IncredibleShrinkingCritic

I especially enjoyed when Pilobolus formed itself into Ellen DeGeneres' crimson velour tracksuit.

Other trenchant observations:
Helen Mirren is sexier at any age than any woman with a facelift.

Jack Nicholson is starting to look like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.
The actresses all seemed to have strangely symmetrical, erect nipples.
Big attempt to make the Oscars "relevant" to "today" by name-dropping YouTube, MySpace, other Internet buzzwords.
Stop giving child actors "cute" things to say.
Loved seeing Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow in a Japanese-hair-straightening-technique smackdown.
Jennifer Hudson, for all the time she had to prepare for this night (if not her whole life), gave a less than stirring speech.
Jerry Seinfeld used his time onstage to audition for next year's host.
Celine Dion's lips pursed up at the end of her song into something out of a horror movie, like an upward-migrated vagina dentata.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 09:27 AM | Permalink

I went into my lunch with Hanna-Barbera expecting to hate them, but after a bottle of wine and Joe and Bill's loud, unembarrassed rendition of The Flintstones theme song, I was won over.

That's Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, the lifelong friends and animation partners who gave us Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo, The Jetsons, the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, and too many more to mention. Barbera died yesterday at age 95. (Hanna died in 2002.)

They had taken me to lunch at a fancy Italian restaurant on Central Park South, back when they were spring chickens -- 77 years old apiece -- and launching their own home-video company. I expected to dislike them for the very reason they were so long-lasting and successful in the industry: they invented "limited animation," a time- and money-saving way of making cost-effective animation for television by reducing the number (and quality) of animation cels per second of running time. The effect on the eye is of less lush, less fluid animation, although kids raised on it probably don't see or know the difference.

Yes. But. The genius of Hanna-Barbera was in adapting the medium they had worked in for so long, but which was dying, to the medium of the future -- television. It was their flexibility, foresight, and risk-taking that gave them staying power in an industry that was gradually phasing out Old School animation anyway. Legendary mogul Harry Cohn himself had canned the duo after walking out of a "pencil test" of their animation, bellowing: "Get rid of 'em!"

"At the height of our careers, we were out in the cold. What were we going to do, work at a hamburger stand?" said Barbera, working up a lather worthy of a cartoon character, let alone someone born in Little Italy and raised in Flatbush. "We had kids in school. We went to every agency, every studio. TV had no money. The entire industry was out of work."

That's why these feisty guys turned out to be more Jetson than Flintstone, imagining and even creating a future where none existed, leaving behind the safety of Bedrock. And look at today's TV animation -- the deliberately sketchy, ragged-looking South Park and The Simpsons are the hip grandchildren of Hanna-Barbera's prescience.

The two men were full of life in a way you can only wish for fellows who built their reputation on the Oscar-winning, feral chases of Tom and Jerry. "Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they're the modern Stone-Age family," boomed Barbera, who wrote that ditty. Hanna, with a less outsized personality, nevertheless chimed in, trying to recall some of the stickier lyrics: "Through the courtesy of Fred's two feet ... no, no, that can't be right ..."

"I'll never forget this humiliating evening," Barbera joked, pretending to slump dejectedly in his chair.

Actually, I'm the one who'll never forget it. I went in ready to chide these mavericks on "ruining" animation, only to come out, a bottle of wine and a song later, chastened to have met two guys were were, like another character we know, smarter than the average bear.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 08:58 AM | Permalink

In response to a reader thread from my Dreamgirls postings, on whether Jennifer Hudson needs to tone down her ghetto-speak, and whether Beyonce for all her polish still has a diction problem:

Ghetto-speak is little different from any of personal idiosyncracies that stars quickly learn to disguise in public -- at least if they value the dubious honor of "stardom," that state of affairs where every cornflake they consume is analyzed, quantified, and photographed in the press. The erasing of ethnicity is not the problem, since some publicity makeovers actually play up ethnicity, or invent it. (What is Charo, anyway?) It has to do with streamlining what they're selling, and with an on-the-job dress code. Women who work in department stores are required to wear pantyhose. Women who make movies for big studios are required to feed the public's fantasies without crossing the line (Britney Spears' lack of panties and Janet Jackson's nipple are red-carpet behaviors that went askew).

