REVIEW: Pain & Gain

20 06 2017

Michael Bay’s “Pain & Gain” features characters who misinterpret “The Godfather,” “Scarface” … and “Pretty Woman.” So is it any surprise that the film on the whole has no idea what it’s talking about when it comes to the American Dream? The concept gets so much lip service throughout that it becomes bludgeoning. Most high school juniors could write something more insightful from their American history classes alone.

Its idea of upward mobility is really just commodity fetishism and capitalistic greed masking itself as aspiration. With their synthetic, steroid-enhanced hardbodies, the would-be Robin Hoods of South Beach feel like Reaganite heroes washed up in the wrong era. Some elements of stealing from an undeserving, coddled elite have resonance in a post-Occupy world; as one gym rat puts it, “I don’t just want everything you have, I want you not to have it.” But the political considerations feel ancillary at best.

“Pain & Gain” is at its best when Bay just embraces the physical comedy of his bulky Goliaths. Some decent humor arises from their ignorance and impotence – as “swoll” as Mark Wahlberg’s Daniel Lugo and Dwayne Johnson’s Paul Doyle may be, their common sense as men is almost entirely absent. It’s too bad that screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, rather than standing outside and sizing them, choose to drop to their level and assume their intelligence level. C+ / 


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REVIEW: Patriots Day

15 04 2017

The narrative elements of “Patriots Day” show Peter Berg at the top of his game. As a film that recreates the terror of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the frenzied search to catch the perpetrators, it’s every bit as taught and harrowing as “Lone Survivor.” Critique ideology all you want – and I had my fair share of issues with the comforting yet alarming deployment of the surveillance state – but objectively speaking, Berg and his technicians know how to edit for maximum tension around an event whose outcome we already know.

Now, you might have noticed that I specified “narrative elements.” That was intentional. “Patriots Day” ends on a lengthy postscript of talking-head style documentary footage with survivors of the bombing. It’s stirring, sure, but it left me wondering – why not just make a non-fiction film? The appetite for documentaries exists now thanks to platforms like Netflix and HBO.

In “Patriots Day,” fictionalization began to feel like trivialization. If the words of real people are powerful enough to end a film, they ought to be powerful enough to sustain a film. Why does Berg think we need Mark Wahlberg sermonizing from the back of a truck bed over sappy, inspiring music to care about the heroism of Boston’s finest? Why does he feel the need to compress the valiant actions of several police officers into one composite, Teddy Saunders, for Mark Wahlberg to play?

Berg tries to have it both ways in the film, leaning on both the authenticity of the survivors’ pain while also shoehorning reality into a convenient narrative device about one police officer who cracks open the case with a hobbled leg. (At times, his lickety-split reactions don’t even make logical sense!) If recent yanked from the headlines stories are going to continue to serve as fodder for cinema, we need to have a larger debate about how filmmakers can and cannot rely on actual participants. B+ / 


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REVIEW: Deepwater Horizon

28 09 2016

deepwater-horizonPeter Berg has a knack for directing blue collar dialogue in a convincing manner. For films like his 2013 survival drama “Lone Survivor,” such exchanges lent the film an authenticity and humanity before its Navy Seals face life-threatening trials. In Berg’s latest directorial outing, “Deepwater Horizon,” the commonplace banter feels more like a counterweight to some of the complex oil industry jargon taking place on a Gulf Coast rig.

For much of the film’s first 40 minutes, the screenplay from Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan overloads with technical terms explaining the operations on the Deepwater Horizon. And even with blatant expository scenes, they still have to dole out some more details in subtitles. It’s wasted air space in the film, which foreshadows the well-known explosion with obvious harbingers of doom. Be it an exploding Coke at the home of protagonist Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) or a BP big wig wearing a tie in the color of their worst level alarm, there’s no denying what’s coming.

