Keeping Michael at Bay

Is the "Transformers" sequel as bad as you think it is?

Nope. Worse.

You can read my review here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=251:transformers-revenge-of-the-fallen&catid=74:movie-reviews.

Away, yes. Go, no.

“Away We Go” is co-written by Dave Eggers. So it’s a heartbreaking work of staggering inconsequence.

The film proves again, if any more proof were ever needed, the primal importance of a story. Without a conflict and movement toward its resolution, there is nothing in a movie to maintain our interest.

“Away We Go” doesn’t have a conflict. It doesn’t even have a situation. All it is is a self-indulgence.

Then again, it is co-written by Dave Eggers, whose “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” takes self-indulgence to a whole new dimension.

In the film’s minimal (at best) plot, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play an unmarried couple who are expecting a baby. They travel around the country (and Canada), visiting with wacky friends and relatives. The end.

Seriously, that’s all that happens. One reason for the trip apparently is to decide where they want to move. They eventually pick the charming old house with a ton of character and a huge yard right on a highly valuable lake front, that they can have for free.

Good call, guys. Hope that wasn’t too strenuous a decision.

The whole film is made up of scenes that would be incidental to other films, mildly interesting but unimportant. The two main characters visit his parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels), who announce they are moving to Belgium before the baby comes. The main characters think this is the most selfish thing they have ever heard, and here is the kicker: They’re serious. But then, that is the world of Dave Eggers (the co-writer is his wife, Vendela Vida) -- as he showed in his navel-gazing novel, he doesn’t understand why everyone else can’t see that he is at the center of all life.

Then the characters go to Phoenix to visit friends (Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan as singularly inappropriate parents), then to Tucson to go bathtub shopping with her sister (Carmen Ejogo), then to Madison, Wisc., to visit his weird hippy earth-mother friends (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton), which at least is a little funny, then to Montreal to visit college friends who are apparently perfect parents (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynsky), and then to Miami to visit his brother, whose wife just left him (Paul Schneider).

The Montreal friends show their children a video of “The Sound of Music,” and we envy the children. They, at least, are watching a movie with a story.

The director is Sam Mendes, who made such a striking impression with “American Beauty.” But that was 10 years and four movies ago. His work since then has been in a steady decline: “The Road to Perdition,” “Jarhead,” “Revolutionary Road” and now this. Mendes’ direction of “American Beauty” was flamboyant and mesmerizing, but maybe that was because he was working from such a great script by Alan Ball.

Nothing happens in the script to “Away We Go.” Perhaps taking his cue from that that fact, Mendes’ direction is lackluster and almost perfunctory. It lies cold and motionless on the screen, like a trout.

Mad about the remake. But not in a good way.

Noel Coward wrote it, Alfred Hitchcock filmed it first and now Stephen Elliott ruined it.

The new version of Coward‘s 1924 play “Easy Virtue” shows what can happen to a play when a director doesn’t understand it. Although how anyone can fail to understand Noel Coward is beyond me.

Coward is elegance, sophistication, understatement. He is stiff-upper-lipped Brits clenching their jaws through the most hilarious dialogue.

But Elliott gives a fatally modern tone to this 85-year-old work, with distractingly flashy direction, pointlessly skewed camera angles, too-abrupt editing, sound effects, slide whistles and the like.

And even if he hadn’t filmed it so grossly improperly, Elliott and his co-conspirator Sheridan Jobbins ruined the movie by doing such a disastrous rewrite of the script.

On the one hand, you have Noel Coward, one of the most celebrated and distinctive British playwrights of the 20^th century. On the other hand, you have Stephen Elliott, whose last movie was the catastrophically awful “Eye of the Beholder.”

To his credit, Elliott did also make the deliciously fun “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” But that was 15 years ago.

Jessica Biel stars as Larita, the race-car-driving American new bride of John, the son of an upper class family whose fortunes are fading (in the original, she isn’t a racer, she isn’t American and she is more upper class than the family). The family takes an instant dislike to her, except the bitter and alienated father, played by Colin Firth.

