• Jackass: The Movie
• The Ring
• Ghost Ship
• Sweet Home Alabama
• My Big Fat Greek Wedding

By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer (LA Times)

The ascendancy of Johnny Knoxville and the rest of MTV's "Jackass" gang to the big screen shouldn't come as all that surprising, especially given the original show's popularity and the synergistic ethos of the cable network's parent company, Paramount, which is releasing the feature-length film based on the series. Then, too, since Jim Carrey seems to have relinquished his party tricks to become an annual Academy Award hopeful and since über-moron Adam Sandler has been elevated to art-house legitimacy in the critical favorite "Punch-Drunk Love," somebody had to assume the mantle of the nation's stupidest non-elected white guys. Hence, "Jackass the Movie," a feature-length endeavor that's every bit as disreputable and often as embarrassingly funny as the MTV program, only longer.

A string of pranks and gags, the movie follows the same premise as the show: ringleader Knoxville and his shock jocks -- Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Dave England, Ryan Dunn, Jason "Wee Man" Acuña, Preston Lacy and Ehren McGhehey -- run around executing very stupid, at times hazardous, human tricks. On the show, the stunts have involved Tasers, pepper spray, a live goldfish (which was swallowed and regurgitated), attack dogs and enough excremental waggery and penis jokes to provoke curiosity about the group's collective arrested growth, especially in what Freud called the anal and oral stages of development. For the most part, the stunts are overwhelmingly idiotic, although they occasionally do approach the great prankster tradition of upending everyday norms, as in the "Bloody Windshield" episode, in which the crew brought a bloodied automobile to a car wash, where it was promptly cleaned.

In the movie, the escapades range from the inspired ("Rent-a-Car Crash Derby") to the silly (the Jackasses, including producer Spike Jonze, run amok while prosthetically made up to look like elderly men) to the disgusting (a Jackass tries out, literally, a display toilet in a store selling bathroom fixtures). When the comedy works, as in the rental-car crash interlude, it's because the stunt taps into the rage, and the attendant sense of helplessness and frustration, that bubbles under the surface of so many of our ordinary exchanges.

In the derby episode, Knoxville politely listens to the rental-car agent as the man carefully drones on about the car's existing dings, then takes the car to be outfitted for an intentional pile-up. What makes the stunt funny isn't the sight of the car getting smashed (or the blowup dolls parked in the back seat), but the gleeful sense of liberation. Here, finally, is one guy who's managed to escape the authoritarian bonds of the car-rental contract.

Upending our consensual reality is at the heart of the greatest pranks, whether the trickster is Marcel Duchamp or performance artist Joe Coleman, who in 1980 showed up at a 10-year high school reunion claiming to be someone who had died five years earlier, then set off explosives strapped to his chest. (He lived.)

In the years since, outrage has become the fulcrum of mainstream commercial culture, fodder for stuff like the BattleBots and reality-based shows such as "Fear Factor." On "Fear Factor," contestants are covered with live worms; in "Jackass the Movie," a guy hangs from a tightrope above some alligators with a raw chicken hanging out of his underwear. Funny, yes, but no one here is pushing the edge of the envelope, either aesthetically or politically, the way Abbie Hoffman did when he was arrested in the late 1960s for trying to elevate the Pentagon in order to exorcise its demons.

In comparison, the "Jackass" guys come off as incredibly tame: At their best, they're closer to the Three Stooges; at their most banal, they're as original as the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing nude with socks on their penises. Can a collection of goofy antics shot in crummy-looking digital video and haphazardly strung together be called a movie? If it's projected onto movie screens in movie theaters and comes with the imprimatur of a big movie studio, there's no reason it shouldn't, especially given the quality of the other brainless stuff out there. It's a hoot, but it's unclear why anyone would shell out money to watch a bunch of guys run around in their underwear puking up their guts and, in one explicitly visible instance, soiling their underwear.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that you don't see any women doing this sort of thing?

MPAA guidelines: R, for dangerous, sometimes extremely crude stunts, language and nudity. Times guidelines: The most revolting images involve defecation and a head wound being sutured in shimmering wet closeup.

Paramount Pictures and MTV Films present a Dickhouse Production in association with Lynch Sideshow Productions, released by Paramount Pictures. Director Jeff Tremaine. Producers Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville. Director of photography Dimitry Elyashkevich. Music supervisor Karen Glauber. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

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By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer

We've all had the experience of seeing a videotape we're sorry we watched, of wishing we could go back in time and take those unhappy images out of our minds. It's like that for the characters in the supernatural thriller "The Ring," only worse. A whole lot worse.

