June 2nd , 2005

 Jane Fonda makes her first movie in 15 years and gets second billing under Jennifer Lopez? This is how low we’ve sunk. Still, she turns sour grapes into tasty merlot. The movie is forgettable fluff—a thing called MONSTER-IN-LAW—but not to worry. There is nothing forgettable about Jane Fonda’s fizzy performance. She walks away with every scene she’s in, and luckily she’s in almost every shot in the picture. In fact, she steals the whole thing right out from under J-Lo with such power and finesse that she even upstages the tiresomely over-publicized booty.
  Beautiful and elegant as she approaches 70, Ms. Fonda has lost none of her looks, talent, intelligence, or sense of humor. This is evident in her brave, funny, candid, and searingly honest new autobiography, My Life So Far, and it is thrillingly on view as she single-handedly elevates a nothing movie like Monster-in-Law several notches beyond the predictable second-rate status it deserves. Actress, activist, feminist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, author, and rescuer of bad movies, Jane Fonda is now a national treasure.
  Monster-in-Law is not exactly deserving of that mantle. After turning down dozens of important roles in the past decade, nobody knows why she bothered with it at all. It doesn’t explore the rivalries between brides and mothers-in-law from hell with much originality or freshness. You could write the plot on the head of a bobby pin. J-Lo is Charlie, a yoga instructor/dogwalker/caterer/receptionist who meets the man of her dreams, a handsome doctor named Kevin (Michael Vartan), who hands her an engagement ring. Jane is her fiancé’s mother, Viola, a rich, successful no-nonsense news anchor/personality from the Barbara Walters-Diane Sawyer School of Take No Prisoners TV Blabber who has won five Emmys but considers her son Kevin the biggest trophy in her possession.
  Kevin has moved back home from San Francisco to be near his mother, whose career has suddenly plummeted after taking her talent for not suffering fools too far. (There’s a very funny bit at the top when she has a “live” on-camera breakdown after attacking a teenage Britney Spears-Paris Hilton clone for thinking Roe v. Wade was a boxing match.) Viola is under doctor’s orders to avoid all stress. Then she meets J-Lo, who “looks like cheap upholstery,” and fakes two phony attacks—heart and mental—that force the mother from hell and the daughter-in-law from hunger to move in together.
  Demanding that Charlie share her bed and serve Evian with ice at all hours of the day and night, Viola disrupts her life, her sleep, and her eating patterns. Ms. Fonda is hilarious modeling bizarre clothes presented as gifts from Chairman Mao and the Dalai Lama and boring everyone to death with riotous bouts of pomposity (“So there I was, sitting with the Sultan of Brunei, Maureen Dowd, Carrie Fisher, and Snoop Dog…”). Charlie is almost tortured to the point of calling off the wedding until she discovers that Viola’s meds are fake. Then she turns the tables and wreaks double jeopardy on her future mother-in-law, slapping spaghetti sauce on Viola’s white Gucci wardrobe and watching her pass out face down in a plate of tripe.
  From this point forward, the movie is nothing more than a series of contrived bitch fights in which both stars prove they’re also good sports, poking fun at each other and getting laughs at their own expense. The other ladies in the film, like Elaine Stritch and standup comic Wanda Sykes, are just window dressing, and I still don’t understand why the pumped but painfully thin Michael Vartan never shaves, even for his own wedding. Is this a new trend? Emaciated blond hunks with black Skid Row stubble?
  Most of Monster-in-Law is nothing to blog about. A good script doctor like Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias, First Wives’ Club) might have given the two women some edge and some oomph, but the pedestrian screenplay by Anya Kochoff rarely rises above the level of a mediocre sitcom, while the lame direction by Australian Robert Luketic pretty much leaves the actors to their own devices. This is probably a good thing, since it gave me great pleasure watching Ms. Fonda conduct a class in how to play comedy from the Stanislavski point of view with believable results. She’s real in the truest sense, and her skill and polish, even in the most humiliating scenes, seem to have rubbed off on J-Lo, who does her best and most natural work on film to date. Class rubs off.
