EW review: Bullock does her thing
'Miss Congeniality 2' lets actress show off comedic assets
By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- Sandra Bullock is a cutie.
She's also an odd size, by which I mean that her very American onscreen persona -- pal/girlfriend, tomboy/glamour-puss, gawky outsider/good-time longneck swigger -- requires special care to keep all the pieces in balance.
Not surprisingly for such a hyphenate (I'd also add comedienne/tragedienne), Bullock's movies are wildly hit-or-miss affairs, as apt to be tonally off ("Murder by Numbers," "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood") as to be on the money ("While You Were Sleeping" and, of course, "Speed").
"Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous" isn't exactly good -- like "Legally Blonde 2," it's a more exaggerated, less buoyant sequel to what should have been a one-off comedy -- but it's an enjoyable (or at least educational) study of what Bullock and her favored writer-producer Marc Lawrence have rightly identified as the star's best comedy assets.
(The two worked together on "Forces of Nature," the original, unexpectedly delightful "Miss Congeniality" and the undervalued "Two Weeks Notice," in which Bullock and her male equal in the romantic-comedy school of I-charm-alone, Hugh Grant, combusted on screen like a house on fire.)
Once again, Bullock plays FBI agent Gracie Hart, who appears to have kept the eyebrow-grooming skills she previously acquired while going undercover as a beauty-pageant contestant but ditched the rest of the upgrade; Gracie still snorts when she laughs, spills when she eats and trips when she walks, and she's back to her butch FBI wardrobe.
She's famous now, though -- too much so for undercover work, but exactly famous enough to suit up in pretty skirts and relearn gracious manners to represent ''the face of the FBI'' (with "The Drew Carey Show's" Diedrich Bader taking up the homosexual-stylist slot vacated by Michael Caine).
And once again, Gracie fights to establish her own personal definition of femininity by throwing off the constrictions of ladylike behavior, this time in the course of rescuing a couple of old pageant pals (Heather Burns and hammy William Shatner reprising their "Congeniality" roles) who have been kidnapped in Las Vegas.
The Vegas setting results in some of the movie's most tired capers (the draggiest of which is a performance in a drag club). The update devised for Bullock's persona, though, as an actress who's more acceptable to audiences as a chick who wants a man than as a chick who has one, is a sharp improvement.
Gracie's partner this time is a tough fellow lady-agent named Sam, with a big chip on her shoulder and a powerful pair of fists -- she's the opposite of a dull, kissable Benjamin Bratt-type hunk. Played by the redoubtable Regina King, Sam makes Gracie look girly in contrast. Paired together, the two women hint at the start of a beautiful comedy relationship, and new ways to let Bullock be Bullock.
EW Grade: B-
'The Ballad of Jack & Rose'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
They could be Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, clothed but innocent nonetheless, lying peaceably on their backs surrounded by wild greenery and looking up at wild blueness -- that's how complete, contained and contented a couple the unknown man and woman appear to be in the opening moments of Rebecca Miller's artistically and personally mature drama "The Ballad of Jack & Rose."
The sinewy, graying man with the ripe Scottish accent, we learn, is Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis); the younger woman is Rose (Camilla Belle from "Practical Magic"), and the two relate to each other with the rightness of nestling cups. That their relationship isn't immediately clear -- it turns out the two are chaste father and daughter, not lovers -- is part of this ballad's mournful melody.
Miller's theme is innocence, the loss of it and the reclamation of equanimity in the face of that loss, and the music she makes is haunting.
The filmmaker sets her dyad in a patch of unspoiled country on an unnamed East Coast island, the remains of a commune in which Jack is now the sole caretaker of an all-but-dead ideal; a slick land developer (Beau Bridges) has already begun building on the edge of Jack's property.
Indeed, Jack is dying too, of a bad heart, and he's angry about the world he cannot put in order; he also feels helpless about the beloved daughter who will soon be parentless.
Rose's welfare is as much a consideration as his own domestic companionship when Jack invites Kathleen (Catherine Keener, conveying a whole, complex woman in just a few scenes), his casual girlfriend on the mainland, and her two sons (Ryan McDonald and Paul Dano) to move in. But Rose is not pleased to share her world with anyone new.
Jack's little girl is becoming a woman -- competitive, possessive, potent, arousing and arousable. And she lashes out at her noncommune -- and particularly at the adult woman now in her father's bed -- in a sequence of chaos-inducing maneuvers that also happen to be perfectly chosen: A venomous snake intentionally set loose is about as boldly symbol-laden a gesture as a storyteller can make, and Miller takes confident, authoritative charge of the mythological, biblical, and sexual implications. She also displays a keen understanding of the intersection between teenage lust and fear.
As in Miller's two previous films, "Personal Velocity" and "Angela," "The Ballad of Jack & Rose" is as much a conjuring of moods and textures as it is of moving characters. Miller's directorial eye favors a kind of singsongy wandering from notion to notion, with plenty of time to literally pause and smell the flowers -- rhythms that both Day-Lewis and Belle respond to as if breathing in unison. (The excellent cinematographer Ellen Kuras has worked on all three of Miller's pictures.)
Of course, as the filmmaker's husband, Day-Lewis may be especially attuned to his wife's respirational style -- besides, he has a rare talent for creating a character from the breath out -- but it's worth admiring how his Jack is a man built out of an exceptionally delicate network of life's gains and losses, and how each tendril is visible in this lovely performance.
For a teenage actress, on the other hand, Camilla Belle's gift for playing a young woman of similar age with such control of the elements of uncontrollable young womanhood, so to speak, is a marvel.
