I realized as I was writing the previous entry that I haven’t posted any film reviews in a while, even though they are supposed to be one of the mainstays of Simple Tricks and Nonsense. There are several explanations, not least of which is my tendency to procrastinate, in addition to my equally pernicious capacity for distraction. (That’s a fancy way of saying that I always intend to write a review when I see a movie, but I’m too tired the day I actually see it, so I figure I’ll write about it the next day. But then when tomorrow comes some new topic smacks me in the forehead and I go for it like a cat following a laser pointer, and the next thing I know it’s been a month since I saw that one flick I was going to write about and, oh hell, I really need to catch up, and… Well, that’s probably more than you really wanted to know about my thought processes. Let’s just stick with, “I put things off and I’m easily distracted.”)

As if those weren’t problems enough, I’ve also been afflicted lately with a profound lack of cinematic enthusiasm. Not for movies in general, which I never grow tired of, but rather for the movies that are being offered to me at the moment. I can’t remember a less enticing crop of summer flicks in the fifteen years since I became aware of a distinct “summer season.” I don’t expect great art this time of the year, but I do expect great entertainment, and so far (with only a couple of exceptions that I’ll get to in a moment), it just hasn’t been there. I haven’t seen even the promise of great entertainment until the last couple of weeks.

The summer season started off reasonably well with the likeable but didn’t-bowl-me-over Hellboy. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 13 Going on 30 were both okay, but not real great… and then a month passed before I was tempted to go to the theater again, and that was for Troy, a movie that had been out for several weeks by the time I saw it. In the meantime, I chose to pass on several would-be blockbusters, including Van Helsing, which sounded good but looked like crap when I finally saw some footage (I prefer movies that look like movies instead of Playstation games, thank you very much), and The Day After Tomorrow, which had excellent-looking previews but sounded impossibly dumb once I read a synopsis. The latest Harry Potter looks fine, but I’m not huge on that series and can probably wait for the DVD. As for comedies, well, they’re always a wasteland… Starsky and Hutch? Dodgeball? White Chicks? Please.

Still, I have seen a few flicks since I last posted a review, four to be precise. Of those, two were decent one-timers, one was excellent, and the fourth (which I just saw tonight) was… well, it didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Here are my thoughts on these four films, in the order in which I saw them (and yes, I will try to contain my usual verbosity, as I know people have lives and can’t spend all day reading my blog. I wish they would, but I know better…).

Troy

I love grand historical epics in which men with bulging biceps and long flowing hair try to kill each other with pointy bits of metal. So why wasn’t I more taken with Wolfgang Peterson’s adaptation of The Iliad? I’m really not sure, actually. The film looks great, the action sequences have some interesting and unique choreography, the performances are generally good, and there are a few scenes that brought tears to my eyes — Achilles’ last stand, in particular. But somehow, these positive elements fail to coalesce into a really effective whole. That happens sometimes — I felt the same way about The Green Mile, a film with a number of scenes that are wonderful individually but just don’t amount to much. I hate to say it, but I walked out of Troy thinking, “So what?” I will give the movie this much: Brad Pitt has never looked more beautiful than he does here, and I don’t think he’s ever given a better performance either. He plays the legendary, unbeatable Achilles as the Bronze Age equivalent of a modern-day sports figure or rock star, arrogant and bored, a man others look up to but who obviously wishes he were anonymous. Eric Bana, another good-looking face, is also good as Hector, and I recommend this film for at least one viewing simply because I liked these two guys.

