Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Killerzzzz
The trailer to "Killers" looked so funny. But not only did they show all of the best material, it was actually better in the context of the trailer than in the movie. My review to this comic disappointment is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/508-killers.html
Spliced
The titles for “Splice” list two people as creating the story -- and then a third name appears below them.
You can almost see what happened: Two people wrote one kind of story and then a third person came along and attached a different kind of story to it. Spliced it, if you will.
The result is a better-than-average science fiction horror film that turns into a worse-than-average family drama. An effort to bring the two genres together at the end is, predictably, unsuccessful.
Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley star, and that is considerably more talent than you would typically find in a science fiction horror film cum family drama. They play scientists, partners outside of their lab coats as well as in, who are splicing together genes from various animals to create new species for pharmaceutical purposes. Inevitably, they decide to splice in some human DNA as well, despite being explicitly warned by their bosses not to do so.
You can imagine what happens next. These unbelievably smart people start to make an unending series of unbelievably stupid decisions. Despite promising that they just wanted to study their creation in an embryonic stage, they allow their little monster to be born. It changes rapidly from a stomach-monster from “Alien” to a female humanoid with chicken legs and a tail with a stinger on the end.
Anyone who has ever seen a science fiction movie (including “Frankenstein,” which this picture explicitly references in its characters’ names) knows that this hybrid should not be allowed to live. But our heroes keep it out of sight, name it Dren (that’s “nerd” spelled backwards) and more or less adopt it as their own mute child.
And that’s where the family drama comes in. Polley’s character, Elsa, treats Dren not only as a human but as a daughter, though her own family history was not ideal. Meanwhile, Dren matures ultra-rapidly and develops a host of skills that are never even remotely explained, such as drawing and spelling.
As the physically mature Dren, Delphine Chaneac holds her own against the strong acting of Brody and especially Polley. Chaneac has the additional disadvantage of not being able to speak for the role, although given some of the places this movie goes, being wordless might be a good thing. The drama sections, which basically comprise the third act, become awfully silly.
But see if the horror portions don’t give you the occasional chill.
You can almost see what happened: Two people wrote one kind of story and then a third person came along and attached a different kind of story to it. Spliced it, if you will.
The result is a better-than-average science fiction horror film that turns into a worse-than-average family drama. An effort to bring the two genres together at the end is, predictably, unsuccessful.
Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley star, and that is considerably more talent than you would typically find in a science fiction horror film cum family drama. They play scientists, partners outside of their lab coats as well as in, who are splicing together genes from various animals to create new species for pharmaceutical purposes. Inevitably, they decide to splice in some human DNA as well, despite being explicitly warned by their bosses not to do so.
You can imagine what happens next. These unbelievably smart people start to make an unending series of unbelievably stupid decisions. Despite promising that they just wanted to study their creation in an embryonic stage, they allow their little monster to be born. It changes rapidly from a stomach-monster from “Alien” to a female humanoid with chicken legs and a tail with a stinger on the end.
Anyone who has ever seen a science fiction movie (including “Frankenstein,” which this picture explicitly references in its characters’ names) knows that this hybrid should not be allowed to live. But our heroes keep it out of sight, name it Dren (that’s “nerd” spelled backwards) and more or less adopt it as their own mute child.
And that’s where the family drama comes in. Polley’s character, Elsa, treats Dren not only as a human but as a daughter, though her own family history was not ideal. Meanwhile, Dren matures ultra-rapidly and develops a host of skills that are never even remotely explained, such as drawing and spelling.
As the physically mature Dren, Delphine Chaneac holds her own against the strong acting of Brody and especially Polley. Chaneac has the additional disadvantage of not being able to speak for the role, although given some of the places this movie goes, being wordless might be a good thing. The drama sections, which basically comprise the third act, become awfully silly.
But see if the horror portions don’t give you the occasional chill.
Friday, May 28, 2010
'Sex' is boring -- and how often can you say that?
Only one of the four has sex, and the city is now Abu Dhabi -- it just ain't the same "Sex and the City." The sequel is long, pointless and nothing more than an excuse to show a lot of fashions. It's not a movie, it's a fashion show. My review is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/506-sex-and-the-city-2.html
The Sands of Stupidity
If someone were to base a movie on the most popular board game in America, we’d get a couple of hours of old roadsters and little dogs trying to buy real estate in Atlantic City.
Obviously, no one is going to pay 10 bucks to watch that, which is why no one has ever made a movie version of Monopoly. Yet studios keep making movies out of video games, which are essentially the same thing with better graphics.
As has now been proven time and time and time again, video games do not make compelling movies because they are not inherently cinematic. Video games are a test of skill and the ability to master whatever tricks you need to get you to the next level. But movies are purely emotional. It’s an entirely different kind of experience.
The latest video game movie to fail is “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which tries to re-create the gaming experience by racing from one action scene to the next. But even with all the action, it turns out to be a terrible bore.
Part of the problem is that the action scenes are largely all the same, with swordfights, dagger fights and characters leaping from one rooftop to the next (I’ve never played the original game, but I’m guessing it involves an awful lot of leaping). Director Mike Newell is obviously trying to capture the magic of adventure films of the past, but what he winds up with is “Raiders of the Least Ark.”
Once upon a time, Newell made wonderful, character-driven stories, such as “Enchanted April,” “Donnie Brasco” and the sublime “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” But apparently he has lost his touch. Where his earlier movies were smart, “Prince of Persia” is fatally banal.
Maybe it is all of those computer-generated special effects. Sure, computer effects may seem perfectly fitting in a movie based on a video game -- which is nothing but effects -- but they tend to drown out all acting and any efforts to create a character.
Suffering the most from this overabundance of effects is a buff Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars as an ancient Persian boy from the streets who was adopted by the kindly king to live as a prince. While his brothers lay siege to a holy city, he proves himself in battle (his brilliant strategy is to go in from the back). As a prize, he is given the city’s beautiful princess (Gemma Arterton) to be his future bride.
The two bicker in the time-honored tradition of romantic comedies, but without any of the humor or credibility. Meanwhile, the romance takes a back seat to the increasingly ridiculous story, which involves a dagger that has the power to turn back time, at least for a minute.
Horrifyingly, the writers tried to use this idiotic story to make political points: The Persian army invaded the sacred city because of inaccurate and trumped-up information it was hiding daggers of mass destruction. The man behind the throne (the vice king, as it were) argues that a man he knows is innocent be put to death without a trial, because a trial “will only give him a stage for his sedition.” And the fighting eventually threatens to bring on an Armageddon that will destroy all life on the planet.
The story is convoluted and periodically nonsensical, and it becomes more dull as the movie drags on. If you find yourself in the theater growing bored, you might want to spend some of your time trying to figure out why Gyllenhaal is trying to use an English accent.
Obviously, no one is going to pay 10 bucks to watch that, which is why no one has ever made a movie version of Monopoly. Yet studios keep making movies out of video games, which are essentially the same thing with better graphics.
As has now been proven time and time and time again, video games do not make compelling movies because they are not inherently cinematic. Video games are a test of skill and the ability to master whatever tricks you need to get you to the next level. But movies are purely emotional. It’s an entirely different kind of experience.
The latest video game movie to fail is “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which tries to re-create the gaming experience by racing from one action scene to the next. But even with all the action, it turns out to be a terrible bore.
Part of the problem is that the action scenes are largely all the same, with swordfights, dagger fights and characters leaping from one rooftop to the next (I’ve never played the original game, but I’m guessing it involves an awful lot of leaping). Director Mike Newell is obviously trying to capture the magic of adventure films of the past, but what he winds up with is “Raiders of the Least Ark.”
Once upon a time, Newell made wonderful, character-driven stories, such as “Enchanted April,” “Donnie Brasco” and the sublime “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” But apparently he has lost his touch. Where his earlier movies were smart, “Prince of Persia” is fatally banal.
Maybe it is all of those computer-generated special effects. Sure, computer effects may seem perfectly fitting in a movie based on a video game -- which is nothing but effects -- but they tend to drown out all acting and any efforts to create a character.
Suffering the most from this overabundance of effects is a buff Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars as an ancient Persian boy from the streets who was adopted by the kindly king to live as a prince. While his brothers lay siege to a holy city, he proves himself in battle (his brilliant strategy is to go in from the back). As a prize, he is given the city’s beautiful princess (Gemma Arterton) to be his future bride.
The two bicker in the time-honored tradition of romantic comedies, but without any of the humor or credibility. Meanwhile, the romance takes a back seat to the increasingly ridiculous story, which involves a dagger that has the power to turn back time, at least for a minute.
Horrifyingly, the writers tried to use this idiotic story to make political points: The Persian army invaded the sacred city because of inaccurate and trumped-up information it was hiding daggers of mass destruction. The man behind the throne (the vice king, as it were) argues that a man he knows is innocent be put to death without a trial, because a trial “will only give him a stage for his sedition.” And the fighting eventually threatens to bring on an Armageddon that will destroy all life on the planet.
The story is convoluted and periodically nonsensical, and it becomes more dull as the movie drags on. If you find yourself in the theater growing bored, you might want to spend some of your time trying to figure out why Gyllenhaal is trying to use an English accent.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
'MacGruber'!
I'll admit it: I laughed during "MacGruber." Out loud. Several times. It's not something I'm proud of, but there you have it. My review, attempting to explain myself, is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/487-macgruber.html
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Robin Ho-hum
The story of Robin Hood has been told on film many times, and none has surpassed the glories of the 1938 Erroll Flynn version. One wonders why they even keep trying. And the newest version is one of the worst. My review of it is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/486-robin-hood.html
Monday, May 10, 2010
'Iron Man 2' -- The same, only less
Loved, loved, loved the original "Iron Man." The sequel is bigger and louder and far less interesting. Gwyneth Paltrow looks great, though. My review is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/485-iron-man-2.html
One, Two, Freddy's Making You Snooze
A favorite trick in horror movies is to have a character suddenly bolt awake from a nightmare.
In the breathtakingly pointless remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” as in the original, that’s all there is. In this new version, it happens at least nine times.
Repetition is never a good idea in a movie, and it is especially bad in a horror film. Once you’ve experienced something like this in a movie, you become acclimated to it and it doesn’t have the same effect the next time you see it. Or, in this case, the next eight times you see it.
Similarly, if you watch a person fall from the ceiling to a bed once, that’s pretty cool — in fact, it’s part of the most iconic sequence in the original. But when it happens twice, you wonder if the writers just didn’t run out of ideas. And each successive time we see serial killer Freddy Krueger run his finger knives along a random surface, usually producing sparks, it becomes exponentially less scary.
Along with the groundbreaker “Friday the 13th,” the 1984 original version of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” helped pave the way for a new style of horror films. No longer would they be subjected to the same expectations of other movies. After these two films, the genre was freed from the shackles of character and story; no more would they be harshly bound to the tyranny of a script or logic. They didn’t have to be well made, or even adequately made, and no part of them had to make sense. All that mattered is that they showed young people being chased around by a faceless guy with a knife and other instruments of evisceration, that the victims screamed and squirmed as they were being killed, one by one, and that their bright red blood spread prettily across the screen.
This version is an awful lot like the original version, but at least it tries an experiment: It wonders if it would make a difference to use a genuinely talented actor — Jackie Earle Haley — as the killer, Freddy.
All good experiments deserve an answer, and the answer to this one is: Nope. It doesn’t make a bit of difference in the long run, although the portrayal of Freddy is notably superior here.
Once again, we are brought into a typical small town where all the parents keep deadly secrets and all the children are still in high school in their mid- to late-20s. A group of these kids (think of them as being in their very late teens) realizes that they are all having the same dream. They all dream that they are being chased by a weirdo with a burned face, a goofy hat, an ugly sweater and knives on the tips of his gloves. Bizarrely, none of them has seen the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but they soon realize that if they fall asleep they run the risk of being killed by this dream.
These characters are basically indistinguishable, but eventually our heroine turns out to be a waitress played by Rooney Mara, the unconventionally attractive younger sister of actress Kate Mara. The younger Mara is perfectly acceptable in her role as Nancy, which requires little more than a lot of screaming. The rest of the cast is generally worse, to varying degrees, although Haley shows promise as Freddy.
Here, as in earlier versions, Freddy is the sole character of any interest whatsoever. But the writers feel compelled to have him make little quips, like the hero of a 1980s action film, in the hopes that these will make him more frightening.
They don’t.
Note: This review originally ran at www.theboomermagazine.com
In the breathtakingly pointless remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” as in the original, that’s all there is. In this new version, it happens at least nine times.
