One could consider S1m0ne as an attempt by writer/director Andrew Niccol to comment on the over-importance of actors in movies today, the amazing advances in technology, and the gullibility of the general public (or sheep, as one of my friends calls us). Indeed, that’s just what I would consider this to be. Plus an extremely funny film and another in an long line of excellent performances by Al Pacino.

I’d also give props to Evan Rachel Wood as Pacino’s daughter and Pruitt Taylor Vince as a tabloid publisher who gets emotionally involved in the target of his story. Though not credited for her efforts in the film, model Rachel Roberts plays the title character quite well, though Niccol obviously used technology to change her appearance and voice to a certain degree. Honestly I’d say that Roberts looks better than the digitally enhanced s1m0ne.

The important thing for me, though, is that this is a really funny movie. Lots of density, as I like to call it, where every frame is used to add a laugh if it isn’t need to advance the story. For example, Pacino sets up a meeting for the co-stars of s1m0ne’s second movie, gets them all seated around a table (his office is beautifully decorated with antiques, by the way), and then tells them that the star will only speak with them by phone. He gets them started introducing themselves, runs off, and just barely gets into place when she needs to speak. Niccols also draws his characters very broadly, playing well on stereotypes and audience expectations–the studio executive, the police detective, the sleazy journalists, the unthinking adulation of audiences.

This makes for an interesting sequence of films for Niccols with which to open his career. The first movie he wrote was The Truman Show, then he wrote and directed Gattaca (recently named number two in Wired’s SF Top 20), and then this one. All three explore questions of identity in a technological world. (Note that although Gattaca was released first, it was written second due to the time needed to put the Truman Show deals in place. Niccols wanted to direct the Jim Carrey picture but couldn’t convince the studio and had to hand it to Peter Weir.)

Definitely recommended

Wow, this was a weird movie, the kind you watch and then ask yourself where the fuck did writer/director/lead actor Eric Schaeffer come up with this? Wirey Spindell is an autobiography of someone named Wirey Spindell, the child of hippies, a kid who doesn’t make it to age seven without becoming a sexual predator, who shuttles from school to divorced parent to elsewhere, always fueled by drugs, alcohol, and sex. Until, in college, he realizes that he either stops or dies. And so he goes into rehab and gives up the toxins…and the sex. Until he meets the lovely Callie Thorne (who was a detective towards the end of Homicide: Life on the Streets). Schaeffer tells this story through flashbacks, with three actors playing his younger self, until we get back to the present. Let’s just pray this wasn’t his autobiography.

Recommended if you like weird artsy films

Earlier, while waiting for the Sweet One’s delicious chicken adobo, we took in a classic Jerry Lewis movie, Cinderfella, which concerned family as well but in an entirely different light. Superficially an update of Cinderalla, complete with fairy godfather (the extremely red-nosed Ed Wynn), this really is just a vehicle for Lewis’s physical comedy. Dame Judith Anderson plays the wicked stepmother (Trek connection: Anderson played High Priestess T’Lar in The Search for Spock), Robert Hutton and Henry Silva are the brothers, and Anna Maria Alberghetti as the lovely Princess Charming, staying with Anderson et fils while visiting America to find a husband. Lewis’ family expect her to hook up with Hutton. Wink wink nudge nudge. But this is a prime example of the work Lewis did after leaving Dean Martin; so many dismiss him these days with a snarky comment about how the French love him but that’s unwarranted–in his prime, the late ’40s through the mid-60s, he did work as well as anyone.

Recommended

Saw a really amazing family film tonight called Tortilla Soup. Family in the sense of being about a family although the movie is also fine to watch with the young ones. Hector Elizondo is the patriarch and Elizabeth Pena, Jacqueline Obradors (the latest NYPD Blue hottie), and Tamara Mello are his daughters. The plot is pretty basic, Mom is long since passed away and the daughters each have a romantic episode, and Dad has lost his senses of taste and smell. The action revolves around the kitchen–Dad is a master chef and he’s taught his daughters well–so a nice bowl of popcorn hit the spot.

Director Maria Ripoll is the real master here, bringing out terrific performances from all the actors, framing the shots with lots of bright colors, and managing the pacing spot on. This is actually a remake of an acclaimed Chinese film (co-written and directed by Crouching Tiger’s Ang Lee) called Eat Drink Man Woman but it really works unlike so many other remakes.And I can’t leave out mention of Raquel Welch, who looks amazing at 60, showing as a woman looking to take Elizondo as husband number five. On the surface this doesn’t come across as such a good film but trust me, which probably accounts for it’s less than amazing box office, but it is.

Recommended

Five cute A Squad cheerleaders, who add a sixth along the way, show that, despite being made of Sugar & Spice, when one of their sisters is in need, they are willing to do the deed. So, perhaps that first sentence was a little on the cute side. But that’s about the level of this movie: very cute and not very demanding.

