WAITRESS

Waitress, director, Adrienne Shelly, 2007

 

HOOK: A trio of twangy-accented waitresses surmount small-town misery in a heartwarming tale of female empowerment.

 

STORY: “Mayberry” for our times with Andy Griffith a little older and a little wiser than we remember him, and a radiant Keri Russell who finds true love–not for the male gynecologist with whom she has an affair, but for the baby she is carrying.

 

GOSSIP: Adrienne Shelly (pictured above)–the movie’s writer, director and the actress who portrayed the third member of the waitress trio was tragically murdered by a construction worker months before her picture was released. He punched the 5’2″ actress after she complained about the noise he was making, and then dragged her body back to her office and hung it from the shower rod in an attempt to make it look like a suicide.

 

JOHN: It’s hard to watch this romantic-comedy-drama without thinking the film’s tragic backstory. And the final scene, where Keri Russell and Adrienne Shelly’s real life three-year-old daughter, Sophie, in a Chaplinesque exit turn and wave good-by (to the audience, but we all know they and we are waving farewell to this gifted woman) is one of the most poignant, unintended moments in movie history.

 

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

 

SPANKY: The deck is stacked against guys in this one, but each character (male and female) has their chance to show another side, and the structure of pies at the film’s beginning, pies at its end, and in between (with Jenna’s fancifully named recipes and other characters’ rhapsodic responses to them–“that pie was biblically good.”) was clever, visually interesting and hunger inducing. I don’t know about you, John, but I headed out to the kitchen after the DVD was over and had me a slice of banana cream “slice-o-life with whip cream on it” pie.

 

“TWO PAWS UP” (3 BARKs out of four)

 

KEEPER:  “Baby don’t you cry. Gonna make you a pie. Gonna make you a pie with a heart in the middle.”

DISTURBIA

Disturbia, director, D. J. Caruso, 2007

 

HOOK: Hitchcock for the “Dial P for Pizza” crowd.

 

STORY: The world is in a heightened state of paranoia—thank God we all have cell phones

 

GOSSIP: The story that became Rear Window which this film rips off first appeared in Dime Detective Magazine in February 1942. Hitchcock gave the Jimmy Stewart character a girlfriend (Grace Kelly) and made him a photojournalist (a voyeur as filmed by a voyeur director for an audience of voyeurs). Side note: “the composer” seen by Stewart is future Chipmunks creator Ross Bagdasarian.

 

JOHN: This movie owes its soul to Rear Window, but the use of adolescents and technology makes it more than an update. Anyone who has ever been in a McDonalds during high school lunch time knows that teenagers are from a different planet, but in this film it is they who are trying to find out adult secrets and the tools they use—video cameras, infer-red binoculars, cell phones and iPods intensify this (for them and the audience) even if the plot fails to provide even a remote glint of insight. There’s a Blair Witch segment that will leave you gasping and the obligatory Jack Nicholson scene of a madman breaking through the door with a baseball bat. I thought the movie was creepy, though I couldn’t help siding with the killer about a kid who has a better computer than me.

 

GO GO (2 GOs out of four)

 

SPANKY: You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve read Dilbert cartoons that have more substance than this manipulative re-run. Like this kid is in psychological as well as physical house-arrest because he popped a teacher after the Spanish instructor made a remark about the boy’s father (whose death in a car accident Shia LaBeouf thinks he somehow was responsible for). Projecting that into his relationship with his mother and the building sexuality this nerd has for the girl next door (Juno?) would be a great Hitchcock thing but, John, it just isn’t happening here. Why do you watch movies? You should just imagine your own? I only wish that murderer had taken out the director, producer (Steven Spielberg, can you believe it?) and the boy’s really annoying Japanese-American sidekick as well. This turkey is for viewers who missed Rear Window, The Shining, Blair Witch Project and high school lunch time at McDonalds.

 

“TWO PAWS DOWN” (0 BARKs out of four)

 

KEEPER: “You’re not the only one watching!”

Dark City

Dark City, Alex Proyas, director, 1998

PITCH: A Blade Runner film noir that literally keeps you in the dark.

STORY: What if everything you remember never happened but someone just wanted you to think it did? Sorry, what was that again?

HOOK: Six Special Effects in Search of an Author.

