Month: June 2014

Obvious Child tackles the subject of an aspiring stand-up comedian (played by real life stand-up Jenny Slater) who decides to get an abortion after a one-night stand. Just when this bracingly funny film seems too intent on toying with its subject, Slater and director Gillian Robespierre soon shift gears into a resonant realism. The rest of the way they nicely blend the harshly comedic and insight-fully serious elements.

Obvious Child has all the positive trappings of a Frances Ha in capturing the angst of Brooklyn twenty-somethings. Slater, a Saturday Night live vet, conveys an awkward charm as comic Donna Stern. Her musings on her life and relationships are at once edgy and moving, often to the discomfort of her significant other in the back of the comedy club. When she’s not revealing her personal life to to live audiences, Donna receives plenty of advice from her roommate, Nellie (Gaby Hoffman great in Crystal Fairy) or fellow stand-ups Joey (Slater’s real life partner Gabe Liedman) and Sam (David Cross), or a mom (Polly Draper) who’s been through it all herself. Slater is a talented actress capturing a very likable character. Her performance and the writing from Robespierre save the proceedings from what could have easily turned into a cringe-worthy exercise in indulgence.

Jenny’s one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy) is, of course, her polar opposite. With “nice guy” written all over him, he’s a convenient, straight-laced rebound after she’s dumped by her boyfriend for one of her friends. In no way reminiscent of her artsy ex, Max perseveres in trying to keep in touch with her after the hookup. He knows nothing of her intention to terminate in a couple of weeks. What he does find out quickly is if you enter into Donna’s confessional world, your life soon is all over the stage for public consumption. It’s no spoiler that he turns out to have more depth than is first apparent.

Obvious Child will receive many accolades for being gutsy in a world of Hollywood movies where the subject of abortion is either a suppressed subplot or a main theme taking the safe way out (Juno, Knocked Up). The highly politically and religiously charged subject is often said to be a 50/50 split right down the middle regarding public opinion. Yet here is surprisingly a rare specimen of a film that allows the pro-choice view to be presented in a thought-provoking, paradoxically mature manner. That it takes a bona fide romantic comedy to get us there is all the more ironic and compelling.

4 Stand-up Comedians and Stand-Up Characters (out of 5 stars)

Let’s first get something out of the way. It’s just too good to be true that a running theme in Jersey Boys depicts a creative relationship between Four Seasons group members Bob Gaudio and lead singer Frankie Valli (both executive producers of the film) while leaving out a key element in the group’s success. Producer Bob Crewe’s actual role as co-writer (along with Gaudio) of the group’s many hits goes ignored in 84-year-old Clint Eastwood’s film version of the musical stage hit. It gets so weird that their one pop smash co-written by Crewe without Gaudio (“Let’s Hang On”) is nowhere to be found in the film while every other big hit is honored. One would have no idea from Jersey Boys that Crewe is anything more than a producer and cheerleader for the group that went on to sell more than 100 million records. Go figure. And while poetic license in a film of this sort is nothing new, a timeline involving a key event surrounding Valli’s daughter is fudged by a full thirteen years and, to boot, Valli sings “My Eyes Adored You” to her a decade before it was written. (It also seems an oddly inappropriate choice for a father-to-daughter song.)

Yet Jersey Boys contains enough impact onscreen that getting upset by factual fibs can seem like mere quibbling. Beginning with Tony-winner John Lloyd Young as a convincing Frankie Castelluccio turned Frankie Valli, Jersey Boys also benefits cinematically from Eastwood’s old school style. Toning down what apparently was a hyped musical barrage in the stage presentation (this reviewer has not seen the play), Eastwood turns up the dramatic undertones. The boys, except for Gaudio (Erich Bergen), came from a working class background replete with troubles with the law and family crises. Supporting actors like Kathrine Narducci as Frankie’s protective mom and Joseph Russo as Joey Pesci (yes, THAT Joey Pesci) add flavor to the proceedings.

Saliently presented and superbly aided by a fine attention for period detail, Eastwood’s capturing of the 1950s and early 1960s is superb. His casting of Valli and bad-boy bandleader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) pays off; both are highly believable characters. Although beset by occasional cliches and plot facilitators, the film works well enough in between its musical numbers to enhance the celebration. Shortcuts sure are present though. When knocking on doors in The Brill Building, the boys run into Crewe (Mike Doyle) in the hallway: we’re given no explanation on how they know each other. Crewe will eventually listen to a few bars of “Sherry” over the phone and flip out over how great it sounds. No mention is made of the Four Seasons as the first white act to record on the black label, VeeJay and its implications on breaking racial barriers in radio programming. Yet Eastwood finds the time to add a pretentious scene of a member of the band watching Eastwood on TV in an old Rawhide episode.

