*This review is reprinted from the 2013 SIFF review

How do you discuss a movie that seems to actively uphold genre trappings and makes absolutely no contribution to the film world at large or the horror subculture? You point out everything wrong with it and hope that no one makes these mistakes again. Well at least that’s what I’m gonna do. That and make fun of it.

Filmed in 2006, All The Boys Love Mandy Lane never saw the light of day (outside of a handful of horror festivals) until the Weinsteins recently picked it up for a late summer distribution and official theatrical release. Often heralded as the best kept secret in the horror genre, now that All The Boys Love Mandy Lane has seen the light of day, it’s clear that it should have stayed dead and buried.

As far as I can tell, the official synopsis is as follows: “Mandy Lane is a girl who is supposedly like super hot. She is like the hottest girl ever and like people would do anything to be with her. Her like best friend Emmet, who is a boy who is like totally not cool, is super jealous that all the boys like her so he like convinces this like super hot dude to jump off the roof into a pool to like impress her. But he like misses and dies. OMG. Months later, Mandy and Emmet are totally not BFFs anymore but Mandy is like super cool still (cuz she’s hot, duh!) and all the boys want to like get into her pants. When Mandy goes on a weekend trip with the popular kids, she like totally gets more than she asked for and bodies like start piling up. Also it’s like totally her friend Emmet.”

Embarrassing across the board, it’s hard to choose where to start digging into this lifeless pile of crap. Trying to decide what was the worst aspect is like arguing which historical dictator was the worse (my money is still on Hitler). In other words, it’s a contest of bads. The directing is flat-line, the acting supremely bottom-tier and the story is literally shocking in its complete and utter lack of originality. Like watching a pot of water boil, there is absolutely nothing interesting going on for the entirety of the film.

If anything, the “story” seems like a primer for something more; a trashed first draft that some dumpster diver found worth in and for some reason decided to make into an actual movie. It is as bare bones as you can get and fails to deviate from conventional horror plot structure to such a degree that you’re left wondering if they meant to be ironic in adhering to your each and every expectation. Cementing classic horror clichés rather than setting them up and flipping them on their heads, All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is mindlessly dull because its so awkwardly straight forward.

It’s as if there was a conscious effort to not add anything that could potentially be conceived as surprising or interesting. Even the death scenes were remarkably lame. I’m no champion of guts-and-gore but there is absolutely nothing here that is either distressing or haunting. Even when a girl gets a rifle shoved in her mouth until she starts to bleed, the practical effects and makeup are so unconvincing and juvenile that I felt like I was watching something my friends and I made in ninth grade. Not to discount our efforts… but come on people.

At the helm of this project is Jonathan Levine who is actually a fairly respectable filmmaker (this project notwithstanding). Levine’s 50/50 showed an unimaginably deft ability to blend cancer with comedy and even Warm Bodies was a mildly entertaining riff on the zombie and rom-com genre. At least Levine is not to blame for the utterly contrived script, as responsibility there goes to Jacob Forman, who, imagine that, has not had another writing credit since. Levine is, however, accountable for the utterly lifeless nature of the film. Each sepia-toned shot is as plagiarized and simple as the next and the repetitive camerawork makes this already slow movie drag its feet even more. Clearly, Levine has moved head and shoulders above this pedigree of filmmaking but it is still an embarrassment to have his name credited to his garbage.

If you’re going to make a slasher in this day and age, you need something to distinguish it from the pack. There are bins literally filled with movies about teenagers-at-an-abandoned-lake/cabin/ranch/who gives a shit and there’s a reason you find these types of movies overflowing the Walmart value bins at 99 cents a pop. They are literally piles of crap and all Levine has done is made the pile higher as there is not one distinguishing feature that makes this one stand above any of the others. In truth, this could be one of the worst horror movies ever made. If not the worst, it is certainly one of the least ambitious.

