film assessment
KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN
Operating time: 128 minutes. Not but rated.
PARK CITY, Utah — The film “Kiss of the Spider Girl,” based mostly on the Tony Award-winning 1993 Broadway present by John Kander and Fred Ebb, has its work reduce out for it from the opening credit.
In spite of everything, two of the best movie-musicals ever made had been tailored from that legendary duo’s oeuvre: “Cabaret” and “Chicago.” Each of these trendy hits are, for good purpose, enduring Greatest Image winners.
I doubt cinema-classic standing would be the path for wobbly Ms. “Spider Girl,” which premiered Sunday evening on the Sundance Movie Pageant. Caught in her internet, I used to be not.
Sure, star Jennifer Lopez’s singing and dancing wow as silver display screen goddess Ingrid Luna. That’s her forte, so no shock there. And newcomer Tonatiuh, enjoying homosexual prisoner Luis Molina, is a susceptible and charismatic discover.
However “Dreamgirls” director Invoice Condon’s off-putting film is a visible and narrative mess; polished the place it needs to be gritty and ugly the place it should be glamorous. Bland, virtually at all times.
The story from Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel exists in two opposing worlds. Harsh actuality is the cramped, dank Argentinian jail cell in the course of the 1981 Soiled Battle that Molina, a flamboyant window dresser who’s a chatty optimist regardless of having been dealt a merciless hand, shares with cranky political dissident Valentin (Diego Luna).
Distant from that claustrophobic cage, we’re whisked to Molina’s escapist fantasy: kaleidoscopic scenes from the fictional Fifties film “Kiss of the Spider Girl,” starring Ingrid Luna as Aurora, that he recounts to his roomie at evening to flee the grime.
At first, Valentin is irritated with all of the showtunes jabber. He hates musicals. However the outspoken revolutionary quickly will get sucked in by the plot.
The identical can’t be stated of the movie’s viewers.
The distinction between the film’s two identities is important. Condon has scrapped the Broadway present’s clink songs usually sung by Molina and Valentin, which was the fitting selection, even when it meant shedding Molina’s fabulous intro tune “Dressing Them Up.”
Retaining incarceration music-free means oppressed Molina’s goals are poetry, whereas his actuality is prose. Good thought, however life behind bars nonetheless appears and feels awfully stagey. The atmosphere isn’t plausible, and subsequently lacks actual menace. You may simply image the scenic painters clocking out seconds earlier than “motion!”
An equal-and-opposite drawback mars the should-be lavish old-Hollywood pastiche numbers with Lopez. The manufacturing design and cinematography are so shabby, they gave me arachnophobia. The budget-friendly units alternate between high-school cafetorium and miniature golf course. Extra prison-like, to my thoughts.
For the dances akin to “Gimme Love,” Condon opts for huge, steady pictures that showcase Lopez’s exemplary talent. That may be a real pleasure of outdated Hollywood movies — watching Gene Kelly nail a sequence in a single go with out an editor’s assist. The identical is true of the radiant Lopez, whose belting and hoofing is healthier than her performing. Granted, Aurora isn’t Girl Macbeth.
The issue is, with out closeups and cuts, the lacking lavishness turns into plainly apparent. Like flipping on fluorescent lights in a half-cleaned lounge, you notice the scuff marks and the flimsy plywood. The phases are deathly ethereal and there aren’t sufficient dancers to adequately fill them. There’s no awe.
Apart from these 11 performances of Kander and Ebb’s masterful songs, there’s a knotty movie-within-a-movie plot involving a love triangle that’s carelessly breezed by way of. Its developments are troublesome to observe, and the temper is torpid and non-committal as if the actors are lampooning the style as an alternative of legitimately attempting.
“Spider Girl” improves within the remaining third because the ice melts between Molina and Valentin. Molina has been harboring a harmful secret, and Valentin begins to contemplate his cellmate not as annoying, however caring and broken. Tonatiuh and Luna forge a real chemistry.
Intimate, linked moments are important to the story. However that is, at its core, a movie-musical, and an finally unsatisfying one.
When you left Rob Marshall’s “Chicago” singing, “It’s good, isn’t it? Nice, isn’t it? Grand, isn’t it? Swell, isn’t it?,” you’ll depart “Kiss of the Spider-Girl” muttering, “It was meh.”