“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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“Don Jon”
Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, Julianne Moore, Brie Larson
Comedy, Drama
90 Mins
R

As the porn-obsessed Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a revelation. Until now, he’s been the cute geek, harvesting the hearts of women in films like (500) Days of Summer and winning the goodwill of men with straight-laced roles in films like Inception, Looper and The Dark Knight Rises. We’ve come to expect JGL to play the nice, moral guy (save for his brash and ill-tempered antihero in Hesher), which is why his aloof meathead in Don Jon is such a perfect role for him. Channeling the beefy bravado of a Jersey Shore local, Levitt’s Jon isn’t the brightest of the bunch and he certainly is a bit of a despicable fella. Many of his lesser qualities, we soon learn, can be placed at the feet of his equally trashy parents and their less-than-enviable upbringing tactics.

When a Carmella Soprano-channeling Scarlett Johansson steps into the mix, Jon is suddenly willing to swivel his priorities as easily as he does his hips on the dance floor. Johansson’s Barbara is a  repugnant brand of Barbie doll ego-centrism and just as porn has shaped Jon’s ideology on sex, Barbara’s own ideals are twisted by an upbringing of romantic comedies. While Jon dreams of mindlessly pounding away, like a drill to a sack of meat, Barbara wets his lips on the idea of a prince in shining armor willing to lay down his coat in the mud for her to spike her perfectly-stilettoed shoes into. Both fantasies are undeniably twisted and make for a tumultuous relationship.

Even though watching porn in a movie theater may understandably make many uncomfortable, the funniest part of the movie is found within the overly sexualized climate always stewing in the background. Sex sells, it’s a fact, but the way that JGL employs that within his satire is blissfully funny. It’s closely analogous to the real world but all sex-as-product is ratcheted up just a hair.

I mean, even the Carl’s Jr. ads are sold with a bikini-clad model undressing and clasping her breasts together. In Don Jon‘s world, how could you resist that cheeseburger or a late night trip to the laptop? My one wish is that JGL had gone all the way and realized this vision of a porn-addled culture to another level. As it is, it’s funny in fits and starts but goes limp when you least want it too.

Week after week, Jon races to church, cussing at other cars all the way, to confess his sins. Every Sunday, it’s the same story: “I had sex out of wedlock this many times and I masturbated to pornography this many times.” He knows his sexual conquests and helpless need to spank the monkey while watching hardcore porno is worthy of confession and yet, he seems to genuinely believe that a couple of Hail Mary’s will hit the reset button in the mind of God. That is, until next week. Gordon-Levitt continues to use these bits of self-reflection to get into the mindset of this bulb who isn’t the brightest; this knife that isn’t the sharpest. Down the road though is the promise that he might just be a guy who’s getting it, or at least starting to get it.

Just as Jon delivers his all on the late night dance floor, JGL gives his all artistically, proving there is volcanic potential welling up inside him. Although he doesn’t always juggle the emotional beats with the prevailing comic tone, Don Jon is largely a success that proves JGL a directorial talent to watch. Hopefully he hasn’t blown his whole load here and is ready to go for round two sooner rather than later. 

B-

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“Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2”
Directed by Cody Cameron, Kris Pearn
Starring Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Will Forte, Andy Sanberg, Benjamin Bratt, Neill Patrick Harris, Terry Crews, Kristen Schaal
Animation, Comedy, Family
95 Mins
PG

Behind the frothy purple food clouds and impeccably realized spaghetti-and-meatballs tornado, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs stood out of the crowd with pithy one-liners and a boldly farcical approach to an animated film. While there was plenty for everyone – with crisp animation and action beats keeping the kiddies thoroughly involved – many of the jokes seemed aimed directly at the 18-and-over crowd. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t a “kids” movie at all – it was a sharp comedy masquerading as a family feature.

It’s cast patched together from SNL greats alongside a host of smart casting choices such as Anna Faris, James Caan, and Bruce Campbell, there was a rich palette of vocal iconography at play that helped bring to life the emotional gravitas beneath the quick-firing zingers. Though perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea, this first installment amply folded bouts of comedy, artistry, and just enough emotional oomph to dish up a surprisingly delicious product, while Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 just crams all the scraps in a blender and serves up that breed of casserole that everyone knows is made exclusively from leftovers.

Following the events of the first film, the folks of Swallow Falls have to relocate from their food-infested island to allow for a government cleanup (on aisle three). After a long stint back on the mainland, Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) is put in charge of an expedition to locate his lost food-creating satellite, the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (or FLDSMDFR for short), by his childhood hero Chester V (Will Forte). When Flint arrives on the island though, he realizes that not only is his machine still in full effect but that it has begun to create life in the form of foodimals.

