Sue and Al (Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw) are Tripp’s parents. “I never sleep with my clients,” Paula tells them. What she does is take hardened bachelors, force them to fall in love with her, and use that leverage to get them to move out of the parental home, after which she breaks up with them and they’re fine. If this sounds to you like a cross between pathological cruelty and actionable fraud, I could not agree more. On the other hand, Tripp is no more benign. His strategy is to date a girl until she begins to like him, and then take her home to bed, not telling her it is his parents’ home. “The only reason he brings girls to dinner is because he’s breaking up with them!” Sue warns Paula.
Oh, what stupid people these are. Stupid to do what they do, say what they say, think what they think, and get bitten by a chipmunk, a dolphin, a lizard, and a mockingbird. Actually, it’s Tripp’s friend Ace (Justin Bartha) who is bitten by the mockingbird. He is dating Paula’s surly roommate, Kit (Zooey Deschanel). She hates the mockingbird because it keeps her awake at nights. They hunt it with a BB gun, only intending to wound it, but alas the bird is peppered with BBs and seems to be dead, and … no, I’m not even going to go there. “You can’t kill a mockingbird!” a gun salesman tells her. “Why not?” she asks. “You know!” he says. “That book, To Kill a Mockingbird!” No, she doesn’t know. “I can’t believe you don’t know that,” the guy says. Not know what? It’s not titled To Kill a Mockingbird Would Be Wrong.
Ace gives the bird the kiss of life and they pump its furry little chest, and it recovers and bites Ace. Kit meanwhile has fallen in love with Ace. Which is my cue to tell you that Zooey Deschanel on this same weekend is opening in two movies; in this one she plays an airhead who saves the life of a mockingbird, and in the other one, Winter Passing, she plays an alcoholic actress who drowns her cat, which is dying from leukemia. It’s an impressive stretch, like simultaneously playing Lady Macbeth and judging American Idol. Deschanel is actually very good in Winter Passing and fairly good in Failure to Launch. You know the joke about how polite Canadians are. If a movie is great they say it’s “very good,” and if a movie is terrible, they say it’s “fairly good.”
I cannot bring myself to describe how Tripp’s friend Ace kidnaps him, locks him in a closet, and tricks Paula into being locked in the room with him, so that they will be forced to confess their love to each other while Tripp remains tied to a chair and Ace uses hidden iSight cameras to telecast this event, live and with sound, for the entertainment of complete strangers in a restaurant, who watch it on a wall-sized video screen.
Now to get technical. The editing of the film is strangely fragmented. I first noticed this during a backyard conversation between the parents. There’s unusually jerky cutting on lines of dialogue, back and forth, as if the film is unwilling to hold the characters in the same shot while they talk to one another. This turbulence continues throughout the film. Back and forth we go, as if the camera’s watching a tennis match. I would question the editor, Steven Rosenblum, but he’s the same man who edited Braveheart, Glory, and The Last Samurai, so I know this isn’t his style. Did the director, Tom Dey, favor quick cutting for some reason? Perhaps because he couldn’t stand to look at any one shot for very long? That’s the way I felt.
Fantastic Four
(DIRECTED BY TIM STORY; STARRING IOAN GRUFFUDD, JESSICA ALBA; 2005)
So you get in a spaceship and you venture into orbit to research a mysterious star storm hurtling toward Earth. There’s a theory it may involve properties of use to man. The ship is equipped with a shield to protect its passengers from harmful effects, but the storm arrives ahead of schedule and saturates everybody on board with unexplained but powerful energy that creates radical molecular changes in their bodies.
They return safely to Earth, only to discover that Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), the leader of the group, has a body that can take any form or stretch to unimaginable lengths. Call him Mr. Fantastic. Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) develops superhuman powers in a vast and bulky body that seems made of stone. Call him Thing. Susan Storm (Jessica Alba) can become invisible at will, and generate force fields that can contain propane explosions, in case you have a propane explosion that needs containing but want the option of being invisible. Call her Invisible Woman. And her brother, Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), has a body that can burn at supernova temperatures. Call him the Human Torch. I almost forgot the villain, Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), who becomes Doctor Doom and wants to use the properties of the star storm and the powers of the Fantastic Four for his own purposes. He eventually becomes metallic.
By this point in the review, are you growing a little restless? What am I gonna do, list names and actors and superpowers and nicknames forever? That’s how the movie feels. It’s all setup and demonstration and naming and discussing and demonstrating, and it never digests the complications of the Fantastic Four and gets on to telling a compelling story. Sure, there’s a nice sequence where Thing keeps a fire truck from falling off a bridge, but you see one fire truck saved from falling off a bridge, you’ve seen them all.
The Fantastic Four are, in short, underwhelming. The edges kind of blur between them and other superhero teams. That’s understandable. How many people could pass a test right now on who the X-Men are and what their powers are? Or would want to? I wasn’t watching Fantastic Four to study it, but to be entertained by it, but how could I be amazed by a movie that makes its own characters so indifferent about themselves? The Human Torch, to repeat, can burn at supernova temperatures! He can become so hot, indeed, that he could threaten the very existence of the Earth itself! This is absolutely stupendously amazing, wouldn’t you agree? If you could burn at supernova temperatures, would you be able to stop talking about it? I know people who won’t shut up about winning fifty bucks in the lottery.
But after Johnny Storm finds out he has become the Human Torch, he takes it pretty much in stride, showing off a little by setting his thumb on fire. Later he saves the Earth, while Invisible Woman simultaneously contains his supernova so he doesn’t destroy it. That means Invisible Woman could maybe create a force field to contain the sun, which would be a big deal, but she’s too distracted to explore the possibilities; she gets uptight because she will have to be naked to be invisible, because otherwise people could see her empty clothes; it is no consolation to her that invisible nudity is more of a metaphysical concept than a condition.
Are these people complete idiots? The entire nature of their existence has radically changed, and they’re about as excited as if they got a makeover on Oprah. The exception is Ben Grimm, as Thing, who gets depressed when he looks in the mirror. Unlike the others, who look normal except when actually exhibiting superpowers, he looks like—well, he looks like his suits would fit The Hulk, just as the Human Torch looks like The Flash, and the Invisible Woman reminds me of Storm in X-Men. Is this the road company? Thing clomps around on his size eighteen boulders and feels like an outcast until he meets a blind woman named Alicia (Kerry Washington) who loves him, in part because she can’t see him. But Thing looks like Don Rickles crossed with Mount Rushmore; he has a body that feels like a driveway and a face with crevices you could hide a toothbrush in. Alicia tenderly feels his face with her fingers, like blind people often do while falling in love in the movies, and I guess she likes what she feels. Maybe she’s extrapolating.