Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this film at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April, but the real trigger to watching it comes from having later bought Lanie Kazan’s record. And she plays Nia Vardalos’s mother in the film–third billed after Nia Vardalos and John Corbett, that guy from Northern Exposure who was briefly the It-Guy for (over-)educated hunks at the turn of the century, so of course I picked it up right away. Not because of John Corbett, although I would have felt more like him seven or eight years earlier when I was the over-educated one with the mullet.

I did not see this film in the theatre, but I saw this film with…. Originally, I thought it might be before my beautiful wife, but the timing is not right. Unlike Get Shorty, this film clearly came out (and by clearly, I mean by checking its date) after we were together married. Apparently, she had seen it with the ladies at work (back in the day when we went to work and not to our separate home offices–oh, so long ago), and she then wanted to watch it with me. And we did.

So this was Nia Vardalos’s big shot. She wrote it, and she stars as Toula, an ugly duckling daughter of a Greek restaurant owner in Chicago who wants more than to be the dutiful daughter all her life. So she–with the help of her mother, played by Lanie Kazan as I mentioned, gets her father to allow her (Toula) to attend college to learn computers. She does and gets some work with a cousin’s travel agency. Along the way, she meets Ian (John Corbett), an English professor who is the only child of WASPy white-bread parents. They fall in love, and the cultures clash as she has a big, boisterous family compared with his mother and father as sole representatives of his family.

The humor comes from that culture clash as they prepare to wed with their (mostly hers) family’s help. She pokes fun at Greek heritage, and Ian’s parents, well, they’re stereotypes (archetypes?) of the sort who name their child Ian.

But, you know what? As a pretty white-bread whitey who grew up in the ghetto and in the trailer park instead of any side that could be called “upper,” I’m not offended because:

• I can laugh at myself and those who look like me.
• There’s no money for me in faking outrage.

At any rate, a pleasant and amusing way to spend a couple of hours.

Apparently, it proved lucrative for Nia Vardalos. She had a hit film that spawned a franchise (a couple of sequels over the decades including one that’s forthcoming) and a television show based on the movie. She’s also had a career with television appearances and small movie roles over the years, but she did not replicate the success of this film into leading role success in the cinema.

I would draw a parallel to my own creative career, gentle reader, but you’re here on this blog, and this blog is pretty much it.

I kind of remember the Pink Panther movies from my younger years. I’d like to say that I saw one of them at the drive-in with my parents. We went a couple of times when I was younger, sometimes my parents, my brother, and I, and at least once with my mother and her friend the country singer and her two boys. Enough to think we went all the time, kind of like how a handful of Christmases and holidays from my very younger years set the pattern. But going to the drive-in in the late 1970s was already trending toward an anachronism. I’ve thought about taking my boys down to Aurora for the drive-in there (and mentioned it to my beautiful wife while talking about this film, triggering Facebook ads for that very drive-in). But I am sure my boys would find the experience underwhelming. I also think that I saw parts of a Pink Panther film when we later at the home of the country singer, her husband the wedding singer, and their two boys, either on a sleepover or in the interim month between exiting the projects and decamping for Missouri at the end of the school year–I remember the bit about Inspector Clouseau’s butler attacking him. I also remember that Inspector Clouseau was a bit of a, what, trope? when I was younger. You’d say someone was a Clouseau who was stating the obvious or was making a bad deduction. And look at his attire on the cover: He was the inspiration for Inspector Gadget, ainna?

At any rate, with the title The Return of the Pink Panther, I thought it would be the sequel to the first film. But, no: This is the fourth in the original series of 11 films (with two 21st century rebooted movies starring Steve Martin instead of Peter Sellers). It came out in 1975, eleven years after the first. So I have no idea of whether I’ve seen bits of this film before–probably what was showing in the drive-in or on HBO at the time would have been later entries in the series.

So: Someone has stolen The Pink Panther, a large diamond with a flaw in it that looks like a leaping pink panther (not like the Owen Corning pitch cartoon character–the cartoon character originated in the titles for the film series) is stolen (again), and Clouseau is tasked with investigating (over the wishes of his commander, who has finally succeeded in getting Clouseau off of the force). His old nemesis The Phantom (Christopher Plummer) is suspected of the crime, but he did not do it–so he sets out also to find out who did. A number of humorous set pieces later (my oldest passed through while I was watching it and guffawed at a bit), and Clouseau is there when the culprit is revealed: the Phantom’s lover, who did it to spice up the retired Phantom’s life.

Uh, retroactive spoiler alert, but it is a 48-year-old movie that isn’t about the whodunit it but the cartoonish comic pieces, like when Clouseau enters the suspect’s hotel room and destroys it with a vacuum cleaner.

I don’t know that I have seen any of the other films or reboots in the wild, but I might pick them up in the future if they’re a buck or so (as this was when I bought it in April).

