WHITE MEN’S BURDENS: Movie Reviews of Suburbicon, Victoria and Abdul and Brad’s Status by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors: I am now offering a new consultation 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

 

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Warning: SPOILERS

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Suburbicon, the new postmodern, neo-noir written by Joel and Ethan Cohen, Grant Heslov, and the film’s director George Clooney (perhaps two writers too many), is probably best described as if the Cohen brothers had adapted a James Cain novel with a bit of A Raison in the Sun tossed in for good measure.

The basic premise is that seemingly mild mannered middle class family man Gardner (Matt Damon) has paid some thugs to break into his house pretending to rob it, but in reality they have been hired to kill Gardner’s wheelchair bound wife (Julianne Moore) for the insurance money and so he can marry his sister-in-law (Julianne Moore redux), who has a set of perfectly good legs thank you very much. Read the rest of this entry »


YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN: Movie Reviews of Manchester By The Sea, It’s Only the End of the World and The Commune by Howard Casner

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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

 

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Warning: SPOILERS

rev-2You Can’t Go Home Again is, of course, the title of a posthumously published novel by Thomas Wolfe, and a phrase that has entered common discourse since. I’ve seen three movies lately that are about people returning home or using memories of their early years as the basis for their stories.

The basic premise of writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s new film Manchester by the Sea revolves around Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a janitor living in Boston who is very good at his job, but is a loner with a somewhat self-destructive personality. When he receives word that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died, he returns to his home city of Manchester by the Sea, a fishing and tourist town. There he is shocked to discover that his brother in his will has requested Lee to become guardian to Joe’s sixteen year old son, Lucas. Joe has provided for Lucas’ expenses in his will and just needs Lee to return to Manchester to live.

Why Lee can’t return and the conflicts over how to handle this request make up the bulk of the movie and much of the heart breaking suspense is waiting to find out what happened that led to Lee’s present situation-you know it has something to do with his three children since they are only shown in flashback. The waiting is painfully unbearable at times. Read the rest of this entry »


HUMANITY AT ITS BEST AND WORST: Movie Reviews of Sicario and The Martian 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

sicario

Sicario, the new thriller about the drug war written by Taylor Sheridan (a first film) and directed by French Canadian flavor of the month Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, Prisoner, Enemies), is, in many ways, two movies for the price of one.

The first is an action/adventure film full of car chases and gun battles and plot twists (many of which, if truth be told, I found just a tad tenuous at best) of the action/adventure variety.

The second is a treatise on the drug war.

The first film is often quite successful and impressive. The second is, at least from my perspective, quite shallow and unconvincing.

This means that for much of the time, Sicario is definitely and highly entertaining. Sheridan and Villeneuve, along with the incredibly soaring cinematography of Roger Deakins (one of our finest today), the film editing of Joe Walker, and the heart throbbing music of Johan Johannson, have crafted an edge of your seat story that never really stops and never really lets you stop watching. Read the rest of this entry »


Movie Reviews of THE MONUMENTS MEN and DATE AND SWITCH by Howard Casner

As I watched The Monuments Men, the new George Clooney film about trying to save stolen art during World War II, the word that kept coming to my mind was “jaunty”. Yes.  It’s a very…jaunty movie, with a, well, jaunty plot, and jaunty characters played by jaunty actors and all backed by a very jaunty score, a wonderful bit of musicality by the wonderful Alexandre Desplat that kept reminding me of the Colonel Bogey march from The Bridge on the River Kwai—it’s that jaunty.

 

Is The Monuments Men any good?  I can’t say that exactly.  But I can say that it’s very enjoyable and entertaining enough and rarely drags.  But it’s really not a lot more than that as much as it tries to be.

 

The screenplay by Mr. Clooney and Grant Heslov (who has done good work in such films as Good Night and Good Luck and The Ides of March) is little more than a series of episodes.  At the same time, I’m not sure exactly what all these episodes really add up to in the end.

 

In fact, by the time it was over, I wasn’t really sure what the Monuments Men, the actual real life counterparts, did in saving stolen art that wouldn’t have been done had they not been around.  It seems like just about everything that happened in the story would pretty much have happened the way it did with or without their intervention.