Repetition is never a good idea in a movie, and it is especially bad in a horror film. Once you’ve experienced something like this in a movie, you become acclimated to it and it doesn’t have the same effect the next time you see it. Or, in this case, the next eight times you see it.
Similarly, if you watch a person fall from the ceiling to a bed once, that’s pretty cool — in fact, it’s part of the most iconic sequence in the original. But when it happens twice, you wonder if the writers just didn’t run out of ideas. And each successive time we see serial killer Freddy Krueger run his finger knives along a random surface, usually producing sparks, it becomes exponentially less scary.
Along with the groundbreaker “Friday the 13th,” the 1984 original version of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” helped pave the way for a new style of horror films. No longer would they be subjected to the same expectations of other movies. After these two films, the genre was freed from the shackles of character and story; no more would they be harshly bound to the tyranny of a script or logic. They didn’t have to be well made, or even adequately made, and no part of them had to make sense. All that mattered is that they showed young people being chased around by a faceless guy with a knife and other instruments of evisceration, that the victims screamed and squirmed as they were being killed, one by one, and that their bright red blood spread prettily across the screen.
This version is an awful lot like the original version, but at least it tries an experiment: It wonders if it would make a difference to use a genuinely talented actor — Jackie Earle Haley — as the killer, Freddy.
All good experiments deserve an answer, and the answer to this one is: Nope. It doesn’t make a bit of difference in the long run, although the portrayal of Freddy is notably superior here.
Once again, we are brought into a typical small town where all the parents keep deadly secrets and all the children are still in high school in their mid- to late-20s. A group of these kids (think of them as being in their very late teens) realizes that they are all having the same dream. They all dream that they are being chased by a weirdo with a burned face, a goofy hat, an ugly sweater and knives on the tips of his gloves. Bizarrely, none of them has seen the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but they soon realize that if they fall asleep they run the risk of being killed by this dream.
These characters are basically indistinguishable, but eventually our heroine turns out to be a waitress played by Rooney Mara, the unconventionally attractive younger sister of actress Kate Mara. The younger Mara is perfectly acceptable in her role as Nancy, which requires little more than a lot of screaming. The rest of the cast is generally worse, to varying degrees, although Haley shows promise as Freddy.
Here, as in earlier versions, Freddy is the sole character of any interest whatsoever. But the writers feel compelled to have him make little quips, like the hero of a 1980s action film, in the hopes that these will make him more frightening.
They don’t.
Note: This review originally ran at www.theboomermagazine.com
Monday, April 26, 2010
Plan B? No, more like Plan C-minus
J-Lo is back, leading us to wonder: Oh, was she gone?
Her latest romantic comedy is, alas, altogether too much like her earlier romantic comedies. My review is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/478-the-backup-plan.html
Her latest romantic comedy is, alas, altogether too much like her earlier romantic comedies. My review is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/478-the-backup-plan.html
Thursday, April 22, 2010
I don't hate to see 'That Evening Sun' at all
“That Evening Sun” thrives on the unexpected.
Anton Chekhov, who knew something about drama, famously wrote that if we see a gun early in a play, it has to be used later. We see a gun several times early in “That Evening Sun” -- it’s lovingly cleaned and loaded -- and although it does indeed show up later it is not used remotely in the way we think it will be used.
More to the point, the two central characters establish their personalities early but then evolve in ways that surprise and even shock us.
Hal Holbrook justly deserves all the rave reviews he has been receiving for his performance as Abner Meechum, an 80-year-old who tires of life in a stultifying nursing home and decides to go back to his old farm. But when he gets there, he learns it is being rented -- and not just rented, but rented to the drunken no-account redneck Lonzo Choat, played by Ray McKinnon. The two don’t like each other to begin with, and when Meechum takes up squatter’s residence in his own sharecropper’s cabin, their argument only begins to escalate.
Meechum is kind of lovably cantankerous, his face affixed in a permanent frown. He feels he has the right to live on his own property, and frankly, he has a point. Working from a short story by William Gay, writer-director Scott Teems explains the central conflict by saying that Meechum’s lawyer son has the right to rent out the property because he is the trustee of his father’s estate. Someone really ought to take Gay and Teems aside and gently explain just what that means.
McKinnon, who actually has an Oscar (for live-action short), isn’t in Holbrook’s league as an actor, and he doesn’t quite put across the sense of menace his role requires. But we certainly get the idea. More natural in their roles are Carrie Preston (of “True Blood”) as his sympathetic wife and -- despite forcing her Southern accent -- Mia Wasikowska (of “Alice in Wonderland”) as their coltish and kind daughter.
In a cameo, Holbrook’s late wife Dixie Carter plays his character’s late wife.
Behind the camera, Teems has chosen to take a languorous pace, which works both to the film’s benefit and detriment. When it works, it works well -- the little, finely observed details add a sense of place and character. But when it doesn’t work, those same details become an irritating waste of time. They remind us of that recent study showing that in an average football game, only 11 minutes are actually spent playing football. At times, “That Evening Sun” feels like it has the same ratio.
In a similar manner, Teems’ script also both soars and drops with a thud. At its best, the script has Meechum scolding his prevaricating son by saying “I would think not being able to lie convincingly to a jury would be a considerable handicap in your profession.” On the other hand, the same script requires Meechum to give vital exposition to a dog. Twice. And once the dog isn’t even alive.
“That Evening Son” is a small picture with a small budget, big performances and an intriguing story arc. It may drag at times and lack the polish associated with more money, but it certainly won’t be expected.
Incidentally, the title comes from “St. Louis Blues” by the great W.C. Handy. Readers of the review in the Richmond Times-Dispatch may have been surprised to read that it comes from an old song by Jimmie Rodgers. Rodgers was also great, but not genius enough to write “St. Louis Blues”
Anton Chekhov, who knew something about drama, famously wrote that if we see a gun early in a play, it has to be used later. We see a gun several times early in “That Evening Sun” -- it’s lovingly cleaned and loaded -- and although it does indeed show up later it is not used remotely in the way we think it will be used.
More to the point, the two central characters establish their personalities early but then evolve in ways that surprise and even shock us.
Hal Holbrook justly deserves all the rave reviews he has been receiving for his performance as Abner Meechum, an 80-year-old who tires of life in a stultifying nursing home and decides to go back to his old farm. But when he gets there, he learns it is being rented -- and not just rented, but rented to the drunken no-account redneck Lonzo Choat, played by Ray McKinnon. The two don’t like each other to begin with, and when Meechum takes up squatter’s residence in his own sharecropper’s cabin, their argument only begins to escalate.
Meechum is kind of lovably cantankerous, his face affixed in a permanent frown. He feels he has the right to live on his own property, and frankly, he has a point. Working from a short story by William Gay, writer-director Scott Teems explains the central conflict by saying that Meechum’s lawyer son has the right to rent out the property because he is the trustee of his father’s estate. Someone really ought to take Gay and Teems aside and gently explain just what that means.
McKinnon, who actually has an Oscar (for live-action short), isn’t in Holbrook’s league as an actor, and he doesn’t quite put across the sense of menace his role requires. But we certainly get the idea. More natural in their roles are Carrie Preston (of “True Blood”) as his sympathetic wife and -- despite forcing her Southern accent -- Mia Wasikowska (of “Alice in Wonderland”) as their coltish and kind daughter.
In a cameo, Holbrook’s late wife Dixie Carter plays his character’s late wife.
Behind the camera, Teems has chosen to take a languorous pace, which works both to the film’s benefit and detriment. When it works, it works well -- the little, finely observed details add a sense of place and character. But when it doesn’t work, those same details become an irritating waste of time. They remind us of that recent study showing that in an average football game, only 11 minutes are actually spent playing football. At times, “That Evening Sun” feels like it has the same ratio.
In a similar manner, Teems’ script also both soars and drops with a thud. At its best, the script has Meechum scolding his prevaricating son by saying “I would think not being able to lie convincingly to a jury would be a considerable handicap in your profession.” On the other hand, the same script requires Meechum to give vital exposition to a dog. Twice. And once the dog isn’t even alive.
“That Evening Son” is a small picture with a small budget, big performances and an intriguing story arc. It may drag at times and lack the polish associated with more money, but it certainly won’t be expected.
Incidentally, the title comes from “St. Louis Blues” by the great W.C. Handy. Readers of the review in the Richmond Times-Dispatch may have been surprised to read that it comes from an old song by Jimmie Rodgers. Rodgers was also great, but not genius enough to write “St. Louis Blues”
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Geeks rule!
If you don't mind the oh-so-familiar gratuitous use of violence for laughs (and you aren't turned off by a filth-talking 11-year-old girl), "Kick-Ass" is a lot of fun. My review is here: www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/473-kick-ass.html
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Rigor mortis has set in
As a rule, the idea of Hollywood remaking movies from other countries is to make a worthy but obscure film available to a wider audience.
But some films deserve to be obscure.
Exhibit A is “Death at a Funeral,” an ill-conceived farce with a lot of English people in it that has now been turned into an ill-conceived farce with a lot of black Americans in it. Not that race plays a part in this picture’s failure. It is essentially a word-for-word remake of the quickly forgotten original, with maybe a couple of R. Kelly and MC Hammer references thrown in for flavor.
As before -- the original only came out in 2007 -- the idea is to turn what should be a somber funeral into a wild, anything-goes farce. On paper, it might seem like a good idea. But actually showing it on the screen reminds of us the sarcastic old cliché “as funny as a funeral.” And if that isn’t a genuine sarcastic old cliché, it ought to be.
What we get is an hour and a half of lovers bickering, siblings squabbling and parents broadly hinting -- at every conceivable opportunity -- that they would like to see a grandchild or two. And what we especially get is a man (James Marsden in this case) who accidentally ingests a powerful hallucinogen and embarks on a prolonged and defiantly unfunny acid trip.
Chris Rock stars and shares the blame as one of the executive producers. He plays Aaron, perhaps the most normal member of a family that is grieving over the recent death of his father. Aaron tries to hold onto some dignity while everything around him is falling apart in ways that begin as tiresome and then become repetitious.
The problem is not with the cast, which includes such comedy forces as Martin Lawrence, Danny Glover, Loretta Devine, Tracy Morgan, Keith David and Luke Wilson. None can overcome the daunting deficiencies of the script, although Peter Dinklage (the only holdover from the original) manages a couple of amusing reaction shots to an extended humiliation.
That is what we are reduced to here, praising a couple of simple reaction shots. Along with writer Dean Craig, blame director Neil LaBute, whose forte is dialogue-driven, nuanced stories filled with realistic and emotionally brutal interplay between characters, particularly between men and women. In other words, what he is best at is the opposite of “Death at a Funeral.”
This movie is all physical comedy, or the verbal equivalent of it. It lazily looks for the cheapest joke and then uses that as a platform from which to search for an even cheaper joke. Or grosser.
I spent much of the film cringing.
But some films deserve to be obscure.
Exhibit A is “Death at a Funeral,” an ill-conceived farce with a lot of English people in it that has now been turned into an ill-conceived farce with a lot of black Americans in it. Not that race plays a part in this picture’s failure. It is essentially a word-for-word remake of the quickly forgotten original, with maybe a couple of R. Kelly and MC Hammer references thrown in for flavor.
As before -- the original only came out in 2007 -- the idea is to turn what should be a somber funeral into a wild, anything-goes farce. On paper, it might seem like a good idea. But actually showing it on the screen reminds of us the sarcastic old cliché “as funny as a funeral.” And if that isn’t a genuine sarcastic old cliché, it ought to be.
What we get is an hour and a half of lovers bickering, siblings squabbling and parents broadly hinting -- at every conceivable opportunity -- that they would like to see a grandchild or two. And what we especially get is a man (James Marsden in this case) who accidentally ingests a powerful hallucinogen and embarks on a prolonged and defiantly unfunny acid trip.
Chris Rock stars and shares the blame as one of the executive producers. He plays Aaron, perhaps the most normal member of a family that is grieving over the recent death of his father. Aaron tries to hold onto some dignity while everything around him is falling apart in ways that begin as tiresome and then become repetitious.
The problem is not with the cast, which includes such comedy forces as Martin Lawrence, Danny Glover, Loretta Devine, Tracy Morgan, Keith David and Luke Wilson. None can overcome the daunting deficiencies of the script, although Peter Dinklage (the only holdover from the original) manages a couple of amusing reaction shots to an extended humiliation.
That is what we are reduced to here, praising a couple of simple reaction shots. Along with writer Dean Craig, blame director Neil LaBute, whose forte is dialogue-driven, nuanced stories filled with realistic and emotionally brutal interplay between characters, particularly between men and women. In other words, what he is best at is the opposite of “Death at a Funeral.”
