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Bringing absolutely no fresh angles to a time-tested means that's seemed particularly overworked of late (e.g. "Big Momma's House," "Sorority Boys," etc.), crotchety-dressing yokfest "Juwanna Mann" may be the most routine spin yet on the basic "Charley's Aunt"/"Some Like It Hot"/ "Tootsie" self-love. Innocuous item's decrepit-watt cast and the imminent tourist of another hoops comedy ("Like Mike") effect that this by-the-numbers time-killer will be benched from theatrical play posthaste. Ancillary biz should be livelier.

Miguel A. Nunez Jr. plays Jamal Jefferies, a pro basketball player who's tops in his game but hits recurrent bottom in terms of arrogant and obnoxious behavior. Fresh off a six-day suspension, he promptly throws a public hissy fit so embarrassing — dropping trou to moon (and waggle) his disdain at both fans and TV cameras — that he's ejected from the league permanently.

Given his reckless bling-blingy party lifestyle and no fresh cash coming in, the falling star is swiftly relieved of flash house and girlfriend (raunch rapper Lil' Kim, in little more than a cameo). A few weeks cooling heels at tough-loving Aunt Ruby's (Jenifer Lewis) manse back in North Carolina leave Jamal desperate to get back in the game. Spying a little girl busting moves on a driveway court, he has an inspiration: He'll don drag to play in the women's national league.

Totally formulaic yet indifferent to character logic niceties, Bradley Allenstein's screenplay doesn't allow the macho, skirt-chasing player a moment's doubt before he skirts up. That obliviousness toward even its most obvious potholes (and situational opportunities) is typical of pic, which isn't inept so much as just wholly void of imagination and esprit. Comedic inspiration here is seldom more than lukewarm, and the much more onerous stabs at dramatic sincerity are so rote you can't imagine why the filmmakers bothered.

In his new incarnation as Juwanna Mann, Jamal proves as much of a ball-hog and egoist as before, to the chagrin of fellow Charlotte Banshees players — especially beauteous captain Michelle Langford (Vivica A. Fox), toward whom he immediately develops ill-hidden, non-platonic feelings. But she's involved with R&B singing smoothie Romeo (thesped by real-life one Ginuwine).

Meanwhile "Juwanna" is avidly pursued, much to "her" distress, by uber-playa rapstar Puff Smokey Smoke (comic Tommy Davidson, pretty much taking Joe E. Brown's "Some Like It Hot" role). Latter's scenes are by far feature's highpoints, with a double-date sequence at a restaurant briefly lifting laugh quotient out of the doldrums.

"Unmasked" at a playoff game, Jamal-Juwanna returns to offer the dispirited Banshees a groaningly cliched apology/motivational speech at halftime during their climactic season session.

Debuting feature director Jesse Vaughan, a vet of "In Living Color" and MTV docus/musicvids, lends pic pace and decent technical sheen but no notable personality, with performers clearly left to their own best judgments. Results flatter few. Davidson aside, only sparky perf is from Kim Wayans as the Banshee's most in-ya-face lesbian. But she and other potentially colorful teammates get too little chance to strut their stuff.

Nunez is adequate albeit lacking the kind of stellar comic flamboyance that might have seized role's ample opportunities and juiced mediocre material. Pollak, Lewis and a sexily clad Fox walk through parts that palpably give them little cause for joy.

Real-life WNBA and NBA players, as well as broadcast sports commentators and a briefly appearing Jay Leno, are deployed to no notable effect. Vaughan doesn't bring any special dynamicism to court scenes, though pic's milieu is credible enough. Tech and design aspects are solid; soundtrack of soul, disco and hiphop oldies is dully chosen, with Diana Ross' "I'm Coming Out" greeting Jamal's new persona, and so forth.

A used crate salesman writes a screenplay about a ruined trash driver skin a death sentence to stuff emptiness in his zest. When a production house, called Mammoth Pictures, wants to pay him after the integument and the contention, he gathers up his father, stepsister, and his pregnant secretary to get the film wrapped.

Peter Bradshaw

The Guardian

,
Friday 28 September 2007

Drawing Restraint 9

Production year:

2005

Country:

Rest of the world

Cert (UK):

18

Runtime:

135 mins

Directors:

Matthew Barney

Cast:

Bjork, Matthew Barney, Naomi Araki, Shigeru Akahori

More on this film

Another startling movie-installation crossover piece from Matthew Barney, author of the legendary Cremaster cycle. It is set on a Japanese whaling ship, deep in whose hold a bizarre cannibalistic rite is performed, in wacky homage to Shinto mythology. Matthew Barney and Björk (who has also composed the music) eat each other, with knives carving into flesh. Barney and Björk are in a relationship of course, and it is Barney's prerogative to cast who he likes, but Björk's star status, and her own already intensively cultivated brand identity, rather overbalance the piece in her direction. Nonetheless, the main event - their mutual consumption - is quite something.

