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Saved! (2004)
Better than Mean Girls
Yep, I said it. With all the new gloss Mean Girls is getting now that its stage musical adaptation has been adapted for screen, it's time for Saved!, which was released a few months BEFORE Mean Girls back in 2004, to get a much-deserved re-examination. While Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls was a superior queen bee to Mandy Moore in Saved!, in practically every other respect Saved! Was a better movie than Mean Girls. The writing was more incisive, more subversive, the dialogue sharper and wittier, the story better. Jena Malone's protagonist is more interesting, better developed, more sympathetic, and better acted than Lindsay Lohan's. Even the supporting characters are better - Heather Matarazzo's wannabe was more realistic than the dumb bimbo cliches of Amanda Seyfried and Lacy Chabert. The outcast friends are better, too, Eva Amurri's outrageous portrayal as the punk rebel Jewish girl ina Christian school stole every scene, and her romance with Mandy Moore's character's paraplegic brother added great dynamic tension to the conflict. And Culkin gave probably his best performance as the latter. While Kieran is still the far better actor (see Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Igby Goes Down, and of course, Succession), MacCauley showed he does have some talent and screen charisma. The adults, too, were not the two-dimensional foils to the teens in Saved! That they were in Mean Girls. Mary-Louise Parker manages to portray a Christian parent not as just an intolerant tyrant like most Hollywood movies do, but as a well-meaning single mom struggling to reconcile her beliefs with her love and compassion for her daughter - and in the end is able to embrace her daughter without abandoning her faith. Even Mandy Moore shines a little at the end, lending some sympathy to her character, providing a peek at why she is the way she is, and also allowing her to be remorseful. And the paster, principal, and father of a gay son he sends off to conversion therapy, is shown not as a monster, but a person with wants, needs, and foibles, And in the end, that's what was so great about this movie, unlike so many Hollywood vs American Evangelism, Saved! Doesn't reject Christianity, it embraces what Christianity is SUPPOSED to be as a way to criticize, not faith, but intolerance and judgement disguised as piety.
Priscilla (2023)
Plodding with little point.
On the one hand, I think the movie did a great job of demonstrating how isolating it was for Priscilla to be married to Elvis, how she withered in the shadow of Elvis, not allowed really to do anything or be anything on her own. The problem though with making a biopic about a person who is not allowed to do or be anything is it makes for very boring cinema. She met him, she fell in love with him, moved in with him, married him, spent much of her marriage waiting for him to come home, and then ultimately got fed up and divorced him. Yawn. I get that's what really happened, and I'm sure it was a difficult time for Priscilla, but that doesn't make it worth making a movie about. And the actress who plays Priscilla is completely forgettable. There's no depth to her character. Maybe that's not the actress's fault, maybe that's all there was in the script, all there was in the source material for the script, but when that's the case, you make the decision to not make the movie. And it wasn't just the Priscilla character that was undeveloped, Elvis himself was undeveloped. Ironically the actor who played Elvis in this film looked and sounded more like the real Elvis than Austin Butler did in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic last year, but Butler succeeded in portraying Elvia as a three dimensional person, while the actor in "Priscilla"seemed more like someone doing a run of the mill Elvis impersonation in an off-Strip Vegas stage show.
Saltburn (2023)
Lazy writing creates a smug, self-satisfied mess
A talented cast including Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike, and Carey Mulligan was wasted on a terrible script with clunky dialogue and a half-baked meandering plot that runs out of steam in the third act. Anyone who has seen "The Talented Mr. Ripely" will guess that Oliver will ingratiate himself with Felix, become obsessed with him, do something that weirds him out, and kill him, all in the first 5 minutes of the film. As soon as you see Oliver looking at the hedge maze you know that's where he will kill Felix. As soon as Felix tells Oliver he has a "surprise" for his birthday, a "road trip", you know he's going to take him to see his mother, you know she'll turn out to be perfectly nice and not an addict, and that Dad's actually alive and a responsible citizen, too. And once Venetia starts calling Oliver out after Felix's funeral, you know she's going to die. Then the supposed "twist" at the end is so clumsily set up that it makes M Night Shyamalan's forced, formulaic plot twists look like freaking Hitchcock. It's incredibly unbelievable. Oliver saw Felix at Oxford, just knew if he punctured Felix's bicycle tire and then lent him his while pretending to be poor and awkward and pitiable, Felix would take him under his wing, invite him to his country manor house so Oliver could manipulate the foilbles he just knew Felix's gentry family would have, kill them off one by one until he could manipulate the bereaved matriarch into signing over the whole estate to him, which was as legally implausible as it was logically implausible (good thing for Ollie wealthy titled socially connected families never have cadet branches that might have something to say about some nobody popping up and having control of the estate signed over to him after three closely timed untimely deaths).