I saw this film in the theater, without Mike as I just mentioned, although in this case “just” is three years ago as befits my work-from-home-addled memory.

In it, Brendan Fraser plays an obnoxious dweeb customer tech support worker at a tech company in San Francisco who tries too hard to relate to his co-workers and earns their disdain and mockery for his efforts. On an uninvited outing to a bar where his co-workers have gathered without him, he runs into a co-worker upon whom he has a crush but who dismisses his clumsy attempts at conversation. When he says he’d do anything to be with her, the Devil, played by Elizabeth Hurley, hears him and offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul. He reluctantly accepts, and the bulk of the movie depicts the situations where he wishes to be rich, to be erudite, to be strong and athletic, and so on, and how the Devil thwarts him. He wants to be rich and married to Alison (his crush), and he ends up as a drug lord whose wife despises him (the scenes in the trailer of this piece prompted my call to Mike in el español), or a giant dumb athlete with a small, erm, you know, Johnson, and so on. Amusing and even funny at times (can I say that as a snoorky blogger, wherein I blend snooty and snarky into the portmanteau).

The film also has Gabriel Casseus as “Elliot’s Cellmate” but a stand-in for an angel or God. I’d remembered this role as played by Don Cheedle, but no. And at the time of my original viewing, I thought It’s that guy from… but looking at his IMDB entry, I can’t think of what it would have been. I saw him in Blackhawk Down and Black Dog) not an actual movie review, but a posting of when I bought the film which I watched shortly thereafter).

Theologically, the film gets a little muddy on the Devil/God thing, showing them at the end playing chess when Brendan Fraser’s character walks by with his ultimate earthly reward (a relationship with a pretty girl), and the Devil tries to cheat after pointing out the lovebirds and drawing the cellmate’s attention away. It does not mention Jesus, et cetera, but if you need to, you can kind of, sort of, recast it a bit as the book of Job, but not really. Although I’m not sure how one should recast the book of Job anyway.

But enough about theology. What of Elizabeth Hurley?
Continue reading “Movie Report: Bedazzled (2000)” →

Ah, gentle reader, this film provided a bit of mental relief for me in the real world. When I proposed watching this film, my beautiful wife said to me, “We saw that in the theater.” To which I responded that I had never seen the movie. Given that the film came out two years before we met, we did not see it in the theater. I was pleased to see that she, too, pencils me into some of her memories from that brief interlude between childhood and marriage. I myself have on several occasions said something like, “Remember when we…” only to discover she was not a part of the we I was thinking of. I thought perhaps I alone was muddy on that brief interlude between summer 1994 and early 1997, the interregnum between college and being a couple, which were very busy and whose memories I sometimes retcon my wife into.

At any rate, this film is based on an Elmore Leonard book. A small time loan shark, Chili (played by John Travolta) has a run-in with a henchman of a major Miami player (the henchman played by Dennis Farina) and humiliates the henchman but cannot be retailiated against because of his powerful boss. Chili goes looking for someone who has run out on a debt and whose $10,000 skimming has blossomed with an insurance settlement for a plane crash that the drycleaner/welsher (played by David Paymer, hello, hello–did I see Crazy People with my wife or before?). Chili goes to Vegas, braces the drycleaner, and is asked by the Las Vegas mob to collect on a debt from a horror movie producer, Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman). When Chili breaks into the house where Zimm is staying, he tells Zimm about the adventure he’s on, pitching it as a movie, and Zimm is interested–if Chili can help get the rights to a screenplay held by the writer’s widow (Bette Midler).

Oh, yes, it gets complicated. But it has a movie-within-a-movie that a medieval drama enthusiast would enjoy. It’s chock full of stars, and it has clever twists that you would expect from an Elmore Leonard book-turned-movie (see also Out of Sight and Jackie Brown, neither of which I’ve actually reported on… yet). I said to my wife after having seen the film that it’s a shame that they don’t make movies from Elmore Leonard books any more, but they’re still making them. Get Shorty had its sequel Be Cool and a television series; 3:10 to Yuma had a remake; Justified was based on a series of books by Leonard, and it’s getting a revival.

Probably a better question, with a worse answer, is why we don’t make writers like Elmore Leonard any more. Or why Hollywood would not adapt their works if we did.

I saw this film in the theatre with my beautiful wife probably on a date night–I mean, 2009 was a busy year for us, what with my sainted mother passing away, my brother returning to the St. Louis area, and our decamping Old Trees for Nogglestead. Still, a year is full of individual days that fit around the big events or the not-events of less consequential years. So we undoubtedly deployed our then-teenaged and by now nearly thirty babysitter and went to see this movie.

You know, I said about Jet Li’s Fearless:

But it’s an interesting film once you peel away the layer of Chinese propaganda film that hovers over all.

* * * *
So, well, yeah, a good story wrapped in Chinese anti-Western propoganda.

