Volume 3, Issue 10
May 10 - May 23, 2001

Movies

CENTER OF THE WORLD

Most of the time, I'm fairly stupid. Before I saw Center of the World, I was on the movie's website. A lot of this movie has to do with strippers, and on the website you get to take a tour of a virtual strip club. At one point there was a webcam feed of a topless girl typing me messages on a laptop sitting between her legs. She wanted to know what my name was, and what I'd do to her. She was going on about strawberries or something, so I told her I'd put on a Def Leppard record and pour some sugar on her. She didn't have a response, although on the webcam she looked plenty perplexed and aroused. I thought I'd hit pay dirt and then she started giving me all of these canned responses about how hot I was getting her. It took me a good ten minutes and my computer seizing up before I came to and realized that it was some bullshit simulation.

The rest of the time I'm damn clever. After I saw the preview for Center of the World-- a racy little trailer complete with nudity and the words 'pussy' and 'wet' spoken aloud-- and realized that it was directed by Wayne Wang, (Smoke, The Joy Luck Club) it once again took me a good ten minutes to get over myself and all of the ingenious sex-movie Wang jokes that I could make in my review. Anyway, after my witless stumble through the virtual strip joint, I realized just what a hopeless dipshit I really am. I felt like Peter Sarsgaard probably did while playing the socially stilted young millionaire Richard Longman in this film. This guy's got problems; he's rich and he can't get laid.

He falls for a stripper, Florence (Molly Parker), and offers to pay her a bunch of money to come spend some time with him in Las Vegas. She agrees, but only if there's a zero-penetration clause in their agreement. For a couple of hours each night she dances for him and gives him head and he gets to buy her drinks and meals all weekend.

This movie is a befitting reflection of the spoils of e-culture. This guy has accrued millions of dollars in some sort of dot-com endeavor, yet has the social skills of a polite nine-year-old. Here is a man-child who lies around in a hotel room in Las Vegas teaching a stripper how to play some Doom-type game on his laptop. He is sweet and confused, which is a bit endearing and first and then eventually kind of sad. His life is anchored to his computer and he is numb to its effects on his social life.

Florence is sleek and trashy. Molly Parker is the art-house answer to the tacky-dopiness of Elizabeth Berkley (Showgirls). Even though I read they used body doubles for some of this movie's sex scenes, she seems fairly at ease shaking her shit-- and besides, she played a necrophiliac in 1996's Kissed.

This movie runs like low-budget soft-core porn, which I admire, and for all its DV artiness, never really comes across as being too pretentious, even though it seems to take the relationship at the center of the movie seriously. It also gave me ammunition to help get some of my web-programming shut-in friends out of their houses and into the sunlight.

Watch for the lucky lollipop in the first ten minutes. C+ --Josh Tyson

Movie Review

THE MUMMY RETURNS

The lady sitting next to me while I watched The Mummy Returns must have been unchained, led up a long dark stairway and delivered to the theatre blindfolded and in a wooden wheelbarrow, because I don't think she gets out much. I've never heard somebody squeal, cheer, and spew out advice so much during a movie. It reminded me of bowling as a kid, when your ball was veering into the gutter and you'd do that dance in the opposite direction hoping to change its course. Not only were her warnings not stopping Brendan Fraser from opening cursed tombs, their lack of effect served only to drive her harder. She was so damn excited at times, I was starting to feel guilty for not enjoying the movie much.

After it was over, I felt like I'd been up for three days; I had cold sweats; I couldn't eat. The Mummy Returns is like an Indiana Jones movie on crank with all of these tweaky borrowings from other assorted movies that let it drag the gut-wrenching weight of a bad acid trip.

During a fight scene between two female characters, I saw some definite Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There's also a creepy E.T. full moon shot tied to a blimp ride pulled loosely from The Adventures of Barron Munchausen. To boot, Fraser and his wife (Rachael Weisz) get to have a little Titanic moment on the bow of said balloon. If these films were director Stephen Sommers' non-sequitur targets then he is a genius. But, I kind of got the feeling that it was more of an accident. His pop-culture vacuum bag must have ripped a little at the seams while he was setting up shop.

It's too much ... this movie never lets up. If there's not an extravagant special effect on screen, it's a safe bet that it's corny dialogue or a sappy romantic interlude. Even the end credits are run with a special effect driven backdrop.

Some of the special effects in this movie represent a waste of what I'm sure were millions of dollars. Just like in The Mummy, they keep showing that giant mummy face chasing the heroes. In the first one I think it was part of a sand-storm-- here it's in a flood. I can't imagine anything looking cheesier. Professional wrestle, The Rock also gets to flex and prance as The Scorpion King-- there is already a spin-off movie in the works about this character-- but his turn also ends in a hauntingly bad special effect. Maybe I'm just too old, but most of the CGI effects in movies today just fucking suck. As evidenced by George Lucas digitally jerking himself off with the Phantom Craphole, you can't make a good movie based on pretty, shiny effects alone. Besides, I liked how in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you could plainly see the shitty little clay puppets riding in the mining car at the end. I even liked the bogus looking torso that Mola Ram pulled the beating heart out of. I think when making action/ adventure films, filmmakers had to be more creative a few decades ago.

Fortunately, The Mummy Returns never seems to be trying to rise above its retarded '40s comic-book roots, and therefore is a swift and painless Hollywood flossing exercise. C--- Josh Tyson

Movie Review

ABOUT ADAM

Why is it that every time I'm about to give up on a film genre, when I fig-ure nothing new is ever going to come out of that category, someone goes and proves me wrong, temporarily restoring my hope?

