Change Your Image
DANAATTHEMOVIES
Reviews
Gigli (2003)
A bad karma or simply a bad strategy?
JLo has been dealt with a "bad karma". Or is Gigli simply a bad strategy on her part?
As a savvy businessperson, JLo had to know what was coming though. Yet, she did not ask Sony Pictures & Revolution Studios to postpone Gigli's release. There was a lot of empty seats at the Mann National Theatre in Westwood, California during its premiere 2 Sundays ago. This meant that a lot of the invited people did not bother to show up. What Sony's PR people did was to fill up the empty seats by allowing the cordoned-off fans to enter the theatre.
The good news is that no movie star is immune to "bad karma". Even Julia Roberts had a stinker (Mary Reilly). In 1993, based on advance marketing tests, TriStar Pictures knew that Mary Reilly was going to bomb in the box office. The thinking was either to keep the movie in storage forever or to release it straight to video. However, TriStar chose simply to postpone its release --- for more than 2 years! Still, when Mary Reilly was finally shown in theatres after the "bad karma" about it had died down, nobody showed up. But Julia survived this, and how.
Benny Medina of Handprint Entertainment (JoLo's former manager whom JLo fired recently after 8 years of faithful service) must be smiling today. Will JLo go ahead with her lawsuit against Benny? Benny promised to fight to the end. Let's see who will back off first.
Bob & Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films must be busy right now planning a revised marketing strategy for Jersey Girl in order to avoid a similar fate that Gigli is suffering. It's slated for release before the year ends. Will Miramax move its release?
Hopefully, Ben Affleck is not bad karma. Gwyneth Paltrow's star seemed to have dimmed after her publicized pairing with Affleck. But, at least, their 2000 movie Bounce did much, much better in the box office. Affleck has a new action movie coming up (Paycheck). Will he recover with this movie?
Gigli proves that a good writer/producer/director (Martin Brest) can lose his touch and elements. Brest directed the megahit Beverly Hills Cop in 1984. This was the movie that made Eddie Murphy a megastar. Brest was the producer and director of Scent of a Woman (the movie in which Al Pacino finally won an Oscar) and the Brad Pitt & Anthony Hopkins movie Meet Joe Black. Brest was the writer and director of 1979's funny Going In Style, with George Burns & Art Carney.
Gigli also proves that an Oscar-winning screenwriter such as Affleck (for Goodwill Hunting) can misread a bad script. Maybe, Affleck did not contribute to any rewrite of Gigli's script and he just concentrated on acting in it.
The way I see it, the only way JLo and Affleck will pair up in a movie again is if, by a miracle, Jersey Girl becomes a box-office hit. Otherwise, as a movie pair, they're as good as divorced/Hollywood style.
It used to be that whatever JLo touched always turned to gold. Not anymore. She must now feel like Oprah Winfrey did when Oprah's pet film project Beloved bombed big time despite Disney's muscle and support. Hopefully, unlike Oprah seemed to have done, JLo will not gain weight as a result.
View from the Top (2003)
Celestial and uplifting!
We meant to see A View From The Top on day one, but kept postponing it for one reason or another. We finally saw it last night (a Monday, 4/7/03) at the fabulous and classy ArcLight Hollywood multiplex.
There is no other way to put it. A View From The Top is hilarious with a capital "H".
Gwyneth Paltrow is really an excellent actor, transforming her character from an awkward "Small Town Girl" in the Midwest growing up and living in a trailer with her mother and 3rd stepfather, to an awkward flight attendant for a small commuter plane serving gamblers and Las Vegas, to realizing her dreams through mishaps, trials and tribulations at a prestigious airline company, and finally making her dream a reality by becoming a classy international flight attendant (with Paris and all the major European cities as her base), and only to discover that her heart is still aching for something else.
This movie is definitely for men and women anywhere on Earth who have dreams and who do something to make their dream a reality. Too bad this movie has not soared well with today's U.S. audience. It was originally scheduled to be released in fall 2001, but after 9/11/01, it never found its place in the U.S.
Candice Bergen's character is an inspiration. I thought at first her character was false, but I was wrong. Candice played her character straight and the result is she's very funny. Mike Myers is very original as the airline company's chief trainer for flight attendants. He developed and played a funny character to perfection but with an imperfect eye.
Kelly Preston and Christina Applegate played their "flight attendant from the midwest" roles extremely well. I really empathized with their characters, both the good and the bad.
I thought that "airline sex" was going to be a sub-plot of this movie. I was wrong. This movie is as clear as a whistle.
Mark Ruffalo plays Gwyneth's love against type. Mark has a funny family, straight from the script pages of "The Royal Tenenbaums" (another Miramax movie). Rob Lowe and Chad Everett have guest roles here, and how their characters mug and hug the camera. Perfect.
