You may not have realized this, but Lindsay Lohan’s boobs are starring
in their very own movie this summer. Oh, and there’s a car in it, too.
Herbie: Fully Loaded is the fifth film to feature the lively little
Love Bug since his 1969 debut, though obviously the white VW will be a
novelty to this G-rated Disney production’s target audience. At times,
however, it’s questionable exactly whom director Angela Robinson
(D.E.B.S.) is aiming for. The opening montage includes footage from old
movies and headlines about what the frisky Beetle has been up to over
the years, while the soundtrack is loaded with classic-rock staples
such as “Born to Be Wild,” “Working for the Weekend,” and “Jump.” And,
of course, there’s the bosomy Lohan, who plays recent college graduate
Maggie Peyton, the skilled daughter in a racing family—though Dad
(Michael Keaton) won’t let her compete. That changes, however, when she
picks Herbie up from a dump and, well, gets his motor runnin’—which
leads to a rivalry with champion driver Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon).

The
kiddies may get a kick out of Fully Loaded, whose squeaky-clean
blandness is enlivened only by No. 53’s impossibly cute mannerisms,
most notably squirting oil on anyone who insults him and swooning,
headlights aflutter, over a newer model. But older audience members may
notice that the fleet of scriptwriters (six are credited) get the
movie’s lessons a bit muddled: Honesty is highlighted, but a Big Lie is
quickly forgiven. Likewise, Maggie’s driving skills are praised, though
it’s the bug that determines whether she wins or loses every race. The
cast members all deliver workmanlike performances, with Keaton
appropriately concerned, love interest Justin Long fittingly
goo-goo-eyed, and Lohan suitably squealy and tight-T-shirt-clad,
suggesting that the rumor her décolletage was digitally reduced by two
cup sizes was just that. But don’t let that worry you, ’rents: Fully
Loaded was shot well before Lohan’s sickening weight loss, so your
young daughters won’t develop eating disorders after watching this
feel-gooder—and it’ll be years before they’re asking for breast
implants.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The big-screen version of Bewitched has the same moral as its
predecessor: You can’t change who you are. This adage is, naturally,
embodied by Isabel (Nicole Kidman), the real-life discontented witch
who ends up playing Samantha, the fictional discontented witch in the
movie’s remake-within-a-remake of the 1964 TV series.

But let it also be a lesson to Will Ferrell, whose character is a
bumbling but arrogant actor with whom Isabel falls in love—and yet
another role that the beady-eyed comic was never meant to play. (Two
more: Melinda and Melinda’s lovesick nebbish and Kicking &
Screaming’s suburban patsy.) Ferrell’s Jack Wyatt may sound a bit like
Ron Burgundy, the mustachioed Lothario whose affair with Christina
Applegate’s newswoman in Anchorman was as entertainingly ridiculous as
the cast’s wide lapels. But the self-absorbed Jack would never declare
that he wants to be friends with Isabel’s heinie, and therein lies the
problem: Unless his romantic life is played strictly for laughs,
Ferrell will never stop being the kind of guy you regard as a weird,
doughy friend.

And even though Bewitched is a Nora Ephron confection—both directed
and co-written by Ms. When Harry Met Sally/ÊSleepless in
Seattle/ÊYou’ve Got Mail—the buddy-boyfriend approach just doesn’t do.
The script, also penned by Delia Ephron and Anchorman writer Adam
McKay, does at least give an explanation of why the fetching Isabel
would fall for Jack, an overexposed and generally disliked megastar
whose last few movies have bombed: A born witch, she’s just moved to
Los Angeles to renounce her powers and start a new, normal life. More
than anything, Isabel wants to settle down with a man who needs her
and, unlike her smooth-talking warlock father (Michael Caine), doesn’t
always get what he wants.

Jack, meanwhile, has been persuaded by his agent, Richie (Jason
Schwartzman), to slum in a television series in an attempt to
resuscitate his career. Wanting to show Bewitched-within-Bewitched’s
producers, in accordance with Richie’s wishes, that he’s no desperate
wash-up but “the sheriff of Ballsville,” Jack makes a list of demands,
including that “every Wednesday will be cake day!” and that an unknown
be cast as Samantha, so he can be alone in the spotlight. Soon after,
he spies Isabel wriggling her nose in a bookstore and talks her into
taking the part. “I need you!” he says. “You need me,” she swoons.

