Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Months of Sunshine'

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

It's amazing what you can find while poking around Amazon's VOD offerings. 13 Months of Sunshine played a handful of small film festivals in 2008 and 2009 without making much of an impact, but thanks to Amazon, it's available to watch for anyone with an internet connection (and $2.99), and can be purchased on DVD as well, even though the movie's official site seems to have expired, and its Facebook page hasn't been updated in years. Orphaned films live on in the cloud, for people like me to randomly stumble upon.

Anyway, as much as the availability of 13 Months may be indicative of some new movie-distribution paradigm, its actual content is much less revolutionary. It's clearly a labor of love for writer-director Yehdego Abeselom, depicting life among the Ethiopian immigrant community in Los Angeles. This is certainly not a demographic that's typically represented in movies, even on the micro-indie scale, so it's interesting to get a glimpse into a sort of invisible subculture. Or at least it would be, if this movie offered up anything distinct from the typical rom-com narrative, with a few devices from the struggling-immigrant genre. The plot features main character Solomon (Sammy Amare) agreeing to a sham marriage with Hanna (Tsion Fikreselassie) so she can get her green card, and of course they eventually fall in love despite just being together for the sake of convenience.

The movie takes forever getting there, though, and the subplots about Solomon wanting to open his own coffee shop and Hanna becoming a model are tedious and awkward, the model storyline especially showing the strains of the limited budget. The acting ranges from passable to painful, but it's definitely hampered by the looping of practically all of the dialogue, which makes it sound extra stilted and false. One thing that Abeselom does well is show how casually the characters switch between Amharic and English as they're talking to each other, in a way that shows how the community has become integrated into American life while also remaining separate. A few more touches like that would have helped 13 Months seem more insightful, instead of just another generic indie dramedy with questionable production values.

Shark Week 2: 'Jaws 2' (1978)

By the time it reached its fourth installment in 1987, the Jaws franchise was basically a joke, but in 1978 it was still pretty respectable, coming off of Steven Spielberg's acclaimed and hugely successful 1975 original. Spielberg even briefly considered returning to direct the sequel, although that duty eventually fell to Jeannot Szwarc, who came in to replace original director John D. Hancock. Despite a lot of production troubles, including Hancock's firing, numerous rewrites and Roy Scheider's apparent reluctance to star in the movie (which he did only out of a contractual obligation), Jaws 2 ended up about as good as you could expect such a redundant sequel to be. It's repetitive and unnecessary, but it's not entirely bad. Shark-attack movies have been living in the shadow of Jaws since 1975, and the same is true for Jaws 2.

It also rehashes the plot of Jaws in many ways, with a giant great white shark terrorizing the resort town of Amity Island, and the town's chief of police, Martin Brody (Scheider), sounding the oft-ignored alarm. Once again local officials refuse to take the threat seriously, and once again Brody has to take it upon himself to defeat the shark. That redundancy reduces the suspense, and you can sense a bit of Scheider's annoyance in his performance, although he does convey Brody's desperation at being stuck in the same damn situation all over again. Szwarc, too, is stuck in a no-win situation when it comes to the shark, since he can't really hold off on showing it the way Spielberg did (everyone in the audience knows what it looks like by now), but the more he does show it, the sillier it appears. Szwarc opts to give the shark plenty of screen time, as well as a badass scar from attacking a boat early in the movie, and it's certainly more of a proactive, vengeful villain (which of course makes no sense). There's a brief reference to the possibility of the original shark having somehow communicated with the new shark, which is quickly dismissed, but this one clearly has it out for the residents of Amity Island.

In addition to Brody and his wife (Lorraine Gary, also returning from the original), Jaws 2 spends a lot of time focused on a group of interchangeable teenagers, including Brody's son Mike, who serve as shark fodder. In its emphasis on teen antics and peril, Jaws 2 sort of resembles a slasher film, right down to the teens who get attacked just after deciding to have sex. The slasher aspect could have been a fun angle, but it isn't fully developed, and it has to share time with Brody's brooding and the self-serving maneuvers of the town leaders. For the first half of the movie, in which Brody grows increasingly paranoid about attacks that he attributes to the shark without conclusive evidence, I was imagining a more offbeat take that would have involved no shark attacks at all, just Brody going increasingly insane as he insists that a shark is terrorizing the town, except it's all in his mind.

Sadly, this is just a by-the-number shark-attack movie instead, although the climax, which puts Brody's kids in peril, is sort of exciting, and Szwarc and the various screenwriters at least find a new and interesting way to kill the shark that doesn't duplicate the ending of the first movie. Given that this mediocre film is regarded as the best of the Jaws sequels, it's probably better for me to stop here and not move on to the later installments.

Shark Week 2: 'The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl' (2005)

Robert Rodriguez's filmmaking career is oddly schizophrenic; his movies are almost all either hyper-stylized violent pulp fantasies (Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete, etc.) or candy-coated, ultra-wholesome kids' movies (the Spy Kids series, Shorts, etc.) with essentially nothing in between (The Faculty is the closest middle ground). The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (which was originally released in 3D) falls squarely into Rodriguez's kid-focused mode, with a story based on the dreams and ideas of his then-7-year-old son Racer Max. It's cute that Rodriguez wants to include his entire family in his moviemaking endeavors, and it's admirable that he creates his movies in such a self-contained way, shooting at his own studio in Texas and serving multiple positions in the crew himself.

