Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Bend It Like Beckham causes big fat Sikh stomach ulcers

Call it "My Big Formulaic Sikh Soccer Romance." Undemanding moviegoers only have themselves to blame for Bend It Like Beckham. After their lowbrow enthusiasm made My Big Fat Greek Wedding a $300 million worldwide hit, studios inevitably sought more of the same.

Gurinda Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach) is a former documentarian whose multiculturalism-obsessed features have typically drowned in a flood of "worthy" themes (race, class, religion, prejudice, sexual orientation, arranged marriages, miscegenation, spousal abuse). After overdoing a stew in an L.A. melting pot (What's Cooking?), she returned to Britain to concoct Bend It, a feel-good mix of sports flick and culture-clash satire that's the painful epitome of "crowd-pleaser."

Parminder Nagra is a pleasantly natural screen presence as west London teen Jessie Bhamra, who defies her tradition-bound Punjabi Sikh parents (Bhaji's histrionic Shaheen Khan, stern softie Anupam Kher) to pursue her goal-kicking dreams. (The title refers to the curve-ball virtuosity of Jessie's idol, soccer superstar David Beckham.)

Ignoring the preparations for elder sister Archie Panjabi's upcoming nuptials, Jess joins fellow soccer fanatic Keira Knightley on a women's team coached by handsome hunk (and Eric Roberts lookalike) Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. Predictable star-crossed complications exacerbate the exploitive cliches (vomit-inducing music-video montages, prurient locker-room lingering on lithe ladies' bodies, big climactic ballgame), prompting viewers to clutch reflexively for the barf bag.

As Asian tradition clashes with Western suburban modernity, Juliet Stevenson limns a cringe-making caricature as a homophobic homemaker and Ameet Chana hesitantly emerges from his closet. With such sophomoric sniggering, co-writers Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges and Guljit Bindra ignore the fact that British movies maturely tackled this stuff years ago (1985's My Beautiful Laundrette, 1999's East Is East, also starring Panjabi).

Easily pleased fans of ethnic wedding flicks, enjoy. More discerning cinephiles, rent Bill Forsyth's superior soccer comedy Gregory's Girl instead.--Anthony Allison

Ghosts of the Abyss

director on cruise control

Let's face it: Even casino maverick Bob Stupak is over the Titanic. The last thing director James Cameron should have done was coast on past glory, despite his 1997 epic Titanic winning 11 Oscars and grossing more than a billion dollars worldwide. After he proclaimed himself "King of the World" like the egomaniac he is, everybody seemed to be over him and his precious film. You didn't see the home video version of Titanic breaking any sales records, did you? The DVD package? Not exactly Criterion Collection material, was it? And all those 14-year-old girls who spent every weekend watching it at the local enormoplex? Well, their hearts have gone on.

During Cameron's Titanic follow-up, self-referentially called Ghosts of the Abyss, narrator Bill Paxton--in one of many lines that threatens to make you queasier than the floating camerawork--says you can leave the Titanic, but the Titanic never leaves you. Not for Jimmy Boy anyway. For this hour-long IMAX-style documentary, Cameron is back at the boat, for multiple 12,000-foot dives to "excavate" the Titanic corpse, using some pretty high-tech scuba pods and aquatic cameras able to withstand the thousands of pounds of deep-sea pressure. (Not only is he robbing from the Titanic legacy, but he's revisiting The Abyss, too. Just what we needed.)

The only reason Ghosts of the Abyss doesn't come across as a mere DVD documentary supplement is it's three-dimensional. Cameron takes special advantage of the technology IMAX 3-D offers and successfully drags you underwater with him, and that's the star here. It handily upstages the decrepit boat, the overtly simpleton-like Paxton and Cameron himself (who gets nearly as much camera time as Paxton and the Titanic). There are plenty of interesting and belief-defying shots here, which is amazing given how uninteresting the subject has become.--Mike Prevatt