The Green Hornet
Director: Michel Gondry
With: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz,Tom Wilkinson, David Harbour
I started listening to The Green Hornet on radio in the 40s. The show emerged from the Detroit pulp factory of George Trendle on WXYZ radio, home also of The Lone Ranger.
It has been filmed before, as serials, and appeared on 60s TV in the campy Batman vein, notable only for the presence of Bruce Lee as Kato.
The current film project has been hanging around waiting for someone to actually make it for years. When I heard that Seth Rogen was involved, I sensed disaster.
Rogen is the puffy clown prince of arrested development and frat-boy humor, John Belushi without the undercurrent of malevolence and menace. Sure, he’s less offensive than Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell, but that ain’t much of a recommendation.
So, imagine my surprise when I enjoyed this movie. Okay, it isn’t great, but it seems to know its own limits and has some fun with the genre. But, it is, after all, a buffoon playing a super-hero.
Never mind the plot. It is full of cool toys and sight gags and the occasional flash of wit. Michel Gondry, whose Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favorite films of the last decade, seems wrong for the director’s job, but perhaps it was he who saved this from careening off into disaster.
Waltz, who played the low-key sadistic SS colonel in Inglourious Basterds, is a villain with self-esteem issues, Chou plays Kato with seething resentment, and Diaz actually has to endure jokes about how old she is. Sheesh.
The 3-D is just annoying and unnecessary. (When will this fad return to the Island of Bad Ideas?) Still, it is a hoot. Just don’t go expecting The Dark Knight.
B
Somewhere
Director: Sofia Coppola
With: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning
Sofia Coppola knows what it feels like to play second fiddle to her father’s career in movies, and she has put it all in this film. Johnny Marco (Dorff) is a movie star living at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. Even though the suite has a kitchen, it is not a home, not even a real apartment. It is a limbo for people with too much money who can’t be bothered.
Not that Marco has a busy life. Between films, he is bored and neurasthenic. The first shot of the film shows him going around and around a dirt track in his Ferrari, a visual metaphor for his life and for the whole film. Going nowhere, and not even fast.
He drinks and drugs with hangers-on, and pays twin pole dancers to come to his hotel room for entertainment and empty sex. He falls asleep during one of their performances, and even conks out while giving oral sex to an easy conquest. He is, in short, a mess.
The only time he comes alive is when he is visited by his daughter Cleo (Fanning). She is eleven, poised, beautiful, sweet and everything he is missing in his life. She visits him from time to time, and cooks for him and gets him out of his torpid life.
When her mother freaks out and goes off to find herself, Cleo becomes Johnny’s full-time charge. And, as if you couldn’t guess, she is immediately the best thing in his life.
High marks go to Fanning, who may even be better at her age than her sister Dakota. Coppola lingers over her, driving home the idea that anyone’s life would be enhanced by being near this angel. A long scene of Cleo ice-skating is a love letter to the purity of little girls. In fact, the trouble with the film is that this is all it is about: Johnny the emotional zombie and wastrel, and Cleo the magical princess. Um, we get it.
Coppola is a talented film-maker who used to have something to say. Maybe all she needed was to get this out once and for all. Let’s hope so.
B-
Blue Valentine
Director: Derek Cianfrance
With: Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling
Despite terrific performances by Williams and Gosling, who have racked up more depressing time in films since Douglas Sirk hung it up, this is a contrived melodrama bursting with foreshadowing and playing directly to the tear ducts.
Cindy (Williams) and Dean (Gosling) are married and the parents of a daughter. They are struggling to make ends meet, and to save their crumbling relationship. The film gives parallel looks at their courtship, i.e., they meet cute and he charms her with his boyish ways, and their marriage, where he refuses to grow up and she feels like she is carrying the load.
He drinks too much, she is getting hit on at work, and it all slides toward oblivion. A sad scene is set at a hot-sheet motel with “theme rooms” that are supposed to have an aphrodisiac effect on those who stay there. It is just tacky and sad, and doesn’t help. Either the marriage or the movie.
By the time I left, I was ready to slash my wrists. The thing is just a drag.
C-