Film Freak Central

Californication: The First Season (2007) - DVD

Image B+ Sound B+
"Pilot (Californication)," "Hell-A Woman," "The Whore of Babylon," "Fear and Loathing at the Fundraiser," "LOL," "Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder," "Girls Interrupted," "Filthy Lucre," "The Devil's Threesome," "Turn the Page," "The Last Waltz"

by Ian Pugh "Californication" can only be described as an attempt to replicate Bukowskian swagger: a lot of drinking, fighting, and fucking, with a touch of melancholy as it silently laments that it doesn't know anything else. It's intriguing, but it proves to be a problem because, unlike its alcoholic inspiration, it really doesn't know anything else--especially how to properly express its perspective on all that drinking, fighting, and fucking. Indeed, it's a major problem, considering the show revolves around a novelist, Hank Moody (David Duchovny), who suffered an unwilling relocation from New York to L.A. after his alleged masterpiece of nihilism God Hates Us All was somehow transformed into a romantic comedy entitled A Crazy Little Thing Called Love, starring Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Much to the chagrin of his agent (Evan Handler), Hank hasn't written a word in almost five years--and in-between trying to win over his ex-lover Karen (Natascha McElhone) and their distant daughter Becca (Madeleine Martin), he spends his time patrolling the local bars and jumping into bed with every woman who crosses his path.

Student Bodies (1981) - DVD

*½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Kristen Riter, Matthew Goldsby, Richard Brando, Joe Flood
written and directed by Mickey Rose

by Alex Jackson I understand on an intellectual level what Student Bodies is trying to do, and I admire its verve and, at times, even its wit. But it just isn't funny. The film, a 1981 spoof of slasher movies, lands with an audible wet plop. There are a few laughs, but a spoof movie needs to be chockablock with laughs if it is ever going to work at all. When joke after joke fails to produce the intended response, we don't have anything left to hang onto--and the experience becomes nothing short of excruciating. I wouldn't mind going the rest of my life never seeing another one of these movies. I think I've basically outgrown them and now demand a little bit of a challenge even from mindless escapist entertainment. Once you see enough of these comedies being done badly, you realize that you have more to lose than you do to gain from investing those eighty minutes.

Can't Hardly Wait (1998) [10 Year Reunion Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Ethan Embry, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Love Hewitt
written and directed by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont

by Bryant Frazer Opportunistic special-edition DVDs are a dime a dozen, so the sudden appearance of a "10 Year Reunion Edition" of Can't Hardly Wait doesn't exactly signal that this insistently lightweight teen comedy is now considered a timeless classic. What it is, instead, is a remarkable time capsule--a look back, as though from decades removed, at what passed for youth culture in 1998. Audaciously staged as a little-more-than-real-time dramatization of a single night's house party, the air humid with that special, pheromone-drenched mist of booze and sweat and young sex and aspirations towards same, Can't Hardly Wait is a reminder of the pop-cultural moment when Brad and Gwyneth were the hot celebrity couple, Jennifer Love Hewitt was an up-and-comer, nobody had ever heard of Selma Blair or Lauren Ambrose, and the likes of Smash Mouth and Eve 6 were planting hit singles on MTV and the radio.

The Babysitters (2008) - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring John Leguizamo, Katherine Waterston, Cynthia Nixon, Andy Comeau
written and directed by David Ross

by Alex Jackson Shirley Lyner (Katherine Waterston) is not only anxious about getting into the right college, she's worried about how she's going to pay for it, too. Unlikely inspiration hits after she babysits for Michael and Gail Beltran (John Leguizamo and Cynthia Nixon). While driving her home, Michael takes Shirley to a diner for coffee and they begin to talk. When Michael first met his wife, she was a boldly sexual "party girl," and he misses that spark. He asks if Shirley has a boyfriend and she says "no." An outburst from a nearby group of teenage boys provides a hint as to the reason, likewise an obsessive-compulsive tic whereby Shirley reorganizes the condiments on the counter. She doesn't seem to view herself as very sexy or lovable; since school has always taken precedence over boys for her, she is rather flattered by the attention Michael is showing her. They have sex. Terrified to confront his infidelity and his exploitation of this young girl, Michael generously tips Shirley, shyly reminding her that he has a wife and kids. This gives Shirley a great idea: she'll recruit her friends to prostitute themselves out to middle-aged men from around the neighbourhood.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Casper Van Dien, Jolene Blalock, Amanda Donohoe, Boris Kodjoe
written and directed by Ed Neumeier

