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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Twisted'

Movie review in the Friday, Feb. 27 Oregonian....

Newly minted homicide detective Jessica Shepard (Ashley Judd) has a problem. Several, actually. Her parents died in a murder-suicide. She can't control her temper. She's drinking too much wine and blacking out.

Oh, and someone's killing every single guy with whom she's, um, "had relations."

Who's the culprit? Her new partner (Andy Garcia)? Her police-chief mentor (Samuel L. Jackson)? Her obsessive ex-boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino)? Her sexist co-workers? The old woman who lives across the street? Or, as Det. Shepard herself suggests, "Do you think it's possible to do things behind your own back?"

Such is the tale "Twisted" tells -- and it's not exactly the first time we've heard this story. (In fact, Bruce Willis had the same problem with someone killing his lovers in 1993's "Striking Distance"; both movies even feature our heroes zipping around in police boats.) But with entries in the serial-killer-mystery genre piling up like so many clubbed seals, maybe it's too much to hope for an original story. (Hell, maybe it’s too much to hope that every other one of them won't star Ashley Judd.) Maybe all one can hope for is a clever director, good performances, and dialogue that doesn't spit in your face.

Well, they got a director. Philip Kaufman has talent. He helped dream up the story for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He directed "The Right Stuff" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and an awesome 1978 remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." But he's lost his way in the New Hollywood. Between "Twisted" and 1993's "Rising Sun," Kaufman seems to have thrown up his hands -- resigned to catch the tail end of whatever narrative trend slumped its way through Tinseltown's development offices. And "Twisted," to be sure, is a total snore.

Oh, the movie's handsome to look at, dominated by a misty San Francisco skyline that dwarfs our characters. (This is the sort of thriller where cops study a dead body while a packed sports stadium glistens across the bay like a dream palace.) And Judd gives one of her better performances, looking like she just wandered in off the set of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

But there's also this big, dopey elephant in the room -- the big, dopey script by Sarah Thorp. Words cannot describe how weak some of Thorp's dialogue is. Well, actually, some of the words from the script can:

Ashley Judd  [talking about how she likes to eat]: "I get hungry."
Andy Garcia  [leaning in to kiss her]: "Me, too."

Camryn Manheim [playing a forensic biologist]: "You can tell a lot about a person by a drop of their blood."
Ashley Judd [nervously]: "Can you tell if they're a bad person?" [No! No, you can't!]

The story's ill-structured, too: "Surprise" plot twists are telegraphed so far in advance that you're constantly outsmarting Judd's character -- you feel like a chess Grand Master trouncing a kid at Candyland. And if you keep blacking out night after night after drinking the same bottle of wine -- waking up each time with another boy-toy dead as a doornail -- for Pete's sake, at least change vintages!

There's this perfect final moment in "Twisted" where someone gets killed and flops into the bay, and a bunch of sea lions in the background start honking away. It's unintentionally funny, and just perfectly sums up the contempt the filmmakers have for their audience. If they dish up poorly staged sex and mayhem, we'll bleat in response -- and fill their coffers with cash. Well, swim around this one.
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(94 minutes; rated R for violence, language and sexuality) Grade: C-minus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Eurotrip'

Movie review in the Friday, Feb. 20 Oregonian....

There's a moment during "Eurotrip" when you suspect you might be in heap-big trouble.

It's during the opening credits.

Said credits are laid out in the form of airliner safety instructions -- you know, the little pictorials that tell you how to fasten your seat-belt or put on your oxygen mask. In "Eurotrip," the cartoon characters in these safety instructions are acting ...  wacky. They're puking on each other. They're finding chickens in the overhead bin. One's wearing an oxygen mask as a fez.

"Fight Club" proved that messing with airline-safety instructions can be good for a sick laugh. But there's something so artless, so yucky yet utterly Borscht-belt, about the way "Eurotrip" tries to do it -- Barf? Chickens? Fezzes? -- that the next hour and change suddenly looks like it's gonna be a long haul.

And it gets much, much worse from there.

"Eurotrip" is a gross-out comedy about teens backpacking across Europe, "from the producers of 'Road Trip.'" In terms of story, "Eurotrip" is "Road Trip"'s special-needs cousin * -- both movies are about sensitive drips dragging their friends on trans-continental quests after sending stupid messages to sexy women.

But the similarities end there.

"Road Trip" was actually pretty funny -- tossing its sex and drug jokes in a salad of well-sketched characters. But "Eurotrip" -- directed with inept contempt by Jeff Schaffer, a former "Seinfeld" scribe who also wrote the "Cat in the Hat" screenplay -- stars a bunch of mostly bland teens who resemble other, better actors and mumble like they're slightly medicated.

Scott (Scott Mechlowicz) makes his way to Berlin with his shaggy pal Cooper (Jacob Pitts) and a pair of fraternal twins (Travis Wester and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s Michelle Trachtenberg, the only flickering light in this mess). They're looking for a hot German girl (Jessica Boehrs); instead, they find soccer hooligans. Sexual predators. And literally dozens of middle-aged men in the buff (full-frontal, I might add) who chase them en masse down a beach, man-bottoms a-jiggling.

