The Movie Vault's Journal

Subject:	Secretary (2002)
Time:	9:01 pm.
Mood:	calm.
Music:	WBRU.

Mary Gaitskill (who wrote the story this is based on) called the movie "vulgar and gross. I really don't see why anyone would want to see this movie." Um, because it's excellent? Maggie Gyllenhaal, in the breakthrough star role she's been deserving, is the masochistic Lee, a young woman with a history of depression and self-cutting. She goes to work for dominating lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader, completing his Quiet Guy with Sexual Kinks trilogy after sex, lies and videotape and Crash), who gets furious with her over typos. Of course, it's love at first sight, even if they're both too damaged to acknowledge it right away. This is a strange and compelling romance, highly believable (and erotic) even when the behavior becomes more and more stylized; the supporting characters (including Lesley Anne Warren as Lee's hapless mom) might as well not even exist, but it's Spader's and mainly Gyllenhaal's show, and they're golden. I'm probably going to write a longer piece on this one for the Movie Vault.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Jackass: The Movie (2002)
Time:	5:39 pm.
Mood:	amused.

It's like watching a bunch of drunk redneck stuntmen doing Stupid Human Tricks. Johnny Knoxville and his band of merry pranksters (including Spike Jonze) do a variety of unspeakable things to themselves and each other. That's the movie -- it's a barely-feature-length version of the TV show (which I never saw). But damn, is it funny. Some of the Candid Camera-type hijinks (often filmed on the streets of Japan) aren't very inspired, but if your criteria for a good movie include sights you've never seen before, prepare for such gems as wasabi-snorting, alligator-baiting, piss-sno-cone-eating, bottle-rocket skating, and my favorite, "the golf course airhorn." The one segment I (and possibly many others) literally could not watch was the paper-cut skit. I laughed all the way through it, though. At its best it's like Hunter S. Thompson staging Project Mayhem at Delta House.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001)
Time:	1:48 pm.
Mood:	amused.

A sort of bookend to Exhausted (the John Holmes bio), with a protagonist who's lasted a lot longer and had a lot more fun. Ron Jeremy, known as "The Hedgehog" due to his physique, is "revealed" in this sympathetic documentary to be basically a nice guy who fell into porn and doesn't take himself too seriously. Jeremy (born Ron Hyatt) is an entertaining subject, gregarious and self-deprecating (his oft-repeated line regarding his popularity is that "if I can get laid, anyone can"). Yet the dark side of his outgoing personality is that he always has to be around people -- at parties, rubbing elbows with celebrities, going out of his way to do fleeting bit roles in mainstream movies (he still yearns to be taken seriously as an actor) -- and he has nobody to go home to. The film reaches a kind of climax when Jeremy ceaselessly promotes his small role in Detroit Rock City, with an added bit of info that's both hilarious and sad. Still substantially less depressing (and less explicit) than most porn-star documentaries. Some of the other legit movies Jeremy has been in: Orgazmo, The Fluffer, Spun, Boondock Saints, and several films for John Frankenheimer, Roger Avary, and Troma.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Spirited Away (2001)
Time:	4:36 pm.
Mood:	grateful.

I did not come to this recent Oscar-winner as a fan of Hayao Miyazaki -- My Neighbor Totoro struck me as too cutesy-wootsy, Princess Mononoke technically impressive but too long for the point it makes. But this one made a believer out of me. Little girl Chihiro (voiced in the American release by Daveigh Chase of Donnie Darko, The Ring and Lilo & Stitch) finds herself lost in a strange bathhouse where spirits go to rinse off the material guck they accumulate while walking the world. That's really about all you should know, though it's stuffed with bizarre imagery that's the stuff of dreams and nightmares, proving that Miyazaki (who almost retired before making this, but decided to make it after observing a 10-year-old girl) is one of cinema's true visionaries. American audiences may not be ready for it (I overheard a lot of post-movie befuddlement from parents who'd taken their kids to see it), but who cares? It already made $200 million before even hitting our theaters.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	The Outsiders (1983)
Time:	9:34 pm.
Mood:	apathetic.
Music:	WBRU.

