Month: March 2013

If The Sapphires is occasionally feel-good to the point of a sugar-rush, cut it some slack. The rewards of this Australian homage to a girl group rising to greater glory in the face of oppressive 1960s Aborigine policies speak for themselves.

Director Wayne Blair bangs the drum for our empathy by straightforwardly depicting Australia’s odd and cruel practice of forced adoption. Aboriginal children were basically kidnapped and put in either new families or boarding schools on the assumption that this would improve their future rather than tear them apart. Here, it’s Kay, who has fairer skin than her sisters left behind. When the time comes for the sisters to break out of their parochial prison of opportunity and set out for entertaining the troops in Vietnam, they find Kay with her white foster parents. The contrast is stark and Kay’s ambivalence striking. Before we know it they’re reunited but not without a struggle.

Sporting a spot-on soundtrack of 60s soul tunes and the terrific voice of Julie (Australian pop star Jessica Mauboy), The Sapphires has many goosebumps moments of exuberance. Largely given its energy by the music and the lead performance of Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids, This Is 40) as the group’s no-nonsense yet empathetic manager, the film’s occasional self-smitten tone creates a few speedbumps along the way. When we get to Vietnam the subtext feels especially unreal. Characters are broadly drawn, plot developments hunker around the corny but are well-saved by O’Dowd’s going all-in with his character. Playing a drunken talent contest emcee, he at first admires the sisters’ bravery and talent in presenting a few country and-western songs. Then comes the idea to change their name (Cummerangunja Songbirds won’t cut it) and their repertoire (soul music, unlike country contains hope, he tells them). Before we know it, O’Dowd puts his foot down and after simmering a few ego skirmishes amoung the sisters, they’re on their way to a watershed trip to ‘Nam. Once they arrive a promoter flack is their first of many obstacles but this group is so rock-ribbed determined their bond emerges mostly unscathed.

Co-screenwriter Tony Briggs is the son of one of the real-life Sapphires on which the film is based. No original recordings exist, so forget trying to make a comparison. If the heyday of Volt-Stax and Motown is at all to your liking, this is a must-see film.

3 1/2 Sugar-Pie Honey-Bunches (out of 5)

Olympus Has Fallen fits nicely into the realm of belief where there’s a large part of America that actually will take this film seriously. Thus it’s far more fun to respond to it as an exercise in camp. Who cares if director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) intends it that way?

The ludicrous premise? Not so much that the White House will be reduced to shattered pieces by ominous terrorists from North Korea but that a lone ranger will manage to infiltrate the occupied White House and save the day. Fanned by a bad break early in the film, former Secret Service agent Mike manning (Gerald Butler) sinks deeper into bitterness and despair once he’s relegated to a toothless DC desk job. When the enemy plane and busloads of no-good Koreans enter the fray, Manning wakes up and takes to the street, telling innocent pedestrians who are being shot down like flies to “get down” while he breeezily takes out a few terrorists. The scenes portraying the attacks, while they might not exactly rival the riveting tsunami scenes from The Impossible, have a merit of their own if you’re able to place your tongue firmly your cheek. As disaster movies go, we’ve all certainly seen worse. This one’s actually fun at times. I won’t even say once you’ve suspended your disbelief, since that is assumed.

So leaving aside the numerous plot holes, since I doubt you have that much time, there are thrills aplenty in Olympus, albeit cheap and minor ones. Keep your eye on Butler’s response to a couple of terrorists he manages to abduct and tie up in the White House. His comeback once they start laughing at him is not to be missed, so don’t out for popcorn in the movie’s middle segments. You can actually leave the theater for awhile in the film’s final segments, however, since they’re as predictable as winds in March. But en route there you’ll be treated to a stunned Morgan Freeman taking over as acting President since both the President (Aaron Elkhart) and Vice President are bound and gagged in the ostensibly impenetrable bunker beneath the White House. Freeman’s response to the startling news that he’s now in charge (didn’t he read his job description?) is to order–with all the gravitas to be expected from Morgan Freeman–a cup of coffee. You won’t need much caffeine for most of Butler’s scenes. He’s actually rather plausible despite his improbable situations. Fresh on the heels of the stinker Playing For Keeps, where hot women the likes of Una Thurman, Jessica Bile, and Catherine Zeta-Jones kept throwing themselves his way, here he barely has time for his emergency room nurse wife (Rasta Mitchell). Bring on the bad guys.

