[Disclaimer: My original plan was to post this almost a full month ago, when these three films were still somewhat relevant.]
There's something a little off about a feel good movie about a pimp who longs to become a successful rapper. Sundance audience award winner Hustle & Flow is frequently entertaining, and something of a relief from most of the summer's Hollywood product, but look a little deeper and you'll find an ugliness underneath its shiny exterior. It's hard to be inspirational when your hero is a whiny, abusive jerk and his goals are so shallow.
Slick direction, solid performances (especially by lead Terrence Howard and supporting player Anthony Anderson) and genuinely exciting song-creation sequences go a long way to covering up the film's more unsavory aspects, but they don't go far enough.
The movie's treatment of its female characters is pretty much indefensible and its portrayal of its primarily African American cast of characters is at the very least suspect. Yes the movie is about a pimp and yes it makes sense to show his mistreatment and disrespect for women, but a movie can be about a misogynist without actually being misogynistic. Unfortunately that's not the case here. The movie is so intent on following its hero's journey that the women he uses and abuses are never allowed much consideration. They receive a lot of screentime but very little depth.
The level of offensiveness of the racial elements is more debatable but I think the movie ends up looking bad here as well. Director Craig Brewer (who happens to be white) uses certain stylistic techniques that clearly pay tribute to the blaxploitation films of the 70s. But as championed as blaxploitation has become it's a little too easy to forget the "exploitation" part of that equation. Hustle & Flow wallows in black stereotypes without saying anything new about them. Even the way in which the lead character is finally able to achieve his goals is an insulting cliche. I'm not sure it's what Brewer was truly intending but at its core Hustle & Flow is an exploitation movie and black cinema deserves better.
The creators behind Pretty Persuasion are trying to be offensive, I think, but I found the movie to be something worse... dull. In its tale of a manipulative Beverly Hills high school student who gets her friends to accuse a teacher of sexual harassment, the movie aims for the same high-school-as-a-microcosm-of-society approach used so winningly in Election, filtered through the darkly comic world view of movies like Heathers. But it falls far, far short of those heights.
The movie fancies itself a satire (the term is literally spelled out and defined on a blackboard in one of the classroom sets) but its targets are so scattershot that it never connects. America's sexualized teen culture, racism, sexual harassment, school shootings, hunger for fame, the news media and numerous other issues are skewered in disappointingly obvious ways. I'm all for black comedy and satire but just trying to be provocative isn't enough if you're not saying anything new.
The film's star, Evan Rachel Wood, is one of the best young actresses working today but she has yet to find a film role that allows her the extraordinary range and talent she displayed on three seasons of the ABC drama Once & Again. Her role here (which borrows a little from Reese Witherspoon in Election, a lot from Nicole Kidman in To Die For and even a bit of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless) is undeniably challenging and it's nice to watch Wood try to meet that challenge, but it's a little painful when she comes up short.
To set his film apart from the teen movie pack, director Marcos Siega was determined to have a restrained visual style (even though a little visual spark would've added some much needed energy). That led to a lot of long takes which in turn leaves it up to the actors to define their own comedic rhythms. It's not entirely Wood's fault that a lot of the movie's humor falls flat but unfortunately she has to deliver the bulk of it and it harms her performance overall. Fortunately she's better with other aspects of the film including its frank sexuality.
Other notables in the cast include James Woods (chewing the scenery to an embarrassing degree), Ron Livingston (wasted) and Jane Krakowski (smart and funny in the film's most solid performance).
Wedding Crashers isn't really about bad behavior, although it's been very successful at marketing itself that way.
The concept, two swinging single guys "crash" weddings to score with emotionally vulnerable women (only to end up falling in love when they meet the "right" two women), would seem a perfect fit for appropriately R-rated contemporary screwball execution. Instead it's really an unusually boring Hollywood romantic comedy with dull characters, terrible filmmaking and a script that's the literary equivalent of paint by numbers. In a lot of ways it's the perfect "R-rated comedy" for our times: the material is so cliched, sanitized and watered-down that only the most prudish viewers could possibly be offended (unless of course you're offended by terrible filmmaking...).
There's a good cast here but they're all pretty much lost at sea, receiving no help whatsoever from asleep-at-the-helm director David Dobkin. Owen Wilson makes for an exceptionally dull romantic lead, Vince Vaughn tries a little too hard with material that just isn't there and Isla Fisher seems eager to steal scenes... if only there actually was anything to steal. And why cast Christopher Walken and then give him absolutely nothing interesting to do? I'm not even going to start listing all the horribly miscalculated supporting characters like the psycho preppy boyfriend and the creepy gay son (someone behind the scenes seems to think gay + artist = CRAZY! what the hell is that about??).
The sole exception to this criminal abuse of talent turns out to be Rachel McAdams (following up very nicely on her breakthrough work in last year's Mean Girls and The Notebook). Her character is as empty as all the others but she manages to overcome that with sheer skill, she's a natural born charmer.
Of course Wedding Crashers has turned into the summer's biggest "sleeper" hit, which only proves that this year's "box office slump" actually has nothing at all to do with the quality of the movies. People are still as willing as ever to spend their money on crap.
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