Nicholas Thurkettle

Originally posted 5/29/04

Van Helsing
Director: Stephen Sommers
Writer: Stephen Sommers
Producer: Stephen Sommers, Bob Ducsay
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley

How cool is that?, writer-director-producer Stephen Sommers seems to be saying with every flourish of over-emphatic music, every digital monster leaping into frame, every shot of figures swinging across endless chasms. How cool is that?

I regret to answer: not very.

It’s not that he lacks for resources. First, he has at his disposal heavyweights of movie-monster-dom like Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley), and the Wolfman; plus a cameo by another famous literary beast. One fantasizes about how Godzilla might somehow be invited to the party.

And second, you can see the expense on screen. Cinematographer Allen Daviau (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) and production designer Allan Cameron (Willow, and Sommers’ two Mummy movies) lavish the screen with their work. Even the gorgeously-dilapidated windmill Frankenstein’s Monster is chased into by the de rigeur torch-wielding angry mob looks expensive. Whenever smoke and fog were needed, I suspect they simply burned piles of $100 bills.

No, where Sommers fails to make Van Helsing cool is – and this one has a pesky way about it – in his script, which knots itself into an irreconcilable mass of arbitrary fantasy rules that, in the end, fail to prop up the absurd plot.
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Originally posted 5/15/04

Laws of Attraction
Director: Peter Howitt
Writers: Aline Brosh McKenna and Robert Harling, from a story by Aline Brosh McKenna
Producers: David T. Friendly, Marc Turteltaub, Beau St. Clair, Julie Durk, David Bergstein
Stars: Pierce Brosnan, Julianne Moore, Michael Sheen, Parker Posey, Frances Fisher, Nora Dunn

Who are these people? I shouldn’t be so confused about the desires and emotions of the lead characters of Laws of Attraction, especially since it goes to the trouble of thumping me over the head with them every two or three minutes. The only rational conclusion is that they aren’t behaving like human beings. The movie is a much more relaxing experience once you’ve decided that.

Let’s start with their jobs. Both Daniel Rafferty (Brosnan) and Audrey Woods (Julianne Moore) are billed as divorce attorneys who’ve “never lost a case!” I may be ignorant, of course, but since divorce settlements are often about negotiation and grudging compromise, wouldn’t the win-lose dynamic not apply in a great number of cases? Maybe they just skip those cases to pad their record.

We meet Woods “tagging along” and taking surreptitious notes while her mother (Frances Fisher) tours the expensive townhouse of her latest target. Then, having lunch afterwards, she says something which amounts to “Yes! This information is just what I need to succeed at the big, important case which I, a divorce lawyer, am undertaking.”

Never mind that her mother knows both her profession and the purpose of their subterfuge. The information is for us. I half-expected the screen to freeze and a guy to walk in front of it and say “See how successful she is? You too can become a high-powered divorce attorney like this, by following our series of 10 easy lessons!

The nicest way I can say it is that Laws of Attraction has been made for people who don’t watch many movies, and need everything pointed out to them in big neon signs.
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Yesterday I enjoyed a brief, informal walking tour of Scripps College in Claremont. I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures, for those of you who are into that sort of thing:

All pictures copyright 2009 by Nicholas Thurkettle. All rights reserved.
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Originally posted 5/2/04

Kill Bill: Volume 2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino, based on the character “The Bride” created by “Q + U”
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Stars: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Gordon Liu

When the credits “Based on the character ‘The Bride’ by Q+U” flash in big bold letters over the end credits of the second half of Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti samurai splatter fest Kill Bill, one half expects a little heart with an arrow through it around the “Q+U”. Because once you look past the blood, dirt and sweat caked on The Bride (Uma Thurman) during her murderous kung-fu rampage of revenge, you realize that almost never in cinema history has an actress been shot more lovingly.

Tarantino’s camera is under the direction of Robert Richardson, an Academy Award-winner in his own right most well known for realizing Oliver Stone’s crazed visuals in The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and many others. And this camera adores Uma Thurman, lavishes her, but not in the usual oily-shiny make-the-woman-look-like-a-pin-up way. Tarantino’s love is like the schoolboy who doesn’t know how to express that he likes the girl, so he puts spiders in her lunchbox. Take a second to look when you’re fully in the groove he’s laying down, when the movie’s at its best – you’ve never seen Uma look so beautiful.

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Originally posted 4/30/04

Haute Tension (High Tension) aka Switchblade Romance
Director: Alexandre Aja
Writers: Alexandre Aja, Gregory Lavasseur
Producers: Alexandre Arcady, Robert Benmussa
Stars: Cecile De France, Maiwenn, Philippe Nahon

Those who have lately impugned the stick-to-it-iveness of the French (as people who use phrases like “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” seem to be possibly impugning) would do well to not share such an opinion around the villain of Haute Tension (High Tension in English, the movie has also screened under the title Switchblade Romance). Not that it would matter what you said, or didn’t say, or did, or didn’t do, because this is one single-minded villain, and they will likely kill you anyway. If only their bullish determination could be focused on something more useful than decapitation.

If nothing else, Haute Tension shows that the French, through 25-year old director/co-writer Alexandre Aja, have closed the slasher movie gap with us Yanks. This is as bloody, jumpy, squirmy, cringe-inducing a suite of violence as you’ll see at the movies this year – except for The Passion of the Christ, of course.

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Originally published 4/18/04

Walking Tall
Director: Kevin Bray
Producers: Ashok Armritraj, Jim Burke, Lucas Foster, David Hoberman, Paul Schiff
Writers: David Klass and Channing Gibson and David Levien & Brian Koppelman, based on the screenplay by Mort Briskin
Starring: The Rock, Johnny Knoxville, Neal McDonough, Ashley Scott

How can I help but smile this scene: The Rock opens his shirt to expose his rippling torso to a courtroom; the crowd gasps, and the judge sternly admonishes “I want the jury to disregard what they’ve just seen!”

Well, I think in my sassiest voice, how could they?

With Walking Tall (a re-make of the 1973 movie “inspired by” events in the life of pro-wrestler-turned-take-no-guff-lawman Sheriff Buford Pusser), we’re firmly, proudly, in B-movie country. This is a movie that lists its stunt performers with the same space and typeface size as the actors.

On second thought, that generosity could simply be a clever way to pad the credits, since by the time they’re rolling up the screen barely 80 minutes have passed.

I don’t mind this, I think more movies could stand to be 80 minutes long. There are too many B-Movies trying to pass as A-Movies these days (that’s right, Bruckheimer, I said it).
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My reviews of Week Two’s episodes of Dancing With the Stars are now posted at I’m Not Here to Make Friends. Competition Night here, Results Night here. This week, an egotistical guest judge triggers my latent case of Baz Derangement Syndrome:

“The vein in Aaron’s forehead looks like a writhing python when the judges are talking; it’s like he wants to preemptively explode their heads before they can say anything bad.”