Hamlet 2: Sometimes Even Catherine Keener Cannot Save You

Okay, I didn't like "Dogma" either. It's not that I'm prudish or can't appreciate a good satire, but "Hamlet 2" bored me, literally to sleep. That's the same way I felt about "Dogma," I realize. Bored. Steve Coogan (he was the little tiny Roman guy in "Night at the Museum") plays a failed actor who is now a drama teacher. But, OH NO! The drama program is in trouble. It's going to be eliminated from the school! Just when a bunch more kids have signed up for drama class, as shop and computer classes have also been eliminated!

So what do we do in a movie, if the drama program is in trouble? That's right. We put on a show to save it! Do we all have to pull together, and overcome our differences, and in the process do we all learn a little bit about ourselves?

I don't know, because right at that point I turned to Dan and said, "I didn't know this was going to be a movie about saving the community center." And then I fell asleep. I also didn't know the movie was going to be about children, or rather 26-year-olds pretending to be children. I also didn't know that Catherine Keener was going to be given such slim material to work on, not that she can't work with less, but still. A little brutal.

Good points in the movie: Elizabeth Shue plays herself, having given up Hollywood to become a nurse. Catherine Keener counts as a good point. She is always hilarious and perfect. Steve Coogan manages to be likeable in spite of the overwrought situation.

To me, it played like a Monty Python skit writ American and writ about a hundred times too long. Coogan definitely seemed to be channeling Terry Gilliam at times, but the character couldn't bear the weight of the entire movie. But then, I didn't watch the whole thing. Maybe I'm letting my bias against movies in which the community center must be saved hold me back from watching a great comedy. What do you think. Should I watch the rest of it?

There Will Be Wide Expanses of Nothing

We watched this movie on Eleanor's birthday. She selected it. In the afternoon, she called me on my mobile and said, "Can you make this happen? It's all I really want, just 'There Will Be Blood,' okay?" And I said, "Well, there will also be cake," because I wanted to assure her that we would truly be celebrating, not just the usual chinese food and art films. And she said, "Okay, I will be there after 7:30." At 7:00 I called home and said to Dan, "Oh, Dan, please go and trade in whatever girl movie I had on the cabinet for 'There Will Be Blood' because it's Eleanor's special birthday wish." And then he said, "Okay." And then I said, "Can you please also wrap the present that's sitting in the front room?" And he said, "Will there be anything else?" Or something else to show mild loving exasperation with all these tasks, and I said something like "Thank you so much for helping me," because I was really grateful, feeling sort of tired and rushed, and he warmly told me that I was welcome.

If you felt like maybe fast-forwarding through the last paragraph, to get to the pay-off, and you kind of let your eyes wander down the screen to find the point of it all, and then coming to the end of the paragraph you felt like I just nattered on about things that were possibly poignant to me but hardly poignant to anyone else, then you get a small sense of why we watched "There Will Be Blood" on 1.5 speed. You can still hear the talking, okay? It's just that on the long shots where someone is trudging across the badlands, he trudges a little faster. On the endless lingering shots when someone is peering into the distance, or the fire, or the dirt, having complex masculine emotions down deep inside, he peers a little quicker.

Is that a crime?

Well, what if I told you I was making it easy for you in paragraph one? For example, I told you how I was feeling twice, when I could have just described the motion of my eyebrows and expected you to intuit it. I also did not include the 30 minutes I spent listening to my four-year-old daughter's wandering narrative based on the pictures in Peter Rabbit. A time I spent silently listening. I didn't include the time it took to drive home, during which I was almost motionless, staring straight ahead, and the kids were listening to Geggy Tah.

After five minutes, we said, "Maybe this is a movie for men?"

After thirty minutes, we said, "It ain't no 'Boogie Nights'!"

After an hour, we went to 1.5 speed.

We went back to the regular speed for the "I ABANDONED MY CHILD. I ABANDONED MY BOY." part and it was totally not worth it.



In the end, we were unmoved. To be fair, the movie suffered in comparison to the brilliant, amazing, wrenching, hilarious, explosive "No Country for Old Men." Let's face it: Coen > Tarrantino. But Anderson 2008 < Anderson 1998.

Across the Universe: Movie Review

If you like the Beatles, you will like this movie. If you aren't a fan, there is absolutely no point in watching it. There are no interesting characters, and there is no plot. There are, however, really interesting covers of Beatles songs. So, that is attractive.



It's like "The Science of Sleep" but with really no characters and more music. It's like "Moulin Rouge" but with no very great acting. There are thirty Beatles songs in it. People sing a lot. The same people sing song after song. But he's not Jake Gyllenhaal, and she's not Chloe Sevigny.

Some of it was amazing -- puppets, masks, special effects, beautiful. Some of it was very very clever -- "I Want You" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun" in particular. Some of it was, okay, schlocky: "Dear Prudence" and "All You Need Is Love." Okay, listen, I told you no one is going to win a reward for writing this or acting in it. However, it is very engaging. And I do love the Beatles. If you look at it as a very very long music video with regrettable interludes of talking and historically romantic layers, your expectations will be correct.