All the way back to the beginning of the star system -- Florence Lawrence was billed as "the first movie star" because she was the first actor to emerge with an actual, identifiable name from behind the mask of her corporate logo (the "Biograph Girl") -- stars and would-be stars have been groomed for whatever red-carpet persona was in vogue in their day. Think of the stars of yesteryear with their "mid-Atlantic" accents from some indeterminable country mid-way to London. Think of how they plucked Rita Hayworth's hairline to raise it to less feral dimensions.

Today's actors shape themselves, often with drastic results, which is why they need publicisits and handlers more than ever: Who knew Tom Cruise was such a flake until he fired his long-time publicist and started expressing his true self in public? Stars should NEVER express their true selves in public unless they're extremely savvy, with -- as Melanie Griffith said in "Working Girl" -- "a head for business and a bod for sin!"

So, my take on Jennifer Hudson: She's completely new to this business and has not yet worked out her red-carpet game plan. As for Beyonce: She's done a great job so far with packaging, but it's true, I noticed that she hasn't found a "public voice" she's entirely comfortable with.

Stars are judged for their off-camera lives, and that's not entirely unfair, because that's the cross that stars, but not necessarily actors, have to bear. And it's what they've signed on for. It's what the movie "Dreamgirls" is all about -- not just wanting to sing, have an audience, make a living at it, but wanting to get to the top, and accepting the compromises that come along with that (quite different) goal. Being a star can (and usually does) mean stripping away much of the individuality that made someone so promising in the first place, toning down the highs, papering over the lows, leaving behind your friends. I imagine many of these stars wake up in the morning disoriented: who's that in the mirror?

Posted by Jami Bernard at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The posters on my last blog entry are right -- why does the competition only have to be between the girls? The male roles in Dreamgirls offer just as much irony, with the reliable Jamie Foxx turning in what could be his first disappointing role (disappointment = expectations divided by results) in the thankless, underwritten role of the girl group's Svengali, and EDDIE MURPHY, of all people, getting ready for his big Oscar nomination!

It's not only Murphy's most mature performance, he seems to be aging gracefully in a way that helps him leave the baggage of his comedy career at the door. As a James Brown-type performer, womanizer, and drug abuser, Murphy does the opposite of what he usually does in his movies. Instead of putting on makeup and costumes so he can be a host of different, one-note characters, he adds layers of character to just one -- which is much more of a high-wire act.

Murphy's best scene -- and I hope they show that one in the clips at Oscar time -- is where his character suffers a setback that sends him quickly, quietly reeling into despair. He does it all with his body and facial expressions, and it's a powerful dramatic moment, sans the usual props.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 01:40 PM | Permalink

On the face of it, there are only two roles worth having in Dreamgirls -- the Pretty One and the Fat One. Beyonce made the obvious choice, and she suffers for it -- because any moment Jennifer Hudson isn't on the screen is a good opportunity to visit the concession stand. As a friend of mine said, "Miss Thing can't be happy about this."

Although Hudson -- notoriously booted off "American Idol," a mistake in hindsight even to Simon Cowell -- has the role of the girl whose voice and body are too big to blend into the (mostly white) American Dream, the take-away from the movie is that Hudson is the Pretty One after all.

First of all, she's pretty. And sexy. She's the only character who has attitude -- not necessarily the fault of some of the outstanding cast, because their characters are mostly ciphers.

Most of all, though, Hudson sells The Song. You know the song I'm talking about. It's as fine a piece of singing AND acting as you'll see this season, which is why the "American Idol" reject, not Beyonce, is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination.

