The Family Stone (2005, 102 min, PG13) ** - Directed & written by Thomas Bezucha, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Diane Keaton, Dermot Mulroney, Luke Wilson, and Rachel McAdams. A reversal of “Meet the Parents:” instead of a daughter bringing home a liberal boyfriend to meet her conservative parents, “The Family Stone” has a son bringing home his conservative girlfriend to meet his liberal parents. But “Meet the Parents” benefits from a really tight focus: the only real characters are Bobby DeNiro and Ben Stiller. “The Family Stone” is all over the place, opening threads that it won’t close, and introducing characters sort of from thin air. And the movie needs some kind of award for the deaf gay guy with his black lover; that’s like, what, nine tokens crammed into two characters? “The Family Stone” has one brilliant scene, in which the girlfriend just keeps cramming her foot deeper and deeper into her mouth at dinner. The rest of the movie is so largely forgettable that I can’t be bothered to keep writing about it.
March of the Penguins (2005, 85 min, G) *** - Directed by Luc Jacquet, narrated by Morgan Freeman. Straight-ahead documentary about the mating cycle of emperor penguins, meticulously photographed by French filmmakers for “National Geographic.” We watch the adult fowl go inland to mate, look after the eggs, and so on and so forth. What comes across is how resilient life is, even in the Antarctic. The courtship is also some of the most genuinely romantic interludes you’re likely to see in a movie theater. With a few exceptions in Freeman’s narration, the movie is refreshing in how much it lets the animals be animals, and refrains from turning them into people.
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, 144 min, PG13) ** - Directed by Rob Marshall, starring Zhang Ziyi, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, and Gong Li. Lavishly produced but obvious and shallow trash epic. At least “Geisha” has the good taste to thrive on its own superficiality; the production design and cinematography are so magnificent that the movie becomes a tactile pleasure, if only intermittently. You can almost feel all those wet shingles, cobblestones, silky kimonos, and lipstick. Rather than making a movie out of what it does well—artifice and “things”—“Geisha” instead rambles on about a lengthy and uninteresting cat-fight between the protégé (Zhang Ziyi) and the older woman (the often great Gong Li in a badly-written villainess role). “Geisha” is also surprisingly noisy; there are so many little sound effects that we have trouble understanding most of what these fine and wonderful actors are trying to say as they struggle with English instead of Japanese. (“Geisha” becomes inadvertantly hilarious for a few minutes; it turns into a heist movie! After the war, the geisha-life behind them, the players are approached to “come out of retirement for one last job.” “Put on the kimono one last time!” They protest: “I’ve put that life behind him. I make an honest living now!”) Still, there are about a jillion beautiful shots in this movie, not the least of which being its three female leads.
JUNEBUG
**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, Benjamin McKenzie, Alessandro Nivola, and Frank Hoyt Taylor
Directed by Phil Morrison & written by Angus MacLachlan
2005
107 min R
Can the word “meh” be an entire review?
I don’t think I was really in the right mood for “Junebug.” Some of the other people with whom I watched it seemed to appreciate it, or at least identify more with what was going on. But after a few minutes of its superior, contemptuous, condescending camerawork striving for “awkwardness” with “ironic” classical music I think I’d had enough. The movie is like David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “Undertow,” “All the Real Girls”) lite, that is, like Green but without Green’s affection for his characters. We are invited to laugh at these Southerners but, unlike in Green’s universe, we are not asked to laugh with them. Even actor Alessandro Nivola, with his short and laconic accent, is doing something of a Paul Schneider impersonation.
Oh yeah here’s a summary: a Chicago art dealer (Embeth Davidtz) and her new husband (Nivola) go to somewhere in the South to meet his family. And it’s awkward.
There’s lots of good stuff, to be sure. The guy from the “OC” does some great eye rolls. The paintings by the obscenely racist and probably insane painter are actually pretty interesting in a sort of outsider/Basquiat kind of way. I like the way the rural Southerners are not housed in dilapidated shanties but in big clean neighborhoods of identical houses. The song in the church basement is the only scene that struck me as having any complexity. The rest of the movie is mostly red staters and blue staters don’t understand each other. Whatever.
I know it’s a richer film than I’m giving it credit for. I should watch it again but I already sent it back to Netflix. I felt two-star when I was watching it. My wife and I talked about it the next day so I’m bumping it up to two-and-a-half. That’s what two-and-a-half is for. “Junebug” didn’t move me enough to form an opinion one way or the other, or even write a real review, which, in itself, is a criticism.
Finished Monday, February 27th, 2006
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