twelve six-minute reviews

All right. For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun … find the fun, and then just do a half-assed job. It’s the American way. Or something.
I want to write 12 movie reviews on which I have been procrastinating dreadfully. So I’ve made a game of it. I have 6 minutes to write something about every movie, and that will be my review. The exception is the Enron movie because I already wrote a chunk of it and I just have to finish it (and maybe take out some of the old text since it was written while I was in A Mood about corporations).
I wrote down all the movie titles on little slips of paper, so we will randomly select the order in which I will review these movies. Now, let’s see how this will work. My boyfriend has kindly offered to draw out the first slip of paper …

1. Maria Full of Grace: 2004, dir. Joshua Marston. Seen on DVD (March 27).
“I guess we did see that movie, didn’t we. Can you remember it well enough to write about it?” That’s what my boyfriend said after picking this movie title out of the jar of little slips.
Yes, we did see this movie and I liked it very much. It reminded me of a Gregory Nava movie I saw in grad school, El Norte, in which a brother and sister decide to leave their small Guatamalan village and head for America.
Maria Full of Grace is about a 15-year-old girl who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. She lives with her mom and her sister and her sister’s children, and she’s the only one working—she supports the family with her job in a flower plantation. She’s fired because she has morning sickness all over the roses, and she needs money.
Along comes a dashing young man on a motorcycle who informs Maria that she can make lots of money by smuggling drugs to America. It’s easy, painless, fun, she’ll be rolling in cash. She agrees and finds out the job isn’t quite as easy or fun as advertised. Maria, her friend Blanca, and another young woman who has done this work before all head for New York on the same plane.
I was very much impressed by Catalina Sandino Moreno, who portrayed Maria beautifully. Beautifully in the literal sense, as well … the actress is gorgeous. Would we sympathize more with Maria if she were a little dumpling with bad skin and hair? Probably not. The director has given us a beautiful young girl in peril, but spins the story in a fascinating way and keeps us in suspense. We are aware that any of these girls could die at any moment, once they agree to smuggle the drugs.
The contrast between Maria’s hometown and New York is naturally striking, but the director manages to make a little corner of New York look inviting as well as a little intimidating.
Maria Full of Grace is a good movie, suspenseful and interesting, with a gentle reminder about some of the horrible things people must do—even beautiful girls—to survive.
2. The Bad News Bears: 1976, dir. Michael Ritchie. Seen on DVD (May 18).
I wanted to see The Bad News Bears for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’d heard Polly Platt talk about it and show a clip, and I wanted to see the whole movie. Second of all, I’d heard about the remake, which would have annoyed me except that it is directed by Richard Linklater, stars Billy Bob Thornton, and is written by the guys who wrote the underrated Bad Santa.
I don’t remember seeing the movie The Bad News Bears as a child (probably because I was considered too young), but I do remember the TV spinoff, which I was just old enough to enjoy, with Jack Warden in the Walter Matthau role. The TV series was genial and not at all edgy and removed any traces of PG-rating-itude that were present in the movie.
The shocking thing about The Bad News Bears is that Walter Matthau’s character truly is a drunk. Not a charming boozer, but a starkly portrayed alcoholic, at least at the beginning of the movie. As the movie progresses, we see the cups of beer replaced by cups of coffee, but this is not strongly stressed. One thing I do like about this movie is that it isn’t too preachy. It says what it wants to say very quietly.
I was terribly disappointed in Tatum O’Neal. She was so wonderful in Paper Moon and her character in this movie was a mess. I think she was supposed to be overly sophisticated for her age, at least when we first meet her, and then she gets a bit tomboyish as we go on. I think the character was poorly written. Perhaps it was meant to be sitcom-funny but the joke doesn’t quite work.
The real hero of this movie is Jerry Fielding, who was responsible for the music (he scored a ton of movies and TV, including The Wild Bunch and the “Star Trek” theme). I don’t know what inspired him to set this movie to the music from Carmen, and I assume it was his idea (although it could also have been Michael Ritchie, the director … or anyone really), but it was pure genius. Will they use it in the remake? They gotta.
(How many other people grew up thinking of Carmen as the theme music from The Bad News Bears? I know I wasn’t the only one.)
3. Quills: 2000, dir. Philip Kaufman. Seen on DVD (Oct. 30, 2004).
It’s been so very long since I saw this movie, over a month. However, Quills was very vivid and memorable, particularly visually.