But both approaches yield poor results: The story very much seems like it was concocted by a child, with a complete lack of coherence or direction, a half-formed message and a bunch of overbearing, one-note characters. And Rodriguez's filmmaking efficiency leads to ugly, bargain-basement special effects, terrible performances and no sense of pacing or modulation. It's not as grating or haphazard as Rodriguez's next family movie, 2009's Shorts (which is pretty much unbearable to watch), but it comes close. The message here is about not being afraid to let your imagination run wild, but in this case I think maybe Rodriguez should have confined his son's ideas to coloring books.

And what about the sharks? There's actually a semi-amusing prologue about the origin of Sharkboy (Twilight's Taylor Lautner, proving that he was an awful actor even at 13), who accompanied his marine biologist dad at a research station until a storm blew it apart, and Sharkboy was found and raised by crappily animated CGI talking sharks. Somehow this led to his acquiring shark-related powers, plus a really stupid-looking shark-themed outfit. That's about it for the actual sharks until the climax of the movie, when Sharkboy fulfills his destiny (?) and becomes king of the ocean, rallying his army of hideous CGI sharks to help defeat villain Mr. Electricity (George Lopez, nearly as bad as the child actors).

As for the rest of the plot, it involves lame preteen Max (Cayden Boyd) teaming up with the title characters to save Planet Drool by learning to believe in the power of dreams, or some bullshit. Again, it doesn't really make sense, and it seems like the plot heads off in a completely different direction every 10 minutes or so. The effects are not only poorly rendered but also sloppily designed, and the movie's entire visual sense is garish and exhausting. Add in the awkward, shrill acting and the repetitive positivity, and this is clearly a kid's project only a father could love.

Shark Week 2: 'Sharktopus' (2010)

There have been so many low-budget shark-attack movies at this point that their creators have to do something really different to stand out from the pack. Thus you get something like Sharktopus, an insanely stupid idea that nevertheless captures the pop-culture zeitgeist for two minutes precisely because of its insane stupidity. Sharktopus comes from two proud traditions of B-movie schlock: It's produced by low-budget legend Roger Corman, and it was created for Syfy, which despite its fancy name change is still in the business of churning out awesomely awful horror/sci-fi TV-movies on a regular basis. What makes Sharktopus stand out from dozens of other terrible Syfy productions? Other than its title, pretty much nothing. It's sloppily constructed, with terrible acting, atrocious special effects and a thin plot that strains to fill 90 minutes. Like a lot of micro-sensations that generate interest online, its entire appeal is in its title and maybe the trailer; watching the movie is essentially redundant.

But I watched it anyway, and it wasn't a horrible experience. Corman has decades of accumulated knowledge in how to package this stuff so it goes down easy, and even abiding by basic-cable standards, he knows how to throw in plenty of scantily clad hot women (the movie takes place mostly at a resort in Puerto Vallarta) and evenly space out the gory moments, plus add the requisite comic relief. All of that stuff is there, just in kind of a watered-down form. Obviously the women have to remain clothed, the violence is pretty tame (although there is plenty of blood), and the comic relief is mild. I did enjoy Ralph Garman as a snarky radio DJ who scoffs at the existence of Sharktopus (naturally right before getting devoured by the half-shark/half-octopus creature), and there's some camp value in the obviously clueless way the actors react to being attacked by a post-production special effect they can't see.

That's pretty minimal entertainment for a 90-minute movie, though, and it's spread thin enough that the rest of the time is filled with boredom, including repetitive exposition and scenes of irrelevant characters who are never seen again. Eric Roberts is the only semi-respectable actor in the movie, and most of the time he looks like he's just biding his time until he can head back to his trailer. Even the way he wears his sunglasses halfway down his face looks condescending. He plays the head of the scientific organization that has gone too far in creating the Sharktopus as a weapon for the military (why does the military want a Sharktopus?), but he spends almost the entire movie on some yacht in an undisclosed location, like he was annoyed at the prospect of sharing too many scenes with the other actors. That kind of half-assed boredom with the material pervades the movie; so many people online were taken with the supposed awesomeness of the concept, but the people making the movie don't seem nearly as impressed.

Shark Week 2: 'Beyond the Reef' (1981)

Although most of the commentary about Beyond the Reef that I found online (it's never been released on DVD in the U.S., but can be watched in its entirety on YouTube) was about how people saw it as kids and had nostalgic feelings for it, it didn't really strike me as a movie made for kids. There's a deadly shark attack within a couple of minutes of the movie starting, and a few more later on. I'm pretty sure I saw a bare breast at one point, too. I suppose it's reassuring, though, that the parents of the '80s weren't so uptight about what their kids watched, and didn't let some partial nudity and deadly violence get in the way of letting youngsters see this lame-ass movie.