Berg sets up “Deepwater Horizon” as an disaster flick, yet he fouls up some key ratios in establishing tension and connection. His energy goes disproportionately to setting up the crisis (roughly 50 minutes), which in turn makes the escape (roughly 35-40 minutes) feels like getting short changed. There’s some decent tension as wounded crew members navigate their way through a literal enactment of the burning platform metaphor, but Berg undermines it with weak characterization and pointless cutaways to Kate Hudson as Mike’s grieving wife back at home.

The film takes an interesting turn in the coda where surviving workers from the Deepwater Horizon rig are greeted in their grief by robotic crisis management professionals. Rather than seeking to ease their pain and embrace the souls who survive, BP adds a thin coat of dehumanization on top of a devastating loss of human life by locking them away from the world in anonymous hotel rooms. These scenes of the battered, tattered employees struggling to cope with the events that just occurred frustratingly dangle the potential “Deepwater Horizon” had in front of us. Were the critique of corporate malfeasance not so toothless, or were the rising action of the film built around developed characters, this lack of resolution might really sting. Instead, it just replicates the numbness of the setting. C+ / 2stars


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REVIEW: The Gambler

23 12 2014

In Rupert Wyatt’s “The Gambler,” Mark Wahlberg plays Jim Bennett, an English professor by day and a high-stakes better by night.  When he gets himself into a tight situation with creditors coming to collect a big debt, Bennett resists help from his put-out mother (Jessica Lange) and a prodigious student (Brie Larson).  Instead, he responds by digging his hole deeper to vault himself out on an even larger scale.

Wahlberg plays the character with a vulnerability and self-deprecation when spitting out screenwriter William Monaghan’s rapid-fire dialogue.  Yet when his lips are still, Wahlberg imbues Bennett with a staggeringly ambivalent sense of hubris.  Viewing a week in his quickly disintegrating life is a strange experience because so much about him seems contradictory.

Bennett is best understood by not trying to understand him at all, simply watching and observing rather than identifying or analyzing.  Monaghan, working from a forty-year-old New Hollywood flick of the same name, harkens back to the era of the characterization’s conception.  Bennett exemplifies the ’70s-style impenetrable antihero, but Monaghan cleverly reassembles him for relevance in the time of TV’s current “difficult men” like Don Draper and Walter White.

Bennett cannot be explained by nor reduced to a few biographical details. Nothing indicates some massive familial implosion. His condition does not appear to have any psychological roots at all, in fact. Bennett has simply shed all illusions about life and convinced himself that the only game worth playing is one where the stakes are all or nothing.

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REVIEW: Lone Survivor

29 01 2014

There’s no sugar-coating or sanitization of the conflict in Afghanistan to be found in Peter Berg’s “Lone Survivor.”  His adaptation of Marcus Luttrell’s memoir of pulls no punches in its visceral portrayal of the unlikely triumph of one man over relentless enemies and harsh earth.

Despite the film’s ultimate resolution being implied in the title, the action is always gripping and engrossing.  Berg’s riveting handheld camerawork ensures that we’re buckled in to feel every moment leading up to the climax.  Every fall down a cliff, every bullet entry wound piercing flesh, and every last dying breath lands deeply in the gut with tremendous force.  When coupled with masterfully precise sound mixing and editing, “Lone Survivor” has the impact of a film like “127 Hours.”

It’s not all about the action, however.  Perhaps the biggest testament the effectiveness of Berg’s multifaceted approach to “Lone Survivor” is that the film’s most nail-biting scene comes not in combat but in a moral debate.  As Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) and his SEAL recon team (Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster) weight the respective merits of killing three of their prisoners to save their own hide or letting them go and risking their own lives, a quintessential problem for America in contemporary geopolitics becomes an immediately necessary quandary to mull over.

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REVIEW: Ted

4 08 2012

For better or for worse, “Ted” is a product of Seth MacFarlane through and through.  In other words, the film plays out like one of those five-part “Family Guy” story arcs.  It also doesn’t help that the comedic pairing of semi-serious Mark Wahlberg and a wildly inappropriate talking teddy bear, aptly named Ted, are essentially performing the same functions as straight-shooting dog Brian and the indecent infant Stevie.