The movie itself is an iffy contender, though highly entertaining. The script is hokey and sometimes downright bad, which is surprising coming from Bill Condon, who wrote the screenplay for "Chicago" and wrote and directed "Gods and Monsters." Its strong suit is Hudson, of course, and those "soft" Oscar categories -- costume, set design -- all of which are presented in closing credits that actually look as if they were designed for an Oscar campaign, complete with sketches and renderings.

Jennifer Hudson sells The Song, and she sells the movie, too.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I felt a little geeky hissing that to the slack-jawed manager of the Park Plaza Cinema on Hilton Head Island. Not that it takes a degree in cinematography to understand that if a movie like The Black Dahlia doesn't fit right on the screen, you do something to rectify it, generally something that takes place in the projection booth (although sometimes it's as simple as readjusting the curtains on either side of the screen).

"Our screen isn't big enough," was the manager's response when I stormed out of the cubicle known as a "theater" to report that The Black Dahlia wasn't being shown in its correct aspect ratio.

The screen isn't BIG ENOUGH? You can watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPod these days. How about a little anamorphic-lens action?

A full third of the information of the movie was lost, trailing off either end of the screen into raggedy-edged, out-of-focus black wastelands. Only the middle of the opening credits could be read; too bad Jennifer Jason Leigh wasn't in the movie so at least we'd get one full word to guess by.

What was worse, perhaps, than the theater manager not knowing or caring that this was either annoying or a sin, depending where you stand on the continuum of cinephilia, was that the audience sat there complacently as well, not even noticing that anything was wrong.

What is it that people see and absorb when they see a movie by a thoughtful director where a third of the information is missing? And why don't they react when TV images are stretched inappropriately to fill the new cinema-wide plasma screens, making everyone look fat and unnatural?

I'm here in South Carolina doing a few book signings at the Hilton Head Health Institute, and Movie Nights are the only times the clientele get off the training wheel and into the "real" world, partly to see a movie, and partly to see if they can do that without buying popcorn. Another of the group came with me to see the DePalma movie, and the minute I sat down, I jumped up to complain about the projection, and when nothing could be done about it, I wandered into The Guardian -- or An Officer and a Gentleman in the Coast Guard -- figuring that if they cut off part of Ashton Kutcher doing the Richard Gere thing it wouldn't matter so much. The woman who stayed behind watched The Black Dahlia, or maybe, in this case, The Gray Dahlia.

Afterward, I asked what she thought of it.

"It was okay," she said, "but I didn't really understand all of it."

Because she didn't really see all of it.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Toronto Film Festival is on this week. Without me. Between that and the publication today of my new book, The Incredible Shrinking Critic, I'm reminded of all the film festivals I've covered over the years where it seemed impossible not to gain weight.

Poor thing, you say. All that free Champagne and fine French food; my heart bleeds for you.

OK, so it was an enviable problem, how to make it past the patisserie located next to my hotel. Movie reviewing mentally engaging, but physically passive. Now, imagine sitting on one's derriere most hours of the day in the middle of the Riviera with only rich sauces to revive you.

In past years covering Cannes, I'd stop in at the next-door patisserie as routinely as I did at the hotel lobby to check for messages, and when things got rough – deadlines, boring movies, foot-in-mouth disease at some cocktail party – I'd squirrel away éclairs in my room. Even when things went well I felt like I was in the trenches; “Incoming!” someone would yell before lobbing a fusillade of pastries.

The first time I managed to turn that around was at Cannes one year after I was fortified by a visit to the Hilton Head Health Institute, where Bob Wright, the director of Lifestyle Education, entrusted me with his trademark coping phrase for high-risk situations: Unwise, better, best.

I'll say this for Bob: For all his wonderful qualities, he's not much of a sloganeer. It's unclear how many of the catchphrases used at HHHI are Bob's invention or holdovers from the original program by founder Peter Miller. Some might even be cobbled together from the nutritional stylings of Dr. Phil, who advises in one of his books to “stop living like a lazy slug.” When the Dept. of Health and Human Services says Calories Count, it's simple and elegant and has the whiff of a pun. Meanwhile, Bob continues to come up with phrases that don't exactly trip off the tongue, like “If you fail to plan, you're planning not to succeed.”

