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I Love You, Beth Cooper

In I Love You, Beth Cooper, nerdy valedictorian Dennis Cooverman (Paul Rust) stands before his graduating class and breaks away from the usual "look back/look forward" tradition of the event and decides to break away a little bit -- and profess his love for Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere). If Beth and Dennis were dating, it'd be an over-the-top sentimental gesture; the fact of the matter is, though, that Dennis and Beth have never spoken. Dennis has, through the miracle of alphabetical seating, gazed on Beth's hair for years and built his image of her into an undying feeling -- or, as he regrettably phrases it in his valedictory address, "I've loved you from behind for years. ..."

And that joke is I Love You, Beth Cooper, in a nutshell; a little eager to shock, a little clumsy, a little bit too eager to make the joke. Directed by Chris Columbus (who gave us such '80s teen-comedies as Adventures in Babysitting and The Goonies), I Love You, Beth Cooper is based on a novel by Larry Doyle, who's written for programs from The Simpsons to Beavis and Butt-Head; the novel is a swift, if shallow read, so clearly attempting to invert and re-invent teen movie moments that it begins each chapter with a quote from the classics of the canon from Rushmore to Risky Business. When his parents tell him to have fun in his last summer before college, Dennis offers that "This whole teenage, coming-of-age thing, it's a relatively new construct; it was invented in the '50s. ..." Well, sure, but "that whole teenage, coming-of-age thing" was re-invented in the '80s by the kinds of movies I Love You, Beth Cooper wants, and fails, to imitate; what plays as tribute on the page feels like rip-off on the screen.

The Rocchi Files: Bruno and Shock Comedy

Even the most casual observer of pop culture must be able to agree that we live in a golden age of filthy, insane comedy. Bruno has more of the same maniacal button-pushing as Borat (even if, to Bruno's detriment, it feels like more of the same), and past years have seen everything from the sticky biology of There's Something About Mary to the puppet-porn of Team America: World Police, from Sex and the City's digestive disasters to American Pie's re-interpretation of the phrase "dessert lover." And some of this stuff works, and some of it does not. But what separates the success of one over-the-top comedy from the failure of another? I know that analyzing comedy is as Mark Twain said, like dissecting a frog -- not much fun, and you kill the subject -- but still, with Bruno about to blow minds at theaters all across America, it might be a good time to step back and look at what makes one joke a flailing failure and another an jaw-dropping moment of true hilarity in the world of extreme laughs. ...

1) Leave Something to the Imagination

Much of modern extreme comedy is all about the shock reaction -- "I can't believe they went there!" -- but, it's interesting to note, a lot of those "I can't believe they went there" moments ring the bell and run away from the door before it opens. There's plenty of moments in Bruno where the worst of the worst is blacked out by on-screen censorship-shapes -- which not only helps the film hang on to an R rating by the skin of its teeth (or rather, frankly, other parts) but also lets you fill in the blanks -- and your imagination is capable of coming up with things far more startling and shocking than even Bruno mastermind Sacha Baron Cohen. But it's not just imagination's power that keeps some modern shock comedy more restrained than you might think; laughter's a matter of degrees, and it's worth noting that there are plenty of recent 'scandalous' comedies (The Sweetest Thing, Good Luck Chuck, My Best Friend's Girl) that go so far over the top they fall apart. There's an old saying among comedy writers: "If it bends, it's funny; if it breaks, it isn't." Successful shock comedy isn’t about breaking taboos, but, often, about bending them -- and knowing when to stop.

Knowing

I'd been looking forward to seeing Knowing, the new science-fiction/horror/disaster/theological/what-the-heck thriller from director Alex Proyas (I, Robot, Dark City) if only because it's a film that I missed in theaters that provoked sharp divisions in the community of critics and movie watchers. I knew people who looked at it, shrugged, and wrote it off as an overly-ambitiously under-written train wreck (not a bad metaphor, considering one of the film's ace special-effects sequences). But Roger Ebert made a case for the film as a four-star minor miracle, a great example of a fantasy film with the rare courage of its convictions and a willingness to go places other movies back away from. And after finally seeing Knowing, I think you can make the case both parties are right.

