Maybe, over the past 12 years since
Kevin Smith’s Clerks came out, we as viewers have become more
accustomed to edge-obliterating humor. Pop-culture obsession. Filthy
language, and filthier scenarios. Television has done it best, with
series such as Strangers With Candy, Crank Yankers, and the
always-topical South Park. Smith, naturally, was his own imitator as
well, continuing to push the envelope in films such as Mallrats,
Dogma, and Chasing Amy. The bar seems to have been raised
ever-higher, and if we aren’t suitably and giddily shocked by the
shows or movies that seem to exist solely for this purpose, maybe
we’ll yawn and walk away kinda disappointed.

Or maybe Smith, not unlike George Lucas
– uh oh, here comes the hate letters — should have left well
enough alone.

The announcement of a Clerks sequel
sent Randal-esque geeks into a tizzy. But along with the ad campaign
came a little trepidation. First, what’s with the bright purple and
yellow? Second, why he hell is Rosario Dawson placed – saucily! –
front and center on the poster? OK, she might have earned a some
fanboy cred in Sin City – but that black-and-white bundle of
debauchery is worlds and $$$ away from Smith’s color-free, $27,000
debut.

Clerks II picks up 10 character-years
after its 1994 predecessor.  Best buds and nearly-lovable Jersey
losers  Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) are no
longer working at the Quick Stop and RST Video because of a fire –
shown in an inspired opening scene that makes the transition from b/w
to color – and begin slacking at Mooby’s, an Everychain fast-food
joint. Months later, Dante’s quitting to move to Florida with his
well-off fiancee, Emma (Smith’s wife, Jennifer
Schwalbach, who’s obviously hopped on the trendy show-your-skeleton
train). There, he’ll run his father-in-law’s car wash. Dante’s still
a little torn between staying in Jersey or starting a grown-up life.
And it doesn’t help that he gets all goo-goo-eyed around his boss,
Becky (Dawson), and even – ugh – paints her toenails in the
office.

Will he stay or will he go? Clerks II,
it turns out, ends up roaming into Jersey Girl territory as the clock
ticks on Dante’s last day. Smith has been vocal about wanting to
present the dilemmas facing the increasing population of adolescents
in their 30s, just as the first Clerks mirrored college-age slackers
who may bitch about their dead-end jobs, but deep-down love how
punch-clock postpones the grown-up world. And unlike his latest,
Smith handles the emotional angle well: The main theme here is
deciding to either do what you love or do what others expect you to
love, and as the movie nears the end of its 98 minutes, things get
pretty touching – Randal even makes a heartfelt speech. You’ve been
warned.

But considering that mushiness is not
what Clerks is all about — not to mention the flogging Smith
received over Jersey Girl (Smith even thanks the movie in II’s
closing credits for teaching him, in so many words, how to “take it
up the ass”) — the majority of the sequel tries to recapture the
original’s edge. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are back,
though they’re now 12-steppers. (When a buyer asks Jay if he’s
tempted to get high, he responds in his unchanged stoner voice, “Not
with the power of Jesus Christ on my side!”) Dante is still
burdened by the weight of responsibility as Randal constantly pulls
him away from his duties. And, of course, there are heated movie
debates, which turn out to be the funniest scenes: Randal goes off on
Lord of the Rings, rather accurately (for some, anyway) mimicking the
action in the trilogy. And he exasperatingly lets it be known that
“There’s only *one* Return, and that’s of the Jedi!”

Unfortunately, most of the dirty bits
of Clerks II comes off as if Smith borrowed some tired
screw-the-customers ideas from Waiting…, concocted one disgusting
bachelor-party send-off (even though the term “interspecies
erotica” is kinda funny), added a running gag on racial slurs,
and sprinkled the script with "pussy" galore. Worse is
the head-scratching filler: An unironic go-kart scene seems to last
forever. And Becky attempts to teach Dante how to dance, on the roof,
a la the original’s hockey game. OK,  Smith may get a pass for
allowing Dawson a chance to sex things up. But the  choreographed,
seemingly town-wide number that follows is arguably more sickening
than the interspecies stage show. Twelve years ago, Randal and Dante
would have been appalled.

Maybe M. Night Shyamalan should turn
his focus to comedy. The writer, director, and onetime King of
Satisfying Twists now presents Lady in the Water, his follow-up to
2004’s disastrous The Village.   Lady might not redeem him: It’s not
nearly as bad as The Village, nor as convoluted as Unbreakable. It’s
almost in the same ballpark – let’s say in the satellite parking
lot — as his sci-fi thriller, Signs. And compared to The Sixth
Sense? This release further suggests that Shyamalan’s simple, finely
crafted breakout hit will one day mark him as a one-hit wonder.

