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FILMSept. 29, 2006

Short Subjects

Mrs. Cleaver: Mum's happy homemaker has a scary past.

By Mark Jenkins

If there’ll always be an England, there’ll always be sentimental English comedies about genteel old ladies who happen to be murderers. That’s what Keeping Mum is, and that description doesn’t spoil anything. There are no surprises in this gently homicidal farce, even if scripters Niall Johnson—who also directed—and Richard Russo don’t disclose the story’s secrets until the last act. That’s just a formality, since everything that matters is revealed in the prologue, set “43 years ago”: Pregnant Rosie Jones is arrested after the dismembered bodies of her husband and his lover are found in a trunk, and she’s sent to a criminal asylum. Just about 43 years later, a woman who calls herself Grace Hawkins (Maggie Smith) arrives in rustic Little Wallop to become the housekeeper for vicar Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson) and his family. Grace shows a particular interest in the vicar’s wife, Gloria (Kristin Scott Thomas), who’s in her early 40s and believes herself an orphan. But helping Gloria means that Grace, a different sort of Supernanny, must fix the whole household: rescue son Pete (Toby Parkes) from school bullies, chill the sex life of teenage daughter Holly (Tamsin Egerton), and reheat Walter’s libido. Gloria is so erotically desperate that she’s considering an affair with an American, a golf pro so vulgar that he’s played by Patrick Swayze. Plus, the neighbor’s dog must be silenced so Gloria can get a decent night’s sleep. It’s the latter problem that reawakens Grace’s killer instincts, but a tale like this can’t slake its comic bloodlust with one yipping mutt. Atkinson makes an effective straight man, Smith is so steely she twinkles, and Scott Thomas’ depiction of respectability deranged by passion is almost as funny here as in The English Patient. Aside from Swayze’s performance—and his innuendo-laden lines, which aren’t his fault—everything harmonizes in this cozily retro fable, which could have been produced by Ealing Studios, Britain’s postwar comedy factory. Take that as either a commendation or a warning.

Who hasn't dreamt of doing this to Ashton Kutcher?

By Louis Bayard

Good actors can sometimes find salvation in not-so-good cartoons. Through the alter ego of Sid, the prehistoric sloth in the Ice Age movies, John Leguizamo was able to tap a warmer emotional range than live-action films have ever afforded him. And in the newly released Open Season, Gary Sinise, straightjacketed in mournful goodness by CSI: NY, gets to roll around on the floor of his growly baritone. As the voice of Shaw, a Ted Nugent–ish hunter ready to slay every four-legged critter in scope sight, Sinise goes beyond the caricature of red-state malevolence into something creepier than this easygoing grade-school flick can readily accommodate. When we first meet him, Shaw has already run down a mule deer named Elliot (voiced by Ashton Kutcher), and when a domesticated grizzly named Boog (Martin Lawrence) sets the deer free, Shaw vows to add both their heads to his already extensive collection. Before you can say “buddy movie,” Elliot and Boog are lost in the woods, butting heads and bickering and threatening to part and—have you guessed it yet?—becoming best pals. Elements of Over the Hedge, Brother Bear, and, well, pretty much every buddy movie known to man are on call here, but if the film’s various parts are more than gently used, the chassis still hums comfortably, and the animals themselves have a vivid texture, right down to the cookie crumbs in Boog’s fur. It helps, too, that directors Roger Allers, Jill Culton, and Anthony Stacchi know how to frame the action: a chase sequence down a long stretch of torrential rapids reminds you just what animation can do. By the end of Open Season, the hunted have turned on the hunters, and pets have given up their domestic niches for the fraternity of the wild. It’s an outcome that PETA might have scripted, but screenwriters Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman never press their agenda too hard, and the climactic battle sequence—an animal Agincourt—is uplifted by some agreeably sly, surreal images: a bellicose Scottish squirrel mounting a liberated dachshund and a pair of human dentures, grinning fixedly from a mallard’s mouth, like some unholy union between Lewis Carroll and Ducks Unlimited.

Fearless

By Mark Jenkins

This martial-arts bildungsroman has been touted as star Jet Li’s farewell to the action flick, and it does feel like a final statement, albeit a shallow and predictable one. Lithe but inexpressive Hong Kong star Li, who built a U.S. following on both imported punch-outs and Western-made team-ups with the likes of DMX, plays kung fu virtuoso Huo Yuanjia. The period is the early 20th century, when much of China was under foreign control. That era is a common setting for Chinese action pictures, since it allows both historical pageantry and a patriotic outcome; typically, a homegrown moral paragon who’s also a kickass fighter defeats some more powerful but less spiritual alien. The story opens with Huo in Shanghai, dueling champions of four colonial powers. After he polishes off three, the film flashes back to Huo’s childhood in Tianjin. His father, a martial-arts master, declines to train his asthmatic son in hand-to-hand combat. The boy learns anyway, and grows up to become a cocky hothead, until his success leads to a calamity that teaches him the emptiness of fighting merely for personal glory. Huo hits the road, undertaking a private Cultural Revolution by becoming a peasant. After learning humility from planting rice, Huo returns to Tianjin, now overrun by the foreign scourge. He has no choice but to battle again, but this time for his country and not himself. Thematically, Fearless resembles the ’70s and ’80s Shaw Brothers Studios films shown recently at AFI, but it’s quite different in technique and tone. While the new film clearly had a bigger budget than those Shaw Brothers movies, director Ronnie Yu (a Hong Kong veteran who’s also directed such U.S. B-movies as Bride of Chucky) spent the money on sweeping but static views of cities and landscapes rather than offbeat humor or dynamic movement. Aside from one showdown on an elevated platform—which should at least get acrophobes’ adrenal glands working—the fight scenes are ordinary. Oddly, the movie’s resolution relies on the essential nobility of Hou’s Japanese opponent, a twist the Japanese-baiting Shaws would never have approved.

