Saturday, September 15, 2007 Rant Archive
KING OF CALIFORNIA is a rare show business occurrence, when the stars align and what could have been a ho-hum film becomes something special. The heavenly bodies in this case are Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood, and both are at the absolute top of their game. Their performances alone are worth the price of admission – even at today’s inflated rates. Ironically, it’s Douglas, the more experienced of the two, with an Oscar and dozens of films to his credit, who has an easier time of it.
He plays Charlie, a Don Quixote-ish character, fresh out of two years in a mental institution. He’s convinced that an 18th Century Spanish missionary’s cache of doubloons lies buried underneath a Costco. Bearded, unkempt he plays the role appropriately over the top, determined to find it. “Sometimes I wake up and don’t know if I exist,” he tells his daughter, Miranda. “Maybe if I do this I will exist.”
Miranda (Wood) is just 17 years old and has been on her own the last two years. Her mother, a crazy hand model, abandoned them years ago. Charlie is a jazz musician who tried to commit suicide and was only saved when his daughter barged in when she heard him gasping for air. Yet even without parents, Miranda has managed to hold her life together. She quit school and got a job at McDonald’s – but was a neat and orderly life turns upside down when her father returns.
As a species, humanity likes revenge, the notion of payback. Every so often, Hollywood goes through a spate of films specifically about revenge, but it’s never very far from our narratives; it features prominently in lots of stories. It’s instructive to re-examine that drive every so often, which is what brings us to Jodie Foster’s latest film, THE BRAVE ONE. Happy moviegoers will be relieved to learn that it’s not a sermon as perhaps you might expect, but it’s got a lot more to say than most films of its type.
Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is a radio show host living in the Big Apple, enjoying life with her dog and doctor fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews). As fans of DAMAGES know, doctors named David aren’t experiencing happy lives in fiction right now, and Mr. Kirmani is no exception. While walking their dog one night, Erica and David are attacked by a group of thugs in a park tunnel and brutally beaten. David ends up dying from his wounds, while Erica gets to spend three weeks in a coma and wakes up bereft and emotionally damaged. Slowly, Erica progresses to where she can go outside again and resume her life, but she feels hollow, like someone moved into her head while she was away. To try and push past her fears, she buys a gun, and almost immediately finds herself in a position where she has to use it. The first time is justifiable, but the next times…not so much. Soon, she finds herself the target of a manhunt spearheaded by her new friend, kindly but determined Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), and simultaneously afraid of and exhilarated by her new power.
Mr. Woodcock has finally made it to your local theatre. It was a rough road for this crotchety PE teacher and his movie. In fact, there were rumors that the movie may not come out at all. But against all odds, including “being on the shelf for more than two years, going through multiple release dates and being largely overhauled after test audiences turned their noses up at an early cut,” according to
Popwatch, Billy Bob Thornton will now be seen terrorizing school children in theatres throughout the country.
With all this early bad press, Mr. Woodcock may have a hard time catching an audience. That being said, the studio picked a good time to release it. The months between Labor Day and the start of the holiday season are widely known for being a slow time of year for the movie industry. But that may be exactly what this movie needs, to catch attention. Everybody has already seen the good stuff that’s come out, so they may actually be desperate enough to give a movie with bad early buzz a try. Personally, the clips I’ve seen look pretty funny, but after seeing KNOCKED UP and SUPERBAD, it’s going to take a lot to impress me.