Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Your enjoyment of Pitch Perfect 2 will be directly correlated to your willingness to endure acapella puns. That is, it’s only acappealing to some. Still with me? Let’s continue. In so much as this Pitch Perfect silliness could be confused with the cloying high school sugar rush that is Glee, the two share poppy musical stylings but are dished up with distinctly different flavors: irritating and irreverent. I’ll let you suss out which is which. Read More
A nobleman, a commoner and a soldier walk into a bar. There sits a property-owning, curly mopped brunette beauty. Which man does she choose to marry? Such is the premise of Thomas Vinterberg’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic 1874 romance novel; a 512-page amorous yarn, turned into a dramaturgical 107-page script, turned into a 119-minute film. In simplifying the story, good sense is tangled in expedited character arcs and though less plodding than many coattail and gown costume dramas, Far From the Madding Crowd is at best a handsomely photographed venture back in time and at worst a perfunctory, sloppily told bore.
As hot as an exposed ankle in 1870, Bathsheba (Carey Mulligan) is a feminist champion amongst old-fashion cods. Her free-wheeling ways are as accented as Beast’s Belle, which we see manifested in her willingness to hop in the slop and give lambs a good spanking to get a move on. “My lord, but what about your dress?” When she shoots down marriage proposal numero dos, you can almost hear the townswomen tittering, “Can you believe she didn’t marry that man?” Titter, titter.
But let’s back up in time. Before Bathsheba becomes a certified landowner and town-wide hot topic, she was naught but a lowly farm girl, her only holdings being her education and her sharp wit. Neighbor farmer Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), upon retrieving her red scarf from the woods – Oh! Red! In June! How scandalous! – wastes little time in trying to secure a marriage. It’s your average “boy meets girl, boy proposes to girl, boy’s dog chase his sheep off cliff, boy loses farm, girl inherits farm, boy works at farm” saga.
English costume romances such as these thrive on their performances and none here disappoint. Mulligan offers up some of her finest work – a nuanced and lively portrait of a woman ahead of her time. Her inner workings are like a skeleton watch; her eyebrows flock hither and thither with each dutifully charged enunciation; her faint smile is a beguiling jewel. And magical though her work may be, it doesn’t prove enough to camouflage the bigger issues at play.
Take for instance Bathsheba’s romance with Mr. Oak – who might I say looks confusingly like a hot Charlie Kelly. Schoenaerts displays fierce subtly in his quiet, complacent role as Mr. Oak and in his own right is excellent as well but his chemistry with Mulligan is cursory at best. Considering that the weight of the film rests squarely on our investment in Mr. Oak and Bathsheba’s brewing romance, the fact that their entanglement is barely lukewarm makes everything else feel a touch soggy, soiled and businesslike. They have kind of a Luke ‘n’ Leia thing going on where you dread having to watch them kiss. For a romance, that’s a pretty huge problem.
Furthermore, they’re both kind of boring characters who like each other because the other one is equally boring. Everyone’s drinkin’ and dancin’ at the wedding? Best tend to heaps of hay!
No matter how fancifully dressed up it is – and believe me, from costumes to sets to cinematography, Far From the Madding Crowd is an appropriately distinguished visual feast – it cannot escape the Hollywood romance formula wherein we’re supposed to root for the centerpiece love story because they’re the sexy stars of the film and the sexy stars of the film are supposed to do it by the end. There’s certainly consolidation points earned for its free-spirited feminist lead – in addition to Mulligan’s apt performance – but that’s not enough of a cover job to disguise its disappointingly flat – and sometimes seriously head-scratching – narrative turns.
The most pronounced of which comes in the form of the character Sergeant Troy (Tom Sturridge) and his perplexing motivations. They prove particularly problematic in that his arc only makes sense if we regard him as a madman. His steadfast abandonment of former love Fanny Robbin (Juno Temple) works in and of itself but not in the context of his later developments with Bathsheba. Relationships like this may thrive on the page with much more time and care dedicated to them but on the screen, they just don’t make much sense at all old boy.
