As always, Hollywood unleashed a bevy of winter films catering to the tastes of Academy voters and the wallets of the mass moviegoing public. Sorting out the worthless from the worthwhile can be a difficult task; luckily, we've done it for you.
Wes Anderson's \The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"" is funnier, more emotional, has more action and is all-around more grand than any of the director's previous works. That is why it is his least gratifying film to date.
When ""Rushmore"" popped up in 1998, it came off as an unexpectedly quaint masterpiece that used its dynamite sparingly. Though Anderson's ""Bottle Rocket"" and ""The Royal Tenenbaums"" were excellent films, they fell just shy of ""Rushmore's"" appeal. The first three movies created a reputation for Anderson that would lead to some small amount of disappointment in his later career.
""The Life Aquatic"" falls short of Anderson's earlier works but succeeds as a smart, entertaining film. The leads give stellar performances, secondary characters all have depth and even the pace rolls along at a startling clip. It draws together multiple storylines and elements, and that abundance of distractions is the one thing that disables it.
In ""The Life Aquatic,"" Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is an oceanographer down on his luck and short of cash. He's set on heading another expedition to track down and kill a mythical shark that ate his friend Esteban (Seymour Cassel). As he's begging for money and assembling his motley crew, he's approached by Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), who claims to be his son. Ned joins Team Zissou while Steve's wife, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), leaves it.
As Team Zissou looks for the shark, they raid the research station of Steve's rival, Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), contend with a pregnant reporter (Cate Blanchett) and even take on a group of pirates. There's a lot at play and it comes together in the end, but along the way it gets a little muddled.
Murray is the anchor of the film, bringing stoic grandeur and his share of arrogance. Huston and Blanchett are tremendous as his female foils. Wilson even gives a strangely satisfying performance.
Backing them up, actors like Goldblum and Willem Dafoe as Steve's second-in-command comprise a tremendous ensemble cast. Even the strip girl (Robyn Cohen) and Intern #1 (Matthew Gray Gubler) chip in some bits that make ""The Life Aquatic"" a wonderful film.
Despite the best efforts of all these actors and actresses, the film suffers from its own excess. The cast is great but at times it seems like there's one too many characters in the frame. There's a lot to look at in ""The Life Aquatic""-perhaps too much, which is the flaw that cuts the movie down from another Wes Anderson masterpiece to merely a great film.
Worthwhile movies always reflect an imaginative spirit, but very few seek to directly characterize the beauty and power of the human imagination. Director Marc Forster has undertaken that task with ""Finding Neverland,"" his story of J.M. Barrie's life while he was writing ""Peter Pan."" While the finished product is flawed, the movie delivers rare insight into the soul of a dreamer and offers a memorable and touching display of big-screen magic.
Based on Allan Knee's play, the movie follows Barrie (Johnny Depp) from his days as a playwright lacking inspiration. His marriage and work are lukewarm when he happens upon the Davies family while writing in the park one day. Barrie quickly bonds with the widow Sylvia Davies (Kate Winslet) and her sons. He finds new vigor in helping the boys explore their imaginations, and in doing so is himself inspired to create his most famous work.
At first, the movie suffers from too cautious a stylistic approach. Forster (""Monster's Ball"") plays it safe with by-the-numbers compositions and editing, merely evoking a mystical world instead of allowing the audience to really inhabit it. His constrictively straightforward style is odd for a movie that does not adhere strictly to facts; Davies was not actually a widow, for starters.
But the strength of the film comes in breaking the mold of biographical films, delineating the spirit and inspiration of its subject's greatest moments, rather than merely parading a dry chronology of his life. Forster becomes more daring during Barrie's games and adventures with the children, alternating seamlessly between the real world and the imagined one. And these two worlds converge transcendently when Forster portrays the first performance of ""Peter Pan.""
Forster is aided by what audiences have known for years: No one captures the beauty of make-believe better than children and Johnny Depp. The playful chemistry between Depp and the perfectly cast boys-particularly with Freddie Highmore as Peter-elevates the film. Meanwhile, Depp delivers a subdued, introspective performance that is contrasted nicely by the two leading ladies, Winslet and Radha Mitchell (""Man on Fire"") as Barrie's wife, who each lend gravitas to their more high-strung characters.
But for all the elaborately orchestrated scenes in ""Finding Neverland,"" the movie's most memorable moment comes in a simple shot of Barrie and his wife retiring to their separate and adjacent bedrooms for the night. As Mary enters her dark room, we see her husband calmly turn on his light and step into Neverland before shutting the door.
This is indicative of the movie at large. ""Finding Neverland"" is a constant struggle between dream and reality, as Forster always keeps one timid foot grounded in reality as Depp moves calmly into fantasy. But what elevates the movie to one of 2004's best is the few moments in which Forster lets us walk with Depp into Neverland, instead of shutting the door behind him.
""Ocean's 11"" proved to be one of the high points of 2001, showcasing a talented cast headed by George Clooney and Brad Pitt supporting a well-written adaptation of the Rat Pack's original film. Unfortunately, the sequel chose style over substance, and heavy doses of charm were unable to keep the story afloat.
The film opens three years after ""Ocean's 11,"" with Danny Ocean (Clooney) and Rusty Ryan (Pitt) settling down after their $160 million heist. However, vengeful casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) has tracked them down and wants his money back with interest, forcing them to regroup their old team and head to Europe for a new caper. Along the way, they encounter two new faces: Rusty's ex-girlfriend and Interpol agent Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and the 'Night Fox' (Vincent Cassel), a legendary thief with his own plans for the team.
