In a summer when it seems that no one in Hollywood has an original thought and are simply banking on sequels to fatten their bank accounts, along comes Hairspray. It’s not really a sequel, nor is it a remake, but in a way it’s both. The new movie starring John Travolta (in drag), Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah and newcomer Nikki Blonsky is based on the Broadway smash hit musical, which in turn was based on a 1988 movie by John Waters. Drawing on the best bits from both its inspirations the new Hairspray is completely original and a happy antidote to the dire sequelitis that has infected the multi-plexes this season.
Shot in Toronto, but set in Baltimore in 1962 Hairspray is the story of the elaborately coiffed Tracy Turnblad. Tracey’s a dance-crazy teen who rushes home from school every day to watch The Corny Collins Show, a cut-rate riff on American Bandstand, which features a cast of milky white teens who strut their bland perfectly groomed selves for the television cameras. At the helm of the show is Velma Von Tussel (Michelle Pfeiffer) the vicious mother of Amber (Brittany Snow), who will do anything to ensure that her daughter is front and center.
When Tracy is sent to detention (for “inappropriate hair height”) she learns a new kind of dancing from the African-American kids who pass their after school penalty time dancing to rockin’ R&B. There Tracy learns a hip-shaking dance that gets her a berth on the Collins show, despite the fact that the evil Von Tussels think she is too heavy and not pretty enough to be on television. She becomes a local sensation, much to the delight of her mom Edna (John Travolta) and father Wilbur (Christopher Walken), whose Har Har Hut is the Taj Mahal of joke shops, and even gets a gig endorsing clothes from Mr. Pink’s Hefty Hideaway.
When Von Tussel cancels “Negro Day,” the once-a-month celebration of black music hosted by record shop owner Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah) Tracy hatches a plan to stage a protest in front of the television station. The movie takes on a more earnest tone as Tracy and her friends—both black and white—conspire to integrate The Corny Collins Show.
Hairspray is one of the more anticipated Broadway to screen adaptations of recent years, and it delivers. Director Adam Shankman is best known for making blandly formulaic family films like Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pacifier gives the proceedings a shimmering 1960s glow that is quite infectious. It’s colorful, noisy and so eager to please that it’s hard not to get sucked in.
The movie’s exuberant tone is maintained by the youthful cast, and while the older cast members try and keep up, they don’t always keep pace.
Tarvolta, in drag as Tracy’s overweight mother raises a laugh or two early on, but as the movie progresses the drag act becomes more an exercise in stunt casting—“Look John Travolta’s wearing a Muumuu!”—rather than a truly great comedic performance. Walken is reliably weird as the joke shop owning father, but the performance is strange rather than funny, which seems a bit at odds with the rest of the film. Pfeiffer, on the come back trail after a few years off, looks amazing and is suitably villainous as the racist, conniving station manager, but the part could have used a little less camp and a few more laughs. Queen Latifah brings her considerable charm to the movie but should have brought a bit more fire to the role of the rebel rousing Motormouth Maybelle.
Nikki Blonsky, however, the former ice cream scooper plucked from obscurity to play the lead role shines. Her beaming smile, strong singing voice and enthusiasm go a long way toward building good will for her character. She holds her own in her scenes opposite more experienced actors like Travolta and Walken. In a cast top heavy with vets, Blonsky and the young cast members—Amanda Bynes, Zac Efron and Elijah Kelley—really are the stars of this show.
Hairspray starts off strong, wanes a bit early and soft peddles the social commentary of the John Waters movie, but makes up for its shortcomings through sheer strength of the cast’s high-spirited will to entertain.
“Old Dogs,” the new comedy starring John Travolta and Robin Willliams as two middle aged men who discover the importance of family, clearly knows what its demographic is. With a boomer soundtrack heavy on hits from the 60s and 70s and a gaggle of incontinence jokes and prostate jokes it’s aimed directly at the crowd who can remember what they were doing when Kennedy was shot.
Williams and Travolta play Dan and Charlie, lifelong friends and business partners on the verge of their biggest deal ever. Dan is a business minded divorcee, who is “allergic to anything under four feet.” In other words no kids—doesn’t have them, doesn’t want them. Just as well, he doesn’t really need children when Charlie is around. He’s still a big kid with an ultramodern apartment full of toys and a habit of flirting with every woman he meets. Their carefully manicured lives are turned upside down when Vicki (Kelly Preston) re-enters Dan’s life. With her are her two kids, the result of a one night stand Dan had with Vicki in Miami seven years before. When Daddy Dan and Uncle Charlie take the kids for two weeks while Vicki serves a jail sentence for environmental activism (how au currant!) they learn that business doesn’t always come first.
