Reel Critics

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Reel Critics column features movie critiques written

by community members serving on our panel. Stamp performance sticks in

‘The Limey’

I remember the first time I saw Terence Stamp in “Billy Budd.” I was

completely dazzled by this beautiful man with the piercing eyes who was

also a good actor. Now, in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey,” it is 30-some

years later but time has not diminished this actor’s talents or good

looks.

In this elegant, bare-bones thriller, Wilson (Stamp) -- a career

criminal who has been known to redistribute wealth -- has just been

released from an English prison. While still serving his sentence he

learned his daughter, Jenny, died in a horrible car crash. Convinced her

death was not an accident, he flies over to Los Angeles to find some

answers. Director Soderbergh uses a deft series of time-shifting scenes

(used to such effect in “Out of Sight”) to keep us off balance and also

to illustrate how dreams can go sour.

Wilson’s cool, no-nonsense pursuit of vengeance is his last effort to

be the kind of father he had first envisioned himself to be.

Wilson’s ultimate target is Terry Valentine, a wealthy record producer

and Jenny’s lover, whose dazzling smile and easy charm is a good cover

for a man in denial about his shady activities.

Instead, Terry relies on his ruthless security man (Barry Newman) to

be the heavy while he dreamily talks about the ‘60s with a girl who

hadn’t even been born for almost another two decades. The movie is

peppered with others whose dreams have died over the years -- Eduardo

(Luis Guzman) and Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), Jenny’s actor friends; a

young, cocky hit man (Nicky Katt); even a DEA agent (Bill Duke, in a

small cameo). All of them have a hard time understanding Wilson’s accent

(hence the title), which provides almost surreal comic relief. His take

on a group of valet parking attendants is very funny. The ending

couldn’t be better, and the scenes using the real-life Stamp (from 1967’s

“Poor Cow”) bring an added dimension to the film. It is in Wilson’s final

realization of what goes around, comes around that makes “The Limey” a

film with more wit, style and substance than any “Lethal Weapon 19” ever

could.

* SUSANNE PEREZ, 45, lives in Costa Mesa and is an executive assistant

for a financial services company. ‘Fight Club’ is painful,

philosophical

Based on the premise that at every man’s heart of hearts is a primeval

pugilist secretly wanting to return to the days of simplicity when men

were men and they could joyfully beat the crap out of each other without

fear of being labeled insensitive, “Fight Club” is, simply put, painful.

Painfully lame, painfully long, and painfully lacking of any real story

that you would care to watch.

Existing in a despairingly dreary world of day-to-day hopelessness,

Jack (Edward Norton) has the ultimate dead-end job crunching numbers for

a major auto maker determining how many deaths constitute a need for a

product manufacturer’s recall. Unable to sleep, as a cathartic experience

he begins attending support group sessions for the sick and dying, where

he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) a chain-smoking, cheap,

trailer-trash type vixen of the streets.

Into both their lives comes Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the ultimate

nihilist and psuedo-philosophizing soap maker. Tyler preaches the gospel

of the Hairy Man of the Forest, stating we are a “generation of men

raised by women” and that in this world of crass consumerism “we work in

jobs we hate to buy things we don’t need.” That we’ve been raised to

think we’ll all grow up to be rich, we’ll all be rock stars and we’ll all

be beautiful -- but we won’t.

With that realization comes deep-seeded resentment and anger. And so

begins fight club, where men come together to beat each other senseless

with bare-knuckled abandon.

There are kernels of truth in Taylor’s premises of emasculated men,

consumeristic masses, and a pissed off public upset that the American

dream has somehow become a nightmare. But one kernel of truth does not a

tub of popcorn make, and I began to tune out the sophomoric philosophical

spewing about midway through the film.

Parts of the movie were entertaining, brilliantly conceived and

filmed, a product no doubt of the MTV generation film school. Parts were

uncomfortable and disturbing. And some parts were genuinely funny. But

the sum total of its parts do not make a whole film.

So, at 2 hours and 19 minutes, rated R for violence and a brief

glimpse of a man’s naked genitalia (relax girls, its neither Brad’s nor

Ed’s), on the Brunette scale of “pay full price,” “bargain matinee,”

“video rental,” ’wait for cable” or “I’d rather be punched, kicked and

bloodied than watch this film again,” I have to give “Fight Club” a

rating of “wait for cable.”

* RICHARD BRUNETTE is a 36-year-old recreation supervisor for the city of

Costa Mesa and a Costa Mesa resident.