Director Garry Marshall has two mega hits on his resume, ironically, the super-gay Bette Midler weepie Beaches and the super straight Julia Roberts-Richard Gere sex comedy Pretty Woman. The creative balancing triumph of the same man directing both these movies dissipates, however, when one looks over the rest of his dreary catalog: everything from the low S&M flop comedy Exit to Eden to the dreadful parody Young Doctors In Love. In between there has been the treacle of The Other Sister, a re-teaming with Roberts and Gere in the dud farce Runaway Bride and the worst of the worst earlier this year, the execrable Raising Helen.
Marshall, it has become clear, is not a director who makes movies with much personality—they are serviceable and formulaic and get the job done. The hits seem to be the ones that start off with the proper wattage of star power molded into the traditional star vehicles. Snagging Julie Andrews for 2001’s Princess Diaries, therefore, ensured the director of his first hit in the 11 years since Pretty Woman. And if Julie Andrews wasn’t born to play a queen on screen, neither was Nathan Lane in The Birdcage.
The first Princess Diaries told the story of teenage klutz Mia (Anne Hathaway) who finds out she’s royalty and is transformed from gawky, frizzy-haired schlump into brunette swan by her grandmother-fairy godmother and current queen of tiny Genovia, the regal but kindly Queen Clarisse (Andrews). Hathaway was discovered for the film and signed by Marshall after doing a short audition tape. Marshall overstates it when he compares her to a young Audrey Hepburn during a making-of featurette on the just-released Special Edition DVD of the movie, but he has shown good casting instincts by putting her in the role.
The special features on the DVD also include a batch of deleted scenes set up by Marshall, a glimpse of a healthy looking producer Whitney Houston posing for photos with Andrews, and lots of other stuff. The extras are sure to appeal to the movie’s core audience of young teenage girls and gay men of a certain proclivity. Here I offer the anecdotal evidence of my 13-year-old niece and my partner, who both grabbed their copies and headed straight for the DVD player where they sat entranced for hours. Later, my niece complained that there weren’t more CD-Rom interactive games and my partner that there wasn’t a feature on the costume designer. There’s the rub!
As for the sequel, Princes Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, Marshall has wisely done his research and added lots more screen time for Andrews (whose elegance and good humor seem effortless—she even gamely tosses off a silly nod to Mary Poppins with aplomb). Marshall also spends less time on the klutz thing with Hathaway—a decided plus. We are now in sunny picturesque Genovia (aka the Disney back lot), where the citizens/tourists all speak perfect American-accented English and are ready at a moment’s notice to line up for a royal parade (not unlike at the Magic Kingdom). Mia has 30 days to wed before losing the throne. She must choose between the impeccably bred but boring Andrew (Callum Blue) and the scheming, swarthy, helmet-haired Sir Nicholas (Chris Pine), who makes her heart hot, and is a dead ringer for 1970s hunk Andrew Stevens in The Fury.
There is also a slumber party in which Andrews says, ‘Queens rarely do karaoke’ before she sort of raps/sings along with Raven as a visiting princess, after which everybody takes a ride on a mattress sled. There is a dressing room for the princess that Joan Crawford would envy—with closets and closets of shoes, dresses and purses, an early scene where Mia and the rest of the royal clan look over her royal potentials (including real-life English Prince William and a fictional candidate disqualified because he’s gay). And there are lots of nice comic visual bits and strangely enough, endless ‘I Love Lucy’ in-jokes.
All in all, this is really the movie equivalent of a Love Boat cruise with Marshall an apt but benign Captain Stubing earnestly doing his best to bring the ship into port. While it lasts—Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, shot in shades of deep purple, gold, yellow and pink—will once again appeal to its previous passengers. That it might not find a lot of new ones could be a problem for future cruises of this ilk and prevent a Happily Ever After tag that, if nothing else, is Marshall’s stock in trade.
Alien vs. Predator was not made available for press screenings, never a good sign. As a fan of both sci-fi franchises (and the game’s pretty cool, too), I’m hoping 20th has a surprise hit after the black hole that was Chronicles of Riddick earlier this summer. By the time you read this, the all-important opening weekend will have come and gone and the tag line of the movie will—or will not—have come true for its audience: “Whoever Wins … We Lose.”
Local Screenings:
Outfoxed, the documentary that tracks the descent of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel’s ‘race to the bottom’ in television news, available on DVD from www.moveon.org, will be screened for free around town at various locations followed by discussion. Both the multiple screenings and talk fests are hosted by the Café Society arm of The Public Square, a debate society that focuses on current events. See www.thepublicsquare.com.
Facets Film Forum continues its Bertolucci festival through 8/28 and includes his greatest achievement on Friday, 8/20, the ravishing Last Tango In Paris. Certainly, it has Brando’s last fantastic sustained performance and the sensuous Gato Barbieri score is a must have for any soundtrack or jazz enthusiast.