This movie is all physical comedy, or the verbal equivalent of it. It lazily looks for the cheapest joke and then uses that as a platform from which to search for an even cheaper joke. Or grosser.
I spent much of the film cringing.
Long Night's Journey Into Date
Note: This review originally appeared at www.theboomermagazine.com
Watching “Date Night” is not dissimilar to being a relatively proficient prospector. You have to sift through a lot of silt, but you find more than a few nuggets of gold.
Of course, with Tina Fey and Steve Carell, you might reasonably be expecting a mother lode. Of all the people in America who learned their craft at The Second City in Chicago and have back-to-back sitcoms Thursday nights on NBC, Fey and Carell are currently two of the funniest.
So it isn’t a surprise that “Date Night” is funny. But it is a little surprising that it isn’t funnier.
Fey and Carell play the Fosters, a couple with kids in the suburbs whose marriage is mired in the mud. They decide to break the routine by going to a tragically chic restaurant where, faced with the prospect of never getting a table, they claim to be another couple who didn’t show for their reservations. A couple of bad guys who apparently haven’t seen “North By Northwest” assume the Fosters are the other couple, shake them down for a MacGuffin and chase them through the streets of New York. Meanwhile, the Fosters have to prove they are who they say they are, find out the identity of the bad guys and bring everyone to justice.
There’s a whole lot of Hitchcock going on here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to make the story seem formulaic. That puts the movie’s ultimate success or failure in the hands of the writer (uneven), the director (uneven) and the stars (less even than you might expect).
For a movie with such masters of verbal wit, many of the better jokes are visual. A scene with a sputtering motorboat is a highlight, Fey’s removing her mouth guard is hilariously unsexy (although she looks good in her U.Va. T-shirt) and a running gag about unclosed cabinets sort of works, too.
But writer Josh Klausner doesn’t know when to stop. Too often, he looks for the easiest gag — usually just the name of an intimate body part spoken for no particular reason. And the movie’s big strip-club set piece only makes us cringe in embarrassment; instead of being funny, it just comes across as a cheap and sleazy way to show Fey in a bustier, fishnet stockings and a strip pole.
Director Shawn Levy does little here to improve on his record of mediocrity (including both “Night at the Museum” movies), so the large number of cameos must be due to the attractive wattage of the stars. It’s a good thing, too, because some of the cameos are among the film’s best moments. James Franco and Mila Kunis are particularly fun as the couple who made the original reservations, Mark Wahlberg is humorous but overused as a beefcake deus ex machina and William Fichtner makes the most out of his small part as a D.A.
As is often the case, the ending is solid and provides more of a sense of having been entertained than the rest of the movie warrants. But don’t worry. There are plenty of flakes of gold to be found.
Watching “Date Night” is not dissimilar to being a relatively proficient prospector. You have to sift through a lot of silt, but you find more than a few nuggets of gold.
Of course, with Tina Fey and Steve Carell, you might reasonably be expecting a mother lode. Of all the people in America who learned their craft at The Second City in Chicago and have back-to-back sitcoms Thursday nights on NBC, Fey and Carell are currently two of the funniest.
So it isn’t a surprise that “Date Night” is funny. But it is a little surprising that it isn’t funnier.
Fey and Carell play the Fosters, a couple with kids in the suburbs whose marriage is mired in the mud. They decide to break the routine by going to a tragically chic restaurant where, faced with the prospect of never getting a table, they claim to be another couple who didn’t show for their reservations. A couple of bad guys who apparently haven’t seen “North By Northwest” assume the Fosters are the other couple, shake them down for a MacGuffin and chase them through the streets of New York. Meanwhile, the Fosters have to prove they are who they say they are, find out the identity of the bad guys and bring everyone to justice.
There’s a whole lot of Hitchcock going on here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to make the story seem formulaic. That puts the movie’s ultimate success or failure in the hands of the writer (uneven), the director (uneven) and the stars (less even than you might expect).
For a movie with such masters of verbal wit, many of the better jokes are visual. A scene with a sputtering motorboat is a highlight, Fey’s removing her mouth guard is hilariously unsexy (although she looks good in her U.Va. T-shirt) and a running gag about unclosed cabinets sort of works, too.
But writer Josh Klausner doesn’t know when to stop. Too often, he looks for the easiest gag — usually just the name of an intimate body part spoken for no particular reason. And the movie’s big strip-club set piece only makes us cringe in embarrassment; instead of being funny, it just comes across as a cheap and sleazy way to show Fey in a bustier, fishnet stockings and a strip pole.
Director Shawn Levy does little here to improve on his record of mediocrity (including both “Night at the Museum” movies), so the large number of cameos must be due to the attractive wattage of the stars. It’s a good thing, too, because some of the cameos are among the film’s best moments. James Franco and Mila Kunis are particularly fun as the couple who made the original reservations, Mark Wahlberg is humorous but overused as a beefcake deus ex machina and William Fichtner makes the most out of his small part as a D.A.
As is often the case, the ending is solid and provides more of a sense of having been entertained than the rest of the movie warrants. But don’t worry. There are plenty of flakes of gold to be found.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Clash of the "Titanic" -- all hands lost
If the new "Clash of the Titans" is meant to be a guilty pleasure, the filmmakers forgot the pleasure part. Also the guilt. It may be stupid, but at least it is never boring. Although it IS remarkably stupid...
My review is at: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/441-clash-of-the-titans.html
My review is at: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/441-clash-of-the-titans.html
Better than it looks, somewhat
Given a comedy about old friends who get in a hot tub and go back to the ’80s to relive a formative weekend, you could have two possible outcomes — it could be hilarious or it could be terrible.
Meet option No. 3: “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a little of both.
The disparity grows from the screenwriters working from conflicting impulses. Part of the time, they want to contemplate how human potential can go unfulfilled and how our choices determine our fate. The rest of the time, they want to show us bouncing breasts and multiple scenes of urination and projectile vomiting.
The filmmakers often go too far in their efforts to be naughty little R-rated boys. But the scattered funny bits are usually worth the wait.
John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry star as middle-aged men unhappy with their wasted lives; Clark Duke co-stars as Cusack’s nephew, the sort of young man who lives in his uncle’s basement and plays on the computer all day. As a way to cheer up the most depressed of them, the four go to a ski resort where the older men spent some of the happiest days of their youthful lives. But the resort, too, has fallen on hard times. Dispirited, they pile into the hot tub, and suddenly they're back in 1986 again.
At first, the movie aims for the most obvious jokes about the ’80s — the big hair, the bright clothes, the leg warmers and a joke about Michael Jackson that was undoubtedly a whole lot funnier when it was written. But then the story kicks in and the characters realize they have to relive the past exactly as it happened or risk changing everything in the future. The problem is, that particular weekend wasn’t great for any of them.
This scenario has a good deal of promise, particularly if you have seen “Back to the Future” and are willing to appropriate one of the best scenes and one of the major actors (Crispin Glover, mistreated here but weirdly amusing). The problem is, the filmmakers filter their ideas through the modern sieve of gross-out, sex-talk, post-Judd Apatow humor.
Director Steve Pink is the worst offender. Pink, who wrote the superior “Grosse Pointe Blank” (also starring Cusack), doesn’t know which tone to pick. So he picks them all. He allows Corddry to act as if he were in a different movie from the rest of the cast and slams home the physical humor while almost ignoring the funnier character-related verbal jokes.
Usually, the people who make trailers for comedies choose all the best parts, implying that it is the most hilarious film of all time. The trailer for “Hot Tub Time Machine” has no funny parts at all, making you think that it is screechingly awful. As is so often the case with this particular movie, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Meet option No. 3: “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a little of both.
The disparity grows from the screenwriters working from conflicting impulses. Part of the time, they want to contemplate how human potential can go unfulfilled and how our choices determine our fate. The rest of the time, they want to show us bouncing breasts and multiple scenes of urination and projectile vomiting.
The filmmakers often go too far in their efforts to be naughty little R-rated boys. But the scattered funny bits are usually worth the wait.
John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry star as middle-aged men unhappy with their wasted lives; Clark Duke co-stars as Cusack’s nephew, the sort of young man who lives in his uncle’s basement and plays on the computer all day. As a way to cheer up the most depressed of them, the four go to a ski resort where the older men spent some of the happiest days of their youthful lives. But the resort, too, has fallen on hard times. Dispirited, they pile into the hot tub, and suddenly they're back in 1986 again.
At first, the movie aims for the most obvious jokes about the ’80s — the big hair, the bright clothes, the leg warmers and a joke about Michael Jackson that was undoubtedly a whole lot funnier when it was written. But then the story kicks in and the characters realize they have to relive the past exactly as it happened or risk changing everything in the future. The problem is, that particular weekend wasn’t great for any of them.
This scenario has a good deal of promise, particularly if you have seen “Back to the Future” and are willing to appropriate one of the best scenes and one of the major actors (Crispin Glover, mistreated here but weirdly amusing). The problem is, the filmmakers filter their ideas through the modern sieve of gross-out, sex-talk, post-Judd Apatow humor.
Director Steve Pink is the worst offender. Pink, who wrote the superior “Grosse Pointe Blank” (also starring Cusack), doesn’t know which tone to pick. So he picks them all. He allows Corddry to act as if he were in a different movie from the rest of the cast and slams home the physical humor while almost ignoring the funnier character-related verbal jokes.
Usually, the people who make trailers for comedies choose all the best parts, implying that it is the most hilarious film of all time. The trailer for “Hot Tub Time Machine” has no funny parts at all, making you think that it is screechingly awful. As is so often the case with this particular movie, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Holly goes lightly into TV fame
If something seemed familiar in the first episode of the new season of "Breaking Bad" -- and we don't just mean the pointed jab at ABC laws in Virginia -- maybe you recognized former Richmonder Holly Rice in an extended cameo.
Rice, a teacher and administrator in Chesterfield public schools for 20 years, played a teacher in the Emmy-winning show, too. In the school-assembly scene in which Walter White (played by the episode's director, Bryan Cranston) uncomfortably attempts to cast a major plane crash in a positive light, Rice is seen standing next to him with a concerned look on her face. She plays the blonde teacher in the light-colored sweater, and is visible for much of the scene.
Rice is the longtime companion, as they used to say, of the show's creator, Vince Gilligan. Gilligan, who wrote this episode, often slips references to Rice into his scripts. Most obviously, the baby born last season to the characters played by Cranston and Anna Gunn is named Holly.
Gilligan is also from the Richmond area, which explains that pointed jab at the ABC laws.
Full disclosure (do blogs even need full disclosure?): Rice and Gilligan are friends of this blogger.
Rice, a teacher and administrator in Chesterfield public schools for 20 years, played a teacher in the Emmy-winning show, too. In the school-assembly scene in which Walter White (played by the episode's director, Bryan Cranston) uncomfortably attempts to cast a major plane crash in a positive light, Rice is seen standing next to him with a concerned look on her face. She plays the blonde teacher in the light-colored sweater, and is visible for much of the scene.
Rice is the longtime companion, as they used to say, of the show's creator, Vince Gilligan. Gilligan, who wrote this episode, often slips references to Rice into his scripts. Most obviously, the baby born last season to the characters played by Cranston and Anna Gunn is named Holly.
Gilligan is also from the Richmond area, which explains that pointed jab at the ABC laws.
Full disclosure (do blogs even need full disclosure?): Rice and Gilligan are friends of this blogger.
Worst. Movie. Of. The. Year. (So far)
If the commercials for "The Bounty Hunter" couldn't find any humor in it, think of how hard it is for the viewers. My review is here: http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/435-the-bounty-hunter.html
Friday, March 19, 2010
Getting Hitchcocky
It takes a director like Roman Polanski to successfully pull off a movie like “The Ghost Writer,” a political crime thriller that might not even have any crimes in it.
At 76, Polanski is back in fine form with this sharply made film, seemingly none the worse for wear for his recent legal dust-up over his appalling behavior in the ‘70s. With the skill shown in his earlier films, the uncanny ability to build tension from seemingly innocuous moments, he entices us to follow him into a world of mystery, intrigue and danger.
Ewan McGregor -- himself better than he has been in years -- stars as a ghost writer of the memoirs of celebrities (his most recent was the autobiography of a magician titled “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered”). For a great deal of money, he is hired to finish work on the memoirs of a recent British prime minister.
Like the main character in “Rebecca,” McGregor’s character is never named. Also like “Rebecca,” he is overshadowed by the previous holder of his position, a loyal and beloved writer who drowned, whether by suicide, accident or something more sinister.