Vinterburg delivered a picture of staggering depth with The Hunt and unfortunately his vibrantly nuanced tendencies have all but disappeared here, like a children hiding beneath his mother’s dress. Though there’s much to like in Far From the Madding Crowd – especially Michael Sheen, props to Michael Sheen – there’s little to love.
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Original, odd and almost entirely charmless The D Train exploits the lovable loser side of Jack Black to tell a high school reunion comedy that inexplicably transforms into a dour drama about sexual assault, repression and survivor’s guilt. I know you’re probably saying to yourself, “Wait, what?” I know how you feel, just stick with me. This is about to get weird. The D Train is duplicitous in its conceit, almost caught unawares of its violently two-faced nature. The off-colored handling of sexual tension proved riotous to some of the members of my audience but I felt left in the cold, deeply questioning those guffawing at instances of rape being made light of onscreen. So on the one hand, we have some very thematically heavy material, frightfully mismanaged and borderline harmfully mishandled and then we have JB, bounding around in tighty whities oblivious to the underlying implications of this sour narrative. The D Train is, to put it lightly, a very confusing (and confused) movie.
When we meet JB’s Dan Landsman all evidence points to the fact that he’s a noxious nobody. He’s the brand of personified stink bomb that claims insignificant titles (“Chairman of the Reunion Committee”) because he’s got nothing else going in his life. At home, he’s got a loving (if impractically supportive) wife in Kathryn Hahn but still finds himself deeply unsatisfied. I’m not sure if we’re meant to pity him or find his petulance amusing but hoisting said central figure up the flagpole by his underpants establishes some strange hurdles for the film to overcome.The script is tasked with turning JB’s Dan into a chubby Llewyn Davis right quick and writer/directors Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul are no Coens.
At a fated high school reunion committee meeting, Dan tasks himself with landing big fish Oliver Lawless (James Marsden), the pedestalized class cool kid and, more recently, shirtless Banana Boat spokesman. Dan insists they used to be as tight as his whities back in the day. Everyone else on the committee begs to differ. Not one to fall in line with reality, Dan cooks up a crackpot scheme that involves lying to his wife and – more importantly and completely unnecessarily – manipulating his boss into sending him to LA to land “a big deal” with a non-existent business mogul when he is only visiting the foothills of LA to meet up with Lawless with hopes of convincing him to attend the fated reunion. Sound like a movie scheme? Thought so.
Later in the film when all of Dan’s lies come to an inevitable head, a distressed Jeffrey Tambor – whose performance as a Dan’s tech-unsavvy troglodyte boss is way better than the movie deserves – asks why he had to be brought into all this. Sure the fine dining and champagne were all well and good in the moment but now the company’s in the drain. We, as thinking audience members ought to ask the same. Why Dan? Why you be such a douche? Magically, Oliver Lawless is three times as douchey. And herein lies the problem to D Train, it features two repulsive, manipulative men being repulsive and manipulative. And then there’s that whole raping thing. There’s so much to D Train that just doesn’t work, doesn’t make sense and leaves you with a fetid taste in your mouth and pretty much all of Dan and Oliver’s actions fall into this category.
D Train‘s only workable comedy comes in the form of Marsden’s inappropriate role as a sexual adviser to Dan’s son (Russell Posner), involving some image comedy involving stacked lawn chairs. Aside from that, I looked upon the characters with too much pity or resentment to summon a laugh of nearly any shape or size. That’s largely because its messages are so mixed and so off that one could conceivably confuse its confusion for malcontent. Worse, one could confuse it for actual comedy. In the age of bullying, Dan’s desperate pleas for Oliver’s approval holds a mirror up to society only to give it a big, approving thumb’s up. It’s like a movie made up 80s kids in leather jackets who still listen to White Snake while talking smack about the fat kids. Out all by it’s lonesome, this kind of thoughtless film is truly an island of shudders.