Nevertheless, “unwise, better, best” is a winner. In dangerous eating climes -- like covering a film festival with its long days and endless platters of pass-around, deep-fried finger food – the goal is not to be perfect but to make choices along a spectrum of unwise, better, best. At Cannes, “better” meant one mini-éclair at the buffet, whereas “unwise” would have been a plateful. (The fact that Will Smith and the alarmingly skinny Angelina Jolie were one table over that year helped my resolve; I didn't want Will saying, “You know, Angie, the Mediterranean is lovely this time of year, but what's with that chick and the éclairs?”)

There's no judgment attached to unwise, better, best. It's about making a reasonable effort under difficult circumstances. Which ties into another HHHI precept, “degrees of on,” in which you are never “on” program or “off” program, merely attached to a different extent at all times. Ideally, you strive for the upper end, where “on” is a neon halo. But as long as you're on to some degree, there's a spread of what's acceptable in terms of calories, behavior, and exercise adherence. Being connected to a healthy lifestyle to some degree at all times is more efficient in the long run than being “perfect” a fraction of the time . The problem with rigidity (aside from alienating friends) is that when you fail to meet lofty, arbitrary, self-imposed standards, the tendency is to give up entirely and go back to bed with the cellophane wrappers from Hostess cupcakes crinkling beneath you.

Another specific new goal of mine for covering film fesitvals without calorie creep was to go to the gym – again, just to keep a sense of connection to my usual routine so it wouldn't pull apart later like the pastry layers of a millefeuille. My hotel, the evocatively named Modern Waikiki, was lucky to have a one-person elevator, let alone a fitness center. For that, I had to go across the street to the Majestic Hotel, which charged a majestic day rate of 25 euros. I went every other day for complete cardio and weight workouts, often alongside the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt By the Sun), whose work I admire even though he yelled at me in bad French to close the windows of the gym. What, no fresh Mediterranean air? Wasn't he accustomed to the frozen tundra or the steppes of his homeland?

Colleagues pitched in with suggestions for where to score quick salads. Indie film reporter Mary Glucksman was really helpful until she told me where to find free dark chocolate squares. This is not the kind of advice the Incredible Shrinking Critic needs. And anyway, Mary, they weren't on the fourth floor of the Palais like you said.

At restaurants, I ordered grilled seabream (a local fish) instead of steak frites, salade Niçoise instead of Caesar. And French yogurt is to die for.

Every pharmacy in France has a scale. When you insert a half-euro coin, it spits out a receipt that gives your weight in kilograms, your height in centimeters, and the number of calories you really ought to be eating. I expected a hand (with a French manicure) to reach out from the machine and slap my face: Stop eating zee food!

Pascal at my hotel did the math for me, changing kilograms to pounds. After two weeks in the South of France, faced with every temptation from the overeater's torture pantry, I hadn't gained an ounce.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hate is such a powerful emotion, don't you think? That was one of the running lines in Gilda, thrown back and forth like acid in the face between Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, who died yesterday at age 90.

The trick in that movie was for Ford's character to maintain what I call (when it pertains to my cats) the Big Tail. When cats know they're confronting a challenge much bigger, stronger, and scarier than they are, they puff up the fur on their tail to look thick and menacing, as if to say -- I've got connections in the Attorney General's office, y'know! (I once caught Buzz making the Big Tail at the dishwasher when it chunked into the rinse cycle unexpectedly.)

Rita Hayworth, as you can imagine from seeing her striptease to Put the Blame on Mame, was the dishwasher to Glenn Ford in Gilda, and Ford gave the Big Tail throughout that strange, perfervid movie, playing a character so at war with himself over loyalty, lust, honor and humiliation you thought he'd explode even before the little bigamy subplot.

I can't say Gilda was Ford's best work, but it was certainly the most fun. An actor who could stand up to Rita Hayworth in her prime, and pretend to hate hate hate her ... ah, but hate is such a powerful emotion, no?

