Movie Reviews of THE SPECTACULAR NOW and ELYSIUM by Howard Casner
Posted: August 14, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alice Braga, Bob Odenkirk, Diego Luna, James Ponsoldt, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jodie Foster, Kyle Chandler, Matt Damon, Michael H. Weber, Miles Teller, Niell Blonkamp, Scott Neustadter, Sharlot Copley, The Spectacular Now | 4 Comments »This year has been something of a horse race for coming of age films. I don’t think I’ve ever really kept count, but I don’t remember seeing as many in one year as I have this one. It’s not a particularly close horse race as horse races go. The lead, when it comes to quality, is obviously, as far as I’m concerned, a dead heat between Something in the Air and The Bling Ring. Behind those two, and lagging far behind it should be noted, are The Way, Way Back and Mud. And behind that, in a distant, distant, distant last place, is The Kings of Summer. However, a movie has now come along that may just about dislodge The Kings of Summer from its singular location.
After seeing The Spectacular Now, I turned to my friend and told him, I swear I’ve seen this film before; it was part of a TV series called The Afterschool Special; starred a couple of familiar TV kids of the day; and was about teenage alcoholics (there were actually a couple of shows like this: a made for TV movie, The Boy Who Drank Too Much with Scott Baio and Lance Kerwin and that Afterschool Special one, The Late Great Me! Story of a Teenage Alcoholic). No, The Spectacular Now is not a remake; but overall, I really couldn’t see all that much of a difference between The Spectacular Now and an episode of a series that was often made fun of in its day for it’s obviousness and PSA feel (it was only a few steps up from those films shown in school in the 1950’s on the dangers of premarital sex).
I really don’t understand the big hoopla over this film. It gets the job done, but I’m not convinced it does much else. But for some reason everyone, including film critics who should know better, is calling it original and non-formulaic—perhaps the two very words that could never be honestly used in describing this picture (directed adequately by James Ponsoldt, with a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber—a far cry from their exciting work of (500) Days of Summer). It’s one of those movies in which every plot turn is telegraphed minutes, if not hours, before it happens; in which everything pretty much happens the way it always does, and always has, in movies like this; and just about worst of all, it’s one of those movies where, if you haven’t gotten the message that has been so obviously preached for the majority of the film, the central character actually tells you what it is in the final scene (really? I mean, really?—Jesus, it’s like the ending of The Breakfast Club, except at least that movie had a bit more interesting of a message to its message).
The story revolves around high school senior Sutter (played by Miles Teller, who is perfectly fine and does his Shia Lebouf best when it comes to his lines, though I’m not sure I ever fully bought him in the role). Sutter has the smarmy personality of a used car salesman, and the drinking problem to go with it. He’s one of these characters who is described in a way that is never dramatized: he claims to be one of the most popular kids at school and that no party is successful without him—of course, we have to take his word for it since he never does anything to prove it. At one point at prom (which feels very underpopulated), he yells out that he loves these guys—why he does, I have no idea (in his defense, this is also the point where he has the best line in the movie: “we’ll never be this young again”). His most moving and honest scene (and the one, perhaps, least encumbered by formula and predictability) is a moment he has with his boss, played by Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk, in which he is very honest about himself and describes himself in a way that, for the first time in the film, is actually supported by events in the story.
It’s not that the movie is without some moving scenes. As clichéd as it is, Sutter has a scene with his father whom he hasn’t seen since he was a child that is quite memorable. It’s not just that his father turns out to be someone other than what he seems at first (who didn’t see that coming). Sutter’s father (played spot on by Kyle Chandler) is more than you’re run of the mill alcoholic; he is one mean drunk and the scene has some unexpected menace that the rest of the movie could have used.
Perhaps the biggest crime of the film, though, bigger than the triteness of the formula and simplistic story telling, is the use of Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sutter’s mother. Leigh is someone who had potential to become one of our greatest actresses with incredible performances in such movies as Last Exit to Brooklyn, Miami Blues, Rush and Georgia, but has now been reduced to playing parts easily beneath her, throwaway roles in movies she is too good for. That is perhaps the only thing in this movie I didn’t see coming.
Writer/director Niell Blonkamp is brilliant when it comes to metaphors. The movie that made his name, District 9, is a comment on race relations and immigration revolving around aliens from another planet making their way to earth and ghettoized in South Africa. Elysium, his new sci-fi story, is a metaphor on the haves and have nots, the 1 percenters having fled a decaying earth to a state of the art space station, leaving the earth to the 99 percenters. Unfortunately, this is about where any interest in this movie stops.
The metaphor is original and exciting, but the set up, the concept, the back story, never seems well thought out and doesn’t feel remotely convincing. After leaving the theater, all I and my friends did was pick apart how unbelievable it all was (it’s a world in which the population has not just sub-par, but almost no medical care; lives on a planet that is losing its resources; an earth where the pollution is deadly, and yet the place is overpopulated—a neat trick if there ever was one, and just one of the many parts of the film that never made sense).
But the fact that after the movie was over all we could talk about was the errors in the premise suggests a much deeper problem here. We were talking about the errors because none of us cared about the characters or what was happening to them. Everyone in the movie seemed bland and one dimensional, spouting dialog that had no bite to it. And the over crushing direction with the emphasis on disco-like pounding action, over crushed any possibility of an emotional connection to what was happening on screen. And it all ends with a scene so ludicrous, I and my friends were desperately trying to be polite and not burst out laughing.
There are plenty of interesting names in the cast. Matt Damon plays the lead with an absurdly ripped body that feels out of place in a world where people can’t get the right kind of nutrition. His chief opponent is played amusingly by Sharlot Copley (who has the lead in District 9); but what’s amusing about it all is not his performance, but that he’s taken the Anthony Michael Hall approach to his career and built up his body so he doesn’t have to play the bullied pipsqueak anymore. And it’s always nice to see Alice Braga and Diego Luna. But perhaps the biggest irony of the movie is that the best and worst performance of the movie is given by the same person, Jodie Foster, as the head of security on Elysium. Bless her heart, she gives it her all and works her ass off, including giving her character an odd, clipped accent; but almost nothing about her performance works. At the same time, she’s compulsively watchable, so what are you going to do?
