Author: Bo List

Jane Fonda has meant a number of things to each decade in which she’s lived in the public eye. In her early years, she was Henry Fonda’s daughter. In the 1960s, she was Hollywood’s talented sex kitten (see Barbarella). In the ’70s, she was “Hanoi Jane,” chatting up the Viet Cong and generally pissing off a lot of Americans. In the ’80s, reinvented again, she was the fitness guru, and in the ’90s, she was Mrs. Ted Turner. During most of that time, she was more than all of those things. She was an actress and quite a brilliant one at that: The China Syndrome, Klute, Coming Home, Julia, even 9 to 5. But then, just before marrying Ted in 1991, Fonda just stopped making movies, leading to an unfortunate 15-year absence.

Now, it is 2005, a decade not yet stamped with any particular Fonda notoriety, and she is back. In treacle. In Monster-in-Law.

Fonda plays Viola Fields, a Barbara Walters-style television interviewer who suffers a nervous breakdown on the set of her show, a show from which she has just been canned in favor of a fresh, young face. Her last interview is with a Britney Spears-esque twit who doesn’t read the newspaper and thinks that Roe v. Wade refers to boxing. The breakdown (which I contend is psychotic rather than nervous) ends with Viola lunging for the songstress’ throat on-camera. If you have seen the Spears interview with Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, you too will understand the throat-lunging impulse.

Meanwhile, a perky young woman, Charlie (Jennifer Lopez), just can’t seem to find love, even though she is smart, beautiful, creative, and fun. When fate has her meet a successful doctor (Alias star Michael Vartan), she falls quickly in love despite some insecurities about her lowly profession as an odd-job maven.

Counting Monster-in-Law, I have now seen three of Lopez’s movies, and they all share that distinction. In Maid in Manhattan, Lopez was a humble maid trying to make ends meet while scoring with a promising politico. In Enough, she was a humble waitress who marries into a wealthy (and nuts-o) family and must overcome the class thing in order to feel good about herself and kill her abusive husband. In all three films, she considers herself undateable and an ugly duckling. I sense a pattern here. What is most certainly common in these films is that they are fantasies — not the least of which is that women like Lopez cannot get dates.

Anyway, Mr. Right, er, Kevin, has a catch. It’s his mom. Viola. She’s spent months in the funny farm and is ready to meet the new girlfriend. Mom and Charlie hit it off so well that Kevin proposes marriage right there at their first meeting. Viola is sent into a psychotic rage so entire that it begins with casual sabotage of Charlie’s happiness and ends with what could be attempted murder.

Monster-in-Law is, essentially, about a mother and a girlfriend duking it out over the affections of their wiener of a son/boyfriend. (Who proposes in front of their mother?) So, it’s J-Lo and J-Fo. Who, oh, who will win? TV’s Wanda Sykes appears as Viola’s assistant and offers much needed comic relief, as does Broadway’s Elaine Stritch, as the film’s unfunny deus ex machina.

This film is, I think, a shrewd move for Fonda. The movie’s no good (there — that’s my review), but it will make money, and Lopez will have a hit after a brief run of flops and media uninterest. But Fonda, whose autobiography just came out along with her fitness workouts on DVD, gets to make her Big Return in the low-stakes safety of this piffle while drawing attraction to those other projects. Monster-in-Law is like rebound sex — inconsequential, forgettable, and it gets it out of the system. Without the nervous anticipation (does she still have it? how does she look?), her next film can be more appreciated.

Good for Jane. Good for us.

I am in Kentucky, preparing to direct a play with the Shakespeare festival here. I am staying with my sainted mother during this project, and occasionally I get the urge to sift through boxes of things I can’t bring myself to throw away. Among them: old journals of private thoughts, some poetry, prose, drawings, and whatever else was filling my head from ages, oh, 12 to about 20. The poetry is gawd-awful, the drawings cartoons, and the prose sentimental treacle. My short stories if you can call them short or even stories are like little Hallmark cards about young boys like me encountering adventures just like the ones I wanted for myself, with happy endings I so desired for my future. It doesn’t take long to tire of this exercise, and before long, the journals are back in the box for another year or three until I am ready, yet again, to look into the mirror of the past and see what a sap I was. In David Duchovny, making his debut as film writer and director, I see a kindred sap.

