..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Get Smart
plus The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

GET SMART (Two stars)
U.S.; Peter Segal (Warner Bros)

Would you believe…a stinker?

It must have sounded like a good idea to begin with: Make a big action-comedy movie out of the old Mel Brooks-Buck Henry TV James Bond spoof, Get Smart. Cast Steve Carell in his glower mode as the straight-faced, blundering, but resilient secret agent 86, Maxwell Smart (the old Don Adams role) and throw in big-budget action, chases and explosions, along with glamorous Anne Hathaway as Agent 99 (the old part for Barbara Feldon, who became a star with her sultry “Hello there, all you tigers“ TV commercials). Throw in Alan Arkin in Ed Platt‘s role of secret U. S. agency CONTROL’s Chief and add Dwayne Johnson as Smart’s new idol, Agent 23, and lethal-eyed Terence Stamp and Borat sidekick Ken Davitian, as the villains, KAOS big boss Siegfried and dopey foil Shtarker.

How can you miss? Well, first off, settling for the not-too-smart script Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (Failure to Launch) have supplied is a good start toward chaos. It’s light on humor, wit, charm, hilarity, sense, nonsense -- everything that worked for the original ‘60s show.
    
With a minimum of pizzazz, we’re introduced to Carell‘s uptight Max as Control’s ace data-gatherer/analyst, a would-be agent whom the Chief won’t promote to the field because he‘s sharp at the desk, but who gets his shot when the identities of the other agents, including 23, are compromised. Soon Max, who has no background or skills, has to learn fast and save the world from KAOS -- while hooking up with the scornful 99 (who thinks he’s a doofus) and trying to outwit Siegfried, who thinks everybody is a doofus. (In this movie, he’s pretty well right.)
    
The original Get Smart creator/writers, Brooks and Henry, are listed as consultants here -- and I kept wondering how exactly they were consulting, or why the producers didn’t just hire the writers of The Producers and The Graduate for this screenplay instead of the team behind Failure to Launch. (Here, they’ve produced something closer to “Failure to Laugh.”). On the worst writing day of both their lives, even if Brooks and Henry had both descended into alcoholic stupors and were wheeled in, comatose, and strapped in chairs before their computers -- I can’t imagine them coming up with something worse than this farrago of old movie and TV inside gags, stale topical humor (stupid presidents), over-produced cliffhangers and inane new jokes (like the running gag where people keep stapling papers to each other’s foreheads.)
    
The only people in this Get Smart that made me laugh fitfully were Arkin and Stamp, mostly because they were so disdainful. Good reaction. Director Peter Segal, who handled sequels for The Naked Gun and Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor is no help either. He directs this movie as if it were a sequel too -- and his failure to launch any consistent style for the comedy-action mix or mine any chemistry between 86 and 99 is only the first and second of his problems.
    
There have been two previous Maxwell Smart movies, both with Adams -- 1980s The Nude Bomb (a movie, about a fiendish plot to undress the world, that probably should have been called “Get Naked”) and the 1989 TV film, with Feldon, Get Smart Again. You’d probably have a better time at either one -- if you’ve gotten smart.



The Love Guru (One and a half stars)
U.S.: Marco Schnabel (Paramount)

One way to make Get Smart look good, however, is to see this movie before it. Mike Myers, hitherto on a Shrek-Austin Powers roll, has dreamt up a character that might have worked for an old Saturday Night Live episode or two -- a beaming, smirky self-help pop philosopher named Guru Pitka, whose constant greeting/mantra to acolytes and newcomers is “Mariska Hargitay,” who has Salvador Dali-like mustachios, who exhorts his followers to his own version of “Intimacy” (“Into me, I see”) and whose dream is to steal Deepak Chopra‘s audience on Oprah's show. Then Myers has stretched both character and script into an hour and a half of bad badinage, bad puns, bad penis jokes and a frantic pantomime to Celine Dion‘s “Because You Loved Me.”