Hah! I wrote the above paragraph sometime in March. It’s a miracle I can remember this film at all.
Quills is a lovely little film from Philip Kaufman, whom I’d forgotten about after reviewing Henry and June for the LSU paper back in 1990. Quills has a lot more in common with Henry and June than with some of Kaufman’s better known films like The Right Stuff or Rising Sun, and I think it works much better than Henry and June which tended to be erratic.
The movie is a fictionalized (very fictionalized) recount of the last days of the Marquis de Sade, who is locked away in a mental institution under the care of the young Abbe du Coulmier. However, that doesn’t prevent him from continuing to write his pornographic stories, which the maidservant Maddy helps him smuggle to his publisher. The Abbe is trying hard to reform him at the same time that de Sade is trying to corrupt the young man.
That’s all very well and good, but suddenly Dr. Royer-Collard, the new head of the institution, enters the picture. Royer-Collard believes in punishing methods of reforming mental patients, and he develops a very personal vendetta against de Sade.
The acting is all top-notch. Michael Caine is brilliant as Royer-Collard—at first I thought he would be too well-known in appearance to pull it off, but he manages it nicely. Kate Winslet, whom I will watch in just about anything (and who fortunately has good luck in picking good roles in good movies) plays Maddy. And of course Geoffrey Rush is perfect as de Sade, and he’s obviously having great fun in the role.
The ending is a bit silly, but overall the movie is definitely worthwhile.
4. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: 2005, dir. Alex Gibney. Seen at Alamo South (May 8).
I wasn’t sure how well I would like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I’d read some positive reviews, and I knew it had sold out when it played SXSW, but I was worried I might be a little bored. Sometimes documentaries about corporations and businesses can be a bit dry.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room turned out to be entertaining as well as informative. By “entertaining” I mean that it held my attention the entire time, not that it was a cheerful and upbeat movie. The picture it paints of Enron executives and the results of their actions is often grim, appalling, and depressing.
Sometimes the movie is shocking, and not just because the Enron executives and sales guys are portrayed as saying and doing some amazingly ballsy and callous things. No, what shocked me was watching video of a company meeting, or a text from a company-wide memo, and realizing that these are the same words I have heard in my own place of employment. That can be chilling.
Now I know that I work for an ethical company that doesn’t monkey around with bookkeeping and finance in the same way that Enron did. Enron was corporate culture gone drastically wrong. How did these guys get away with it? They conned everyone. People keep saying that something didn’t seem to add up but they blamed themselves for not being smart enough to understand the situation.
How slanted is Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room? Is there balanced information that we aren’t hearing about? Hard to say. However, it didn’t have that blatant propaganda style that is so obvious in movies like Outfoxed and Fahrenheit 911. You get the impression that there wasn’t anything good about the Enron situation, that we aren’t missing any key pieces from the other side. That could mean that there aren’t any, or it could mean that this is damned fine propaganda, the kind that makes you think it is earnest and fair filmmaking. Maybe a little of both, is my guess.
One thing I particularly liked about Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was the music. The filmmakers decided to have a little fun with the soundtrack, which includes Tom Waits, Oingo Boingo, and Judy Garland. This may be the only non-music documentary film where I have wondered if the soundtrack is available.
I saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in a theater, but I think it will look and sound just fine if you watch it on DVD on a standard TV setup. You don’t need a big screen for this movie. You do need to fight the urge to remove yourself from any corporate influences in your life, though. And you might spend the next week looking very carefully at company memos and policies, wondering, can this happen again? And will it affect me next time? And what can I do about it?
[After finishing all the reviews, I checked the Web and yes, you can buy the soundtrack to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Cool.]
5. My Little Chickadee: 1940, dir. Edward F. Cline. Seen on DVD (June 1).
You all know how I adore Thirties comedies, and how fond I was of Mae West’s I’m No Angel when I saw it last year. I could not wait to see My Little Chickadee when it finally appeared on DVD. Mae West and W.C. Fields together, acting and co-writing! What fun it would be!
Can you believe that I barely made it through the movie?
We actually turned off the movie halfway through, put on another movie entirely, and I didn’t watch the other half for nearly a week. I almost sent it back, but I wanted to give the movie (and Mae West) a fair chance.
Mae West is the best thing about My Little Chickadee. I think it would have been a better movie if she had been the sole star and Fields had been removed entirely. I confess I am not the biggest fan of his work, but I did love Never Give a Sucker an Even Break and I thought this might be just as subversive.
