My mother was very helpful to me with this batch of movies. When I told her how I was wrestling with my feelings regarding one of the movies, she immediately sent me the book it was based on and, of course, I read it.
It did make me appreciate the film more as a largely successful adaptation of an impossible-to-adapt story, yet at the same time, the book's own shortcomings pulled into focus what I didn't like about the movie.
But it wasn't the worst movie I saw...
Big Momma's House
release: June 2
dir: Raja Gosnell
pr: David T. Friendly / Michael Green
scr: Darryl Quarles and Don Rhymer, story by Darryl Quarles
cin: Michael D. O'Shea
An FBI agent goes undercover as a Southern matron.
One of those movies where you just have to go with it, because on a script and story level, it's not that far off from old-school Hollywood farces. The problem is...as movie stars go, Martin Lawrence is a great sidekick. Everything about his performance just sweatily screams for love and laughs. It's embarrassing.
Gone in 60 Seconds
release: June 9
dir: Dominic Sena
pr: Jerry Bruckheimer
scr: Scott Rosenberg, from the 1974 film written by H.B. Halicki
cin: Paul Cameron
Former car thief is forced back into the game and must heist 50 cars in 72 hours...or his brother gets killed.
This one is just so much fun, knows hwo to get in, groove for two hours, then get out. Nicolas Cage is great as the master car thief brought back to save his brother - no scenery-chewing, just confident Movie Star Charisma. The sound design and cinematography give you a feel for the cars at the center of the film, lovingly shot, their different motors and customizations meticulously recreated. My one complaint, actually, is that Angelina Jolie's character is superfluous, a love interest shoehorned in to give, I suppose, some kind of sex appeal, when the cars already serve that purpose. They are sleek, sexy, and purr when handled correctly. Besides, Frances Fisher and her leatherwear are hot enough.
Sunshine
release: June 9
dir: István Szabó
pr: Andras Hamori / Robert Lantos
scr: István Szabó and Israel Horovitz, story by István Szabó
cin: Lajos Koltai
The history of Hingary in the 20th century as seen through the lens of three generations of Jewish entrepreneurs.
This beauty seemed determined to gain my adoration, specifically. A three-hour epic? About the Jewish experience? Encompassing the changes of a country (Hungary, in this case) from monarchy to fascism to Communism? Focusing on the lie of assimilation? With an Act One table-setting performance from Jennifer Ehle and a sudden Act Three key supporting performance from the greatest American actor who ever lived, William Hurt? I was in heaven!
Ralph Fiennes plays three generations, each exceptional within his country's government and culture, each trying to somehow "transcend" his Judaism by being the perfect Hungarian. But, of course, it all catches up. When he's a high court judge under the monarchy (Ignatz), he is forced to retire when he won't prosecute old friends merely for their political differences; when he's a world champion athlete under the fascists (Adam), he's sent to the camps when his Jewish heritage is discovered; when he's a high-ranking policeman under the Communists (Ivan), he is forced to destroy his friends and family before belatedly turning against the regime. A grand performance of three similar yet different men, a part beautifully structured and characterized by writer-director István Szabó.
But then the whole thing is beautifully structured, novelistic even. So much history: a family's, a nation's, a world's. In asking to consider how one bloodline can affect and be impacted by global events, we are asked to consider our history, the whole history. Listen, my father was born in Puerto Rico to German immigrants, and, by the time I came around, was so assimilated that his first two languages were practically lost, certainly not passed down. Did it help us be better as Americans? Will "assimilating" to the morés of now keep your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren safe? There are no easy answers, but Szabó asks us to consider the questions. If this is not in my 2000 Top Ten, it's because I didn't post a Top Ten.
Shaft
release: June 16
dir: John Singleton
pr: Scott Rudin / John Singleton
scr: Richard Price and John Singleton & Shane Salerno, story by John Singleton & Shane Slaerno, from characters created by Ernest Tidyman
cin: Donald E. Thorin
NYPD's own John Shaft, nephew of the infamous private detective, must work outside the law to catch a wealthy racist who killed a Black man.
This should have been the start of a franchise - or, perhaps, a TV series, though I don't think Samuel L. Jackson would do one of those. The first thing I have to point out: what a phenomenal cast! Christian Bale is having a specific 2000, playing a wealthy and connected killer, a racist to boot, whose money and power can't save him from John Shaft; Toni Collette's waitress is so good, so lived-in, you feel she must be local; and Jeffrey Wright as Dominican drug lord Peoples Hernandez, oh baby, it's a performance, you thrill every time he's on screen. The aforementioned Jackson, of course, gives you exactly what Jackson as Shaft requires. And the screenplay! A great continuation of the 1970s series and a terrific cop drama genre, with a plot concerned with American justice and who's rich and white enough to afford it - and an uncompromising finale that hits the point home.