Or at least I think he is bitter and alienated. It’s hard to hear half of what Firth says.

In this version, the family’s suspicions of Larita are confirmed when they discover she was suspected of murdering her terminally ill first husband. In Coward’s version, the family learns that she was divorced -- a sensational fact at the time, but still not on a par with murder. Because she was a divorcee, they assume she has had many lovers, hence the title. With the version shown on the screen, “Easy Virtue” means nothing.

The disapproving, controlling mother is played by Kristin Scott-Thomas in atypically overstated performance. But because her performance is so in keeping with the ill-advised broadness of the rest of the film -- when in doubt, cut to the annoying yappy dog for laughs -- we can assume she was merely responding to Elliott’s directions.

Obviously, she never saw “Eye of the Beholder.”

Elliott doesn’t seem to differentiate musically between Coward and Cole Porter, and at his very worst he sullies the soundtrack with a semi-hot jazz version of the 1977 disco hit “Car Wash.”

Coward would be too suave to turn in his grave. And that’s the fundamental difference between he and Elliott.

Give it a rest

The comma in the Christmas carol title “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” makes all the difference.

With the comma, which is the way it is written, it is a way of wishing happiness to people at Christmastime. Without the comma, which is the way a lot of people think it is supposed to be, it is telling a bunch of folks to go to sleep. Which doesn’t make sense.

Which brings us to the comma-less new film “The Merry Gentleman.” Perhaps the title is supposed to be ironic, because the gentleman in question keeps contemplating suicide. But then he is involved in an understated romance, which is a little bit merry, and before it edges into drama -- with hints of a thriller, plus overplayed and eventually empty religious implications -- it looks like it might try to be a bit of a comedy, though not a very funny one.

In other words, it’s a mess. Tonally, it doesn’t always make sense. And besides, the main character isn’t a man at all, gentle or otherwise.

Kelly Macdonald is absolutely superb as our heroine Kate, the battered wife of a cop. She picks up and moves to Chicago, where she gets a job as a receptionist at a generic company that does nothing specific. Her opposite number is Frank, a profoundly depressed hit man/tailor, who is in no way merry.

Generally, in a movie such as this, the two lonely people will find each other and have a beneficial effect on each other. This is especially true when, as in this case, the woman first appears to the hit man with her arms outstretched like Jesus -- literally, like Jesus -- welcoming him into her arms while he is busy trying to kill someone. At Christmas.

By the end of “The Merry Gentleman,” she has had an effect on him, but it is shown strictly as a metaphor. Anyone looking for something to happen in the story on a literal level, which is basically everyone, will find the ending enormously unsatisfying.

Frank the eternally dour hit man is played by Michael Keaton, who never once opens his mouth to speak for the first half-hour or so. When they first meet face to face, they meet cute; he finds her under a Christmas tree, where she has fallen.

Sounds like a comedy, with an unhappy professional killer falls for an unusual woman, like “You Kill Me,” but not nearly as funny. But then the tone shifts, and it shifts again and again until there is little tone left. Just the sense that there are only three lonely people in Chicago (including a cop played by Tom Bastounes) and they keep running into each other.

Keaton also makes his debut as a director, reportedly stepping in when writer Ron Lazzeretti became ill. Perhaps a more seasoned veteran could have made something fuller from the underfocused script, but Keaton prefers to give his actors as much unspoken face time on camera as they can stand. As a result, the dialogue is marked by long, pained, alienated pauses, even when it should not be. It’s like Harold Pinter writing a romantic comedy.

Sadly, “The Merry Gentleman” is an opportunity missed. It could have been a better movie. It could have been “You Kill Me,” but someone already made that.

It’s just “The Merry, Gentleman.”

Oy, Egoyan!

You think Simon being on a bus as it passes his uncle in a pivotal conversation with his uncle and his French teacher is a coincidence?