From the hippotatomus to shrimpanzees, and in the immortal words of Jurassic Park‘s John Hammond… life has found a way. Aided by his friends and family, Flint seeks to destroy the machine and eliminate the threat of the foodimals, particularly the devilish Cheesespider and an imposing Tacodile Supreme. While food puns like these keep the film feeling fresh, the delivery is often hung up. Instead of just letting the jokes flood out, they are set up for a younger audience who probably won’t appreciate the puns in the first place. Instead of just coming out with it, they add the pieces together like an equation from Dora the Explorer. “A chimpanzee and a shrimp? A shrimpanzee!” Had they stuck with the quick-witted, fast-slinging formula of the first installment, there’s no doubt these puns would have landed with uproarious laughter rather than meek chuckles.

We learned from our first meeting with him that Chester V is as nefarious as he is a riff on Steve Jobs and soon his manipulation of Flint opens a rift in Flint’s many other relationships. And yes, I mentioned Steve Jobs so let’s take a moment to dive into the comparison: Chester V is a tyrant of the industry, having turned his product, the FoodBar, into a must-have for every consumer. For a bar of food, the similarities with the iPhone are many, especially if you look at the wave of excitement resulting from the announcements of the FoodBar 2.0 in the past up to the most recent 8.0 version. The company logo is a light bulb, similarly fashioned in the Apple logo’s minimalist, pure-white style. Furthermore, an apple itself is one of the only fruits not personified on the island. A coincidence? I think not.

Why there are obvious blaring parallels between a villainous animated character and a deceased tech-giant is hard to pinpoint but the Hollywood presentation of Jobs has been not too kind following his demise. While the film never quite owns up to its riffing on Jobs, the storyline doesn’t really lead anywhere interesting, which makes it all the more disappointing.

Instead of upping the ante and addressing a new set of challenges, CWACOM2 took the easy route (or should I say gumdrop path?) and it resulted in a sparsely entertaining follow-up. Everything just feels second-rate and nonsensical. Even small details like replacing Mr. T with Terry Crews, having Will Forte voice a different character than he did before, and abandoning Bruce Campbell’s mayor character is metaphorical of the shift in quality. Couple that with the fact that directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller were replaced by rookies Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn and the sinking caliber all starts to make sense. Unlike the first, this is a movie for kids that adults won’t really be able to relish in.

As we learned in CWACOM 1, genius comes with a price. For all the short-term success of Flint’s FLDSMDFR, the resulting chaos proved too hefty a bill to pay – in many ways, embodying a similar message to Jurassic Park. That is – you shouldn’t play God. For however high you rise, the fall will inevitably come. The same can be said for this half-baked sequel. While number one took us to the top, this second is the inevitable plunge back into the realm of the mediocre. In the footsteps of its predecessor, it is marginally entertaining but majorly disappointing. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

C-

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“Prisoners”
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, Terrence Howard, Viola Davis, Paul Dano, Maria Bello, Melissa Leo, Dylan Minnette
Crime, Drama, Thriller
153 Mins
R

In Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve tactfully dangles each of his characters off the precipice of horror. They’re always about to cross an ethical line in the sand, nearing a brutal action beat, close to making a devastating choice… and then it quick-fades to black. Each cathartic movement is truncated in a manner as frustrating and poignant as Jake Gyllenhaal‘s overly pronounced blinks. In a film this precisely designed, everything has multiple layers of meaning, so it’s no happy accident that this closing-of-the-door trend spans the entire film. Considering the dark material at play, it seems clear that this stylish tactic – aided by gorgeously glum cinematography from Roger Deakins – amounts to a statement about the solitude of choice and the all-enveloping difficulty of isolation within a mind that has become irrevocably haunted. But the true strength within the film is not in revealing a stanant answer to the questions posed throughout the film but in inviting us to participate in our own private study of guilt under duress.

Hugh Jackman‘s Keller Dover has lost his daughter. Taken after Thanksgiving supper, her whereabouts are as much a question mark as the identity of the culprit. On the alignment chart, Dover is chaotic neutral – a raging, by-all-means-type who stomps over whatever moral boundary stands in the way of his getting his daughter back. Jackman harnesses unbridled rage in a manner that he’s never quite been able to touch upon before. This is the darkness we’ve always expected of the man behind the Wolverine and his performance here is surely one of his finest. But Dover is not the only character at play (or even the central one strictly speaking) nor is he the only one intent on finding his lost child.

Circling him is Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki, a by-the-books lawman with a keen eye for detail, a nagging sense of duty, and a strong foothold in legality. He’s a man doing his best in an impossible situation, limited by the law, and driven by a need for closure. Lawfully good to a T, Loki tries to examine the equation from all angles but just can’t seem to get a read on why the pieces aren’t properly fitting into the puzzle. Having just played a member of the police force in the truly excellent End of Watch, Gyllenhaal invites comparison between the roles but thankfully, there is little commonality to be found between the two. This is a wholly new character and yet another fine performance.