But speaking of Jody Foster, though the film preaches understanding and sympathy and how we should treat each other with respect and as equals and all the other ten points of the Sermon on the Mount law, I did find it odd that in the movie women were given only two choices: the female trying to do the job of a male and by doing so, becomes a bitch of a Lady Macbeth because, well, that’s what happens to women who try to do a man’s job; and the female who is an adjunct to the male and is defined by her relationship to him—in this film, she’s not even allowed to be a doctor, no that’s a man’s job, she has to be the nurse in the equation.
That’s not even bringing up the other issue in that we have a world where the vast majority of people on Elysium are white and the more than the vast majority of people on earth tend to be minorities, mainly Hispanic. But who is the savior of the world? The whitest of the white, Matt Damon.
In the end, I am quite worried that with this second movie, Blonkamp may be on his way to becoming the next M. Night Shyamalan, someone with only one good picture in him. What is worse, Blonkamp may turn into one of those filmmakers who is a great visual stylist and thinks that that also automatically makes him a good writer or that he doesn’t need a good screenplay as long as he is at the helm. Even District 9 suggested that this might be the way of the world for Blonkamp; it was a great idea with a strong first half, but the second half become much more formulaic and lost much of the originality and vibrancy of what came before.
Movie Reviews of FRUITVALE STATION, THE WAY, WAY BACK and BLUE JASMINE by Howard Casner
Posted: August 8, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alec Baldwin, Allison Janney, Andrew Dice Clay, Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchette, Fruitvale Station, Jim Rash, Liam James, Maya Rudolph, Michael B. Jordan, Nat Faxon, Peter Sarsgaard, Ryan Cooglar, Sally Hawkins, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carrell, The Way, Toni Collette, Way Back, Woody Allen | 2 Comments »The movie Fruitvale Station has a horrific finale, a fevered, shaking camera dramatization of a terrible, tragic incident. It’s also the main reason to see the film. It’s a disturbing, chaotic and frustrating set of scenes and makes you very angry. So if nothing else, the movie has certainly achieved something here. At the same time, as a whole, the movie never really connected with me. The rest of the film is a chronicle of the events, a day in the life of type thing, of the central character, Oscar Grant, a young man with a difficult background spending his last day on earth without knowing his time is running out.
How you feel about the film will probably depend upon how you feel about this character. Oscar (played sincerely and solidly by Michael B. Jordan) is a petty drug dealer who has been in and out of prison. He’s also a compulsive liar; a player; has anger management issues; and refuses to take any responsibility for how his life has turned out. He’s the sort of guy who tells his girlfriend and mother of his child that that last affair he recently had, you know the one, well, hey, now, babe, that meant nothing and it’s over and I’m a new guy now; then in the next scene, he’s flirting with a young woman at the store he once worked at. He’s also the kind of guy who threatens his ex-box with bodily harm if he won’t give him his job back, the job he lost from constantly showing up late (at another time, he threatens to urinate on a poor store owner’s entranceway if he won’t let some friends of his use the store bathroom—you see a pattern here).
After all that, he should be fascinating. He’s the sort of character that I go to movies to see. But Oscar isn’t. In fact, he’s sort of familiar and the kind of character we’ve seen many times in movies before. There’s nothing that particularly unique or vibrant about him. He’s even a bit bland, when all is said and done. Hard to believe when one reads the description above, but that was pretty much it for me.
I think because of this, once the emotional effect of the horrific incident at Fruitvale Station wore off, I thought: okay, it was a terrible event, but I’m still not sure why the writer/director Ryan Cooglar made the movie. The tragedy at the end is not presented in a way that is a commentary on Oscar’s life, though one gets the feeling that Cooglar wants it to be in some way. Instead, it’s unclear Cooglar offers any real insight to the situation or has anything to say about it other than, well, than “shit happens”. Which, actually, is a perfectly fine theme; it’s just unclear that this was Cooglar’s intention.
I do highly recommend a film with a similar situation, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, written and directed by Paul Greenglass, also a true story about a black teenager who was shot and killed by police officers for unclear reasons; this time in England. It’s a tension filled story that grabs you from the beginning and refuses to let go. Fruitvale Station felt a bit too leisurely to me.
Over the past couple of years, two genres of film seem to have dominated the silver screen: the coming of age film (from Moonlight Kingdom to The Perks of Being a Wildflower to The Kings of Summer to The Bling Ring to The To Do List) and the film apocalypse (from It’s a Disaster to This is the End to The World’s End to World War Z to almost any movie based on a super hero). I’m not sure what this means. I can’t say that it’s a particularly optimistic view of the world to say that just when one takes the first steps toward being an adult you’re shit out of luck because the world’s about to bite you in the ass big time.
The latest foray into the coming of age category is The Way, Way Back, a story about a teen, Duncan (played satisfactorily by Liam James), having to spend a couple of weeks at a beach house with his mother Pam and her new boyfriend Trent, who treats Duncan like a cockroach to be stomped on. While The Kings of Summer is a more ambitious film, The Way, Way Back is actually more satisfying if for no other reason that while the kids in the former film are nothing but spoiled brats who don’t know when they are well off, the hero in the latter film is in a near nightmarish situation in which he is more sinned against that sinning.
But like many films in this popular genre, The Way, Way Back is fun and entertaining and even moving at times, while not really bringing anything new to the table and it all feels rather formulaic. What it does have is some very nice acting, especially from Sam Rockwell in the Bill Murray role, as Owen, the manager of a swimming park who takes pity on the depressed Duncan and becomes the true father figure that Trent (Steve Carrell, giving it his all, while at the same time, never seeming comfortable in the roll and always looking miscast) could never be. Giving more than able support is Toni Collette as the scared and desperate Pam; Allison Janney, hysterical as Betty, the alcoholic in the making next door neighbor; and Maya Rudolph as Owen’s long suffering co-worker.
Perhaps the most original and intriguing aspect of the screenplay (by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who also directed) is the character of Betty. In many ways, she treats her kids in the same inexcusably awful manner as Trent treats the kids under his roof. But while Trent leaves you with the feeling that he’s one degree off from becoming Ted Bundy, it’s obvious that Betty and her kids all love each other very much. It’s a clever juxtaposition.
But in the end, does it really matter? The way things are going in the movies these days, all the characters are going to die in a couple of years anyway.
