Month: September 2013

Its “female Woody Allen” critical trappings notwithstanding, the well-written Enough Said leans heavily on the bulk-sized talents of the late James Gandolfini. He’s the very oxygen of this film, whose timbre and wit surpass the previous, not inconsiderable, films of Nicole Holofcener.

Bittersweet is the realzation that two of Gandolfini’s final film characters envelop a tenacity of resistance to moderation. Both the hitman with unquenchable appetites in Killing The Softly and Gandolfini’s character Albert in this film resist the urge for good health . In Killing Them Softly that’s putting it mildly. In Enough Said, Albert’s more subtle, prideful independence of spirit still haunts this fan of a wonderful actor. Given press accounts that his fatal heart attack in Rome earlier this year may have struck after a binge-like feast, it makes Enough Said a little tough to watch when he tells co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus he’s not about to start counting calories.

Have no fear. Enough Said is more than able to withstand any such misgivings. A portrayal of vulnerability and acceptance and their mutual collision courses, its juxtapositions of the comic and the poignant are often riveting.

Eva (Louis-Dreyfus) is a single mother and masseuse, who is one part bumbling schlep, and one part resilient if insecure optimist. She trudges toward a relationship with a similarly single-parenting Albert, who has a huge waistline and a bigger heart. Their daughters are even both imminently heading off to college. Where Eva wavers is in her inherent mistrust of a new relationship eventually turning as sour as her previous one. So she goes for a short-cut from hell. Her unwitting Faust here is none other than Holofcener regular Catherine Keener as a masseuse client who Eva eventually learns just so happens to be Albert’s ex-wife. Marianne (Keener), a poet who knows Joni Mitchell, bitches and moans about Albert’s shortcomings. These digs take on a double-edged sword for Eva. On one level she wants to leave it alone and run for the hills. But on another, more primal one, she’s fascinated with the information she can now cull–a “Travel Advisor” she calls it.

What could have in the wrong hands turned into one of the stupidest endings in romantic comedy history, resonates here, sturdy and goose-bumpy. And sure enough, it’s Gandolfini who seems to make it happen–a magician of casualness and sincerity. Inhabited by characters who feel like real people, one subplot involves the acceptance of the shortcomings of the maid of Eva’s friend, Sarah (Toni Colette). Eva’s vulnerability is reinforced in another subplot where she gets a little too emotionally close to her daughter’s needy best friend. Proving a movie is as good as its minor characters, Tracey Fairaway is perfect as Eva’s daughter Ellen, an aloof cum needy paradox.

There’s an economy of dialogue as a wealth of situations weave tighter Holofcener’s theme of imperfect people feeling their way around new territory. When Eva sits down with her ex-husband and his new wife at a group dinner you can cut with a knife the tension in the air. When she first encounters Albert, she feels as if they’re old friends already. While two stars of two of the most popular televison shows of all time take us through what for them is also new turf as actors, Holofcener seems to say that we always hurt the ones we love. It’s what we do next that counts.

4 James Gandolfini As A Great Comic Actor, Too (out of 5 stars)

Yes, In Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets a greater charge out of solo sex with internet porn than the real thing with luscious Scarlett Johansson.

He’s got a real problem.

Don Jon more than adequately handles the dilemma with bracing humor, and, to keep things honest, with a pathos that, although kept simple, avoids simplemindedness. Written and directed by Gordon-Levitt, Don Jon isn’t shy to teach a lesson or two, including one that might not be so obvious at first. Yet Gordon-Levitt harvests a lot of fun out of a serious subject.

Jon Martello (Gordon-Levitt), consummate player who’s no slouch at meeting women, is a self-assured lothario in nightclubs, “scoring” women in both senses of the word. He and his two pals–one a schlub, the other a cool black guy–rate potential conquests on a 1-10 scale. Then Jon usually swoops in and makes the connection, typically whisking his newly found partners into a cab en route to some real live sex back at his immaculately-kept apartment.
Problem is, it doesn’t hold a candle to his as-many-as-11 encounters a day he has with his porn pals.

Before we know it, he lands Barbara Sugarman (Johannson–wonderful as a Jewish princess in a Joisey accent)–a declared “dime” on the boys’ rating scale. She tantalizingly teases him in high-octane scenes that showcase both of their acting skills, and even goads him into taking a college night course before finally succumbing to his demands. Barbara’s coming over to dinner at his parents’ will bust your gut. An hilarious Tony Danza as Jon’s father goes about as far as he can without overplaying the character of the macho, leering dad. Brie Larson (Short Term 12) has an intense, minimalist role as Jon’s sister, who throughout the film darts sharp looks at him and the rest of the family while constantly preoccupied on her cellphone. The one scene where she actually speaks springs on the viewer like a bolt of lightning.

