Word: genericizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have great chemistry, taking an argument about a dress and twisting it beautifully into a full-out tete-a-tete. Snipes' nuanced performance--for which he received the Best Actor Award at this year's Venice Film Festival--makes you wish that he would give up playing generic action heroes and return to more serious acting like that of his earlier work with Spike Lee. Charismatic and sincere, he is particularly effective in scenes with Downey (who gives real depth and personality to a character who could have easily come across as a mere caricature...
...mistake. The movie makes viewers obliged to feel sorry for them, a surefire way to kill the fun. Bean's curator host is incredibly whiny and annoying, and quite undeserving of all the screen time he soaks up. MacNicol, whom one wants to strangle, is straight out of the generic fretting and put-upon straightman mold, and his presence truly cheapens Atkinson's admirable efforts...
...form and style of Bean are remarkably generic and trite. However, Atkinson's antics, though truncated, make it barely watchable. When he is by himself and allowed to perform up to his usual levels, the audience can almost forgive the staleness of his vehicle. Scenes including those wherein he monkeys in front of mirrors, goes on secret undercover missions of silliness and gets himself arrested in an airport simply for being Beanish are the film's only redeeming moments. Unfortunately, the contrived sappiness of the plot takes what should have been divinely inspired idiocy and makes it merely dumb...
...Waves lend a familiar sound to a bunch of otherwide deservedly unknown songs. Don't think that unpopularity leaves other tracks necessarily disappointing. "I Love L.A." by the revivors of this past summer's Latin element, O.M.C., has a catchy groove, Boyzone's "Picture of You" frolicks in generic R&B melodies, "He's A Rebel" by Alisha's Attic combines Motown and 50s rock into a contemporary oldies derivative and 10cc's "Art for Art's Sake" lounges in a lazy, drugged-up guitar wasteland. There is even a hilarious cover of "Yesterday...
...ruled by the demographic imperative, it is bound to confuse, if not actually offend, its natural constituencies--nostalgic oldsters, transgressive youngsters--who are antithetical in the first place. Nor in its weirdness does it offer anything but befuddlement for the general movie audience out for a good, conventionally generic time...