Blue Jasmine is a character study of a faded Northern bell. Any resemblance to A Streetcar Named Desire is purely unintentional, I’m sure (and I have the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge in my pocket). But though written and directed by the great Woody Allen, it feels like a screenplay written by someone who had no emotional attachment to anyone in the film or anything that is going on in it as well. And when it’s all over, you go: fair enough, but exactly why was it made?
It stars Cate Blanchette as Jasmine, a woman married to a Bernie Madoff type (Alec Baldwin) who loses all her upper class trappings when her husband is arrested and the IRS and the court take everything she owns. She moves to San Francisco to live with her sister Ginger, someone she feels too superior to to really want to have anything to do with (Sally Hawkins). The story is told in a rather clunky manner with tons of expository dialog and some distracting side trips (mainly dealing with the Ginger’s love life) that just get in the way of Jasmine’s central through line.
The plot is often not that believable; Jasmine takes a computer course for some reason that never made sense—she claims to be computer illiterate, but no one in her social background is this obtuse. She also has a romance with a politician on the rise (Peter Sarsgaard), someone who works for the State Department yet still has enough money to buy a second home only Donald Trump could afford (okay, I’m exaggerating, but you get my drift). This subplot is so questionable that one is expecting Sarsgaard’s character to turn out to be a con man of some sort with the intent of Jasmine getting a taste of her own medicine; but no, he is exactly what he seems. And that’s without mentioning a surprise ending that only poses more questions than it answers.
On the plus side, this is a movie that is cast within an inch of its life. Everyone is excellent and some, like Hawkins and Blanchett, are brilliant. Perhaps most surprising Is Andrew Dice Clay who is spot on as Hawkins’ working class ex-husband (who knew that Clay could actually have had an acting career if he hadn’t been such a jerk). But in many ways, that is almost all Blue Jasmine has. Whether that is enough, is up to you.
Movie Reviews of ONLY GOD FORGIVES, THE WOLVERINE and WASTELAND by Howard Casner
Posted: August 1, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Hugh jackman, James Mangold, Kirsten Scott Thomas, Larry Smith, Luke Treadway, Mark Bomback, Nicolas Winding Refn, Only God Forgives, Rowan Athale, Ryan Gosling, Scott Frank, Svetlannd Khodchenkova, The Wolverine, Timothy Spall | 8 Comments »I hate to say it. It’s so snarky and such a cliché and I hate it when I hear someone else say something like it, but I simply don’t know a better way to phrase it: Only God Forgives is the sort of movie a filmmaker makes when he starts believing his own press. In other words, it’s a film that shows incredible talent on the part of its director Nicolas Winding Refn (who also wrote the screenplay), but is so showy, ostentatious, gaudy and florid, calling attention to how brilliant the filmmaker thinks he is, that it becomes impenetrable as it drowns in its own pretentiousness. One just stares at the screen trying to figure out what everyone was thinking while you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m sure it means something to the filmmakers, but hell if I can make heads or tells of it”.
This is too bad, I mean, really too bad, because Refn is the wunderkind from Denmark who made his name with the Pusher trilogy (which I haven’t seen) and used the notoriety of those films to come to the U.S. to make Drive, that glorious neo-noir about a stunt driver by day, get away driver by night, who finds himself conflicted when he falls for his neighbor who has a little boy as well as a husband in jail. That movie was a controlled, tension filled character study with a real page turner of a story. In contrast, Only God Forgives moves at a snail’s pace with a story made up of beautiful sets filled with people who often sit or stand immobile looking like mannequins, all filmed within an inch of its listless life (the stunning cinematography is by Larry Smith)—it’s as if Macy’s windows were designed by Chan-wook Park or Kar Wai Wong.
The basic story revolves around an American with mommy issues who runs a boxing gym in Bangkok. When the American’s psychotic brother rapes and kills a sixteen year old prostitute, a fascistic, but righteous, police detective uses very righteous and fascistic means to restore order by manipulating the prostitute’s father/pimp into killing the brother. When the American finds out what his brother did, he lets the father go. But then the American’s mother comes to town ahead of an expected drug delivery and she wants vengeance.
Ryan Gosling plays the American, and like many of his other roles, he’s probably a bit too metrosexual for the part (he speaks so little so that whenever he does, his tinny voice seems a bit out of place). In the end, it’s Kirsten Scott Thomas as the mother, in wicked Babs Stanwyck blonde tresses, and Vithaya Pansringar, as the righteous police detective with a karaoke fetish, who deliver the most effective performances (Thomas also has the best line; when she finds out what her son did to the prostitute, she says, “Well, I’m sure he had his reasons”).
Much has been made of the violence in the movie and it’s there, for sure, but it’s nothing that out of the ordinary for this sort of film and I’m not sure what everyone is so upset about. At the same time, IMHO there is some hypocrisy here. It’s obvious that Thomas has more going on in her relationship with her sons than simply expecting a card on mother’s day. But while Refn has no problem throwing gallons of blood around the sets, he seems to balk at showing incest. I’m not convinced the movie is as brave as Refn may think it is. Even White Heat with James Cagney was more daring in this area.
In the end, Refn has nobody to blame but himself for how it all turned out. He is the director and the writer after all, so it’s a little hard to find another fall guy. But it might be interesting to take note: for the first film in the Pusher trilogy, he co-wrote the screenplay with Jens Dahl; Drive was written by Hossein Amini. And there is something about this movie that does show contempt for screenwriters. It’s a film that feels all driven by the vision of an auteur who doesn’t think he needs help to reach his vision. There was certainly potential here, but it might have been interesting to see how it would have all turned out if someone else had written the screenplay.
The Wolverine is a perfectly acceptable entry in the rash of blockbusters revolving around comic book heroes. There’s nothing that wrong with it and ends up being more fun than one might think. Perhaps the easiest way to say it is that on a scale of one to ten, it’s far, far superior to Pacific Rim and Man of Steel, but it’s no Iron Man or The Dark Knight. It stars Hugh Jackman in the title role and he looks great in his Elvis sideburns and motorcycle tough Marlon Brando clothes. The serviceable screenplay is by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank; the ditto direction is by James Mangold. It all revolves around some dirty dealings among a wealthy Japanese businessman; the Yakuza; and a walking virus of a slinky blonde (played amusingly by Svetlannd Khodchenkova, again in tresses gold of Stanwyck Babs). In the end, it should be said the movie doesn’t paint the country of the rising sun in a particularly positive light: it’s major themes seem to be that save a Japanese soldier from the bombing (atomic, of course) of Nagasaki, he’ll still stab you in the back, and Japan is a country run by the rich and the mob with a police force that doesn’t seem to exist.