by Bryant Frazer Hollywood has lately been lousy with torpidly sincere, marquee-name-bedecked anti-war movies, but leave it to the auteurs working in the low-budget trenches to devise an impolite satire of current war efforts. Starship Troopers 3: Marauder isn't exactly deep, but it is an Iraq War allegory that takes on not only the political groupthink that comes with a war well-fought, but also the delusional, God-on-our-side religious angle. In this ramshackle action adventure written and directed by Ed Neumeier, co-writer with director Paul Verhoeven of the original Starship Troopers (which was more a rambunctiously contrary riff on Robert Heinlein's same-named novel than an actual adaptation), the Federal Network's space marines are fighting against a race of alien bugs in an interplanetary war that's become so unpopular that the penalty for anti-war protestors is televised hanging. "This is a very simple ruling," declares one federal judge before an execution, adding--in quotation of a notorious comment made by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer in September 2001--"People need to watch what they say."

Daniel (1983) + One Missed Call (2008) - DVDs|One Missed Call (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

DANIEL
**½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Timothy Hutton, Mandy Patinkin, Lindsay Crouse, Edward Asner
screenplay by E. L. Doctorow, based on his novel The Book of Daniel
directed by Sidney Lumet

ONE MISSED CALL
½*/****
DVD - Image B Sound B
BD - Image A- Sound A
starring Shannyn Sossamon, Edward Burns, Ana Claudia Talancón, Ray Wise
screenplay by Andrew Klavan
directed by Eric Vallette

by Ian Pugh There's a great story just screaming to be told in Sidney Lumet's Daniel: In reworking the legacy of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg from the perspective of their fictionalized son, it's poised to deliver a fascinating tale about the tragic, perhaps inevitable consequences that starry-eyed idealism can have on the family dynamic for generations to come. This strange collision of Winter Kills, The Godfather Part II, and Citizen Kane finds sensitive intellectual Daniel Isaacson (Timothy Hutton) deeply opposed to pasting his parents' name on a foundation for "radical studies" in service to the anti-war movement circa 1967, which puts him at odds with his revolution-obsessed sister (Amanda Plummer). Soon, however, Susan attempts suicide, forcing Daniel to hunt down the facts and search his memories for the truth about his parents Paul (a manic Mandy Patinkin) and Rochelle (Lindsay Crouse), who were accused of selling--or conspiring to sell--A-bomb secrets to the Soviets and executed at the height of the Red Scare. Were they really that deeply involved in a conspiracy, or were they just patsies?

The Fall Guy: The Complete First Season (1981-1982) + CHiPs: The Complete First Season (1977-1978) - DVDs

THE FALL GUY: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image B Sound B- Extras C-
"The Fall Guy Pilot," "The Meek Shall Inherit Rhonda," "The Rich Get Richer," "That's Right, We're Bad," "Colt's Angels," "The Human Torch," "The Japanese Connection," "No Way Out," "License to Kill (Part 1)," "License to Kill (Part 2)," "Goin' For It!," "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harold," "Soldiers of Misfortune," "Ready, Aim... Die!," "Ladies on the Ropes," "The Snow Job," "Guess Who's Coming to Town," "Child's Play," "Charlie," "Three for the Road," "The Silent Partner," "Scavenger Hunt"

CHiPs: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image C Sound B Extras D
"Pilot," "Undertow," "Dog Gone," "Moving Violation," "Career Day," "Baby Food," "Taking Its Toll," "Green Thumb Burglar," "Hustle," "Highway Robbery," "Name Your Price," "Aweigh We Go," "One Two Many," "Rustling," "Surf's Up," "Vintage '54," "Hitch-Hiking Hitch," "Cry Wolf," "Crash Diet," "Rainy Day," "Crack-Up," "Flashback!"