House of D, which smacks of autobiography, introduces us to Tom Warshaw, (played by Duchovny himself), an artist living in Paris with his French family. He decides that on his son’s 13 birthday, he will tell his Big Secret, which centers on an incident that occurred when Tom was himself 13. This means, to us the viewers, that a coming-of-age story must precede the revelation of the secret, or I guess the movie would only be 20 minutes long. So, we are taken on a wondrous journey back to 1973 Greenwich Village an era of shaggy haircuts, a deceitful Republican president, and an unpopular war dragging on halfway across the planet. (It should be easy for us 2005-ers to relate.)

So, 1973: Young Tommy (Anton Yelchin) lives with his widowed mother (played by Tea Leoni Mrs. David Duchovny to you) and attends Catholic school. He has a job delivering for a deli (insert lots of sexual meat-related jokes here) alongside his best friend, Pappass. Pappass, we are told innumerable times, is retarded. This means, cinematically, that the ante for situational comedy is upped considerably, as is the potential for embarrassment and danger. That Pappass is played by Robin Williams means only that dangerous, comic embarrassment is even more likely.

Tommy is a fairly normal boy for his age, though perhaps smarter and a bit more emotionally complicated than his contemporaries. He is 12 years old, beginning puberty and just starting to notice girls to the chagrin of Pappass, who has an inkling that the onset of courtship may mean that he has been outgrown. But they continue to have adventures anyway, and together they long to purchase the Beautiful Green Lady a banana-seated bicycle in a store window. They save their money and hide it under a grate outside the local women’s house of detention. (Get it? The House of D?) This is, incidentally, foolish. Each day they navigate past criminals and pimps and drunks to count and then bury the money, in plain view of the miscreants.

The House of D (the prison, not the movie) provides Tommy with a source of wisdom otherwise lacking in his peers and parents. A prostitute (complete with heart of gold) named Lady Bernadette is there, in a cell about three stories up. With a shard of mirror (beware, guards!) she is able to look down onto the street to Tommy burying his money and, by turns, offer life advice and beg for smack money. She is played by Erykah Badu, a fascinating actress and singer, and it is the conversations she has with young Tommy (artfully lit and directed in a film that is otherwise artless) that anchor the film.

I dare not reveal more. There are coming-of-age secrets ahead, and I won’t spoil them. But this isn’t a very good movie, so maybe I’m spoiling it more by suggesting that you avoid it. With so many good ingredients (including a fine Frank Langella as a stern teacher) you would hope for better but not in the hands of a novice. Duchovny, a smart guy (a Princeton man, no less), will write and direct again, I’m sure. Hopefully, this freshman misstep will get the sugar out of his tank.

My experience with realtors is fairly slim, having only rented. However, I can recognize a nervous agent when I see one, and the realtor in The Amityville Horror is as jittery as I’ve ever seen. Who can blame her? She’s trying to sell a big, scary house that she knows was the site of a grizzly family murder just a year or so before. Also, she sees shadows and hears noises as she’s showing the home to potential customers. Shouldn’t she be pointing those out, along with the high ceilings and spacious dining area?

Alas, this shuddering lady just doesn’t know how to market this house but makes the sale anyway. One would think, by the magnitude of her heebie-jeebies, that she had made a career of trying desperately to unload the Bates Motel, the condo where Rosemary had her baby, and that Exorcist house. That could be her niche, if she could just take a Valium before the showing. She does admit that a tragedy occurred, but only after the Lutz family agrees to buy.

My point, if there is one, is that early on when the Lutz family is looking at a beautiful old house, the illogical behavior of the realtor is just like every other element of The Amityville Horror. We are informed nay, telegraphed that we are supposed to be scared. And then, lots of computer-generated frights appear, which should be scary but aren’t.

