Save the Last Dance
ph. MTV Films/Paramount
I first saw this movie on a plane, and not just a plane but on my plane coming to Canada. Save the Last Dance helped shaped my young naive mythology and imagination of this continent and high school. I ate the movie up, I ate the soundtrack up (featuring Method Man and Redman, Fredro Starr, Pharoahe Monch, Pink). When the cool kids in Grade 9 were talking about when they were talking about fake ID’s, this is what they were talking about. But unlike the kids who went to my high school the cast of this film, mostly in their thirties, won’t have a hard time getting into some grubby club that don’t look like the Le Deux copycats in our entertainment districts here. Yes, Fredro Starr, if you threw me to the walls of my high school washroom, I’d just make fun of you for being in high school at 34. So I was a bit elated when this movie came on TV less than a week ago.
I’m trailing. As you know, this movie is about Sara (Shakespearean actor Julia Stiles), who has to move to Chicago and give up ballet because of her mother’s death, insipid enough to wear little hair clips, deny that she accidentally calls Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas) an know-it-all asshole in front of his sister Chenille (Kerry Washington) and say ‘Noo’ when Chenille asks her if she likes him. She gets this sibling duo as her Uncle Toms, teaching her the ropes in a cutthroat urban high school milieu, that the correct word for ‘cool’ is ‘slammin,’ that dance is her passion and the way for a white girl in the country to connect with a predominantly black populous. What does she give them in return? She buys Kerry Washington‘s character a rum and coke, no ice, and she gives Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas) her body. He’s thirty years old, Julia, don’t ‘git’ with him.
Hey look, it’s that guy from “Oz.” Everyone else from that show got another show, like “Dexter,” “30 Rock,” “The Wire” but nothing for him. Another casting note is Nikki (Bianca Lawson) who also plays Kendra the Vampayar Slayer, my favourite slayer. That girl fights like girls in my high school used to fight.
A little part of me wishes she was more famous, if her acting and everyone else’s acting for that matter weren’t so bad. There was also a DJ named Snooki, a male character. So I changed the channel.
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Bourne Identity: The First One
ph. Universal.
Matt Damon is, as David Edelstein says, an ‘intensely focused‘ actor, and in my opinion, the best actor of his generation. Here in The Bourne Identity he can fake his way through German, can rust his through French, sex appeal, agile, kicks ass. Remember that with the afterthought that in the same year, he came out with another movie where all he does is just walk.
Despite that, the more I watch this, the more I realize how cheesy this is. Jason Bourne/John Michael Kane (Matt Damon), we know that you don’t know who you are. If you beat up five security guards in one minute we’re sure unconvinced that you’re in the shipping business with martial arts training. Why can’t the guy from Lost get a break? Why are you picking up that girl with the weird red hair (Franka Potente) when you could have easily just done this movie by yourself? Why does she say ‘scheisse’ all the time just to remind us that she IS German? Why did that guy jump off the window? Why is Julia Stiles barking that ‘I don’t know’ and ‘It’s impossible’ and not fired from the CIA yet?
Why is that other six-footer assassin (Clive Owen) being mopey when you shoot him instead of being either tough or gross? Why did you hesitate in doing that thing you were told to do whereas more – I assume – complex narratives would have the heroes doing the bad things and regretting the hell out of it?
‘Jason Bourne is the typical white subject position who can’t remember his own atrocities,’ as said by my Imperial film professor. From Connecticut. There are ideas about ethics and…first-world identity in this movie that apparently are better expanded within the next two films. I’m looking forward to them.
Okinawa Assault 