Isabel’s falling for pretty much the first guy who speaks to her is
unbelievable, yes, but not as much as Kidman’s breathy-bimbo spin on
her character. With eyes wide and voice pitched to the sky, her Isabel
never stops being Daddy’s widdle girl, even after the script has her
get wise to (and, gosh darn it, angry about!) Jack’s
scene-hogging—which becomes more frantic after Jack remembers
Bewitched’s big joke: that Darrin was replaced—“and no one noticed!” A
spoiled, pouty, and ultimately dim princess does not a charming leading
lady make—even when paired with an equally spoiled and pouty paramour.
Ferrell, at least, does get to go a little cowbell in Bewitched’s
otherwise deflated second half, which finds Jack officially under
Isabel’s vengeance-driven love spell: Suddenly skipping and spinning at
the sight of her, Jack is later heartbroken when they have a tiff, and
reduced to sobs (to the tune of “Everybody Hurts”) whenever he sees a
janitor’s broom or some pointy-hatted trick-or-treaters.

As Bewitched delves further into romance, its function as tribute is
largely abandoned. It’s only a small loss. Kidman absolutely has
Elizabeth Montgomery’s nose twitch down cold, but otherwise the
sitcom’s magic is correctly handled only by a few: Shirley MacLaine is
a natural as Iris, the hammy actress cast as Samantha’s mother, Endora.
Carole Shelley is also note-perfect as the fumbling Aunt Clara. And
just like in Batman Begins, Caine is the classiest and most consistent
comic relief here, whether popping up as the Gorton’s fisherman to give
Isabel advice in the freezer aisle or temporarily forgetting about his
daughter’s troubles to hit on Iris. The irony of the headliner’s
upstaging is irresistible: Even if Ferrell manages to wring out a few
laughs here or there, in the end, no one’s going to notice.

The characters in Saving Face also try to hide their true natures,
but not because of lifestyle-shifting whims. Rather, two generations of
Chinese-Americans find their choices restricted by cultural taboos,
with the mother harshly judging her daughter even while being
ostracized by her own parents for failing to adhere to their strict
moral code.

Michelle Krusiec plays Wil, a young, single surgeon living in New
York City whose widowed mother (Joan Chen) nags her to go to the mixers
the Chinese community in Flushing holds every Friday night. Wil gamely
attends, usually dressed in boxy button-ups and slacks, not in hope of
meeting a nice young man but to better mask her secret: that she
prefers the company of women. Her sexual orientation becomes more
difficult to hide, however, when her mother, who had previously been
living with Wil’s grandparents, shows up at her door with the intention
of staying indefinitely. Mom’s upset, and Wil fears that the
48-year-old is also sick. (Actually, she’s pregnant, and her father,
played by Jin Wang, is threatening to disown her unless she finds a
husband before the baby is born.) At the same time, Wil is starting to
fall for Vivian (Lynn Chen), an openly gay ballet dancer who gets
increasingly frustrated by Wil’s reluctance to tell her family about
the relationship.

For all its familial heaviness, writer-director Alice Wu’s debut
displays a light touch. Krusiec’s Wil, hair always in a ponytail and
shoulders slightly hunched, is a sassy but dutiful daughter and
granddaughter, rolling her eyes at her family’s traditions while among
friends but still doing her best to respect them. And she’s no smartass
around the lovely and straightforward Vivian, either. Not quite
bumbling but definitely lovestruck, the young doctor brings
vulnerability and sweetness to a relationship you can’t help but root
for.

A Chinese-American lesbian love story may sound like something
targeted to a very specific audience, and Wu’s script certainly has
some fun with Americans’ perceptions of Asian culture. (A video store’s
Chinese film section, for example, offers only The Last Emperor, The
Joy Luck Club, and porn.) But Saving Face’s entertaining takes on
intergenerational conflict and relationships in general transcend
nationality. Joan Chen, whose character is called only “Ma,” moves
nimbly between being her father’s deferential daughter, Wil’s uptight
mother, and an impossibly young-looking and lonely woman who still gets
nervous about dates—which she goes on a string of, all hopeless. And
for all the elders’ discipline, even the old folks at the dance can’t
stop themselves from dividing junior-high-style into boys and girls,
each group bellyaching about the other.

