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October 16-22, 2008
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Too good to be good
by Michael Phillips
Crowing about Crowe
by Michael Phillips
Too good to be good
by Michael Phillips
There’s a lot working against City of Ember in terms of its commercial prospects. Among the question marks: an indistinct title, taken from a popular-but-not-epoch-shattering series of books; an apocalyptic vision of the future that resists the usual swells of triumphalism; and dialogue that is markedly free of jaded wisecracks and references to Jerry Maguire or Cops.
Also, it’s good. So it has quality working against it, too.
It’s a little fuzzy in terms of story, and too dour for young kids, but City of Ember comes from director Gil Kenan. He and his designers create a sharply realized and fantastically rich underground city, held together by cables and wires and string. Kenan made Monster House, also good, also not for the young ones. If he ever lucks into a project worthy of his imagistic strengths that has some populist hooks going for it, look out.
The story plops you down in a rough situation, after the end of the world as we know/knew it. While life above ground regenerates, the citizens of Ember cope with their makeshift contraption of a city, built to last for 200 years. Time’s almost up. The infrastructure’s crumbling. The place is run by a genial fascist of a mayor (Bill Murray, playing it straight and padded with an enormo-tummy). Children at the age of 12 are assigned jobs to help keep the machine grinding along, amid power blackouts and food shortages.
Saoirse Ronan, a deserved Academy Award nominee for Atonement, plays Lina, who gratefully switches assignments with her pal Doon (Harry Treadaway of Control) so she can become a fleet-footed messenger and he can go to work in the elaborate pipe works. The rest of the story, adapted by Caroline Thompson from Jeanne DuPrau’s novel, involves a treasure hunt-type secret map and humanity’s salvation. Thompson tosses in a giant sewer mole for a thrill sequence that seems out of place with the rest of City of Ember, but I suppose kids — like movie producers — feel cheated unless something with considerable sharp teeth threatens to chomp a protagonist.
Even with the mole and a conventional shoot-the-rapids climax (taken from the book), I liked the texture, tone and spirit of this movie. The blend of art direction and computer-generated effects favors the former, not the latter. This is a project wherein you really notice the sets — big, three-story ones, too big for a typical Hollywood soundstage. (The picture was shot mainly in Belfast.) Thompson’s script stumbles a bit expositionally, but who knows? If older kids and adults seek out this picture, which 20th Century Fox and Walden Media clearly aren’t sure how to sell, they may well find themselves drawn into a subterranean world of considerable imagination.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Crowing about Crowe
by Michael Phillips
Right around the point horn-dog magazine writer Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) is frantically scouring a fancy garden party for cocaine so he can take advantage of the dim-bulb starlet (Megan Fox) he’s been fervently stalking, the putrid showbiz comedy How to Lose Friends and Alienate People appears to hit Defcon 5 in mistaking its brand of moral laxity for cutesy irreverence.
When Sidney’s scheme is thwarted by the screenplay’s need to have him do the right thing and safely drive home his drunk, depressed and lovelorn co-worker Alison (Kirsten Dunst), you then worry for her safety in such loutish hands. And she’s the one we’re supposed to root for him to win over.
Ostensibly a rom-com reorganizing of British author Toby Young’s 2001 satiric memoir about the self-sabotaging, cheeky swath he cut through his brief celebrity journalism career at Vanity Fair, the movie version, scripted by Peter Straughan, drops its surrogate into a soul-imperiling scenario at the fictional rich-rag Sharp’s: Will Sidney cozy up to celebs or be allowed to take them down in print? (And can he do both?)
But when it’s not turning the real Young’s escapades — ordering a stripper to a colleague’s office on Take Our Daughters to Work Day, or asking a musical comedy star upfront if he’s Jewish and gay — into lifeless comic bits, it appropriates everything else from The Devil Wears Prada, The Apartment or the Farrelly brothers. It leaves the whole affair derivative, tone-deaf and garishly unfunny. Pig urine and transsexual genitalia gags jostle for position alongside forced slapstick, dumb one-liners and the film’s only (unintentionally) humorous material: the disingenuous sentimentalizing of “glossy posse” outsiders who deplore what they’ve become after they work to acquire their every desired perk.
Director Robert Weide, whose stewardship of the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm indicated an understanding of hostile laughs, can’t make up his mind whether the fame-grubbing Sidney is a principled jerk, an immature closet romantic or Jerry Lewis. He’s impossible to follow as a protagonist, much less care for, and the rubber-faced Pegg — normally good at wiry slacker charm — throws everything at the wall to little effect.
Dunst’s frustrated novelist, meanwhile, is more believable when she calls Sidney “loathsome” in the first half than when affixing a moony stare at him in the second. And Danny Huston and Gillian Anderson, as a sleazy editor and icy power publicist, respectively, hit their marks with expected professionalism. But only a curtain-haired, cigarette-smoking Jeff Bridges as Sharp’s impresario Graydon Carter — I mean, Clayton Harding — intriguingly connects institutional bitterness with A-list gatekeeping. His dismissive tossing of a crudely sloganed T-shirt of Sidney’s out of a top-story window is the movie’s funniest gag, and somehow acts as its perfect critique too.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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