It’s 20 years down the road but Eddie Wilson’s music is heating up the charts in a way it never did in the old days. The a-holes at the record company have even found some unreleased music Eddie made without the Cruisers–but was it made before or after he drove off that bridge? Meanwhile Eddie is alive, living in Montreal under a new name, working construction, making music only for himself.

Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! starts with a decent premise, Michael Pare returns as Eddie and has John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band back again to make the music. But fans of the original movie will quickly realize that this one was made simply to cash in and is devoid of any originality. The plotting is split between an A story showing a band coming together and a B line mystery of lost and now found Eddie Wilson tapes. Eddie is driven by his music and neither he nor the band is good enough for what is in his head. Even the Eddie Lives! songs are consciously chosen to mirror the energy and pace of the first.

Made by a Canadian cast and crew, other than Eddie only Matthew Laurance plays the same role except in a few brief flashbacks (taken from the first, not newly filmed), even the writers (Rick Doehring and Charles Zev Cohen in essentially their only IMDB-credited production) and director (Jean-Claude Lord???) were clearly chosen for low cost. Though I’ve never met these people and have nothing against them, the entire production is low budget and, if I recall correctly, went straight to video without benefit of theaters.

In a sense I was disappointed by Eddie Lives! because Eddie and the Cruisers was such a wonder to me. The obvious connection was to Bruce Springsteen, with a similar mythos and music, was really exciting at a time when Born in the USA was all over the charts. But the second film came out in the shadow of Bruce’s split with the E Street Band and, besides, what happened to Pare’s career in the six years between them?

Modestly recommended

I hope I never really get caught up in simplistic politcal correctness yet, on the other hand, I’m sure that humor derived from negative portrayals and comments is usually coming from a wrong place. That conflict surfaced as I was watching and enjoying Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa yesterday.

Skipping right over the questionable tactic of producing an adult movie that many kids will see advertised and want to watch themselves, and this is not a movie I’d recommend at all for the under-15 crowd, screenwriters John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (previous claim to fame: Cats & Dogs) use so many human attributes and characteristics as targets of mockery that it’s hard to know where to start: alcoholism, sexual abuse, race, height, a mentally-challenged child whose father is in prison and mother is dead, age-induced loss of contact with reality, wussiness, suicide and murder.

However, the movie is genuinely funny and only afterwards, when I began thinking about what I’d write, did the vast negativity of the picture came to me. The basic story came from the Coen Brothers and they’ve shown a definite lack of sensitivity in past movies such as Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Fargo yet have an ability to make the films work. The director here is Terry Zwigoff, who’s garnered some notice for a couple of offbeat movies based on comic books, especially Ghost World; this is Zwigoff’s first shot at a decent budget and a mainstream production.

Beyond the politcal correctness, though, this film is genuinely nasty and filthy. Santa rarely utters a sentence fragment that doesn’t include a curse word, even when talking to small children and drinks everywhere; he targets ‘hefty’ women for his favored backdoor sex except when he gets together (in a car, in a hot tub, whereever they can) with Santa sex-obsessed Lauren Graham. There’s a gratuitous subplot where the Kid keeps getting picked on and beat up by a slightly older neighborhood bully. And so on.

The actors are mainly TV types: Bernie Mac (who seems to be the ‘cool black dude’ these days), Graham (who isn’t really hot enough for her role but gives an okay performance), John Ritter (last movie role but not quite meebly enough here), Lauren Tom (convincing as a shrew but is that what her character is supposed to be?) and even minor roles such as Billy Gardell (the Roundtable Pizza guy) and Ethan Phillips (Neellix on Star Trek: Voyager).

Props to Thornton, though I wonder if–and I’m basing this solely on press reports of his behavior–he isn’t just more or less playing himself in a Santa suit. Tony Cox is pretty good as his accomplice, the real brains of the outfit or at least the partner able to stay sober for more than an hour at a time. Last props to Brett Kelly, playing the Kid, taking all the abuse that the bad Santa can give and then some.

(Barely) Recommended

Range is not something you expect that much of from creative types. Actors, well, that’s a little different but writers, directors, musicians, even painters generally stay within a certain zone and when you find someone capable of reaching beyond the normal boundaries, that’s quite a pleasant surprise. Kind of like Wynton Marsalis, reaching out from his jazz exploits, where he was from a young age considered one of the greats, to produce some outstanding classical compositions as well.