Finally, ever wonder why on earth did all these talents agree to make this small Miramax movie for nothing? Simple. This extremely positive movie was produced by Brad Grey --- their personal manager.
I love the soundtrack and am buying one when it becomes available in record stores.
Congratulations, Miramax and Brad Grey Films. Here's wishing that this movie receive much, much better luck at the box office internationally.
The Ring (2002)
Ringu: As in hokey, a variation of hokey-pokey.
Just because Spielberg's DreamWorks made a horror movie (an American version of a Japanese hokey) doesn't mean it's better than the budget-challenged "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Halloween", the campy 1957 "Voodoo Island" or the maligned "Abandon". The most dreadful thing about "The Ring" is its characters' lack of belief in and respect for themselves. Thus, to me, this movie draws comparison to the equally-dreadful, boring and inane "Blair Witch Project".
My neurotic and droll mind actually thought that DreamWorks' marketing funds generated (a) the good buzz on this movie from the starving media, (b) the bad buzz from the media on "Abandon" (another inane thriller movie which opened at the same time as "The Ring" on 10/18/02) (Translation: No marketing funds from Paramount), and (c) the phony squeals, screams and applause from the Saturday night audience at Loews Cinema at Universal City in Los Angeles.
In the end, it's all about money and good old-fashioned ballyhoo. DreamWorks produced another profitable movie that the public wants. No argument there. But for the media to say and the adoring public to start believing that "The Ring" is an intelligent and a genuine horror movie, now, that's a lot of croak.
The Cat's Meow (2001)
Bogdanovich is still on top of his game!
Overall, The Cat's Meow scintillates and satisfies. 31 years after "The Last Picture Show" and 29 years after "Paper Moon", Mr. Bogdanovich still delivers and how.
I spent $9.50 to see this movie in L.A. because it's a Bogdanovich movie and I was interested to see his personal take on the Ince-Hearst-Davies-Chaplin-Parsons incident of 1924. He did not disappoint. Notwithstanding the excellence of all actors in The Cat's Meow, my feeling as the end credits rolled (with Kirsten Dunst's singing voice on the soundtrack) was that Mr. Bogdanovich was its main star.
The casting is terrific. I felt each character. The sets were meticulously staged. They transported me to my self-image of and my personal feel of the 20's.
I am disappointed though that Mr. Bogdanovich had a limited budget for this movie and that no major studio in Hollywood backed him up. (A sign of the times?) A bigger budget would have been great because there probably would have been an expanded script and more outside 20's sets and scenes, and it would have lifted this movie from its seemingly limiting sets. I am also disappointed that after 3 weeks, this movie is still being shown in small arthouses in L.A. and that no major multiplex/major exhibitor has picked it up. Nevertheless, I must congratulate the movie's distributors/financiers (Lions Gate Films and German financiers) for giving the greenlight to this project.
Hearst died in 1951, Davies in 1961, Parsons in 1972, and Chaplin in 1977. No revelation from any of them before they crossed over as to what really happened? Did Davies, Parsons and Chaplin take the secret beyond their grave? If they did, it is probably because they did not want to meet an angry and intimidating Hearst beyond the great divide.
A footnote: Ince finally got his due in this movie. In 1994-95, I worked at the famous Culver Studios (the site of Ince's studio in the early 20's) in Culver City, California. Ince's pictures hang on the wall of the historic main building. I thought then that this was all that was left in Hollywood of his legacy. Not quite...
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Artistically Infinite!
The basic premise of A.I. is an extremely well-known fact before the movie's opening day --- a male child robot (played by Haley Joel Osment) programmed to need and receive a mother's love in a future world where NYC is a deserted, sunken city, and, among others, a male adult robot (played by Jude Law) programmed to satisfy any woman's sexual desires in this world.
This premise is a main marketing base for this movie (that is, that A.I.'s plot is quite a long s-t-r-e-t-c-h) (or is it?), and this was deliberately hyped by the producers to the media and to one and all to attune each undecided moviegoer to the movie's bizarre and unknown qualities. The movie project's other main marketing element is that this was a Stanley Kubrick pet project for a long time that was picked up by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick died, with major financial backing from Kubrick's home studio (Warner Bros.) and Spielberg's outfit (DreamWorks). For a mainstream Spielberg to associate himself with a pet project of out-of-this-world Kubrick should by itself give anyone on Earth a concrete idea (in bright, neon lights, if I may add) as to what to expect from this movie. If you did not, what planet did you come from?
In other words, the marketing experts and the people behind this project have forewarned us that when watching this movie, we should suspend our current beliefs (or more aptly, our current disbeliefs) and open our minds to uneasy questions and possibilities as members of the human race. Why is it that we can understand and enjoy Godzilla, Superman, Star Wars, E.T., Planet of the Apes, etc. and not A.I.? Please keep the answer to yourself because no matter how you want to express the multi-dimensional aspect of your mind, it is not going to be multi-dimensional enough for A.I.
