The only thing memorable about Sex and the City 2 is the Number 2 part, which describes it totally, if you get my drift. Everything else in this deadly, brainless exercise in pointless tedium is dedicated to the screeching audacity of delusional self-importance that convinces these people the whole world is waiting desperately to watch 2 hours and 25 minutes of platform heels, fake orgasms and preposterous clothes. It is to movies what fried dough is to nutrition.
It’s been two years since their last chick flick and in the interim, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda have turned from Cosmo girls who munch into cougar ladies who lunch. They still devote their lives to the credo that no crisis is ever so great it can’t be solved by a new pair of Manolo Blahniks, but now there’s a difference. No longer waiting for orgasms, they’re waiting for menopause, and in all four cases, they’ve found it. No film has ever contained so many sloppy hairdos soaking wet from hot flashes. Tired of being called the heterosexual equivalent of Armistead Maupin’s gay West Coast lampoon of Sex and the City called Tales of the City in the San Francisco Chronicle, this installment opens with Carrie in a man’s tuxedo, playing the best man at a gay wedding almost as vulgar as the homophobic one-liners about the minister, played by—are you ready?—Liza Minnelli, who parodies herself by telling the congregation “Marriage is serious…or so they tell me” before blasting off with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”.
Carrie, a neurotic Black Belt shopper who lives for designer labels and an occasional columnist who writes about being fabulous and single, has been married two years to Mr. Big (Chris Noth), who once dumped her at the altar. (Sarah Jessica Parker looks better after her face mole was surgically removed, so why does her hair look like 20 pounds of mattress stuffing?) Uptight, waspy Charlotte (Kristin Davis) brings her bald Jewish husband, her two babies, and a lesbian nanny without a bra. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is back with nice-guy bartender Steve (David Eigenberg), but still too preoccupied as a lawyer to pay much attention to her home life (although rarely seen so much as filing a brief). Samantha (Kim Cattrall), still the group slut who has slept with every eligible man in Manhattan and half of Brooklyn without learning anything about real life in the Porthault sheets, brings a new face that looks like some of the sutures are still in it and her usual stinging one-liners (“It’s a gay wedding—what’s one more bitch with an attitude?”) These are the jokes, and since the four women dress like drag queens it’s not always easy to tell the difference.
Substituting for a plot, the four bimbos brew trouble in paradise. Allergic to the kitchen, Carrie calls herself “more Coco Chanel than coq au vin” and wants to go out on the town every night, while Big pleads for osso bucco at home and watching old black and white classics in bed like It Happened One Night. (The only sane person in the entire film, if you ask me.) Smith (Jason Lewis), the old squeeze Samantha turned into a Hollywood star by smearing sushi on her V-word, comes to town for his new movie premiere and puts a temporary smile on her face, although it sags again when Miley Cyrus shows up on the red carpet wearing the same dress. (Penelope Cruz also makes a cameo appearance as the senior v.p. of the Bank of Madrid. Who could make this stuff up?) You keep asking yourself “Where is this going?” and the only answer you come up with is “Every place it’s already been before.” In the 2008 chapter, Carrie had a nervous breakdown in a Vivienne Westwood wedding gown that looked like a cloud of lemon meringue pie on the front steps of the New York Public Library, and her soulmates whisked her off to Mexico for mariachis, margaritas, and a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge, where Charlotte pooped in her lingerie. This time, after Mr. Big suggests two days a week off from marriage, they all drag Carrie to Abu Dahbi (played by Morocco) where more than an hour is wasted on camel rides, karaoke numbers, and insulting Middle East jokes like “Abu Dahbi Doo”, “Bedouin, Bath and Beyond”, and “Lawrence of My Labia”. A mild touch of feminism makes a brief appearance when a group of women covered in black confess they’ve been inspired by a forbidden book by their idol…Suzanne Somers!! Samantha gets arrested for nudity and kissing in public, Carrie loses her passport in the casbah, and they almost miss their return flight, which elicits from Samantha a mournful shriek: “I can’t be in menopause and coach!”
Dragging its deplorable carcass into infinity, Sex and the City 2 is so bad you can’t even watch the trailer. Almost everyone who has ever appeared on the TV series re-appears to mutter two or three lines that contribute nothing to the film they’re in. The women—too old now to pout, whine and babble about their wet dreams, affluent and successful for reasons that are never clear—are all vain, narcissistic, selfish, superficial, and really rather stupid. The actors work hard to perform triage, but they’ve been playing these roles so long they’ve grown moss. The insipid screenplay and catatonic direction seem chloroformed. Both are by Michael Patrick King. He’s an expert at product placement and marketing (the end credits list hundreds of free plugs for everything from limousines to breakfast cereal), but I seriously doubt if he could direct Jeeps in the middle of the Mojave desert.
When all this greed pays off with millions in box-office receipts, the hacks responsible for Sex and the City 2 will say “I told you so”, but that won’t make the movie any better. You can’t make caviar out of Jujubes.
