  
| 
| ||||||||||||
  EW review: 'Scary Movie,' 4 shameAlso: Fascinating 'Page,' not so 'Wild'By Lisa Schwarzbaum  Anna Faris reaches deep in "Scary Movie 4." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- If the "Scary" franchise continues beyond "Scary Movie 4" -- and there's no reason to think it won't, so long as the universe keeps providing such spoof-ready pop-cultural phenomena as "Saw," "The Grudge," and Tom Cruise's lovestruck gymnastics on Oprah's couch -- then here's a modest proposal: Enforce a one-term limit on whichever auteur de junque is entrusted with "Scary" 5, 6, 7, or 13. That way, not only would more artistes get to play in the game (I've got a hankering to see what Baz Luhrmann would do with the form, in full "Moulin Rouge" twirl) but audiences would be spared the diminishing returns bred of overfamiliarity with a genre that's hit-or-miss to begin with. (One man's Chris Elliott-as-"Village"-idiot snot joke is another woman's look-at-the-wristwatch moment.) All this is my way of saying that just as the Wayans brothers' "Scary Movie 2" was a duller model than their original "Scary Movie," so David Zucker's "Scary Movie 4" offers nothing we didn't see in his "Scary Movie 3" -- except, perhaps, the uncomfortable sight of Dr. Phil trying to mock the unbearable lightness of being Dr. Phil while Shaquille O'Neal peddles his Shaq-ness. The plot (what plot?) solves the mystery of a haunted house, a ghost boy, and an alien invasion, stumbling goofily from punchline to punchline; the "Brokeback Mountain" joke with two black cowboys (Anthony Anderson and Kevin Hart) defending their heterosexuality while reaching for lubricants was tired four months ago. I bow to reliably funny franchise princesses Anna Faris, as resilient heroine Cindy Campbell, and Regina Hall, as Cindy's horny pal, Brenda. (Faris, a "Brokeback" cast member for real, now gamely bathes Cloris Leachman with a bucket of fake urine in the name of hilarity.) But I wonder when the pair might want to relinquish their whoopee-cushioned thrones. (Craig Bierko plays "War of the Worlds' " Tom Ryan playing Faris' next-door neighbor and boyfriend. And a fine crazyperson he makes bouncing on Oprah's furniture with Cruise-y mania, too.) As ever, the criteria for mockworthiness have less to do with the scariness of the source material (or, for that matter, the precision of the joke bombs) than a certain self-seriousness expressed in an easily identifiable production design that's ripe for loving cannibalization. Zucker and his crew (including scripters Craig Mazin and Jim Abrahams) have fun with the working-class housing in "War of the Worlds" (and Dakota Fanning's gumdrop-colored wardrobe), the dour landscape in "The Village," and the accursed little stool that signals tragedy in the ring in "Million Dollar Baby." They just don't have much to say about the movies they mock. And as ever, the jokes are a jumble of the gross, the baggy, the raunchy, the mistimed, and -- every once in a while -- the refreshingly incorrect. The scariest moment in "Scary Movie 4" involves Zucker veteran Leslie Nielsen, playing his patented bumbling President Harris: While the U.S. is under attack, this yutz sits in a chair at an elementary school, raptly listening to a kid read a book about a pet animal. EW Grade: C+ 'The Notorious Bettie Page'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman It has often been said that Bettie Page, the legendary '50s pinup with the pert features framed by those famously severe black bangs, was the rare American sex goddess who was equally at home projecting the image of a good girl or a bad girl. Frolicking, naked, in the ocean foam, her leg extended with playful pleasure, she was all dazzle and sunshine: the girl next door who said yes yes yes. In her scandalous underground bondage photos, where she posed as a dominatrix with a whip held high, or as a masochist with a ball in her mouth, she vamped like a pussycat from hell, her eyes narrowing with mean delight -- or widening in mock terror. Yet the mysterious alchemy of Bettie Page isn't just that she could turn on a dime from light to dark, saint to sinner, virgin to vixen. It's that she was somehow able to project both qualities at once. In the bondage photos, so shocking for their time, her warm, spirited, peekaboo vibrance doesn't disappear; it's there just beneath the surface aggression of her poses. As for her all-American cheesecake shots, they have a quality of delirious, laughing abandon, as though she were winking at the she-devil inside. What Bettie Page conjured -- always -- was the promise of pleasure without limits. She was a one-woman orgy