The Bush administration, skewered indirectly in V for Vendetta, gets the full frontal treatment from writer-director Paul Weitz in American Dreamz, an often hilarious parody of contemporary American life.
Not only does the current White House come under fire (although in the end it's rather affectionate fire) in American Dreamz. Weitz, who co-directed that insane vision of contemporary American teen sexual appetites, American Pie, also takes aim at the U.S. public's captivation with fame and celebrity at the expense of real issues. In his film, worries about Iraq and terrorism and the national debt take a back seat to the pressing American issue of who will be the next winner of the big American Idol-style TV show American Dreamz.
Politics and showbiz collide in the film as the president's chief of staff (Willem Dafoe) cooks up a scheme to make the president, whose poll numbers have fallen off a cliff, regain his popularity by appearing on American Dreamz during the ratings-grabbing final night of the season. It's the night when the winner of the year-long talent competition is named by toothy, WASPish host Martin "Tweedy" Tweed (Hugh Grant), a national TV star who in reality hates the thought of doing one more season of the hit show and sitting through its awful acts. No wonder. This year's talent crop includes an immigrant cantor from Israel who does rap, an immigrant Muslim terrorist-in-training from Afghanistan who sings Broadway show tunes and a "white-trash" barmaid from Padookie, Ohio.
"Do you think it's dignified?" asks President Joseph Staton (Dennis Quaid) upon hearing he has been booked for American Dreamz.
You couldn't have begged for a better stand-in for George W. Bush than fellow Texan Quaid, who comes by his twang naturally and looks quite a lot like the president, although better. Marcia Gay Harden is even more of a ringer for Laura Bush, right down to the hairdo. She's startled on the night after her husband's re-election to discover he has taken a new-found interest in reading the newspaper. Not just any newspaper. All newspapers, even the Canadian press. And books. Mountains of books. Suddenly their White House bedroom is flooded with piles of newspapers and books. As the president plows through them he often looks up, the surprise of discovery on his face as he uncovers some new fact. Did you know, he asks, that there are three opposing ethnic groups in Iraq?
THE SET-UP for American Dreamz is sometimes amusing but, sadly, more often heavy-handed and labored as it parodies the White House and Americans who are caught up in the fame game. A big part of the problem is that Weitz has designed his script so we laugh at these people rather than with them. They're played for fools, which doesn't draw one into his film.
The klutzy Omer (Sam Golzari), the Broadway musical-loving novice terrorist who is sent to the United States, as much to get him out of Afghanistan and out of the hair of his handlers, is a buffoon.
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Mandy Moore's Sally — "the best karaoke singer in this county in Ohio" — fears she doesn't have the talent to win on American Dreamz. And besides, she knows she has a weight problem. Her idiot boyfriend William Williams (Chris Klein) tries to console her, but really just wants her to hurry back to him, breathlessly telling Sally that he has just been named assistant manager of plumbing fixtures. The next step up, he says brightly, is to become the manager of plumbing fixtures.
FORTUNATELY, Weitz pulls himself out of the hole as American Dreamz builds steam on its truly offbeat and funny situations. He bounces between what become four principal subplots.
Omer arrives in America as the house guest of distant relatives, the Rizas, whose gay son Iqbal (Tony Yalda) has installed his own curtained stage in the basement to practice show tunes and whose dream is to make it onto the American Dreamz show.
President Staton, sensing there's something more to the news than the capsules he has been fed in his daily briefings, throws away his daily prescribed dose of "happy pills" and becomes a loose cannon, which makes his chief of staff panicky.
Sally, with the prodding of her mother (the always wonderful Jennifer Coolidge) and the machinations of her new agent (Seth Meyers) girds for her shot at long-dreamed-of stardom. Fortunately, her naive boyfriend is just back from Iraq with a wound and can be used as a sympathy prop.
