No Reservations
My Blog
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Now, I hate to be too harsh on a film but with the movie No Reservations I find that to be quite difficult. The first question I have is, Don’t these actors read these scripts before they take the role? I mean, if I had read this script I think I would have asked if it had somehow gotten mixed up with the junior high screenwriting competition entries.
It really was that bad.
A famous director once said that no amount of directing talent could make up for bad writing. Well, I don’t think this director could make up for good writing.
You see, the problem was three fold. One, the script was uninspiring, uninteresting, and failed in just about every attempt at wit. What seemed intended as funny came across as inane and sophomoric. It’s like they got Lawrence Kasdan to write the script but shot him up with Thorazine first.
Two. The pacing was off. What I mean by pacing is the time it takes for the actors to deliver a line, or the time it takes the camera to switch from one angle or point of view to another, or the duration of silence between lines in dialogue. Even how fast an actor walks into, through, or out of, a room. All of these, among other things, work together to control the pacing. (For perfect pacing look at Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon). In this case, it was slow at times when it should have been fast, too quick when it should have been allowed to build to a point, such as the scene where the little girl, Zoë, couldn’t find her scarf, yet the stairwell scene with the neighbor was almost downright stalled.
Three. No spark. No sizzle. Not so much as a mere flash of light anywhere in the entire movie. The male lead was no doubt supposed to be cute, but only came off as annoying. The female lead was supposed to be lonely, in need of someone or something other than her work to give a deeper fulfillment to her life, but she appeared to be no more than just a hard working single woman doing her job.
All of the stage business-a theatre term for any little bit of action in a scene-looked set up, manufactured - synthetic. Note how Catherine Zeta-Jones’ character ‘helps’ take off a customer’s overcoat.
Pitiful.
Or the scene where the pregnant underling hands her a bottle of water and tries to settle her down. Talk about tearing down that imaginary fourth wall? You can almost see the director off stage yelling, “Aaaaand ACTION!”
And how many times are we going to have to see the gum smacking, nose pierced, Goth painted babysitter in black showing up and shocking us all? In the words of Rocky Balboa, I’m gonna’ have use a bad word here…Cliché.
In Good Fellas we get the chance to see what the seductive, tinsel mob nightlife was like. In Sideways we get to feel the passion of someone who is a true lover of fine wines to the point where we wanted, yearned even, for just a taste of the virgin vine ourselves. But in No Reservations, there was no such draw to gourmet cooking. We didn’t get the ‘feel’ of the prestigious chef-run kitchen nor did we get to experience the tastes and wonders of the elite upper level food preparation arts. The animated Ratatouille did a bettrer job of whetting the appetite. A cooking infomercial had more culinary intrigue. As Tom Servo, Joel, or Crow would say, “Sad, really.”
Also, the whole therapist bit was unnecessary and should have been left on the cutting room floor. And I’ll even say that if they would have omitted the kid and the dead mother thing entirely the result would have been a cleaner, better film. You didn’t need it. It only cluttered the story. A simple romantic comedy about a lonely workaholic woman and a carefree, happy-with-life kind of guy would have been preferable, and would have given us a much tighter and shorter, oh the gods have mercy, SHORTER movie.
No Reservations is very much a perfect case study of bland, tepid, and flavorless filmmaking.
“Sad, really.”
I could say much more, but there are only so many gigabytes in the World Wide Web so I’ll just leave you with this. If you decide to see No Reservations, wait for it to come to the dollar movie theatre…on half price Tuesday…with a coupon. You’ll thank me.
Keck
