Another day in hell...or New Jersey?

Season Opener shocker: Drunken baby shower and new cast members take RealHousewives of New Jersey back to its roots

A season in hell, or just another day in New Jersey?

At first all seems well on a sunny morning in pristine Franklin Lakes as newcomer Melissa Gorga prepares for her baby boy’s christening. She just can’t wait to “welcome her son into God’s kingdom,” as she says with eager anticipation. But she has no idea that soon the whole family, in-laws and grandparents included, will be headed, hand-baskets in hand, into a fiery abyss of drunken rage.

The Season Three opener of The Real Housewives of New Jersey is a shocker, and it’s long overdue. Lately we’ve been wondering if Bravo had lost its touch. We’ve been yawning at Orange County and snoring at New York during endless successions of drunken shenanigans in stretch limos and at vicious cocktail parties. We couldn’t even muster the strength to care about Kelly Bensimon’s slow but steady descent into psychosis. New Jersey may be hell on earth, but so far we love every minute.

Bravo went nearly “art cinema,” introducing traumatic flashbacks, ironic cuts, overwrought soundtracks, and some gritty reality filming worthy of Dogme 95. For a moment we thought we had even lost one of Bravo’s truly seasoned cameramen.

Such extraordinary hell on earth was unleashed that neither Caroline Manzo nor Jacqueline Laurita seemed remotely consequential. We won’t dwell on the fact that formerly fierce Ashley bursts into crying jags around her mother because she can’t bear commuting from New Jersey to Manhattan every day (an unheard-of feat!) for her unpaid internship in PR. We can’t linger on the Manzos awkward efforts to cook “Southern food” as they wonder if people in Arkansas (sometimes called “Mountain people”) can cook pasta.

No more talk of such trivialities. Danielle “Garbage” Staub’s antics seem increasingly petty in retrospect and her stripper-pole-sex-tape-sensibility is just a faded memory. Clearly, the Manzos are irrelevant. And who knew Teresa Giudice even had a brother, Joe Gorga, who points out the conflict that will no doubt define this season. “My blood has done me wrong,” he growls at one point. It’s all about the Gorgas and Giudices--like the Montagues and the Capulets only no one’s ever going to be in love.

But how did this mayhem begin?

Anyone who’s bothered to pick up a cash-register magazine at Kroger’s knows by now that Teresa and her husband Joe went through bankruptcy proceedings since last season. Teresa says the news hit her over the head. Certainly all those shopping trips for pediatric couture and umpteenth mortgages never gave her a clue, right? Charging everything is normal, isn’t it?

Now her husband Joe has been reduced to a pizza boy at the new family restaurant, Giuseppe’s Home-Style Pizzeria. When we first see him, Joe is wearing the most unfortunate gingham-and-denim hybrid shirt with epaulets. Teresa commends him for going from construction to the food business, but she figuratively chops off his balls later by explaining that “Momma’s bringing home the bacon now” since it’s her book that supports their four girls. She looks a little bit like her title, Skinny Italian. Maybe, a bit too skinny. The financial problems have clearly taken their physical toll. And she feels that she hasn’t gotten the support from her family, at least as far as her quite successful brother Joe Gorga is concerned.

Enter Melissa Gorga and Kathy Wakile, the newest real housewives on the New Jersey block.

Though she’ll be right in the thick of things, it’s at first much less gothic for newbie Kathy Wakile. Her own life seems downright pastoral. In some pale imitation of Douglas Sirk, Kathy wheels to the local Italian delicatessen on a bright autumnal afternoon to buy fresh foods for supper. She struggles a little to cycle home with the rustic bounty for her kids, Victoria and yet another Joseph, who seem normal enough until Kathy walks in on Joseph in his room. “On the bed with knives?! This isn’t even a hard surface,” she exclaims. “Why can’t he collect stamps?” she wonders in a video diary. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

Melissa says that she tends to be very spoiled, and she wants her husband Joe to put lotion on her. In their first private scene together, he smells her feet and then suggests putting lotion on her butt cheeks. “He’s one of the best developers in New Jersey,” she explains later. Teresa was a bridesmaid at their wedding, but the relationship is strained, to say the least. Melissa and Joe have three children, Antonia, Gino and Joey, and Joe expects his wife to make a home-cooked meal every night. She has trouble discerning between “work ethic” and “work ethnic,” but who cares? It’s Neanderthal-central chez Gorga, and Melissa plays the naughty cave-wife.

Melissa and Joe begin preparations on the “big day” by drinking champagne with friends at the house. But over at Teresa and Joe Giudice’s, everything is chaos. Joe is puttering around the garage and tells Teresa that he might have diarrhea as he moves a cement-covered wheelbarrow. Teresa thinks that she might be getting the runs as well, and wonders if she shouldn’t linger a bit longer before heading for the church. We couldn’t agree more, since there is nothing worse at a christening than loose, watery stools.

Baby Joey looks adorable in his white christening outfit, and Melissa asks him if he’s ready to go to Jesus’ kingdom as they drive to the church. It sounds more like an execution or a theme park, but once the cameras pan the reception hall, it’s evident that Melissa has gone all out for baby’s big day. There is a lovely airbrushed portrait as well as a photo with him dressed as a football. The blue-and-white sheet cake is in the shape of a cross, as are the ice sculptures. Melissa notes that Teresa shows up late to the christening and only with Joe at the reception, but explains, “That bitch will never miss a party, especially when someone else is paying for it!”

Joe Gorga is evidently drunk as Teresa comes over to congratulate them again. And then her brother tells her to “walk the fuck away.” Even little Gia comes up to stop her mother from making a scene as Joe says to his sister “You’re garbage!” It seems Teresa is the new Danielle this season, at least in the eyes of Joe and Melissa Gorga.

When, “I’ll fucking kill every one of yous!” was the teaser for the next scene, we were on the edge of our microfiber sofa. The camera cuts to a plastic cross ornament hanging off a simple branch sprayed white, as little Gia’s sobs are heard in the background. Almost inexplicably, a series of increasingly vulgar fights breaks out. Joe Giudice charges Joe Gorga. Then some random guests begin trampling each other, provoking yet another brawl. Soon, Teresa’s atherosclerotic father starts a fight. Then Joe Gorga shrieks a painful aria of family loyalty at his parents (who shriek back), as Joe Giudice, outside, screams about “kicking ass” in front of his terrified children.

“War has lots of casualties,” Kathy says later of this shattered family, and we suspect this season’s going to be Pagliacci, Il Trovatore, Tosca, Romeo and Juliet, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship all wrapped into one.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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