Rod Stewart’s old tune The First Cut is the Deepest ran through my mind when I took a break in the middle of watching The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest this morning, which shows how odd our minds work since I don’t think I’ve heard the song since it was a minor hit back in the late ’70s. But it does sort of fit in with the movie, so fair enough.

The First $20 Million is based on a hilarious novel by Po Bronson, has a pretty decent director in Mick Jackson (Steve Martin’s LA Story and the original, BBC TV version of Traffic), and a good screenwriter in Jon Favreau (Swingers). So why the film never got a theatrical release and went direct to DVD/cable is something I don’t understand, though perhaps Norm Schrager’s review on FilmCritic.com is a clue to studio executive thinking on the matter.

Schrage doesn’t seem to have read the book and, while reading his review, I thought that was possibly a problem for him. But films have to stand on their own and by the time this one came out, the boom Dot Com times it depicts had ended, probably souring the tastes of most for a humorous look at the good times. I seem to have an odd ability to ignore such things.

So I laughed quite heartily at the adventures of Andy Casper and cohorts. I thought Favreau and Jackson did a good job of picking the right 100 minutes from the novel on which to focus the film. The meat of the story is an adventure in creating a small company in a garage and they wisely ran quickly through the lead up to get us there. Good comedies usually benefit from a non-comic subplot that provides breaks in the storyline and, while it was done better in the novel, the romance is a good layoff and also contributes to the denouement.

Adam Garcia really does the lead character of Andy Casper–I know a bunch of guys who wish they were just like him from tech company marketing departments, trust me. The other three PC99 team members are a bit more stereotyped, though Jake Busey actually is just right for his demented engineer role as opposed to usually just being a jerk. Rosario Dawson is sweet as the sculptor and Garcia’s love interest while Chandra West (familiar from NYPD Blue where she’s Mark Paul Gosselar’s current love interest Dr. Devlin) is the beautiful bitch with a terrific blow off line about her tits.

Recommended

Difficult to imagine a movie that’s more of a contrast to the afternoon’s fare than writer/director Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, a highly stylized marital melodrama set in 1957. Julieanne Moore, Oscar-nominated for her performance, plays the wife in an odd triangle with husband Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert (yes, 24’s President).

Haynes, an idiosyncratic Art House filmmaker, takes all the elements of a classic ‘50 melodrama–an IMDB reviewer suggests Douglas Sirk and his Magnificent Obsession as the model–and pours in plot elements that could never have been used in that time: homosexuality and interracial romance. The dialog, the sets and clothing, the imagery and coloring are used to emulate a bygone era in a way that simple historical films don’t even attempt to match; if anything, most filmmakers consciously avoid this and aim a modern eye at the past.

Moore, blonde wig and perfect flowing dresses, is the image of a ’50s high society wife, so much so that the local newspaper’s society writer and photographer show up at her home in the opening act to document home and lifestyle. The article, by noting her “kindness to negroes,” provides the opening notes of that plot conflict; eventually, her friendship with Haysbert becomes the primary gossip in their town. Quaid’s journey of self-discovery begins in the opening scene after he’s arrested for DUI but his self-described sickness does not have the same devestating impact. Possibly this is because Haynes is homosexual and not black but I suppose his desire to contrast private and public shame required one or the other to be treated as he did.

Recommended

Ain’t nothin’ in the world like a good face melting guitar solo, am I right? Of course I am. Is there, though, anything more annoying than 108 minutes of in your face Jack Black, especially when everything else about the movie is really good? No, of course there isn’t. Such is the sadness that is School of Rock.

Seriously dude, Jack Black just pushes my buttons. He’s a little bit younger than me, eight years, but we seem to have grown up with more or less the same influences in music and movies (okay, more AC/DC and less Springsteen for him) and yet Black has missed the point completely. The cliche is that there’s a thin line between madness and genius but the other side of that coin is that there’s also a thin line between funny and too much. It’s a line that Jerry Lewis crossed once in awhile but generally knew where it was drawn; Martin Lawrence doesn’t even appear to sense the line’s existence. Black, unfortunately, is closer to Lawrence than Lewis.

Which is really too bad because Mike White (most famous for Chuck & Buck but also last year’s The Good Girl) has written a really funny script and, other than Black’s exaggerations that he probably couldn’t control, Richard Linklater does a superb job of blending a gaggle of 10 year olds with clueless adults. White also decided to act, taking the supporting role of Black’s roommate and pseudo-role model, though that was also probably less than optimal–is Jason Lee too big to take the second banana role these days?

The kids who play Black’s students are just terrific–they actually play the instruments that you see on the screen and were cast for their musical talent as much as (or more than, in some cases), their acting. Frankly, a couple of them can’t act but fit a desired stereotype, but no big deal.

I must say that the ending is about as cliched as you can expect but sometimes cliches work–because of the truth that underlies them–and that’s what happened here. Everything is jeapordized as the lies unravel but, bless their hearts, the kids have learned Jack’s lesson and refuse to lay down. They force Jack to stand with them and even make their parents, cardboard cutouts of people with sticks up their asses, demographically perfect, coo and awe at rebellion. Stickinittodamanitis, indeed.

Recommended

“(2001) Jean Reno, Ryoko Hirosue. When his former lover dies, a French policeman travels to Tokyo to take care of his estranged daughter. Comedy Drama” Well, I think enough of Jean Reno and writer Luc Besson to at last sample any of their movies and this was the oldest thing left on my TiVo stack–what’s a Friday afternoon for anyway? And boy, I’m glad I watched!

Wasabi is a funny, well-done action comedy sort of like Rush Hour except set in Japan and with dialog in French. Plus a little Japanese but at least for the French the film had subtitles. No biggie, since most of the movie is in the action and the dialog is mostly for laughs. Worth it, though, because the laughs are pretty decent although not quite the sideslappers that Jackie Chan had.

Besson is pretty prolific scriptwriter–he fit Wasabi in between The Transporter and Kiss of the Dragon–but he always seems to do well with Reno in hand. Reno is big and bulky, not given to graceful martial arts though quite good with his fists and a gun, and surprisingly adept at delivering straight lines to the funny men. Hirosue is just adorable, especially the red hair, and she provides the emotional weight for the film.

Recommended

Marketing executives have begun to realize that the Hispanic consumers make up more and more of the people spending money in America demographic, hence the numerous Spanish language cable networks, TV and radio stations, and newspapers. All good, all good, for sure but this also means more movies targeting the same audience, and Hollywood likes nothing better than turning out a good chick flick.

Now I’m not a chick, but I’ve seen and enjoyed my share of them. Sadly, Real Women Have Curves is only a chick flick and not a very good one. America Ferrera is quite appealing as the lead actress, playing Ana, a chubby Mexican girl graduating from high school in Los Angeles. Lupe Ontiveros also gives a real performance as Ana’s bitchy, bitter mother.

But even a chick flick needs things like plot and character development to succeed. 90 minutes is enough for the typical teenage-focused movie but writers Josefina Lopez and George LaVoo simply meander among the mother-daughter relationship, the business difficulties of the other daughter, Ana’s budding but meaninglessly (artificially?) shortcircuited romance, and her teacher’s (played by George Lopez) efforts to get her to attend a good university rather than simply repeat her mother’s life.

Director Patricia Cardoso is ultimately responsible for leaving us with little more than eye candy. Movies, the saying goes, are a director’s medium and I just never felt her hands shaping and guiding this film. From beginning to end, there is no change in how Ana relates to her mother, no change in how the mother sees her daughters or acceptance that what was the right choice for her 35 years earlier might not be the best option in the new millenium.

Not recommended