JOHN: Well, as I see it, this could be one of two things:
1) an homage to the first real science fiction movie, Fritz Lang’s 1920s Metropolis (set in a corporate city-state, society has been divided into two groups: one of planners who live high above earth in sky scrapers and another of workers who live underground toiling to sustain the lives of the privileged).
2) a dramatization of the struggle between the collective consciousness and individualism ala The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (We assume that the individual consciousness we have today has always existed in humans, but Jaynes points to studies of the two hemispheres of the brain and to archeological and even literary evidence to dispute that.). A fascinating book but not one that immediately jumps to mind for adaptation into a movie—and as the talky, intellectualizing conclusion of this film shows, one that won’t have movie audiences leaving the theater humming any Star Wars-like theme.

GO GO (2 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: I thought we were going to see Sex and the City, which come to think of it probably would have been scarier. There’s a danger in seeing a movie in which everyone falls asleep, as the characters in this one do at midnight every night. I fell asleep but unfortunately when I awoke the same plot was just droning on and on, Ketiher Sutherland trying to act creepy, William Hurt being creepy. When Metorpolis first came out critics called called it “vague,”confusing” and at times ”plain silly.” Fritz Lang (after breaking up with his Nazi-supporting wife who wrote the original story) said he didn’t even like the film, and he found its ending “false.” So Proyas couldn’t have made a better homage. Dark City is vague, confusing, just pain silly and its ending seems completely false. Way to go Hollywood!

“NO PAWS UP” (1 BARK out of four)

KEEPER: “When was the last time you remember doing anything during the day?”

CLIFFORD, THE BIG RED DOG

Clifford, The Big Red Dog, 2005

  

PITCH: A two-story high, red cartoon dog befriends kids instead of eating them.

  

STORY: The little girl, Jetta, jealous of Emily Elizabeth’s giant dog, falsely claims she has a pet that is even bigger and smarter—a giant parrot. When the neighborhood kids challenge her she dresses up the good-natured Clifford as the bird, with a hose tied to his neck through which she pretends he can talk. Her own dog, Machiavelli, is shamed, and Jetta forced to tell the truth when Clifford can’t fly.  

 

HOOK: A canine King Kong is betrayed by one deceitful human but cherished by another, a kindergarten-aged Fay Ray.

  

JOHN: I’m helped today by my three-year old grandson, Desmond, who will give you the perspective of the intended demographic.

J: How did you like the movie, Desmond? D: I want a popsicle.

J: What did you think of such a big dog? D: He looks like a turkey!

J: Well, Clifford is dressed up like a bird, but is meant to be a parrot. Anyway, what was the best part? D: I want a popsicle.

J: You can’t have a popsicle. D: You’re a turkey! Boink. Boink. Boink.  

                                                  GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

  

SPANKY: Who’s following this monster with a pooper scooper, that’s what I want to know. I think with all this attention focused on Clifford most audiences miss the angst Jetta’s real dog is experiencing. That’s the tragedy here, not that a kid lies or that a dog can’t convincingly impersonate a parrot. “Machiavelli’s Revenge,” that’s the episode I want to see, which dramatizes the little dog pointing at Clifford and telling all the kids, “A prince may be perceived to be merciful, faithful, humane, frank, and religious, but he should only seem to have these qualities.” A message every real dog already knows well.    

                                                 “TWO PAWS UP” (3 BARKs out of four)

  

KEEPER: Neighborhood kid to Jetta about the parrot, “It’s Clifford. It’s not even real.” (As if the big, red dog is.)

 

KISS ME DEADLY

Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich, director, 1955 

 

PITCH: Hard-boiled private eye vs. the atomic age. The P.I. loses. 

 

STORY: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), a cheap, sleazy, vigilante, is searching for a mysterious box he knows nothing about, save for the fact that it contains something more valuable than anything he has ever chased in the past. This great whatzit is a symbol of truth that promises each character an answer to something inexplicable. The final discovery buried the film noir genre forever.

  

HOOK: If the 50s seem surreal, this is a b&w Dali masterpiece.

 

JOHN: Mike Hammer was the tough guy hero of kids my age. Ralph Meeker gives him a snarling brutishness that is necessary for the ending of the film but not the kind of Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart tough guy you want to emulate (even in your male fantasies). The women are more psycho than seductive and the light pulsating form the mysterious case everyone is searching for is the best symbol of evil the movies have ever come up with. Warning: The re-mastered DVD shows a more romanticized ending, the “alternative ending,” which is a bit more existential, is the one that was shown in theaters during the films initial release. In both the final words THE END zoom out from the inside of the exploding house. And it is.

