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Just where does it say that making an interesting video for someone such as REM qualifies a director to do a feature-length film? It's like giving a pilot's license to anyone who can draw a picture of an airplane. But it continues to happen, with fabulously mixed results.
Tarsem Singh, whose oeuvre includes the award-winning "Losing My Religion" clip as well as a slew of TV commercials, is the latest to make the leap from phosphor-dot to celluloid. Working from a script by Mark Protosevich, writer of the upcoming Gary Sinise sci-fi thriller Impostor, he constructs a lurid, glossy-glitzy spectacle that owes as much to vintage busty-woman-in-peril pulp artwork as MTV -- although, come to think of it, the music channels have mined that vein pretty thoroughly too.
Lopez plays Catherine Deane, an eye-candy psychoanalyst who works with a research laboratory that's developed a technique, which naturally requires skin-tight bodysuits (why doesn't my dental hygienist ever wear spandex?), for getting inside the subconscious thoughts of coma victims. Exactly why they would want to is never fully explained except to say that it has something to do with baby seals (no lie). A vaguely mysterious character who's certainly got back but got no back story, Catherine amuses herself, when she's not encouraging adolescent male fantasies that involve her dressed like Princess Leia and riding on horseback through gorgeous Freudian desert scenery, by lounging around the house in panties and rolling joints (Puff Daddy's contribution to set dressing) (to keep things impartial, another scene prominently displays a D.A.R.E. poster).
Going scantily clad and mellow does prepare her well for the challenge of ambling through the id of serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), though. He is an extreeeemely sick kitty who drowns women in a big glass cage and finds sexual satisfaction by indulging his masochistic inner child while watching videotapes of their deaths. We're meant to feel sorry for Carl because his abusive father had him baptized in a swamp when he was little and he's got a rare form of schizophrenia that puts him into an irreversible coma right after he kidnaps his latest victim and locks her in his automated aquarium. An FBI profiler (Vince Vaughn) handling the case persuades Catherine to put on the bodysuit and check Carl's psyche for clues.
Bad idea. Even unconscious, Carl's got issues. And most of them center around torture, questionable veterinary practices, and leftover costumes from The Phantom Menace.
All this high-fashion runway dream-fu with the comely Ms. Lopez might be more intriguing were it not for a plot that simply runs out of gas rather than come to a climax. That, and having been weaned on working with people who lip-synch songs rather than speak dialog, Singh doesn't show anywhere near the same proficiency with sound as he does with sight; he insists on making his melodious heroine into yet another hoarse whisperer (we are going to have to gather in one room everybody who thinks Baldwin-Basingerspeak is sexy and make them sit through their own movies).
Just once it would be nice to see something that explores the beauty and wonder of everyday life with the same panache that many admittedly talented, artsy directors apply to stories concerning talking shoes and lesbian bankrobbers. But I guess Paean to a Produce Manager just doesn't have the same zing. C-
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