Guru Pitka, whose idol/mentor was the cross-eyed holiness, Guru Tugginmypuddha (played, in the nadir of his career by Sir Ben Kingsley), has been hired by the Toronto Maple Leaf ice hockey team‘s improbable but comely owner (Jessica Alba as Jane Bullard) to help her win the Stanley Cup by straightening out her distraught star player Darren Roanoke. Roanoke, who also has a mother complex (brought on by Telma Hopkins) has lost his wife Prudence (Meagan Good) to the ridiculously well-hung L. A. Kings goalie Jacques “le Coq“ Grande (played by Justin Timberlake, at the nadir of his career -- and he was more competitive in this category). Roanoke needs Guru Pitka to unlock his stick and unleash his puck.

The other characters have names like Dick Pants, Guru Satchabigknoba and Coach Punch Cherkov -- the last played by Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer, who has the movie’s funniest single line, an out-take ad-lib. Given this persistent Dickensian trend in nomenclature, I’m surprised Myers’ character wasn‘t called Guru Wattadicka, Guru Wakoffinajon or Guru Schlong. There’s even a cameo appearance by Deepak Chopra as himself (not, thankfully, renamed Deeprik Chopra). Despite all this, Myers has locked his Guru Pitka into a chastity belt for most of the movie, as if begging our applause for his restraint. Myers has made me laugh before; here I felt itchy.

Incidentally, this movie -- which has been directed by newcomer Marco Schnabel without a hint of style (even in his Bollywood parodies) -- has been hit by a vigorous E-mail campaign decrying its alleged offensiveness to the Hindu faith. Give me a break. That’s about as time-worthy as blasting A Night at the Opera for being offensive to opera, The Producers as offensive to Broadway musicals, The Three Stooges as offensive to nincompoops or Bananas as offensive to Cuban revolutionaries -- or bananas. Get a life, you guys. You don’t hear Celine Dion complaining, do you?

 

The Duchess of Langeais (Three and a half stars)
France; Jacques Rivette (IFC Films)

A great adaptation of the Honore de Balzac novel of mad love among the French aristocracy, by aging New Wave master Jacques Rivette. See, if available. We’ll return to it at length next week.

 

Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts (Three and a half stars)
Australia/U.S.; Scott Hicks (Koch Lorber Films)

An excellent documentary on composer Philip Glass, whose repetitive, mantra-like music for operas, symphonies and movie scores drives some people batty, but who endears himself to me here for his highly practical philosophy of success. (Get up early in the morning, Glass says, and work all day.) Glass, by the way, is no stranger to work. He’s not only immensely prolific, but while his huge breakthrough hit (with Robert Wilson) “Einstein at the Beach“ was being performed by the Metropolitan Opera, he was still driving a cab to make ends meet. Bravo, maestro!

Here, in 12 parts that echo the title and musical structure of one of Glass’s pieces, we see his history, and daily routine. We hear from his wives and painter-buddy Chuck Close, about life under Glass and the glory days of the SoHo scene. We also hear from Errol Morris (who wanted a good Phil Glass imitator to write the score for The Thin Blue Line and settled on Glass), and we watch the creation of Glass’s opera (with librettist Christopher Hampton), “Waiting for the Barbarians.”
   
The movie, shiningly directed by Scott Hicks, is also brimful of Glass music. It’s not Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Mahler. But it’s no imitation. And it gets to you.

 

Up The Yangtze (Three stars)
Canada/China; Yung Chang (Zeitgeist Films)
    
This is an often beautiful chronicle of a sad event: the flooding of China’s legendary Yangtze River for a hydroelectric project, the displacement of a peasant family who live along the old banks and a last boat trip on the river. The movie has the same great subject and theme as Elia Kazan’s Wild River and Elem Klimov’s and Larissa Shepitko‘s Farewell: the beauties of the past and simplicity, the perils of progress and government. Director Yung takes us on that last boat ride and shows us plenty of interesting sights along the way -- enough to make you mourn for the death of the great river.

