With everyone bracing themselves for the blockbuster movie season, Hollywood has produced an acceptable start to the summer. For unabashedly cheap thrills, \The Scorpion King"" isn't half bad.
The movie serves as a sort of prequel to the ""Mummy"" franchise, although it explains little more than its title character in regard to the rest of the movies. It follows Mathayus (Dwayne Johnson, aka ""The Rock"") as he joins forces with the sorceress Cassandra (Kelly Hu) to take on the evil king Memnon (Steven Brand).
The movie is successful in entertaining with action, PG-13 level skin and special effects. It holds no pretense of being serious. The makeup, sound effects and costumes are all over the top. The Rock is surprisingly strong in the lead, with the ability to play the strong, cartoonish hero character with nearly as much charisma as Brendan Fraser did in the first two ""Mummy"" movies, while Michael Clarke Duncan is great fun to watch and Kelly Hu is top-notch eye candy.
The movie isn't for everyone. Some people will cringe at a lot of the overdramatic and unrealistic dialogue. Some people will want more of a story. Some people will have a hard time watching a supposed ancient Egyptian warrior with an obvious manicure, but none of these things compromise the movie's objectives.
In the end, ""The Scorpion King"" plays like a highly stylized comic book come to life, and that's okay. The whole point is cheap thrills and ""The Scorpion King"" delivers. While not as good as ""The Mummy,"" it isn't the gargantuan waste of time that ""The Mummy Returns"" was either, especially at a sleek 90 minutes.
As genre that hasn't filled itself out, ""Kissing Jessica Stein"" should act as a refreshing addition to mainstream lesbian themed films, such as ""Chasing Amy,"" ""All Over Me"" and ""Bound."" It makes an attempt, but fails in a few ways.
""Kissing"" offers us two soul-searching women living empty lives. Our title character, Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt), works a draining editing job at the New York Tribune. In her free time, she secludes herself in her apartment reading and painting into the wee hours. In her social desperation, a clich??d montage of blind dating ensues, but to no avail. Is Jessica desperate enough to turn to women? We don't really know, since her intentions are never very clear to us.
Helen (Heather Juergensen), who places the ad, is a free-spirited downtown gallery owner with supportive, yet stereotypical, gay male friends. They urge her to pursue her lesbian curiosity, since it's the only thing left for her to conquer. We see her build up lesbian curiosity, but like Jessica's situation, it seems like an escape from men in general. Juergensen plays a more passionate and genuine character than Westfeldt, who nervously stumbles her way through the role.
The two ladies awkwardly meet and magically click, but only in a best friend way. Sure, these ladies can hold a good conversation about lipstick layering, but you never really see the bond that supposedly holds them together. Their romantic sides only come out with many, many glasses of red wine. Their chemistry, if you would call it that, is very contrived; much like grown-up teenagers bumbling through adolescence, which is hard for the us to accept, no matter how cute their mishaps seem.
The highlight performance of the movie is by Jessica's Jewish mother, played by Tovah Feldshuh. At first she seems like a token, manipulative mother, wanting to set her daughter up with a nice Jewish boy, but during a breathtaking scene with Westfeldt, her genuine concern for Jessica becomes more apparent. More forgettable is Scott Cohen's performance as Jessica's jealous and suspicious co-worker, Josh. He's her brother's best friend from college and her ex-boyfriend, which should make him more interesting, but it doesn't. He still has feelings for Jessica, but you never root for him because of his jerky, jealous tendencies.
Helen and Jessica's relationship goes through many high and low points, all accompanied by desperate yelling and painful small talk. The last 20 minutes of the movie seem additional to the story. Westfeldt's strained performance ruins the end of the film. You just want Jessica Stein to spit her words out and be happy, but she just can't, due to the overabundance of awkwardness that makes the movie hard to watch.
One thing that rings true in this movie is the idea that love isn't easy, no matter what your orientation is. It doesn't present a predictable package of a relationship that moves from point A to B, but rather, shows how complicated feelings can be. It's a well-written movie that suffers from acting faults. If you can look beyond that, then ""Kissing Jessica Stein"" can be an enjoyable, surprising romantic comedy.