Posted by Jami Bernard at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Another audio files from my interview with Spike Lee on his HBO documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts:

Where were you when the levees broke?

Posted by Jami Bernard at 12:58 PM | Permalink

Snakes on a Plane is silly fun, and delivers on the snakes -- CGI creatures with monster-movie attributes. But the one (perhaps only) thing it does well is to recreate the look and feel of a tossed-off movie of the '70s. Cheesy, pastel sets, bad hair, lame jokes, none of that streamlined, calculated appeal to the bottom line that characterizes movies today. I half expected to see Jan-Michael Vincent show up any moment as a flight attendant.

But what's with Julianna Margulies? She looks as if all character has drained from her face. I hope she didn't get "work" done.

New Line didn't screen in advance for critics, although there was no reason not to. As long as you see this with a late-night, rip-roaring-drunk crowd, it's quite acceptable -- even though horribly directed by David R. Ellis, who misses every opportunity to exploit the personalities of the passengers on the snake-bedeviled plane. The kickboxing dude? The girl who'd do anything for her dog? Come on -- let's get some action going! Kick-boxing with the cobra, perhaps? Last licks on behalf of the lapdog?

Because they're motivated by an overdose of pheromone spray, the snakes tend to attack the passengers' sex organs whenever possible, which sent last night's first paying audience into appropriate spasms of hooted ecstasy. Fangs for the mammaries, indeed.

I've spent the Morning After sending personalized greetings from Samuel L. Jackson to my friends, courtesty of the movie's interactive website.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 10:01 AM | Permalink

I interviewed Spike Lee about his powerful, important new HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, about Hurricane Katrina and its shameful aftermath. The doc debuts Monday and Tuesday nights on HBO (there's a giant premiere tonight [Wednesday] in New Orleans), and my story appears this Sunday in the TV magazine of the New York Post. Meanwhile, here's a foretaste, one of several audio snippets from that interview.

Despite amassing 500 hours of footage and 100 interviews, edited down to a four-part, four-hour tapestry of human misery and government incompetence (if not worse), Lee regrets not being able to locate the woman who had the balls to shame Condoleeza Rice as the Secretary of State was blithely trying on pricey shoes at Ferragamo while, as Lee puts it, "people were drowning."

Listen to Spike's one regret ...

Lee was kind enough to agree to this interview, even though he and I have been, uh, on the outs for about 15 years. More on this and other simmering celebrity grudges in future posts.

Photo by Jami Bernard

Posted by Jami Bernard at 04:10 PM | Permalink

I interviewed Mel Gibson many years ago in London on a morning when he was clearly hung over. After arriving an hour late, looking like Christ dragged to the cross of media interrogation, he nursed cappucino after cappucino, a black cloud hanging over him through the whole dispiriting session. I can't blame stars for hating interviews, but since it's usually part of their contracts to help promote their movies, or at least it fosters good will with their studio employers, and since their profession makes them perfect for at least acting like they're actors who enjoy talking about their work, I have no sympathy.

This particular interview was for Bird on a Wire, and whether it was bird or dog or turkey, you didn't see Goldie Hawn showing up late and scowling. Known for her professionalism, Hawn was perky, engaged, and wearing a Lycra top that flirted with areola territory. At least she was making the effort.

The film community has long known of several biblical commandments Gibson was prone to breaking. Now that he's confessed his alcoholism -- the lesser of two evils on display during his recent arrest for drunk driving -- it's almost a relief to be able to state the obvious: that the vehemence of The Passion of the Christ has always been as much about the strident zeal of the newly reformed addict as about Gibson's guarded anti-Semitism.

Think of ex-smokers who won't tolerate others lighting up, not even outdoors, or those nouveau vegetarians who examine the meals of complete strangers with disgust. At some point, Gibson gave up (or tried to give up) his hard-partying ways, and the result is the kind of intolerance people often exhibit when they struggle to keep themselves in check. I haven't followed closely the timeline of Gibson's turnaround -- his embracing of religion as part of his atonement for years of bad behavior -- but TPOTC was clearly part of his own, personal detox program. Once you're on the wagon, you can't proclaim it loudly enough, and TPOTC was not just a movie about Jesus, it was an attempt to rewrite history according to the narrow view of one particular religious sect, one that is as rigid in its views (toward Jews, for example) as reformed alcoholics are rigid on the topic of booze.

