Wading through this junky sequel to her genial goofball hit Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste -- though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing. Set a mere three weeks after the first film, which was released in 2000, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous finds Bullock as the charmingly clumsy FBI agent, Gracie Hart, vainly fending off unwanted celebrity.
On her last assignment, Gracie infiltrated a beauty pageant by metamorphosing from duckling to swan, a mission that earned her legions of female fans across the country.
After Gracie's cover is blown during a bank heist, endangering her and every other undercover agent on her team, the powers that be decide that she should become "the face of the FBI." Gracie, hurt after being dumped by a romantic prospect (the agent played in the first go around by Benjamin Bratt, wisely nowhere to be seen or heard here), agrees to the reassignment on the tenuous grounds that flouncing about in designer threads is better for her soul and career than pushing pencils.
PHOTO: AP
And so, after a consult with the obligatory swishy style guru, Joel (Diedrich Bader), Gracie undergoes yet another transformation, one designed to strip every gram of charm and integrity from her character. Clarice Starling, meet Paris Hilton.
Usually an effervescent screen presence, Bullock turns in a performance as flat as day-old champagne. It's hard not to blame her, particularly given the shoddy work by both the screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who helped write the first Miss Congeniality, and the director John Pasquin, whose previous crimes against cinema include the Tim Allen vehicle The Santa Clause. It isn't just that Miss Congeniality 2 is nearly absent a single genuine laugh; it's that instead of a screenplay and a story we now have stereotypes and sketch comedy. In place of screwball heroics and wish-fulfillment the filmmakers give us jokes about tampons and some curious gender unease, particularly between Gracie and an angry female agent with the abominably cutesy name of Sam Fuller.
Played by the talented actress Regina King, Agent Fuller spends much of the movie smacking Gracie around really, really hard, a peculiar tic that only becomes more peculiar as the movie dribbles along. In between the feeble glimmerings of a plot and a hailstorm of body blows, the two women develop a grudging admiration for each other that should by the logic of the cliches both women have assumed -- Sam's all man, Gracie's all girl -- led into an intimate clinch. Alas, this particular wish is not to be fulfilled. Instead, the sub rosa romance between Gracie and Sam is quashed in favor of way too many uneasy, unfunny jokes pegged to gay men. As it turns out, being fabulous is far more dangerous for a woman (and a movie star) than being armed.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
RSS