However, Lady in the Water is funny as
hell. Paul Giamatti stars as Cleveland, the stuttering, easily
freaked super of an apartment building that’s quite realistically
filled with some oddballs. Bob
Balaban, likely best recognized as the dry NBC suit on Seinfeld, is –
also dead-on – a terse, cynical film critic who, barely provoked,
bitches that there’s no originality in cinema anymore and immediately
responds to a polite query that his latest screening, a romance,
“Sucked….why do people in movies always talk in the rain?” Even
Shyamalan, who always makes a cameo in his movies, has a significant
part here as a writer who has a lightly antagonistic
relationship with his roommate-sister (Sarita Choudhury). Even if the auteur’s
ability to chill is sliding, he proves here more than in any other of
his movies that he can write a script that’s consistently humorous
without being sitcom-y – and if he ever gives up filmmaking
entirely, he can also do a pretty good straight man.

The
plot builds around an otherworldly looking woman (Bryce Dallas
Howard) who seems to have been living in the building’s pool.
Cleveland catches a glimpse of her one night, and later wakes up to
find her standing next to his bed. She’s not a talker, this one –
perhaps Shyamalan learned his lesson after her awful performance as a
blind woman in The Village – but Cleveland manages to find out that
her name is Story and she comes from “The Blue World.” Crude
children’s drawings at the beginning of the film explain that there
are a people who live in the water, and occasionally one is sent to
land because humans can be a great people, they only lack the
light…oh, you’ve heard this before.

The
rest isn’t so familiar and gets increasingly more difficult to go
along with. The water-lady is a “narf,” a character in a bedtime
story (one that Shyamalan has told his kids). The goal is getting the
stringy-haired sea-chick back home, but there are complications:
There are evil monkeys in the woods that surround the apartment,
along with creatures who are flat and covered with grass but morph
into wolflike beasties that would prefer to eat her alive than let
her return to the water. And there’s also a puzzle that needs to be
put together before Story can leave, involving discovering which
people in the complex fill certain roles – the Protector, the
Healer, the Guild, for example – and getting them together to, uh,
help her cross to the other side or something. And everyone, from a
group of stoners to a reclusive, lonely man, bafflingly participates with enthusiam.

There
are no scares and hardly any thrills in Lady in the Water, though
cinematographer Christopher Doyle fills scenes with a menacing
Halloween atmosphere when appropriate. The plot, though convoluted,
is exotic enough to hold your attention, and the dialogue is far
superior to the stilted conversation in The Village.  So you might be
sufficiently lulled into thinking it’s all good enough, and start
scoffing only upon further thought –  yet another Shyamalan
twist.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Toilet
[n]: 1) Location of the
hallmark gaggifying gag in a terrible comedy. 2) Location Owen
Wilson’s career will find itself in if it doesn’t get off the
once-endearing, now-irritating shaggy-slacker track. Co-directors
Anthony and Joe Russo’s You, Me and Dupree – a movie that needn’t
go beyond its title to grate – doesn’t do Wilson any favors as he’s
asked to humiliate himself as Dupree, an implausible train-wreck of
an unemployed house guest in the elegant home of best-bud Carl (Matt
Dillon) and Carl’s cooing new wife, Molly (Kate Hudson, who could use
some career resuscitation herself).

Most damning, however,
isn’t just the phoned-in acting of the three leads plus Michael
Douglas, who plays Molly’s daddy and Carl’s boss at a
land-development firm. All have proved capable of doing fine work,
most notably Dillon’s Oscar-nominated turn in last year’s Crash (you
have to dig a bit farther back for the others). But the Russo
brothers and first-time scripter Mike LeSieur are, quite simply,
astoundingly inept storytellers. Two plot lines – Dupree’s nonsense
and Carl’s battles with Molly’s hateful Dad –  awkwardly vie for
attention as giant uh-ohs instead of dialogue serve as character
development. Even if broad, broad humor is your kind of thing,
after sitting through fires,  oh-my-god! nudity, all kinds of
breakage, hijacked projects,  and talk of vasectomies – just to
give a few examples – your painful reward is yet another bad-movie
staple, conflict built on lack of communication, as well as a twist
so unbelievably ridiculous it makes what came prior look like The
Comedy of Errors.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

If you spray-paint it, they will come.
At least that was the thinking of Steve Ross, late founder of Warner
Communications, and his minions as they tried to get on the soccer
bandwagon by creating the New York Cosmos, which played its first
game in 1971 – to an audience of 3,746 at Yankee Stadium. The
story of the spectacular rise and eventual decline of the Cosmos is
definitively – well, sort of – documented in co-directors Paul
Crowder and John Dower’s Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story
of the New York Cosmos.

