You won’t hear anyone leaving Jackass
Number Two cooing, “Why, that was rahther droll, wasn’t it,
darling?” But even those who are more partial to Dorothy Parker-type witticisms may find it astonishing how funny a lineup of
guys getting unexpectedly punched in the face can be.

And as most
people know, that’s largely all there is to the Jackass ideology. The
former MTV series, co-created in 2000 by Number Two director Jeff
Termaine, Adaptation director Spike Jonze, and star Johnny Knoxville,
is centered on a bunch of cackling idiots performing stunts that
range from simply moronic   (such as the seconds-long “Rake Jump”)
to potentially fatal (dodging bulls is a favorite). Also, there’s a
lot of vomit. And excrement. And bare asses and gas, usually aimed in
another’s general direction.

Written by participant Preston Lacy and
first-time scripter Sean Cliver, the sequel includes the usual gang,
including Wee Man, Steve-O, and Bam Margera, famous for tormenting
his bafflingly game parents, who also make an appearance. You’ll find
a couple of their activities familiar – how many different ways can
the guys propel themselves into water? — and the gag-inducers, for
better or worse,   more nauseating then ever. (The cameramen earn
their pay.) You might even pity some of them, such as when Dave
England nearly tears up before a pellet-firing stunt, saying he’s
about to have an anxiety attack – with Knoxville reassuring him,
“It’s going to hurt really bad, but it’s just loud!”

Even if
you’re immune to the unexplainable hilarity of watching adult men
willingly get walloped, there’s a good amount of freak-on-the-street
Dadaist humor here, too, with Jonze, for instance, disguised as a,
let’s say, rather “open” elderly woman and a sketch called “Old
Man’s Balls” that may just be the funniest few minutes in movies
this year. Odds are that many viewers will find the gang’s terrorist
put-on, with Ehren McGhehey dressed as a Muslim with dynamite
strapped to his torso  (and a questionable beard glued to his face),
has gone too far. It’s slightly redeemed, however, when it becomes a
prank-within-a-prank turned on McGhehey himself. At the end of his
increasingly worsening ordeal, he laments, “Was the dick hair
necessary?” Of course it was.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

“Does the world really need a new
version of [Blank]?” In this decade of relentless remakes and
franchise-shaping before Installment #1 even hits the screens, the
question is getting pretty tiring and the ensuing debate usually
meaningless – nothing’s changing anytime soon. But All the King’s
Men, whose release was delayed from last December, at least has a
quasi-argument for its production. Democrat James Carville, the
Louisiana political consultant with an outsize personality,
spearheaded the project, stressing to producers the present relevance
of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel. (Carville himself
gets executive producer credit.) Warren’s book, its main character
based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, was released in 1946 and
turned into a film in 1949.

Warren’s main message? It may shock
you: Initially idealist politicians often turn corrupt, bringing
others down with them.

Maybe it was a surprise back then –
populist Long served as governor from 1928 to 1932, then became a
senator until his assassination in 1935 – but it’s probably safe to
say that for many people in 2006, that idea is pretty much a given.
Besides the overall similarities he cited based on his perspective on
the Bush administration, Carville pointed out one parallel between
the book and current events: Part of what launched the career of
Willie Stark, the fictional Long, is the shoddy construction of a
schoolhouse whose eventual cave-in killed two students. Clearly
comparable to the levees in Carville’s  home state – though Katrina
hit after All the King’s Men wrapped, and again, the situation isn’t
something of which the public needs a cinematic metaphor.

So messing with this old Oscar-winner
still, really, leaves the question of why. Writer-director Steven
Zailian (1998’s A Civil Action) didn’t view the 1949 film, instead
reimagining his version straight from the book (though he shifts the
time period from the 30s to the 50s). The story is muddled but
otherwise the same: Willie Stark (Sean Penn) is a married, struggling
door-to-door salesman who’s mouthy about his money-grubbing local
politicians and runs for county treasurer. Willie loses, but his
man-of-the-people campaign attracts the attention of journalist Jack
Burden (Jude Law), who then follows Willie as he continues to find
his way into government. Willie is introduced to Tiny Duffy (James
Gandolfini), a Tony Soprano-ish tax assessor who convinces him that
he could run for not merely major, but governor, and win. (“You
could win without getting out of bed,” Tiny says.)

Willie begins campaigning with
Tiny-scripted speeches and advice. But Jack and Willie’s – aide, or
whatever she is — Sadie Burke (Patricia Clarkson), find out that
he’s been set up to split the vote. They tell him this.
(Telepathically – lots of questions get answered with an
arched-eyebrow look here.) So Willie decides to out Tiny during a
speech, yells to the “hicks” in the audience that he’s also a
hick and therefore can help them, and his rise to power begins. Jack
quits journalism and joins Wilie’s administration. Exactly how and
when Willie turns corrupt isn’t clear – Penn’s Willie yells to
constituents like a nut from the very beginning, while staying
low-key around his cronies — as is the point when he starts cheating
on his wife, who shows up early and then is long forgotten. Out of
nowhere, too, Jack begins yearning about an old love.