In order to get you to avoid this detestably lame sack of doo-doo, I’m going to go ahead and ruin the “twist” ending. Are you ready? Here come the final notes on Forman’s script: “It was her! She did it! She teamed up with her BFF and they were a team! OMG! Yes! Victory! Score! LMAO! Together they killed the popular kids…but now it’s time for them to kill themselves. Duped ya! Oh no she didn’t! Instead she’ll kill her BFF and totally gets away with it! Ha! Been there, killed them. Killed them all. Now it’s the end. Yes!”

All joking aside, this is literally the most poorly executed twist of all time. So it was her. Fine. It doesn’t really matter to me either way but I was ready to get to the bottom of this. Why exactly did she decide to seemingly abandon her unpopular best friend and befriend the popular kids (who’s only crime against her was really intense levels of awkward flirtation but I mean they never like tried to rape her or anything)? And just when we’re ready to get the answers and have the whole thing wrap up, it doesn’t. There’s nothing. No explanation. No justification. It’s almost as if Levine thought that he resolved everything, put down the camera, sparked a big joint and called it quits. It’s the movie equivalent of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner: 12 years later and we’re still at war. Maybe it would have come across as ironic or, um, something if Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) didn’t have the personality of a pet rock but alas!

I’m just going to quickly breeze over the “acting” portion of this write-up because there is really nothing to talk about. There’s the jock, the popular kid, the nerd, the slut, the pretty one, and the virgin and each of them play their role with about as much bravado as an Ent (that’s me making a clever Lord of the Rings reference to call their acting wooden!) I guess the only two who are really required to do anything on an acting level are Heard and Michael Welch as Emett but dear lord are they terrible characters. When you make Friday the 13th‘s Jason look like a complex and rounded character study, you know you’re doing something wrong. Shame on you both.

All in all, this is a movie you should simply avoid. It’s not scary. It’s not funny. It’s not ironic. It’s white bread soaked in water. It’s such a dullard that it’s almost confusing. I really do think that Levine must have assumed that there was something ironic about doing exactly what we expected him to do but in reality, it works about as well as the Hindenburg. That is, it blew up in his face. Even diehard horror fans are sure to walk away feeling empty and robbed at the end of this movie so if you absolutely must, must, must see it, wait for it at the bargain bins in Walmart because that is sure to be its eventual home.

F

“Runner Runner”
Directed by Brad Furman
Starring Ben Affleck, Justin Timberlake, Gemma Arterton, Anthony Mackie, John Heard, Oliver Cooper
Crime, Drama, Thriller
91 Mins
R

However, upon delivery of the goods, Furman comes up short. Like a poker player holding his cards until the last moment, he never really brings the Block character to full-menace, summoning hearty pangs of disappointment from the thrill-hungry audience. But this is a common trend of the film: a slow-play that ultimately reveals a losing hand.

For all his efforts to turn something as intangible as online poker into a exciting experience, the promising sense of a well-dressed thriller fades quickly and we feel about as duped as the legions of online poker addicts gambling away their life savings. Luckily, we get away only having lost about an hour and a half, as little of Furman’s build up amounts to anything at all. It’s just left to wither away without ever accomplishing much or really saying anything. While it hardly gets down and dirty in the realm of the truly terrible, it’s a forgettable bag of movie mulch, tied-and-tethered to a sinking stone.

Princeton grad student Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake) is a gaming junkie. Not the type likely to spend his college tuition on a night of online poker, no, instead Furst tempts other Princetonians to pursue various gambling .coms and gets a cut of their losses. As one of the few people who herd traffic to these gaming sites, Furst knows that he has a better-than-average sense for the game and so hubristically puts his entire college tuition on the line (“Oh no he didn’t”) to make ends meet.