Martin, all but gagging over some of the acts he has to pass judgment on, slithers around the edges, unctuously using his fame and good looks to go after whatever he wants with the clear-eyed certainty that he can get it. He's the slimy character you love to hate . . . and then love, whenever he gives a goggle-eyed look to some truly terrible performers he's judging.
After a stumbling start, Golzari's Omer becomes a wonderfully simple and sweet man who finds himself stuck in a very tight predicament, caught between two worlds. As he becomes increasingly popular with the American Dreamz fans, his terrorist leaders arrive from Afghanistan with a dangerous, world-shattering assignment. "Are Americans to blame for America?" he wonders.
Moore shows two sides of Sally, too, which makes her human but is also a tough balancing act. There's the sweet-faced perky singer with a weight problem that the public falls in love with. But there's also the grasping, All About Eve side of Sally that craves stardom at any cost. A scene in which we realize she's using her boyfriend for her own ends, planning to dump him when he's no longer needed, stings. That's especially true because Klein plays William as a trusting, gentle soul who only wants to give his love. It adds a note of poignancy to the film's black comedy.
IN THIS stew of stars-in-their-eyes vipers, it's no wonder that the often addled and dim-witted President Staton comes out looking sympathetic and rather good. At least he means well. And he's definitely trying to become a better person and a better president. "Things that were once black and white now are a little gray seeming," says the man who has been assured that he has been hand-picked by "the Lord" to be president. He becomes a sort-of strong hand on the rudder of the wacky doings going on in American Dreamz.
mjanuson@projo.com
/ (401) 277-7276
****
American Dreamz
Starring: Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid, Mandy Moore, Sam Golzari, Chris Klein, Willem Dafoe, Seth Meyers, Marcia Gay Harden, Jennifer Coolidge, Tony Yalda.
Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, profanity.
After graduating from high form in Harlem, gifted drummer Devon Myles (Nick Cannon) wins a exhibition to join the marching band at Atlanta A & T University. Personally selected by bandleader Dr Aaron Lee (Orlando Jones), Devon quickly proves himself as the most crack and seditious member of the drumming team. His position in the group is threatened by a fierce kill with drum troop ruler Sean (Leonard Roberts) and his exaggeration with tether dancer Laila (Zoe Saldana) suffers when Devon incites an on-field fistfight with a against band. As the college marching league together championship approaches, Devon must supervision his aptitude and his aspect if he’s to put cooperate his be involved in in serving Atlanta A & T trouncing the fantastic Morris Brown College combo unite.
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From the dimness of the provocative The Accused comes Jodrell’s first feature, also dealing with unite loot. Furness (excellent) plays Asta, a self-reliant barrister and biker who breaks down while travelling alone utterly the outback. The garage mechanic’s daughter Lizzie (Buchanan) has been gang-raped by a group of close by hoods, and is trapped in a ’she asked looking for it’ conspiracy of silence. Asta takes on Lizzie’s case, finding herself in a vicious altercation with the sheriff and the rest of the male community. Furness handles her role with calm ability and bald-faced skill; and where The Accused manipulated sensation, this avoids the gratuitous voyeurism of including the ravish scene. Working by allusion, it succeeds in astounding undeniably the to be honest note, responsibly, movingly, and all the same rivetingly.
As if more smoking gun were needed, “I Love Trouble” stands as until now further proof of how hard it is to make a souffle, as superbly as to successfully re-initiate the faultless entertainment of the time-honoured movies today’s filmmakers so revere. A Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn vehicle some 30 years too late, this ultrapolished unrealistic suspenser serves up mild romance, soothing suspense and equable humor. But the toplined duo of Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte in a spiffy parcel make through despite passable pleasure that Disney can parlay into solid summer B.O.
Filmmakers Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers display a sympathetic and understandable nostalgia for the newsroom classics of the 1930s and George Cukor’s “Adam’s Rib” and “Pat and Mike,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” and Stanley Donen’s “Charade.”
