Wading through this junky sequel to her genial goofball hit Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste -- though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing. Set a mere three weeks after the first film, which was released in 2000, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous finds Bullock as the charmingly clumsy FBI agent, Gracie Hart, vainly fending off unwanted celebrity.
On her last assignment, Gracie infiltrated a beauty pageant by metamorphosing from duckling to swan, a mission that earned her legions of female fans across the country.
After Gracie's cover is blown during a bank heist, endangering her and every other undercover agent on her team, the powers that be decide that she should become "the face of the FBI." Gracie, hurt after being dumped by a romantic prospect (the agent played in the first go around by Benjamin Bratt, wisely nowhere to be seen or heard here), agrees to the reassignment on the tenuous grounds that flouncing about in designer threads is better for her soul and career than pushing pencils.
PHOTO: AP
And so, after a consult with the obligatory swishy style guru, Joel (Diedrich Bader), Gracie undergoes yet another transformation, one designed to strip every gram of charm and integrity from her character. Clarice Starling, meet Paris Hilton.
Usually an effervescent screen presence, Bullock turns in a performance as flat as day-old champagne. It's hard not to blame her, particularly given the shoddy work by both the screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who helped write the first Miss Congeniality, and the director John Pasquin, whose previous crimes against cinema include the Tim Allen vehicle The Santa Clause. It isn't just that Miss Congeniality 2 is nearly absent a single genuine laugh; it's that instead of a screenplay and a story we now have stereotypes and sketch comedy. In place of screwball heroics and wish-fulfillment the filmmakers give us jokes about tampons and some curious gender unease, particularly between Gracie and an angry female agent with the abominably cutesy name of Sam Fuller.
Played by the talented actress Regina King, Agent Fuller spends much of the movie smacking Gracie around really, really hard, a peculiar tic that only becomes more peculiar as the movie dribbles along. In between the feeble glimmerings of a plot and a hailstorm of body blows, the two women develop a grudging admiration for each other that should by the logic of the cliches both women have assumed -- Sam's all man, Gracie's all girl -- led into an intimate clinch. Alas, this particular wish is not to be fulfilled. Instead, the sub rosa romance between Gracie and Sam is quashed in favor of way too many uneasy, unfunny jokes pegged to gay men. As it turns out, being fabulous is far more dangerous for a woman (and a movie star) than being armed.
The arrival of a Typhoon Gaemi last week coincided with the publication of a piece at Yale Climate Connection on the upcoming bill for coastal defenses in the US: US$400 billion by 2040. Last week’s column noted how Taiwan is desperately short of construction workers. I doubt “sea wall and dike construction workers” are on the radar of most readers, but they should be. Indeed, the extensive overbuilding of residential housing has crowded out construction workers needed elsewhere, one of the many ways the housing bubble is eating Taiwan. FLOODING For example, a September 2022 piece in Frontiers in Environmental Science, a
Last Sunday’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) national congress was the most anticipated in years, and produced some drama and surprises. As expected, party chair President William Lai (賴清德), his New Tide (新潮流系統, usually abbreviated to 新系) faction and his allied “trust in Lai” (信賴) coalition of factions won majorities and control of the party, but New Tide did not do as well as expected due to an unexpected defection (two previous columns — “The powerful political force that vanished from the English press,” April 23, 2024 and “Introducing the powerful DPP factions,” April 27, 2024 — provide indepth introductions
Stepping inside Waley Art (水谷藝術) in Taipei’s historic Wanhua District (萬華區) one leaves the motorcycle growl and air-conditioner purr of the street and enters a very different sonic realm. Speakers hiss, machines whir and objects chime from all five floors of the shophouse-turned- contemporary art gallery (including the basement). “It’s a bit of a metaphor, the stacking of gallery floors is like the layering of sounds,” observes Australian conceptual artist Samuel Beilby, whose audio installation HZ & Machinic Paragenesis occupies the ground floor of the gallery space. He’s not wrong. Put ‘em in a Box (我們把它都裝在一個盒子裡), which runs until Aug. 18, invites
International students who cannot speak “basic English” are walking away from Australian universities with prestigious degrees, academics say, a situation one described as “mind-blowing.” More than a dozen academics and students said the universities’ financial reliance on foreign students over many years had hollowed out academic integrity and threatened the international credibility of the sector. Many said the rise of artificial intelligence was accelerating the crisis to the point where the only way to fail a course would be to hand nothing in, unless universities came up with a coherent institutional response. ’MIND BLOWING’ A tutor in an arts subject at a leading sandstone