Archive for August 2006
Quinceanera
is a bible story set in the universe of of Hummer limos and
gentrification. Old-world values clash against new-world realities in
L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood, where an extended Mexican-American
family struggles with issues such as materialism, teen pregnancy, and
homosexuality. There’s little lecturing, though, in co-writers and
-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s uplifting
narrative, even as it fundamentally asks, WWJD?
The tolerant Christ figure here is Tio Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), an elderly
street vendor who feeds the hungry and embraces the outcast. He lives
with his great-grandnephew, Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a gang member who
has been disowned by his parents and therefore sparks an uproar when
he drops by his sister Eileen’s Quinceanera, a weddinglike ceremony
to mark a Mexican girl’s 15th birthday. Eileen (Alicia Sixtos),
however, gets the royal treatment from the folks: Rather than
focusing on the spiritual aspect of the commemoration, Eileen’s day
is one lavish party, with her friends cooing over her gorgeous dress,
a stylized video remembrance, and a giant limo complete with stripper
pole.
The film, which easily flows between Spanish and English, opens with this
celebration but then shifts to Eileen’s 14-year-old cousin, Magdalena
(Emily Rio), whom later that night is told by her excited mother
(Araceli Guzman-Rico) that someone has offered to alter Eileen’s
dress for her own upcoming Quinceanera. Naturally, Magdalena wants
her own dress. And, if not that, at least the limo. But her
preacher/security guard father (Jesus Castanos) not only doesn’t have
the money, he’s determined to keep the event traditional instead of
flashy. Magdalena pouts, but then finds out she has a bigger problem
– she’s pregnant, despite her insistence that she’s never had sex
with her boyfriend, Herman (J.R. Cruz). Her mother wants to support
her but her dad throws her out of the house, leaving her with nowhere
to go but Uncle Tio’s couch. He takes her in without question
despite already sharing his home with Carlos, whom we find out is
gay.
Quinceanera concentrates not on the teenagers’ “sins,” but the good that lies
underneath them. While the elders cluck over Magdalena’s pregnancy –
Carlos’ sexuality is never really discussed – Tio, except for
placing her picture on a backyard shrine, all but ignores it.
Gonzalez is the highlight of the film, imbuing an already remarkable
character with a pleasant gentleness as Tio tells stories and putters
around his home. He expresses his unconditional love in the simplest
terms: “I’m glad you have a friend,” he tells Carlos, who has
been involved in three-way trysts with Tio’s new landlords that
secretly turns into a relationship with one. (His uncle doesn’t know
these details, however, even after things turn sour, with harsh
consequences.)
Rio and Garcia, too, are understated and natural, though Garcia’s Carlos
hides his hurt under tough, silent, unsmiling posturing – Glatzer
and Westmoreland are to be commended for completely avoiding the gay
stereotype – though slowly becomes comfortable enough to reveal his
strong sense of family and love of his new, untraditional clan. Rio’s
Magdalena, meanwhile, is a combination of innocent little girl lost –
her pregnancy has a medical explanation but is deemed a miracle –
and spitfire teen as she at first fights those about to abandon
her and comes to accept that she’s about to grow up, and fast. In a
time when 15-year-olds are still kids, Magdalena’s Quinceanera ends
up being a true, joyous mark of her path to adulthood.
Poster Boy tells the story of a
semi-closeted gay son of a conservative senator, but its audience
will be put to the tolerance test more so than its characters. Zak
Tucker’s directorial debut, co-written by freshman Lecia Rosenthal
and Ryan Shiraki (scribe of 2004’s superior Home of Phobia), may have Quinceanera’s good intentions regarding unconditional love.
But combined with its facile attempt at political indictment and
across-the-board caricature, Poster Boy is less thought-provoking
than just plain irritating.