It's not every movie that has room for Tom Cruise and Tom Waits, but this overwrought, stylized teen melodrama might only hold your interest if you were young enough to be impressed by it in 1983. I can't for the life of me understand why Francis Coppola somehow decided to pay a double visit to the world of S.E. Hinton (in this and Rumble Fish later the same year). The most exciting performers in it are Matt Dillon (as a surly "greaser") and Diane Lane (as a kind-hearted "soc"), but they're hardly in it. Instead we spend most of our time with poetic C. Thomas Howell and skittish Ralph Macchio on the lam after one of them stabs a soc. But it's okay -- they're really good kids underneath, as we see when they actually rescue children from a burning church. (Sheesh.) As photographed by Stephen Burum, this is a beautiful empty pop homage, with seemingly nothing of Coppola in it whatsoever. This is another movie I caught bits of on cable when I was in junior high but never managed to see all the way through until now.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (2002)
Time:	10:05 pm.
Mood:	amused.
Music:	WBRU.

Everything that doesn't have to do with Steve Irwin's cheerful death wish is completely dull, but fans and non-fans (I'd never seen the show) of Irwin's popular Animal Planet program should find this a worthy distraction. A U.S. satellite blows up, and a vital piece of it winds up in the belly of a 12-foot crocodile. Secret agents race after the debris, unaware that Irwin and wife Terri are trying to move the croc into safer waters. The movie pretty well reaches climax when the Irwins capture the croc after a long, impressively sustained chase-and-wrestle. We also get Steve mucking about with a king brown snake, a bird-eating spider, and a baby kangaroo. A brief and painless alternative to the evening news.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	The Big One (1998)
Time:	10:03 pm.
Mood:	thoughtful.
Music:	WBRU.

Never let it be said that Michael Moore is solely a Republican-basher: This documentary, filmed during Moore's Downsize This book tour, has no love for the Clinton adminstration, which oversaw a number of corporations posting record profits while giving workers the boot. Moore is against any entity that aligns itself against the will and best interests of the hardworking poor, and here -- in a sort of continuation of the "Crackers, the Corporate Crime Chicken" shtick he used to do on TV Nation, only without the chicken -- he wanders into various corporate offices with his camera crew and attempts to present CEOs with checks for 85 cents to pay for the first Mexican worker whose cheap labor will be supplanting that of a minimum-wage American. Moore comes off as a jocular man of the people, especially during speaking engagements, when he has the crack timing of a seasoned stand-up comedian. Eventually Moore finds a CEO willing to talk to him -- Nike chairman Phil Knight, who amiably welcomes Moore into his office yet neither backs down from nor apologizes for his decision to have 14-year-old Indonesian girls manufacture his shoes. You may be so thrown by Knight's unpretentious, clear-conscience defense of himself that you might actually prefer the cowardly CEOs who never let Moore past the lobby -- at least they're easier to hate. Moore's main achievement here is his portrait of an America unified by getting screwed by corporations. The irony probably doesn't escape him that Random House, his book's publisher, pushed it to #1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, or that Miramax, owned by Disney, distributed this film. It's not quite up to Roger & Me or as messily angry as his next documentary feature Bowling for Columbine, but Moore's voice -- bewildered, sarcastic, faux-naive when he needs it to be -- remains essential.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Pumpkin (2002)
Time:	7:10 am.
Mood:	indifferent.
Music:	WBRU.

Christina Ricci (also one of the producers) is a perfect blonde sorority sister who's never had a moment of angst. When her sorority decides to volunteer to help the local Challenged Athletes group in order to win the Sorority of the Year award, she meets a quiet, pained discus thrower named Pumpkin (Hank Harris), a mildly retarded boy who uses a wheelchair but can walk with some difficulty. They fall in love, and the movie concerns itself mainly with the horrified reaction everyone has. Ricci becomes a foul-mouthed rebel overnight, which basically means she ostentatiously plays someone completely unlike her in the movie's first half and then clicks into familiar Ricci mode in the second half. Here's another movie that tries to work up empathy with the two leads by turning everyone else around them into caricatures (including Brenda Blethyn in the thankless role of Pumpkin's smothering mother). The scenes between Ricci and Harris feel tender and honest, but they're few and far between, and at 117 minutes the film is way too big for the story's britches. For a more realistic treatment of a similar relationship, look at the "Fiction" section of Todd Solondz' Storytelling (the parallels even include an irascible black creative-writing professor in both films).