Knowing begins in 1959, as a middle-school class fills a time capsule with their visions of what the future will be like. The kids stuff the cylinder with drawings of rocketships and flying cars ... except for dark-haired, dark-eyed Lucinda (Lara Robinson), who fills a page with numbers so cramped and close that they're almost incomprehensible. The teacher asks for a drawing; Lucinda insists that this is what she wants, what she needs the future to know. ..

Push

Earlier this spring, Push came and went from theaters remarkably swiftly -- a pity, because while Paul McGuigan's sci-fi/conspiracy/action film may not be perfect, it's got a lot going for it. Written by David Bourla, Push may not have a big budget, but it's got big ideas -- or, more importantly, the judgment, too often absent from Hollywood films, to know how small things can be big. Start with the premise: Push follows a group of psychics, being pursued by various government entities in the hunt for the film's great whatsit plot device in Hong Kong. The psychics, though, can each only do one interesting thing -- no crazy quilt of paranormal abilities: Just one. So, sure, it's nice to be able to see the future, but that's not much help when a gun's pointed at your head, Or maybe you're a telekinetic who can move objects with your mind, but that's not much good when the person chasing you can make you do anything they want with their mind. ...

And as anyone who ever wondered why Superman didn't just whip Lex Luthor silly in an eyeblink (or, more bluntly, had the misfortune of watching an episode of Heroes) knows, stories about people with infinite power are boring, and hard to write in a way that makes them interesting; the heroes and heroines of Push, though, are gifted but not invulnerable, powerful but not all-powerful. Chris Evans is a telekinetic trying to live under the radar in Hong Kong; Dakota Fanning, who can see and draw the future, enlists him in finding a missing vial of a new drug -- like steroids for psychic abilities -- that Division, the quasi-governmental bad guys, with their own psychics in play, are hunting.

A Disagreement: Erika and James on Public Enemies

(This week at redblog, we're sharing a head-to-head discussion between Erika Olson and James Rocchi about Michael Mann's Public Enemies -- and their very different views. After James and Erika make their case, please feel free to share your thoughts on the film. ...)

Usually I’m right there with you on your reviews, James, but when I read what you had to say about Public Enemies I felt as though we’d seen two different movies.  I left the theater not only disappointed, but also completely befuddled as to how Mann and his fellow screenwriters (Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) managed to make a film about the final years of John Dillinger’s life — as well as the storied “War on Crime” era at the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover  — so... well, boring.  

Sure, there were prison breaks and shoot-outs and getaways, but not once was I swept up in the action.  Not once did I care whether Dillinger pulled off another heist or Purvis got his man. Instead, I spent the bulk of the film’s two-hour-plus running time (way... too... long) trying to figure out who was who among Dillinger’s men (I know not everyone can look like Depp, but seriously, I couldn’t tell the other guys apart), who was shooting at whom, what in the heck they were doing/planning overall, and why they were so popular among normal folk — celebrated, in fact — for holding up banks in the middle of the Great Depression.

That’s why I have to ask, were you already familiar with Dillinger’s story before watching Public Enemies?  Because I wasn’t — I knew he was a bank robber and that he was shot in front of the Biograph Theater here in Chicago, and that’s it. Therefore, since Mann neglected to set the stage with how Dillinger and his fellow gangsters rose to infamy or give so much as a hint as to why in the world the public loved him so much, I was in a constant state of Waiting For An Explanation while watching the film.  Little did I know that I should’ve read up on my 1930s American history before settling into the theater.  So while I agree with your statement that Johnny Depp made it easy for the audience to like Dillinger, I definitely don’t think he helped us understand the man anymore than we’d already naturally understand the fact that criminals generally try to avoid getting caught.  