Its very structure is off-putting:
Framed as an obnoxiously gruff reporter’s interview with Henry (Matt
Newton), his clash with his campaigning father, Sen. Jack Kray
(Michael Lerner), is recounted in flashbacks. A college student who’s
open about his sexuality on campus but not at home, Henry is
combative when Dad demands that he introduce him at a rally to
demonstrate his strong family values. Henry tries to get out of it
but is blackmailed by a fellow student who’s assisting Kray.
Meanwhile, other students are organizing a protest, and we’re
introduced in a roundabout way to Izzie (Valerie Geffner), a sullen,
ratty-haired woman who has HIV, and her gay roommate, Anthony (Jack
Noseworthy).
Poster Boy is so sloppy it uses the
same extra to walk by two main characters twice in a handful of
seconds. In an attempt to be edgy – or something – Tucker uses a
handheld camera to nauseating effect, bobbing around during even the
most mundane conversations. (As well as the ridiculous ones – how
about “The fact is that for me, the *flesh*, the *body*, the whole
materiality of *being*, is not something one controls!” which Izzie
spews at a party, for worst line of the year?) The main story,
clearly based on Dick Cheney’s hypocrisy regarding his
administration’s policies and his lesbian daughter Mary, is muddled
by its confusing, undeveloped subplots. Maybe that’s why it’s so
over-the-top: Kray is too hateful to be believed, slapping Henry –
whom he only calls “son” — as he demands his participation at
the rally, “even if it means cutting a smile across your face with
a knife.” (Yet, bizarrely for such a career-driven person, he tells
Henry that he needs to “get his priorities straight” and find a
girl.) Lerner, who also played Angry Dad last year’s equally terrible
When Do We Eat?, knows how to growl and threaten, yet can’t help but
look ridiculous in the role.
There are exactly two compelling
moments in the movie. One involves a monologue by Henry’s
smarter-than-she-lets-on mother (Karen Allen) when she takes her
husband down a peg for mistreating their son. The other is Henry’s
rant to his interviewer that pretty much summarizes Poster Boy’s
message, in case you missed it: that politicians push “issues”
such as homosexuality in voters’ faces to force them to take sides in
the hope of gaining an edge, sometimes even if it’s at the expense of
their personal integrity. By this point, however, the film’s
integrity is long gone.
copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com
With no press screenings yet a year’s
worth of hype, Movie With the Name threatened to be a throwaway Boat
to Heaven – what star Samuel L. Jackson said the producers might as
well call the film if they changed its title to the snooze-worthy
Pacific Air Flight 121 as intended.
Happily, the brilliantly stupid
Snakes on a Plane nom de crap stayed put, and surprisingly, it’s a
thriller so entertaining it makes recent disaster flicks such as
Poseidon look like the real trash. Similar in concept to Scream, SoaP
consciously mocks the we’re-all-going-to-die formula of its genre
while painting the numbers too cleverly to be banned to
so-bad-its-good territory. The setup, if anyone cares, involves
Sean, a murder witness (Nathan Phillips) whom one sorta-scary Agent
Flynn (Jackson) persuades to testify. Flynn’s escorting him out of
Hawaii into protective custody on a flying machine that, despite
extensive security precautions, the creative killer has rigged –
with crates of serpents and leis sprayed with pheromones that will
piss them off — to shut Sean’s mouth for good. Ergo: Snakes. Plane.
Directed by Final Destination 2’s David R. Ellis and written by John
Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez – with, famously, input from
web-boarding boosters while, not so well-known, bearing a striking
resemblance to a 1998 Saturday Night Live skit – SoaP succeeds
because its hamming is selective. The stereotypes, such as a flight
attendant on her last day (Julianna Margulies), a princess carrying a
chihuahua (Rachel Blanchard), and a better-than-thou prick who huffs
about everything (Gerard Plunkett), are unabashed, and the
snake-o-vision, sort of like looking through unfocused night-vision
goggles, is cheesy. But the acting is fine (Jackson hasn’t been as
pitch-perfect tempestuous since Pulp Fiction) and the humor plentiful
(watching a snake get peed on is unexpectedly hilarious).