Wasteland is a sort of heist film that is structured in such a way that the pay off finale is its only real reason for existence. Because of this, the screenplay (by the director Rowan Athale) has only one purpose and that is to revolve itself around the “surprise” twist ending (the surprise is in quotations because it’s really not all that big a surprise by the sweet time it takes to finally get there). What happens is often what happens in movies structured this way: the story and the characters never quite seem believable or satisfying since they are not there to drive or tell the story, but only to set up the ending.
The story unfolds in an as told to way: recently released petty criminal Harvey (Luke Treadway) is being interrogated by DI West (Timothy Spall) after being found at the scene of a crime, a break in at a club owned by a mobster with the mobster’s enforcer, who Harvey has a grudge against, lying almost dead on the ground in front of him. Harvey, who is in pretty bad shape himself, tells West what happened.
It’s not a bad way to tell a story, but it’s a fairly clunky one here. Athale makes one of the most common mistakes in screenplays like this: Harvey tells West all sorts of details that he couldn’t know since he wasn’t there to witness the events himself. And the way he tells a story doesn’t feel like the way an accused criminal would tell it, but the way a character needs to tell it so the audience gets the whole shebang (again, to set up the ending). He doesn’t even tell West the same story the audience sees: at the very end, we discover suddenly that Harvey has never used the names of his accomplices the whole time in talking to West, though in the flashbacks, the names are constantly used—so what parts of the story did he tell West and which didn’t he? (And just how hard is it going to be for West to figure out just who these friends of Harvey are anyway? One of them is Harvey’s roommates, for Christ’s sake, not to mention a character who is his ex-girlfriend)
Though there is something satisfying about Harvey’s ultimate plan (Harvey wants revenge and he gets it, sort of; the enforcer ends up in hospital, but there’s no indication that anything more is going to happen to him), it’s just dramatized in a somewhat slipshod manner and it’s all a bit convoluted with too many goals for the characters. And the ending with West listening to Harvey one more time is ridiculous and not one iota believable (again, it’s not there because the characters would act this way, but out of necessity to reveal to the audience that “surprise” ending).
At the same time, everybody gives the whole shebang their all. You certainly can’t fault any of them. They get more than everything out of their parts that they can and, in fact, act as if an Oscar nomination depended upon it. At the same time, they are trapped by lengthy sets of dialog that often go on and on. One doesn’t always know how to react the verbosity. Sometimes you admire the actors for their dexterity in saying Athale’s realistic and vibrant dialog; at other times, you just want to yell at the screen, just shut the hell up and get on with it already. Only Spall, with his long suffering, jowly bull dog look, gives the strongest and most interesting performance (and Athale’s biggest error as screenwriter is probably the underuse of this character).
Movie Reviews of IN THE FOG, RED 2 and THE CONJURING by Howard Casner
Posted: July 27, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Anthony Hopkins, Brian Cox, Bruce Willis, Byung-hun Lee, Carey Hayes, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chad Hayes, David Thewlis, Dean Parisot, Erich Hoeber, Helen Mirren, In the Fog, John Malkovich, Jon Hoeber, Lily Taylor, Mary-Louise Parker, Neal McDonough, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Sergei Loznitsa, Sergie Kolesov Red 2, The Conjuring, Vera Farmiga James Wan, Vladimir Svirskiy, Vladislav Abashin | 22 Comments »In a Russian village recently taken over by the Germans during World War II, six men are marched out to be hung for being part of the underground. One is pardoned. Assuming that the pardoned one must have been an informer, two Russian soldiers are sent to kill him. The one pardoned denies having done anything wrong, but can’t explain why he was released. It doesn’t matter. It’s gotten to the point where he’s not sure whether he wants to live or die as it is.
In the Fog is a story about a group of people trapped in a nightmarish situation that cannot have a satisfactory ending for anyone involved. Reminiscent in certain ways of Army of Shadows (Jean Pierre-Melville’s powerful story of French resistance fighters), all the characters are forced to make up their own morality as they go along because there are no standards to cover their situation. As a result the three men find themselves in both a literal and metaphorical miasma that is referenced by the title. It’s a harsh, unflinching and deeply moving story about a situation that most of us will never find ourselves in.
Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa, with Vladislav Abashin, Vladimir Svirskiy and Sergie Kolesov as the three men.
I would truly love someone to explain this to me: Pacific Rim, which is filled with one-dimensional characters, bland actors, even blander acting, and even blander dialog, with a slip-shod script, a movie that has almost nothing to redeem it except some neat CGI (as if the producer/director/writer thought that’s all a movie is, instead of that being the least a movie should be), gets a 65% with top critics on rottentomatoes.com (72% all critics), while Red 2, a thrill ride of a movie with brilliant actors playing fun and vibrant characters, spouting witty dialog worthy of, well I won’t go Oscar Wilde, but I will go Noel Coward, in a clever plot and a story not dependent on special effects, only gets a 28% from top critics and a 39% from all critics? Maybe contemporary wisdom is wrong. Maybe it’s not the studios that are the problem here if critics can’t even tell the difference between a good blockbuster and a bad one.
Red 2 is a sequel to Red (okay, not much originality there, but still). As in the earlier one, a bunch of over the hill secret agents get caught up in some totally ridiculous set of circumstances whose purpose is not so much to make sense, but to give the audience a great time watching over the hill actors get to do things over the hill actors are almost never allowed to do (unless you’re Sean Connery). I won’t try to explain the plot except to say it’s as dexterous as a roller coaster at Six Flags and involves some sort of apocalyptic macguffin mumbo jumbo and a bomb planted in the Kremlin.