After a while, you become unsure whom
exactly the movie is about. (Though with lots of ominously dim
lighting and a scene hauntingly and elegantly set in the state
capitol in Baton Rouge, which Long built and was also assassinated
in, cinematographer Pawel Edelman at least gives viewers a pretty
picture to look at.)  Law’s Jack narrates in an increasingly
annoying, half-Southern, half-English drone that is admittedly
fitting for the Brit’s flat, one-expression performance. Penn is
inarguably a powerhouse, though that depends on one’s taste for
scene-devouring and gonzo accents (the authenticity of Penn’s
hick-speak, actually, is a source of debate, even among natives).
Clarkson –  the only native Southerner – is mostly subdued and in
the film too little to make much of an impression, as is Kate Winslet
(Brit) and Mark Ruffalo. The also  rarely seen but nonetheless
magnetic Anthony Hopkins (Welsh), who plays a powerful judge, tinges
his Louisiana accent with a bit of his natural, slightly
snooty-sounding European. As the story branches out in all sorts of
hard-to-follow directions, it’s clear that one fine cast – and more
money thrown at a remake — has been mostly wasted.

Feast is a little more well-defined:
There are weird monsters, and they want to eat people. The horror flick is the latest product of Project Greenlight, the screenwriting contest/reality show that gives hope to wannabe filmmakers that they can mimic the fairy tale of Good Will Hunting, the first and Oscar-winning script by the show’s celebrity names, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The program, funded by Miramax Television and

It starts off promisingly enough.
First-time director John Gulager opens with a small, black and white
frame of desert, which bursts into color when a car hits a telephone
pole head-on. Cut to a bar, where the patrons drive grubby trucks
with bumper stickers such as “My Other Toy Has Tits!” As the
characters are introduced, there’s a yellow-shaded still of each that
gives info such as name (usually horror-movie stereotypes like
“Bozo”) and life expectancy, which, entertainingly, is used
alternately to describe the time/method of death or what their future
holds (for Jason Mewes, aka Clerks’ Jay, it says “already surpassed
expectations”). And as soon as Bozo (Balthazar
Getty), trying to get all the life-weary drunkards
and staff to, I don’t know, fight or gamble or something and yells,
“C’mon, give me some action!” you know what’s coming next.

For about a third of the movie –
written, by the way, by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton –
everything’s kind of Shaun of the Dead-amusing. (If you
forgive the blatant ripoff of a group holing themselves up in a bar
while bitey things try to get in.) Henry Rollins plays a borderline
fey motivational speaker — “These monsters are no match for the
human spirit!” — while a torn-apart, maggot-covered, barely living
customer (Judah
Friedlander) mumbles, “God, your sink sucks!” as he’s trying to
clean up a bit. The invading creatures themselves are sort of like
lightning-quick, squealing jackals, covered in lots of slime and
spewing maggots (hello, Slither?). And one of the writers’ funnier,
more inspired elements is the unexpected method the munchers use to
reproduce.

However.
There’s never an explanation for where these monsters come from. They
don’t really appear all that often – though when they do, the
over-the-top butchering should elicit no-they-didn’t! laughs – and
even the suspenseful moments don’t pay off in cardiac-arrest scares.
And as the 86-minutes go on – and on – the mostly funny dialogue
sinks to sub-B-movie-levels (drinking game: a shot every time someone
says “lock this place down!” or “we have to fight!”) along
with the majority of performances (Navi Rawat as “Heroine” is
particularly abominable). Gulager’s initially interesting camerawork,
in which the he doesn’t frenetically bobble the camera during the
first attacks as much as seem to drop it and knock it around (OK,
third ripoff, as that’s a little Blair Witch), seems to become an
excuse for keeping the audience from finding out that even the
filmmakers don’t know what in the hell is going on. And thus
another fairy tale ends up, well, a bloody mess.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

“Does the world really need a new
version of [Blank]?” In this decade of relentless remakes and
franchise-shaping before Installment #1 even hits the screens, the
question is getting pretty tiring and the ensuing debate usually
meaningless – nothing’s changing anytime soon. But All the King’s
Men, whose release was delayed from last December, at least has a
quasi-argument for its production. Democrat James Carville, the
Louisiana political consultant with an outsize personality,
spearheaded the project, stressing to producers the present relevance
of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel. (Carville himself
gets executive producer credit.) Warren’s book, its main character
based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, was released in 1946 and
turned into a film in 1949.

Warren’s main message? It may shock
you: Initially idealist politicians often turn corrupt, bringing
others down with them.