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Preston Sturges was a man of Hollywood´s first one-gink bands. He wrote, directed and instances produced all of his films, and his scripts were frequently originals fairly than adaptations. He cultivated a wry sense of humor and a deceptively cynical over of humanity; commonly favourable but always skeptical. He lauded the common man and poked deride at self-aggrandizing elitists, often to a tiring and sometimes pandering degree, but with a more ironic advantage than Frank Capra. I deliberate on Sturges can conceivably be summed up this character: he believed in the American dream, sort of.

Not many people could write snappy dialogue correspondent to Sturges, and his understanding is on generous present in "Unfaithfully Yours" (1948), the final major dusting of his craft. "Unfaithfully Yours" depends not quite exhaustively on the verbal dexterity of both Sturges and its terminally irritated cardinal man Rex Harrison. Harrison plays Sir Alfred de Carter, an orchestra conductor with a very uninitiated and very pretty wife Daphne (Linda Darnell). Harrison has complete confidence in himself, to circa the least, and in his wife… at least until his brother-in-law August arrives to stir a tempest in Sir Alfred´s tea cup.

Sir Alfred de Carter loves his woman, but does not, as a heterogeneous rule, particularly care for anyone else. This holds doubly true in the case of the obtrusive August (Rudy Vallee) which prompts this unpleasantness from prematurely in the film:

August: You are no uncertainty hip, Alfred, that I contain a deep sense of family obligation.

Sir Alfred: I wasn´t hep of it, but I´ll willing to take your word for it.

August: We are brothers-in-law, aren´t we?

Sir Alfred: I´m jittery we are, and there´s not a blasted thing we can do less it.

Poor August not in any way stood a chance.

He has come to inform Sir Alfred that he suspects his sister (Daphne) of a sure thing indiscretions. Misinterpreting Alfred´s load to "sustain an eye on my mate," he had her followed by private detectives who saw her… Bah, Sir Alfred will find out none of it and he grabs the detective´s report in sight of August´s hand and rips it to pieces. And that, as far as Sir Alfred is concerned, is that.

Alas, he cannot flap the publicize no matter how he tries. He throws it away, throws the trash can itself away, and even burns it but it keeps boomeranging fail to him; eventually he is self-conscious to read the contents and is not appropriate with what he sees. Outwardly, truthful Daphne was spotted entering the motel room of Sir Alfred´s inexperienced secretary Anthony (Kurt Krueger) where she stayed for quite some time.

This kicks off the deportment of the film´s twinkling decree in which Sir Alfred´s suspicions assemble and build until they consume him while he is directing his orchestra. During the symphony, he entertains multiple revenge fantasies in which he alternately kills Daphne, frames Tony, forgives his wife, and challenges everyone to a game of Russian Roulette.

This is where the film bogs down destined for me. Sir Alfred´s three separate revenge fantasies take up almost the undivided go along with represent and are framed awkwardly; in each case, Sturges dollies in from a long before you can say 'Jack Robinson' no way right into Sir Alfred´s eyes thus "entering" his mind. Perhaps this device seemed innovative in 1948, but today it just seems clunky. The revenge fantasies are dream of and exhausted out (not to introduce implausible, but I suppose that is the point) and the script all but buckles eye this burdensome material although there is a propertied payoff in the final act when Sir Alfred tries to portray each of his imagined plans only to discover that truth doesn´t work quite as smoothly; it seems there is no such shit as the practised fratricide. A protracted slapstick sequence involving a Rube Goldberg widget of a disc recorder is amazingly amusing.

Scarecrow-framed Harrison is a perfect best for the acid-tongued Sir Alfred. With his clipped, clinical usage, he spits out each word peer napalm, granting his targets are not often as cushy as he first thinks. Sturges also breathes pep into many of his secondary characters who affirm to be ample foils fit Sir Alfred´s verbal sparring. Sir Alfred tries his best to bully the allegedly "common" gumshoe who tracked his wife, only to discover that the shackle is a well-informed and argumentative aficionado of authoritative music who thinks Sir Alfred conducts awfully swell for a "limey." Similarly, a cymbal player in Sir Alfred´s orchestra becomes memorable for the undeniable zeal with which he performs his restrictive role; you never saw such a tall grin or such generous cymbals!

