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February 12-18, 2009
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Bankrupt comedy
by Jessica Reaves
Horrifying remake
by Christopher Borrelli
 Bankrupt comedy
by Jessica Reaves
If there is a single bright spot in the financial crisis, it is the possibility that one day producer Jerry Bruckheimer will run out of money. In a more just world, this would have happened before he gave the green light to Confessions of a Shopaholic, a thin, largely unfunny comedy that marries lazy filmmaking with bad timing. Star Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) is charming enough, and a gifted physical comic, but this material is so predictable and leaden that she has no prayer of keeping it afloat.
Shopaholic follows the misadventures of Rebecca Bloomwood (Fisher), whose primary personality trait appears to be her delirium-inducing love of high-end clothes shopping. Like many Americans, Bloomwood is drowning in debt, hounded by a debt collector and interviewing for totally unsuitable jobs. Unlike most Americans, she does it all while wearing stiletto heels and animal prints.
Our heroine’s other distinguishing features are excellent hair and criminally bad taste (Bloomwood proving anew that it is possible to wear jaw-droppingly expensive fashion and still look like a deranged streetwalker). She is joined in her ridiculousness by the dim but cute Luke (Hugh Dancy), her parents (Joan Cusack and John Goodman, hamming it up as if their lives depended on it) and other actors (Kristin Scott Thomas, Wendy Malick) who really should know better.
Shopaholic is based on Sophie Kinsella’s popular novel, which was set in London, lending the proceedings a hint of quirky charm (lots of tea and British euphemisms). The movie is set in New York, within the swank halls of the Dantay West magazine company (a thinly veiled reference to publishing giant Conde Nast).
As if the plot and script weren’t adequate handicaps, Shopaholic opens in an epically weak economy. Touchstone has acknowledged this by attempting to market the movie as a cautionary tale for our times, a sort of Christmas Carol for the fiscally frivolous. Put down your credit cards, overspenders of America! Or you, too, could share Bloomwood’s terrible fate! Which apparently includes capturing the heart of a charmingly diffident Englishman and landing a plum job for which you are uniquely unqualified.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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 Horrifying remake
by Christopher Borrelli
I don’t know about you, but my last encounter with Jason Voorhees was less than pleasant. We were in space, if I remember, and his employment situation, bloody awful in the best of times, only steady during the Reagan administration, had grown so desperate that he had to venture outside Earth’s atmosphere to find anyone left to kill.
Jason X, the movie was called. And though he had led a full life — appearing in 3-D, vacationing in New York, going to hell, becoming a zombie, splitting in two, rotting away, coffee klatching with Freddy Krueger — to be honest, metaphorically, Jason had put on a few pounds.
This man-child-homunculus was carrying a lot of baggage, some of which didn’t contain a human skull. So give a guy a little credit for having the courage to hit reset on that whole machete-based career trajectory and start anew — Mickey Rourke-esque, if you will.
This new Friday the 13th, unquestionably savvier and snappier than the original Friday the 13th, though just as useless, is a needed return to simplicity: An SUV of dramatically varied teens (sluts, nerdy sluts, one black guy, other sluts) visit Camp Crystal Lake. Pot is smoked. Sex is had by all. Also, topless waterskiing. They are then impaled and/or burned alive. Personally, after a decade of torture porn, I miss this whole straightforward, arrow-through-the-eye-socket approach.
What’s fresh, though, is the pretense — Michael Bay, the driving force behind this ongoing wave of ’70-’80s trash remakes (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror), has given Friday the 13th a sense of humor and a fleeting, CW-like self-awareness, which tends to dull the edge on the machete.
In short, think a violent episode of Dawson’s Creek. A young, earnest guy with a wounded look shacks up with a group of camping sluts and nerds while he is out looking for his missing sister, who was possibly butchered by Jason while she was being the wounded, earnest member of a group of camping sluts and nerds.
That pathos, incidentally, extends to Jason himself, who clearly had a hand in the script. Finally we see his home life. We hear about his desire to be alone. He is, more or less, a cranky neighbor — and a survivalist. One camper wonders why he doesn’t just fish. Yes! (Sigh.) After 29 years of Friday the 13th pictures, that may not count as progress, but I’ll take it.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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