It's definitely the kind of movie that only seems good in nostalgic hindsight: The acting is terrible, the frequently dubbed dialogue is clumsy, the plot makes very little sense, and the life lessons are seriously muddled. At the same time, it's cute and upbeat, and the scenery (of Bora Bora) is beautiful. Most impressively, the filmmakers get a tiger shark to behave like a puppy, as main character Tikoyo befriends a baby shark right after its mother is killed following the attack at the beginning of the movie. As a kid, island native Tikoyo saves Polynesian-American girl Diana from a shark attack, then befriends Diana and spends time with her as he teaches his shark to be a loyal pet.

A decade later, the grown-up Diana (Maren Jensen, best known as Athena on the original Battlestar Galactica) returns from studying in America to find Tikoyo (Dayton Ka'ne) all grown up and palling around with a full-sized tiger shark, which is tame enough to carry humans on its back and splash up at Tikoyo playfully through a trap door in his hut. This is the fun, silly stuff that probably appealed to kids, and it's pretty impressive to watch, to see this creature that movies have conditioned us to believe is so dangerous and see it be not only harmless but also lovable. Director Frank C. Clark seems very aware of the preconceptions about shark movies, and he sometimes will show the shark (named Manidu, and supposedly containing the spirit of its namesake, a wise old mentor for young Tikoyo) in a stereotypical attack-movie shot (filmed from low and behind, with ominous music), only to have it do something adorable instead.

The thing is, though, that Manidu still kills people, but they're all evil developers who want to encroach on the beauty of Tikoyo's little inlet (and also exploit the cache of black pearls he lives right above). So it's like a cute agent of vengeance, and the movie never really reconciles this murderous impulse with the sunny vibe of Diana and Tikoyo's romance or the fish-out-of-water scenes with Diana's clueless (and perpetually horny for island men) American best friend. The villains (led by Diana's brother) are cartoonishly evil, but their defeat is sort of ambiguous and open-ended, and the movie just kind of stops without really resolving the story. It's based very loosely on a novel by Clement Richer (here is a Time Magazine review from 1951), which was also made into a 1964 Italian movie called Tiko and the Shark, and the fact that this is the most notable version of the story demonstrates just how unremarkable the whole thing is.

Shark Week 2: 'Tintorera: Killer Shark' (1977)

The bargain-basement Mexican sharksploitation movie Tintorera: Killer Shark is just one of many opportunistic '70s Jaws ripoffs, but it achieved infamy for its use of real sea animals being injured and killed in scenes of the main characters hunting for sharks. The transition between bloody underwater slaughter and sleazy sexcapades is rather jarring, although the unseemly tone of the whole thing ties it together. It's not like director Rene Cardona Jr. was interested in some kind of radical verisimilitude, either -- there just wasn't any concern with animal welfare on movie sets in Mexico at the time, and it was a lot cheaper to spear actual animals than mock up fake ones to use. I don't know if indifference or malice would be the sadder motivation.

And all of those animals died in vain, too, bringing about this totally shitty movie. Cardona barely seems interested in shark attacks at all, spending most of his time focused on the sexual exploits of his main characters, American rich guy Steven (Hugo Stiglitz) and his Mexican friend/rival Miguel (Andres Garcia). Steven, wealthy for unspecified reasons, shacks up off the coast of a beautiful Mexican resort town in his fancy yacht, coming ashore to lure hot young women with gross pick-up lines and his ever-present creepy leer. No matter what Steven is doing, Stiglitz always has a look in his eyes like he's on the verge of sexual assault, and whoever dubbed in the English-language dialogue sounds just as sociopathic.

Steven even meets Miguel when they both happen to sleep with the same woman (she's later eaten by the shark, although neither of her paramours knows or cares), and they bond over their shared womanizing. Eventually they also bond over their enjoyment of shark-hunting, which they engage in even before they know that a killer tiger shark (or "tintorera") is on the loose. This is certainly the most environmentally unfriendly shark-attack movie of all time; in addition to killing sea animals for fun, in one scene Steven throws an empty champagne bottle off the side of his boat into the ocean, and then tosses in the glass, too. You could almost look at this movie as a revenge fantasy from the perspective of the shark, who gets back at these unfeeling murderers who are constantly killing its kin.

Cardona doesn't see it that way, though -- not that he has any sort of message here at all. The movie is just a vehicle for lots of nudity and occasional animal attacks, and a pretty weak one at that. Apparently there's a longer Mexican cut of the film that's 40 minutes longer than the American release I watched, and I can't imagine how there could be 40 more minutes of anything in this movie, unless it's just extended footage of topless girls swimming (which I suppose I could support). The sheer sleaziness can be kind of amusing, although the animal abuse certainly dampens the entertainment value. Better to stay away and not support this sort of thing at all.

Shark Week 2: 'Shark Attack 3: Megalodon' (2002)

No, I haven't seen Shark Attack or Shark Attack 2, but from what I can tell, neither of those movies has anything to do with Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, aside from featuring sharks attacking (and the original Shark Attack apparently doesn't even feature much of that). And while Shark Attack and Shark Attack 2 are undoubtedly terrible, Megalodon is the one that has built up a reputation as one of the great bad movies of all time, thanks in large part to one particularly infamous line that star John Barrowman (who's gone on to be very successful on Dr. Who, Torchwood and the British stage) will apparently never live down.