There’s a bit of tragedy thrown in for good measure, but this being
more or less a romantic comedy, it basically just makes people put
aside their differences and realize what’s important in life. That’s
not very surprising, but after 90 minutes of everyone struggling to
keep up prim appearances, Saving Face’s brazen resolution sure is: If
people don’t like how other people choose to live, one character
suggests, “fuck ’em.”

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Après Vous… is the kind of farce in which people hide from each
other, information is withheld, and silly lies are told. In
writer-director Pierre Salvadori’s French confection, the duplicity
seldom has to do with matters life-or-death—unless, of course, you’re
one of those people for whom romance is a life-or-death matter. In the
end, the film is all about love.

And comedy, of course. Luckily, star Daniel Auteuil is charming
enough to make all the high jinks bearable. Auteuil plays Antoine, a
genial middle-aged waiter who’s more devoted to his job than his
girlfriend, Christine (Maryline Canto). When he’s cutting through the
park after work one evening, late for yet another date, Antoine is
again derailed when he finds a man named Louis (José Garcia) trying to
hang himself from a tree. He stops him, naturally—and then brings Louis
home, helps him get a job, and tries to reunite him with the woman who
broke his heart, a florist named Blanche (Sandrine Kiberlain).
Christine, obviously, is not pleased.

Co-written by Salvadori, Benoît Graffin, and David Léotard (based on
an idea by Danièle Dubroux), the film doesn’t entirely treat Louis’
depression as a joke. His frequent anxiety is both amusing and
sympathetic—a scene in which he panics and tries to ditch an interview
for a job he’s not qualified for is gut-wrenching—and when he’s really
down, both the script and Garcia get it just right. “Even breathing
hurts me,” Louis says, getting up from the table when Antoine and
Christine’s conversation turns unthinkably polite and pedestrian. For
most of the movie, though, Garcia is like a French Tony Shalhoub, both
resembling the actor and playing the character’s Monk-like neuroses
(he’s afraid, for example, of things hanging above his head) with
perfect understatement and comic timing.

Auteuil, however, is the movie’s centerpiece, and his puppyish
Antoine is goofy without being dumb and eager to please without seeming
pathetic. (Well, at least most of the time—his knee-jerk purchase of
another party’s canceled wedding flowers to get on Blanche’s good side
is a little ridiculous.) And Salvadori & Co. give him plenty to
work with. In one of the most entertaining scenes, Antoine visits
Louis’ grandmother to intercept the suicide letter Louis has mailed.
Tiny and temporarily blind after a cataract operation, Grandma welcomes
Antoine and begs him to read the note that has just been
delivered—which he does, only turning statements such as “I want to
die” and “I have no friends” into their opposites and further
embellishing by saying Louis is dating someone new, a model who’s also
studying economics.

At a leisurely 110 minutes, Après Vous… is a bit too much whimsy,
further encumbered by a sorta-happily-ever-after resolution that
doesn’t make much sense. But these are small drawbacks in a film that
manages to achieve the seemingly impossible: It’s a love-conquers-all
froth that even a thinking moviegoer can enjoy.

Happily Ever After is also French, and its take on love is, in
general, far more cynical. A look at three middle-aged men—two married
with children, one a swinging single—writer-director-actor Yvan Attal’s
bittersweet comedy examines, as one character tells a philandering
friend, “fairy tales you learned when you were a boy.”

Those fairy tales, of course, regard everlasting love, a state that
Georges (Alain Chabat) and Vincent (Attal) are starting to doubt
they’ve attained. Hotel manager Georges is married to the gorgeous but
increasingly combative Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner); car salesman
Vincent’s seemingly unshakable marriage to Gabrielle (Charlotte
Gainsbourg, Attal’s real wife), a real-estate agent, is becoming dulled
by routine. When the friends are discussing their predicaments, both
sigh with envy as Fred (Alain Cohen), also a salesman, takes calls from
the two women he’s scheduled afternoon and evening dates with later.