Marley Shelton, who must have been thrilled to be still playing a teenage character at age 27, is the captain of the group and she gets her dream, having the gorgeous quarterback/most popular guy in school fall for her. Only he (James Marsden, who must have signed on to play this doofus before getting the Cyclops role in x_men) knocks her up just before the junior prom so when the tell the folks they’re getting married and keeping the baby, the ignorant parents kick them out. They get an apartment, jobs (she in a supermarket bank branch, he in a video store), and stay in school. Flash forward to the next school year–the movie does without any kind of indication–and Shelton has realized that they just aren’t going to make it.

Then she has an epiphany: her and the girls will rob a bank. One of the other cheerleaders, played by Mena Suvari (and yes, this is well after American Beauty and American Pie), has a mom she’s never met doing life in the joint for killing Suvari’s father. Well, one less than tearful visit later and the girls have gotten all the instruction needed from mom’s pals. They need guns–but not bullets–and lucky for them, since they don’t have the cash for the guns, the dealer has a good looking daughter who’s pining to be a cheerleader. Fern joins the squad, the squad gets the guns.

One last gift from mom in jail, a set of Betty doll masks, and the girls are off to their one-time entry into the life of crime. Everything, mainly, goes well, they get home with piles of cash and a cute bassinet for the mom-to-be. Except…Lisa (The Practice’s Marla Sokoloff), a B Squad cheerleader, is in the supermarket and realizes that the robbers are her rivals.Faster than you can say “Cheerleader captains can’t be seven months pregnant with twins,” Lisa is the new A Squad captain and the alibi for her new pals. The big twist, from the genius word processor of Mandy Nelson, is that the whole movie is being told by Lisa, in flashback, to the FBI while the A Squad sits in a cell. Until she coughs up, at the very end, the alibi.

I guess teen movies are generally supposed to be “fun” and “cute” and not too concerned about taking adult viewers like me on an emotional journey. They are cute, the girls run around in skimpy cheerleading outfits and sometimes just bras and panties (even the ultra-Christian one), and come out ahead in the end. I guess I was expecting a little something more from a movie written, directed (Francine McDougall), and produced (Wendy Finerman) by three women.

Neutral: not bad for a teen comedy but not great either

Mike Hodges and Michael Caine followed up the original (that is, not the crap Sylvester Stallone remake) production of Get Carter the next year with Pulp. In Carter, Caine plays an insider looking to right a wrong but in Pulp he is the outsider trying to figure out an old puzzle. In both films, though, solving the mystery has the beneficial side effect of saving the protagonist’s skin. Caine really was a masterful actor back in the day, totally able to slip into the skin of his characters and not just playing some variant of himself in every film.

Pulp is fairly obscure and I expect the only reason I saw it was that Showtime (and HBO and Starz as well) needs more and more product to fill the ever-expanding set of channels. Tivo seems to understand that I like British crime dramas. The combination works well.

Caine plays Mickey King, a man who ran away from his wife, three children, and funeral home business to pursue his dream of writing gangster fiction (pulp) while living near the Mediterranean. He’s been successful enough (though his publisher continually credits the works to a series of double entendre pseudonyms) that a man (Hart to Hart’s Lionel Stander) has come to make him a mysterious offer: a great man, nearing the end of his life, wishes King to ghostwrite his autobiography. Someone, or some group, does not wish this book written, though, and keeps trying to kill King and the mysterious great man. All the author has to go on in uncovering his nemesis is a photo of a group of men who participated in a weekend of hunting and debauchery many years ago.

The great man is retired, reclusive movie star Preston Gilbert, played by Mickey Rooney, who lives on a great, isolated island estate (this part of the film was made on Malta and there is a good deal of sun-drenched natural beauty to be seen). Gilbert was one of the men in the photo, along with a communist-turned law and order politician whose campaign for office we are shown frequently. This politician, and others, are worried that the central story of a girl’s death during the debauchery will come out in the actor’s life story and they are determined to prevent this.

Mike Hodges, who also directed the recent Croupier, does a decent job of directing, though I give him less points for the script. This film, stylistically, is meant to be seen as in synch with the time in which it was made (1972). King is thrown into events, never able to control them, even at the end where he is laid up in bed and scared off from pursuing his story any further. There are drug-inspired bits thrown in for no plot or character-related reason, such as the sequence of taxi accidents at the beginning. And so forth.

Recommended

Dark British humor in a 1999 BBC telefilm that Tivo Suggests was considerate enough to record for me. Martin Clunes plays Ben Black, the host of TV show called Sex ‘n’ Death, who can’t sleep. He claims the insomnia is due to the heat wave but events suggest other causes, like his deep-seated cruelty to all around him and heartache over losing his new love (the luscious, leggy, breastful Jane Peachey) and his true love (the producer of his show, quite lovely herself, Caroline Goodall, who played Anne Hathaway’s mom in The Princess Diaries).