Crotch Rocket: A Number Two jackass overcompensates for his idiocy.

By Tricia Olszewski

You won’t hear anyone leaving Jackass Number Two cooing, “Why, that was rahther droll, wasn’t it, dahling?” But even those who are partial to Dorothy Parker–type witticisms may find it astonishing how funny a lineup of guys getting unexpectedly punched in the face can be. And as most people know, that’s largely all there is to the Jackass ideology. The former MTV series, co-created in 2000 by Number Two director Jeff Termaine, Adaptation director Spike Jonze, and star Johnny Knoxville, is centered on a bunch of cackling idiots performing stunts that range from simply moronic (such as the secondslong “Rake Jump”) to potentially fatal (dodging bulls is a favorite). Also, there’s a lot of vomit. And excrement. And bare asses and gas, usually aimed in another’s general direction. Written by participant Preston Lacy and first-time scripter Sean Cliver, the sequel includes the usual gang, including Wee Man, Steve-O, and Bam Margera, famous for tormenting his bafflingly game parents, who also make an appearance. You’ll find a couple of their activities familiar—how many different ways can the guys propel themselves into water?—and the gag-inducers, for better or worse, more nauseating than ever. (The cameramen earn their pay.) You might even pity some of them, such as when Dave England nearly tears up before a pellet-firing stunt, saying he’s about to have an anxiety attack with Knoxville reassuring him, “It’s going to hurt really bad, but it’s just loud!” Even if you’re immune to the unexplainable hilarity of watching adult men willingly get walloped, there’s a good amount of freak-on-the-street dadaist humor here, too, with Jonze, for instance, disguised as a rather “open” elderly woman and a sketch called “Old Man’s Balls” that may just be the funniest few minutes in movies this year. Odds are that many viewers will think the gang’s terrorist put-on, with Ehren McGhehey dressed as a Muslim with dynamite strapped to his torso (and a questionable beard glued to his face), has gone too far. It’s slightly redeemed, however, when it becomes a prank-within-a-prank turned on McGhehey himself. At the end of his increasingly worsening ordeal, he laments, “Was the dick hair necessary?” Of course it was.

School for Scoundrels

By Josh Levin

Maybe it’s the $8 haircut, or maybe it’s because it looks as if he’s got an extra row of teeth, but Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder looks the part of a guy with low self-esteem. And anyone who’s witnessed Billy Bob Thornton’s virtuoso foul mouthery in Bad Santa knows he was born to play domineering. School for Scoundrels, though, proves that great casting isn’t enough to carry a movie—toss perfect actors an imperfect script, and you’re going to get an audience mourning what might’ve been. Heder plays a meter maid named Roger who gets picked on at work and faints when he so much as sees his hot Australian neighbor Amanda (Jacinda Barrett). In a last-ditch effort to slough off his lameness, Roger hands $5,000 to Dr. P (Thornton), a mysterious instructor in the dark art of seducing women. Director Todd Phillips recreates the giddy idiocy of Old School’s climactic physical comedy decathlon as Roger and his classmates—including High Fidelity’s Todd Louiso and Saturday Night Live’s Horatio Sanz—get transformed into stallions. But School for Scoundrels, a remake of a 1960 British comedy, loses its spriteliness when its ragtag group of beta males stops shooting each other with paintball guns. Heder holds his own when the film morphs into a competition between Roger and Dr. P for Amanda’s affections. (Well, at least he successfully looks goofy while wearing tight, sky-blue tennis shorts.) Thornton, though, surprisingly comes up short. Sure, Dr. P is a conniving son of a bitch—he gets Roger fired and woos Amanda by pretending to be a surgeon, for starters. But compared to the actor’s roster of badasses—Willie in Bad Santa, the Bad News Bears’ Morris Buttermaker, Davy frickin’ Crockett in The Alamo—this man isn’t fit to call himself a scoundrel. The problem here is that Dr. P’s intellectual brand of revenge-taking reins in Thornton’s trademark id. In the absence of copious cussing and violence, writer-director Phillips’ decision to abandon the film’s winning pratfall-based brand of humor in favor of a cat-and-mouse game seems misguided. The lesson: When you have a perfect cast, keep it simple, stupid. CP