by Ian Pugh In giving a modern-day look-see to a television series that stars a late-'70s/early-'80s icon as a Hollywood stuntman who improbably moonlights as a charming, violent bounty hunter, it seems only natural to start the discussion by lobbing a few Death Proof jokes in its general direction. Take the time to really sit down and watch "The Fall Guy", however, and you'll find that the complete honesty of its quest to grab the viewer's attention just melts away your desire to be snarky. Lee Majors is the show's anchor as Colton Seavers, the eponymous stuntman who spends his free time on assignment for a bail bondsman (Jo Ann Pflug) searching for folks who've skipped town before their court date, bringing his overeducated cousin (Douglas Barr, dead weight) and a stuntwoman-in-training (Heather Thomas, attractive dead weight) along for the ride. Although that premise gets bogged down in guns, fistfights, and doing crazy shit with whatever vehicles are available, Majors's earnest performance offers a sense of levity to the proceedings, particularly once the character finally overcomes the traits ascribed to him by "The Fall Guy"'s whiny country+western theme song, which complains about the stuntman's inability to hold onto fame, money, or women. Indeed, as the series progresses, it becomes more interested in presenting Seavers as a conceptual mirror for the man who plays him, making Colt more of an aggressive ladies' man (Majors was, after all, married to the era's goddess-avatar of teenage onanism) and perhaps even turning his tides of bad luck into a tidy metaphor for Majors's unsuccessful foray into features on the heels of "The Six Million Dollar Man".

Made of Honor (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin McKidd, Sydney Pollack
screenplay by Adam Sztykiel and Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont
directed by Paul Weiland

by Bryant Frazer First, the obvious. Made of Honor is what's generally known as a "chick flick." I'm not totally comfortable deploying that term, especially in its usual derogatory, casually-sexist usage--but in a purely descriptive and possibly cynical sense, that's what we have here. It's a love story, featuring a conventionally handsome leading man (Patrick Dempsey) playing opposite a conventionally pretty woman (Michelle Monaghan) whose character is engaged to marry the conventionally wrong guy (blond Scot Kevin McKidd). It's directed by a man (Paul Weiland), although to its credit there is a woman prominently involved (co-writer Deborah Kaplan), and it's designed from the bottom up to appeal to undemanding female filmgoers.

Mute Witness: On "Synecdoche, New York"

originally published September 14, 2008
As threatened, a few stream-of-consciousness thoughts on Charlie Kaufman's latest...

When Synecdoche, New York premiered at Cannes, I remember being annoyed by how feeble the critical coverage on it was. But I get it now. This is a film I'm hard-pressed to describe, let alone review in depth, after just a single viewing. I can say that I see why Kaufman kept this one for himself rather than entrusting it to Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry—it's so dense and cryptic that it would be nigh uninterpretable by anyone but the source. Kaufman is a pretty meat-and-potatoes director, all things considered, but there are so many idiosyncrasies built into the material that it's stylish by default.

TIFF '08: Gigantic

**/****
starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, Ed Asner, Jane Alexander
screenplay by Adam Nagata & Matt Aselton
directed by Matt Aselton

by Bill Chambers Gigantic is littered with dead and loose ends, which wouldn't be a big deal if this were the quasi-freeform jazz of a Cassavetes or even an Apatow wannabe, but is a considerable problem when taking into account the crispness of the film's aesthetics. The clean 'scope compositions and fat-free performances become increasingly incongruous; by the time the movie stops short with everything and nothing resolved, you're convinced the filmmakers snatched a script out of the oven half-cooked after a window of opportunity opened up, not-unreasonably convinced that their cinematic faculties would see them through. Co-producer Paul Dano, suddenly charismatic and borderline handsome (going toe-to-toe with Daniel Day-Lewis evidently did wonders for him), is Brian, a single, 28-year-old mattress salesman who inexplicably dreams of adopting a Chinese baby to raise alone if need be; Zooey Deschanel, in a mesmerizing, career-best turn, is a spacey, baby-voiced sexpot named Happy; and a finally-funny-again John Goodman is Happy's crass millionaire father, whose need for a bed brings Brian into contact with his daughter. Fundamentally, Gigantic is about two lonely people coming together, and there's promise in how it inverts the Knocked Up formula by making Brian the expectant parent and Happy a maturity-deprived bachelorette. But there are just too many pointless, writerly indulgences--including a derelict (Zach Galifianakis) seemingly manifested from Brian's subconscious who shows up to terrorize him at regular intervals, and a scene set in a massage parlour I can't see surviving the channels of distribution except as a DVD supplement--cluttering up the narrative. Gigantic? More like "bloated." PROGRAMME: Discovery