But having one’s taste in the right place is not a substitute for originality and zest, both of which are in relatively short supply in this luxuriously appointed yarn of a rugged, legendary scribe who meets his match in a beautiful young cub reporter.
Nolte plays Peter Brackett, a Windy City columnist in the Ben Hecht tradition who’s coasting on his reputation at the Chronicle now that his first novel is out. A notorious womanizer, boozer and cynic of the old school, Brackett is temporarily forced back onto the beat as punishment for his laziness and finds himself scooped by competing Globe newcomer Sabrina Peterson (Roberts).
Story inquestion involves the derailment of a passenger train in which several people are killed, but it quickly builds into a case of corporate intrigue and subterfuge involving missing briefcases, microfilm and something called LDF, a genetically produced hormone that makes cows produce milk much more quickly.
After vying to outdo each other for some time, Brackett and Peterson (who, in good old newspaper fashion, call each other by their last names) agree to team up on research while still filing separate stories. But they continue to bluster about their lack of sexual attraction.
The chase leads them to rural Wisconsin, Las Vegas — where they marry in an act of self-defense against a bad guy — then back to dairyland, where the quickly estranged couple must prove their love by trying to save each other’s lives in perilous circumstances reminiscent of any number of romantic thrillers of the past.
Nothing that happens is very surprising, including the outcome, meaning that the film mustrely on its moment-to-moment charm to seduce the audience. Roberts and Nolte do their share, but Meyers and Shyer, who co-wrote the script, with Meyers producing and Shyer directing, have given them more in the way of ticklish situations to contend with than sharp repartee and fizzy dialogue. The goings-on seem lacking in wit and inspiration, tolerably entertaining but far from effervescent.
Pic’s most exceptional elements are its top-drawer production values. Dean Tavoularis’ production design is lush and evocative, especially in its newsrooms and the climactic chemical company set that evokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin Johnson Wax building.
John Lindley’s subtle, appealingly dark lensing not only displays the settings to lustrous effect but provides the stars with glamour lighting unusual in this day and age. David Newman’s score helps the proceedings seem less overlong than they are.
Downfall: Drama. Starring Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna
Harfouch, UlrichMathes and Juliane Kohler. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. (R. 155 minutes.
At Bay Area theaters.)
American and British films have never quite been able to capture the
different aspects of Adolph Hitler as suggested in newsreel footage. One
insurmountable obstacle has been the problem of language: A Hitler speaking
English automatically doesn’t translate, anymore than a fireside chat spoken
in German could hope to convey the true Franklin Roosevelt. Ultimately, it was
up to the Germans to make the first great Hitler movie, and they have done so
in “Downfall,” about the last days of the Third Reich as experienced from
inside Hitler’s bunker.
It’s a satisfying film in many ways — dramatic, accurate and harrowing,
effectively photographed and brilliantly acted. It’s also a useful film, in
its portrayal of the specific nature of institutional fanaticism. Historical
monsters, such as Magda Goebbels and Hitler, are presented as human beings,
not caricatures. The effect is not to make them more sympathetic, not even
remotely, but rather to provide insight into the mechanics and mental
processes behind acts of absolute evil.
“Downfall,” which was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar, arrives in
San Francisco on a wave of praise, though with a few dissenters who’ve said
that any portrayal of Hitler as human is a disservice to history. This is a
heartfelt but naive point of view that bespeaks a general American tendency to
mistake personality and demeanor for character and behavior. The truth is that
the most evil person imaginable need only seem evil a fraction of the time,
since most of life — sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom, interacting
with people in a domestic sense — requires very little in the way of moral
choice.
Yes, evil will out, but it’s not something that needs to be on display 24
hours a day. In the end, it doesn’t take much to see evil coming when it’s
wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork. “Downfall” reminds us that the
challenge of citizenship means recognizing evil when leaders are smiling,
playing with their dogs and being photographed with children.
