The new Jackie Chan flick, The Tuxedo, opened yesterday and frankly I expected it to steamroll Reese Witherspoon’s Sweet Home Alabama. Neither got great reviews but the Chan appeal, with Jennifer Love Hewitt providing the hottie factor, should have done the job. Surprise, surprise because according to Box Office Mojo, the Southern fried romance walloped this one on opening night, 12.8 to 4.5 (millions).

We went with Chan, though, and our theater at a lunch time showing was mostly full and a friend reported being left in the cold by a sell out in Daly City. And though the reviewers had nothing good to say about The Tuxedo, we enjoyed ourselves and had many laughs. Chan is 48 years old now, still able to outfight the baddies but willing to take it easy if it won’t hurt the film. Regardless of what was written, Chan made reasonable choices in this film.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not the film of the year of even the best film I saw this month. It is, however, funny and creative. There’s one scene in particular I’m thinking of here, where Hewitt is in her office on the phone with Chan and one of her coworkers keeps holding up “I love you” notes to her, which she crumples and tosses. Screenwriter Michael Leeson has a very impressive oevre going back to Love, American Style and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, so that’s not too surprising.

Recommended for the fun

The official site is here but for some reason I can’t really get the page to come up. YMMV.

Anyhow, this film is an attempt to bring another high profile Asian filmmaker to a more global audience and, of course, to create another action franchise but I don’t know if the grosses will be there to warrant a second film. This was not well-reviewed, to say the least, and couldn’t even surpass the aging (but leggy) Greek Wedding on opening night.

So here we have rogue DIA agent Lucy Liu taking on her boss (Gregg Henry), who apparently stole FBI Agent Antonio Banderas’ wife Talisa Soto (and child), over a deadly nanotech weapon that Henry stole. The FBI gets wind of it and Assistant Director Miguel Sandoval goes out into the field to bring Banderas back to the job; he’s been mourning Soto for seven years but hasn’t lost any of his skills or forgotten anything. The bait? The wife is still alive and after the assignment he will give up the information.

Henry and Soto are now married, with child, but Liu, all on her own, takes down a protective detail transporting the boy and sticks him in a cage in a cave. Henry has used the boy to transport the weapon across the border–in his blood–but for some reason the movie appears to take place in Vancouver. Not just shot in Vancouver, with the Canadian city standing in for, say, Chicago as it often does but the actors tell us it is Vancouver. The producers seemed to realize this little problem (why would a top American government official live in Canada?) and threw a fig on it by having Sandoval say something early on about a transnational task force but this is just one of numerous absurdities.

I mentioned a high profile Asian filmmaker and I didn’t mean just the Chinese Liu but that the director is Kaos (actually a Thai man whose full name is a mouthful: Wych Kaosayananda). The cast is very global: Soto, Sandoval, and Banderas are Latino, Henry’s top man is Scotsman Ray Park (yes, Darth Maul from Star Wars: Episode I and Toad from X-Men), and Banderas’ partner is the Chinese-Canadian actor Terry Chen. But I think the main takeaway I had from the direction was that Kaos is in love with fire or, more precisely, with flame, at least judging by the loving way he films the flames from the many, many explosions.

Liu, who is hardly some FOB Chinese star unable to speak English, has almost no lines; her body counter is higher by far than her word count. Banderas is the same stereotypical world-weary near alcoholic he so often plays. The script was written by Alan B. McElroy and a look at his oevre shows he, like so many in Hollywood, shows up for a payday but doesn’t always feel the need to put his heart into his work.

Recommended for major action or Lucy Liu fans only, but barely

A modern variation on Catcher in the Rye, Tadpole sets an upper west side Manhattan 15 year old boy on a Thanksgiving school break he’ll never forget. Mature beyond his years, capable of discussing Voltaire in the original French and so worldweary he has no difficulty being served in a bar, Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford, who’ll follow this up by playing Pyro in X-Men 2) has taken the train home from his Connecticut prep school to tell his stepmother Eve (the always alluring Sigourney Weaver) that his father (John Ritter) doesn’t treat her well enough and he is in love with her. Hijinks, of course, ensue though this is not major studio teen romantic comedy.

No, in Tadpole, director/co-writer Gary Winick has created the latest intelligent independent comedy, a worthy follower to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Stanford and Weaver are excellent, Ritter is a weak link, Bebe Neuwirth is luscious and lascivious as stepmom’s best friend and even Robert Iler (Tony’s son on the Sopranos) is quite good as the Grubber’s best friend.

Note that although there is no nudity or blood splatter (well, no violence at all) and essentially no cursing, Tadpole deserves at least the PG-13 rating for it’s sophisticated subject matter.