Unfortunately, My Little Chickadee is about as subversive as a bar of soap. It’s supposed to be a rollicking comedy about West and Fields pretending to be married in a frontier town. West has been sent away from her hometown because she is a bad influence and of uncertain virtue.
Here is an example of what I liked and disliked about this movie: the scene in which “wild Indians” attack the train on which West and Fields are riding. It is difficult for me to watch movies with this kind of stereotyping, even though it was typical of 1930s and 1940s films. I cringed a bit. However, I loved watching Mae West pick up a gun and start shooting away, not afraid of a damned thing, and with excellent aim to boot. The guys are all screwing up, and she takes care of everything coolly and rationally. I wish she weren’t shooting these horrible Indian stereotypes, but I love the way she does it.
Destry Rides Again does this all a lot better and funnier, too. I think I’ll wait for more of Mae West’s pre-Code movies to become available, which I suspect I will enjoy more than My Little Chickadee.
6. Gunga Din: 1939, dir. George Stevens. Seen on DVD (April 2).
I could not wait for Gunga Din to be released on DVD. People are always talking about how it is the ultimate action-adventure picture and nothing these days is ever as good and Spielberg stole from it and everyone’s stolen from it and … well, I was certainly looking forward to a great film. Ben Hecht worked on it, even!
I made it through the first 30 minutes. No more.
I did try. A friend told me to think of it as being like His Girl Friday but with three guys and no kissing. Didn’t work. I did sit through 10 minutes more on a second occasion but I could not get into it.
First of all, this movie is terribly racist by contemporary standards. I know, I know, back in 1939 no one thought of it that way, it was the same year as the equally racist Gone with the Wind, but I have a little trouble with that movie too these days, although it has an advantage because I have seen it many times since childhood.
I somehow thought Gunga Din was going to be a clever child, not an old man whom everyone was shouting at, and who didn’t seem very bright … and who was played by a white guy, to boot.
I could not really find it in my heart to cheer on the British protagonists, who were in a country where they didn’t belong in the first place.
I realize that Spielberg did in fact borrow heavily from this movie … for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a movie in which I have the same problems with the stereotyping of people in India.
It was distasteful and dull and it just didn’t work for me. I admit I don’t like most of George Stevens’ movies, the big exception being Alice Adams. But it was a real shame to turn off a Cary Grant movie after 30 minutes. We put on The Philadelphia Story instead. My boyfriend didn’t make it through the end of that movie either, but he still liked it better than Gunga Din.
7. Lightning in a Bottle: 2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua. Seen at Arbor Great Hills (Nov. 6, 2004).
Now this is just embarrassing, that I never wrote anything about Lightning in a Bottle, a movie which we saw on a whim and ended up liking.
Lightning in a Bottle is a movie made from a live concert, a 2003 tribute to the blues at Radio City Music Hall.
It’s been so long. What can I remember about this movie?
It was great to see Dr. John and I was sorry he never got center stage. I liked nearly all the female perfomers: Ruth Brown, Mavis Staples, and Natalie Cole particularly. I thought the “remix” of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” was atrocious. I don’t know what the hell John Fogarty was doing in there. Solomon Burke knocked my socks off. I don’t know what the hell Bill Cosby was doing in there. I love the Neville Brothers, they make me almost miss New Orleans. Macy Gray ought really not to attempt “Hound Dog.” Buddy Guy can play anything he likes. I met Jimmie Vaughn once. One of his backup singers bought me flan. That has nothing to do with this movie.
The songs are intercut with interviews with the performers, some historical background on the blues, etc. I wished I could hear more of the older blues songs from musicians who aren’t around anymore, but that wasn’t the point of this documentary.
We got to listen to (mostly) great music for two hours. The fact that the movie itself, apart from the music, wasn’t so memorable? Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe we should buy the soundtrack.
8. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams: 2002, dir. Robert Rodriguez. Seen on DVD (April 17).
Spy Kids 2 … well, maybe the problem was that it didn’t have George Clooney in it. That’s what my sister might say.
Maybe I just liked Spy Kids better. Or maybe I was so impressed by The Iron Giant, which I’d seen the week before, that very little would be able to match it.