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

It's a little glib to say that nothing is useless, because it can be used as a bad example. But it's also true, and that's what I thought watching Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, the second stab at bringing the popular fighting video-game to the screen. TO provide a little context, the last effort, in 1994, stared Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia (in his last role, depressingly enough) and it was so directly inspired by the look of the game that Julia was clad in a crimson cape so large that it looked like one of those big building communist countries put up seemingly overnight when they host the Olympics.

The people behind the new version of Street Fighter took a different tack with this version -- keeping it real, as the kids say. And so you have a plot where Chun-Li (Smallville's Kristin Kreuk) chases down the international crime boss, Bison (Neal McDonough) who's abducted her father, while driven cops Nash (Chris Klein) and Maya (Moon Bloodgood) are tracking Bison's latest criminal conspiracy to punish the poor on the streets of Bangkok. And this raises an interesting question: Who, exactly, looks for gritty social realism in a movie based on a videogame? Say what you will about Dragonball: Evolution (another videogame adaptation this year, from the same studio) but it was fun; this version of Street Fighter is like if someone had the movie rights to Pac-Man and made a gritty drama about eating disorders.

12 Rounds

There should be a lot of reasons to dislike 12 Rounds, or at the very least to be suspicious of it sight unseen. It's directed by Renny Harlin, the man whose string of action successes was painfully derailed by Cutthroat Island. It stars John Cena, whose acting resume primarily springs from his work in the squared circle of the professional wrestling ring. The plot, as a diabolical criminal (Aiden Gillen) sets Cena's cop a series of tasks he must accomplish or face dire consequences, is a plain-and-simple rip off of Die Hard with a Vengeance. The film is backed by World Wrestling Entertainment's movie division, who've previously given us action-stinkers like The Condemned and The Marine.

Yet, as the saying goes, no one in Hollywood knows anything. As 12 Rounds unfolds, it's surprisingly satisfactory and enjoyable. There are a few big reasons for that, and a few small ones, but the fact is that, for a B-movie action film, 12 Rounds goes the distance. To continue the boxing metaphor, it's what my dad would have called a 'ham-and-egger' -- the kind of fighter who doesn't make it with flashy knockouts but through skill and will and battered persistence.

And part of what makes it satisfying is Cena -- or, rather, how Cena's character, New Orleans cop Danny Fisher, is written. At the start of the film, Danny and his partner get lucky and arrest international arms dealer Miles Jackson (Gillen), even though Jackson's girl dies in the bust. A year later, Danny and his partner Hank (Bryan White) are detectives … and Danny still feels bad about what happened, wondering if he and Hank really deserve what they have. The movie moves past this moment of self-aware self-doubt pretty fast, but it's always there -- and while I don't think I'd want to watch Cena play, say, Hamlet (and I don't think Cena would want to play Hamlet, either), the attempt to add a touch of shading and complexity to a brown-bag action film actually makes it better. And Cena can speak a line and throw a punch, and his acting has improved since The Marine; it'd be easy to say that for a wrestler, he does okay, but the fact is that while he's not as much of a natural as, say, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, he's far better than Steve "Stone Cold" Austin.

Public Enemies

Public Enemies, the latest from director Michael Mann, fits in remarkably well with Mann's other movies like Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice -- not just for the cops-versus-crooks plot (long before it opened, some film fans were dismissing Public Enemies as "Heat in Tweed") or its intimate, immediate shot-on-digital-video look and visual style, but more importantly in its tone and theme and tenor. With its guns-and-guts storyline, Public Enemies has some of the swagger and rhythm of a summer blockbuster action-crime film, but it's as smart and thoughtful as it is flashy and full of action. Public Enemies, like Mann's other crime films, only looks like a shoot-'em-up. It's an exciting and visceral film, to be sure, but the bright and frequent muzzle flashes from the .45's and Tommy guns can't eliminate the darker shadows and shades of grey in the script and the film, part of what the critic F.X. Feeney has called Mann's ongoing mission of presenting a "profound, interactive, philosophical history of the United States."