As audience members, our loyalties are split between these two men. As a psychological treatise, we naturally tend to align ourselves with the character we spend the most time with. In spending equal amounts of time with both men, our fealty is in our own hands. Without allegiance to one or the other, we’re able to remove any biases that could arise if the film were framed in an alternative perspective. In this more detached regard, we see the strengths and flaws in both characters.

Each have their gaping holes, fueled by their past – alcoholism and reckless youth for Dover and Loki respectively – and see themselves as lone wolves up against the pack. If only they could have recognized their counterpart in the other, they might have been able to work together in pursuing this same endgame. But both are blinded by their own sense of self-efficacy – the idea that they alone are the hero in this twisted tale.

But for how much each character mistakes him or herself as the sole player with agency – the last vestige of hope in a hopeless situation – no decision is made in a vacuum and each character’s choice alters the course of the others. At various intersections, different approaches come to a head and each character firmly stands on their own ground, allied to their principles and personal ideology of necessity.

For Dover, that “at-all-costs” mentality comes to fruition quickly. When police let primary suspect Alex Jones – played by an absolutely spellbinding Paul Dano – free, Dover takes the situation into his own hands by capturing the dullard boy and torturing him to squeeze any information out of him that may have been overlooked by police. At this juncture, we face our first moral quandary.

Simulating many of the same tactics the American government uses on foreign and domestic terrorists, the scenes are torture to watch. Paralleling this hotly contested US policy, those strapped to a wall, beaten senseless, and faced with psychological degradation may be withholding key bits of information that could lead to lives saved but at what cost? Where is the threshold between being a savior and becoming a devil? Villeneuve scores again here in not spoon-feeding an answer to the audience but asking them to make this judgment for themselves.

On the outside of the equation are Franklin and Nancy Birch – played by a trepidatious Terrence Howard and an uneasy Viola Davis – both of whom align themselves with true neutrality. They have also lost a daughter in the same turkey-day event but remain helpless outsiders. They see the solution as out of their reach and believe that only in allowing larger forces to play out, will they get their daughter back. Always on the outskirts of unfolding events, observers of the horror and yet placated enough to avoid either side of the conflict, they are the eyes of the audience.

As Davis’ character says at one point, “We’re not going to help kill ’em, but we won’t stop ’em either.” At many points, this is how we, the audience, feel. Hers is the altruism of a grieving soul, not willing to lambast her own moral fences but equally unwilling to stand in the way of Jackman’s moral slide. Here, questions arise about the proximity of action and inaction. To what degree is standing aside and letting something happen the same as participating? Another line drawn in the sand, another counterpoint to the structure of law, and another measure of threshold. It’s these types of probing questions that elevate the film beyond a mere detective procedural into a clinical study of deeper psychology. Again, Villeneuve asks: at what point do we become corrupted?

Perhaps one of the strangest and affecting aspects of the film is the simulated call-and-response created between the film’s content and the audience’s reaction. In my screening, scenes of brutality were met with laughter, gasps, and cheers – a vast spectrum of human response that helps to gauge the complexity of issues such as these. To feel outrage not only towards the film but your fellow moviegoers signals something viscerally and sub-textually rich that is rarely found in a movie so potentially wide-reaching.

In chartering such a delicately mapped progression of plot and character beats as well as stimulating such a wide range of reactions, major points should also be delegated to screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski for staying true to the characters and subsequently not allowing them to backpedal out of sticky situations. Guzikowski does not inorganically alter their courses once they’ve begun the dreary descent down their respective rabbit holes and it makes the end result seem that much more well-earned and poignant.

At the center of Guzikowski’s maze of lies is true chaotic evil, and figuring out who is pulling the strings is half the fun. Unlike other detective stories, the puzzle-like aspects of the film aren’t its only strong suits making it more than a one-and-done experience. It’s capped off by a stirring grim narrative about waging war on God that is haunting in its calculated cruelty. We haven’t seen dialogue this unrelentingly dark since Stellan Skarsgård‘s diatribe in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

While often uncompromisingly bleak, Prisoners ends up as more of a pulpy, often riveting, character study than what we may originally have suspected. The film is just caked in grit, a feel that the rain-soaked atmosphere helps to amplify, and yet gives equal attention to that within the performances and narrative. Even though it is in many ways reminiscent of a David Fincher film in both tone and feel, it’s hardly imitation. Instead, Villeneuve crafts his own signature touch rich in moody artistic, using the idea of deadlocked forces to tell a story about the blinding solitude inherent in the human condition As each character on the screen is captive to their own physical or psychological prison, we are captive to the deep digging questions steaming out of the gutters of the film. Questions that we can only answer for ourselves in the vastness of solitude.

A-

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