This Lutz family, George (Ryan Reynolds) and Kathy (Melissa George) are a happy, young couple. Kathy has three children from her previous marriage (from which she is widowed), and the challenge of integrating Mom’s shaggy new husband into the affections of her children cannot be overestimated. When George and Kathy buy the house, a fresh start seems possible at last. But the words of that realtor haunt them as do some very literal spooks and haunts. George finds himself cold all the time and restless. And grumpy. And mean. Within just a few days, he transforms from amiable construction guy to ax-wielding tyrant, insisting that the oldest son hold logs while he chops them to teach him a lesson about whining. George also is compelled to break through walls in the basement, sensing that some unseen force is behind them.

Meanwhile, Kathy is justifiably concerned. Her kids are being verbally (and, gradually, physically) abused. A much-needed date at a cheap Italian restaurant seems to do the trick, but the ghosts back home wreak havoc on the babysitter. This highlights a connection for Kathy: When George is away from the house, he’s fine. When he’s near the house, he’s psychotic. What to do?

A trip to the doctor reveals nothing, and the local priest (Philip Baker Hall) runs away after the briefest attempt at an exorcism. (I hope this papal conclave elects a pope who will crack down on wussy exorcists.) Seems like this is a problem only the Lutzes can fix.

So, there are some good points to this unnecessary remake of 1979’s film of the same name with Margot Kidder and James Brolin as the Lutzes. (Wow. It must have been intimidating for the newer cast to step into the shoes of Kidder and Brolin, who are best known for rummaging crazily through neighboring shrubs and marrying Barbra Streisand, respectively.) But none of the good points seem to be so intentionally. Hall is fine, but only because he adds some much-needed class to these otherwise drab and undistinguished proceedings. There are some genuine scares not the computerized special effects but the human ones that come from a child being in danger.

Reynolds is an interesting camera subject and very sympathetic, but neither script nor director seems to know how to help him with the transitions between scruffy/lovable and mean/possessed. He tries hard, but he has neither the skill nor the support to make the leaps the film asks of him. George does fine with Kathy, though it’s hard to get totally behind her, since it takes her so long to get her kids out of the house, and by that time George has graver intentions for that ax than firewood.

“Houses don’t kill people. People kill people,” George comments, justifying his purchase of a house in which murders occurred. This is an amusing homage to the NRA line “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” True. But people with guns can kill more people and kill them faster than people without. Similarly, movies don’t numb us to violence and horror. Bad movies numb us to violence and horror. The Amityville Horror is numb and dumb.

Makers of ostensibly disreputable “gross-out” comedies such as There’s Something About Mary and Me, Myself & Irene, the Farrelly brothers aren’t natural filmmakers. But their films have a combination of anarchic glee and palpable generosity that gives their work both a distinctive personality and sense of purpose. The result has been a body of work that hasn’t been taken as seriously as it should be. (There’s Something About Mary was a box-office smash and one of the best American films of the past decade but had no prayer of getting nominated for an Oscar.)

The main problem with the duo’s latest film the baseball-themed romantic comedy Fever Pitch isn’t the one I expected: that stars Drew Barrymore and especially Jimmy Fallon would be too low-wattage for filmmakers used to letting the likes of Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey, Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, and Matt Damon run wild. Rather, it’s that Fever Pitch is as close to “director-for-hire” as the Farrellys are liable to get. Right off the bat they share authorship with Nick Hornby, whose football-themed (right, soccer) book is the basis for the film. But the Farrellys are also working from someone else’s script, one produced by a team (Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz) whose resume (A League of Their Own, Parenthood) reads anonymous but agreeable. The result isn’t a romantic comedy reflected through the Farrelly prism (as Mary and Shallow Hal were) but a more conventional film where the directors’ attempts to inject their own idiosyncrasies not so much the stray bits of only mildly effective slapstick and gross-out humor but the affectionately drawn band of misfits who make up Fallon’s “summer family” at Fenway Park come across as more awkward and forced than in films they can call entirely their own.