Lo and behold, Furst gets scammed, finds mathematical certainty of his being ripped off, and flies to Costa Rica to confront the man behind the curtain: the illusive Ivan Block. At some beachside vista, he meets Rebecca Sharan (the gorgeous Gemma Arterton) and flirts his way into a party to meet with Block. Right here, we run into our first issue (that is if you’re not counting Timberlake’s opening monologue where he tells you all about himself rather than letting it be revealed over time…but I digress). We’re told how impossible it is to get a meeting with Block from no less than three characters and Furst just waltzes up and bam, it’s meet-and-greet time.

Intellectual inconsistencies like this pepper the rest of the film, revealing the dangerous “tell” that this movie won’t even play by its own rules. With that knowledge, any urgent sense of danger melts away like butter on the popcorn required to digest this caliber of flick. Though these little dollops of stupidity don’t necessarily stand out quite so boldly while you’re in the midst of watching Runner Runner, upon reflection, the lack of foresight is as clear as a fold on a two-seven-split (that’s poker terminology for quit while you’re ahead.) No single moment is so egregious that it’s offensive on its own, but taken in junction with the fact that nothing really comes of anything that’s said or done, the truly frustrating nature of the film is revealed.

Anthony Mackie in an over-sized suit makes a run at Furst, threatening him with banishment from the US if he doesn’t come forward with proof of Block’s ill-doings, but he’s about as intimidating as a schnauzer in a clown costume. That is, he’s all bark and no bite. But that seems to be the point of all this: a lot of talk backed up by very little walk.

Behind the camera, Furman doesn’t accomplish anything that hasn’t been done before but he admittedly didn’t have much to work with, coming off a pipe bomb of a script from longtime duo Brian Koppelman and David Levien (Rounders, Runaway Jury). It’s about as paint-by-numbers as it comes, borrowing from the thrillers of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that we’ve seen so many times before. The romantic subplot, thrown in there for kicks and focus-group ratings, is about as hot as a winter morning in Maine. Both Timberlake and Arterton may be fine specimens of nature but their whimsy flirtation provides a trainer-bra level of support for any of the emotional gravity that’s supposed to come from them. We just know exactly how everything is going to shape up before it gets there, making the journey along the way as familiar as the morning commute.

Furman’s last, The Lincoln Lawyer, was a surprisingly rousing success, however, it seems he learned little from that triumph. Where that provided edge-of-your-seat suspense, this falls behind in the first leg of the race and never manages to catch up. Even the name of the film, a tip-of-the-hat to a poker play where the turn and the river (the final two cards in play) end up significantly improving your hand, is unintentionally ironic. Where a runner-runner depends on the end of play bettering things, in Runner, Runner the finale peters out and flips no trump cards.

It’s not quite bad enough to stand too firmly against but it’s far too soft to inspire any level of recommendation. Ultimately, Runner Runner is best left for a lazy Sunday when you’re half-watching but mostly invested in your smartphone or a periphery conversation.

C-

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“Parkland”
Directed by Peter Landesman
Starring Zac Efron, Paul Giamatti, Jackie Weaver, Marcia Gay Harden, James Badge Dale, Colin Hanks, Mark Duplass, Ron Livingstone, Billy Bob Thornton, Jeremy Strong
Drama
93 Mins
PG-13

Everything that holds Parkland back is cemented right into its very foundation due to the fact that it’s a story with an airplane hanger’s breadth of anecdotal perspective. Following the journey of no less than six central characters during the days of and following JFK’s assassination, this mostly true biopic is so frequently shifting gears that it never manages to achieve a degree of focus or narrative intent. Leapfrogging from story to story, the focal point is so consistently fleeting that we never feel tethered to a single narrative. Instead, we’re lost in a jumble of self-importance and historical whodunnits with actual characters cast to the side. In attempting to capture everything about a historic day, director/screenwriter Peter Landesman has captured almost nothing.

Partially based on Vincent Bugliosi‘s novel Four Days In November, Parkland is exactly the type of historical drama that allows the importance of a true-life event to supersede the actual narrative within the film. Characters are painted in broad strokes, making their varied reaction to the assassination feel plastic, like action figures trying to sing, dance, and cry. Every story beat is so uptight and self-aggrandizing that it’s impossible to sort this mish-mash of events into whatever framework the film is supposed to achieve.

