Month: May 2013

Proving that bigger-and-faster and more elaborate are rarely better, Now You See Me foolishly wastes a talented star cast. Combining shiny computer-generated effects and car chases with a screenplay fraught with smoke and mirrors, it sheds very little light on the real mysteries of professional magic. For genuine insight on the subject, turn to the marvelous documentary on the life of conjurer Ricky Jay. Enlightenment and entertainment are evident in spades in what is a highly plausible look at a man who does things that are incredibly hard to believe.

If you happen to see the films back-to-back, you’d be advised to wash down the sleek and arrogantly preposterous Now You See Me with the Jay film, Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries And Mentors of Ricky Jay. To do it in reverse would needlessly upset a rarefied display of a man’s moving, lifelong dedication to a difficult yet mesmerizing art. Deceptive Practices provides a fine display of previous practitioners who were Jay’s mentors, including archival clips of probably Jay’s most influential mentor, Dai Vernon, who performed well into his nineties. You get the sense Jay, 64, is such a good illusionist largely due to the time and effort he’s devoted to such apprenticehips since Jay started magic at the age of four, at the encouragement of his maternal grandfather, himself an amateur magician.

The small-scale simplicity of Jay’s stunts stand in contrast to the hectic indulgences of Now You See Me. While it may seem unfair to compare a dramatic thriller with a biographical documentary, these two current films loom as stark opposites: the one, a hollow showmanship that grows increasingly farfetched, numbing our curiosity; the other a carefully crafted glimpse into the world of a real-deal magician, uncolored by bombast.

Now You See Me doesn’t merely have rough patches. It’s a start-to-finish cartoon. Its screenplay exceedingly insistent on outgoing itself, which ends resembling a dog chasing its tail. A hearty streak of fine actors (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine) seem to be snickering under their breath. One of the stupidest final twists in recent memory vexes the situation further.

If you pull off these films together, you’ll stand witness to an additional important contrast. The history of magic and his own mentorships are as clear to Jay as how own stellar, amazing performances are to the viewer. His film controls the pace of his tricks, allowing only a sprinkling throughout the film. Now You See Me superfluously dissembles a time-honored art by high-teaching it ad nauseum. Deceptive Practice gently examines a modern-day genius of this art, surrounding Jay’s stunning feats with subtlety and historical context. As a nice bonus, the documentary out-entertains the “entertaining” thriller by wizardly leaps and bounds.

Now You See Me – 2 Glitzy, Bloated Stars (out of 5)

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay – 4.5 and-now-the-real-artist, thank-you-very-much stars (out of 5)

No more reminiscent of the Beatles’ tune than of Danish director Susanne Bird’s excellent prior films (In a Better World, Brothers), Love Is All You Need, well, could use a lot more movie. It wears its thinness like a badge of honor while basically showering us with cliches that seem proud they’re not part of a showy Hollywood-style rom-com sledgehammer, but remain cliches nonetheless.

We start out with a hairdresser, Ida (a very good Trine Dyrholm), coming home from a breast cancer treatment only to find her bag-of-wind husband fornicating on their couch with his young blond secretary. “Your illness is tough for me, too,” he defends. Too easily willing to forgive, Idea’s self-esteem couldn’t be any lower. Enter the rich Philip (Pierce Brosnan, who looks mostly bored here). Still remorseful after losing his wife in an accident, Philip is withdrawn, both from life and from his son, who’s getting ready to marry Ida’s daughter.

Only he and Ida, despite living in the same city, have somehow never met.

Soon he’s berating her in an airport parking lot after she smacks her car into his, and, lo and behold, they come to realize each other’s true identity before boarding the same plane to their kids’ wedding in Sorrento. Brosnan’s rustic villa there will soon entertain a cast of semi-stock characters looking to celebrate and finding it not so easy. Just when we think we might get a little more depth from the two main characters, Bier rolls out picture-postcard shots of the Amalfi Coast, or, worst, peels off a reprise of the film’s soundtrack theme: Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.” If you thought “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” had played itself out in the 25-year-old Moonstruck, so did I.

Not a terrible film, Love is All You Need mostly frustrates. Insights sneak in to remind us of Bier’s talent. Philip’s overbearingingly crass sister-in-law, Benedikite (a great Paprika Steen) gives Bronson a couple of scenes to entertainingly prove he’s more than a match for her cynicism. The film’s wedding “climax” is both heartfelt and amusing Yet love Is All You Need’s building blocks gain little traction. Too bad. Lost in its depiction of a family’s little rumpuses (Ida’s husband defiantly brings his shallow secretary to the wedding) is the film’s larger theme of two lonely opposite-personality types finding each other and overcoming fate’s ugly hand. More than once Philip and Ida simultaneously head out to parallel balconies in his villa yet both stare ahead, seemingly isolated from each other. Sure they eventually connect, but there’s a cagey, this-only-happens-in-the-movies feel to it all. Filmmakers as good as Bier, even when attempting to go light, usually have you believing rather than pretending.