Most accounts from a range of interview
subjects, including former players, sportswriters, and business
partners, are  undisputed, such as the team’s explosion in popularity
when Pele, retired Brazilian superstar, was signed in 1975, as
well as the owners’ decision to substitute paint for Astroturf when
the Cosmos claimed the derelict Randall’s Island Downing Stadium as
their own. (Which led Pele to wonder What the hell kind of
grass do you people play on? and temporarily decide that his first
feet-shredding game would be his last.)

But although the team’s
timeline is exhilarating – and profile of the unstoppably
successful Ross, who also bought Atari,  inspirational – the
featherweight documentary’s humor comes mostly in the discrepancies:
On the innocuous side, a montage of commentators and newspaper
headlines give wildly differing reports on Pele’s agreed-upon
salary. But some details about how certain situations played out
become a straight-up battle in he said/he said interviews, especially
those involving the detestable Giorgio Chinaglia, the arrogant
Italian hotshot who joined the Cosmos in 1976 and bought them in 1984
– and who disputes some accusations here while clearly stating he
couldn’t care less about what people thought about him. (One anecdote
he doesn’t take exception with is demanding that Pele bring him his
hotel-room TV when Chinaglia’s didn’t work.)

With a string of
otherwise endearing personalities and a  compelling narrative, Once
in a Lifetime is marred only by the filmmakers’ excessive attempt to
bring back the ’70s, with funky music (fine), paneled scenes and
stills (OK), and then furious zooming, lightning pans, and
ever-quickening halved and quartered screen shots (nauseating). The
stylization is a quibble, though, next to the doc’s ability to
entertain until the very end, with the credits intercut with a string
of Cosmos-involved interviewees stamped with their current
occupations – and a note, accompanied by a ka-ching, that Pele refused to participate.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Just like “effeminate swashbuckler,”
“Johnny Depp in [Blank] 2!” sounds plain wrong. The Great Gonzo
of thespians appeared to never want his resume sullied with popcorn
sequels even in his get-in-the-door days: Sure, Depp’s first film was
A Nightmare on Elm Street, but when he appeared in that franchise’s
sixth installment – appropriately called Freddy’s Dead: The Final
Nightmare – it was as a different character. Who was credited as Oprah
Noodlemantra. After scaring Disney silly, however, with his
off-the-wall take on Captain Jack Sparrow in 2003’s ca-chinging Pirates of the
Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Depp earned his first Oscar
nomination, and  obviously figured that, well, maybe this mainstream
stuff wasn’t so bad.

So Depp has continued to take the yar!
out of the pirate in Caribbean’s sequel, subtitled Dead Man’s Chest.
The basis of his interpretation of the eyeliner-wearing, tottering
captain is now notorious – Keith Richards with a slightly limp
wrist. Not much is different about Depp’s mugging here, and returning
director Gore Verbinski has his star pull out the oh shit! bug eyes
perhaps a few too many times. Yet whenever Sparrow is out of the
story – which, surprisingly, is rather frequently – you’ll
probably miss him.

The opening scenes portend this minor
flaw in the otherwise relatively engaging if over-the-top two-and-a-half hour movie.
Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), genteel swordsman, and Elizabeth Swann
(Keira Knightley), sorta-genteel governor’s daughter, are on their
way to be wed when they’re arrested for piracy and aiding Sparrow in
his first-film effort to recover his former ship, the ghost-manned
Black Pearl. Elizabeth protests, Will stands there in his peach-fuzz
mustache, and just like the two actors, it’s all rather dull. Cut to
a scene of the ocean’s soft, glossy waves, and you’re already tuning
out – until, just like in Curse of the Black Pearl, Depp’s Sparrow
makes such a unique entrance that the story based on a Disney World
ride finally gets interesting.

Besides the young lovers’ betrothal,
there’s little plotwise that connects the two scripts, both written
by Shrek collaborators Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. This time,
Sparrow owes a blood debt to one Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), ruler of
the ocean (via the sea monster Kraken) and captain of another
supernatural ship, the Flying Dutchman. Jones’s cursed crew, for some
reason, are rotting amalgams of undead pirate and fish – Jones, for
example, has an octopus instead of a head – which allows for
impressively gross if distractingly overdone CGI. (The Black Pearl’s
damned were spookier, more elegant souls who turned to skeletons in
the moonlight.) Sparrow’s freedom, if lore is correct, lies in a
buried chest whose key he only has a drawing of; meanwhile, he’s also
hunted for his compass, which usually spins wildly but is said to
eventually lead to one’s greatest desire. Elizabeth and Will, for
different reasons, end up not in prison but helping Sparrow in his
quest/escape.

