Artificial Cheese

When you watch two movies on the same day, you can’t help trying to find similarities between the two. The two motion pictures featured in this Sunday Night Showdown are Waist Deep and Everything is Illuminated.

Waist Deep is an action/thriller starring the oh-so sexy Tyrese Gibson, and the equally sexy Meagan Good. The eye-candy makes up for the giant plot-holes and emotionally inconsistent acting. The movie starts with Tyrese’s son getting inadvertantly kidnapped by the Tyrese’s arch-enemy. The rest of the movie plays out like a Grand Theft Auto mission with a completely inadequate sex scene.

Everything is Illuminated should be qualified as drama but will be remembered for its comedy and imagery. The movie is based on a novel written by Jonathan Safran Foer, who serves as a character in this rendition. Foer is played by Elijah Wood, a Jewish manboy who likes collecting random things to get over his fear of forgetting the past. He teams up with a translator (Eugene Hutz, lead singer of Gogol Bordello) that speaks very broken english and the translator’s grandfather who serves as a driver. The mission is to find information about Elijah Wood’s grandfather and a mysterious woman named ‘Augustine’.

At first glance, these movies seem like opposites. I would even go so far as say that they are polar opposites, if it weren’t redundant and unnecessary. The main characters compare as a muscular black sex symbol and a weak jewish white man. Waist Deep is a high-paced action set in a seedy metropolitan gangland while Everything is Illuminated is a slow drama based in the colorful and lush Ukranian countryside.

But after some time, I began to realize that these movies are superficially and …subdermally similar. The most obvious similarity would be the overall goals of the main characters. Both Elijah Wood and Tyrese spend the entire movie searching for someone. Just as Tyrese is armed with a pistol, Elijah Wood is armed with a photograph of his grandfather. Both embark on their respective quests completely dependent on their supporting characters.

The supporting characters also share some similarities in that they play antagonists at some points in their movies. Tyrese was initally betrayed by Meagan Good before she willingly helped him, just as Elijah Wood’s character was battling through antisemetic behavior from his supporting cast before they respected him. Through the course of the movie, both Tyrese and Elijah Wood won over their assistants through persistence and honesty rather than submission or compromise.

A week from now, I will probably not remember anything about Waist Deep as it was just another shallow action movie that didn’t try to cerebrally involve the viewer. But everyone has their opinions on movies. Some people don’t want to be intellectually stimulated by movies, and movies like Waist Deep serve as a satisfying escape from reality. For those that enjoy slow-paced dramas with subtly executed humor, Everything is Illuminated might be your cup of tea. The movie has some flaws in execution, and proves to be more abstract than it needs to be, but Eugene Hutz is reason alone to watch this movie.