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The Sweetest Thing
and High Crimes

Film Review By John Demetry

Cameron Diaz stars in The Sweetest Thing "The crap we feed our children!" Those were a friend's words to prepare me for The Sweetest Thing. Such words also apply - in less fun spiritedness - to High Crimes.

These two new Hollywood releases deserve film culture-digestive system analogies. To get as scatological as The Sweetest Thing and its gross-out humor, call The Sweetest Thing and High Crimes: cultural stool samples. Where does this crap come from? And where is it going?

The totally famished expectations of the current movie audience allow such trite as these two films to pass quickly. Pause the process. One could make some interesting "comparisons and contrasts" (as high school English teachers would say). The experience of The Sweetest Thing and High Crimes need not be a total waste.

I expected little from director Roger Kumble's The Sweetest Thing. His previous film, an adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses called Cruel Intentions, was an unaccountable abhorrence. With The Sweetest Thing, Kumble again fails to credibly portray modern romantic rituals -- even licentiously, much less with moral scrutiny.

On the other hand, I always have high hopes for High Crimes director Carl Franklin. The director of the 1992 cable mini-series Laurel Avenue -- a masterpiece -- proved him capable of great things, of an open-hearted awareness of modern sexual, familial, and political turmoil. In High Crimes, he replaces such insight with his undeniable craft. Stars Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, and James Caviezel have never looked better.

Perhaps I enjoyed Kumble's craft-less The Sweetest Thing because it's the more honest of the two films. It provides a suggestive metaphor. Cameron Diaz, as heartbreaker Christina Walters, disses her friend's dating self-help book by calling it "relationship propaganda." It turns out that The Sweetest Thing actually is relationship propaganda - and so, in a way, is High Crimes.

The Sweetest Thing barely makes sense. Each event careens into the next like bumper cars. It's more like a kiddy-ride at the amusement park - never reaching those delirious peaks and loop-da-loops of the most subversive comedies. Kumble locates genuine dating fears and travails, but he fails to reveal anything about them. With his perverse inability to tell a story or bring a comic situation to pay off, Kumble doesn't analyze social context.

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Related Sites:
The Sweetest Thing: Official Site

High Crimes: Official Site
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That describes the crime of High Crimes. Its silly analogy: a lawyer (Judd) knows as little about her husband's hidden past as she does about her country's own secret history. High Crimes links the two as a self-help guide to self-fulfillment (read: self-involvement). The movie lets Judd off the hook from the responsibility that the discovery about the United States' clandestine involvement in South American politics ought to impart.

Similarly, Diaz's character in The Sweetest Thing is more femme facile than fatale - she fears "commitment." One of her friends, played by Selma Blair (so incisive in Storytelling this year), however, endures enough embarrassment to scare anyone from the dating scene. A near-classic sequence involves her bringing a cum-stained dress to the dry-cleaners. The sequence never achieves climax; it never penetrates accepted cultural norms.

Both films ultimately revel in hegemony-endorsed red herrings. In The Sweetest Thing, that red herring is homosexuality. In High Crimes it's the racial other.

Again, I think The Sweetest Thing is the more honest of the two films. Diaz gets poked in the eye when spying through a men's room glory hole. The third of Kumble's Angels, played by a game Christina Applegate, causes a motorcycle accident when she pretends to be enjoying some driver's seat cunnilingus action from Diaz. Both scenes, and others in a similar vein, are very funny. The girls of The Sweetest Thing

Fear and fascination with homosexual subcultures aptly - honestly - reflects the anxiety of sexual license in modern dating - hetero or otherwise. Here, at least, it's played for laughs -- an airing out of recognizable, shared discomfort - rather than the menace of homo prurience in Cruel Intentions.

In High Crimes, Judd projects her anxieties, best aimed at scrutinizing her husband and country or herself, onto an alcoholic, African-American lawyer played by Freeman. To Black filmmaker Franklin's credit, the audience is aware of Judd's mistake -- but Franklin manipulates it for mere suspense mechanics.

The crime committed by Judd's husband -- a massacre of innocents in a small El Salvador village -- gets brushed off as the work of a madman. Franklin isolates the bad seed in the military and husband pool -- with no sense of the fruit that bore it. Franklin never explores Judd's and the country's racism -- merely using it for narrative convenience. Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman's talents are wasted in High Crimes

The "propaganda" of these movies is not dangerous and will not influence viewers. Rather, the removing of character motivations from social context evidences the way people treat movies and their place in the world. That's what puts the culture in the proverbial crapper: the fear of commitment to the art -- and to life.





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