Age is not only the enemy of ballet dancers, opera singers and athletes. It takes an exacting toll on film stars, too. After 50, it’s not as easy to keep a career going as it was in the days of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant. Thank god Michael Douglas has built up some negotiating power. He can afford to wait for the good stuff to come along. The older he gets, the more serious and relevant the roles—and the more he looks like his father. Solitary Man is so sad that its chances of achieving commercial hit status are deeply uncertain, but it’s the best thing he’s done since Wall Street and Wonder Boys. On the heels of last year’s A Serious Man and A Single Man, small wonder that confusion reigns. But Solitary Man, co-directed by David Levien and Brian Koppelman (who also wrote the screenplay), is the best film of the three. When it premiered last September in Toronto, the program book called it a cautionary tale about “an alpha male led astray by his greed and his zipper”. (Sounds like a politician, for sure.) But Mr. Douglas’ Ben Kalmen emerges more three-dimensional than that. He’s a rat for the full 90-minute running time, but perversely fascinating. Once the charming and popular king of the used-car dealers and ruler of a vast empire of franchises that made him a TV celebrity and landed him on the cover of Forbes, he had a beautiful and loyal wife who was once his college sweetheart (Susan Sarandon), an adoring daughter (Jenna Fischer), a lush Manhattan lifestyle, and enough money to endow a Boston university with a state-of-the-art library. Then he got caught in an illegal scam, spending all of his money trying to stay out of jail, wrecking his marriage and destroying his reputation in the bargain. Now living on aspirin with a grim heart condition, he faces a mid-life crisis trying to jump-start his life with old friends and colleagues who have turned their backs on him. Now on the verge of closing a deal that will put him back in business, financed by his new squeeze (Mary Louise Parker), a tough, rich divorcee with connections to Wall Street and the mob, he recklessly sleeps with her daughter. There goes the new car dealership, as well as his future hope. He even gets beaten to a pulp by her hired thugs and lands in the hospital.
Unable to get his groove back and terrified of growing old, Ben defines his life at 60 by how many women he can take to bed, carelessly ignoring his ex-wife, who still has a warm spot in her heart for him, and his daughter, who is tired of lending him money to keep him aloft, finally cuts him off from seeing his own grandson. He can’t get a bank loan because he has no collateral, and after his years of experience he’s burned so many bridges that even when he swallows his pride no other dealer will offer him a sales position. While his options dry up, he gets evicted, and even though he no longer believes in friendship, he accepts some demeaning job behind the counter of a delicatessen owned by an old college acquaintance (Danny DeVito) who only wants to help. At the end of his rope, a hand is extended where he least expects it, but it’s not sure whether he’ll take it or not. He rises from a park bench after hitting rock bottom while his ex-wife waits in a parked car at the curb, but a shapely skirt passes, distracting him. It’s like Tom Hanks at the crossroads in the highway at the end of Swept Away. You don’t know which direction he’ll take.
The movie is slow, talky, and takes time getting started. Often it seems like an infinite amount of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the uniformly terrific acting by the attractive cast keeps it meretorious. Ms. Parker is a real Hard- Hearted Hannah, it’s been years since Ms. Sarandon has invested this much wisdom and maturity in a role, and there’s a nice bit by Jesse Eisenberg as a clueless college doofus Ben befriends and then betrays (a far cry from his other starring role this week in the harrowing Holy Rollers). But it is really Michael Douglas who empowers a low-key character study like Solitary Man by showing the nuances of living in denial—of age, failure, and impotence. It’s funny and distressing to watch, but he shows the charm his character once had in younger years and then lost. It’s a thrill to watch him examine the ups and downs of how men in their middle years cope—-with an energy and sensitivity that makes you care, even if he is a heel.
Despite the misleading title, Holy Rollers is not a film about an offbeat Protestant religion talking in tongues. It is, instead, a harrowing, fact-based footnote to the history of the illicit drug trade about a small group of Hasidic Jews who were recruited as mules to smuggle ecstasy from Europe into the U.S. in the late 1990s. For a period of six months between 1998 and 1999, officials estimate this small ring of young orthodox Jews imported over one million ecstasy pills from Amsterdam to New York. Holy Rollers is about how they did it, and one boy in particular who grew up so fast that his life changed irrevocably as a result.
Jesse Eisenberg is excellent as Sammy Gold, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who works in his father’s fabric store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with an arranged marriage pending and plans to become a rabbi. Watching his family struggle to find enough money to afford something as simple as a new stove while spending hours in Hebrew school and facing approaching manhood with no guarantee of economic security, Sammy is torn between the claustrophobic community of orthodox Judaism and the excitement of the secular world outside the synagogue. When a neighbor named Yosef is suddenly spotted sporting a new Rolex watch, Sammy’s envy is understandable. Yosef opens a new window with tales of fast cars, beautiful girls and material financial security, offering the curious Sammy $1000 to import “medicine” from Europe. Stimulated by the idea of easy money, he naively decides to give a potentially lucrative job a try, so he and his best friend Leon fly to Amsterdam, spend one night in the heart of the red-light district, and return with suitcases full of illegal ecstasy. It’s the fastest road to luxury Sammy has ever dreamed about.