Best, the
filmmakers kept in mind that SoaP, title be damned, is meant to tense
you up like a hug from a boa constrictor, and considering the action
starts early, its stress level remains impressively consistent until
the end. Drop the Plan 9 predictions and enjoy every motherfuckin’
minute of it.
copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com
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When a Even the title, though ultimately a little baffling, could be Writer-director Bart Freundlich’s comedy centers on two couples: New York in winter is the setting, which not only reflects the The rifts are less caustic than in, say, Allen’s Husbands and Wives,
The Illusionist is more difficult to categorize: Let’s just say it’s Edward Norton, intense as ever, stars as Eisenheim, an increasingly The Illusionist could have easily gone ponderous. Nobody ever seems Composer Philip Glass, who added another layer of infuriating |
copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com
Have you seen Take the Lead, released just this past March? Then
you’ve seen Step Up. The movies even share a cast member, Jenna Dewan,
who, uh, takes the lead in Anne Fletcher’s debut. Dewan, a professional
dancer, plays Nora, a student at the Maryland School of the Arts in
Baltimore whose senior showcase could be her key to avoiding her
mother’s deal that if the rug-cutting doesn’t work out, she must apply
to some godforsaken place like Cornell.
Nora’s an uptown girl, and
she’s never had a backstreet guy—that is, until thuggy Tyler (Channing
Tatum), serving community service for trashing an elaborate set on the
school’s stage, begins working there as a janitor. When Nora’s dance
partner sprains his ankle and her auditions for a replacement are
abysmal, Tyler, who likes to convulse to music with his friends, offers
to help Nora practice. Of course, the bad boy’s perfect—in every dreamy
way—even when he’s an hour late or bails on her completely. Soon,
Tyler’s encouraging her to follow her original vision of not a couple’s
dance but an ensemble Britney number.
You know the rest. Step Up has
all the elements of a shamelessly predictable story: Teens from the
ghetto giving rich kids the evil eye, a sassy best friend, the cold
lady-who-lunches mom versus the warm works-at-the-all-night-diner mom,
a tragedy, a triumph. One thing that’s missing, though, is character
development. All Tyler and his buds (Damaine Radcliff and De’Shawn
Washington) seem to do is wreck stuff, playfully push one another, and
giggle until you can’t stands no more. The actors are merely
adequate—the worst, surprisingly, is a stilted Rachel Griffiths as the
school dean—and there’s only occasional, and very mild, humor in Duane
Adler and Melissa Rosenberg’s script. On the plus side, Nora’s hair and
practice outfits are pretty, and when the characters do start bustin’ a
move, it’s impressive—and actually entertaining. The best way to
approach Step Up is to adopt the pre-stepped-up Tyler’s perspective on
life: If you don’t hope for anything, you won’t be disappointed.
copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com
The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of
Ethan Green quickly brings anyone not familiar with the gay comic
strip of the same name up to speed: “Ethan is a man unlucky in
love,” states the intro. “Don’t feel sorry for him. It’s his own
damn fault. Really.” Love, though, is a relative term in George
Bamber’s debut film, written by new scripter David Vernon based on
the hijinks of Eric Orner’s strip. And the term
unlucky doesn’t quite apply, either. But if you can forgive a few –
OK, many – gay stereotypes and consider the story to be less about
misfortune in commitment than simply adventures in dating, the
celluloid portrayal of Ethan’s allegedly fab-free lifestyle is rather
funny and, well, loafer-light.
In fact, we first meet the central
character (Daniel Letterle) in a serendipitous moment: Holding an
apple and looking skyward as he ponders his book, Finding the
Boyfriend Within, in a park, Ethan is knocked out by an errant tennis
ball. A recently divorced and outed baseball player, Kyle (Diego
Serrano), gives him mouth-to-mouth, and it’s lust at first tongue.