And since “Ted” bears such an uncanny resemblance to the comedic stylings of “Family Guy,” the optimal way to consume it is the same: as a set of stand-alone YouTube clips that make you roar with laughter and cut out the story that connects the jokes.  MacFarlane, absurd metaphor-spawner that he is, has never quite figured out how to tell a story that compels anywhere near as much as his cut-away humor does.

Granted, his borrowed, trite plot is merely there to string together the laughs.  Yet it also winds up depreciating the value of the entire film because eventually you forget all the jokes.  But the story is something that sticks in your head.  For instance, I could recite one or two funny lines from “Ted” off the top of my head, but that creepy and unnecessary subplot involving Giovanni Ribisi as a sexually disturbed adult willing to kidnap a talking teddy bear will always haunt my memory.

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REVIEW: The Fighter

22 12 2010

As Mena Suvari’s teenage temptress Angela Hayes told us in “American Beauty,” there’s nothing worse than being ordinary.  In the ring of boxing movies, it’s all too easy to become ordinary.  While the latest contender to take a punch at the reigning champions, David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” is a little too lightweight to compete, it’s got some nice heart.  And as practically all movies about the sport have taught us, soul is all that really matters, right?

However, this isn’t really a boxing movie so much as a movie involving boxing.  It’s mainly a story of brotherhood, family, and pride that’s made all the more fascinating because it’s true.  As many cinematic boxers preceding him have, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) works a low-paying, labor-intensive job to make a living since his boxing career won’t exactly pay the bills.  In his corner, he has his brother, former prize fighter Dickie Ecklund (Christian Bale) who became the pride of their hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts after triumphing over Sugar Ray Leonard.  Now, he’s an unreliable mess so addicted to crack that HBO is doing a documentary on him.

Micky is in many ways inexorably tied to his family with Dickie as his trainer and his tenacious mother (Melissa Leo) as his manager.  She performed the same role back when Dickie was in the ring and often still acts like his manager as opposed to Micky’s.  She puts an emphasis on family unity, which is tough for Micky to swallow as his many trashy half-sisters are often very overbearing.  Micky’s familial concerns lie with his young daughter being raised by his bitter ex-wife and her husband, neither of which want him to have any part in her life because of his lifestyle.

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F.I.L.M. of the Week (December 10, 2010)

10 12 2010

With the release of David O. Russell and Mark Wahlberg’s collaboration “The Fighter” today (albeit in only four theaters), I thought today would be as good a time as ever to feature the duo’s first movie together, “Three Kings,” in the “F.I.L.M. of the Week” column.  The poster and topic may make it seem like your average war movie, but Russell’s knack for style and substance both in his script and direction elevate it to one of the most unconventional and exciting entries in the genre.

Iraq, 1991.  Operation Desert Storm is over, but four soldiers who see little action feel a little unfulfilled.  They wonder what they actually accomplished during the mission since they were so uninvolved.  Boredom, curiosity, and intrigue combine to bring together a group of four unlikely people together on a strange mission.

The burnt out Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) leads family man Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), dumb redneck Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze), and hard-as-nails Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) on a search for Kuwaiti bullion they think is hidden in Saddam’s bunkers.  Following a map they found in a prisoner’s butt and their unbounded desires to strike it rich, they traverse through dangerous territories in Iraq waving the banner of freedom as a Kevlar vest for their journey.  However, what they find amounts to a whole lot more than gold.

“Three Kings” is not just about an expedition for gold; it’s about what happens when humanity gets in the way of things.  Along the way, the four soldiers encounter a number of situations with two choices: helping themselves or helping innocent Iraqi citizens.  Gates and company find it harder and harder to choose in self-interest despite getting closer and closer to the gold.  Russell’s movie is a powerful testament to the kindness of the human soul and how it can remain intact even during war.

