Destination Wedding

Midway through “Destination Wedding”, Frank (Keanu Reeves) and Lindsay (Winona Ryder), the anti-social duo destined to fall in love, or something like it, have returned to their hotel after the eponymous ceremony. They are lying in bed. He explains how, borrowing the Greek Mythology’s Flaws of Aphrodite and revising it, Lindsay possesses “the folds of Aphrodite”, which he defines as the graceful way “the cheeks of beautiful women arrange themselves when they smile.” It is not objectification. Even if “Destination Wedding” attempts to turn these two into genuine characters through conversation in which they harangue each other about their wants and needs and what they hate and what they really hate, Keanu’s robotic intonations and Winona’s Emmy-Reacting-GIF of a performance make it virtually impossible to distinguish them as Frank and Lindsay. And that’s okay. That’s why we’re here, to get lost in their movie stardom, and Keanu is simply speaking for all of us when he compliments Winona’s cheekbones.

That makes it a little unfortunate, then, that director Victor Levin, who also wrote the screenplay, almost completely forgoes fawning close-ups. I mean, really? No, his preferred style is either medium or long shots of both actors, the camera peering at them from between rows of winery barrels or from afar as they sit side-by-side in massage chairs or through various wedding guests as they sit in the back row and cast judgment on all those around them. The only times Levin does cut closer is usually in the midst of one of Frank and Lindsay’s long-running conversations and only for a second, lingering not on the respective actor’s features but their instant reactions. It’s disappointing even if it makes sense. After all, this movie is just them, never allowing us to hear from any other characters, not the bride or the groom, not even the guy on the curb at the end when Frank asks him a question, the latter seeming to be Levin deliberately underlining at the last second his whole movie was just supposed to be Frank and Lindsay (Keanu and Winona).

It’s a good thing that it’s them, frankly, because Frank and Lindsay are fairly disagreeable if not downright irritating people. The movie is subtitled “A Narcissist Can’t Die Because Then the Entire World Would End” for a reason. They are self-involved and, per romantic comedy tradition, at odds immediately. But then, that self-involvement is, in its own way, what draws them together. Given that the entire movie is a running conversation between two people in a scenic locale, Cinema Romantico is obligated to drop a “Before Sunrise” comparison. And that is true, so long as you sub out Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for, like, I dunno, Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets” and Joan Allen in “The Upside of Anger.” These two are so insufferable that there is no one else on Earth, most likely, properly suited for them. Narcissists deserve love too, in other words, which is essentially what “Destination Wedding” boils down to, so long as you are lending credence to all the philosophical, or thereabouts, ideas they are espousing, which, honestly, you maybe don’t even need to do to accept their own version of love anyway.

At one point Frank chastises Lindsay for complaining about her lot in life, explaining that this is what the 99% detests about the 1%, even if Frank and Lindsay are not, technically, the 1%. He and she have problems, yes, and they are right to, that’s okay, but they should, he implores, suffer silently and get on with it. No one wants to hear, in other words, about the problems of beautiful people. True, though they don’t tend to mind looking at beautiful people just be beautiful which is why we have movies and movie stars in the first place. Silents are virtually extinct, but while “Destination Wedding” could use two dozen more close-ups, and it’s not really a movie about snappy editing, you could still watch with earplugs and come away content.

5 Actresses To Play Jesse Wallace's Ex-Wife

I recently re-took the distressing “Before Midnight” plunge after avoiding it for a year and a couple months after having my ardent (pitiful) Jesse & Celine Idealism shattered. And. Well. Yeah. It still hurt. I came around to seeing the ending in a bit more of a positive light – not positive as in “good” but positive as in “happy” – but not entirely. I don’t think I’ll ever get there. And in other ways, it was an even more brutal emotional experience than the first go-around. So brutal, in fact, that I unleashed yet another essay regarding my relationship with these films. And. Well. Yeah. I couldn’t bring myself to publish it. I almost trashed the whole thing. Not because I wasn’t pleased with it but because it kinda freaked me out. Perhaps I’ll put the post up on my birthday because an emotionally terrifying post coinciding with my birthday totally seems Cinema Romantico-esque.

