The story involves Dr. Doom’s plot to … but perhaps we need not concern ourselves with the plot of the movie, since it is undermined at every moment by the unwieldy need to involve a screenful of characters who, despite the most astonishing powers, have not been made exciting or even interesting. The X-Men are major league compared to them. And the really good superhero movies, like Superman, Spiderman II, and Batman Begins, leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in some of the same theaters.
Fast Food, Fast Women
(DIRECTED BY AMOS KOLLEK; STARRING ANNA THOMSON, JAMIE HARRIS; 2001)
There’s nothing wrong with Fast Food, Fast Women that a casting director and a rewrite couldn’t have fixed. The rewrite would have realized that the movie’s real story involves a sweet, touching romance between two supporting characters. The casting director would have questioned the sanity of using Anna Thomson in the lead role.
The sweet love story stars Louise Lasser in her best performance, as Emily, a widow who finds Paul (Robert Modica) through a personals ad. Their courtship is complicated by pride and misunderstanding, and by way too many plot contrivances. The lead role involves Thomson as Bella, a waitress who is said to be thirty-five.
A gentleman does not question a lady about her age, but Thomson was playing adult roles twenty years ago, has obviously had plastic surgery, and always dresses to emphasize her extreme thinness and prominent chest, so that we can’t help thinking she’s had a boob job.
Faithful readers will know I rarely criticize the physical appearance of actors. I would have given Thomson a pass, but the movie seems to be inviting my thoughts about her character, since Lasser’s character has one big scene where she confesses she’s not really as young as she claims, and another where she wonders if she should have her breasts enlarged—and then Thomson’s character asks the taxi driver, “Aren’t I voluptuous enough?” It’s unwise to have one character being honest about issues when we’re supposed to overlook the same questions raised by another character.
The movie takes place in one of those movie diners where everybody hangs out all day long and gets involved in each other’s business. Bella rules the roost, pouring coffee for Paul and his pal Seymour (Victor Argo). The diner has so many regulars, it even has a regular hooker, Vitka (Angelica Torn), who stutters, so that guys can’t tell she’s asking them if they feel like having a good time. We learn that for years Bella has been having an affair with the married George (Austin Pendleton), who claims to be a Broadway producer, but whose shows sound like hallucinations. He spends most of their time together looking away from her and grinning at a private joke.
Bella meets a cab driver named Bruno (Jamie Harris), who has become the custodian of two children, leading to more misunderstandings that threaten to derail their future together. And then Bruno meets Emily, Seymour falls for Wanda, a stripper in a peep show, and there comes a point when you want to ask Amos Kollek, the writer-director, why the zany plot overkill when your real story is staring you in the face? (You want to ask him that even before the zebras and the camels turn up, and long before the unforgivable “happy ending.”)
Lasser and Modica, as Emily and Paul, are two nice, good, lovable people who deserve each other, and whenever the movie involves their story, we care (even despite some desperate plot contrivances). Lasser’s vulnerability, her courage, and the light in her eyes all bring those scenes to life, as does Paul’s instinctive courtesy and the way he responds to her warmth. There’s the movie. If it has to pretend to be about Bella, Kollek as the director should at least have been able to see the character more clearly—clearly enough to know the audience cannot believe she is thirty-five, and thinks of her whenever anyone else mentions plastic surgery.
Final Destination 2
(DIRECTED BY DAVID ELLIS; STARRING ALI LARTER, A. J. COOK; 2003)
Look, we drove a long way to get here, so if you know how to beat death, we’d like to know.
So say pending victims to a morgue attendant in Final Destination 2, which takes a good idea from the first film and pounds it into the ground, not to mention decapitating, electrocuting, skewering, blowing up, incinerating, drowning, and gassing it. Perhaps movies are like history and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.
The earlier film involved a group of friends who got off an airplane after one of them had a vivid precognition of disaster. The plane crashes on takeoff. But then, one by one, most of the survivors die, as if fate has to balance its books.
That movie depends on all the horror clichés of the Dead Teenager Movie (formula: Teenagers are alive at beginning, dead at end). But it is well made and thoughtful. As I wrote in my review: “The film in its own way is biblical in its dilemma, although the students use the code word ‘fate’ when what they are really talking about is God. In their own terms, in their own way, using teenage vernacular, the students have existential discussions.”
That was then; this is now. Faithful to its genre, Final Destination 2 allows one of its original characters, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), to survive, so she can be a link to the earlier film. In the new film, Clear is called upon by Kimberly Corman (A. J. Cook), a twenty-something, who is driving three friends in her SUV when she suddenly has a vision of a horrendous traffic accident. Kimberly blocks the on-ramp, saving the drivers behind her when logs roll off a timber truck, gas tanks explode, etc.
But is it the same old scenario? Are the people she saved all doomed to die? “There is a sort of force—an unseen malevolent presence around us every day,” a character muses. “I prefer to call it death.”
The malevolent presence doesn’t remain unseen for long. Soon bad things are happening to good people, in a series of accidents that Rube Goldberg would have considered implausible. In one ingenious sequence, we see a character who almost trips over a lot of toys while carrying a big Macintosh iMac box. In his house, he starts the microwave and lights a fire under a frying pan, then drops his ring down the garbage disposal, then gets his hand trapped in the disposal while the microwave explodes and the frying pan starts a fire, then gets his hand loose, breaks a window that mysteriously slams shut, climbs down a fire escape, falls to the ground, and finally, when it seems he is safe … well, everything that could possibly go wrong does, except that he didn’t get a Windows machine.
Other characters die in equally improbable ways. One is ironically killed by an air bag, another almost chokes in a dentist’s chair, a third is severed from his respirator, and so on, although strange things do happen in real life. I came home from seeing this movie to read the story about the teenager who was thrown twenty-five feet in the air after a car crash, only to save himself by grabbing some telephone lines. If that had happened in Final Destination 2, his car would have exploded, blowing him off the lines with a flying cow.
There is a kind of dumb level on which a movie like this works, once we understand the premise. People will insist on dying oddly. Remember the story of the woman whose husband left her, so she jumped out the window and landed on him as he was leaving the building?