TIFF '08: The Wrestler

***½/****
starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Todd Barry
screenplay by Robert Siegel
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Bill Chambers Mickey Rourke has spent the Aughties staging a series of mini-comebacks, but they've mostly sidestepped his iconography in favour of transforming him into a character actor. Not so Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is poignant largely for how it reflects and refracts the Mickey Rourke mystique. Quite aware of his film's ghoulish appeal, Aronofsky, after spotlighting the visage of young, beautiful Mickey Rourke under the main titles, shields Rourke's face from view long enough that even though we know what he looks like now (that detour into prizefighting and God knows how many botched surgeries really took their toll), his first close-up still causes momentary grief. But the film is not just about lost youth, Rourke's or otherwise (44-year-old Marisa Tomei, reacquainting Before the Devil Knows You're Dead viewers with her breasts, God bless her, plays the kind of stripper pitied by her clientele): it's about how the culture of '80s nostalgia--arguably the dominant culture--is like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, arrested in a childlike state and unable to resist squeezing the life out of Reagan-era totems. Wrestling, meanwhile, proves to be the perfect analogue for acting in that its Golden Age, like Rourke's, was somewhere around 1987, the year of Angel Heart and the seminal WrestleMania III; when Rourke's washed-up Randy "The Ram" Robinson, permanently cast out of the ring by a heart attack, challenges a neighbourhood kid to a game of Nintendo wrestling, suffice it to say the conflation of relics is nothing less than poetic. The credits for cinematographer Maryse Alberti and editor Andrew Weisblum--Aronofsky normally collaborates with the flashier Matthew Libatique and Jay Rabinowitz, respectively--suggest a certain putting-away of toys for the director, who confines his intercutting technique to one dazzling sequence (juxtaposing an exhibition match with its locker-room aftermath, it unfolds like the love scene from Don't Look Now) and seems to have a renewed faith in subtext, as indicated by the puny supermarket manager (Todd Barry) who humiliates Ram at every opportunity ("Don't you spend Saturdays sitting on other guy's faces?" he says in response to Ram's request for an extra shift), clearly but not explicitly seeing Ram as some proxy for the school bully. That's what makes a subplot involving Ram's attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, who's slowly being remade, Vertigo-style, into a Dita Von Teese clone by boyfriend Marilyn Manson) such a glaring misstep: Virtually the first words out of her mouth are a painfully expositional summary of Ram's failings as a parent, and she's shown the exit in a way that hastens as well as cheapens Ram's inevitable relapse. Nevertheless, the pathos of those final shots feels earned; The Wrestler bears out as the most haunting sports film, or rather the most haunting film about the margins of a sport, since Fat City. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) - Blu-ray Disc

Kill Bill, Vol. 2
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Genre poetry from B-movies' poet laureate, Quentin Tarantino's conclusion to Kill Bill is marked by the filmmaker's carefully-calibrated celluloid insanity, as well as a deceptive maturity that allows a few powerfully-struck grace notes for the cult of femininity and the sanctity of motherhood. Its first portion overwhelming for its craft before lodging in the craw with its ever-present but tantalizingly difficult-to-nail moral code, Tarantino's epic whole clarifies a dedication to a sort of low, Samuel Fuller/Nicholas Ray tabloid cosmology, grounding itself eventually in the bold, lovely, curiously old-fashioned declaration that the last best reward is to be true to the primal clay of an idea of innate gender roles. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is so named not merely for camp grandeur's sake, but also to highlight the power of cultural archetypes and their roots in biology.

