Langoria lands DOA

Recently married and scraping the bottom of the barrel for movies — yep, Eva Langoria is now officially a desperate housewife.

Oh, and check out the Oompa-Loompa complexion with that Tangerine Dream spray tan. Any oranger and she could be a spokeswoman for Tropicana.

Over Her Dead Body is a tired hunk of film. It starts wheezing and ends wheezing, a dogged journey for this asthmatic stinker. You might be inclined to like it, but don’t forget that February is a notoriously wretched movie month that studios usually shovel with junk unworthy of the other 11 months.

It’s at this point I am required by cinema law to inform anyone who might still be reading that Over Her Dead Body is a romantic comedy, which means that if you’ve ever enjoyed a romantic comedy, or ever found yourself fascinated with the shagginess and shape of Hugh Grant’s hair, you will enjoy this one no matter what I tell you about it. I could say it kicks kittens, or headbutts clergymen, or lights daycare centers on fire and you’ll still line up for tickets. At least you’re loyal, I’ll give you that.

Langoria, who I’ve already mentioned, is a TV star. It shows here as she plays, with the dexterity of a file cabinet, a wedding planner so vile that she assaults the serving staff for the placement of gravy boats and napkin holders. I’m surprised the chefs don’t cheer when she is crushed to death by an ice sculpture in the first five minutes. Langoria, who is much prettier in real life than in this movie, plays Kate, a chirpy bimbo. Correction: a chirpy, dead bimbo.

A year later, her boyfriend, Henry (good-guy Paul Rudd, Knocked Up), falls in love with Ashley (Lake Bell), a psychic who might have made contact with Kate from beyond the grave. Henry and Ashley seem cute together, and they seem to be well on their way to eternal bliss, but then Kate, in the form of a ghost dressed in elegant whites, shows up to distress Ashley in hopes that Henry is lonely and miserable and single forever. Misery may love company, but it says nothing of Kate, who is willing to spend her days in purgatory just to prevent Henry from loving again. Some girlfriend, huh?

Like most romantic comedies, the characters are from a manila file folder marked with “Stock rom-com characters.” Consider the beautiful Ashley, with her exotic profession, cozy pad and penchant for doing cute things in her bra and panties. Then there is the gay roommate, who dispenses sage advice at opportune times. Apparently, gay males have no life until a hot, single woman is sobbing in their arms. Kate is the neurotic, fast-talking tart who needs to be put in her place.

These are stock characters, but Rudd’s Henry threw me. He’s very funny — hilarious even — in every misstep the movie makes. His lines could even be considered classics in a slightly better film. When the girls deflect their rage onto each other, Rudd somehow stays sane and grounded. It helps that he plays it almost entirely straight, even as the script falls back on cheap slapstick and flatulence jokes. At one point, a skit with an obese dog is popped into the script that will make you ponder the profession of veterinarians.

Rudd aside, though, Over Her Dead Body is filled with bland, overacted dialogue and stale formulas. Regarding ghost-movie clichés: I swear here and now I will chuck nacho cheese at the screen the next time a living character has a conversation with an invisible dead character in public. The film also seems poorly made. Notice the dodgy dialogue dubbing of the scene in the supermarket. Apparently, someone forgot to turn the microphones on that day.

This is TV director Jeff Lowell’s first feature film, and it shows, but not as bad as it does for Langoria, who couldn’t act her way out of a spray-tan booth, which probably explains her ghastly color. Rudd, though, really shines considering the material has been done to death … and back again.

The real king of late night

David Letterman, his face aglow in wild-eyed resilience, refuses to be defeated. He’s the Rocky of the late-night circuit: sure he comes in second in anything related to television viewers, but America cheers his uncompromising style, not his points/share.

And except for ratings, nothing else can defeat him: Not heart surgery, would-be kidnappers, fatherhood, a cigar-chomping (and cursing) Madonna, a long-running feud with Oprah and definitely not a strike that is likely to cost the movie and television industry more than $1 billion dollars — if it ends soon. Here we are less than a month into 2008 and already Time magazine has my nomination for its famous Person of the Year issue.

Yes, Dave and his production company, Worldwide Pants, made a backdoor deal with the Writer’s Guild of America to return to the air with writers and without crossing picket lines. Before that he paid his non-striking staff’s paychecks with his own money so they wouldn’t get canned. These moves proved to be golden decisions in the entertainment world, and some were saying that Letterman’s deal could start a domino effect that could end the strike completely. (That didn’t quite happen, though the WGA-Letterman deal did help the strike.) But the strike drama is only half the story. The other half is Letterman’s actual return to television, a return marked with an uncompromising burst of energy. And a beard.

