Confessions of a Shopaholic - Review

Every Manhattan-set movie or book aimed at women, from Sex and the City on down, has essentially been part of a fantasy world. There are few black people, or poor people, or anyone who can't pronounce Christian Louboutin, and all it takes for success is some wide eyes, a trim waistline, and a fix on the perfect guy.

But Confessions of a Shopaholic takes the whole chick lit package, the candy colored dresses and the personal chauffeurs, to a ridiculous, intolerable new level. Isla Fisher, normally an appealing and capable actress, is reduced to a fluffy pink stereotype here, and all the name-brand talent surrounding her gets shoved into one-line cameos, all to make room for more shopping montages. Setting aside the unintentionally funny moments that remind you how distant this movie is from the economic crisis we're in, Shopaholic is awful in its own right-- shallow and screechy and completely rotten at its core.

Fisher's Rebecca Bloomwood is intended as a lovable goofball sort of character, a less world-weary Carrie Bradshaw, but largely comes across as an idiot as she shops her way into $16,000 in debt, then stumbles into a job at Smart Savings magazine. The editor who hires her (Hugh Dancy) seems about as blindsided by her looks as he is impressed with her talent, and for inexplicable reasons overlooks her complete lack of financial knowledge, bizarre behavior (she's evading a debt collector, you see) and overall stupidity to keep her hired.

And of course, it turns out she's a hit-- because most Americans are as stupid as Rebecca, and we need her to explain finance in terms of shoes and handbags. She impresses the president of the publishing company (John Lithgow, wasted in a stern suit role) and even the haughty editor (Kristin Scott Thomas) of the fashion magazine she really wanted to work for to begin with.

With her life on the upswing Rebecca promises her sensible, slightly kooky roommate Suze (Krysten Ritter) that she'll get her finances in order. But there are balls to attend! And mannequins who actually come to life and coax her into stores. Of course, just when Rebecca thinks she has it all, her personal financial troubles come back to haunt her, and it's up to her to sort things out, win back her man, and give us the generic ending demanding by anyone who bothered to buy a ticket for this.

Most of the intended comedy comes from Rebecca's various pratfalls, which include hiding in a clothes rack to steal back a letter, fighting other women at a sample sale and diving across the table to answer the phone. In most movies these kinds of slips endear us to the female character, but here they only serve to make Rebecca seem like more of an idiot, devoid of all personality except a fetishistic love of shoes. In one scene, Fisher gets to cut loose and dance, showing wild moves similar to what made her notable in Wedding Crashers. But the scene doesn't fit at all with her character, and immediately after Rebecca is back to blank, cute neutral. It's as if Fisher took the reins for one moment and gave actual characterization a shot, but director P.J. Hogan stopped her before it was too late.

Everyone in the movie overacts wildly, with the exception of cool British Dancy, but especially grating are Ritter and the always-hyper Joan Cusack, both of whom bug out their eyes at least twice a scene. The mugging is almost preferable,to the blank presence from so many other actors, including Lithgow, John Goodman as Rebecca's dad, and Scott Thomas, whose customary restraint gets swallowed by the movie's frenetic pace.

There's lots to look at, between Patricia Field's gonzo costumes and Dancy's sparkling blue eyes, but nothing to feel in Shopaholic, other than a deep regret that we ever thought this kind of lifestyle was funny, much less admirable. Sophie Kinsella's books, on which the film is based, were written at the beginning of this boom decade, but feel as antiquated here as a story from the Gilded Age. A better, smarter movie could have let us forget modern troubles and lose ourselves in this candy-colored world, but Shopaholic has too many comedic dead spots and too little wit to carry anyone away.

The International - Review

The International has a big obstacle in its way right from the outset: How do you make banking interesting? Like making math fun, turning the world of money lending into something that’ll keep you awake for two hours, is a tall order. A Beautiful Mind made math exciting by using a lead character who is not only crazy, but experiences amusing hallucinations. The International tries to make banking more fun than watching paint dry, by turning the finance industry into one big, espionage ridden shoot-em-up. Though recently laid off Wallstreet workers looking for payback may take pleasure in seeing a few bank executives rubbed out, when the bullets aren’t flying you’re likely to find yourself wishing for that wet paint.

