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Reviews for Clerks II and Lady in the Water |
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Written by asap
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Wednesday, 19 July 2006 |
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Bob should have stayed silent
‘Clerks II’
[1 out of 5]
Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman
NR / 1 hrs. 45 mins.
By Robert W. Butler
McClatchy-Tribune
It’s been 10 years since Kevin Smith burst upon the screen with the scabrous, made-on-a-shoestring comedy “Clerks” and was hailed as a fresh new face in cinema.
He hasn’t learned much since then.
His movies still look crummy, as if they’d been shot with a pinhole camera. His humor still relies on sophomoric raunch and recurring characters who became tiresome the first time around.
And while he has stretched thematically — tackling Gen-X romance with “Chasing Amy” and Catholicism with “Dogma” — his films are more overblown skits than real stories. His most grown-up film, “Jersey Girl,” was so reviled by his fan base (figures ... I liked it) that Smith hurriedly retreated to the tried and true.
Thus we have “Clerks II,” the further adventures of New Jersey slackers Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson). Our boys are older and jowlier, but not much has changed. They’ve graduated from a convenience store to slinging burgers at Mooby’s, a fast-food chain whose signature meal is a multi-storied sandwich called the Cow Tipper.
The goateed Dante, who has long regretted his dead-end life, is about to end it all. No, not suicide. He’ll soon be marrying Emma (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, the filmmaker’s wife), a controlling woman who calls all the shots in their relationship and is taking her new hubby to Florida where Dante will work for her father.
The wise-guy Randal, still maintaining a state of prolonged adolescence, rides his pal unmercifully for selling out but is busily planning a bachelor party that will feature Kinky Kelly and Her Donkey Show.
Lingering outside the restaurant are a couple of other refugees from the first film: the obnoxiously hyperactive Jay (Jason Mewes) and his hulking partner Silent Bob (Smith). They peddle weed and play an obnoxiously loud boom box.
So far, so drab. O’Halloran and Anderson display nothing like range, delivering one-note performances (and not very convincing notes at that), and Mewes and Smith cling to the same shtick they’ve delivered in all of Smith’s films.
Smith introduces issues of aging and responsibility here, but they’re undermined by the tastelessness of his humor. He’s running on a creative treadmill, working up a sweat but getting nowhere.
Director all wet with his latest fantasy
‘Lady in the Water’
[1 out of 5]
Paul Giamattie, Bryce Howard, M. Night Shyamalan, Mary Beth Hurt, Bob Balaban
PG-13, I hr. 45 mins.
By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune
 It’s the big moral lesson you learn in freshman English. The hero, in the epic tragedy, is brought low by his “tragic flaw.” And usually that flaw is excessive pride — hubris, vanity.
For director M. Night Shyamalan, the Macbeth in the story of his career, has been reading his “Sixth Sense” reviews again. He’s decided he can save us from ourselves. He’s out to avenge himself on the critics who nicknamed him “Village Idiot” after his bumbling “The Village.”
And he’s plainly in over his head with “Lady in the Water.”
If you thought “Poseidon” was the big Warners disaster movie this summer, you thought too soon. “Lady” is a monumental miscalculation, an endeavor as wrongheaded as “The Postman,” as foolish as any film fiasco of the past 20 years.
It’s a messianic parable about a narf, a sea nymph (Bryce Howard) who surfaces in a suburban Philadelphia apartment complex and is found by the stammering, sad-faced super (Paul Giamatti). She’s being hunted by a green wolflike thing called a “scrunt.” And her name is Story.
As in, “How’s this Story go?”
It’s a tale meant to tell itself as you read it aloud, a bedtime story with Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) piecing it together from the “No tickee, no washee” Korean stereotypes upstairs. They’re the ones who know what a “narf” is.
“Lady” rings false, from Giamatti’s first mannered stutter to the absurd cliches that inhabit each and every room of Shyamalan’s version of “Rear Window.”
He’s been saddled with comparison labels since “The Sixth Sense,” “the new Hitchcock,” “the new Spielberg.” Something tells me that won’t be a problem for him from now on. This is in the running for the worst movie of the summer. | Only registered users can write comments.
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