Even if you haven’t read Fever Pitch, the plot of the film will be familiar to you if you’ve read Hornby’s more popular High Fidelity or seen its more successful film adaptation. The romantic-comedy elements are wrapped around a funny but tortured self-critique of Peter Pan syndrome, a consideration of the rewards and limits of cultural obsession, and the way immersion in music or sports (or any number of other things Star Wars movies, perhaps?) can affect one’s interactions with other humans, especially members of the opposite sex, who tend to be less obsessive about those things.

In Fever Pitch, this takes the form of Ben (Fallon), a shlubby geometry teacher at East Boston High who is also an almost embarrassingly rabid Red Sox fan. (Confession: I’ve been a Sox fan for nearly 25 years and remember the torturous, thrilling ’86 post-season like it was yesterday, so I can relate.) But Ben is forced to confront his baseball jones when he becomes smitten with high-powered business exec Lindsey (Barrymore), a non-fan used to dating guys with more than jerseys and sneakers in their closets.

At its frequent best, Fever Pitch combines the Farrellys’ distinctive sunniness with a sportsaholic self-critique familiar from Ron Shelton’s underrated Tin Cup. But Fever Pitch lacks both Tin Cup‘s sexiness (Kevin Costner and Rene Russo’s grown-up courtship dance trumps Barrymore and Fallon’s puppy love) and conceptual rigor. The rawness with which Tin Cup exposed its hero’s empty machismo is why it wasn’t quite the hit Shelton’s previous sports flicks were. Fever Pitch edges into this kind of critique of Ben he turns down a romantic getaway to Paris because it conflicts with a midseason Fenway homestand but pulls back. Maybe because the Farrellys share Ben’s obsession or, more likely, because the filmmakers, in this one case, are too nice for their own good.

So Fever Pitch lets Ben off a little too easy, disrupting the gender balance required of the greatest romantic comedies. For most of the movie, Fever Pitch seems as accessible to women viewers as men. (My wife’s favorite part: when Ben explains that he and his friends like to scout the players and “talk about which to keep, which to get rid of” and Lindsey guilelessly responds, “And the Red Sox ask for you opinion?” Needless to say, she could relate.) But it ultimately embraces a boy’s fantasy, and Lindsey’s late-film revelation that she’s the one who’s been selfish rings hollow.

You have to wonder if the movie would have been different had the Red Sox not decided to reverse 86 years of history in the midst of the film’s production, vanquishing the dread Yankees and seizing the World Series title. Faced with something as incredible as the 2004 postseason, perhaps it’s hard to fault the Farrellys (New England boys themselves) for giving in to the rush.

Chris Herrington

Sahara, the new action film with Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz, is based on the novel of the same name by Clive Cussler. I haven’t read Cussler’s novel or any other of his work, though he did pen the book that later became the movie Raise the Titanic (1980). Jason Robards was in that film. He later scoffed at the movie (which was a turkey), claiming he only did it for the money. Robards and his then-wife were remodeling their home, so they called the film Raise the Bathroom. A quarter-century later, Cussler has penned yet another book that has become yet another stinker.

Cussler’s Raise the Titanic characters are back in Sahara but with distinctly 21st-century updates. McConaughey replaces stately Richard Jordan’s Dirk Pitt, William H. Macy stands in for the late Robards’ Admiral James Sandecker, and quirky clown Steve Zahn takes over ex-Navy Seal Al Giordino for grizzled character actor M. Emmet Walsh. These intrepid fellows work for the National Underwater and Marine Agency (a real organization founded by Cussler). Pitt is a lifelong devotee of an old legend of an ironclad Civil War ship that mysteriously crossed the ocean to Africa during wartime, bearing treasure and, perhaps, death. When a gold Confederate dollar shows up on the black market, Pitt knows he must be near the ship and borrows the good admiral’s speedboat and buddy Al to head to Mali where, surely, they will find the ship. That’s the first of two plots.

