MOVIE REVIEWS: 'United 93,' 'Hard Candy,' 'Stick It' and 'R.V.'


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




United 93
(dir. Paul Greengrass)

Shawn Levy weighed in on this today -- beautifully -- for The Oregonian, but I wanted to echo his remarks a bit.

I saw "United 93" last week in a room full of film critics, and it was, without exaggeration, one of the most soul-quaking experiences I've ever had in a theater. Everyone in the room was crying to the point of their speech being impeded as they left the auditorium. We all had to stand for a while in the lobby and talk before re-entering the real world, like divers in a decompression bell.

Director Paul Greengrass' genius is that he takes a fat-free, documentarian approach to the incident -- working from a script pulled in large part from documents and transcripts, with non-actors playing themselves as air-traffic controllers and the like. This movie is completely free of melodramatic or political horseshit. There are no falsely ennobling bonding moments among the passengers; you never learn anyone's name; no one's ideology is explored in any detail. Stuff other filmmakers would hammer home is smartly thrown away. The movie simply shows what happened and intelligently reconstructs the rest -- starting on the hijacker's mission, then handing itself over to the passengers' mission, all while intercutting with the guys on the ground who are doing the best they can while shocked, confused, and unable to scramble fighter jets worth a damn because they can't get higher-ups on the phone.

The straightforward approach does something kind of incredible: It sand-blasts four-and-a-half years of rhetoric, jingoism, partisanship, conspiracy theories, and spin right off the hijacking, making it terrifying and immediate. Greengrass all but obliterates the pile of words we've been heaping on 9/11 since, oh, 9/12. And it's devastating.

In the lobby, Marc Mohan pointed out that this is a movie about failure -- failure of the hijackers, failure of the agencies on the ground to talk to one another. The passenger's victory -- which is so well-staged and set-up, you find yourself hoping they'll pull it off, despite knowing the ending -- is that they cause someone else's failure, even if they can't fully re-take the plane. This is the part of the film that's going to be tricky to discuss, I suppose, but to me their victory-in-failure was more inspiring than something two-dimensionally melodramatic. They organize and fight like desperate men because they know they're doomed. It's primal and stirring in ways I'm still processing.

"Let's roll" is a throwaway line that's part of a larger bit of dialogue.

I could be wrong, but I think this is going to be a seimic cultural event -- if people can get over the mental hump of paying to watch this in a theater. Word-of-mouth is going to be insane; if it survives its first week, I predict its second week will be bigger. I know how hyperbolic this sounds, but this was the first time in a long while that a Big Important Movie gave me the hypnotic communal experience of a good church service.
_____




Hard Candy
(dir. David Slade)

It's almost impossible to discuss the punishing psycho-thriller "Hard Candy" beyond its first 25 minutes without spoiling some evil surprises.

So I'll just say that it opens like this:

Two anonymous online chatters -- "Lensman319" and "Thonggrrrl 14" -- agree to meet at a coffee shop to "hook up." "Thonggrrrl" turns out to be a jittery 14-year-old honor student named Hayley (Ellen Page) who wears a little red hoodie. "Lensman" turns out to be a thirtysomething photographer named Jeff (Patrick Wilson) with a smarmy, barely-concealed lust for underage girls.

Their coffee-shop conversation is one of the more skin-crawly interactions I've seen in a movie in a good long while. Everything -- from Jeff's too-smooth manner to Hayley's woman-child naiveté to the brightly lit close-ups of faces and forks cutting cakes -- is designed to unsettle by writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade.

Jeff, who's been courting Hayley online for three weeks, uses all the advantages of adulthood against her, buying her gifts and giving her a ride to his way-too-tidy house in his child's toy of a Cooper Mini.

There are photos on Jeff's wall of young female models. There is music and dancing. Minors are plied with alcohol. Pictures are taken.

And then, a la "Wolf Creek," the screen goes dark -- and the movie changes into something tricky and merciless.

The remainder of "Hard Candy" deals in wince-inducing surgery, revealed secrets, power struggles, surprise twists and no-win ultimatums. As in the original permutations of another, older story featuring a girl in a red hood, the lines between predator and prey blur when both parties turn out to be cunning.

The film does lose quite a bit of its queasy power as the revelations start piling up, unfortunately, and there's so much monologuing by Hayley and Jeff that you wonder if Nelson's script wasn't first written for the stage.

But Page (soon to appear as superheroine Kitty Pryde in "X-Men: The Last Stand") is an amazing find. Hayley seems to be played by several different actresses, depending on how far the camera is from Page's face. (Actually, it's a credit to both her and Nelson that they can sell overcooked lines like "Playtime is over -- now it's time to wake up.") Meanwhile, Slade demonstrates a gift for making audience members cover their body parts in sympathy, even though he reveals very little actual blood.

Despite the hot-button pedophilic story hook (I'm surprised Jeff and Hayley didn't meet on MySpace), "Hard Candy" ultimately beats with the heart of a stagier, more complicated psychological revenge picture -- along the lines of Polanski's "Death and the Maiden." And while the film's blunter, more thrillerish and sadistic second half is less unnerving than its bloodless first, it still works as a smarter-than-usual cat-and-mouse deathmatch.
_____




Stick It
(wr./dir. Jessica Bendinger)

Speaking of tough underage girls with homophonically similar names....

