The
Ladykillers (1955 and 2004)
For once, I actually liked a remake more than the original. And that remake featured Tom Hanks. Hey – no one’s more surprised than I am.
It’s slightly less surprising when you consider that the remake is directed by the Coen brothers. Their remake of the classic British comedy The Ladykillers could have gone either way, but fortunately it ends up being pretty good.
I saw the original the day before I watched the remake, and I was thinking it was probably a bad idea because the remake could only suffer in comparison. But it turns out that the original isn’t all that great. It’s badly dated, for one thing, and Alec Guiness simply wasn’t made for broad comedy. He’s much better when he’s subtle and dry, but here he’s all buckteeth and cartoonish (oddly, Peter Sellers, who could do that type of caricature much better, is almost invisible in a bit part). Hanks, in the same role in the remake, goes over the top, too, but it suits him far better.
In the Coen brothers’ version, all the members of the gang get more screen time, more developed characters, and better lines. The rather needlessly convoluted caper that requires the gang to move into an innocent old lady’s home makes a lot more sense in the remake than in the original. In fact, the only thing the original does better is the demise of the Hanks/Guiness character.
So, you may never hear me say this again, but you can skip the original and head straight for the remake.
On the recommendation of a coworker, I tried to read Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights – I loved his book on Ed Rendell’s amazing turnaround job on Philadelphia, A Prayer for the City – but I couldn’t get into it. Bissinger tried to take on the voice of the Texas high-school students he was writing about, and it came off as cheesy and fake.
Surprisingly, the movie is quite good. I can’t stand football, and it’s the only sport that I still can’t understand, despite having had its rules explained to me upwards of a dozen times. But Friday Night Lights isn’t really a football movie; it’s a slice of the lives of a group of teenagers on the cusp of going from small-town heroes to… none of them really know what awaits them, just that, unless they win the state football championship, it won’t be as good.
The young cast is outstanding, and Billy Bob
Thornton is
very good as their coach. The movie
earns its emotional climax honestly, and it mostly sidesteps the sports
movie
clichés – I truly didn’t know how the climactic big game would
turn out.
Here’s my suggestion for watching, if you must, National Treasure: do a shot every time someone says the phrase “steal the Declaration of Independence.” With any luck, you’ll pass out halfway through the movie.
A disturbing little movie, sort of Deliverance for the pre-teen set, Mean Creek is nicely made, with good performances from its young cast. Rory Culkin plays Sam, a runty kid who gets beaten up by hefty bully George (Josh Peck). Sam’s older brother and his ne’er-do-well friends concoct a scheme to give George a taste of his own medicine. The scheme goes badly wrong, as such schemes are wont to do, and the boys, along with Sam’s semi-girlfriend Millie, show their true moral character.
The characters are rich and complex. George especially is realistically
complicated; he’s a typical schoolyard bully, but he shows a
vulnerable,
eager-to-please side. Just when you’re
starting to feel for him, though, he does something deliberately cruel
and
hurtful (or just plain annoying). The
best performance may be Carly Schroeder as Millie; she makes it very
obvious
that girls mature faster than boys. But
all the actors are very good, and the movie is realistic and satisfying.
This movie was called “evocative” and “lovely” and other elegant adjectives by several film critics, and it’s about the closing of a movie theater and the magic of movies and all that, so I decided to check it out. The first thing I noticed was that the director’s modus operandi seems to be to set up the camera and let it roll without moving it for a certain amount of time, regardless of whether anyone is actually in the frame. The second was that he apparently couldn’t afford a writer, because there was no dialogue. I tried to soak in the atmosphere, because that’s all there was, and have some patience, but after 20 minutes – one-quarter of the movie – I decided I was getting absolutely nothing out of it and turned it off to watch another rerun of South Park.
Tedious and talky, Coffee
and Cigarettes is a series of
vignettes apparently filmed on a whim over the years by Jim Jarmusch. Nothing connects them except for the presence
of the titular vices (and frequent mentions of how bad coffee and
cigarettes
are for you). The vignettes range from
the loopily entertaining (an ingratiating Iggy Pop and a sullen Tom
Waits meet
in a bar, Alfred Molina tries to befriend snotty Steve Coogan [though
it’s
quite unbelievable that both men act like Coogan’s the bigger movie
star], RZA
and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan find Bill Murray [whom they consistently
address as
“Bill Murray,” as in “Bill Murray, don’t you know coffee’s bad for
you?”]
serving coffee in a cruddy café) to the dull (most of the rest
of the
vignettes) to the bizarre (a truly opaque encounter between Steven
Wright and
Roberto Benigni that ends with Benigni going to Wright’s dentist
appointment in
Wright’s place). Even if you’re a
Jarmusch fan – I usually am – I don’t recommend this one.
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