Clooney, Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and the hysterical Jonze are all fantastic in helping the movie to shine, but “Three Kings” is David O. Russell’s movie, and he knocks it out of the park.  His script is a strange mix of comedy, drama, and action, but it never fails to satisfy, often on multiple levels at once.  Behind the camera, he toys with several experimental techniques to produce one of the most eccentric-looking war movies I’ve ever seen.  He provides a very different sort of artistry for the genre, and it’s a fantastic retrospective statement on our time in Iraq (before our second entry) that packs one heck of a punch.


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Oscar Moment: “The Fighter”

9 11 2010

“The Fighter” was supposed to be sight unseen until after Thanksgiving, a move that lends a certain amount of prestige and mystery to an Oscar contender.  However, all assumptions are out the window after today’s announcement that it will be shown as a “secret screening” at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles tonight.  So tomorrow, official speculation begins on one of the most buzzed movies of the season.

To begin the chatter, it’s best to start with how this staked out a spot on every pundits top 10 list without anybody laying eyes on it.  “The Fighter” is a prestige December release for Paramount (the studio bringing us “True Grit” in the same month) about the boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, played by Mark Wahlberg.  Boxing is a very Academy-friendly sport: “Million Dollar Baby” and “Rocky” won Best Picture, “Raging Bull” was nominated, and acting nominations have been bestowed upon “Cinderella Man,” “Ali,” and “The Hurricane.”  Sasha Stone at Awards Daily attempted to figure out why the Academy is so in the ring for boxing and came up with a list of 10 reasons.  Here are the most pertinent:

3. During the fight, it is required that the fighter retreat momentarily to get rubbed down, stitched up, and sponged. During this time, the fighter is warned to back off because “it’s not worth it.” And if that doesn’t work, “cut me.”

5. If the hero does lose, he or she must manage to look like the winner because he or she won at the important stuff:  he or she was a good person and tried hard.  No matter what, never smash a champion belt for the jewels. It’s worth more intact and in its original condition.

7. There has to be something else at stake besides just playing the game. Palpable desperation for financial gain, for instance, personal recognition, a chance to play like the big boys do: nobody likes a rich fighter doing it just for sport.

With those in mind, “The Fighter” seems to be a straight down the Academy checklist movie.  Then again, I said the same thing about Clint Eastwood’s rugby flick “Invictus” last year, and it didn’t fare too well.  So is it really just the subject matter that gives us faith in the movie?  It’s certainly not because of David O. Russell, whose movies have hardly been a hit with the Academy in the past.  To make matters worse, Anne Thompson puts Russell in a category with Mel Gibson for despised people in Hollywood.  His quarrels with actors have been well-documented thanks to sites like YouTube, and Thompson says that the movie would have to be really good for people to get over the fact that he directed it.

I think the actors are the big selling point of the movie.  Mark Wahlberg is four years removed from a much-deserved Best Supporting Actor nomination for ‘The Departed,” and he tried to get back in the race last year for “The Lovely Bones” (which stunk and accordingly flopped).  The leading role of boxer Ward will offer up some meaty material for the actor to sink his teeth into, and as long as he does a good job, I don’t see what could keep someone like Wahlberg out of Best Actor.  He’s a likable actor who has a great success story of his own.  Besides, look at the boxing movies I listed that have found Oscar success.  With the exception of “Cinderella Man,” the movie’s main boxer has been nominated.  Swank and DeNiro won.

The movie also has three supporting performances that could each be big movers in the Oscar race this year, particularly given how volatile both fields are.  Christian Bale took off all the Batman brawn and went skinny for his role as Dickie Eklund, Micky’s older brother and trainer.  It’s really more of a co-lead from what I hear, and according to a nice chart laid out by Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience, one can learn that those were quite popular over the past decade.

Eklund also struggles with substance abuse, and addicts are another Academy favorite.  This category saw nominees Benicio del Toro in “21 Grams” as a reformed alcoholic, Thomas Haden Church in “Sideways” as a promiscuous wine enthusiast, Eddie Murphy in “Dreamgirls” as a recreational cocaine user, and Josh Brolin in “Milk” as the man who can’t put down the Twinkies.  Bale is playing a role that screams “OSCARS” from the rooftops; like Russell, he has a temper issue that people will have to forgive for him to go the extra mile.

