By Tricia Olszewski
During the course of the compact, 83-minute Interview, variations on the line “Do you realize that you're unpleasant?” are spoken approximately 216 times. Possibly, some of those sentiments are actually just bouncing around your brain, a natural consequence of watching two actors exercise their chops so strenuously that you're the one who'll feel exhausted afterward.
Steve Buscemi's Interview is a remake of a 2003 film of the same name by slain Dutch director Theo van Gogh. Buscemi, who adapted the original script with first-time writer David Schechter, also plays Pierre Peders, a political journalist who has been relegated to doing a celebrity profile for his magazine. His subject is Katya (Sienna Miller), a starlet with a Sex and the City-like show on TV and loads of mass-appeal movies in the can. Though Pierre is itching to get out of it so he can cover a breaking Washington scandal, he's scheduled to meet Katya a restaurant one night. She's an hour late; we see her telling a friend earlier that she “thinks she has to be somewhere.” When she finally arrives, the privileges Katya enjoys are obvious: No one balks as she talks on her phone in the cell-free restaurant, and the people already sitting at her favorite table cheerily scoot to another one.
Pierre hardly disguises his disgust – if not exactly at Katya, at what she represents – and proceeds to conduct a half-assed interview. It's clear that he hasn't bothered to prepare. When Katya calls him on it, they both forget about trying to be civilized and decide to just get the hell away from each other. Doesn't work: Pierre ends up in a cab with a driver who's too busy harassing the on-foot Katya to avoid hitting a parked van. Katya suddenly feels bad about her behavior and brings Pierre, who's got a gash on his forehead, back to her loft for first-aid, booze, cigarettes, and lots of mood-cycling and conversational jousting.
Interview is at once captivating and infuriating. It's theatrical in its spareness – there aren't any time jumps, costume changes, or even much of a plot, just Pierre, Katya, and lots of soundtrack-free talk. Buscemi and Miller are sharp in their portrayals of, respectively, the jaded journo and misunderstood ingenue who quickly drop professional pretense and try to get to know one another more casually. The problem is that the characters are too mercurial to even come across as believably nuts. It's not much fun watching, say, Katya talk Pierre into letting her kiss him, only to wriggle free from the embrace and shout, “God, I hate you!” Or listening to him meltingly say how beautiful she is one moment, then offer a bitter armchair-psychologist analysis about her lack of talent: “You're good at lying, but mostly to yourself.”
The whole spectacle – and with the two characters going hot and cold on each other every few minutes, answering questions with questions and “playing games,” it is a spectacle – is fashioned as some kind of ridiculous power struggle, an attempt by each to intellectually and emotionally one-up the other. Unsurprisingly, all of their back-and-forth about their careers, families, ideas about love, etc. are merely steps on the way to the Big Reveals, the kind that seem to come to light only during such encounters involving late hours, drink, and a love-hate dynamic. Interview's whiplash turns may make it a dream addition to an acting- or scriptwriting-class syllabus. But by the halfway point of the film, viewers will more likely sympathize with one of Katya's pained questions to Pierre: “Haven't you got enough already?”
Stardust's plot is as crammed as Interview's is minimal. The PG-13 fairy tale, directed and co-written by Layer Cake helmer Matthew Vaughn, is very Princess Bride in its tongue-in-cheek telling of swashbucklers and enchanted lands. No doubt, though, that audiences of all ages – the movie's intended demographic isn't exactly clear – will instantly compare it to the more recent adventures of a certain beloved boy wizard named Potter.
Both share obvious elements – witches, magic, good vs. evil, the idea that mugg...regular people live in one realm, largely unaware of the magical world that exists under their unbewitched noses. Stardust takes place in Wall, an area between England and the supernatural kingdom of Stormhold. Now, try to keep up with me: Stormhold's king (Peter O'Toole) is dying and is expected to name one of his three still-living sons successor. The king is proud that he murdered his own brothers to obtain his crown, though, so he encourages his spawn to do the same. Not only does the successor have to be the last one standing, however; the king has taken a ruby pendant, drained it of its color, and thrown it out into the sky (with great whooshes, light, and general fanfare). The new king must find the pendant and restore its color to win the crown.
Meanwhile, in Wall, a young, motherless peasant named Tristan (Charlie Cox) is trying to woo the beautiful and popular Victoria (Sienna Miller again). She pretty much laughs at him, but when they spot a shooting star (accompanied by great whooshes, light, and general fanfare), she agrees to marry him if he finds the star and brings it to her within a week. This means crossing into Stormhold, which normal folk aren't allowed to do, though Tristan's father once managed to bypass the guard and create a little magic himself there some 18 years back, if you know what I mean. The “star” is actually the ruby, which is actually a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes doing a Gwyneth Paltrow impersonation in terms of both looks and awkward British accent). Also after Yvaine is Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), an evil, aged witch who needs the star's heart so she and her equally hideous sisters can be young again. Lamia turns back the clock temporarily in order to go undercover in her hunt, though she ages whenever she uses magic (whooshes, light, fanfare).
This web has been extracted from a mere 250-page novel by Neil Gaiman, which underscores the big difference between Stardust and any of the Potter films: Whereas the latter movies have been whittled from books many times that size, their stories have been at once smarter and easier to digest. (Then again, this isn't much of a surprise coming from Vaughn, whose Layer Cake was also visually impressive if narratively cloudy.) Still, Stardust has its, uh, charms. Its humor, though sometimes forced, is smile- if not guffaw-inducing, with highlights including a ghostly Greek chorus of the king's dead sons and a typically droll cameo by Ricky Gervais as a fence. (Less successful – OK, just plain weird and sorta offensive – is Robert De Niro's turn as the “wopsie” captain of a flying pirate ship. The term will define itself.)
Out of the all-star cast, Pfeiffer is the ace here. Fresh off her somewhat limited role as a ruthless stage mom in Hairspray, she's allowed to run away with this movie, taking cackling glee in her character's witchly schemes and gamely stealing the spotlight even when Lamia is increasingly resembling the crypt keeper. The love story itself – naturally, the affair that began the story isn't the one that concludes it – exists merely as an excuse for lots of special effects (though some are cheesy) and scheming (much more satisfying). Still, once you're more at home with the basic plot and can relax as it unfolds, Stardust ends up being a lovely little fairy tale – it may even fulfill the jonesing that the Summer of Harry has no doubt left in its wake.