28 SEPTEMBER, 2000: Thank heavenly God the fall is here. As I’ve mentioned, the summer wasn’t the bastion of bad movies it could have been (and sometimes HAS been), but it was just… a bastion of summer movies. Big dumb action movies and big dumb comedies and big dumb families plopping their big dumb asses down do eat big tubs of popcorn and watch whatever movie they were ‘supposed’ to see that week.

But I kid the lemmings.

There was one great movie this summer, one movie that really got into my head and has stayed there (I’m not counting ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and ‘Hamlet’, late spring flicks that flew through Cinemas East for a couple of weeks each). The surprise is that it was ‘The Cell’, a fairly big-budget studio flick with a big star. Then again, that same description could be applied to ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Erin Brockovich’, and ‘Wonder Boys’, so maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

‘The Cell’’s story is admittedly kinda ridiculous. Jennifer Lopez (in a nice, understated performance—and looking fantastic) plays a child psychologist who is using some experimental virtual reality technology to literally go into the mind of a rich kid in a coma. Vince Vaughn is an FBI agent tracking Vincent D’onofrio, a brilliant serial killer (hey, can we have just one movie about a really stupid serial killer? Besides Keanu Reeves?) who has just captured his latest victim before going into a coma himself. Vaughn has forty-eight hours to find D’onofrio’s last victim before she’s drowned. He asks Lopez to go in.

Director Tarsem has a music video background; he has an amazing eye for visuals, and the art design and cinematography is breathtaking (only once does he blow it, by constructing a sequence that just looks entirely too much like his video for REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’). However, he’s not just one of these bullshit music video guys who wants to make us suck his dick for moving his camera so well. He also constructs the story beautifully, bringing its threads together with no trouble, and he coaxes not only convincing but interesting work out of his cast. Lopez does nicely and isn’t afraid to underplay it; neither is Vince Vaughn, whose opening scenes seem almost tossed-off but ultimately add up to a strong performance. D’onofrio, one of our most underappreciated character actors, get to go the other way, but he doesn’t just chew up the considerable scenery—he gets to put together an interesting character in mostly just bits and pieces.

‘The Cell’ is the kind of movie that always gets under my skin: dark, brutal, and disturbing, but skillful and vivid. It reminded me of ‘Seven’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs’, and not just because it was about a serial killer, but because it dared to take me places that movies are usually afraid to go.

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Movies I’m most looking forward to this fall: Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Traffic’, Cameron Crowe’s ‘Almost Famous’, Altman’s ‘Dr. T and the Women’, Ang Lee’s ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ Tony Kay’s ‘Get Carter’, Jay Roach’s ‘Meet The Parents’, Spike Lee’s ‘Bamboozled’ (a harsh-looking movie that’s already pissing people off), and two movies that could either be great or horribly corny: Mimi Lerder’s ‘Pay It Forward’ and Boaz Yakin’s ‘Remember The Titans’.

Also saw a trailer for ‘Driven’, Stallone’s new race-car flick that’s coming out next spring. It’s directed by Renny Harlin. They are actually using the following phrase in the trailer: ‘From the director of ‘Deep Blue Sea’ and ‘Cliffhanger’.” FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ‘DEEP BLUE SEA’? Who the fuck does that sell it to? Well, I guess it’s better than ‘From the director of ‘Cutthroat Island’”…

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I hope it doesn’t sound mean to say that I didn’t think Neil LaBute had ‘Nurse Betty’ in him. Here’s a guy who wrote and directed ‘In The Company of Men’ and ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’, and on the evidence of those two films, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this ain’t a guy you’d wanna have over to cook out brats and play Twister. He’s a little dark, is what I’m getting at, and this is a movie that sounded pretty sunny.

The great thing about ‘Nurse Betty’ is that it is and it isn’t. Yes, it’s definitely got a nice streak running through it, and Renee Zelleweger’s title character is certainly one of the nicer people to appear in a LaBute film, and the basic premise (Kansas housewife goes to LA to fall in love with the heartthrob of her favorite soap) sounds like the fodder for any number of crappy Meg Ryan movies. But there’s also some pretty dark shit going on here. Betty’s nuttier than one of my roommate’s dumps, for starters, because she saw hitmen Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock kill her slimy ex-husband (with a grisly scalping, in fact, which you sure as fuck won’t see in any Meg Ryan movies, though it sure couldn’t have hurt ‘You’ve Got Mail’) . So they provide a fairly violent undercurrent for a movie that takes Betty’s loopy mental state lightly, but seriously.

So LaBute manages to take a movie that could have felt like channel-surfing and provides a consistent, unique tone. And the acting is just fucking GOOD. Renee Zelleweger’s been pretty underwhelming lately (‘The Bachelor’, anyone? Please?), but she couldn’t be more right for this role; she’s 100% believable and her meltdown on the soap set late in the film is a goddamn heartbreaker. She’s also really cute. Is it even necessary to mention how great Morgan Freeman is? He brings in his usual strength and wisdom and warmth, and it’s nice to see it coupled with the hitman thing and a chance to show off some killer comic timing. And his little crush on Betty is so sweet and funny, it’s just perfect. Chris Rock often looks uncomfortable in movies (loved him in ‘Dogma’ and ‘Lethal Weapon 4’, but he had moments where he just looked awkward as shit), but here he manages to infuse his role with some Rock-isms without compromising the character or the film (or, most importantly, his relationship with Freeman). I’m STILL unconvinced Greg Kinnear is a very good actor, but boy oh boy can he play an asshole with the best of ‘em.

‘Nurse Betty’ is the kind of movie that luckily slips through the cracks every once in a while. LaBute had even gone so far as to admit that it was being shot while USA Films was taking over Gramercy/Polygram/whatever the fuck they were, and nobody was really paying attention to what was going on with the movie. Good. Stay the hell outta the way, Hollywood, and sometimes you might accidentally end up with a movie that’s worth a damn.