The film is curiously explicit without a lot of heavy breathing and next to no nudity. It refuses to saunter into Cliche-Land once Barbara gets a load of Jon’s clandestine hobby, a practice she abhors as much as his dishonesty in the relationship. Jon’s addiction meets Barbara’s anger in a veritable train wreck of their individual expectations. Helping smooth the rocky road is the reliably sharp Julianne Moore as a sensitive older woman Jon meets at his night class.

Don Jon may paint itself into a corner where only somewhat broad brushstrokes can save the day but its lesson are heartfelt and authentic. Its humor meshes well with its sober-mindedness–no easy trick here. The kid from Third Rock From The Sun is not only a frontline actor (and a very good one here) but now a director who knows how to handle a story. For starters, he picked a tough subject and aced it.

4 What Turns Out To Be Better Than Scarlet Johansson? (out of 5 stars)

Bringing to mind vintage David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac), Denis Villeneuve tampers wit the formula of the police procedural, elevating it to the highly original. Dense enough to favor complexity over simple solutions, Prisoners will keep you guessing while invoking a character-driven sense of gloom and foreboding.

Two young girls disappear while their families are sharing Thanksgiving together. Earlier, their older brother. while out on a walk with them, had spotted an RV camper parked on one of the otherwise empty streets of their unnamed Pennsylvania town. The driver of the vehicle, a hapless Paul Dano, is soon apprehended but then let go due to insufficient grounds for arrest. Incidentally, he “has the I.Q. of a ten-year-old.” This will not stop one of the girls’ fathers, a surefooted Hugh Jackman, from pursuing both lead investigating cop Jake Gyllenhaal, and eventually Dano himself, in a fit of revenge-seeking. Terence Howard and Viola Davis are the other set of parents, who eventually face moral decisions that no parent will ever want to face. Oscar-winner Melissa Leo plays Dano’s mom, and Maria Bello as Jackman’s wife, round out this cast made in heaven.

Gyllenhaal, fresh off a fine performance in the crazed, very good End of Watch, seems to have a knack for playing cops who portray a depth of emotion while still coming across as genuine cops. Jackman may be the bigger story here, though. In a role that could have easily been overplayed, he displays a fierceness that somehow still seems grounded in, paradoxically, a solid if skewed sense of judgement. (Incidentally, there’s almost a temptation here to equate the movie’s core underlying theme of a moral ambivalence regarding the use of force with a sociopolitical symbolism regarding ends justifying the means that would imitate such Zero Dark Thirty discussions.)

Villeneuve directed the epic-sized yet scaled to razor-precision Incendies, one of the very best films of 2011, while the Canadian director was still working in his native French. Here he has taken on the Hollywood studio multiplex form. He shows no lessening of his indie skills, focusing on intensely personal and realistic scenes between basically good people at odds both with their vexing situations, and themselves. As a thriller, Prisoners is basically airtight. Every moment rings plausible–which isn’t to say it’s always easy to figure out. Villeneuve knows when to avoid the big Hollywood payoff scene. His dissolves and fadeouts often come, refreshingly, a step before overkill. The film conveys a dark sense of malice yet its violence–at times intense–remains miles away from feeling exploitative. When characters consistently behave in a fashion that feels believable and never made up out of whole cloth, the result earns its own authenticity–no matter how zany the plot seems on the surface. It’s always refreshing to see a major director unveil himself before our eyes.

4 Revenge Not Sweet (out of 5 stars)

In a film strikingly out of harmony, parallel strains of comedy and action jarringly clash in The Family. Usually likeable crowd-pleaser Luc Besson steers a trio of AAA-list actors (Robert DeNiro, Tommy Lee Jones and Michele Pfeiffer) into a cul-de-sac of scenes that far too often miss hitting the funny bone. In fact, The Family is far more a “smile” movie than an out-and-out “laugh” one.

