Caseus Archivelox: Vanilla Sky & Tortilla Soup

2002-06-26 - 3:09 p.m.
So the two movies my dad rented from Saturday night. Just by looking at them you wouldn't expect them to be related, but they are in an unfortunate way: both are completely unnecessary remakes of good foreign movies. Vanilla Sky was by far the better movie, because while it did dumb down and add unneeded bells and whistles to a good plot, it was still well directed and acted (by everyone besides Penelope Cruz who continues to be absolutely terrible in English-language films, no, I'm not forgetting Blow, she was easily the worst thing in that movie, and don't get me started on Woman on Top or All the Pretty Horses for her bad acting). Penelope can act in Spanish films, but eesh, she was very bad in this. And it's not that she didn't know what she was talking about, it was a very similar plot to Abre Los Ojos which she had done much better in. But I liked Vanilla Sky.

Tortilla Soup on the other hand. Ok, let me try to recreate what the moviemakers were thinking when they decided to make the movie: Two very white men are sitting in the office of one. They are giggling constantly, have problems making coherent sentences [ed. note: I've made them slightly more sensible, because they really were giggling too much, and it would have taken longer had I included every "Oh wait... wait..." and breaking down in laughing, and their long digressive rant about how hot Velma was and that Shaggy was banging all the women on all the 70s TV Shows, and that he once walked in on a threesome of Ginger, Farrah Fawcett, and The Fonz... but I digress, and you don't care]. One is saying, "Ang Lee is really hot now. Look at Crouching Tiger, and I'm sure The Hulk will be big. But his earlier Hong Kong films are too inaccessible to American audiences. They're stupid. Let's remake one." Another says: "We haven't made a good Latino movie in years. That's a growing audience, and all the pot I've been smoking is giving me some serious munchies, so let's remake Eat Drink Man Woman as a Latino movie." The first: "That's the best idea I've heard since I was passed the script for Big Momma's House." The second: "But we need all the Mexican actors and actresses we can find for the movie." The first: "I don't know any." The second: "What about Hector Elizondo? I'm sure we can find lots of them. And they'll all be incredibly talented, and we can have another Oscar caliber film like Eat Drink Man Woman." Then they both took more hits from the prodigious bong lit with the scripts of people like John Sayles and Charlie Kaufman and started to giggle. 6 months later this piece of recycled claptrap was released and caused me to waste 100 minutes of my life. Every plot twist was obvious from the beginning, I only cared about the youngest daughter (because she looked fairly good) and the eldest daughter because it was Elizabeth Peña who was in one of my favorite movies (and has incredible relevance to my love of serious movies, not to mention my love of dark hair) Lone Star. I loved that movie when I saw it when I was 16 (which is one reason why I can forgive Matthew McConaughey for almost any number of bad films he's been in, although if Reign of Fire sucks because of him, any goodwill will be completely gone). I liked movies before then, but it was more as one of the uneducated masses like movies rather than the more cultured lover of non-s---ty movies I am now. Tortilla Soup was terrible. My dad who normally reads the New York Times reviews to figure out what movies to see listened to some friends (he declined to mention who they where when I asked) who said it was a great movie. Reading the review (which has lines like "There hasn't been this much forced wackiness since what some consider the golden days of sitcoms, and poor [Raquel] Welch doesn't have the acting skills to make her anything other than an embarrassment. She's important in an unforeseen way: she makes you focus on the other performers in any given scene. Martin and his grown children are missing something, besides a script. Even if you haven't seen "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Tortilla Soup" is still as predictable as a fast-food restaurant" in it) would not make me want to see the movie. The only good thing about it is the food preparation scenes. But there is too much crappiness between the food scenes to make it worthwhile. If you want good looking food, go for Like Water for Chocolate, Tampopo, Big Night, or the aforementioned Eat Drink Man Woman. Those are great movies with mouthwatering food. Tortilla Soup wasn't.