Tag: Brittany Murphy

The Ramen Girl (2008, Robert Allan Ackerman)

There’s not much good to say about The Ramen Girl, except the Japanese cast does pretty well. They don’t get actual story arcs, and they’re only around to service the vanity of narcissist protagonist Brittany Murphy. But their acting is good, even though director Ackerman is terrible with their scenes too.

Murphy is a trust fund Barbie who runs off to Japan pursuing bro Gabriel Mann, who throws her aside after one night together. While Mann seems quite the villain, once the film gets into Murphy’s behaviors more, it plays just as likely she’s a stalker. Becca Topol’s script is godawful to be sure, but the film’s literally about Murphy not learning anything and being rewarded for it. So any time there’s a moment of character development or revelation, it’s simultaneously obviously accidental and also mildly interesting what it unintentionally explains about Murphy’s character (and the film’s mentalities).

After Mann runs out on her—leaving her with nothing but a sad pair of ex-pats (Daniel Evans and Tammy Blanchard)—Murphy finds her way to the neighborhood ramen shop and starts insinuating herself into the lives of the owners. Nishida Toshiyuki is the depressed, drunken chef, and Yo Kimiko is his tolerant wife. Murphy decides Nishida will teach her to be a ramen cook, which is a big deal for Nishida. He’s sad because his son didn’t want to be a ramen chef, making him feel less of a man than pseudo-competitor Ishibashi Renji. It doesn’t matter. It’s all background to Murphy being cloying and clingy. And bad. Her performance is atrocious. Again, Ackerman’s directing is awful throughout, but when it comes to directing Murphy, Ackerman manages to get worse and worse at it as the film progresses.

Maybe because her character arc is all being mad at Nishida for expecting her to understand Japanese. And if not Japanese, to understand the secret ramen chef camaraderie he’s convinced is a thing. More, he’s convinced Murphy is his heir apparent even if she doesn’t ever understand what he’s trying to tell her about it. At one point, she magically understands someone else’s Japanese. The magical realism aspects are Girl at its most inventive, so it’s too bad Ackerman entirely bungles them.

Technically, it’d be too nice to call it a mess. Ackerman’s composition is lousy, and he doesn’t seem to understand how DV works, which is fine since cinematographer Sakamoto Yoshitaka doesn’t know how to light it. Bad music from Carlo Siliotto and bad cutting from Rick Shaine lump things out.

It’s possible a better editor would’ve helped—better music definitely would’ve helped—but there’s only so much anyone could’ve done. Murphy’s performance and Ackerman’s direction are incompetent.

Though Blanchard’s also risible. Every time she shows up, it reminds Ramen Girl could be worse, actually. She could be in it more.

The only engaging aspect—besides the Japanese actors, who just get screwed over, so they’re a wasted investment—is trying to figure out if Murphy’s a narcissist, sociopath, or just a solipsist (doesn’t believe anyone exists outside her own mind).

Ackerman can’t even shoot the food. It’s ostensibly a cookery picture, and Ackerman can’t even shoot the food. Ramen Girl is less filling than a Cup o’ Noodles

Clueless (1995, Amy Heckerling)

I really didn’t want to bag on Clueless when I watched it this time, the first time since the theater, almost twenty-four years ago. It got good reviews on release, which I fully disagreed with—I’d forgotten how much audiences in the eighties and nineties liked farcical sitcom-level characterizations. Particularly in the nineties with the lusterless, generically appealing male leads–Clueless has no standout male performances, not even Dan Hedaya playing Dan Hedaya playing a movie dad. Paul Rudd is a twenty-one year-old who ogles his fifteen year-old ex-step-sister, Alicia Silverstone, and presumably is her first lover, waiting until she’s sixteen. Rudd’s not playing it self aware.

Yes, Clueless would be a very different film if he were, but it might be at least somewhat honest. Jeremy Sisto is the creep who tries to force himself on Silverstone, then leaves her in a bad neighborhood to be mugged at gunpoint after she rebuffs him.

Breckin Meyer’s the stoner who Silverstone’s friend, Brittany Murphy, secretly likes but can’t tell Silverstone because Silverstone doesn’t approve of stoners. Meyer’s charmless but somehow too mediocre to be bad. Ditto Donald Faison as Silverstone’s best friend Stacey Dash’s boyfriend. There’s a lot to unpack with Dash and Faison as the only two Black people in the movie. I guess Sean Holland, as Faison’s friend, but… Holland’s not in it much.