But ex-drunks fall off the wagon. Why? Because they're human, not divine. All the addiction literature makes note of it. As Gibson observed in his statement, it's a good thing he was arrested before he hurt someone.

The anti-semitism he betrayed from the bottom of the bottle is something else. Alcohol is a chemically proven disinhibitor, and Gibson apparently spun himself like a top as he spewed his bile at the arresting officers, demanding to know if they were Jews, blaming the Jews for all the wars in history. (Hmm, where do the Crusades fit into that theory?) His published "apology" mentioned alcoholism but not the anti-semitic remarks, or at least not specifically. Just as he's never distanced himself from his father's crazy, Holocaust-denying rants, Gibson still refuses to pin down just what it is about the statement "Jews are to blame for everything" he doesn't believe.

But I'm surprised anyone's surprised. TPOTC is an anti-semitic screed. I'm not saying that in an accusing way, simply as a matter of fact, like saying The Awful Truth is a screwball comedy or Oliver Stone's movies are blunt. I received thousands of e-mails after my initial review of TPOTC, the majority from those who believed that a movie can't be "anti-semitic" if it's "true."

Where to begin to refute such a Moebius strip of incomprehension and illogic?

For the most part, I'm guessing the problem is that people don't know how to "read" a movie. They can't see how Gibson, as writer, producer, and director, created his own "truth" through the magic of movie composition, editing, casting, lighting, and words. What went into TPOTC, what didn't, the litany of choices he made, the calculated variables of the moviemaking process itself, all this contributed to saying on film what Gibson said to the arresting officer the other day.

What part of "Jews are the devil" does Gibson not believe? He's sorry he fell off the wagon, embarrassed himself and his family, broke the law and endangered others. He wasn't sorry for the hole in his heart.

And why should he be? After all, he's said it all before, on film, and he must have known what he was doing, because it went down millions of gullets as smoothly as a nice cold beer.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 11:21 PM | Permalink

Uma Thurman gamely sends up her tough-girl, kick-ass, Kill Bill persona in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, but the nearly clever idea that powers the screenplay sputters into brownout mode early on, developing rolling blackouts and cutting off vital blood supply to brain cells.

As the brown-bewigged Jenny, Thurman adopts a mousy librarian demeanor (even though Jenny, inexplicably, works at a high-end art gallery). As Jenny's blonde alter-ego, the Fantastic-Fourish superhero "G-Girl," the character is tricked out like Superman with laser vision and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound (and an allergy to extraterrestrial rocks).

But Jenny reveals her bipolar secret early on to new boyfriend Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), thus sidelining the movie's one running joke -- the powerful woman who is secretly insecure, a jealous bunny-boiler in the making. As Glenn Close would say in Fatal Attraction, which this movie vaguely references, she WON'T be IGNORED.

With the full subtext now on display, like underwear worn over street clothes, the story has nowhere to go, no ideas to push, no opportunity for playing peekaboo with G-Girl's embarrassing, relationship-killing secret: She can save Metropolis from ruin but she's jealous and possessive.

What to do? Some filler with sidekick characters, and a few Jokes that repeat like the reprise of title songs in a musical -- here's a scene of sex so super the bed moves, and here's a scene of buddies discussing sex so super the bed moves, and here's, yes, more bed-moving. At least Brigadoon only showed up once every hundred years.

Luke Wilson's reaction shots are fun, but you can't hang a movie on them. (If it were Owen Wilson, maybe.)

