Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Y'know, the critical buzz on this film is actually pretty good. You never would have known it from those awful trailers that made it look like THE SIXTH SENSE with sex thrown in. Capone appears to be absolutely besotten with Ms. Lopez in the film, and I sympathize. Right now, I'm wearing out a friend's DVD of BRING IT ON, watching as both of my future wives Kirsten Dunst and Eliza Dushku must band together to wear tiny skirts and earn my lov... I mean, and win a cheerleading competition. Anyway... I need to go watch a few chapters again. Here's our man in Chi-town in the meanwhile...
Hey Moriarty, Capone in Chicago here. Since it looks like you're running the show while Harry's tanning his ass in Cannes, I figured I'd send you my review of a surprisingly good film, one which I was expected to suck thanks to some suck-ass trailers and T.V. commercials. Here's ANGEL EYES...
Why does Jennifer Lopez have to be so beautiful? It makes it so much harder to believe she’s ALSO a very good actress. It doesn’t seem right that she should be so versatile. Oh well, at least we don’t have to worry that she’ll have a successful singer career as well. That would just send me over the edge.
Let me first start by saying that the ads for J. Lo’s latest film, ANGEL EYES, are 100 percent misleading. This is not some supernatural love story, such as GHOST or CITY OF ANGELS. This is not a film where we find out at the end that he love interest is a guardian angel or a ghost or an 8-year-old who sees dead people. In fact, there is nothing otherworldly about this film at all...thank God! What we have instead is probably the best all-around film that Lopez has ever made.
Lopez is Sharon Pogue, a tough-as-nails Chicago cop (although I’m pretty sure not a single scene of ANGEL EYES was shot in Chicago), who would rather work the graveyard shift and spend the rest of her time asleep or just alone. She has no social life and we suspect early on that something in her past has made her afraid to like or trust people in general. During a foot chase early in the film, Lopez’s life is saved by a man who at first appears to her to be just a good citizen, but we know he’s been following her, watching her, waiting for the moment when their paths can cross. FREQUENCY’s James Caviezel is Catch, the drifting but charming man who watches over her. He couldn’t be any less threatening and she appreciates that he is a man who seems to share her desire not to be bothered by people.
As the film goes on, the layers that cover both characters’ pain are slowly pulled back. Sharon’s problems revolve around her father’s abuse of her mother (the still luminous Sonia Braga). Apparently many years earlier, Sharon called the police on her father (Victor Argo), something he has never forgiven her for. Sharon is angry at her mother for protecting him, and angry at her brother for seemingly following the same abusive tendencies as the father. The scenes of Lopez and her parents are extremely believable and tough to watch, and they reveal Lopez the actress in ways I’d have never thought she was capable of. Her work in OUT OF SIGHT is about as close as it’s come to this point. But after succumbing to the banality of THE WEDDING PLANNER, I certainly wasn’t expecting her follow-up work to be so strong.
Catch’s secret past is even more painful, and he has entered a world of denial so strong as to almost be considered selective amnesia. He just refuses to acknowledge what happened to him about a year earlier. Because of the film’s first scene where we see Lopez rescue an accident victim, we have some clues as to what Catch’s mystery past involves. Anyway, the two strike up what might be the hesitant relationship on film. This is no wild romance movie; this is about two people trying to be together despite overwhelming tendencies to be alone and wallow in their respective miseries. Director Luis Mandoki has dealt with troubled relationships in the past, both successfully (WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN; WHITE PALACE) and not so much (MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE).
With all my gushing about Lopez, I don’t want to forget to mention how convincing Caviezel is in ANGEL EYES. We spot his disturbed tendencies early on. The character was clearly more confident and self-assured before his tragedy, and he keeps us guessing what sent him into his tailspin. The good news about ANGEL EYES is that it treats its characters, its relationships, its family dramas, and the audience seriously. This is exactly the kind of script that Sandra Bullock would have gotten her hands on and dumped a ton of sugar onto to make it PG-13 (ANGEL EYES pulled in an R rating, mostly for a few too many F-words). Lopez’s character has few opportunities for glamming herself up, and the movie is better for it. It’s shocking how someone so decidedly unoriginal as a music maker can be so good at picking scripts. Lopez is the draw, but the intelligence of ANGEL EYES will keep you in.
Capone
(....Mrs. Jennifer Lopez-Capone....Mrs. Jennifer Lopez-Capone...)
