Month: August 2013

There are breakthrough performances and there are smashing, no-holds-barred unforgettable ones.
Brie Larson plays Grace, a guardian in a group foster home for wayward youth. Grace has the added advantage that she grew up in a similar environment after an estrangement with her dad. She can be tough and see through bluffs and manipulations and, even more importantly, know when and how to offer empathy and tenderness. Larson’s uncanny performance still resonates days after seeing the film.

Short Term 12, the sophomore feature from Destin Cretton, jumps out as one of the year’s best films despite one of the year’s worst selections for a title. Cretton himself experienced working in such a facility and it shows in spades. Except for stretches in its last quarter, a fiction film hasn’t felt this much like a documentary since United 93. Cretton works his ensemble cast like a savvy orchestra conductor. Not only is the previously nondescript Larson brilliant, but John Gallagher Jr. (The Newsroom) as Mason, her co-worker and clandestine lover, and Keith Stanfield as Marcus and Caitlyn Fever as Jayden, two of their charges, also offer the rare privilege of watching actors who remove from the viewer virtually any sensation that they’re actually acting.

Marcus is approaching 18 and beginning to get cold feet because he’ll soon be leaving the home. Although he seems to hate it there, the prospect of going back into the real world seems a lot worse. A scene where Mason skillfully reaches out to him and the usually near-catatonic Marcus begins to recite an out-of-nowhere, pitch-perfect, deeply moving rap, is a scene so good you’ll want to see it again. The soon to be 15-year-old Jayden is very brught and wittily harsh. Hiding a deep boiling-under-the-surface wound, she comes off like an adult one moment, and touchingly, a hurt baby the next. She’ll go on to grow closer to Grace despite her resistance.

Cretton refuses to put sprinkles and hot fudge around his story. If you come into Short Term 12 prepared for an arthouse-lite, feel-good film that solves all , you’ll be disappointed. Grace and Mason aren’t therapists and many of the problems the film presents have no apparent solutions. Yet the film’s humanity will shake you. Grace and Mason make the situation as palpable as they can and we feel them reaching another level in going places with these kids that offer them a gift that no therapist can equal. They offer the act of hands-on caring–one tough as nails one moment yet richly loving when it matters most.

4.5 One Of The Year’s Best Films (out of 5 stars)

Closed Circuit promises more than it delivers, simmers rather than sizzles, all the while tiptoeing around topical issues. Sparks missing, its well-acted competency merely instigates a curiosity about the highly relevant challenges of government surveillance and cover-ups. While it often whets the appetite, it ultimately goes for a paint-by-number approach–preferring to mostly duck rather that confront.

An all-powerful British secret intelligence agency, MI5, decides to put on trial a suspected ringleader of a terrorist suicide bombing that took out scores of victims. Unlike most trials, a lot of evidence will be kept secret and presented in a closed court by a seperate defense attorney from the one handling the defense in open court. A very good Rebecca Hall plays the former; Eric Bana, the latter. The law requires them to not only not have any previous ties but to stay completely clear of each other during the trial. A gaping plot hole asks the viewer to believe an all-powerful MI5 would completely miss the couple having previously had an affair. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Hall and Bana will naughtily join forces during the movie but you may want to ignore the obvious fact that if an all-powerful government security force with something to hide was this desperate to keep secrets, they would have avoided a trial in the first place.

Cliches abound. Bana’s associate commits suicide just before the trial, forcing him to take over the case. More characters will briskly die; allies will prove to be corrupt, and Bana and Hall will manage to miraculously avoid detection–despite the omnipresent cameras–by retreating to a luxurious luxury apartment where they fall just short of physically reigniting their relationship….

…You could say the film also falls short by allowing them to do anything heroic about their situation. Closed Circuit attempts to gain validity with the subtle conclusion that we’re all just powerless pawns. It’s not hard to buy that point but it makes for rather dull entertainment. A quite-good-as-usual Jim Broadbent and the talented Ciaran Hines and Rid Ahmed (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) can only help out to a point. Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) commands our attention as she seems shellshocked that the good guys don’t always win.