Two-time nominee Amy Adams and one-time nominee Melissa Leo will both try to crack the Best Supporting Actress field, and given the year, both of them could make it provided that “The Fighter” is a big threat across the board.  This is a category especially friendly to doubly nominated movies; in six out of the last ten years, one movie has received two Best Supporting Actress nominations.  With “For Colored Girls” almost entirely out of the picture, this could be the only movie to swoop down and grab two spots.

But if there’s only one, I have a feeling it will go to Melissa Leo.  She was a surprise nominee back in 2008 for “Frozen River,” and the Academy picked her up out of obscurity and put her on the map.  That means they like her and want her to succeed.  From early buzz, she has a showier role as the mother of Wahlberg and Bale than Adams has as Wahlberg’s love interest.  Looking over the past decade of nominees, maternal figures, good or bad, show up a lot.  (Just for fun, Mo’Nique was the last bad mom to win, Jennifer Connelly was the last good mom to win.)

The movie could also score nominations in technical categories like editing, cinematography, and makeup because boxing movies require a lot of orchestration with the camera to make the fights coherent.  But the big question remains if this could be a Best Picture nominee.  It’s been assumed for months now, but it can’t stay hidden any longer.  Soon we will see the true colors.

We aren’t entirely dry on news about “The Fighter” as a whole; the movie showed at ShowEast for theater owners and won raves according to Steve Pond at The Wrap.  These aren’t Oscar prognosticators, but Pond said the consensus was that it would be a “likely Best Picture nominee, with a pair of performances that will definitely figure into the Supporting Actor and Actress races.”  We will know a lot more tomorrow, but until then, we sit back and predict.  And wait.

BEST BETS FOR NOMINATIONS: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Leo), Best Film Editing

OTHER POTENTIAL NOMINATIONS: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Adams), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup


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REVIEW: The Other Guys

6 08 2010

Will Ferrell made a name for himself playing in the movie industry by playing some crazy larger-than-life characters, such as Buddy the Elf and Ron Burgundy. Recently, he has been tarnishing that name by playing Will Ferrell, or at least how we have come to perceive Will Ferrell: a lazy, pathetic, and fairly eccentric bum. After a series of unintentionally humorless flops, it’s hard to have confidence that “The Other Guys” could end the slump.

The movie isn’t great, certainly nowhere near the likes of “Elf” or “Anchorman,” but it’s a definite improvement from “Step Brothers” and “Land of the Lost.” The story and the characters still aren’t quite back in full force, yet there’s some comfort in seeing the return of a crucial ingredient – laughter.  Fairly often, a joke will fall flat or just not work quite right. But more often than not, they manage to work, and we laugh more than we wince.

This isn’t the movie to break Will Ferrell’s slump; however, it’s definitely a step in the right direction and hopefully the beginning of an upward trend. It definitely helps that he’s not playing some ridiculous moron but rather a regular Joe Schmoe moron, someone who might actually exist out there. While we’ve been there done that with Ferrell’s one-note comedy of bizarre characters, there’s something refreshing and, dare I say, exciting about watching him go off the beaten path for a while.

But there’s more to this movie than just reporting that Will Ferrell can be decent again. We can’t forget Mark Wahlberg, who plays a cop that is a complete polar opposite of his Staff Sgt. Dignam from “The Departed.”  While he got to play the ultimate hard Boston police officer in the 2006 Best Picture winner, he’s tackling a decidedly different role as Holtz, the paper-pushing officer stuck working with Ferrell’s pitiful Gamble.  Wahlberg has never been in a comedic movie before, yet it’s amazing how he blends right in as if we’ve been seeing him do these types of movies for years.  I won’t go as far as to call he and Farrell a new “odd couple” (a new favorite critical comparison), but they certainly do play off each other well throughout the movie.