2 1/2 Almost-Edgy Romantic Bromides For Baby Boomers (out of 5)

Purists be damned, Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby first soars with visual gymnastics, then knows enough to settle down for crunchtime. Swanky and gaudy, this version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic stays faithful to the text yet adds a dimension sure to piss off those who’ve sought to canonize the original text. Before you call Luhrman the insensitive brute who would disgracefully desecrate Fitzgerald with anachronistic flourishes like a Jay-Z-helmed soundtrack, though, remember the 1920s were culturally revolutionary like probably no other decade. Luhrman successfully jars the viewer into a stunned disbelief while beholding the spectacle. Cameras sweep and surge, confetti and fireworks and exaggerated (ARE they?) crowd scenes give reinventing a new meaning. None of it seems outside the theme of Fitzgerald’s holding a mirror to the opulent American spirit. He both celebrates the singular romantic vision of a reinvented rags-to-riches Gatsby and, finally, laments the hollowness of that idyllic-to-a-fault vision.

Of course if you’re here for a movie and not a Great Books lesson, let your hair down and have a little fun.
When Luhrman drops Jay-Z for Gershwin, and finally introduces us to our main character, it’s as if God has arrived in West Egg. Partygoers, mostly who’ve never laid eyes on Gatsby, set up the grand entrance of Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s favorite frontman, and now easily the finest Gatsby to come to the screen in this, the fourth screen rendition of the novel. You’re probably looking at an Oscar-caliber performance. He makes a rare appearance at one of his over-the-top parties with the intention of meeting his new neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Come to find out, it’s Carraway’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan, who lives directly across the bay in old-money East Egg, who Gatsby has really got his eye on. Seems they share a past. As Daisy, Carey Mulligan nails both the vulnerability and ordinariness of Daisy. In the film’s pivotal scene, in the Plaza Hotel in New York, she gets figuratively tossed around like a ping pong ball by her all-or-nothing romantic pursuer Gatsby, and her brutish yet cleverly calculating husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). A victim of the age when women were virtually powerless to shape an identity independent of the men upon which they relied, she’s a tragic figure in her own right. It is sad yet plausible in its context, that she can no more live up to the impossible pedestal Gatsby places on her, than she can make a decision to save him from his fate at the film’s climax.

DiCaprio keeps us invested in his character until the very end. Like Nick, we get wrapped up in his optimism, his focus, even his pigheadedness. His gaze never leaves the green beacon emanating from Daisy’s place. Like a good magician, he distracts the viewer with His Act. It is only after his demise that we realize we’ve been duped. You can’t redo the past, after all. His partner in deception, Luhrman has a leering final word: while Carraway writes out his text in 3D splendor, he ostentatiously adds the word “Great” to his finished title and manuscript….Great as in grand rather than excellent? The same might be said for Luhrman’s best-yet film rendition of a book that, until now, one might have thought lent itself only to stodgy adaptations.

4 Hammering Yet Tender Takes on America’s Gatsby (out of 5)

Paint-by-numbers directing is a specialty of Mira Nair (The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding). In her new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she adapts the novel by Mohsin Hamid by taking one step forward with a noteworthy performance by Riz Ahmed as a Pakistani Princeton student who makes good working on Wall Street. Unfortunately she takes two steps backward by adding to the novel a largely bogus thriller element, and a superfluous romance with a dour Kate Hudson.

Ahmed almost saves the film. We witness in extended flashback his meteoric rise in the business world once his genius acumen encounters the mentorship of his new boss, Kiefer Sutherland. They go around the world assessing the value of companies and, just as often, breaking them apart. In scenes that seem interminable, he cozies up to art student Hudson. Back in the present, he is a Pakistani professor suspected of kidnapping a CIA agent, who is still at large. Spanning much of the film, his interview with a journalist (Liev Schreiber) is genuinely suspenseful. Did he or didn’t he? Hard to tell. Then, entering the scene like a sledgehammer, is a surveillance of the interview by CIA agents ready to pounce with a raid. In the novel the Schreiber character was ambiguous; here, we soon find out the side he is on. If she really felt she needed a thriller tacked on, at least make it a good one. The implausible finale is close to a joke.

When 9/11 happens and Ahmed’s world starts to cave in around him, the film sizzles. Previously friendly co-workers begin to look at him suspiciously. He’s asked walking through an airport to come in for questioning. He’s jailed in a case of mistaken identity after walking out of his work building. We see the glove coming out for the strip search. Yet the dramatic tension depicted in these scenes isn’t enough for Nair. In an absurd turn of events, Hudson, too, has a racist, malevolent surprise up her sleeve. Not leaving well enough alone, Nair swells her film to 140 minutes. Scenes with Ahmed wrap him in a glow so we don’t miss the point that he is a character to be admired. Even an exciting performance by Sutherland eventually gets lost in the shuffle.

Finally, there is a parallel drawn between greedy capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Sutherland’s rants don’t sound much different from those of a radical sheikh, and the damage done by his company can easily be viewed as a reason for the roots of radicalism. Had we not been hit over the head by the thriller and Kate Hudson elements of the film, we may have gotten that message clearer. Like much of the rest of the film, it’s blurred by bloatedness.

2.5 Two Very Fine Performances Stymied By A Misguided Film (out of 5)