“Herbie” is dollar signs in executives’ eyes

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005)
Disney presents an Angela Robinson film, starring Lindsay Lohan and Michael Keaton. Written by Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant, Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Mark Perez. 100m. G.

2 stars

Oh, NASCAR, this time you’ve just gone too far.

When you pilfered recklessly from amongst our white, male, lower and middle classes, I admit I stood idly by. But this synergy strategy you’ve engaged in with the Disney company is just plain greedy.

“Herbie: Fully Loaded” is a recruitment film, luring in our young, impressionable pre-teens with promises of magic cars and thrilling chases. It doesn’t reinvent the “Herbie” high concept as much as give it a 21st century facelift, awakening this three-decades-old idea.

It’s not that Disney had anything more to offer than the sterilized slapstick I recall from my early days. It’s just that the combination of cultural forces was too potent to ignore any longer.

In this brush-up, sassy Maggie Peyton (Lindsay Lohan) uses her graduation money to save a precocious bug from its salvage yard existence. The Beetle is more than just a transportation device; it’s a bona-fide problem solver.

The Peyton family racing team has fallen on hard times, staking their reputations on the crash-prone Ray Jr. (Breckin Meyer). Without accident-free qualifying heats, the Peytons risk losing sponsorships and personal fortunes.

Enter Herbie, whose car appearance betrays his rather rambunctious human personality. The bug nudges Maggie into a street race with Nextel Cup champion Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon), and then promptly defies all semblance of gravity and governing physics to beat him.

Welcome to the proverbial paint-yourself-into-a-corner moment, screenwriters.

But these five credited script doctors turn the tables on us, knowing they’ve already made the audience willingly accept a magic car. They transform Murphy into an obsessive arrogant type who ignores his manager’s admonition to forget the meaningless defeat.

Instead, the reigning champ coordinates a high stakes matchup, wherein he will challenge all comers to a desert race for a large cash prize. Maggie bites, beguiled by Murphy’s empty promises and charms.

It would be within the realm of reason that a professionally created racecar would smoke a 1963 Beetle in an un-handicapped match. But the “Herbie” creators aren’t constrained by trifles like logic, so they conceive a situation in which Herbie loses out of spite for its owner.

The kiss-and-make-up between Maggie and her vehicle is reserved for a legitimate NASCAR event, in which Herbie outwits modern racing greats like Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett and Tony Stewart to take top honors. All three appear in this film, buoyed by lesser known racers, as an unofficial stamp of approval for this propaganda for their sport.

While a two star rating doesn’t qualify as an official endorsement, I do encourage parents to take their young children to see this film. Except for a tense scene involving a demolition derby, both our female protagonist and her enchanted vehicle remain relatively unscathed throughout. Even the traditionally busty Lohan has been Disney-fied, appearing here in rather sanitized fashion. There’s a couple moments that could lead to heavy breathing from your tweener sons, but Lohan and others are woefully ignorant of their own sexuality for the most part.

Mostly the film annoys my sense of decency, looking and sounding more like a cash cow than a proper release. I’d imagine I’d enjoy a legitimate story with a racing subplot - ala “Days of Thunder” - or even a family-friendly tale of a car who surprisingly befriends its human owner. But to mix the two in the name of profit, well: Something is rotten in the state of Disney.

Love is a battlefield

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)
20th Century Fox presents a Doug Liman film, starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Written by Simon Kinberg. 120m. PG-13 for sequences of violence, intense action, sexual content and strong language.

3 stars

What we have here, moviegoers, is failure to communicate.

After a torrid romance in a South American villa, John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) Smith haven’t just hit a speed bump in their marriage; they’re Titanic-approaching-iceberg-bad.

And despite their roles as highly valued assassins, the Smiths have little to talk to each other over their roasted chicken and peas. That’s because they take their cover seriously, and also because they don’t know what is already known to us: they share an almost identical occupation.

His fake life is as an engineer, in a small, nondescript office that just happens to be protected with a oversized Masterlock. She’s in “information technology,” a catch-all term so generalized he’s never tempted to ask too many questions.

The marriage is in dire straits, until one day they both get contracted for the same hit. Nothing like a rocket launcher to spice things up in the bedroom.

It takes a bit for our heroes to figure out their spouses are competition, but John and Jane catch up to their omniscient audience shortly after their mutually failed contract hit.

Then the fireworks begin, first with a shoot-out in their Ethan Allen-inspired suburban home and then with a sexually-charged romp through the wreckage. It’s a sultry, high-concept summer movie that isn’t quite intelligent enough to be a genuine thriller, despite its pretty camerawork and eye-catching A-list stars.

The chief complaint critics have lobbied against the film is that it can’t quite decide if it wants to be a laugh-fest or a blow-’em-up, as if the two genres weren’t ever conjoined. It’s clunky, sure, but did I mention how much fun it is as well?
The enjoyment comes primarily from equipping the two most attractive Hollywood stars – who also manage quite well as actors - with snarky repartee. Both think they’re impenetrable hot-shots; their discovery of each other is treated as a job, albeit with entanglements.