That’s nothing compared to the staggering, mind-blowing and frankly movie-ruining coincidence that is revealed just a few scenes later.

Truth be told, “Adoration” was a goner long before that. The latest film from Atom Egoyan runs fatally off the rails in the early going and crashes into a chasm long before the coincidences come along that would destroy even a good movie.

The Canadian filmmaker’s best efforts, such as the haunting “Exotica” and the crushing yet optimistic “The Sweet Hereafter,” weave a magical spell from disparate, unlikely ingredients that are brought together as if by alchemy in ways never before seen.

The ingredients in “Adoration” are disparate, all right, but they don’t seem to fit together at all. It is as if Egoyan started out with one idea, didn’t know what to do with it, and let the story meander aimlessly until it finally found an ending.

A movie about a terrorist who sends his pregnant, unsuspecting wife on an airplane with a bomb turns into a story about a woman becoming a surrogate mother (the literary kind, not the giving-birth kind) and a teen seeking assurance that his parents were in love. Needless to say, the terrorist story is much more interesting.

Egoyan is not above making movies about people in extremis -- a kidnapped, murdered girl in “Exotica,” a fatal school bus accident in “The Sweet Hereafter” -- but in this film he takes the road that turns out to be quite justifiably less traveled.

Devon Bostick stars as Simon, a Toronto high school student whose French teacher reads aloud a magazine story about how Israeli agents famously foiled a hijacking attempt involving a woman who did not know she was carrying a bomb. The article is just being read for translation, but Simon shocks his class by saying that it was his mother with the bomb, his father who sent her and that he was their unborn child.

For a while, there is some question of whether he is telling the truth or if he is making it up as a way to tell the story from a different perspective. Egoyan might have found some success had he continued along this path, though one doubts this subplot could sustain a whole movie. But instead he starts showing people talking philosophically about the questions raised in his story in video chatrooms on his laptop.

If there is anything less compelling in a movie than people sitting down and unconvincingly discussing ideas, it is people doing so by staring into a computer.

Arsinee Khanjian -- Egoyan’s wife -- stars as the French teacher whose actions become increasingly irrational, though I don’t believe we are supposed to see her that way. Scott Speedman, whom you wouldn’t immediately pick to play a serious role in a serious movie, co-stars as Simon’s uncle, a tow-truck driver.

The scenes between the teacher and the uncle are the movie’s most important, but they are the worst in conception and execution. The actors aren’t up to the rigors of the roles, and the script lets down the characters.

At his best, Egoyan is positively masterful. But watching “Adoration” is absolute agony.

Taking of Pelham 123

Want to read my views on "The Taking of Pelham 123"? You can find my review at BoomerLife Magazine online, here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=247:the-taking-of-pelham123&catid=74:movie&reviews.

Next week, I'll have reviews of less blockbustery fare on this blog (and not on BoomerLife, which is now where I review the more popular films).

"Land of the Lost"

Want to see my review of "Land of the Lost"? You can find it on the Web site of BoomerLife Magazine, here:
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=231&iter

Smaller. Thinner. Still Greek.

The audience laughed and laughed.

They didn't just laugh at the jokes in "My Life in Ruins," they said the jokes before the characters did and announced what was going to happen before it occurred, and then they laughed when what they knew was going to happen, happened.

I guess there's something to predictability, to having their expectations met. And no more. The big news is if you can make it through the first hour-plus, the film does improve. But that's a big if.

Nia Vardalos takes another big step back from the freshness of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" with this lesser comedy. Svelte and lovely, she plays Georgia, a Greek-American professor now living in Athens.

Laid off from the University of Athens, Georgia now makes do giving tours to busloads of international stereotypes. It's a job she hates -- we're supposed to think this is because she is uptight, but it's really because she is a full professor in Ancient Greek culture and she is giving rudimentary tours to incurious tourists who just want to shot for souvenirs.

