Directed by: Paul Weitz
Starring: Hugh Grant, Mandy Moore, Sam Golzari, Dennis Quaid Willem Dafoe.
Rated: PG-13 for brief strong language and some sexual references.
Parental Notes: This is a fairly safe movie for preteens and teens. The sexual references are fairly tame and the strong language is sparingly used.
Satire is a tricky genre. If it's too cutting, it can come across as nasty and ineffective. If it's too easy on its targets, it comes off across as lightweight and more comedy than satire. “American Dreamz” tries to walk the tightrope and doesn't quite make it. Rather than offering a sharp satire on modern American politics and showbiz, it's a political comedy with a few sharp moments in it. On the comedy-satire spectrum, it falls somewhere between “Where's My Bush?” and “Thank You For Smoking.”
“American Dreamz” centers around a fictional reality show of the same name, modeled on “American Idol” and hosted by Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason”), a borderline sociopath who loathes his job and the contestants almost as much as himself. Grant is finding a niche skewering his foppish romantic hero roles from the nineties, and he does a delightfully wicked job here. The two contestants we get to know best on the show are Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore, “Saved!”), an ambitious and cold-blooded spotlight seeker in whom Tweed sees his own reflection, and Omer (feature-film newcomer Sam Golzari), a bumbling would-be terrorist who is in the U.S. awaiting activation by his sleeper cell. They fill their roles with enthusiasm.
Omer's moment to shine comes when he is chosen to compete on American Dreamz and it is announced that President Staton (Dennis Quaid, “Yours, Mine, and Ours”) is going to be a guest judge on the final round of the competition. Omer's sleeper cell contacts him with instructions to make it to that final round and martyr himself to take out the president. This is a touchy thing to be satirizing, which may be why director Paul Weitz (“In Good Company”) soft pedals so many of the opportunities for sharpness in the film. The terrorists are cartoonish, with fake beards, carefully dirtied faces and turbans, surprisingly excellent English, and a TiVo. Omer is sweet and enthusiastic, and we're reminded of it by his overly blushed cheeks. The minor contestants on the show are brushed over quickly with boring songs that bring nothing to the screen. It's all thoroughly safe.
Another soft pedaled aspect of the film is its take on the president. President Staton is obviously supposed to be President George W. Bush, but all the jokes are broad, familiar ones. Staton isn't too bright, his advisers keep him in the dark, and he is essentially a puppet for his conniving Chief of Staff, Wally (Willem Dafoe, “Manderlay”). Once Staton starts reading newspapers and trying to understand things for himself, there's an opportunity for some real quality satire but instead we get him complaining that in reality North Korea and Iraq are not at all like Doctor Octopus and Magneto and giving in to Wally's insistence that he wear an earpiece and do and say what he's told. There's nothing new here, and it's disappointing to see Quaid's spot-on parody of Bush wasted like that.
While “American Dreamz” is a competent comedy, it isn't as smart a satire as it would like you to believe. It doesn't quite gel as a farce because it's vying for satire, and it doesn't quite gel as a satire because it's too broad. There are moments that work and it's quite funny if you're laid-back about it, but if you're in search of another smart film like “Thank You For Smoking,” keep looking.
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Directed by: Liz Friedlander
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Rob Brown, Alfre Woodard, Yaya DaCosta
Rated: PG-13 for thematic material, language and some violence.
Parental notes: This is an accurately rated film. It's not aimed at the Kindergarten-and-younger set, and they probably wouldn't enjoy it. Teens and preteens are likely to have a good time, though, especially if they're interested in dancing.
Pierre Dulaine is a professional dancer who started the Dancing Classrooms project in New York. The documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom” followed several classes of children in the program from their first tentative dance steps to the inter-school competition at the end of the program. Now “Take the Lead” offers a dramatization of the program's beginnings, helmed by first-time director Liz Friedlander and starring Antonio Banderas. It's yet another film about rough inner-city kids learning self-respect from a passionate teacher, but the infectious good humor and catchy music make it easy to be drawn in.
When the film opens, ballroom dance instructor Pierre Dulaine (Banderas, “The Legend of Zorro”) witnesses a frustrated teen taking his anger out on his principal's car with a golf club. Rather than turn the boy in, Dulaine goes to see the principal (Alfre Woodard, “Something New”). Now, Dulaine is a gentleman, the sort of fellow who stands up when a woman walks in the room. Banderas plays him with a lilting Spanish accent and a twinkle in his eye, and it's almost impossible not to like the fellow. Banderas' well-earned status as a Hollywood sex symbol certainly helps: he's lithe and graceful even when he isn't dancing, and although Banderas isn't a formally trained dancer he sure burns up the floor. Principal James, in contrast, has been ground down and although she cares a great deal about her students she's sick of seeing them gunned down in gang violence or dropping out to spend the rest of their lives in poverty. She's a tough broad, with plenty of bristliness from her years on the front lines of education.