Spielberg is no doubt a master storyteller and director, and he reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock. I did not like Spielberg's Amistad and Hitchcock's Spellbound, but I do not hold it against them. No matter what, both directors are able to hold my bladder for 2 hours.
A.I. is like traveling to the unknown. I was totally unprepared for the second hour of Spielberg's A.I. His second hour assaulted my mind multi-dimensionally and mercilessly (for lack of better words). I thought the movie could have ended at least 3 different times during its last hour, but like a roller coaster ride to the unknown (for lack of a better comparison), it just kept going and going and going and going (to my utter amazement, discomfort and impatience). I was dazed and mezmerized when the movie finally ended. Up to now, I'm still grappling with some of the questions that I think even Spielberg himself did not conjure up in this movie. And that's amazing. It's not a Moulin Rouge (another new summer movie that I like very much); it's A.I. (as in Artistically Infinite).
A.I.'s art, as with a painting, is in the eye of the beholder. If you did not sense and appreciate the parallels and double entendres in the movie, you definitely went off to a different direction. In A.I., the future and the present are one in more ways than one, and that's excellent science fiction in my book.
My congratulations to Spielberg, Warner Bros. and DreamWorks.
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Definitely, this movie is not for the artistically dead or deprived.
The director blew my mind. The whole cast and crew simply brimmed with talent. I fell in love with Nicole who's simply t-e-r-r-i-f-i-c with a capital T. The beautiful and haunting sets, the dazzling costumes, the color quality, the interplay of music from all genres, the heartfelt interpretation of the characters by the actors --- they all gave me a high.
This movie is like an opera within an operetta within a vaudeville stage show within a carnival freak show within the Great White Way within a burlesque show within a VH1/MTV show within a street sideshow within a school presentaton. Aaah, the facades of life.
Congratulations to 20th Century Fox.
Something's Got to Give (1962)
Absolutely a gem. A big turning point in Marilyn's career.
It's unfair to compare an unfinished product (Something's Got To Give) with a finished product (Move Over Darling).
Doris Day is one of my favorites, but her 1963 version of My Favorite Wife had the familiar Immaculate Mary stamp of the genre that made her a number one box office attraction in the late 50's. Move Over was directed by her Pillow Talk director, Michael Gordon, and a role was especially created for her comic Pillow Talk sidekick, the reliable Thelma Ritter, as her mother-in-law in this movie. Bianca (Polly Bergen) and Nicholas (James Garner) naturally never made it in bed as a couple, before or after their civil marriage. Horrors, if they did. Ditto with Chuck Connors (Stephen aka Adam) and Doris (Ellen aka Eve) on that fantasy island for 5 years. Horrors, if they did. Absolutely no sex for Nicholas and Ellen for 5 years except to each other.
With Marilyn's version of My Favorite Wife, however, the script and career possibilities were limitless. First, it was directed by the great George Cukor. Second, I believe it was the first time for Marilyn to play a mother in her career, and it was about time. More importantly, Marilyn put her career at risk (or showed her strength or vision, if you will) in this movie by agreeing to be surrounded by "strangers" (from Cukor to top movie star Dean Martin to the beautiful Cyd Charisse to Tom Tryon to Phil Silvers to John McGiver). Her character, Ellen, was the exact opposite of Doris Day's Ellen. This Eve had no sexual pretensions and she loved to show off her body. And what a 36-year old body. Bianca (Cyd) and Nicholas (Dean) definitely slept together when they honeymooned in Hawaii. And what about Stephen/Adam (Tom) and Ellen/Eve (Marilyn) on that fantasy island for 5 years? Don't even bother to think that they were able to hold it off for one minute! Alas, we'll never know how this movie would have actually ended. We all have a million versions. But we would never see Marilyn's full version. Something's got to give.
The Harvey Girls (1946)
Entertaining, latte musical; if you go for strong coffee, see Yentl.
It's really interesting how MGM's writers turned the script of The Harvey Girls from a light drama with Lana Turner in the lead to a light musical with Judy Garland. Oklahoma was then hot on Broadway, and MGM, smelling a trend, joined the bandwagon. Judy was in top form in this movie and she was MGM's number one asset in the 40's. If Judy only knew that 5 years later, the studio that she embraced since the Wizard of Oz days in the 30's will drop her and leave her out in the cold just when she needed all the support she could get from the studio which profited so much from her for more than 12 years. It's also interesting how MGM's casting executives decided who among their old and young stable of major and minor talents under contract will play what role in this movie. Very eclectic choices. Knowing all of these, I watched this movie for the 3rd time the other night, and it was very transforming for me. Beats a rainy night in L.A. anytime.