‘Bend it Like Beckham’ scores, ‘The Core’ is the pits

Uncle Don

‘Beckham’ bends to the audience’s liking

“Bend it Like Beckham” is one of those rare treasures, a feel-good

movie that manages to appeal to all age groups without insulting

anyone. It is a movie about sports that manages to be about the

importance of families.

The “Beckham” of the title is British soccer star David Beckham.

In the movie, he is also the idol of a teenage girl, Jess (Parminder

Nagra), from a Sikh Punjabi family in the Southall area of London.

She eats, sleeps and dreams soccer. Her exceptional skills help her

overcome the local boys’ reluctance to have a girl on their team.

One day, Jess is noticed by Keira, who plays on an all-girl team.

Keira invites an excited Jess to join the team. Before long, she is a

main part of the team, but her parents can not know of her

participation because of their strict Punjabi roots. A sport played

while wearing shorts is unacceptable.

It would be so easy for a less well-written script to allow the

story to slip into a silly farce of deception as Jess creates one

story after another to explain her frequent absences. Co-writer and

director Gurinder Chadha keeps the audience pulling for Jess’ success

as a soccer player while enlisting our support for her parents. Who

wins? The audience certainly does.

* JUNE FENNER, a Costa Mesa resident, is vice president of a

work-force training company.

‘Core’ goes to painfully familiar territory

“The Core” opens in Boston, which is falling apart faster than the

Celtics after the retirement of Larry Bird. Weird stuff is happening:

Watches are stopping, and people are dropping like 200-pound flies.

Back in Los Angeles, one of the space shuttles manages to land in the

L.A. River, avoiding bridge abutments, derelicts, shopping carts and

common sense.

Now we’re in London, where the pigeons in Trafalgar Square start

dropping like, um pigeon droppings. It’s off to Italy, where Rome,

which may not have been built in a day, managed to fall in a few

hours in the aftermath of an electrostatic storm. The filmmakers

manage to blow up the Coliseum, the Parthenon and a bunch of them

other buildings that they told us in grade school were important to

know about.

So what’s the cause of all the commotion? The earth’s core has

stopped spinning. It’s too bad the theater’s projector didn’t stop

spinning. Then I wouldn’t have this dim bulb of a flick to review.

So what happens when the core stops spinning? We get storms,

microwaves, the end of life as we know it and, most importantly, the

premise for a really stupid movie.

The usual congregation of mad and semi-mad scientists head to the

hills, well, actually the desert, to meet with another not-really-mad

scientist, (Delroy Lindo), whose invention will save the earth. It’s

a Gatling gun-looking thing that makes big honking holes in

everything it’s fired at. They must have aimed it at the script of

“The Core.”

We are provided with a long-winded technical explanation for what

happens when the core stops spinning, but what it comes down to is:

We’re all toast. Only this man, his machine and a phalanx of escapees

from the 12-step program Overactors Anonymous (Hillary Swank, Stanley

Tucci, Aaron Eckhart and Tcheky Karyo being the primary offenders)

stand between us, the unfortunate viewers and planetary annihilation.

Lindo’s machine kinda looks like one of the sandworms from “Dune.”

Made from what Lindo calls “Unobtainium,” it reeks of tedium.

Scattered around this segmented tube of triteness are the usual

random bits of machinery and vagrant pieces of electronics that

combined with the largely dim lighting to create an aura of technical

prowess, but instead evoke memories of “Plan 9 from Outer Space”.

It looks like the only way to restart the circulation of the

earth’s core is to tunnel down and drop off a couple of bombs. They

could have taken “The Postman,” “Waterworld” and “Ishtar,” but since

they’re trying to merely restart the earth’s core, not destroy it, a

half-dozen or so nukes are apparently less dangerous.

Getting to the earth’s core involves inserting our marginally

heroic half-dozen or so yahoos into the tunneling machine (“The

Virgil”), dropping the sucker into the Marianas Trench, where it

heads down faster than the NASDAQ.

Along the way, the Virgil passes assorted special effects that

either look stolen from 1966’s “Fantastic Voyage” or filmed by a

drunk in front of a hyperactive lava lamp. I could have sworn there

was one scene where the background was an over-baked cheese pizza.

Our intrepid heroes wear space suits made of Reynolds wrap, with

arbitrary tubes, antennae and hoses sprouting off them like they were

Chia Pets as they argue their way toward oblivion and obliviousness.

So why did the earth’s core stop rotating? Take a guess ...

Natural causes? Space aliens? The government?. If you picked door No.

3, hand yourself a cheap exploding cigar. Yup, it’s the old “the

government wrecked the planet” conspiracy theory that fuels this

film.

Along the way, the Virgil, which was built to take a licking and

keep on ticking, starts to lose its compartments as quickly as a

hillbilly loses its teeth. Now, it’s near the end of the movie, only

the command module of the Virgil is left. The bombs have been placed,

the captain martyred, the crooked scientist sacrificed, and we’re

left with Becky and Josh, a couple of exploding nukes, and an intense

desire to see the ending credits start to roll.

If the gold standard for cheesy flicks is “Tremors,” then “The

Core,” a bore, barely rates as Velveeta, and that ain’t real cheese.

* UNCLE DON reviews B-movies and cheesy musical acts for the Daily

Pilot. He may be reached by e-mail at ReallyBadWriting@aol.com.