BEFORE: I went to a beer and ice cream tasting event tonight, where 6 gourmet ice creams and sorbets were paired with microbrews. The highlights were a chocolate ice cream topped with candied bacon, paired with a Achen Bruin (Trappist Dubbel) and a Grado Plato Chocarrubica Oatmeal Stout from Italy, in a beer float with vanilla ice cream.
Wrapping up my Sean Penn movie chain with the ultimate challenge for an actor, which is playing a mentally disabled/challenged character...you know, the "R" word...
It can either win you an Oscar (Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man") or sink your career (Rosie O'Donnell, Juliette Lewis).
THE PLOT: A mentally retarded man fights for custody of his 7-year-old daughter, and in the process teaches his cold-hearted lawyer the value of love and family.
AFTER: Those are IMDB's words, not mine - see, they said "retarded", not me. I'm not even going to discuss Sean Penn's portrayal of a mentally-challenged individual, because I'm starting a whole chain of movies on the subject, and watching this is like setting the standard - I'm laying down a baseline. I will say that for the first time, I could actually see Sean Penn playing Larry Fine in the proposed biopic of "The Three Stooges".
No, I want to discuss the character of Rita, the lawyer played by Michelle Pfeiffer (last heard in "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas"). Since they couldn't give Sean Penn's character any sort of arc or character development, they TRIED to do it with her character. So when we first see her, she's a rich, successful, entitled lawyer with rage issues, relationship problems, and food issues - and she only takes Sam's case as pro bono work to make herself look good, which misses the point entirely.
She's a blatantly obvious foil character for Sean Penn's Sam - he loves his daughter very much, and would do anything to get her back, while as a wife and parent, Rita's just going through the motions. They say half of life is just showing up, but she's barely doing that.
If you've ever seen the show "Kitchen Nightmares", chef Gordon Ramsay visits a restaurant that's not doing well, and usually ends up verbally sparring with a restaurant owner or chef who's given up or lost their passion, has let the quality of the food go downhill, and then wonders why the customers aren't coming back.
So Chef Ramsay shows up, and after butting heads with the restaurant owner for two days (and an appalling dinner service), finally the dawn breaks, and they "get it" - oh, you're supposed to serve fresh food that tastes good! And you're supposed to be NICE to the customers, and give them what they want! And I watch at home and wonder, "Could they really have been THAT stupid?"
Pfeiffer's Rita is like that restaurant owner - finally realizing that maybe she should be NICE to her son, and not be such a raging emotional drama queen with her husband. The revelation comes too late - like those customers, hubby hits the road, but hey, at least she learned a valuable lesson, and that's good, too, right?
Come on, if you need a retarded person to show you that you need to be nice to your kid and love your husband, you're pretty goddamn stupid. Or else this movie is manipulation of the highest order, which I suspect is closer to the truth.
Let's talk about cover versions of Beatles songs - I, for one, love them. I have a huge collection of them, more than I could ever listen to in fact. I've owned the soundtrack to this film for years without watching the movie. Unfortunately, I have to ask myself why they're here, and I have to point to further manipulation - it's a handy way to fill space, without them the movie's story probably merits no more than 45 minutes.
It's certainly not the only movie to have an all-Beatles covers soundtrack - so this one falls somewhere between the films "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Across the Universe", both chronologically and in terms of quality.
Also starring Dakota Fanning (last seen in "Charlotte's Web"), Dianne Weist (last seen in "Synechdoche, New York"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Laura Dern, and Loretta Devine, with cameos from Ken Jenkins (also last seen in "Lucky Numbers"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Powder"), Brent Spiner (last seen in "Phenomenon"), and Rosalind Chao. Also Sam's friend Robert (the paranoid one) was played by character actor Stanley DeSantis - who once made some t-shirts for my boss, he had a little printing business on the side. (We tried for years to track down Stanley to make more shirts, but he passed away in 2005, so we never got our master templates back in order to make more shirts.)
RATING: 4 out of 10 capuccinos (that's 2 points for the Beatles, 2 points for the artists who covered them...that's right, without the Beatles songs, this movie was in danger of receiving a zero score!)
So do you have a copy of "Riding The Bus With My Sister"? I know I'll never get the opportunity to see "The Day The Clown Cried" but when I saw this Hallmark DVD at Building #19, well, that was $4 quickly spent.
ReplyDeleteOn the off chance that this flick is in the queue, I won't spoil anything for you. But it didn't disappoint me in the least. When any of the various Movie Quality and Dignity meters in my toolbox need to be zero-calibrated, I wave the sensor over this movie and adjust the sensitivity accordingly.
No, but I've seen "Digging to China", I thought Kevin Bacon did an admirable job playing a retarded man in that film. Better than Tom Hanks in "Forrest Gump", at least. Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man", and of course Billy Bob Thornton in "Sling Blade" probably set the standard. I should probably re-watch Leonardo DiCaprio in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" at some point.
ReplyDeleteThat's the high-end, I suppose. I haven't watched the movie you mentioned, or "The Other Sister", because I believe it represents the low-end. And I can't justify watching movies that I KNOW to be horrible when I have so many fine films on my list...
A bad movie can teach you as much about storytelling as a good one. I'll watch a bad movie over and over again until I think I understand exactly why it didn't work.
ReplyDelete