During the Friday, Sept. 25 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, I express surprise that "Surrogates" wasn't screened for critics until the day before it opened -- because it's actually a pretty decent little sci-fi flick with Sad Bald Bruce Willis. (The great Outlaw Vern does a pretty good job summing up the film's plusses and minuses.)
We also meander into discussions of Dennis Quaid, "Breaking Away," what makes a good sports film, and the dangers of becoming the sort of movie reviewer who simply steers the target audience into the theater. _____
Extra-long "director's cut" of a movie review in today's Oregonian....
I love that Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody decided to follow up "Juno" with a horror-comedy that lovingly mashes up "Heathers," early Sam Raimi and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." It's so much cooler than Halle Berry following her Oscar win with that money-grubbing demolition of Catwoman -- because unlike Berry, Cody clearly has a love of genre material.
And while "Jennifer's Body" doesn't always connect -- particularly when it tries to build horror-movie tension -- it's still an obvious labor of movie-geek love. It follows the supernaturally troubled relationship between a couple of high-school girls: bookish Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and maneating head cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox).
Needy has been Jennifer's friend since sandbox days. Possibly because of a sublimated crush, Needy blindly does Jennifer's bidding. One evening, this requires Needy to act as Jennifer's wingman at a performance by a bland (and possibly Devil-worshipping) indie band led by Adam Brody.
There's a fire in the venue. Jennifer disappears in the band's van. When she re-appears, she's covered in blood and has somehow been magically transformed into a bile-spewing demon succubus. And, as in "Heathers," social murder becomes literal murder: Jennifer continues attending classes in her usual bitchy human guise -- only now with occasional breaks to seduce and quite literally eat boys from various social castes.
"I knew what I had to do to be strong," says Jennifer, trying to explain to Needy the relationship between her new supernatural powers and her taste for man-flesh. Maybe this is Cody's moral: Destroying others to make yourself superficially beautiful and popular is a bad thing to do. Or maybe there's some more-elaborate postfeminist statement going on here that I can't quite parse. Either way: demonic cannibalism? Wrong.
Anyway. Needy's loyalties (and hormones) are put to the test. There's also some mild satire of the community's response to tragedy and the warped priorities of teenagers and indie musicians -- though nothing registers at a "Heathers"-level Richter-scale reading. And it all unfolds at a measured pace.
Anyone who joined the backlash against Cody's try-too-hard dialogue from "Juno" (a movie that I thought connected despite lines like "Honest to blog?") will find much ammunition here. Needy and Jennifer have nicknamed each other "Vagisil" and "Monistat"; Jennifer calls uses "salty" and "Jell-O" as adjectives to describe human beings; Amy Sedaris briefly turns up as Needy's mom and declares herself a "hard-ass, Ford-tough mama bear" before disappearing from the story entirely; J.K Simmons turns up with a wig and a hook and a funny way of saying "pecan sandies"; and when one character tells another to leave the room, she does so by saying, "Move on, dot org!"
But if director Karyn Kusama ("Girlfight," "Aeon Flux") nails anything, it's this: She successfully directs her actors to say those lines with nary a whiff of self-consciousness, making most of the dialogue as throwaway-amusing as Cody intended. Performances are for the most part very strong in "Jennifer's Body," especially Seyfried's and even Megan Fox's -- this despite the latter starlet's fame being rooted thus far in her ability to lean over motorcycles and burn bridges in interviews.
Fox's talent may end up being a bit like Keanu Reeves' talent, where's it's only evident with certain directors who know how to use the actor. But Kusama uses Fox well, making the most of the "Transformers" star's gift for radiating blank-eyed arrogance. It's not a performance that suggests a lot of range -- Jennifer is a narcissistic user at the start of the movie, and she's a narcissistic user with fangs and an "X-Men" healing factor by the end -- but it's a performance that's memorable, fun to watch, and maybe even a little iconic. Jennifer reminded me of one of those women in Daisy Dukes lounging on a sofa in a chat-line commercial -- only instead of "having the best time," she's casually munching on a human femur.
That said, "Jennifer's Body" does fall a bit flat at times. I think it's because Kusama and Cody don't always have as much fun with the horror aspects of the story as they could. Jennifer seduces and devours a boy, nobody really investigates, and then it happens, rhythmically, again and again, without much variation or character growth. The only seductions to break the pattern are a lingering Sapphic moment between Needy and Jennifer and a clumsy/honest fumble between Needy and her super-supportive boyfriend (Johnny Simmons). These are also the most emotionally charged moments in the film.
There's also this: The film wears its desire to be "Buffy" and Raimi and "Heathers" as nakedly as Ms. Cody wears her tattoos -- particularly during the one-liner-packed climactic battle, which features both levitation and Hannah Montana references. Only the results here feel more self-conscious, less satirical, and less thrilling.
Cody's ambition is admirable: She used her Oscar clout to pay tribute to the dark, funny material that rocked her socks at the video store when she was younger. But "Jennifer's" essential lack of tension will probably keep it from making its way to the shelf alongside those cult classics.
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Grade: C-plus; 102 min.; rated R for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use.