Also, I was in the kind of mood where I had my eyes open for sexism in Spy Kids 2, because I’d just seen Sin City and I wondered if the sexism in that movie was simply native to the comic book, or if Rodriguez’s movies always favored the macho men and the pretty (if deadly) chicks.
In Spy Kids 2, the original kids from the first movie are shoved out of the way and demoted when another spy family’s kids get the plum jobs. To make matters worse, the other kids’ dad (Mike Judge, in a flair-free role) is named head of the spy agency over Antonio Banderas (why were only dads being considered and not moms? I wondered) and Evil Is Afoot. Or athumb, really.
Alan Cumming isn’t in this movie nearly long enough. Neither is Cheech Marin. However, we get a healthy dose of Steve Buscemi and I always enjoy watching Steve Buscemi. I am very happy he didn’t end up in a coffee can in this movie.
Ricardo Montalban makes a brief appearance as the grandfather, but he doesn’t do much except nag.
Antonio Banderas is hot as usual, but he doesn’t do much in this movie except be nagged.
All throughout the movie, I noticed that Juni, the boy, gets much more interesting things to do than Carmen, the girl. The spy boys get to fight cool monsters while the spy girls sit in a nest and talk about how annoying boys are.
Just not my thing, I guess. And it’s not like I was the target demographic. But I hoped for something a little better from Robert Rodriguez. (He and I are almost the same age. Realizing that makes me feel like a slacker.) I’m not seeing the third movie; it looks even less appealing and more sexist. Even though it does have George Clooney.
9. The Iron Giant: 1999, dir. Brad Bird. Seen on DVD (April 9).
I am never going to be able to say everything I want to say about the wonderfulness of The Iron Giant in six minutes, so I will start by saying this: Rent this movie if you haven’t already. It is not a kids-only movie. It is not just for animation fans. Go rent it right now this very damn minute.
The film’s writer-director, Brad Bird, recently directed The Incredibles. That movie was very good. This one is even better.
First of all, I like traditional animation and this movie does some lovely things with the animation. It doesn’t take over the whole movie—you aren’t gazing in awe at the amazing hair effects—it helps push the movie along, it’s generally subtle, it works perfectly.
I didn’t recognize any of the voices until afterwards, but somehow that always happens to me. I am terrible about recognizing voices in an animated movie unless they are Holly Hunter or Tom Hanks. Every time we see Finding Nemo I get surprised all over again that Austin Pendleton’s voice is in there. Wow. M. Emmet Walsh’s voice is in the movie and I don’t even remember which character.
The movie is about a kid who loves to adopt stray pets and then … he finds a stray robot. A giant robot … you could tell from the title, couldn’t you. The robot is voiced by Vin Diesel, and it is probably the only Vin Diesel work that I like.
The movie is set in the 1950s during the heart of the anti-Communist witch hunts and that is very definitely a part of the storyline. See why I said this isn’t a kids-only movie?
Okay, I confess: This movie made me cry. A lot. Without being manipulative about it. Very few movies manage to get away with that.
This is a terrible review of a very good movie that has been astonishingly overlooked. The Iron Giant was incredible. We may need to buy the DVD.
10. But I’m a Cheerleader: 1999, dir. Jamie Babbit. Seen on DVD (March 25).
I started writing a review of this, I know, but I can’t find it so I’ll have to start over from scratch.
Mostly what I remember about this movie is that we saw it on the night of the big hailstorm in North Austin that damaged the roof of my house and nearly totalled my car. Now I understand that hailstones can be the size of golfballs. The cat was traumatized, poor thing.
But I’m a Cheerleader wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. I think if I’d seen it a few years ago, I would have found it funnier. I blame this not on the film, but on the political climate.
Because things that we’re supposed to laugh at in this movie, because they seem so over-the-top and improbable, don’t seem all that surreal these days. I read recently about a “home for curing homosexual teens” that sounded just as bizarre as the one in this movie. The rules were just as insane. The reasons behind putting children in these places are just as dumb: girls who had a complete disinterest in feminine fashion, boys who acted too campy, etc.
This is the first movie in which I saw Natasha Lyonne and she is just right as the cheerleader whose parents have decided she’s well on the way to being a lesbian unless she is reformed immediately … even though Lyonne’s character has no idea she leaned that way. She doesn’t like kissing her boyfriend … because he’s a terrible kisser. Stuff like that.