Here's a nice surprise:

A writer-director tackles that most clichéd of genres: the sports movie.

And while she doesn't reject the clichés outright, she plays with them -- writing, editing and directing every scene as hard as she can until her movie is funnier and better-acted and better-looking and overall just less insulting than even the advertising might suggest.

That, in a nutshell, is the joy of "Stick It."

Taken alone, the premise is fine, if you're 14 and prone to doodling Nadia Comaneci on your PeeChee. A disgraced gymnastics prodigy named Haley (Missy Peregrym) is arrested after doing window-shattering BMX stunts at a construction site. (She's "extreme," you see.) As punishment, she's sentenced to train at the Vickerman Gymnastics Academy, run by a grouchy old coach (Jeff Bridges) who's a little disgraced himself.

Does Haley rebel against her training? Does she apply her "extreme" mentality to gymnastics, throwing mad tricks on the mat, beam, vault and bars? Does she feud with her uptight teammates? Do we learn the dark secret that led her to walk out of Worlds a while back, leaving her fellow wannabe Olympians in the lurch?

Are there evil mothers? Comic-relief guy-friends? Montages?

The answer to all these questions is, "Duh." But writer/director Jessica Bendinger -- who penned the thinking-man's cheerleader saga "Bring It On" -- makes a solid directorial debut by simply attacking these clichés in the most entertaining ways possible, then slathering it all with a thick patina of comedy. Even the script's puns are well-delivered.

If there's a competition or training montage, Bendinger finds a snappy way to film it, or sets it against a Haley voice-over that moves the story forward. (There's a great bit where the director zips through an entire day of competition by showing every gymnast's routine simultaneously, in a kaleidoscopic composite shot.)

And best of all, Bendinger employs a secret weapon named Missy Peregrym. Man alive, Peregrym does a star turn as Haley. She's playful, snotty, smart, great at physical comedy, looks like Hilary Swank with the sharp edges belt-sanded off, really wears those Ramones and Black Flag t-shirts and is just totally unafraid to twist her face into shapes as she spars with Bridges, who's his usual lumpen, wry self.

The movie's only real misstep comes toward the end, as Bendinger moves the story off Haley and has the girls abandon years of hard-wired competitive bloodlust to team up against biased judges. But other than flubbing the dismount, "Stick It" is smarter and funnier than it has any right to be.
_____




R.V.
(dir. Barry Sonnenfeld)

Watching the mattress-soft family comedy "R.V.," it's easy to forget that director Barry Sonnenfeld has his fingerprints all over some of the best film comedy of the past two decades.

It's not that "R.V." is inept. It isn't. It's just that it's yet another aggressively inoffensive family road-trip movie -- only with Robin Williams in the Clark Griswold role -- and it's pleasant and formulaic and nice-looking without bothering to be terribly funny.

But come on: Barry Sonnenfeld was the cinematographer on "Raising Arizona," "Throw Momma from the Train," "Big," and "When Harry Met Sally…" Then, with 1991's "The Addams Family," he became a director, and for a decade -- in the "Addams" films, "Get Shorty," and "Men in Black" -- Sonnenfeld was masterful at turning his deadpan, lightly morbid sensibility into popular art.

Unfortunately, his brilliant live-action "Tick" was jerked around by TV executives, "Wild Wild West" and "Men in Black II" underwhelmed, he left "A Series of Unfortunate Events" over budget issues, and the fire (if not the craft) just seemed to go out of the guy's work. Until "R.V.," Sonnenfeld hadn't directed a feature in four years, choosing instead to helm TV pilots and sparkle neurotically on Letterman.

I'm sorry to dwell on the creative burp in Barry Sonnenfeld's career, but it's a vastly more interesting subject than "R.V." itself. The movie's about a cola-company PR exec named Bob (Williams) who takes his perpetually unimpressed family (Cheryl Hines, Joanna "JoJo" Levesque and Josh Hutcherson) on a cross-country road trip in a rented motor home. For contrived reasons, Bob's also secretly trying to write a corporate-merger presentation and give it in Colorado behind his family's back, and.… It's not important, really. The story's just a non-stick pan in which to fry a bunch of easy jokes about snotty kids, dumb hicks, wild animals, errant sewage sprays and R.V. crashes. It's perfectly safe, soft-edged family entertainment. I cracked a few smiles and laughed, like, twice.

The cast is solid. Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth are fun as the heads of a strange, likeable white-trash family. And Williams does a nice job throwing away lines like "Thank you" after each insult by his two-dimensionally snarly wife and daughter. With the exception of one long improv riff on a campground basketball court, Williams nicely underplays his role. Unfortunately, Sonnenfeld also underplays his -- and not in a good way. We should expect more of him.

Psycho predator/prey
Some nice twists on an old routine
Expectations left behind
(The Oregonian, April 28, 2006)

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Posted: Fri - April 28, 2006 at 12:31 AM        

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