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June 26, 2007
ANDYTOWN ALMIGHTY
EVAN ALMIGHTY is on its way to becoming the HEAVENS GATE of comedies. There are two arguments afloat (get it?):
1. After remarkable success, it’s the failure of the mass marketeering for the religious right.
2. It’s not funny.
This is all very curious to me, as the universally-panned FANTASTIC FOUR sequel is doing gangbusters. Meanwhile, despite almost three times the budget (it’s the most expensive comedy ever made), EVAN opened to half of its precursor, BRUCE. I thought BRUCE was a nice little piece of Capra-corn populist religion. As Walter Chaw more vehemently criticized, it is a little distressing that given all the power of a deity, the wielder would choose to give his girlfriend a bigger bra sizes, promote himself to head anchor on the local news, and divinely empower his dog to use the toilet. But I thought this was all part of a neat, if hokey, philosophical message about man’s self-serving nature.
My problem with this new movie that I haven’t seen is this quote from “god” (played by Morgan Freeman) regarding Noah’s Ark: “I think it's a love story about believing in each other.” I’m not going to argue that at the root of the Noah message is a “love story” – viewed properly, everything in the Bible is a transcendent love story between a believing people and their Creator. But, “believing in each other?” Come on, Detective Somerset! As Frederich Buechner beautifully noted, Noah’s story is so powerful because it’s so dark, so incomprehensible. He writes, “It is a tale of God’s terrible despair over the human race and his decision to visit them with a great flood that would destroy them all except for this one old man, Noah, and his family. Only now we give it to children to read. One wonders why.” His ultimate point is that the story is about us, should we ever decide to become “fools in our faith,” and that the ark “somehow managed to ride out the storm.” Evan Almighty, on the other hand, seems like an excuse for a lot of cute reaction shots of animals and some OFFICE related humor.
I didn’t have high hopes for BLACK SNAKE MOAN. After enjoying Craig Brewer’s largely unseen super-low-budget debut THE POOR AND HUNGRY, I was infuriated by the critical and commercial success of HUSTLE AND FLOW. On my old blog, I wrote:
“Forgive me if I didn’t shed a tear for the ‘violent pimp who wants to become a violent rapper’ rags to riches story. And for a Memphis movie . . . not enough Memphis. Other than a few scenes and a few throwaway lines of dialogue, it could have been set anywhere. Not a fan.”
HUSTLE set itself as a movie about the magic of music, but ended with its ambitious hero becoming famous not through the noble part of hip-hop (its honesty and spirit), but through the gratuitous excess of his gangster image. Brewer celebrates this in the tradition of ROCKY or SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER.
But BLACK SNAKE MOAN is a much better movie, probably because Brewer trusts Blues more than he does rap as a means of salvation, though perhaps in this case it works because said salvation is spiritual as opposed to economical and egotistical. After too many big ticket productions, Samuel L. Jackson reminds us why he matters here: playing a guy who is one bucktooth and syllable away from a Saturday Night Live caricature, he manages to make us believe in a characters who is part Blues myth-incarnate, part spiritual stoic. I struggle to think of another actor who could play this part. For the first time ever, Christina Ricci didn’t make me remember that she got her start playing Wednesday Addams. Only Justin Timberlake is terrible: he looks like he grew up in a trailer park, but so do any ten guys you find in the Mens Room at Alfreds on a given Saturday Night. Timberlake has no discernable acting talent, so he breathes loudly and squints a lot. I’m hoping his acting career dies a quick death before he bankrolls a vanity project that has him playing a good musician.
I finished THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE and can now give it my highest recommendation. It’s about 100 pages too long, but worth the excess.
In order to prepare myself for DIE HARD 4: DIE EVEN HARDER THAN THE LAST THREE TIMES YOU DIED, I watched DIE HARD 2. I hadn't seen it since I was in the ninth grade, when I diagnosed it as "Wicked Awesome." I'm now changing my rating to "Offensive." This has to be one of the worst sequels ever, and yes I did see SPEED 2.
Anybody heard the new Ryan Adams CD yet? Is it worth getting?
Is anybody even reading this?
| By Andytown | 11:02 PM
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Comments
Haven't heard the new Ryan Adams yet.
JT was incredibly lame in MOAN. I also thought the entire movie was LAME. They acted as well as they could in a movie that seemed to have different writers for the first and second parts. Jackson was great, he did an amazing job, and he carried the movie. Ricci played a tramp with an "itch". Anyone could have played that part. If she had done something more, I would be able to say that she made that role her own.
SO I am scathing today... Hold on, it gets better...
EVAN is a movie to which we can all take our not ready for prime-time but way over Disney kids. It isn't a cartoon, it isn't dirty, and it has enough humor that the whole family can laugh. Trust me, as the mother of an eight year old boy, being able to have something like this is precious. It raises questions that any self-respecting person will ask about faith and action and involvement in the lives of others. Does that mean...? Could it be...? This is a movie that challenges us to consider the lives we live and how we could better apply our faith to make those lives richer?!
Sure it's a lot to get out of a movie. BUT I took my son to see it. I was afraid of some adult humor. What I didn't expect was the reaction I got from my maturing little kiddo. Having heard Noah for most of his life, he was able to see what it might have been like to do what God says when no one around him was.
All I am saying, is that there is another very appealing side of EVAN that may be under the radar.
Yes, Andy, we are reading this.
Posted by: Sarah Beth at June 27, 2007 12:46 PM
the new ryan adams is secured, against my better judgment. i haven't listened to it yet. i'll probably wait for you to tell me how overrated it is in so many andytown "rant" words, in which case i shall happily delete it from my itunes, thereby freeing up more space for npr podcasts and sulky poems from my depressed friends.... jrew always talks about the poor and the hungry and how its way better than hustle and flow.... could i make a request for more positivity on this blog? you only gave a total of two sentences to the one thing you liked and a total of an entire long post to all the things you didn't. i demand more good things!
Posted by: bethalynika at June 27, 2007 05:33 PM
Okay,
Sarah Beth . . . I suppose by "reviewing a movie I haven't seen" I was hoping against "being attacked by people who actually have seen the movie." If you say its "a movie that challenges us to consider the lives we live and how we could better apply our faith to make those lives richer," then I'll take your word for it. I mainly used it as an opportunity to quote Buechner. Sorry if I was negative.
As for BSM, I disagree - I think it's a movie that takes on exploitative elements but then goes in for a closer look. If at any point. SLJ decided to give in and have his way with Wednesday Addams, I would hate it. For a movie about a backwoods blues musician who chains a nymphet, its surprisingly restrained. Eli Roth would turn this scenario into another excuse for his torture porn, but Brewer is more interested in how music informs our salvation experiences.
Bethanlynika . . . I think I was overall pretty positive. I gave a positive review to a movie by a director whose last movie I hated, and I gave a thumbs up to the Noah story. Other than the aforementioned HUSTLE and DIE HARD 2, I recommended three things (Buechner, Boyle, and BSM). A little love?
Posted by: andytown at June 27, 2007 06:30 PM