Supporting players the likes of Robert Forrester, Melissa Leo, Delbert Mulroney and Angela Bassett preen and pose convincingly enough. Ashley Judd is around just long enough to remind us she’s probably running for Congress and we’ll see her onscreen even less if she wins. Yet it’s Butler’s show. When Freeman considers taking the Seventh Fleet out of Korea in order to save the President’s life, it’s Butler who has to remind him via telephones that a lot more is at stake. I know I said we’d ignore the film’s implausibilites but frankly there’s one whopper concerning America’s secret codes as they affect its nuclear arsenals that was so grave I have to notch the film’s rating down by at least half a point. All the jingoistic pandering and fear-mongering paranoia doesn’t make much of a dent in the pure satisfaction gained from a decent pulp thriller, but insulting our intelligence certainly offsets it some.

2 1/2 Wild Maniac Terrorists Waltz Into The White House (out of 5)

Lily Tomlin bursts through the ho-hum safe and silly bromides in Admission as the comedy legend she is. Playing the hippie/feminist mom of Tina Fey’s main character, an admissions officer at Princeton, Tomlin helps rescue a a film that often has trouble walking and chewing gum simultaneously.

The film splits itself between satirical comedy and heartfelt drama. The funny half does a decent job going inside the politics and anxieties of the college admissions process. The other half goes over the battles between personal and career concerns of a contemporary female professional. While Fey can aptly slide back and forth between styles, the film’s screenplay offers as many softballs as bon mots. Also central to the plot are the vagaries brought on by adoption, as if Admission didn’t already have enough on is plate.

How good is Fey? Bouncing off a steady Paul Rudd, who plays a teacher at an alternative high school, she holds sway in keeping our interest. It helps when the likes of Wallace Shawn plays another foil to Fey–that of a retiring admissions director, eager to soon choose between Fey and a rival to be his successor. Shawn can work the eyebrows like no other actor and I’d be talking about him more of Tomlin weren’t in the film. She’s so good even her occasionally drippy and maudlin dialogue hardly gets in the way.

As far as plot, let’s just say Rudd has a surprise up his sleeve once he convinces Fey to visit his school. As a result her steely resolve to stay unemotional as a final arbiter of who gets in the most prestigious American college becomes, well, compromised. A scene where the admissions panel goes through the process of selecting its applicants is worth the price of admission here. If you’re a Princeton grad, get ready to wince at the film’s stereotyping. One thing that probably rings true is Wallace freaking out when his college loses the prestigious Number One ranking in the US News & World Report College Guide.
Did I mention Lily Tomlin is really good here?

2.5 You Won’t Believe How Hard it is To Get Into Princetons (out of 5)

James Franco, practically unrecognizable as a drug-dealing hoodlum/rapper, provides a saving grace of sorts to the largely limp Spring Breakers. With Franco onscreen the film’s stylistic excesses are obscured to an extent. Director Harmony Korine seems to be acting on an impulse to give the spring break genre a heightened grindhouse intensity of casual sex and lurid violence while simultaneously holding this particular corner of the American dream up to serious scrutiny. It’s a shame he undermines both the cheap thrills and the moral lessons with an artsy-fartsy veneer on things.

The drive-by shootings and orgies too often flow through a filter of introspective filmmaking as pretentious as it is repetitive. Although the dubstep soundtrack is mostly effective, it’s offset by visuals that revel in the overdone. Voiceovers often duplicate verbatim the same dialogue two or three extra times while the film’s characters mostly stare into space. These ginned-up techniques soon begin to seem like trappings meant to stretch the film to ninety minutes. The dramatic tension of crazed chicks getting bailed out of jail by Franco and falling under his spell, while well done, runs adrift when we’re constantly interrupted by the meandering interludes. Any potential dramatic momentum gives way to impressionistic twaddle, then eventually wavers to the most improbable of endings.