It’s the two marquee names that carry the movie.  They don’t get any help from Eva Mendes, who plays Gamble’s smoking hot wife, or Steve Coogan, the Brit who plays the Wall Street scumbag who is meant to remind us of Bernie Madoff.  Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, the Dignams so to speak of the movie, aren’t in the movie long enough to produce many laughs, and the ones that they do were ruined in the trailer.  There are some nice running jokes with Michael Keaton, the police chief who moonlights at Bed Bath and Beyond, that wind up being funny after a few tries.  But have no doubt about it – this is Mark Wahlberg’s movie and it is Will Ferrell’s movie, for better or for worse.  B- /


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (July 30, 2010)

30 07 2010

I had always been interested in seeing “Boogie Nights.”  And for those of you who happen to know the film’s subject matter, no, it’s not because I wanted to see certain things.  Released in 1997, the movie features plenty of today’s stars long before they had the luster and prestige their names bear now.  Five members of the ensemble have since been nominated for Oscars, and an actor who wasn’t even given top billing has even won an Oscar.

In an effort to see some of Julianne Moore’s finest roles, I decided it was time to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award-nominated second feature.  The movie was her breakout, earning her notices from everyone, including the first of her four Oscar nominations.  But it’s not just to feature her that “Boogie Nights” is my “F.I.L.M. of the Week;” the entire ensemble shines in a true work of artistry by Anderson.

I can’t dance around the topic any longer – this is a movie about the adult entertainment industry, in Los Angeles during the ’70s and ’80s.  Director Jack Horner is looking for an actor to build an empire around, someone who can do more than just look good.  He finds just that in Eddie Adams, a young nightclub employee with talents that Horner seeks.  Changing his name to Dirk Diggler, Horner’s discovery becomes the star he always dreamed of.

But the bigger Diggler’s star becomes, the closer he moves towards becoming a supernova.  His fame has made him violently angry and cocky.  He has also spiraled into severe drug abuse and addiction.  Soon enough, he finds that his greatest asset for his job doesn’t function the way he wants.  Diggler slowly drops towards rock bottom, and thanks to a strong performance by Mark Wahlberg, it’s a gripping journey to watch.  See, the stories of fame in the adult film industry are no different than any other entertainment industry.

As I said earlier, there is quite the ensemble at work here, including John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, and William H. Macy as members of Diggler’s posse.  It’s quite fun to see them in their younger years, just getting started in Hollywood.  He was leagues away from stardom at the time, but a definite standout is Philip Seymour Hoffman as a crew member infatuated with Diggler.  He plays an unsettling character, and it’s nailed with the precision we now regularly associate with Hoffman.

The women are great, too.  Heather Graham, who most people don’t take seriously, is seriously brilliant as Rollergirl, an actress who does all her movies wearing rollerskates.  Anderson wrote the character with great depth, exploring her insecurities and weaknesses.  Graham goes there with him, truly shocking us not only by how good she is but how far she is willing to take her character.  And then there’s Julianne Moore, who entered mainstream consciousness for her portrayal of Amber Waves.  She acts as a mother figure to Diggler, yet at the same time, she finds herself very attracted to him.  Moore can play both objectives well, but she’s at her best when they clash.

In only his second movie, Paul Thomas Anderson handles “Boogie Nights” with the precision of a Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, sharing the former’s knack for great camerawork and the latter’s ability to select great music.  Now that I’ve seen this, I have to wonder why I like his later movies so much less.


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Shameless Advertisement #16 – The Other Premiere

28 07 2010

Want to know a way to really make me happy on my “blogoversary?”  Go on Facebook and vote for my hometown, Houston, Texas, to get THE OTHER PREMIERE.

What exactly is THE OTHER PREMIERE?  And why is it important enough to get all caps?  Well, the movie “The Other Guys” is holding a second premiere on August 3.  That city is selected by a Facebook contest where the cities with the highest votes move on.  Houston has made it to the top 5 with Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia, and St. Louis!

