SAY IT AGAIN, DIANNE

DIRECTED BY CAMERON CROWE

STARRING: JOHN CUSACK, IONE SKYE, JOHN MAHONEY, LILI TAYLOR, CHYNNA PHILIPS, AMY BROOKS, POLLY PLATT, JEREMY PIVEN with BEBE NEUWIRTH and PHILIP BAKER HALL

Dianne Court (Ione Skye) is the nervous valedictorian whose speech doesn’t connect with a single person from school. Lloyd Doddler (John Cusack) doesn’t want it to. He’s a sweet variation of the jock who’d score ten on ten on the vulnerability scale. In him, there’s much to love and little to comprehend – he’s the guy who’d ask you what you’d want for your birthday as much as he’s capable of springing a surprise on his own. And he can manage a full party at that, given the amount of people in his influence circle – one he plays ‘keymaster’ to.

‘Say Anything’ has a plot that I don’t even need to discuss. You'd see why. Dianne has won a fellowship to England, Lloyd doesn’t even know what he’s going to do the coming Summer. Dianne has a friend in her Father (John Mahoney), Lloyd has a big sister (Joan Cusack) to whom he plays older brother at times. And younger brother at other times. He finds close friends in DC (Amy Brooks) and Corey (Lili Taylor) while Dianne has muses at best. His is a world that she is yet to explore. Hers is one he wouldn’t if not for her. Let me quote some lines in support of that:

"I don’t know, I’ve thought about this quite a bit, Sir. And I don’t think there’s really much that’s waiting out there for me. I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, I wouldn’t buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought or... processed. And I wouldn’t want to repair anything sold, bought or processed, as a career, I don’t want to do that. My Father’s in the army and he wants me to join, but eh... I can’t do that. What I’m going to do then is... kickboxing. Which is a new sport, but I think it’s got a good future."

Cameron Crowe is the best 80s filmmaker of the 90s. And the new millennium as well. Right down to his latest in ‘We Bought a Zoo’ (that I happened to watch/review a few days back), an unusual choice of film that he romanticized in his own way. He’s the epitome of extra-optimism characteristic of one who grew up with Springsteen and Rock-n-Roll; he ‘sticks.’ Enough to get you inspired; enough to get you wanting not to be. Either way, he’d trigger a response.

I’m reverse-processing the Crowe line of heroes here. ‘We Bought a Zoo’ had a really natural Matt Damon, complete with testy smile and the twinkle in his eye as the romantic, which he contrasted with a passable portrayal of the helpless Dad who didn’t know what to do to help his Son, only capable of holding on to him, hoping he’d cling. ‘Elizabethtown’ had Orlando Bloom in a surprising revelation of potential as the Crowe-romantic, which I think he followed up decently well in his segment with Christina Ricci in ‘New York, I Love you.’ ‘Jerry Maguire’ and ‘Vanilla Sky’ had Hollywood’s own jerk/loser in Tom Cruise (remember ‘Cocktail’?), while in ‘Almost Famous,’ he split man and boy to two different beings (Billy Crudup and Patrick Fugit), switching bodies every now and then.

‘Say Anything’ has John Cusack. I think he’s one of the most endearing of Hollywood heroes. Anyone who’s watched ‘Bullets over Broadway’ would side with me here. Like how someone who’s watched ‘Midnight in Paris’ would side with me on Owen Wilson as well, whom I’ve liked ever since Wes Anderson’s ‘Bottle Rocket’ (1996). These are really personal filmmakers we're talking about. Allen, Crowe; Alexander Payne. You can’t get any more personal than a Woody Allen protagonist does. Payne, I think, would come second best, where Crowe is ambition rather than depiction as such. Cusack would eventually go on to work his charm yet again with the inimitably sugar-coated ‘Serendipity’ that had Nick Drake as well to add to its worth.

Anyway, since this is a recollection (self-proclaimed) and not an actual ‘review’, let me quote another line.

“Are you here because you want someone or you want me? (pause) Well, you know what? Forget it. (goes ahead and kisses)”

Ione Skye is beautiful. Standout beautiful, I mean. In the sense that I wouldn’t want to watch another film of hers to foil the impression she’s made with this one. It’s a rare delight when actor and character mesh so well that you’re in a trance enough to not see their individual fibres. Like Julie Delpy in ‘Before Sunrise.’ Felicity Jones in ‘Like Crazy.’ Emily Watson in ‘Punch-Drunk Love,’ even though more abstract and less-emphasized. All these people substantiate a really pretty woman with character and intellect or simple street-smartness which, in essence, amounts to the same thing. And Skye, as Dianne, we find, is exactly what Corey and DC concur about her – that she’s “a Brain, trapped in the body of a game-show host.”

I don’t mean to patronize when I say this, or maybe I do mean to, but ‘Say Anything’ sets the romance standard. Contemporary urban cinema-wise, I mean. It has all the ingredients, where what’s best is that Crowe made the ingredients and he's made them with wild-eyed honesty and utmost care. I’d like to move for induction of the Crowe standard into the list of the seven basic plots in Film Theory as an upgrade of the 'Romeo and Juliet' routine. Who’s with me on this?

TWENTY SECONDS TOO LATE?