Another Dollar Movie Night excursion that more than paid off!

Definitely recommended

I’d been looking for this film for months, since I started spending so much time with the Sweet One, because it’s one of my all time favorites and she’d never seen it. Fortunately BBC America cablecast it earlier in the week and Tivo stored it until we had some time. I consider it one of a trio of smaller, character-driven movies that came out in the early 1980s along with Chariots of Fire (also produced by Sir David Puttnam) and Barry Levinson’s Diner.

Dealmaker Peter Riegert is sent by corporate head/crazy old man Burt Lancaster to negotiate the purchase of a small coastal village in very northwest Scotland so that their company can build a new terminal and refinery. Picking up a native, though not local, lackey when he arrives in Scotland, he needs to work out the deal with the wily, randy hotelier/accountant/barkeep Denis Lawson. The locals decide to keep Riegert on the hook to get the most money but this is mainly a way for writer/director Bill Forsyth to keep us in the quaint little village (two fisherman argue over whether dollar has one or two l’s in it) and introduce us to people who really aren’t terribly well acquainted with the second half of the 20th century. Plus the amazing natural beauty of the barely touched by human hands territory and, I would guess, they filmed in late Spring or mid-Fall.

Peter Riegert never really lived up to his promise as an actor but he did make three really good movies: Animal House (his film debut), this one, and 1988’s Crossing Delancy, where he was amazing as Amy Irving’s reluctant, old-style matchmaker-arranged suitor. In Local Hero he really delivers as we fall in love with Furness through his eyes and feel his heart melt. At the open he is pissed about having to go on the road (”I’m more of a Telex man, really. I could wrap this up in an afternoon from the office.”) but at he end he is sad and reluctant to leave. Lawson is his key counterpart, a classic city versus country faceoff, befriending Riegert yet keeping him at enough distance to try for every last bit of money. The one mistake, though it does give Forsyth a way to his ending, is bringing Lancaster to Scotland to finish the deal when a last minnute obstacle appears to derail the entire deal.

I would write more about why this is such a favorite of mine but I’m having difficulty putting the reasons into words well: Riegert and Lawson’s performances, the beauty of the locale and Jenny Seagrove, Mark Knopfler’s enchanting music, Forsyth’s script. Just see it.

Absolutely recommended

I haven’t been to the movies in a couple of weeks and I’d avoided this movie based on the terrible reviews in the newspapers. But there wasn’t anything else playing at the Dollar Movie night over in Milpitas (or Tiny Penis as the less than reverant locals like to say) that could be agreed upon. So we saw Sum of All Fears, the Ben Affleck re-imagining of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character.

Ryan’s books are huge bestsellers and yet the series hasn’t done so well on the big screen. Alec Baldwin didn’t work out and Harrison Ford was just too old when he made his first appearance–sometimes the Hollywood studios get caught up far to much in star power. So Clancy and fellow producer Mace Neufeld decided that, with so many more Ryan novels yet to be filmed, they needed a fresh start with a younger actor and got the 30 year old Affleck, who will be thrilled to have the $15-20 million dollar paychecks these films are sure to bring him. The creative types also needed to revise the Ryan character, who is in his late 30s and at a more advanced stage in his CIA career in the novel, and so they made him just one of the analysts in the CIA’s Russia section. John Clark (played by Liev Schreiber in place of Clear and Present Danger’s Willem Dafoe) is another major character in the Ryan world and the script has him younger than the novel, though just as weary of fieldwork and just as efficient and deadly. They also changed the villains from Muslim terrorists to neo-Nazis although this was a pre-9/11 decision, but that was probably a wise choice.

Overall, I have to disagree with the critics. There were parts of the plot that got compressed too much and not everything made enough sense–girlfriend Dr. Muller is standing in front of big glass windows as the bomb goes off, the glass is blown in towards her and the pressure wave throws her 10 feet or so, but she is essentially unharmed and doesn’t get enough radiation exposure to do any damage. John Clark is almost as good at slipping in and out of personas as Jarrod from The Pretender but with a better travel budget and superior tools. The film moves so fast that it doesn’t always take the time to make sure we know who a particular character is.

But Affleck was strong as Ryan, Morgan Freeman puts just the right amount of wry in his delivery, Alan Bates delivers the leader of the neo-Nazis as someone who really believes in his own psychotic vision, and the remainder of the cast does well, especially the US Cabinet members and Michael Byrne as Russian spymaster Anatoli Grushkov. Phil Alden Robinson keeps his finger on the action button, with minimal stops at the exposition station, and the way he handled the big explosion was difficult to watch because of how real it seemed.

Recommended