TIFF File (Up Up and Away'd)

originally published September 7, 2008
The stars don't tell the whole story, of course, but for quick reference purposes, here's a rundown of everything I've screened so far @ this year's TIFF, followed by brief commentary:

TIFF '08: Rachel Getting Married

**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mather Zickel, Bill Irwin
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married has the cultural disadvantage of arriving soon after Margot at the Wedding and the personal one of following Claire Denis's 35 Shots in my screening log. Denis does so much more with so much less; perhaps sight-unseen, people have been calling this a return to form for Demme (as in, the form before The Silence of the Lambs created certain commercial expectations of/obligations in his work), but I don't remember him ever being this histrionic. And my heart sank a little when I saw that Declan Quinn, collaborating with Demme for the first time outside the documentary realm, had replaced the man who's photographed almost every one of Demme's fiction features to date, Tak Fujimoto, though I imagine the almost-painterly Fujimoto would have resisted Rachel Getting Married's Dogmé-influenced shooting style. Out on a weekend-pass from rehab, goth-y, parasitic Kim (Anne Hathaway, mannered and overmatched) returns home to disturb the shit before her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) marries African-American fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, of TV on the Radio) and these long day's journeys into night are no longer viable. Unfortunately, the picture insists on pathologizing all the withering remarks and squirmy frankness via a Tragic Family Secret, making a kneejerk transition in the process from a caustic embarrassment comedy tempered by the director's trademark folksiness to a simply embarrassing melodrama for which a devout humanist like Demme seems overqualified. While I can't deny that Rachel Getting Married has some lovely grace notes in its plodding second half (see: a family tradition of competitive dish-stacking), it definitively jumps the shark with a wedding sequence (surely the most protracted since The Deer Hunter's) in which the film regains its comic footing in the worst way: because it's like a MAD MAGAZINE parody of a Jonathan Demme ceremony, complete with Sister Carol and Robyn Hitchcock performing, the groom inexplicably serenading his bride with Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," and Roger Corman in attendance. Sometimes it sucks to be an auteurist, but what can you do? PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

The Counterfeiters (2007) - Blu-ray Disc

Die Fälscher
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Dolores Chaplin
screenplay by Stefan Ruzowitzky, based on the book by Adolf Burger
directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky

by Bryant Frazer This year's winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is defined in equal terms by what it is and what it isn't. It is a Holocaust survivor's yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take place in Sachsenhausen. The film's weight comes from the things we know about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.

TIFF '08: Lorna's Silence

Le silence de Lorna
***½/****
starring Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Bill Chambers That figures: I'm finally ready to get on board the Dardenne Brothers bandwagon and everyone's bailing. What I like--maybe love--about their latest, Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), is that it zigs when you expect it to zag, which may peg me as superficial (some reviews of the film have admonished it for having a plot) but which nevertheless strikes me as a refreshing change of pace from the neorealist wallowing of their earlier work. (To my mind, the Dardennes crossed the threshold of self-parody with the psychotically-overrated L'Enfant and needed to acknowledge that they'd become predictable.) The picture opens on Lorna (Arta Dobroshi, bearing a striking if irrelevant resemblance to the Ellen Page of Hard Candy, right down to the costume), an Albanian immigrant residing in Belgium's economically depressed Liège (a.k.a. Dardennes Central) who's evidently reached the end of her tether with junkie husband Claudy (L'Enfant's Jérémie Renier, in a lovely performance). (We don't have to live with him, of course, but he generates a tremendous amount of pity when she slams the door in his face after he sweetly asks her to play cards.) Slowly, as though the narrative itself were irising out, Claudy is revealed to be the pawn in a green-card scheme, the necessary evil before Lorna can enter into an equally sham marriage with a Russian mobster. But if The Apartment taught us anything, nothing brings ersatz couples together like convalescence: During Claudy's latest detox, he and Lorna start acting more like a real husband and wife. And then comes the most jarring bifurcation this side of Full Metal Jacket; Lorna's Silence is two different movies, really, and it's the picture's second, less conventionally satisfying half which has courted the most hostility from critics, despite the fact that it arguably justifies more than any of their previous films all the ink spilled over the years comparing the Dardennes to Robert Bresson. (Maybe it's a challenge to those who insist on making the link.) Tempting to trot out that hoary description "fairytale for grownups," but let's just say that Lorna's Silence is on top of everything else a clever and affecting pro-choice fable. Minor Dardennes is my kind of Dardennes, I guess. PROGRAMME: Masters

