The premise of Idle Hands: an easy way to cash in on an audience that has never heard of some of the movies listed below. The story: Pot-smoking slacker teen loses control of his right hand, which goes on a murderous rampage and is undeterred by being cut off and microwaved.
Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin isn’t bad in The Cooler, but he’s not any good, either, and the film as a whole is terrible. The best thing I can say about Baldwin is that he’s the only performer who doesn’t look completely adrift in this disaster. If the Academy Awards measure a performer’s work relative to everybody else in a picture, then give Baldwin the statuette. Otherwise, his nomination is a joke.
Just as Pulp Fiction spawned a number of crude imitations, it appears that Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves has inspired young filmmakers to mimic his bleak depictions of degradation. The British film Under the Skin brings with it the affectations of von Trier’s film – the hand-held cameras, the grim natural light, the misogyny, the attempted shocks – in the service of a painfully immature story without a shred of psychological understanding or depth in its main character.
Most hot young actors wouldn’t dare trying to play vacuous, affected, manipulative, selfish, back-stabbing rich kids. It would look too much like reality. Ryan Phillippe, though, is one of our great screen artists. He has the guts to play a vacuous, affected, manipulative, selfish, back-stabbing rich kid, and to avoid the criticism that he is simply being himself, he decides to play the role badly.
The two movies at which I’ve had the most fun in the past 15 or so years both came courtesy of Albert Brooks. In each, Brooks played weenie-boy whiners in search of something important: courage (Defending Your Life) or the reason all his relationships with women fail (Mother). In The Muse, the Brooks character isn’t looking for anything nearly so deep; he just wants a good script – something Brooks could have used as well.
If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.
