A suitable bachelor is discovered: nice Andrew Jacoby, duke of Kensington (Callum Blue). Mia accepts his proposal, despite, as she writes in her diary on the Web site, “He’s everything a girl should want in a husband-to-be. It’s … just that … something … you know.” Meanwhile, of course, she hates the handsome young Sir Nicholas, who hangs around a lot and annoys her. “Dear Diary: Just look at him … all sneaky and smug and … and … cute.”
OK now, given those clues, see if you can figure out who she ends up with. And for that matter, consider Joseph (Hector Elizondo), the chief of palace security. He has been in love with the widow Clarisse for years, and she knows it and is pleased. That provides us with a romance without closure that has persisted ever since the first movie, and if there is anything nature abhors more than a vacuum, it is a loving couple kept asunder when they should be sundering.
Director Marshall puts his cast and plot through their paces with the speed and deliberation of Minnesota Fats clearing the table. He even provides a fountain for two characters to stand beside, so they can illustrate Gene Siskel’s maxim that nobody in a comedy ever comes within ten yards of water without falling in.
Yes, it’s nice to see Julie Andrews looking great and performing a song, although the line “Give the queen a shout-out, and she’ll sing” is one I doubt will ever be heard in Buckingham Palace. It is also rather original that at her slumber party, Mia and her friends don’t get wasted at a private club, but engage in the jolly indoor sport of mattress surfing.
The Promise
(DIRECTED BY CHEN KAIGE; STARRING CECILIA CHEUNG, JANG DONG GUN; 2006)
The Promise is pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything but a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection. What a disappointment from Chen Kaige, who has made great movies (Farewell, My Concubine) and no doubt will make them again.
The plot involves a touch of the crucial romantic misunderstanding in Vertigo. Princess Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung) thinks she is in love with the great General Guangming (Hiroyuki Sanada), who has saved her life after she offended the king (Cheng Qian). But actually she is in love with the slave Kunlan (Jang Dong Gun), who is impersonating the general. Kunlan has been assigned to protect the king from an outlander assassin named Wuhuan (Nicolas Tse) and another assassin named Snow Wolf (Liu Te). This is all going to be on the final.
Qingcheng’s love for the general (or Kunlan) is doomed whether or not she discovers that the former slave is impersonating his master. That is because in the early scenes of the movie, we saw Qingcheng as a child, being told by the Goddess Manshen (Hong Chen) that although she will have beauty and power and be a princess, she will lose every man she ever loves. This has possibilities. Since she loves Kunlan (thinking he is the general), what would happen if Kunlan were lost as per the prophecy, and she ended up with the real general? Would she then think she loved him and live happily ever after, not realizing he is not really the man she loves? Would her mistake grant him immunity? At some point I wanted James Stewart to appear and herd everybody up into a bell tower.
One of Kunlan’s gifts is the ability to run really, really fast. I’m thinking of The Flash here. The problem with attaining that velocity is that Kunlan obviously must abandon the world of gravity and physical reality, and become a computer-generated graphic, and you know, it’s a funny thing, CGI running may be faster than real running, but it never seems like anybody is really working at it. We’re watching an effect instead of an achievement.
The CGI work in the movie is cheesy. One problem with CGI is that it inspires greed in directors. Chen Kaige reportedly had one thousand real extras for one of his battle scenes, and considering that Orson Welles put on a great battle in Falstaff with close-ups of about nine actors, that should have been plenty. But no. He uses CGI to multiply those soldiers until they take on all the reality of the hordes of Troy, who were so numerous that in one shot it was obvious they would all fit inside their city only by standing on each other’s shoulders. Enough is enough.
Another difficulty is that the story is never organized clearly enough to generate much concern in our minds. The characters are not people but collections of attributes, and isn’t it generally true that the more sensational an action scene, the less we care about the people in it? It’s as if the scene signals us that it’s about itself, and the characters are spectators just as we are.
I spent a fair amount of time puzzling over my notes and rummaging on the Web for hints about the details of the plot, and in the process discovered a new Movie Law. You are familiar with the Law of Symbolism: If you have to ask what something symbolized, it didn’t. Now here is the Law of Plots: If you can’t describe it with clarity, there wasn’t one. I know someone will throw up Syriana as an objection, but there is a difference between a plot that is about confusion, and a plot that is merely confused.
R
Raise Your Voice
(DIRECTED BY SEAN MCNAMARA; STARRING HILARY DUFF, RITA WILSON; 2004)
Hilary Duff has a great smile, and she proves it by smiling pretty much all the way through Raise Your Voice, except when there’s a death in the family or her roommate Denise says something mean to her, or she sees her kind-of boyfriend Jay kissing Robin after he said he’d broken up with her, or when her dad says she can’t go to music camp. The rest of the time she smiles and smiles, and I love gazing upon her smile, although a still photo would achieve the same effect and be a time-saver.
She smiles in Raise Your Voice, a carefully constructed new movie that doesn’t make her a contemporary teenager so much as surround her with them. She plays Terri Fletcher, a young music student, who after a personal tragedy wants to begin again by attending a three-week camp for gifted young musicians in Los Angeles. Her dad (David Keith) is against it: Terrible things can happen to a young woman in Los Angeles. Her mother (Rita Wilson) conspires with her artistic Aunt Nina (Rebecca De Mornay) to sneak her off to the camp while Dad thinks she’s visiting Nina in Palm Desert. Aunt Nina is one of those artists who does alarming things up on stepladders with an acetylene torch.
All the kids are snobs at the camp, primarily so they can soften later. (If they soften right away, there goes the plot.) Terri’s new roommate is Denise (Dana Davis), who plans to work hard for a scholarship, and resents Terri as a distraction. Sizing up Terri’s wardrobe and her smile, Denise tells her: “You’re like some kind of retro Brady Buncher.” I hate it when a movie contains its own review. For that matter, earlier in the movie her brother tells her she’s a “Stepford daughter,” but he encourages her to go to the camp, direly predicting: “If you don’t, you’re going to end up doing Cats at the Y when you’re forty.”
Terri meets a nice kid named Jay (Oliver James), who has a British accent and is very encouraging and warm, and brings her out of herself and encourages her to sing with joy, and writes a song with her and says he doesn’t date the bitchy Robin (Lauren C. Mayhew) anymore because she was “last summer.” There is also an inspiring music teacher (John Corbett), who wants to find the best in her, and doesn’t have to look very deep.