Many of the usual suspects are here. Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker are still working out their Nick and Nora Charles relationship while John Malkovich plays the part of the guy who is summed up with the old chestnut, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you” (and having the time of his life doing so). Also back on board is Helen Mirren, channeling Julie Newmar by purring her way through her part as a hired assassin, whether she’s dumping acid on a dead body or shooting Russian soldiers while lying on a picnic blanket with her stocking foot curled up as if she’s having an orgasm. They are joined by newcomers of various generations, including Anthony Hopkins as a mad doctor; Catherine Zeta-Jones as Kryptonite (she plays a woman in lust with Bruce Willis and all involved carry this off without one reference to Michael Douglas, which may actually be the real miracle here); Byung-hun Lee (the great star of Korean films like I Saw the Devil and The Good, The Bad and The Weird) as a Bruce Lee type martial arts expert who owns his own plane; David Thewlis who traffics in stolen information, but has an Achille’s punt (that pun’s a bit obscure, but I’ll go with it anyway); Brian Cox as a Russian agent who has a foot fetish (but it’s Mirren’s foot, so who can blame him); and Neal McDonough as a fascist with the smile of a Neo-Nazi.
Directed by Dean (Galaxy Quest, which may explain a lot) Parisot and written by Jon and Erich Hoeber (who wrote Battleship, which doesn’t, though the source material, a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, may).
The Conjuring is one of those horror movies like The Innocents and The Haunting about creepy crawly doings at a house in a remote location. A family made up of mother, father and five, count ‘em, five, girls move into a fixer-upper whereupon slowly, but surely, ominous things start happening, the sort of things that get so bad, the family feels compelled to call in demonologist experts Ed and Lorraine Warren (most famous for their investigation of the Amytiville Horror—oh, did I forget to mention that The Conjuring is based on a true story—well, that’s their story and their sticking to it).
The movie starts out rather well with some nice fun and wittily eerie scenes (one involving a hide and seek game that employs clapping). The house itself is a marvel of design and becomes a character in its own right (with gigantic basements and crawlspaces). And the family is headed by Lily Taylor and Ron Livingston, who give first rate performances (why, oh, why isn’t Lily Taylor given more to do in films).
Things get a bit harder to take seriously when Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as the demonologists enter the scene. They have a totally different acting style than the others (they underplay to a fault, apparently to emphasize how every day the supernatural is to Ed and Lorraine—they have lines like demons can stick to you like gum on a shoe). They’re a bit stiff to the point that a few generations before this, they’d make perfect models for American Gothic. What also doesn’t help is that the movie takes place in the 1970’s and just one look at Wilson in his sideburns and polyester suit and Farmiga in her granny dress, and it’s hard not to let out an unintentional giggle or two (it was the ‘70’s; what did we know about fashion).
The movie has a nice build in the beginning (it doesn’t rush things as too many scare fests do); has its fair amount of frights; and there’s enough mood left over to feed an orphanage. But by the end of the movie, director James Wan and writers Chad and Carey Hayes go for broke and basically throw everything at the story except the kitchen sink (which kind of makes sense since, in the movie, the various demons throw everything at the characters except the kitchen sink). At this point, the movie becomes a fairly routine and pedestrian ghost story.
Perhaps what is most disturbing, though, is the idea that the witches killed at Salem (you remember them from history class, right) weren’t just poor beggar women or people who made enemies of the wrong people or an injustice grown out of sexual hysteria—no, according to the movie, the Salem witches were really, well, witches. Huh. Who’d a thought it?
Movie Review of PACIFIC RIM by Howard Casner
Posted: July 18, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Burn Gorman, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Diego Klattenhoff, Guillermo del Toro, Indris Elba, Max Martini, Pacific Rim, Rinko Kikuchi, Robert Kazinsky, Travis Beacham | 8 Comments »When Orson Welles went to Hollywood in 1940 and arrived at the studio, he called it “the biggest train set any boy ever had”. Out of that, we got Citizen Kane. Today, we get movies like Pacific Rim. It’s a movie that reminds me of that joke in which you get a child an expensive toy and all he wants to do is play with the cardboard box it came in. Because that is all Pacific Rim is. It’s a blockbuster of a toy engulfed by cardboard characters with cardboard emotions with a cardboard set up and a cardboard plot as flimsy as that metaphor suggests.
The basic idea is perfectly fine. A rift between dimensions down deep in the Pacific Ocean is allowing gigantic creatures to come through and attack mankind; as is fairly obvious, this is not by accident, but at the behest of some ugly creatures who have worn out their own place of existence and need to colonize. To combat these creatures, gigantic robots have been built that are piloted by pairs of people who have close, though not quite psychic, relationships to each other. Yes, that’s right. This is basically Godzilla v. Transformers…not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
Six years later, the bad guys are winning and the good guys are just now deciding that it might actually be a good idea not to just fight the creatures in a rock ‘em, sock ‘em manner, but to more fully investigate and actually do something about the trans-dimensional fissure itself. And by now all the governments in the world have dropped all conflict and come together to combat a common foe, in true Susan Sontag, 1950’s sci-fi style. But since Asia is now perhaps the major importer of American films, the final pair in the final robot in the final fight are a hero from the USA and a refugee from Japan (though in keeping with proud U.S. tradition, the American hero is played by a British actor).
The cast is filled with a bunch of B-listers and refugees from various TV series: Charlie Hunnam; Indris Elba; Diego Klattenhoff (who wins the award for best name); Max Martini (oops, sorry, no, Max wins the award for best name); Robert Kazinsky; with Charlie Day and Burn Gorman in the roles of C3PO and R2D2, though without those tin cans’ more appealing personalities. And c’mon, if truth be told, though many of these actors have shown talent, this is still the sort of cast you end up with when, for whatever reason, you can’t get the ones you really would have liked to have had. Only Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi (who in true formulaic tradition, becomes Hunnam’s partner) perhaps escapes this description, though you wouldn’t know it by the performance she gives.
What’s so surprising, as well as frustrating, is that for a story that has at its center the need for deep, almost psychic bonds between people, no couple—not one—shows one whiff of charisma. This is probably because every performer is pushed over the top in their acting with performances that are robbed of the remotest sign of subtlety. When the special secret guest star, the inevitable Ron Perlman, is eaten by one of the monsters, I turned to my friend and said, “well, we know they don’t keep kosher since they just ate a bunch of ham”.
The screenplay is by Travis Beacham, with dialog at the level of his previous foray (“Release the Kraken!”), and by Guillermo del Toro, who also directed, in the manner of a police officer reduced to traffic cop (I don’t think we’re in Pan’s Labyrinth anymore, Toto).
One of my most painful movie going experiences in recent memory.
