CulturePulp.

MOVIE REVIEW: '13 Going on 30'

Movie review in the Friday, April 23 Oregonian....

As a moviegoing experience, "13 Going on 30" is a charming, funny piece of wish-fulfillment for young girls -- and, if you're much older than that, a totally disturbing critique of male sexuality.

More on the disturbing stuff later. After all, older straight men probably wouldn't (or shouldn't?) be caught dead in a showing of this flick, at least not without daughters in tow. Suffice to say that "13 Going on 30"'s intended audience (teenage girls, one hopes) will devour the film's premise -- which works as both a lo-cal, female version of "Big" and a fun, dumb riff on "It's A Wonderful Life."

Our story begins in 1987, in an opening sequence that's a pitch-perfect distillation of John Hughes teen comedies, right down to the fashions and music. (It's not hard in these early scenes to guess what director Gary Winick's been watching for inspiration.) Chubby junior-high photographer Matt (Jack Salvatore Jr.) quietly pines for Jenna (Christa B. Allen) -- who keeps him at arm's length while she dreams of (what else?) being popular. Too bad she can't see how perfect Matt is; sucker's so ahead of the curve, he listens to Talking Heads!

Following complications too silly to detail (they involve a dollhouse sprinkled with magic dust), Jenna gets dissed by the cool kids, wishes she was "30, Flirty and Thriving" -- and suddenly finds herself flash-forwarded into her own body, 17 years later, where she's played by "Alias" überhottie Jennifer Garner.

Jenna has no memory of the past decade and change, and is delighted to discover -- with her Manhattan address, magazine-editor job, and New York Ranger boyfriend -- that she's been dropped into a Candace Bushnell novel. She's less delighted to discover she's become slightly evil since junior high. Much wackiness -- most of it involving Garner acting like a 13-year-old while looking disturbingly alluring in a miniskirt -- and simple lessons about the wisdom of teenagers ensue. Plus, things get complicated when Jenna tracks down the modern-day Matt (Mark Ruffalo) to help her fill in the blanks, and he's become like totally hot and artistic!

"13 Going on 30" is all about the simple homilies: Jenna tells her boss (Andy Serkis) that "we need to remember what used to be good" as she proposes re-designing her magazine to look like a cross between a junior-high yearbook and a Ralph Lauren ad. There's something quietly delightful about a teen movie pointing out, in these jaded times, that laughter and silliness and being nice are more important than being "cool" -- and Garner's wonderful when she's conveying the wide-open delight and pain of a teenage girl who nurses a crush and misses her parents; she has a great wounded face. (All this and she gets to quote Pat Benatar and re-enact the moves from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video; talk about a role to tear a cat in!)

Ultimately, the film wins you over with its essential sweetness -- despite the flat production values and the fact that, toward the end, the screenwriters very nearly forget that Jenna's a mental 13-year-old, choosing instead to play the final act as straight romantic comedy.

Which brings us, finally, to that disturbing-critique stuff for older viewers. As with "Connie and Carla," it's advisable not to think too deeply about "13 Going on 30"'s larger implications. Don't ask, for example, if we need another movie that paints a nasty picture of successful women, or what the film's saying about men when it shows a sophisticated guy falling in love with a sexy woman with a 13-year-old brain. After all, your daughters won't be asking those questions. Will they?
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(97 minutes; rated PG-13 for some sexual content and brief drug references) Grade: B

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Connie and Carla'

Movie review in the Friday, April 16 Oregonian....

"Connie and Carla" may be fairly funny, sort of sweet and slightly muddled, but there's one thing about which it is utterly certain:

It loves, loves, loves it some bad cabaret.

Writer/star Nia Vardalos' follow-up to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" stars her and Toni Collette as Chicago dinner-theater wannabes on the run from a mobster. They disguise themselves as drag queens -- and end up headlining a hit drag revue in West Hollywood. Which means the movie is positively awash in vampy, campy song-and-dance numbers -- often shown in their entirety -- from such musical chestnuts as "Cats," "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "South Pacific." You see, Connie and Carla's enthusiastic assaults on well-worn stage tunes are welcomed as high camp by audiences of gay men -- a notion that is in no way being run into the ground by pretty much every episode of "Will & Grace."

Still, it's a funny idea -- an unofficial remake of "Some Like It Hot" with a sort of "Victoria/Victor/Victoria" twist -- and Vardalos and Collette have a terrific chemistry. They're like townie song-and-dance versions of Romy and Michele. And -- how to put this? -- they have great faces for drag; Collette in particular has a hilariously deadpan pout as she vamps onstage in thick eye makeup. The best parts of the movie are in the opening, when they're yowling on the run and smacking each other around in a car; you can tell the actresses are just having a ball.

Things get sappier, however, when we're introduced to the drag queens who eventually become Connie and Carla's backup singers. There's this whole subplot with a sensitive queen (Stephen Spinella) who's trying to reconcile with his brother (David Duchovny) that traffics in TV-movie narrative beats: Duchovny's uncomfortable with men wearing dresses! His girlfriend's a bigot! Cue tinkly piano cues! Reconcile and repeat!