Oh, and then there’s Justin Walker as Silverstone’s crush. There’s a lot to unpack with Walker too.

But I don’t have the vocabulary or experience to unpack Clueless. There’s even something about the phrase Clueless and who taught Silverstone—who frequently calls people clueless in her narration, which isn’t good either—to call people clueless and who to call clueless. Give me a Roman Polanski movie about demonizing a woman’s sexuality to talk about; I don’t feel comfortable talking about what writer and director Heckerling is doing with this one. Other the writing and directing an immediately dated, desperate for MTV credit (it is Paramount), dumbing down of Jane Austen’s Emma for audiences who would be embracing the original setting just a few years later.

Oh, wow. You know who gave it ★★★½. Oh, of course he did. Immediately disqualified. Holy cow, he doesn’t even talk about Rudd perving on a sixteen year-old. Hello, 1995.

I feel like I’m back in high school again describing how narrative arcs work. What’s really funny is… they work the same way I said they worked back then as they do now; now, after I’ve read a couple hundred actually great novels, done a bunch of undergrad (shudder) workshopping, and gotten an MFA in writing.

Anyway.

What’s so funny about Clueless is how much I wanted it to succeed. I mean… I knew it wasn’t going to happen from the opening credits, but I really did want it to be a win. I really wanted to be remembering it wrong. I really wanted Heckerling to have some good reason for the Paul Rudd thing—which, given the movie avoids ever letting Hedaya know about the “like, it’s not actually incest, Flowers in the Attic much” romance after building up his legendary anger the whole movie—but she doesn’t. It’s a combination of “well, see, it’s like Emma, see” and so Heckerling doesn’t actually have to write anything like actual character development. Why bother when you have a montage sequence.

Clueless is… oh, crap, I can’t say it’s clueless, can I? I can’t go so cheap. Clueless is tedious, best pinned to the wall of historical item to be examined. Though, sadly, not for anything Heckerling intentionally does in the film. She can’t even direct the actually funny parts well, which makes everything even more distressing.

Clueless is badly done.

Sidewalks of New York (2001, Edward Burns)

Sidewalks of New York is Edward Burns embracing the idea of becoming the WASP Woody Allen. Well, Burns is Irish Catholic, so not exactly the WASP Woody Allen… but something nearer to it than not. It’s his attempt at making a quintessential New York movie while being aware he’s making a quintessential New York movie.

And he partially succeeds. Even with one enormous—so enormous I’m tempted to call it ginormous (even if Oxford thinks it’s a word, I don’t)—problem, Sidewalks is a good film. It’s an extremely finished, safe film, but it’s a good one.

What’s so striking about the film is how comfortable Burns gets with his cast. It isn’t the traditional Burns cast—these aren’t Irish guys on Long Island, it’s a bunch of New Yorkers from the boroughs transplanted to Manhattan.

It’s somewhat anti-Manhattan, actually, even though every scene except one is set there.

The acting is all wonderful, particularly from Rosario Dawson (who, unfortunately, is victim of the ginormous problem), Brittany Murphy and David Krumholtz. Burns is good, but he really doesn’t give himself a big role. He usually lets Dennis Farina (who’s hilarious) overpower their scenes. Stanley Tucci is good, just giving an excellent Tucci performance. Heather Graham is sort of out of her league, sort of not. My favorite is when she can’t help laughing at Tucci.

In smaller roles, Michael Leydon Campbell, Nadja Dajani and Libby Langdon are excellent.

It’s Burns being unambitious and gloriously so—that statement’s a compliment.

The Groomsmen (2006, Edward Burns)

The Groomsmen looks wrong. The film doesn’t have any grain and the lighting suggests it’s shot on some kind of DV (it isn’t). Everything is very controlled–a bright outdoor scene doesn’t seem bright in Groomsmen, it seems like the color has been toned down so as not to offend. It looks like a Mentos commercial really, and that defect doesn’t make any sense. Burns has made films for quite a while now. There’s no excuse. Unless the DVD transfer is just a disaster or something.

It doesn’t help Burns coasts through The Groomsmen in every way possible. I kept waiting for some great shots, but there was literally only one. A very steady Steadicam tracking shot. Every other shot in the film was generic and felt like Burns wasn’t even paying attention when he was setting it up. The film’s got a gradual build-up, so I gave him some benefit of the doubt–and then tracking shot reassured me–but then nothing else ever appeared. But he’s also disconnected with the picture as a writer and actor as well.