Soon Kyle has penned an autobiography, with a dedication to Ethan –
“You make my every day a double-header” — that makes the men at
his book reading initially go “awww” and then turn to scowl at
Kyle’s pretty lover. In the meantime, Ethan’s roommate and ex, Leo
(David Monahan), is trying to tell Ethan that he’s selling the house,
and at an after-reading party, Ethan meets the egotistic force field
that is Punch (Dean Shelton), a fast-talking, baby-faced 19-year-old
who immediately reveals that his likes are “dick, dick, and more
dick” and is also a part-time real-estate agent. Who happens to
work with the world’s worst realtor, Sunny Deal (Rebecca Lowman), a
snarled, psychotic blonde guaranteed to keep Leo’s house on the
market for a lifetime.
Ethan Green purports to be a message
movie, but it’s not a concept that Vernon handles very well. That
tennis ball soon becomes metaphorical, pounding the audience over the
head with the sentiment “Ethan sabotages good relationships!” But
until the groaner of a closing line – something about games,
winning by refusing to play, etc. — the one-note motif is easy
enough to stomach, divvied pretty evenly among the characters to
lecture their friend about in bits. Actually, most of Ethan’s friends
don’t have much oomph, either. There’s Charlotte (Shanola Hampton),
another roommate who was recently dumped by her girlfriend and thus
replaced all the pictures of her ex with images of her cat. Leo and
Kyle are more story propellers than personalities. And Ethan’s mom
(Meredith Baxter) is just plain bizarre: Though a planner of gay and
lesbian weddings, she seems a little *too* accepting of her son’s
lifestyle, chatting easily about his porn collection and even saying
hello during a webcam cruise that happens to connect to Ethan’s other ex,
who for some reason lives with her.
So what the hell saves the comic’s
big-screen transformation from ending up a costly mistake? Letterle,
mainly, with great support from Shelton and also Joel Brooks and
Richard Riehle, who both figuratively and literally add color as the
Hat Sisters, two gossipy old queens whose fashion sense is a tacky
take on Sunday best and who excel in the art of eye-rolling.
Shelton’s projectile delivery of the one-liners Vernon peppers his
script with ensures that Punch comes off not as an insufferably smug
and deluded kid but as ridiculous as intended, constantly talking
about how gorgeous he is, aggressively pursuing Ethan – in one
scene tearing open his shirt twice and then dropping his pants in a
matter of minutes – and nonchalantly brushing off Ethan’s flat-out
rejections. But it’s Letterle, who’s in every scene, who carries the
movie with both his physical comedy and deft timing. Whether taking
gentle pratfalls with just the right amount of giggle-inducing
obviousness (he’s also a professional dancer) or reacting to lunacy
around him with merely a slight start or eyebrow-raise, Letterle’s
Ethan is neither forcefully fey nor sitcom-y broad – and in a story
that not-so-smoothly piles one romantic setback after another, that’s
pretty fabulous.
No one may want to make a respectful
man out of Ethan, but the saying “Why buy the cow when you can get
the milk for free?” ironically doesn’t apply in Barnyard: The
Original Party Animals. In writer-director Steve Oedekerk’s animated
feature, cows get married. And have babies while comfortably lying on
their backs. And the babies coo and walk on two legs immediately
after birth. Also, the male cows have udders. In other words, your
children – who, now matter how young, probably understand that cows
go “moo” and not “my husband was killed in a storm” – may
have to be rewired by a science class.
Then again, Oedekerk’s the guy
responsible for assaulting audiences with 2002’s Kung Pow: Enter the
Fist, so compared to a live action, three-boobed woman, maybe these
modifications aren’t quite as irritating. And neither is the movie
itself – boring is a much better description of it. The premise is
a thin one: When a farmer (Fred Tatasciore) is away, his animals
play…I mean, “party.” They craft boogie boards to take
out-of-control rides down hills. They use cell phones to buy “gray
market” items from underground gophers (get it?). And at night,
they throw wild, well, barn burners: Drinking, dancing, and
college-party chaos is the reward for their usual daily placidity.