Even worse, Parkland is tin-eared to the very message it sings. This singular event was of such substantial importance that it affected each and every American person, Landesman’s film says. So why does the film itself feel so very unimportant?

By focusing on those outside the innermost circle of JFK’s life, the “facts” onscreen seem like a history lesson in the benign. One of the accounts on its own could have made for an interesting singular narrative but in trying to sardine-can the whole collection into one over-arching narrative, the whole dish ends up smelling fishy and is destined for the garbage bin.

Had Landesman pitched the idea of a miniseries to HBO, this may have been an effective study into the various avenues by which JFK’s demise affected US citizens but as it is, it’s so tightly crammed that none of the components have any room to breathe. The result is narrative asphyxiation.

Almost more noticeable than the tightly crammed tidbits of story is the slacking drive behind the project. There is nothing packed in here with a need to burst into the public arena – no missing bit of knowledge destined to be known by all. Rather, any sense of urgency is left stewing on the back burner. If anything, you could say that the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination is the impetus behind the film but that is slim inspiration. With lack of purpose comes lack of power, as is the case with Parkland, a film without purpose and power.

Even the lackluster casting by Lindsay Graham and Mary Vernieu is off-kilter. The performers filling up these various character sketches are an incoherent grab-bag of talent. Spanning from ex-Disney king Zac Efron to Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Jacki Weaver to 24‘s James Badge Dale, there is no consistency of artistic capacity. Sure, Efron works with what he has and is hardly the problem in a film filled with so many issues but his presence alongside heavy-hitters like Giamatti and Weaver simply serves to confuse the audience. I wonder, what is the intention behind this bit of casting and/or was there any at all?

Further down this line of questioning: who is this film for at all? It’s very clear it’s not intended for a young audience – with the constant lack of excitement helpless to capture the short-lived attention span of the youth – and yet it’s not quite for an older audience either. Again, it just seems like a case where Landesman has no idea what he’s doing.

Landesman’s overly cautious approach to the inherently sensitive material just ends up giving everything a vanilla coating that is almost more offensive than a mishandling. While he tries his damnedest to honor the legacy of JFK in every way possible, everything is so sterilized that it might as well be a Hallmark special. Like those “films,” it’s all very slight, very mild, and mostly tasteless. A mere forty minutes into the film, I thought everything was just about over. Checking my phone (which is something I never, ever do), I realized that it wasn’t even halfway through yet. For a film a smidgen over an hour and a half, this felt like a three-hour docudrama, a testament to the short-lived staying power of this borefest of a history lesson.

And while there is nothing staggeringly bad about it, it’s just that there is so little good about it. Sure, some audience members may experience a sharply visceral reaction, depending on their personal association with said events, but none of that response comes ingrained within the fibers of the film itself. It all basically amounts to a variety of people crying over the President dying. If you cried back in 1963, I’m sure this will affect you now. Otherwise, you probably won’t feel much at all. And while no one here is arguing that the event at the center of the film are not important pieces of American history, that fact hardly legitimizes the existence of this particular film.

Often told with the wandering panache of a drunkard on Funny or Die’s Drunk History, Parkland has neither foresight into what makes a film interesting nor any captivating power over its audience. Where Drunk History mocks, Parkland tries to educate in the same capacity. Calling it exhaustively ineffective is perhaps the easiest way to sum up the misfire at hand. Try though he may have, Landesman has assassinated his own movie with a magical bullet, a bullet dosed with an extremely effective audience-tranquilizer.