And now it’s crunch time.  I would seriously love to have this great event in Houston, mainly because Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg will be in attendance.  So do me a favor, all Houstonians and fans of this blog – get on your Facebook account and vote for Houston!

So click on either the link in the picture, the links all over this post, or the link below, if you are the kind of person that likes to see the URL:

http://www.facebook.com/otherguysmovie

You can vote once per day, so remember to go back and vote!  Thanks for your time … and GO HOUSTON!


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REVIEW: The Lovely Bones

24 05 2010

I generally agree with the consensus opinion on popular books, movies, and other works, despite how you might interpret my Rotten Tomatoes average of agreement with other groups that lingers around 75%.  But every once in a while, there is that one which I just can’t seem to embrace like everyone else;  Alice Sebold’s novel “The Lovely Bones” was one that fell into that category.  I found it overly melodramatic and an unrewarding experience after enduring three hundred pages of wrenching gloominess.

Nevertheless, I went into Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of “The Lovely Bones” with an open mind.  Maybe I would be able to tap into that love that everyone felt for the book.  In a nutshell, I didn’t feel much other than apathy, a pretty pathetic feeling for a movie that involves the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl.  That’s the kind of the thing that should rattle some cages, right?  Jackson can’t get the emotions in focus, and the whole movie in turn suffers from a pervading chilly feeling.

It’s hard to capture heaven on film because no one actually knows what it looks like.  But Jackson’s vision doesn’t really align with any sort of popular conception of heaven, and it gives off all sorts of weird vibes.  At times, it gets so crazy that it almost becomes laughable, particularly when flowers bloom underneath shelves of ice.

These vibes infect and contaminate the real world, which Jackson isn’t terrible at capturing.  However, anyone who has read the book can clearly see that Jackson wanted us to sympathize more with Susie Salmon’s family as they grieve her disappearance and assumed death.  I wanted to kill Susie’s mother (played by Rachel Weisz) in the book, yet here she gets a pardon.  Her most hideous actions are simply omitted.  The role of the police investigator (Michael Imperioli) and the grandmother (Susan Sarandon) are reduced to basically cameos.

The only part of this movie that was really good was Stanley Tucci, who plays the creepy neighbor that murders Susie.  He is startling, delivering a performance that is deep and truly haunting.  As the hairs on your spine stick straight up, you will most definitely be wondering what happened to the sweet little man who made us laugh in “Julie & Julia” and “The Devil Wears Prada.”  Other than Tucci, the only other cast member who’s any good is Susan Sarandon, but she has no screen time and looks 20 years too young to be a grandmother.  Rachel Weisz can’t make us feel anything towards her character, Mark Wahlberg is too intense for his own good, and Saoirse Ronan is just awful.  She screams and cries, and I didn’t buy any of it.

The only reasons I could give for watching this movie would be to get depressed or to watch Stanley Tucci’s transformation.  The latter is the only legitimate excuse; there are much better movies to get you in a melancholy mood.  C /


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REVIEW: Date Night

26 04 2010

The stars in comedy heaven lined up and brought together the two of the funniest people in the sitcom galaxy, Steve Carell and Tina Fey, for an on-screen outing in “Date Night.”  It feels strangely like watching an episode of “Saturday Night Live” nowadays: incredibly potent actors trudging through material that doesn’t deserve their comedic talents.

But once you can put that issue to rest, what you are left with is a reminder of the power of the actor.  It takes extraordinary expertise to entertain an audience with poor writing, and Carell and Fey emerge from the ashes looking like heroes.  Honestly, these two could read off the entire health care bill and have one of the highest grossing movies at the box office.

It’s amazing to watch these two comedians play off of each other.  Together, they put their own unique spin on some dry lines and injecting some much-need humor into them while managing to turn lackluster repeated gags into hilarity.  “Date Night” is all about them; the movie’s best moments are when it turns off the roaring plot engine and lets them take the wheel.