EW Grade: A
'D.E.B.S.'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
The elite squad of girly-girl crime fighters who flounce and ditz their way through "D.E.B.S." wearing Catholic-school jailbait outfits made me wonder: Did the director, Angela Robinson, realize that it's a fool's game to try to parody the "Charlie's Angels" movies, since they're cheeky parodies to begin with, or did she hoodwink herself into thinking that she was doing something original?
It's supposed to be funny that the quartet of action heroines are just banal head-tossing sorority sisters, but the ''joke'' is on the audience, since the four actresses come off as the blahest of blah amateurs.
So what's there to laugh at? Why, the daring and outrageous lesbian angle! Amy (Sara Foster), the unofficial leader of the D.E.B.S., has a secret crush on Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), a supervillainess who is bent on getting a date far more than she is on world domination.
She seduces Amy into a secret love affair, which is offered as a naughty subversion of the usual hetero blockbuster heroics. Except that the movie seems five years behind the zeitgeist. This girl-on-girl romance barely raises a chuckle, a hormone or an audience eyebrow.
Cardboard-thin and terribly shot, "D.E.B.S." is low-budget even by indie standards, and that's a major disadvantage when you're taking off on a genre that would scarcely exist apart from its turbo cheesecake style. The movie has no wit, no charm, no cleverness, no traction. Simply put, it is no fun.
EW Grade: F
'Steamboy'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
The relatively novel practice of re-voicing Japanese animated features in English may strike some as impure, but in the case of "Steamboy," the eagerly awaited second feature from Katsuhiro Otomo, whose 1988 "Akira" is one of the touchstones of anime, it's nothing if not appropriate.
The film takes place in a Jules Verne fantasy of Victorian London, a formal gray kingdom of bowler hats, muttonchop sideburns and magic industrial inventions.
I can't imagine what it would sound like in Japanese. Porn, cyberpunk, down-the-rabbit-hole reverie: It's hard to think of a corridor of outlandish imagination through which anime hasn't passed.
"Steamboy," by contrast, is a work of stodgy retro classicism. The hero, voiced by Anna Paquin (well, why not?), discovers that his father, a scarred megalomaniac, has built the Steam Castle -- a gigantic fortress of pipes, levers and pressure gauges that rises over London like a wrought-iron factory version of the mothership in "Close Encounters."
It's nifty to behold, but about the only drama in "Steamboy" lies in waiting for this colossal hovering machine-monster to blow a gasket.
EW Grade: B-
'Oldboy'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
The brio and glee that Korean bad-boy filmmaker Park Chanwook brings to the gaudy psycho-shockeroo "Oldboy" is undeniable, even impressive. It's the perverse, hard-boiled ugliness of the story to which Park has applied his talents that alienates me. For you, results may vary.
It takes twisted visual and narrative chops to deposit the businessman antihero, Dae-su (Korean star Choi Min-sik), abruptly into solitary confinement in a mysterious prisonlike apartment that's a marvel of cheesy wallpaper, cool club lighting and surrealist hallucinations (including that sci-fi bad-trip classic, ants under the skin).
There's orneriness in letting Dae-su stew for 15 years. And grunge chutzpah is required to abruptly release the guy, then send him into a Japanese restaurant, where he bites ravenously into a plate of writhing live octopus. (The sight is a novel gross-out that would daunt the producers of "Fear Factor.")
As for the plot itself -- a nightmare of dislocation and shuffled memories in which Dae-su finds out who imprisoned him and why, unfolding in a Grand Guignol of violence and perversion in which teeth are extracted, a tongue is severed and sex is incestuous -- well, the filmmaker who can dream such creepfest fantasies is the man to whom Quentin Tarantino, a declared Park Chanwook admirer, can tip his Kangol cap in awe.
"Oldboy" caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.
EW Grade: C
'Mondovino'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Early in Jonathan Nossiter's "Mondovino," we meet Aime Guibert, a white-haired vintner in the south of France who surveys his calling with the cynical resign of a horse-and-buggy driver in 1910. ''Wine is dead,'' he says, his features drooping into a scowl of sadness.
A little later, we meet the killers of wine -- that is, if you agree with Guibert's elegy. They are Robert Mondavi, who starting in 1966 probably did more than anyone to plant Napa Valley on the world-vintage map, and his eldest son, Michael.
In "Mondovino," winemakers from half a dozen countries are filmed with a handheld camera that ambles its way through their vineyards and homes, but Nossiter poses the Mondavis in a single still frame, so that they look as sinister as the Corleones. The film seems to be saying: These are the capitalist oligarchs of the New Wine Order.
As we learn, the Mondavis tried -- and failed -- to take over a vineyard in Aniane, the only village in France with a Communist mayor. (Guibert, who lives there, helped to lead the fight against them.) It was a Pyrrhic victory for the old ways, though.
"Mondovino," a look at the changing world of wine and what it says about all of us, is a searching meditation on love, flavor, money, tradition and globalization. We meet a number of European winemakers, disciples of the mysteries of old-oak barrels and terroir, and several of the new oligarchs as well, like Michel Rolland, a jaunty wine consultant who hops all over the globe doling out expensive tips on the science of micro-oxygenation.
If "Mondovino" were simply a tale of ancient artisans versus the corporation, it might have been a reductive movie. But Nossiter, who made the stirring lost-souls-in-love drama "Sunday" (1997), finds ripples of subtlety within his design. We meet the fabled critic Robert Parker, whose reviews in the Wine Advocate determine prices around the world. Is he the Pied Piper of globalized taste, shoring up American dominance, or is he right about the sensations he champions?
The highest praise I can give to "Mondovino" is that it makes you want to sample every vintage it shows you and find out the answer yourself.
EW Grade: B+
More from Entertainment Weekly: Movies
Click Here to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly
