Word: mcgregor
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...mastery of a technique wherein cartoonish, exaggerated characters interact with frighteningly realistic characters to great comedic and dramatic effect. Here, though, all of the characters are cartoons, and with no contrast (and no reason for the audience to care about them), the film becomes reliant solely on Ewan McGregor's big smile as a lure for audience involvement. McGregor is a handsome guy, but no mug could save these flimsy characterizations--especially in conjunction with that ridiculous hair...
When director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge, producer Andrew MacDonald, and star Ewan McGregor cruised over from the U.K. and crashed onto the U.S. film scene last year with the brilliant Trainspotting, cinema got the adrenaline shot that the Pulp Fiction only purported to give. Trainspotting's startling ability to combine black humor, wit, romance, violence and pathos in a story about Scottish heroin addicts marked it as one of the best films of the year, if not the decade. The team embraced their incredibly risky subject matter with energy and vigor, and managed to make commercially palatable a screenplay...
...film opens promisingly enough, as we are introduced to Robert (McGregor), a recently laid-off janitor with a really bad haircut. After having been replaced by a cheap robot and dumped by his gum-chewing girlfriend within the space of a few hours, our shaggy protagonist is at the end of his rope. During a trippy-freak-out-on-the-bed scene (which bears a strong resemblance to the trippy-freak-out-on-the-bed scene in Trainspotting), Robert comes up with a solution: kidnap his ex-boss' daughter Celine (a painfully typecast Diaz), drive away and improvise from there...
...problems with the film are not limited to stylistic issues: McGregor and Diaz display about as much chemistry as a pile of salt and, well, another pile of salt. It is difficult to tell whether or not the two actors really have no connection at all or if the script is to blame; either way, something has gone terribly wrong somewhere in the creative process...
...directing films this year? It's like a harmonic convergence for cineastes and film geeks. Lucas, of course, hasn't been behind a camera since finishing 1977's Star Wars; he is currently in London shooting the first of the three long-awaited Star Wars prequels in which Ewan McGregor will star as the youthful Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Natalie Portman as Luke Skywalker's mom. Kubrick, who hasn't worked since 1987's Full Metal Jacket, is also in London, where he is filming Eyes Wide Shut, a psychosexual thriller with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; Kubrick began shooting...