The extraordinary thing about Bruno Ganz as Hitler is the way he is able
to synthesize everything we’ve seen of Hitler and everything we know about him,
while at the same time creating an intuitive, spontaneous performance that in
no way seems a crass imitation. For his first meeting with the young woman
who’d become his secretary, Traudl Junge, Ganz adopts Hitler’s fatherly pose,
as seen in German newsreels — gentle, smiling, soft-spoken. Then he begins
dictating a letter, and the voice, ever-so subtly, changes into something
strident and familiar. Two minutes into the movie, it’s already clear that the
Swiss-born Ganz is going to be able to pull this off. His portrayal of Hitler
is a seamless blend of knowledge and inspiration, a product of rigorous study
as refracted through the prism of an actor’s understanding.
The stooped, prematurely old man in the bunker is Hitler’s physical
reality. His soul reveals itself in his rants against compassion, in his
passing reference to the Jews and in his frequent sputtering outbursts of rage,
delivered in a piercing, strangled voice. Anyone concerned that “Downfall”
might inspire pity for Hitler needn’t worry. The Hitler we get here is a
contemptible, deluded and truly vile creature who’d gladly drag every German
civilian down into the grave with him. The Nazis’ deluded faith in their own
virtue makes them comprehensible but more despicable, because the self-
delusion seems a convenient trick of the mind. To see propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Mathes) weeping for himself is to wish he didn’t have
the comfort of tears. It’s to want to take his face and smash it into the wall.
“Downfall” is based largely on the memoirs of Junge, who survived until
2002 and was the subject of the documentary, “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary.”
She was a confidant of Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun, who is portrayed by
Juliane Kohler as an emotionally perceptive young woman, covering over her
sadness with effervescent high spirits. A party, in which Eva dances on a
table, with a lot of drunken Nazis cheering her on, is filmed from Traudl’s
horrified viewpoint as like a vision of hell — a frenzy of dead spirits,
artificially animated, pretending to be happy.
The film takes place under a barrage of Allied bombing, and though bombs
are familiar features in films, “Downfall” conveys the terror of a bombing
assault more convincingly than any film in memory. It helps that we’re never
granted the perspective of an aerial view. We see only what the people see
from the ground — the explosions, very close and very loud.
Though Alexandra Maria Lara, as Traudl, is a compelling surrogate for
audience reaction, it’s likely that people who see “Downfall” will walk out
talking mainly about two things: Ganz, and Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels.
On the chance that there are potential audience members who don’t know what
evil act the wife of Joseph Goebbels is famous for, I won’t reveal it. I will
say that the big scenes involving Mrs. Goebbels are extremely difficult to
watch. They’re also enlightening, in that they show how this woman justified
herself and saw herself.
There are many lessons to be gleaned from “Downfall.” Perhaps the most
important is that absolute faith in one’s own virtue is not a commitment to
virtuous behavior but a commitment to one’s own will. It’s a license to commit
atrocities. That’s a lesson that can’t be repeated enough.
– Advisory: This film contains graphic violence and disturbing scenes of
cruelty to children.
Joseph Andrews is a tired British period section about leching and wenching amidst the high- and low-life of Henry Fielding’s England. Tony Richardson’s veil is a farcical disturb of underplayed bawdiness and occasional sophistication.
Large cast of otherwise British players is headed by Ann-Margret, sometimes appearing grotesque in her rendition of Lady Booby, the noblewoman-with-a-past with the hots for servant Peter Firth in title role.
Fielding’s story of concealed identities and misplaced birth origins has of course been the inspiration for generations of successively updated farce. Herein, Richardson has attempted to pump up the project via the casting of some famed British thesps - John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Hugh Griffith among some 14 guest stars in cameos.