So she is packed away to the “sexual redirection center” for gay kids, which is run by Cathy Moriarty. Did I mention the casting of adults in this movie is hilarious? Lyonne’s parents are played by Mink Stole and Bud Cort. RuPaul is in it, and Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures), Richard Moll, Julie Delpy … if nothing else, it’s fun watching all these people having fun with their roles.
But for me, this movie was often sad where it should have been funny. People really do act this way. It breaks my heart.
11. Slums of Beverly Hills: 1998, dir. Tamara Jenkins. Seen on DVD (May 21).
I swear I picked the order of these reviews at random, so it is funny that the two Natasha Lyonne movies are together.
My boyfriend kept bugging me to see this movie, but I thought he was talking about either Down and Out in Beverly Hills or Slaves of New York and so I kept putting it off. I am so glad he persisted, because this is just the kind of movie I like.
Slums of Beverly Hills is a top movie in the Dysfunctional Family genre, a genre my sister and I love for some odd reason. My only regret about seeing this movie is that I didn’t get to see it with her, but I bugged her into finally seeing it and she loved it too.
Slums of Beverly Hills is about a dysfunctional family in the 1970s that moves from crappy apartment to crappier apartment in Beverly Hills (usually in the middle of the night) because the dad wants the kids to go to school in Beverly Hills so they can all be successful. The dad is played by Alan Arkin, who is just a pleasure to watch in this movie.
Complications ensue when Arkin’s niece, played by Marisa Tomei, decides to move in with the family and go to nursing school and clean up her crazy life. Her dad (Carl Reiner) pays for the family to live in a luxury apartment, for once, so you’d think that everything would start going well for the family. Riiiiight.
Oh, geez, I hope that someday I can write a dysfunctional family story that is half as funny as this one. It would be very hard to top. Not that my family is dysfunctional, of course, merely colorful.
I didn’t like Marisa Tomei’s character much, and I felt the actress was a little too over-the-top (she reminded me too much of Fran Drescher at times). But Natasha Lyonne and Alan Arkin are wonderful … and the thing with the halter top, and the thing with the dining-room chair, and the climactic scene with Carl Reiner, oh, this is a very funny movie indeed. I’m not sure exactly why I identified with it so much, but I did.
Tamara Jenkins, where are you? We need you to make more movies like this one, please.
12. The Celluloid Closet: 2004, dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Seen on DVD (April 22).
I can summarize my feelings about The Celluloid Closet quite neatly: I liked the book a lot. I felt the movie was a glossy Hollywood pretty-picture featherweight documentary that evaded many of the real issues about homosexuality in films that Vito Russo attempted to tackle, particularly in contemporary film.
I was somewhat disgusted by the “happy ending” tacked onto this documentary, the implication that now that Philadelphia had been made, there would be no more stereotyping of gays in film, everything was hunky-dory, Hollywood had learned its lessons. I think they should have shown some of the nastier gay stereotypes from 1990s Hollywood films to balance it out—Father of the Bride leaps to mind, but there are so many more—and shown that Hollywood still has a long, long way to go.
The Celluloid Closet was made for HBO and I suspect for a particular audience: the people who loved Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, also directed by Rob Epstein. It wasn’t made for a gay audience or an audience of film geeks. It was made for straight white upper-class people who want to learn a little bit about the history of gays and film and still feel comfortable and happy about the world at the end of the movie.
I loved seeing all the film clips but the interviews seemed pretty useless. Why spend so much time interviewing Tom Hanks and Whoopi Goldberg? What did they have to do with anything? I would rather have seen more of Richard Dyer and Quentin Crisp. But as I said, the movie was made for a very mainstream audience, and when I looked at the deleted scenes I realized that the filmmakers decided to go with big Hollywood names over interesting film experts. (And what the hell is Susie Bright doing in there? I mean, I like her, nice to see her, but there are so many other people who have worked extensively in film whom I would have preferred to see.)
There are two commentary tracks on the DVD of The Celluloid Closet: one by the filmmakers and one by Vito Russo, who died before the film was completed. The Vito Russo commentary really isn’t a commentary—it’s a recording of a lecture he gave at a gay and lesbian film festival in the 1990s. For me, it was far superior to the documentary, even though the clips on the screen didn’t match the audio of Vito Russo.
I wish someone would take the audio track of that Vito Russo lecture and match it up with the right film clips. I would enjoy seeing that so much more than the watered-down movie of The Celluloid Closet.
[Whew. Twelve reviews. I’m wiped out. Bedtime.]