Posts tagged "Cameron Diaz"
From my childhood third world perspective, looking through a keyhole into the widely disseminated First World pop culture, sports were the furthest thing. But I have a sneaking suspicion, that Oliver Stone's portrayal of the public and private lives of a football team in Any Given Sunday feel inaccurately cartoonish. For the pats decade, there has been a different quarterbacks who would host SNL once every four years and another one who would announce his blindly conservative views. And mind my traces of nerdy, anti-jock prejudices but anyone who gets to college through a sports scholarship should never be in front of a microphone ever.
That said, I don't remember the late 90's with the memory of men Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx). He starts out as a nervous last resort on this movie's football team, the symbolically named Miami Sharks, replacing quarterback Jack 'Cap' Rooney (Dennis Quaid), the latter feeling varying degrees of pressure from his coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) and his wife to play on, has taken it to himself to swallow his pride and make way for the new blood.
Then becoming its unlikely rising star, and it's inevitable that this new fame, the fake friends that go with them and the endorsements get to his unprepared head. For some reason, he would be allowed to embarrass himself through a nationally broadcast sports channel and a rap music video. The movie also gives us access to his semi-private life, with his stupid crass boring ass parties and such. It was as if Stone was conflating that decade's football stars with those in basketball, like actor Michael Jordan, rapper Shaquille O'Neal and model Lebron James. Beaman is the cringe-inducing manifestation of the black masculine ego, Stone's inadvertent racial, gendered caricature. I'm not saying that this movie's racist but if someone told me that it was, I wouldn't object to his or her opinion.
Knowing that characters within the Sharks are less surprisingly coarse, what interests Stone are stories with trashy narcissists who have no business in becoming figureheads of America's institutions, whether they be political, financial or athletic, but they end up doing so because of luck and some talent. Timing is important to them, entering these systems in dire times, and their presence within their new worlds make these institutions more precarious, the same way the Sharks' standing within the NFL is vulnerable. Speaking of talent, I can't fully discredit Stone's anti-heroes or villains no matter what they do or how they get to the top, Clay Shaw is well-connected and an efficient taskmaster, Gordon Gekko knowing stocks at the back of his cranium. Of course after vomiting spells and surprisingly, Tony coaching, Beamen can magically pass the football to the other side.
It also helps to know who's on scriptwriting duties. Helping Stone out is John Logan, responsible for the expanisve, ambitious, masculine and violent A-list vehicles like The Last Samurai, Sweeney Todd and the Oscar-winning Gladiator and Daniel Pyne, whose work in Fracture and the TV series "Miami Vice" bring equal amounts of flash and contemporary grit to this movie.
Back to Stone's characters, if the 'trashy' character is a secondary protagonist like Beamen, there comes a more major character who has to make us less cynical and make us believe that the Sharks and football are holy institutions with integrity and rules. That's what Tony is for. Pacino amazes here, as we can hear his vocal restraint even when he's yelling at his players and calling them 'an embarrassment.' He has a good rapport with the other actors playing athletes, guiding these characters individually especially in times of need, like injuries, ego deficiencies and the like.
There's also owner-by-nepotism Christina Pagliacci (Cameron Diaz). Both are conflictophiles, Tony and her respectively representing old and new ways of handling a sports team, both of them being right in their own ways. There's a short yet innately caricature-like moment when Diaz is sitting on her desk, "Thinker" pose and all. She's absent in chunks of the movie and neither is she perfect, especially in verbal clashing with a commanding presence like Pacino, but she's aware of the pressures that faces her character.
Supporting cast includes Aaron Eckhart as an offensive coach impatiently waiting under Tony's wing, Ann Margaret as Christina's alcoholic, chagrined and emotionally abandoned mother Margaret and LL Cool J as an endorsement hungry player resentful, like everyone else, of Willie's refusal to follow the playbook.