DIRECTED BY CAMERON CROWE

STARRING: MATT DAMON, SCARLETT JOHANSSON, COLIN FORD, MAGGIE ELIZABETH JONES, PATRICK FUGIT, ANGUS MacFADYEN, ELLE FANNING, JOHN MICHAEL HIGGINS, CARLA GALLO with JB SMOOVE, STEPHANIE SZOSTAK and THOMAS HADEN CHURCH

Cameron Crowe’s most adventurous film till date might not have all it takes to jump off the page. But it has enough to make do with. ‘We Bought a Zoo’ is ridden with Crowe-staples in a plotline that looks too easy to come by but hard to digest – exactly what the man has been about all his life. It’s a leisure trip that doesn’t amount to much else. Kind of how a newly-widowed father takes his two kids, one on the shoulder, the other by his side, on an escape into the wilderness where, in this case, he’s bought it beforehand. ‘Do not feed the animals’ doesn’t apply to his crazy twenty seconds.

Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) is about Damon’s age and has his hair, something that his seven year old daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) uses to distinguish him with from other Dads his age. It has been six months since his wife had died, so we’re looking at a time past the mourning period where the decision gets made about setting the wheels in motion back again. Well, the wheels are in motion, Ben gets hit on by a fellow single parent who’s taken her time to make them some lasagna, a dinner which he, out of solidarity or rather a lack thereof, saves for later in a fridge that’s stacked. There looks to be plenty of cooks for hire about town.

The younger child is easy where the older one is beyond repair. It’s only natural to expect that with Crowe’s optimism. Rosie mothers her Dad, Ben gives back. The older child is a boy who has, to put it simply, crossed over. Every child spawned in Hollywood is an amazing artist post-trauma. In a Cameron Crowe movie, we’re simply looking at escalation. Dylan (Colin Ford), named for Bob Dylan by both Benjamin and Crowe, sleeps with his art book so his Dad could take a look when he’s done. This effort is totally required after he gets expelled from school for decapitating on the school wall. It’s what you get when you draw a grotesque head-severing mural amidst sunshine and rainbows.

On a parallel note, Ben quits his job as an investigative reporter who’s given a column on an e-Paper as a sympathetic gesture. His Boss thinks it’s only natural. Ben thinks he can do better. He’s still a forty-year old bundle of quirks with all of Damon’s spontaneity and, like I said, a whole head of hair. His son has just been expelled, his daughter can adapt and his brother Duncan (Thomas Haden Church) keeps asking him why he hasn’t moved on yet. What can be a better time to decide to?

Now, I don’t know how many real-estate agents are Black, and it sure isn’t easy logic to ascertain why Crowe had cast JB Smoove in the role of one Mr. Stevens, but we almost have a ‘Show me the Money’ recap where Rosie tells him she likes him instead. He shows the Mee-twosome of Ben and Rosie a long-abandoned house that’s ‘9 miles away from the nearest grocer.’ However, it doesn’t overlook a graveyard as far as clichés go. It comes with a Zoo. And a 28-year old zookeeper by the name of Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson) who’s married to it to agoraphobic proportions.

The other ‘inmates’ are technical expert Peter MacCready (Angus MacFadyen), who’s kind of a Luigi to this Radiator Springs where Guido, possibly, is Robin Jones (Patrick Fugit) as the only person in the vicinity who can be entrusted with the extremely rare Capuchin monkey. Then there’s Lily Miska (Elle Fanning) a really tall 13-year old who is home-schooled and works at the restaurant for under-the-table wages just so she could bring Dylan a sandwich at 4:15 in the evening every day. There are a couple more people to put up tent-poles and fences and help to round up an escaped bear, but that’s only because there can’t be more rifles than there are human beings. It’s a ground rule.

Duncan calls Kelly a motivating factor. Ben courts the zoo. A personal drama becomes an obstacle course where the hurdles disappear with a sleight of heart. In other words, Ben sidesteps them with his daughter on his shoulder and his son by his side, like I said. It’s an escape, not a solution, but the sad part is that the escape also encompasses the solution, as discussed by Kelly and Ben with respect to Spar, the Tiger, in an obvious comparison. Jerry Maguire tells Dorothy Boyd that he’d take her Son to the Zoo sometime. Dorothy tells him that wouldn’t change a thing. It’s the same case with Kelly and the film on the whole. It takes us all to the Zoo. We have a wife-bereft individual and a son who’s resisting change and we go to the zoo with them. I think that sums up the experience.

‘We Bought a Zoo’ is exactly how Crowe would make ‘We Bought a Zoo’ and that doesn’t make it a bad film. It’s ill-fated in that there’s been a better one recently. I’m talking about ‘the Descendants,’ from the second-most romantic of defeatists after Woody Allen. Everyone in this film pitted against everyone in ‘the Descendants’ would lose big on credibility except for Kelly who doesn’t have a peer. And Ben, maybe, who is Damon’s own characteristic show. ‘Elizabethtown’ wasn’t worst-hit where ‘Jersey Girl’ went down on a ‘Garden State’ time. ‘We Bought a Zoo’ is most unfortunate that way. Between two inheritances, you pick the one with more at stake. And I, with widower-speculation, felt I should kiss Elizabeth goodbye rather than have Katherine (Stephanie Szostak) say ‘Why Not?’ again. Which, of course, has more to do with the film than the actual situation that is Crowe-crazy and, no doubt, beautiful.