 

Even Clooney and Heslov seem to suspect this as they add on a ticking time bomb of a climax trying to get some art out of a cave before the Russians get there.  I’m not saying this didn’t happen exactly the way it did here, but it feels more like a creation of the writers to come up with some sort of tension when there really wasn’t much of it in the first place.  It’s a fun bit, but is really milked and ends up coming across about as realistic as the ending of Argo.

 

And then there are all those speeches given by Clooney’s character Frank Stokes (yeah, he not only co-wrote it, he stars in it as well) trying to justify what they did and that saving art is not only just as important as saving a human being, it’s actually kinda more important (maybe, maybe not, I don’t know, it’s a bit mudded as far as I’m concerned).

 

The issue here is that every time he gives one of these speeches, he seems more and more desperate in his reasoning and becomes less and less convincing.

 

Of course, in full disclosure, I’m of the camp that says a thousand Mona Lisa’s can burn if it would cost one life to save it.  We can make new art that will equal old smiley face, but a particular human being can’t be replaced.  So every time an officer refused to help Stokes in his quest, I kind of sympathized with the officer (or as one of them put it, and I paraphrase, “I’m not going to write home to a soldier’s mother and tell her that her son died because we tried to save a steeple”).

 

The directing by Clooney (yes, he not only co-wrote it and stars in it, he also directed it) gets the job done.  And it has a fun (or as I put it earlier, jaunty) cast with Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob  Balaban, Bill Murray, Hugh Bonneville as the men and Cate Blanchett as the French partisan who helps them (I guess there weren’t any French actresses available at the time).

 

True, it’s a white bread acting approach to filling the roles as opposed to something like The Dirty Dozen (in The Monuments Men, everybody is cool; in The Dirty Dozen, they’re insane psychopaths), but, hey, whatever gets an audience into the seats.

 

However, if you want to see perhaps a slightly more profound movie that takes a few more chances about the same subject matter, I would strongly recommend checking out The Train, a movie about a German trying to take art out of Paris that meets resistance in the Resistance.  It stars Paul Scofield and Burt Lancaster and is a far more interesting film.

 

 

I don’t know what it is about Nick Offerman, but whenever he comes on screen, I just sort of relax.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe it’s because he always plays these same calm teddy bear types, but he’s sort of the father I would always have wanted even if no one else on the screen, including his kids, understands how lucky they are.

 

Offerman is actually more of a minor character in the new teen com bromance rom com, Date and Switch.  But he’s a welcome addition as are Megan Mullaly and Gary Cole as the other parents who haven’t a clue even when they do.

 

The story is actually a variation on American Pie in which two BFF’s, Michael and Matty, vow to lose their virginity before prom but Matt throws a spanner into the wicket when he reveals to Michael that he’s gay.  So now, not only does Michael need to do the dirty deed, he has to figure out what he wants to do about his friend, and Matty has to figure out what he wants to do about being gay.

 

Date and Switch is cute and charming.  It’s basically almost nothing but staircase wit (the screenplay is by Alan Yang) with the champagne quality of the dialog and all the frothy bubbles it emits getting more than its fare share of laughs.   And that’s certainly nothing to sneeze at.

 

At the same time, the wit is backed up by staircase acting.  And though this gives the movie many enjoyable and entertaining moments, it’s actually not as great a combination as you might think, because Nicholas Braun as Michael and Hunter Cope as Matty deliver the clever dialog as if it had been rehearsed to within an inch of its unnatural life (the direction is by Chris Nelson).

 

I mean, they’re good, they’ve very good.

 

The problem is that they’re too good.

 

With the result that though everyone tries their damnedest, they just can’t quite reach the delirious naturalism of something like Superbad.

 

And it probably doesn’t help that the lead actors look like they’re about to graduate from college, not high school.

 

And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with Yang going out of his way to make sure the audience knows that Matty may be gay, but he’s really no different than anyone watching and only wants to live his life as a stereotypical straight person, looking down on most other gay people and the bars they attend.

 

There are also various twist and turns along the way (none of them particularly surprising or unpredictable) and the whole things works it way out with a pleasing formulization.

 

It may not be as much fun as the foam party the characters attend at one point, but it’s not a bad night out either.


Movie Reviews of THE SPECTACULAR NOW and ELYSIUM by Howard Casner

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 Review of PROMISED LAND by Howard Casner

Gus Van Sant tends to go back and forth between two types of films.  On one hand, he makes personal, edgy, independent movies like Mala Nocha, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Last Days, Gerry and the incredible Elephant.  His other films are more conventional, like Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester and Milk. His more personal films are exciting, chance taking, challenging.  His more conventional films are entertaining, but, well…conventional.