You could make a similar statement about a bunch of George Clooney films: A good story if you ignore the anti-American, anti-military, and especially anti-Iraq War message wrapped around it (see also Three Kings et al.).

A journalist, portrayed by Ewan MacGregor, loses his wife to an editor and makes his way to the Middle East to report on the war there and re-establish his manhood. He hooks up with a former (?) military man who participated in a paranormal research program who has a mission in the Iraq War, although he is not sure what it is. Through a series of flashbacks, the military operator, played by George Clooney, tells of the origins of the unit when Jeff Bridges, playing the Dude character, becomes a flower child and soaks up New Age stuff like a sponge and runs the military research unit like a commune, but it comes crashing down when a more military-minded and potentially inferior “gifted” officer, played by Kevin Spacey, fouls it up.

So it’s got some wryly amusing moments in it. It doesn’t really acknowledge the paranormal, leaving it a little ambiguous but certainly nobody here is a superhero at best.

But, yeah, a mocking tone that questions the military and its involvement in the Iraq War. While the Iraq War was still sort of going on. But more intelligent than anything that would come later with The Message.

And I have it on DVD in case I want to watch it again in another fifteen years.

Well, gentle reader, you know what you’re getting with a modern Chinese film. You’ve got some star power in Jet Li (whose other films I’ve enjoyed, including Kiss of the Dragon, Hero, The Black Mask, Lethal Weapon 4, and most recently The Expendables). Okay, an older Jet Li, kind of like you get an older Jackie Chan in similar films, but still interesting and exciting to watch. But it’s an interesting film once you peel away the layer of Chinese propaganda film that hovers over all.

Jet Li plays the adult son of a martial arts teacher whose father lost a public bout with honor and tried to instill that honor into his son, but did not. Eventually, Jet Li becomes the leader of a washu school of martial arts that his father began, and he becomes successful in drawing students. He starts to live a bit of the high life with it, but when a rival school’s leader beats one of his students, for no reason (he is told by the student), he fights that leader in his (Jet Li’s character’s) friend’s restaurant, leading to its (the restaurant’s) destruction and the loss of the friend. Worse, he kills the other school’s leader, and then he learns his student embelished the story and the whole thing was unnecessary. He ends up wandering, falls in with a family and a blind girl (played by Li Sun) and learns to love and live again. So he returns home to fight again, this time for China against the forces of the West plotting against China.

So, well, yeah, a good story wrapped in Chinese anti-Western propoganda. Although, strangely, the Japanese champion comes off humanized, or at least lives up to the Chinese ideal.

So all right. Perhaps in a couple of decades the Chinese propoganda element will be lessened or merely a historical note. And then we can look upon it as a story of redemption, and not preparing to paste it to my children who are coming into draft age.

But enough about us. About Li Sun.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Jet Li’s Fearless (2006)” →

After watching The Green Hornet, I picked up this film which might have been the movie that launched Seth Rogen’s career, to see if his characters always annoyed me. Which is a little less than rage-watching, but he had a big moment about a decade and a half ago, and I wanted to maybe catch a little of his career in case it ever comes up in a trivia night. After all, the things I thought were trivia–pop culture details from the 1940s-1970s–is now ancient history and the lost wisdom of the Ancestors.

So.

In the film, Rogen plays a frattish bro living with a bunch of friends who are hoping to make it rich off of an Internet site (coming sometime) that tells you when you can see boobies in the movies. Katherine Heigl plays an up-and-coming broadcast talent who finally gets her break in front of the camera. The frattish boys are out at the club because that’s what they do, and Heigl’s Alison is celebrating her promotion, and after many, many drinks, Rogen’s Ben and Alison hook up. The coitus they barely remember results in Alison becoming pregnant, and against the advice of her family and at risk of her career, she decides to keep the baby. When she tells Ben, he decides to help, and they get to know each other as they prepare for the baby’s birth.

So the manboy in this film does undergo some character growth–the woman too–but I attribute this more to it being a Judd Apatow film more than a Seth Rogen film. some of Apatow’s other works also have those bits of growth and depth to them–This Is 40, The 40-Year-Old Virgin maybe–but some are just straight ahead comedies (Anchorman, Superbad, Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, et al). Looking over Apatow’s ouevre, I have seen a lot of his films, and although I note that many of the same actors appear in them–his family, Leslie Mann, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, and so on–I don’t think of the Apatowverse like I think of the Stillerverse or the Sandlerverse. Probably because he’s behind the camera–far behind it as a producer and writer not always the director.

So the film was not as bad as I had feared it would be. Like most 21st century R-rated comedies, it has a lot of swearing and requires drugs or blackout drinking for major plot points–I need some Cary Grant films as a palate cleanser–but it is easily the best Seth Rogen film I’ve seen. Of which the sample size is small (although he has smaller parts in other movies in the Apatowverse, he stars in but a few).