When it finally comes to a halt, The D Train arrives in the station a thinly veiled assault allegory poorly masquerading as a comedy; a stupid and ugly mess that doesn’t have the balls to own up to what it actually is and what it’s trying to say. It’s a very strange product, intended for those tickled by the “grossness” of man-on-man sex and with little capacity for sussing out deeper meaning. Which is frustrating because it really does have a good cast.
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What to say about The Avengers: Age of Ultron? It’s certainly a Marvel movie; a spectacle-heavy rationing of motormouthed zingers, busy with whip-pan, slo-mo action montages and done up like a prom queen with CG glitz. It’s the insatiable younger brother to Joss Whedon’s initial compulsory corporate softball tournament; a large and in charge super-conglomeration that rarely stops to make time to make sense, and though darker (emotionally), bigger (logistically) and meaner (spiritually), it’s not nearly as much fun as when space worms were involved. The Marvel brand has been defined by its sense of “fun” and Age of Ultron certainly houses the brand of larger-than-life, escapist entertainment that Marvel fans have emptied out their pockets for in the past but it misses the shock-and-awe boat that installment numero uno rode in on, instead serving up a welting reminder of the inconsequential, aggressively episodic nature of this whole shared universe business. By the end of Ultron’s short-lived age, tables have been set but little has actually changed. This is Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Age of Redundancy. Read More
The Water Diviner frankensteins elements from three distinct movie genres: a blood and honor war movie, a fish-out-of-water travelogue and an old timey, on the road adventure flick. Despite borrowing trappings from all of the above genres, it still can’t manage to be interesting or, unsurprisingly, cohesive. It’s like A Good Year collided into a Gallipoli and started napping. The picture is hamstrung to the point of essentially becoming the Australian Unbroken, with director Russell Crowe disproving the old adage “if you can fake it, you can make it.”
For a film about WWI, lost children, sharia law, horse riding and… coffee?, Crowe’s directorial debut is a feckless kitchen sinker short ordered on excitement and emotion, despite the oft circled back upon thumping drums of war and obvious tear duct ploys it pulls throughout. And from cute Turkish lobby boys in a fez to the ear-splitting thump of canons blasting at our heroes escaping over the hills like certified Von Trapps, The Water Diviner is just one miffed attempt after another to win our sympathies and our interest. All it won from me is a few snores.
In addition to directing, Crowe also stars in his movie as a man whose sons are lost to the Australian war effort (a fact that is revealed in a very shitty table-setter of dramatic misappropriations to come) and whose wife offs herself from the grief. The Water Diviner even manages to slip in your classic Crowe cradling the deceased corpse of his wife, a la Gladiator. Score. After forfeiting his car to the local (and supremely snarky might I add) priest, Crowe’s Connor sets of for Turkey to recover the bodies of his three dead boys. Hip hip, hurray!
Jai Courtney appears with a silly mustache (it’s a bad movie, of course Jai is in it) as a Lt. heading up the corpse recovery effort over in Turkey and has little to play with in a role that ultimately just gets forgotten about halfway through the movie. His part is meant to forecast his career (*ba dum tssh*). Once Bond girl Olga Kurylenko is paired up with Crowe as a love interest despite their 16 year age difference (I was also surprised to find out that Crowe was only 51. I could have sworn that he was just about Neeson’s contemporary. Now I get the whole “Russell Crowe’s a fatty” argument…but I digress.) The chemistry between Kurylenko and Crowe is as forced as an arranged marriage (ironic seeing that such issue becomes a contention point) and fails to anchor the romantic element in something believable or worth caring about. Once again, you might as well snooze through these segments (I know I did.)
As Crowe stumbles about, busting chops hither and thither, yelling about his sons (general Fightin’ Round the World fare) he comes to the realization that perhaps all of his offspring have not perished. Zoinks, there’s only two corpses with bullet holes in their heads! Perhaps William or Timothy or whoever it was survived after all! Whodathunkit?! Did I mention that he finds the bodies of his sons by some kind of watery premonition? Because that happens.