"Have you heard about this tape that kills you when you watch it?" a bored teenage girl (the movies recognize no other kind) asks her friend Katie in the opening scene. "When it's over, the phone rings and someone says, 'You will die in seven days.' " The girl giggles and then notices something. Katie isn't giggling.

Yes, friends, Katie has watched this particular tape (which begins with the image of a ring) and has received that very phone call, and no good will come of any of it -- for her or for anyone else. Within scant minutes, the prophecy is fulfilled and the story of that deadly video kicks into a higher gear.

"The Ring" does the best it can with this splendid premise, one of the creepiest, spookiest notions in years. It came from Japan, where novelist Koji Suzuki wrote the original book, and the film that resulted was such a sensation that it inspired a sequel and a prequel.

DreamWorks acquired the remake rights and, perhaps not surprisingly, gave Ehren Kruger's efficient script to director Gore Verbinski, a solid generalist who previously made "Mouse Hunt" and "The Mexican" for the studio.

Verbinski is a bit of a rarity these days -- someone who, as his credits show, can be counted on to do a reliable job in a variety of genres. (Which is probably why DreamWorks also used him to spell Simon Wells when the latter faced exhaustion during the making of "The Time Machine.")

Having someone like Verbinski in charge of "The Ring" means that while the premise and his competence ensure that the film will be unnerving, things could be scarier still if a director who lived only to chill the blood was behind the camera.

It's not only Katie, as it turns out, who saw the tape; three of her young friends watched it with her and they all died at precisely the same time exactly one week later. This unsettling coincidence catches the eye of Katie's aunt, crack newspaper reporter and single mom Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), who's already been asked by her sister to figure out what's going on.

Also affected by Katie's death is her cousin, Rachel's young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), a solemn, spooky little person who has "I see dead people" written all over him.

Ever the intrepid reporter, Rachel traces the tape to the sinister Shelter Mountain Inn and, being a fearless modern person, watches the video (which has something of the look of a bad student film) for herself.

Naturally, things start to happen that convince Rachel this tape is for real. She contacts her video whiz friend Noah (Martin Henderson) and is astonished and chilled to learn that this tape in effect has no fingerprints, no clues as to where it was made.

Rachel perseveres, and her discoveries, which end up involving -- among other elements -- dead horses, a lighthouse, a mental hospital and potent cameos by Brian Cox and Jane Alexander, culminate in a clever enough ending.

"The Ring's" shrewd premise is fueled not only by the omnipresence of video copies that turn up in our lives from who knows where, but also by a particularly modern feeling of powerlessness, by a sense that forces out of our control have a profound and unhappy effect on our lives.

One of the keys to making "The Ring" work as well as it does is the strong performance by Watts, who came to prominence with her dual role in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." It's up to her to lend credibility to this strange scenario, and her presence succeeds in making us believe.

Helped as well by the foggy atmosphere of its Pacific Northwest setting, "The Ring" is certainly acceptable. But no one seeing it is going to feel as spooked as executive producer Roy Lee, the man who introduced the film to DreamWorks, did when he first saw the Japanese version. He was so scared, he told a reporter, that he simply turned off the movie, and more than once.

To make an audience feel that intensely, you need a different kind of director and a different kind of film.

MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, language and some drug references. Times guidelines: scenes of horror.

'The Ring'
Naomi Watts...Rachel Keller
Martin Henderson...Noah
Brian Cox...Richard Morgan
David Dorfman...Aidan
Daveigh Chase...Samara

Released by DreamWorks Pictures. Director Gore Verbinski. Producers Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald. Executive producers Mike Macari, Roy Lee, Michele Weisler. Screenplay Ehren Kruger, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki and the motion picture by the Ring/the Spiral Production Group. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli. Editor Craig Wood. Costumes Julie Weiss. Production design Tom Duffield. Music Hans Zimmer. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

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By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer (LA Times)

See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory.

Recently returned from a six-month gig, the crew of an Anchorage salvage boat is hired by a young airplane pilot (Desmond Harrington) to tug in an ocean liner that he's sighted adrift in the Bering Sea. Some 40 years earlier luxurious Italian ship the Antonia Graza had disappeared. What we know (but the tug crew doesn't) is that the ship's passengers had been systematically murdered in an interlude of such grisly extravagance that director Steve Beck, whose first feature was "Thirteen Ghosts," stages the massacre not once but twice, as if to ensure that we savor each fatal blow. Beck has a way with severed body parts -- he snaps a mean wire cable -- but there's so little substance to Mark Hanlon and John Pogue's screenplay, which is as vaporous as the story's restless phantoms and considerably less engaging, that all he can do is pour on the blood.

