Category: 2000s

When tax attorney Steve Martin opens his door to the woman he thought he had been corresponding with online, he instead finds Queen Latifah, an escaped felon who wants his help in clearing her name. She soon ingratiates herself to him and his family so he offers his assistance. I generally find Queen Latifah very likable, but she has been in a number of stinkers in her career and this is one of them. It’s mostly forgettable except for its very broad racial stereotypes, especially those coming from racist neighbor Betty White.

I was fairly certain I had watched this before, but couldn’t remember a single detail. It was similarly bland this time around, but I did recall details from my previous view as I watched. Very loosely inspired by Tim Owens’s experience replacing Rob Halford in Judas Priest, this features Mark Wahlberg as the lead singer of a cover band who is hired to replace Jason Flemyng, the gay lead singer of the band he imitates. Unlike the actual story, this is inexplicably supposedly set in the 1980s, but looks nothing like the 1980s. In fact, Jennifer Aniston looks like she just walked off the set of Friends to film her scenes. The movie is rather dumb and entirely predictable, but the shoehorning of the Seattle grunge scene at the end is borderline offensive. I was mildly amused at the stunt casting of real life musicians such as Blas Elias, Jason Bonham, and Zakk Wylde as musicians in the various bands and former partners of musicians as the rock stars’ wives. I do somewhat like the soundtrack, even the songs credited to the fictional bands.  

I had thought I had watched this film before but it left no impression on me. A second watch didn’t do much to alleviate that feeling. The story of Edie Sedgwick, an heiress who was best known as one of Andy Warhol’s Superstars who died at a young age because of her drug abuse, isn’t very interesting, at least as shown in this film. It portrays her as a poor little rich girl whose life follows a rather predictable trajectory, used and discarded by any of the men in her life. Sienna Miller does do an admirable job in portraying Sedgwick, from her highs to her lows. Comparing pictures from the time portrayed, the two are almost indistinguishable from each other.

For someone clamoring for a film about Abbie Hoffman twenty years ago, this would have probably sufficed. Though I can’t attest to its veracity, it covers a lot of the events of Hoffman’s life from his days as a counterculture activist to being on the run from the authorities after a cocaine possession arrest. I found the later half interesting in the family that developed between Hoffman, his second wife, their son, and the woman who supported him while he was in hiding. Vincent D’Onofrio gives a solid performance as Abbie, as do Janeane Garofelo and Jeanne Tripplehorn as the two women in his life. Overall though I think I found a deeper portrait of Hoffman in the concise story shown in The Trial of the Chicago 7.

For some reason, manic pixie hat maker Winona Ryder falls for much older restauranteur Richard Gere. Unfortunately she has a tumor weakening her heart and she’s dying. Though maybe it’s not unfortunate because there’s no other circumstance propelling the story. They have absolutely no chemistry and Gere’s character is unlikable pretty much through the entire film. I can’t think of a single thing to recommend it unless someone is trying to complete either of the leads’ filmographies.

When dim-witted Colorado gubernatorial candidate and son of a US senator Chris Cooper fishes up a corpse while making a campaign video, private investigator and ex-reporter Danny Huston is hired to investigate the case but also keep any of the candidate’s skeletons from making waves. It’s not Sayles’s best nor most enthralling work. Cooper is playing a character very similar to George W. Bush, being controlled by power and money behind the scenes. I had hoped to see much more of Cooper but the story rests with Huston meeting with a large cast of characters: Richard Dreyfus, Daryl Hannah, Kris Kristofferson, Miguel Ferrer, and more. At its core, it’s a twisty mystery that squanders it’s cast to take on more issues than it should: political corruption, corporate power, environmentalism, and undocumented workers.