The movie cuts away from the payoffs of the big scenes. We get the foreplay for both of Britney’s sex scenes, but never see what happens. Her big meeting with her mother lacks the showdown. We can be grateful, I suppose, that after Mimi falls down some stairs after learning that Kit’s fiancé is the man who raped her, we are spared the details of her miscarriage and cut to her later in the hospital. Perhaps study of the live childbirth scene in the Spice Girls movie warned the filmmakers away from obstetric adventures in this one.
Like Coyote Ugly, a movie it resembles in the wardrobe department, Crossroads is rated PG-13 but is going on seventeen. Caution, kids: It can be more dangerous to get a ride in a convertible with a cute but ominous guy than you might think. (See Kalifornia.)
And you can’t always support yourself by tips on Karaoke Night. When the girls sing in a karaoke contest, a three-gallon jug is filled with bills, which, after they’re piled in stacks on the bar, are enough to pay for car repairs and the rest of the trip. Uh, huh. Curious about that karaoke bar. It has a position on the stage with an underlight and one of those poles that strippers twine around. You don’t see those much in karaoke clubs.
D
Daddy Day Care
(DIRECTED BY STEVE CARR; STARRING EDDIE MURPHY, JEFF GARLIN; 2003)
Daddy Day Care is a woeful miscalculation, a film so wrongheaded audiences will be more appalled than amused. It imagines Eddie Murphy and sidekick Jeff Garlin in charge of a day-care center that could only terrify parents in the audience, although it may look like fun for their children. The center’s philosophy apparently consists of letting kids do whatever they feel like, while the amateur staff delivers one-liners.
I realize that the movie is not intended as a serious work about day-care centers. It is a comedy (in genre, not in effect). But at some point we might expect it to benefit from real life, real experiences, real kids. Not a chance. It’s all simply a prop for the Eddie Murphy character. Aggressively simpleminded, it’s fueled by the delusion that it has a brilliant premise: Eddie Murphy plus cute kids equals success. But a premise should be the starting point for a screenplay, not its finish line.
In the film, Murphy plays Charlie Hinton, an advertising executive assigned to the account of a breakfast cereal based on vegetables. This leads eventually to desperate scenes involving Murphy dressed in a broccoli suit, maybe on the grounds that once, long ago, he was funny in a Gumby suit. The cereal fails, and he’s fired along with his best pal Phil (Garlin). Charlie’s wife, Kim (Regina King), goes to work as a lawyer, leaving her husband at home to take care of their son, Ben (Khamani Griffin). Next thing you know, Charlie has the idea of opening a day-care center.
Enter the villainess, Miss Haridan (Anjelica Huston), whose own day-care center is so expensive that Charlie can no longer afford to send Ben there. Huston plays the role as your standard dominatrix, ruling her school with an iron hand, but you know what? It looks to me like a pretty good school, with the kids speaking foreign languages and discussing advanced science projects. Obviously, in the terms of this movie, any school where the kids have to study is bad, just as a school where the kids can run around and raise hell is good. This bias is disguised as Charlie’s insight into child psychology.
The new school is successful almost from the outset, and empty seats begin to turn up in Miss Harridan’s school as parents switch their kids to the cheaper alternative. No sane parent would trust a child to Charlie and Phil’s chaotic operation, but never mind. Soon the partners hire an assistant, Marvin, played by Steve Zahn as a case of arrested development. Miss Harridan, facing the failure of her school, mounts a counterattack and of course is vanquished. She appears in the movie’s final shot in a pathetically unfunny attempt to force humor long after the cause has been lost.
What the movie lacks is any attempt to place Murphy and his costars in a world of real kids and real day care. This entire world looks like it exists only on a studio lot. A few kids are given identifiable attributes (one won’t take off his superhero costume), but basically they’re just a crowd of rug-rats in the background of the desperately forced comedy. Even the movie’s poop joke fails, and if you can’t make a poop joke work in a movie about kids, you’re in trouble.
The movie’s miscalculation, I suspect, is the same one that has misled Murphy in such other recent bombs as I Spy and The Adventures of Pluto Nash (which was unseen by me and most of the rest of the world). That’s the delusion that Murphy’s presence will somehow lend magic to an undistinguished screenplay. A film should begin with a story and characters, not with a concept and a star package.
Dear Wendy
(DIRECTED BY THOMAS VINTERBERG; STARRING JAMIE BELL, BILL PULLMAN; 2005)
Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy is a tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray. Mine strayed to the fact that the screenplay is by Vinterberg’s Danish mentor Lars von Trier, and the movie, although filmed on three-dimensional sets, feels as artificial and staged as his Dogville (2003). Once again a small group of people inhabit a small space, can all see each other out the window, and live in each other’s pockets.
The movie is set in Electric Park, a set in which two rows of buildings face each other and a third row supplies the end of the street. Towering overhead is the elevator for the mine shaft; the locals were mostly miners, but the mines are nearly played out. Dick (Jamie Bell), the orphaned son of a miner, lives with his protective black housekeeper, Clarabelle (Novella Nelson), and his life lacks purpose until he goes into a store to buy a toy gun.
The weapon, as it happens, is real. Dick is a pacifist, but falls in love with the gun, which he names Wendy. Much of the movie consists of a letter he writes to Wendy, about how he loved her and lost her, and how everything went wrong. He descends into an abandoned mine for target practice, finds he has a psychic bond with Wendy (he can hit a bulls-eye blindfolded), and soon enlists other people his age into a secret society named the Dandies.
They meet in the mine, which they redecorate as the “Temple,” and begin to dress in oddments of haberdashery, like fools or clowns. They have the obligatory unlimited supply of candles. They take a vow of nonviolence. Then Clarabelle’s grandson Sebastian (Danso Gordon) appears on the scene, fresh from jail. The local sheriff (Bill Pullman) suggests that Dick “could be like Sebastian’s friend, and keep an eye on him.”
Sebastian is black because he is Clarabelle’s grandson, of course, but also because as the only young black man in the film he is made into the catalyst for violence. This is the Vinterberg/von Trier version of insight into America, roughly as profound as the scene in Dirty Love where Carmen Electra holds a gun to a man’s head simply because she likes to act black and thinks that will help. To call such reasoning racist is tempting, and yet I suspect in both movies the real reasons for it are stupidity and cluelessness.
Right away there is trouble. A romantic triangle forms, as Sebastian holds Wendy tenderly and Dick gets jealous. Sebastian helpfully supplies all of the Dandies with guns, and then a challenge emerges: Clarabelle visits her granddaughter at the end of the street every year, and has become afraid to leave the house. The Dandies devise an ingenious scheme to protect her from danger during her one-block walk, despite the fact that the town seems to contain no danger. I am reminded of a guy I knew who said he carried a gun because he lived in a dangerous neighborhood, and another guy told him, “It would be a lot safer if you moved.”