The problem is really the plot, which never makes a lot of sense. Clive Owen plays Louis, an Interpol agent investigating a vague and complicated banking organization called the IBBC. He’s after them because, they lend money to people. Some of their lendees are even bad people and apparently banks are supposed to do some sort of background check before opening a saving account? I’m not sure, but Clive Owen seems really pissed about it. Or maybe he’s just pissed that the bank keeps sending assassins to kill his friends. Ok, killing people is a crime so I understand why he’d take them down for that, except they wouldn’t have killed his friends if he hadn’t already been investigating them for, again, money lending. Last I checked, aren’t banks supposed to lend money? It’s not like the IBBC was selling bad mortgages. If there’s an accountant in the audience, see it and send me an e-mail straightening this whole thing out.

Luckily The International doesn’t wait long before it starts inventing excuses for Clive Owen to fire off a gun. When that’s happening, the movie is intense and visceral. In between those scenes, it’s full of artifice in which cliché, brain dead superiors scream that our heroes are out of time and must drop the case, even though they’re obviously getting massive results and doing everything right. But the movie needs tension when the bullets aren’t flying, so there’s a lot of talk about needless timelines which serve no other purpose than to be a ticking clock. Clive needs a reason to drive his car really fast. Gotta stop those bankers, before they make another loan!

At some point Naomi Watts gets into the mix as a New York investigator with a stake in what’s going on. She’s left out of the gunplay and I’m not entirely sure why she’s in the story at all. It doesn’t matter. There’s a fantastic shootout in the middle of the movie, set inside the Guggenheim museum. This is almost certainly the only thing you’ll remember when walking out of the movie, and since Naomi Watts isn’t involved, feel free to write her off. The Guggenheim sequence though, you’re not likely to forget. The International is worth sitting through if only to see it. It’s well shot yes, but spectacular mainly because of the setting. The museum is a series of never ending, spiraling, balcony ramps with beautiful glass artwork in the center. You can guess what happens when Clive Owen has to fight off an army of guys armed with machine guns. Big fun. That’s what.

Still, this a movie about banking. Shoehorn all the bullets you want into it, but it remains a plot driven by accountants. Maybe that’s relevant, with the economy in shambles because of the greed of banking executives like the ones Clive sets out to blow up in The International. I know I’d certainly like some revenge against those bastards. Unfortunately The International’s approach is stark, cold, and not one that lends itself to revenge. In the movie’s final moments the script takes a vicious left turn in an effort to strip away everything and leave us with only the emotional and raw. Yet even there, Tom Tykwer’s direction ensures that the film remains calculating and distant, as if instead of a movie we’re watching a monetary transaction between a filmmaker and his audience.

Pink Panther 2 - Review

Steve Martin continues to be a revered comedy icon even 10 years after his last relevant comedy (that would be Bowfinger), but even he knew he needed some help to get anyone to accept a second remake of the classic Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. So for The Pink Panther 2, Martin stacks the deck with talented comedians and actors from across the globe. Emily Mortimer and Jean Reno are back, John Cleese has replaced Kevin Kline as Clouseau's nemesis Inspector Dreyfus, and Alfred Molina and Andy Garcia have joined as international investigators brought to France when, once again, the Pink Panther diamond is lifted. Add in Aishwarya Rai as a mysterious diamond expert, Lily Tomlin as an etiquette teacher and Jeremy Irons as a suspected culprit, and it's a cast that would make anything worth watching.

Anything except The Pink Panther 2, that is. The movie that brings together all these stars is a dull and obvious comedy that either squanders the talent of its cast or leaves them to founder within the scrambled and episodic screenplay. Decent pratfalls and physical gags will take you a long way, but there needs to be some semblance of wit and coherence to keep viewers older than 10 interested. Harald Zwart steps in for director Shawn Levy here, but his poor sense of comedic timing and lack of visual style may have only made matters worse.

When the film opens Inspector Clouseau (Martin) has been relegated to parking meter duty after winning a Medal of Honor at the end of the last film, with Dreyfus hoping to keep him out of the office and out of the way. But when the Pink Panther is stolen, along with priceless artifacts from Italy, Japan and England, Clouseau is the obvious choice to join the international Dream Team charged with recovering the items. There's a Brit (Molina), an Italian (Garcia) and a Japanese whiz kid (Yuki Matsuzaki), all of them exasperated by Clouseau's ego and clumsiness. The Italian is more interested Clouseau's secretary Nicole (Mortimer), whom he woos even while Nicole and Clouseau refuse to acknowledge their mutual crushes.