Perhaps The Good Girl and School of Rock don’t quite put scriptwriter Mike White at that level yet but throw in his Chuck & Buck and you’ve got a pretty good start for someone well shy of 35. The movies are so different that I didn’t realize the connection until well in Good Girl, a drama that has nothing to do with music but in a certain light is the flipside of Jack Black’s epiphany in Rock.

Jennifer Aniston(!) is Justine, a worn-down wife to John C. Reilly’s Phil, working at a sad little discount store in a strip mall in nowhere Texas, 30 years old, no children, a stoner husband and no view to a future. Aniston plays Justine as if all the air had been squeezed out of her body, slumped, totally out of energy. She shows up at work just to get a paycheck, something her cosmetics counter supervisor (Deborah Rush) points out a couple of times. Then she notices a cute, younger new cashier, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who seems as weary as her and when he explains that he’s taken the name Holden (as in Catcher of the Rye’s Caulfield), she’s interested.

Gyllenhaal’s Holden is able to verbalize Justine’s feelings, recognizing a kindred spirit, and he can’t help noticing she’s the hottest female in 30 miles. So he quickly falls for her and Justine falls for the bait. Admittedly, though no real nudity can be seen, the one sexual romp the two have in a cheap motel room is very hot. And with their passion, the pair attempt to burn away the ennui, to find a connection that might bring some light into their dreary lives. Director Miguel Arteta furthers this feeling by setting the movie in winter, with few blue skies but lots of rain and snow on the ground.

Hollywood allows dramas to not end happily, and we don’t get to turn off the TV with Justine and Holden happily ensconced in a cozy apartment together in San Diego, even though the couple does consider running away as an option. Though The Good Girl is major studio-influenced enough to tie down all the loose ends, use up all the foreshadowings and leave the audience satisfied that the title is true rather than ironic.

Recommended

In the ’60s, I Spy was a fun TV show but like far too many films based on similar inspiration, I Spy the movie should never have been made. Eddie Murphy can usually be counted on for a laughs and he does deliver here and Owen Wilson is okay, but director Betty Thomas (yes, the former Hill Street Blues cop) makes everything easy and obvious. She has a track record of doing the same, so no big surprise.

Not recommended

Richard Curtis gives us one of the sweetest movies of recent memory with his meditation on the many aspects of love in Love Actually. This is not a slick, made for Hollywood movie and if you were expecting a love story with Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister falling for Martine McCutcheon’s Natalie, as some of the advertising might lead one to believe, you would be wrong though hopefully not disappointed.

Curtis, who made his directorial debut with this effort, is a veteran screenwriter who has long effective in combining romance and comedy (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral for romantic comedies, most of Rowan Atkinson’s oevre for pure comedy) and I think he’s really put it all together for Love Actually. The film is a melange of vignettes on different types of love, elegantly stitched together, and elevated to a lofty whole by an excellent cast. Grant is definitely a personal favorite, as is Emma Thompson playing his (younger?) sister–her Much Ado About Nothing is in my all-time Top 10–married to philandering Alan Rickman.

Love can be wonderful, sweet, endearing, unanticipated but also hard, painful, demanding, disappointing and unrequited, and Curtis covers them all. This is on my Top 5 for the year and I don’t expect that to change.

Definitely recommended

If you were a fan of the old Airplane comedies, you might enjoy Scary Movie 3. That early ’80s comedy is probably a better point of reference than the first two Scary films, which shouldn’t be too surprising since the Wayans brothers, originators of the series, dropped out and gave control to David Zucker. He wrote and directed Airplane!, then went on to such high brow cinematic achievements as Naked Gun, the Trey Parker/Matt Stone collaboration BASEketball and this year’s Ashton Kutcher gem, My Boss’s Daughter.

SM3 is funny, and lots of laughs but really brings very little from the first two movies except Anna Farris, who had supporting roles previously but takes the lead this time alongside Charlie Sheen, Simon Rex, Regina Hall, Zucker regular Leslie Nielsen, and Anthony Anderson (in dreadlocks). Lots of high profile cameos, lots of pop culture references, and a few aliens. Actually has a plot–Zucker and co-authors Pat Proft and Craig Mazen are pros and able to work in the movie parodies without forgetting the movie isn’t just a collection of sketches.

Recommended