It’s all spearheaded by Otis (Kevin James), much to the chagrin of
his father, Ben (Sam Elliott), who takes the responsibilities for
organizing meetings and watching over the hen house – passing the
time by singing “I Won’t Back Down” — so coyotes don’t snack on
the birds at night.
The time comes, however, for Otis to
grow up and become a leader himself, and anyone who’s seen a movie
before knows the rest. The result is a swell enough message for kids
(though promoting crazee misbehavior when an authority figure’s
back is turned perhaps isn’t the best idea) and they’ll likely find
the sight of animals goofing around pretty amusing – for a while.
The parties are shown over, and over, and over again, and when the
movie goes Bambi, the immediate reaction seems to last forever.
Oedekerk also isn’t the most original humorist, blatantly modeling a
human character on South Park’s Cartman, right down to bits of
dialogue.
To be fair, there are a few funny bits
here and there: a frail dog on crutches who’s about to turn a mere
13; a nosy, shrill neighbor (Maria Bamford) of the farmer who’s
constantly calling the police about the seeming nogoodnik, much to
the annoyance of her beer-drinking, beaten-down husband (Oedekerk); a
Cops sendup when a few of the animals go get revenge on a cow-tipper.
Compared to recently released animated features The Ant Bully and
Monster House, Barnyard is a disappointment. Then again, a movie in
which a singing cow – even a male one with bodacious udders –
introducing kids to Tom Petty can’t be all bad.
copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com
Little Miss Sunshine has a precocious
kid with giant glasses, Steve Carell, and a name cloying enough to
hurt your teeth – and it’s also depressing as hell. The plot is
simple – a family drives from New Mexico to California so their
young daughter can participate in a beauty pageant. But the topics
that pop up along the way are not: The debut of co-directors Jonathan
Dayton and Valerie Faris and also scripter Michael Arndt incorporates addiction, bankruptcy, death, divorce, and squelched
dreams into this road trip. It’s hard to imagine a sadder journey.
Especially one that, well, simultaneously makes you laugh.
The Hoover family is already barely
keeping it together before they load themselves into a VW bus and
head for the titular pageant. Sheryl (Toni Collette) hurriedly throws
fast food on the table for dinner and has just taken it upon herself
to care for her suicidal brother, Frank (Carell), after he leaves the
hospital with bandaged wrists. According to doctor’s orders, Frank, a
Proust scholar who lost a boyfriend, his job, and then his apartment,
must never be left alone, and therefore shares a room with Sheryl’s
brooding teenage son, Dwayne (Paul Dano). Dwayne wants to become a
pilot – and, influenced by Nietzsche, has taken a vow of silence
that’s thus far lasted nine months. There’s Richard (Greg Kinnear),
Sheryl’s worse half, who is desperately trying to brand his self-help
program on being a “winner” when, in fact, his ideas of victory
and positive thinking make him a reprehensible human being. Richard’s
foul-mouthed dad (Alan Arkin) also lives in the Hoover home, having
been kicked out of a retirement facility for snorting heroin.
And, of course, there’s little Olive
(Abigail Breslin, whom you might have seen in Raising Helen but will
more likely remember from Signs). Olive’s 7, obsessed with beauty
pageants – she watches them on video and mimics those crowned –
and, despite her gap tooth and pot belly, finds out that she is now
eligible to compete to be a Little Miss Sunshine because of a more
scheming girl’s disqualification. Amid all the chaos, she might have
never found out: The fried-bucket repast quickly heads south as
Frank’s “accident” is discussed, Dwayne writes in his notebook
that he hates everybody, Grandpa bitches that everyday they eat
“goddamn fucking chicken,” Richard becomes increasingly
uncomfortable/insulting and Sheryl tries to not jump out a window.
Then Richard casually mentions a message about
little-miss-something. Olive runs from the meal from hell to the
answering machine of her potential salvation – and Breslin’s
pogoing, then squinting, then screaming Olive briefly flickers the
movie with a moment of pure joy.