  

 GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)

 

SPANKY: This film fits my category of  “Cars You Love to Chase.” The film starts with a white Jaguar convertible coupe driving down a lost highway. Then we get a classic MG, followed later by an early model Corvette. What we want to do when the Jag plunges off the cliff is stop the film and run it backward. In fact if you did that with the entire film you’d have a contemporary Book of Genesis, starting with a Big Bang and ending with a naked lady running down the road (also that way Ralph would become “meeker”).

  

“TWO PAWS UP” (4 BARKs out of four)

  

KEEPER: “Kiss me, Mike. I want you to kiss me…The liar’s kiss that says ‘I love you,’ but means something else. You’re good at giving such kisses. Kiss me.”

 

88 MINUTES

88 Minutes, Jon Avnet of Fried Green Tomatoes fame, director, 2008

 

 PITCH: Let’s see if Al Pacino can chew up as much scenery in 88 minutes as it takes Kiefer Sutherland to do in 24 hours (Actually the movie is 105 minutes long but after the first inane half hour who’s counting anyway?)

  

STORY: Disheveled, forensic psychologist Pacino (Oh yeah, he looks like a high-paid professor who works with the FBI.) is pitted against a serial killer awaiting execution (who does look like a professor who works for the FBI). Needless to say time is running out for both men.

 

HOOK: If you love repeated, quick-cut flashbacks and nursery rhyme killers this is your flick. If you feel you’ve experienced this many, many times before, then you  spend the evening noticing how all the women are not only younger than Pacino but considerably taller.

 

JOHN: This is one of those movies that by the end everyone, including Scar Face, looks like he or she might be the real killer. I was so confounded by the time it got to the end, I couldn’t find my car in the parking lot. A bag of popcorn, without butter,  at the new Minneapolis multiplex where I saw the feature was $5.25. Somehow I don’t think serial killers are the real problem. P.S. Al, your career is officially over.

 

 ½ GO (1/2 GO out of four)

 

SPANKY: Can anyone bark, “What!” into a cell phone like Pacinol? And this movie is fueled on cell phones. It looks like Hollywood has given up trying to find a romantic interest for our Dog Day Afternoon guy (now that was a title). Who cares? He pretty much grabs the camera and shakes each scene like an old shoe anyway—whether or not it’s part of the idiotic plot. Predictable and dumb.

 

“TWO PAWS DOWN” (0 BARKS out of four)

 

KEEPER: “If I couldn’t forgive you, I wouldn’t deserve you.” (What!)

 

THE THIRD MAN

The Third Man (Carol Reed, director, 1949)

 

PITCH: Moral ambiguity of war and how the American need to get to the bottom of things eventually screws everything up.

 

STORY: Jowsph Cotton as Holly Martins takes his cowboy writer’s sensibility to post war Vienna and the shadowy world of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime.

 

HOOK: Black & white like no other black & white film, plus the evocative zither of Anton Karas (movie music has never been so memorable, with the possible exception of Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas).

 

JOHN: Dazzling! Not only war-torn Vienna at night lit by spotlights, but a terrific cast, imaginative director and haunting music plus a screenplay written on the spot by the great Graham Greene. This greatest of all foreign noir films features a romp through the sewers (a perfect metaphor for rampart underground corruption), Ingrid Bergman like Vali, close ups of Viennese street people rivaling the photographs of Walker Evans and Orson “Look at Me” Welles at his most mythical. Makes it seem as if we have never really seen a movie before. I have watched this classic at least a dozen times and each viewing is more exciting than the last. It’s as if, for one moment, all that was wondrous in the world came together so we would never be satisfied with anything less again.

 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)

 

SPANKY: Roger Ebert called the scene introducing Lime half way through the movie, after much build up, one of the greatest in film history. In real life Carol Reed awaited the enfant terrible for days after he was due on location and had to improvise those great scenes of Joseph Cotton chasing shadows projected against walls of bombed out Vienna. By the way when Welles did show, it took two days and six people to get the cat to disclose him in the doorway (the entire film took only 21 days). Cats are evil!

 

“TWO BIG PAWS UP” (4 BARKS out of four)

 

KEEPER: “In Switzerland they had 500 years of brotherly love, of peace and democracy and what did that produce…the cuckoo clock.” – Harry Lime (Welles wrote these lines himself)