Plot two: Drs. Eva Rojas (comely Cruz) and Frank Hopper (Glynn Turman) are in Africa examining patients with distinctly plague-like symptoms. People are getting very sick and dying very fast, and though they work for the World Health Organization, nobody will take them seriously. So they trek on alone to find the source of the illness. Their appeals for help to a stylish French billionaire only put them into greater danger, as he is connected to Mali’s baddest, toughest evil warlord whose political and financial ambitions are not remotely bothered by this plague. In fact, the plague serves as a distraction from his diabolical plans, which involve solar energy, toxic waste, and warlording in general. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

Astonishingly, Pitt and Rojas encounter each other a number of times (Africa sure is small, ain’t it?), even though they are searching for different things. But, just as all you have to do to make a Reese’s cup is combine chocolate and peanut butter, all you have to do to connect the dots between a horrifying biohazard with an ironclad Civil War treasure is well, I don’t know. And after seeing Sahara, I don’t think I can recall how they figure out that the ship and the source of the plague are in the same place. But thank God Pitt and Rojas do or the Atlantic Ocean would be in a heap of trouble. Trust me.

If it pleases the court, I accuse Sahara of being utterly, completely, and totally ordinary. Nothing distinguishes this from its many source materials (James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code have all had DNA stolen in order to construct, nefariously, Dirk Pitt), nor does it seem to try very hard on its own. The buddy relationship is just like any other in movies, and the tepid romance is tacked on and extraneous. (Yawn.) In fact, there is more chemistry between McConaughey and Zahn. Pitt introduces pal Al as his “wife,” and then, when asked how long they have “been together,” Al answers “since kindergarten.” They are more a couple than Rojas and Pitt seem to want to be. (Rojas and Pitt don’t even kiss.) But who cares? The movie is put together well enough (by Michael Eisner’s son Breck), implausible but fun, unimportant but diverting, unattractive but well-paced. McConaughey is colorful enough (in fact, one Web site commenter referred to him as “orange looking” in this), and Cruz, not very good in this role, is at least nice to look at.

Sahara‘s not bad. It’s just not at all good. Shouldn’t “not good” be bad enough? You tell me. n

I admire truth in advertising. I like to order a Diet Coke and get a Diet Coke. I like names for things that tell me exactly what to expect: Campbell’s tomato soup; the Weather Channel; Cracker Barrel.

Sin City, the new film co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, paints a picture (sometimes literally) of exactly that: a city of sin. Mortal sins, original sins, cardinal sins, sin-sations. Every kind of sin imaginable, from lust to greed to pride, is on magnificent, monochromatic display. And while this movie’s going to make some people uneasy, I admire it because it sets out to do something and does it 1,000 percent.

Based on Miller’s series of dark and intense graphic novels of the same name, Sin City takes three of the (several) stories and lines them up Pulp Fiction-style consecutive and yet strangely concurrent and overlapping.

The first is the tale of Marv (a fantastic Mickey Rourke), a tough guy with a heart of gold and a face as square and tough as a cinder block. One night he goes to bed with Goldie the only woman who ever showed him any kindness and when he wakes up, she’s dead. Someone has slipped in and murdered her quietly. Marv vows to uncover the mystery, but he himself is a suspect. With the help of a band of mercenary hookers (who rove through most of the film), he discovers that a strange, farmboy cannibal (spooky Elijah Wood) killed Goldie, as well as a number of other prostitutes, and that the powers of the Catholic Church are somehow behind the young killer.

Story number two involves reformed killer Dwight (smoldering Clive Owen, doing his best stab at an American accent), whose new girlfriend Shellie (Brittany Murphy) has an old boyfriend (magnificent Benicio Del Toro) who’s not quite done with her yet. What starts as an innocent-enough brawl between two thugs and the prostitute they both want turns into a full-out, inner-city war when the roving vigilante hookers from the first story show up to battle a legion of corrupt cops over the regrettable death of one of Sin City’s finest.

The third tale involves Bruce Willis as Hartigan, one of Sin City’s few cops with a conscience. When a powerful senator’s son kidnaps a young girl for pedophiliac and murderous intent, local police are expected to look the other way. Not Hartigan. He rescues the young girl and wounds the creep son (Nick Stahl) so that he is impotent. He’s then framed and gets sent to prison for eight years for the crime that he prevented in the first place. When released, he seeks out the girl, now 19 and a stripper (Jessica Alba), to protect her from the menacing Yellow Bastard the pedophile, now up and mutated from years of experimental therapy to restore his virility.