Attal, whose previous multihyphen effort was 2001’s My Wife Is an
Actress (which also co-starred Gainsbourg as his other half), doesn’t
present these marrieds as suburban Stepfords. The entire movie has a
hip, young feel, thanks to its soundtrack (Radiohead, Velvet
Underground), its dryly comic script, and the rock-and-roll
attractiveness of the couple it focuses on, Vincent and Gabrielle. Out
of all the characters, they seem the least likely to become
discontented: The opening scene shows Gabrielle being picked up in a
club by a stranger; only later do we find out that the mystery man is
her husband. They play other games as well, with Gabrielle being
partial to food fights and Vincent forever sneaking up on his wife and
son to scare the bejesus out of them. Vincent plays cards with the
boys, and Gabrielle spends afternoons record-shopping—in other words,
each has a sense of play, respect for the other’s space, and a
seemingly still-burning attraction to the other.

It’s a bit of a surprise, then, that it’s their marriage that gets
the rockiest. Vincent begins an affair that Gabrielle guesses but
doesn’t mention, while she flirts with infidelity as well (in one of
the movie’s coolest scenes, a wordless record-store encounter with
Johnny Depp, set to “Creep”). When Fred and Georges find out, the
script goes further into what’s-it-all-about, with the bachelor
admitting his loneliness and Georges becoming more exasperated with his
own situation.

Happily Ever After is more realistic than Après Vous…, yes, but
that doesn’t mean it’s never dreamy. And it’s when things go fanciful
that the movie stumbles: Attal incorporates a heartbreaking fantasy
sequence so seamlessly into a scene in which Gabrielle is showing an
apartment that it seems to be a flashback. And its final scene is
flat-out surreal; it would be romantic—if it didn’t involve two
previously unmatched characters and raise the question about what
exactly Attal is preaching. You won’t necessarily come away from
Happily Ever After thinking any of the characters’ choices are better
than others. But it will make you feel all their anguish, happiness,
emptiness, and passions—and that’s better than any pat agenda.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

The couple in Mr. & Mrs. Smith could be any of us, really. Well,
set aside the fact that they’re assassins. And that they look like Brad
Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Besides that, John and Jane Smith are pretty
typical: They feel trapped in a joyless marriage. They barely hide
their mutual resentment, whether discussing the drapes or correcting
each other during a therapy session. They always eat at 7, usually
silently, with sporadic strained conversation centering on what Jane
has added to a same-old dish. Even if the pair weren’t trying to off
one another, John’s observation to his wife would still ring true: “You
obviously want me dead, and I’m becoming less and less concerned about
your welfare.”

See, the fabulous John and Jane, living luxuriously in suburbia and
working for rival organizations (how many assassination agencies are
there, exactly?), have long kept their true occupations hidden but now
have, well, a professional interest in each other. Husband and wife
finally decide to take each other out not because their relationship is
in trouble—though Simon Kinberg’s hugely anti-marriage script makes
much of this—but because they discover that, for reasons unexplained,
they were both hired to eliminate the same target (The O.C.’s
puppy-doggish Adam Brody, donning a Fight Club T-shirt). This shared
objective apparently allows them to officially go Bruckheimer on each
other.

Pitt and Jolie are, of course, sleek and sexy. As he’s done in films
from Snatch to Ocean’s Twelve, Pitt gets laughs out of little moments:
John’s self-congratulatory shimmy after a death-defying dune-buggy ride
or the strangling motion he makes when he’s explaining to the therapist
how he feels about Jane. And through most of the movie, Jolie is a
swoony mix of Lara Croft and Batman, double-fisting automatic weapons
when necessary and, in one superslick scene, gliding down the side of a
building aided by a purse-anchored wire.

But part of the trouble with Mr. & Mrs. Smith is that although
the stars are good at alternately affecting ennui and cool, they go
flat when director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) asks them to bring
on the rage—and this happens so early, you wonder where the already
strained story could possibly be headed. The answer, really, is
nowhere. Once John and Jane’s conflict of interest is out in the open,
it’s one explosive battle after another, resulting in the destruction
of their home, a department store, and, in a Bad Boys II–Êstyle highway
melee, multiple cars. All the stuff blowing up is supposed to symbolize
the couple’s love-hate passion, of course. But there’s a problem with
building what amounts to a small-scale romantic comedy around
blockbuster-sized violence: Whether Jane is running over her husband or
they start clutching at each other after a particularly heated fight,
the scenes are full of bluster yet devoid of genuine emotion—so much so
that it seems likely the actors are a real-life couple after all.

