Allen Yee
Ryan goes by the numbers in Ropes.
Allen Yee
Ryan goes by the numbers in Ropes.
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Against the Ropes
Opens Fri., Feb. 20, at Meridian and others
A standard-issue, woman-overcoming-the-odds boxing movie, this feel-good Meg Ryan vehicle has been delayed so long that not only do you confuse it with every other boxing flick that preceded it, you feel like you've already seen it several times before on TV reruns, cable, and a particularly forlorn, dusty shelf at Blockbuster. It could've been made in the '40s with Barbara Stanwyck or in the '70s with Jane Fonda, not that it would have been much better or worse. The same stock figures and clichés are put through the same sparring routines and training montages without ever rising to the level of Rocky—nor even a later eye-roller like Barbra Streisand's The Main Event.
Considering that the freshest boxing movie in recent years was 2000's Girlfight, it's a disappointment that Ryan never climbs into the ring. As in last year's In the Cut, she looks great, but there's no threat of violence or sex to disturb her perky, wholesome image. Instead, she plays Jackie Kallen, a real-life boxing manager in Cleveland, who, on a dare from the sexist boxing establishment, transforms a raw young middleweight (Omar Epps) into a title contender. Starting out trashy and downtrodden, like Erin Brockovich with slightly better fashion sense, Ryan's big moment comes in the climactic bout when she strides purposefully toward the ring to tell her fighter, "You are a champion, dammit!" I was hoping she'd push Epps aside with her nicely sculpted arms and KO the opponent herself. No such upsets occur.
In fight sequences so flatly edited it's as if Raging Bull were never made, Epps doesn't look remotely impressive, though I'm sure he did lots of Pilates to tone himself for the part. How did Ryan prepare? Apparently by studying old tapes of Mike Ditka, whose broad Midwestern accent she seems to be channeling from NFL halftime shows. Ropes isn't just a hokey boxing movie, it's a bad, bland "baaaxing" movie without the color or criminal interest of real ring characters like Don King or Mike Tyson. In its final round, the film even resorts to having Jackie's former detractors applaud her—foreseeing, correctly, that we in the audience won't. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER
The Dreamers
Opens Fri., Feb. 20, at Harvard Exit
Ah, Paris 1968! The riots! The auteurist movie worship! The pushovers in miniskirts! Bliss 'twas it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very confusing. In Bernardo Bertolucci's solemnly somnolent ode to his youth, we meet a dewy American student (Michael Pitt), who looks like DiCaprio's homelier kid brother and acts like a dumber version of the kid in Mary McCarthy's Birds of America. He falls in love with the Cinémathèque Française, and with a cinephile he meets there (Eva Green), who resembles Maria (Last Tango in Paris) Schneider's bosomy but homelier granddaughter. She invites him to stay in her rich parents' apartment with her Gallically grumpy, incestuous twin brother (Louis Garrel). The folks are away, so the twins get stoned and inflict sicko games on the innocent Yank.
The twins' game is acting out classic movie scenes: the Louvre race from Band of Outsiders, or Garbo's hammy moping in Queen Christina. When her brother can't guess her Dietrich-in-a-gorilla-suit homage, his punishment is to jack off to a Dietrich movie poster while she and the American watch. Later, she's made to hump the American while her brother watches.
All these old film references do is emphasize their vitality and the inanition of the kids' imitations. The sex is sort of steamy at times, but the steam soon dissipates. Brando's orgy with Schneider in Tango was existential, dramatic, cinematic; The Dreamers is static, a champagne cork too pooped to pop. The kids start what might have been fertile conversations about art and culture (Chaplin versus Keaton, Mao versus the movies, etc. versus etc.), but these kids can't debate, only masturbate. When the girl decides to gas the three of them to death in their sleep, I thought she had a point.
Abruptly, they're saved by the 1968 riot outside their window. Now the twins get the movie they've been waiting for. Paris kids were shouting, like Mickey and Judy, let's have a show! But The Dreamers isn't much of a show, or much of a movie. It's a cinema in-joke about a band of insiders trapped in Bertolucci's skull. Those of us watching are left wishing for a revolution that never comes. (NC-17) TIM APPELO
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Runs Fri., Feb. 20–Thurs., Feb. 26, at Varsity
It's safe to say that Mystery Science Theater 3000—the now-defunct cable show in which two robots and a human stranded in space were forced to endure cheesy old B-movies—made watching bad cinema cool again. Basically a re-creation of that same cheesy old B-movie fodder, Skeleton is that rare breed of film in which an extraterrestrial mutant and its alien keepers find themselves dancing before a reanimated skeleton and a half-feral woman named Animala. Writer-director Larry Blamire, who also plays the sci-fi flick's strapping scientist hero, Dr. Paul Armstrong, captures the absurdity of B-movies with a connoisseur's eye, but his facile mockery soon grows tiresome. Sure, Skeleton boasts some good lines (e.g., "I've never been horribly mutilated, but I certainly don't want to start now!"), but more than half the fun of bona fide B-movies is that the stilted dialogue was unintentionally stilted. Blamire's affection for the genre is clear, and that spirit shows throughout his willfully hokey spoof. Many viewers, however, will prefer the genuine article; a better night could be had on the couch watching Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, tossing quips and microwave popcorn at the small screen. (NR) NEAL SCHINDLER