The rest of it I'm not a big fan of. Stone's indulgent camerawork were effective in his earlier movies. He tries to use the same techniques to capture the game's frenzy but it doesn't work, especially with adding the aggressive, multi-genre popular music. Scenes of football games portrayed with pathetic fallacy, either with glaring, desert-evoking multiple spotlights or the rain and mud, either weather condition showing every anguished sinew of the athletes despite all that padding. That and the flashbacks were needlessly fetishistic. The more subtle the better. And of course, Charlton Heston appears some commissioner who says about Christine that 'she'll eat her young,' reinforcing the movie's xenophobic streak in thinking that a woman could be in power is if she's evil. Please.
Are You Ready For Some Football? (Oliver Stone Style) (moviesinpurgatory.com)
December 21, 2011 | Categories: Movies | Tags: 1999, Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx, John Logan, Oliver Stone, sports | Leave a comment
Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss…
…Octavia Spencer, a bit player back in 1998. She might just win an Oscar this year, and I hope I'm not giving her a jinx by speculating.
As Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting début, Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich concentrates more on surrealism, word play and the sharp turns between sincere emotion and dark humour. His later scripts would thankfully highlight his characters' humanity more. And his directors like Jonze, Michel Gondry and Kaufman himself will slow the dialogue's delivery down, make the music (mostly Jon Brion) louder and turn the lighting up a bit. The cast is also commendable. Catherine Keener in her bitchiest role, Cameron Diaz who never seemed to turn down a movie offer in the 90's (although that worked well for her ), the en pointe John Cusack who had a good year and John Malkovich himself. Sorry for the short post, which some of you might think that this movie deserves better. I'm also equally sorry for the link below.
Cage, Black, Carrell & Kaufman! (perezhilton.com)
August 3, 2011 | Categories: Movies | Tags: Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, Charlie Kaufman, John Cusack, Jon Brion, Octavia Spencer, Spike Jonze | Leave a comment
Neverending Christmas: Shreks
I already complained about watching the Shrek trilogy on twitter and did it anyway. The sharp comedy that turned itself into a cliché simply by existing again and again and again. We watched the first one in Grade 9 religion class, I think.
ph. Dreamworks
One thing about lobbing off one gag on top of another is that one will eventually make you laugh. Or that on repeated viewings, you'll actually laugh about the one you forgot about. Such as when the recently rescued Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) opens the new morning with a series of vocalizations. She sings with a beautiful blue bird. We know what's coming. She intentionally sings with such pitch and volume that the bird explodes. She takes the bird's eggs, and there's a mixture of solemnity instead of pushing the gag. And you know, Fiona the 0rge cancels out how this movie's supposed to be about couples who don't look good together.
The best in show/scene for the second installment goes to British comedy queen Jennifer Saunders, who plays Fiona's fairy god mother. In order to get Fiona to marry her son, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), she locks Shrek up on Fiona's childhood bedroom. She mocks his cries out for her. Great delivery.
Ooh, Shrek the human's (Mike Myers) kinda hot. Looking back two paragraphs ago, yes, it's a sad North American staple for a hot woman to be paired with Kevin James . That got my weird brain to thinking about what my former prof said about masculinity being the absence of performance. Both in ogre and broad-shouldered human form, Shrek is more acceptable as a masculine figure. Especially than his arch nemesis Charming, one of the gags involve the latter whipping his hair, feminizing the character. Even Fiona sees something wrong with Charming, pretending to be the transformed Shrek, mugging for the citizens' attention at her royal wedding.
The theme of the masculine duality between Shrek and Charming rides on up to the third installment. It makes sense that Charming's in a fairy tale version of a dive bar until you really think about it. He thus tries to rectify that wrong by getting the other bar patrons, fairy tale villains, to sign up to invade Far Far Away. I mean, what's stopping him? It's not like Shrek can function in his royal duties anyway.