Snickering Buried

Geoffrey D. Roberts

Just Buried,

an official selection of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, is a pedestrian comedy that will probably offend many viewers with its tasteless and sick brand of humor.

The movie follows Oliver Whynacht (Jay Baruchel), who inherits a funeral parlor from his estranged father Rollie (Jeremy Akerman). This establishment is located in a small town where nobody has died since the retirement home adjacent to it burned down five years ago. Rollie left his business to Oliver because he was ashamed of his son for being a delivery boy at a grocery store. He felt this would finally force Oliver to make something of himself.

Oliver soon discovers the funeral home is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Henry (Graham Greene), the accountant, informs him that Rollie was adamant his son was the right person to make the funeral home profitable again, despite the fact Oliver has no experience with the funeral business and is also petrified at the thought of death and dying.

Later that evening Oliver stops to eat at a diner with Roberta (Rose Byrne), the parlor?s embalmer. After talking for several hours, he realizes they are both too intoxicated to risk driving home. Roberta tells Oliver to take a dirt road, one that leads directly into town and is seldom traveled on at night. Meanwhile, as part of his nightly walking routine, Armin (Slavko Negulic) is hiking down the same road in total darkness. Oliver, too drunk to see Armin walking toward him in time to hit his breaks, crashes head-on into the man. Roberta then helps Oliver carry Armin?s dead body off the road. Roberta makes it look like Armin broke his neck after tumbling down an embankment at night.

Armin?s funeral, the first one held in the town for many years, gives Oliver and Roberta an idea about how to keep the funeral home in full operation. They decide to murder more innocent people and try to make each killing look like an accident.  Along the way, they must deal with the problem of silencing people who know what they?re doing or have threatened to come forward with information about what really happened to Armin.

Baruchel, badly miscast as Oliver, overacts throughout the film and lacks chemistry with Byrne. It?s also disappointing that Greene?s considerable acting talent is wasted here. His character crops up sporadically to make a few self-deprecating remarks only to disappear toward the end of the film. However, Byrne, best known for her portrayal of Dorme in 

, is delightful to watch as the incredibly quirky and homicidal Roberta.

You may be wondering where the inspiration for this movie came from. When Chaz Thorne?s best friend?s girlfriend gave him an idea for a comedy about someone who just inherited a funeral parlor and resorted to murder to keep it open, the filmmaker set out to write and eventually direct what would become 

Just Buried

. Unfortunately, Thorne?s directorial debut suffers from heavy-handed direction, bad casting, and poor performances — with Byrne being the exception.

(Released in
Canada
by Seville Pictures; not by MPAA)

Made fit peanuts and shot on DV, this phenomenally suggestive film may ostentatiously turn out to be Miike's chef-d'oeuvre. A mysterious stranger (Watanabe, himself a skilled indie director) moves into an ultra-dysfunctional middle-class relaxed - and destroys it by leading each member of the Yamazaki family to his or her most hidden, solipsistic appeal. Only one of them (the bullied son, given to beating up his mother) ultimately has the courage to defeat unloose. The junkie mother (Uchida, a pre-eminent author) learns to get excited on hyper-lactation and rediscovers her tender role, welcoming her erring husband and daughter defeat to suckle at her breasts: a regression to infantilism more scary than any of the previous incest, violence, massacre and necrophilia. Funnier and less cerebral than Pasolini's Theorem, its distinct follow, this is dialect mayhap the most devastating attack on the nuclear family all the time made.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th
Dimension (W.D. Richter) 1984 

   
I don’t really understand the
fascination with irritable sci-fi films that most people earmarks of to have, so I’ll say
that my review of

Buckaroo Banzai

,
which attempts to roast them, is not precisely coming from a guy that likes this
characterize of fetich to Rather commence with. The film starts out rather incoherently with the
titular protagonist (Peter Weller) who seems to be some systemize of Renewal man.
As a doctor/crime fighter/comic post hero/rock prima donna he seems to embody the
person that so multifarious losers want to be, so I’m not sure if Weller’s
relatively vacuous carrying out is meant to be behalf of the joke, effectual them
that it’s not all that they’ve cracked it up to be. You fix the impression
that writer/director Richter thinks this entire enterprise of hero worship is
rather dotty, so it really feels a bit fruitless that he spends so much time
debunking it. The other distressing thing is that the parody is rendered
basically ineffectual since there are not many moments that give every indication to have required the
imaginative tinge that the hokey sci-fi stories that it’s sending up have in
spades. This photograph is content to forge hold up to ridicule of the asseverate of Creative Jersey and foreign
accents and allow its cast’s overacting to do the rest, but it doesn’t
nearing work.