D

“Gravity”
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris
Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
90 Mins
PG-13

The true star of Gravity is not Sandra Bullock but director Alfonso Cuarón and his crew of special effects wizards. Starting off with a bang, Cuarón opens with a mind-blowing 13-minutes long uncut shot. The dance of Cuarón’s camera quickly establishes the level of head-scratching wonder that will go on to define the film. Floating from on high into tight zooms before zipping into wide pans with a solitary shot, Cuarón’s camera is one of mystifying eloquence, a whodunnit of CGI effects. His uninterrupted camera work displays an immeasurable degree of invisible precision, whether it’s drifting amongst the black canvas of space or capturing cacophonous yet silent explosions. For the miles-from-simple technological feats he has achieved here alone, Cuarón proves he is an undeniable modern master of cinema.

But that fact, in and of itself, doesn’t mean that Gravity is not without its missteps. At times, the script from Cuarón, and son Jonás feels clunky and a bit unnatural. How much this stems from English not being the Cuaróns’ native language is debatable but it at times serves to take us out of the moment, a tragic reminder that this is indeed still a film with people reading their lines. Thankfully, the film is predominantly a silent one and these tell-all bits of dialogue serve more as a relic to the disaster movies of the golden age than lofty, award-seeking self-indulgences. From that limited prowess within the script comes simplicity of storytelling that both elevates Gravity and holds it back from being truly wonderful.

The plot is simple and yet grand. On a routine procedure to install new hardware in the Hubble telescope, Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) and seasoned astro-pilot Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are informed that a Russian missile designed to take out a defunct Cold War-era satellite has triggered a domino effect of hazardous space debris racing towards their vessel. Not only does this mean that everyone on Earth is losing their Wi-Fi at an alarming rate but the Explorer ship on which they arrived soon loses communications with NASA’s Houston. In moments, their ride, along with the lives of its other three crew members (who we never meet), is destroyed and Stone and Kowalski are left stranded in the inhospitality of space.

The disaster movie that follows is somewhat standard in procedure, with the hero constantly getting snagged in one ill-fated coincidence after another. At least in this case, the events surrounding the space rubble accident legitimize much of the unhappy accidents occurring left and right. Coms going down and broken mechanical pieces actually make sense in the context of thousands of shards of satellite debris orbiting like razor blades, faster than speeding bullets.

From the very opening moment of the film to the final slow pan, Cuarón has us hooked. Caught up in an onslaught of cringing tension, the audience is captive to his cinematic ride and, in many ways, it is the tired cliché used to describe lesser action films. This is the definitive movie equivalent of a roller coaster. The immersive set pieces, dexterous camera work, and a foreboding sense of disorientation prevail, making this a film that requires the biggest screen possible and actually legitimizes the 3D surcharge and the trip to the IMAX theater.

But having all the elements of larger-than-life grandeur allows Cuarón to step back at moments and let a sense of claustrophobic isolation slide in and take hold. Ironically enough, this current of claustrophobia is widely prevalent throughout the film. Considering  we’re caught in the endlessness space, it seems counter-intuitive to experience such a weighty feeling of constriction but there’s something about the tight spaces, the constantly dwindling air supply, and the hard-pressed confines of a space suit that make every moment feel trapped, like a snake worming out of its own skin. A moment of silent serenity, reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001, in which Bullock strips off her suit in zero gravity and hovers like a peaceful fetus, suggests more than just a nod to Kubrick. It takes aim at something deep without our psyche, supplanting the rapture of humanity’s natural state. “Is there anything more unnatural than being in space?” Cuarón asks. His fear realized, space stands in stark contrast to the human womb; it’s the anti-life.

As far as its chances go for this year’s Oscars, I count no less than seven Academy Award nominations for Gravity. First and foremost, the award for Best Visual Effects is in the bag. There’s no need to even compete at this point, as an upset in this category is about as impossible as living in space without a spacesuit. It will most certainly be nominated for both Sound categories, Mixing and Editing, and stands a good chance to take home either or both. Cuarón is also highly likely to have his name amongst the Best Directors and for great reason, what he has done here may not quite be an emotional powerhouse but its the movie magic that the Academy, critics, and movie fans love.

