Cole Smithey - Reviews: Film

February 2012
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August 27 Episode

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August 28, 2010 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 5th Episode

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March 9, 2010 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Celine: Through the Eyes of the World

She: Not Right
Celine's Strange Distribution
By Cole Smithey

Presented as a "performance" rather than a documentary of her 2008-2009 "Taking Chances" world tour, "Celine: Through the Eyes of the World" is an insult to your intelligence on many levels. Television writer/director-turned-glorified-editor Stéphane Laporte spastically splices together performances of the same song from various concerts in diverse global locations like Cape Town and Dubai so that you don't get the continuity of a single Celine Dion show. Back stage shenanigans, photo-ops with foreign children, teary-eyed press conferences, and saccharine moments with her family, bodyguards, and dance crew substitute for a storyline. Perhaps the most glaring example of corporate pop music on the planet today, Celine plays to the lowest common denominator masses who have sipped from her egomaniacal Kool-Aid and are only too happy to blabber on about it.

Like an amped-up cross between Ann Coulter and Sarah Jessica Parker, the singer gesticulates and pulls faces like a circus clown as she exaggerates the literal import of every oh-so-spirit-lifting power ballad. Think of her as the anti-Sinatra. Distrustful of her abilities, Celine smothers every song with cloying histrionics tilted to make you feel like you're being force-fed a giant box of gooey chocolates with a rhinestone-encrusted funnel. There's nothing smart or natural in her performance. Even as a skilled vocal technician, here is a singer who doesn't know the first thing about phrasing or mood. Perhaps a few years with some Graham Parker records would help. I'm not kidding.

A day visit for Celine, her husband, and child to Hitler's Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin provides an opportunity for Celine to experience some deep feelings that she'll repurpose in that night's duet with a German opera singer. Whew! While in a South Africa, a visit to Nelson Mandela's former prison cell provides yet another chance for Celine--sans make-up--to pull sad faces like a vaudeville child actor seeking applause. The film also loses points for stealing part of its title from "Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World" (2001). The most satisfying moment of the film arrives in a backstage scene with Celine doing an imitation of a horse that is spot-on. Oh yes friends, we've got a "special" one here.

The irony is that Celine's overkill act might work better as an off-off-Broadway performance art piece about greed. In New York City, cinemas that charge $12.50 for films that screen several times a day, "Celine: Through the Eyes of the World" costs $15.00--because it's a "performance"--and is shown only once a day in a logic-defying schedule that switches from 7:30 at night to two-o'clock in the afternoon depending on the day. The unspoken reason is that the film is scheduled to screen only eight times at each cinema it plays for its limited week-and-a-half run to work fans into a tizzy of anticipation for her upcoming tour. The Associated Press reported recently that Celine is due to return in March of 2011 to Caesars Palace in Vegas where her new show will feature songs "incorporating the romance of classic movies."

Not Rated. 117 mins. (D) (One Star)

February 22, 2010 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Valentine's Day

Half-Eaten Chocolates
A Sampler You Don't Want to Give
By Cole Smithey

"Valentine's Day" is yet another date movie that's less than the sum of its parts. The sheer number of A-list actors involved spells trouble. Jessica Biel, Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, and Anne Hathaway provide cast padding for the likes of B-listers Taylor Swift, George Lopez, and Emma Roberts. Intertwining romantic threads weave a haphazard pattern in the City of Angels where Ashton Kutcher plays Reed, a pink-shirt-wearing flower shop owner who prematurely proposes to Jessica Alba, playing a typecast role as Morley, a snooty little minx who rejects his offer. Reed's platonic gal-pal-since-childhood Julia (Jennifer Garner), is dating a doctor with big secrets, and has her own love lessons to learn. Anne Hathaway falls on her actor's sword as Liz, a temp office receptionist who has a sideline as a phone sex entertainer when she isn't pursuing a "simple" relationship with Topher Grace as her doormat-to-be. With half as many sub-plots the filmmakers might have been able to keep the plates of passion spinning atop their spindly knees. As it stands, by the time Liz's office boss Queen Latifah experiments with some off-hours phone sex as an African dominatrix, there's far too much broken china for anyone to escape without bloody feet. Screenwriter Katherine Fugate, whose credits include "Xena: Warrior Princess" and "Max Steel," should stick to her day job as a TV writer. Hollywood is full up with hacks as it is.

"Valentine's Day" so wants to be a platform for Ashton Kutcher to inhabit a cupid who gets shot with his own arrow that the film all but collapses around him. The disparate narrative sampler starts out with Reed rolling out of bed with his fresh-faced girlfriend Morley. He gets down on his knee at bedside to propose to her. When Morley refuses to wear the ring, for fear of attracting too much attention at work, we know Reed will not be having the Valentine's Day he imagines. With this single scene, the filmmakers unknowingly paint the movie into a corner because Kutcher's energetic comic touch is better suited to the confection than every other character. Julia Roberts is Grace, a soldier flying home on a leave that will give her only a handful of hours to spend with her significant other before she has to return to duty. Bradley Cooper plays Grace's seatmate Holden, who imposes his kinder-than-thou personality on her so that the audience is left waiting for the other shoe to drop. The filmmakers hoard personal revelations about Grace and Holden for a miscalculated emotional climax that discharges the last bit of helium from this heart-shaped fiasco.

Most of the film has a perfunctory going-through-the-motions kind of vibe that reflects the way many people think of Valentine's Day. Everyone knows that florists jack up the prices on flowers for an occasion built around initiating consumer spending. We're already used to watching Ashton Kutcher sell cameras in commercials that repeat the same kind of whispered flirtation that momentarily erupts from the half-eaten chocolates of "Valentine's Day." That his florist character has to suffer the emotional indignities of his profession is the perhaps the best consolation of sitting through this romantically inept film.

Rated PG-13. 117 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

February 10, 2010 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack