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.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
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
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