But there's more to Megalodon than just Barrowman's Ben Carpenter delivering the world's most awkward come-on. For starters, the movie takes place in Mexico but was shot in Bulgaria, and almost every supporting character is played by a local actor whose dialogue was post-dubbed, giving the movie a very stilted, unnatural feel even with the rare bits of dialogue that aren't horribly written. The "Mexican" resort where the movie takes place is decorated with Mexican flags and pictures of Mexico's then-President Vicente Fox. This seems to be the movie's primary mode of illustrating character backgrounds and roles; the former Navy man who helps the protagonists defeat the megalodon has giant photos of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and a huge U.S. Navy logo on his wall to indicate his patriotism. Even more amusingly, paleontologist Cat Stone (Jenny McShane, who had a completely unrelated role in the original Shark Attack) is introduced with what looks like a picture book about dinosaurs sitting on her desk. That level of knowledge about anything scientific is pretty much standard for this movie, though.

Barrowman plays a resort employee who stumbles on the title creature, a prehistoric giant shark thought to be extinct. He uploads a picture of the shark's tooth to a hilariously rudimentary website, which attracts the attention of the San Diego-based Cat, who shows up hoping to study the creature. Of course, it's far too dangerous to study, and various victims soon succumb to megalodon attacks, while the fat cats who own the resort refuse to shut down the beach. The movie really kicks into hilariously awful mode when Ben and Cat discover that the megalodon they were chasing was just a baby, and the actual giant shark ("the size of a Greyhound bus," Ben says) shows up. Most of the shark scenes are just recycled stock footage, and the supposedly monster-size shark is just the same footage shown in close-up, with various items (boat, inflatable raft, jet ski) superimposed over it and made to look tiny in comparison (the shark swallows all of those things whole).

Barrowman insists that the infamous line was a joke not meant to end up in the final film, but it's hard to tell just how much of the rest of the movie is intended to be funny. It's not quite goofy enough to be a full-on satire, but certainly bits like the guy directly jet-skiing into the horribly green-screened shark's mouth aren't expected to be taken seriously. Given the proliferation of terrible shark-attack B-movies, it takes something special to rise above the pack and into the realms of the great bad movies of all time; whatever that is, Megalodon clearly has it.

Shark Week 2: 'The Deep' (1977)

Thanks to the massive success of Jaws in 1975, novelist Peter Benchley became a hot commodity, and his second book, The Deep, was made into a movie two years later, with Benchley co-writing the screenplay. The Deep features Benchley trying to branch out from shark attacks into other sorts of undersea thrills, but he's better at creating an implacable, nonverbal menace than he is at putting together an exciting story about human beings. It probably doesn't help that The Deep's journeyman director Peter Yates is no Steven Spielberg. Still, there's some decent stuff in The Deep, primarily in the impressive underwater cinematography, and it features a very attractive Jacqueline Bisset in an essentially see-through wet T-shirt for the first 10 minutes of the movie, which was credited with much of the movie's box office success.

There's very little shark action going on here, though -- far less than I expected when I picked it for this project. Other than a few brief glimpses, the entire shark-related portion of the movie is limited to one scene. Bisset and Nick Nolte play a pair of tourists in Bermuda who stumble on the wreckage of a sunken World War II ship while diving. Amid the more recent debris are artifacts from an 18th-century Spanish royal cargo shipment, and the two amateurs hit up a local history and salvage expert (Robert Shaw, another Jaws connection) to learn about what they've discovered. Unfortunately for them, the WWII ship is full of thousands of vials of morphine that an unscrupulous soldier (Eli Wallach) was smuggling at the time, and a local drug lord (Louis Gossett Jr.) is eager to get his hands on them.

The drug lord tries to sabotage our heroes' efforts to get to the treasure, which is where the sharks come in: At one point his henchmen whip a bunch of sharks into a frenzy by chumming the water above where the divers are working, and there's a sort of swarm of sharks that's menacing at first but doesn't really amount to anything. Far more impressive is the giant moray eel that attacks from out of nowhere and, in the climactic battle, literally bites the drug dealer's head off. There's not much excitement elsewhere in the dull story, which plods along through a rote investigation into the origins of the treasure. The dive sequences, including the wordless eight-minute opening, are impressive, although more for the way they look than for any success at creating suspense. Benchley's career as a Hollywood hitmaker fizzled after The Deep (although he continued writing moderately successful books), and it's not hard to see why.

Shark Week 2: The Revenge

Back in 2008, the first little theme project I ever did for this blog was Shark Week, in which I wrote about seven shark-related movies over the course of a week coinciding with Discovery's much-loved event of the same name. I picked that theme for a week because I didn't think there was really enough content to sustain for much longer than that, at least not without covering a bunch of redundant shark-attack B-movies that are essentially all the same. Well, three years later I decided it was a theme worth revisiting -- not all shark-attack B-movies are the same, and I found a few that seemed intriguing to write about, along with some other shark-related oddities.