For those of you who nitpick at actors playing the same role over and over again, you could potentially scoff at the stars.  There are plenty of moments where we catch glimpses of Michael Scott and Liz Lemon.  But as a fan of both “The Office” and “30 Rock,” I see absolutely no problem with that.  There’s a reason why these are two of the highest profile characters on television, and it’s not a bad thing to see these two actors incorporating a little bit of what they do best.  “Date Night” is no day at Dunder-Mifflin or TGS; it’s two average people like Michael and Liz thrown into outrageous circumstances beyond their control.  As much as we might not want to admit it, there’s a little bit of each of those characters in all of us, and Carell and Fey have to channel a little bit of their small screen personas to make us care what happens to the Fosters on the big screen.

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Categories : Movie Reviews

What To Look Forward To In … December 2009

14 11 2009

What is in my mind the finest month for the movies is almost here!  Let Marshall guide you through the best and steer you away from the worst, but most of all enjoy!  The studios have been holding back their best movies all year to dump them all here, where they can get serious awards consideration.

December 4

A major Oscars wild-card is “Brothers.”  No one really knows what to make of it.  If the movie hits big, it could completely change the game.  But it could just fly under the radar like most expect it to now.  However, the trailer makes it look as if it the movie could be absolutely mind-blowing.  Directed by Jim Sheridan, who has received six Academy Award nominations, “Brothers” follows Grace Cahill (Natalie Portman) as she and her daughters deal with the loss of her husband, Sam (Tobey Maguire), in war.  Sam’s brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes to live with Grace to lend a helping hand.  But romantic sparks fly between the two at precisely the wrong time: the discovery that Sam is alive and coming home.  With the two brothers both tugging Grace’s heart for their share, a different type of sparks fly.

You have heard me say plenty about “Up in the Air.”  If you haven’t read my Oscar Moment on the movie or heard my bliss at the release of the trailer, let me give you one more chance to hope on the bandwagon.

But the movies don’t stop there.  “Armored,” an action-drama that is tooting its own moral horn, starring Matt Dillon and Laurence Fishburne.  “Everybody’s Fine” appears to be a holiday movie, so that might be worth checking out if you’re in the spirit.  The movie, a remake of a 1990 Italian film by the same name, stars Robert DeNiro as a widower who reconnects with his estrange children.  And “Transylmania” looks to cash in on the vampire craze sweeping the nation by satirizing it, but I doubt it will be financially viable because it is being released by a no-name studio and without any big names.

December 11

The highlight of the weekend for many will be “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s return to the traditional animation by hand musical.  The movie looks to capitalize on what we know and love Disney musicals for, adding some catchy tunes to a fairy tale we have known since childhood.  Anika Noni Rose, best known for her role as Lorrell in the film adaptation of “Dreamgirls,” lends her talented voice to the princess Tiana.  As a huge fan of “Dreamgirls” during the winter of 2006, I couldn’t think of someone better equipped to handle the sweet, soft Disney music (which isn’t designed for belters like Beyoncé or Jennifer Hudson).  That being said, the music won’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard from a Disney fairy tale.  It is being scored by Randy Newman, not Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast,” etc.), and will have a jazzy feel much like its setting, New Orleans.

This week also boasts the opening of three major Oscar players. Two have been featured in Oscar Moments, “Invictus” and “A Single Man.” The former opens nationwide this Friday, the latter only in limited release. I’ll repost the trailers below because they are worth watching. But read the Oscar Moment if you want to know more about the movies.

According to the people that matter, “The Lovely Bones” has all the pieces to make a great movie. But for summer reading two years ago, I read the source material, Alice Sebold’s acclaimed novel. I found it dreadfully melodramatic and very depressing without any sort of emotional payoff to reward the reader for making it through. But maybe Hollywood will mess up the novel in a good way. If any movie could, it would be this one. With a director like Peter Jackson and a cast including Saiorse Ronan (“Atonement”), Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, and Susan Sarandon, it could very well happen.  It opens in limited release on this date and slowly expands until its nationwide release on Martin Luther King Day weekend in 2010.

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Categories : What To Look Forward To