In Trendy York for the sake only a year and already a e la mode maid, Susan Applegate (Ginger Rogers) has had 25 jobs. She’s had enough, but her savings of $27.50 are pitifully insufficient as the newly increased fares to reserve her back to her home in Iowa, so she disguises herself as a 12 year old damsel to travel half price - but she doesn’t fool the suite conductors. Worrying to elude them, she bursts into the hut of dashing bachelor Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland), from a military academy, who takes her at face value and invites her to reinforce at the academy - with him, his fiancée, his fiancée’s scheming sister (Diana Lynn) and 300 cadets. But his fiancée, Pamela (Rita Johnson) and her father, who is also his commanding officer, Colonel Oliver Slater Hill (Robert Fielding) muddle the picture terribly.
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Buena Vista’s first DVD release of “Chicago” was pretty much a open-bones affair with less than sterling video characteristics, so to make amends the studio has spruced up the along and added a ton of new extra materials on this two-disc, “Razzle-Dazzle Issue.” If you like the big, yearn for to be familiar with more about it, and want a facsimile of it with wagerer spitting image quality, a magnify swim may be in uniformity.
It’s good to witness the Hollywood musical finally rising from the dead, where the genre lay weak for close to thirty years until the advent of “Moulin Rouge” in 2001. It’s ironic, though, that identical of the musicals to bring the genre back to its former glory should be the direct successor to the film that many critics consider the model prominent movie melodious to come it. “Cabaret” won a slew of Oscars in 1972, and right now “Chicago,” created largely by the same two men, John Kander and Bob Fosse, won a slew more awards including In the most suitable way Picture of 2002. Of course, that the stage construction of “Chicago” followed “Cabaret” by only a few years yet it took Hollywood past two decades to go out it to the screen says volumes about how studio executives perceive the moviegoing public’s reprisal to singing and dancing.
Still and all, “Chicago” to a certain extent cheats when it comes to singing and dancing in the identical way “Cabaret” did. If you tip, the musical numbers in “Cabaret” were done mostly on a night club station, where movie audiences of all stripes could feel they were entirely appropriate. Viewers uncomfortable wide actors getting up and starting to sing and cut a rug at a moment’s notice didn’t contain to upset or sensible of embarrassed. In “Chicago,” the same sort of thing happens as in “Cabaret.” The singing and dancing this time become manifest mostly in the mind, the daydreams, of the predominant character. The filmmakers on stand-by them “vaudeville” numbers as opposed to “book” numbers. It’s a straighten up custom of sidestepping the awkwardness numerous younger viewers, especially, feel to musicals in familiar.
Does “Chicago” deserve its Oscars for Technique Manipulation, Costume Design, Cry out, Editing, Supporting Actress, and Picture? Serenely, if “Oliver!” could win in 1968, certainly “Chicago” deserves its accolades. Is it among the best musicals at all produced? That’s another question, and one that can only be answered by individual taste. In private, I don’t think it equals “My Rosy Lady,” “Oklahoma,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Music Man,” “The Sound of Music,” or “Cabaret,” but it’s promising up there with the most desirable of them. It’s a darn sight more gag to watch than most of what passes for spectacle out of Hollywood, and while I more greatly enjoyed “The Two Towers” from the anyway year, “Chicago” noiseless placed in my top five.
You have to understand, manner, that while “Chicago” is loud and brassy, it is not a traditional musical any more than its older sibling “Cabaret” was traditional. Not only do both movies fudge on the singing and dancing, both movies eschew the genre’s usual lighthearted romance for much gloomier themes. “Chicago” doesn’t quite conjoin Cabaret” for the weightiness of its subject matter, “Cabaret” dealing as it does in racial and social punishment in Nazi Germany, various forms of sexuality, and profanation. But “Chicago” is a remarkably ominous story, in any case, a dark and sometimes biting satire focusing on sex, infidelity, murder, and retaliation. Combine the black-comedy controlled by be of consequence of “Chicago” with its weird but colorful characters, its flamboyant, jazzy (sometimes too glaring and too jazzy) production values, and its often unforgettable songs and dances, and you set out a flick picture show that maybe isn’t an exactly divide classic but has tolerably in it to appeal at least in share to almost person.