I like the first half of the third movie. It was my first time seeing it, so the gags feel fresh. There's a feminist spin to it – as Charming rounds up the villains, Fiona rallies her fairy tale princess BFF's, who are normally passive and wait for a…prince charming. This came out when I was in summer school. For a class I was watching some old movie either about the Algerian resistance or one about a depressed Senegalese maid. Yes, I could have rebelliously written an essay about either of those movies AND Shrek 3.
December 31, 2010 | Categories: Movies | Tags: 2001, 2007, animation, British actresses, Cameron Diaz, comedy, fantasy, Jennifer Saunders, Mike Myers, Rupert Everett | 3 Comments
ph. Columbia Tristar DVD
'Cameron Diaz is born in 1972. Her father is Cuban and her mother is part Cherokee. Her Cherokee heritage is the reason we're showing her movies here at APTN.' So says the voice-over. Here she's paired with Pete (Owen Wilson), because the film would rather pay for martial arts training than pay for the more expensive Wilson brother.
This should be bad movie territory, and of course it's not perfect. It's also an excuse to advertise Nokia, and break said Nokia. The film also has a lot of different espionage scenarios that it might as well be written by the manatees who write Family Guy, which isn't that bad of a thing here. I saw it for the first time was when I was twelve. The film also makes room for comedy that I can still laugh at today. I don't know where comedy is placed in McG's priorities, so I'll give the cast credit for that. Fact! Lucy Liu was the fifth choice to play Alex. Other actresses slotted to play Alex were Julia Roberts and Jada Pinkett-Smith, who have their own humour. Other actresses Angelina Jolie and Thandie Newton can wear skimpy leather office wear. But I can only see Liu balance sexy, campy and funny, both dominating and empowering the Red Star engineers. Of course, the film needs someone who can bring funny as much as Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Bill Murray, who have a steady hand in comedy work.
And who can turn down Bill Murray who in the film look like he's almost improvising? 'May I have some ice water please?' He then does some pretend crying, talks to a bird, plays catch with a wall, put antenna in his head, makes fun of Cher. Hilarious.
'Bitch' is used in the film at a time when, I imagine, it would sting as bad as the c-word did last year. The word is mostly directed to the angels. The frumpy woman at Red Star says it to Alex, Natalie (Diaz) says it to Eric Knox's associate Vivian Wood. But when a guy says it to Natalie, he gets punished for it. To our delight.
Fact! Although this is the movie that helped Barrymore into a marriage with Tom Green, this movie put her in the arms of another man. Sam Rockwell and her play doomed couple Eric Knox and Dylan. This won't be the last time Rockwell's character would hide something from Barrymore's. They'll also be paired up two years later in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Their careers have gone on different paths, but someone pair these two people again, in a more serious movie this time.
The sequence is also one of director McG's Wachowski Brothers references in the action part of the film, Knox shooting Dylan bullet time style and all. Dylan would later do air kicks, destroying four guys at the same time. Dylan is the shorter and more voluptuous of the girls, the others look like ballerinas while they're fighting. But she throws more punches that the audience can feel.
The Chad (Tom Green) is great. Where is the Chad? I still think he's funny and it's weird to see this film showing him as a relic of the past. Well, as long as he isn't doing damage to movies today. He's Canadian? Dammit I was looking forward to hating him!
The film also has a well-rounded soundtrack that covered my bipolar music tastes spanning a decade, from Prodigy to Heart. And of course, to the disco music that is the only clear reference to the TV show in which the movie is based. The final act doesn't show what Charlie looks like but where Charlie lives. I imagined him to be more of an office guy than some old coot with a Hawaiian shirt on a beach house. Strange. Anyway, Hope you had fun as much as I did.
Casting the 'Charlie's Angels' Reboot (tvsquad.com)
November 30, 2010 | Categories: Movies | Tags: 2000, action, Bill Murray, Cameron Diaz, comedy, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Owen Wilson, Sam Rockwell | 2 Comments