Movie Reviews of BYZANTIUM, I’M SO EXCITED, THE LOOK OF LOVE and YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET by Howard Casner
Posted: July 13, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alan Resnais, Byzantium, Gemma Arterton, I’m So Excited, Luarent Herbiet, Matt Greenhalgh, Michael Winterbottom, Moria Buffini, Neil Jordan, Pedro Almodovar, Saoirse Ronan, Steve Coogan, The Look of Love, You Aint Seen Nothing Yet | 4 Comments »Byzantium is the new vampire flick written by Moria Buffini and directed by Neil Jordan. Neil Jordan also did that other vampire flick, you know the one, uh, Interview With the… something or other. Let’s just say that he’s come a long way since then.
The story is about two women, mother and daughter, trying to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as vamps are wont to do these days. But because of the relative times in which they turned, the two masquerade as sisters. They are on the run from a brotherhood who want to eliminate them because women are not allowed to be vampires (yes, Gloria, the whole thing has a somewhat feminist slant to it; not only are they female vampires in a male vampire world, the mother takes over a group of prostitutes from a twitchy, male pimp). The daughter is played by Saoirse Ronan, who played the title role in Hannah, and her mother/sister is played by Gemma Arterton, who played Gretel in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Both are more than quite good (Ronan is especially riveting) and are quickly gaining a reputation for playing characters you would not want to meet alone in a dark alley…or in broad daylight on a public street for that matter.
They are backed up by a slew of British B listers, including Daniel (Made in Dagenham) Mays as a hapless, shaggy dog looking motel owner; Sam (Control) Riley, as a sympathetic vampire (giving a much better performance than he did in the recent outing, the somewhat embarrassing On the Road); Johnny Lee (Elementary) Miller as a woman hating cad; Tom (In the Loop) Hollander as a well meaning teacher; and Maria Doyle (Orphan Black) Kennedy as a fellow teacher. All provide much more than adequate support.
To say Byzantium is a poetic mood piece is an understatement. It lives, breathes and exults in its moodiness. It’s filmed with dark, muted colors. The scenes always feel overcast, even during the day. There’s a menacing atmosphere in every shot set as it is against a fun fair, the dark streets of a coastal city and an ominous looking deserted, broken down pier. And it takes its moody time in telling its tale. Of course, there’s the rub. How you react to it will probably depend on how you feel about the pacing. If you like it, you will probably think of it as deliberate. If you don’t like it, you will probably think of it as sloooooooooow. I loooooooooooved it, so that’s that.
Writer/Director Pedro Almodovar’s new film I’m So Excited opens with a wonderful Saul Bass like set of titles that felt like it had that perky and fun feel so often associated with an Almodovar film, especially, to quote Woody Allen, the early, funny ones. Unfortunately, that was the last wonderful thing about it. The movie never gets off the ground.
I know, I know. That was a really groaner of a pun. But I think I’m more than in the right since the whole movie is sort of one big metaphorical groaner of a pun type thing. The basic premise is as fabulous as the three gay flight attendants that serve everyone’s needs (everyone’s). A commercial airline has taken off for South America, but when one of its landing gears won’t work, they must make an emergency landing. But to do so, they have to find an appropriate airport. This requires them to go around and around and around…and around, in circles, not getting anywhere. On top of that, the flight attendants have drugged everyone in second class so they won’t cause any trouble, leaving the first class passengers wide awake to deal with their personal soap opera like problems. Yes, indeed. The whole shebang is a metaphor for Spain today as it tries to grapple with their disastrous economy, beset by a variety of scandals.
But to reiterate: it’s a fabulous idea that, very sadly, just doesn’t work. And it’s easy to see why, and in a “if it was a snake it would have bitten you” way. Almodovar begins the whole rigmarole in the middle of act one. There’s no set up for the characters and their conflicts and much of what set up there is takes place off screen (like the drugging of the second class passengers). Because of this, we have no idea who anybody is or why their actions matter or why their actions are funny (everyone seems terrified of one particular passenger, but why is unclear until almost half way through the movie). And though the movie is suppose to be about the passengers on board, at a couple of points, the whole movie stops to go back down to earth to follow the actions of the lover of a famous actor who is also on the plane. The screenplay has no focus, no shape, no discipline. Normally, that would be positives for an Almodovor film; but here, I’m afraid it’s not—it actually takes focus, shape and discipline to create a satisfying lack of those.
With Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz in cameos for some reason as unclear as most of the plot.
The movie The Look of Love (written by Matt Greenhalgh and director Michael Winterbottom) also opens with a wonderful title sequence, this time one that seems inspired by James Bond films. But also like I’m So Excited, that’s just about the last wonderful thing about it too.
The Look of Love is the based on the true story of Paul Raymond who became Britain’s richest man by building up an empire of erotica (not pornography as he has to keep telling people who for some reason, just don’t seem to believe him). The movie gives us the facts of his life; it gives us the fashions and styles of the various periods; it gives us erotic sex, including such oddities as a British farce Raymond produced that has as part of its set a swimming tub inhabited by naked women who have nothing to do with the play’s plot (it was a huge hit). What it never gives us is a reason why anyone wanted to tell this story.
And like I’m So Excited, it’s also incredibly clear (see snake comment above) why the movie doesn’t work. By the time you get to the end, it becomes apparent that the movie was supposed to be a study of Raymond’s relationship with his daughter (played by Imogene Poots) who died from a drug overdose. But since half the movie doesn’t deal with this relationship (especially the half before she’s even born), the movie never seems to be going anywhere or to have any real purpose to its existence.
The cast does what it can with the material. Steve Coogan, as Raymond, who was excellent in the recent What Mazie Knew, is as bland and dull as his character is written here. But the movie does better in the supporting area, including Simon Bird of The Inbetweeners, almost unrecognizable in Sgt. Pepper hair and mustache, as the jingle writer who marries Raymond’s daughter; Chris Addison from In the Loop, also unrecognizable as Raymond’s right hand man and photographer; James Lance as Raymond’s attorney; and David Walliams of Little Brittain in a witty performance as a randy vicar (Matt Lucas can also be seen in a blink and you’ll miss him scene as Divine).
At one point, the movie has a scene between Raymond and the illegitimate son (Liam Boyle) he’s never met. It’s a painful study of awkwardness and suggests everything that the movie could have been, but wasn’t.