Anyway, in lieu of that post, I still got to thinking. Because I’m always getting to thinking, if not about interesting things, per se, at least about things that I find “interesting” at which point I subject my few loyal readers who haven’t already flown this cinematic coop on account of my Katy Perry references to ponderings about them. ANYWAY, I got to thinking about the character in “Before Midnight” who is never seen but still a major player – that is, The Other Woman. The one to whom Jesse was previously married and gave birth to his son and whom he left Celine for because Jesse was meant to be with Celine because the world is perfect and wonderful (it isn’t). She is a major player because, as we learn, she moved Jesse’s son out of New York under the cover of darkness to limit her ex-spouse’s visitation rights. Cold. About as cold as the ways in which she’s referenced. In order, she is referred to as being “drunk and abusive psychologically”, possessing “the mother instinct of Medea” and – oh boy, here we go – “a hateful cunt” (Celine’s words! CELINE’S WORDS!!!).

So let’s say in nine years when “After Noon” (it’s a play on words) is released that Linklater, based upon our above criteria, wants to cast the ex-Ms. Wallace. To whom does he turn?

5 Actresses To Play Jesse Wallace's Ex-Wife

Marisa Tomei

Well, obviously. I mean, she should be in everything after all.

Winona Ryder

I concede both the predictability of this choice and its blatant self-referentialism, that casting the woman who acted opposite Hawke in the angstiest of angst fests, “Reality Bites”, would be an in-joke of epic proportions in a film series that should have nothing to do with in-jokes. And yet. Set all past history aside and simply envision Ms. Ryder in a metaphorical vaccum as a woman with “the mother instinct of Medea.” Yeah, you did.

Amy Adams

If you thought “The Fighter” was against type, this would totally go against the “Enchanted”, Probably The Nicest Person In The Whole World grain, and she could do it. Beware all ye who doubt the versatile skillz of AA. (I’m also assuming that in nine years she’ll have six Oscars and can just get cast in whatever she wants.)

Rosemarie DeWitt

God. God, what I would give to see Rosemarie DeWitt bust out the scoff face as Jesse does his Verbal Scat thing and then just cut him off and lay a titanic DeWitt-ish “You're so full of shit” on him. “I know what you’re doing, Jesse, okay? You’re answering all my questions with questions. I mean, I know you think you’re being really cagey, but you’ve used this same evasive methodology since I met you. It’s pretty obvious. And by the way, shoehorning a Dostoevsky reference into the middle of an argument? There’s no peanut gallery. There aren’t judges awarding you literary style points.” GOD, what I’d give.

Rachelle LaFevre

I am not a movie casting director because if I was a movie casting director I would do things like cast Billy Dee Williams as Batman and cast Kate Beckinsale as a version of Guinevere that told that charlatan Arthur and that lip server Lancelot what to go do with themselves and ruled the kingdom her damn self, but still… I like to imagine casting directors having epiphanies like the one Eddie Adams from Torrance had in the hot tub in “Boogie Nights.” And that was exactly the kind of epiphany I had when considering who should play Jesse Wallace’s ex-wife. When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign, I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign, it just blows up because the name is so powerful. Rachelle LaFevre.

Homefront

While “Homefront” may have been directed by Gary Fleder, it was written by Sylvester Stallone, and this shows in the way it feels leftover and freeze-dried from the 1980’s, born of such rough & tumble Me Decade rural action opuses like “Next of Kin” and “Road House.” Don’t presume it coincidence that the main character’s undercover code name is……Dalton. In fact, there was often talk of a Stallone/Schwarzenegger vehicle, which came never to fruition, but which is apropos because often “Homefront” feels like the belated sequel to Schwarzenegger’s “Commando” (1985). That’s a film that finds Arnie as John Matrix, retired Army colonel, living in isolation with his precocious daughter Jenny to protect himself from rabid enemies. Those rabid enemies kidnap his daughter and, thus, he travels to South America to get her back. “Homefront” acts in reverse, with Jason Statham as retired DEA agent Phil Broker, living in isolation in Louisiana with his precocious daughter Maddy to protect himself from rabid enemies. Those rabid enemies eventually ferret him out and attack and, thus, he stands up to defend his Homefront.

