Guy de Fraumeni’s Hollywood In The Hamptons

Red-hot movie lovers will admit that there are “guy flicks” and “chick flicks,” which appeal to each gender’s primal instincts. They dip deeply into their buried desires either consciously or otherwise. I was thinkin’ maybe the sexes should indulge in the others wish-fulfilling celluloid fantasies. Crossing over can be rewarding as long as you’re engaged in totally new sensory experiences.

Dear Ladies,

You can belly-up to the latest guy’s gross-out movie, Smokin’ Aces, with all the violence, bizarre sex, god-awful language and roaring fun. Prep your girlfriends with huge bowls of four-alarm chili sloshed down with lots of brewskis. With your head in the right place, you could maybe have a deliriously good time. Maybe, that is. It’s cut-to-the-bone, whiplash humor can dominate every lovely thought you came in with and mask them with black leather perversities.

Dozens of finger lickin’ good performers are drawn to the adrenaline puffing writer-director Joe Carnahan who slammed his way to Hollywood’s hot-to-trot producers with Narc, his 2002 killer-cop exploration that perforated the genre like an ulcer. With Smokin’ Aces, he punches holes in the ordinary “blood and guts” flick with lots of bullets, but his most lethal weapon is his mischievous wit that rips up his acknowledged earlier exponents of gangland mad men with chainsaw glee. Yep, there’s a chainsaw in Carnahan’s ghoulish tool kit. The whole kit and caboodle contains more rat-tat-tats than a Fred Astaire movie, though any device that can cause pain or death will do and there’s plenty to go around. The entire gory, dizzying tempo spins off a zillion characters doing their stuff with grandiose zeal, making you wish they had more time on screen.

The center of this maelstrom is a stink-cheesy, lounge act magician, Buddy “Aces” Israel who’d been doing business with the mob in Vegas. Always workin’, workin’ to get ahead, Buddy goes into business himself and quickly makes mean enemies. He makes so many enemies, in fact, that he has to blab to the F.B.I. for protection. The primo boss-man offers a million dollars for Aces’ heart, literally. Aces is exactly suited to Jeremy Piven, HBO’s “Entourage’s” lizard agent, who morphs his killer instinct into the real thing as Buddy and everyone wants him dead. Carve out his heart? A pleasure. The rest of the cast is made up of a freaky bunch of folks like R & B singer Alicia Keys, rapper Common as one of Buddy’s henchmen and a mob lawyer, played marvelously by Jason Bateman, who hires a bail bondsman named Jack DuPree (Ben Affleck) to help. Also assisting are a couple of bumbling ex-vice cops. Meanwhile, an FBI deputy (Andy Garcia) has two agents (Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds) out to bring nutsy Buddy in to testify. That is if they can beat many more “get Buddy” wannabes. What a strange mix: Blacksploitation hit girls (sexually around-the-way), two skinhead neo-Nazis, a torturing Latino and a disguise master. Shake ‘em and mix ‘em up with naked hookers strewn around Buddy’s coke-dusted Lake Tahoe suite. Whew! I can’t go on. And you femmes thought the guys had it easy.

Dear Gentlemen,

To get your pals ready to skip over to the chick side of movie faves, get your pitcher of Cosmopolitans nice and chilled and serve with a tray of cucumber slices daubed with hummus. You can all have one too many of both because the movie Catch and Release is too, too much. This fairytale of love lost and found is totally out of touch with today’s concepts of love and sex and their current dynamics, let alone feminism. You guys might really like it. And besides, it’s also about fishing (psst, the movie’s title. Got it?) In bucolic Boulder, Colorado, Gray, a simpering Jennifer Garner abruptly loses her would-be husband to an accident. It’s one way for the fellow to get out of marrying her. Anyway, what would you do if you were Gray? Naturally, you’d move into a primitive fishing cabin with three of the dead guy’s friends. Fishy, eh? She learns a lot of wormy stuff about her buried fiancé that should have been interred with him. He owns a fortune in bucks and had a mistress, lively Juliette Lewis, who may be the mother of his son.

Good grief! Whatever thorns might have scratched, the writer-director Susannah Grant has carefully pruned to make it safe and soft as Charmin. Oh, the love-subs for Gray? They are Timothy Oliphant, Sam Jaeger and Kevin Smith, in there for laughs. Boy, did we need it.

And you thought the women had it tough.

Guy Jean de Fraumeni is the producer/writer/director of award winning European and American feature films. He has been a judge at Major Film and TV award competitions, including the Oscars, the Emmy’s and various film festivals. Sarah Halsey assists him.