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First review of Signs, and others...

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on August 1, 2002 at 16:05:17

The news is not good.

clark

........................................................

To Beat the Heat

Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published August 1, 2002
San Diego Reader

Full Frontal, Goldmember, Signs, and Tadpole

Accompaniments to the air conditioning.... Signs. (As in warning signs or road signs, depending on your point of view.) For all those who can believe in crop circles, and those who only wish they could, this is not the answer to a prayer. M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, certainly takes a serious approach. So much so that you might imagine the grim cast of characters labored under the impression they were in an Ibsen drama. There are reasons for that: the hero, played by Mel Gibson as a change from Bruce Willis, is a backsliding cleric whose wife was killed six months earlier in a roadside mishap, details of which are leaked out in dribs and drabs. In the end, the ponderous, portentous forward progress of the film, together with its charged atmosphere of Domestic Tragedy, proves to be, as it were, all approach and no (or very late) arrival; all heavy-handed foreplay and diminutive climax. Shyamalan does not lack intensity or concentration, and he is capable now and again of touching a sensitive spot, prompting a tremor: the first glimpse of an alien appendage disappearing into a cornfield, or the attempt to get a look at the shadowy prisoner locked behind the pantry door, or the siege in the cellar illuminated only by flashlight. Unhappily, the filmmaker, more cursed than blessed by his Sixth Sense, seems more concerned now to be a spiritual leader than a mere storyteller. Somehow, when alien invaders descend over the entire planet, the crisis of faith of one grieving widower in rural Pennsylvania is apt to seem small potatoes, no matter how symbolic or symptomatic of all mankind. And the confinement of most of the action to the family farm -- like some Roger Corman grade-Z science fiction of the late Fifties -- is ultimately stultifying. To be sure, the portable television, whenever the strictly monitoring father (no longer "Father") allows his children to watch it, serves to widen the scope, at least in our imaginations: the proliferation of crop circles in India (too fast and far apart to be a conspiracy of hoaxers), the strange lights suspended over Mexico City, the network broadcast of a Little Green Man's cameo appearance in a birthday-party home video, etc. One of the TV viewers is tactless enough to remark, "It's like War of the Worlds." We wish!
Goldmember. (Or Austin Powers in Goldmember, or whatever it's called.) Austin Powers, now Sir Austin Powers, has become respectable. That happened -- it's the American way -- as soon as he became a "franchise." Although critics are under injunction not to spoil the "surprise" of the Big Names who pop up on screen by way of endorsement (in return, one supposes, for mojo), any visitor to the Internet Movie Data Base could find out that Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, and Sir Steven Spielberg are among them. It should be no surprise, either, that the movie was accorded a command performance at the White House, nor that our local Museum of Contemporary Art would light upon an Austin Powers theme for its big summer fund-raiser ("Black Tie or Shagadelic Costume"). Everyone wants to be a sport. Well -- not everyone. Not me. Austin Powers, a decent idea for a skit, was overextended in his first feature film, and every subsequent sequel only extends the overkill. There is already, in just the second sequel, a "Twelve Days of Christmas" feeling of picking up baggage as we go. (Did we really need to bring back Fat Bastard? Will we need, next time, to bring back the freckle-faced and flaking-skinned Goldmember?) Sure, the running time can be padded with peepee-poopoo jokes (picture our President slapping his knee), along with incongruous spoofs of rap music, blaxploitation films, The Silence of the Lambs, what-have-you. And suddenly our swinging superspy can develop parental-approval issues. But what has any of this to do with the original premise? When I predicted two months ago that Goldmember couldn't match Undercover Brother for regressive good fun, I didn't know that Mike Myers would put up a Foxxy Cleopatra character (Beyoncé Knowles) for such direct and detrimental comparison: Myers, to draw him into further comparison with the likes of Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, does not write very well for women. (He does not write very well for anybody, but women especially.) And more than ever would I want to stress my compliment about the internal cohesion -- the solidness -- of the material in Brother. (No sequels, please.) By contrast, the final revelation in Goldmember, via a Galaxy Far Far Away, would have been enough to sour me if I hadn't been soured already. Just to prove, though, that I was not sitting with my arms folded throughout the entire film, let me note that Michael Caine, whose eyeglasses in his Harry Palmer roles were clearly one of the inspirations for Austin Powers, looks to be a smart choice for the hero's father, though not without some sort of time-travel rationale, never forthcoming. (Was not Austin a full-blown adult in the Sixties?) And the sight gag of our hero atop Mini-Me's shoulders under a janitor's coat -- a sharply tapering figure teetering around on tiny legs -- is a sight for sore eyes. And the bit about subtitles partially disappearing over a white background was a bright idea, albeit dimly, dirtily carried out. (Without scatology, Myers would be held necessarily to skit-length.) And there was one sophisticated line of dialogue, quoted here in its entirety if it will save you the bother: "There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures. And the Dutch."

Full Frontal. Steven Soderbergh offers no reassurance, after Ocean's Eleven (and Traffic and Erin Brockovich), that he has not been ruined beyond redemption. Outwardly, this day-in- the-lives-of-motley-Hollywoodites would appear to be an attempt to recapture that old Independent Spirit, even if the filmmaker hedges his bet by enlisting Julia (Roberts) and Brad (Pitt) and others, so that the mainstream press and mass audience will have something to buzz about. (Besides the gossipy topic of Hollywood or the impenetrable meaning of the title.) The "appearance" of independence, in any event, amounts to little more than the appearance of cheapness, messiness, and obscurity: the over-reverberant sound, to be specific, and the grainy blurry home-movie-ish image that alternates with a sharper and higher- grade image for a film-within-the-film called Rendezvous. (Apart from the film stock, little difference can be discerned -- is that the point? -- between Hollywood "reality" and the "fiction" of Rendezvous, a film, if I've got it straight, about a magazine reporter interviewing an actor on an airplane, following him to a meeting with Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, onto location with Brad Pitt, and back to the airport.) Where independence for Soderbergh once might have meant something like self-sufficiency or self-possession, it now seems to mean things like self-indulgence and self-importance. Not to forget self-deception. Any random touch of cleverness -- the cameo of Terence Stamp in his fictional persona from Soderbergh's The Limey -- vanishes like a drop of water on a hot stove.

Tadpole. A rude reminder that in the world after Attack of the Clones there are still differing grades of digital video. The production banner over Gary Winick's little coming-of-age comedy -- Indigent (or InDigEnt), acronym for Independent Digital Entertainment -- is a commendable example of truth-in-labelling. Poor for sure. Needy indeed. An anemic, myopic image that gets ever blurrier with every inch of distance from the camera, and ever pastier with every inch of closeness to it. There is no great harm, nor great joy either, in the amorous antics of a precocious, Voltaire-reading high-school sophomore (Aaron Stanford), in love with his stepmother (Sigourney Weaver) and actually in bed with the stepmother's best friend (Bebe Neuwirth, a sly scene stealer). And I can have no objection to films other than computer-animated kiddie films that come in at under an hour and a half: this one a quarter-hour under. If only, let me be clear, to abbreviate the tedium.

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