Suspecting something dangerous and immoral about their little caper, Leon is so traumatized by the experience that he retires after one job, but Sammy is hooked by the lure of prosperity. In Amsterdam, this corrupted innocent would still rather visit the Anne Frank house, but there’s no time. Instead, he gets his first vision-blurring hit of ecstasy from a party girl named Rachel (played by an Ellen Barken look-alike named Ari Graynor who has lit up many a Broadway stage) and an eye-opening tour of Amsterdam’s sex clubs and a serious Ethiopian drug operation run by a gang of Israeli businessmen that produces 100,000 pills an hour, surrounded by security guards with machine guns. Learning fast on the job, Sammy becomes not only a trusty smuggler, but a crafty salesman, too, moving the stuff on the streets of Brooklyn for a hefty profit—a valuable part of a transatlantic courier service that slips effortlessly in and out of JFK undetected. Who could look less suspicious passing through customs than an orthodox Jew dressed in black and wearing a porkpie hat and long curls? Of course it’s not long before Sammy’s double life goes haywire, his family disowns him, and he cuts off his Hasidic curls and graduates to the role of drafting new mules, dispensing the same sage advice he was taught: “Relax, have a good time, mind your business, and act Jewish.” The bubble finally bursts when the new kids he recruits clumsily meet up face to face with drug-sniffing airport dogs. A drug trafficking empire with guns and matzoh balls comes to a violent end and Leon, his poor but respectable old friend who has since married Sammy’s intended bride and moved closer to becoming a rabbi, comforts Sammy on the front steps of his modest Brooklyn home as the sound of approaching police sirens grow louder.
In the coda that wraps up a case that became a hushed-up scandal at the time, we’re relieved to learn that Sammy turned government informant and got off light with a stint in federal boot camp. Yosef and his other neighborhood “bosses” were not so lucky. They got 16 years in prison on drug conspiracy charges and Rachel got a year for participating. Part of the film’s ability to hold attention must be credited to the guileless sincerity of Jesse Eisenberg’s performance, couching inner turmoil in an immaculate state of unsophisticated chastity. The direction by Kevin Asch and the sometimes clumsy script by Antonio Macia have their moments, but the film has obvious shortcomings. Holy Rollers is nicely staged, though not always dramatically engaging, and so lacking in structure that whole sections of the story seem to have ended up on the cutting room floor. Why did Leon realize right away the bounty was something more threatening and lethal than “medicine for rich people” but Sammy’s gullibility plunged him further in the direction of disaster? It’s not easy to sympathize with a kid who knows the difference between right and wrong but still greedily, stubbornly distances himself from everything he’s been taught with full knowledge of the consequences. Young Mr. Eisenberg and a fine cast give Holy Rollers the ballast it otherwise lacks, but we’ve been down this road so often that there are times when I could only wonder why I was watching it at all.
From France, Micmacs is another overdose of Gallic whimsy from oddball director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, Delicatessen) about misfortune, vengeance and love. Most of all it is, of all things, a comedy about international arms dealers that borrows heavily from the madcap style of silent-film era icons like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I can’t say I found it as mesmerizing as other critics did when it was unveiled last year in Toronto, but I admit is hugely original.
In 1979, on a sand dune in the Sahara Desert, a soldier is blown up by a landmine. His orphaned son Bazil (played by popular French clown Dany Boon) grows up to work in a video store where he is gunned down in a freaky drive-by shooting. The surgeon flips a coin and decides to leave the bullet in his head. When Bazil is released from the hospital, he finds himself homeless and unemployed. On the streets he is taken in by a band of bizarre but friendly scavengers with names like Caculator, Slammer, Elastic Girl, Tiny Pete and Mama Chow, who live in a junkyard eking out a marginal living collecting scrap. One day while out foraging for discarded junk to turn into charming tools and sculptures to beautify the dump, Bazil finds himself on the street that houses the manufacturers who built the bomb that killed his father and the bullet that is lodged in his brain forever. Leading an army of outcasts, Bazil recruits his new “family” to set about plotting a lunatic revenge that embraces themes of misfortune, vengeance and love.
As the sheer volume of tertiary characters increases, the movie gets confusing and just a wee bit boring. But that is an important part of Jeunet’s quixotic style, and eventually you get used to the Rube Goldberg inventions, the lady contortionist and the human cannon as though they were all as normal as the six o’clock news. It’s fun picking out the sources for the elastic expressions, many from such inspirations as Marcel Marceau and Jacques Tati. The contrasts between the evil arms dealers who make weapons and the rag-tag misfits who make objects to charm and amuse are ingenious, and of course like all Jeunet movies, there’s a love story. Micmacs may not be everyone’s cup of capricious comedy, but it delivers an audio-visual picnic of surprises that makes craziness contagious.