TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Two for the Money' and 'Waiting...'


Movie reviews in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the (slightly shorter) print versions.




Two for the Money
(dir. D.J. Caruso)

Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) has a gift. But he doesn't have particularly good luck. Abandoned by his father before he was 10, his Sun Devils quarterbacking career destroyed by a gruesome injury, Brandon's now living with his mom, training for an increasingly unlikely comeback and riding his bike to a crappy job at a 1-900 phone bank -- where he demonstrates an astonishing 80-percent accuracy at predicting the winners of football games.

Fortunately (or, should I say, unfortunately), betting guru Walter Abrams (Al Pacino) takes note of Brandon's crystal-ball abilities, and makes him an offer he can't refuse: Walter will shower Brandon with money, cars and women, but only after re-inventing Brandon as "John Anthony, The Million Dollar Man" -- a perfectly legal "sports consultant" advising high-stakes gamblers on their perfectly illegal bets.

Of course, Walter ends up being a less-than-ideal mentor, and Brandon struggles with his gift the moment he becomes "conscious of his damaged wings," as Hemingway once wrote of Fitzgerald. The whole movie, in fact, is something of an addict's parable, as Brandon finds himself sucked into Walter's irrational fantasy that "John Anthony" really does have magical abilities bestowed by the fickle gambling gods.

Owing to its Faustian-bargain structure -- and its co-star giving yet another of his noisy "Howl" Pacino performances -- a few writers have compared "Two for the Money" to "The Devil's Advocate." But it's a little more complicated than that. Walter isn't evil or omnipotent; in fact, Pacino plays him (beautifully) as a needy survivor, a recovering gambling addict who's alternately tender and feisty with his beautician wife (Rene Russo), depending on how cornered he feels. (As Russo puts it: "Walter, get out of your head -- it's a bad neighborhood.")

Yes, the showboating scenes feel familiar, as when Walter crashes a Gambler's Anonymous meeting to hand out business cards -- but that doesn't make them any less skillfully performed. And Pacino's playfulness seems to rub off on McConaughey; watch, for example, Brandon's spontaneous reaction in a beauty salon after learning that Russo is married. It's also great to see Armand Assante again, feral and quick-witted and slightly terrifying as a millionaire gambler who gets understandably pissy (literally and figuratively) when Brandon costs him $30 million in a single weekend.

Ultimately, this is a minor film for all concerned, and for a simple reason: As the film gets more "dramatic" in its third act -- focusing more on the boring logistics of the betting business instead of the loopy relationships -- "Two for the Money" gets less interesting. The movie also suffers from low energy and a grimy, uninteresting look. But while it's focused on the people -- on men who never had mentors struggling to mentor themselves and each other -- it works as a fairly smart B-picture.
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Waiting…
(wr./dir. Rob McKittrick)

If you take a date to see "Waiting…," here's an absolutely crucial piece of advice:

Eat dinner before the movie.

You see, "Waiting…" is a gross-out comedy that introduces you to the people who make and serve your food in those T.G.I. Friday's-style restaurants. And, if the movie's to be believed, those people hate your guts. They spit in your gravy. They drop your steaks. They have sex in the restrooms. They take a laissez-faire attitude toward showing off their genitals. And behind those pointlessly decorated walls, they seethe with rage and quiet desperation. (You know, when they aren't doing Whip-Its in the freezer.)

It's a great idea for a comedy -- basically, a feature-length version of the Tchotchke's scenes from "Office Space," only much, much filthier. Here, the restaurant is given the perfectly awful name of Shenaniganz, and first-time writer-director Rob McKittrick has somehow drafted a very decent lowbrow-comedy cast: Ryan Reynolds as the wiseacre alpha-male waiter (i.e., "the Bill Murray role"); Justin Long as the nice kid offered an assistant-manager job he doesn't want; John Francis Daley of "Freaks and Geeks" as the gawky new employee; and solid performers like Luis Guzmán, Chi McBride, Anna Faris, David Koechner, Dane Cook, Alanna Ubach and Wendie Malick -- all doing their damnedest to help McKittrick make a ribald institutional comedy in the Ramis-Reitman mold.

Unfortunately, the movie only gets about halfway there, and has to coast on charm a little too often for its own good.

You could cut a great trailer from "Waiting…": The handful of scenes that work are really funny -- as when Reynolds and Malick (playing his mother) trade scabarous insults in front of a mortified Long, or when waiters terrify a child with a birthday song, or when Daley finally loses his cool after his long first day at Shenaniganz (a day that includes a pitch-perfect spoof of chain-restaurant orientation videos).

But for every gag that flies, there are at least one-and-a-half that don't.

Ubach, brilliant as Marcia's lesbian pal in "The Brady Bunch Movie," seriously overdoes it as a rageaholic waitress. Reynolds played a sharper smart-aleck in "Blade: Trinity." And too many subplots (especially anything involving a couple of wannabe-gangsta busboys) deal in the sort of bland jokes you'd find in a straight-to-video "Meatballs" sequel. As Koechner, playing Shenaniganz's idiot manager, tells Long at one point: "The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra." Which "Waiting…," for all its rude charm, lacks.

Long-shot mentoring
Still 'Waiting...'
(The Oregonian, Oct. 7, 2005)


Posted: Fri - October 7, 2005 at 11:00 AM        

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