Putting that on the marquee, of course, wouldn't do a lot to sell tickets, so Public Enemies is being sold as a guns-a-blazin' action flick, with the double-barreled punch of Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger and Christian Bale as top cop Melvin Purvis. That's what is being sold, but there's much more up on the screen, and the question is if audiences will accept getting more than they expected when they don't get what they were told to expect. Yes, you do get Depp in a suit taking loot, but you also get a look at what happens when Purvis is tasked by the head of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to bring Dillinger in, prove that a federal police force could stop crime and keep Hoover from looking bad. Hoover declares a "war on crime," and the appearance of victory becomes just as (if not more) important as victory. As the desire to bring in Dillinger grows more and more fevered, the tactics of the men working alongside Purvis grow more and more desperate, it's hard not to hear echoes of the here-and-now.

The Rocchi Files: Some Modest Proposals for the Oscars

While it's hard to have too much sympathy for people whose red-carpet, black-tie lives we can only barely imagine, let's take a moment to put ourselves inside the lives of the people at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As Locke wrote on Wednesday, facing declining ratings for the Oscars (and a correlating reduction in revenue)  the Academy's looking for a way to raise a little excitement around next year's Oscars -- and, today, announced that they'd be doubling the number of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10.

Now, this is hardly unprecedented -- from the first best Picture Academy Awards in 1929 up until 1944, the Oscars would have a variable number of Best Picture nominees, from as few as 3 to as many as 11 -- but, on the other hand, once you've been doing something for 65 years, you have to think it's become a bit of a tradition, and traditions are hard to change. There's already been howling in the film commentary community about this; some awards-loving journalists have already drafted the shortlist of the 10 possible nominees for 2009's Oscars, peering far into the future -- which, to me, is like trying to handicap a high school football championship based on baby pictures. Others are bemoaning the 'Attaboy' Oscars, arguing that making the pool of possible contenders so broad will only sap the meaning of the Best Picture race. Other think the Academy's making a naked play to open up the Best Picture race so that strong dramas like Revolutionary Road can squeeze into a broader field, and making room for commercially successful -- but still well-made -- films like The Dark Knight or Wall*E, and by getting a few moneymakers people have actually seen into the race, get viewers more enthused by the Oscars telecast. I don't think this is a great plan (and there will be some explanation of 'why' below), but it did make me think about ways to liven up the Oscars, and wonder what your thoughts were on the subject -- which you can share after my proposals, some of which might actually work without turning the Academy Awards into the MTV Movie Awards.

My Sister's Keeper

We live, as someone once noted, in a cynical world. (It was either Socrates or Jerry Maguire; I'm always confusing the two.) And so, the idea of seeing My Sister's Keeper, a new medical melodrama from director Nick Cassavetes (who seems to have an affection for this kind of thing, from the muscular medical thriller John Q to the nostalgic neurological romance of The Notebook) adapting a book by best-selling author Jodi Picoult, didn't exactly thrill me, based solely on the poster and a vague notion of the plot. I always say that I don't mind having my heart warmed by a film; what I object to is having my heart microwaved -- brought up to a piping-hot temperature that doesn't last by the fastest, cheapest, most brutal means possible.

And My Sister's Keeper, where Abigial Breslin sues her family to be liberated from the medical procedures she undergoes that help keep her leukemia-stricken sister Sofia Vassilieva alive, is only as simple as that sounds when it's boiled down to that pitch. Watching it unfold, I was, in fact, moved -- not by mere pity, or by the simple device of pitting one young woman's life and happiness against another's -- but, rather by the portrait of a family that loves each other as best they can, of people trying to do small, good things in the face of big, bad things like death. My Sister's Keeper isn't shy about the medical reality of the situation -- Vassilieva doesn't have the movie-cancer like Ali McGraw got in Love Story, where you just look more and more beautifully lit as you edge closer to death; we see her wracked by pain, drooling blood, scared and shivering.