Month: December 2012

Good music takes you back in time. Real good music takes you back emotionally to the very instant you first heard it. In Not Fade Away, The Sopranos creator David Chase’s first project in five years, music’s power to shape and change a culture is powerfully rendered. An excellent cast of nobodies and James Gandolfini, and a great score selected by E-Street band member Steve van Zandt combine to bring back the feelings the music itself originally produced. While I was myself on the cusp of teenagerhood in the years depicted here (1963-1968), I can relate to Chase’s story of kids starting a band and going through changes. Even more importantly, I can testify to the film’s uniqueness in conjuring up the exact vibe from back in the day when music was everything.

So do you need to be pushing Social Security age to appreciate Not Fade Away? Hardly. If you think lead character Douglas Damiano (an excellent John Magaro) and his bandmates are anything but cool in choosing The Rascal’s “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” as their demo song, you probably wouldn’t know a good tune if it hit you in the kisser. When Douglas gets his moment to come from behind the drum kit and take over as the band’s lead singer to the tune of The Stones’ “Time Is In My side'” it stands out as one of many goosebump moments. And by the time Douglas’s sister (who has served as narrator and at first seems a marginal character) closes the film doing a little dance to the Sex Pistol’s version of Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner,” the realization sets in that the film’s five-years span equals an eternity in culture-years. From the innocence of Douglas and bandmates Eugene (Jack Huston, Boardwalk Empire) and Wells (Will Brill) when the fledgling band covers the Stones, Kinks and Bo Diddley, to a fevered climax where Charles Manson himself may be offering Doug a lift–things are changing fast.

Likewise, change is clear in Douglas’s relationship with his sneering, disapproving dad, Pasquale (Gandolfini). The temperamental Pasquale increasingly goes off while watching his son put more and more of his energy in the band, begin to dress in Cuban heels, and grow his hair. A crescendo is reached when Douglas disses the Vietnam war and Pop really snaps. After a bit, an olive branch will emerge from Pasquale, one of many stellar tone changes that Chase conducts like a maestro.

If Chase, who drummed and played bass in a band during the same years depicted here, is tapping into a wellspring of autobiographical background, he does so with nary a cliche to be found anywhere. Not Fade Away is the polar opposite of a sentimental let’s-start-a-band ode. Its attention to detail (including great TV clips of the era) and its exuberant, sharp dialogue make for a bittersweet story. Not to be outdone, Van Zandt has chosen his soundtrack perfectly. The final scene may evoke the headscratching finale of The Soprano to some. To my way of thinking it is a perfect exclamation point to a plucky tale that harks back to an era when the only joy to be counted on was the music, and the only certainty was change.

4 Garage Bands In Search of a Boss Chord (out of 5)

Judd Apatow blends honest, quirky relationship observations with sometimes hilarious, sometimes banal potty jokes in This is 40. In other words, it’s another Apatow flick. Paradoxically, the humor elements in this film seem to have a good time coexisting with the slice-of-life stresses of a marriage strained by child-rearing and financial woes. My veneration for his ability to pull off the most outrageous comedic bits while keeping a consistent dramatic flow is only occasionally offset here by scenes that fall too flat for comfort.

Apatow does little to avoid the assumption that This is 40 is perhaps largely autobiographical since he casts his real life wife, Leslie Mann, and their two daughters, Maude and Iris, as three of the lead characters. A well-to-do Los Angeles setting rounds out the dead ringer aspects. Paul Rudd is on hand to play Apatow’s alter ego, here a record label owner who, since he’s about to have to sell his house to stay above water, needs a financial break-out event and decides to bring back Brit late-70s rocker Graham Parker for a new record and a concert. (It would have been nice to have a little more performance scenes from Parker and his band the Rumour than the perfunctory couple of minutes provided here. After all, the film is well over two hours and is not exactly free of dead spots. Not even a couple of vintage Parker cuts on the soundtrack?)

Mann plays Rudd’s wife who owns a boutique that employs Megan Fox and Charlene Yi, one of whom is probably stealing from the business. Naturally, Rudd and his buds pine after Fox, who, incidentally, goes into a soliloquy about employing herself as an escort and how it’s not really prostitution. Rudd and Mann have a fight where they somehow compare themselves to Simon & Garfunkel, and Albert Brooks, Rudd’s father, plays a mooching dad to three in-vitro identical triplets. Brooks (back to comedy after his top-shelf dramatic performance in Drive) riffs jokes about not being able to tell the kids apart and manages to make faux-pax fun at Mann’s own biological Dad (John Lithgow), who’s largely estranged and cold. There are the requisite penis and vagina jokes and one that’s hard to see coming involving a tasteless body part of Rudd’s.