2.5 Big Government’s Watching Us (out of 5 stars)

If you’re on your way to the multiplex in search of that great new end-of-the world comedy you’ve heard about, be careful you don’t confuse the hilarious This Is The End with the new Edgar Wright film, The World’s End. You’ll still garner more than a few laughs with the final installment to the trilogy that includes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but you wouldn’t want to miss the real deal.

It’s not that The World’s End is mediocre, though. To the contrary, it’s one of the summer’s more refreshing comedies. Genre-bending rarely gets this good. What starts out as a middle-aged buddies flick morphs into a robot-horror send-up as abruptly as you can say, “There’s blue ooze coming out of their heads instead of blood.” Credit the comic skills of British TV comic star Simon Pegg with keeping the film soundly tongue-in-cheek as he portrays a 40-ish lout with loads of charisma to match the unchanging fact that this guy is an unequivocal load. He manages to look up four old friends who’ve all gone on to a respectable uniformity of establishment success and to somehow convince them to reenact a pub crawl they attempted a couple of decades back. He lies, cajoles, and makes them feel guilty until they comply to revisit their hometown, Newton Haven.

When they get there something is amiss, apart from the fact the first two pubs look identical, or”Starbucked,” as one of them says. Old friends and acquaintances don’t seem to recognize them.
Pretty soon, they’ve got a bunch of young, eerie lads staring at them.

Enter, round two, when the movie goes 180 degrees onto robotland and an endless array of fight scenes. The comedy still comes, but it begins to slow down. The talented interplay between Pegg and Nick Frost, as a stuffy financial type who goes off the wagon mid-film, can only partially save the proceedings. Rife with repetitiveness, this could have been a better film with a little tweak here and a few less fight scenes there. (It’s funny the first time when our heros at the drop of a dime develop superb brawling skills; after the dozenth, not so much.)

Despite its flaws, there’s a lot go like here, not least of which is the superb soundtrack featuring 80s British faves Sisters of Mercy, The Beautiful South and many very good Manchester bands. Paddy Considine and Eddie Matson lend their not inconsiderable acting talents to the mix, although the usually superb Considine is largely wasted here. And the eye candy couldn’t be better: Rosalind Pike transcends the patronizing role of designated female, easily outdoing Emma Watson in her brief scenes in This Is The End.

By my personal laugh count, you should see this film. After you see This Is the End.

3 Simon Says See This Film (out of 5 stars)

In The Spectacular Now, a rich, original screenplay and two strong lead performances form a refreshing coming-of-age yarn–one that will likely stick in your mind for a long time. Avoiding cliches of the teen-film genre, director James Ponsoldt and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber ((co-screenwriters of (500) Days of Summer)) are no dummies when it comes to offering a portrait of high school angst that ultimately has little to do with high school and much to do with life. Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) will pluck your heart without getting too gooey.

Teller and Woodley play opposite numbers. He’s a brimming-with-confidence charmer; she’s an uneasy, demure nerd. When Sutter Keely (Teller) wakes up passed-out on the lawn of Aimee Finicky (Woodley), their meeting starts off slow and gradually takes on steam. She’ll tutor his under-achieving academic side, overlook his increasingly apparent drinking problem, and make him promise to go hard after the withheld information on the whereabouts of his long-absentee father. In short she’ll whip him into shape (except for the drinking) while pinching herself that this life-of-the-party dude actually seems interested in her.

Rebounding at the film’s outset from a break-up with the more conventionally attractive Cassidy (Brie Larsen) Sutter pretends at first that Aimee doesn’t mean squat to him in any serious way. Before we know it he’s asked her to the prom, or was that just the contents of his ever-present liquor cask talking?
The film diverges as Sutter hunts down his pop. Hardly a crock, although teetering on melodrama, these scenes also resonate, largely due to Kyle Channel’s convincing performance as the estranged dad who’s, er, lost his way some. The ever-dependable Jennifer Jason Leigh is on hand as Sutter’s mom–long the protector of Sutter from his dad.