The subject matter of Sin City is reprehensible. The violence is almost numbingly constant. Sex is dirty, dirty, dirty. Even the most heroic of Sin City’s denizens kill without thinking twice, cops (even the good ones) are viewed as dispensable annoyances, and every single woman in the film is a prostitute or a stripper. The filmmakers have tried to justify that choice by depicting the women as strong and in control of their lives, but how in control can they be when they subject their bodies to the sexual whims of men for their livelihood? And it’s not like Sin City is peopled with affable johns like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Even the heroes are trouble. More than one set of genitals is ripped or shot off. Ick.

That said, Sin City is awesome. Filmed in gorgeous black and white and reproduced frame-by-frame from Miller’s graphic novel, Sin City is a marvel of visual and violent beauty. Color is used with uncompromising discretion: red lips, gold hair, red blood, green eyes, the Yellow Bastard. The result is the opposite of the same approach in Pleasantville. This is Unpleasantville. But the re-creation of the look and spirit of the comics is not limited to the pretty pictures. The acting from the posturing of the women to the steel-eyed resolve of the men is dead-on in the style of comic characters, as vibrant and as roundly two-dimensional. It reminds me of Moulin Rouge in that it transcends the balance of style versus substance. In a case like this, when the aesthetic is so rich and complete, the style is the substance.

Sin City is not for everyone. In fact, it is almost not for me. But a work as thorough and brave and rich as this deserves some respect. There is virtue in this Sin. n

I went straight from watching a tepid A&E
Biography on Bruce Willis to the theater to see his latest foray,
Hostage.

Less journalistic exposé than video-montage love letter, the
Biography episode did manage to interview some Willis
collaborators who identified key elements to his sometimes-baffling longevity and success. Unlike Misters Stallone and Schwarzenegger also
born of the 1980s action genre Willis actually succeeds at playing the average Joe caught in unaverage circumstances.

Muscular without being grotesque, resourceful without being superhuman, and vengeful without losing his humanity, Willis
has been able to age with some grace (he turns 50 this week) and turn in performances that allow him to grow as well as hone his
reliable, sellable traits. I’ve always liked him, and
The Sixth Sense affirmed for me his ability to act, while affirming for him, I think, the
notion that less can be more. Since then, his heroes have been granted a potential for restraint and calm that previous action-ers have
lacked. Hostage definitely benefits from the finishing-school training that
Sense afforded him.

Hostage begins with a prologue of sorts. Willis is Jeff Talley, first-rate hostage negotiator, in the middle of a seemingly
routine talk-down with a deranged father holding his wife and son at gunpoint in a dingy L.A. house. The neighborhood is surrounded by
police, and only Talley has his cool. When the opportunity to take the gunman out arises, Talley passes. “No one dies today,” he replies. But
the negotiation goes wrong and all three family members end up dead. Talley is devastated.

A year later, Talley is the chief of police in Ventura County, an uneventful, crimeless hamlet. At a nearby deli, three
goodfornuthin’ local boys ogle the daughter of a wealthy accountant (Kevin Pollak) and get flipped off in return. Thus sets into motion a
routine carjacking that becomes quite a deal more than that when the boys get a look at the rich fortresslike house the family lives in. Surely,
there must be something more interesting in the house. Sure enough unbeknownst to all but the father, there is a CD hiding in a
Heaven Can Wait DVD case that contains a secret something-or-other related to some shady, high-stakes deal with mystery men we never see.
These boys have jacked the wrong house on the wrong day.

Talley is called onto the scene, loses one of his officers to gunfire, and quickly hands jurisdiction of the seemingly hopeless
situation over to the sheriff’s department. He heads home to his troubled wife and daughter (played by real-life daughter Rumer). But Tally
is abducted himself and informed that unless he cooperates with the mystery men, his own family will be killed. Cooperating means
reestablishing control over the hostage scene and making sure nobody goes in or out until yet more mystery men can arrive and deal with
the home and whatever secrets it may hold. So, Talley is on a race against time, balancing two hostage situations and having to
somehow wrestle control back from the sheriff and issue baffling orders to a bewildered team of law-enforcement officers.

