Showgirls 2. No, really.

11810132-greg-travis-as-phil-in-showgirls-2Depending on who you talk to, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is either one of the biggest cinematic disasters of the last 30 years – ineptly acted, written, and danced – or it is a camp masterpiece for the ages – deliberately funny, ironic, and sly. I’m not sure either way. However, the unofficial sequel Showgirl 2: Pennies From Heaven is a great combination of both options. It is utterly incompetently made, with direction and acting only slightly more convincing than what might come from pre-teens with an iPhone. It is also rather funny, and deliberately so. Rena Riffel wrote and directed the movie and stars as hilariously dumb Penny, one of the dancers in the original film, who desperately wants to leave Vegas and become a legitimate star. Her voyage involves murder, prostitution, Freemasons, and more than a few homages to classic scenes from the first film, including a sex scene in a pool that is lesbian version of the iconic and odd copulation of Elizabeth Berkley and Kyle MacLachlan. If Pennies From Heaven had been 90 instead of 145 minutes, it would have been better. The joke can only last so long.

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Battle of the Year

chris_brown-battle_of_the_year-skeudsWhile I have not seen every dance movie ever made, I’ve seen enough to declare that Battle of the Year is one of the worst. Whatever you say about the dramatic messiness of the Step Off movies, the dancing is pretty great, not only in the quality of the steps and choreography but in the way that it is shot. You can actually see the dancing. In Battle of the Year, there’s only one scene that depicts an entire dance routine, and it’s about 90 minutes into the movie. While there’s tons of dancing prior to that great moment, it’s in spurts, focusing on singular tricks or brief, confusingly edited snippets of longer numbers. The result is dance movie that is oddly focused on the story, which is never a good idea. Dante (Laz Alonso), a hip hop mogul, is bummed that Americans have not won the international b-boy competition held in France called Battle of the Year, so he hires an old crew mate – an alcoholic, former basketball coach grieving his dead wife and son – to mold a championship team. Jason (Josh Holloway, falling far, far from Lost) puts together a dream team of egotistical breakdancers and trains them into a force to be reckoned with. In a rare moment of surprise in the plot, they prove that they have become a team with they all defend the honor of the one gay dancer. At the Battle of the Year, they dance against teams from Russia, France, and Korea, and it’s all strangely and unnecessarily patriotic. Even stranger is the presence of Chris Brown, who is supposedly the best dancer on the team, but clearly isn’t, and then somehow doesn’t get to go to the Battle. I assumed it was because Brown’s parole officer wouldn’t let him leave the county.

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Pulped Prisoners

maxresdefaultAbout half way through Denis Villeneuve’s haunting, absorbing, and morally problematic Prisoners, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are screaming at each other. Keller is insisting that he knows that Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the man who has kidnapped and hidden his and Franklin’s young daughters; Franklin, in tears, keeps saying, “You don’t know!” He’s in tears because Keller has kidnapped Alex and is torturing him, and Franklin has reluctantly helped. (This isn’t much of a spoiler because the previews for the film tell you all of this, more or less.) This scene is intense and loud and both Howard and Jackman are convincingly falling apart, but I couldn’t help but agree with Fanklin. Keller is wrong; his obsession with Alex is based on an impotent rage and only a shred of evidence that Alex, who has an intellectual abilities of a 10-year-old, took his daughter. As Keller becomes more violent and more sure of himself, I found him less and less sympathetic and more and more hopeful that Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) would catch Keller before he finds Keller and Franklin’s daughters. It’s a strange, if fascinating experience to cheer against the film’s hero. Continue…

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De Niro’s Self-Parody

family13f-5-webAfter seeing Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook last year, I was hopeful that he had turned a corner. Once considered the great actor of his generation, for almost twenty years, he had been mostly phoning it in. But in Silver Linings Playbook, he worked his ass off. He was subtle, sweet, sympathetic, and I immediately thought he would get attention from awards at the end of the year; he did, and was nominated for an Oscar for the seventh time. But then I saw The Family, and he had returned to self-parody. And I don’t mean that he’s happy to be typecast as an Italian-American tough guy and just recreate expressions and noises from Raging Bull or The Godfather, Part II, though he’s done this a couple dozen times.

In Luc Besson’s new mob comedy The Family, he plays Giovanni Manzoni, a vicious mobster in witness protection in Normandy, France, who passes himself off as writer. In comic irony, the locals think Gio is an intellectual of some sort, and they ask him to discuss The Harder They Come at the local film society. The movie turns out to be Goodfellas, one of De Niro’s greatest roles, and Gio earns rapturous applause after telling the crowd all about mob life in the United States. This is supposed to be moment of meta-comedy, but it was more successful at reminding me not only how derivative The Family was, but also how far De Niro has fallen. Continue…

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Mr. Manly Action Star

RIDDICK-superJumboA few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who has been working at a large Hollywood studio. The conversation came around to closeted actors and actresses, and my friend repeated what another friend told her, “Vin Diesel? Oh, she a lady.” I laughed, not because it would be funny if Diesel were gay and closeted, but rather that he’s done something to lead to such a camp pronouncement. His screen persona is solidly and profoundly macho, complete with roided muscles and a deep voice that rarely utters any words with more the one syllable, and if it turned out that he was actually a big old queen, well that’s some good irony. Maybe he is a great actor, at least in one role: manly action star. Maybe that character, Mr. Manly Action Star, is a bad actor. Maybe he’s not only a terrible actor, but also a retrograde chauvinist. Maybe Mr. Manly Action Star is just an overcompensation for being a self-hating homosexual. Continue…

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