Upon learning how hard things are for the students, Dulaine insists that he wants to help. James eventually accepts his offer and puts him in charge of the perpetual detention a group of the worst kids in school have been assigned to. There's Rock (Rob Brown, “Coach Carter”), who is determined to graduate and have a better life than his alcoholic parents, if he can stay out of the gang his late brother was involved with. There's Kurd (Jonathan Malen, “Mean Girls”), a redheaded wanna-be gangsta who is protective of his reputation as a player. Lahrette (Yaya DaCosta) is helping to raise her younger siblings while their mother supports them through prostitution. The rest of the kids in the classroom have similar stories. For them, life looks nearly hopeless. Some of the young actors are professionally trained dancers, but not all of them, and the dance scenes are fascinating. Once the movie is really rolling, the kids come up with a blend of ballroom and hiphop, both in terms of music and the moves themselves, and that's a lot of fun to watch.
Dulaine sets out to teach the kids dancing, much to the amusement of the school faculty. This wouldn't be much of an inspirational film if his passion didn't persuade the kids to take a chance on themselves, and soon they're determined to go up against the serious dancers from around the city at a major competition. The dance sequences are thrilling, both the smoldering ballroom dancing of Dulaine and the shimmying hiphop of the high schoolers.
“Take the Lead” doesn't diverge from the standard inspirational genre to which it belongs, but it offers a fun take on the old story and makes an excellent case for why the real-life Dancing Classrooms project is so important. Kids who learn to ballroom dance learn to respect themselves and each other and to interact with the opposite sex without sex or violence even being on the table, and both of those are lessons well worth teaching.
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Directed by: James Gunn
Starring: Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker, Elizabeth Banks
Rated: R for strong horror violence and gore, and language.
Parental Notes: This is definitely an R-rated horror movie; while it does have quite a bit of humor, it also has people exploding, heads being destroyed, and other unpleasantness. This is not a kid flick.
The intentionally funny horror film is not a new genre. The eighties brought us “Ghostbusters” and “Evil Dead II” for example. In the last few years we've had “Eight Legged Freaks” and “Shaun of the Dead,” and now we have “Slither,” a self-aware blend of comedy and gore which will have you laughing as frequently as grimacing in disgust. Written and directed by Troma alumn James Gunn (if you haven't at least heard of Troma, you either won't like this movie or need to visit troma.com posthaste), it's at once an homage to and a skewering of all those awful alien invasion horror movies from back in the day.
A meteorite strikes just outside the small town of Wheelsy, and even before a gross slug critter crawls out of it you know it means trouble. This is the sort of town that once had a hopeful future and now waits all year for the drunken party that opens deer-hunting season. The slug from the meteorite possesses the town's richest citizen, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”), and he sets about spreading his web of control, kidnapping a local gal for his nefarious purposes and generally behaving very suspiciously. The townspeople don't really pay him any mind, although they do post notices for their missing pets, filling the community bulletin boards.
The hero of the film is Police Chief Bill Pardy, played to perfection by Nathan Fillion (last seen in “Serenity”). Fillion has superb comedic timing and deadpan delivery, and he commits to his role enough to carry off lines about what a bad day he's having. Pardy is the standard sort of hero for this sort of story: he's a good guy, honorable, and still carrying a torch for the girl he fell in love with back in junior high school. Even better, when attacked by alien slugs, he has the presence of mind to warn his companions “don't let them get in your mouth!”
The girl Pardy's pining for is Starla (Elizabeth Banks, “The 40 Year Old Virgin”), and she's married to Grant. This puts her at the epicenter of the infestation, but she's thankfully not a screeching damsel in distress. She does a bit of screaming, sure (this is a horror flick, after all), but she's also determined to help Pardy bring Grant under control and find the missing woman. The female characters here are actually better than we viewers might expect. Cute young thing Kylie (Tania Saulnier, “Found”) has an obligatory bubblebath early on, but once she fights off the slug that attacks her, she proves herself thoroughly capable of rescuing the hero, and not just for comedic effect.
The alien itself is pretty revolting, and there are plenty of nasty special effects, both fancy CGI and old-school prosthetic, by the time we get to the big face off at the end. We are, after all, dealing with a multi-tentacled slug thing and its numerous offspring, which embed themselves into the brains of their victims and turn them into zombies controlled by the original alien mind. There's plenty of gross-out blood and guts material for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
Humor is an important component of horror films, too -- one without it is almost certain to devolve into a pretentious mess worthy of “Mystery Science theater 3000.” But “Slither” cranks the humor way, way up, giving us both parodies of the genre (breathless heroine: “Be careful!” Hero, sarcastically: “Oh, now there's a thought.”) and a fair bit of general goofiness (one of Pardy's deputies gets a little squid doll and half-jokingly suggesting they use it to help potential witnesses I.D. the alien).
The ending doesn't provide quite as much of a big bang as one might like, but the rest of the film is solid enough that I was able to forgive “Slither” for a mediocre last few minutes. Fans of this sort of film likely will be able to as well. This is a great installment in the genre, and it's to be hoped that the box office take is good enough for Gunn to put out more films of this sort.