  Ms. Fonda said in interviews that this movie was a fluke. She has no interest in returning to films on a full-time basis. I hope she’s kidding. At a time when moviegoing has become the visual equivalent of wading barefoot through garbage, a class act like Jane Fonda is not easy to come by. We must not lose our grip on this one any time soon.   This summer’s most unexpected new star might turn out to be Mark Bittner, an aging, graying San Francisco hippie with no girlfriend, no income, and no abdominal six-pack. He’s a nondescript “wouldn’t turn around to notice if you saw him on the sidewalk” kind of man whose fledgling career as a musician flopped years ago. He was homeless for more than a decade and lived on the roof of a hotel. Yet he has become a hero in the Bay Area, a local celebrity who befriended and immortalized a flock of wild parrots that populate the trees around his rent-free crash pad.
  It took him a year before the birds came to him, and THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL, a mellow but easygoing and likeable documentary directed by Judy Irving, takes its time showing how he did it. During its 83 minutes, you meet some of the 45 birds who develop living personalities right in front of your eyes. You’ll love the downtrodden and romantically unattached blue-crowned conure. You’ll want to throttle the twin cherryheads. You may even cotton to the pet that nibbles Bittner’s shoes. Even the sudden arrival of aggressive red-tailed hawks circling the flock for possible lunchtime snacks become neighborhood familiarities.
  To make matters worse, Bittner’s impatient landlords announce they are going to renovate his building and he’ll have to move, leaving the parrots to fend for themselves in the vicious world of predators who threaten endangered species. There is such a sense of emotional investment in both men and birds in this film that people all around me were crying when Bittner was forced to pack up his hot plate and leave his feathered friends to fate. This movie is more than an urban curiosity piece. Its subject is compassion for life, both human and avian, and it does what all good documentaries should do: It asks challenging but important questions. How do people survive in a society that is often intolerant of eccentrics, where even parrots are expected to conform?
  In her investigation of man’s conflict with nature, director Irving even suggests that Bittner’s interference might not be in the birds’ best interest. But there is much to admire and recommend in a film that depicts an average person’s journey into a world of dedicated scientific inquiry, which makes it a fine choice for viewers of all ages. Ms. Irving is a nature photographer and an environmentalist, but she does not romanticize the birds at the expense of objectivity. She even shows the strong parrots turning on the weak and injured members of their species in a shocking display of cruelty. Still, there are breathtaking close-ups of the animals and their world, an urban haven of lush hillside foliage that encloses one of the city’s historical wooden staircases. Nobody knows where the parrots came from or how they got there, but go to Telegraph Hill and you’ll meet people who talk about these birds as a part of their environment as vital as Fisherman’s Wharf or the Embarcadero. Carefully considered, beautifully shot, and often gripping in its narrative, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is one of the most riveting and ingratiating documentaries of the year.  CRASH is one of those unsettling, multi-layered (and often confusing) chronicles of lives criss-crossing in Los Angeles at as many intersections as the freeways. Like 21 Grams, it pits hope and redemption against loss and disillusionment in the wake of tragedy. Like Mulholland Falls and Short Cuts, it weaves disparate lives together with thin yarn in ways that are not always convincing. Still, there is no denying that Paul Haggis, a Canadian writer/director who moved to Hollywood to turn out formulaic TV episodes in the 1970s, makes an auspicious feature-film debut that extracts astonishing performances from an ensemble cast.
  Using the dangerous, slick, and coldly poetic presence of automobiles throughout the film to serve as guiding metaphors for power, grace and beauty, he juggles their impenetrable superiority with the sad, eloquent, and poignant inequity of a parade of characters. In the admirable collage, highlights include the extraordinary Don Cheadle as a detective struggling to save his wayward younger brother from a life of crime while investigating the murder of one cop by yet another brother with a badge. Matt Dillon brings unexpected nuance to the role of a villainous LAPD officer and devoted son. His most heinous abuses of the law and his opportunity for salvation come in two encounters with the luminous Thandie Newton in which the dramatic tension is almost unbearable.
  Biggest shock of all: Sandra Bullock, playing against type, as the compulsively detached wife of a district attorney who breaks down like melted steel after a terrifying car-jacking. Rife with moments of racism, intolerance, misunderstanding, and desperation to survive life’s most violent blows, Crash unfolds its interconnecting stories with such positive conviction that hope conquers confusion and doubt with intelligence and optimism. Mr. Haggis is a filmmaker worth watching, and Crash is a good place to start.