At last! A film that answers the eternal question: What if motivational speaker Tony Robbins was the subject of a rom-com?
The unfortunately titled "Love Happens" concerns a very Robbins-like grief counselor/motivational guru (Aaron Eckhart). He wrote a book called "A-Okay!" He's in Seattle, about to close a huge publishing deal. He's also hosting a workshop in which he spouts clichés and makes people walk over hot coals to help them get over their dead loved ones.
Enter a florist with a quirky hobby (Jennifer Aniston)! They meet cute! The court cute! There's a late-film crisis! Eckhart is finally forced to confront his own grief! The soundtrack drips sap! There's some weird stuff involving a parrot!
Structurally, this is as by-the-numbers as rom-coms get, right down to the wacky best friends played by Judy Greer and Dan Fogler. For a while, it's low-key enough to be tolerable. But late in the film, things get pathetically melodramatic. This includes long digressions into the grief process of one workshop attendee (John Carroll Lynch), the aforementioned foolishness with the parrot, and, I kid you not, tearful confessions in a crowded room followed by yet another one of those moments where someone stands up and slow-claps until everyone else joins in. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, well, watch this.) If "Love Happens" accomplishes nothing else -- and it doesn't -- I hope it finally kills the slow-clap scene. Forever.
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Grade: D-plus; 109 min.; rated PG-13 for some language including sexual references.
During the Friday, Sept. 11 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we talk about "9," "Whiteout," "Achewood" and Sylvester Stallone's weird new plans for Rambo.
I turn up about 46 minutes in, but (as always) the whole show is well worth a listen. (I'm delighted that honey-voiced Dave Walker is back on the show as a regular.)
For the latest CulturePulp comic strip, I sat down with Portland-based comics artist Steve Lieber. We talked about "Whiteout" -- both the 1999 graphic novel (which Lieber illustrated) and the movie adaptation that opens nationwide on Friday, Sept. 11.
Also: Here's a link to the raw text of my full hour-and-a-half conversation with Lieber -- about "Whiteout," how to draw Antarctica, Lieber's almost supernaturally Zen attitude about the Hollywood development process, obsessive research, amateur spelunking, how to extract payment from difficult publishers, how to make a 100-page comic in 20 days, horrible teaching experiences, designing Hello Kitty floats, working for a literal ton of food, and why a 3-D map of Gotham City might be a nice way to appease the continuity gods.
• Memories of Dawn Taylor making the Oregon City Historical Society very angry with her merciless taunting of "The Father of Oregon," Dr. John McLoughlin.
• A terrifying photograph of Dr. John McLoughlin (pictured at left).
• My long-ago comic strip about Dr. John McLoughlin.
• The Aquaman comic-book ad for Hostess Fruit Pies (pictured). (The original art for this ad hangs on a wall in Portland.)
• And finally, the impending arrival in Portland of Swedish "Cort and Fatboy" fan "anno-superstar."
This is one of the longer, stranger shows I've ever recorded with the lads. Enjoy. Or avoid.
Writer/director Sophie Barthes says the premise for "Cold Souls" came to her while she was sleeping. She dreamt that Woody Allen (in a premise right out of one of his New Yorker essays) checked into a futuristic clinic specializing in soul removal and storage. Allen's soul came out looking like a chickpea.
Incredibly, Barthes spun this into a droll little existential sci-fi comedy screenplay -- and then got Paul Giamatti to both produce the movie and step into the Woody Allen role.
In the film, Giamatti (playing himself) decides that having his soul temporarily removed will help him give a better stage performance as Uncle Vanya. (In the movie's funniest scenes, soul removal turns out to have the exact opposite effect on Mr. Giamatti's acting.) Mayhem erupts when Giamatti's soul is then stolen from cold storage and the semi-famous actor gets mixed up in the semi-illicit Russian soul-brokering market.
The movie is gorgeously shot by Barthes' partner, cinematographer Andrij Parekh, the performances are solid (I could watch Giamatti fret for hours), and the general tone is a fairly confident tightrope-walk between dry farce and existential gloom -- not bad for a writer/director feature debut. If I have one real beef with "Cold Souls," it's simply this: I don't think it digs particularly deeply into the philosophy or the unanswerable questions dredged up by its premise. This is at least partially because the "soul" is indefinable in a way that "emotions" or "memories" aren't (memories and emotions being the chief aspects of human nature explored by "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," to which "Cold Souls" will inevitably be compared).
Barthes never settles on a definition of our inner being -- how could she? But because she doesn't instead revel in the eternal question of what souls are -- beyond making them vague inner-being sources of sense memories, doubt and inspiration, as well as her movie's MacGuffin -- it's hard to understand why everyone gets so worked up about them in such specific ways. It’s entirely possible that I will decide a couple of days from now that this was Barthes' entire point. At the moment, I just think she's being a little glib, going for an easier satire of our belief that technology can solve our innermost problems.
That said, the movie still works as a clever little "Twilight Zone" episode with great production values, and it's an impressively ambitious debut for Barthes. I'd love to find out if she's descended from Roland.
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(101 min.; rated PG-13 for nudity and brief strong language; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B-minus