 

 

The Passion of The Mao (Two stars)
U.S.; Lee Feigon (Indie-Pictures)
    
A tongue-in-cheek, cartoon-packed documentary on Chinese Communist leader-legend Mao Zedong, his rise and impact, including his famous “swim” down the Yangtze River, and the ups and downs of his tumultuous, sometimes bloody reign. Feigon has a sense of humor but he’s sometimes pretty easy on his subject. Also, since Feigon focuses for such a long while on Mao‘s active sex life, the Chairman’s name (see above) begins to look like a Mike Myers gag. (Naw, it couldn’t be.)

 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days (Four stars)
Romania; Cristian Mungiu, 2007 (IFC)
    
Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which won both the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a new Romanian film of relentless narrative power and nerve-racking impact. Set in Communist Romania in 1987, in a world that (in important ways) mostly no longer exists, it’s an ultra-realistic drama about young people, living near the end of the Nicolai Ceausescu dictatorship -- two college woman trying to arrange an illegal abortion, in a country where terminating pregnancies after four months is considered murder. (Hence the title.) The movie, terrifically well written and acted (especially by Laura Vasiliu as the thoughtless unwed mother, Anamaria Marinca as her hard-pressed friend and Lad Ivanovo as the abortionist), also introduces a brilliant new director-writer, Cristian Mungiu, and reintroduces the highly gifted cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, who shot Cristi Puiu‘s devastating Romanian gem of two years ago, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Mungiu and Mutu make “Four Weeks” in a rigorous and beautifully controlled style: each scene shot in a single take, the camera catching all the details with an almost ruthless voyeurism. As we watch this piercingly anxious story unfold, we can feel the cold and breathe the air of that ‘80s dictatorship, with its barren streets, empty halls and wary people. One of 2007’s best films, precursor perhaps -- along with “Lazarescu,“ Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin', Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest and others -- of a Romanian New Wave that may prove as rich and memorable as the Polish, Czech, Yugoslavian and Hungarian waves that swept through the old eastern Communist bloc states before it.

CLASSIC RELEASES

Classe tous Risques (Four stars)
France; Claude Sautet, 1960 (Criterion Collection)
   
Claude Sautet’s great film noir -- with a script, from the scenarist’s own novel, by crime expert/ex-con Jose Giovanni -- is a tough, brilliant, inwardly melancholy chase and revenge saga, in the dark, relentless mode of that later neo-noir classic Point Blank. This film has the look and smell of doom, and a cast that radiates violence and fate. Lino Ventura is the crook-on-the-run saddled with two kids, Jean-Paul Belmondo his hard-fighting buddy (“The best thing about me is my left”), Sandra Milo (of 8 ½) is the looker who digs Belmondo, and Marcel Dalio, Michel Ardan and Claude Cerval are among the smart-dressing, double-crossing Paris underworld denizens they’re up against.
      
Since Ventura and Belmondo are both sometimes considered French Bogart equivalents, the movie packs a double whammy. A favorite of noir experts Jean-Pierre Melville and Bertrand Tavernier, “Classe” ranks near the top of the short list of French crime movie classics, with Rififi, Diabolique, Breathless, Le Cercle Rouge, and damned few others.

 

BOX SET

Popeye the Sailor 1938-40, Volume Two (Four stars)
U.S.; Dave Fleischer, 1938-40 (Warner)
   
The second box set devoted to Paramount’s and the Fleischer brothers’ ineffable and wildly popular, super-tough, spinach-loving sailor -- along with his spider-thin bombshell Olive Oyl, hamburger-snarfing freeloader J. Wellington Wimpy and burly basso profundo rival/nemesis Bluto -- is another joyous romp through a lost classic childhood world of gritty, ethnic black-and white cartoonery. As Popeye would say (or mutter) “I yam what I yam!” Amen and hurrah to that, sailor man.

 

- Michael Wilmington
June 19, 2008

 

June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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