The Grouchy Editor

Movies like Centurion want desperately to be taken seriously, but they make it so damned difficult.  They often begin with some type of solemn, written prelude, in this case regarding an ancient dispute between the Romans and some people called the Picts (“based on a 2,000-year-old legend,” the end credits assure us).  The movie features lots of gory beheadings and spearings, swelling violin music, and some spectacular, fairytale-like photography (shot on location in Scotland), all of it skewed to make us root for hero Michael Fassbender and his fellow Romans.  But I stubbornly refused to do so.

I preferred the scruffy Picts.  For one thing, as you watch the movie, you discover that all of the supermodels were Picts.  Also, the Picts, bless their blue-painted cheeks, were the native inhabitants of Northern Britain; it was the arrogant Romans who imperialistically invaded the Picts’ homeland.  (I’m no European historian, I’ll admit; I’m just going by the story as presented.)

The main Pict supermodel, a brunette “tracker” named Etain (Olga Kurylenko), was raped and then de-tongued by nasty Romans when she was a child.  The young son of the Pict king is slaughtered by a conniving Roman.  The Roman soldiers, with whom we are meant to side, are disorganized, constantly on the run, and say “fuck” a lot.  They also speak in an odd mixture of ancient Roman and modern MTV.  “Being a legend will get you laid,” chortles one soldier, a sentiment quickly followed by, “The gods have forsaken us.” 

Which side would you root for in this dispute – the rude, vulgar, invading Romans, or the Picts with all of their supermodels, including Etain, her blonde comrade, and a fetching witch?  Oh, and these supermodels can fight:  It takes a slinky, sultry beauty like Etain to lick a Roman general in hand-to-hand combat.

All of this twaddle is filmed with deadly earnestness, but how anyone older than 12 can take any of it seriously is perplexing.  Perhaps the joke is on me.  Maybe Centurion is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a campy frolic, but I don’t think so.  I’d ask the foxy Etain, but she has no tongue.       Grade:  C

Director:  Neil Marshall  Cast:  Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko, Ulrich Thomsen, Imogen Poots  Release:  2010

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I went to the lake this afternoon – my childhood lake, Kandiyohi, in central Minnesota.  I shot off firecrackers on the shore, and then boated through some wavy cattails.

This was all in my imagination, of course.  I was actually in an air-conditioned movie theater, where they were showing Piranha in 3-D.  The movie takes place at “Lake Victoria” in Arizona, and that got me reminiscing about Kandiyohi.  After about 15 minutes of the movie, I couldn’t digest any more of the clunky, idiotic dialogue I was hearing, so I stopped listening and began to hear those firecrackers in my mind …. Ten minutes later, when I could no longer stomach the sight of third-rate actors and first-rate actors slumming, I stopped looking at the film.  Instead, I began to see those cattails.

Periodically, I would stop daydreaming because something would catch my eye on the screen.  One time, I was intrigued by the performance of an actress billed as “Girl Cut in Half,” who briefly displayed two enormous talents before, well, being cut in half.

A few other times, porn actress Riley Steele interrupted my reverie, once when she performed some kind of nude underwater ballet with Playboy model Kelly Brook, then again when she had to climb back onto the boat.

But mostly, I stayed on Kandiyohi Lake.  Piranha’s plot, which you’ve seen a thousand times before, and its cast – unfathomably including the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Elisabeth Shue, and Christopher Lloyd – and its 3-D effects, which ranged from mildly amusing to downright distracting, simply could not compete with those dreamy cattails and firecrackers in my head.       Grade:  C-

Director:  Alexandre Aja  Cast:  Elisabeth Shue, Richard Dreyfuss, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, Jerry O’Connell, Kelly Brook, Riley Steele, Nancy Walters  Release:  2010

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Imagine a famous feminist – say, Gloria Steinem – sitting down with two filmmakers to do a serious interview about her life’s work.  But there’s a catch:  Her interrogators are Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell.

How you react to that scenario will likely color your view of Let It Rain, a French comedy from writer-director Agnes Jaoui.   Is this movie a satire, in which an uppity woman receives her well-deserved comeuppance?  Well … yes.  Is it social commentary that underscores the kind of obstacles, ignorance, and frustration a serious person must leap-frog to effect meaningful change?  Yup, that too.

In Let It Rain, Jaoui, who also stars as best-selling author and feminist Agathe Villanova, straddles the fence between heavy and light, but she never falls off because her main concern is people, not ideology.  The relatives and locals Agathe copes with on a visit to her hometown are largely indifferent or hostile to her cause, certainly.  But isn’t Agathe also a bit full of herself? 

Jaoui the director subjects Agathe to one slapstick situation after another, usually at the hands of those two inept filmmakers.  Everyone else Agathe encounters appears to be down-to-earth and friendly, you bet.  But don’t they all owe something to people like Agathe, people who don’t just complain but actually accomplish things? Isn’t Agathe really an island of common sense among fools and dreamers?  Or is she just a pompous ass?

There is a scene near the end of the film in which Agathe has a heart-to-heart with Mimouna, a saintly, long-suffering family servant who thinks only of others, despite major problems of her own.  “Think of yourself.  Just a little,” counsels Agathe.  Does Mimouna’s rejection of this advice make her an exemplary human being, or just a sap?  Will I ever stop asking questions in this review?

There’s a lot of chat in Let It Rain, and its ending is a bit pat, but the dialogue is never less than amusing, the characters are all engaging, and the acting is first-rate. The movie injects feminism with something its critics say it sorely lacks:  a sense of humor.  Jaoui wants you think – but only between the laughs.           Grade:  B+ 

Director:  Agnes Jaoui  Cast:  Agnes Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze, Pascale Arbillot, Guillaume de Tonquedec, Frederic Pierrot, Mimouna Hadji  Release:  2010 

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