eileenm Reviews

Pay It Forward (2000)

I wish I'd written it...

[8/10 · 9 October 2000]

For nearly the entire of "Pay It Forward", I kept thinking "I wish *I'd* written this..." I still wish I had. For several reasons.

I have always thought that Random Acts of Kindness was a wonderful idea, and have tried to practice this philosophy more consciously in the last few years. With varied success, but I've definitely found that the joy is in the doing. This movie takes that philosophy to the next logical level, and the basic idea is brilliant and beautifully simple. What a wonderful idea for a story... I wish I'd thought of it!

Although the plot brought few surprises, there were many lovely moments that allowed the three main actors to display their considerable talent admirably. Haley Joel Osment makes up for a slightly rushed and sometimes flat delivery of lines with his absolutely transcendent facility to convey thought and feeling through subtle facial expression and body language.

It is not surprising that the film's youngest starring actor is so impressive. It is in the little things that one finds both the strengths and the weaknesses of this film. The little moments between the characters were wonderful... the cereal eating scene between Trevor and Jerry, for instance, was priceless. Yet the minor charactors are not developed as well as they could and should have been, and the movie would have been considerably improved had more thought and care been put into developing the secondary plotline. It could have illustrated more clearly and interestingly a point that I think got lost in the terribly cliched and somewhat frustrating ending... that it is not in the perfectly executed action that true grace lies, but in the intention and effort itself. It wasn't Trevor's successful attempt to help his teacher that touched and 'improved' the wider world - it was his 'failed' attempt to help Jerry achieve a life of sobriety. Had this story line been better developed we might have been spared the maudlin ending... Trevor (and the audience) might have come to accept that imperfect effort still is valuable, that one doesn't have to be an 'angel' to make the world a better place. I think that's a very important point to make. I wish I'd written this movie!

Coyote Ugly (2000)

Bruckheimer's second adolescence

[7 August 2000]

There's no way around it... it's 'Flashdance' for the millenium. It's almost as sparkly, almost as deep, almost as entertaining, and... even less original, as Bruckheimer's done it before. It is so familiar that my husband, who had no idea that it came from the same director and is well known to be anti-observant, commented that it was nearly exactly the same movie. It isn't as though we needed an updated homage to the older film this year... we had 'Center Stage' for that, if we had yearned for it. It certainly isn't that Bruckheimer had something new to relate through the lens of the wisdom he's theoretically garnered over the past couple decades. He's apparantly struggling with the intersection of a preternaturally extended mid-life crisis and a bad case of director's block. Let's hope that with this regression he's gotten it out of his system and can get on with his life.

That said, we hadn't intended to see it (we couldn't find the theater in time to go to our intended viewing of 'The Patriot'), so we weren't the intended audience. And we saw it on the supersaver's Matinee, so we only wasted three measly bucks per ticket. For that price it was relatively inoffensive, and an acceptable excuse to sit in an air-conditioned building and enjoy our popcorn.

Flawless (1999)

Pointless

[23 May 2000]

In spite of the above, I *did* like this movie. I just could have liked it so much more with a bit more thought on the writer's part. DeNiro and Hoffman were perfectly sufficient to the job, and the other characters were interesting... except for the over-the-top-and-pointless 'bad guys'. The movie could have been truly thought provoking and something more than standard fare had the writer not chosen to add such a hackneyed and lame 'action film' subplot (although I did enjoy the slimey apartment manager character) in what seems purely a cynical ploy to convince potential producers of box-office appeal.

Nonetheless, the film is interesting enough to offer some entertainment on a night in which you are looking for something relatively lightweight.

Dinosaur (2000)

Little Foot Lives a Bug's Life

[7/10 · 20 May 2000]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've seen the story before (I can't believe they didn't get slammed by a lawsuit from Don Bluth studios), and it was disconcerting to see the dinosaurs *smiling* (ugh). Certainly it would have been much better (and more impressive) had they done the story telling without talking dinosaurs... from the trailer I was hoping for something similar to "The Bear". Given the standard plotline, that shouldn't have been too difficult a stretch.

BUT

The message was inoffensive, the visuals stunning, the pace brisk (perhaps too much so for the sake of character development), and heaven knows that I'd rather spend my hard earned bucks on this movie than on this summer's Pokemon ad-disguised-as-a-film. I saw it with six ten-year-old boys and two other adults; predictably the adults thought it was okay, and the kids thought it was great. Not a bad way to rest your frayed nerves after too much time spent herding adolescents around the mall...

The Road to El Dorado (2000)

Guys Interrupted - by Music

[5/10 · 2 April 2000]

Clever dialogue and appealing characters don't quite overcome the basic flaws of this movie, though they do keep Road to El Dorado from amounting to a complete waste of our spent time and money. The basic story line is exceedingly simple and cliched, the two 'bad guys' (Cortez and Tzekel-Kan) are very standard fare and not well developed in either character or motivation, and the movie suffers from the director's evident inability to commit to an effective target audience. The largest and most difficult barrier to enjoyment of this film, however, was the music. It seemed purely a nod to the apparent modern convention that animated movies must have a certain number of perky songs inserted at regular intervals throughout in order to please the juvenile crowd. The songs seemed stamped from the same mold, were musically uninspiring to say the least, and were an annoying interruption to the flow of the story rather than providing narrative or character development, or serving as an enjoyable interlude. The songs seemed a mailed-in afterthought on Elton John's part, and less than that on Tim Rice's; not one stood out, provided a laugh, or inspired child or adult to hum along or tap a toe. The director would have done better to have provided the economic opportunity to some starving neophytes who might have cared about the outcome.