Thurman is clearly more comfortable with comedy than any other acting style, and she's good at it. Her Quentin Tarantino roles have all been essentially comedic. Super Ex-Girlfriend, though more obviously billed as a comedy, is a bad one, a lazy and half-baked one, and it's a step down for her. She's not even the lead -- Wilson's reaction shots play the lead. G-Girl's super powers are indicated by cheesy special effects, the kind that would be impressive on small-screen Smallville; she she goes into action, there's a watery ripple effect as if G-Girl is disturbing the cosmos just a little. Her powers seem to reside in placing a watermark on the screen; could G-Girl be the first heroine for the paper-supplies industry?

Screenwriter Don Payne (who is writing next year's Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer) is clearly more interested in the superficial aspects of the high-concept, comics-based joke than in mining the rich, deep vein of Jenny/G-Girl's personality conundrum. Comics are not superficial, though. The best of them explore the painfully human -- how to fit in when you're different, how to turn your back on those you love to protect them from retribution by your enemies -- and movie comedy should demand no less. We should laugh at but also feel for the plight of poor Jenny -- so competent. So helpless.

That's not to say there are no good scenes, like one in which Jenny and Matt have dinner out with Matt's work colleague Hannah (Anna Faris). A missile is headed for midtown, and the other diners are glued to the TV, but jealous Jenny doesn't want to leave Matt alone with an attractive woman. "Shouldn't SOMEONE do something?" Matt hisses to Jenny. "Maybe SOMEONE needs just ONE NIGHT OFF!" she hisses back, like any couple bickering over who did what in the relationship.

I wouldn't go on at length about a movie like this except that the missed opportunity is profound. Fatal Attraction is in desperate need of a feminist makeover, but I'd rather see a serious one than a comic send-up (it is its own send-up, really). And superhero comics are all about the strain of keeping subtext in place, the exhaustion of keeping the secret life and the public life in balance. The chief mistake of Super Ex-Girlfriend is that Jenny/G-Girl should be the protagonist, not the less-interesting Matt, whose goal is to get a hot chick who won't turn out to be high-maintenance. That's too common a movie topic, and it's been addressed countless times.

No, what this needed to be was a hip, breezy summer spin on The Upside of Anger, that movie in which Kevin Costner is strangely attracted to Joan Allen even though she's a raving bitch. As a woman, I want to see such a movie in all its variations. And I want to see Uma Thurman (or any actress!) play a smart, strong, funny woman, not the male-fantasy version of it.

Posted by Jami Bernard at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The biggest unintentional guffaw of Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen's remake of the 1972 disaster flick, came when the captain announced that it was neither bird, nor plane, nor iceberg, but a "rogue wave" that was to be the harbinger of death, destruction, and Act II.

Rogue wave, my ass. At least try to make the movie's galvanizing event sound plausible.

My bad. According to a splashy piece in The New York Times science section yesterday ("Huge, Freakish, but Real, Waves Draw New Study"), rogue waves exist indeed and are suspected of causing many a flip twixt the ship and the slip -- even those watercraft that don't have Kevin Dillon aboard, playing as clueless a character as a screenwriter can dream up on his sofa. ("I'm just lucky," says Lucky Larry, or final words to that effect, before doing a Tarzan from an electrical vine over a cavernous inferno.)

Posted by Jami Bernard at 11:26 AM | Permalink

Will I respect myself in the morning?

Unclear. But I felt sleazy as hell as I purposely made eye contact with the stooped Chinese woman who was selling bootleg DVDs at a pizza place in Queens. This on the heels of a spectacular FBI roundup of 13 bootleggers, the punchline to a long-gestating sweep through New York.

Those 13 may be behind bars, but there's still inventory floating around out there. The Chinese pizza connection was a veritable one-woman Blockbuster, carrying all the latest summer titles -- X-Men, Da Vinci Code. Also like the folks at Blockbuster, she didn't seem to have any personal interest in or knowledge of the movies she sold. I noticed her because her body language was that falsely ingratiating kind found in pleading-eyed scavengers who try to sell single-stem roses to diners before a restaurant kicks them out. But the table of teenagers near me squealed with glee when the woman splayed her plastic-wrapped wares like slabs of an oversized Tarot deck; I was curious.