The only relief during Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s tedious,
headache-inducing last half comes from Vince Vaughn, doing a
characteristically motormouthed turn as an apron-strings associate who
punctuates his spiels about efficiently pulling a job with comments
about how his mother is “the only woman I ever trusted.” And yes, this
is a movie ultimately about trusting the opposite sex. And, ostensibly,
about how ordinary people with ordinary problems can put those problems
aside in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Thing is, everything
is extraordinary here, from the couple’s unruffled disposal of their
targets early on to the peril that finally brings them back together.
Vaughn’s lively bit part, some clever dialogue, and the headliners’ sex
appeal manage to keep Mr. & Mrs. Smith from being a completely
dehumanized disaster. But when Jane insists “Come on, it was just a
little bomb” in one mea culpa moment, you can’t help wishing it were
even littler.

In Torremolinos 73, co-stars Javier Cámara and Candela Peña do much
more with much less. In Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger’s
low-budget debut, the pair also play a married couple—though materially
poor, rather ordinary-looking, and very much in love. Yet when a little
action drops into their vanilla lives, this comedy succeeds in becoming
more interesting instead of simply overloading its audience with frenzy.

At the start of Torremolinos 73, Alfredo (Cámara) is an unsuccessful
encyclopedia salesman, getting doors slammed in his face by everyone
from little old ladies to kids. His landlady is threatening to evict
him, while his wife, Carmen (Peña), wants a baby. When his boss, Don
Carlos (Juan Diego), sits him down to explain that the encyclopedia
market is a thing of the past, Alfredo expects the worst. But instead
of getting fired, Alfredo is given another career opportunity: Carlos
asks him and his co-workers to switch over to the company’s new film
division, which will produce “scientific” movies on reproduction for
the Scandinavian market. In short, they’ll all be making a little
homemade porn, behind the camera and in front of it.

As the title indicates, Torremolinos 73 takes place in Andalucia in
the early ’70s, an era that’s evoked with details from Alfredo’s
turtlenecks and ’stache to the washed-out cinematography. When Alfredo
agrees to take on these new duties—urged on by Carmen, who’s thinking
that the generous compensation will finally let them start a family—the
movie essentially turns into a cheerier version of Boogie Nights.
Initially nervous as they’re trained—by an alleged Ingmar Bergman
collaborator and his tarty wife—in how to simultaneously shoot and be
sexy, Alfredo and Carmen quickly gain, ahem, confidence. After Alfredo
gets a good response from Carlos on their first film, Berger shows a
gleeful montage of the couple’s subsequent efforts, in which characters
are assumed and many pieces of secondhand furniture are violated, all
to a poppy soundtrack.

Though Carmen merely delights in all the new things they can buy—and
is slightly freaked out when she’s recognized shopping—Alfredo gets
serious about filmmaking when it becomes apparent he has a gift for it.
Torremolinos 73, also the title of the script Alfredo writes and
shoots, then becomes a rather funny parody of Bergmanesque art cinema,
with Carmen playing the muse while Alfredo directs her caped lover—aka
Death—with blather such as “You have an endless desire for desire!”

Cámara, who starred as the obsessed nurse in Talk to Her, is a
likable hangdog hero, playing Alfredo straight and slightly tortured
while displaying a goofiness that recalls Peter Sellers. And Peña, a
plainer Rachel Weisz, makes a believable transition from skittish
housewife to camera-ready siren. Though the tone of Torremolinos 73 is
essentially bright, Berger does add a few storytelling twists that let
the actors wrestle with some deeper emotions. Anger, jealousy, and
disappointment are all nicely played out when Alfredo shoots his final
scene. And happily, the marriage rights itself—without a superstar,
machine gun, or bomb in sight.