That's what happened with About Adam, the latest romantic comedy to be imported from Ireland. The origins probably have something to do with why this is more enjoyable than others in its genre. Ireland, after all, has a habit of producing two kinds of movies: very, very depressing dramas and comedies that, while not the funniest movies in the world, tend to keep their audiences smiling for at least a couple hours.

This one looks at what happens to Lucy Owens' family when she leaves her depressive stand-up comic boyfriend and falls for the most likable man in Dublin. He immediately wins the approval of the whole family, literally charming the pants off of Lucy's sisters. His various affairs are the focus of the story, which is told four times from the viewpoint of each Owens sibling.

When you get down to it, About Adam isn't really about Adam. While the title character gets more screen time than anyone else, part of what makes this movie work is the way it tells more about the people Adam affects than it does about him. Adam is more of a catalyst than a character, throwing the lives of one Dublin family into upheaval.

Not that they seem to mind. The other refreshing aspect of About Adam is the adulterer isn't hastily condemned. Rather than make Adam a villain who tears the

Owens clan apart, writer/ director Gerard Stembridge looks for the positive possibilities of infidelity, and actually finds a few. There are no tragic, melodramatic moments for the women of the movie to make us feel sorry for them, nor are there scenes of anger brought on by Adam's cheating. Everyone seems to be happy living in the moment, barely avoiding consequences and getting all the pleasure they can out of any given situation. That Stembridge manages to sell the audience on the idea of guilt-free infidelity is quite an accomplishment by itself. Keeping us entertained while he does it speaks volumes about his potential as a filmmaker.

It doesn't hurt that Stembridge had a good cast to work with. While none of the roles are particularly challenging, the actors fit nicely into their roles and seem to be having fun with the light-hearted material. Stuart Townsend brings just

enough irony to the part of Adam to keep him from seeming like another pretty face, while Frances O'Connor, Kate Hudson, and Charlotte Bradley all do well with stock characters that grow under Adam's influence.

About Adam will probably be forgotten within a few years. There isn't anything really groundbreaking about it, and it won't win any major awards. But it is thoroughly entertaining, and that's enough to make it worthwhile. B --Chris Ward

Movie Review

THE DISH

When making movies about the great space race of the '60s, sentimentality is an occupational hazard. There's a tendency to candy coat and sentimentalize the whole endeavor of putting man on the moon, and deservedly so, since the players were quite heroic, and the mission was grand and successful. Still, it looked like The Dish-- an Australian movie about one unlikely hamlet's role in the 1969 Apollo 11 mission-- might finally slip a bit of outsider's jaded perspective into the genre.

Not so. The Dish is just as corny and overblown as any other recent space flick ... maybe even more so. The story concerns a town down under called Parkes, which happens to own the only satellite dish in the Southern hemisphere large enough to receive television pictures from space. Naturally, when the time comes for man's walk on the moon, Parkes is selected to aid NASA in capturing pictures during the 12 hours that America isn't pointed in the right direction.

Sam Neill plays the dish's curator, and Patrick Warburton takes on the role of NASA's appointed American supervisor for the mission. There's a small resentment between the Australian crew and this know-it-all American scientist, but the conflict is mild. In fact, considering all that happens (the story is based on fact), every conflict is mild. Even the life-threatening turn of events at the end fails to generate any suspense.

There are two or three genuine laughs (not enough, since the trailer played this up as a comedy), and the movie does convey a proper sense of awe at the appropriate historical moments. I'm not sure if this was meant to be a powerful movie or not, but if it was, it failed. Only the easily amused and ready-to-cry will get anything out of The Dish other than glassy eyes and the desire to run out of the theatre and do something more exciting. D --Chris J. Magyar

DVD REPORT

NUDE ON THE MOON

Let's tip our hats to Doris Wishman, an authentic feminist pioneer. She was probably the only, and certainly the most prolific, female director to (ahem) bust into the field of the '60s Nudie Flick. While she remains most famous for the films she made with pneumatic android Chesty Morgan (Deadly Weapons and Double Agent '73, also available on DVD), this film's title alone assures its place in the Exploitation Movie Hall of Fame.

Moreover, Ms. Wishman was a genuine auteur. She seems to have created her own cinematic language, spurning the one created by Chaplin, Keaton and Griffith, which every other director seems to employ. Did John Ford regularly shoot conversations from behind the head of the person talking, so that we looked upon the face of the listening party? Did Hitchcock's camera wander away mid-scene to examine the objects atop a nearby dresser? Did Howard Hawks constantly cut away from events to showcase tight close-ups of the character's shoes?

As for the film's, er, plot, well, there are these guys ... and they build a rocket to the moon ... and, uh, there's nudes up there ... well, okay, they're really just topless, but still....

That's about it, really. In other words, Gone With The Wind, eat your heart out. (Did I mention the funniest 'spacesuits' in cinema history? Or the toy rocket ship, which more than once completely changes shape? Or the song "Moon Doll," which they sing like a billion times? Or the bizarre fascination the Earthmen exhibits towards dry ice fog when there're all these topless women around? Or the larding of cold crème in a guy's hair to suggest he's old? Or...)

Being a Something Weird DVD, this one is typically packed with amusing odds and ends. First is the trailer for our feature presentation. The ones for nudie flicks tended to be quite long and this one is no exception, lasting over six minutes. Following this is a hilariously sexist five-minute short. This features an attractive blond stripping out of her spacesuit (repeat to yourself that it's just a show) in order to distract perhaps the cheapest-- and most phallic-- moon monsters ever. And what female viewer won't be enchanted when hearing a narrator intone: "Maybe space driving is easier for dizzy dames ... there's less traffic for them to snarl up"? A--- Ken Begg