And just as there is no rhyme or reason why even the most brilliant mastermind should think that such a far fetched plan that involves passively hoping multiple variables outside his control come to pass, there is also no plausible explanation given for why Oliver should choose to target this family. He supposedly loved Felix until Felix got creeped out by his lies (back to the Talented Mr Ripley rehash), but even before his lies about his parents were discovered, he was screwing Venetia and the Farleigh for reasons that don't seem to serve his machinations or plot or character development and would threaten his chances with Felix. Then it is he hated Felix, the one guy at Oxford who was kind and accepting of him unconditionally. Some class warfare motivation is implied, the poor kid (checks notes) scratch that, comfortably middle class kid envíes rich kid (yawn). And then there is the implication maybe Oliver did all this just because he's a sociopath, which is a lazy cop out. It's like in a bizarre case of alternative pleading as plot development, director/screenwriter Fannell is throwing character motivation options against the wall like so much undercooked pasta to see what sticks.
And Oliver is not the only character who is poorly fleshed out. The Farleigh character is well acted and succeeds in making the audience hate him, but Oliver is so over the top creepy and cringy that Farleigh's douchebaggery towards him does practically nothing to build audience empathy for Oliver. And the way Oliver is able to get Farleigh disowned so easily by revealing his coke use is as anticlimactic as it is unbelievable. Carey Mulligan's character is so one dimensional, and barely there before she's unceremoniously killed offscreen with no impact on the characters or the audience that you wonder why Fannell bothered to cast a name actor like Mulligan in the role at all. Richard E Grant is the slightly dotty hereditary member of the leisure class, a tired stock character, as is Rosamund Pike's facilely effusive but actually flinty upper class British woman character, as is Venetia's poor little rich girl/wild child.
A a psychological thriller this movie is a failure. As a social satire this movie is a failure. As an absurdist black comedy this movie is a failure. It only serves to make the audience uncomfortable for 2 hours while failing to deliver a payoff in either humor or smart ploy list or incisive commentary that would make that discomfort worth it in the end.
Ambush (2023)
An inaccurate mess
Only a third of the way through this movie I had already lost count of all the anachronisms and sloppy mistakes. Early in the film a character talks about the nutritional value in an MRE. MREs didn't even enter field trials until the early 1980s, almost 20 years after this film takes place (1966). Jonathan Rhys Meyers's character, an American officer with a vaguely Southern accent, refers to himself as "Leftenant Colonel Miller", the British pronunciation of that rank. He also is wearing the eagle insignia of a full colonel, not a lieutenant colonel. And his rank insignia is also oversized and very shiny. He also wears two, one on each side, instead of wearing one rank insignia and one branch insignia, and he wears them on his shirt below his collar instead of attached to his collar. He repeatedly addresses a lower ranked officer, a captain, as "sir", (the captain also addresses him as sir) allows the captain to speak to him as if he is a lower rank, and he also salutes this captain, who returns his salute - per military courtesy a captain would salute a colonel, not vice versa, but also neither would be saluting each other in the field under combat conditions where saluting someone would be a good way to give any snipers watching an idea of who the officer is so they can shoot him. Also, whatever rank colonel/leftenant colonel/lieutenant colonel Miller is supposed to be, no officer at his level would be going out on patrol like Miller does. The soldiers are using a variant of the M-16 with the round ribbed hand guard that wasn't introduced until the M-16A2 in the 1980s. Several soldiers are wearing BDU uniforms in woodland camouflage which weren't introduced until the 1980s.
What Women Want (2000)
Stylish Romantic Comedy
The premise is kinda cheesy, the plot predictable, and even though the idea is to make fun of the main character's casual sexism, the way it's represented as just boyish cluelessness instead of toxic misogyny is a little cringy when viewed in 2021. That being said, overall, the movie is quite enjoyable. Gibson and Hunt give great performances and have good chemistry, and the cast is well filled out with good performances in secondary roles by Alan Alda, Marissa Tomei, Bette Middler, Judy Greer, and others. The main thing I really liked about the film was its style. The film really showcases Chicago beautifully, and the whole visual concept of it is gorgeous, the set interiors of Nick's apartment and the advertising firm, a dark but still warm midcentury appeal in the former, early 20th Century commercial American Beaux Arts in the latter, with lots of warm dark woods and leather, and Gibson's and Hunt's wardrobes fit well with the interiors, a lot of classic styles with wools and suedes, it all has a very autumnal palette. The Sinatra-heavy soundtrack not only works well with the visual aesthetic, but also fits the themes of the film very well.
