I’m not doing anything until you stop calling me Mulder

The TV Set
feels less like a send-up than the truth. Writer-director Jake Kasdan’s
"story of one pilot" follows a pitch for a sitcom from casting to the
filming of the first episode through the perspective of its writer.
Mike (David Duchovny) is bearded and dry, and has based his series, The Wexler Chronicles,
on his own experiences after his brother killed himself. Naturally,
he’s excited about the opportunity — until the suits pick a broad
actor over his choice for the lead, and the hypersensitive director
frames ridiculous shots, and the network starts to wonder if the whole
suicide thing is really necessary. "Suicide, to me, is kind of the
premise for everything that happens," Mike carefully tells Lenny
(Sigourney Weaver), the executive in charge. "I know," she responds.
"But let’s think about it for a second – what if it weren’t?"

Like
the small-screen version of Robert Altman’s The Player, The TV Set
admittedly aims at a slow-moving target. Kasdan, who directed episodes
of the beloved but short-lived series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared,
neither completely vilifies the television industry nor puts Mike on a
pedestal. Sure, making the network’s hit a reality show named Slut Wars
("Carla. Put your clothes on and get outta here!") may be caricature,
but in the era of Trading Spouses and The Bachelor, the idea barely
needs to stretch to cross that line. Instead the film simply makes us
witness to what are likely common conflicts during a program’s
development. With the exception of a BBC producer (Ioan Gruffudd) whom
the network brought on board to add "some of [his] class thing," it’s
the ratings whores versus the talent throughout the process, with Alice
(a perfect Judy Greer), a double-speaking agent, stuck in between:
"They love it," Alice frequently reports to Mike. "But they have some
concerns."

The
TV Set is a breezy 87 minutes, with witty dialogue that adds phrases
such as "the boner factor" and "I’m between marriages" to the lexicon.
Weaver is nicely slippery as an executive who can effortlessly turn a
personal anecdote of a near-tragedy into an argument to back up
aggressive business decisions. And after a string of awful films –
though he gets a pass for last year’s Trust the Man – Duchovny is funny
and likable again without resorting to Mulder-isms. Even bit parts make
an impression, from a surly cameraman to a network marketer who
instructs a test audience as if they were children.

Kasdan
adds a layer to Mike beyond merely being idealistic and in love with
his material. (Though he does moan about potentially "making the world
more mediocre.") He’s got one baby and another on the way, and his wife
(Justine Bateman), though agreeing that the network is molding the
series into mass-appeal crap, suggests that he stay flexible for the
sake of a paycheck. Mike’s attempts to swallow attitudes such as "You
don’t want to be too original!"– along with the handy painkillers he
got for stress-related back spasms – is a bit soul-sucking to watch.
But The TV Set, unlike the probable final version of The Wexler Chronicles
pilot, never gets ridiculous or dull. And the next time you turn off
yet another terrible show, you’ll surely remember that its creator may
not be to blame.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

The concept is genius. Retro may be all the rage, but when
writer-directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were cooking up
Grindhouse,
they were reaching beyond John Hughes movies and not putting baby in a
corner. Instead, they put baby in a strip club and hot pants: The
frequent collaborators, perhaps the most devoted fanboys in the world,
wanted to pay homage to the exploitation films of yore. (“Yore,” in
this case, being the ’70s.) As with all their work, they wanted blood.
Guns. T&A. And if zombies and car chases could be factored in, all
the better. They wanted the type of flick that would have been shown
back then in run-down theaters known as grindhouses.
(Unfamiliar with the concept? Then perhaps you stayed home with the
rest of the country during the film’s dismal $11.6 million opening
weekend.)

But instead of making a mere movie, Rodriguez and Tarantino created
a moviegoing experience within a moviegoing experience. They scotched
the idea of co-directing a singular vision of giddy nastiness and each
birthed their own, to be presented as a quasi–double feature complete
with old theater slides and coming attractions at the beginning and at
intermission. The intended result would be three-plus hours of a
teenage boy’s dream and arguably the biggest event release since Anakin
became Vader.