Maybe it was a surprise back then –
populist Long served as governor from 1928 to 1932, then became a
senator until his assassination in 1935 – but it’s probably safe to
say that for many people in 2006, that idea is pretty much a given.
Besides the overall similarities he cited based on his perspective on
the Bush administration, Carville pointed out one parallel between
the book and current events: Part of what launched the career of
Willie Stark, the fictional Long, is the shoddy construction of a
schoolhouse whose eventual cave-in killed two students. Clearly
comparable to the levees in Carville’s  home state – though Katrina
hit after All the King’s Men wrapped, and again, the situation isn’t
something of which the public needs a cinematic metaphor.

So messing with this old Oscar-winner
still, really, leaves the question of why. Writer-director Steven
Zailian (1998’s A Civil Action) didn’t view the 1949 film, instead
reimagining his version straight from the book (though he shifts the
time period from the 30s to the 50s). The story is muddled but
otherwise the same: Willie Stark (Sean Penn) is a married, struggling
door-to-door salesman who’s mouthy about his money-grubbing local
politicians and runs for county treasurer. Willie loses, but his
man-of-the-people campaign attracts the attention of journalist Jack
Burden (Jude Law), who then follows Willie as he continues to find
his way into government. Willie is introduced to Tiny Duffy (James
Gandolfini), a Tony Soprano-ish tax assessor who convinces him that
he could run for not merely major, but governor, and win. (“You
could win without getting out of bed,” Tiny says.)

Willie begins campaigning with
Tiny-scripted speeches and advice. But Jack and Willie’s – aide, or
whatever she is — Sadie Burke (Patricia Clarkson), find out that
he’s been set up to split the vote. They tell him this.
(Telepathically – lots of questions get answered with an
arched-eyebrow look here.) So Willie decides to out Tiny during a
speech, yells to the “hicks” in the audience that he’s also a
hick and therefore can help them, and his rise to power begins. Jack
quits journalism and joins Wilie’s administration. Exactly how and
when Willie turns corrupt isn’t clear – Penn’s Willie yells to
constituents like a nut from the very beginning, while staying
low-key around his cronies — as is the point when he starts cheating
on his wife, who shows up early and then is long forgotten. Out of
nowhere, too, Jack begins yearning about an old love.

After a while, you become unsure whom
exactly the movie is about. (Though with lots of ominously dim
lighting and a scene hauntingly and elegantly set in the state
capitol in Baton Rouge, which Long built and was also assassinated
in, cinematographer Pawel Edelman at least gives viewers a pretty
picture to look at.)  Law’s Jack narrates in an increasingly
annoying, half-Southern, half-English drone that is admittedly
fitting for the Brit’s flat, one-expression performance. Penn is
inarguably a powerhouse, though that depends on one’s taste for
scene-devouring and gonzo accents (the authenticity of Penn’s
hick-speak, actually, is a source of debate, even among natives).
Clarkson –  the only native Southerner – is mostly subdued and in
the film too little to make much of an impression, as is Kate Winslet
(Brit) and Mark Ruffalo. The also  rarely seen but nonetheless
magnetic Anthony Hopkins (Welsh), who plays a powerful judge, tinges
his Louisiana accent with a bit of his natural, slightly
snooty-sounding European. As the story branches out in all sorts of
hard-to-follow directions, it’s clear that one fine cast – and more
money thrown at a remake — has been mostly wasted.

Feast is a little more well-defined:
There are weird monsters, and they want to eat people. The horror flick is the latest product of Project Greenlight, the screenwriting contest/reality show that gives hope to wannabe filmmakers that they can mimic the fairy tale of Good Will Hunting, the first and Oscar-winning script by the show’s celebrity names, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The program, funded by Miramax Television and

It starts off promisingly enough.
First-time director John Gulager opens with a small, black and white
frame of desert, which bursts into color when a car hits a telephone
pole head-on. Cut to a bar, where the patrons drive grubby trucks
with bumper stickers such as “My Other Toy Has Tits!” As the
characters are introduced, there’s a yellow-shaded still of each that
gives info such as name (usually horror-movie stereotypes like
“Bozo”) and life expectancy, which, entertainingly, is used
alternately to describe the time/method of death or what their future
holds (for Jason Mewes, aka Clerks’ Jay, it says “already surpassed
expectations”). And as soon as Bozo (Balthazar
Getty), trying to get all the life-weary drunkards
and staff to, I don’t know, fight or gamble or something and yells,
“C’mon, give me some action!” you know what’s coming next.

For about a third of the movie –
written, by the way, by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton –
everything’s kind of Shaun of the Dead-amusing. (If you
forgive the blatant ripoff of a group holing themselves up in a bar
while bitey things try to get in.) Henry Rollins plays a borderline
fey motivational speaker — “These monsters are no match for the
human spirit!” — while a torn-apart, maggot-covered, barely living
customer (Judah
Friedlander) mumbles, “God, your sink sucks!” as he’s trying to
clean up a bit. The invading creatures themselves are sort of like
lightning-quick, squealing jackals, covered in lots of slime and
spewing maggots (hello, Slither?). And one of the writers’ funnier,
more inspired elements is the unexpected method the munchers use to
reproduce.