In fact, if the movie has a problem, it's that it sort of wallows in good intentions as it tries to make drag queens palatable for suburbia. The scenes where Connie and Carla lecture us about unhealthy body image are well-meaning, but they also bring to mind the immortal words of the aliens scolding Woody Allen in "Stardust Memories": "You want to do mankind a service? Tell funnier jokes!" The movie's far funnier, more humane, and quietly getting its message across during the scene where a drunk Vardalos, in drag and adopting a killer falsetto, flirts with a drunk Duchovny, who doesn't know she really is a woman.

It's a tricky balancing act, and the movie falls off its tightrope a few times. As a writer, Vardalos doesn't quite nail Connie and Carla: Are these women ditzy white trash, campy gay groupies, or clever performers with great voices? And the "wacky" climax, where villains are waiting in the wings while our heroes perform onstage? Yeah, that was played in Donny and Marie's "Goin' Coconuts."

Still, as long as you don't analyze its deeper implications too deeply, its heart's in the right place; there's the same sort of essential sweetness to the proceedings that made "Greek Wedding" such a huge hit.

That said, if you do analyze its deeper implications too deeply, troubling questions arise. Must we always have straight "tour guides" whenever a Hollywood movie explores a gay subculture? What is the movie telling us by suggesting that gay people, as a faceless voting bloc, enjoy badly performed showtunes? Why do the inept-but-straight Connie and Carla get to school the inept-but-gay drag queens, who are clearly their moral and intellectual superiors? And does Debbie Reynolds, who shows up toward the end, sleep in some sort of hyperbaric suspended-animation chamber?
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(97 minutes; rated PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual humor and drug references) B-minus

'Quantum Spirituality': Watching 'What the Bleep Do We Know' with the wellness crowd

A "Scene & Herd" report for The Oregonian's A&E on April 2, 2004. Please note my far more skeptical review of a re-edit of this film in Feb. 2006.

It's Saturday night at the Bagdad, and there's a line around the block for a movie about.... What the hell is this movie about again?

"My teacher said it was homework," says one young woman in line. For which class? "Yoga."

A clue! This prompts a survey of the line, which snakes around the corner for "What the BLEEP Do We Know?" -- which is, it turns out, a slick semi-documentary about the spiritual implications of quantum physics. Suddenly one notices that this is a real wellness-oriented crowd, no matter the many pitchers of beer they consume over the next two hours. Half the folks in line look like they study some sort of body-work, radiating that special brand of holistic self-satisfaction; the crowd skews young and cable-sweatered. The women wear baby tees sporting complicated Hindu-lite emblems that look like they fell off Sobé bottles. The men wear scarves.

Shot in Portland, "What the BLEEP" -- directed by Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse and William Arntz and starring Marlee Matlin -- debuted at the Bagdad a few weeks ago. Other than a few newspaper ads and fleeting press, it seems to be building its audience on word of mouth. Screenings have been added at the Mission and the McMinnville Moonlight Theater -- and, if the packed house at the Bagdad is any indication, we may have a sensation on our hands.

"I hear people are lining up to see this on weeknights," adds the yoga student.

"What the BLEEP" is a sort of holistic hand grenade. Its goal? Nothing less than the grand unification of science and spirituality -- only entertaining! Structurally, it's eerily similar to those McGraw-Hill films they used to show in elementary school: The film peppers you with insights from talking heads in the worlds of science and spirituality (none of whom are credited until the end, which may be the only way you could listen to someone who refers to herself as "Ramtha" without giggling). Sound bites about quantum physics, biology, reality and the nature of God are illustrated with F/X-laden fictional interludes starring Matlin as an anxious photographer forced to change her perceptions (irony!). All this and the movie starts with footage of Matlin encountering multiple versions of herself in the Bagdad lobby -- which created quite the tittering frisson in the Bagdad audience.

For the most part, it's provocative fun, but nothing you haven't heard on a Deepak Chopra tape -- the movie's filled with assertions about how "seeing" happens in two directions and how we're only looking at "the tip of an immense quantum-mechanical iceberg" and stoner conundrums like "Have you ever thought about what thoughts are made of?" and &tc. -- but something extraordinary happened afterward. The credits rolled and people stayed in their seats -- and immediately started discussing what they'd just seen.

"I can believe in things existing in two places at the same time," says one young woman exiting the theater. Outside, Jonna and Wilson Lynn declare the film ridiculous -- "It almost seemed like a satire," says Wilson -- while Samuel and Janet Stevenson (reflecting the vast majority that evening) defend it as a joyful celebration of life's deeper mysteries. "I found the connections to science interesting," says Janet. All agree that the fevered arguments suddenly raging around them about the very fabric of perception were very refreshing indeed.

Meanwhile, two guys in creepy android costumes wait outside the door, handing out flyers for an art show -- a Dada antidote to all the Very Important Thoughts rattling through moviegoer heads.
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Quantum Spirituality (The Oregonian, April 2, 2004)