    Only a handful moments in the flicks
even struck me as crowing-worthy, and even those seemed terribly isolated,
instead of with of something funnier. For all of the film’s implied zaniness
and attempts to effect a semblance of senselessness there’s next to no feeling that
anything could become of come upon. The in Britain artistry values are broadly artificial, but not so
shoddy that they become in any progressing zany. Everybody gets so worked up in the
movie that you wish it offered something more exciting than the ho-hum
progression of gun chases that it turns into. Frankly, I think that notable
debacle

Howard the Duck

is a much
better movie along these terms. There’s nothing here that really makes the
movie feel “fun” to me, though the film’s cult status suggests there are
those that this film will prayer to immensely. There’s teensy-weensy here that really
distinguishes the filmmaking, which is fairly pedestrian. The strongest aspect
of the cloud is purposes not bad meeting in the script, but so many of my
problems with the film stem from that same source. The amount of vigor that the
supporting actors throw into their performances suggests they slogan something
horrific here, but I ingenuously don’t see it. To me,

Buckaroo Banzai

seems
stranded in an alternate dimension where films don’t need to have a solid
perspective to remain. 

*

1/2 

01-11-02 

Jeremy Heilman 

"High-tech cartoonish action
thriller."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

This is the first in the box office hit series, and it gave a needed
adrenaline charge to the action pic in the 1980s. John McTiernan ("Predator"/"Last
Action Hero"/"The Hunt for Red October") serviceably helms this high-tech
cartoonish action thriller that goes on for too long and is overblown,
but adequately delivers the Rambo-like heroics and there's enough entertainment
in the well-conceived set pieces to yell out Yippee Ki-yay with the hero
as he saves the day. It's written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza
and is based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. 

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a tough New York City cop with 'regular
guy' values visiting Los Angeles on Christmas Eve to see his estranged
wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) and his two little ones. Holly's an ambitious
executive working for a Japanese company run by the enterprising and well-educated
Takagi (James Shigeta). A limousine picks up John at the airport and he
meets his wife, who goes by her maiden name of Gennaro, at the office Christmas
party in a high-rise LA office building owned by the thriving Nakotomi
company. The chauffeur, Argyle (De'voreaux White), decides to wait in the
building's underground garage while John decides whether he will be spending
Christmas with his family or at a hotel. 

While John waits in another room a gang of about 12 German terrorists
led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) invade the building and take it over,
and murder the security guard and the CEO at the office party to show they
mean business. The gang brings along a black computer whiz (Clarence Gilyard
Jr.) and heavy duty explosives and missiles, as they intend robbing the
well-protected high-tech vault of its $6 million in untraceable bonds and
plan on destroying the glass skyscraper and killing the thirty hostages
taken and held on the 30th floor when they open the vault–feeling the
destroyed building will lead the police thinking no one escaped and would
therefore not chase them down. 

It's up to lone-wolf cop John to act as a one-man police force and
bring the machine gun toting terrorists down, but first he must strip down
into an undershirt and later go barechested as the action intensifies and
the bullets start flying all over the place. 

The film has a number of secondary characters playing big assholes,
that include: the sniveling, coke-snorting self-absorbed Nakotomi executive
Ellis (Hart Bochner), who endangers John's life by foolishly trying to
cut a deal with the ruthless bad guys; the stupid and arrogant LAPD deputy
chief Dwayne T Robinson (Paul Gleason), who is in charge of rescuing the
hostages but only makes things worse by refusing to listen to the info
John is feeding him and thereby endangering the lives of the hostages;
the FBI replacements of Robinson, who are just as stupid and arrogant but
even more callous about endangering human lives; and the media who are
shown to be irresponsible and willing to endanger lives just to get a story,
as shown how the pushy but inept TV reporter (William Atherton) allows
the terrorists to learn the name of John's wife. It's only the man of the
people, desk sergeant Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson), who can communicate
with John and understand the seriousness of the situation and how deadly
are the terrorists they are dealing with.

It's Richard Edlund's special effects that gives this violent, loud
and explosion-filled film its kick. Also helpful are the winning performances
by the hero and villain: the amiable performance by the gruff wise-cracking
Willis, who takes a few slugs for the good of keeping the story suspenseful;
while Rickman plays to a tee the hissable villain who is suave but always
as repulsive as a terrorist is expected to be.

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