As John scurries from room to room avoiding bullets and tear gas, it must dawn on him that Jane is certainly the more talented of the pair. But admitting that is a form of emasculation; Jane is more than willing to keep the illusion alive to protect her dear husband’s ego. Besides, her shotgun blasts aren’t really that close to his precious little head.

Both are equipped with not only enough ammunition to make the Winchester company blush, but with best friend archetypes.
John’s guy pal is Eddie (Vince Vaughn), a lackey in the hitman firm. When the Smiths don’t wipe each other out, despite specific orders from their respective firms, the job gets fed down the line.

The price tag? An attractive $400,000 payout for each.

“Oh that’s nice,” Eddie coos. “But it takes at least half a mill to get me out of bed.”

Even if best friends won’t turn on the couple, there’s plenty of people to perform some high visibility erasing. The duo is corned in the movie equivalent of a furniture warehouse, so that they can blow up things and shoot out windows and “ooh” and “ahh” over the Scotch Guard all at the same time. The slo-mo shoot-out is all very John Woo, although I’ll admit I thought our fearless twosome were going to go out all “Butch Cassidy”-style when they were backed into a pre-fabricated shed.

Alas, this film has an extremely pat and trite ending, just as we expect from such summer fluff. And we forgive it, because it ends with a clever last line and we walk out with smiles on our faces. Besides, we’re still fanning ourselves after getting all hot and bothered by the sight of big guns and big lips and svelte bodies.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” reveals my hypocrisy when assigning ratings to films, sure. But did I mention how much fun it was?

Skateboring

Lords of Dogtown (2005)
Columbia Pictures presents a Catherine Hardwicke film, starring Heath Ledger. Written by Stacy Peralta. 107m. PG-13 for drug and alcohol content, sexuality, violence, language and reckless behavior - all involving teens.

1.5 stars

I had gone to “Lords of Dogtown” at the urging of a friend, who had seen the original source material, a documentary, and had suggested this fictionalized account.

After exiting the theater – and finding myself totally unsatisfied by “Lords” – my friend mentioned how faithful the Hollywood version was to its predecessor, “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”

I was slightly enraged. In an effort to appropriately place the blame, I needed to look no farther than “Lords” writer Stacy Peralta.

While a member of the Zephyr skate team, Peralta became one of skateboarding’s first stars during a late-1970s craze. He wrote and directed “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” which commemorates his rise to fame. Apparently, that wasn’t sufficient.

Whether the idea originated with Peralta or not, he was complicit in this retread. The film is a second homage to the three Z-boy stars: Peralta (John Robinson), Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch) and Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk). All three are lackeys at the Zephyr Surf Shop, toiling under the tutelage of owner Skip Engbloom (Heath Ledger).

School isn’t in the picture; family is deemed equally unimportant. The boys love surfing and, when the waves aren’t breaking on the Venice beaches, skateboarding on backlots and abandoned playgrounds. They hold Skip in somewhat high regard, something the habitual drug user can’t manage even for himself.

But when Skip’s business pal introduces him to polyurethane wheels, the surf shop owner sees opportunity. The Z-Boys are created, revolutionizing skateboarding from an advanced form of roller skating to an art form. Suddenly there were ramps where there was flat surfaces, ollies where there were only daffies.

The Z-Boys real life rise and fall is appropriate for Hollywood novelization, so it makes sense that “Lords of Dogtown” has the ability to reach a larger, more mainstream, audience. Yet there still exists a great disconnect; we uncover little of why the boys show disdain toward life or why skateboarding becomes their release.

This failure to personify our disaffected protagonists is in complete contrast to “Thirteen,” director Catherine Hardwicke’s 2003 debut. In that film, audiences could point to a series of bad decisions that catalyzed Tracy’s downfall during her “self-expression.” In “Lords,” we’re given stock generalizations that provide little solace: the boys are poor, they have absentee parents, etc.

Absent of any real substance, the film becomes a glorified skateboarding video. Hardwicke is a real trooper, employing a camera operator to follow the boys up and around the swimming pools they “borrow” for ramp space. It’s some fascinating stuff, but I’m not certain it would be authentic enough for the ardent skateboarder or as engaging as the documentary. Surely audiences are sophisticated enough to prefer real skaters over their fictional counterparts. (We are, aren’t we?)

The true fascination with “Lords” is not in the skating, but in the boy’s patron saint, Skip. Ledger plays him as a non-stop drunk, who tempts impressionable youth with a carefree life. As the film progresses, he de-evolves from Pied Piper to Peter Pan, watching as his followers become more famous and increasingly independent. He’s forced to close his factory and become a grunt at a more standardized surf shop finally, a cruel conclusion for an innovator who caught his rising star but didn’t have the sense to know what to do with it.

The Australian actor also adopts a borderline unintelligible speech pattern and hides behind a wiry scruff, forgoing the charms that made him a teen-age heart throb in films like “10 Things I Hate About You” and “A Knight’s Tale.”

In fact, Ledger has never resisted challenging himself with a difficult character. “Lords” succeeds only when he does.