Bullock is sure to get a Best Actress nomination, even though it is most likely the least deserving of the bunch and she doesn’t stand much of a chance at actually winning. Best Picture is, again, surely a lock but an unlikely victory. Cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men) is another likely nomination as the film is spectacularly lit even amongst such a bulk of CGI. Going even deeper, Best Score and Film Editing both hover in the cross hairs and could easily sneak in, especially if one of the above is omitted. 

Gravity is pure entertainment done right and it’s achieved with transcendent technical mastery. Seamlessly blending nail-biting moments of suspense with quiet character moments in the vacuum of space, Cuarón has achieved a rare technical feat that sometimes overwhelms its lingering emotional subplot. But more than anything, it is a staggering success and one that will be appreciated by all. Cuarón has definitely chartered a new course here, setting the effects bar higher still than films like Inception or Avatar. Gravity is simply a game changer.

A-

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“Enough Said”
Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Starring Julia Louis Dreyfus, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, Toni Collette, Ben Falcone, Tracey Fairaway, Michaela Watkins
Comedy
93 Mins
PG-13

The passing of James Gandolfini delivered a wrecking-ball wallop to the artistic community. Those who knew him described him as being closer in nature to a teddy bear than the character he was most known for portraying – the volatile Tony Soprano. In light of this fact, his role as Albert in Enough Said is probably the most soul-bearing role he has ever portrayed. Revealing a portly puppy dog who  wants acceptance and love more than anything, this may very well be the closest we’ve ever come to truly understanding the emotional complexity residing behind Gandolfini’s soulful eyes. While it would be a touch disingenuous to call his work here a “knockout,” his performance is thoughtfully restrained and bitingly honest in every way imaginable.

To watch this film and not be transported into thoughts of what Gandolfini might have done next is difficult to skirt around but it’s a task that we, the audience, are charged with while watching. But as both a reminder of his talent and a way of saying goodbye to the man, Enough Said has more than enough to say, especially in terms of the massive talent of its two stars. 

Julia Louis Dreyfus, hot off a big win at the Emmys for her role on the hit HBO series, Veep, plays Eva, a single mother who gets tangled up in a new, complicated relationship with Gandolfini’s Albert. Having just met a new client and friend in Catherine Keener‘s poet Marianne at the same gathering where she met Albert, Eva soon comes to realize that the new man in her life is the ex-husband of the new friend in her life. Obviously, moral complications arise from her not letting either party in on her big secret as she continues to pursue both relationships with reckless abandon.

Rationalizing her role in both Albert and Marianne’s lives, Eva convinces herself that by utilizing Marianne’s weathered knowledge of Albert as a husband and lover both, she can potentially save herself some time by getting all the dirty details up front rather than having to wait around for them to bear their ugly heads. But even while using Marianne as an unknowing rat, Eva can’t really grasp the barrage of complaints as she sees Albert as a kind and funny man, regardless of his rotund stature.

At one point, Eva asks close friend Sarah, played Toni Collette, employing her homegrown Australian accent, whether her ex-husband is unlovable or if he’s just not the right person for her. Are there some people who just aren’t worthy of loving or is love just a series of calculations and miscalculations, a series of experiments towards a more perfect chemistry. It’s clear that Eva has answered her own question in the process of asking it but still continues to extract information like a CIA mole. Subtle moments like these dig deeper into the emotional subtext than can be expected from the bumbling faux-drama of the romantic comedy framework. While Enough Said is undeniably a rom-com, it’s the rare one that works.

Clearly demonstrative of the mature nature of director and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener, these heavy-hitting examinations of what makes a relationship “good” are grounded in a reality where we all live, one that posits that the familiar adage, “It’s not you, it’s me” is more than reasonable excuse for a relationship’s conclusion. Like a six-piece puzzle for children, it’s clear that some pieces just aren’t meant to fit, no matter how hard you try to jam them together.

Try though you may to make a relationship work, once you’ve finally washed your hands of it, it’s easy to see the proverbial tears in the fabric and ensuing incompatibilities set in motion from day one. As the old adage of psychology goes, hindsight is 20/20 and there’s no need to beat yourself up for it too much. Some things just aren’t meant to be but getting to that realization is a learning process in itself. We all make mistakes, Holofcener’s film says, but can we learn from them?

Thankfully, she’s been around the block enough times to actually understand the underlying message of her film enough to titillate the audience. In many regards, Dreyfus is a vehicle for Holofcener’s battling conscious – the good angel and bad angel arguing over which road is best. We feel her presence in Dreyfus and it makes for a sense of honesty uncommon for the genre. In parsing genuine feeling from stereotypical emotional arcs, Holofcener, Dreyfus, and Gandolfini have gotten to the truth of the matter rather than re-constituting freeze-dried bags of romcom tropes.

When Eva’s promising new relationship starts wearing quicker than it would under normal circumstances – her mind filled with stories of Albert’s slobbish gluttony and general immaturity – the glimmer of hope for mid-life companionship begins to flicker. We watch, silently judging Eva’s sly game and yet to chide her actions unconditionally is to say that hers is a position we could never see ourselves in. I don’t know about you, but the opportunity to unearth someone’s dirty laundry before we get in bed with them (so to speak) is one that’s hard to pass up for any reasonably damaged human being.

By putting these reasonably challenging questions on display, Enough Said feels like it has a sense of purpose. It’s abundantly evident that no one here is in it for the paycheck (particularly Dreyfus, who is worth a staggering three billion, with a b, dollars) and that this passion project is propelled by bona-fide passion. It does have moments where it drags its feet and some clunky adherence to genre clichés – a gag-worthy moment in the airport is particularly slack-lined – but those are largely overcome by the inspired chemistry between Dreyfus and Gandolfini – a woman set to continue on her string of victories and a man who will be dearly missed.

B-

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“Baggage Claim”
Directed by David E. Talbert
Starring Paula Patton, Derek Luke, Taye Diggs, Jill Scott, Boris Kodjoe, Adam Brody, Jennifer Lewis, Tia Mowry-Hardrict, Affion Crockett
Comedy
96 Mins
PG-13

D+

“Rush”
Directed by Ron Howard
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl, Olivia Wilde, Alexandra Maria Lara, Pierfrancesco Favino, David Calder
Action, Biography, Drama
123 Mins
R

With any Ron Howard movie, we expect a degree of excellence as much as we expect an old-timey feel and some dated-sounding dialogue. With Rush, Howard delivers on those expectations but manages to get out of his own way more often than he has recently, a fact for which we can all be grateful.

Telling the true story of two rivals battling over a championship title in the 1976 Formula One racing world, Howard has harnessed magic by pitch-perfectly casting Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Daniel Brühl (Inglorious Basterds) as James Hunt and Niki Lauda. While both embody a character, lifestyle, and mythos, Brühl brings Lauda to life with unrestrained commitment – a role that he is likely to walk away from with a Best Supporting Actor nomination at next year’s Oscar ceremony.

In an opening voice-over from Brühl, we immediately learn just how dangerous the sport really is. With statistics claiming that two Formula One racers perish each year, the degree to which these competitors put their life on the line is an ever-looming threat – one that Brühl accounts for in his mathematical approach to driving and Hunt devilishly uses to his advantage.

Both racers know the inherent danger well and have formulated their own tactile approach to the life-or-death nature of their craft. For Hunt, a willingness to use his competitor’s fear of death is instrumental to his success, taking advantage of people’s fears and essentially playing “chicken” with other drivers who take the danger more seriously. He’s a footloose mess, vomiting from nerves before his races and then cruising lead-footed to the winner’s circle. His cavalier playboy attitude is the stuff of tabloids and couldn’t be further from Niki Lauda’s tallied approach. 