It was grey and looked quite scratchy, and Dave had it shaved off on live TV later, but the beard’s brief appearance, a minor footnote to the vast span of Dave’s colorful career, will serve as a marker for what appears to be great things to come. Consider: The Late Show’s guests have been fantastic (Robin Williams, Tom Hanks and Howard Stern were primo interviews); the writers are using their positions to influence, on-air mind you, a strike negotiation; and Dave, guilty as usual, leads the crew along for a wild system-bucking ride. Leno may be the king of late night television, but he’ll never keep up to his long-time rival, Letterman, who wins style points for integrity, his endearing pliability in his field of entertainment and, what appears to be, a living breathing personality behind that freshly-shaven chin.

The guy seems three dimensional. Not just his show, but Letterman himself, right down to his soul. So far he’s the best thing to happen to entertainment in this new year.

Blink-this-one-goodbye.com

Untraceable. No kidding. At this point it would be easier to trace a dust mite across Paris Hilton’s library card.

Let me present to you the dumbest movie of the year. Untraceable might even be the dumbest movie in a number of years. I’m pained to tell you it took three people to write it.

Here’s a clanker of a plot. It begins with Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), a computer crimes investigator with the FBI. We know this is Diane Lane because, yep, that’s her naked standing behind opaque shower doors … three times. In the movie’s first glaring mistake, she’s shown carrying a gun even though her job is to apparently type with maddening accuracy on a keyboard all day. She works in one of those offices that was designed from TiVo’d episodes of 24: speed-of-light web access, all-inclusive security access (DoD, CIA, NSA, Dominos Pizza), and computer stations with five monitors but only one keyboard and mouse.

To set up how good Jennifer is at her job, she’s allowed to nab an Internet fraudster with three keystrokes — one to ping an IP address, another to call in a SWAT team, and one last one to bypass a little legal thing called a warrant. The last shot of the sequence involves her analyzing a clue that no detective, Nancy Drew included, could have figured out without reading minds in some other dimension in space and time. But whatever.

The next day, a Web site (www.killwithme.com) starts showing up in blogs and on Internet postings. The home page features a man tied to a metal bed frame bleeding from his chest. The wounds aren’t bad, but a bag of blood thinner is hooked up to his arm. The more people view the site, the more the thinner is injected into his veins. If too many people log on the man will bleed to death. If this sounds like the entire Saw series — gruesome deaths, over-engineered torture devices, bloody voyeurism — then you’re on the right page.

Anyway, the man dies because Internet users not only tune in but sign up for the free newsletter and RSS feed. Of course, more victims eventually appear on the site — one in an acid bath and another who hangs perilously close to a garden tiller — to the dismay of Jennifer, who’s hot on the case. Her method of police work involves calling out source’s names and explaining their cookie folders in detailed prose, although I’m positive these characters are not actually in the film, or even described in omniscient terms. They just exist for someone to talk about.

As if that White Pages-like list of names weren’t enough, we’re thrown several red herrings for good measure. One of them is a brooding cop with the charm of a suave villain but the chin of a bumbling hero. He actually is a genuine cop, which makes me wonder if the makers of Untraceable ever noticed that their own editing was setting him up as a bad guy. That or they’re just dense.

The real villain has dozens of secret motives and apparently a really good Wi-Fi connection. The danger with this movie is that it sets up a villain that knows everything. No, seriously, everything. This is because he’s hacked into the Everything Database using a ping-protected IP nanorobot. And when a villain knows more than the Almighty the movie looks pretty stupid when he fails at the end. Oops, did I give something away?

Shame on all those involved here. Director Gregory Hoblit helmed one of my favorite films from 2000: Frequency. Even Colin Hanks — yes, Tom Hanks’ son — who plays a spectacled techie, can’t hit a decent note. Diane Lane was an Oscar nominee just four years ago. I got a laugh out of one blogger who suggested we all take turns guessing Diane Lane’s next “Un ” movie. She’s already done Unfaithful, Under the Tuscan Sun and now Untraceable. She's trying to corner the market on the U shelf at the local video store.