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

Generally, it’s not a good idea to let a 7-year-old write a screenplay.
Even if he’s Racer Rodriguez, son of Robert, renegade auteur and most
recently director of the slick, cool, and just plain gangbusters Sin
City. But when Racer started spinning tales about a creature who’s
half-shark, half-boy, the elder Rodriguez decided to turn the stories
into a movie: The Adventures of Sharkboy & Lavagirl in 3D, for
which father and son share the blame—er, writing credit. From the
horrible 3-D to the presence of David Arquette, Sharkboy & Lavagirl
answers one of its own character’s questions: “What does it mean when
your train of thought wrecks?” The script has a few such semiclever
metaphors, including a winding Stream of Consciousness and a tumultuous
Sea of Confusion, brought to life on Sharkboy and Lavagirl’s home
planet, Drool. But mostly, the 94-minute movie repeats the word “dream”
approximately 10,000 times. That’s because its main character, Max
(Cayden Boyd), is a dreamer, keeps a dream journal, and rather
laughably gets bullied with such threats as “I’m going to burst your
bubble, dream boy!” after he tells his class about his run-in with
superheroes Sharkboy (Taylor Lautner) and Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley).
Soon the pair crash Max’s classroom—Lautner scowling like a tiny
bouncer, Dooley smiling like a mental patient—and whisk him off to
Drool to help them battle an evil…electricity enthusiast, Mr.
Electric (George Lopez, who also plays Max’s teacher).

Then a message
flashes to put your paper glasses on, and things really get annoying:
Nearly all color drains from the screen, and along comes the wonder of
3-D—used mostly on the Rodriguezes’ favorite move: people spitting out
their food. With glasses off, you can better see that Drool is actually
an imaginatively noirish amusement park—at least until the killer plugs
are unleashed. As for the story itself, its message about the power of
imagination is pounded home from beginning to end, sometimes more or
less logically (“Everything that ever is or was began with a dream”),
sometimes not (“Don’t smash people’s dreams, because you’ll smash your
own as well!”). Worse, Boyd’s stiff, wussy portrayal of Max will have
you siding with a bully when he follows Max’s Sharkboy story with a
tale of his own: “I have a friend who’s half-dork, half-boy. I call him
Dorkboy.”

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com

You may look at Lords of Dogtown and say, “Jesus Christ, another
Grind.” (Or, more likely, “Jesus Christ, another what’s-its-name—that
crappy skateboarding movie from a couple of years ago.”) And Lords of
Dogtown is indeed a story already told, a fictionalized version of
2002’s Dogtown and Z-Boys. That documentary, by
skateboarder-turned-filmmaker Stacy Peralta, recounted the
hoods-to-heroes history of a group of Venice, Calif., skaters who
transformed their hobby into an extreme sport after the introduction of
urethane wheels in the early ’70s.

Peralta intentionally put out Dogtown and Z-Boys before getting
started on the Lords of Dogtown script, just in case Hollywood decided
to bastardize his recollections until they turned into, well, Grind. In
the movie’s opening minutes, things don’t look promising: Poseur
teenagers trying to outcool one another, ridiculous tough talk such as
“I ain’t surfing no sloppy seconds,” and director Catherine Hardwicke’s
nauseating overreliance on shaky handheld camera—whether she’s zooming
in on surf- or skateboard action or just panning over a collection of
newspaper clippings—all add up to an eye-rollingly desperate attempt to
project attitude. And the group’s moniker, “Boy Kings”? Please.

But then Hardwicke calms down, a little Hendrix plays, and a couple
of surprisingly good actors—notably, the magnetic Emile Hirsch, as Jay
Adams, and Heath Ledger, unrecognizable and dead-on as the boys’
stoner/businessman mentor, Skip Engblom—grab your attention and let you
know that this isn’t just another teen movie. With a kickass soundtrack
that features only the good kind of ’70s music, including David Bowie,
the Faces, Deep Purple, and the Beach Boys, and an uplifting story
about a bunch of likable kids whose passion unexpectedly turns into a
career, Lords of Dogtown ends up feeling like Almost Famous, only with
surfer dudes instead of a socially awkward rock nerd.

The film begins in 1975, when surf-shop owner Skip decides to make a
competitive team out of the sun-and-fun posse that hangs out at his
store—which in addition to Jay includes Peralta (Elephant’s John
Robinson), Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk), and Sid (Michael Angarano), the
genial rich kid eager to fit in. The combination of new,
concrete-hugging wheels and a summer drought that’s keeping Venice’s
pools dry allows the boys to invent the gravity-defying style that’s
dominated skateboarding ever since. Soon, the kids are getting
noticed—at competitions, where square judges scoff, “He didn’t do one
wheelie!”; at parties, where Betties swarm; and by big sporting-goods
corporations, which begin signing up the Z-Boys (so named after Skip’s
store, Zephyr) after their photos appear in a magazine spread.