But Richard’s got this thing this
weekend, Sheryl can’t drive a stick, they can’t afford to fly, and
leaving Grandpa, Frank, and Dwayne the run of the house is clearly a
bad idea. As Olive’s running herself into a tizzy, the adults again
deflate. Then Richard gets down to look Olive in the eye and ask if
she’s sure she can win – and her affirmative response is all he
needs to agree to pack the herd into the bus and drive them to
California.
Surely, everyone knows how these road
trips go. The label on this potentially tired setup, in blinking
neon, is “family dysfunction.” And, yes, with its juggling of
jokiness/despair, some of this Sundance hit may seem familiar –
think Napoleon Dynamite, only with more than one joke. (Ignore,
however, the “Where’s Olive?” tagline, which suggests it’s Home
Alone 12.) But even with its occasional notes of wackiness – a
broken clutch means they have to push the bus to start it and then
scramble to jump on, for instance – Little Miss Sunshine’s script
so deftly captures the emotion behind each setback that it’s less
like a sitcom than a clan’s real day-to-day life squashed into 101
minutes. It’s a testament to what getting forced out of your own
routine and head can do – sitting in a hospital, say, would have
never brought the smile to Frank’s face that a successful
clutch-popping attempt does. (“No one gets left behind!” the
professor triumphantly declares.)
The cast is uniformly excellent, from
Arkin’s gruff grandfather ranting breathlessly on topics such as his
studliness at the old folks’ home (“I had second degree burns on my
johnson!”) and doing drugs “I’m old!”) to the role Kinnear was
born to play, a smug, khaki-shorts-wearing know-it-all who
abhorrently points out to Olive that beauty queens probably don’t eat
ice cream and that “Uncle Frank gave up on himself, and that’s
something that winners never do.” As the deadline for the pageant
check-in nears, everybody is so drained from their personal and
collective issues that all focus touchingly turns toward fulfilling
Olive’s naive dream – and then debating whether to shield her from
it when they see all the creepy JonBenets with their expensive
costumes and years-honed talents. Ultimately, they leave it up to
her, and the result is a jubilant testament against, in a word,
bullshit. The moral of the story comes from Dwayne, who, no longer
silent, realizes that his dad’s emphasis on always winning will screw
you up but good: “Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty
contest after another.”
A child in Talladega Nights: The Ballad
of Ricky Bobby is also influenced by a dubiously go-get-’em father:
“If you ain’t first, you’re last,” Reese Bobby tells his son,
Ricky, who was born in a speeding car. He shares this wisdom when he
gets kicked out of Ricky’s school on Career Day, after years of
absence. And then he disappears on Ricky again.
Even though the no-good, no-job Reese
(Gary Cole) doesn’t even remember giving this advice when Ricky
(Will Ferrell) is grown — “That don’t even make sense – you
could be second, you could be third…” — it doesn’t really
matter. Ricky already had a love of speed and hunger to win implanted
in what serves as his brain. He becomes a member of a NASCAR pit
crew, and when the opportunity comes up, midrace, to substitute for a
lazy driver, the Ballad begins. (Actually, it begins with a quote
about America’s need for “hot, nasty, badass speed” — attributed
to Eleanor Roosevelt.)
Directed by Adam McKay and co-written
by McKay and Ferrell – the same matchtup responsible for 2004’s
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy – Talladega Nights exists
mainly to 1) get Ferrell back on, uh, track (sorry) after his roles
in the awful Bewitched and Kicking & Screaming and 2) make fun of
white-trash NASCAR lovers. The premise is pretty thin, but the
filmmakers get a fair amount of, um, mileage (sorry again) out of it.
Ricky wins that first race and becomes the It driver, marrying a
glaringly blond trophy wife, Carley (Leslie Bibb), naming their two
mouthy boys Walker and Texas Ranger, and staying true to his
grade-school best friend, Cal (a hick-puppyish John C. Reilly), all
while lovin’ America.
