommy Athens (James Woods) on the afternoon Athens is murdered, so Chili has a reason to pay a visit to his not-exactly-grieving widow Edie (Uma Thurman) — and, by the way, ask her help in producing this hot new thing. Life must go on, right?

Out of a cast that also includes Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, and Harvey Keitel, Travolta is the only one who doesn’t embarrass himself, though his approach to “cool” is “phoning it in.” Vaughn assumes a terribly unfunny wigger personality throughout, Thurman is irritating as she mugs and head-bobs in a highly unbelievable attempt to act down, and Keitel, arguably the biggest slummer here, is simply a charmless dirtbag. Andre 3000 gets a few laughs as an overenthusiastic member of Cedric’s posse, as does the Rock, whose light-loafered bodyguard delivers a dialogue-as-monologue from Bring It On to show off his acting chops. 

How all these characters fit together doesn’t matter much — not to the audience, nor, apparently, to director F. Gary Gray or writer Peter Steinfeld, who found it easier to just have everyone point guns and exchange “beeyotch”s than explain why, say,  the naturally evil “Russians” the characters speak of have everyone’s panties in a knot. This subplot, if it does nothing else, at least confirms that Be Cool might have been cooler in, oh, 1990.

As for the much-ballyhooed reunion of Travolta and Thurman on the dance floor, well, lightning doesn’t strike twice. As uncomfortably forced as their sorta-samba to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Sexy” may seem, however, it’s not Be Cool’s most anguishing moment. That comes courtesy of Steven Tyler, whose picture is next to the definition of cool in the dictionary yet whose cameo demands he not only act thrilled to run into Edie, Aerosmith’s former tour laundress, but also wax sentimental when Chili dares to tell him what he was really thinking about when he wrote “Sweet Emotion.” The theory is  apparently so damn touching, in fact, that Tyler instantly agrees to allow Chili’s protégé  to join the band for a song at their next L.A. gig. When Aerosmith later takes the stage in a rawkin’ concert scene, it promises to be the coolest few minutes of the movie. But when Tyler then shouts “Linda Moon!” to a sea of bafflingly receptive fans before the no-name takes the stage, Be Cool officially becomes a film only Marge Simpson could love.

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The sight of Vin Diesel covered in crap after crawling through a sewer
is not as satisfying as one might think—which means there’s no good
reason for The Pacifier to exist. Brought to us by Bringing Down the
House director Adam Shankman and Taxi writers Ben Garant and Thomas
Lennon, the film is a clear ripoff of bruiser-turned-babysitter flicks
such as Mr. Nanny and Kindergarten Cop—and exactly the kind of kids’
flick that should have self-respecting parents just saying no. No more
fart jokes. No more Home Alone–style pratfalls. And for God’s sake, no
more guns and explosions.

Regardless of what you think about the XXX
star’s head-scratching attempt at comedy, when The Pacifier opens, it
actually seems like a Vin Diesel movie. Diesel plays Shane, a Navy SEAL
involved in some anti-Serbian dealings that leave a few ships blown up
and several men dead. (Having family fun yet?) Shane takes a bullet
himself but after a short recovery is given another mission: to protect
the brood of a professor who was killed on Shane’s watch after
designing a computer program some bad guys now want. Naturally, when
Mom (Faith Ford) needs to leave to settle dead-daddy business and Helga
the Haggish Housekeeper (Carol Kane!) decides to quit, child-hating
Shane is stuck taking care of the five darlings, who range from poopy
infant to pissy teenager. Surprisingly, Shane is both less cartoonish
and less convincing than the kids, with Diesel coming off as neither a
hardened badass at the beginning nor—spoiler alert!—a lovable lout at
the end. And to be fair, just because the excrement bit is an
embarrassing failure doesn’t mean that it’s not mildly amusing when a
school official tells our hero, “Wow, looks like you’ve got a pair of
legs coming out of your shoulders!” Or when Shane refutes a girl’s
comment about his voluptuousness by saying, “They’re not boobs.” And
when Diesel sings a toddler to sleep with a song that begins, “When you
think you are low, lower than the floor”? Now that’s funny because
it’s true.