Early on in the film, we see Connor water witching; sliding around his property dousing for underground agua sources. Which he promptly discovers, digs a 12 foot hole and voila! a lake sprouts from the ground like a babe from the womb. Connor screams at the sky victorious. He later uses this same technique to find the corpses of his kids. The celebration isn’t as pronounced. I don’t know if we’re supposed to take this whole affair at face value (it is worth mentioning that this is “inspired by true events”) or find it inspiring or spiritual or whatever but it’s just so… ugh.
What follows is a supremely boring search for a foredrawn conclusion we all know to expect only 10 minutes into the movie (like playing connect the dots with only a dozen dots. We know it’s an elephant alright?!). Though he’s mostly solid in front of it, Crowe has some issues behind the camera including horrible CGI (the reported $125 million budget will really make you scratch your head), repetitive scene work and a general lack of oomph. For a man who’s worked with a who’s who of directors in a handful of big box office hits, it’s evident that Crowe has learned very little at the feet of the masters. Indeed, his feature is flat where it should be round, hollow where it should be dense and overstuffed with movie hullabaloo in each and every orafice. The sets and costumes do admittedly look nice in Crowe’s all-encompassing sepia tone though.
Don’t let its multiple AACTA Award wins and nominations fool you, the only thing The Water Diviner can divine is a good siesta.
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For a movie that takes place entirely on a computer screen – and only utilizes about a third of the theater screen size at any given moment – Unfriended is a surprisingly flight, economic horror goof-off more geared towards mocking the import teens place on their minute affairs than wrassling up any real scares. Between five-finger games, teenage infidelity, killer computer viruses and a tragic case of pants pooping, Unfriended adds log after log to the straight-faced but campy fire resulting in a delightfully dumb, and occasionally laugh out loud funny, 80-odd minute horrorette. Read More
Based on a true story, True Story tells the story of a NYT journalist disgraced for publishing an untrue story about neo-African slavery who must earn back his mag-cover reputation by penning the true story of a wily, potential homicidal killer notorious for telling untrue stories. Got it? Good. Director Rupert Goold‘s doesn’t bother trying to reinvent the wheel with this 2001 true crime saga/Christian Longo biopic so much as he flips the genre’s tropes on their back and proceeds to dissect with a spoon in slow-moving, dull-edged pokes and prods. The result is psychologically unsettling – and speaks to the hazy nature of truth and truth-telling in journalism – but often the pathway is too humdrum and lacking in the significant battle of wits that such a feature truly demands to really get any blood boiling.
James Franco‘s shady simpers have always lent him a kind of notable incredulity and his best performances have come from a place of being able to exploit that to his characters’ advantage. From Aron Ralston to Saul Silver, Franco emotes through his half-cocked smile and stoney, squinty peepers. For however half-baked and half-witted the writer/director/actor/poet/professor/artist can come across as, there’s something genuinely unnerving about casting his baby browns and easy grin as those of a bonafide psychopath but, due to a script that is decidedly set to simmer, he never gets to really explore the character’s darkest depths to fulfilling – or particularly worthwhile – degree. Rather the project, like Franco’s role within it, is served undercooked and is ultimately underwhelming.
Sitting across the aisle from Franco’s murderous sycophant is a clean-cut Jonah Hill as Michael Finkel, the aforementioned defrocked journo. He wound up here in a round about way involving identity theft (when captured, Longo was posing as Finkel) and pure dumb luck (a phone call from a party interested in the scoop.) Having been stripped of his position at the New York Times and deemed untouchable by its many competitors, Finkel would be the last man to land an exclusive with a recently captured topper of the FBI’s Most Wanted List but Longo, for reasons not fully clear, has invited Finkel to his stainless steel conference room in exchange for “writing lessons” and friendly convos. You see Longo is a dedicated Finkel fan – or so he says – and wants to learn to hone his writing prowess at the foot of a master. And potential master fibber. After all, there’s not that many great avenues for self-expression for the incarcerated and Longo has always craved an audience.