However.
There’s never an explanation for where these monsters come from. They
don’t really appear all that often – though when they do, the
over-the-top butchering should elicit no-they-didn’t! laughs – and
even the suspenseful moments don’t pay off in cardiac-arrest scares.
And as the 86-minutes go on – and on – the mostly funny dialogue
sinks to sub-B-movie-levels (drinking game: a shot every time someone
says “lock this place down!” or “we have to fight!”) along
with the majority of performances (Navi Rawat as “Heroine” is
particularly abominable). Gulager’s initially interesting camerawork,
in which the he doesn’t frenetically bobble the camera during the
first attacks as much as seem to drop it and knock it around (OK,
third ripoff, as that’s a little Blair Witch), seems to become an
excuse for keeping the audience from finding out that even the
filmmakers don’t know what in the hell is going on. And thus
another fairy tale ends up, well, a bloody mess.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Hans Canosa’s Conversations With Other
Women takes some getting used to. A split screen is employed
throughout the film. Dialogue, by his writing partner on 2002’s Alma
Mater, Gabrielle Zevin, is sometimes too clever, too precious, and
too analytical. And the entire movie is about a wedding hookup, its
two lead characters essentially the only people with whom we get to
spend 84 minutes.

Give it a chance. What immediately begins as a deceptively simple story about a horndog and a bored
bridesmaid escaping for some quiet while others revel in the next
room blossoms into one that not only  demands attention, but may
become more rewarding with repeated viewings. Almost immediately we
meet the unnamed man (Aaron Eckhart) and melancholy woman (Helena
Bonham Carter), whose small talk includes their ages and what she’s
doing here if she’s so miserable (turns out she was initially
uninvited until the bride, an estranged friend, had a member of her
wedding party bail). Then the conversation goes deeper, into
relationships and “history” — “mine is a sad, dull,
real-people kind,” the woman tells him, resisting to dish – and
we discover that she is currently married but once divorced, and he
is also divorced and now casually dating a much younger dancer whom
the woman repeatedly refers to as “23 on August the 12th.” With
an obvious sexual attraction, it seems inevitable the two will end up
in bed, despite the woman’s constant wavering and
sometimes-irritating psychobabble such as, “If we go in [the hotel
room], we’re committing to a course of action.”

Zevin smoothly transforms Conversations
With Other Women from an anonymous one-night stand into a lovely
rumination on carrying torches, settling for innocuous but
passionless relationships, and the possibility of loneliness no
matter what your romantic status. In Before Sunrise/Before Sunset
style, there’s not much action but a whole lot of talking, most of it
natural and often witty but sometimes achingly poetic. “There’s
something about you that sends me,” the man tells her. He imagines
them as a long-term couple, saying that he would take care of her
even in old age: “I’ll walk you and water you and feed you….”
The split screen, initially annoying as each is on either side,
isolated despite their usual nearness, occasionally even entering the
other frame with an elbow or such. But Canosa will now and then use
half of his division to show a young couple; also distracting but
eventually intriguing once you become accustomed to it. Finally, the
frames are used for different takes of the same scenes, with the
pair’s  emotions and reactions varying.

Eckhart and Bonham
Carter are gorgeous and impressively casual in their roles despite
the subtleties the script calls for throughout the night. His
character’s the puppy to her bridesmaid’s seemingly impervious yet
heavyhearted voice of reason. When she somewhat unconvincingly
states, “There are no happy endings in our future,” he doesn’t
quite buy it, either. And as Conversations With Other Women
concludes, at just the right time, on a rather open-ended note, you
get the feeling that neither of them ever will

“I had to stop trying to figure out who killed the Dahlia,” an investigator says in the third act of
Brian De Palma’s disappointing, often ludicrous noir, The Black
Dahlia. For the fictionalized PI, it’s a matter of concentrating on
another angle of the real-life 1947 Elizabeth Short murder. For the
audience, however, this decision will likely be motivated by the same
attitude taken by the LAPD after an exhaustive probe into the
still-unsolved case: that of surrender.

Based on the book by James Ellroy (L.A.
Confidential) and scripted by War of the Worlds’ writer Josh
Friedman, The Black Dahlia doesn’t quite begin promisingly, either.
Josh Hartnett – do I really need to continue? — is Bucky
Bleichert, a former champion fighter-turned-cop who is partnered with
another former pugilist and sometime opponent, Lee Blanchard (Eckhart
again). Though voiceover is a standard and often compelling component
of film noir, the duty here is left to Hartnett, who, both in vocal
and performance, doesn’t seem to know the difference between cool and
just plain flat. Instead of playing the young hotshot to Lee’s older,
unflappable cop, Hartnett weighs the film with Bucky’s initial
stoicism, which doesn’t make his later turn to passionate
crime-solver and ardent lover terribly believable, either.

