UK - "C&C" Reviews Jun 11 2004 UK - "C&C" Reviews The Telegraph hated it, but it had kind (?) words for David: "Enter the token straight guy, a surprisingly deft David Duchovny as Vardalos's confused love interest, keen to patch things up with his estranged bartender brother (Stephen Spinella). It's a terrible role, but Duchovny's quizzical discomfort at least provides some kind of respite from the screeching fag-haggery of his co-stars. (They clutch each other and wail so often that the movie ought to have been renamed "Shrill and Shriller".)" A drag from start to finish (Filed: 11/06/2004) Connie and Carla I'm Not Scared Silence Between Two Things Edward Said: The Last Interview Toni Collette is the best thing in Nia Vardalos's desperate cross-dressing follow-up to 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding', writes Tim Robey Connie and Carla, 15 cert, 98 min You win one, you lose one. Last week, Toni Collette was stranded in the Australian outback in Japanese Story; this week, she's just stranded in Connie and Carla, an all-singing, all-dancing, mainly excruciating gender-swapped spin on Some Like it Hot. Mainly excruciating: Connie and Carla While actually singing and dancing, this splendid actress can't help but be the best thing in the movie, but, between the numbers, you keep wishing she'd duck for cover before the next bit of egg gets catapulted in the direction of her face. Blame Nia Vardalos. Collette is stuck playing second fiddle here to the writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, whose gigantic box-office takings were a testament less to its very disposable charms than to the time-honoured marketability of crude ethnic stereotypes. Vardalos got away with it once, thanks to her polished ugly-duckling persona and obvious labour of love getting the thing made. But Connie and Carla - which attempts to do for cross-dressing what MBFGW did for feta cheese and ouzo - trails with it an acrid waft of follow-up desperation. Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Collette) are aspiring cabaret singers on the run from the mob, thanks to some business with stolen drugs being planted on them that's so lazily scripted you almost suspect it's meant to be a joke. They have the bright idea of hiding out by pretending to be a pair of drag queens in West Hollywood - where they'll no doubt blend in nicely, since the implication is that no one straight or female would dream of living there - and make friends at their local gay bar, where their brassy renditions of Cabaret and Oklahoma standards soon become the talk of the town. In between lectures on the folly of Botox injections and eating disorders, Vardalos is preaching tolerance, inevitably, but what's hardest to stomach about the movie is that it's an impostor itself. When someone describes the duo's transvestite friends as "freaks", it's Vardalos who gets the shocked, wounded close-up, not the men themselves, who might be handy to have around for home decorating but are otherwise neutered adjuncts right out of Will and Grace. Enter the token straight guy, a surprisingly deft David Duchovny as Vardalos's confused love interest, keen to patch things up with his estranged bartender brother (Stephen Spinella). It's a terrible role, but Duchovny's quizzical discomfort at least provides some kind of respite from the screeching fag-haggery of his co-stars. (They clutch each other and wail so often that the movie ought to have been renamed "Shrill and Shriller".) Even the showtunes are stifled by the televisual flatness of the staging, which is precisely what you get when you hire a prolific sitcom director (Michael Lembeck) whose sole feature credit to date is The Santa Clause 2. However, it would be flattering Connie and Carla even to imply that it belongs on TV. It belongs on a skip. I'm Not Scared, 15 cert, 101 min Back in 1991, Gabriele Salvatores's sun-kissed wartime romance Mediterraneo was one of the first films to win its distributor Miramax an Oscar for best foreign film. More than a decade on, after such similarly succulent Italian imports as Il Postino (1994), La Vita è Bella (1997) and Malèna (2000), peddling this postcard cinema has become a billion-dollar industry that shows no intention of shutting up shop. I'm Not Scared isn't Salvatores's first film since Mediterraneo - he's made seven - but it's the first with the right ingredients for Miramax: cute children, golden fields of corn swaying in the summer air, and rumblings of a kidnapping plot that's in no danger of resolving itself unhappily. Based on the bestseller by Niccolò Ammaniti, it engineers an exact cross between the Spanish classic Spirit of the Beehive and Stig of the Dump, as 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) discovers a filthy urchin in a bunker outside his village and tries to help him escape. As a tense and menacing rites-of-passage tale, it might have worked. Instead, it's all wearyingly torpid, sticky and, well, Miramaxy, not helped by a good-for-nothing orchestral score. When the closest thing to a troubling image is a bunch of combine harvesters on the distant horizon, something's clearly amiss. Silence Between Two Things, no cert, 95 min All sorts of things are amiss in Silence Between Two Thoughts, many of them not the director's fault. The Iranian authorities confiscated the negative, so the only form in which it can be shown here is a sort of bootleg video version. It's an unbelievably punishing watch - dingy, impenetrable and oppressive - and for all the praiseworthiness of the political gesture, you have to question the sanity of releasing it at all. Following on from his relatively perky electoral satire Secret Ballot, Babak Payami here relates a dauntingly grim allegory about an executioner being wedded to one of his intended victims because of a religious custom that, being a virgin, she would