You Don't Mess With the Zohan and Nanooush

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Writers (WGA):

Adam Sandler &
Robert Smigel

Director:

Dennis Dugan

I don't like Adam Sandler or long, nonsensical movie titles. I also cringe when I see former SNL actors launching films based on one-joke characters a la Corky Romano (you can probably list thirteen more). For all those reasons, I would not be someone who you would expect to mess with the Zohan. However, there was something oddly intriguing about a counter-terrorist with a penchant for hummus and hairstyling.
And guess what? It worked. The pacing, the ethnic flavor, the Mariah Carey...I was laughing, out loud, at Adam Sandler. I was able to look beyond Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, The Waterboy, and the other films I aggressively avoided to see a seasoned comedian developing a new culturally relevant persona. Sure he borrows from the Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn Dodgeball team and yes, you can spot Judd Apatow's handiwork, but it comes down to Sandler's special tahini seasoning. He has grown up. The teenage boy who laughs at paraplegics and imagines penguins in the bathtub is ready to commit.

Middle eastern counter terrorism hairstylist comedies go well with Nanooush wraps and mint iced tea.

Wall-E, Bucky, and Olafur

Wall-E
Written/directed by Andrew Stanton

Wall-E may be the best example thus far of what the Pixar machine can produce. The first 40 minutes: silent exploration of our vividly imagined future world by a tiny trash compactor are utterly brilliant and incredible. Through Wall-E's binoculars, we see a savaged earth, the result of humans' overconsumption and gross negligence. Humans have exhausted earth's resources and then catapulted themselves into space on a 700- year space cruise. Meanwhile Wall-E has been left to compress the pieces of a wasteful civilization (along with a cochroach and an endless supply of twinkies--the two things that can survive Armageddon as we learned in fifth grade).
Yet, in spite of its dystopic themes, Wall-E is not without hope. While year 2700 humans are now obese babies who slide around on space style Laz-E boys, suckling cupcake sodas and mindless television (sound painfully familiar?), they are not without conscious. But it requires the heart of a robot (or the heart chamber harboring a budding seedlet) to remind them of the world they have discarded.
There was something magical about this film. Yes, it was sort of simple and prescriptive, maybe a little dull for its target audience (the heavy-handed environmental undertones certainly aren't without cause, but hard for the hannah montana and younger set). But fundamentally it was universal love story which took common objects and made them spectacular and otherworldly through stunning animation. I see this as in line with the goal of any great art work, which is why I recommend this film in tandem with the new Buckminster Fuller show at the Whitney Museum (a genius and scholar of sustainability and eco-consciousness, not just those funny domes), as well as the Olafur Eliason public art tour de force, the NYC Waterfalls (now cascading water along the East River). Both artists strive to create beauty through environmental responsiveness.

I also loved the scene with the spork. Classic.

Kung Fu Panda and Ollie's

Kung Fu Panda

Written by Jonathan Aibel &

Glenn Berger

Directors: Mark Osborne
John Stevenson

While certainly not a lasting animated classic, a beautiful and entertaining summer flick with sophisticated animation in a new setting with new characters (a red panda? kung fu warriors?). I had the fortune to see this in an IMAX format, which further emphasized the lush scenery of northern China. I found myself struggling to see the lines of character drawings/gesture---the world was so vivid, vibrant, real. However, the kitch of the kung fu genre didn't hold up in this squeaky clean plot line. Jack Black's Panda wasn't free to be anything but dopey and pudgey. Unlike the animation, the movie had little edge. It's a heart-warmer expanded to a wider cultural context. To be paired with Ollie's on the west side...simple, palatable Chinese food. No promises about the soup.

Then She Found Me

Then She Found Me  

Written by Alice Arlen and Victor Levin

Directed by Helen Hunt

The less glamorous stepsister of the forty something female in New York flick...here comes Helen Hunt in a directorial debut (a student film with a high profile cast) relationship drama.  I became invested in some of the interpersonal dynamics (mostly because I find Bette and Colin so charming).  However, the film oscillated between The Savages and something a little bit more mournful, interrupted by boom mics hanging over actors' heads...multiple times, very tacky.  Would pair this with something like tea (perhaps Teany?) ...needs to steep a little more to become more potent.

The Tao of Carrie

Style and Sadness

Sex and the City 

Written/directed by Michael Patrick King

Midnight in a Manhattan multiplex: mini skirts and Marc Jacobs bags march up the escalator of the Lincoln Square Loews.  This is not your typical summer blockbuster crowd (Indy who?), but rather a cultish sorority of millennial mavens.  They are gathering to pay homage to the series that taught them how to shop, how to date, and how to live in the city of New York.  

As Carrie Bradshaw explained as soon as the clock struck 12:01, these are the twenty-somethings who came to the city in search of "love and labels. "  Tonight they are among their friends, real and imagined, wearing stilletos and slip dresses as a sign of solidarity to the sisterhood of Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda.  Mere teenagers when the show first aired on HBO on their neighbor's rec room television in northern New Jersey, southwestern Ohio, and the mitten of Michigan, these young girls are now young professionals pursuing the life promised by Carrie and co.  Certainly their suburban soccer moms didn't teach them to dress or hail a cab like that.  Each audience member can identify with one or more of the women (ex."I am a little Charlotte meets Miranda..." or some other combination of the four females).  Through that connection, the show has been instrumental in each audience member's urban upbringing.  The show was hope in the form of 30 minute serials.  You CAN "have it all, it declared--the clothes, the men, the city, the job, the friends.

After I left the movie theatre that night, some of that magic had vanished.  While the clothes are still fabulous and the friendships still solid, the society isn't.  With age (now the women are pushing or well into their forties) comes a desire for commitment that doesn't seem attainable in our consumer-driven culture.  Men shop now too.  And the return policy on single girls in this populous city is pretty loose (the principles of supply and demand seem to say hang on to what you've got--see Charlotte and Harry).  Watching SATC the movie was like watching the women who raised me beaten down by bad situations and weak scripts: adultery, cold feet, infertility, and monogamy (actually, I don't quite understand the whole Samantha side story).  These women are no longer free, they are trapped in a Lifetime movie.   Albeit with better clothes.  

SATC clocked in at 2.5 hours, too long for a comedy, which this was not.  Our glimpse into these womens' lives didn't offer moments of professional success (no Miranda trial lawyer scene), we only got to see the women at their most vulnerable (frail Carrie, dejected Miranda).  The superheroine sexpots shrank a little.  The world no longer seems like their oyster in the way it is presented to Charlotte's daughter (you can do anything, the white knight is waiting).  The women are more real, broken, and less fantastical.  Carrie's principal self-reflective narrative (her sex column, a popular motif in the tv show) is absent.  This frame story served an important purpose in linking the vignettes into some kind of positive moral.  Without this device, we are left to our own devices.  We find ourselves in this city that Carrie brought us to and we can't call home.  

But here we are, with our friends, our shoes, and our Magnolia Bakery cupcakes (now at 68th and Columbus as well as in the West Village) left to forge our own destiny.  Can you have your cupcake and eat it too?  Here's hoping.