Your task is harder than mine was because the typical multiplex movie is heralded by an ad campaign costing anywhere from $20 million to $50 million. Fast-food restaurants now have tie-ins with everyone from Shrek to Spider-Man; when I was a kid we were lucky to get ketchup with the fries. Enormous pressure is put on the target audience to turn out on opening weekends. And Hollywood’s most valued target audience, Byron, is teenage males. In other words, you.
So I am writing you in the hope of saving your friends, your sister, Jasmine, and your mother, Toni, from going to see a truly dismal new movie. It is called A Cinderella Story, and they may think they’ll like it because it stars Hilary Duff. I liked her in Cheaper by the Dozen, and said she was beautiful and skilled in The Lizzie McGuire Movie, but wrote:
As a role model, Lizzie functions essentially as a spokeswoman for the teen retail fashion industry, and the most-quoted line in the movie is likely to be when the catty Kate accuses her of being an “outfit repeater.” Since many of the kids in the audience will not be millionaires and do indeed wear the same outfit more than once, this is a little cruel, but there you go.
That’s probably something your mother might agree with.
In A Cinderella Story, Hilary plays Sam, a Valley Girl whose happy adolescence ends when her dad is killed in an earthquake. That puts her in the clutches of an evil stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge, whom you may remember fondly as Stifler’s mom in the American Pie movies, although since they were rated R, of course you haven’t seen them). Sam also naturally has two evil stepsisters. Half the girls in school have a crush on Austin (Chad Michael Murray), a handsome football star, but Sam never guesses that Austin is secretly kind of poetic—and is, in fact, her best chat room buddy. She agrees to meet him at the big Halloween dance, wearing a mask to preserve her anonymity; as a disguise, the mask makes her look uncannily like Hilary Duff wearing a mask.
Anyway, this is a lame, stupid movie, but Warner Bros. is spending a fortune, Byron, to convince you to see it and recommend it to your mom and Jasmine. So you must be strong and wise, and do your research. Even though your mother no longer watches my TV show, you use the Internet as a resource and no doubt know about movie review sources like rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com, and even (pardon me while I wipe away a tear) rogerebert.com. Even when a critic dislikes a movie, if it’s a good review, it has enough information so you can figure out whether you’d like it anyway.
For example, this review is a splendid review because it lets you know you’d hate A Cinderella Story, and I am pretty much 100 percent sure that you would. So I offer the following advice. Urgently counsel your mom and sister to forget about going out to the movies this week, and instead mark the calendar for August 24, when Ella Enchanted will be released on video. This is a movie that came out in April and sank without a trace, despite the fact that it was magical, funny, intelligent, romantic, and charming. It stars the beautiful Anne Hathaway (from The Princess Diaries) as a young girl whose fairy godmother (Vivica A. Fox) puts a spell on her that makes her life extremely complicated. She has the usual evil stepmother and two jealous stepsisters. Will she win the love of Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy)? A Cinderella Story is a terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water, but Ella Enchanted is a wonderful movie, and if Jasmine and your mom insist on Cinderella you can casually point out what Ella is short for.
As for that guy Ernest Madison, he was about eleven when Dragon-slayer came out. He must have been a child prodigy, to swear off movie critics at an age when most kids don’t even know they exist. If he still feels the same way, I hope he goes to see A Cinderella Story. That’ll teach him.
Your fellow critic,
Roger
Cold Creek Manor
(DIRECTED BY MIKE FIGGIS; STARRING DENNIS QUAID, SHARON STONE; 2003)
Cold Creek Manor is another one of those movies where a demented fiend devotes an extraordinary amount of energy to setting up scenes for the camera. Think of the trouble it would be for one man, working alone, to kill a horse and dump it into a swimming pool. The movie is an anthology of clichés, not neglecting both the Talking Killer, who talks when he should be at work, and the reliable climax where both the villain and his victims go to a great deal of inconvenience to climb to a high place so that one of them can fall off.
The movie stars Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone as Cooper and Leah Tilson, who get fed up with the city and move to the country, purchasing a property that looks like The House of the Seven Gables crossed with The Amityville Horror. This house is going to need a lot of work. In Under the Tuscan Sun, another new movie, Diane Lane is able to find some cheerful Polish workers to rehab her Tuscan villa, but the Tilsons have the extraordinarily bad judgment to hire the former owner of the house, Dale Massie (Stephen Dorff), an ex-con with a missing family. “Do you know what you’re getting yourselves into?” asks a helpful local. No, but everybody in the audience does.
The movie, of course, issues two small children to the Tilsons, so that their little screams can pipe up on cue, as when the beloved horse is found in the pool. And both Cooper and Leah are tinged with the suggestion of adultery, because in American movies, as we all know, sexual misconduct leads to bad real estate choices.
In all movies involving city people who move to the country, there is an unwritten rule that everybody down at the diner knows all about the history of the new property and the secrets of its former owners. The locals act as a kind of Greek chorus, living permanently at the diner and prepared on a moment’s notice to issue portentous warnings or gratuitous insults. The key player this time is Ruby (Juliette Lewis), Dale’s battered girlfriend, whose sister is Sheriff Annie Ferguson (Dana Eskelson). Ruby smokes a lot, always an ominous sign, and is ambiguous about Dale—she loves the lug, but gee, does he always have to be pounding on her? The scene where she claims she wasn’t hit, she only fell, is the most perfunctory demonstration possible of the battered woman in denial.
No one in this movie has a shred of common sense. The Tilsons are always leaving doors open even though they know terrible dangers lurk outside, and they are agonizingly slow to realize that Dale Massie is not only the wrong person to rehab their house, but the wrong person to be in the same state with.
Various clues, accompanied by portentous music, ominous winds, gathering clouds, etc., lead to the possibility that clues to Dale’s crimes can be found at the bottom of an old well, and we are not disappointed in our expectation that Sharon Stone will sooner or later find herself at the bottom of that well. But answer me this: If you were a vicious mad-dog killer and wanted to get rid of the Tilsons and had just pushed Leah down the well, and Cooper was all alone in the woods leaning over the well and trying to pull his wife back to the surface, would you just go ahead and push him in? Or what?
But no. The audience has to undergo an extended scene in which Cooper is not pushed down the well, in order for everyone to hurry back to the house, climb up to the roof, fall off, etc. Dale Massie is not a villain in this movie, but an enabler, a character who doesn’t want to kill but exists only to expedite the plot. Everything he does is after a look at the script, so that he appears, disappears, threatens, seems nice, looms, fades, pushes, doesn’t push, all so that we in the audience can be frightened or, in my case, amused.