The chemistry between Rudd and Mann, and Apatow’s skill of getting beneath the skins of his characters saves the proceedings. A real sense of credibility lingers through Mann and Rudd’s arguments and posturing. Also admirable is their ability to manage a couple of wise-ass daughters and keep it loving despite tremendous pressure. There is also an amusing Philadelphia local angle. Current and former Philadelphia Flyers (James van Riemsdyk, Scott Hartnell, Matt Carle and Ian Laperriere) are on hand to provide cameos in a nightclub (didn’t Los Angeles just win a Stanley Cup?) where they’re hitting on Mann. The players, currently locked out of the NFL, ironically seem as financially unaffected by any financial woes as Mann and Rudd actually do here. On second thought, realism in a Judd Apatow comedy will only get you so far.

3.5 Keep an eye on Paul Rudd’s mirror (out of 5)

The new nearly three hours-long film version of Les Miserables will forever be remembered for the raw powers of Anne Hathaway as the doomed Fantine. Current critical backlash–bah, humbug– is mostly concerned with director Tom Hooper’s penchant for closeups, his failure to change the stage show’s reliance on nearly constant singing, his unique decision to render all the singing live, and his casting of Russell Crowe, despite his rather characterless voice, as the villaious Inspector Javert. Forget it! See this film, not just for the rapturous Hathaway performance of “I Dreamed A Dream” (you’ll forget all about the unnerving Susan Boyle), but for an intense, heart-wrenching experience in pure passion. Never having taken in Les Miserables as a stage production and essentially a “Les Mis musical virgin,” I was blown away.

Hathaway.

Is.

Stunning.

When her laborer turned forced prostitute protests her fate to the Gods, it’s as if we’re in another dimension. (Pools of tears will be sure to inundate theater seats on the film’s Christmas Day opening.) Hathaway’s Fantine remarkably rips straight from her soul. Just when you can’t take anymore, she ups the intensity yet another notch, and another. Filmed in a single take, the live singing heightens the total effect…

Then Fantine is off-screen for much of the film, and the rest of the cast more than makes amends. Hugh Jackman, veteran of stage and screen, portrays Jean Valjean, the film’s protagonist. Crowe, though he’s unlikely to make one forget Charles Laughton from the 1935 straight-dramatic film version of the Victor Hugo classic on which the musical was based, holds his own in providing Javert with just the right edge. After the first few minutes, his singing voice actually appears quite normal. Jackman’s superior stagecraft anchors the whole affair. He brings the flair he demonstrated in playing roles as flamboyant as Peter Allen to an endearing character who is the heart and soul of a literary classic turned Broadway musical classic, turned perhaps unsubtle film, yet one fully saturated with a transforming passion. The film has an extraordinary power and eminently entertains.

The lyric “That’s all you can say for the life of the poor/It’s a struggle, it’s a war” sums up the frustrations of the workers in Fantine’s factory line. Though unable to come to her immediate aid, Valjean’s vow to look after her daughter, Cosette, reflects the same mercy he was once shown by a bishop who saved him from the hangman’s noose. Hugo’s themes of empathy and justice are well represented here as Valjean wrestles Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) away from a demented couple, the Thenadiers, played with aplomb by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helen Bonham Carter. Hooper may have added one or two too many instances of Javert reappearing on the scene out of nowhere to again pursue Valjean, but I quibble. The musical that played for 16 years on Broadway and has reportedly been in production somewhere in the world from its 1985 opening to the present day, has finally arrived on the screen. Often containing singing in counterpoint, where two singers sing different words at the same time, Les Miserables achieves its own unique counterpoint of expressing despair and redemption in equally forceful doses of movie magic.

4.5 “Higher Plans To Become An Honest Man” (out of 5)

Hyde Park On Hudson tackles dual suppressed public relations problems of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: his polio and his marital indiscretions. Not shy on infusing such a rich menu with still more challenging ingredients, Roger Mitchell’s film also takes on the 1939 visit of King George VI to Roosevelt’s country home, Springboard, in upstate New York. You’ll remember George VI from The King’s Speech. His visit is the first ever to America by a reigning British monarch and, if the film is to be believed, it comes at a time when Roosevelt’s affair with his sixth cousin, Daisy, is at a particularly critical juncture.

Oh, forgot to mention. Roosevelt is played by one Bill Murray. While the film’s varied elements are blended mostly capably, it is Murray’s absorbing performance that overshadows any of the film’s tonal shortcomings in its constant shifts from the profane to the political and back again. It’s hard to say which of FDR’s womanizing or his paralysis from polio was the more shielded from the public. With the press out of view, FDR is carried by an aide from his garden into his house. We witness his driving his specially equipped car, often the scene for his dalliance with Daisy (a superb Laura Linney), entirely with his hands. And while his pre-Monica Lewinsky constituency is spared the gritty details of his amorous transgressions, we get the strong feeling his wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams, The Ghostwriter) knows all about his ways and she looks the other way.