We find that Bucky and Lee are not only
work partners, however; Lee’s apparent girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett
Johansson, again self-assured and sophisticated beyond her 21 years),
takes a shine to Bucky, and the three of them develop an odd
friendship in which they spend the bulk of their free time together.
And though the pair start off as regular fuzz, they’re soon promoted
by the district attorney after he organizes a boxing match between
them to attract positive publicity in hope of getting a bond
proposition passed that will boost the department’s budget. Here, the
story finally takes off: Their first case, which turns into a messy
shootout, is quickly overshadowed when the mutilated corpse of a
young woman is found nearby. They discover that it’s Short, who had
been nicknamed the Black Dahlia because of her fondness for dark
clothing. She was an aspiring actress who ended up taking roles in
black-and-white porn films (with a usually unsatisfied, unseen
director voiced by De Palma) and was likely a prostitute. Her body
was cut in half at the torso and drained of blood, her bowls and
reproductive organs removed, bruises on her arms, her mouth sliced to
either ear in a bloody smile. 

Despite the murder’s gruesomeness, De
Palma, director of such acclaimed bloodbaths as Scarface and
Carlitos’ Way, doesn’t linger on it, mostly giving the details as a
coroner’s report with glimpses of the body. The investigation itself
takes interesting directions, leading Bucky to discover that Short
(played by Mia Kirshner in flashback) was possibly a lesbian and
involved with a similar-looking vamp, Madeleine Linscott (Hilary
Swank). Meanwhile, Lee goes, as Bucky says, “all squirrelly” over
the case, obsessing about it 24-7, becoming cruel to Kay, and
furiously leaving a meeting in which the department is watching one
of Short’s old films for clues.

From there, however, The Black Dahlia
goes spectacularly wrong. All sorts of extraneous characters, some
only represented in name, get tangled in the case. Noir-slick and
period-appropriate dialogue such as “no dice” and (as in the
above review) “it sends me” becomes nonsense like this exchange
between Bucky and Madeleine: “I don’t get modern art.” “I doubt
modern art gets you, either. I do!” And Bucky’s latent passion is
absurdly ignited – see him sweep dinner off the table for a
melodramatic, out-of-nowhere embrace, or rattle off in voiceover the
confusing chain of events he’s figured out that may have led to
Short’s killer. (Mark Isham’s mournful-jazz score, mostly stylish,
only adds to the soapiness of such scenes.) And in addition to
Hartnett, Johansson is 40s-era beautiful yet uncharacteristically
disappointing, barely registering as she’s given little to do but be
a housebound girlfriend.

Eckhart, though, completes his 2006
leading-man trifecta – including Thank You for Smoking and
Conversations With Other Women – with a terrific performance as the
increasingly unhinged Lee: Watch his face go from amused to uneasy to
downright menacing in seconds as he sees Bucky plant one on Kay at a
New Year’s ball. Kirshner is wide-eyed and doleful; also worth
mentioning is Fiona Shaw as Madeleine’s nutty mother, who turns a
family dinner hilariously awkward with her drunken comments and goes
far, far over-the-top in a second scene that is laughable yet oddly
compelling. Besides its few good performances, the best thing about
The Black Dahlia is its lushness, with sunny days and gleaming-golden
homes, and nights and old-fashioned indoor set pieces nearly sepia in
color. It’s all too pretty to end up such a wreck.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

“On 9/11, more people died of AIDS
than died of violence.” That’s just one of the startling
revelations in Nobelity, a documentary written and directed by Turk
Pipkin. Pipkin, former Night Court scribe, begins the movie talking
about his daughters, and how a parent’s job is to protect them during
the day and reassure them at night. “But is everything going to be
OK?” he asks himself. “Are we going to leave a better world for
future generations, or is this going to be the time when it all
started to unravel?”

According to the rather alarming
Nobelity, the latter is more likely to be true. Pipkin spent a year
seeking out the inconvenient truth from nine Al Gores, all Nobel
Prize winners, about subjects such as the environment, nuclear
weapons, hunger, poverty, and the general divisiveness that pits
global citizens against each other. Most disgustingly, the most
popular conclusion that is drawn is one that most of us probably
already suspect: that the blame lies in “institutional resistance”
– i.e., politics. As Steven Weinberg, who was awarded the 1999 Nobel
for Physics, points out, the government, for the most part,  doesn’t
care about people who don’t vote. Leaving an inhabitable planet for
current voters’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, then? Not on
the agenda. And Harold Varmus, expert in medicine, asserts that the United States’ foreign aid is spurred not by altruism, but to help our
“friends.” These  are perhaps obvious observations in these
increasingly cynical times, but it doesn’t hurt the population to be
reminded.

