Whatever Became Of Christina Ricci?

I've no idea if anyone even gives a damn about poor Christina Ricci's career any more, but she's been on my mind recently because Black Snake Moan is part of my not-as-epic-as-it-should-be 'evolution of the Southern heroine' essay. So as I was kinda-working-but-kinda-not and wandered onto her IMDb profile, I came across this piece of news.

"I am thinking Christina Ricci got the better deal here," writes Brad Brevet. Well, compared to poor, continually undervalued Maria Bello, that seems to be true (Maria being married to Kevin James is on an Embeth Davidtz being married to Anthony Hopkins level of absurdity), but it's a sad day when Christina Ricci has to settle for an Adam Sandler porn comedy. Indeed, Ricci's career seems to have got lost somewhere- her only films of note (let's not mention Anything Else, shall we?) in the '00s have been Monster, in which she was quite terrible; Speed Racer, in which she had fuck all to do; and Black Snake Moan. The latter of which is easily the best role she's had since her finest one to date in Don Roos' acidic comedy The Opposite of Sex back in 1998. And what else is she known for beyond the obvious Wednesday Addams? I'd wager that gothic little girl remains the thing most people know her for.

It probably doesn't help that she doesn't seem to have grown up. She may play an intensely sexual nymphomaniac (I'm guessing nymphomaniacs generally are intensely sexual) in Black Snake Moan, but once Samuel L. Jackson has chained and tamed her she's back to her incredibly tiny girlishness in a flowery dress and she could be back in 1995. And now she, devoid of box office clout (not that she ever had it in the first place), is stuck with the 'supportive girlfriend' parts like Speed Racer or this porn comedy, Born to be a Star. Her other upcoming projects don't seem any more promising:

• All's Faire in Love, a Renaissance faire comedy (um, okay)
• After.Life, a schlocky-sounding horror (although the director's only other work seems well-regarded, so who knows- dreadful title though)
• The Hero of Color City, an animated movie about a box of crayons (words fail me)
• Alpha and Omega, another werewolf movie (see exhibit A)
• and Long Time Gone, a potentially-promising (but possibly not-happening) family drama with Anjelica Huston.

She seems to have two 'personas' that the industry, at least, views her as being interesting as: the dangerously sexual, manipulative young woman, or the horrifying, pale-faced 'other'. Her bug-eyes may remind of Bette Davis but do parts like those Bette played even exist any more? Is there room for an 'unconventional' beauty in Hollywood today? Ricci is too small to be intimidating, seemingly too oddball for the mainstream. And yet that seems to be what she's continuing to chase. She may have thrown a more challenging part like Black Snake Moan in there, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Her career, ultimately, seems to be less chasing mainstream success than really having no idea what to do with herself.

And that, my friends, is really quite sad. [Next week on 'Whatever Became Of...': Winona Ryder. (I may or may not be joking.)]

Chauvinism or misogyny? It's all the same to me...

A new year and new resolutions. The past six months have been so lax on this blog that I've probably driven away any tiny readership I had, but now I'm ready and motivated to actually write things. Later, my contribution to StinkyLulu's Supporting Actress blog-a-thon, but now, some nastily negative words on a couple of films that deserve them.

I never thought I would see the day when I could say I hated a Woody Allen film, but I suppose that everyone’s illusions must be shattered at some point. Anything Else is not, unfortunately, as dismissible as both its title and its plot suggest, but a self-indulgent, useless, hateful piece of work- made all the more deplorable for the fact that it was made by a filmmaker once so insightful and witty. I’ll put aside my accusations of misogyny for a moment and focus on the other thing that’s most horrifying about Anything Else: Woody Allen now thinks so much of himself that he’s not in this film once, he’s in it twice. Oh, yes. Not content with his usual youthful stand-in, this time played flatly by Jason “American Pie” Biggs, Allen also gives himself a part to play, a delusional, wizened comedy writer named Dobel. Allen angles his and Biggs’ characters into a weird kind of friendship, in which Allen gives Biggs lots of quotations, leading, naturally, to Biggs practically begging Allen for advice when his agent is troublesome and his romance goes sour. At one point near the end of the film, Allen actually gives some (unintentionally?) ironic advice to Biggs that, to paraphrase, suggests he listen to the ‘wise words’ of those offering them and then ignore them completely. The distressing fact is that by this time Allen seems so convinced of his own wondrousness, refracted not through his part but Biggs, that you are left with two thoughts: either Allen is foolishly promoting his own ‘superb’ insights, or he’s realized that he is, actually, past it, and is encouraging you to go back to when he could actually play his own central figures and actually had some interesting things to say about relationships. Allen has played the same tune for thirty years now, and, looking at this film, for all its squarely photographed pseudo-chic New York settings, he’s still stuck in the 1970s.

But I’m ignoring the main point of this entry. It could be, perhaps, that I’m going a bit far in accusing this film of outright misogyny, because it never outrightly professes to hate women, simply that they are incomprehensible. It’s probable that, as one of the two conclusions above sees Allen’s foolishness, he doesn’t see that he’s being misogynistic. Perhaps the debacle with Mia Farrow has finally caught up with his pen (or typing fingers). But Anything Else seems to see women as one of two things, handily encapsulated into a familial pairing of mother and daughter: a woman is either a loose nutcase, or a pathetic nutcase. It’s almost shocking to see two such charismatic, dextrous performers as Christina Ricci and Stockard Channing playing these shrewish characters, delivering lines either so flatly they seem braindead or so wildly they look bug-eyed, but that’s what Allen has them do. The other couple of women that make appearances in the film- one an ex of Biggs in flashback, the other someone Ricci angles to set him up with- aren’t harridans like Ricci and Channing, but they’re so bland and unimportant that they’re most likely just harridans-in-waiting.

