Change Your Image
Maury McG
Reviews
Jacob Two Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1999)
A Kooky, Krazy Kid's Film
A friend and I were surfing the digital cable the other night and ran into this obscure little film at about 3 a.m. on HBO. Intrigued by the premise, and the title, we decided to watch a bit of it, and were sucked in. Jacob Two-Two is absolute fun--it has cuteness but with enough darkness to keep it from simply being fluff.
The first thing that caught us was the song that accompanied the opening credits (!), a slow, gravelly song about Jacob--the narration in the film is also done by the singer of this song (not sure who, although the music was done by Tim Burns and Jono Grant), which gives it an off-kilter quality from the start. The actors are good and are used wisely, and constitute a surprising list of talent: Miranda Richardson, Maury Chaykin, Gary Busey (appropriately grotesque as the Hooded Fang), and Ice-T as a rapping judge. Oh, and Matt McKinney of Kids in the Hall fame. Many of these characters are real people that Jacob Two-two encounters in the real world, and become (a la Wizard of Oz) warped players in his hallucination/dream of a world where children are tried and convicted of minor crimes and sent to Slime Island, a place where there is no fun or laughter.
It's a bit creepy, a bit hokey, a bit funny, a bit sad--it's a lot of things, really, and is definitely a film that more people should see. And, last but not least, the young actor who plays Jacob, Max Morrow, is a real find--a better and more naturally sweet child actor than any other I've seen (Jonathan Lipnicki and the Lloyd kid from Episode One come to mind). He makes Jacob cute without being treacly, and this is a delicate thing which could have ruined the film for me. Get him in more good movies, please! And check this movie out--whether for adults or children (I'd say not under eight years old, though--it could be too scary), it works.
American Psycho (2000)
In the Really Real World (Possible Spoilers, But I'm Not Sure)
There has been much debate on the issue of whether or not the events in the film truly happen (within the context of the film, of course) or whether they are all in Bateman's mind. The ambiguous ending sheds no light on this particular issue, and I think that was a smart choice for Mary Harron to make--however, I think that this issue is, aside from the misogyny and sex, one of the main reasons that so many people hate this movie.
My take on the issue is this. We have a main character who is also the narrator of the film, and we see the events in the movie through his eyes (Bateman is in every scene except one). Okay. We have to rely on Bateman and his immediate surroundings for all our knowledge about the world he lives in. The problem here is that Bateman is insane, a point the title alone makes very clear. So what the viewer is left with is an unreliable narrator, a character whose perception might be off but who wants or needs to tell his story anyway. Following that theory, the only thing about Bateman that we can really trust in is the fact of his insanity, so *anything* is possible.
I think that all the murders in the film really do happen, with the exception of the shooting spree near the film's end (that one I haven't quite figured out). Bateman only feels alive when he kills--it is the only real thing in his world--so I believe in his perception of those events. However, just like the consequences of the murders, the ordinary world of work and drugs and parties is nebulous and not so clearly defined. Those are details that Bateman can skim over because they are Not Important, and nothing is important to Bateman but fulfilling his own homicidal urges. As the character himself states, there *is* no Patrick Bateman; however, there is a serial killer who is locked in that persona as if it were an Armani straitjacket. When the killer emerges from this facade, *that* is real--as real as we're ever going to get within the context of the film. And don't forget, this film is a satire of a cross-section of Eighties culture that was built on materialism, the very essence of false security and surrealistic social values. The real yuppies for whom Bateman serves as composite would have sold their grandmothers for reservations at Dorsia. How "realistic" is that?
Dracula 2000 (2000)
Some Regrettably Necessary Nitpicking to Keep Me Sane
Dracula 2000 was a pretty okay movie. I didn't feel cheated because I shelled out the cash to see it at the theatre; I laughed and raised my eyebrows alternately, and the "origins" idea was neat-o, if a trifle too overplayed. All in all, not bad, and a worthy successor to the Hammer film ideology.
My main concern is Gerard Butler. Any actor who tackles the role of Dracula must have cinematic presence, charisma, and sex appeal; Butler is possessed of these, I believe, although they don't drip off of him, and for the the first half of the movie, I totally believed his Dracula --lusted after him, in fact. However, the spell was broken when he began to speak at length (earlier one-liners, like "We are all so much more complicated than our names," are fine). Butler, unfortunately, has a weak chin and a bit of baby-fat in his cheeks, and the lisp from the fangs doesn't help when he's trying to deliver speeches and explanations while still maintaining the Mr. Sexy Man image. This one thing interfered so insanely while I was watching the movie that it became all I could think about, to the point that the final fifteen minutes that Butler was onscreen were lost to me. I was too busy wishing the lower half of his face would stop moving!
This kind of thing is no one's fault, to be sure, although I wish I wasn't the only one to notice it.