The former prime minister, effectively portrayed by Pierce Brosnan, is not Tony Blair, but he is certainly Tony Blairish. His detractors claim he was a puppet of the United States and that some of the actions he took (ordering suspected terrorists to be kidnapped and handed over to the CIA for torture) constituted crimes.
The ghost writer role is seen by Polanski and his co-writer Robert Harris as a cipher, an insignificant man subject to the whims of people more powerful than he. It is the prime minister who is more dynamic; he can be friendly and frightening at the same time, open and reserved, devious and naïve.
It is a testament to the skill of Polanski and Harris (who also wrote the original novel) that we precisely know the prime minister’s domestic situation without it ever being spelled out. He is married to the lovely and stalwart Olivia Williams, but a subtle glance or two lets us know that he has recently begun to stray with his capable assistant Kim Cattrall.
With these players in place, Polanski begins tightening the screws -- both on them and us in the audience. From the bunker-like house where the prime minister has taken up residence to the gloomy, heavy atmosphere at the beach (Germany standing in for Martha’s Vineyard), Polanski creates a mood of ominous dread, of being in circumstances neither controlled by the writer nor even understood.
It is true that Polanski comes to this tense unspooling of the story by way of Hitchcock (and a little bit of early Kubrick at the end). It is one master borrowing the technique of another -- echoes of camera angles, hints of music -- and it is marvelously effective.
From the performances (including Eli Wallach and stellar work from Tom Wilkinson in small roles) to the script to the atmospheric direction, “The Ghost Writer” comes together like a good political crime thriller should. It is wholly satisfying.
At 76, Polanski is back in fine form with this sharply made film, seemingly none the worse for wear for his recent legal dust-up over his appalling behavior in the ‘70s. With the skill shown in his earlier films, the uncanny ability to build tension from seemingly innocuous moments, he entices us to follow him into a world of mystery, intrigue and danger.
Ewan McGregor -- himself better than he has been in years -- stars as a ghost writer of the memoirs of celebrities (his most recent was the autobiography of a magician titled “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered”). For a great deal of money, he is hired to finish work on the memoirs of a recent British prime minister.
Like the main character in “Rebecca,” McGregor’s character is never named. Also like “Rebecca,” he is overshadowed by the previous holder of his position, a loyal and beloved writer who drowned, whether by suicide, accident or something more sinister.
The former prime minister, effectively portrayed by Pierce Brosnan, is not Tony Blair, but he is certainly Tony Blairish. His detractors claim he was a puppet of the United States and that some of the actions he took (ordering suspected terrorists to be kidnapped and handed over to the CIA for torture) constituted crimes.
The ghost writer role is seen by Polanski and his co-writer Robert Harris as a cipher, an insignificant man subject to the whims of people more powerful than he. It is the prime minister who is more dynamic; he can be friendly and frightening at the same time, open and reserved, devious and naïve.
It is a testament to the skill of Polanski and Harris (who also wrote the original novel) that we precisely know the prime minister’s domestic situation without it ever being spelled out. He is married to the lovely and stalwart Olivia Williams, but a subtle glance or two lets us know that he has recently begun to stray with his capable assistant Kim Cattrall.
With these players in place, Polanski begins tightening the screws -- both on them and us in the audience. From the bunker-like house where the prime minister has taken up residence to the gloomy, heavy atmosphere at the beach (Germany standing in for Martha’s Vineyard), Polanski creates a mood of ominous dread, of being in circumstances neither controlled by the writer nor even understood.
It is true that Polanski comes to this tense unspooling of the story by way of Hitchcock (and a little bit of early Kubrick at the end). It is one master borrowing the technique of another -- echoes of camera angles, hints of music -- and it is marvelously effective.
From the performances (including Eli Wallach and stellar work from Tom Wilkinson in small roles) to the script to the atmospheric direction, “The Ghost Writer” comes together like a good political crime thriller should. It is wholly satisfying.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Something old, something new, a whole lot borrowed
Well, someone has gone and made “My Big, Fat Black/Hispanic Wedding.” And it’s a big, fat flop.
“Our Family Wedding” is a remedial lesson in race relations, a film for people who find “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” fresh and full of insight for our time. Judging by the way people were laughing in the theater, apparently it’s also supposed to be a comedy.
But really, can a movie with humor this atrocious, this poorly conceived, this ineptly rendered truly be considered a comedy?
Lance Gross and America Ferrera are a nice and strikingly handsome young couple who are in love and want to get married -- in three weeks, yet. But they haven’t told their parents yet because -- get this -- Gross is black and Ferrera is Hispanic!
Excuse me for a moment while I laugh myself silly.
The mid-’60s fun just keeps on rolling when the fathers (one is played by Forest Whitaker and the other by Carlos Mencia, but I’m not going to tell you which is which) turn out not to approve of the mixed marriage. They don’t like each other either, due to an early confrontation that is so torturously conceived that you cringe and feel embarrassed for the actors, particularly Whitaker.
It’s not the last time you feel that way. But soon you stop feeling bad for the actors and start taking pity on yourself. After all, they’re getting paid to be there. But we actually spend money to watch the scene with the frisky billy goat, the Worst Softball Game Ever Filmed (seriously, if you don’t know anything about the game, don’t try to film it) and the wedding-cake food fight that is so appalling they actually do it twice.
Writers Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman have concocted an extraordinarily unremarkable script (“I fell in love. It changes things. It doesn’t change who you are”) that posits a Los Angeles in which members of different races have never met each other.
Rick Famuyiwa’s direction is as haphazard as the writing, lurching awkwardly from one situation to the next with little sense of timing or logic. At his very worst, he shows a wedding reception that lasts so long it feels as if it were shot in real time.
No, that isn’t the worst. The worst is that softball game with the pitcher who pitches for both teams, except when she doesn’t, and the third baseman who plays left field. That’s the worse scene. But it has a lot of competition for the claim.
“Our Family Wedding” is a remedial lesson in race relations, a film for people who find “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” fresh and full of insight for our time. Judging by the way people were laughing in the theater, apparently it’s also supposed to be a comedy.
But really, can a movie with humor this atrocious, this poorly conceived, this ineptly rendered truly be considered a comedy?
Lance Gross and America Ferrera are a nice and strikingly handsome young couple who are in love and want to get married -- in three weeks, yet. But they haven’t told their parents yet because -- get this -- Gross is black and Ferrera is Hispanic!
Excuse me for a moment while I laugh myself silly.
The mid-’60s fun just keeps on rolling when the fathers (one is played by Forest Whitaker and the other by Carlos Mencia, but I’m not going to tell you which is which) turn out not to approve of the mixed marriage. They don’t like each other either, due to an early confrontation that is so torturously conceived that you cringe and feel embarrassed for the actors, particularly Whitaker.
It’s not the last time you feel that way. But soon you stop feeling bad for the actors and start taking pity on yourself. After all, they’re getting paid to be there. But we actually spend money to watch the scene with the frisky billy goat, the Worst Softball Game Ever Filmed (seriously, if you don’t know anything about the game, don’t try to film it) and the wedding-cake food fight that is so appalling they actually do it twice.
Writers Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman have concocted an extraordinarily unremarkable script (“I fell in love. It changes things. It doesn’t change who you are”) that posits a Los Angeles in which members of different races have never met each other.
Rick Famuyiwa’s direction is as haphazard as the writing, lurching awkwardly from one situation to the next with little sense of timing or logic. At his very worst, he shows a wedding reception that lasts so long it feels as if it were shot in real time.
No, that isn’t the worst. The worst is that softball game with the pitcher who pitches for both teams, except when she doesn’t, and the third baseman who plays left field. That’s the worse scene. But it has a lot of competition for the claim.
A minor 'League'
Sometimes, a movie title can tell you too much.
Given a romantic comedy “She’s Out of My League,” you can literally predict everything that is going to happen in the film: A nice-but-nerdy young man -- skinny and average-looking -- is going to fall for a beautiful and sassy young woman with a great attitude, a great apartment and a great job. And she is going to fall for him, too.
Somehow, I have the sense this is more a fantasy for guys than for women.
The only surprise associated with this movie is that it is actually significantly funnier than you may fear it will be. Even though you can predict all the jokes before they are said, as the women in front o
of me were doing, the jokes are actually fairly decent.
Or rather, indecent. Body-part humor abounds, as does embarrassing-situation humor. And when a group of male friends get together, they talk about sex in a way less like real people than characters in recent movies.
Do you remember how after “Pulp Fiction” came out, we were treated to a spate of copycat movies by Tarantino wannabes? Well, “She’s Out of My League” is the first film by a Judd Apatow wannabe.
Even some of the actors are from the Apatow fold, notably star Jay Baruchel. Baruchel plays Kirk, a TSA employee at the airport in Pittsburgh (thanks to cinematographer Jim Denault, Pittsburgh has never looked more romantic). A small act of kindness leads Kirk to meet perky event-planner Molly, played by Alice Eve. Molly looks a bit like Reese Witherspoon and everyone in the movie thinks she is the most beautiful woman on the face of the globe (I personally disagree, though she is certainly attractive).
One wonders if writers Sean Anders and John Morris are from California. The only thing that seems to matter to any of the characters is how people look. No one talks about how well suited Kirk is to Molly, or how nice it is he has found a worthy girlfriend after pining for a harridan for two years. All Kirk’s three best friends (they’re straight out of the Apatow best-friend mold) talk about is how much hotter Molly is than Kirk.
Even Molly’s best friend Patty (in these movies, girls only get one best friend) is concerned solely with the disparity in their hotness. Patty, who is played by perpetual best-friend Krysten Ritter, is sour and bitter and, as if often the case in roles played by Ritter, rather more interesting than the lead actress. She has a way of delivering lines that makes them seem funny even when they aren’t.
But other characters’ lines are better, and you laugh at them (or at least smile) even when you know they are coming.
The ending, however, is lame. It is as sub-mediocre as you may have been afraid the whole film would be.
Given a romantic comedy “She’s Out of My League,” you can literally predict everything that is going to happen in the film: A nice-but-nerdy young man -- skinny and average-looking -- is going to fall for a beautiful and sassy young woman with a great attitude, a great apartment and a great job. And she is going to fall for him, too.
Somehow, I have the sense this is more a fantasy for guys than for women.
The only surprise associated with this movie is that it is actually significantly funnier than you may fear it will be. Even though you can predict all the jokes before they are said, as the women in front o
of me were doing, the jokes are actually fairly decent.
Or rather, indecent. Body-part humor abounds, as does embarrassing-situation humor. And when a group of male friends get together, they talk about sex in a way less like real people than characters in recent movies.
Do you remember how after “Pulp Fiction” came out, we were treated to a spate of copycat movies by Tarantino wannabes? Well, “She’s Out of My League” is the first film by a Judd Apatow wannabe.
Even some of the actors are from the Apatow fold, notably star Jay Baruchel. Baruchel plays Kirk, a TSA employee at the airport in Pittsburgh (thanks to cinematographer Jim Denault, Pittsburgh has never looked more romantic). A small act of kindness leads Kirk to meet perky event-planner Molly, played by Alice Eve. Molly looks a bit like Reese Witherspoon and everyone in the movie thinks she is the most beautiful woman on the face of the globe (I personally disagree, though she is certainly attractive).
One wonders if writers Sean Anders and John Morris are from California. The only thing that seems to matter to any of the characters is how people look. No one talks about how well suited Kirk is to Molly, or how nice it is he has found a worthy girlfriend after pining for a harridan for two years. All Kirk’s three best friends (they’re straight out of the Apatow best-friend mold) talk about is how much hotter Molly is than Kirk.
Even Molly’s best friend Patty (in these movies, girls only get one best friend) is concerned solely with the disparity in their hotness. Patty, who is played by perpetual best-friend Krysten Ritter, is sour and bitter and, as if often the case in roles played by Ritter, rather more interesting than the lead actress. She has a way of delivering lines that makes them seem funny even when they aren’t.
But other characters’ lines are better, and you laugh at them (or at least smile) even when you know they are coming.
The ending, however, is lame. It is as sub-mediocre as you may have been afraid the whole film would be.
The Greengrass Zone
You can always count on director Paul Greengrass to deliver an edge-of-the-seat thriller. "Green Zone" is no different -- except for the few parts that are. My review is here: http://theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/430-green-zone.html
Friday, March 5, 2010
If you go chasing rabbits
On NPR, Bob Mondello said the new "Alice In Wonderland" would be better titled "C.S. Lewis Carroll's Alice In Narnia, Starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Scarecrow." And he's right.
My feelings about the movie are mixed to slightly negative (it picks up at the end), but my favorite moment comes in a particularly "Wizard of Ozy" scene and the music subtly plays "Over the Rainbow." Cute. My review is here:
http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/421-alice-in-wonderland.html
My feelings about the movie are mixed to slightly negative (it picks up at the end), but my favorite moment comes in a particularly "Wizard of Ozy" scene and the music subtly plays "Over the Rainbow." Cute. My review is here:
http://www.theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/421-alice-in-wonderland.html
Monday, March 1, 2010
Lethal Beverly Hills Weapon of 48 Hrs.
If you were watching movies in the 1980s, you've already seen "Cop Out," and you've seen it done better. Much better. My review is here: http://theboomermagazine.com/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/415-cop-out.html
Friday, February 19, 2010
Scorsese, still trying
Did you realize it has been 17 years since Martin Scorsese last made a notably good feature film? (Not counting the excellent documentary on Bob Dylan). My review on the uneven -- but not bad -- "Shutter Island" is here:
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/409-shutter-island
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/409-shutter-island
Saturday, February 13, 2010
'V.D.' -- Nothing to Clap About
The romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" has a handful of laughs scattered among too many actors and too many stories. My review of it is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/403-valentines-day
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Kill and Kill Again
Mel Gibson stars as Mel Gibson in “Edge of Darkness,” a Mel Gibson film not dissimilar to several other Mel Gibson films.
This time out, he’s a cop (check) going outside the constraints of the law (check) in righteous anger (check) to seek vengeance (check) on the vast conspiracy (check) that killed his daughter (check and check).
The conspiracy here is vast and powerful and not always fully explained, but it has something to do with making nuclear MacGuffins and arranging the paperwork so it seems as if they come from other countries. Not that it matters. What is important is that these guys are so bad, they kill everyone twice. Sometimes, they poison you and then they shoot you. On other occasions, they fatally irradiate you and then they drown you. When they try to kill a character by running him or her over (in a bit of stunningly fortuitous timing), the character manages to survive.
Gibson has been down this path many times before, but the role he plays doesn’t seem repetitious so much as familiar (although also, perhaps, unnecessary). Because he is a movie star, we sometimes tend to forget that he is also quite a capable actor, and after some histrionics at the beginning he settles nicely into the role of a deeply grieving father trying to cope with the violent death of his only child.
As he goes throughout the day, he hears her voice and sees images of her as she was when she was about 5. These intimate scenes, heartbreaking in their dramatic irony, are the best in the movie; we share his deep sense of loss when he recalls such a sweet and frisky girl (the young Gabrielle Popa), and we are saddened to think that as a young woman she will be killed twice.
This being a Mel Gibson film, we understand that his grief will be translated into outbursts of furious violence directed at the many people responsible. Gibson is well into his 50s, but he still does violence well. Still, these scenes are the picture’s weak link, and that is probably the fault of the writers, William Monahan and Andrew Bovell. Gibson’s character seems to have a sixth sense about who is a bad guy, and he acts accordingly, even if the villains aren’t doing anything threatening. Yes, he’s a cop and his intuition is finely tuned, but some of this stuff he could only know if he has read the script.
Let’s put it this way: You don’t want to be following him in a black van. Ever.
Much of the information he acts on comes courtesy of Ray Winstone, who is the movie’s most interesting character. Winstone plays a secret, um, well, he’s kind of a contractor who, er, actually, it’s kind of hard to say what he does. But he appears to know everything (which comes in handy when it comes time for exposition), he sees himself as a moral arbiter (that’s the interesting part), he lurks around in scary parking garages out of movies of the ’70s and he is currently working for evil guys who, to their eventual dismay, drive black vans.
The film is based on a highly praised 1985 British miniseries of the same name, and the reason we don’t always understand how Gibson’s character knows what he knows might be due to the adaptation of the source material. The filmmakers had to squeeze more than five hours’ of information into something less than two, and it seems likely that some of the explanations got lost in the translation.
We are just to take it at face value that there is a vast conspiracy and that Gibson can piece it all together. That isn’t too hard a concept to believe, because he’s done it all before.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
This time out, he’s a cop (check) going outside the constraints of the law (check) in righteous anger (check) to seek vengeance (check) on the vast conspiracy (check) that killed his daughter (check and check).
The conspiracy here is vast and powerful and not always fully explained, but it has something to do with making nuclear MacGuffins and arranging the paperwork so it seems as if they come from other countries. Not that it matters. What is important is that these guys are so bad, they kill everyone twice. Sometimes, they poison you and then they shoot you. On other occasions, they fatally irradiate you and then they drown you. When they try to kill a character by running him or her over (in a bit of stunningly fortuitous timing), the character manages to survive.
Gibson has been down this path many times before, but the role he plays doesn’t seem repetitious so much as familiar (although also, perhaps, unnecessary). Because he is a movie star, we sometimes tend to forget that he is also quite a capable actor, and after some histrionics at the beginning he settles nicely into the role of a deeply grieving father trying to cope with the violent death of his only child.
As he goes throughout the day, he hears her voice and sees images of her as she was when she was about 5. These intimate scenes, heartbreaking in their dramatic irony, are the best in the movie; we share his deep sense of loss when he recalls such a sweet and frisky girl (the young Gabrielle Popa), and we are saddened to think that as a young woman she will be killed twice.
This being a Mel Gibson film, we understand that his grief will be translated into outbursts of furious violence directed at the many people responsible. Gibson is well into his 50s, but he still does violence well. Still, these scenes are the picture’s weak link, and that is probably the fault of the writers, William Monahan and Andrew Bovell. Gibson’s character seems to have a sixth sense about who is a bad guy, and he acts accordingly, even if the villains aren’t doing anything threatening. Yes, he’s a cop and his intuition is finely tuned, but some of this stuff he could only know if he has read the script.
Let’s put it this way: You don’t want to be following him in a black van. Ever.
Much of the information he acts on comes courtesy of Ray Winstone, who is the movie’s most interesting character. Winstone plays a secret, um, well, he’s kind of a contractor who, er, actually, it’s kind of hard to say what he does. But he appears to know everything (which comes in handy when it comes time for exposition), he sees himself as a moral arbiter (that’s the interesting part), he lurks around in scary parking garages out of movies of the ’70s and he is currently working for evil guys who, to their eventual dismay, drive black vans.
The film is based on a highly praised 1985 British miniseries of the same name, and the reason we don’t always understand how Gibson’s character knows what he knows might be due to the adaptation of the source material. The filmmakers had to squeeze more than five hours’ of information into something less than two, and it seems likely that some of the explanations got lost in the translation.
We are just to take it at face value that there is a vast conspiracy and that Gibson can piece it all together. That isn’t too hard a concept to believe, because he’s done it all before.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
'Dear John': Letters to Nowhere
The pace of the story of “Dear John” shifts and varies. Sometimes it ambles. Other times it meanders.
Surprisingly, the picture starts out strong, with a sun-dappled romance on the beaches of South Carolina. An earnest young man meets a good-hearted young woman and they fall in love against a golden backdrop of full moons and first kisses in the rain. Theirs is the kind of romance that makes women in the audience sigh while the men wonder if Peyton Manning really is that good or if he just benefits from an unusually powerful and well-disciplined offensive line (hint: He really is that good).
It’s a chick flick absolutely, but at least it is well made, at first, with honeyed photography and cunning dialogue that reveals the two lovers’ growing relationship.
But their time together is destined to be brief, and not just because the film is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. She is a college student who has to return to school, and he is a soldier who must go back to do vague and undefined special-ops things overseas. But they promise to write each other every day.
And that is where our interest begins to dwindle. Problem No. 1 is that having two actors endlessly read letters back and forth is never cinematically satisfying, particularly when the letters are as mundane as these. Problem No. 2 is that the film doesn’t seem to know where it is going and it certainly doesn’t know where to end. And Problem No. 3 is that one of the lovers, the earnest young soldier, is played by Channing Tatum.
Tatum looks like a chiseled piece of marble, and unfortunately he acts like one, too. If he knows how to give inflection to his words, any inflection at all, he keeps that knowledge a well-hidden secret.
Tatum’s opposite in the film is Amanda Seyfried, who will never be confused with Meryl Streep (who played her mother in “Mamma Mia”), but she is appealing enough in the dewy-eyed, romantic part of her role. It helps that Seyfried is unconventionally beautiful, with the face of a Botticelli by way of Modigliani.
The director is Lasse Hallstrom, which may explain why the romance scenes are so effective (Hallstrom’s many fine movies include “Chocolat”). But he never quite finds the movie’s handle, and it appears possible that, despite the popularity of the original novel, there may be no handle to find.
Writer Jamie Linden also gets the romance right, but little else. His story lacks cohesion. It spends so much time on what appears to be unrelated tangents that we know the tangents will eventually become the point of the film. This tactic of feinting in one direction before taking the story off in a different one is probably supposed to be a twist, but it feels more like a bait and switch.
Eventually, with so little happening so much of the time, we just get tired of it all. Our interest wanes, and even the most romantic-minded people in the audience start thinking about football. When, after many false starts, the movie finally comes to an end, we check our watches and are surprised to learn that it didn’t last much, much longer.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
Surprisingly, the picture starts out strong, with a sun-dappled romance on the beaches of South Carolina. An earnest young man meets a good-hearted young woman and they fall in love against a golden backdrop of full moons and first kisses in the rain. Theirs is the kind of romance that makes women in the audience sigh while the men wonder if Peyton Manning really is that good or if he just benefits from an unusually powerful and well-disciplined offensive line (hint: He really is that good).
It’s a chick flick absolutely, but at least it is well made, at first, with honeyed photography and cunning dialogue that reveals the two lovers’ growing relationship.
But their time together is destined to be brief, and not just because the film is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. She is a college student who has to return to school, and he is a soldier who must go back to do vague and undefined special-ops things overseas. But they promise to write each other every day.
And that is where our interest begins to dwindle. Problem No. 1 is that having two actors endlessly read letters back and forth is never cinematically satisfying, particularly when the letters are as mundane as these. Problem No. 2 is that the film doesn’t seem to know where it is going and it certainly doesn’t know where to end. And Problem No. 3 is that one of the lovers, the earnest young soldier, is played by Channing Tatum.
Tatum looks like a chiseled piece of marble, and unfortunately he acts like one, too. If he knows how to give inflection to his words, any inflection at all, he keeps that knowledge a well-hidden secret.
Tatum’s opposite in the film is Amanda Seyfried, who will never be confused with Meryl Streep (who played her mother in “Mamma Mia”), but she is appealing enough in the dewy-eyed, romantic part of her role. It helps that Seyfried is unconventionally beautiful, with the face of a Botticelli by way of Modigliani.
The director is Lasse Hallstrom, which may explain why the romance scenes are so effective (Hallstrom’s many fine movies include “Chocolat”). But he never quite finds the movie’s handle, and it appears possible that, despite the popularity of the original novel, there may be no handle to find.
Writer Jamie Linden also gets the romance right, but little else. His story lacks cohesion. It spends so much time on what appears to be unrelated tangents that we know the tangents will eventually become the point of the film. This tactic of feinting in one direction before taking the story off in a different one is probably supposed to be a twist, but it feels more like a bait and switch.
Eventually, with so little happening so much of the time, we just get tired of it all. Our interest wanes, and even the most romantic-minded people in the audience start thinking about football. When, after many false starts, the movie finally comes to an end, we check our watches and are surprised to learn that it didn’t last much, much longer.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Five coins in the fountain, which one will the fountain bless?
Attractive girl meets studly young guy, they show an easy, unforced chemistry and fall in love. A few of the jokes are even pretty funny. What could go wrong?
In the romantic comedy “When in Rome,” what goes wrong is the rest of the film. The standard romantic comedy part of the film is actually OK, if perhaps a little too standard. The problem comes from the twist. Two writers and a director, who possibly have never seen a movie before, thought it would be a good idea to interrupt this love story with an extended silly bit about a magic spell. The spell, alas, turns out to be the whole point of the film.
Kristen Bells stars as Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum. She loves her job more than she has ever loved any man, which, considering her job, is understandable. Nevertheless, she is young and cute and therefore in want of a husband. No wonder she is peeved when her younger sister meets a guy, is engaged to him two weeks later and marries him three days after that (in a swank wedding that must have broken all records for being the fastest ever organized).
This wedding brings Beth to Rome as maid of honor, where she meets and falls for the best man, Nick, played by the interchangeable hunk Josh Duhamel. Beth is a klutz and so is Nick, and the repeated scenes of them breaking things or falling down grow quickly tiresome. But that doesn’t matter, because we soon are presented with the film’s major wrinkle. And we wish we weren’t.
In a tipsy pique, Beth pulls five coins out of one of the Roman fountains that grant wishes of love. This act makes the five men who originally threw in the coins fall instantly in love with her. For the rest of the movie, she is stalked in an unquestionably unfunny manner by the likes of Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Dax Shepherd and Danny DeVito.
Yes, Danny DeVito. Poor Danny DeVito. And it gets worse than that. He plays the owner of a sausage company, an occupation the filmmakers think hilarious. They make painful jokes about it, but their sense of humor is suspect. These are people, after all (writers David Diamond and David Weissman, and director Mark Steven Johnson), who think it is a good idea to have Beth pick five coins out of the fountain. Shockingly, they must not know the Comedy Rule of Three -- three variations on a theme are funny; five is overdoing it, especially when the jokes are this lame.
Fortunately, the movie has the excellent John Bailey as director of photography. Bailey (whose stellar work includes “Groundhog Day” and “American Gigolo”) makes Rome glow even more than it does already, and he makes New York sparkle.
So it looks great, and a good handful of the jokes shine (I like the part about the elevator best, but some will prefer the extended sequence inside an uber-hip Village restaurant). The main actors are appealing. And the beginning shows considerable promise.
All that is missing is a worthwhile story.
In the romantic comedy “When in Rome,” what goes wrong is the rest of the film. The standard romantic comedy part of the film is actually OK, if perhaps a little too standard. The problem comes from the twist. Two writers and a director, who possibly have never seen a movie before, thought it would be a good idea to interrupt this love story with an extended silly bit about a magic spell. The spell, alas, turns out to be the whole point of the film.
Kristen Bells stars as Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum. She loves her job more than she has ever loved any man, which, considering her job, is understandable. Nevertheless, she is young and cute and therefore in want of a husband. No wonder she is peeved when her younger sister meets a guy, is engaged to him two weeks later and marries him three days after that (in a swank wedding that must have broken all records for being the fastest ever organized).
This wedding brings Beth to Rome as maid of honor, where she meets and falls for the best man, Nick, played by the interchangeable hunk Josh Duhamel. Beth is a klutz and so is Nick, and the repeated scenes of them breaking things or falling down grow quickly tiresome. But that doesn’t matter, because we soon are presented with the film’s major wrinkle. And we wish we weren’t.
In a tipsy pique, Beth pulls five coins out of one of the Roman fountains that grant wishes of love. This act makes the five men who originally threw in the coins fall instantly in love with her. For the rest of the movie, she is stalked in an unquestionably unfunny manner by the likes of Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Dax Shepherd and Danny DeVito.
Yes, Danny DeVito. Poor Danny DeVito. And it gets worse than that. He plays the owner of a sausage company, an occupation the filmmakers think hilarious. They make painful jokes about it, but their sense of humor is suspect. These are people, after all (writers David Diamond and David Weissman, and director Mark Steven Johnson), who think it is a good idea to have Beth pick five coins out of the fountain. Shockingly, they must not know the Comedy Rule of Three -- three variations on a theme are funny; five is overdoing it, especially when the jokes are this lame.
Fortunately, the movie has the excellent John Bailey as director of photography. Bailey (whose stellar work includes “Groundhog Day” and “American Gigolo”) makes Rome glow even more than it does already, and he makes New York sparkle.
So it looks great, and a good handful of the jokes shine (I like the part about the elevator best, but some will prefer the extended sequence inside an uber-hip Village restaurant). The main actors are appealing. And the beginning shows considerable promise.
All that is missing is a worthwhile story.
Tender enough, reasonably merciful
I really wanted to love “Crazy Heart.” I wanted to love it as much as I loved “Tender Mercies” and “The Wrestler.”
But we are faced with a case of like, not love. “Crazy Heart” has its many merits and is certainly worth seeing. Yet it is too much like “Tender Mercies” and “The Wrestler” to be less spectacular than they are.
Based on the 1987 book by Thomas Cobb (“Tender Mercies” came out in 1983), “Crazy Heart” tells the not unfamiliar story of a once-famous country singer whose self-destructive thirst for alcohol has left him broke, bitter and empty. Reduced to playing bowling alleys in such towns as Pueblo, Colo., his life now consists of a broken-down truck, a daily hangover and nights with groupies past their prime. Possible redemption -- and his last chance -- comes in the form of a good woman who finds it in her heart to love him. The only question is whether he is too far gone to accept the change she can bring him.
Bad Blake, as he is called, is the sort of character a good actor can really get his teeth into. Jeff Bridges, who is always good, plays him with the quiet self-loathing the character needs, the soulless weariness of too many nights on the road and too much self-indulgence. Bridges has been getting all the press and the awards, including a Golden Globe, but to my eye his performance is the film’s second best.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is spot on with her more subtle portrayal of Jean, the woman who could make a difference in his life. We believe her reluctance to get involved with an alcoholic country singer, we believe that she is a caring, loving mother, we believe that she is smart and sensible and that she would never go out with a guy named Bad unless he looked like Jeff Bridges.
The direction of Scott Cooper (who also wrote the script) may be predictable, but it is still effective. We know we are going to see soaring shots of the great Southwest mixed with scenes of a sweaty Bad playing in bars. But here is something we don’t expect to see, and it makes a difference: the musicians behind them are actually playing their instruments in time to the music. Technically, that’s a hard trick to pull off in a film, but Cooper had both the confidence and the ability to pull it off.
Even more impressive is that he makes us care, at least to some degree, about a selfish, boozy singer who could definitely use a shower. Or two.
T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton wrote the songs, which manage a difficult trifecta -- they reveal the thoughts of the character singing them, they fall within the limited ranges of Bridges and Colin Farrell as his one-time protégé, and they sound good. The only exception to the part about sounding good is the big song, the one that gets nominated for awards, the one that is supposed to be the best. It has no hook, it has no verve, it just sort of meanders. The script calls for a transformative song, a song that will long be remembered.
“Crazy Heart” will be remembered and regarded well after the song “The Weary Kind.” You forget that song while it is still being sung.
But we are faced with a case of like, not love. “Crazy Heart” has its many merits and is certainly worth seeing. Yet it is too much like “Tender Mercies” and “The Wrestler” to be less spectacular than they are.
Based on the 1987 book by Thomas Cobb (“Tender Mercies” came out in 1983), “Crazy Heart” tells the not unfamiliar story of a once-famous country singer whose self-destructive thirst for alcohol has left him broke, bitter and empty. Reduced to playing bowling alleys in such towns as Pueblo, Colo., his life now consists of a broken-down truck, a daily hangover and nights with groupies past their prime. Possible redemption -- and his last chance -- comes in the form of a good woman who finds it in her heart to love him. The only question is whether he is too far gone to accept the change she can bring him.
Bad Blake, as he is called, is the sort of character a good actor can really get his teeth into. Jeff Bridges, who is always good, plays him with the quiet self-loathing the character needs, the soulless weariness of too many nights on the road and too much self-indulgence. Bridges has been getting all the press and the awards, including a Golden Globe, but to my eye his performance is the film’s second best.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is spot on with her more subtle portrayal of Jean, the woman who could make a difference in his life. We believe her reluctance to get involved with an alcoholic country singer, we believe that she is a caring, loving mother, we believe that she is smart and sensible and that she would never go out with a guy named Bad unless he looked like Jeff Bridges.
The direction of Scott Cooper (who also wrote the script) may be predictable, but it is still effective. We know we are going to see soaring shots of the great Southwest mixed with scenes of a sweaty Bad playing in bars. But here is something we don’t expect to see, and it makes a difference: the musicians behind them are actually playing their instruments in time to the music. Technically, that’s a hard trick to pull off in a film, but Cooper had both the confidence and the ability to pull it off.
Even more impressive is that he makes us care, at least to some degree, about a selfish, boozy singer who could definitely use a shower. Or two.
T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton wrote the songs, which manage a difficult trifecta -- they reveal the thoughts of the character singing them, they fall within the limited ranges of Bridges and Colin Farrell as his one-time protégé, and they sound good. The only exception to the part about sounding good is the big song, the one that gets nominated for awards, the one that is supposed to be the best. It has no hook, it has no verve, it just sort of meanders. The script calls for a transformative song, a song that will long be remembered.
“Crazy Heart” will be remembered and regarded well after the song “The Weary Kind.” You forget that song while it is still being sung.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Apocalypse again
In the future, 30 years after the apocalypse, there will be no food, no water, no books. But there will be plenty of sunglasses, because sunglasses are cool. And there will be randomly placed smoke machines, because smoke is cool. And everyone will walk in slow motion, because nothing is cooler than slow motion.
In other words, in the future, 30 years after the apocalypse, life will be like a music video.
“The Book of Eli” is just the latest in a long line of “Road Warrior” rip-offs, using a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape as an excuse to film juicy violence and gore. But it is more objectionable than most, because its pretensions are so cynically removed from its obvious purpose. On the surface, it makes a big show of being about the salvation found within Christianity. But in reality, it is just a film about limbs being severed and blood spewing prettily from the stumps.
That’s kind of the opposite of Christianity, especially when it is the Christ figure himself who is doing most of the severing. It is true that he only kills people who are actively trying to hurt him or had hurt him in the recent past and are no longer capable of hurting him, but because the character is essentially immortal his actions amount pretty much to murder.
The Christ figure, known mostly as The Walker but whose name turns out to be Eli, is played by Denzel Washington (if you question whether he is a Christ figure, check out the lightning when he is essentially crucified). Eli has in his possession the only extant copy of the Bible, all the other versions having been burned after the nuclear holocaust. Ever since the war ended, he has been walking toward the west with this bible, knowing only that he must deliver it somewhere and trusting to faith that he will know where.
Time to do the math: The continental U.S. is about 3,000 miles across. Eli has been walking for 30 years. If he started at the easternmost point and winds up at the westernmost, he is averaging just 100 miles a year. Even given the obvious problems of crossing mountains, that’s just 482 yards a day, a little more than a quarter of a mile. If he walks 12 hours a day, he’s going a less-than-blistering 12 yards an hour.
It must be all that slow motion.
Along the way, he picks up a beautiful protégé, played by Mila Kunis, and a villain, played almost inevitably by Gary Oldman. Oldman’s character is, along with Eli, just about the only person left in the world who reads, and one of the few who knows what the Bible is. He craves the sole remaining copy, not for its power of redemption but to use as a weapon to capture the hearts and minds of the illiterate hordes and use them to do his evil bidding.
So the movie is both pro-religion and anti-religion. Ordinarily, this is the sort of logical paradox that would sink a movie. But writer Gary Whitta refuses to be bothered by notions of logic. If it fits his narrative to have two people walking much faster than other characters can drive, so be it. If he needs another character to be simultaneously east and west of the same town, that’s fine, too.
The whole mess has been directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made such a splash 17 years ago with their derivative “Menace II Society.” Two or three few forgettable movies later, they are back with a big star and a lot of computer effects, to little intelligent purpose. For reasons we will never know (other than they think it looks cool), the whole thing has been filmed in a palette of various shades of mud.
How apropos.
In other words, in the future, 30 years after the apocalypse, life will be like a music video.
“The Book of Eli” is just the latest in a long line of “Road Warrior” rip-offs, using a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape as an excuse to film juicy violence and gore. But it is more objectionable than most, because its pretensions are so cynically removed from its obvious purpose. On the surface, it makes a big show of being about the salvation found within Christianity. But in reality, it is just a film about limbs being severed and blood spewing prettily from the stumps.
That’s kind of the opposite of Christianity, especially when it is the Christ figure himself who is doing most of the severing. It is true that he only kills people who are actively trying to hurt him or had hurt him in the recent past and are no longer capable of hurting him, but because the character is essentially immortal his actions amount pretty much to murder.
The Christ figure, known mostly as The Walker but whose name turns out to be Eli, is played by Denzel Washington (if you question whether he is a Christ figure, check out the lightning when he is essentially crucified). Eli has in his possession the only extant copy of the Bible, all the other versions having been burned after the nuclear holocaust. Ever since the war ended, he has been walking toward the west with this bible, knowing only that he must deliver it somewhere and trusting to faith that he will know where.
Time to do the math: The continental U.S. is about 3,000 miles across. Eli has been walking for 30 years. If he started at the easternmost point and winds up at the westernmost, he is averaging just 100 miles a year. Even given the obvious problems of crossing mountains, that’s just 482 yards a day, a little more than a quarter of a mile. If he walks 12 hours a day, he’s going a less-than-blistering 12 yards an hour.
It must be all that slow motion.
Along the way, he picks up a beautiful protégé, played by Mila Kunis, and a villain, played almost inevitably by Gary Oldman. Oldman’s character is, along with Eli, just about the only person left in the world who reads, and one of the few who knows what the Bible is. He craves the sole remaining copy, not for its power of redemption but to use as a weapon to capture the hearts and minds of the illiterate hordes and use them to do his evil bidding.
So the movie is both pro-religion and anti-religion. Ordinarily, this is the sort of logical paradox that would sink a movie. But writer Gary Whitta refuses to be bothered by notions of logic. If it fits his narrative to have two people walking much faster than other characters can drive, so be it. If he needs another character to be simultaneously east and west of the same town, that’s fine, too.
The whole mess has been directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made such a splash 17 years ago with their derivative “Menace II Society.” Two or three few forgettable movies later, they are back with a big star and a lot of computer effects, to little intelligent purpose. For reasons we will never know (other than they think it looks cool), the whole thing has been filmed in a palette of various shades of mud.
How apropos.
A singular bore
When a director shows at least a dozen extreme close-ups of eyes, it means he is either being artistic or incompetent.
In “A Single Man,” it doesn’t matter which -- the effect is the same. It is one of those movies so intent on being impressively (and oppressively) arty that it forgets to tell a story.
The film is based on what we can only assume is a very short story by Christopher Isherwood. It relates what happens during one day in the life of a grieving man whose true love died eight months before. It’s not a terribly busy day, but periodically he looks lovingly at an gun, calling to mind Camus’ famous dictum that the only question worth considering is whether or not to commit suicide.
In this particular case, which way he chooses couldn’t possibly make less difference to us.
Colin Firth shows less personality than usual as George Falconer, a professor of English at a California college in 1962. We are to understand George’s singular lack of vitality as a result of his deep grief over the loss of his love in a car wreck, but usually Firth is a nuanced enough actor to give us a glimpse of the man behind the pain.
Not so this time, and one suspects that might be because the filmmakers have an agenda in mind, rather than a plot. George’s dead lover was a man. The movie seems designed entirely to convince us squares that gay people can fall in love, too. That idea might have been revolutionary when the book was published in 1964, but now it seems more than a little pedestrian.
The man who thinks this is still a story worth telling in the 21st century is its writer and director, Tom Ford. Ford is a noted fashion designer, but he has zero experience in making movies, and it shows. As a writer, he gives his characters too little dialogue and then too much, and it comes out sounding like “Sometimes, awful things have their own kind of beauty.”
That line is said by a male prostitute. In Spanish.
Ford is even worse as a director, from his inability to draw a worthwhile performance from any of his actors (including Julianne Moore as George’s only friend) to his glacial pace. His fascination with extreme close-ups of eyeballs and lips appears to be related to his belief that they are the portals of attraction, but the repetitive depictions of them only add to the overall sluggishness.
In the meantime, Ford repeatedly takes the artiness one step too far. Early in the picture, for instance, he uses super-grainy film stock to show George driving past neighborhood children in slow motion, while a clock ticks loudly on the soundtrack. Any of those elements would have been fine alone, but taken all together they simply become too much.
Eventually, George is offered a way out of his doldrums by means of an exceptionally boring but pretty male student who would be more than happy to oblige. Which leads us in the audience to two questions: Will George find peace with this vacantly pretty young man? And will the cameraman ever find the right focus?
In “A Single Man,” it doesn’t matter which -- the effect is the same. It is one of those movies so intent on being impressively (and oppressively) arty that it forgets to tell a story.
The film is based on what we can only assume is a very short story by Christopher Isherwood. It relates what happens during one day in the life of a grieving man whose true love died eight months before. It’s not a terribly busy day, but periodically he looks lovingly at an gun, calling to mind Camus’ famous dictum that the only question worth considering is whether or not to commit suicide.
In this particular case, which way he chooses couldn’t possibly make less difference to us.
Colin Firth shows less personality than usual as George Falconer, a professor of English at a California college in 1962. We are to understand George’s singular lack of vitality as a result of his deep grief over the loss of his love in a car wreck, but usually Firth is a nuanced enough actor to give us a glimpse of the man behind the pain.
Not so this time, and one suspects that might be because the filmmakers have an agenda in mind, rather than a plot. George’s dead lover was a man. The movie seems designed entirely to convince us squares that gay people can fall in love, too. That idea might have been revolutionary when the book was published in 1964, but now it seems more than a little pedestrian.
The man who thinks this is still a story worth telling in the 21st century is its writer and director, Tom Ford. Ford is a noted fashion designer, but he has zero experience in making movies, and it shows. As a writer, he gives his characters too little dialogue and then too much, and it comes out sounding like “Sometimes, awful things have their own kind of beauty.”
That line is said by a male prostitute. In Spanish.
Ford is even worse as a director, from his inability to draw a worthwhile performance from any of his actors (including Julianne Moore as George’s only friend) to his glacial pace. His fascination with extreme close-ups of eyeballs and lips appears to be related to his belief that they are the portals of attraction, but the repetitive depictions of them only add to the overall sluggishness.
In the meantime, Ford repeatedly takes the artiness one step too far. Early in the picture, for instance, he uses super-grainy film stock to show George driving past neighborhood children in slow motion, while a clock ticks loudly on the soundtrack. Any of those elements would have been fine alone, but taken all together they simply become too much.
Eventually, George is offered a way out of his doldrums by means of an exceptionally boring but pretty male student who would be more than happy to oblige. Which leads us in the audience to two questions: Will George find peace with this vacantly pretty young man? And will the cameraman ever find the right focus?
Heaven forbid!
Have you ever seen a movie that was based on a bestselling book you haven't read, and you recognize instantly that the book is far, far better than the movie could ever be?
I have.
My review of "The Lovely Bones" is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/373-the-lovely-bones
I have.
My review of "The Lovely Bones" is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/373-the-lovely-bones
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The youth are revolting
The problem with “Youth in Revolt”? Not enough revolt.
It’s a placid comedy, cool and tranquil, when it needs to be strong, vibrant, exciting. Or, failing that, funny.
I’m all for smart, subtle comedy, but “Youth in Revolt” is too subtle and not smart enough. It’s like someone telling you a joke that you know could be funnier and told better. It’s a good set-up, it just needs a killer punch line.
Michael Cera stars as that Michael Cera character he has now played in about three movies too many. He’s a brainy, sweet, nerdy teenager who favors the music of Frank Sinatra and the movies of Fellini and is therefore a virgin. He is also only 16, but in today’s teen sex comedies, that is the equivalent of being a spinster.
This is an important point. Not the part about the spinsters, but that “Youth in Revolt” is basically a teen sex comedy. And yet, it isn’t raunchy, it isn’t horny, it barely has a pulse. It’s “Slow Times at Ridgemont High.”
Our hero, Nick, goes to a trailer park where he meets his soul mate Sheeni, played by Portia Doubleday. She likes Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Gainsbourg and records on vinyl. It’s probably supposed to be funny that such an exotic and sophisticated creature should have fundamentalist parents and live in a trailer park, which manages to be condescending on several different levels at once.
Love is in the air, but the Belmondo- and Gainsbourg-loving Sheeni inexplicably keeps pressing Nick to be bad. So he invents an alter ego (also played by Cera) who needs to be hilarious for the comedy to work. He isn’t, and it doesn’t. But in the guise of being bad, Nick does some truly horrendous, unforgivable things. What is meant to be merely a lovable flaw in his plan instead turns him into a hateful psychopath. Isn’t that funny?
An impressive supporting cast is wasted in a wide variety of roles. Nick’s divorced parents are played by Mary Kay Place and M. Emmet Walsh, with Justin “Mac” Long as their stoner son who supplies all the characters with magic mushrooms. The resulting psilocybin scenes are a perfect example of what is wrong with the film: They aren’t a funny idea in the first place, they’ve been done before, and they don’t go far enough to look for laughs.
Instead, we get the horrifying image of M. Emmet Walsh smearing mashed potatoes all over his face. There are some things that, once seen, can never be unseen.
Director Miguel Arteta’s sole stylistic plan seems to be to film as much as he can in slow motion in the hopes that something will look funnier that way. He also directs with such a carefree attitude toward lighting that it comes as a genuine shock to see a couple of lighting technicians listed in the credits. Honestly, what did they do all day?
It’s a placid comedy, cool and tranquil, when it needs to be strong, vibrant, exciting. Or, failing that, funny.
I’m all for smart, subtle comedy, but “Youth in Revolt” is too subtle and not smart enough. It’s like someone telling you a joke that you know could be funnier and told better. It’s a good set-up, it just needs a killer punch line.
Michael Cera stars as that Michael Cera character he has now played in about three movies too many. He’s a brainy, sweet, nerdy teenager who favors the music of Frank Sinatra and the movies of Fellini and is therefore a virgin. He is also only 16, but in today’s teen sex comedies, that is the equivalent of being a spinster.
This is an important point. Not the part about the spinsters, but that “Youth in Revolt” is basically a teen sex comedy. And yet, it isn’t raunchy, it isn’t horny, it barely has a pulse. It’s “Slow Times at Ridgemont High.”
Our hero, Nick, goes to a trailer park where he meets his soul mate Sheeni, played by Portia Doubleday. She likes Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Gainsbourg and records on vinyl. It’s probably supposed to be funny that such an exotic and sophisticated creature should have fundamentalist parents and live in a trailer park, which manages to be condescending on several different levels at once.
Love is in the air, but the Belmondo- and Gainsbourg-loving Sheeni inexplicably keeps pressing Nick to be bad. So he invents an alter ego (also played by Cera) who needs to be hilarious for the comedy to work. He isn’t, and it doesn’t. But in the guise of being bad, Nick does some truly horrendous, unforgivable things. What is meant to be merely a lovable flaw in his plan instead turns him into a hateful psychopath. Isn’t that funny?
An impressive supporting cast is wasted in a wide variety of roles. Nick’s divorced parents are played by Mary Kay Place and M. Emmet Walsh, with Justin “Mac” Long as their stoner son who supplies all the characters with magic mushrooms. The resulting psilocybin scenes are a perfect example of what is wrong with the film: They aren’t a funny idea in the first place, they’ve been done before, and they don’t go far enough to look for laughs.
Instead, we get the horrifying image of M. Emmet Walsh smearing mashed potatoes all over his face. There are some things that, once seen, can never be unseen.
Director Miguel Arteta’s sole stylistic plan seems to be to film as much as he can in slow motion in the hopes that something will look funnier that way. He also directs with such a carefree attitude toward lighting that it comes as a genuine shock to see a couple of lighting technicians listed in the credits. Honestly, what did they do all day?
Friday, January 8, 2010
Look before leaping
"Leap Year" isn't as horrendous as I'd feared. Then again, few things are. My review is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=370:leap-year&catid=74:movie-reviews
Oops.
Somehow I forgot to post the link to the review of the utterly forgettable movie "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" It originally appeared at www.boomerlifemagazine.com:
Sometimes, a terrible title is just that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the movie is just as bad.
And sometimes it does.
“Did You Hear About the Morgans?” is a terrible title, simply awful. Cataclysmic. And while this fish-out-of-water romantic comedy isn’t quite as satanically catastrophic as its title (how could it be?), it still is pretty darned dreadful.
All the elements are in place for a satisfying, lighthearted romp. But the jokes need to be funnier and the direction needs to be peppier. The formula is willing, but the script is weak.
Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant star as married-but-separated New Yorkers who witness a murder. They are put in the Witness Protection Plan until the hired killer can be caught, and they find themselves in what seems to them to be a foreign country — a small town in Wyoming.
Think of the possibilities this premise presents. Writer-director Marc Lawrence did, and the best he could come up with were the most obvious, timeworn clichés — cow-milking, barn dances, giant breakfasts, a rodeo and a grizzly bear. There will be some who will say the bear provides the best acting in the movie, but don’t listen to them. He looks trained.
Parker is equally unconvincing as the neurotic, compulsively talky vegetarian, while Grant half-heartedly plays yet another version of his charmingly stammering standard character. While in Wyoming, they are looked after by a typically laconic Sam Elliott as the sheriff and Mary Steenburgen as his rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ wife.
“It’s Sarah Palin,” says Parker of the wife, proving that there really are a handful of decent jokes to be found in this film, if you look hard enough. Meanwhile, we watch the four main actors with fascination — which of them, we wonder, has had the most face work?