Me, Myself & Irene
release: June 23
dir: Bobby Farrelly / Peter Farrelly
pr: Bobby Farrelly / Peter Farrelly / Bradley Thomas
scr: Mike Cerrone & Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly
cin: Mark Irwin
Mild-mannered traffic cop has a deviant alter whose presence becomes more present during a case involving a mob witness.
Non-stop hilarity. The Farrelly Brothers, man, there are several things I like about them. First of all, they're dedicated to writing and casting disabled characters without making their "disabilities" a punchline, the joke is on the ableists who don't expect them to be just as crude, horny, and hilarious as anyone else in this world can be. They create the kind of plot that would have been used for a noir thriller in the 50s and make it suspenseful and shockingly hilarious. Their women are confident, independent, funny, sexy, subject to being a trophy of the men involved but the Brothers are well aware of it. And they have the genius to write the part of a split personality at war with itself and cast Jim Carrey, so that he may give a tutorial on comedy both physical and timbrous. One of my favorite discoveries of this project.
The Patriot
release: June 28
nominations: Best Score (John Williams), Best Cinematography, Best Sound (Kevin O'Connell / Greg P. Russell / Lee Orloff)
dir: Roland Emmerich
pr: Dean Devlin / Mark Gordon / Gary Levinsohn
scr: Robert Rodat
cin: Caleb Deschanel
A simple farmer enters the American Revolutionary War.
Four things stand out to me. The cinematography, most obviously, so indescribably beautiful with its capturing of mists and gunsmoke, an early, undeveloped America with its fields of green, its sea of trees. The score by John Williams, also obviously, it's there from the beginning alongside the cinematography, the two elements that an audience will notice first, sight and sound, stirring, rousing. The third is a two-fer: Mel Gibson's protagonist is, excuse me, a bone-deep performance, playing a man of violence trying to keep himself at peace, a father in grief and trauma trying to enetertain his better angels rather than vengeance; Jason Isaacs' antagonist is so perfectly venal that it upset contemporary Englishmen and, frankly, that's what good propaganda is for, they enslaved half the world and taught the other half how to perfect brutality, let them suffer - he's terrific. The fourth thing is how the screenplay tosses back and forth between well-observed depictions of wartime sorrow, national identity, and historical details, and the usual Hollywood bullshit: saccharine romance, death to distract from dramatic inertia, and propagandistic chest-beating. So it's not a great movie, but oh, it's so well-made!
The Perfect Storm
release: June 30
nominations: Best Sound (John T. Reitz / Gregg Rudloff / David E. Campbell / Keith A. Wester), Best Visual Effects (Stefen Fangmeier / Habib Zargarpour / John Frazier / Walt Conti)
dir: Wolfgang Petersen
pr: Gail Katz / Wolfgang Petersen / Paula Weinstein
scr: William D. "Bill" Wittliff, from the book by Sebastian Junger
cin: John Seale
The true story of the Andrea Gail, a fishing vessel whose entire crew was lost at sea during an insane storm in 1991.
The Perfect Storm is based on a non-fiction book that was not only enough of a best-seller to warrant a film adaptation, it was one of those everybody you knew at the time had read. I even recall when the paperback reissue with the "Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture" came out - indeed, it might have coincided with the Atlanta trip - for I picked up the book in an airport newsstand and my mom clucked dismissively at its inclusion of photos, not of the actual people and places involved, but of the actors on the sets and the visual effects. Crass, it was thought.
And crass is how I feel about the film itself, though I don't think it means to be. The entire hook is not just that it was a once-in-a-thousand-years storm, but that an entire ship was lost. The original book by Sebastian Junger and the bookends of the film itself stress that this is inevitable, or at least, not shocking, with the film showing us the memorial wall of fishermen lost at sea and the book detailing other vessels lost at sea, all hands, throughout the centuries. Still, we know going in - or, at least, we do if we have any awareness of the bestsellers of the time this film was released, which most audience members would, frankly - that these are real men who died at sea, whose stories we really don't know. And so James Newton Howard's "we're going on an adventure!" score, the invention by the screenwriters of personal tensions between crew members and offshore romances...look, this is probably the best way to adapt this particular book into blockbuster storytelling, but the question I'm asking is, should it have even been made at all? This is not a film about people and nature, this is a film about making money at the box office. Great VFX, though.
Tomorrow, my rewatches of July 2000, including the comic book film that gave hope to Marvel, X-Men!
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