It doesn’t take long for Talladega
Nights to get the stereotypes of its target out of the way: Ricky’s
car is sponsored by Wonder Bread, his family eats a buffet of fast
food every night, Skynyrd’s king, foreigners are weird, etc. The
subject’s a softball, but Ferrell’s vaguely Dubya-accented shtick makes
it work for a while, whether Ricky is timidly giving his first
on-the-track interview (the way his hands gravitate toward his face
even though the inteviewer says to put them down – you have to be
there) or later brashly making commercials for any and all products
(“I’m Ricky Bobby, and if you don’t chew Big Red, then fuck you”).
Among the broadness are a couple of subtler jokes, such as Ricky’s
answer to the question of why his rival, the French Jean Girard
(Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Ali G), came here: “Public schools? The
healthcare system?” But mostly, it’s all beer and balls.
A long segment in which Ricky loses his
touch lags, saved only by The 40 Year-Old Virgin’s Jane Lynch as
Ricky’s mother and Junebug’s Amy Adams, once again proving she can
deliver mouthsful of dialogue with ardent and impressive speed as
Susan, Ricky’s manager and eventual love interest. Unlike Anchorman,
these blander moments suffer from a lack of cameos from the usual
Ferrell clan – Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell (though
perhaps “I love lamp” isn’t the kind of dumbness they were going
for here). After going from full-on laughs to forced giggles,
however, Ferrell and McKay successfully resuscitate the audience with
never-fail outtakes – which should leave you happier than a celebration dinner at Applebee’s.
copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com
It’s nearly impossible
to avoid metaphoric, quote-whore criticism of a movie about orgasms,
so let’s get it out of the way: Billy Kent’s directorial debut,
The OH in Ohio, gets this close — but doesn’t completely satisfy.
Quirk
queen Parker Posey is Priscilla, a Cleveland ad exec who is married
to Jack (Paul Rudd), a high school science teacher. But Jack is
haggard, moody, and not-so-slyly drinking on the job, all because
though the couple has had sex 1,482 times (she tends to count
things), Priscilla has never had an orgasm, even by herself. Jack
loses it and leaves her (i.e. moves out to the garage), which finally
makes Priscilla determined to fix things. One masturbation class
(with the teacher, played by Liza Minnelli, saying things like
“liberate your labia!”) and vibrator later, Priscilla is
enlightened and addicted – and, naturally, it changes her life.
Meanwhile, Jack is rescued by Kristen (Mischa Barton), one of his
stoner-turned-Merit Scholar (!) students who ridiculously tunes in to
his exact problem, says “You’re in pain. I want to help,” and
takes charge from there.
The debut script by Adam Wierzbianski (based
on a story by Kent and Sarah Bird) has its funnier moments amplified
by the cast, particularly Rudd, who first uses his talent for perfect
deadpan and later is yelling out “My cock’s jammin’! It’s
*jammin’*!” when his character is rejuvenated by Kristen. Also
entertaining is Keith David as Jack’s “technology”-loving
confidant and Danny DeVito as Wayne, a carefree, longhaired
swimming-pool entrepreneur; It’s a bit odd to see the usually
typecast Posey playing a rather normal, if f/rigid, woman, but her
Priscilla is giddy and charming as she makes the transformation into
a labia liberator.
Cleveland natives will be happy to see their
city portrayed as having corrected its mistake-on-the-lake status,
with several aerial shots of a dense downtown and an outright
marketing pitch slickly incorporated as Priscilla tries to woo a
large corporation to do business there. The movie sinks, though,
whenever Barton’s onscreen, between her shallowly drawn Magical Whore
and flat delivery of lines that alone are Wierzbianski’s worst. (“I
know Playboy Advisor bullshit,” she says in a forced tantrum.) And
even at 88 minutes, it just goes on too long. Pre-vibrator Priscilla
would sympathize.
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