Joined by jewel expert Sonia (Rai), the Dream Team travels the globe on the trail of the mysterious thief The Tornado. Each location is essentially just a new opportunity for a Clouseau pratfall. He runs atop a giant globe in a mansion, he falls off the Pope's balcony, he burns down a restaurant in Rome. The physical gags, as tired as they may be, work a whole lot better than the French jokes, which once again find Clouseau unable to pronounce "hamburger" and, in his scenes with Tomlin, constantly ogling women. The goal seems to be to establish some kind of witty repartee among the assorted comic legends, but all the verbal scenes are draggy and obvious, making Tomlin's presence, for the first time ever, unwanted.

Mortimer brings some sparkle as the dopey and devoted Nicole, and Molina especially makes a fun opponent for Clouseau, as in one early scene where the two size each other up by lobbing random insults like "You were 14 before you learned to enjoy the taste of avocado!" Reno, though his character lurks weirdly on the sidelines for most of the film, gets a beautifully bizarre song-and-dance scene with Martin. You get the sense that, in a better movie with more ambition, the audience could be having as much fun as the stars did behind the scenes.

Once I was watching The Office on DVD, and spent 10 minutes watching deleted scenes before I realized it wasn't the actual episode. The Pink Panther 2 is pretty much the same experience, making you wonder if there's a cut of the film that doesn't linger so needlessly on Clouseau's love triangle, or leaves out the scenes (Clouseau karate fights with tweens?) that have nothing to do with the plot. But apparently Martin and Zwart really did want to make a movie this aimless and derivative, aware that their target audience of children won't know what they're missing. Would that the rest of us could be so lucky.

Taken - Review

Taken really has no right to be as much fun as it is. A movie with less interest in character development and dialogue than in roundhouse kicks and gunplay, Taken is brutish and loud and slow in parts, but also undeniably entertaining.

The presence of Liam Neeson in the lead role is a bonus, but surprisingly, not really the source of success. Credit goes to Pierre Morel, the director who previously made the gonzo French action movie District B13 and brings the same frenetic, sadistic energy to the manifold action sequences here. The plot takes forever to get going, and suffers throughout from terrible dialogue and ridiculous twists, but when it comes to the action-- which is why you bought the ticket in the first place, of course-- Morel is completely in charge..

But first, there's an interminable half hour or so spent meeting Bryan Mills (Neeson), a former spy now living in Los Angeles in order to be closer to his teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who lives with her mom (Famke Janssen) and a rich stepdad who buys her a pony for her 16th birthday. Mills, poor guy, can only afford a karaoke machine. We needlessly watch Mills return briefly to the job to protect a pop star-- and take down an assailant in the process-- and hang out with his old spy buddies, since apparently screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen took the "show, don't tell" method of exposition way, way too seriously.

The plot finally emerges when Kim asks permission to spend the summer in Paris, and Mills, an insanely overprotective father, denies her at first. She then confirms the worst suspicions of every overprotective parent on earth by getting kidnapped, along with her friend Amanda, within minutes of arriving in Paris. After a frantic phone call with Kim that gives a few key clues about the kidnappers, Mills has packed his toolkit of weapons and jetted overseas, preparing to "tear down the EIffel Tower if I have to" in order to find his daughter.

He stops just short of that, but destroys any number of cars, construction sites, and lives as he races through the seedy underbelly of Paris. He determines Kim and Amanda have been taken by Albanian traffickers, who kidnap unassuming young women and, usually within 70 hours, ship them away forever. A number of plot threads that might give more insight into this under-discussed, tragic world are abandoned, including an odd moment when Mills cares for a kidnapped woman whom he first thinks is Kim. There's also an encounter in which Mills' French government contact appears to be in cahoots with the traffickers, but that's mostly an excuse for Mills to throw a few more punches and track another clue.

The action, though sometimes over-edited and confusing, is mostly thrilling, including an early chase scene at a construction site and a final confrontation on a boat in the Seine. Neeson is such an automatically empathetic figure that he gets away with a lot, including torturing a suspect, threatening innocent bystanders, and shooting a man's wife in the arm to teach him a lesson. There's a whole lot of violence within the PG-13 rating, and not all of it of the satisfying, "justice to the bad guys!' kind. But action fans will be continually impressed by Morel's skill behind the camera, and instinctive understanding of how to pace even the most extended action sequence.

Maggie Grace, even given how little she has to do in her role, is astonishingly bad at playing a teenager, and Famke Janssen adds another to her line of blank, stuck-up wife roles. But all the movie really needs is Neeson and a row of henchmen for him to mow down, and as long as the action is moving, it all works fine. A 5-minute coda to wrap up the characters reminds you of how awful the beginning was, and keeps the movie from really qualifying as "good." But as fast, dumb entertainment goes, Taken is tough to beat.