The story is stretched out for maximum
hijinks, to be sure: Stops along the way to the showdown at the
Flying Dutchman include a rather funny escapade on what might as well
be Skull Island, with Sparrow commanding its natives with vocabulary
such as “bom licky licky!” and describing Will, who has been
captured, as “eunuchey – snip snip.” Wild parrots don’t squawk
any Polly nonsense but more practical requests such as “Don’t eat
me!” There are plenty of escapes – some exciting and some
ridiculous, such as Sparrow trying to sneak past someone using a very
thin-leafed plant. And in addition to the thrilling Kraken action,
its giant tentacles slapping men overboard and swallowing ships,
there are naturally  plenty of sword fights: One of Verbinski’s more
impressive sequences involve a three-person battle on a giant,
rolling mill wheel.

Additional characters further pad the
plot, including Will’s father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), a
maggot-covered, hermit-crab snacker who was thrown to the bottom of
the ocean for betraying the Black Pearl’s mutineers, and a voodoo
fortune teller (Naomi Harris), who offers Sparrow protection against
Jones in the form of, as he incredulously points out, “a jar of
dirt.” (And no, Richards does not  make an appearance as Sparrow’s
dad, but he will cameo in the third installment.) Each of these minor
players along with Nighy’s multitentacled captain have more zip than
Sparrow’s coupled helpers combined, though Knightley curiously
manages to make this Elizabeth feistier than her last one, the
misguidedly silly center of Pride & Prejudice. Black Pearl fans,
however, will likely be returning primarily to see Depp’s antics,
which for now are still entertaining despite their rather
un-Noodlemantra-like familiarity.

Unlike Jack Sparrow, let’s hope that
Amy Sedaris’ Jerri Blank is not modeled on a real person. Sedaris is
the star and scripter of Strangers With Candy, a prequel to the
divisive Comedy Central show that was canceled after three seasons.
Conceived as an anti-After School Special series by co-writers/stars
Stephen Colbert and director Paul Dinello, Strangers With Candy is
bizarre. And gross. And offensive to pretty much everyone except
straight white males.

The 85-minute, months-shelved movie is
no different. The story expands on the background of Blank, a
hideous-looking 47-year-old “boozer, user, and loser” who ran
away in high school to a life that alternated between prison and the
gutter. Now with an overbite, bisexual nymphomania, and a big, fat,
’80s-clothed ass, Blank returns home to find out that her mother’s
dead and her father (Dan Hedaya, replacing Roberto Gari, the series’ much funnier portrayal of the dad)
is in a coma. Blank also discovers that she has a stepbrother,
Derrick (Joseph Cross), and a stepmother, Sara (Deborah Rush), who
instantly finds the prodigal daughter repulsive. Blank’s dad,
however, has a slight reaction when Jerri comes to his bedside,
leading his doctor (Ian Holm) to suggest that there may be hope if
she tries to make up for the hurt she caused her parents.

So, logically, Blank goes back to high
school with the intention of becoming a model student. No one seems
to notice that the new girl looks like a hooker/addict version of
their moms, and she quickly falls in with the outcasts, Tammi (Maria
Thayer) and Megawatti (Carlo Alban), an Indonesian the writers named
after his country’s former president, who develops a crush on Blank.
Alban is also a replacement for Orlando Pabotoy, who played Blank’s
Filipino best friend in the show, with the not-too-subtle idea that
otherness makes for an easy target. Other characters include the
school’s principal, Onyx Blackman (Greg Hollimon), Chuck Noblet
(Colbert), a married science (switched from history) teacher, and
Geoffrey Jellineck (Dinello), a dopey, femme art instructor. Noblet –
at one point mistakenly remembered as Crotch Niblet by a former
student – is having a secret affair with Geoffrey.

If you haven’t yet gotten the gist,
pretty much the whole premise of Strangers With Candy is to fling
un-P.C. insults, such as Noblet’s insistence that a science-fair team
be made up of “Koreans and Jews” to ensure a win that will save
the school’s funding. The script’s line-crossing jokes are plentiful,
and with Colbert, Dinello, and Sedaris being their typically
hilarious selves, the success of the movie depends solely on the
audience’s tolerance for such humor. There are, to be fair, wittier
gags woven in that are delivered so quickly they’re easy to miss,
such as Blank’s response to whether she’s thinking about signing up
for the science fair: “No, I was thinking about pussy. Science
fairs are for queers.” Another attempt to class up the film are
cameos by Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Allison Janney,
and Philip Seymour Hoffman. After going serious with his recent
roles, Hoffman in particular seems to be having a blast with his
modest screen time as a school board member jealous of his lover’s
past.  Even if you get your panties in a knot over names such as
“Alexander Graham Wang,” you’ve got to laugh at the Oscar winner
hissing, “You whore!”

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com