A twist: The young son in the house, Tommy (Jimmy Bennett), manages to wriggle free and hide in his
maze-o-secret-passages with his sister’s cell phone and calls Talley. Suddenly, Talley has a link to the inside and can at least secure the DVD while waiting for
the evil reinforcements. But no there are two DVDs of
Heaven Can Wait. Is it the 1978 one with Warren Beatty? Or the 1943 version
with Gene Tierney? Darn! Why couldn’t they have chosen
Ishtar?

Hostage is getting a lashing from a number of critics for a crime no greater, I think, than averageness. Very little
distinguishes Hostage from other suspenseful movies with similar themes. That said, it is successful at generating suspense and providing surprise,
and, for the most part, at presenting real people behaving truthfully in extraordinary circumstances.

Willis turns in a respectable, low-key performance (his several heroic tasks are performed and directed plausibly), and the
supporting cast returns the favor. Only the three hoodlums veer toward overacting at times, and while I could nitpick for their being over the top,
I can’t imagine I would behave any less manically if I found myself shut into a fortress with hostages and police
everywhere. The camera develops a strange infatuation with one of the hoodlums, Mars (Ben Foster) and can’t decide whether to
make this sociopath a misunderstood romantic or a Christ figure.

Average, yes. Distinguished, no. But
Hostage delivers as promised and is worth, at least, the ransom of a matinee ticket price.

On the night I saw The Jacket, I had a fitful sleep filled with strange dreams, all variations on the film. So filled was my head with loose images (some from the movie, some from my ill sleep) of psych-ward terrors, time travel, and Adrien Brody’s huge, expressive face that I could scarcely sort them out; fact from fiction from science fiction.

The Jacket is a mind trip with moments and imagery and language that continue to haunt and disturb. After a night of tossing and turning and waking and thinking that I too was confined to a straitjacket, I can’t help but afford John Maybury’s chiller at least a few good words.

Brody is Jack Starks, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who, in 1991, briefly experienced death on the battlefield when shot in the head by a scared child he was trying to help. A year later (1992, remember), Jack is a drifter, walking long, lonely, snowy highways and hitching for rides with nowhere in particular to go. One fateful day, he helps a drunken mother and cutie-pie daughter with their stalled truck, only to be shooed away by the intoxicated shrew. But before he leaves, he gives the young girl, Jackie, his dog tags. Soon after, his next hitch goes awry when the driver shoots and kills a police officer and sets the scene to look like a wounded Jack did it. Jack maintains his innocence, but psychiatrists testify that his war trauma must have pushed him to the act. So, to the asylum we go. It’s not pretty. There are TVs, but they all seem to be showing strange, hallucinogenic programs and patients shuffle about meaninglessly. Worst yet, it’s run by Dr. Becker, played by Kris Kristofferson in his not-nice mode. Becker has an unconventional treatment that involves intense antipsychotic drugs and confinement while straitjacketed in a morgue drawer. This is all kept on the down low, since these methods, we are told, were banned in the 1970s.

A curious phenomenon occurs while Jack is in the drawer. He finds himself able to travel 15 years into the future to 2007. Is this a hallucination? A dream? Or is he really traveling? It doesn’t matter because he’s able to score with the little girl who took his dog tags and who grew up into a pert but grungy Keira Knightley (who went medieval on us as Guinevere in last year’s King Arthur). With her help in 2007 and that of a kindly, sensible shrink back in 1992, Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Jack is able to piece together enough information to learn that, in 1992, he’s about to die. The only questions now: how and why, and how to stop it.

