Two Movies: Babes and Baloney

2010_2_17 Two Movies
I watched two movies last night, one a melodrama based on the trials and tribulations of two sexually confused and compromised women, the other a far-fetched fantasy about the lacks in our justice system, with a plot so extreme and impossible it would be laughable if it wasn’t so gory and bloody.
“The Burning Plain” was directed by Guillermo Arriaga, a Mexican filmmaker who has made three strong films early in this decade (“Amores Perros,” “21 Grams,” and “Babel”) but this effort is very weak by comparison. “The Burning Plain” is a side by side story on a parallel course, with totally different conclusions. Gina (Kim Basinger) is an unhappily married woman with four kids and an outside relationship with a Mexican man who lives in a dilapidated trailer out in a Southwestern desert, Texas would be my guess. At every opportunity Gina skips out to rendezvous with the Mexican man for some sex. (Both women make their mandatory naked scene in this movie.) Actually, the movie opens up with a scene of the trailer being consumed by flames; then when two teenage boys approach the burnt-out husk of the trailer we learn that Gina and the man died in the fire and that her lover was the father of the two teenage boys. (Most of Gina’s story is told in flashbacks.) One of the boys starts a romance with Gina’s teenage daughter and she becomes pregnant and eventually runs off with the boy, thus repeating the mistakes made by her mother. Later on, as one story plays off the other, we find out that the daughter had something to do with what started the fire that killed her mother and her lover. It raises the question did the two youngsters get involved with each other in sympathy with the lost parent of the other, to assuage some guilt that each had for different reasons? That possibility gave the movie some needed emotional texture.
Sylvia (CharlizeTheron) is a hostess at an upscale sea-side restaurant, probably in Northern California. Her story opens with her standing naked at an open window, shocking some female passer-bys who hustle their kids away from such a terrible sight. Sleeping in her bed is one of the cooks from the restaurant (John Corbett). Not long after that she is seen having indifferent sex with one of her customers, a virtual stranger, someone she had just met. We learn that promiscuity is her bag, something that goes back to guilt and sadness she feels over a daughter she gave up after a romance with a Mexican man. A Mexican man is seen following her around and she finally confronts him half naked assuming sex is what he is after. It turns out he is an emissary for the Mexican man who fathered the her child, now a 14 years old girl who had works with her father who is a pilot that sprayed pesticide over farm land in Mexico. But the father had recently crashed the plane and might not survive his injuries, so he had asked his friend to take the girl to her birth mother who she should get to know no matter what happens to him. Sylvia rejects the idea at first but eventually her maternal instinct kicks in and she does take the girl in and begin a relationship with her. So her story has a positive resolution compared to Gina’s misadventure. She can go on, her load lightened.
The second movie,”Law Abiding Citizen,” opens with an ugly and extremely brutal home invasion. Two dirt bags kill the wife and daughter of Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) who seems to be a wealthy inventor of some sort. He is the unfortunate witness to the death of both his loved ones. He is the law abiding citizen of the title who is forced to take matters into his own hands because the prosecuting attorney, Nick Price (Jamie Foxx), when making a deal to “win” the case allows the one who did the killing to escape the death penalty and any significant jail time. After a pause of uncertain length, Shelton comes roaring back as the dark avenger. He is arrested right off the bat for the gruesome killing and dismemberment of Darby, the killer who got off. And somehow he seems to be responsible for the death of several people involved with case, like the other home invader, their lawyer, the judge at the trial, one of Nick’s assistants, and the D.A., all die by mysterious and arcane ways. Shelton seems unstoppable in his rampage, as he sees it, against injustice. The D.A. and Price meet with someone in a covert government agency who knows Shelton. He is a death-dealing specialist for , presumably, the CIA. He is known as “The Brain,” and if Clyde wants you dead, you are dead. ( I think Clyde could be a spin-off of Liam Neesum’s “specialist “ in the box office hit, “Taken.”) When he realizes what he is up against Price digs in and locks horns with The Brain and I probably don’t have to tell you who will win the competition?
There were giant holes in this movie and situations that scored in terms of imagination but were too bizarre and ridiculous to have actually worked and would have had Shelton needing a construction Crew and a battery of electronic wizards and several months to pull off, like, to name one, a long well-made tunnel from at a nearby warehouse to a cell in the Solitary Confinement area in the prison where Shelton was kept. He could “step out” any time he wanted to initiate his murder and mayhem on the outside.
Gary Gray, the director of “Law Abiding Citizen,” is an experienced director who seems to specialize in thrillers. His best known films are “The Italian Job,” and “Trapped,” both thrillers with plenty of imagination that starred Charlize Theron, among others. “The Negotiator “is another one of his films, another thriller. “Law Abiding Citizen” is more a reach than his other films. To enjoy the film suspend all sense and sanity—and hold your nose, especially when the bloody brain parts spatter.