WEEKEND MOVIES - I don't know if it's because I'm too excited about the films I'm going to see at the upcoming Chicago International Film Festival (more on this tomorrow), or that I don't have the connections to see movies for free in Chicago like I had in Iowa City, but nothing about this past weekend's new movies looked interesting to me -- interesting enough, anyway, to actually shell out $9 to see them. The synopsis for the movie Trapped features this great line: "Three locations, three kidnappers, three hostages - one family and a chilling, breakneck 24 hours until it's all over." I gotta hand it to Columbia's marketing people, it almost makes the movie sound interesting, doesn't it? Kevin Bacon stars as one of the kidnappers, with Charlize Theron as the kidnapped girl's mother. Who knows what Bacon is doing with his career these days? With apologies to Paul Verhoeven-Hollow Man fans, he really hasn't made a decent film since 1995's Apollo 13. And then there's Theron, who might actually be the worst actress in Hollywood right now. Her performances in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Cider House Rules are textbook bad acting. In The Banger Sisters, Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn play two former '60s groupies who reunite and reminisce about their infamous pasts when Hawn's character is faced with a life crisis. Enough said. The unfortunately titled spy movie Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, with Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas, is so bad it actually hasn't garnered a single positive review yet on Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe this doesn't surprise you that much, but at least one critic, usually writing for some fringe Internet site (like this one), always finds something to recommend about even the worst dreck. But here's Ballistic with 65 reviews and not one critic liked it. (Click here to see a list of other movies with 0 "fresh" reviews.) I saved The Four Feathers for last because it's the one new movie I might break down and see at some point because the subject matter -- British colonialism in North Africa, ten years before Khartoum -- is somewhat interesting and Rick McGinnis over at Movieblog listed it, along with Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, as the movie he is most looking forward to this fall during my CinemaScoped Critics & Reader's Poll.
There are two things keeping me from being too excited about this movie: 1) I wasn't as enamored as everyone else with director Shekhar Kapur's last movie, the best picture nominated Elizabeth (1998). Frankly, I thought it was over-directed and far more confusing than it needed to be. 2) The cast -- Heath Ledger, Kate Hudson, and Wes Bentley -- conjurs for me the phrase "junior varsity." Apparently, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson, and everyone else from Dawson's Creek was unavailable. OK, that's not completely fair. I enjoyed Bentley as the moody misfit Ricky in American Beauty, and loved Hudson in Almost Famous. Even Ledger impressed me with a brief role as Billy Bob Thornton's son in last year's Monster's Ball. But those were all supporting roles, and something about all three of these young actors taking on British accents scares me. Reviews have been less than stellar so far, with only 42 out of 102 positive. Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times writes: "The picture's wheezing fussiness and devotion to the British empire and its minor nods to questioning unthinking loyalty to an ideal make The Four Feathers a possible first of a kind: a movie that's halfhearted about ambivalence." On a similar note, Salon's Charles Taylor says: "For all of the contemporary post-colonialist consciousness that Kapur tries to bring to The Four Feathers, the oddest thing about the movie is how it winds up affirming the same damn moldy values the material has always held dear." The cinematography should be luscious though with Robert Richardson's (Oliver Stone's cinematographer of choice, currently working on QT's Kill Bill) careful eye surveying all of that desert.


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