The prowess shown by both Teller and Woodley conjures up pangs of recognition of what it felt like growing up. (The 21-year-old Woodley, won’t be off the radar for long. She’s signed for the lead in forthcoming filmizations of the widely popular teen novels, Divergent and A Fault Of Our Stars.) The Spectacular Now is commendable in not trying too hard, for not getting lost in a thicket of “big moments.” The small and the meaningful, both challenges and joys, come to the fore in all of their despairing confusion. Woodley, who along with the rest of the cast won a Special Jury Award at Sundance, is wonderful. Clue for viewers: these two characters are about as real as it gets.

4 Let’s-Live-For-Today’s (out of 5 stars)

This observer counts himself among the luckiest of the lucky after seeing Cate Blanchett capture Blanche Dubois onstage, in a performance for the ages, at BAM in Brooklyn during a teasingly short run a few years ago. In Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, a gem of a film that twists the themes of A Streetcar Named Desire into a snarly, brilliant tour de force, Blanchette shines in an equally genius performance.

Allen, now 77, has lately directed some of his very best films since 2005’s Match Point marked a poignant comeback for a career that looked like it was heading into the shadows. Blue Jasmine is solidly among the top quarter of his 40-odd films. Like vintage Woody, it is certainly funny in spots, but hardly a comedy. What is parallel with Streetcar is we get a run-down has-been of an elegant woman who remains alluring despite her inability to coinicide her imagined past with her real one. What is different from the Williams play is we get a deftly superimposed Bernie-Madoff-esque plot with a slick Alex Baldwin appearing in flashbacks as Jasmine’s former husband Hal–who brought her to ruin, only she hasn’t admitted it yet.

At the film’s outset, we get a distracted, frazzled Jasmine talking the ear off of a woman at an airport luggage terminal. We soon realize that she just met the woman, who can’t wait to get away from her. Jasmine might as well have been talking to herself–something, incidentally, she will be prone to do throughout the film. It’s Blanche’s madness gone not a little berserk. We watch Jasmine plop herself down at the San Francisco apartment of her cheery sister, Ginger (a very good Sally Hawkins), who remains socially miles away from the stratified circles to which the the formerly wealthy, pampered Jasmine was accustomed. A flashback sets the tone of how emotionally remote the two adopted sisters were when Jasmine was a queen of the ball. Additionally, Hal pulled a financial scam on Ginger and her former husband (Andrew Dice Clay, not a bit out of his league here). Thus the irony that, now down on her luck, Jasmine shows up at Ginger’s door–a situation that does not go unnoticed by Ginger’s blue-collar boyfriend, Chilli (Bobby Cannavale), who’s been dying to move in with her and now faces an amusingly preening and pompous Jasmine as a short-term house guest turned potentially long-term fixture. It’s not long before Jasmine meets up with a witty and wealthy diplomat (Peter Sarsgaard). She can’t wait to gain back her status. Her reliance on her ever-present Vodka bottle and Xanax to steady herself while she makes her big play doesn’t seem to increase her chances. Yet she’s a hard one to fault. Her shaky judgement always seems to come from a place with its own internal logic.

Much of the tension surrounds Jasmine’s grip on reality–or the lack of it. Blanchard is a joy to watch as she forces the viewer’s full empathy on a complex character who’s admirable and pitiful, noble and devious. I fully expect the character Jasmine to stay with me indefinetly–much as her literary precursor Blanche. Both serve to remind us of human frailty. In all its splendor.

4.5 Woody Topping Himself With A Gem (out of 5 stars)

While it set my expectations admittedly low, We’re The Millers mildly surprises with a not bad laugh quotient. If you ward off its cheap sentimentality, you can do far worse for a summer comedy in a year of Identity Thief and numerous other turkeys.