otherwise go to heaven rather than hell. Further developments are tough to grasp, partly because the actors constantly seem to be standing stock-still under Payami's off-camera orders rather than behaving in any recognisable way like human beings. Your doubts, however compromised, are just too great to give the benefit to something this agonising to watch. After this and other recent disappointments, such as Samira Makhmalbaf's studiously opaque At Five in the Afternoon, Iranian cinema - very much the art house plat du jour a couple of years back - is turning into a bewildering parody of itself. Some new ideas are sorely needed. Edward Said: The Last Interview, no cert, 114 min Edward Said: The Last Interview, which is playing at London's ICA, does what it says on the tin. The celebrated Palestinian- American academic died last year after a bitter decade-long struggle with leukaemia, having recorded this feature-length armchair dialogue in November 2002. Robbed of a centre, as he puts it in enormous frustration, by the ravages of the illness, he was still an amazingly dynamic and persuasive talker, not least in his forceful criticism of the Israelis and Arafat alike. What was perhaps most remarkable in this polymath was his unified way of looking at the world. What Said most valued, whether in music, literature, or political debate, was the same quality - a sense of counterpoint. Or to quote one of his favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Pied Beauty: "All things counter, original, spare, strange…" Go here to read the review: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/06/11/ bfalsos11.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/06/11/ixartright.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- From: Ireland OnLine Vardalos in big fat drag 11/06/2004 - 10:19:53 Connie and Carla Director: Michael Lembeck Cast: Nia Vardalos, Toni Collette, David Duchovny Cert: 12. Don’t sneeze. This one’s so lightweight, it will blow away. Vardalos, who wrote and starred in the successful My Big Fat Greek Wedding, has clearly run out of original thought, as this weak effort borrows too heavily and obviously from a string of previous hits - Some Like It Hot, most obviously, but also Priscilla, Thelma and Louise, Victor/Victoria and Sister Act. Consider the plot. Two gals, Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Collette, and what is such a fine actress thinking about … other than the money), witness a mob slaying and take off for Los Angeles, where they disguise themselves as a couple of guys pretending to be gals in a drag act. All goes well until a hetero hunk (Duchovny) turns up. It’s a passable, ill-constructed, tired rehash of several much better films. It has a couple of good-ish moments, and clearly Ms Vardalos has much lost ground to regain if she is not to be remembered as a one-hit wonder. Star Rating: 1/5 ---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FROM: The Scotsman Connie and Carla (12A) ** Rory Ford BLAME Euro 2004. How are football widows meant to occupy their precious recreational time when they can’t even get near the TV remote because their significant others are glued to that all- important Latvia v Czech Republic crunch match? Blame the current spate of effects- heavy blockbusters currently dominating the box office. What are people of more "mature" sensibilities supposed to go and see if they have no interest in freak weather conditions/Quidditch matches/ monster mashes/ overlong sword and sandal epics? Given the circumstances you can almost see the point of Connie And Carla. Almost. Here’s a film that’s cannily been released at a time when it can sweep up all the disaffected cinema punters looking for a good time. It has box office pedigree (writer and star Nia Vardalos scored a surprise hit last time out with My Big Fat Greek Wedding). It has a touch of class provided by co-star Toni Collette - currently enjoying a reappraisal due to her career-best turn in last week’s Japanese Story. It even boasts a supporting turn from David Duchovny, which should help answer all those nagging "where is he now?" questions the few remaining X-Files fans have been entertaining for the last couple of years. Oh yes - and it’s camper than Graham Norton headlining a musical remake of Carry On Camping. That should be everyone taken care of then. Except, no. Connie And Carla should be more appositely titled My Big Fat Disappointing Second Feature. It’s a reasonably good- humoured but desperately uninspired script from Vardalos that plunders far better movies for its set-up. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. Small-town wannabes Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Collette) are performing show tunes as a singing duo to bored uninterested audiences at Chicago airport when they inadvertently witness a mob hit. Fearing for their lives they go on the run. "We need to hide someplace where there are no dinner theatres. In fact, we need to hide someplace where there is no theatre period, no culture whatsoever," frets Connie. "Los Angeles!" counters Carla. So before you know it the two gal pals are taking bus tours of the stars’ homes in LA hoping to catch a glimpse of Debbie Reynolds’ house. They’re like two very camp gay men trapped in women’s bodies - which will prove to be useful later on. A brief stint working in a beauty salon allows Vardalos to make some lame gags about LA-LA Land’s body fascism, but satire isn’t the former stand-up’s strong point. Actually after watching this you’ll be left wondering what is. You can take the girls out of showbiz but you can’t take the biz out of the girls and their innate desire to perform leads them to pose as drag queens singing would be showstoppers at their local gay bar. Yes, it’s Some Like It Hot, but with a "clever" gender switcheroo. Except this is more like Some Like It Not