Shotgun Stories (2008) - DVD

**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacobs, Natalie Canerday
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw I'm sick of the kind of exceptional that Shotgun Stories represents--sick enough that I wonder if it doesn't actually reflect a certain faddism attending the creation of the picture. How many times is it seemly to invoke Faulkner before the prestige of it sours into eye-rolling familiarity? To call Shotgun Stories an American classic ignores that it's a tonal clone of David Gordon Green's idylls, which themselves owe their cadences to Terrence Malick's true American classics (which themselves owe a tremendous debt to Charles Laughton's singular Night of the Hunter). That's just the cinematic legacy. At the end of all that impeccable menace, that twisted Grant Wood Americana and surreal, gravid Norman Rockwellian perversity, is this post-millennial, post-9/11 moral that revenge is strange and bitter fruit. As it goes, it's not much; and as the novelty of it's faded like the cheap denim spent in the telling of it, the only thing left is this faint after-image of better, more pioneering films in the genre. Like so much that begins as alternative fare, Shotgun Stories ends up the normative mean to which prestige indies inevitably tend. There's a lot to admire about this film, I just feel like I've seen it about a dozen times by now.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) - Blu-ray Disc

Kill Bill, Vol. 1
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There is a palpable, undeniable perversity to Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature film, a taste for the extreme so gleeful and smart that its references are homage and its puerility virtue. I seem to find a reason between every Tarantino film to dislike him, to cast aspersions on my memories of his films, but I'm starting to think the source of my dislike is jealousy. Tarantino is the director Spielberg is too timid to be: a gifted visual craftsman unafraid of the contents of his psychic closet, and a film brat whose teachers happen to be blaxploitation, samurai epics, and Shaw Brothers chop-socky instead of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. And it isn't that I have aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, it's just that I want to be as good at something as Tarantino is at making movies.

TIFF '08: The Girl from Monaco

La fille de Monaco
**/****
starring Fabrice Luchini, Roschdy Zem, Louise Bourgoin, Stéphane Audran
screenplay by Anne Fontaine, Benoît Graffin
directed by Anne Fontaine

by Bill Chambers Her ringtone is a wolf whistle, her bedroom is decorated with Princess Di memorabilia, and she says things like "I feel orange." She's The Girl from Monaco. She's also a coarse variation on Sarah Jessica Parker's SanDeE* from L.A. Story (this time, it's she who does the weather), duking it out for the soul of lawyer Bertrand against his emotionally-involved bodyguard, Christophe. Bertrand (Fabrice Luchini) is in Monaco representing a suspected murderess (Stéphane Audran) in a case high-profile enough that the accused's wealthy son assigns Bertrand round-the-clock protection in the form of gentle giant Christophe (Roschdy Zem). But the biggest threat to lonely bachelor Bertrand, a doormat when it comes to the opposite sex, is Bertrand himself. Consequently, Christophe becomes his girl wrangler, going so far as to send one would-be stalker into a cum coma (™ Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II) on Bertrand's behalf. Thing is, Audrey (Bourgoin) has already been there/done that with Christophe; a succubus built like a porn star, Audrey is the kind of problem you can only solve with a serpentine stretch of highway, Grace Kelly-style. (If you think I'm being tasteless, you should see the movie.) I feel like I'm missing out on some in-joke based on the fact that Bourgoin was a real-life weather girl for the Canal+ channel, but her performance seems bravely-uninhibited for one that's implicitly self-referential. She sure does make an impression in any event for the McGuffin of a formulaic buddy comedy. Between this Anne Fontaine joint and Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend (another agreeable time-waster), it would appear that French filmmakers have just discovered said sub-genre, but they're not doing as much to subvert it or innovate it as their CAHIERS DU CINEMA peers/precursors would have done. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations