CRIME DOES PAY: Movie Reviews of Logan Lucky and The Nile Hilton Incident by Howard Casner

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Warning: SPOILERS

Everyone in the US seems to agree that the working class is under siege. And it’s still unclear whether there is any real relief in sight.

I’m not sure whether this is the reason filmmakers have been creating stories that focus on the more downtrodden in our society (zeitgeists are almost impossible to recognize until we are out of them), but last year we had Hell or High Water, and more recently we’ve had Patti Cake$, Beach Rats and the topic of this review, Logan Lucky.

All the films have fallen into various genres and niches. Hell or High Water is a modern western/crime film; Patti Cake$ is a musical; Beach Rats is a coming out story; and Logan Lucky is a heist film.

All have, as their central characters, people struggling just to make ends meet or who are lost in a world that seems to have no future for them.

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I’M READY FOR MY CLOSEUP, MR. DEMILLE: Movie Review of Hail, Caesar! by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors: I am now offering a new service: so much emphasis has been given lately to the importance of the opening of your screenplay, I now offer coverage for the first twenty pages at the cost of $20.00.  For those who don’t want to have full coverage on their screenplay at this time, but want to know how well their script is working with the opening pages, this is perfect for you.  I’ll help you not lose the reader on page one. 

 

Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

and check out my Script Consultation Services: http://ow.ly/HPxKE

Warning: SPOILERS

rev 3Hail, Caesar!, the latest comic satire from Joel and Ethan Coen, is one of those films that has so much that is right with it, plus a bit more that is brilliant, that it makes it all the more disappointing that it doesn’t quite come together.

The basic premise has as its center piece one Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), head of production at the fictional Hollywood studio Capital Pictures (the same studio that the Brothers used in Barton Fink). Over the course of one or two days, he has a difficult decision to make: should he remain at Capitol where he’s constantly having to put out fires both large and small and is constantly confronted by the insane antics of his stars, or will he take a position as head of Lockheed, a safe position with a guaranteed future (this is the 1950’s after all, and TV is more than making its presence known), fewer hours and less stress on the nerves?

Well, so far so good. Read the rest of this entry »


A BIT SHORT: The Big Short and The Hateful Eight

First, a word from our sponsors: I am now offering a new service: so much emphasis has been given lately to the importance of the opening of your screenplay, I now offer coverage for the first twenty pages at the cost of $20.00.  For those who don’t want to have full coverage on their screenplay at this time, but want to know how well their script is working with the opening pages, this is perfect for you.  I’ll help you not lose the reader on page one. 

 

Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

and check out my Script Consultation Services: http://ow.ly/HPxKE

Warning: SPOILERS

big short 1The Big Short, like Spotlight, is the one of those movies ripped from the headlines—of years and years ago; but this time the subject is not pedophile priests, but the downfall of the American economy. Written by Charles Randolph and the director Adam McKay, from a book by Michael Lewis, it’s also a very satisfying bit of agitprop theater with Brechtian distancing devices thrown in for good major.

It basically tells the story of four different groups of people who all realized, more or less at the same time, and years ahead of schedule, that the housing mortgage bubble was going to burst in 2007 and destroy the world’s economy.

This leads to the movie’s major irony: the people who figured this out then proceed to invest heavily against the U.S. economy, making tons of money when their Cassandra like prediction of doom came true.

So basically, we in the audience, along with the characters in the movie, find ourselves and themselves actually hoping that the U.S. financial system tanks like the Titanic. Read the rest of this entry »


THERE ARE NO SMALL PARTS: Movie reviews of Magic Mike XXL and Minions by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

and check out my Script Consultation Services: http://ow.ly/HPxKE

Warning: SPOILERS

minions 2It’s not that common, but it’s also not completely unusual, for a supporting or minor character from a movie to be given a film of their own. This is more likely to happen in TV with spinoffs of popular TV series (Frazier, anyone?), but it does happen in tinsel town as well.

In Dead End, the Dead End Kids got their own franchise and when they grew up, they become The Bowery Boys. In The Egg and I, two of the minor characters, Ma and Pa Kettle, got their own series as well.

And in The White Sheik, Cabiria, a prostitute, via Federico Fellini, got her own vehicle in Nights of Cabiria; Ensign Pulver became the title character in the sequel to Mister Roberts (well, to be fair, Roberts was no longer around); and Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes brings front and center the bickering couple who appear in the first episode of Scenes from a Marriage.

So in the past couple of weeks we’ve seen two more examples of the selfsame approach, though with a different emphasis in each outing and with much different results.

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REEL MEN, REAL MEN, PART ONE: Movie reviews of Foxcatcher, Rosewater and The Imitation Game by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

Warning: SPOILERS

imitation oneIt’s November, which means we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, are fast approaching awards season, which in turn means distributors, producers and studios are bringing out a bunch of stunt performances, or as we vulgarly call them in the vernacular, bio-pics, to qualify for the Academy Awards (among other competitions).

And this year is not only no different, it may actually set a record as it’s quite possible that three of the five female nominees for best actress Oscars will be for movies with characters based on real people and the male category may have up to four.

So please join me for the first installment of Reel Men, Real Men.

Foxcatcher is a movie about a poor younger man with daddy issues who becomes entangled in the life of a wealthy older man with mommy issues. The filmmakers seem determined to raise all the goings on to the level of Greek tragedy, but I’m not convinced it comes close to anything remotely Sophoclean. Read the rest of this entry »


Movie Reviews of WORLD WAR Z and WHITE HOUSE DOWN by Howard Casner

About the only positive thing I can say about the rash of apocalyptic movies lately is that most of them have been in the planning for years, which means that they may no longer be reflecting a zeitgeist, and in fact may be a few years behind the times.  If this is true, then the new bunch of movie ideas of the future may very well offer a slightly rosier view of our future.  We can only hope, because these movies are giving us precious little of it.

 

World War Z (directed by Marc Forster and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof, and J. Michael Straczynski) is basically Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, but with a zombie twist.   The premise may be pure fantasy, even ridiculous if you like, but there’s just enough realism to the background, to the way such a preposterous event would be handled, that it gets under your skin in a way other apocalyptic movies don’t.  Like another recent apocalyptic film with a similar fantasy premise, Battle Los Angeles, the movie is just a tad too real.

 

In many ways you know the story.  A virus breaks out that turns people into rabid beasts that have no other goal than to spread the virus to other hosts.  It’s up to our intrepid hero, Gerry Lane (blond, blue eyed Brad Pitt, natch) to save the world, or save it the best it can be saved.  To do so, he must travel the globe from New York to Korea to Israel to Spain, with a side stop in…New Jersey (oh, well, no “if it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” itinerary can be perfect).   In fact, this may very well be the first travelogue zombie flick.

 

Pitt also saves the movie.  There is nothing special about his character, or any of the characters.  As in Battle Los Angeles, they are all fairly bland with dialog that falls more than a bit flat.  But Pitt takes control in the old fashioned way of a John Wayne.  If you don’t have a three dimensional hero, you at least have someone incredibly handsome and charismatic to look at.

 

What’s more, his travels not only help him solve the mystery of the outbreak, it also enables him to meet some of the first rate thespians of other countries.  I don’t know who the casting director is, but he or she is worth their weight in gold.   As Pitt travels from place to place, he runs into such top notch character actors as Luki Boeken from Israel (who usually only produces film); Peter (The Loop) Capaldi from England; Piefrancesco (Columbus in Night at the Museum) Favino from Italy; Ruth (12 Years a Slave) Negga from Ireland; Moritz (The Baader Meinhof Complex) Bleibtreu from Germany.   Perhaps the biggest find of the movie is Daniell Kertez who gives a powerful and touching performance as an Israeli soldier who gets co-opted into the fight.   Mireille Enos of The Killing is also along for the ride; she has the embarrassing and thankless task of the “those also serve who sit and wait” role of Pitt’s wife (sigh).

 

Though the screenplay cheats once or twice when it comes to the rules (especially a scene on an airplane), and though it has some of the clichés one often sees in genre films like this (a child with asthma, a car that won’t start—though both seem thrown away and used at unimportant points in the story), it is rather intelligent.  It does something really clever: it tells us at the beginning to look for clues.  And through Pitt’s eyes we do.  Because of this, the plot is not just a series of meaningless action sequences in a vacuum.  We know it’s going somewhere.

 

In talking about sic-fi films, the critic Susan Sontag said that “[s]cience fiction films are not about science.  They are about disaster”.  She also made one another pertinent observation, that one of the continuing themes of these movies it that by giving the world a common enemy, it brought a unity to mankind; all wars and disagreements stopped as all the nations on the earth joined forces as one to defeat this threat to the earth.  She was mainly referring to the films of the 1950’s, but in the end, this is the ironic happy ending of this movie as well.

 

 

Can Channing Tatum steal a movie?  That’s certainly a question I never thought I’d ask.  Even stranger, it’s also not a question I’d ever thought I’d answer, “yes” to.  But he actually achieves this remarkable feat in the new action film White House Down.  Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that he was one of the producers, insuring that the movie would play to his particular strengths.  But it must be said, his underplaying naturalness and the stumbling way he says his lines are the primary joy one gets from this  action film.

 

The story revolves around a domestic terrorist plot to take over the White House.  It climaxes with the possibility of missiles being launched in which the world as we know it would cease to exist.  But since this is a movie directed by Roland Emmerich, that’s not really what’s at stake.  Nuclear war could break out; millions could die; the world could become a radioactive wasteland.  But for Emmerich and writer James Vanderbilt all that’s irrelevant.  In the end, all that really matters is if Channing Tatum’s character Cale can earn back the respect of his young daughter. No, I’m not making this up.  Really.  And it’s almost as close a call as those launch codes getting into the wrong hands.

 

How much you enjoy White House Down will probably depend on your tolerance level for silliness on the day you see it (it’s one of those movies, you know the kind, where everyone starts out being a crack shot and then, once the big opening action sequence is over, no one can hit anyone else except when it’s convenient for the plot).  I guess, though, if truth be told, I was in a particularly good mood that day, because I kind of got a kick of the sheer lunacy of it at times.

 

It does have a nice supporting cast, with Richard Jenkins as the Speaker of the house, as well as a welcome appearance by the veteran Michael Murphy as the VPOTUS.  Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum have a nice chemistry together (actually, Tatum has a nice chemistry with everyone).  And for what it is, Vanderbilt’s screenplay is very well written: stupid, over the top, preposterous, but well crafted where everything that happens has a payoff (sort of a variation on those lines from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible”, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions”).

 

If you’re a Republican, see the first half.  If you’re a Democrat, see the second.