THE LAST SAMURAI (Edward Zwick, 2003)

My nephew takes exception to the fact that in Edward Zwick’s sometimes interesting, sometimes ridiculous The Last Samurai Tom Cruise was speaking Japanese phonetically rather than understanding the Japanese he spoke. (The Cruise character’s Japanese is limited to a few lines of dialogue.) I’m not bothered by this, because Cruise will have understood what he was saying from the English-language script, and the character itself is doing the same thing, speaking the Japanese that he has learned phonetically to correspond to the translation he has been given for his English. The titular Japanese character, “the last samurai,” by the way speaks perfect English.
    I don’t say this often about a film, but this one is far too short for the territory it wishes to cover. The character that Cruise plays remains murky (in any language), and stays outside the time-period to boot, and an even weaker performance is delivered by the actress who plays the widow of a man whom Cruise has killed in battle. Two of the film’s performances, however, are excellent: Ken Watanabe’s as Katsumoto, “the last samurai,” and Shichinosuke Nakamura’s as young Emperor Meiji. Each of these actors delivers at least one heart-piercing moment.
    What about Zwick? It turns out that he has as little as ever to say about anything, and he and his cinematographer, John Toll, deliver one visual cliché after another. Perhaps if he hadn’t skimped on his protagonist’s background—Cruise’s Nathan Algren begs the question: How much war can a man take?—and had devoted another full hour to it up front, then he might have been compelled to address all the psychological and moral issues that he glides over to get to the battles. Zwick is too quick.
    However, I do like the Henry V-material. I only wonder that the film makes no mention anywhere of Japanese racism. The nineteenth-century (like the twentieth-century) Japanese considered other Pacific Asian ethnicities as vastly inferior to themselves and would not have thought much of some white man like Nathan Algren either. To cover this, all that Zwick and his writers have come up with are jokes about how “ugly” and “repulsive” Algren, a.k.a. Tom Cruise, is.
    Yeah, right.

HAIRSPRAY (Adam Shankman, 2007)

Despite top billing, John Travolta claims a supporting role, as Edna Turnblad, in Adam Shankman’s Hairspray, which is based on a stage musical that’s based on John Waters’ 1988 movie, where Divine more reasonably got third billing for his Edna. One of the worst film actors ever, Travolta is okay here, although clichéd; but acting is hardly what matters in this protracted film.
     Tracy, Edna’s daughter, is the protagonist, who, despite her plus-size and brunette bouffant, wins a daily dancing gig on Philadelphia’s local television program for teenyboppers in the early 1960s, The Corny Collins Show, a satirization of American Bandstand. The question remains, though, whether Tracy can also win the crown of the show’s best dancer, especially since Amber Van Tussle, a nasty, skinny blonde, has won three years running. Meanwhile, the program relegates African-American teens to one installment of the show per year; but the times are a-changin’, and blacks, joined by a smattering of whites, including Tracy, march in protest on the TV station to have the program integrated. As it happens, Tracy loses her competitive crown, but so does Amber, and Tracy doesn’t mind at all.
     The songs and dances—music by Marc Shaiman; lyrics, Scott Wittman and Shaiman; choreography, Shankman—are nearly nonstop and buoyant, with an occasional grown-up light poignancy. The songs are inoffensive; the dancing, uninteresting. Corny Collins, sensing the pulse of the future, pursues integration of his show’s dance floor cold-bloodedly, purely for commercial reasons: the film’s one palpable hit.
     The film’s civil-rights backdrop somewhat demeans the actual struggle and fails to convince.
     All the acting is superficial, but Travolta has an hilarious moment when plus-size Edna runs into a door, and James Marsden is striking as calculating Corny Collins, a miserable bastard beneath his perpetual on-air smile.