The Terminal

An intelligent comedy-drama about grown-ups, made for grown-ups. What an unusual thing to find between Memorial Day and Labor Day! This film, loosely based on an actual guy who has been living at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris for some twenty years, is the best Steven Spielberg flick since Schindler’s List. (I personally think Schindler very nearly destroyed Spielberg’s career; for a long time after that one, he forgot that his primary mission as a director should be to entertain the audience. He finally started getting back into form with Minority Report, improved with Catch Me If You Can, and has finally roared back to life in this film.) Tom Hanks continues to amaze me by taking huge risks in the roles he chooses, then conquering them so completely that few people even realize that he’s doing anything special. He’s simply brilliant in The Terminal: study the scene in which his character sees news of the civil war that’s shredding his homeland on CNN. The character speaks minimal English, but he can tell from the video what’s happening back home, and the silent horror that grips his face, notably his eyes, as the knowledge sinks in, is absolutely heart-rending. If he didn’t already have two (or is it three?) Oscars, I’d say he would be a contender for another one. Catherine Zeta-Jones is also notable in this film for the courage to look a little bit older and little bit more haggard than she really is. Certainly it’s not the kind of “uglification” that Charlize Theron underwent for Monster, but it was interesting to hear one of the most beautiful women on the planet talk about being 39 and not have many prospects in the love department. The Terminal is quite simply the most satisfying, most entertaining, most likeable film I’ve seen in months.

Shrek 2

Full disclosure: I’m not a big fan of animated films. There are various reasons, but a major issue for me is the tendency for makers of these films to think that they don’t need to speak to anyone over the age of ten. There just isn’t much in the average cartoon that grabs my interest. The original Shrek was a little better than most in this regard because it had a subversive grittiness that I enjoyed (the jokes at the expense of Disney were brilliant) but even that film, which I enjoyed, wasn’t really something I’m going to go back to again. I can describe the sequel the same way: enjoyable, worth a look, not something I’m going to add to the library. Many of the jokes are just variations on what we saw last time, a little bit of the edge has been toned down, and I still think that the notion of Fiona becoming (and remaining) an ogre undermines the whole surface-appearance-doesn’t-matter theme. (I would’ve preferred that she stay human and hot and choose to be with Shrek anyway, but then I guess I’m just weird…) The best thing about Shrek 2 is actually a new character, Puss-in-Boots, voiced by the very cool Antonio Banderas, who sounds like he’s having a real hoot sending up his Zorro persona. I would happily see a Puss-in-Boots movie over a third Shrek film…

The Stepford Wives

Tonight’s viewing quite frankly baffled me. It’s been ages since I saw the original Stepford, but from what I remember, it’s pretty silly stuff and wouldn’t play very well in the modern, post-feminist age. (Basically, men of the late-60s/early-70s can’t handle their newly liberated wives, so they turn them into mindless fembots.) I kept wondering all the way through this new version whose brilliant idea it was to remake such a cheesy relic of a very distant cultural epoch. The script of the new version attempts to update the idea a bit with some talk about the compromises career women have had to make, the way our society has overscheduled and exhausted itself, and the suggestion that maybe the women’s movement wasn’t entirely a good thing for either gender, but I didn’t feel like these ideas were very well thought out. There was a fresh twist in who was actually behind the scheme to robotize the inhabitants of Stepford, and that character had some interesting reasons for embarking on such madness, but the message of the film was badly muddled. So was the film’s tone: is it a drama with some funny bits or a comedy that simply isn’t very funny? The cast tries hard — Nicole Kidman plays the whole thing very seriously, apparently thinking she’s in a much better movie, Christopher Walken is, well, Christopher Walken, and Matthew “Ferris” Broderick plays convincing milquetoast. Glenn Close and Faith Hill are perfect fembots, especially Faith, who I’ve always thought was a little too perfect even in real life, and Bette Midler is amusingly brassy as Kidman’s best friend in Stepford. But the intellectual foundations of the movie are just too unsteady to build much of anything on. It isn’t even clear if the fembots are entirely mechanical or robot bodies into which human brains have been transplanted, or if the wives just have brain-controlling implants but are otherwise human. And is a “Stepford wife” really any man’s idea of the perfect woman? If the “average man” was really going to dispose of his wife in favor of an artificial creation of some sort, wouldn’t that substitute be a lot less Martha Stewart and a lot more Jenna Jameson? I don’t know, just a thought. In the end, The Stepford Wives isn’t really a bad movie, but it has a lot in common with the wimpy husbands who would prefer a fembot over a powerful woman because their ego can’t handle their wives making more money than they do: it’s flaccid and not very satisfying.