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redman-11
Reviews
Crazy in Alabama (1999)
Lazy in Hollywood
The trouble with most Melanie Griffith vehicles-and for some reason I'm excruciatingly aware of the number of them I've seen- is that you're only seeing one character, ever, and not a very good or memorable one at that. Ms. Griffith should be at the very center of a firestorm of debate on what's wrong with Hollywood, and the principal lesson we can learn from movies like this one is that Hollywood is lazy. Melanie Griffith is not only not a very good actress, she is so abominably bad and mind-numbingly predictable in her infantile reactions and sex-kitten phrasings that she should never have been seen aside from her appearances in Body Double and Something Wild, in which the characters she played were simply tailored to fit her deficient persona. For anyone who still disagrees, let me put it this way. If you were to remove the mannerisms, vocalizations, and elements of style that Ms. Griffith has simply lifted from Judy Holliday and Marilyn Monroe, you would not have enough actor left to fill the shoes of a crowd-scene extra. Yet the Hollywood system somehow works to keep this Cleopatra's barge afloat, long after it should have run aground. But, since she's who she is, however unfortunate that may be for all of us, we'll go on seeing her again and again, silicon-blown lips and breasts and, oh, what's the use? This movie is really parts of two movies that never really come together, and that wouldn't really be able to stand up by themselves either. We have a typical Hollywood construct, 60's racist Alabama, intercut with a retail clerk's dream of ascendance to stardom: kill your abusive husband, steal a car, by a hat for the hatbox, (paste classical reference here) sweet-talk a cop out of holding you in jail--Banderas probably knows so little about police procedure in this country that he actually thought the hatbox in a stolen vehicle would not be checked-- win big in Las Vegas, audition for Bewitched, and become a star. Maybe we're supposed to remember here that Liz Montgomery also played Lizzie Borden in a TV movie several years after Bewitched tanked and she was renovating her image as a Now woman. Regardless, the classification of this film as "comedy-drama" should have been the tip-off that whenever Ms Griffith found herself in trouble, the baby-doll would pop out, coo sickeningly, and her character would survive for yet another stunning costume change. Now, the "serious" side of this movie flounders like the fully dressed blacks diving into the pool--we're supposed to think here of baptism, even before we see the image of the little boy floating in the crucifixion pose--and we are also supposed to swallow yet another screenwriter's slam-dunk of a terribly complex and many-sided situation, that of racial injustices of sixties Alabama. I remember sitting in an editing room, telling my working partner I'd just come back from Alabama, where my father is buried. "F--- Alabama!" she said. She was from New York, and movies like this were her entire experience of the south. So, here we are, in the middle of this dreadful hash: a dream of becoming a star, which, oddly enough, is played by an actor who has expressed in interviews this same desire, over and over again: to be a star, even tho she is incapable of acting. Then we have the Hollywood construct of a mythical, deeply stereotyped world: racist South, lustful cop, get-rich Las Vegas, and star-studded Hollywood. And to top it all off, we have A. Banderas, who, come to think of it, may actually be the closest thing to a male counterpart to Melanie Griffith you're liable to find. He's fulfilling his dream of coming to America, becoming a star in something other than Almodovar films (the worst of which was much better than this) and finally, directing. Every boy's Hollywood dream. Like Griffith, he seems to think that talent or ability should have nothing to do with it. And if this movie had been anything like the hit it was billed as in the trailers, He would have been right. But, somehow, over and over again, that self-referencing Hollywood myth simply breaks down, over and over again. What we have, then, is shoddy "stars" that no one really wants to see, like Melanie Griffith, shoddy directing, that we could live without, like Banderas,' and shoddy films, that no one really wanted to see, playing three times a day on Bravo, like this one. Do yourself a favor, the next time this one's on: Change the channel.
Father Goose (1964)
Castration Comedy
This is a sick, sadistic farce-a castration comedy sure to be a favorite with man-haters everywhere. Cary Grant stumbles into a war he wants no part of, and is blackmailed and conned into a life of utter isolation, spotting Japanese plane and ship movements for the Royal Navy. First his cruiser is scuttled-by the very people who have enlisted him-and next he is persuaded to transport a troop of Brownies from hell led by Leslie Caron. These lovelies promptly throw him out of his digs, bury his booze, steal his blankets, tools, and food, and endear themselves to the females in the audience by laughing when he cuts himself on the sharp edge of a can, biting him, and hitting him on the foot with a hammer-which they are in the act of stealing from him at the time. If you enjoyed the kind of cruel humor in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," you'll love this movie. I just had a hard time sitting through the series of setbacks the Cary Grant character lives through in the first forty-five minutes or so of the film. If I want to see someone crucified, I'd prefer "The Greatest Story Ever Told," not this Punch and Judy show masquerading as comedy.