The Groomsmen is chock full of characters–Burns, brother Donal Logue, cousin Jay Mohr and friends Matthew Lillard and John Leguizamo. All of them have a subplot going on except Lillard, who owns the bar and is happily married with a couple kids. I assume his subplot is supposed to be the missed high school glory days, but it really isn’t. Lillard’s character is too well-adjusted. Lillard might give the film’s best performance, it’s either him or Logue. While Lillard was flawless, I never thought Logue would be capable of giving such a nuanced, haunted performance.

Burns is able–as a writer–to not give himself many scenes as an actor and he doesn’t. His subplot, ostensibly the main plot, is boring. His absence is almost immediate, which made me think he was going to use the time to concentrate on the film’s direction. He doesn’t. The direction shows a shocking lack of attention and there’s certainly nothing innovative.

There is some funny stuff in the script, but it feels undercooked, like Burns produced an unfinished draft. Too many characters to follow, some conversations too loose, the sort of things he should have cleared up. Mohr’s essentially playing an idiot–he’s the comic relief–and it’s fine. Leguizamo’s good. Burns is clearly an acting piker here, but Heather Burns (I don’t think she’s a relation) is good as Logue’s wife. Brittany Murphy, as Burns’s fiancée, is fine. He keeps the women, with one exception, at home and it hurts the film. The characters start in situations Burns can never make reasonable. They just seem silly.

But the main, male characters don’t even go through interesting arcs. Nothing in the running time should bring any eureka moments for these guys, it’s all stuff they could have hashed out in the first five minutes. Burns feels like he’s got a collection of notecards with pat movie psychoses and he’s assigning them one by one. It’s a shame, since he certainly didn’t start out this way.

The Groomsmen isn’t terrible by any means, but it’s exceptionally disappointing.

The Dead Girl (2006, Karen Moncrieff)

I had assumed, just because of the large cast, a Nashville approach for this film. However, frighteningly, I think it might have been inspired by Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity (the film, not the short story collection). The stories are all independent, more about their central characters than about the event tying them together, in this case, a dead girl. The stories range in quality from terrible to mediocre. Even if they’re mediocre, they don’t have a decent conclusion. The most interesting part of these stories is what is going to happen next. In fact, in most cases, the only important thing is what is going to happen next and the film makes no assumptions. In some ways, it creates unsolvable cliffhangers for the characters… baiting the viewer with an ominous promise (the possible killer, the suicide attempt) then delivering on nothing.

There are five stories. The first two are traditional romances. The third is an awful, dumb thriller, which creates an impossible situation then cheats its way out with the end of the section. The fourth has the most promise but only in terms of what happens immediately after the story ends and then at some point in the future in those characters’ stories. The last story, which finally gets around to revealing the dead girl, is terrible, but not the worst. The way Karen Moncrieff ends it, syrupy, tragic sweet… is an offense to the good work a lot of her actors put in.

The most amazing performance in the film is easily James Franco, just because he not only doesn’t suck, he’s actually really good. He’s in the second story with Rose Byrne (Byrne being the whole reason I had any interest in the film in the first place). She’s good, but her role’s so simple, it’d be hard for her not to be good. Other good performances include Marcia Gay Harden, Josh Brolin, and Giovanni Ribisi. Terrible, unspeakable ones… well, just Mary Steenburgen, who plays a stereotypical role (just like everyone else in the film except maybe Brolin and Ribisi) and does a really bad job of it. Kerry Washington’s good when she’s not doing her Mexican accent. I guess her eyes emote well. Mary Beth Hurt and Nick Searcy have the dumbest roles in the film and there’s really nothing for them to do with them.

The Dead Girl offers absolutely nothing new to… anything. It’s a useless film, filled with decent and good performances. Moncrieff’s an adequate director in parts, but usually not. There’s nothing distinctive about her composition (something I realized in the first five minutes, never a good sign). I guess her dialogue’s okay, but the film’s a bunch of Oprah episodes strung together, which might be fine if there were some artistry or competence involved.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Written and directed by Karen Moncrieff; director of photography, Michael Grady; edited by Toby Yates; music by Adam Gorgoni; produced by Eric Karten, Gary Lucchesi, Tom Rosenberg, Kevin Turen and Henry Winterstern; released by First Look International.

Starring Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Rose Byrne (Leah), Toni Collette (Arden), Bruce Davison (Bill), James Franco (Derek), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora), Mary Beth Hurt (Ruth), Piper Laurie (Arden’s Mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista), Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Nick Searcy (Carl), Mary Steenburgen (Beverly) and Kerry Washington (Rosetta).

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