You Aint Seen Nothing Yet is the latest from legendary director Alan Resnais. It’s about a stage director who dies and in his will invites a number of the legends and soon to be legends of France’s acting community to an isolated mansion (including Mathieu Amalric, Hippolyte Giradot, Michel Piccoli, Sabine Azema and Lambert Wilson). There the director’s attorney shows them a new production of a play the director staged many times, Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice (though the play seems to be a combination of two of Anouilh’s stage works). All the invitees have at some time been in a production of this play under this director’s direction, so as they watch the play they begin to act out the parts themselves.
This is actually the most interesting aspect of the film, watching the way different actors would say the same lines; seeing actors who are far too old for the parts (since they originally played them when they were younger) still giving convincing performances; seeing the setting switch from the director’s home to modified sets.
But this movie never quite comes together. I suspect whether it works for you will depend on what you think of the play within the play they are performing. As was said, it’s a combination of two of Anouih’s works (adapted by Resnais and Luarent Herbiet) and though it starts out well, it eventually becomes almost incomprehensible until you lose all emotional connection to Orpheus and his doomed lover.
After the play is over there are a couple of surprise endings that aren’t that surprising and aren’t that interesting. Perhaps it’s best to say that the whole thing just went over my head.
Movie Reviews of WORLD WAR Z and WHITE HOUSE DOWN by Howard Casner
Posted: July 10, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brad Pitt, Channing Tatum, Damon Lindelof, Daniell Kertez, Drew Goddard, J. Michael Straczynski, James Vanderbilt, Jamie Foxx, Luki Boeken, Marc Forster, Matthew Michael Carnahan, Michael Murphy, Mireille Enos, Moritz Bleibtreu, Peter Capaldi, Piefrancesco Favino, Richard Jenkins, Roland Emmerich, Ruth Negga, World War Z | 146 Comments »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.
Movie Reviews of DIRTY WARS, ALIYAH and A HIJACKING by Howard Casner
Posted: July 7, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Abdihakin Asgar, Aliyah, David Riker, Dirty Wars, Elie Wajeman, Gaelle Mace, Jeremy Scahill, Pilou Asbaek, Pio Marmai, Rick Rowley, Soren Malling, Tobias Lindholm | 2 Comments »Dirty Wars is a documentary that begins as an investigation into the killing of the members of a family who gathered for a celebration in a remote area of Afghanistan. The victims included pregnant women; the victimizers were a specialized force of American soldiers. The attack was covered up (to the jaw dropping extent of the soldiers removing bullets not just from walls, but from bodies themselves). But journalist Jeremy Scahill, who also wrote a book exposing the dirty dealings of Blackwater, found out about it and in investigating what took place, discovered that this attack was only one of many covert actions carried out by JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, a group that are made up of men who don’t exist on paper and who have missions taking place in countries we’re theoretically not at war with. Mission: Impossible, but without the camp element.
Dirty Wars is a film that succeeds from a documentary standpoint, but doesn’t do as well from an aesthetic one. The story is powerful and makes you angry. It makes you want to scream that something should be done. And it infuriates you when you realize that JSOC were the ones responsible for the raid on Osama Bin Laden and are therefore now untouchable.
But Dirty Wars falters in other areas. It is narrated by Scahill with a blandness and droning quality that was just a bit too Jack Webby for my taste. And somewhere along the line, director Rick Rowley, and writers David Riker and Scahill, seemed to have gotten the idea that the story is about Scahill and not so much about JSOC and their victims. Because of this, the movie constantly cuts way from the horrifying atrocities committed by American forces to show Scahill looking wistfully off into the distance, losing his innocence as he grows more frustrated at how little attention is being paid to his story (a loss of innocence that really isn’t that convincing, at least not for a journalist who has been writing for as long as he has). There’s even a scene that looks like an outtake from The Hurt Locker where Scahill is bored shopping, wishing he was back in a war zone.
But in many ways, it is understandable if this criticism seems a bit petty. In the end, this is a troubling and disturbing film that should be seen.
Aliyah (which refers to the immigration of Jews to Israel) is a more than satisfying light drama from France about a small time drug pusher who is no dope (pardon the pun). He realizes that if he’s ever going to get out of the life, now is the perfect time to do it before he is too far in. So when he finds out his cousin is going to open a restaurant in Israel, he asks to be let in on it. He just has to make enough money for his part while doing things like proving he’s Jewish, improving his Hebrew and taking a course on what it means to move to Israel.
That’s really about it. Not a lot happens outside of that. In fact, the film, as written by Gaelle Mace and the director Elie Wajeman, seems to do everything it can to avoid formula. Even when a studio style of telling the story rears its ugly head at the end, threatening to introduce the one last drug deal cliché, the author here takes a different way out.
Alex, the central character, is played by the tres handsome actor Pio Marmai with an effortless charm. In fact, he seems to sweat charm, which is perfect for a movie that wins you over using the same approach. It’s a nice, low key character study and is recommended.
A Hijacking, the Danish movie written and directed by Tobias Lindholm, is about the tense negotiations revolving around the taking over of a ship by Somalian pirates. It’s an action film without any action, a thriller that is more tense by having few thrills. It’s a film in which the suspense is played out in meeting rooms, cramped ship quarters and over the phone, with the chief negotiators never meeting one another. Take that Steven Segal and Tommy Lee Jones.
The drama revolves around three characters: Peter C. Ludvigsen (Soren Malling), the chief negotiator for the company who owns the boat, a character of great noblesse oblige and a slight case of hubris; Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbaek), the hapless cook on the boat who gets roped into being a go between because he’s, well, the cook, and the pirates need to be fed and he’s there, so he becomes the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time squared; and Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), the negotiator for the Somalians who keeps claiming he is not a member of the hijackers (with almost the same inflection of Dante in Clerks—“I’m not even suppose to be here today”). It’s a triumphant triumvirate of acting.
Negotiations are made more difficult because Ludvigsen is informed by a pirate expert (yes, such people exist) that if he immediately agrees to whatever the pirates ask, they will simply ask for more and then more and then more. Instead, Ludvigsen has to bargain, certainly a skill he more than possesses, but one he has never had to use when human lives are at stake. So Ludvigsen has to treat the hostages as if they are cargo and offer a ridiculously lowball counter offer to the pirates. And then the games begin.