Yet, don’t refrain from seeing this film. Franco’s character, Alien (he pronounces it A-Lean) will stick with you. He’s outrageous, compelling and looks and speaks truly devil-may-care. When he takes a shining to the straight-arrow in the bunch, Faith (Helena Gomez), we almost don’t see him as exploitive. He’s fearless and scary at the same time, and equally charismatic and vain. He portrays an exaggerated bloating of a stereotype: “Look at my shit” he gleefully tells the gals as they all swim in a big bed filled with a huge arsenal of guns and hundred dollar bills that spew over onto the floor. The toll for this loot proves too much for Faith and one of the other girls (played by Korine’s wife, Rachel) but the remaining two stick around for the final shenanigans. From terrorizing a restaurant’s patron’s with squirt guns in an earlier scene, we know they’ve got the moxie to force some cash to finance their spring break trip. Then they meet Alien and the craziness just begins.

3 Disney Girls Gone Wild In An Unlikely Art Flick With An Uncanny James Franco (out of 5)

If the Academy Awards were ever to set out to encompass a truly international scope, a performance like that of Nina Hoss in the accomplished German film, Barbara, would not go unheeded. She is marvelous as Barbara, a banished physician who finds herself in a boondocks East German town at a time before the Iron Curtain fell. Her crime? Attempting to flee across the border from the oppressive regime into West Germany.

We encounter her as she begins to work in a hospital–all the while under surveillance from a Stasi heavy, Klaus Schultz (Rainer Bock). She keeps her distance from the other employees, refusing to even to eat with them in the cafeteria. The head physician, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), takes an interest in her. Or so it seems…

…Barbara is an impeccably paced study of the microcosm of a few characters in a small, out of the way town and how they represent the macrocosm of a society hellbent on inducing paranoia and suspicion as tools of control. Every move made by Andre can be read as either a generous forthcoming or a deceiving surveillance. He appears so legitimate it almost seems Barbara unreasonably suspects him. Then Schultz’ guys show up to not only search her place but her body cavities. The high-strung Barbara gives in to Andre’s advances in glacial steps. Hoss’s performance marvels the most in her nonverbals. She’s the master of a glance, even a twitch.

Patients in the hospital occasionally cry out in bursts of grief, piercing through the sterile stillness that director Christian Petzold, so effectively maintains. Relationships change and a thriller of sorts begins to develop. It give nothing away that moral compromise is one of the themes here. As it was so wonderfully explored in the more straightforward The Lives Of Others, Barbara gives an equally relevant payoff while taking a different tack. It moves forward with subtlety and its suspense is more of the quiet variety. Yet the dilemmas it presents are no more timeworn than that of freedom itself.

4 Gripping and Riveting Iron Curtains That Unveil A Great Performance (out of 5)

Barbara is playing this week at the Ritz V

If you regard the pairing of Steve Carell and Jim Carrey as adversarial magicians as a prospect for laughs, you wouldn’t be unreasonable. In the Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the results are, well, tricky at best.

Carell plays Wonderstone, a calcified headliner at Vegas casino. He performs the same old routines with the same old partner, childhood buddy Anton Marvelton (an out-of-place Steve Buscemi). Carrey does his magic on the street. That his tricks often involve a virtually illusion-free, self-inflicted wounding of himself only serves to increase his fanbase. Carell, self-absorbed and with an ego most viewers will wish could pull a disappearing act, fights with Buscemi. The two break up their decades-long partnership, and casino audiences continue to thin.