But that's not all. These nutty 18-year-olds drink enough absinthe to kill Oscar Wilde and chase it down with Eastern-bloc vodka. They accidentally declare the Pope dead and set Papal vestments on fire. They kick mimes in the nethers. They do horrible things in confessionals. They dabble (however accidentally) in incest. They're tortured by Lucy Lawless in a dominatrix outfit. They barely react as a 4-year-old paints a Hitler mustache on his face and goose-steps across a living room. No, really. And this in a film produced by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks! With tons of product placements for Frommer's guide books!

Now, I should point out that I actually like well-done transgressive humor; I think "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" is the best movie musical in recent memory (yes, that includes "Chicago"), and a withering satire to boot. But "Eurotrip" is quite possibly the single most artless gross-out comedy I have ever seen. It relentlessly slaps you with dead carp after dead carp of icky gags -- without any of the cleverness, cinematography or characterization that would give those gags even the slightest bit of juice -- until you're left with your jaw resting lightly on the theater floor, which seems hygienic by comparison. By film's end, I wanted to put these poor teenagers into therapy, fire their agents, and hand everyone in the audience a moist towelette. Avoid at all costs.
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* Footnote, added August 2012: Today, eight-and-half years later, I would never, ever use the term "special-needs cousin" to comparatively insult a movie. Sorry -- not sure what the hell I was thinking then. I do recall that this particular insensitive turn of phrase generated at least one angry internal editorial memo at The Oregonian's offices and probably came closer to getting me fired -- on my second week of freelancing for that paper -- than I'd ever care to know. The movie still totally sucks, though.
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(89 minutes; R for sexuality, nudity, language and drug/alcohol content) D-minus

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Against the Ropes'

Movie review in the Friday, Feb. 20 Oregonian....

Poor Jackie Kallen.

In the real world, Kallen's something of a girl-power icon. She's America's most famous female boxing manager, with four world-title fighters to her credit. She was commissioner of the International Female Boxers Association. She's a motivational speaker and author. She's leathery and un-dumb. She scrapped her way into the boys-only club of boxing back when it really was boys-only.

All of which makes me wonder if Kallen isn't privately mortified by "Against the Ropes" -- in which Meg Ryan plays a character "inspired by" Kallen's life.

"Inspired by" is apparently Hollywood-ese for "we only used the name." In real life, Kallen was a journalist who launched a PR firm for athletes, then decided to take a stab at boxing management. In "Against the Ropes," Kallen (played with drag-queen subtlety by Ryan) is a lowly secretary with serious daddy issues who buys a boxer's contract for a dollar -- on a dare, in the quietest crowded restaurant in movie history -- from a woman-hating promoter (Tony Shalhoub).

When the boxer turns out to be a crack-head, our tobacco-tongued heroine decides to empty her savings and manage Luther Shaw (Omar Epps) -- the thug she watched beat her boxer to a pulp over a drug-money dispute. As soon as Kallen recruits an old trainer (played by Charles S. Dutton, who also directed, and who's easily identified as "the trainer" by his succession of funny hats), we're in the land of sports clichés. Will there be tension between the fighter and his mentors? Check! Will there be training montages? Check! In a moment so implausible it feels like science fiction, will Kallen interrupt a major sporting event to work out personal issues with poor, mismanaged Luther? Check!

To be fair, there are a handful of funny lines, and Epps has tremendous physical charisma -- there are entire universes under those heavy eyelids, and he's magnetic even when the script gives him a wee little palate of rage to paint with. But beyond that, "Against the Ropes" creates what critics refer to as a "target-rich environment." The fight choreography often looks less like actual boxing and more like brawls from "The Fall Guy." Dutton apparently studied the lesser "Rocky" movies when deciding how to create "drama" within a fight; I kept wondering when Luther would take on Mr. T. And the Lifetime-TV-movie direction is underscored by a tinkly Lifetime-TV soundtrack by the late Michael Kamen.

And then there's Meg Ryan. Egad. In what must have felt like an Oscar bid at the time, Ryan struts with a hip-thrusting ferocity that would bounce children into walls, all while doing some Funny Voice acting -- she sounds like she's practicing a white-trash accent while chain-smoking Marlboros. Ryan's obviously shooting for some sort of "authentic" salty-broad vibe, but then every once in a while she does that squinky little Meg Ryan thing with her nose and takes you totally out of the performance. She showed more effortless grit in "Kate and Leopold," for pity's sake.

Even worse, the movie betrays the very girl-power principles that make the real Kallen inspiring. In the movie, Kallen gets addicted to fame and totally loses it -- making fun of Luther at press conferences and lacing her too-skinny booty into leather outfits that would make Cher blush. In other words, unlike the real Kallen, the movie Kallen can't handle it in a man's world. It’s this weird anti-woman message masquerading in a movie about "empowerment." And there's nothing inspired about that.
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(1 hr. 43 min.; rated PG-13 for crude language, violence, brief sensuality and some drug material) Grade: C-minus