With its minor shivers and modest Grand Guignol showmanship, "Ghost Ship" is the sort of flimflam that would have filled eight paneled pages in the great horror comic book "Tales From the Crypt" or consumed about 30 minutes on the latter-day HBO spinoff. Two of that show's original producers, action auteur Joel Silver and director Robert Zemeckis, also co-produced this film (they were executive producers on "Thirteen Ghosts"), and it's too bad that neither they nor their director put a fraction of the effort tending to niceties of character development that they did to the nastiness of character annihilation.

Among the familiar faces that help pass the time are Julianna Margulies, squaring her jaw with Sigourney Weaver fortitude, Ron Eldard, Isaiah Washington and Gabriel Byrne. None is called on to do much, and all comply accordingly.

"Ghost Ship": Rated R for strong violence and gore, language, and sexuality. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. In general release.

*

--Manohla Dargis
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By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer (LA Times)

In the new romantic comedy "Sweet Home Alabama," Reese Witherspoon plays Melanie Carmichael, a hot New York fashion designer who, on the night of her debut collection, is whisked off to Tiffany's for a marriage proposal. Her boyfriend (who's the mayor's son) pops the question amid stacks of robin's-egg blue boxes and a cortege of smiling staff weighed down with treasure. Melanie beams, accepts, then pounces on a diamond bigger than the Ritz and the Plaza put together. She may be a romantic, but she knows good value, which is why she's soon headed south of the Mason-Dixon Line, returning to her humble past to divorce the hick she left behind.

If movies were anything like life (and her ghastly collection anything like fashion), Melanie would be already divorced and weeping into her Women's Wear Daily. Instead, the day after her runway triumph, this Dixie Holly Golightly is driving through her hometown of Pigeon Creek, Ala., with a look of such unmitigated horror you'd think she'd taken a wrong turn into a John Waters trailer park. What's strange about her reaction is, although it's missing the usual complement of retail citadels and junk-food chains, her former home looks a lot like any number of American towns you pass on the interstate. There may be a Confederate flag or two aloft and a conspicuous absence of black residents, but the white people seem pleasant enough. Even if they listen to the Charlie Daniels Band, everyone has a forehead.

Great comedy can be had from putting the wrong person in the wrong place, but so can great condescension. Hollywood loves making movies about the joys of small-town life--but you get the feeling that the people making these movies wouldn't be caught dead (or alive) anywhere but Beverly Hills. (They love the idea of whistle-stop provincialism, not its reality.) In "Sweet Home Alabama," the big joke is that the couturier who's stormed the big city originated from a small town where she once pledged everlasting love to the boy next door. Her big lesson, of course, is that there's no place like home. But because no one involved in this film actually believes tipping cows is preferable to tipping at Babbo, she learns that lesson while holding her nose.

Soon after reaching Pigeon Creek, Melanie tracks down her husband, Jake (Josh Lucas). Pulling up to his house, one of those shabbily chic movie shacks that looks like it would fetch upward of a million dollars in Laurel Canyon, she begins waving a sheaf of divorce papers and demanding her freedom. She's still wearing the same sour look she drove in with, but as Melanie takes in the howling bloodhound, the art-directed clutter and the engine grease smudged over her husband's face, something else begins tugging at the corners of her mouth. The sourness turns to disdain, then shades into full-on disgust. It isn't just Pigeon Creek, the South or the inopportune husband that's scraping at her so insistently--it's the poverty.

Forced to stay put in Pigeon Creek, Melanie cuts a careless swath through family and friends, her every insult played for laughs. When she brags to a childhood friend that she's a designer and the woman eagerly asks if she knows Jaclyn Smith, the Charlie's Angel turned Kmart fashionista, the joke is on the woman betraying her ignorance, not the one betraying her snobbism. Of course it's easy to knock other people's taste; it's also convenient, especially if the digs obscure more precarious topics. The film may be named for a Lynyrd Skynyrd rebel yell, and the locals may dress in Civil War drag to play war games, but that's meant to be just atmosphere, like the Confederate flag pillow on the family couch and the black friend who playfully dubs Melanie his "steel magnolia."