“Old Dogs” is the broadest played comedy since “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze.” It’s filled-to-bursting with funny faces, slapstick humor and not one, but two crotch shots. It’s mostly by-the-numbers—except for a strange “body puppet” sequence featuring the late Bernie Mac—that relies on Williams and Travolta to bring a little something extra to a script that may have been a laugh-free-zone in lesser hands. Williams wrings whatever laughs there are to be found in a spray tan catastrophe scene and Travolta finds the funny as an over medicated man at a bereavement pot luck. Also packing a few laughs are Luis Guzmán as the hungry childproofing expert and Matt Dillon as the hard line camp leader.
“Old Dogs” works best when it is going for laughs, unfortunately the slapstick is interspersed with mushy moments that seem to come out of nowhere. One moment Dan has lost all depth perception and is playing the wildest game of golf since Adam Sandler and Bob Barker threw it down on the links in “Happy Gilmour,” the next Williams is using his earnest “Patch Adams” eyes, staring at the camera, fretting that he’s not cutting it as a dad. The sudden shifts are a bit jarring, but for every sentimental scene there are four sciatica jokes, or a grand-pa gag.
“Old Dogs” is a sequel in spirit to Travolta’s “Wild Hogs.” Call it boomer porn if you like—it showcases older successful men, their beautiful younger wives and interesting lives—but at its heart it’s just an old fashioned family comedy.
As if riding the New York subway wasn’t nerve racking enough, with its express trains that don’t stop until Rockaway Beach, rats the size of Chihuahuas and mystery smells, along comes The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 about a domestic terrorist holding a subway train full of people hostage. This remake of the 1974 Walter Matthau urban terror movie from visual stylist Tony Scott—simply calling him a director doesn’t do justice to his frenetic technique—is a tense subterranean thriller that makes Manhattan’s legendarily hectic above ground traffic seem safe and secure by comparison.
In this update a band of bad guys lead by John Travolta, in full blown psycho mode with a goatee and a bad attitude, launches an elaborate hijacking of the Pelham 1 2 3 train (so named because it leaves Pelham Station at 1:23 pm). Following the train’s capture Ryder (Travolta) makes contact with dispatcher Denzel Washington, a veteran MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) employee who knows the system inside and out. Ryder demands 10 million dollars in exchange for the lives of the 19 people aboard the train. If the money doesn’t arrive in one hour, he promises hostages will suffer.
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is the talkiest action movie of the year. More words than bullets fly, but Scott keeps things moving at a clip with his trademarked feverish visual and sound design. In creating the look of Pelham Scott seems to have pushed his Final Cut Pro program to the max. Images blur, jump and freeze elegantly, backed by a soundtrack heavy on industrial sounds used as punctuation. It’s an interesting palate that could easily have overwhelmed the film—as it has in past Scott works like the wild Domino—but luckily Scott has cast two charismatic and interesting actors in the lead roles.
It’s been years since Travolta played such an all out foul-mouthed baddie. He relishes the role, bringing a fun unpredictability to the psychopathic Ryder. He’s nuts and dangerous, but Travolta doesn’t play him as a slobbering madman, but an unhinged sociopath who is playing an elaborate game with people’s lives—including his own. Lately Travolta has been dressing in drag (Hairspray) and playing up to the kids (Bolt) but Pelham proves he hasn’t forgotten how to access the dark side.
On the other end of the scale is Denzel Washington who hands in a natural, modulated performance, full of charm and wit. It’s not as showy a role as Travolta’s and it is ground he has tread before—think Inside Man—but he is so comfortable a presence on screen that he is the focus of every scene he’s in.
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is more psychological drama than action movie and doesn’t necessarily improve on its source material but its intense visual style and the acting chops of Travolta and Washington (along with supporting cast members Luis Guzmán, John Turturro and James Gandolfini) make it a good summer diversion.
Wild Hogs boasts an all-star cast of old pros with a collective career span of 94 years. This is relevant because Wild Hogs is a movie about middle age and the kind of life lessons people pick up as the clock ticks on. The film’s leads, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen and William H. Macy, are all in the throws of middle age and should have learned by now to avoid stinkers like this. With almost 100 years of experience between them they are old enough to know better.
In this baby boomer fable four weekend warriors try desperately to cling to their youth. During the week they are average citizens plucked straight from central casting—a henpecked husband, a computer nerd, a dentist who craves the gravitas that comes along with the title doctor and an investor who looks like he’s on top of the world, when in reality he’s broke and about to be served with divorce papers by his model wife—but on the weekends they are The Wild Hogs, a bike gang complete with porcine insignias embroidered on their leather jackets by their wives. A better name might be The Mild Hogs.