Much has been made of 44 year-old Jennifer Aniston playing a stripper. She and neighbor Jason Sudeikis, hardly a match made in heaven, play wife and husband in a fake family designed as a disguise to aid Sudeikis’ sudden need to smuggle an SUV full of marijuana in from Mexico. There’s a gaggle of sit-com enriched jokes, some zany, some crusty (Aniston doing a half-baked, nudity-free strip tease to throw off a mean drug lord). Ed Helms, who has a pet killer whale, nevertheless never seemed less menacing–yet as Sudeikis’s supplier he manages to get him in a tizzy over a drug debt that sets up the border caper. The inevitable cartoon Mexican villains also soon emerge.

Sudeikis only deals pot and never to kids. Nobody in this fake family seems to ever smoke it. The two parentless teenagers they “adopt” for their enterprise are hopelessly innocent (Will Poulter) and bittersweet-streetwise (Emma Roberts looking more like Sarah Michelle Gellar everyday). The actual straight family they encounter includes the brilliant Nick Offerman, (see his his marvelous turn in The Kings of Summer), and Kathryn Hahn as eccentric middle-of-the-roaders who have in tow a daughter that is conveniently Poulter’s age. He blows his first chance with her, however, when she catches him receiving kissing lessons from his fake sister and mom.

The actors play off each other rather well, there’s good timing to the better jokes, and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) keeps it all from falling too far into Dumbland. Sudeikis and Aniston are especially good at demonstrating just how clashing their characters’ personalities are. Nothing stupendous here, for sure, but its callous and sharp enough to keep its edge while the drip, drip, drip of screenplay cliche intermittently threatens. Even a rather erotic-free Aniston makes up for an absence of hotness with dependable comedienne chops.

3 We’re The Makers of a Decent Laugh-fest in a Summer of Comedy Dreck (out of 5 stars)

Amidst a thicket of buddy bantering and ridiculous plot twists, 2 Guns strenuously goes after the violent and the coy at every turn. Individual scenes work despite all the heavy lifting, but the end result falls short of a satisfying thriller. About two crooked buddies short.

Meet Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington. Oh, you’re plenty familiar with them? Here they seem to be experiencing a secret glee at the special camaraderie they enjoy as two wisecracking hoods. When two such pros get together, things are pretty likely to go entertainingly, right? Mark’s a Navy guy, Denzel a DEA agent–both gone rogue soon after they rob a bank together while their identities are still unbeknownst to each other. They’re up against two mean asses in Edward James Olmos and Bill Paxton, as a drug lord and a mysterious villain with an especially noteworthy sadistic streak. With actors like this around what can go wrong? How about a blah of overkill?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll still see anything Denzel and Wahlberg decide to do. I’ll even put up with a scene, as I did here, that depicts the two of them trying to crash their pickups into each other, then reaching into each other’s windows to grab each other, then finally rolljng around on the ground with thier arms clenched around each other’s throats. It’s even OK they seem like an old married couple much of the time–finishing each other’s sentences and the like. And when Olmos pees on his hands before getting ready to slaughter the both of them, you know he’s serious. But no less pissed off than Paxton, who keeps playing his own unique Russian roulette with his victims, including an undaunted Denzel. Paxton’s trying to figure out what happened to the $43 million Mark and Denzel robbed from the bank where he had a few bucks tucked away. Nobody has any idea where the money ended up, least of all the viewer. But don’t worry. The plot’s just an excuse for scenes like the one where Wahlberg sneaks up on a Navy agent trying to kill him. He goes under the car that agent’s leaning on and sneaks up on him by sliding under his crotch with his gun aimed you know where. Needless to say, the agent gives up. There are plenty of other crotch jokes, like the one where Wahlberg tells Denzel if he wants his car keys, he can find them down–….you get the idea.

Director Balthazar Kormakur follows up his previous Wahlberg film, Contraband, with this adaptation of the BOOM! Graphic novels series. Paradoxically, the movie’s greatest strength–the charisma of its two leads–somehow stifles the otherwise technically proficient proceedings. It’s as if with actors this good, every plot crevice and screenplay silliness is that much further exposed in bold contrast.

2 1/2 Buddies in A Wild Goosechase (Out of 5 stars)