Years ago, the MPAA took me along on a stakeout of a Bronx video store that was serving as a front for bootleggers. So now, I briefly thought of calling my old contact (who, notwithstanding, had long since left the MPAA) and alerting him to the skulduggery of this old woman -- although she was "old" only in the sense that actresses over 40 were once considered fodder for granny roles. She was possibly in her 50s, but she shuffled as if she were in her dotage, perhaps because life had beaten her down. Or perhaps she'd lost the will to live after seeing Click, the moronic, depressing new Adam Sandler movie that I bought from her for five bucks, rationalizing to myself that it was in the service of "research" for this blog.

Whoever filmed Click off a movie screen with a camcorder was sitting to the left of the theater, coughed like a banshee, hit the mute button twice by mistake, and squeaked his chair with alacrity throughout the movie. As for those pesky end credits, he didn't bother filming them. They're not part of the movie, are they?

If you care about film, you don't want to see one off a bootleg copy. But then, if you care about film, you don't want to see Click.

No one has accused Sandler of having range. His claim to fame is still his man-boy singing of silly songs in a silly voice. As most sentient beings will agree, a little Sandler goes a long way. But that doesn't stop him in Click -- SPOILER ALERT!!!! -- from performing an excruciatingly sorry-ass death scene in which he flails about, gasping, in a hospital gown and a puddle of water. His character, who has fast-forwarded through his life to avoid the hassle of experiencing any of it, suddenly sees the error of his ways and tries, with his dying breath, to gain absolution from the family he betrayed.

Hamlet he ain't.

But the week wasn't a total loss. Here's the view from my neighbor Nick's terrace:

Posted by Jami Bernard at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

BIG-TIME spoiler alert ahead ... not that you wouldn't guess it within the first reel.

Both Superman Returns and The Da Vinci Code play off the notion that Christ is mortal -- or mortal enough to spawn heirs.

There's been no outcry, no protests, no picketing over Superman Returns (unless you count complaints that Kate Bosworth is no Margot Kidder and Brandon Routh is no Christopher Reeve). And certainly there's no good reason to protest the movie on religious grounds, but then, why protest Da Vinci Code either? What they have in common is the subtext of divinity versus humanity. Where they differ is in the seriousness with which they appear to raise the issue -- although I would argue that Da Vinci Code is no more serious, in its genre way (and certainly no more high-minded or realistic) than Superman Returns.

In the case of SR, perhaps the kind of people who protest this sort of thing are mollified that Superman is just a comic character, not a JC stand-in -- despite the fusillade of JC references that are hurled onto the screen like meteors aimed at Metropolis. Jor-El (the holographic Marlon Brando, referenced in a pane of Fortress of Solitude flat-screen-TV ice) gave his "only son" that humankind could learn to be just a little bit nobler. Director Bryan Singer's Superman hovers, Christ-like, in space, where he spends his nights filtering out the babble of the world's prayers like a messianic antenna. He decides which prayer to answer, and in what order. The central dilemma of Superman, and of Superman Returns, is how to prioritize.

And yet, Superman Returns is about social ineptitude. Superman returns from a five-year walkabout in space, and Lois is so furious at his lack of social grace -- he never said goodbye -- that she's channeled her rage into a good-riddance essay that has won her a Pulitzer. The essay probably doesn't mention what she hasn't really discussed with her new boyfriend, either -- that she spent a night with the Man of Steel. She slept with her source!

Full disclosure: I've written a Lois Lane comic, (a 5-page story within Superman: Secret Files & Origins) and did a rewrite on a Superman script. Should that make me more inclined to like or dislike Superman Returns? Dunno. I doubt the success of the movie will influence sales of my little comic one way or the other.

But if I were a religious protester, one inclined not to see the forest for the trees, I'd protest this movie's depiction of Clark Kent, not of the savior Superman who answers the most desperate prayers. The human in him knocks up a girl, leaves without saying goodbye, and doesn't pay child support. What would Jesus do?

Posted by Jami Bernard at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)