Interiors (1978)
Interior Surfaces
There was a Laraine Newman Saturday Night Live skit in which she plays a ditzy stewardess who bakes a peach cobbler for her Beverly Hills boyfriend. "Look," the boyfriend's mother remarks, "The shiksa's baked us a Presbyterian Pie!" Ladies and Gents, this is Woody Allen's Presbyterian Pie. In Interiors, we see (but only through his direction, for once) Allen on stilts attempting to reach the stature of a truly great director, Ingmar Bergman. It's interesting to think that, while Bergman is said to be one of Allen's favorite directors, so much of the Swede's influence, at least in this movie, seems to have proved indigestible, or incomprehensible, to Woody. At least that's the only way I can explain the clumsy, aping, pastiche-like quality to the to the long, drawn-out silences, and the improbable intellibabble dialogue. I live in a college town, and I never sat through a dinner like that. Geraldine Page makes what was, at that time, a rare appearance as an ice-grey-clad snow queen in her "ice palace:" in Allen's sex-obsessed, Freudian universe, her problems stem from this frigidity first, and the same lack of any real feeling extends to her daughters. I would suggest that not only has this character lost her life-it seems to have been stolen from her in some mysterious way by her husband and daughters-but the character itself, down to mannerisms and hairstyle, is simply a late Bibi Andersson impersonation, and as such is enough to throw even the most avid student of films into a tailspin, since the character doesn't derive so much from the plot, such as it is, as from the director/writer's idea of what a Bergmanesque matriarch should look and sound like. So there is no real explanation for her actions, or her character. Ms. Page's Oscar nomination for the role can be traced to the rarity of her film roles, and her stage reputation, coupled with Hollywood's obsessive need to legitimize itself as Real Theater. Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Sam Waterston give delectably pained and studied performances. There is much sighing, clenching of jaws and twisting of heads, as if the characters' neuroses had somehow translated themselves into virulent forms of neuralgic palsy. They can't think the cricks out of their necks, however, just as they can't make the dialogue sound real. This movie was a step forward for Allen, in that normally his characters did little more than talk, copulate, think about it, and talk some more. Here they cut out the sex part and simply think, think, and talk and talk. About nothing you or I would be the least bit interested in. Since Allen, in long view, seems to be something of an anomaly, a deep thinker inside a basically shallow person, the characters say things like (of someone's cologne): "It permeates the house." Honestly, has anyone ever sat in your presence and used the word "permeates" in conversation? But what can you expect of characters who show more emotion over the breaking of a vase than they do while fending off being raped, attending their father's wedding, or their mother's funeral? And, notice: every single review of this film you'll ever read mentions that vase: it's almost the only thing that happens in this film. Maureen Stapleton, as others have mentioned, is the salvation of this movie, and as a "vulgarian," is completely outdone (probably unintentionally) by Page: what could be more vulgar than smashing the prayer candles in a church, or appearing at the scene of your ex-husband's wedding in order to commit suicide? I have to admit, I was really rooting for the old girl to catch that undertow, since the gaspipe hadn't done the job. I vote for typing this movie as a kind of fantasy, one where a New York comic is transformed into a Northern European auteur, making yet another memorable film-which this film, some 20 years after the buzz has worn off, simply is not. Keep trying, Woody, but try to be more like yourself.
One, Two, Three (1961)
Before Wenders, There Was Wilder
This is a delightful cold-war comedy set in a divided Berlin, whose recent (the movie is set in 1961) Nazi past is still in evidence: all Cagney's employees rise to attention whenever he enters the office, his right-hand man clicks his heels, (the newspaper reporter turns out to have been his Uberlieutenant) and the nearest nobleman is a hotel men's-room attendant. When Cagney's boss in Atlanta sends his daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin) overseas in an attempt to defuse her latest romance, she promptly disappears, only to turn up wearing the wedding ring ("forged from the cannon that defended Stalingrad") of a card-carrying East German student (played by Horst Bucholz), and pregnant. A fast-paced, hilarious hour ensues which can only be compared to the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties in its rapid-fire one-liners, plot complications, and doubletakes. Nothing is sacred, including Cagney's resume, since his "Public Enemy" persona is mimicked by a walk-on cameo Red Buttons (as an MP) and Cagney himself menacingly wields a grapefruit half in a moment of frustration. The transformation of the young Communist into a glad-handing, ambitious aristocrat and bottling-plant manager, even as he zips up the fly of his new striped trousers and turns to greet his instant in-laws at the airport, is as easy as 1,2,3. This film manages to lampoon every identifiable political, economical, and social type it races past, in brilliant form. I viewed this most recently in March of 2002, and found it as freshly comic as when I first saw it, as a boy of twelve or so. Some younger viewers may miss some of the "Marshall Plan" references, but I rather believe a film like this will stimulate interest in the cold-war era, since it does much to capture the atmosphere of edgy, veiled conflict which we were forced to joke about at the time in order to live with. I can't imagine seeing a comedy quite this well-written, acted, or directed being made in the P.C. world we have inherited since then.
Copycat (1995)
Another typical manipulative thriller
Contains Spoilers This film bugged me because it stretched my usual easy credulity and attitude of charity towards plot devices by doing two implausible things, towards the end, where most films of this type screw up. Sigourney Weaver was certainly intelligent enough to realize the killer wanted her alive at all costs, so she would have feigned suicide earlier, before Ms. Hunter came on the scene, in order to throw him into a panic. Secondly, any police detective would've inspected the dead body and gotten Ms. Weaver down first, rather than search for the killer as she did. Thus she would have discovered the killer's ruse and foiled his plans. Once again, plot propulsion overcomes believability and intelligence in another typical Hollywood star vehicle. Also, when Ms. Weaver finally breaks free, why doesn't she just go out the way Ms. hunter just came in moments before? Because that way she wouldn't have run into a chain-link fence. Blah!