Lawrence has previously scored with such hits as “Music and Lyrics” (which he wrote and directed) and “Miss Congeniality” (which he wrote). But with “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” he flails about like the fish out of water he so desperately wants his characters to be. Some of the jokes could apply for AARP, such as Steenburgen’s assertion that PETA stands for “People Eating Tasty Animals.” Or when Parker is asked whether she would rather live somewhere else or die in New York, she pauses and, when prompted to reply, says, “I’m thinking.”
That one goes all the way back to Jack Benny, bless him. And his timing was better.
If the title is indicative of the lack of coherent thought that went into making this picture, the soundtrack only proves it. Time and again, Lawrence resorts to the most hackneyed, obvious song choices to underscore his already obvious point. When his New Yorkers first go into the country, he plays a little Hank Williams. When he wants to show irony over a weekend night of bingo, he plays “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers. Really, the Bay City Rollers.
A far better movie could have been made from this material, but Lawrence and company were not up to the challenge. If you are ever asked “Did you hear about the Morgans?” the best answer is “no.”
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.BoomerLifeMagazine.com. He writes each week for Boomer Fridays, available here, on the making of a classic movie that has special appeal for baby boomers. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer Life magazine.
Sometimes, a terrible title is just that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the movie is just as bad.
And sometimes it does.
“Did You Hear About the Morgans?” is a terrible title, simply awful. Cataclysmic. And while this fish-out-of-water romantic comedy isn’t quite as satanically catastrophic as its title (how could it be?), it still is pretty darned dreadful.
All the elements are in place for a satisfying, lighthearted romp. But the jokes need to be funnier and the direction needs to be peppier. The formula is willing, but the script is weak.
Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant star as married-but-separated New Yorkers who witness a murder. They are put in the Witness Protection Plan until the hired killer can be caught, and they find themselves in what seems to them to be a foreign country — a small town in Wyoming.
Think of the possibilities this premise presents. Writer-director Marc Lawrence did, and the best he could come up with were the most obvious, timeworn clichés — cow-milking, barn dances, giant breakfasts, a rodeo and a grizzly bear. There will be some who will say the bear provides the best acting in the movie, but don’t listen to them. He looks trained.
Parker is equally unconvincing as the neurotic, compulsively talky vegetarian, while Grant half-heartedly plays yet another version of his charmingly stammering standard character. While in Wyoming, they are looked after by a typically laconic Sam Elliott as the sheriff and Mary Steenburgen as his rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ wife.
“It’s Sarah Palin,” says Parker of the wife, proving that there really are a handful of decent jokes to be found in this film, if you look hard enough. Meanwhile, we watch the four main actors with fascination — which of them, we wonder, has had the most face work?
Lawrence has previously scored with such hits as “Music and Lyrics” (which he wrote and directed) and “Miss Congeniality” (which he wrote). But with “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” he flails about like the fish out of water he so desperately wants his characters to be. Some of the jokes could apply for AARP, such as Steenburgen’s assertion that PETA stands for “People Eating Tasty Animals.” Or when Parker is asked whether she would rather live somewhere else or die in New York, she pauses and, when prompted to reply, says, “I’m thinking.”
That one goes all the way back to Jack Benny, bless him. And his timing was better.
If the title is indicative of the lack of coherent thought that went into making this picture, the soundtrack only proves it. Time and again, Lawrence resorts to the most hackneyed, obvious song choices to underscore his already obvious point. When his New Yorkers first go into the country, he plays a little Hank Williams. When he wants to show irony over a weekend night of bingo, he plays “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers. Really, the Bay City Rollers.
A far better movie could have been made from this material, but Lawrence and company were not up to the challenge. If you are ever asked “Did you hear about the Morgans?” the best answer is “no.”
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.BoomerLifeMagazine.com. He writes each week for Boomer Fridays, available here, on the making of a classic movie that has special appeal for baby boomers. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer Life magazine.
Top 10 of 2009
Note: This article first appeared at www.boomelifemagazine.com
For a substantial part of the population, 2009 turned out to be the temporal equivalent of a root canal. And when, as in years past, they headed to the movies to escape from their troubles, the movies turned out to be…uninspiring. Or at least uninspired.
This was, after all, a year that gave us “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” — which went on to steal $150 million from unsuspecting ticket-buyers at the box office. It is a year that made the fourth iteration of “The Fast and the Furious” a worldwide smash (rejected advertising tagline: “At least it’s better than the third iteration”). And it is a year in which the film expected to be the biggest smash by far, “Watchmen,” fizzled and sputtered.
So what did the year’s biggest smash turn out to be? “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” Yeesh.
And yet, even among such great steaming piles of mediocrity, certain films revealed themselves to be everything we want in a movie. They made us laugh, they made us cry, they made us feel that our nine bucks weren’t wasted.
Considering how shatteringly unexceptional most of the year was, a surprising number of these movies of quality hit the screens. There were more than a few, but fewer than a bunch. Certainly enough to fill out a Top 10 list. Ours follows, in ascending order:
10. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — This charming fable is about an optimistic character whose animal nature gets him into trouble, which he can only escape through his shrewdness. The stop-motion animation captured the attention of children, while adults were attracted to the clever humor and the vocal characterizations of the entire cast, especially George Clooney — who had a very good year.
9. “Everybody’s Fine” — Yes, this fine drama is one of those movies that flopped. Robert De Niro gives one of his finest, most delicately shaded performances in years as a slightly clueless father who travels around the country visiting his reluctant adult children. Based on an Italian film of the same name, and do you know what? That one was excellent, too.
8. “Julie & Julia” — You forget you’re watching Meryl Streep and you actually believe you are watching Julia Child on the screen — and then you wonder why she sort of looks like Meryl Streep. The two prongs of this story (Julia Child learning to cook and Julie Powell trying to cook like Julia Child) play off of each other to a wonderful effect. The happy marriage between Child and her husband, played by Stanley Tucci, is the romance of the year.
7. “Nine” — OK, I’m the only person in the world who loved this movie. But hey, it’s my list. This musical version of the Federico Fellini masterpiece “8½” explores the strain and the angst felt by a movie director as he attempts to create his next movie while trying to navigate his way through the women in his life, past and present. Basically, it’s about how hard it was for Fellini to be Fellini, only with songs.
6. “District 9” — Even if this South African film weren’t this spectacularly well made, it would still be notable just for the premise: aliens from outer space come to Johannesburg, where they are treated in much the same way that blacks were under Apartheid. It’s a science-fiction metaphor, and a good one, working well on both levels. (And for sci-fi creature fans, it offers a high ick factor). Newcomer Sharlto Copley is a revelation as the main character who comes to see both sides of the conflict.
5. “Zombieland” — Hilarious. An overworked horror premise (zombies have taken over, only a few humans left, blah, blah, blah) is played for laughs. You’d think the writers could not maintain the level of humor for the entire film, but their witty script never falters. My favorite moment: In a brief down time amidst the chaos, young Abigail Breslin tries to explain the difference between Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana.
4. “Food, Inc.” — After watching this horrifying and persuasive documentary, you may never want to eat again. It argues with conviction that the subsidies to farmers to grow corn, which were written to benefit the giant agribusiness corporations, have led to an unhealthy reliance on corn in practically everything we eat.
3. “The Messenger” — The best movie to come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this explores a side of the conflict previously unexplored — the lives of people whose job it is to tell relatives that their loved ones have been killed. Ben Foster is terrific as the literally and figuratively damaged soldier who slowly finds a way to heal through his dealings with Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton. Both of them are also great.
2. “Lorna’s Silence” — In a year when the best acting was truly exceptional, Arta Dobroshi stands out above the crowd. In this Belgian import, she stars as a mercenary Albanian woman who married a Belgian junkie solely to gain Belgian citizenship. When the citizenship comes through, she plans to divorce him and marry a Russian for money, but the Albanian mob has other ideas. Amongst all the cynicism blooms a faint flower of hope.
1. “Up in the Air” — Funny and dramatic, flippant and serious, this well-crafted story fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. George Clooney (did we mention he had a very good year?) stars as a man whose carefully constructed emotional isolation is reflected in the time he spends traveling. Anna Kendrick is equally superb as his protégé. Clooney’s soullessness is necessary for his heartless but timely job; he travels around the country firing people.
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.BoomerLifeMagazine.com. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer Life magazine.
For a substantial part of the population, 2009 turned out to be the temporal equivalent of a root canal. And when, as in years past, they headed to the movies to escape from their troubles, the movies turned out to be…uninspiring. Or at least uninspired.
This was, after all, a year that gave us “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” — which went on to steal $150 million from unsuspecting ticket-buyers at the box office. It is a year that made the fourth iteration of “The Fast and the Furious” a worldwide smash (rejected advertising tagline: “At least it’s better than the third iteration”). And it is a year in which the film expected to be the biggest smash by far, “Watchmen,” fizzled and sputtered.
So what did the year’s biggest smash turn out to be? “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” Yeesh.
And yet, even among such great steaming piles of mediocrity, certain films revealed themselves to be everything we want in a movie. They made us laugh, they made us cry, they made us feel that our nine bucks weren’t wasted.
Considering how shatteringly unexceptional most of the year was, a surprising number of these movies of quality hit the screens. There were more than a few, but fewer than a bunch. Certainly enough to fill out a Top 10 list. Ours follows, in ascending order:
10. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — This charming fable is about an optimistic character whose animal nature gets him into trouble, which he can only escape through his shrewdness. The stop-motion animation captured the attention of children, while adults were attracted to the clever humor and the vocal characterizations of the entire cast, especially George Clooney — who had a very good year.
9. “Everybody’s Fine” — Yes, this fine drama is one of those movies that flopped. Robert De Niro gives one of his finest, most delicately shaded performances in years as a slightly clueless father who travels around the country visiting his reluctant adult children. Based on an Italian film of the same name, and do you know what? That one was excellent, too.
8. “Julie & Julia” — You forget you’re watching Meryl Streep and you actually believe you are watching Julia Child on the screen — and then you wonder why she sort of looks like Meryl Streep. The two prongs of this story (Julia Child learning to cook and Julie Powell trying to cook like Julia Child) play off of each other to a wonderful effect. The happy marriage between Child and her husband, played by Stanley Tucci, is the romance of the year.
7. “Nine” — OK, I’m the only person in the world who loved this movie. But hey, it’s my list. This musical version of the Federico Fellini masterpiece “8½” explores the strain and the angst felt by a movie director as he attempts to create his next movie while trying to navigate his way through the women in his life, past and present. Basically, it’s about how hard it was for Fellini to be Fellini, only with songs.
6. “District 9” — Even if this South African film weren’t this spectacularly well made, it would still be notable just for the premise: aliens from outer space come to Johannesburg, where they are treated in much the same way that blacks were under Apartheid. It’s a science-fiction metaphor, and a good one, working well on both levels. (And for sci-fi creature fans, it offers a high ick factor). Newcomer Sharlto Copley is a revelation as the main character who comes to see both sides of the conflict.
5. “Zombieland” — Hilarious. An overworked horror premise (zombies have taken over, only a few humans left, blah, blah, blah) is played for laughs. You’d think the writers could not maintain the level of humor for the entire film, but their witty script never falters. My favorite moment: In a brief down time amidst the chaos, young Abigail Breslin tries to explain the difference between Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana.
4. “Food, Inc.” — After watching this horrifying and persuasive documentary, you may never want to eat again. It argues with conviction that the subsidies to farmers to grow corn, which were written to benefit the giant agribusiness corporations, have led to an unhealthy reliance on corn in practically everything we eat.
3. “The Messenger” — The best movie to come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this explores a side of the conflict previously unexplored — the lives of people whose job it is to tell relatives that their loved ones have been killed. Ben Foster is terrific as the literally and figuratively damaged soldier who slowly finds a way to heal through his dealings with Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton. Both of them are also great.
2. “Lorna’s Silence” — In a year when the best acting was truly exceptional, Arta Dobroshi stands out above the crowd. In this Belgian import, she stars as a mercenary Albanian woman who married a Belgian junkie solely to gain Belgian citizenship. When the citizenship comes through, she plans to divorce him and marry a Russian for money, but the Albanian mob has other ideas. Amongst all the cynicism blooms a faint flower of hope.
1. “Up in the Air” — Funny and dramatic, flippant and serious, this well-crafted story fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. George Clooney (did we mention he had a very good year?) stars as a man whose carefully constructed emotional isolation is reflected in the time he spends traveling. Anna Kendrick is equally superb as his protégé. Clooney’s soullessness is necessary for his heartless but timely job; he travels around the country firing people.
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.BoomerLifeMagazine.com. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer Life magazine.
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