So once again I'm honoring the week about actual sharks with a week about movie sharks, and since last time culminated with Jaws, this time of course will culminate with the slightly less classic Jaws 2. Posting will start later today and go through August 6; in the meantime, check out the pieces from the original Shark Week:

Shark (1969)
She Gods of Shark Reef (1958)
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Spring Break Shark Attack (2005)
Dark Waters (1993)
Open Water (2003)
Jaws (1975)

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Highway 13'

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The 1948 cheapo thriller Highway 13 comes on DVD as part of the Forgotten Noir series, and it seems pretty justifiably forgotten. Barely qualifying as a feature at just an hour long, it's a bare-bones tale of corruption and sabotage marked by clumsy writing, terrible set design and special effects, listless acting and rushed pacing. There's a certain sleazy charm to these anonymous programmers, and occasionally some of them exhibit flashes of real artistry (there's a reason a movie like Detour has become a classic). Highway 13 definitely doesn't fall into that category, though.

It also doesn't really qualify as a noir: It doesn't take place in a city; the action occurs mostly during the day; the hero is never corrupted or even really tested; and while one female character has a single nasty seduction sequence, I wouldn't classify her as a femme fatale. Instead it's just a straight-up crime story, with a trucking company suffering from a series of mysterious accidents along the titular highway in rural California. One of the company's drivers (Robert Lowery) takes it upon himself to figure out what's going on, and ends up suspected of the sabotage himself. The plot twists aren't particularly interesting or surprising, the acting is flat, the characters are one-dimensional (or, in several cases, no-dimensional), and the dialogue is amusingly bad. I laughed every time the head of the trucking company (Michael Whalen) showed up to express concern in the most unenthusiastic manner possible. As the movie starts he seems far more interested in his company's reputation for timeliness than in the fact that his wife was the victim of the latest accident. (Later, when it turns out that he was behind the whole thing and killed his wife on purpose, he's just as affectless and blase.)

Highway 13 barrels ahead so forcefully that you don't have a lot of time to stop and think about how stupid it is, although any time the movie shows a horribly unconvincing "mountain" backdrop or an absurdly explosive truck crash using miniatures, the lack of craftsmanship is immediately apparent. There isn't even a whole lot of titillation to captivate the drive-in audience; just bland innuendo between the hero and his girlfriend, and the aforementioned single seduction scene. Even the camp elements (including a curmudgeonly old diner owner prone to getting pies thrown in his face) are pretty lackluster. This one is likely to stay forgotten.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Waterloo Bridge' (1931)

Of all the early Bette Davis movies that I record from TCM, most of which feature her in very small roles, Waterloo Bridge caught my eye because it was directed by James Whale, best known for Gothic-style horror movies like Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House. Waterloo Bridge isn't a horror movie and isn't remotely Gothic, but it does feature Whale's tendency to portray social pariahs sympathetically. In this case that's Myra (Mae Clarke, who went on to play Victor Frankenstein's wife in Whale's Frankenstein), a prostitute in London during World War I. She starts out as a chorus girl (which totally sounds like an early Hollywood euphemism for "prostitute" already), but when work dries up, she's forced to become a streetwalker. Her favorite pick-up spot is the title location, where she meets Roy (Douglass Montgomery), the world's most naive and wholesome soldier. He too is American, fighting with the Canadian military because he just couldn't wait to join the war effort.

Myra agonizes over her relationship with Roy, who is clearly incredibly dim and can't figure out that he's fallen in love with a prostitute. Montgomery is bland and kind of dopey as Roy (which is sort of the point, I guess), but Clarke does a good job as the conflicted but good-hearted Myra, and Whale treats her position very matter-of-factly, as do the other characters who know about it. It's a refreshingly non-melodramatic portrayal of Hollywood's go-to tragic profession, right up until the very end when Myra gets what looks suspiciously like cosmic comeuppance for her harlotry. The pre-Code laxity also provides for a nice scene at the beginning in which Myra and her fellow chorus girls are in various states of undress backstage.

But what about Bette Davis? Yes, she's in this one, too, although to very little effect. She plays Roy's sister, who appears in maybe two or three scenes and exists solely for exposition purposes or to move the plot along. She's perfectly fine, but there's no indication of future star power, and the part could probably have been played by anyone. Davis would later get plenty of chances to play fallen women, and I think she could have done well as Myra here, although Clarke really does quite a good job, especially in contrast to Montgomery's tiresome swooning. Waterloo Bridge was based on a play, and it does seem a little stagebound at times; I think maybe half the movie takes place in Myra's one-room apartment. It was adapted again in 1940 with Vivien Leigh (the most famous version) and in 1956 as Gaby with Leslie Caron. Bette Davis never got the chance to play the lead.

Necessary Roughness

Last week I was pretty tough on the new USA legal drama Suits, and the network's latest new drama Necessary Roughness gets back to what makes USA shows appealing: It's kind of forgettable and not exactly innovative, but it's likable enough to be able to watch on a casual basis, perfect laundry-folding or dish-washing TV. I doubt I'll deliberately tune in again, but I could watch it randomly a week or a month from now and have a perfectly good time.

It's also a slight change of pace for USA, since it features a psychotherapist rather than a lawyer or cop or doctor as its main character. Callie Thorne plays Dr. Dani, as she's known, who in the first episode is recruited as the therapist for a big-shot loose-cannon football star. She helps him out and is offered the chance to act as the team's go-to therapist, although press materials indicate she'll also start treating other high-profile clients (actors, politicians, etc.). I'm not entirely sure how that will work, since the regular supporting cast is focused around the football team, but since therapists tend to see clients regularly, presumably characters will stick around rather than being a "case of the week."

Thorne is appealing as the somewhat cliched character of the therapist who can't get a handle on her own problems, and the pilot does a good job of balancing the character development with the plot of the week (something that Suits failed to do). Therapy is less obviously results- and process-oriented than medical treatment or legal work, and the show has a tough time showing how exactly Dani helps her client address his problems. But Roughness breezes along amiably enough, and Dani's interactions with her teenage kids, her gambling-addicted mother, her asshole ex-husband (go-to asshole actor Craig Bierko) and her ditzy best friend (Amanda Detmer) are all enjoyable to watch and full of potential. I probably won't be watching Necessary Roughness again anytime soon, but for fans of the kind of show that USA puts out, this is a much safer bet than Suits.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Barney's Version

I haven't read the Mordecai Richler novel that Barney's Version is based on, but it's not hard to tell that the movie has been condensed from a much larger narrative. The sprawling character study is entertaining and often moving, with a great lead performance from Paul Giamatti, but its various elements often feel disjointed, like there's some connective tissue that got lost in the translation from page to screen. It's no surprise to learn that the novel relies on first-person perspective and a question of narrative reliability, as the aging Barney (suffering from Alzheimer's disease) tells his story (his "version"), while his son offers corrections.

That whole device is missing from the movie, although Barney (Giamatti) still suffers from Alzheimer's disease in the present-day framing sequences. Without the narrative uncertainty, it instead comes off as a little sappy, although the movie avoids overplaying the cliched memory-loss moments too much. The main draw of the story isn't that part, anyway, but the flashbacks to Barney's life as a younger man, first as a vagabond in Italy bumming around with his drug-addict aspiring novelist best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) and marrying a troubled free spirit (Rachelle Lefevre, underused). Barney then heads back to his native Montreal, where he becomes a TV producer on a trashy soap opera and marries a shrill Jewish stereotype (Minnie Driver). Driver's character (who's never named) is pretty one-dimensional, and Driver's inscrutable accent and hammy mannerisms don't help her develop further.

It takes almost half the movie to get to the heart of Barney's story, his romance with the lovely and compassionate Miriam (Rosamund Pike), the love of his life and mother of his children. The bits with Driver are sometimes funny, thanks mostly to Dustin Hoffman's goofy performance as Barney's uncouth dad, but Barney's relationship with Miriam has real depth and emotion, and the slow demise of their marriage is the movie's most effective and resonant plot point. Pike does a great job of conveying Miriam's allure as well as her intelligence, and she convincingly shows how Miriam could fall for this schlubby older guy. She then just as convincingly shows Miriam's heartbreak as their relationship falls apart. A good hour of the movie is a wonderfully affecting portrait of the arc of a relationship, but it's a little lost amid all the other stuff (including a tacked-on mystery about the possible murder of Boogie). A novel can easily encompass this kind of diversity in taking stock of one man's entire life; the movie struggles to do the same, although it comes out mostly ahead.

Available on DVD June 28.

Suits

USA shows are not generally known for being edgy, but the first episode of new legal drama Suits deploys basic-cable swear words and a drug-dealing subplot like it's angling to be taken seriously, which only makes its formulaic set-up all the more unimpressive. The extra-long pilot also spends more than half an hour setting up the extremely basic premise, so that the boring case of the week comes off as an afterthought (not that it's really worth any more attention). I imagine that future episodes will focus more on the procedural stories, and there's no indication here that creator Aaron Korsh (who was a writer on the similarly unimpressive ABC legal drama The Deep End) has any innovative or original stories on tap.

The characters that will have to anchor this show around the cases of the week aren't really worth following, either. They're probably supposed to come off as cool and capable, but I just found the two leads to be irritating douchebags. The idea is that Mike (Patrick J. Adams) is some kind of slacker genius with a photographic memory, so he never went to law school but he knows everything about the law. He's been supporting himself by taking the bar exam for people, and has reluctantly agreed to help out his drug-dealer best friend. Then he conveniently (although it takes far too long for the events to fall into place) runs into hotshot corporate lawyer Harvey (Gabriel Macht), who is also conveniently looking for an unconventional maverick like himself to take on as his new associate. Harvey agrees to fabricate some fancy credentials for Mike, and finally we have a show. What should have taken at most 10 minutes takes three times that.

Harvey jerks Mike around and pretends not to care about Mike or their clients, but of course deep down he really does. Mike knows every aspect of the law but can't do practical things like fill out a subpoena form. They're collections of quirks rather than real people, and even welcome faces like Gina Torres and Rick Hoffman in the supporting cast can't make up for the void at the center of the show. USA shows are usually breezy and inoffensive, even if they don't exactly compel you to watch every week, but this one is just insufferable.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on USA.

Combat Hospital

Summer on network TV is time for cheap reality shows and Canadian imports, and ABC's Combat Hospital is the latter, another standard-issue TV drama that feels just a tiny bit off thanks to being produced abroad. At least Combat Hospital doesn't try to hide its its foreign origins like another ABC show, Canadian cop drama Rookie Blue. The show takes place at an internationally staffed field hospital in Kandahar, so characters come from a variety of countries that make up the coalition fighting in Afghanistan, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia and, yes, Canada, where main character Dr. Rebecca Gordon (Michelle Borth) hails from.

There's some decent acting talent here, including Elias Koteas as the hospital's head doctor and Deborah Kara Unger as an Australian psychiatrist (although Unger barely shows up in the pilot). But despite the unique setting, most of what happens in the first episode is fairly basic medical-drama stuff, including a useless pregnancy scare (plus scene-setting relationship trauma) for the main character, some vague operating-room suspense, and a character who says "It's nothing" and then later (surprise!) collapses and convulses. The cast also seems strangely underpopulated for a show of this type, which would usually explore the scope of a large medical operation. Here you get the sense that the four main characters are the only doctors in the entire place (although for all I know, that's true of a place like this).

The show is set in 2006 and doesn't seem to be angling for any political commentary; the wartime milieu is mainly just an excuse for heightened urgency in the medical emergencies, and in practice isn't much different from the approach used in the short-lived and little-loved Off the Map. Medical-drama junkies who are desperate for something new to watch will probably find this show tolerable, and performers like Koteas and Unger could bring some depth to it eventually, but for now Combat Hospital is just a generic medical drama with superficially distinctive trappings.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on ABC.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: Payment on Demand (1951)

Despite how old-fashioned it seems now, Payment on Demand probably represented a pretty progressive attitude toward divorce in 1951, just in broaching the subject in a straightforward, non-sensationalistic manner. It seems horribly retrograde now, of course, with its harsh judgment of a woman's desire for even a modicum of independence and self-determination, but you can see the wheels of progress turning slowly but surely in the background, in the ways that some characters interact and respond to the news that wealthy businessman David Ramsey (Barry Sullivan) has decided to divorce his wife of many years, Joyce (Bette Davis). Yes, there's the sleazy married guy who hits on Joyce as soon as he learns she's divorced, and yes, there are the patronizing lawyers and private detectives who take advantage of her distress. But there's also a surprisingly sympathetic and nuanced reaction from Joyce's society friends, as well as from her young-adult daughters. You get the impression that by the time the younger Ramseys get around to potential divorces, things will be a whole lot easier for them.

Director and co-writer Curtis Bernhardt sort of stacks the deck against Joyce, though, showing her as a manipulative social climber who pushed her husband to become a high-powered rich executive when he would have preferred a simple rural life. It's an interesting performance from Davis, because Joyce isn't just a conniving villain that Davis can play with maniacal glee; she's a flawed woman who's a bit insensitive and calculating in her efforts to achieve what she believes is best for her and her family. Bernhardt sets up periodic flashbacks throughout the movie, showing the development of Joyce and David's relationship from early bliss to eventual resentment (it's sort of like the 1951 version of Blue Valentine), and Joyce is clearly the bad guy in many of them, but she doesn't do what she does out of malice. Davis plays her more as sad and misguided, and it's a shame that the movie essentially dismisses Joyce's interests and goals, because they are entirely legitimate.

Regardless of Joyce's shortcomings or genuine concerns, of course the movie has to head toward her and David patching things up, although at least it resists tying things up as neatly as, say, a movie made 10 years earlier might have. Bernhardt allows for ambiguity in the flashbacks (which use an interesting theater-style technique of constructing walls out of translucent material that gives everything a sort of artificial feel), and he even gives David's mistress probably the most progressive attitude in the whole film. When she and David are discovered by the P.I. Joyce has hired, he desperately offers to marry her so that she won't have to endure a toxic scandal. But she brushes the idea aside, asserting that her friends and associates won't care that she had an affair with a married (but separated) man. Throughout the scene, lush classical music plays like the swelling score of an old movie, and when the mistress tells David she's through with him, she shuts off the record player in her apartment and abruptly cuts the music. It's a stark and creative way to show the contrast between generational attitudes, and an indication of the sophistication that this movie has in spurts, even if it's a little dull and conservative on the whole.

Triskaidekaphilia: 13 Moons

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

In the early '90s, Alexandre Rockwell was an important part of the vanguard of new independent filmmakers, along with people like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. He collaborated with those two (as well as Allison Anders) on the 1995 omnibus film Four Rooms, and he won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his 1992 film In the Soup. It seemed like he had a promising future ahead of him.

But unlike Tarantino or Rodriguez or Kevin Smith, Rockwell was never able to translate his initial acclaim into a lasting career, and he's made films only sporadically since the '90s. By 2002, he still had enough goodwill to assemble a pretty impressive cast for 13 Moons, including Steve Buscemi, Peter Dinklage, Sam Rockwell and Peter Stormare, along with both the filmmaker's ex-wife (Jennifer Beals) and his future wife (Karyn Parsons). There isn't anything impressive about 13 Moons beyond the casting, though, and even the many capable actors in the ensemble turn in some pretty lackluster work. Rockwell shoots on ugly, cheap-looking video, and half the time it looks like the cameraman is running to catch up with actors who've wandered away from the set. The rest of the time the camera sits uncomfortably close to the actors' faces, not in a revealing, well-composed close-up but like an awkward, inept home movie.

