In a season as bad as this one, frustration can turn to resentment.
Why, friends
ask, is summer such an abominable time for movies? It can't be said that
Hollywood simply dumps the dregs into the multiplex in June; they really work
hard at this summer game. What is it, we are all entitled to ask, that soaks
them in the delusion that the general public loves blockbusters? The good news
is that in this summer of 2010, the big ones are failing at the box office.
The bad news
is that critics who really love to go to the movies take little pleasure is
slamming what they see. People who make movies work far too hard only to have
some self-indulgent critic fine tune his verbal savagery at their expense. But
in a season as bad as this one, frustration can turn to resentment.
In this vein,
I would suggest that you might want to skip two that are floating around now.
Consider "Cyrus" and "The Extra Man." Someone has referred to "Cyrus" as a
"delightfully demented comedy." I would call it instead a slightly creepy drama.
John (John C. Reilly) is a lonely guy who meets Molly (Marisa Tomei), a lonely
girl at a party his ex-wife (the ever fine Catherine Keener) forces him to
attend. As they fall in love, we learn that Molly's 20-something son Cyrus
(Jonah Hill) not only lives with his mother but has, to put it politely, a
serious co-dependency problem with her. And yes, it's a creepy dependency. John
C. Reilly brings his natural warmth to the role of the suitor having to deal
with a possessive adult potential step son. Marisa Tomei's Molly unfortunately
indulges her creep for far too long. Far worse, she doesn't seem to understand
the problem and draws no boundaries around her own life.
"The Extra
Man" springs from this premise: young male teacher at a rarefied private school
is fired for a cross dressing incident; middle-aged failed
playwright/teacher/gigolo takes the young man in and becomes his mentor in all
things Manhattan. Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline) and Louis Ives (Paul Dano) are
both English teachers. I hope fervently that the character name Henry Harrison
was merely an unfortunate choice rather than a deliberate composite of Henry
Higgins and Rex Harrison. We meet Gershon (John C. Reilly in a rare unsuccessful
role) who speaks in falsetto and wears an enormous red beard. There is no
apparent reason for this, or even for his existence in this movie for that
matter.
Kevin Kline
has a fine time pontificating in the manner of a learned man-about-New York, but
his Henry Harrison is awash in self-absorption and he is financially dependent
on handouts from the ladies he escorts to the opera and various charity dinners.
Moving around the city in the lifestyle he wants without paying for it is
Henry's driving force. Both he and his student Louis are exploring their vastly
uninteresting identities, and that is a pretty unpleasant process to watch.
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