Movies
Excellent: Movies this great are rare, so don't miss it.
Good: At least worth the price of admission.
Okay: See it if you have nothing better to do.
Bad: If you absolutely have to see it, wait for the DVD.
no stars: Frickin' terrible; give us our two hours back,
you director from hell.
The Cookout (☆1/2)
PG-13, 85 minutes, South Wind 12 The latest in a years-long slate of broad African-American comedies, The Cookout is amateurish and categorically offensive in that it presents "blackness" as having inherent entertainment value. For all the talk about liberal Hollywood, the dream factory sure spews out a lot of uninformed junk.
The film assembles a fine cast and a small army of screenwriters to tell the story of the Anderson family. The youngest Anderson, Todd (Quran Pender), is a first-round draft pick in the NBA,
so he moves into an upscale New Jersey suburb with his new girlfriend. An early scene where the Anderson clan crashes the neighborhood, sending its white residents screaming up their pristine lawns in
horror, has a pointed satiric candor that the rest of the movie could have used more of.
After hearing about his cousin Todd's good fortune, a pot-smoking kid confuses the word "draft" and says, "Drafted? Damn this war!" That's a funny line, but it also illustrates the triviality of this meandering little movie. I remember this issue coming up in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, where low-economic black kids were shown as falling victim to an unofficial draft system that sells the armed forces as their only viable option. Why not explore that problem in a feature film? How much longer will films like The Cookout, in
which NBA stardom catapults a black youth and his family out of the ghetto, dramatize one-in-a-million fantasies as the only avenue to black success?
Such a throwaway comedy might be less of a disappointment if there were a more diverse selection of black films to choose from. Whites get movies like Zach Braff's Garden State, about an estranged twentysomething hooked on antidepressants who returns home for his mother's funeral. Even a small portion of Garden State's insight into modern life would be welcome in the wasteland of black cinema.
-Stephen Shupe
Wicker Park (✩✩)
PG-13, 115 minutes
Wicker Park is one awkward situation after another.
The key elements of the story are told in flashbacks and jump cuts from various perspectives of three central characters. The first half of the movie is told from Matt's (Josh Hartnett) point of view. He is a rising star in his investment banking firm, about to close the biggest deal of his career and marry the sister of his boss. Through one of the movie's many random coincidences, we learn that Matt was once in love with a beautiful dancer named Lisa (Diane Kruger) who strangely disappeared from his life two years ago. In a restaurant he thinks he sees and hears Lisa, but doesn't get a good enough look at her face. He pieces together various clues and tries to track down the once lost love of his life. Matt ends up breaking into an apartment that he believes is Lisa's, and is right ... sort of. The Lisa who he meets in the apartment is not his Lisa from two years ago, but a completely different Lisa who happens to have the same taste in shoes, dress, compacts etc.
I could write a 10-page essay attempting to explain the plot and still probably wouldn't get through it. This is one of those movies where everything could be solved if the characters in it made at least one rational decision before the last ten minutes. Scenes that are supposed to be taut are really just annoying and drawn out. Wicker Park's awkward moments come when we realize the story is not just about one potential stalker, but two. The movie made me question when the line is drawn between love and obsession, but the plot is too confusing to know if that is its intent. By the end, it is really hard to care for Matt because he has made things a lot more frustrating than they needed to be in the first place.
— Jon Ralston
Vanity Fair (☆☆1/2)
PG-13, 137 minutes, South Wind 12
A movie's pieces – its art direction, music,
cinematography – are supposed to work together to serve the story. If the story leaves you with nothing, then no matter how beautiful the rest of it is, the film becomes meaningless, and that is Vanity Fair's curse
PG-13, 137 minutes, South Wind 12
Based on the popular novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, director Mia Nair's film is beautiful and sweeping and all that. But it ends with a thud, a feeling of okay or whatever.
As Becky Sharp, Reese Witherspoon is sharp as a needle. Her Becky is a conniving, status-hungry, wrong-side-of-the-tracks social climber. Determined not to die alone and penniless, Becky uses the easiest thing at her disposable -her sexuality - to aid in her conquest of London society. Helping in her endeavors is a wealthy peer, Amelia (Romola Garai), and Amelia's engagement to a wealthy but untrusting soldier (Bend It Like Beckham's Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Becky throws herself onto man after man until finally winning the heart of a soldier with
a gambling problem (James Purefoy) who is the one man who sees her for who she is. The plot goes on to touch upon a flirtation between Becky and her rich neighbor (a creepy Gabriel Byrne), a birth, a death, unrequited love, etc.
Now all this sounds great. Perhaps it was the length of time to tell the story or the lack of change in Becky's character, but all the goodness the movie had going for it fell flat and by the end, I learned little. What I did walk away with is knowledge previously given to me by Seventeen magazine (with Witherspoon on the cover) that all the pretty things on the outside can never amount to pretty things on the inside.
-Lindsey Ramsey
Jayplay 9.9.04
13