In my dream, there was a bunch of extra doctors running around, each with different motives for imprisoning and deluding Jack. And I guess, now that I am awake, I realize that this is a valid concern on my part. Why? Why do Dr. Becker and his associates think this cruel and unusual treatment is useful, especially on a rational, well-spoken patient like Jack? We are asked to believe that they really are doing this in the patient’s best interests, but they scowl and laugh like movie villains and abuse Jack almost gleefully. I guess that in a world of Abu Ghraib, motiveless, well-intended atrocities committed by supposedly “good guys” shouldn’t surprise me, but in a film without a strong narrative, I wanted some explanations.

The Jacket is an effective, if bland, thriller; well-acted on the whole (though Knightley works awfully hard at wounded and dark, in a role that Jason Leigh might have played 15 years ago) and well-paced as it unravels its sordid mystery. Hollywood doesn’t quite yet know what to do with elegantly attractive Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, what with his leading-man smile but gaunt frame and gi-normous nose. The Jacket reaffirms him as ideal for roles as tortured, bedraggled survivors. It will take a good romantic comedy to further test his mettle.

I just wish that, with the time-jumping and psychological hoo-ha, The Jacket were more clever. No M. Night Shyamalan twists and turns. Nothing Hitchcockian here. You would think that a movie about dementia and traveling through time would offer at least one shocking revelation. But no. Like Jack, we too wander this movie’s highway looking for a ride.

So, Mom says to me, “Bo, I bet it’s hard sometimes to write those reviews of yours. I imagine some movies just don’t have much to write about in them.” I’m thinking about that as the deadline looms for my Cursed review and also just having watched the Academy Awards. Now, for the most part, those movies were easy to write about. But poop like Cursed and the other nine-ish horror movies that have come out in the last few weeks? I must compel myself to say some things about Cursed — a half-baked horror film with few discernible virtues or even distinctions.

It’s got Christina Ricci in it, which is good, because she’s all kinds of spooky already. (“Scram, makeup lady! This one’s a natural!”) She was sullen and weird in the Addams Family movies, and scarier than that was the film industry’s strange attempts to promote her as a child sex symbol in the 1990s. Anyway, in Cursed, she plays Ellie, who seems to be starting a job with Craig Kilborn’s late-night talk show. (He appears as himself.) She and brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) get bit by a werewolf while trying to help an injured motorist, and hilarity — oops, I mean terror — ensues when they start to show signs of lycanthropy (that’s werewolf-ism, y’all!). Jimmy, I intuit, is intended to be nerdy-cute in a 21st-century kind of way: smart, awkward, lean, not bad to look at, and cracking wise at every opportunity.

Jimmy immediately identifies their symptoms as the onset of becoming, themselves, lupine night stalkers and reveals with the help of books (literacy!) that the only way to cure themselves is to kill the head werewolf. But Ellie can’t be bothered — not with a very important Kilborn interview to line up: Scott Baio! Scott Baio was Chachi on TV’s Happy Days and the subsequent spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi, and his most distinguished foray into film was the “sexy” teen comedy Zapped! back in 1982. Ellie also has a moody boyfriend who’s opening a hot new movies-inspired club called Tinsel. Think Planet Hollywood meets Studio 54 but without the decadent sex and drugs of either. (I have not been to L.A., but it seems like the last thing L.A. would want or need is another gathering place with movie memorabilia. But the youngsters in Cursed seem to like it, so I’ll shut up.) An additional, competing werewolf also seems to be lurking. Moody Boyfriend is played by Joshua Jackson, late of Dawson’s Creek. It’s obvious that he’s hiding something from the moment we meet him, and while I’m not about to reveal who the other werewolf is, I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Chachi.

Cursed seemed cursed from the start. Apparently, there were production snags that held up the release, as well as some omitted appearances by Omar Epps and Skeet Ulrich and reduced roles for Baio and ‘N Sync’s Lance Bass, who appear as themselves in cameos. Wes Craven directed this two-bit Scream knockoff, which is sad, because he directed Scream in the first place. Scream was a great franchise and proved that horror can be funny and scary and in tune with popular culture. Cursed isn’t even in tune with Planet Hollywood, and Planet Hollywood sucks. So trust me: Cursed is worse. — B/