Day: September 24, 2005

Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents is a nicely confident British period piece…funny, ascerbic, touching at times. And it sinks in, yes, but not that deeply — it has that wry Frears sensibility, and satisfies only as far as it goes. If you’re looking for a delightful time at the Royal in West Los Angeles, it does the trick…but it’s not an A-list Best Picture contender. Why? It’s more of a chuckler than a feeler — it’s emotionally earnest and Judy Dench is terrific in the lead role (ditto Bob Hoskins as her stage manager), but even with the dead-son element it doesn’t quite put a lump in your throat. Almost, close…but not quite.

And yet Curtis Hanson’s In Your Shoes, dismissed by a certain columnist as a good commercial film but not an awards-calibre thing, has an emotional resonance factor (it’s not about shoes or bickering sisters but resolving family hurt) that might persuade some in the Academy to think about Oscar-ish distinctions. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I don’t think so. It got to me (and I can be kind of a hard-ass), and I’ve felt how it plays with a crowd. If any- one catches In Your Shoes at one of those sneak preview screenings being held across the country this evening (Saturday, 9.24), I’d appreciate some reactions.

“A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg’s latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis declared in her 9.23 review. “That sounds far grimmer or at least more relentlessly grim than this shrewd, agile, often bitingly funny film plays. The great kick of [it] — or rather, the great kick in the gut — comes from Mr. Cronenberg’s refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price. The man wants to make us suffer, exquisitely. Decades of mainlining blockbusters have, for better or perhaps for worse, inured us to the image of bullet-chewed bodies and the pop-pop-pop of phony weapon fire. For the contemporary movie connoisseur, film death is now as cheap as it is familiar. To which Mr. Cronenberg quietly says, ‘Oh, yeah?'”

A TV comedy show is usually two things — what the creators intend it to be in their heads as they’re fine-tuning the season opener, and what the creators change it into after they’ve shifted into panic mode after an initial bad review or two, or when the ratings are much lower than expected. So let’s see what happens with Comedy Central’s The Showbiz Show with David Spade from here on…

The instant a film is described as a “romantic comedy,” it’s dead to me. That’s why I wouldn’t watch Dirty Love on a plane…even if I was dead-bored. You can always depend on a “romantic comedy” to be arch, off-the-ground and phony as a three-dollar bill. There have been exceptions, yes, but 96% of the time the term means the movie will be farcical and dumb-assed. It will contain nothing angular or vaguely thoughtful, nothing perverse, no laughs… and it will have a juvenile and relentlessly hyper attitude about sex. It means loyal readers of Star, In Touch, People and Us will be there on opening weekend (maybe).

I don’t believe in airing dirty laundry if you’re profiling someone involved with a new film (actor, director, etc.) for its own sake. However, you should absolutely get into it if it applies to the work. Naturally, being an L.A. Times piece, you won’t find this criteria in Michael Goldman’s interview with Jenny McCarthy about Dirty Love (First Look, 9.23). Starring and written by McCarthy, the film is described on the IMDB as “an edgy comedy about a girl who has fallen out of love” and more particularly about “a jilted photographer who sets off on a mission to get back at her philandering model boyfriend.” It is therefore not only allowable but necessary to ask if the reason for McCarthy’s divorce from John Asher, the film’s director, is echoed in the movie’s plot. Goldman wimps out, of course. He writes that the divorce was due to “irreconciliable differences” and quotes Asher as saying that getting divorced “was something that Jenny felt she had to do.” Damn it, did they get divorced because Asher cheated or what? Did the idea of a “philandering boyfriend” come to McCarthy as she was writing the script because of marital experience with Asher…yes or no? If not, what real-life experience was McCarthy drawing from? The decision by Goldman and his Times editor to sidestep this was cowardly.