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Indie flix
By PHILIP BOOTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 10, 2002
If you like your tough guys goofy
[Photo: New Line Cinema] |
Knockaround Guys (R) (91 min.) -- The latest from producer Lawrence Bender, a.k.a. Quentin Tarantino's right-hand man, is pure guilty pleasure: It's a derivative piece of work, a fish-out-of-water tale packed with the same quirky Mafioso characters and familiar themes -- father-son conflict, loyalty, sudden violence -- that have been explored to greater effect in other movies. And yet Knockaround Guys, made nearly two years ago, is surprisingly entertaining.
Its success owes in part to the fun to be had watching career goofball Dennis Hopper and creepy John Malkovich grapple with Italian-American accents and Mob lingo. Hopper, uttering "not for nuttin' " at one point, is respected career gangster Benny "Chains"; the ex-con has finally decided to give an important assignment to his twentysomething son, reluctant tough-guy Matty (Barry Pepper). The latter's mission is to make sure a bag of cash is transferred to an interested party in Spokane, Wash.
That stash of $100 bills, through a series of unforeseen circumstances, winds up in the hands of a pair of teenage stoners in Wibaux, Mont. There, Matty and his pals (played by Seth Green, Andrew Davoli and a pre-stardom Vin Diesel) engage in culture clashing and toy with the town sheriff (a cheeky Tom Noonan) before gathering at the "beef terminal" for a showdown.
Writer-directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien, helming their first feature together, spike their story with tough-guy dialogue and amusing touches, including a running gag about a hunting show on local television and a meeting at the Killdeer drive-in theater, where a festival of Kung Fu movies is in progress. They're funny bits in a movie as modest as its intentions. B
Audience eats film's dust
[Photo: Twentieth Century Fox] |
The Transporter (PG-13; violence, sexual situations) (91 min.) -- Marry the high-octane hot-rodding of The Fast and the Furious and the tough-guy action of XXX to the nonstop fiery explosions of Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and the unholy spawn is likely to be The Transporter.
It's all about fast cars, a fast woman and an even faster fade from memory for one of the fall's fluffiest releases. But while it lasts, the thing really moves. No big surprise here: Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) is the movie's co-writer and producer, and Hong Kong native Corey Yuen takes his directorial cues from action-movie maven John Woo. Besson, too, seems to be cribbing from his own The Professional.
The fast guy in this case is the title character, coolly efficient, casually amoral freelance driving ace Frank Martin, a former Special Forces agent willing and able to do whatever it takes to complete his contracted mission. It's the biggest role yet for Jason Statham, seen in Guy Ritchie's Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Martin, whose expertise in the art of quick getaways and hairpin turns has paid for a lavish seaside villa, demonstrates his cold-blooded professionalism early, forcing a gang of bank robbers to apply a particularly drastic solution to a weight-limit problem.
The driver succeeds in part because of his strict adherence to a set of rules designed to minimize risk. Breaking one of those personal commandments ("never open the package"), he encounters feisty, sexy Lai (Qi Shu). Romance brews, and Martin decides to stick his neck out for her humanitarian cause. We'd have to say the showdown between Lai and her corrupt businessman father (Ric Young) is particularly ludicrous. But then so is everything else about the movie. C
Secretary wanted; dictation necessary
[Photo: Lions Gate Films] |
Secretary (R) (111 min.) -- Love stories don't come any stranger than Steven Shainberg's brooding tale of workplace sexual perversions. Who else more likely to be at the center of such affairs than James Spader, typecast again as a man with more hangups than a telemarketer?
Spader plays E. Edward Grey, an attorney always in need of a new secretary, judging from the permanent, lighted "help wanted" sign under his shingle. The reason is simple: Grey treats his secretaries like dogs, or at least horses: He trusses the newest employee in a saddle atop his desk, a carrot jammed in her mouth, to assert his authority.
Grey's latest secretary is Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal, sister of Jake), and she starts enjoying such attention. Lee certainly doesn't get it at home, where an alcoholic, abusive father and her own insecurities leave her with an ugly habit of self-mutilation. Nothing Grey does can be much worse than what she does to herself.
Lee enters the job as a mousy figure. She emerges stronger, although the process creating the transformation isn't convincing. Each time she submits to Grey's domination, common sense tells us Lee would never morph into the quasi-controlling figure she becomes. Secretary isn't a feminist morality tale like In the Company of Men or The Business of Strangers: It's an allegory with no clear purpose except to make us all voyeurs to voluntary sexual harassment.
Lee's situation grabs the attention of reporters, although little comes from the investigation. Her family rallies in support but never directly intervenes. A neurotic boyfriend (Jeremy Davies) isn't much of an alternative to Grey's kinky seduction style.
Gyllenhaal is fine in her first starring role, although Lee isn't much more than a reactive victim. Spader makes Grey a weakling rather than a monster who could incite the appropriate outrage. Not much else happens in Secretary, and all of it occurs too slowly for full audience involvement. Lee doesn't seem able to escape her situation, but I'll bet several moviegoers will before the end credits. C
Urban gimmicks
[Photo: Paramount Classics] |
Just a Kiss (R) (89 min.) -- If New York City is so large, why do movies usually show the same half-dozen or so caricatures falling in and out of love or bed with each other? Fisher Stevens, an actor whose career I've never understood except for his dating Julia Roberts, strenuously intersects the lives of oh-so-glib urbanites in a common roundelay gussied up with the animation tricks of Richard Linklater's Waking Life.
The technique is called rotoscoping, a process by which live action and backgrounds are digitally transferred to cartoon form -- and it's the only reason to spend time with Just a Kiss. But even that gimmick gets old long before the short film ends. No matter how surreal things appear, the same creaky drama mechanics are at work.
The hub of the sexual pinwheel is Dag (Ron Eldard), a TV commercial director living with video biographer Halley (Kyra Sedgwick). Dag had a fling with Rebecca (Marley Shelton), a suicidal dancer dating Dag's best friend, Peter (screenwriter Peter Breen). Then there's Andre (Taye Diggs), a cello player with experience with both women, his wife Colleen (Sarita Choudbury), who hooks up with Peter, and, most memorably, Marisa Tomei as a dominatrix bowling alley waitress with eyes for at least two of the players just mentioned.
That's a lot of infidelity to cram into one movie, although a more accomplished storyteller than Stevens might have managed it. It's all so pat and padded that those rotoscoped moments evoke more reality than anything else. A miss is Just a Kiss, and a sigh is just what it deserves. C
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