Pipken travels all over the world not
only to interview his eloquent, amiable subjects but also to check
out conditions for himself. The country that leaves the biggest
impression is India, whose over a billion citizens teem the streets
and work hard for, on average, a mere dollar a day – yet are
frequently smiling. “I’m wondering if Americans are forgetting how
to smile,” Pipkin says in voiceover. Yes, it’s a bit corny, as is
dramatic segments that the director uses to serve as segues between
the fascinating talks: He scowls and holds his head in hands as he
edits his footage, adds slow-mos of his daughters, writes key words
that serve as chapter titles (“Reason,” “Persistence,”
“Love,” etc.) on a board.

But you’d have to be a heartless bastard not to forgive these bits
in light of the package Pipken has neatly assembled to give us ordinary
schlubs access to the world’s greatest minds. All are compelling, but
the laureates who may haunt you the most are the 96-year-old Joseph
Rotblat, who was a nuclear scientist and then turned his efforts
instead to ban the weapons he helped create. When questioned about how
many nukes exist today, Rotblat responds, “There aren’t enough targets
in the world for all these weapons.” His most chilling statement is
simply, “We are really, really in danger.” Then there’s Wangari
Maathai, an environmentalist whose simple idea for helping Africa is to
teach its most impoverished citizens to plant trees to reverse the
devastating effects of deforestation, with an underlying motive of
education and empowerment.

Pipken also speaks with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose
sweetness and palpable love of mankind is concurrent with his message
that we need to start regarding everyone across the globe as our
family, just as God has no enemies, regardless of whether one is, for
example, gay or straight, Bush or bin Laden. Tutu’s belief that one
person can affect the world is echoed by fellow peace activist Jody
Williams, who puts it in layman’s terms: “There is nothing magical
about change. It is getting off up your ass and caring enough to take
the first step.”

A movie that takes exception to the idea of one happy, global family is Crank. Co-written and
-directed by first-timers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, Crank is
mindless entertainment of the most gleeful kind. It’s full of sex (in
the middle of a Chinatown market), drugs (“medicinal” coke), and
rock ‘n’ roll (“Bang Your Head” and, uh, “Achy Breaky Heart”).
It stars perhaps the coolest new leading man on the planet, the
Transporter franchise’s Jason Statham. And like the films that
brought  Statham fame, Crank makes you laugh at its knowing absurdity
and over-the-top action – which, like the bus in that Keanu movie,
can literally never stop.

Statham plays Chev, an L.A. hit man who
crossed the wrong people and learns via a DVD labeled “Fuck you”
that he’s been poisoned with the “Beijing cocktail” in his sleep.
The drug makes him woozy; the message makes him mad – so Chev
starts destroying his television and off he goes to get revenge.
Speeding along in his classic car, he’s fine. Sitting at red lights,
he’s not. (In case we don’t see the torpor overcoming him, there are
graphics of his heart to show its state.) Chev figures out a little
too quickly that he needs adrenaline to stay alive, but he calls his
doctor (Dwight Yoakam) anyway — “What are you doing?” Doc asks.
“Driving through mall. Cops chasing me,” he nonchalantly answers
– who confirms his suspicion and tells him to get some epinephrine
stat.

At first, Crank threatens to be another
Domino. Neveldine and Taylor hyperstylize the beginning to the point
of unwatchability, with the camera whirling and jumping and even
still shots flashing too quickly to give your stomach a break. The
credits and street grid that show where Chev is make the movie look
like a videogame, and random bits of dialogue are written in
subtitles. Thankfully, though, the filmmakers somehow make the latter
concept funny, and the overall visual frenzy is mostly limited to the
endless tactics Chev takes to keep himself going – which themselves
are endlessly inventive, including not just violence and fast driving
but using nasal spray and rocking out to a cover of the Mulleted
One’s classic as if it were death metal.

Obviously, Neveldine and Taylor have a
sense of humor, and Statham’s deadpan presence is the perfect
complement. (“Hang on,” Chev tells his doctor when he’s driving
through the mall. The next shot? His car wedged in an
escalator.) Chev’s ditzy girlfriend, played by a perfectly annoying
Amy Smart, further complicates his time’s-running-out dilemma as he
tries to shield her from his brutal reality for as long as possible
by, say, dumping out the contents of her purse while he goes off to
punch a few people. It’s all played, unsurprisingly, more for the
sake of maximum action than sense. But isn’t it  better to find
entertaining illogic in movies than depressing irrationality in the
real world?

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

In 1973’s The Wicker Man, the women may
flit around glaringly naked, but in the 2006 version, they’re
Kool-Aid-drinkin’ evil. And the ladies partial to long flowing hair
and dresses get punched. And kicked. And shoved aside. Any surprise
that Neil LaBute did the redo? The writer-director, also responsible
for venom-filled films such as In the Company of Men and The Shape of
Things, should get ready for cries of misogyny here, too. Though in
this case, the bitches – did I mention they’re also called bitches?
– done deserve it.

