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By Cole Smithey

‘27 Dresses’

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Agonizing, flaccid, and about as romantic as bottle of flat champagne, “27 Dresses” is a perfect example of the stereotypical Hollywood romantic comedies that Judd Apatow’s “40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” successfully disemboweled. So it’s sadly ironic that Katherine Heigl, the pregnant chick in “Knocked Up,” should show up in such an inferior showcase for her talents. Heigl plays Jane Nichols, a young Manhattanite doomed to be always a bridesmaid and never a bride. Now there’s a novel idea for a movie. Cough. Nichols’ favorite activities revolve around reading the “commitments” section of the newspaper to drool over the wedding ceremonies of lucky couples when she isn’t adding to her collection of bridesmaid dresses (guess how many) from gauche theme weddings that are barf-inducing for their tackiness. The girl who wants what she doesn’t want has to learn the hard way that the man she has a crush on, her boss George (Edward Burns) is a dimwit, after he falls head over heels for Nichols bimbo sister Tess (Malin Akerman). And yes, there is a mandatory montage in which Nichols models all 27 dresses. Yawn.

If the insipid dress changing sequence weren’t insufferable enough to curdle the stomach of every male in the audience, the filmmakers step in cliché poop again when they subject viewers to one of the most tormenting sing along scenes in cinema history. Inebriated Nichols and her also drunk pal Kevin (James Marsden) dance on top of a bar while belting out Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” along with the jukebox to the feigned approval of cast extras that can hardly hide their disgust at the embarrassing display. Note to screenwriter’s young and old; no sing alongs — ever.

In the process of doing dual bridesmaid duty for two weddings on a Saturday night, busybody Nichols forgets her day planner in the back of a taxi with Kevin, a cynical journalist she’s only just met. Unbeknownst to her, he is the author of her favorite wedding column. He capitalizes on the opportunity her lost diary presents to pitch a story about Nichols’ wedding obsession to his editor.

While Kevin stalks Nichols like a smitten lover with an ulterior motive, she watches her ditzy sister pretend to love dogs, hiking and vegetarianism in order to win over George, the outdoorsy clothing store entrepreneur that Nichols serves as his personal assistant. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”) sabotages even the script’s old lady friendly tone with Nichols bawdy co-worker Casey (Judy Greer), whose job it is to inject crude humor, ostensibly to keep audiences awake between the death knell plot lulls that occur at regular intervals.

From Shepherd Frankel’s cookie cutter production design to Catherine Marie Thomas’ atrocious costumes, “27 Dresses” is a comedy without the necessary visual style, tempo or chemistry to compensate for the script’s tone deaf sense of humor. Sophisticated romantic comedies are the province of French cinema. The worst French romantic comedy looks like a masterpiece compared to a picture like “27 Dresses.” Hollywood has been stuck too long churning out perfunctory wedding cake movies that are predictable for their bogus characters and retreaded gags. Apatow and newcomer Diablo Cody (“Juno”) are invigorating the genre with a precision that takes note of shifting cultural identities. These are vital filmmakers with a sense of the romantic condition of lust, desire, and trial and error. At heart, our lead is a narcissist and exhibitionist who loves spectacle. She doesn’t know the first thing about intimacy or carnality. There’s a name for people who get on top of bars and sing with the jukebox at the top of their lungs; we call them idiots, and let the bouncer do his job. CV

‘There Will Be Blood’

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Paul Thomas Anderson has grown immensely as a writer/director since his last picture (“Punch Drunk Love”), so much so that in a single film he has become America’s most visionary and accomplished modern-day auteur. Anderson based “There Will Be Blood” on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s lesser known novel “Oil!” about a 1920s oil miner named Daniel Plainview (exquisitely played by Daniel Day-Lewis) who strikes it rich after being approached by the twin brother of a young preacher about purchasing his family’s oil-rich land in Southern California. Paul Dano (“Little Miss Sunshine”) plays evangelist Eli Sunday, a man with Plainview’s avaricious heart but not his iron stomach for exacting the pounds of flesh that come with such thickly veiled ambition. Embedded in Anderson’s profoundly epic literary adaptation is timeless themes of savage greed, blatant corruption and social oppression that reflect the corporate, economic and ecological injustices ravaging the world today.

At the heart of the story is a rivalry of showmanship between Plainview and Sunday as opposite sides of the same cast-iron coin. The young minister has a knack for the theater of the pulpit where he casts spells over the local citizens of a rugged desert town that wants desperately to be funded by a veritable Niagara of cash that Plainview’s oil-drilling promises. Both men are self-made inventions so invested in their presentational lies that there is no room for any inner voice of conscious to interrupt the tyranny of their intentions. But Sunday is a rank amateur compared to Plainview whose carefully guarded sense of personal responsibility lends the film its crucible of thematic essence.

After a mine accident kills the father of a young boy mysteriously named H.W., Plainview adopts the lad and treats him as an equal business partner. Dressed in a double-breasted suit and tie, H.W. (played with astonishing maturity by newcomer Dillon Freasier) serves as an ideal foil for Plainview to win over the sympathy of locals and business associates. Moreover H.W. represents a link to human warmth for Plainview, whose singular focus on oil and profit would otherwise neglect. Still, Plainview is not much of a father figure as he proves when H.W. is made deaf by an oil strike accident. The tragic circumstance gives the film its emotional spine that will be crushed into dust before Plainview’s self-loathing and deep-seeded anger brings the final curtain down.

“There Will Be Blood” is a historically rooted parable that traces a vital path of Western culture through the industrial revolution via a primitive man who sees a prevalent opportunity and selfishly sets about claiming all he can for himself. It is about an iconic archetype of a man who starts out with the barest trace of human decency, and by the end of his life has none. Aesthetically there is visual, musical, and linguistic poetry in every frame. Plainview’s mechanical nature does not allow the story a traditional life-affirming closure without looking empathetically toward H.W. as a strong individual who learns from the cruel lessons of his surrogate father and escapes his clutches. A more cynical perspective would favor the actual black oil that Plainview uses to build his fortunes as a welcome result to his barbarous methods. From this viewpoint, oil is the fountain of life that feeds generations of hungry people. Anderson embraces the inexplicable facts of reality for their intrinsic dramatic truths, and what we are left with is a complex multiple character study of an evangelical, corporate and political culture.

Composer Jonny Greenwood (of the band Radiohead) creates the film’s fiercely original musical score that expands the scope of the story with unusual sounds that tweak with emotion and strange experience. Anachronistic and phantasmagoric, America’s early race for oil is brought into personal terms that resonate with the withering decay of greed. CV

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