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Scotland, PA (2002)
Time:	6:59 am.
Mood:	cranky.
Music:	WBRU.

Please don't. Trust me -- just don't. This is the worst film I have seen in years. Set in the '70s for some reason, it's at least the third modernization of Macbeth (after Joe Macbeth and Men of Respect), only this one concerns the power struggle over -- are you sitting down? -- a burger joint. And the laughs keep on not coming! James LeGros and Maura Tierney (wife of writer-director Billy Morrissette, who'll be lucky if he gets another project based on this sludge) are the young couple who murder greasy-spoon owner James Rebhorn and turn it into a McDonald's-type place complete with drive-thru. It's yet another indie movie that's supposed to be hip and funny but never is. Things get off to a bad start with the introduction of this movie's version of the three witches -- stoners Andy Dick, Timothy "Speed" Levitch, and Amy Smart -- and actually get worse from there, with scenes that drag on into an infinity of stupidity and pointlessly obscene dialogue for Tierney's character that gets really fucking boring really fucking quickly, as you can imagine. The only small saving graces are Christopher Walken as the inquisitive detective McDuff (I wouldn't even recommend renting this just for him -- that's how annoying it is) and the selection of '70s rock that probably usurped half the movie's budget. Otherwise, you have been warned. The whole thing just made me wish a serious director would do Macbeth again for real (the last theatrical feature based on the play was Polanski's 1971 version).

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Auto Focus (2002)
Time:	7:27 am.
Mood:	impressed.
Music:	WBRU.

The erratic Paul Schrader has found his ideal subject -- a religious family man secretly obsessed with meaningless sex. Actually, according to this movie, Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear in a finely tuned study of optimism shading into enervation) was less interested in sex than in the representation of sex -- photographing or videotaping himself and his orgy buddy John "not the horror director" Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) in various acts of decadence. Auto Focus marries technological and sexual obsessions in a way that might make David Cronenberg envious. Schrader establishes Crane's milieu (the swingin', groovy '60s) in a way that explains Bob's behavior as the Playboy dream realized. But Crane also doesn't seem to exist unless he's playing to an audience -- either himself (on his surreptitious videos) or the viewers of Hogan's Heroes or, later, sparse dinner-theater crowds. It's a pitiless and depressing movie, more admirable than lovable, but Schrader certainly has achieved his objective: to make Crane's auto-voyeuristic kinks look hollow and unfulfilling. The movie itself is neither, due to the strong acting (including Maria Bello, Ron Leibman, and Rita Wilson) and Schrader's control of tone from frisky curiosity to dead-end sexual addiction. It could be called the rise and fall of Bob Crane, if he ever actually rose.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Time:	7:31 am.
Mood:	bored.

I enjoyed this more than the later Rob Cohen/Vin Diesel collaboration (xXx), but not by much. Take away the thrilling car stuntwork and you have your typical Point Break scenario, in which undercover cop Paul Walker infiltrates a Hollywood racing scene lorded over by Vin in full don't-even-try-to-be-half-the-man-I-am mode. Walker has a crisis of conscience as he faces a choice between his job and his new friends. Most of it is just an excuse for racing sequences, deservedly the movie's selling point. Cohen, who's in his fifties, seems to have embraced these flashy Vin Diesel movies as a way of forestalling old age by regressing to adolescence, though a glance at his filmography tells you his taste in material has pretty much always been trashy. The DVD comes complete with an amusing PSA from Walker along the lines of "Kids, don't try these stunts at home."

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Normal (2003)
Time:	6:57 am.
Mood:	blank.