Lindholm is also the co-author of two of director Thomas (The Celebration) Vinterberg films, the haunting drama about two brothers, Submarino, and the soon to open film The Hunt, a tense and striking story about a man accused of pedophilia. In this solo effect, he has created one of the must see films of the year. It’s riveting, powerful and leaves you gasping at times. It’s a story you will not forget soon.
Movie Reviews of THE KINGS OF SUMMER and THE BLING RING by Howard Casner
Posted: July 1, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Chris Galetta, Emma Watson, Gabriel Basso, Isarael Broussard, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Katie Chang, Marc Evan Jackson, Megan Mullally, Moises Arias, Nick Offerman, Nick Robinson, Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring, The Kings of Summer | 853 Comments »The Kings of Summer is the new coming of age film by writer Chris Galetta and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. It’s very sincere and heartfelt in the tradition of such movies as Stand by Me and The Breakfast Club. But in the end, how you feel about it all will probably depend on how you feel about the central teenage characters. Personally, I thought they were a pair of drama queens and ungrateful little shits who didn’t know how well off they were. So I guess you know where I stand.
Both Joe and Patrick, the aforementioned teens, act like they’re from homes headed by Joan Crawford. Patrick (Gabriel Basso) is stuck with the nightmare of parents (Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson) whose worst crime is that they would fit right in on any network sit com. They give him hives (just like most network sit coms give me). Joe (Nick Robinson, late of Mud) has a father, Frank, (played by Nick Offerman) who is portrayed with a bit more depth—he’s still recovering from the death of his wife. Joe helps him through it by taking hour long showers and, when his father complains, standing nude in front of him. Frank’s biggest sin is wanting to have a family game night so Joe can meet the new woman Frank is dating. Well, all I can say, folks, is call child welfare services before any of them get out the wire coat hangers.
So, beset by the slings and arrows of, etc., that they believe they are receiving from their parents, the two callow youths run off to live in the woods where they can be their own boss. But they do it in the manner of Henry David Thoreau who made sure he was close enough to civilization to receive a constant barrage of visitors and near enough to his brother so his sister-in-law could do his laundry once a week (in The Kings of Summer, the pair have people over for game night and are within walking distance of a Boston Market).
The only aspect of the screenplay that seems to support the boys’ view of their horrible childhood is how little effort the parents put into trying to find them. I would think that this lack of interest would be even more upsetting than the hives Patrick gets. At the same time, it must be said that this section of the screenplay isn’t that believable, both that the authorities don’t put a lot more effort into it and that the kids couldn’t be found very easily (this all might have made more sense if the parents knew exactly where their sons were and decided to just let them work out their issues on their own).
But nothing in the film is really that believable. It all seems a bit pushed, a bit forced, a bit too romanticized, from the house that’s built in the woods (in less time than it takes most people to build a doghouse); to the third musketeer in their band of merry-men—to mix literary references (this is Biaggio, played by the Al Jolson-eyed Moises Arias who is unsure of his sexual orientation and is therefore used as comic relief—he’s actually the only one I sympathized with since his father didn’t even seem to know he had taken off); to the parents who are written with the attitude that they were never the confused, young, alienated kids their children are (there is almost always a whiff of hypocrisy in these films where the adults are ridiculed and made fun because they don’t love or understand their kids; but the writers, former kids all, don’t feel they have to do the same for the parents, and who probably now act more like the parents they write about than the kid; at the same time, credit must be given where credit is due—Offerman, Mullally and Jackson are excellent).
In the end, character arcs are fulfilled and life lessons are learned (especially never play Monopoly with either Joe or Patrick, who, apparently, are the sorest losers in the world), with formula being the real king here. But the whole thing is done with so little tension and conflict that the filmmakers have to force an ending by bringing in a deux ex machina in the form of a cotton head since nothing the characters are doing are ever going to resolve anything. Vogt-Roberts even seems to instinctively understand how little drama there really is here; he uses all sort of directorial flourishes like slo-mo shots, montages and constantly cutting away to nature to cover up what seems to be lacking at the core of it all.
The Bling Ring, the other coming of age film to come out this year, this one written and directed by Sofia Coppola (based on a Vanity Fair Article by Nancy Jo Sales), is filled with drama queens and little shits just like The Kings of Summer. But the difference is that that’s the point. Where The Kings of Summer is a romantic fantasy, The Bling Ring is a dark comedy that, as all good dark comedies do, becomes more real than reality.
The Bling Ring is another of Coppola’s dissection of the idea of celebrity (all of her films, except for her first, The Virgin Suicides, has some connection to this idea—even in Marie Antoinette the tragic queen isn’t looked at from a political point of view as much as if she was an 18th century version of Lindsay Lohan). The movie chronicles the true story of a group of entitled kids who break into the homes of and steal from various celebrities who are out of town on film and modeling shoots (some of the biggest revelations here are that celebrities are some of the worst when it comes to locking their doors; none of them seem to have live in help or very large families; and one of them wears high heels large enough to fit the male lead, though which of the celebrities has man feet, that I will not tell you). This is a group of psychopathic Bugsy Malones whose chutzpah is only overshadowed by their sheer stupidity; they upload pictures of their booty on Facebook, as if it never entered their head that adults even know what social media is.
The story begins in the same way that so many of these teenage tragedies do: a depressive with issues of self loathing (Marc, a gay teen who is school attendance challenged, played by Isarael Broussard with a series of hang dog looks) meets a sociopath (Rebecca, played by steely eyed Katie Chang). As happens in any self respecting film noir, an innocent is seduced by a femme fatale; think Double Indemnity with a lot more acne.
If nothing else, The Bling Ring is highly entertaining. It never lets go once it grabs you. The story seems too ridiculous to be believable, but like a train wreck, you just can’t look away. Coppola has gathered a first rate cast of young people to play her jackal-like pack of juvenile delinquents. I am even not ashamed to say that I didn’t recognize Harry Potters’ sweet Hermione, Emma Watson, as a self-absorbed teen with a messianic complex with delusions of grandeur. She steals the show with as much ease as she steals Paris Hilton’s purse.
The biggest criticism I’ve heard about this film is that Coppola doesn’t explain or pass judgment on her characters (this was also a criticism I remember at the time Martin Scorcese released Goodfellows). I have to admit I don’t quite get this. If you have to have Coppola tell you that these people are morally reprehensible and what they are doing is wrong, then the problem probably isn’t with Coppola, it’s probably with you.
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