As a result of compulsive viewing of America's Next Top Model over the summer, I had waaaay too much awareness of Eve before it aired, since promotional spots for it (along with All of Us and Rock Me Baby)aired continuously. Compared to those two shows, Eve looked, by far, to be the best of the bunch. And, sadly, it is.

Which is not to say Eve remotely resembles a good show. Whatever charisma and acting skills Eve displayed in Barbershop have mysteriously vanished, so either she had some incredibly good direction in Barbershop, or she is getting incredibly bad direction here. Matters are not helped by the additon of Jason George to the cast, who is perhaps the stagiest actor this side of Rebecca Pidgeon. For those of you who missed out on Platinum (which took last year's award for "Show That Comes Closest to Being Good Without Actually Being Good") Jason George played the uptight pair of brothers who run a record label. His incredible stiffness was balanced out by Sticky Fingaz' overly earnest, but incredibly unschooled, performances. It made for a fascinating opportunity to observe the full spectrum of bad acting, which, I guess, counts for something.

Here, Mr. George is up against Eve, who apparently has been told that "nervous" is the only emotion her character can possess. Even when chatting with her girlfriends. More amusing than actually watching the show is to pretend that the director is some greenhorn film school grad who read about WIlliam Friedkin's attempts to enhance the jitteryness of his actors on the set of The Exorcist and has taken to threatening Eve with a handgun throughout shooting. Except instead of firing it into the ceiling at random to make the cast properly twitchy, he keeps the gun perfectly trained at his leading lady at all times, thus explaining her inability to act relaxed.

My rule of thumb is that any time I invent stories to explain what's going on off-camera, the show is probably no good. So, I guess Eve is no good. End of story.

Rating: C- (Barely Passable)

Topics: sitcoms, television

Now that we've had the first official cancellation of the Fall 2003 season, I suppose it's about time that I get on the ball and start reviewing some of them (before they're all gone)

And what better way to kick off the season of reviews than with the very first cancelled show, Luis, starring everyone's favorite Hey, It's That Guy!, Luis Guzmán. Now, I like Luis Guzmán as much as the next guy, and in most cases, significantly more. It certainly doesn't hurt that he tends to show up in the works of Steven Soderbergh and P. T. Anderson, but, even when appearing in lesser works, does an admirable job of improving the situation, which, really, is the sign of a truly impressive character actor.

So I shudder to think what this sitcom would be like if it starred, say, Paul Rodriguez as an irascible doughnut shop/apartment building owner. As it is, it's dreadful. Luis's daughter dates a listless white painter. Luis doesn't like him. Funny! Luis kicks him out of his apartment building. Funny! Luis comes to a reconciliation with his daughter. Touching!

It's pretty apparent that they're going for a tell-it-like-it-is All In The Family style sitcom, which has never been done well. Have you tried watching All In The Family lately? It hasn't aged well. In fact, I would hazard that of all the "beloved" sitcoms of the 70's and 80's it's the hardest to sit through today. If you're going to lift liberally from an old sitcom, make it a good one. Who wouldn't want to see Luis Guzmán find a sexy young djinni in a bottle? Or Luis Guzmán married to a witch? Or Luis Guzmán trapped on an island with Jim Backus (either a Weekend at Bernie's-style romp with Jim Backus' corpse or a digitally reanimated Jim Backus -- your call)? I should totally be a TV executive. Maybe my shows would stay on past October...

Rating: D- (I can't quite bring myself to give Luis Guzmán an 'F')

Topics: sitcoms, television

Note: This review contains unfair thematic disclosures which would be prohibitive to a natural reading of the film's intrinsic qualities.

If a movie can be just a tiny little bit dizzying, it’s Lost in Translation, a film that asks not only whether the gauzy ethereal stuff of Virgin Suicides can be transferred to modern day, to big city, and to Bill Murray, and finds that it can indeed, but on its own only for one shot, the first one, and forever after that only as a contrast, as it takes up its place in the scuffle between gauzy and gaudy. This unevenness is the story of the film, which gets a lot of press as “richly layered” but whose layers resemble more a chocolate layer cake than terrestrial strata – there are layers, to be sure, but they’re not miles long and sprawling, but rather neatly constructed and carefully stacked, and you don’t so much chip and dig through one to get to the next, but observe them all at once, marveling at how distinct each one is and how well it fits exactly below another.

But why refer to metaphor with metaphor? Especially when the story on its own will play so well with audiences, a story of Americans lost in a Tokyo which is both the star of the film and irrelevant. The story’s about the Americans, not about Tokyo, and so it could easily be in any of a number of other places, but it’s something about Japan’s specific brand of culture shock that grounds the film specifically as what it is; if it were in Thailand, it would get more Golden Globe awards, Cambodia, more worldwide bannings, Vietnam, more Time magazine writeups, Laos, much less box office. There’s something about Japan’s friendliness, about the degree to which America has absorbed sushi and Dragonball Z, that makes us think we should get Japan, and so even though the movie’s about Bob and Charlotte, it wouldn’t be the same movie if they ambled among the starving children of India, not by a longshot.

If that much is clear, then it’s naïve to ignore the setting entirely in our focus on the love story therein, but the Tokyo character is so perplexing, even comic in its incomprehensibility, that if a starving-children-of-India film colors a love story with hopelessness, and a political-oppression-in-China film colors its love story with struggle, and a Merchant-Ivory film colors its love story with repression, convention and waistcoats, then the Tokyo of Lost in Translation reflects its neon graphics down onto the love story with the same staggering feeling of being out of place that the city itself imparts on the vacationing Americans in the street below.

Or even the window above, in Charlotte’s case, for her elevated viewing of the streets is the time at which we are most unable to conjure up her fear of her surroundings. In her window she is bolder, less dressed (which is to say less guarded), and it’s less clear that she’s worried about Tokyo and more clear that she’s worried about herself. The city from up here is pretty, holds less sway, and it’s only when she ventures out into the crowds that she starts getting lost from her real troubles and finding new ones – but she tends to welcome these, at least at the start of each challenge and in theory, and it’s important that we never see her at any of a thousand Tokyo McDonald’s locations.

But she does run into trouble, and does get lost, and does have difficulty feeling things where she is. Whether they’re real – whether she’d feel lost and sad if her personal non-going-away, in-America-or-not problems weren’t in the back of...

Read the rest of the review!

Topics: movies