As Finkel and Longo circle one another, becoming dangerously close and blasting past the line of unprofessional-ism early on and with relish, an unconventional game of cat and mouse unfolds. Goold’s game playing is meant to keep the audience on their toes but he can’t shake the feeling of being too obvious and too oblivious to his obviousness. As we’re expected to parse out whether Longo is a David Gale or a Hannibal Lecter – a patsy or a true psychopath – the film hems much closer to the dramatic success of the former (sitting at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Felicity Jones steps in briefly to jumpstart the coronary pumps but her character – the most interesting in the film – is mostly relegated to the offscreen or in charge of sulky but supportive backrubs. When she does rise from the depths to blast her unbridled, fearless opinion of Longo at his own self-satisfied face, Franco again fails to take charge of the scene and the character, leaving him to lie flat as a scolded pup and with just about as much agency.
Though Hill and Franco have played together well in the past – This Is the End and, to a lesser extent, Knocked Up – seeing the two take on such self-serious roles – stripped of even the smallest inkling of black comedy – is far less satisfying than one might hope for. Though for admittedly different reasons than you might expect. Neither flat-out fail (The Interview) or fall on their face (The Sitter) so much as they just do their jobs competently and without any fanfare to speak of. Each have worked as dramatists in their own right but the near-inspired union here is one tear away from disintegrating into a black hole of complete and utter humorlessness.
You would think that the casting of such comedic icons would demand us to reinvent our perspective on the two high-profile jesters. That is just not the case. For a two-hander so focused on these dueling central performances, neither has enough seasoning to turn the product tasty nor ship off our assumption that once “cut” is called, one of the two launch into a one-liner of the “that’s what she said” variety. Give me True Story the Comedy next time. At least that would be different. Instead, we’re treated to a blandly flavored re-heated crime saga that, though not bad, is highly forgettable (even a week after screening it, I almost forgot I had seen it at all.)
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In Alex Garland‘s sci-fi opus, Ex Machina – most commonly seen in the phrase “deus ex machina”, meaning “god from the machine” and frequently used to describe convenient plot contrivances (of which Ex Machina has none) – refers to the process by which a machine transcends its “machininess”. The Turing test has come to describe this as-of-yet unrealized phenomenon more specifically. This experiment tests for a “machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.” Thus the barrier to entry for any truly credible A.I. is sky-high.
Not only must you exhibit superlative intelligence but it must also be nigh indistinguishable from that of a human; a tricky task indeed and one that drives the audience to question what it is specifically that makes an intelligence human. Halfway through Garland’s film, a character drives a scalpel into his arm fervently hunting for circuitry. When the aesthetic design and electronic capacities are this close to impeccable, who’s to say what is man and what is machine. Read More
Most men buy a cherry red Corvette when they hit their midlife crisis. They dye their hair back to black (speaking of, how has AC/DC never done a Clairol commercial?) and date 20-year old models (here’s looking at you Anthony Keidis). But not Noah Baumbach. The 46-year old independent filmmaker who hails from Brooklyn is all about taking his halfway point in the old game of life with a modest dose of thoughtful reflection. In his now trilogy of brusque analyses on postmodern youth, he has come to terms with the train of aging rather than running down the tracks from it.
Written and directed by Etan Coen – no, not he of the Coen Bros ilk – Get Hard left me questioning whether a mainstream comedy could deal with – and more importantly make fun of – race relationships and prison yard homosexuality without being intrinsically racist or homophobic. The answer is trickier than you might think. The liberal in me got tense around Get Hard‘s stereotypical depictions of “black people doing black people things” – hanging on stoops, twerkin’ – and “gay people doing gay people things” – the ever-delightful pairing of brunch and BJs. Read More