Charlie's Angels (2001)

When we moved my grandpa up from California to Boise in 2009 he brought with him a couple score VHS tapes and 2 DVD's. The DVD's were almost certainly given to him and I doubt he ever watched either, one of them was American Beauty, which I recently re-watched and have mixed feelings about the extent to which it held up, and the other Charlie's Angels. So I recently watched Charlie's Angels, it of course is based on the 1970's ABC television program of the same name that has been dismissed, and not altogether inaccurately, as T & A TV. I've watched that "crime of the week" series a scattering of times over the decades, I'm not a big fan but enjoy its 1970'sness. Given the proliferation of TV show to movie adaptations that really took off in the 1990's a Charlie's Angels movie was all but inevitable.

Among the producers on the project was Drew Barrymore, who costars along with Lucy Lu as one of the Angles, and who helped recruit Cameron Diaz for the project. According to the little booklet that came with the DVD Barrymore sold Diaz on the project as a kind of feminist action film, though if somehow not obvious before it's pretty clear watching the film that it was designed for the male gaze. It's harmless enough fun, directed by a guy named McG who had been a commercial and music video director and since has done a few more movies and produced a number of TV shows including The O.C, and Supernatural. Filmed in 2000 but not released until 2001 the film is of the "extreme esthetic" that characterizes the first few years of the new millennium, a kind of 90's cultural backwash which I am oddly fascinated by given those were the year's of my LDS mission so it's this weird cultural blind spot for me, it's of my lifetime but its like going into the past as my first hand knowledge is so limited.

John Forsyth was still alive so he could reprise his off camera, voice only role as Charlie in this. Bill Murray is Bosley, and he's basically just coasting. Tim Curry and Crispin Glover, oddly, are in the movie to, as are a couple of people who would go on to be much better know, Sam Rockwell, and Melissa McCarthy in a very bit part. The movie kind of tries to have an approximation of a serious plot, ironically part of that involves efforts to stop the theft of a voice identification software that "will end privacy as we know it", and while the Angels succeed their good work would be undone a month or two later by passage of The Patriot Act. Really a nothing of a movie, but the girls look good and seem to be having fun. **