Besides several episodes of his own series, the movie provides Clunes with a rival host, or Presenter as they say across the Pond, named Neil Biddle (Martin Jarvis) as a foil. Biddle hosts Just for Laughs, a cruel variant on Candid Camera, and the two take turns setting each other up: Black crushes Biddle’s prized Corvette, Biddle puts Peachey onto Black for a (not to be consummated) sexual reconciliation, and finally Black sets ’sister’ prostitutes onto Biddle.

All comes to a climax as Black confronts his internal demons, challenges his viewers to grow up and get over their infantile need to see others humiliated, and threatens suicide. Faked, of course, and hopefully a boost in ratings for the repeat.

Recommended for fans of Brit humor

Loved the movie, hate the website: x X x. Why do these clowns have to make things so difficult? Sure, have it look and sound cool, have plenty of extras like games and wallpaper, but how about also providing the basic information like cast and crew. Even IMDB doesn’t have a good handle on this film.

Enough of that. Vin Diesel breaks out in this film, and breaks out hard. Even reviewers who panned the movie praise the actor. My opinion is that Triple-Ex is the next big action franchise, not Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan or Daredevil (coming early next year), or the Rock as Scorpion King. Actually, I think all four of these actors will do fine and will make numerous action movies that gross lots of dollars. X-Men, if X2 does well next year, will go on for quite a few years although no one actor dominates that series. But Diesel showed more here in one outing than these others have in several opportunities.

The script is by Rich Wilkes, whose previous contributions are highlighted by Airheads and The Jerky Boys, and who apparently spent most of the last five years brainstorming on this concept. I can just imagine him watching Bond after Bond, Arnold after Bruce after Sly, night after night, and thinking what would be the next logical step. He must have kept coming back to James Bond as the perfect model for a new franchise. Who could blame him? Die Another Day is the 20th film in the series, it’s survived through five actors in the role, and countless writers and directors. Bond, though, in many ways is so last century.

So Triple-Ex updated every which way. The character could be any ethnicity except Asian, the nationality is American, but he’s still, in the end, a patriot. The music is completely in your face, except for a disappointing little symphonic theme at the end. The car is as grungy as the character, just the opposite of Bond in both ways. In quite a few ways, xXx is just like 007: the women dig him, he’s always in conflict with his boss, he has a cool R&D team to supply neat gadgets, and he waits until the timer on the bomb shows 0:02…0:01 before saving the world.

Strong supporting cast: Samuel Jackson is the total pro although the scarring seems a touch too much. Asia Argento is bootylicious as well as intelligent. Marton Csokas, the baddie, looks Eastern European but comes from New Zealand where he did numerous roles in TV shows like Xena, Hercules, and Farscape. The actor who plays this movie’s version of Q is good too, reminds me a lot of Alias’s Marshall Flinkman, but I can’t tell you who plays him because the website is so crappy.

One jarring problem, which perhaps they’ll fix for the next go round: why do Jackson and Diesel work for the NSA? Sure, it’s a real American spy shop but the NSA is completely about elint, electronic intelligence. That is, these are the guys monitoring and processing every phone call and every email. They don’t do humint, or field work by humans. Why doesn’t xXx work for the CIA? This movie didn’t begin filming until after 9/11 last year so they could have used the higher profile of the agency after that tragedy. Hmm.

Director Rob Cohen cranked it up several notches from last year’s release, The Fast and The Furious (which I saw recently but didn’t review). The pace matches the music, pounding and throbbing. He puts lots of hotties on display but no real time wasted in bed. Good foreshadowing, good use of high explosives and imaginative tech. Several notches above The Skulls, that piece of Joshua Jackson college dreck.

Cohen should have pushed harder for a producer credit–Vin Diesel got one–because that will be worth money when they replace him as director but that’s his mistake. Neil Moritz, the producer, has a nose for money, just look at his track record. And this movie had a good, but not great, $46 million opening weekend. Austin Powers in Goldmember did $25 million better two weeks ago and Signs did $14 million better last weekend. Diesel, by the way, was paid $10 million for his time and will get “double that” for the 2004 sequel according to an exec at production house Revolution Studios.

Recommended unless you’re an old fart–Diesel is worth the price of admission.

Yeah, baby! I have no clue what the reviewers were going on about when they said Austin Powers in Goldmember was a tired and stale retread of the formula. I walked out thinking about AP4 and how the “secret” ending opened up all kinds of interesting possibilities. Okay, I do understand what the reviewers meant about formula: lots of the same bits from the previous film show up again but dammit they did it really well.

Verne Troyer is the big surprise here, even though he never speaks, with some great physical humor. Michael Caine’s father is spot on, you see just where Austin got his mojo. The Goldmember character, who hopefully won’t be back next time, didn’t work quite as well, but was not really important enough to the film to be a problem. Seth Green and his disappearing hair and incipient insanity gave good laughs.

Maybe next time around we’ll meet Austin’s teenage son?

Highly recommended