Entertainment :: Movies
Now playing on the summer screen in Bay Areaby David LambleBay Area ReporterThursday Aug 6, 2009 The Hurt Locker I’m not sure why playing Jeffrey Dahmer in what one critic hailed as "a sensitive, non-exploitative serial-killer movie" qualifies Jeremy Renner to play a military bomb-disposal expert in the best and perhaps last of the Iraq-era war movies, but there you have it. Fans of director Kathryn Bigelow’s heart-pounding, subversively funny, early-90s surfer bank-heist flick Point Break know this gal can handle the guy-land niche of mixing screen gore with a grasp of the genre’s absurd pertinence. Unlike every other film tacking our desert misadventures, The Hurt Locker (based on a taut script by Mark Boal) doesn’t hint at a political agenda until the final minutes, when a disillusioned soldier addresses an oddly nihilist monologue to his infant son. Until then, the filmmakers are content to let us tap into the adrenaline rush of three bomb-disposal soldiers. Two of them, as compellingly inhabited by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, are counting the days until they go stateside, while Sgt. William James (Renner) seems far too into the job. In an early scene, Sgt. James throws off his protective gear with the tart aside, "If I’m going to die, at least I’m going to be comfortable."
The title refers to a small box of explosive devices James has under his bed as ghoulish keepsakes, "things that almost killed me," illustrating an old maxim that some warriors never feel as alive as when they’re close to a brutal death. To drive home the point, existential as they come, Bigelow provides a numbing prologue where Sgt. James’ predecessor is killed shortly after obsessing about an afterwork hamburger.
The filmmakers keep us from settling in with the characters with a jumpcut, jigsaw-style plot that heaves from disaster to disaster. The closest we get to an ordinary emotional engagement is a long stretch in the middle, where Sgt. James is blindsided by his reaction to the apparent torture death of a young, wisecracking Iraqi boy.
Otherwise, the guys employ the standard American male tactics for holding feelings at bay: off-duty, their playtime resembles YouTube backyard boxing videos. Renner and Mackie exchange drunken punches to the gut as we silently wonder what civilian life could offer that might possibly compete with this sweaty, boozy, dirty love.
Shrink Kevin Spacey is an extraordinarily talented dark soul whose early film success was partially based on the ability to spew some annihilating rants, the kind that leave pieces of verbal shrapnel flying. See Swimming with Sharks and American Beauty. Here, Spacey is a depressed, pot- and booze-addicted Hollywood psychiatrist whose client list is a petting zoo of screwed up, up-and-coming talent. Spacey divides his time between his well-appointed office and the back seat of his pot dealer’s German sedan.
Director Jonas Pate and screenwriter Thomas Moffett give us a saucy collection of one-liners encapsulating virtually every self-destructive behavior flourishing in West Side LA. Their Grand Canyon-style conceit, whereby the film’s shaggy cast of fuckups all funnel across the good doctor’s couch, works fitfully well. Dallas Roberts steals his beats as a paranoid, germ-phobic talent agent, and Mark Webber gets to duke it out with Spacey as a devious apprentice writer who’ll stop at nothing to create a hot script.
At its best, Shrink is a sort of Cliff Notes for the real Satan’s guide to Hollywood, The Day of the Locust. Warning: watch out for a scary glimpse of an almost unrecognizable Gore Vidal as a very elderly, overly loquacious TV talk host.
(500) Days of Summer The self-pitying hero of this pleasant if shallow young-love-on-the-rocks dramedy, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), has landed a job he knows is beneath him, that of copywriter for a treacle-prone greeting card company ("Everyday you make me proud, but today you get a card.") The only worthy perk is Tom’s libidinous proximity to the boss’ assistant, Summer (Zooey Deschanel). The faux-clever premise of this "anti-love story" is that it’s told forward and backward, the narration peeling off different days of Tom’s bitter memories of the "bitch" who got away. The device serves its pseudo-post-modern function of making us hip to Tom’s crash landing before the poor sap himself. Unfortunately, it also serves to wall us off from empathy with Summer. The idea of the gal being in the driver seat, able to give the guy the boot for any old reason, is appealing, but without proper execution, it’s merely a romantic cliche turned on its head.
It’s a pity the filmmakers didn’t trust their very appealing stars to go deep, because these two could. Despite stagy attempts to inject spontaneous quirkiness - Tom and Summer making out in an Ikea showroom while a large Chinese family glares disapprovingly, or Tom improvising a Ferris Bueller-like chorus line in downtown LA - (500) Days stumbles clumsily through most of its patented bad-date shenanigans, seldom improving on the genre. One horrible stumble nearly caused me to bail on the lovers. Tom gets into a punch-out with a pushy bar lout, and Summer treats him like some boozy relative who’s just ruined the company picnic.
See this one for the always scintillating Gordon-Levitt, for whom this is a mainstream coming-out party. But if you’re looking for a feeling person’s post-modern affair, rent last year’s dark comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss.
Cheri This gorgeously lensed but surprisingly dull reunion from the creators of the wickedly naughty Dangerous Liaisons - director Stephen Frears, screenwriter Christopher Hampton and star Michelle Pfeiffer - presents Pfeiffer’s character with a saucy dilemma: how does France’s #1 courtesan react when her services are no longer in demand? Lea de Lonval’s problem has a surprisingly simple solution: take her close friend Madame Peloux’s hopelessly spoiled dandy of a son, Cheri, under her wing until mama can find the boy a suitable, wealthy child bride.
Delighted to get away from Cheri’s mom - Kathy Bates, oddly tepid in what should be another trophy monster - Lea and Cheri are blown away by just how well their summer in the country goes. It stretches out to an unforeseeable six years of what, in Belle Epoque France, might be described as living in sin.
Yet that hoary cliche misses the point Collette probably meant to make in her 1920 novel. For Lea is her era’s sexual royalty, a mistress of pleasure, whose job is to get the debauching out of the boy’s system and turn him into a grandchild delivery system. For all of Pfeiffer’s well-modulated performance, Frears’ spot-on evocation of the time, and a witty line or two from Hampton, it’s precisely on the point of the kind of man Cheri has become that the film wobbles. Rupert Friend’s Cheri lacks the mix of epicene, almost feminine decadence that would make his fate a succulent if tragic third-act dessert. A better choice would have been the emotionally nimble Andrew Garfield, fresh off his disturbing turn as a "rehabilitated" child-killer in Boy A.
Take a pass on Cheri, and rent Catherine Breillat’s provocative The Last Mistress, where a saucy man-child fights almost to the death for his scandalously unsuitable lover.
 Copyright Bay Area Reporter. For more articles from San Francisco's largest GLBT newspaper, visit www.ebar.com
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