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Before Schultze got the blues, he had the mean reds. The timid title
character in writer-director Michael Schorr’s debut, Schultze Gets the
Blues, is a lifelong salt miner and polka player in a bleak industrial
German town. Forced into early retirement, Schultze silently drinks
beer with his friends, eats dinner alone, and spends his afternoons
polishing garden gnomes and padding around his modest home, unsure of
whether to fluff a pillow or take a nap. Without work, his days are
emptier, but it’s clear that life has never been a wild ride for
Schultze.

Until one sleepless night, that is, when a fateful turn of the radio
dial introduces our downcast hero to something new. (Apparently, Clear
Channel hasn’t made the same inroads in Germany that it has stateside.)
Schultze (Horst Krause) doesn’t know quite what to do when he hears
spirited zydeco coming out of his aging wireless—right after a local
station’s traffic-news segment reports, “There is no traffic news.” So
he listens hard, occasionally glancing at the receiver as if it had
just sprouted legs, then turns the radio off and takes a few steps
toward his bed. But he doesn’t make it: Back to the zydeco and the
quizzical looks, until Schultze finally waddles over to his accordion
and begins to play. It’s the same old polka that he always practices,
but he plays it faster and faster until it sounds like a joyful number
that might as well have come from another world.

That world, of course, is Cajun country, and given that Krause looks
like a cross between Drew Carey and John Popper, it’s hard to imagine a
more appropriate actor to play a man newly obsessed with
accordion-based blues. As Schultze, the actor is closely shorn and
hugely waisted, always wearing a dapper hat, which he doffs in greeting
or thanks more often than he actually speaks. This is a man with such a
meek acceptance of the way things are that it seems unlikely he ever
suspected there might be more to existence than work, polka, and beer.

This depiction of late-life searching has a thematic connection to
About Schmidt, and Krause’s resemblance to Carey isn’t the only thing
the movie has in common with The Drew Carey Show. If Cleveland moved to
Germany and the Carey gang were heading toward retirement, they’d seem
a lot like Schultze and best buds Jürgen (Harald Warmbrunn) and Manfred
(Karl Fred Müller). Schorr finds humor in the soul-crushing dullness of
lower-middle-class life, from Jürgen’s ridiculously hostile
admonishment of a lawn-mowing neighbor (after he carefully removes a
plant from the window he needs to open) to the friends’ shocked
response to their watering hole’s new barmaid, who dances on tables and
doles out the pints they’re used to receiving from some old coot.
Though they eventually warm up to her, at first the lass is more change
than the trio can handle. The same-old is held in such regard in
Schultze’s sleepy village that he actually consults his doctor when the
strange sound that came out of his radio gets under his skin. “A change
in musical taste is not an illness,” the doc has to tell him.

For a film about music, Schultze Gets the Blues is oddly quiet—which
feels appropriate in, say, dialogue-free scenes between longtime
friends, but awkward the few times Schultze is bold enough to explore
his new style in front of an audience at the local nursing home or with
his music club. (With responses ranging from silence to polite applause
to accusations of his playing “bloody nigger music,” neither
performance goes over very well.) The only soundtrack to Schultze’s
accordion-free activities is his heavy breathing, which sounds like
nothing so much as a series of sighs.

The leisurely, episodic style that Schorr employs to summarize
Schultze’s pre-zydeco life—a beer here, a chess game there, more beer
later—feels like sloppiness in the movie’s second half, which finds
Schultze in the United States, sent by his club to represent it in
their Texas sister city’s music festival. Though Schultze barely speaks
English, he takes the opportunity to explore the South, drifting from a
crab-eating session on a houseboat to a meeting with a bayou cop named
Capt. Kirk. But because Schultze’s demeanor remains largely
unchanged—he’s too intimidated to play at the festival, and he’s
sheepish around anyone who tries to befriend him—it’s difficult to
ascertain whether this trip is a life-affirming move or a dismal
reminder that he should have never flown the coop.

Schorr never explains, either, exactly where Schultze goes or how he
manages to obtain the dilapidated houseboat he uses to get there.
Instead, the film becomes more defiantly picturesque, relying on humid
waterfront atmospheres and showcasing the American equivalent of
Schultze’s peers. Schorr’s lens is too often trained in on a table of
old men playing poker or a few well-lined couples dancing—some looking
directly at the camera—at a honky-tonk. As beautifully composed as some
of these shots are, they do little more than turn Schultze Gets the
Blues into a travelogue. Schultze’s story may not be a very exciting
one, but it’s not until he’s pushed to its side that the telling
becomes a bore.

Copyright 2005 movie-babe.com