This movie really irks me with the way it does its preaching. Its message: by viewing Internet violence, be it on YouTube or jihadist Web sites, viewers are contributing to Web-based terror as much as the perpetrators themselves. Ok, agreed. But it preaches this through the Torture Porn genre, a kind of film becoming popular among gorehounds because it shows hopelessly exploitive and deliberately graphic views of uninterrupted pain and punishment. So Untraceable, kind of Torture Porn Lite, indicts us for viewing violence by showing us violence. It’s like protesting IEDs by blowing them up with nuclear weapons.

Overall, Untraceable is just ridiculous, neither thrilling nor intelligent. It just poops along for cheap, violent thrills with ludicrously stupid dialogue and plot. Case in point: a character, his entire body boiling in acid, blinks a clue in Morse code.

And I have only one response to that: Long blink, short blink; long blink, long blink, long blink; long blink; short blink, short blink, short blink, short blink; short blink, long blink; long blink, short blink; long blink, short blink, long blink; short blink, short blink, short blink.

When puking at home has lost its charm ...

Super-huge, gargantuan, impossible-even-to-grasp-how-big-it-is spoiler alert right here, right now. And consider it in effect until ... well, the remainder. If you haven’t seen Cloverfield, and in fact desire to see it, then you should avert your peepers and click away. The other blogs are quite interesting, I promise you.

For those still reading, let me announce here that it pains me to send readers away, but with a movie like Cloverfield — with its secretive development, cryptic preview ads and cagey plot details — I’m given no other choice. Movies this secret, with all their unmentionable mystery, could put movie critics out of business.

The idea of keeping elements of a movie hidden probably dates back to Psycho, when Alfred Hitchcock himself would plead with viewers to not spoil the plot. Janet Leigh’s early (and naked) death was a secret because it was startling and unexpected, as was the ultimate revelation that Norman Bates was psychologically deranged. Most secretive movies nowadays try to sell you that same line of logic, that their secrets shouldn’t be spoiled because they’re awesome secrets. Rarely is that really the case, though, since these same movies barely invest any interest into their secrets to begin with. Too often now they’re just marketing ploys.

Cloverfield is different, though. It’s staying mum, but not because the secrets are jolting or shocking, or even because they’re lame like those in Pirates 3. It’s keeping its mouth shut because it works better when the viewer knows nothing at all walking into it. That is why I’m sending readers away, because a fresh perspective is paramount to everything else.

Cloverfield is like Signs and The Blair Witch Project crashing into each other at Mach 4. Signs because it takes a major calamity and localizes it onto one reference point on a smaller scale. Blair Witch because it purports to be real footage of real people experiencing a real event. Of course we know it’s not real, but from their shoes it’s mighty authentic.

We begin with five young adults at a party. An earthquake interrupts the evening, so everyone spills out onto the sidewalk to survey the damage. That’s when Lady Liberty’s head rolls down the street with bite and claw marks marring her pretty green dome. Then, down the street, a large reptilian-like creature crashes through the Chrysler Building rendering it into a fine powder that sweeps down the street in such a way that New Yorkers are all too familiar with. Our five heroes, with their video camera documenting the early carnage, dive into a store and take stock of their limbs.

From there on they document their journey through the city, first to escape on the Brooklyn Bridge and then to rescue a girl trapped on a roof somewhere in Midtown Manhattan. Of course these tasks are not easy, because, if they didn’t notice, there’s a monster the size of Vermont stomping through Madison Avenue. And he makes Godzilla look like a member of the Wiggles — kid’s stuff.

The quintet — soon-to-be quartet — dodge falling debris, looters, fleeing rats and destructible architecture to eventually take cover in the streets as the military sends bullets, mortars, rockets and salvos of hot lead into the creature’s side, apparently to no effect. “Whatever it is, it’s winning,” a soldier tells the group, who work out a deal to get access to Midtown to save their friend on the 59th Floor of a building pushed Pisa-like into its neighboring skyscraper by the monkey/lizard/whale monster. They’re told to be clear of the city by 6 a.m., when a siren will signal an ominous and unavoidable event.

See, now I’ve gone and given away too much, spoiler alert or not. That’s all the plot you get.