Clooney and Pitt once again anchor the movie with their calmness and dry humor, while Matt Damon renews his role as the rookie thief tormented by the elders. Elliot Gould, as a flamboyant casino owner, delivers one of the film's best performances, and the bickering Malloy twins (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan) are consistently hilarious.
Sadly, the cast's magnetism and humor can only go so far without a good story, and they were given one of the worst. Using a script that was rewritten from a potential John Woo film, the storyline lacks what made ""Ocean's 11"" such a strong film: a big payoff. There is only a Faberg?? egg that Ocean and the Night Fox keep stealing, even when they are only getting a replica. By the end of the film, the egg has been stolen back and forth so many times that not even director Steven Soderbergh seems to know who has it.
The cast is poorly used. Two of the original film's best characters are practically exiled from the film, either refusing to join the heist or sent straight to prison. Zeta-Jones is charismatic enough to match Clooney and Roberts, but her character is unable to take a stance on her relationship with Pitt. Cassel is only an arrogant French stereotype, more comparable to the Merovingian from ""Matrix Reloaded"" than a master thief.
The end of the film is perhaps one of its most telling points, with the eleven original cast members gathered around poker tables throwing around money. It seems like they had fun getting together and didn't care if there was a reason or not-the film was simply a pretext. To enjoy this film, the trick is to adapt that same mindset and focus on the acting and humor, because paying attention to the plot is hopeless.
The holiday season is a great time for studios to pump out movies luring free-spending audiences to see sequels that fall short of expectations. It seems as if moviegoers have completely ignored critics, who lambasted ""Meet the Fockers"" as nothing but a tired and over-sexualized comedy of errors.
Gaylord Focker (Stiller), fianc?? Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo) and her parents Jack (DeNiro) and Dina (Danner) load into Jack's new high-tech RV along with grandson Little Jack and a returning Jinx the cat (both used to the maximum of their simplistic comedic possibilities) to meet Gaylord's parents living in Florida. After an uneventful opening sequence of relative calm and mild banter, the movie introduces Bernie (Hoffman) as a lawyer who gave up his practice to be a stay-at-home dad. Roz (Streisand) is the breadwinner of the family, a sex therapist who specializes in senior sexuality-emphasized in a cringing geriatric yoga scene that will haunt habitual yoga-goers of the under-30 crowd for some time to come.
The movie continues with sequence after sequence of physical comedy, mistaken motives and scripted small talk with the Fockers that brings out the copious amounts of over the top, gross-out sexual humor that the movie is criticized for.
Having no apprehension discussing the sex life of themselves, their son or even of Jack and Dina, Bernie and Roz are overbearing, affectionate parents who meddle more than they realize. A whipped cream-covered Streisand and a sock-puppet therapy session with Danner shifts the story into a welcomed exploration of aging marriages-not particularly hip, sexy, nor something commonly explored within pop culture. While this may disgust younger audiences who will argue that the movie is in poor taste, the baby boomers have flooded theaters to see middle-aged sex-capades played out with as much smut and raunch as any twenty-something film.
In the midst of Oscar season, major studios release films that are purported to be the cream of the cinematic crop from respected auteurs and indie wunderkinds alike. James L. Brooks is no stranger to this time of year, and his latest Oscar hopeful ""Spanglish"" does not deviate from his tried-and-true formula of bittersweet-yet-cozy comedy-drama. However, while ""Spanglish"" indeed possesses the characteristic sloppiness of Brooks' earlier movies, he replaces his usually keen dialogue and wry insight for pandering and a suffocating amount of sentimentality, and the result is one of the worst films of the year.
This trite, cloying film begins with a framing device that unintentionally attracts negative attention to itself. Brooks turns his satiric eye on a series of amazingly corny Princeton admissions letters (which are read aloud), but then chooses to linger on an especially sappy one that constitutes the voiceover for the main film. Said voiceover is by Cristina (Shelbie Bruce), who recounts the story of her mother Flor (the delectable Paz Vega), a noble, headstrong woman who unwittingly changes both her and her daughter's lives by working as a housekeeper to the neurotic Clasky family in Malibu.
This quirky tribe consists of John (Adam Sandler), a celebrated chef, and Deborah (T??a Leoni), a frazzled and exasperating housewife. Also in the house are Deborah's boozy mom (Cloris Leachman) and the couple's two kids (including a daughter struggling with self-esteem issues). These people from very different backgrounds converge chaotically, and their seemingly endless conflicts drench the audience in a sea of celluloid schmaltz.
To his credit, Brooks secures an intriguing performance from Sandler, who admirably salvages some truly poignant moments from his shoddily written role. This is his first performance as a normal guy-even his turn in ""Punch Drunk Love"" was a version of his typical irate man-child character-and perhaps more roles like this will broaden his appeal.
Cloris Leachman is also quite funny in an exuberant role that is, in many ways, the polar opposite of her hilarious performance in ""Bad Santa"" (this grandma opts for fixing martinis instead of sandwiches). Paz Vega manages to provide a warm, alluring aura that overshadows some of the clumsy screenplay's clich??s as well.
But even dialogue so terribly artificial and overstated is not the worst aspect of ""Spanglish."" The character of Deborah Clasky as portrayed by T??a Leoni is one of the most grating, spectacularly obnoxious characters to grace the silver screen in a while. If Brooks had ended ""Spanglish"" with that succubus getting hit by a train, this would be the feel-good movie of the year.
There is a perceptive, endearing culture clash dramedy that sporadically emerges from beneath the sap, but it is continually covered by Brooks' saccharine craftsmanship and Leoni's woefully over-the-top, misguided acting.