Jersey Boys keys in on the relationship of straight-arrow Valli with the unhinged spendthrift DeVito. Early in the film DeVito exclaims there are three ways to get out of the neighborhood–going into the army, getting “mobbed-up,” and going for fame. He and his friends had two out of three covered: in between singing in the group The Four Lovers, the boys screw up petty crime heists. DeVito goes to a loanshark to rustle up funds for a demo.

A few years later The Four Season have a string of Number One and Top Ten hits. DeVito becomes increasingly protective of his role as the band’s business leader as he becomes more and more jealous of the closeness between Valli and Gaudio, who instantly brings a previously nonexistent professionalism to the group. (Not long before meeting the group in 1958, Gaudio had already achieved a notoriety when at the age of 15 he composed the novelty hit “Who Wears Short Shorts?” while guitarist of The Royal Teens.)

In a tense scene at the mansion of mob boss Angelo “Gyp” Decarlo (Christopher Walken), the previously complacent Valli stiffens his spine and agrees to take on a big debt that DeVito secretly brought on the group’s shoulders. Ever loyal, Valli, despite family problems, shows a huge reservoir of drive. When the group disintegrates around him he seems to grow stronger. The fun and games may be in the past, but the undying memory of four guys harmonizing under a street lamp endures.

Young not only deftly handles the unique falsetto of Valli, he gives a performance that nicely delves into the dramatic nuances of a reserved and troubled hero. Looming in the film’s epilogue is the spirit of the American underdog defiantly reveling in the simple, bouncy melodies of a baby boomer-era nostalgia gone exultant.

3.5 Just Four Guys Trying To Get Out Of The Neighborhood (out of 5 stars)

In a perfect world, by its sheer innocuousness a film like The Grand Seduction would deflect harsh judgement. Problem is, the goings-on in this film reach so far into the corny corner, they did finally transform this viewer’s tolerance from initial submission straight to irritability. Heaven forbid how much dumber still this would have been had it not had an actor as fine as Brendan Gleeson in the lead.

Gleeson plays the ringleader in a scheme to bring a factory of some sort to Tickle Head, a harbor in Newfoundland with barely more than a hundred residents. The former fishing community now lies in deep unemployment with nearly everyone on the dole. Gleeson still collects a check made out to a dead relative. This lack of integrity doesn’t stop him from taking on the mayoral duties when the town’s former mayor leaves to work airport security. Gleeson’s motivation for public service transcends possible altruistic motives after his wife leaves to go work in a factory in the city. In a contrived plot facilitator, Tickle Head’s factory can only happen if the town contains a medical doctor, which it doesn’t. So when the former mayor gets ready to bust a physician (Taylor Kitsch) trying to enter Canadian customs with a load of cocaine, the wheels are somehow set in motion for the doctor to serve a six-month community service stint in Tickle Head in order to duck more serious charges.

Thus begins the seduction. In order to get the doc to move in permanently, Gleeson rounds up a gaggle of devices meant to wow the doc. They range from dubious (the hockey-loving townspeople pretend to actually love and play cricket (of which the doc is a big fan, despite none of them having a a clue about it) to lamebrained (they leave scattered bills around the ground to stimulate any fortuitous karmic feelings on his part). They also tap his phone conversations to discover things like his penchant for lamb dhansak, which–presto!–the lone restaurant in town suddenly finds itself serving. The town’s seemingly lone eligible woman (Liane Balaban) wants nothing to do with pretending to be interested in the doc, but Gleeson persists.

Directed by Don McKellar (check out his 1998 film Last Night) and written by Ken Scott, who previously wrote a French Canadian version entitled La Grande Seduction, The Grand Seduction shows little restraint when it comes to mawkish dynamics. Its farcical template finally steps aside and the film begs to be taken seriously once the yucks give way to sentimentality. Gleeson will intermittently tickle your fancy, but there is little else in Tickle Head besides warmed-over frays into a too often fishy spectacle.