Cloverfield, part human drama and part horror flick, is a fascinating picture that gets very inventive with its camera gimmick. By making a video camera the film’s point-of-view, it allows us to experience the monster the way most people now experience the Internet — from another person’s perspective. (The video is marked “Department of Defense” but something tells me in the film’s world it’s already on YouTube.) Although this trick should limit the directions of the plot, the movie is still able to employ romance, humor, suspense and even flashbacks (in the form of undeleted video) to its arsenal of tricks. These are difficult tasks given Cloverfield’s methods. To squeeze a sense of humor out of this is very complicated; as it turns out, people are naturally funny, sometimes even when monsters destroy their city.

One drawback to the handheld-style point-of-view is that some people will feel a little ill. Some might heave into their popcorn. The shaky camera is not kind on weak stomachs, that’s for sure.

As much as I liked Cloverfield, though, it wasn’t wrapped up as neat as I would have liked. It responds to the monster’s actions in strange ways during the final 10 minutes. And the characters make questionable decisions in the closing moments after 80 minutes worth of (somewhat) wise choices. I also found some of the torturous, end-of-the-line dialogue a little unsettling. At times it felt almost too personal and the camera lingered on it so, long that it felt obtrusive. Maybe the acting - by a bunch of unknowns to boot — was just that effective. Maybe being a voyeur is supposed to be uncomfortable. Whatever it was, it worked, and in a big way.

Oh, by the way, spoiler alert over.

One thought on Diablo Cody ...

Say what you will about Juno and its desperate plea for hipster appreciation (it's still the best film of 2007) because soon-to-be-Oscar-nominee and newly named Entertainment Weekly columnist Diablo Cody is the raddest person in the universe. That is all.

Rethinking Renfro postponed indefinitely

Last week I dusted off my idea book for for this blog and my newspaper section; I was looking for 2008 features. One idea I've been chewing on since early last year was a piece called Rethinking Renfro, a re-examination of the under-appreciated actor Brad Renfro, whose work I've admired without actually knowing it. Looks like that piece won't be running in its original form: Renfro, at the ripe ol' age of 25, died this morning in Los Angeles.

No word on the cause of death, but you don't have to venture far to nab an accurate guess. It's no big shock that he's died (I called Layne Staley's death years before it happened), especially since the young actor was living a hard life on hard drugs, but now that it's happened it's still a shock nonetheless. The leads of the stories announcing his death are dropping one title more than others: The Client, in which Renfro landed his big debut, as John Grisham's troubled Southern hoodrat who witnesses a mob-tinted suicide. A solid movie, a good movie even, The Client cemented Renfro's career as the peculiar outsider, the troubled boy with a cold stare and a loner with an attitude. He seemed to perfect this character in Tart and Bully, both from 2001. These were the movies I saw that made me realize how talented the dearly departed was. Oh, and he was also in Ghost World, an entire movie about outcast losers. I probably don't even need to mention Apt Pupil, where he plays a normal kid who seeks out a Nazi criminal.

In any case, Renfro was a talented actor and he could have had his best work still in front of him. Drugs suck. They steal from us too many talented folks.

Another take on 2007 films

The great city of Chicago (never been there, but so I hear) is home to many things, including a person whose opinion of music and movies I highly respect. Her name is Caitlin and we once worked together, many moons ago, in Arizona. I asked her for her favorite movies of last year and here's what she gave me:

1.) "I'd have to go with Juno. To echo Roger Ebert's sentiments, there really wasn't one misplaced scene or line or emotion in this movie. It was as close to perfect as a movie can get, in my opinion. I could watch that character for hours and not be bored."

2.) "Hmmm ... now it gets tricky ... how about Pan's Labyrinth. I think this one came out in 2006, but I didn't see it until 2007, so whatever. I thought it was very different, but very cool. Foreign films are usually shot better, don't you think?"

3.) "Knocked Up. Something about this movie just really struck a chord with me. I think the characters seemed very authentic, and I actually enjoyed the romantic-comedy aspect of it. I usually hate that shit."

4.) "I have to say that Sweeney Todd was great, but the blood was almost too much for me. Like I said, I'm a fan on the old Broadway version, which is not nearly as dark and gory. I thought the performances were superb, and the singing was decent. The actual music was effing great — way better than the original recordings, I thought. I love the music. Burton cut out a lot of songs from the Broadway version, but all my favorites made it in. I've been singing "Johanna" ever since. I'll steal yooooooou, Johannaaaaa!"

5.) "A Mighty Heart. I really liked how this one was shot in a pseudo-documentary fashion, and Angelina's performance was flawless. If that was an accurate portrayal of Marianne Pearl, which I've heard it was, than she has to be the strongest, bravest woman in the world."