 

Promised Land is one of his conventional films.  And it’s a fine film.  A really fine film.  No, I mean it, it’s perfectly fine.  It’s also entertaining and has some moving moments, top notch acting, and I can’t imagine you’d be bored if you saw it.  But in the end, well, the best thing to really say about it is that it’s a, well…a perfectly fine film.

 

The screenplay is by Matt Damon (as in co-writing Good Will Hunting Matt Damon) along with John Krasinski and Dave Eggers.  The story basically revolves around Steve (played by Damon, yep, he’s in it, too), the representative of a natural gas company, and his efforts to convince a small farming community to lease their lands for fracking.  This rep has just received a promotion because of his exceptional skills at selling pigs in a poke (and at a good bargain, to boot) and the town seems ripe for the picking, made up of citizens who seem desperate to get out from under their economic woes.  But problems occur when a high school teacher who is not what he seems (a marvelous Hal Holbrook), suggests that maybe they should think about what they are doing before they actually, well, you know, do it.  Complications then ensue when an environmental presence (Krasinski’s Dustin Noble, don’t you love that name and yep, Krasinski’s in the movie, too) shows up and challenges Steve not only for the hearts and souls of the locals, but also for the heart and soul of a local school marm (Rosemary DeWitt’s Alice).

 

The first part is the strongest aspect here.  It moves at a solid pace.  There’s a lot of wit and the characterizations are strong.  The writers are especially good at creating very believable relationships.  It’s obvious that Steve has been working with his partner, Frances McDormand’s Sue, for some time.  The two have some very cute moments of people who know how to push each other’s buttons, both for good and for bad.   And when Holbrook’s school teacher rises (with a face that feels as if it belongs on Mount Rushmore) and puts flies in Steve’s ointment, it’s a striking moment.  At the same time, it’s also one of those moments that are there due to formula so that at this point, and with the arrival of Noble, the story starts, well…fracking apart a bit.

 

First, I found it just a bit hard to buy Steve’s innocence and naivety.  According to the screenplay, he has no idea of the truth behind his company even though he’s been with it for so long and is such a good salesmen that he gets a promotion in the opening scene.  Not only that, he has the ability to bribe a city official with a single bound, employing the cut throat skill of Rick Blaine paying off Captain Renault in Casablanca (I have to be honest, I did think of the good Captain’s line, “I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here”, when it came to Steve).   Yet still, in spite of all this, his character arc is basically that of someone losing his virginity.

 

But once Noble arrives, just when the tension should increase and the suspense mount, the plot actually loses forward momentum.  Part of this is because the actual competition between Steve and Noble is not that well dramatized; you’re not given enough information to keep score, so you never know who is winning and who is losing.  Steve keeps complaining that Noble is hurting their sales while at the same time claiming that they have the vast majority of the land leased.  Noble keeps claiming he’s winning, but we see very little evidence of it.  But perhaps the real issue that is not explained clearly is that the ultimate success of either party will be determined by a city vote—but exactly what this vote consists of or what they are voting on is never clearly stated.  We’re not even sure how bad off this town is; people say they are in trouble, but there’s no real evidence of it.  It’s all so vague that the conflict in the movie that is dramatized the strongest is not the battle over fracking, but the battle over Alice, as if that’s what’s really important, not the future of the farms.  I mean, who cares if the land is raped and destroyed as long as our hero gets the girl, right?  (The second conflict that is dramatized the strongest is whether Krasinski can replace Damon as the most charming actor in Hollywood these days–it’s a draw, but if I was Damon, I might be concerned).  And the central fracking conflict (God, sometimes I feel like I’m on Battlestar Galactica) finally becomes so muddled that Steve’s come to Jesus moment is not really earned and is more there for formula rather than a true outcome of character.

 

The result is that the part of the movie that never really gets dealt with is the bigger and more important issue (certainly more important than who gets the girl) of a town being caught between a rock and a hard place—if they frack, they lose; if they don’t frack, they lose.  But this philosophical through line just never plays that strong a part here.  But in the end, isn’t it a little hard to root for a side if neither side can win?