In The Stepford Wives, Kidman plays Joanna, an idealistic TV executive-slash-staunch feminist whose new season lineup features man-bashing reality shows that one could hardly call subdued. But when one of her controversial shows gets her into trouble with the network, she’s fired. Depressed and miserable, Joanna, with her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick), moves the family from the chaotic anxiety of the city to the picture-perfect bucolic town of Stepford, Connecticut – or is it too perfect? The town seems so ideal, so happy, so cheerful, so joyful, so…perfect, that it’s too much for a true-blue New Yorker to handle. With the two other black sheep of the town, Roger (Roger Bart) and Bobbie (Bette Midler), Joanna looks for the secret this seemingly flawless town is hiding, and they find it: The men of Stepford, headed by Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), who’s married to Claire (Glenn Close), have been turning their wives into robots, programmed slaves that wait on them hand and foot, even – as Bobbie shockingly points out – providing enormous orgasms at the middle of the day. Together, the three have to find a way to escape before they themselves become robots.
Director Frank Oz does one thing different with his new version of Stepford: Instead of setting the film’s tone as a horror movie, he ups the comic aspect of the screenplay. This decision could’ve proven to be fatal for the remake, though Oz, with screenwriter Paul Rudnick, is able to pull this off: the hilarious script of dark-comic satire and zippy one-liners successfully infuses and melds the scraps of the ‘70s feminism movement that appeared in the novel with the modern-day sensibilities of 2004.
But the cast is what I love the most about The Stepford Wives: Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, Glenn Close, Matthew Broderick, (big screen debut alert!) Faith Hill – what more could you want? Their performances, like Stepford’s façade, are perfect: Kidman and Midler are hilarious as the antisocial Joanna and bohemian scatterbrain Bobbie, respectively. But it’s Glenn Close, Faith Hill and the other oh-so-perfect women of Stepford that provide the film’s true delight; their Stepfordized selves are funny and freaky at the same time that when you laugh (and you laugh a lot), you’re not sure whether you’re laughing because you think it’s funny or because you’re afraid to actually be scared.
Bottom Line: The Stepford Wives is a fresh, fun, hilarious feminist satire with an irresistible cast.
Grade: B+
Freddy vs. Jason? That’s so last year. The next battle royale between two movie monsters is Alien vs. Predator, which tries to replicate the success of the former, which was a fun, campy, but dumb romp of horror-geek fantasies; however, AVP is nothing but dumb.
There’s barely a plot in AVP, so I don’t know why I’d bother trying to explain it. But for the desperately curious, here I go: After an ancient pyramid is found in Antarctica, an old, rich guy (Lance Henriksen) with disposable cash hires a team of bland, two-dimensional characters to excavate the site; among them are Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), an environmental guide, and Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova), an archaeologist. However, once they arrive at the pyramid, they realize that they’re caught in the middle of a war between the two sci-fi movie alien species: the Aliens from the Alien quadrilogy and the Predators from the two films starring the Governator. And as always, as the body count rises, they must find a way to escape before they’re killed…blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so you already may have noticed that I don’t like this movie very much, and there are plenty of reasons why. Let’s begin with the screenplay, or rather, the lack of it: writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson’s skeleton of a script is just a sorry, pathetic excuse to get the two monsters together, and is filled with some of the most shockingly bad dialogue we’ve seen all year; at one point, some guy with a gun (frankly, the movie was so boring I didn’t even bother to remember his name) oh-so-eloquently shouts, "You ugly, son of a bitch!" to an alien. Now that’s a quote to remember, one that stands alongside, "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn." Also, half the time, with all the bullets, slime, and blood flying past you, you don’t even know what’s happening, and you don’t even bother to know.
Anderson is so caught up with all the visual effects and action that he doesn’t care if his screenplay is a mess, if the story propels to absurdity, and if his actors give terrible performances. Words aren’t enough to describe the extreme dreadfulness of Alien vs. Predator: bad, terrible, awful, stupid, silly, dumb, ridiculous, painful, excruciating, torturous, horrendous, agonizing, pathetic, even headache-inducing; they just don’t do the trick. AVP isn’t just the hands-down worst film so far of 2004, it’s cinema at its lowest, most unpleasant form.
Bottom Line: Alien vs. Predator’s tagline goes, "Whoever wins… we lose." They’re right: We lose 90 minutes of our time, we lose our faith in cinema, and we lose the will to live.
Grade: F
•Watch The Stepford Wives.
•Definitely avoid even thinking about watching Alien vs. Predator. If you are, however, forced to see it, don’t forget the Extra Strength Tylenol.