Murray gets it right with unalloyed wit and a resonant above-it-all air. You would be wrong to consider this a straight dramatic role since it is teeming with a humor and lightness that makes the larger mission of deciding whether to join King George in the war effort against Germany look like a walk in the park. In the film’s big scene Murray breaks out the scotch and cigars, brings George into his study, and makes him feel comfortable by subtly yet comically comparing George’s infamous stuttering to FDR’s own polio.
By this time FDR has dissed Daisy but it doesn’t stop him from calling on her to take a vital role in the climactic hot-dog picnic that is meant to seal Yankee-Brit solidarity. You get the feeling FDR always gets exactly what he wants. Unlike Daisy. Although she’s certainly a timid creature, her complacency once her relationship with FDR changes seems less a character flaw or product of the time, though, than to arise from a genuine affection for FDR.

Somewhat of a Mama’s boy, FDR respectfully puts his meddling mom, Sara, on a pedestal none of the other women in his life approach. While Wilde does an excellent job of portraying a self-assured Eleanor, she is mostly in the background, or as Murray tells Daisy, hanging out with her “she-women” friends. The marvelous British actress Olivia Colman plays Queen Elizabeth as a hoity-toity nag who pushes George around every chance.

Wearing its estimable lightness well, Hyde Park on Hudson ably unveils a seemingly quaint time of celebrity which seems downright nostalgic compared to today’s anything goes climate. Yet the film’s biggest revelation may not be that of FDR’s cheating ways or his hidden disability, but its portrayal of his ability to shmooz a king. He does so with a charm and tact that is sadly missing in the public arena today.

3.5 It’s Actually Bill Murray Playing FDR’s (out of 5)

Playing For Keeps dissolves into formulaic drivel at nearly every turn. Gerard Butler, Scottish accent in tow, plays George, a retired soccer star who begrudgingly takes over coaching his son Lewis’s lackluster soccer team. He’s got nothing better to do since he’s unemployed and living in his ex-wife’s Virginia town to be close to Lewis, who is, incidentally, rather dull for a screen kid. The fun is supposed to start when a bevy of excited soccer moms (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Una Thurman, and, for extra comic relief, Judy Greer) throw themselves at George like they’ve been drugged.

Greer, a silly Suzie, goes first and shows up at his apartment, where she, er, takes control. Zeta-Jones makes Greer look passive. She just happens to be a self-assured former sports broadcaster with connections. Knowing the way to a man’s heart, she promises George, an aspiring soccer commentator, that she’ll get his audition tape to ESPN on the condition that they have to run to an abandoned studio and produce one together. Unsurprisingly, the tape isn’t all they produce. Third in line, and the best, is Uma. George has been warned by her back-slapping, rich husband, Dennis Quaid, that she’s a little frisky and Quaid is prone to go nuts on whatever guy might be tempted by her. Naturally, George comes home one night to find Uma has somehow broken into his place and awaits him in his bed in her underwear. Here he goes from his normally passive lunk to a downright infuriated victim. Thurman seems to really be enjoying herself in this lascivious role. For a moment, so are we, but then she’s offscreen and we’re back to the rest of this lot.

If this all sounds like a lot of prurient piffle for a film that still wants its Bad News Bears main plot, there’s more. As beautiful as these babes are, George is impervious to their charms. You see, he’s still in love with his ex-wife, Jessica Biel, who, wait, just happens to be getting ready to remarry. Her betrothed is a strictly white-bread-and-jello kind of guy. George, of course, will come to demolish him. Here we’re reminded that something like ninety-nine percent of Biel’s filmography consists of total or near-total duds. She continues the tradition by bearing witness to a lot of insipid, forced feats by George to win her back.

The movie so often jerks back and forth between farcical sex comedy, boy/dad soap opera, and hokey romantic comedy that there is whiplash to be had for all. Some will call this misogynist in its portrayal of these women who act worse that horny guys. Maybe so, but Thurman and Zeta-Jones and Greer all have a twinkle in their eye that they know exactly what they’re up to here. They seem hellbent on saving Butler and the film’s director and screenwriter from the film’s overtly treacly elements. No matter how you cut it, the film’s cloying sentimentality is more offensive than all the girls’ silly sexual horseplay combined.

2 Uma Thurmans versus Inept Plotting and Hackneyed Concepts (out of 5)