An average-joe factory worker (Tom Wilkinson) confronts his wife of 25 years (Jessica Lange) with the news that he's a woman born in a man's body and needs sex-reassignment surgery. She has the predictable reaction, then gradually grows to accept the situation and his new identity as "Ruth." This is admittedly a sensitive and non-exploitative study of an unexplored subject -- the impact of gender dysphoria on marriages -- but it seems to have been made for absolute newcomers to the topic (or people whose only exposure to it has been the "She's a He" crap on Jerry Springer). And writer-director Jane Anderson (adapting her play Looking for Normal) often gives her characters flatly unbelievable things to say and do, such as when Wilkinson slouches off to his blue-collar job wearing earrings. The real problem is that we get no sense of what's being shattered in the marriage, and little sense of what he's had to do to repress his feelings all those years; at times we seem to be watching a highlight reel of these people's lives. What saves it from TV-movie banality are the performances; Wilkinson and especially Lange tear hungrily into the predicament, and there's good supporting work by Clancy Brown (who only gets to play nice guys in HBO films -- see The Laramie Project) as Wilkinson's understanding boss and Hayden Panettiere, who steals many scenes as the couple's hilariously forthright teenage daughter ("Are you going to shave your bikini line?").

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	xXx (2002)
Time:	5:57 pm.
Mood:	bored.

Among the official MPAA reasons for the movie's PG-13 rating is "non-stop action sequences." That's true, but two hours of it gets numbing and eventually tedious. Vin Diesel, who used to be a likable supporting actor in such films as Saving Private Ryan and Boiler Room (and I have to give him eternal props for being the voice of the Iron Giant), has let himself be turned into the next swaggering hunk of action beef. xXx, which casts Diesel as an extreme-sports punk turned secret agent, seems to have been made by teenage boys for teenage boys; it's a degraded xXxerox of the 007 movies, except Diesel, when presented with a comely leading lady (Asia Argento, who comes up with a wicked dirty laugh during a cafe scene but otherwise looks bored), hardly gives her the time of day. Watch him when he has to kiss a woman: he looks like he's smooching a wall. Director Rob Cohen keeps the large-scale stupidities popping, and the movie can be percussive idiot fun for a while if you allow it to be, but why allow it to be? This is the sort of junk that Andy Sidaris and James Glickenhaus were doing in the '80s for 1/100th of the budget, and it was insufferable then, too.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Willard (2003)
Time:	5:00 pm.
Mood:	refreshed.
Music:	Nirvana.

Saw it, loved it. Kicks the original's ass.

Trailers shown: A bunch of them -- let's see if I can even remember them all. There was A Man Apart, Anger Management, Identity, Bad Boys II, X-Men 2, and the delayed Phone Booth. Except for Bad Boys II (which looks as bad as you'd expect), nothing I hadn't seen before.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Left Behind (2000)
Time:	8:52 pm.
Mood:	amused.
Music:	WBRU.

How do you end the official narrative of your religion? Scare the followers into thinking that in the "end times," only the true believers will be taken up to Heaven, leaving the doubters on a chaotic Earth to deal with the Anti-Christ. It worked for the writers of the Bible, and it seems to have worked for Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the popular Left Behind series, the first of which became a direct-to-video (and later theatrically released) potboiler starring, of all people, Kirk Cameron. He plays an intrepid TV journalist, if you're ready for that. He and a bunch of others get L.B.ed, and he finds out about a conspiracy involving powerful bankers (code for "Jewish"), the "Eden Project," and the Anti-Christ his own self masquerading as a peace-loving U.N. secretary. (Gee, is that why Bush won't listen to the U.N.? Has he watched this movie too many times?) Those who don't buy what the film is selling are forced to fall back on its merits as a film, which are slim. The hysteria following the Rapture, complete with martial law in the streets, is nicely handled, but everything else, from the acting to the overly didactic script to the not-exactly-WETA-quality digital effects, stinks of "made for video." If this is among the best that "Christian entertainment" has to offer, purveyors of atheist entertainment shouldn't lose much sleep. There's already been one sequel (Left Behind II: Tribulation Force).

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Willard (1971)
Time:	8:48 pm.
Mood:	tired.
Music:	WBRU.

