TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Wolf Creek' and 'Rumor Has it...'


Longer versions of reviews in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.




Wolf Creek
(wr./dir. Greg McLean)

If there's one reason serial-killer movie fans should see "Wolf Creek" -- and there are, in fact, several reasons they should see "Wolf Creek" -- it's this:

John Jarratt gives one of the best hick-psychopath performances I've ever seen.

Jarratt, 53, has enjoyed a long and fairly strange career in his native Australia. He turned up in a well-regarded Peter Weir film ("Picnic at Hanging Rock"), a ridiculous giant-croc thriller ("Dark Age"), a girls-on-the-farm TV drama ("McLeod's Daughters") and even a home-improvement show ("Better Homes and Gardens"). Quentin Tarantino -- who's declared Jarratt his favorite Australian actor -- just cast him in his upcoming exploitation spectacular, "Grind House."

And after "Wolf Creek," it's easy to see why.

Jarratt plays Mick -- a weirdly giggly good-ol'-boy who gives three shallow, hard-partying twentysomethings (Cassandra Magrath, Nathan Phillips and Kestie Morassi) a tow after their car mysteriously breaks down. As they sit 'round the campfire at his abandoned mining camp, Mick's humor turns on a dime -- he glares at Phillips for an uncomfortably long time; brags at length about his former career sniping vermin with a scope rifle; and tosses off jolly insults, which he laughs off just a little too loudly.

Up to Mick's entrance, the movie has been a lovely, leisurely, slightly overlong road picture -- with lots of semi-improvised shots of the kids yelling "Woo!" -- and Jarratt's greasy, over-friendly stare is unsettling. He gleefully blunders through all the film's established boundaries.

And then the twentysomethings fall asleep. The screen goes dark. And the movie changes.

Without ruining too much, what follows is a lean, surprising, merciless thriller -- one that plays a bit like "High Tension" did before spinning off into the gay-panic end-twist nethersphere. (It's supposedly based on a couple of high-profile murder cases in Australia, but this is about as much of a "true crime" film as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was.)

Writer-director Greg McLean, shooting some gorgeous images on handheld, hi-def video, doesn't feel the usual generic need to leave a sacred-cow protagonist unscarred. It's fascinating how the film keeps handing itself off to a new terrified kid, and how each kid's in a slightly different mini-movie -- Magrath in an ersatz "Breakdown," Morassi in "Duel" (or maybe "Road Games") and Phillips in "Texas Chainsaw." And, in a nice break with cliché, when characters do really stupid things -- such as lingering on piles of evidence, or pushing their getaway cars off cliffs -- they're roundly punished for it.

Some people will argue the audience is punished, too. (I wouldn't be surprised if there are walkouts during the "head-on-a-stick" sequence.) But there's a dark purity in McLean's effort. While "Wolf Creek" has a few clunky moments where you want to smack these idiot kids, the movie embraces a stark aesthetic that feels refreshingly old-school in a field of slasher films drunk on self-reference, wisecracks and "clever" narrative tricks. And Jarrat's jolly-creepy performance may place Mick in the pantheon of great movie killers.
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Rumor Has It…
(dir. Rob Reiner)

"Rumor Has It…" sets up a situation that's so fundamentally weird, it's almost weirder that Rob Reiner chose to direct it as a cookie-cutter romantic comedy.

I mean, check out this story pitch:

Sarah (Jennifer Aniston) and the man she "theoretically" wants to marry (Mark Ruffalo) fly to Pasadena for the wedding of her little sister (Mena Suvari).

Once there, Sarah -- who's already a neurotic train wreck -- finds out her family was the model for the Robinsons in Mike Nichols' classic '60s comedy "The Graduate."

Sarah's dead mother was "Elaine Robinson." Sarah's father (Richard Jenkins) was the stiff Elaine ditched (temporarily, as it turns out) at the altar. And Sarah's acid-tongued, smoky drunk of a grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) was aging seductress "Mrs. Robinson."

The setup allows screenwriter Ted Griffin to have his cake and eat it too. He gets to make a de facto 30-years-later sequel to "The Graduate," but can't be accused of directly defiling Nichols' film. But here's where the story gets really weird:

Sarah realizes she might be the biological daughter of Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) -- the model for Dustin Hoffman's "Benjamin Braddock." She tracks him down. (And it turns out that he sort of did go into plastics in real life: Beau's a venture-capitalist tech pundit who gets showered with applause for saying pap like, "The Internet revolution isn't coming. It has arrived!")

And then -- after he assures her he can't be her bio-dad -- Sarah tumbles into bed with him.

Meaning "the ex-Beau" is either (a) a lying, incestuous pervert or (b) a vaguely sleazy hedonist who's now homewrecked three generations of women from the same family. (Either way, it's hard to root for a relationship where a man actively woos a woman while talking about wooing her dead mother.)

Griffin left "Rumor Has It…" as director a few weeks into filming, and was replaced by the past-his-prime Reiner. The result is an intermittently funny but totally schizophrenic piece that might as well be titled "When Harry Met Oedipus."

Reiner gets relaxed, funny performances out of Ruffalo, Costner and especially MacLaine, who at this point can make shrugging funny. (Ruffalo's almost as good in a couple of small moments; watch when he checks out his hair during an abortive attempt at Mile High Club sex.) And Griffin gets off a few decent one-liners. Here's MacLaine, riffing on Pasadena high society: "That's what happens when you give people everything they want and leave them alone for 100 years." Here's Costner, justifying the unbelievable awkwardness of trying to seduce his non-daughter: "Life should be a bit nuts -- otherwise, it's just a bunch of Thursdays strung together."

And of course, beyond self-referentially riffing on a Hollywood classic, the scenario raises all kinds of potentially interesting questions. What happens when characters in a May-December romance reunite after they've both passed their respective primes? Are long-term love and remembered passion two different animals? Are families doomed to repeat their mistakes -- in this case, with the same guy?

But Reiner (and possibly Griffin; I'd have to see the original draft of his screenplay) lacks the vitality to tackle any of this with any vigor, or rigor, or consistency. For every smart performance (Ruffalo, MacLaine), there's a dumb and/or screechy counterpart (Mena Suvari, Kathy Bates). Poor Aniston's character is a ridiculous mess -- with daddy issues far too pronounced to be played as light, sitcom-y farce. And after an excruciating scene where everyone screams at each other on the phone for no apparent reason, the movie just kind of dribbles to a close, with three or four back-to-back air-clearing conversations about relationships we barely know -- or, in the case of Costner and Aniston, barely comprehend.
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Not your average hick psychopath
Post-Graduate work fails to seduce
(The Oregonian, Dec. 25)

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Posted: Sun - December 25, 2005 at 11:44 AM        

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