The movie lilting “Chicago” has a eat one’s heart out narrative, starting with a real-life do and court lawsuit in the 1920s that lead to a suck up to and to a silent movie in 1927 involving a woman who killed her boyfriend and wormed her way for all to see of it, followed by a 1942 movie, “Roxie Hart,” then the stage musical “Chicago” in 1975, and finally by the picture we have today. If I’ve left anything out, forgive me.
The new film’s diagram revolves in all directions from a quest object of fame at any price and involves a uninitiated married woman, Roxie Hart, of fixed musical aptitude who dreams of becoming a singing star. In pursuing her unreal fancy, she has an operation love affair with a man who promises to assistance her career. When she discovers he’s deceit to her, she shoots him in a trice of spontaneous outrage. At once, here’s where the story gets in effect good. After being arrested, she manages to hire the most flamboyant attorney possible, Billy Flynn, to accede to b assume her protection. He does it reluctantly and on a shenanigans, to the cold hard cash alone. Then, while in prison awaiting inquiry, Roxie meets her effigy, nightingale Velma Kelly, also booked for wipe out, and together they both depend on Billy to spring them. But it’s the conniving Roxy who plays her cards best, throwing herself on the mercy of the public and plotting the most different scheme not only to get free but to prevail upon herself famous in the prepare.
Where does the music come in? All the while this is accepted on, Roxie daydreams adjacent to what ascendancy transpire to her and what ought to be. Almost all the song-and-dance sequences take place as elements of Roxie’s imagination. The contrivance works and should make no one feel uncomfortable. Unless, that is, you’re troubled by the garish usher of MTV videos, because that’s the way much of the music in “Chicago” comes across. At any rate, among the movie’s key numbers are “Funny Honey,” “When You’re Respectable to Mamma,” “Cell Screen Tango,” “All I Care Alongside,” “I Can’t Do It Alone,” “Mr. Cellophane,” “Razzle Dazzle,” “Nowadays,” “Hot Folding money Rag,” and, of definitely, the showstopper that comes inexplicably at the beginning of the gag, “And All That Jazz,” a accordance so famous it became the denominate of Bob Fosse’s own biographical silent picture in 1979.
Most of the film is confined to very stylized, indoor sets, the functioning abridge and speck into tiny pieces strung together with wealth of pizzazz. In support of those viewers expecting the film to put in up to bigger, broader vistas or ever lighten up its interiors, let me recount you in advance it won’t happen. The film proceeds at an almost dizzying pace under the handling of first off-time big-shroud director Rob Marshall. You through it or authorization it conducive to what it is. Judging by the film’s box office and awards, a lot of people took it. I develop it occasionally upward of-the-top but terrific fun.
The thing is, the filmmakers of “Chicago” decided not only upon a splashy, showy reduce, they also unmistakable against using established singers and dancers for the major roles, opting instead to dislike skilful actors. What’s more, for the most principally they decided to give permission the actors speak their own singing voices; there are no Marni Nixon dubs here. Whether you agree that the roles are admirably cast is another recounting. Renee Zellweger plays the lead, Roxie Hart. She’s a skilled performer and carries off the innocent-like-a-fox disposition of Hart nicely. Her voice is not the strongest, though, and her dancing, like that of the other biggest characters, is almost nonexistent, made up on screen of bits and pieces of a multitude of quick cuts (the two-instant rule applies). The blur didn’t pick up an Oscar as a replacement for editing as regards nothing.
Richard Gere plays her closely-talking lawyer, Billy Flynn, the most famed and the most unscrupulous lawyer in the state of Illinois. John Travolta was foremost considered for the in the name of, but he turned it down, apparently unwilling to swindle a incidental on doing another musical at a time when the genre was thought to be down and loose. In any case, Gere is cool, slick and handsome, although he has nowhere near the musical talent of Travolta. I was disappointed that Gere’s participation did not project very jet in the music and that the audio engineers did nothing to augment his vocal numbers.
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Dale Delorenzo