Before seeing the remake this weekend, I thought I'd check out the original, a huge hit in its day. I can't see why. Bruce Davison does give a defining performance as the cringing Willard Stiles, a mama's boy (Elsa Lanchester plays Mama) abused at his office job by his scummy boss (Ernest Borgnine), who forced Willard's dad out of the company. Willard befriends a couple of rats, Socrates and Ben, and eventually trains them to wreak minor havoc (sort of like Project Mayhem with rodents) that escalates into murder. The movie's main problem is that it's really little more than a crudely directed revenge thriller, and even the talked-about Borgnine-meets-rats scene is laughably unconvincing. I have hope that this nothing-special movie may be one of the few that benefit from a remake. We'll see in a couple of days.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Roadside Prophets (1992)
Time:	9:47 pm.
Mood:	bouncy.

A terrific road movie that deserved a wider audience. John Doe (of X) is Joe, a plant worker who finds himself on a journey to Jackpot, Nevada, where he aims to scatter the ashes of a casual buddy electrocuted by a video game. Joining him for the ride is Sam (Beastie Boy Adam "Ad Rock" Horovitz), a nutcase who looks for his long-lost parents in every Motel 9 he comes across. As these guys tour the desert on their motorcycles, writer/director Abbe Wool (also cowriter of Sid & Nancy) presents the expanse of the country as a strange but unthreatening landscape of the mind, where such oddballs as Timothy Leary, Arlo Guthrie, a dope-smoking David Carradine, and John Cusack (as Caspar the dine-and-dasher) turn up. Doe and Horovitz give killer performances, putting the kibosh on the old myth that musicians suck as actors. Wool has said she doesn't want the movie compared with Easy Rider, but it's fair to point out that it speaks to its generation (X) in about the same way that Easy Rider spoke to hippies. Anyone who ever wanted to chuck everything and take off will relate to it, but the film appeals specifically to those who have settled for less, who don't expect much in particular out of life except a few good moments, and who don't pass judgment on loonies. Roadside Prophets at its best is a glowing (but never didactic) ode to nonconformity. Great soundtrack by Pray for Rain, the Pogues, Beastie Boys, and many others.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995)
Time:	6:12 pm.
Mood:	uncomfortable.

A sleaze-world Rashomon, carried out with comic perseverance by British documentarian Nick Broomfield (Kurt and Courtney, Biggie and Tupac). In the months after Heidi Fleiss's arrest and detox period, Broomfield sniffs around the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles -- the porn actresses, the rough men and women who cater to the basest instincts, the blonde prostitutes available to sheiks and Hollywood royalty. That L.A. is a moral pit has become a banal truism; the shocking thing about this largely unsensationalized film is its unblinking gaze upon the flesh merchants who justify their livelihood with depressing glibness. Broomfield goes back and forth between Heidi's two evil mentors: Madam Alex, who once ruled the Hollywood-hooker roost, and Ivan Nagy, a consummate scumbag and everyone's worst nightmare of a decadent Hollywood "filmmaker." Finally we sit for a prolonged talk with the woman herself, who speaks eloquently and nervously on her behalf. We decide that Heidi the media harlot is the most trustworthy person on view. But Broomfield doesn't stop there. By the very end, we don't know whom to believe, and we are relieved to be freed from the fog of contradictions and self-justifying rhetoric; we need some air. The movie's poker-faced accumulation of lies and glimmers of truth is devastating; it has the force of great satire, all the more powerful for being real.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Permanent Record (1988)
Time:	10:31 pm.
Mood:	okay.

It appears to have been made to be shown in high-school classes as a warning against suicide. Alan Boyce is David, a music student with everything going for him: talent, acceptance into an elite music school, popularity, two girlfriends (Jennifer Rubin and Pamela Gidley), loving parents (Kathy Baker and Barry Corbin), a rock band with his best buddy Chris (Keanu Reeves). But he throws it all away; he jumps off a cliff during a party, and everyone assumes it was an accident until Chris discovers the truth. The second half of the movie is basically everyone dealing with David's suicide and asking the big "why?" (Points to the film for not definitively answering it; we get hints along the way, though.) This isn't much more than a conscientious TV-movie drama, with a rather maudlin climax, but the performances are solid (including Keanu's, surprisingly) and thirtysomethings who caught it back in '88 probably have a soft spot for it. Music buff alert: Joe Strummer did the score, and Lou Reed has a cameo near the beginning. Director Marisa Silver later directed the "female" half of He Said, She Said.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Advertisement

Advertisement