James Gandolfini as the casino boss, eventually has enough and pulls the plug on Wonderstone, who’s so broke he needs to live in a shabby motel and do gigs at retirement homes. Two “jokes” will give you an idea of the humor in this slight sleight-of-hand film:

When Carell has dinner at former aid Olivia Wilde’s place on his first night away from casino life, he promptly collects the dinner dishes and sets them outside her apartment door for ostensible room service pickup….Gandolfini, who has been on an incredible roll lately (Not Fade Away, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty) has not one, not two, but three occasions to ham it up as he less than hilariously forgets the age of his son. On the third occasion, Burt is doing a magic show for Gandolfini’s kid’s birthday party and promptly gets usurped by Carrey, who decides to steal the show.

Carrey also steals the film. His hyper magic emerges dark and edgy, a refreshing counterpunch to Wonderstone’s white bread and vanilla approach. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone even enlists the venerable Alan Arkin as a legendary magician Rance Hollloway, who Wonderstone encounters in, of course, the nursing home. (Holloway, in the film’s opening flashback, inspires a school-age Burt, with a how-to-perform-magic VHS tape). While Arkin doesn’t disappoint, there’s a larger problem. The film’s riches-to-rags/will-Burt-get-the-girl?/will-Carell-and-Buscemi reunite? senimentalities slow down even a vibrant Carrey and Arkin. The film’s pace begins to resemble a car with a bad transmission, sputtering in fits and starts in between some decent jokes. Just when Carrey pulls his final, entertaining stunt, we’re robbed by a script move that neuters his rivalry with Wonderstone. Then as if to be reminded further that 90 percent of the okay magic in this film was computer-generated, the film gives us a massive trick ending that is about as plausible as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Director Don Scardino has helmed a scant three films since the notoriously thin Cruising in 1980. Something tells me that isn’t about smoke and mirrors.

2 1/2 Jim Carrey Is Back and Tries His Damnest To Overcome a Silly Yet Stale Magic Film (out of 5)

Another self-congratulatory, demented youth party film comes roaring out of the woodwork, dead on arrival. 21 & Over, directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, writers of The Hangover, will likely rile racist and misogynist sensibilities while largely falling short in laughs. A mere handful of funny moments fails to mitigate a tired formula. Jeff Chang (Justin Chon) is cruelly turning 21 on the eve of a big medical school admissions interview. Seems his overbearing dad is watching him like a hawk to make sure he’s in tiptop shape for the big event. Two pals, Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylab Aston) show up in a taxi to coax Jeff Chang (he’s never called anything else in this flick) to go out for his birthday anyway. Just one drink.

After a few bar scenes where bacchanalia never seemed so airless, Jeff is practically in a coma, although he manages to get carried around while asleep propped between his two buddies like a ragdoll. Before long he’ll be eating a tampon in a Latina sorority while Miller and Casey manage to spank a couple of blindfolded pledges with paddles. One of them excietdly forgets and talks , revealing that they are actually unbelonging males and not sorority sisters. Then they make a mad dash for Jeff Chang and eventually throw him out of a second story window. Since viewers have no revengeful opportunity to throw this movie out of a window, we proceed to a pep rally where a guy who earlier in a bar accidentally had a dart thrown in his face by Casey, is now the key to Miller and Casey finding out where Jeff lives. Oh, I know, they started out the movie at Jeff’s place, so why wouldn’t they know where he lives? Beats me.

Jeff gets abandoned and left with two practical-joking stoners at a party somewhere along the way, and exits with a bra on his chest and a teddy bear stuck to his crotch. Naturally he gets himself arrested. I won’t divulge anymore spoliers but there’s a hot girl Nicole (Sarah Wright) involved who seemingly can’t wait for Casey to make his move–a detail the less-dorky Miller doesn’t fail to mention incessantly.

Teller went full circle from his quality performance as the sensitive kid opposite Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole to last year’s party flick, Project X. Here he bears not only the extra weight of assuming the stereotype-spewing, wild-and-crazy foil opposite the straightlaced Aston (Pitch Perfect), but a further career progression from the talented to the tawdry.

1 1/2 Naughty, Brainless Insults To Our Intelligence (out of 5)