Gah!!!
Now Playing: ...Catch-up on my reviewing duties
FEVER PITCH (2005, Peter and Bobby Farelly)- Amiable but slightly disappointing offering from the Farelly brothers, who get to indulge their love for the Sox and all things New England. I hate to be the kind of churl who takes the guys to task for making a movie that's "not funny enough," but right now I gotta be that churl- sure, the film's message that couples have to compromise and find room for each other's passions is a worthwhile one, but their previous film, STUCK ON YOU, was able to more adeptly balance warm observation and laugh-out-loud scenes of bizarre comedy. Also, this might have worked better at greater length, since the feeling of the year dragging on for the principal characters didn't really come across in the film at its present duration. Still, Fallon proves surprisingly charming, and Drew less surprisingly does her thing well. Rating: **1/2.

SAHARA (2005, Breck Eisner)- pretty stupid in spots, but with a real laid-back charm, inspired no doubt by the presence of McConaughey. Also, it's hard to hate a movie that twists itself in knots just to (SPOILER) pit a small army (tanks, choppers, etc.) against a Civil War-era cannon in the climactic scene (c'mon, you had to see that coming). Time for a moratorium on French villains played by Lambert Wilson though. Rating: **.

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER (2005, Mike Binder)- highly entertaining throughout, but also quite perceptive about its characters, even the most pathetic ones (as when Binder's lecherous deejay gets a chance to explain his preference for young ladies). Allen can play this character in her sleep, but she does it well, and Costner plays it loose to great effect. I loved the un-rushed way in which individual scenes were permitted to play out at their own pace, quite a contrast to most Hollywood offerings, which plow through the story to get to the end. And speaking of the end, I won't give it away except to say that it worked for me because of how it cast Terri's anger in a different light by removing the primary reason behind it. Rating: ***.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (2004, Michael Radford)- Radford doesn't so much avoid the troubling racial politics of the play as simply explains them in terms of their historical context. This, combined with Pacino's Shylock, which is a sympathetic portrayal largely because of the actor's innate fierceness, is why the film (mostly) works- up until the unavoidable climactic courtroom scene, in which Shylock either gets what's coming to him (the prevailing view in Shakespeare's time) or is made the victim of racial persecution (more likely to be the prevailing view now). Either way, the lightly comic follow-up sequence involving a pair of rings feels anticlimatic and unsatisfying nowadays. Rating: **1/2.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998, Terry Gilliam)- the more I watch this film, the less I enjoy it in a traditional sense, and the more I realize that I'm not really supposed to. It's best that the book couldn't get made into a film until decades later, in retrospect, since this film uses hindsight to posit the story as a portrait of a time when the idealism of the 60s had fully disintegrated (hence the San Francisco flashback) but the fallout from the tumultuous times (distrust of youth, the ever-impending culture wars) had just begun to spread. Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo's over-the-top attempts at hedonism are largely joyless, and purposely so- they can't keep the spirit alive, much as they try, when the rest of the world (particularly Vegas, which traffics in hedonism of a much more red-state stripe) refuses to join in. Rating: ***.

Also, I just saw a Sierra Mist Free commercial with Fred Willard and Michael McKean. Calling Christopher Guest! These guys need something better to do with their time.