New Reviews

Harpies, mimes, zombies and pies

The Portland Tribune, May 11, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

© Laurent Thurin

"The Iceberg"

Edited by Anne Marie DiStefano

‘Georgia Rule’ (R)

The latest from director Garry Marshall (“The Princess Diaries,” “Runaway Bride”) is a cringe-inducing carnival of irritating characters and implausible situations that fails miserably at wringing comedy from sexual abuse and alcoholism.

Now, anything is fair game for satire, but this is a particularly touchy premise. A sexually aggressive teenager (Lindsay Lohan) accuses her stepfather of molesting her after her alcoholic mother (Felicity Huffman) has banished her to Idaho to stay with a strait-laced grandmother (Jane Fonda).

The subject matter needs a different touch than Marshall provides.

Inappropriate humor abounds, from Lohan’s seduction of a local Mormon boy to her loudly announcing the embarrassing condition of the 10-year-old with whom she’s been wrestling.

Huffman and Fonda both look embarrassed to be here at all and, in turn, we’re embarrassed for them, too.

– Dawn Taylor

Cinetopia, Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Hilltop, Division Street, Stark Street, Bridgeport

‘The Iceberg’ (NR)

Imagine being locked in a closet with an emotionally disturbed mime. Or if you’re a film buff, imagine a Jacques Tati comedy in which a brain-damaged Monsieur Hulot endlessly re-enacts the scene in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where Richard Dreyfuss builds a mountain of mashed potatoes.

Now imagine paying money to imagine these things, and you’ve conjured up the experience of suffering through this flotsam.

It’s a Belgian trifle that attempts to recapture the magic of silent screen comedyandbecomesinstead an example of cuteness wielded as an instrument of torture.

In it, a woman accidentally locks herself in the freezer at the fast-food joint she manages, and emerges the next day so crazy for the cold that she convinces a mute doofus of a fisherman to sail her to an iceberg.

The film’s three directors render the physical comedy as recurring symptoms of some obsessive-compulsive disorder, placed in a series of stylized deadpan tableaux. Each spastic episode is so repetitive and endless you could leave the theater, go to the store and buy a hammer, hit yourself with it repeatedly, and still get back before the bit is over.

Oddly enough, you get the feeling a talented animator might make the same tale into a nice little 10-minute short. Trouble is, to get that feeling you have to see this movie.

– Pat Holmes

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