The Fractured Mirror

The Fractured Mirror entry: Ellie Parker (2005)
over 3 years ago – Thu, Dec 01, 2022 at 11:18:53 AM

Ellie Parker (2005)

Just a few years after Naomi Watts played an actress in her 2001 breakthrough film Mulholland Falls she starred as the title character in 2005’s Ellie Parker, a lukewarm mess of a struggling thespian on the verge of giving up.

The scruffy labor of love is a micro-budget adaptation of a 2001 short film of the same name Watts made with her Mulholland Drive costar Scott Coffey, who also wrote, directed, acts in, and, for good measure shot Ellie Parker as well.

The project began life with a 2001 short film of the same name. Shot on digital video over a period of years for that trademark look of grubby amateurism, this deeply personal eyesore casts Watts as a self-absorbed wannabe who is an exhausting ham in audition rooms and what passes for her real life.

Ellie Parker follows Watts’ talent-impaired striver as she auditions unsuccessfully, is cheated on by her loser boyfriend, meets with her shrink and an agent played by Chevy Chase and generally endures the worst of what show-business and Los Angeles have to offer.

Coffey’s character study of someone not worth knowing gets unflatteringly close to its star in myriad ways. He shoves that awful digital camera so far into Watts’ endlessly expressive face that we can practically count her pores.

A protagonist doesn’t have to be likable but they need to be compelling and, for all of her talent, Watts here is an unfortunate, unpleasant combination of unlikable and uninteresting.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Orgazmo (1997)
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 03:05:05 PM

Orgazmo (1997)

Trey Parker’s sometimes inspired but frequently painful 1997 Mormon superhero pornography comedy Orgazmo is less a story its creator had to tell, or a film that he had to make, than puerile nonsense he had to get out of his system so he could move onto less juvenile endeavors.

Like far too many pornography-themed comedies, Orgazmo takes wobbly, misfiring comic aim at a version of the adult film world that does not currently exist and never has, one inexplicably reliant upon scripts and costumes and fight choreography and other matters unrelated to fucking.

In addition to writing and directing, Parker stars as Joe Young, an earnest Mormon missionary preaching salvation in the sinful Gomorrah of contemporary Los Angeles. The wholesome bible-thumper ends up falling backwards into the world of pornography when his theater background and unexpected fighting prowess lands him a role as the titular sex superhero in Orgazmo, an XXX-rated romp that transcends the ghetto of hardcore porn and becomes the third top grossing film of all time.

Parker’s adorably doe-like hero does pornography to raise money for his upcoming wedding to a similarly devoted true believer but also to keep his friend G-Fresh (Masao Maki) from losing his sushi business when he’s terrorized by thugs. Despite being an elderly Asian man, G-Fresh speaks in a cartoonish approximation of Hip Hop slang, a comic target every bit as exhausted and exhausting as superheroes and porn. The trope of a white or Asian man speaking enthusiastic Ebonics has never been funny but it’s seldom been as punishing as it is here. It would be impossible for a comic genius like Parker to make a movie that’s entirely unfunny and wholly devoid of laughs. But Orgazmo comes awfully close.

Today is the last day of the week-long Black Friday sale at my site!
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 09:48:02 AM

Hey you beautiful people,

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The Fractured Mirror entry: Paris When It Sizzles (1964)
over 3 years ago – Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 12:27:18 PM

Paris When it Sizzles (1962) (FM)

A decade after triumphing in 1954’s Sabrina, William Holden and Audrey Hepburn reunited for the effervescent 1964 goof Paris When it Sizzles. Hepburn does not seem to have aged a day between the two films while the famously hard-living Holden seems to have aged several unusually bleak decades. When Holden’s character mentions that he’s forty-three it’s jarring because he seems at least fifteen years older.

The film’s gleefully meta-textual script was adapted by hotshot scribe George Axelrod from the 1952 French film Holiday for Henrietta. The Manchurian Candidate and Breakfast at Tiffany’s postmodern flourishes include several references to Axelrod’s previous collaboration with Hepburn, as well as My Fair Lady along with myriad other in-jokes and fourth wall shattering cameos from Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra’s voice.

A consummate movie-movie that never stops reminding audiences that it is a dizzy, fizzy, ebullient fiction, Paris When It Sizzles typecasts Holden as Richard Benson, a superstar screenwriter who is supposed to be writing a movie for powerful producer Alexander Meyerheim (Noel Coward). Instead the libertine lush has been squandering his money and his prodigious talent on a continental spending spree.

With only a few days to finish the script, the cynical, sharp-witted scribe hires aspiring writer Gabrielle Simpson (Hepburn) to act as an assistant, secretary and catalyst. Holden and Hepburn do double-duty here as the protagonists of both the film and the film-within-a-film they’re working on, a heist film of staggering, intentional stupidity and ridiculousness called The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower.

This bifurcated structure affords Axelrod an opportunity to satirize everything from the French New Wave to method acting through the character of a earthy ham played by Tony Curtis in a role that falls somewhere between a cameo and a meaty supporting turn.

In Paris When it Sizzles work is foreplay and boozy sexual harassment is posited as sexy flirtation. Holden and Hepburn’s easy charm and mega-watt chemistry sell a premise that would be deeply problematic in lesser hands and with less appealing leads. Hepburn’s eager protege is not quite the aggressor here. She’s not a seductress but she is awfully eager to be seduced and it’s easy to see why she would be attracted to such a brilliant, troubled, charismatic soul. Paris When It Sizzles is twenty minutes too long and entirely too silly, if such a thing is even possible, but its perfectly cast stars and Axelrod’s witty script make it an amusing trifle that sags at times but also sparkles.

The Fractured Mirror entry: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 08:27:29 AM

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

Kevin Smith’s 2001 comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a self-indulgent vanity project by, for and about Kevin Smith. As a loving, masturbatory tribute to the grubby, lazy world the stoner filmmaker created in his previous movies, it was almost perversely inessential and unnecessary. Yet that somehow did not keep Smith from churning out a follow up nearly two decades later in 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.

The world has changed a lot since 2001 and Smith, surprisingly, has changed with it. In many ways Jay and Silent Bob Reboot offers more of the same in terms of gleeful, free-floating profanity, shameless fan service, winking references to Smith’s movies and life and pandering geekiness. Smith, however, shows an admirable eagerness to grow up here and trade in the juvenile brattiness of the earlier film for something more substantive, mature and diverse.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is largely about the title doofuses heading to a pop culture convention on the West Coast to keep a Kevin Smith-directed movie exploiting their images from being made but it’s also about Jay learning that he’s a father to Millennium "Milly" Faulken (Harley Quinn Smith), the resentful progeny of his one-time fling Justice (Shannon Elizabeth) and learning to embrace parenthood and responsibility.

It’s hard to say what’s more surprising: that much of this follow-up to a juvenile exercise in puerile raunch is an earnest, joke-free drama about two lost souls coming together as a family or that those scenes are the highlights. As a meta comedy and Hollywood satire this is a total stiff but as an unexpected showcase for the acting chops of Jason Mewes and the director’s daughter this has a lot of corny, sappy charm.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is not good or necessary but it is genuine and sweet. That alone is enough to make it infinitely superior to its rancid predecessor.