Month: October 2004

Oh dear lord, the hearts and the rainbows and the giggling and the hard plastic candy-colored CGI bears singing — someone make it stop! This horrifying attempt at children’s entertainment puts Care Bears, those schmaltzy-sweet cartoon characters designed for nothing beyond moving merchandise to toddlers, in all manner of jeopardy: racing in jet cars, flying … more…

We’ve seen this kind of thing before — The Dysfunctional Family Get-Together, Black-Comedy Division — but this one has a cast to die for and a bitter poignancy that imparts the sly and frequently mean-spirited wit with genuine feeling. Edmund Collins (Rip Torn: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) has died, leaving behind a suicidal widow … more…

But as unlikely as this may sound, *Team America: World Police,* with all its screaming, flailing outrage, all its deliberate provocations, all its, well, puppets, is really, deep down beneath all the vulgarity, a poignant, mournful search for that missing middle ground, one that tries to burn away all the hypocrisy and all the wishful thinking about the whole big mess that is the world to come up with a sad, pragmatic reality.

When every brain-dead, idea-bereft movie and moronic TV ad for toothpaste or whatever thinks it’s cool to go all *Matrix*-y on us, I guess it takes the genre that invented the cool slo-mo kung-fu fighting stuff to remind us how to do it right.

This is the mess we’ve got ourselves into these days, where a satire about a borderline retarded candidate for high political office who is an obvious puppet for far more nefarious forces just isn’t satirical enough. It’s like what Lily Tomlin once said: No matter how cynical you are, you can’t keep up. That should be a lot scarier than anything John Sayles has to tell us.

We Americans should probably be insulted, as a people, by movies like this travesty of a remake, *Shall We Dance?* See, the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, upon which this is very closely based, is a charming, lovely film, fleet and sure-footed, subtle and elegant. It was a box-office phenomenon in its native land and one of the biggest arthouse hits ever in the United States. But now, comes time to sell a version of the story to mainstream American audiences, what does it look like? Instead of class, we get crass. Instead of living characters, we get lazy stereotypes. Instead of light effervescence, we get a lead balloon. We should be embarrassed to be seen as a culture that requires crudity and glaring obviousness in our entertainment.

Oh, the comparisons just come so easily: Like Coyote Ugly, only sillier. Like Crossroads, only sickening-sweeter. Like every other vehicle for a teenage pop queen, only exactly the same. Hilary Duff (Cheaper by the Dozen), as Hilary Duff(TM), heads to a summer program in Los Angeles at the way coolest music conservatory in the country, … more…

Some filmmakers spend tens of millions of dollars to create the kind of elegant minimalism first-time writer/director Shane Carruth achieves here on a budget of $7,000. The elegance is a partly a side effect of shooting fast and cheap in 16mm and blowing up to 35mm: a deliberate flatness and an industrial brightness that complements … more…