Buck-toothed Lauda is a scion who abandons family fortune to pursue the one thing that he believes himself to be great at: racing. Unlike Hunt, Lauda does this for the reward, not the thrill. There’s no dream of fame and unbridled popularity, just a drive to be the best. But Lauda goes into each and every race with the personal belief that he has a 20% chance of dying out on the track. It’s a statistic that he holds onto and proves an introductory window into his calculated soul.

While Lauda at first seems like the cold-blooded antagonist to the fun-loving Hunt, Howard does an excellent job at keeping their often-rocky competition believably civil while somehow investing us equally in their respective journeys. Instead of letting our affiliation with one man jettison our sympathy for the other, Howard offers a tactfully measured counterbalance between the two men -a ying-and-yang, symbiotic union where the strengths and weaknesses of one is reflected in their rivalry. “It is better to have a clever enemy than a foolish friend,” Lauda says of his relationship with Hunt. As such, they may be foes but they are never truly enemies.

With a first act that is slow to pick up steam, when Rush finds its pace, it sails briskly along, amping up the adrenaline, dramatic gravitas, and laughs along the way. By the time the film climaxes, we’re glued to the screen, jittering with every treacherous turn, and torn between who to root for. Making adult entertainment of this caliber has become an uncommon trend in recent Hollywood dealings so Rush is a breath of fresh air meant to be swallowed in healthy gasps while it screams across the screen.

As far as the execution of the film goes, never has a racing movie been filmed with such bold and inventive camerawork. From the crafty placement of the camera – often capturing tilted profile shots of the racing vehicles or found jammed inside the firing pistons of the engine – to the sky-high degree of tension, this is a film to root and cheer for. When you get to the bottom of it, Howard is wildly adept at blending the stuff of big blockbusters with the feel of a small drama. Rocking back and forth between quiet character moments and massive set pieces laced with invisible CGI, Rush casts a multifaceted spell that attacks from more than one angle. In the end, we’re battered but not beaten, feeling more alive than we did before we began the journey.

But surrounding the surge of effort steaming from Brühl and Hemsworth, other performers come off as little more than nice-looking wallpaper. Olivia Wilde enters – dressed in the frilly outfit of a 70s pimp, capped with a purple fedora and draped in an excessive and expensive fur – and exits without much to do. Her role as wife, then ex-wife, Suzy Hunt is as much eye-candy as it is required to honor the true-life events of Hunt. While this relationship gives a window into the dark child thriving in James, Wilde has little to work with, putting in a forgettable one-and-done performance.

Alexandra Maria Lara is given more to do but is equally tame compared to the larger-than-life figure who surrounds her. As much a keepsake as a talisman for Lauda, Lara’s character suffers from Hollywood-woman-in-the-70s syndrome. That is, she’s baselessly supportive to her husband but blase in-and-of herself. The fact that the female leads are weak cling-ons to the robust male leading characters is a tad off-putting for 21st century filmmaking but we have to take into account the truth behind the fiction – that fact that there is an authenticity to their feminine piety, a common trend latent in that regressive era. 

For the three men of the film though, Rush is a rousing success that Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl, and Ron Howard can all celebrate. Known more for his hammer-wielding prowess as Thor than for any considerable acting ability, Hemsworth has been given quite an opportunity here and he exploits it well. Dropping the cape and donning the persona of a deceased icon, Hemsworth showcases talent we may not have suspected before.

And even though Hemsworth is hardly a household name at this point, he is still far more known than his co-star Daniel Brühl, but that may soon change. With a performance this strong, a complete physical transformation, and the Academy-friendly “based on a true story” stamp, his chances for a nomination are strong.

As for the man behind the enterprise, Howard deserves high praise. Coming off his utterly inexcusable interlude of cinematic smudge that is The Dilemna, Howard is back on top, making a picture that is as exciting as it is emotionally stirring. With showmanship on display from all three men, Rush is a mature picture that balances our need for excitement with our search for truth.

B+

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