Renee Zellwegger is Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Before Chick-lit, there was Mary Gaitskill's novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin. My graduate school conspiritors/comrades and I always held this book up contemptuously as one of those books where women sit in the bathtub (no bubbles) and contemplate their thighs (the shape) and feel dreary. That may or may not have actually happened in the text. I may or may not be unfairly remembering this novel as one characterized by half-drawn curtains. I do think that this book is what Chick-lit was, before Chick-lit realized it would be better if books about women didn't make readers want to drink poison. That maybe comedy would occasionally be nice. Anyway, the title of this book has stuck in my mind, across the long merry years, and it's what I was thinking of this week as I watched Renee Zellwegger first in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and then in Miss Potter.

Bridget Jones was a screaming nightmare from start to finish. Not funny, nonsensical, and hard to watch. Everyone played their characters so firmly and purposefully and dutifully that we ended up with a Bridget too ruddy, too shiny, too stiff, a Colin Firth with too giant a brick up his too pearly ass, and a Hugh Grant aping across the screen as such an unredeemable playboy, my arms fell off. Nothing good. Particularly nothing good about Renee Zellwegger's complexion. It'll put your eye out. If you're seeking a really exhaustive collection of unflattering necklines, this movie is a must-see. Otherwise, skip. If you haven't already. Which I had. Until now.

Miss Potter, on the other hand, was a mild delight. Ewan MacGregor was freshfaced and bouncy. Renee Zellwegger wore those long heavy skirts like in Cold Mountain. And Emily Watson, who I have relentlessly loathed, ever since she spent all of Breaking the Waves running around in Scotland crying, "JAN, JAN" and biting her lower lip, was actually fantastic. I almost forgive her all that Scottish snivelling. Yeah maybe it wasn't Scotland. Whatever. In this movie, she was kind of horse-boned and likeable. The movie was nearly great -- of course I did *want* to like it, so I may be feeling generous in my response to it, but I really feel like at times it was piercingly beautiful, and really fell through a thousand meanings at once. Not the whole time. But some of the time.

1408 is Great

When I first saw this poster, browsing Blockbuster Online, I thought maybe John Cusack and Samuel Jackson had been teamed up in a historical drama about the year 1408. Maybe John Cusack would put on a corset, and Samuel L. Jackson would stare into middle distance and contemplate oppression. As it turns out, not.

I sometimes feel hesitant about movies based on Steven King stories. After all, Lawnmowerman. You know? But I have never been disappointed in either John Cusack or Samuel L. Jackson, so I trusted these actors. And 1408 was fantastic.

Here's the premise: John Cusack is a writer who goes around debunking hauntings. He publishes books about the "Most Haunted Country Houses" and "Most Haunted Mansions" etc. but he does not believe in ghosts, he has only eye-rolling for wide-eyed proprietors and their warnings of locking your door against spooks. In the first scene we see him investigating a bed and breakfast that's supposed to be haunted but turns out to be about as spooky as a mushroom omelet. Then he gets an anonymous tip: Don't stay in room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in NYC.

When he arrives in New York to stay in room 1408, after having to sue the hotel for the right to do so, hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson gives him dire warnings against it, as well as a whole dossier of pictures and case files from suicides in that room. Many, many suicides, usually after less than an hour in the room. John Cusack rolls his eyes and marches upstairs, enters the room, and closes the door.

After this point, all the other actors and actresses in the movie fade into the background, and it's John Cusack's stage. Whenever I see a great performance like this, I think, "Who else could have pulled this off? Nobody!" This may or may not be true, but Cusack's natural sneer, his indifferent posture, and his cool factor really made this character work. Totally, totally amazing. It was so creepy, so ghastly, so horrifying that I almost crawled into my husband's armpit for safety.

There was no gore. No decapitation. No severed leg flying through the air. This was not Saw or Hostel or Grindhouse or any of those bloodbaths. This was pure, tight, excrutiating psychological thrill, and it was perfectly, perfectly executed. Okay, well, the ending was a little loose, but... I'm glad of that. I needed a little breathing room by the end of the movie.

I wholeheartedly recommend this. It's the best kind of horror movie. No disgusting tearing apart of flesh, nobody burned alive, no goofy monsters, and you can go to bed and sleep well, because the situation is so specific (just in room 1408!) that you don't have to worry subconsciously that the horror is going to get into your house.

Five pumped fists for 1408.

The Mayor of Casterbridge Movie: Thanks, A & E

You know how some movies that are made from books make you think, "Wow, they really skipped over a lot of this book!" But then you forgive the film maker because he had time constraints and really it was so beautiful anyway and it evoked all of the emotion of the book, even if it skipped over some scenes?

This movie wasn't like that. The director, working for the visionary and cutting edge Arts and Entertainment channel, put in everything he could find in the book, and possibly more. Every scene change was marked with a schmaltzy swell of orchestral music, thundering through the same part of theme music from the bleak, obvious score. And there were many scenes. The number of scenes was: maximum.

The actor who played Michael Henchard reminded me a lot of Chris Cooper. You know him. He's been in various things as Lt. This and Col. That, most recently in "Breach" as that CIA guy. He has one of those mouths that looks like a gash you cut with a kitchen knife in a spaghetti squash, down on both sides. Know what I mean? No? He also has hooded eyelids which he uses to peer into a middle distance when considering manly things. Yet doesn't look like he's ever had stubble.

The long and short of it was that we couldn't even make it through disc 1. Oops! I think I'll wait until Hollywood turns it into a movie with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth-Jane and they cut out most of it and give it an adult contemporary soundtrack. Then I can bitch with the rest of you that they cut out the scene in the granary, but at least I'll make it to the end of the movie.