The Zephyr team’s brush with fame isn’t an entirely smooth or
welcome one—on their increasingly heavy sponsorship, one boy remarks,
“Man, Stacy looks like a stock car!”—and each of the guys faces
personal problems of his own. (Rebecca De Mornay, bedraggled beyond
recognition, plays Jay’s hapless druggie mother in the most developed
subplot.) Shot in San Pedro and Imperial Beach, the film uses
re-creations of the Z-Boys’ original hangouts, most prominently a
dilapidated pier that helps give its version of California a
less-than-sunny vibe.

But the bulk of Lords of Dogtown focuses on the fun had by a bunch
of previously aimless teenagers who suddenly realize, We’re going to be
on summer vacation for the next 20 years! And Hardwicke luxuriates in
it: A party scene seems to unfold in real time, from its most jubilant
hangout moments to the inevitable “I am a golden god”–Êlike messiness.
The boys’ first successful foray into a stranger’s empty pool is
accompanied by the whole of “Space Truckin’,” playing from the sweet
minutes they start kissing air to the oh-shit instant they’re chased
out by some dude in a Ron Burgundy suit and ’stache. But they always
get away, always laugh about it afterward, and even when they wreak a
little havoc, their detractors usually shut up once they see what the
Boy Kings can do. By the time Lords of Dogtown ends, the term doesn’t
sound so ridiculous at all.

If there’s any title cooler than “Boy King,” it’s “rock star.” And
though the musicians in Rock School are only 9 to 17, they deliver what
their filthy-mouthed teacher promises at the beginning of the
documentary: “They’ll rock your asses.”

Yes, Don Argott’s Rock School seems awfully similar to School of
Rock, the 2003 comedy in which Jack Black took a group of students
under his windmilling wing. Here, the teacher in question is Paul
Green, the founder and director of the Paul Green School of Rock Music
in Philadelphia: a hyper 32-going-on-17-year-old who admits he’s
probably not qualified to teach. That’s perhaps an understatement,
given that his method of encouragement is to say, “If you mess up once,
I’ll punch your face out.” As the mother of one of Green’s
approximately 120 students deadpans, “It’s not the Sorbonne.”

Green began the program in his living room in 1999, after his own
music career didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Focusing on a largely
’70s-rock catalog heavy on Santana and Frank Zappa, Green veers from
joking around with the kids to what can diplomatically be described as
tough love. He soon recants his earlier statement about his
qualifications to say he’s a natural teacher, though a handful of Rock
School’s 93 minutes, mainly shot in the school’s tight spaces, may make
you cringe. Expletives and some serious temper tantrums are a typical
reaction from Green when a student screws up, and Argott catches him in
quite a few moments of red-faced fury bracing enough to make even
audience members sit up a little straighter. He can’t be too nice,
Green says during an interview, because the kids are “manipulative
little fucks.”

Harsh, yes, but then again, it’s hard to argue with results. Green
is the main attraction at first, but when his students finally get to
play, they steal the show. Not all of the kids are wicked talented:
Nine-year-old mouth-breathing twins Asa and Tucker are more cute than
impressive as they rock out in the school’s Beginners’ Black Sabbath
Show, and 16-year-old hangdog Will sticks around mostly for social
reasons—in Green’s words, he’s “a piss-poor musician.” But when a
select group of students travels to Germany to participate in
Zappanale, a five-day Zappa festival, they do their teacher proud.
There, the kids play in front of a huge audience with former Zappa
collaborator Napoleon Murphy Brock, and their performance is an
exhilarating mesh of perfect timing, gritty vocals, and stellar
musicianship: A solo by tiny, lightning-fingered guitar prodigy C.J.,
for example, ends with the rest of the band and then Brock himself
bowing before him.

Indeed, Rock School captures much of the joy of its fictional
predecessor, and without the sugarcoating of another recent
look-what-kids-can-do documentary, Mad Hot Ballroom. The students’
thrill at what they can accomplish is one obvious source of
feel-goodness, but many of the movie’s smiles come from Green’s
never-ending patter. Whether he’s urging his infant son to say “Jethro
Tull” or challenging one boy to do better by asking if he wants to play
for the Bangles, Green manages to convey that his enterprise is
fun—though fun to be taken quite seriously. “We can laugh at
ourselves,” the teacher advises at one point, “but now we’re going to
play some Sabbath, and that’s no laughing matter.”

copyright 2005 movie-babe.com