Fleder, however, more recently a middle-of-the-road professional (“The Express”, “Runaway Jury”) insistently attempts to dress up the film as Bayou Tony Scott, handheld camera and overeager cutting, overburdening its reflective moments with heaps of style, when an approach more reminiscent of its 1980’s forefathers would have gone a long way in strengthening its tone. Even so, Fleder, unintentional or not, pulls out two spectacular shots that underline the deviously tongue-in-cheek undercurrent of portions of the film. First, is a crate piled high with bags of precious meth offset by a Mountain Dew can in the forefront. Second, is the main character and chief heavy having a face-to-face, heart-to-heart in a local café with a wild west, Monument Valley-esque mural in the background that momentarily re-casts them as the White Hat and the Black Hat. If the whole film had been this way, “Homefront” might have had a long life on TNT Saturday afternoons. Instead it will have to make do with being generally blasé and sporadically joyous.

“Homefront’s” problem and blessing, in fact, is the heavies often seem more interesting – well, more loony, which makes them more interesting – than the off-the-rack father/daughter relationship meant as the focal point. Statham’s awkwardness is intended, raising his daughter all alone, but too often his performance strikes the wrong note of awkward. There are also occasional hints of a Big Daddy/Hit Girl relationship here, such as when Maddy makes like Daddy at school, employing a bit of Statham-Fu on a bully, but they never quite take flight beyond that bit of plot-instigation.

Much more fascinating is this backwoods family that becomes Broker’s adversaries. The classmate Maddy injures is the son of the sister, Cassie (Kate Bosworth), of the town’s meth king, Gator Bodine (James Franco), and so sister begs brother to teach out-of-towner a lesson. Franco, playing a meth cooker named Gator the same year he played a drug dealer named Alien, was but a stock-broker named Ryan away from playing the tri-headed monster of American Capitalism over the course of twelve months. File it under missed opportunities. Nevertheless, he brings a comic glint to his eye, as he often does, the whole performance feeling like a put-on because the character itself is a put-on, a small-timer who wants to be big. He desires statewide distribution for his operation, and that’s why he comes to view his sister’s pleas to confront Broker as more than just a nuisance. Through a little cinematic snooping (i.e. Happen Upon A Box Of Files In The Basement And Find The File Revealing A Character’s Entire Backstory), he learns Broker’s dirty little secret and intends to use it against him.

The scheme, which allows for Statham to do as Statham does, involves threats and intimidation – “Country payback” as the Token Black Guy (Omar Benson Miller) puts it – and an old Gator ally, Sheryl Mott. She is played by Winona Ryder. No one does the Panic Eyes like Winona and she imbues her eyes in nearly every scene with the twitchy panic of a methhead – in over her head but swept up in Gator’s laconic fury nonetheless. There is a righteous moment near the end when a character’s cellphone becomes a beacon which might seem a screenwriting convenience, except that Ryder has laid the groundwork throughout to make you fully believe she would forget to confiscate the cellphone. Her character is also referenced as having been busted for trying to smuggle drugs into Angola, which seems like fodder for a comic movie offshoot. To paraphrase Bridget Fonda talking to Robert DeNiro in “Jackie Brown”...“If you aren't the biggest fuck-up I've ever met in my entire life. How did you ever smuggle drugs into Angola?”

Statham’s character is an interloper in this back country and, really, he becomes an interloper in the movie. The obligatory action-packed climax almost – almost!!! – turns on a different character, the local sheriff (Clancy Brown), making amends, only to cop out at the last second because, of course, Clancy Brown doesn’t have top billing. So it goes. These meth addicts, stomping, squabbling, are more intriguing to watch than the hero, and, as such, the most intriguing character of them all sort of gets forgotten.

Kate Bosworth is not becoming in this movie. She is frightening to look at, a long-gone junkie, rail thin and consumed by the desperation of another fix. The family business has made her into this racing-mind monster and essentially abandons her when her problem gets too deep. Somewhere in there, amidst all the mechanized plotting and handheld camera work, however, Cassie cries out for help. No one listens. Why would they when there’s meth to make and skulls to crack and “Road House” is on TNT again?