LaBute removes a bit of sense in updating writer
Anthony Shaffer’s  bizarre, campy original, which involved a pagan
community and a devoutly Christian cop  who visits to look for a
missing girl. Now the forces aren’t naturalists versus puritans, but
gals versus the guys: After witnessing a fiery car accident in which
the occupants, including a bratty little girl, disappear,
now-traumatized police officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) gets a
letter from his ex, Willow (Kate Beahan), saying that her daughter
has vanished and asking for his help. Sedatives in hand, he travels
to Willow’s hometown of Summersisle, an olde-tyme private island
reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Ed discovers that
the residents, led by Sister Summersisle (a glowing Ellen Burstyn),
don’t care so much for strangers, as each of them coolly deny knowing
the girl and dismiss him. He also soon realizes that they’re all
chicks, with a few mute men around to change lightbulbs and such.

Like its predecessor, The Wicker Man isn’t so much a horror film as a
skin-crawling mystery. LaBute does toss in a few minor jolts and
freakish images – a couple of old, blind, talking-in-unison twins
will stay in your head longer than the movie will –  but mostly
focuses on Ed’s increasing insanity as the natives infuriatingly deny
him information or outright lie to him. Cage, who prepared for the
role by darkening his hair, earns mostly legitimate laughs as his
character wigs out at the visions that haunt him, responds to the
residents with sarcasm, and then turns entertainingly badass as they
continue to question his authority: “You have my permission to stay out of the fucking way!” he tells a woman as he searches her
home. Besides Burstyn, the rest of the cast isn’t very good, and
though LaBute took out some old chunks of cheese, he unfortunately
replaced them with new ones – and they don’t include nude dancing
nymphs.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Bright colors, sassy opening credits,
women who are strong but a little loony – Queens sure does look
like the work of Pedro Almodovar. But
it doesn’t take long to realize it’s the product of another imitator:
Spanish director and co-writer Manuel G[O AIGU]mez Pereira wraps the
comedy about five mothers and their gay sons’ impending nuptials like
a sparkly wedding gift yet delivers the equivalent of a toaster.

With Yolanda Garcia Serrano and Joaquin
Oristrell sharing script duties, Queens takes place over one weekend,
building to Spain’s first mass gay wedding in which twenty couples
will participate. Chaos rules as the film follows three; the men,
however, are less important (and less distinguishable) than their
parents. We first meet the flighty Nuria (Veronica Forque), mother of Narciso (Paco Leon), who has a compulsion
for sleeping with men she just met and is constantly calling her
shrink. Then there’s Magda (Carmen Maura, an Almodovar
regular),  mom of the uptight Miguel (Unax Ugalde) and owner of the
hotel where the event (and an employee uprising) is taking place.
Ofelia (Betiana Blum) is the ditzy mother of Miguel’s partner, Oscar (Daniel Hendler), and refuses to put her giant fluffy dog
in a kennel despite the hotel’s policy. Narciso’s partner, Hugo
(Gustavo Salmeron), is trying to cope with the bitterness of
his mom, Helena (Mercedes Sampietro), who’s a judge and ends up
having to perform the ceremony. Last, there’s Reyes (Marisa Paredes),
an arrogant actress who spits venom at her gardener, Jacinto (Lluis
Homar), whose son Jonas (Hugo Silva) is marrying her own son,
Rafa (Raul
Jimenez).

If you’re confused, the movie won’t
make anything much clearer. With nearly all of the men dark and
handsome, it’s difficult to keep them, um, straight, especially with
a couple dads and scenes in which the partners are separated thrown
in – in general, there are just too many damn characters. Pereira
further muddles things by having Queens occasionally move back and
forth in time. And subplots  including Ofelia’s eventually lost dog –
who, conveniently, roams exclusively among the paths of Pereira’s
entire gay world – and a strike by Magda’s raise-demanding kitchen
employees may round out a few roles, but considering the flatness of
the rest of the movie, the distraction is hardly worth it.

Besides Salmeon’s Hugo, must
deal with his cold mother, a father who asks him how he knows he
doesn’t like women if he’s never slept with one, and later
developments that threaten to disintegrate his relationship, the guys
are mere props. (Ugalde’s hotheaded Miguel, forever angry about
something, is too over-the-top to be believed.) Stronger acting, if
only by default, comes from the women; especial standouts include the
always-magnetic Maura and Forque and Blum, who must balance
their characters’ childishness with a bit of motherly sense. Pereira also makes sure they look gorgeous — ­perfect hair, curve-hugging clothes — ­among the film’s Madrid setting, which contrasts the chic hotel with some old-world beauty. But despite the eye candy, Queens is little more than not-terribly-funny froth, the kind in
which disasters pile on yet a tidy ending follows. Unlike Almodovar, Pereira hasn’t seemed to grasp that complexity doesn’t
require convolution. 

Another Pedro Ripoff – any of them,
over the last 20-some years – can’t be worse, however, than Another
Gay Movie. Writer-director Todd Stephens, along with story helper Tim
Kaltenecker, set out to make a Porky’s/American Pie parody in the
vein of Scary Movie or, its obvious namesake, Not Another Teen Movie.
Therefore, there are bodily fluids. And finger-sniffing. And lines
such as, “I can’t believe I almost sucked my own dad’s dick.” And
all of the above are repeated, it seems, every five minutes, making
the movie’s 92 total one long, disgusting ride.

After Nancy Sinatra’s bouncy opening
theme song, “Another Gay Sunshine Day,” the nosedive is swift.
Openly gay friends Andy (Michael Carbonaro), Jarod (Jonathan Chase),
Griff (Mitch Morris), and Nico (Jonah Blechman) are graduating from
San Torum High School and determined to “do the big A” before
summer’s up. Andy, the bland Jason Biggs of the group, fantasizes
about his history teacher, Mr. Puckov (Graham Norton, with a terrible
German accent), and suffers from overinvolved parents who’ll burst
into his room while he, say, is angling a cucumber up his ass. Griff
is the nerd with a big package. Jarod is the jock with the opposite
problem – and don’t think there isn’t a scene where he tries to fix
it. And Nico, with his half-platinum hair, slack wrists, and penchant
for pink, has a (literally) blind girlfriend who shows up
occasionally, though his post-grad goal is Richard Hatch. Who plays
himself. And shows his wang.

There are a lot of wangs in the
unrated Another Gay Movie, along with out-in-the-open  masturbation,
full-on balling, and a lone locker-room dude who first drops the soap
and then…ugh, never mind. The sights, however, aren’t nearly as
nasty as the accompanying sounds, whether the ever-present squishing
noises so pronounced they regrettably make you feel as if you’re
there or the dialogue itself: One 40-year-old-looking, mulleted
lesbian student (Ashlie Atkinson) counsels the boys that sex can be
messy, what with “penis drippings, ill-timed queefs, and 31 flavors
of genital cheese!” Stephens also makes it clear that toilet humor
needn’t be exclusive to dimwitted straight movies.

The film, and it’s hard to say this,
does have rare moments of cleverness, such as the name of the teens’
school – if you don’t get it, read more Savage Love – and Andy’s
mother, played by drag queen Lypsinka (ne John
Epperson) with a touch of Mommie Dearest. But the story itself is a
mess,  with implausible developments, no sense of time passing, and
not one conversation that doesn’t have to do with sex. And forget
about the acting – it’s all wannabe camp. After all the cringing,
the last scene    Another Gay Movie assaults you with is actually a
scary one: The characters are celebrating summer gone by, then look
toward the camera and toast, “To the sequel!”

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

When
Nietzsche advised, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he
probably never imagined that  it could be applied to eating
earthworms. But it’s the unwitting strategy of the naturally
picked-on new student in How to Eat Fried Worms, the big-screen
version of the 1973 novel by Thomas Rockwell (son of Norman).

The
movie, actually, shares little with the book, with writer-director
Bob Dolman (scripter of 1988 children’s fantasy Willow) concentrating
the ick: Instead of having to eat 15 worms in 15 days – raw or
cooked, and with any condiment desired – for the big prize of $50,
11-year-old Billy   (Luke Benward), who is previously shown to have a
weak stomach, is challenged to eat 10 worms in one day without
getting sick. The bet is made on Billy’s first day at school, when
bully Joe (Adam Hicks) fills Billy’s thermos with creepy crawlers and
yells across the cafeteria that the new kid eats worms. In a moment
of bravery, Billy answers that yes, he eats worms all the time, as a
matter of fact, and flings one in Joe’s face. “That was really
stupid!” Billy laments to too-tall outcast Erika (Hallie Kate
Eisenberg). (He doesn’t seem quite as worried when she admits that
she loved it.) The conditions are that Joe and his gang prepare the
worms, turning them into even grosser concoctions such as the
Barfmallow and Greasy Brown Toad Bloater Special, and the loser has
to walk through school with a pantsful of slimers.

Fried Worms will
joyfully freak out the youngsters as each worm goes down, and the
characters are rather likable, especially Benward’s Billy, who
clutches his head like an adult without his Xanax and lets his true
goofiness peak through his faux bravado. But the movie has dubious
lessons: Since when does “standing up” to a bully mean doing
exactly as he demands? The big event, too, is planned on a day when
Billy is watching his little brother, Woody (Ty Panitz), ensuring
that no parents are around, even when the gang goes from kitchen to
kitchen to make like Emeril (the Burning Fireball is seasoned with a
“Bam! Bam! Bam!”) Chances are, though, that your tykes will
remember only the squirming, and at least it won’t be the kind that
more yawn-inducing kids flicks bring on.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com