2.5 Shopworn Fish Tales (out of 5 stars)

Nowadays 68-year-old Shep Gordon loves his home in Maui and reflects on having hung out with the Dalai Lama. Before he goes on to manage the likes of Alice Cooper and Anne Murray, start a film studio, and amass a probable vast fortune and a wealth of celebrity friends, we are treated to his reminiscence of starting at the bottom. At the film’s outset, broke, high, and ramped up to deal drugs, he checks in at a Los Angeles motel. His story goes he accidentally encounters Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix after witnessing their poolside inflagrante delicto. Jimi suggests he become a talent manager and there goes Alice Cooper, in another room at the motel–why not him? (Jim Morrison also resided there but one guesses he already had representation). If you think this is breezy stuff, get ready for the rest of the film: an entertaining if swaggering biopic of a guy everyone seems to love–at least everyone interviewed here. The list of worshippers includes Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Willie Nelson, Tom Arnold (who cares), and the director of the film, Mike Myers.

If inside celebrity stories appeal to you and the machinations of music biz deals fascinate your curiosity, Supermensch is a more than decent way to kill an hour and a half. The little guy makes good, overindulges in booze and drugs and makes it even bigger. Cunning trumps talent in breaking musical acts. Convincing John Lennon and a few of his buddies including Mickey Dolenz to pose in a picture with Anne Murray to give her proper rock ‘n roll cred seems to be all she needs to vault her way to platinum sales.

It turns out Gordon also virtually invented the celebrity chef after empathizing with talented cooks’ underpaid status at the time. Just like running into Janis and Jimi, he has the luck of the gods with him once he places Emeril Lagasse and many other now famous chefs on the newly emerging Food Network. Emeril’s now-tired signature “bam” when he merely threw a little spice garnish at the end of preparing a dish was a whole lot like Cooper tossing a live chicken to his audience so they could mutilate it and rub the blood all over. Gordon wallows in his own ability to repeatedly find the right gimmick.

Then Gordon walks away from managing his chefs because he wasn’t taking any money doing it and decides he needs to retire and find his own life. All that crazy fun manipulating the public (giving them what they want?) with the various manufactured antics of Alice Cooper, or of dangerously going buck up against a corrupt black “chitlin circuit” and booking acts like Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Van Dross in white concert halls where they actually started getting paid–well it took so much out of him, he needed a rest. Even an estranged girlfriend’s extended family that he decides to support after hearing of her death, are basically strangers until he reaches out. So there’s a sadness when after a very dangerous surgery where he’s unconscious for days, he wakes up to find a paid assistant as the only one greeting him. A marriage a few years earlier to a younger woman went el foldo when, he says, she didn’t want to go to a doctor to help them conceive a child. She is not heard from in the film. Neither is Sharon Stone, one of the many and apparently more longstanding of this chronic womanizer’s girlfriends. Nor is his business partner, Joe Greenberg, who apparently had much to do with springing Alice Cooper into fame and fortune.

There’s a lot of fun to be had here but simultaneously the levity begets serious questions. Myers may be holding back from going a little deeper because there’s a helluva interesting party story being told here, but is it also because he might be fearful of what more digging might bring up? Sure, Gordon is quoted as saying fame in and of itself can never be a positive. When he survives the near-death experience, though, or talks about the Dalai Lama, the spirituality comes forth in crumbs rather than anything more substantial. I was left feeling Myers likely was too reverential to his hero to mine any subterranean stuff on his subject because the alternative that Gordon really is a supermensch in all his unblemished glory seems too hollow for this to be the whole story.

As a footnote, I wish we were given at least a little something more than a mention on Blondie or early Pink Floyd, both of whom Gordon also managed. Paying Deborah Harry and Syd Barrett more respect would have nicely washed down the gobs of Alice Cooper and Anne Murray thrust upon us as forced (and very lucky) celebrities.

3.5 School’s Out For This Worshipful Biopic (out of 5 stars)

It’s a small pity many more viewers will catch this admittedly entertaining film than 2011’s far better Source Code. While both are sci-fi endeavors with a Groundhog Day-like time-loop as their touchstone, Edge Of Tomorrow edges into a muddled zone of plausibility despite its highly engaging first half. Luckily, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt play the leads and it surely doesn’t hurt having Bill Pullman around in a key supporting role. Basically on sold ground as a futuristic actioner, Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne identity, and the under-appreciated Go), grapples with eventually trying to do too much. It does nice things with the notion that saving the world from Mimics, alien creatures far smarter than we are, boils down to the will of a reluctant hero.