Except—sigh—Grindhouse doesn’t entirely work. If you prefer that your mediocre movies at least start with a bang, however, you’re in luck. Grindhouse
begins with Rodriguez’s fake trailer for a Western called Machete
(starring Danny Trejo and offering the unforgettable tagline, “They
just fucked with the wrong Mexican”). Then Rodriguez’s feature, Planet
Terror, starts rolling. Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) is giving her
last go-go dance at a dive before flipping off her boss and wandering
into the cold lonely night. She runs into an old flame, Wray (Freddy
Rodriguez), whom she wants nothing to do with—until a couple of
zombies, the product of government bioterror gone wrong, tear off her
leg. The threat of apocalypse isn’t far behind, also affecting
husband-and-wife doctors (Josh Brolin and Marley Shelton), the wife’s
special friend (Stacy Ferguson, aka Fergie), and various
law-enforcement types.

Planet Terror is gleeful cheese, presenting a world in which all
your crap-movie clichés are served—everyone has a gun, or is a
martial-arts expert, or is part of a you-didn’t-believe-in-us! couple.
(Or, in Wray’s case, all of the above.) The repercussions of this
particular wave of the undead are wonderfully and ickily
Slither-like—ballooning body parts, bursting pustules, and likely the
most disgusting infected nether regions you’ve ever seen. Some of the
story is slow, but Rodriguez is so extreme when things do get campy
that those stretches don’t ruin the movie: The action, including
McGowan’s well-advertised gun-leg, is thrillingly inventive, as is
intentionally terrible dialogue such as Cherry’s post-amputation moan,
“I was going to be a stand-up comedian. Who’s going to laugh now?”
Rodriguez also composed the score, which leans toward Pulp Fiction’s
style of menacing surf-rock.

Tarantino, rather surprisingly, doesn’t do as well, either with his
own film or his way-too-long screen presence. He plays a horndog
military man in Planet Terror; instead of using his funny side as a
dorkily sleazy hey-bébé type, well, he’s credited as “Rapist No. 1.”
’Nuff said. The misogyny continues in Death Proof, his half of Grindhouse.
The film follows a serial killer, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), who
self-medicates by pulverizing women with his reinforced Chevy Nova.
Tarantino’s described Death Proof as a “women’s revenge” story, and
that’s not a lie—Stuntman Mike rather entertainingly turns into a
sniveling idiot when he’s being threatened with a vehicular smackdown
by a group of gals. But it takes a long time to get to that point, and
the action, though sensational, makes up a too-minor part of the movie.
(I may be kicked out of the Estrogen Club for this, but truthfully, not
enough people die.)

What dominates Death Proof is talk—lots of girlfriends talking.
About, for instance, why guys they like cheat or don’t call them back.
There is a bit of Tarantino’s acrobatic dialogue here, but none of it
snaps, none of it’s memorable, and you’d have to be one of these young
women’s mothers to find any of it interesting. Only during a couple of
segments do you feel Tarantino’s excitement behind the camera. The best
part of the film is Russell, but he disappears near the midpoint when
the story seems to become something else entirely.

Worse, Death Proof has a giant continuity whoops, and not the B-movie kind. Brilliantly, the directors faux-aged Grindhouse
to look as if it’s been on the marquee since the Nixon administration.
The presentation is dogged by scratches, hiccuping frames, and missing
reels (amusingly, the two reels that are MIA are of impending sex
scenes), even burnt film stock and bogus adjustments. It feels so
genuine that you may find yourself getting irritated and grumbling
about the current trend of dumping union projectionists. But Death
Proof, at a point you probably won’t initially notice, gets crystal
clear. Not only does it not feel right, it isn’t right, at least
according to the grindhouse aesthetic.

As is true of both directors’ past films, however, the soundtrack is
terrific, so unusual and fun that it often comes across as the bleu
cheese that makes that wedge of iceberg palatable. And as is the case
with the majority of releases in general, the trailers embedded in Grindhouse
are some of its most glorious moments. In addition to Rodriguez’s
Machete, you’ll see Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S., Eli Roth’s
unbelievably grotesque Thanksgiving, and Edgar Wright’s hilarious Don’t
Scream, which shows that the British Hot Fuzz director can also kick
out minutelong masterpieces. Word is that some or all of the directors
are thinking about expanding their teasers into movies—Grindhouse might not have quite nailed its ambition, but there’s good reason to look forward to a Grindhouse 2.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

Go ahead, holla for Ice Cube…

OK,
I know it was Easter ‘n’ shit, but HOW IN THE BLOODY HELL did
Grindhouse make just $11.6 mil?? How did it get BEATEN by…I can
hardly say it…Are We Done Yet? *spits*

I
guess some people would look at me funny if I argue there’s no
accounting for taste in ‘merica, since it’s a movie about…well, fuck
that, it’s about cool stuff, dammit.

