Dumb and Dumber for the art-house crowd
Imagine
Of Mice and Men if George and Lenny
were both boobs, The Odd Couple if
Felix and Oscar were Norwegian, or Dumb
and Dumber without the scatological humor, and you’ll most likely conjure
up Elling,
one of the overlooked nominees for Best Foreign Language Film in the most
recent Oscar race (all the attention went to Amélie and eventual winner No
Man’s Land). Yeah, it’s a comedy about a couple of mentally challenged
guys, but it manages to be funny without being exploitive or preaching the
upbeat Forrest Gump message that, no
matter how damaged we seem to be on the outside, we’re all the same on the
inside (in my case, guts, black stuff, and about 50 Slim Jims).
Based on a play adapted from a
popular Ingvar Ambjørnsen book, Elling opens with the diminutive title character (Per Christian Ellefsen), a
40-something mama’s boy, being sent to the nuthouse when his mother dies. He’s
assigned to live with the hulking, Gerard Depardieu look-alike Kjell Bjarne
(Sven Nordin), a man of similar age who’s obsessed with both food and women,
although he’s a virgin.
Two years later, and without much
explanation, Elling and Kjell Bjarne get their own apartment in Oslo. It’s kind
of a halfway house, with social worker Frank Åsli (Jørgen Langhelle)
occasionally checking in on the duo to make sure they haven’t burned the place
down. Elling and Kjell Bjarne are very apprehensive about the whole
living-on-their-own thing, as they were much happier within the safe confines
of their psych ward. The situation is made worse, at least in their eyes, by
Frank, who insists they do things like learn to use the phone and,
occasionally, even leave the apartment to get groceries.
Much of the first half of Elling is fish-out-of-water stuff made
tolerable due to strong writing, the whole Odd Couple angle (Elling and Kjell
Bjarne — or fussy superego and slobby id — bicker like an old married
couple), and the fact that both characters are extreme agoraphobics. The second
half has them opening their minds and venturing out into the world a bit, with
Kjell Bjarne falling in love with a pregnant neighbor (Marit Pia Jacobsen) and
Elling writing poetry that he hides in sauerkraut packaging at the grocery
store.
Director Petter Næss, who also
helmed the stage production of Elling,
has a knack for the timing of physical comedy and for set pieces. He’s also
blessed with wonderful performances from his two leads. There aren’t too many
films that can be simultaneously funny, offbeat, and heartwarming (at least,
without a thick shmear of the goo), but Elling manages to do all three quite well, making it one of the year’s most enjoyable
releases.
Reese
Witherspoon is a good actress. Her talent and charisma were enough to save
Legally Blonde, but there isn’t an
actor on this planet gifted enough to rescue her latest project, Sweet
Home Alabama. It’s a painfully predictable romantic comedy with
approximately zero originality, except the part where the filmmakers didn’t
cast Owen Wilson as the charming, blond redneck.
Witherspoon plays Melanie
Carmichael, an up-and-coming designer in New York City’s fashion world. When we
first meet her, she’s dreaming about her first kiss, but soon awakens to the
chaos that is her first big runway show. Luckily, it’s a hit, and her JFK,
Jr.-esque boyfriend, Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), who happens to be the son of the
city’s mayor (Candice Bergen), sneaks her into Tiffany’s for a memorable
engagement scene.
Melanie wants to hold off announcing
the engagement, though initially we don’t know why. When she heads down to
Pigeon Creek, Alabama, her ancestral birthplace, we begin to get an inkling why
she’s acting so strangely. It turns out she’s still technically married to her
high-school sweetheart, former star quarterback Jake (Josh Lucas), a grease
monkey complete with coonhound. Melanie has made numerous attempts to finalize
the divorce during the seven years she’s spent in New York, but Jake has thus
far refused to comply.
The tug of war between Melanie and
Jake is everything you’d expect it to be, with Melanie hating his guts until
the second after he signs the papers, at which time she gets that dreamy look
in her eye.
Meanwhile, the more interesting part
of the film (strictly by default) is the transformation city-slicker Melanie
undergoes once she returns to Pigeon Creek and runs into various inbred friends
and family, as well as her criminal past (as Felony Melanie). Her accent slowly
resurfaces, and her hair gets less and less chic. Alabama‘s numerous scenes involving Civil War re-enactments are a
subtle reminder to us and to Melanie that you can’t ignore your past.
Technically, Alabama‘s not a
fish-out-of-water story, it’s a fish-back-into-a-backwater story, though the
film sticks close to the formula of the former (except it doesn’t make Andrew
odiferous enough).
Most of Alabama‘s humor comes at the expense of the hillbillies (though
gays and lesbians take quite a hit, as well), but in contrast to the way
Yankees are portrayed, Southerners come out smelling like roses. Everyone north
of the Mason-Dixon Line is shallow and malicious, while our Dixie friends are
all wacky, but warm. All I could do was sit there and wait for the damn thing
to end, while simultaneously feeling sorry for talented co-stars like Fred
Ward, Mary Kay Place, Jean Smart, and Melanie Lynskey.
A brainless
action flick, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever does little besides offer a barrage
of explosions and gunplay. Its ridiculous story takes a backseat to the
over-the-top direction of Wych Kaosayananda, a Thai filmmaker who uses the
pseudonym Kaos. That’s right — Kaos. That should give you some idea of what
you’re in for if you go to see this movie. It’s like watching somebody else
play a violent videogame.
Ballistic is about a former FBI agent named Jeremiah Ecks (Antonio Banderas), who lost
his wife in a car explosion several years before the film opens. Content to
look sad and spend his time in dark bars, Ecks is approached one day by his
ex-boss (Miguel Sandoval), who has some surprising news — Ecks’ wife, Vinn
(Talisa Soto), is still alive. The catch is that Ecks will have to take on one
last case before he’ll be told where his wife can be found. The case involves a
kidnapping, and the suspect is a former FBI agent named Sever (Lucy Liu), who
is really good at blowing stuff up, flipping through the air, and shooting
whatever stuff she didn’t already blow up.
Aside from a nifty shot in which the
camera follows a man as he falls off a tall building and onto the roof of a
parked car, Kaos’ idea of style seems to be showing typical action scenes in
slow motion. There are so many slo-mo sequences, the film would run about 42
minutes if played at normal speed. Because of the way Kaos cobbles together the
story, and the dippy way he shows flashbacks, Ballistic is often a bit confusing, but that doesn’t prevent it
from being one of the worst action films of the year.
Interested
in more movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy, at
www.sick-boy.com, or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.
This article appears in Oct 2-8, 2002.