Witherspoon has charmed her way through weak material before, but she's too inexperienced to save the character from director Andy Tennant, whose main achievement here is to turn his star's natural twinkling menace into malice. (If the older cast members fare better, it's because they're either storming the scenery, like Candice Bergen, or in on some private joke, like Fred Ward.) Then again, it's hard to imagine what a more seasoned performer could do with a woman so consumed with her own narcissism that she purposely outs a closeted male friend at a local bar because, as Melanie later explains, she didn't want anyone noticing her bad behavior.

The South takes another beating in "Sweet Home Alabama," but that's nothing compared with the one conferred on the sweetheart personality of its pint-sized Gen. Sherman.

MPAA rating, PG-13 for some language/sexual references. Times guidelines: vulgar language.

"Sweet Home Alabama"
Reese Witherspoon...Melanie
Josh Lucas...Jake
Patrick Dempsey...Andrew
Candice Bergen...Kate
Mary Kay Place...Pearl
Fred Ward...Earl

A Touchstone Pictures presentation, released by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. Director Andy Tennant. Screenwriter C. Jay Cox. Story by Douglas J. Eboch. Producers Neal H. Moritz and Stokely Chaffin. Director of photography Andrew Dunn. Production designer Clay A. Griffith. Editors Troy Takaki and Tracey Wadmore-Smith. Costume designer Sophie De Rakoff Carbonell. Music George Fenton. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

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By Gene Seymour, Newsday

There's not a lot of voice-over narration in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." But what little there is convinces you that the original stage monologue by Nia Vardalos would have been a hoot to hear. You don't have to be Greek to chuckle at the affectionate jabs Vardalos aims at her loving, smothering family.

Little wonder that Tom Hanks and his Greek-born actress wife, Rita Wilson, loved it enough to co-produce (with Gary Goetzman) a filmed adaptation, written by Vardalos and set not in her native Canada but in Chicago.

That's not a problem, but there are, alas, others with a movie that's about as overbearing and over-the-top as the family it depicts. It's not surprising that Vardalos' story has become an elongated domestic sitcom since it's directed by Joel Zwick, whose resume includes such go-for-the-gut TV fare as "Laverne & Shirley," "Full House" and "Family Matters." What is surprising is how clunky and wobbly it looks even with the talent involved both in front of and behind the cameras. Some folks--including, perhaps, Vardalos herself--apparently decided that the only way to open up the monologue and serve it to the masses was as an urban fairy tale with ham fists and thick shtick.

Which proves a disservice, most notably, to Vardalos the actress, who for at least most of the first couple of acts is touching and sweetly affecting as her fictional alter-ego Toula Portokalos, thirtysomething, unmarried and apparently quite willing to spend the rest of her days as a drab, nondescript waitress for her family's restaurant, Dancing Zorba's.

It seems to her a finer destiny than the one mapped out by her crusty old-school father, Gus (Michael Constantine): Find any Greek man, make babies and feed everybody. (Gus, by the way, has these funny little tics of using Windex for medicinal purposes and of claiming Greek origins for every single word, even Japanese ones. As with a lot of the riffs in this film, it's funnier the first or second time than it is the seventh or 12th.)

One afternoon, the proverbial handsome prince--a WASP-ish college instructor named Ian (John Corbett, essentially playing the same laid-back heartthrob as he did in "Sex and the City") shows up at the restaurant and gives Toula reasons to shed her moldy reserve and go off on her own. Eventually, improbably, Toula and Ian reconnect, fall in love and become engaged. Thus begins a noisy, cumbersome build-up to the wedding, throughout which you stumble over cheap jokes at the expense of both Toula's family and Ian's. Even Richard Pryor would think his parents are portrayed as a little too white-bread prim. All told, this is going to make passable television. Eventually.

MPAA rating: PG, for sensuality and language. Times guidelines: Some risque humor, mild vulgarities.

'My Big Fat Greek Wedding'

Nia Vardalos... Toula Portokalos

John Corbett... Ian Miller

Michael Constantine... Gus Portokalos

Lainie Kazan... Maria Portokalos

Andrea Martin... Aunt Voula

Joey Fatone... Angelo

Gold Circle Films presents, in association with Home Box Office and MPH Entertainment, a Playtone Picture, released by IFC Films. Director Joel Zwick. Producers Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman. Executive producers Norm Watts, Paul Brooks, Steven Shareshian. Screenplay by Nia Vardalos. Cinematographer Jeffrey Jur. Editor Mia Goldman. Costume designer Michael Clancy. Music Chris Wilson, Alexander Janko. Production designer Gregory Keen. Art director Kei Ng. Set decorator Enrico Campana. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.
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