items tagged with South Park Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

THE NATIVITY STORY

After more than an hour of noble attempts and unfortunate - though unembarrassing - failings, director Catherine Harwicke, in her biblical tale of The Nativity Story, finally lands upon the style she appears to have been aiming for all along. Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) has just given birth to Jesus, and as she lies in the manger alongside her husband, Joseph (Oscar Isaac), a blinding shaft of light descends from the heavens and lands directly on the holy family, creating a tableaux that is at once instantly familiar and freshly moving.

THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN

Considering the film’s title, this might sound ludicrous. But in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell, playing our hapless hero Andrew, gives what might become a legendary comedic screen performance.

OPEN RANGE

What will it take for Kevin Costner to give a performance again? His new movie, the western Open Range, which he also directed, has a lot going for it – beautiful camerawork, impressive editing, a strong, simple storyline, a marvelously cantankerous Robert Duvall – yet smack at the center is sweet, dear, painfully inadequate Kevin Costner, looking and sounding so uninvolved with his surroundings and his fellow actors that he weakens his entire film. (It took great restraint to laugh at him only once, at his hysterically unmotivated reading of the cowpoke classic “Let’s rustle up some grub.”) Some will argue that Costner is actually deeply in character, playing an uncivilized man for whom conversation and companionship offer little comfort, but look at him onscreen: His Zen blankness is indistinguishable from a coma, and his “concentration” resembles nothing so much as a somnambulist struggling to stay awake. As usual, Costner is fine with rare moments of fringe comedy – reminding us why we once liked him in movies like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams and Tin Cup – but he’s positively deadly in Open Range, and not because of his character’s prowess with a gun.

THE FAST & THE FURIOUS

In The Fast & The Furious, that stolid, basso profundo actor Vin Diesel is forced into a close friendship with the blond, pretty, incredibly bland Paul Walker, so you know immediately that you’re in make-believe territory once again.

THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY & BULLWINKLE

One of the happier surprises of last summer was the release of South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, a marvelously written musical comedy that transcended its source material and shot off into a madcap animated universe all its own, raising the bar for all future TV-show-turned-feature-film projects. And while it would be great to report that the film version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle approached South Park's level of cinematic exuberance, the filmmakers are facing an uphill battle: The animated series this one is based on is already such a whirligig of action, cliffhangers, and verbal and visual puns that raising the ante on it as a movie seems kinda pointless. (Clever and funny though it often is, the South Park TV series has nothing on the brilliance of the original R & B series.)