in centerfold form. Yet who, exactly, was she? "The Notorious Bettie Page," Mary Harron's frisky and fascinating biopic, lets us know -- sort of. Gretchen Mol, as Bettie, gets that naughty/nice erotic charisma to an astonishing degree. Soft, eager, and polite, with a twang that only enhances her apple-pie sweetness, Bettie, a demure Christian girl from the outskirts of Nashville, arrives in New York City in 1949 with dreams of becoming an actress. The movie presents her as a traditional girl, caught in a society that runs on men's whims, with a free spirit locked deep inside her. She wouldn't look out of place in a typing pool, yet the one thing she truly knows, for all her modesty, is that she's pretty, so when a man on the beach asks her to model for some photographs, she thinks, Why not? Posing for amateur ''camera clubs,'' Bettie gets in touch with her inner exhibitionist. As she strolls through the woods with one of the club members, she volunteers to take off her bikini top, then her bottom, too, and suddenly, her skin shines, her smile is flirty glee, and she wiggles her rump in triumph. Standing, in her full tawny glory, in the sun, like Norma Jean before she became Marilyn Monroe, Mol is more than radiant; she makes Bettie's blissful lack of self-consciousness a magical state. Bettie, in a strange way, is never more Christian than when she asserts the holiness of her own body. Later, in the studio of Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), who does fetish photographs for specialty clients, she puts on all that bondage gear -- corsets, leather boots laced up her thigh -- as if it were a sci-fi costume, and when the photographer, a gently scurrilous bloke (Jared Harris), asks her to snarl like a tiger, she does, and beautifully, but she's really just a little girl playing dress-up. Harron has a great time staging these scenes as a demented workplace sitcom, with Klaw, a sad lump of a fellow who's always in a sweat, and his sister, Paula (Lili Taylor), catering to the tastes of their clients as if they were selling appliances. If Bettie, in joining up with the Klaws, were simply a dim bulb, her innocence might have come off as a malicious joke. Instead, the great joke of "The Notorious Bettie Page" is that it's precisely Bettie's purity -- her eager, trusting wholesomeness -- that allows her to radiate sexuality without a trace of inhibition or shame. Framed by the Estes Kefauver indecency hearings, the movie says that in an era -- the 1950s -- that regarded sex as perversity and scandal and even crime, something restricted to the underground, it took a nice girl who couldn't see perversity (because she didn't feel it) to turn ''sin'' into the sexy-sublime. Shot in satiny period black and white, with shifts to tropical postcard color whenever Bettie visits the ''paradise'' of Florida, "The Notorious Bettie Page" is a comedy of high freakishness that invites us to climb deep into the mystique of Bettie Page's image, her phenomenon. Yet the movie doesn't probe her interior life in any revelatory way. I wish that Harron had given us a more detailed and intimate view of Bettie's relationships with men (the boyfriend she meets in acting class remains a sketchy nice guy), or of her partnership with Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson), the pinup model-turned-photographer who created some of Page's most memorable images. The movie, in a sense, is just like Bettie's photos: all glorious surface. "The Notorious Bettie Page" captures, with seductive finesse, how Bettie Page happened, yet what it leaves us with is the tantalizing enigma of a girl who couldn't truly be ''bad'' because she made sex divinely delicious. EW Grade: B+ 'The Wild'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman Lifting a concept isn't exactly foreign to the world of animation (what's "The Lion King" if not "Bambi" with manes?), but it isn't often a rip-off gets as blatant as "The Wild," a flat-out regurgitation of "Madagascar." Seriously: same overly civilized New York zoo animals, same midnight escape to the canyons of Manhattan, same stowaway to Africa, same tribe of deranged musical beasties. The difference is that where "Madagascar" was witty enough to see the folly of a domesticated lion finding his untamed self, "The Wild," beneath some ''wacky'' chatter, is earnest to the point of dullness. EW Grade: C Click Here 
|
| ||||||||||||
| © 2007 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. Site Map. |
 |
|
to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly
External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com
Pay service with live and archived video. 