What
really irritates me is that I carefully planned when to see it, hoping
to catch not a theater full of morons (say, at a midnight show) but a
good group of fans (tried to go Friday afternoon, but didn’t make it).
So I saw it Sunday afternoon — and the theater was small, and the
sound wasn’t very loud, and there weren’t a lot of people there, and
the people who WERE there were pretty quiet. (!) And there’s no doubt
in my mind that I would have had a different experience in front of a
larger-than-life screen with a bunch of RR/QT nuts.

Now to try to write my review based on that feeling. It sucks how many factors can influence your enjoyment of a movie.

(For
the record, loved loved loved the trailers and aged reels — though why
did Death Proof suddenly get clear toward the end? I liked Planet
Terror better. I’m a little ashamed to say this, but I wanted more
people to die in Death Proof. And I thought it was way too chatty,
without the usual Tarantino snap.)

Taking the "cock" out of peacock

“Twin dongs.” That’s the offending
detail that first beleaguers the scheming figure skaters who decide
to compete as a pair in Blades of Glory, the Will Ferrell – Jon
Heder comedy that also likes to talk about wieners, boners, and a
book titled I’d Like to Put My Poems in You. And if you don’t quite
understand the problem, there’s even a visual that a skating fan uses
to demonstrate that something’s amiss with this coupling: “Let me
ask you something,” a dude says as he cradles two hotdogs in one
bun. “Does this look right to you?”

Yes, Blades speed-skates toward
homophobia with gags such as the clinging peacock costume Jimmy
MacElroy (Heder) wears stretched across body or the cringing
expression Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) wears when Jimmy’s crotch
is in his face for all the Olympics audience to see. Yet the joke’s
more on the ridiculous posturing – swishy or otherwise – of
figure skaters than the idea of two men ice-dancing together. And the
fact that this particular pair hates each other.

When Jimmy and Chazz are banned from
the sport after fighting during a men’s-single competition awards
ceremony, they fall to obscurity, the former working at a
sporting-goods store and the latter drunk and puking in his costume
as an evil wizard in a “Grublets on Ice” show. (“I just threw
up in here, people,” Chazz mumbles into his mic. “That’s the
reality.”) When they eventually run into each other, they recoil –
after all, Jimmy’s the adopted child with the curly locks who was
dubbed “Little Orphan Awesome,” while Chazz used to thrust his
pelvis to Billy Squires’ “The Stroke,” shoot fire from his
fingers, and was described as an “ice-devouring sex tornado.”
When Jimmy’s weirdo stalker (Nick Swardson), desperate to have his
fixation skating again, tells him that the rules say a ban applies
only to your particular division, Jimmy sulkily passes it on to Chazz
that they can compete in the pairs competitions. Naturally, they then
fight. But the scuffle is captured on camera, and when Jimmy’s coach
(Craig T. Nelson) watches it in slo-mo, he sees not hapless enemies
roundhousing and tossing each other into walls, but a magical
combination of strength and grace.

Blades of Glory is co-directed by two
freshmen, Josh Gordon and Will Speck, and written by an astonishing
four scripters. But the movie has Ferrell all over it: You see the
actor’s paunchy bod again, for instance. You learn the logistics of a
“boob handshake.” And you get dialogue like, “That’ll give me
time to get my jugs waxed,” put Cyrano-style into the mouth of
sweet Jenna Fischer’s sweet  love-interest character, by her older
siblings and Jimmy and Chazz’s rivals, the Van Waldenbergs (Amy
Poehler and her superbly silly husband, Will Arnett). It’s largely an
easy, one-joke sendup, sure, but unlike Ferrell’s previous Talladega
Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Blades doesn’t whip through all
the comic possibilities in its first half, just to rely on tired
repetition in the final rounds. More impressive, there’s not a
lowbrow bathroom gag to be found among all the wieners, boners, and
dongs.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

Hey baby, are those real?

You’ve lied. You’re called on it. What
do you do? Certain people crumble. Others, like author Clifford
Irving, are further emboldened: They don’t merely deny the charge,
they add to their story – a few more layers, lots of  outrage. They
doth not protest too much. Whatever the falsehood, sometimes it’s
hard to tell when someone’s faking it.

Irving, the subject of Lasse Hallstrom’s The Hoax, nearly got away with his most famous lie in the
early ’70s. It was far from white: Frustrated by his failure, Irving
pitched a biography on reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, telling
his publisher McGraw-Hill that Hughes selected him to tell his story.
Irving had a handwritten directive and whispered of his
communications with Hughes. He humbly admitted to the execs that he
was as astonished as they all were. The thing is, Irving had never
met Hughes. And the letters were forged by the writer himself.

At least that’s how it started
according to the film, which was written by William Wheeler based on
Irving’s own book about the experience – though he reportedly does
not want to be associated with the movie, citing, ironically,
untruths in Wheeler’s telling. The story begins with Irving (Richard
Gere) living it up after being assured by his editor, Andrea Tate
(Hope Davis), that his latest work would be published and become a
success. Not so fast: The deal didn’t get inked, and he and his
artist wife, Edith (Marcia Gay Harden), were left broke as ever. A
Newsweek article on Hughes, one that contained a photo of a letter
handwritten by the businessman, gave Irving the idea that would
eventually land him and his researcher, Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina),
in jail.

As in previous efforts such as 2005’s
Casanova or 2000’s Chocolat, Hallstrom’s touch is playful
here. Even as Suskind is having palpitations over photographing
government documents – never is research as crucial as when your
powerful subject doesn’t know who you are – Irving still acts  like
it’s all a harmless prank. The author gets high off his own
ingenuity, spinning tales a shade too colorful and proclaiming, “The
more outrageous I sound, the more convincing I sound!” Irving even
plays dress-up – slicked hair, pencil mustache – when he
energetically mimics Hughes on falsified taped  interviews.
Throughout the endeavor, the pair are frequently challenged, often in
an office of circling publishing wolves. Suskind sweats; Irving grins
and beefs up his story. Hughes talked about buying a majority
interest in McGraw-Hill if they don’t support the book, Irving tells
‘em: “Just keep the printing presses and get rid of the idiots!”
They’re slack-jawed. Whew, another escape.

Gere knows that there’s one trait every
good liar must have: charm. (It doesn’t hurt in a nearly two-hour
movie, either.) His enthusiasm as the never-say-die Irving forces you
onto the character’s side, holding your breath along with his
whenever the results of another handwriting analysis are announced
and celebrating as eases out of another tight spot. Molina’s Suskind,
therefore, is the comic relief for as long as the project is
portrayed a joke. Sweaty and messily dressed, Molina makes Suskind
anxious and awkward when it’s showtime (“He gave me a prune!” he
offers the publishers as a Hughes anecdote, barely after the
greetings have ended) and more comfortable but just as nervous when
Suskind’s with Irving (“There’s an angry billionaire and he’s
chasing me!” he points out when his friend attempts to reassure).
Davis, in contrast, is fierce despite Tate’s very 70s, very feminine
A-line suits and helmeted dark bob. Her steely reluctance as Tate is
quashing her doubts about Irving’s stories then nicely gives way to
giddiness when it starts to seem like the project’s for real, though
her ferociousness never really disappears; Davis’ best moment may be
when Tate takes down an assistant who allegedly screwed up: “Pray
that you die, you sniveling twat,” she hisses shortly after beaming
at the prospect of a Hughes visit.

The Hoax subtly morphs from a fun story
about a scam into a character study, with a bit of a thriller thrown
into the mix, A Beautiful Mind-style. The partners’
consciences regarding the book – one nervous about the lies, the
other not – shows roots in their home lives as everything starts to
fall apart. The story even gets political, dragging in a battle
between Hughes and the Nixon White House regarding Hughes’ airline,
TWA, that has a tie to Irving’s book. No matter how closely you pay
attention at this complex but mesmerizing point, you’re likely to
walk out of the theater feeling, appropriately, like the characters –
unsure of what was fantasy and what was reality, but knowing you’ve
just been caught in a whirlwind.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com