Not content with having Billy Wilder spinning in his grave, Vardalos’ set-up means that Connie and Carla are women pretending to be men pretending to be women - just like Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria. There really isn’t anything original under the LA sun. Admittedly there’s nothing wrong with raiding old movies for ideas - as long as you’re going to put a fresh spin on them - and at least write some new gags. Vardalos has none. In lieu of a script, the movie pads out its running time with endless sequences of Connie and Carla performing their musical medleys to increasingly adoring audiences. The first one is moderately amusing and establishes C and C as also-rans living out their dream - by the time you get to the fifth you’ll be begging for mercy. Director Michael Lembeck is a TV graduate whose only previous feature was the straight to video sequel The Santa Clause 2. He seems more than a little lost on the big screen, unwilling - or perhaps unable - to do more than flatly film Vardalos’s tired script. There’s little doubt that this is Vardalos’ project all the way. Collette (who is by far the better actress) is likeable and passably funny as Carla but she is sidelined and made up to look absolutely hideous in her guise as a drag queen. Vardalos, in marked contrast, is glammed up. Hmmmm. Every time the movie threatens to capture your interest Vardalos’ ego gets in the way. A sub-plot concerning fellow drag queen Robert (Stephen Spinnelli) being reunited with his estranged straight brother, Jeff (Duchovny) who’s about to get married almost drags the movie back into the land of the living. Spinnelli plays it - no pun intended - straight and with a quiet dignity while Duchovny similarly looks like a recognisably human being among a collection of shrill stereotypes. You may guess that this sibling relationship is headed for love, hugs and acceptance, but then when a movie is this mishandled you’ll take any hint of genuine sentiment over another tiresome musical medley anyday. However, Vardalos’ vanity muscles in on the reconciliation and poor old Spooky Mulder ends up playing her obligatory love interest. Yes, she’s torn between posing as a drag queen and telling him she’s really a woman (Victor/Victoria). Yes, she plants a kiss on him in reverse gender guise (Some Like It Hot). No, Duchovny doesn’t slap his/her face - shame. Not to put too fine a point on it, Vardalos is one of the most annoying actresses in Christendom - strident, charmless and unfunny. She makes a fatally weak focus for the movie and is deeply unconvincing as a romantic lead both due to her unlikeable presence and - not to be ungallant about this - prominent proboscis. It takes a frankly unmanageable leap of faith to buy that Duchovny (no slouch in the schnozz stakes himself) would ever be attracted to Vardalos even if she weren’t posing as a drag queen. Similarly the "comic" villains who are after C and C are too buffoonish to provide any sense of a real threat (or, God knows, momentum) to the story. All that is left is a series of patronising platitudes about the value of tolerance, which may well fall on stony ground because the movie itself is frequently intolerable. A Big Fat Ego Trip, in fact. Cultivating an interest in football never seemed quite so appealing. http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=661602004 ---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- FROM: Channel 4 News (UK) CONNIE AND CARLA FILM REVIEW Nia Vardalos follows up My Big Fat Greek Wedding with a broad comedy about two showbiz wannabes who hide out from the mob by posing as drag queens. Also starring Toni Collette Like a burly man in high-heeled shoes, gender-bending comedy Connie And Carla is attention-grabbing, however it's too often awkward and clumsy. Writer and star Nia Vardalos may have scored 'Big Fat' box office receipts with her Greek Wedding, but while that was a breath of fresh air, this tale of women pretending to be men pretending to be women reeks of desperation. Vardalos is Connie, one half of a cut-price cabaret act who entertains notions of stardom. Unfortunately her stage partner and bosom pal, Carla (Collette), is primarily focused on her romance with hometown hick Mikey (Mihok). It's only when they witness a mob killing that the duo are forced to broaden their horizons and skip town for Los Angeles. Once there, Connie and Carla reinvent themselves, mostly involving foot-high wigs and inch-deep make-up, and together they become Hollywood's hottest drag act. It's simply fabulous darling, except they're in danger of blowing their cover. Furthermore, masquerading as a gay man in a glittery gown threatens to seriously scupper Connie's chances with local heartthrob Jeff, played by the charismatic David Duchovny. It could be Some Like It Hot meets The Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, instead Connie And Carla is lacking in refinement - and not just in the wardrobe department. Every twist of the plot feels like a turn of the wringer, culminating in a finale that's in such a hurry to tie up the loose ends, it trips up and falls flat on its face. Toni Collette delivers the only sincere performance while many of the major players are treated as caricatures. Positioned centre stage, Vardalos appears insecure, consistently overselling her lines. There are some genuine laughs to be had, like Jeff's reaction to being kissed by Connie while still believing her to be a man, and hitman Tibor (McGiver) getting swept up in a singalong. Unfortunately, the occasional bit of sparkle just isn't enough to keep this show from veering off the road. http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=131270 ---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- UK - "C&C" Reviews http://emerald.bbboy.net/ddfans-viewthread?forum=2&thread=977 Powered By BbBoard - http://bb.bbboy.net