Along for the "If It's Tuesday, It Must be the Parthenon" ride are ugly Americans (Harland Williams and Rachel Dratch), tipsy Australians, bickering Brits and their sullen teen daughter, slow-moving seniors, Spanish divorcees on the prowl, a stupid American student, a businessman who we assume is supposed to be gay so we brace ourselves for the inevitable gay jokes (these come instead at the expense of a couple of gay Greeks), and Richard Dreyfuss in an unconvincing fat suit.

Dreyfuss plays a tourist who thinks he is funny, but isn't -- actually, a number of characters spend considerable time telling each other that they are not funny, and they're all right. Then, when it is convenient to the script, he abruptly changes character altogether and suddenly becomes a wise old sage who never makes another joke. He also undergoes what appears to be a major new phase in his life, which is promptly ignored by writer Mike Reiss.

Reiss' excuse is that his considerable previous work has all been in television. But director Donald Petrie is an old pro of strikingly uneven quality, from the soaring highs of "Miss Congeniality" and "Mystic Pizza" to the disastrous lows of "Richie Rich," "Just My Luck" and "Welcome to Mooseport." "My Life in Ruins" lies between the two extremes, but is definitely on the "Mooseport" side of the scale.

On the other hand, it does boast a middlingly appealing performance by Vardalos and a couple of funny lines -- one about Australian accents and one about Uncle Phil. These jokes provoke laughs, in part, because they are unexpected.

For the rest of the movie, feel free to recite the jokes along with the characters.

"Up," up and away-ish

Let's not get hysterical.

As of this writing, the new animated 3-D movie "Up" is ranked the 12th best movie ever made by the notoriously fickle voters on the Web site IMDb. That puts it just behind "Casablanca" and just ahead of "Star Wars."

Can we all agree that "Up" is not in the same universe as "Casablanca" and "Star Wars"? You have to know that the makers of the film, talented though they may be, did not slap their hands together in satisfaction and say, "Yep, we got us another 'Casablanca.'"


"Up" is reasonably pleasant and well animated, with a couple of moments of emotional satisfaction. It made me laugh out loud a grand total of once (at an image of dogs playing poker), though a couple of other semi-funny scenes had already been shown in the inescapable trailer. In other words, it's good, but it's nothing special.

The filmmakers wisely decided to skip the hackneyed idea of a surrogate father learning to bond with a surrogate son, and jumped all the way to a surrogate grandfather learning to bond with a surrogate grandson. That's much better because, you know, there's a greater difference in their ages. Otherwise, it's the same old story that has been done (and done and done) so many times before.

Ed Asner provides the voice of the old man, who looks like a bobblehead version of Spencer Tracy in his "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" days. When he was a youth, Carl wanted to be an explorer like his Lindberghesque hero Charles Muntz. But he met and married a fellow explorer wannabe, Ellie, and life got in the way of their dreams.

Then Ellie died, and Carl was left to sit home alone and grow cantankerous. I'll say that again: Then Ellie died. "Up" is a children's film, and some children are not ready for the reality of the death of a beloved character.

Carl decides to fulfill their mutual dream of going to South America, where Charles Muntz had gone, by hooking up his house to a thousand colorful balloons and floating southward. Along for the ride is a stowaway boy, Russell. Give the writers credit for this: Russell may be sweet-natured, but he is dimwitted. There is plenty of comic potential to be mined in a stupid child, and the filmmakers excavate some of it.

But it is in South America that the film begins pinballing violently between tones. Three writers are credited with the script, and one wonders if each one was charged with creating a different tone, with no one available to meld their sections together. It is as if one writer was responsible for the truly heartwarming scenes involving Carl's bonding with Russell, one was responsible for the action scenes and one was responsible for the silly scenes, such as the talking dogs who can fix gourmet dinners.

It is the silly scenes that are so wrong for this film and throw it out of kilter. But the film is otherwise enjoyable, though not spectacular. "Casablanca," it ain't.