Eager to shed the shackles of middle age the Hogs decide to hit the open road, leave Cincinnati, drive across America and dip their toes into the Pacific Ocean. Their Easy Rider dream soon becomes a nightmare when they happen across an honest-to-God biker bar. Stripped of their dignity by the down and dirty Del Fuegos, Woody (Travolta) seeks revenge and accidentally blows up the biker bar. On the run from the bikers they seek refuge in a small tourist town where there is the inevitable show down between the hooligans and the heroes.
There is the occasional laugh in Wild Hogs, but considering Brian Copeland, the pen behind My Name Is Earl and Arrested Development, wrote the script this should be sharper, funnier and less clichéd than it is. You can squeeze a titter out of an audience by showing an inappropriately naked middle-aged bum or by telling weak bladder jokes, but we’ve seen and heard all this before. The jokes are too easy, and rarely rise above the level of slapstick. Many movies have tread this same path, but only Albert Brook’s Lost in America manages to balance the humor with the pathos of middle age.
More disturbing than the shallow treatment given the main characters is the film’s blatant homophobia. In one running joke Travolta’s character repeatedly shudders at Macy’s familiar touch, even though they have been friends since childhood. Other scenes involving a gay motorcycle cop and an effete karaoke singer at a country fair qualify as gay bashing.
The cast tries valiantly to make the best of the material, managing the snappy dialogue like the pros they are, but aren’t convincing as long-time friends. The lack of chemistry sucks some of the fun from their scenes together. Ray Liotta hands in a nice turn as a sadistic biker, showing off his rarely used comedic skills.
Wild Hogs is a predictable story of middle age that is far less than the sum of its parts.
It’s time for the cats of the world to unite against stereotyping in movies. Too often on film cats are portrayed as bad, the personification of evil. Ever since Sylvester was introduced to the Tweety Bird cartoon cats have gotten a bad rap. Remember Cats and Dogs, the movie about an evil army of cats poised to take over the world? Or how about the scheming cat from Babe or the twin evil Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp? Even Garfield is portrayed as lazy and cynical. It’s time for this denigration of our feline friends to stop! Unfortunately the new movie Bolt from the folks at Disney perpetrates the unfounded and cruel stereotypes of cats as sinister and manipulative.
The hero of the movie is, of course, a dog. He’s Bolt (the voice of John Travolta), the pampered titular star of the television show Bolt. His character is a mix of the Six Million Dollar Man and The Littlest Hobo. He’s a super dog with super powers, but he’s also a method actor, so to get the best possible performance from him producers use special effects to make Bolt think he is actually a super dog with a sound barrier breaking Super Bark and other powers. That means no re-shoots and no second takes. “If the dog believes it,” says Bolt’s director, “the audience will believe it.” All goes well until one day when Bolt escapes from the set in search of his “person” and co-star Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus). Thus begins a cross country search, accompanied by Rhino (voice by Mark Walton), a star struck hamster and Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman), the obligatory mean cat or “degenerate creature of darkness” as one character calls her. When Bolt realizes that he doesn’t have super powers and that his life of fighting evil has been a sham he wonders, “If I don’t chase bad guys, what am I?” Luckily for Bolt and the reputation of cats everywhere Mittens redeems herself and is able to help him find happiness as a regular dog.
Bolt is a lushly animated story with genuine laughs for both adults and kids. It starts off with a bang with an action packed clip from the Bolt television show in which the canine defies gravity, defuses bombs, stops automobiles with his steel reinforced head and generally saves the day. It’s a wild ride that had the children in the audience I saw it with squealing, although it may be a bit intense for really young kids.
As I noted in my review of Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, in Bolt it isn’t the above-the-title stars that carry the show, but the supporting characters. Madagascar wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without the penguins and Bolt would be much less interesting without Rhino, Mittens and a variety of pigeons from the dim-witted New York birds to the slick screenwriting rats-with-wings Bolt and company meet in Los Angeles. Seasoned voice actors like Mark Walton give these characters some real oomph, unlike Travolta and Cyrus who provide recognizable voices but little else. The movie’s biggest laughs come from the supporting cast, and Rhino, the determinedly loyal hamster deserves his own movie.
Bolt, despite its treatment of cats as the Rodney Dangerfield of the animal kingdom—they just can’t get no respect—is solid entertainment for the whole family.
In a summer when it seems that no one in Hollywood has an original thought and are simply banking on sequels to fatten their bank accounts, along comes Hairspray. It’s not really a sequel, nor is it a remake, but in a way it’s both. The new movie starring John Travolta (in drag), Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah and newcomer Nikki Blonsky is based on the Broadway smash hit musical, which in turn was based on a 1988 movie by John Waters. Drawing on the best bits from both its inspirations the new Hairspray is completely original and a happy antidote to the dire sequelitis that has infected the multi-plexes this season.