Cruise, rarely better, convincingly plays Major William Cage, a fish out of water who is suddenly thrust into combat from his prior duty as a PR liaison despite his status as an honorary officer who had previously been protected from the front lines. When it sure looks like he’s killed after parachuting into a nasty swarm of the hyper-spider/octopus-like aliens, he abruptly wakes up and realizes he’s back at a point in time before boarding the combat plane. He’ll go on to relive the same mission, always coming back to the same morning. He soon re-encounters his antagonistic sergeant (Pullman), who had pegged Cruise as a deserter in a stolen officer’s uniform. In a hop, skip, and a jump Cruise is hobnobbing with a legendary helmetless warrior, Rita Vrataski, “The Angel of Verdum,” (Blunt), who must be famous since her mug is plastered on the side of a bus. She’ll come to train him; from all the implied repetition he’ll come to get to know her more than is wise for the sake of their mission.

An unusual alien warfare strategy backfires and Cruise suddenly possesses an errant power that can be kept alive by his making sure he dies each time he goes through the cycle again. With the fearless Blunt and a know-it-all wacky scientist leading the way, he tries each time to go a little further to capturing the Omega, the “brain” of the alien forces. Take away the charismatic Cruise and the non-action segments of this film would probably be dull. His humor in dealing with the repetition’s many challenges keeps Edge Of Tomorrow from sinking into just-another-big-budget-cool-special-effects-flick territory.

Based on a 2004 novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, it’s original title was All You Need Is Kill. Better it should have been changed to All You Need Is Inconsistency. The plot’s increasing complications, trying their damnest to pull you out of the story, verge on going twist-and-turn-happy. The nice thing about Source Code is it scaled down the fuzziness, then saved the headscratcher for its wallop of an ending, rather than the other way around. In Edge Of Tomorrow, the layers of density build up, only to lead to a near-silly Hollywood ending that’s totally inconsistent with the plot’s own logic. It sure is fun watching Cruise and Blunt though.

3.5 Blunt Edges Of Cruise (out of 5 stars)

You would think disease films are the bane of critics far and wide. The casual assumption is here comes another Love Story in its umpteenth incarnation replete with maudlin sentimentality and wooden stereotype characters. This film treatment of the wildly popular young adult novel The Fault In Our Stars manages to avoid much of the eye-rolling-inducing cliches present in the genre. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Spectacular Now, 500 Days Of Summer) harbor both a respect for their source material and a knack for writing interesting enough witticisms that go a long way toward defraying the emotional pain of its three central characters.

However, in a star-making turn, Shailene Woodley (The Descendants, The Spectacular Now) takes her character, Hazel, a sixteen-year-old with stage-four cancer, into a dimension that propels what would probably be no more than an average film into an entirely different proposition. Her every expression commands attention as she wheels around her ever-present oxygen tank. Basically friendless at the film’s outset, she meets an outgoing charmer at a church-based support group she attends at the urging of her mom (Laura Dern), who fears Hazel has sunk into depression. Gus (Ansel Elgort), who is high on life after his disease has gone into remission, sports an amputated leg and loads of panache. Gus and Hazel are soon exchanging late night text messages and gravitating toward each other in a big way, although they profess to bypass the boyfriend/girlfriend thing.

The Fault In Our Stars contains a third character, Isaac (Nat Wolff, the best thing about the new film Palo Alto) who seems a lot more upset that his girlfriend is dumping him than the fact that his one good eye will also go sightless after a surgery that scares her off. You don’t just need a decent screenplay to pull off the kind of flip, irreverent reactions these characters have to their plight. Actors the caliber of Woodley and Wolff need to bring it home, and it happens here nicely. Less successful is Elgort, rather one-dimensional, especially compared to Miles Teller, Woodley’s counterpart in The Spectacular Now. The Spectacular Now is the better film but The Fault In Our Stars allows Woodley to tackle a much more complex character. She is worth the price of admission and then some. Willem Dafoe, in yet another villainous role, plays an expatriate author who Hazel is bent on contacting in his hometown of Amsterdam. He’s an annoying character–both by design and by Dafoe’s overplaying him. It’s lucky the kids in the film are around to act rings around him.

3.5 Faults In Our Stereotypes (out of 5 stars)