DeNiro, fresh off performances in The Silver Linings Playbook and Limitless that suggested he was priming for a comeback, here plays a mob guy who drags his family into a witness-protection program. In France. Thus the French director Besson can play both ends of the cultural clash with the nitty-gritty Brooklyn family that includes a take-no-shit wife (a very good Pfeiffer, channeling her Married To The Mob character) and two kids who couldn’t be more chips-off-the-old-block. Before long, Pfeiffer blows up a grocery store after overhearing anti-American sentiments from the salesclerks. Her character may have “working class” written all over it but this chick’s fluent in French. The kids have their own mean streaks that don’t exactly rise to the top of the moral ramparts. Belle (Diana Agron of Glee) is pretty deft at wielding a tennis racket against a male aggressor.

Giovanni Manzoni (DeNiro), a piece of work who has his moments here, can’t sit still and wantonly gives a plummer he doesn’t like a beating but takes him to the hospital afterward to show he’s not such a bad guy. Later, Gio gives a businessman responsible for the brown water that comes out of his faucet, a lesson that includes a chain tied to the back of the car. In between, he spars with FBI agent Tommy Lee, assigned to monitor him, and starts writing his memoir. An American-style cookout brings together our outsider family with the townspeople. It includes Gio (fantasy only this time) shoving a French guy’s face on the hot grill after Frenchy gave him a bit of unsolicited barbecuing advice.

It’s the kind of town where only a few policemen are present at the police station–a detail that leads to a bunch of gangsters (you’ll spot a couple of veterans of The Sopranos in this group of course) lurching after the informant Gio for a less than climactic finale. You don’t want to know how they find out his whereabouts. It’s one of those implausible plot facilitators that stretches patience so thin you’ll want to shriek a loud “No” in the movie theater.

Besson (the brilliant La Femme Nikita, The Professional) has a talent for over-the-top violence. He revels in its exaltation, often with such high craftsmanship it forces the viewer to ignore his utter brusqueness and indelicacy in favor of rolling with it for maximum kicks. He even instills a genuine admiration for attempting a project like The Family. Occasionally a sharp shift in tone will come mid-scene , leaving a feeling of “Are you kidding?–hmm, that was pretty good.” Far too often, it feels like he’s spinning his wheels.

DeNiro fans shouldn’t give up on him, though. Even though he has the lame The Big Wedding and the miserable New Year’s Eve on his recent credits, there’s hope another Silver Linings comes his way. Meanwhile, there’s a scene in The Family where Gio, somehow mistaken for a notable author, is asked to watch Goodfellas with the local French film society. While Besson is having his little joke as Gio reflects on the all-too-familiar DeNiro character in the film, see if the scene doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies as you realize here’s the great DeNiro reduced to parodying his former acting glory like some poor huckster on The Shopping Channel.

2.5 Comedies Short on Laughs (out of 5)

Wong Kar-Wai hasn’t released a new film in six years. I was a defender and proponent of his previous film, My Blueberry Nights (almost universally trashed), loved the film before that, the brilliant sci-fi-esque 2046, and highly appreciated his earlier critically acclaimed films such as In The Mood For Love and Chung King Express. So it was with much anticipation that I approached his new film, a biopic of Ip Man (Tony Leung, in a white hat), an influential teacher of Bruce Lee (Lee makes no appearance here).

Despite the lead actors spending years in training to do their own martial arts fight scenes, despite the excellent fight-scene choreography from Yuen Wo Ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Kill Bill; The Matrix), and despite the usual exquisite craftsmanship from Wong and master cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd, unfortunately the result leaves more than a little to be desired. Ziyi Zhang, whose fictional character eventually takes over the film, is her usual mesmerizing self, but once she put up her sleeves and got rolling in a fight, I kept wishing for the vastly more exciting kung fu scenes in Zhang Yimou’s excellent 2004 film, House of Flying Daggers.

Maybe I need to take a course in Mid-20th Century Chinese politics to get more jazzed about The Grandmaster, or maybe the missing large chunks that were cut out from the film will somehow turn on the light switch once the director’s cut hits, but I have to admit I probably won’t be waiting around for it.

The criticism on Wong has been that he can be superficial–all amazing and gorgeous surface, little depth.
Here, in telling the story of how Ip Man, in the 1930s, decided to end the bickering between the Northern and Southern Chinese styles of kung fu, and bring together the two styles, I reluctantly couldn’t agree more. Lifeless characters seem to be looking around for some air as the scene shifts to Hong Kong after the Japanese Army invades.

While Wong’s images often evoke feeling, here it’s far too hit and miss. Although the scene where Ip Man wards off a razor with a set of chopsticks is pretty cool.

2 1/2 Maybe The Director’s Cut Will Save The Day But I Doubt It (out of 5 stars)