by Cole Smithey

Legally Blonde


Based on all the media-hewn backslapping over Reese Witherspoon’s first shot at a leading lady role, you’d think Legally Blonde was a modern Billy Wilder comedy with the latest rendition of Marilyn Monroe in front of the camera. Instead this weak and predictable comedy, by debut feature director Robert Luketic, is a poorly lit attempt at dredging humor from a sterile and flat script. While Witherspoon makes an attractive ditzy blonde with enough book-smarts to overcompensate for her character’s fashion victim obsessions, her talents are dissipated in a movie that chases its own tail. Following Witherspoon’s cruelly good performances in movies like Freeway and Election, Legally Blonde is a career misstep for a talented actress capable of creating much more complex characters. The movie is sure to clip the wings of everyone involved in its production.

Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is as close to being a “valley girl” as any female could get without affecting that most annoying speech pattern popularized in Encino Valley, California in the early ’80s. She’s a typically cheesy southern California sorority sister dating a rich-dude heartthrob named Warner (Mathew Davis - Pearl Harbor) with visions of marriage dancing inside her little naturally blonde head. But just when Elle thinks Warner is going to pop the question, he drops the bomb that she’s not serious enough to share in his political plans to become a Senator by the time he’s 30.

With the impetus of being dumped by her dream boy, Elle decides to follow Warner to Harvard Law School and prove her worthiness to win him back. After a series of unfunny scholastic victories, Elle gets accepted into Harvard and starts attending classes opposite Warner and his new brunette girlfriend Vivian (Selma Blair - Cruel Intentions). It isn’t long before Elle realizes she has to ditch her pink heart-shaped notepad and fuzzy pen for a power book laptop to outshine her studious peers.

Between trips to her overweight manicurist, Elle continues to look great, if trying way too hard, in hot pink while coming up with smart answers in class. Her attention to detail in one class wins Elle a coveted intern spot at her professor’s time law firm, working on a big murder trial beside boyfriend material in the guise of Emmett Richmond (Luke Wilson - Charlie’s Angels). Naturally it’s Elle’s body that her professor is really after, giving Elle yet another blonde stereotype to rise above and push her into Emmett’s arms.

The heavily clichéd premise that ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ is Legally Blonde’s white flag. The problem with Elle’s character is that she’s so materially agenda driven that you suspect she’d have no life if she weren’t forcing people to categorize her personality so she could surprise them even more. So what if Elle is a “smart blonde,” able to win legal cases and shock everyone around her as if they were a star-struck audience to her dominant charms? She’s still a plastic doll character incapable of inner discovery or being what most people consider sincere, humble behavior. That’s not to say that any such character depth is necessary or even warranted in a light-hearted comedy, but because the movie’s gags and dialogue are so tedious there isn’t much else to ponder except Witherspoon’s knee-jerk characterization.

There are quite a few scenes in Legally Blonde that are shot so poorly, and with such awkward lighting, that you feel like you’re watching a student film rather than a full budget feature with name actors. It’s the kind of movie that probably felt adequate whilst the cast and crew was busy making it even if it lacked sturdy characters and piercing dialogue. But a dog is a dog and one can only hope that Reese Witherspoon pulls in the reigns on a ditzy “smart blonde” persona that, in her case, needlessly overstates the case for an actress capable of far greater challenges.

Scary Movie 2


Breaking their own promise of “No Sequel” to their first Scary Movie, the notoriously madcap Wayans brothers have been lured astray by Miramax to attempt a recreation of their former success. Scary Movie was a medium budget film that became the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever largely because it was a fresh idea performed with incredible enthusiasm. But everything that follows Scary Movie 2’s opening Exorcist parody sequence proves to be a crude and loose jumble of poorly executed attempts at comedy send-ups. The Exorcist skit is truly inspired, with loving attention paid to make-up and set design. But it’s James Woods’ appearance in the role of the elder exorcist that spurs the hilarity because the usually serious dramatic actor has so much visible fun with the part.

Where Scary Movie attacked ‘slasher films’ as a suspense genre in dire need of a complete and utter deconstruction, Scary Movie 2 tries to access a much more subtle and esoteric genre of horror movie, the supernatural thriller. Tapping into movies like The Haunting, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Hannibal, and Poltergeist, Scary Movie 2 uses a meager plotline that mostly ignores the need for character development, shock, or suspense. Instead the audience is treated to arcane comic skits that center on bodily fluids, brand name recognition, physical deformity, and countless references to marijuana.

Many cast members from the original Scary Movie returns in the sequel even if many of their characters were killed off in the first movie. A handful of thrill seeking college students with sleeping disorders are requisitioned by a depraved and lecherous college professor (Tim Curry - The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to spend a weekend inside a haunted mansion called “Hell House.” Aside from a lusty ghost, the house is also occupied by a creepy caretaker named Hanson (Chris Elliott - Kingpin) with the most grotesque left hand you will ever see. While the professor observes his subjects by remote controlled cameras, each oddball has his or her own run-in with supernatural forces. Clown puppets come to life, skeletons attack while dense fog seeps underneath doors, and a black cat battles Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) like a feline Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull.

But there’s no unity between characters and the story or between the listless jokes and the premise of the satire. The characters aren’t painted with any of the genre appropriate archetypal characteristics that they had in Scary Movie. Tim Curry is squandered because his evil professor never really does anything supposedly included in his diabolical plan. When his character vanishes into the dark, it happens with a whimper rather than a bang. The main thing that Scary Movie 2 has going for it is a cool hip tone that makes its lacking storyline and klutzy pacing seem almost intentional.

The Wayans brothers (director Keenan Ivory Wayans, actors Shawn and Marlon) threw the kitchen sink into making a satire that dances lightly on the heads of supernatural thrillers, politics, sex, corporate influence, racial identity, and pop culture materialism. Scary Movie 2 is a sequel movie product that relies on its audience as consumers already familiar with the product to purchase it again. You can’t really hold anything against the film’s creators because they’re merely trying to imitate a former success based on a hybrid formula of comedy. Predictably, this particular hybrid has been watered down to something very close to cotton candy. Even the movie’s gross-out sight gags play as something contrived that disintegrates as soon as it appears.

Sequels usually suffer because a production company rushes a writer to finish the script so the film can be put on the market while the appeal of the first movie is still fresh in audiences’ minds. Indeed, everything about Scary Movie 2 feels rushed and randomly chosen. As the poster promises, Scary Movie 2 is both “more merciless” and “more shameless.” It’s also a lot more forgettable than its predecessor.