The plot involves the tired device of disparate characters coming together over the course of one night, in this case all connected to a bail bondsman (David Proval) whose son is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. The unlikely crew works together to track down an unstable donor (Stormare) who's run off from the hospital, in the process coming to terms with their own personal issues, etc. None of the actors seem to have a handle on who their characters are, and most of them never evolve beyond their initial one-dimensional portrayals. The movie ends with one of the phoniest, most random "moment of clarity" bits I've ever seen, as a yellow hot air balloon flies over the city (via incredibly fake-looking special effects), somehow symbolizing rebirth (or something?) for these damaged people. It's a fittingly nonsensical ending for a movie that can never justify its own existence. I haven't seen any of Rockwell's earlier films, but whatever he had in the '90s, he'd clearly lost it by 2002.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: So Big! (1932)

This one is kind of a bust on two fronts: On the Bette Davis front, her presence in So Big! is pretty paltry, confined to the last 20 minutes of the movie and just a handful of scenes (I couldn't even find a decent picture of her in it). Plus, it's a pretty unremarkable movie overall, with Barbara Stanwyck giving a fairly colorless performance as a woman who goes from an artistic dreamer to a hardscrabble farmer while trying to give her son the creative life she never had. It rushes through a decades-spanning story in about 80 minutes, with Stanwyck's Selina going from young girl to old woman over the course of the movie. The rushed pacing means that the movie never really pauses long enough to give any of its plot elements enough time to develop. Just when we're getting used to Selina as a young schoolteacher in rural Illinois, she gets married to a taciturn farmer and pops out a kid. And just when we're getting used to Selina as a farmer's wife with a young son, her husband dies and the kid's all grown up.

The whole movie flies by in that way, until Selina's old and gray and her son is a heartless businessman who gave up his ambitions of being an architect. At that point the movie is three-quarters over anyway, and that's when we get a little bit of Bette Davis as a fabulously sassy artist who teases Selina's son Dirk with her sexy allure but pulls back because he's such a boring suit with no passion for anything. Davis, looking delightfully fetching and with a naughty twinkle in her eye, does wonders with the small part, and even our old friend George Brent the wet blanket (in the first of his many collaborations with Davis) shows up about five minutes before the movie ends and provides a bit of a spark.

None of that makes up for the hectic pacing of the rest of the movie, or the abrupt ending, or Stanwyck's listless performance. Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was adapted for the screen two other times (once before this, and once after). For her sake, I hope those versions were more interesting.

Stephen King Month: The Shining (1980)

I have to confess that I'm not much of a Stanley Kubrick fan; that's film-critic heresy, but much of Kubrick's work strikes me as too aloof and closed off, and even the movies of his that I like I tend to appreciate more than enjoy. The Shining is a movie of immense technical achievement, but at heart I find it too cold. That kind of detachment is fine for certain stories, but Stephen King's work is almost always driven by emotion, and I think that's a major element lacking in Kubrick's film. At the same time, I was constantly impressed with Kubrick's ability to build tension in a sort of sadistic, dispassionate way, like a kid torturing a bug with magnifying glass. It's difficult to empathize with any of the characters in the movie, but the sense of dread that comes out of the imagery combined with the relentless score of modernist classical music will eat at you over time.

The Shining is also just an amazing movie to look at; it features one of the earliest uses of the Steadicam, and Kubrick's long tracking shots through the cavernous Overlook Hotel are mesmerizing, giving a sense of its enormity as well as its emptiness. The hotel itself was built entirely on soundstages, and it's a monumental achievement in production design. Kubrick's meticulousness comes through in the movie's use of color, the way each corridor and room is dominated by a particular hue, sometimes bold and bright, sometimes muted and pale, but always noticeable and always contributing to the sense of the characters being isolated and overwhelmed.

The characters themselves are another story, though. Despite Kubrick's legendary penchant for dozens of takes, the performances in The Shining don't quite work together, or with the movie's impeccable design sense. Jack Nicholson, as writer Jack Torrance, is plenty intense and scary, but the problem is that he plays Jack as essentially unhinged from the start, even before the Overlook starts to warp his mind. So even the early domestic scenes of Jack and his family, or his interview with the managers of the Overlook for the job of winter caretaker, come off as slightly unsettled and disturbing. While King's story is about Jack's descent into madness and his possession by the evil that resides in the hotel, the movie seems to present Jack as inherently unstable, and thus much of the humanity of the character is lost.

Shelley Duvall is irritatingly hysterical as Jack's wife Wendy, and Danny Lloyd is awkward and flat as their son Danny, although that sometimes contributes to the creepiness of his line readings. It's weird to say that the movie succeeds in spite of its characters, but that's a testament to Kubrick's abilities as a craftsman. It misses the point of King's novel, and it seems to have a misunderstanding of what's truly scary about the story, but it nevertheless manages that feeling of dull anxiety throughout, which is something that few King movies achieve. And of course, telling the story exactly as conceived in the novel isn't the best approach anyway; I may not love this movie, but I wouldn't hesitate to take it over the more literal King-penned TV adaptation from 1997. That one has the whole story, but almost none of the craft.

How far to Castle Rock: Kubrick is definitely not the type for cutesy references to other works, although at one point Jack does mention Portland, Maine.