Reign Over Me, Mike Binder’s 2007 release, could be described slightly more kindly as chauvinistic, if only because women are so sidelined in the film as just to be there when either Don Cheadle or Adam Sandler need someone to show how wonderful they are, despite the fact that they’re played by the fairly respectable performers Liv Tyler, Jada Pinkett Smith and Saffrow Burrows. Unlike Anything Else, Reign Over Me at least shows some variety in its careless depiction of womenfolk- Tyler is a kindly but apparently useless shrink (mostly just a pretty face), Smith is Cheadle’s jigsaw-playing, party-pooper of a wife, while Burrows gets the worst of the lot as a psychotic patient of Cheadle’s (he’s a dentist) who wants to, um, service him for no apparent reason. Reign Over Me doesn’t hate these figures- Tyler especially seems to be a respectable source of help, even if she’s the shrink apparently encouraging Burrows’ pursuit of Cheadle, and the only time we see her with Sandler shows her as strikingly ineffectual- but it clearly believes the male figures are both more interesting and more valuable: Smith is a source of annoyance because she won’t let Cheadle go gallivanting with Sandler on his scooter at three in the morning?

Reign Over Me purports to be a film dealing with the personal aftermath of the war on terror- Sandler’s wife, children and dog were all killed on 9/11- but as it develops, it’s really just another film where Sandler can do his shtick, only protected from criticism by the veil of seriousness. It’s salvaged from disaster by Cheadle’s good work, managing his character’s wavering reactions to Sandler’s outbursts with earnest good-heartedness, and playing well off the rest of the cast. He anchors the movie in the realm of the real, balancing Binder’s sentimental and predictable impulses (such as flickers of Sandler’s memory visualised as his children running through the same hall he now looks down) against a sturdy characterization of a successful man trying to bridge the gap between his youth and his present. Even so, though, the film sways dangerously off course almost immediately, and by the time it’s dived headlong into a courtcase, I was already lost to the calls of Punch-Drunk Love and Spanglish.

Anything Else: F; Reign Over Me: C-

2007 Capsules

It's the return of the capsule reviews! They're just so handy. Here are some thoughts on the last five 2007 releases I've seen.

It's been a few weeks now, but the last 2007 release I saw, on DVD, was Bridge to Terabithia. Point number one. Gabor Csupo, the director, is also the man behind the Rugrats. This makes him a very important person in my childhood. Point number two. I had never heard of- and therefore never read- Katherine Paterson's book on which the film is based. These points have no connection and no real bearing on anything, but I just thought I'd mention them. As for the film itself: I really liked it. It's not a film of particular technical finesse (the special effects are awful, but they're also unimportant, unless of course you're the marketing people...) or great revelation, and some of the scripting seems rather simplistic and trite (particularly the school scenes), but it's remarkably affecting and the central relationship, which is the entire basis of the entire film, is so well acted by Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb (whose smile will probably literally kill men when she's older) and so charmingly done (and heartbreakingly broken) that it just makes the heart beam. This might be overly generous, but it's a B+.

It's also a B+ for Black Snake Moan, which is so deliriously absurd it all its off-kilter shots at convention that it's hard not to admire it. Every time I thought the film was heading into cliched, obvious territory, it seemed to take a sudden swerve in a direction I didn't know existed. Its addressing of issues of race and sexuality are at first so blatantly transparent that it seems the film is going nowhere; but it subverts everything, finds new depths in old cliches, and does so with such panache and vibrancy that I just found it rather bewitching. And its good to see Christina Ricci in a strong, challenging role again.

Cate Blanchett, though, finds herself in more familiar territory with Elizabeth: The Golden Age, for which Nick Davis has written such a hilarious, deliciously-constructed putdown that it hardly seems worth chucking in my own piece. But suffice to say, Elizabeth has the gloss, but it is, literally, all surface- poke it, and it shatters. So Elizabeth wore an enormous gardenia for a hat: so what? Director Shekhar Kapur presents all the requisite events of Elizabeth's 'golden age' (as you might expect), but there's nothing in them- no life, no impact, no emotion, no purpose. It's just a story. No one seems to care about it, except to dress it up in pretty clothes and either yell, giggle or whisper at you. It's a C- from me, and most of that grade was earned by the stone walls. Oh, and Samantha Morton.

Once was too a disappointment, though in a markedly different way. I by no means hated the film; I was charmed by the music and the central relationship, but after hearing such great things about the film, I couldn't help expecting a little more. It's one of those films where the two characters don't have names- they're simply 'guy' and 'girl'. And it's not like we don't find out anything about their lives- we go to their homes, meet their families, see their jobs. I don't know what it lacked for me. But there was something missing. I'll get back to you if I figure out what it was, but, for now, it's a (still) tentative B.

And, furthest back in time, we have the rather terrific documentary Deep Water, which screened on tv over here, and concerns the tragic events of one of the entrants of the 1968 round-the-world yacht race. What was great about the film, I feel, was how it kept a superb balance between the central figure of the film and the other entrants- they weren't ignored, forgotten about, simply because they survived. Deep Water, less than focusing on just the one man who died, is concerned with the effect of the 'deep water' on all the entrants, how it affected them all differently. The film is also beautifully narrated by Tilda Swinton, superbly scored, and mixes in some more artistic effects rather well. B+.

That's all for now, folks. Come back soon when uni is done and I'll actually have time to go to the cinema.