You know how it is. You have low self-esteem, or you have to move alot so you don’t do good in school, or you do do good in school but people pick on you, or you get kicked out of school, or you don’t get along with your parents, or you don’t have any parents. But then you find out about breakdancing or karate or illegal street racing or lambada (the forbidden dance) or civil war re-enacting or vegetarianism or whatever. Your eyes are opened to an exciting new world, you meet colorful new friends and rivals, you work real hard and train and almost give up but you have to prove something to somebody or to yourself or to both, so you go to the big tournament or championship or whatever. Well, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut WHIP IT is about a girl finding herself through roller derby, and I was hoping it would be a little smarter version of that type of story. A generic plot that manipulates you in an obvious but enjoyable way, and that pays tribute to a sport I happen to enjoy. Like, say, DRUMLINE with girls on rollerskates. Or BRING IT ON with tattoos. That’s all I was hoping for, but WHIP IT turns out to be way better than I was hoping. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Drew Barrymore’
LikeFever Pitch
Monday, April 11th, 2005Usually even if I see a movie like this I wouldn’t review it. Because you know, light-hearted romantic comedy is not my area of expertise. But if a movie critic is a bear then FEVER PITCH is a big pile of fish slathered in a barrel of honey, and I think you know why. Because it’s easy as shit to write baseball puns and metaphors. It’s fuckin tee-ball for the hack headline writers of the world. Sometimes they wonder how the fuck they gonna come up with a pun for a movie headline, but with a baseball movie you hit control-A for “strikes out,” control-B for “swings for the fences.”
Actually I don’t think either of those is true, FEVER PITCH is more like a double or a triple or maybe a real good double play. They never use defensive plays in metaphors but double plays are obviously important, also triple plays but those don’t happen enough to be a common phrase. I don’t think there is such a thing as a quadruple play but it would be cool though. Anyway this is a cute romantic comedy deal but what makes it worth mentioning is
1) an observant premise that speaks to many people in ways most movies don’t
2) a likable cast, crucial to this kind of crap
III) subtly avoiding some of the usual crap you would expect in this type of movie
In the movie Jimmy Fallon (young guy that would always fuck up and start laughing when he was on Saturday Night Live a couple years back) is a math teacher who asks out yuppie businesswoman Drew Barrymore (girl from E.T. and the Charlie’s Angels dulogy). Jimmy is such a sweetheart that when he shows up for the first date and she’s puking her guts out from food poisoning, he not only nurses her back to health but cleans the bathroom and rents ROADHOUSE for her. (more…)
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
Saturday, January 1st, 2005E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL: THE SPECIAL EDITION: FOR THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY: THE MOVIE
This is one of those things where they take an old movie that was very popular, and then they change it, because they think the only way anybody would want to see a movie they loved on the big screen again would be if somebody just completely fucked with it and tried to ruin it. They did the same thing with the Star Trek pictures, and the exorcist (see below) and Night of the Living Dead on video (I’m still staying away from that one).
This goes into the Star Trek category where the individual who made it (Steve Spielberg) gets old, forgets everything that made him vital when he was young, and decides to change things, but claims it’s actually perfectionism. The most infamous thing here is that he wanted no guns in the movie at all. Which is kind of weird for a movie where the main characters get chased by a mob of cops. So there they are, a bunch of fuckin cops and government spooks, running around all holding a walkie talkie with their trigger fingers poised to, I don’t know, hit the little beeper button that you use for Morse code.
What they didn’t pussy out on was the language, because there is a bit of cussing from out of babe’s mouths and shit. The famous one is the little boy, Elliot, yells “SHUT UP, PENIS BREATH!” to his brother. Congratulations to Steve Spielberg for leaving that in, although I would have liked him to update it to the more common “COCKSUCKER!” (more…)
