Why, I am asking, is this funny? I am thinking hard. So much money and effort was spent on these explosions that somebody must have been convinced they had a purpose, but I, try as I might, cannot see them as anything other than action without mind, purpose, humor, excitement, or entertainment.
The movie’s premise will be familiar to anyone who ever watched the original TV show. I never watched the show, and the plot was familiar even to me. A disembodied voice (John Forsythe) issues commands to the three babes who work for his detective agency, and they perform his missions while wearing clothes possibly found at the thrift shop across the street from Coyote Ugly.
Barrymore, Diaz, and Liu represent redhead, blonde, and brunette respectively (or, as my colleague David Poland has pointed out, T, A, and Hair). Sad, isn’t it, that three such intelligent, charming, and talented actresses could be reduced to their most prominent component parts? And voluntarily, too. At the tops of their careers, they chose to make this movie (Barrymore even produced it). They volunteered for what lesser talents are reduced to doing.
The cast also contains Bill Murray, who likes to appear unbilled in a lot of his movies and picked the wrong one to shelve that policy. He is winsome, cherubic, and loopy, as usual, but the movie gives him nothing to push against. There’s the curious feeling he’s playing to himself. Sam Rockwell plays a kidnapped millionaire, Tim Curry plays a villain, and … why go on?
In the months to come there will be several movies based on popular video games, including one about Tomb Raiders and its digital babe, Lara Croft. Charlie’s Angels is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game and the movie.
Christmas with the Kranks
(DIRECTED BY JOE ROTH; STARRING TIM ALLEN, JAMIE LEE CURTIS; 2004)
Christmas with the Kranks doesn’t have anything wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed by adding Ebenezer Scrooge and Bad Santa to the cast. It’s a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end. And what is it finally so happy about? Why, that the Kranks’ neighbors succeed in enforcing their lockstep conformity upon them. They form a herd mentality, without the mentality.
The movie is not funny, ever, in any way, beginning to end. It’s a colossal miscalculation. Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis star as Luther and Nora Krank, who live in a Chicago suburb with their daughter, Blair (Julie Gonzalo). Julie is going to Peru in the Peace Corps, so this will be their first Christmas without her, and Luther suggests that instead of spending $6,000 on Christmas, he and Nora spend $3,000 on a Caribbean cruise.
Sounds reasonable to me. But perhaps you’re wondering how a couple with one child and no other apparent relatives on either side of the family spends $6,000 on Christmas. The answer is, they decorate. Their street coordinates a Christmas display every year in which neighbors compete to hang the most lights from their eaves and clutter the lawn with secular symbolism. Everyone has Frosty on their rooftop.
When the word gets around that the Kranks are taking a year off, the neighborhood posse gets alarmed. Their leader is Vic Frohmeyer (Dan Aykroyd), who leads a delegation to berate them. Before long, pickets are on the front lawn, chanting “Free Frosty!” and the local paper writes a story about “The only house on the block that’s keeping Frosty in the basement.”
As a satire against neighborhood conformity, Christmas with the Kranks might have found a way to be entertaining. But no. The reasonable Kranks are pounded down by the neighbors, and then their daughter decides, after having been away only about two weeks, to fly home for Christmas with her new Peruvian fiancé. So the Kranks of course must have their traditional Christmas Eve party after all, and the third act consists of all the neighbors pitching in to decorate the house, prepare the food and decorations, etc., in a display of self-righteous cooperation that is supposed to be merry but frankly is a little scary. Here’s an idea: Why don’t the Kranks meet Blair and her fiancé in Miami and go on the cruise together?
The movie’s complete lack of a sense of humor is proven by its inability to see that the Kranks are reasonable people and their neighbors are monstrous. What it affirms is not the Christmas spirit but the Kranks caving in. What is the movie really about? I think it may play as a veiled threat against nonconformists who don’t want to go along with the majority opinion in their community. What used to be known as American individualism is now interpreted as ominous. We’re supposed to think there’s something wrong with the Kranks. The buried message is: Go along, and follow the lead of the most obnoxious loudmouth on the block.
Christmas, some of my older readers may recall, was once a religious holiday. Not in this movie. Not a single crucifix, not a single creche, not a single mention of the J-name. It’s not that I want Christmas with the Kranks to get all religious, but that I think it’s secular as a cop-out, to avoid any implication of religious intolerance. No matter what your beliefs or lack of them, you can celebrate Christmas in this neighborhood, because it’s not about beliefs; it’s about a shopping season.
So distant are the spiritual origins of the holiday, indeed, that on Christmas Eve one of the guests at the Kranks’ big party is the local priest (Tom Poston), who hangs around gratefully with a benevolent smile. You don’t have to be raised Catholic to know that priests do not have time off on Christmas Eve. Why isn’t he preparing for Midnight Mass? Apparently because no one in the Kranks’ neighborhood is going to attend—they’re too busy falling off ladders while stringing decorations on rooftops.
There is, however, one supernatural creature in the movie, and I hope I’m not giving away any secrets by revealing that it is Santa Claus. The beauty of this approach is that Santa is a nonsectarian saint, a supernatural being who exists free of theology. Frosty, on the other hand, is apparently only a snowman.
A Cinderella Story
(DIRECTED BY MARK ROSMAN; STARRING HILARY DUFF, JENNIFER COOLIDGE; 2004)
“Ernest Madison says he swore off movie critics when they panned Dragon-slayer, one of the favorites of his childhood. ‘I stopped paying attention to critics because they kept giving bad reviews to good movies,’ says Madison, now thirty-five.
“Fourteen-year-old Byron Turner feels the same way. He turns to the Web for movie information and trailers, then shares what he’s discovered with his friends, his sister, Jasmine, even his mother, Toni.
“‘I used to watch Roger Ebert, but now I get most of my information from Byron,’ Toni Turner says. ‘I don’t really pay attention to critics anymore.’”
—STORY BY BOB CURTRIGHT IN THE WICHITA EAGLE
Dear Byron,
I know what your mother means because when I was fourteen I was also pummeling my parents with information about new movies and singing stars. I didn’t have the Internet, but I grabbed information anywhere I could—mostly from other kids, Hollywood newspaper columnists, and what disk jockeys said. Of course, that was a more innocent time, when movies slowly crept around the country and there was time to get advance warning of a turkey.