Cinderella (2021)
Pandering Disney Channel Movie Quality
Given the amount of hype Amazon Prime gave this movie, I expected at least better production quality, but this felt like a movie produced for the Disney Channel. Interiors were good, because they were filmed at actual stately manor houses, but "town" scenes were obviously on Pinewood Studios' backlot, not even redressed. Every progressive, girl-power "plot twist" was telegraphed a mile before it happened, and the message was heavy-handed. It was basically a jukebox musical, most of the musical numbers were new arrangements of Top 40 hits of the last 40 years, which made them feel shoehorned and pandering. Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver were wasted as the overbearing patriarch who lightens up and the stifled mother who makes him see the error of his ways. So too was Idina Menzel as the predictably not-as-wicked-as-she-first-appears stepmother. Billy Porter's flamboyant "twist" on a fairy godmother felt like it crossed the line from pandering to LGBTQ to outright offensive stereotype of LGBTQ. Camila Cabello's voice was that annoying breathy affected one that seems so popular among young female popstars now, and her acting was pretty bad. The prince was annoying and too pretty, with an unbelievably swift redemption arc. The town crier and his crew felt like a ripoff of Hamilton.
Medicine Man (1992)
An unfairly maligned film
I first saw this on one of my first dates as a 16 year old. Probably picked it because I always liked Sean Connery, and because "Save the Rainforests" was all the rage back then. I thought the movie was fine, but it didn't leave a big impression on me either way. I picked it up again a few years ago mostly out of nostalgia for my youth and the zeitgeist of the early 90s, and my wife also remembered seeing it and liking it when it was first released. Yeah, some of the messaging is a little heavy handed and the story predictable. Yeah, Bracco's performance is kinda annoying, but both Bracco and Connery blamed that on McTiernan's direction of her, which she says went against her instincts. Despite its flaws, the story is fairly engaging and the visuals of the rainforest are stunning.
Criminal Minds (2005)
Formulaic Police Procedural
Another clone of the CSI/NCIS model, with the requisite carbon copy cast members - older fatherly/motherly leader, attractive and badass lead field investigator(s), slightly quirky but still attractive younger field investigator(s), and very quirky support personnel. The high turnover of cast made it hard to really care about any characters, but there were some surprisingly good actors for such a formulaic pulpy show with pedestrian acting. One actor who was NOT good - Paget Brewster. Don't get me wrong, she's hot as all getout, but her super-serious-emphatic-stern-badass-woman line delivery is so over-the-top cartoonish, it pushes the whole show into unintentional parody of the genre.
Avanti! (1972)
Disappointing.
I was hoping for a Wilder/Lemmon collaboration with the madcap wit of Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, or Irma la Douce, but this was neither of their best work. The script was overly long, direction off, and Lemmon's usual stuffy but loveable character came off more sour than usual. His transformation from clucking his tongue at his father's infidelity, to cheating on his own wife, whom he seems to love dearly at the beginning of the film, doesn't develop believably, nor does it make him a more endearing character. The subplot of the blackmailing bellhop and his jealous chambermaid girlfriend was an inane distraction laced with somewhat offensive stereotypes. Even the cinematography didn't do a great job of romanticizing Italy, and the hotel interior shots were so obviously soundstage sets that they spoiled the illusion of being on the coast. And I got tired of hearing people talk about how chubby Juliet Mills's character is supposed to be, especially when she shows everything during the skinnydipping scene, it's clear she was not overweight by any stretch.
All About Steve (2009)
A vastly underrated movie that will hopefully be appreciated in time
This was actually a much-misunderstood and underrated movie. My wife is a child psychologist who works with kids with Asperger's Syndrome, and she said Bullock's portrayal was spot-on for an Asperger's person - narrow interest (crosswords), social awkwardness, etc. We found her character endearing, as well as those of the misfits she hooks up with along the way. I think a lot of people were uncomfortable with her character, because it challenges their preconceptions about pretty women, that they shouldn't be quirky or odd, and just because some people have a hard time identifying with (or maybe are fearful that they might identify too much with) or rooting for quirky misfits in general. Too bad.
All About Steve (2009)
A vastly underrated movie that will hopefully be appreciated in time
This was actually a much-misunderstood and underrated movie. My wife is a child psychologist who works with kids with Asperger's Syndrome, and she said Bullock's portrayal was spot-on for an Asperger's person - narrow interest (crosswords), social awkwardness, etc. We found her character endearing, as well as those of the misfits she hooks up with along the way. I think a lot of people were uncomfortable with her character, because it challenges their preconceptions about pretty women, that they shouldn't be quirky or odd, and just because some people have a hard time identifying with (or maybe are fearful that they might identify too much with) or rooting for quirky misfits in general. Too bad.