Month: August 2014

British comics Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan share an amusing penchant for performing incessant spot-on impressions in The Trip To Italy. In Michael Winterbottom’s sequel to 2011’s The Trip, the semi-fictional pair have the enviable task to take an all-expenses-paid excursion along Italy’s Liguria and Amalfi coast. Their mission: write a few reviews of high-end restaurants and lavish hotels for The Observer. Of course, it’s all an excuse for Rob and Steve to relentlessly outdo each other with competing impersonations of Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Hugh Grant, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. The brilliant-looking food is intermittently tossed in as so much window dressing, as are scenes of the two exploiting their celebrity and humor for the sake of exploring the good graces of a couple of female hosts they meet along the way.

The Trip is Coogan and Winterbottom’s fourth feature together (see the remarkable 24-Hour Party People). Coogan, best known in England for his portrayal of spoof talk show host Alan Partridge, this time around takes a backseat to the even-lesser-known-in-America Brydon. Coogan’s aloofness is offset by Brydon’s directness. In between the clowning, Brydon makes a half-hearted attempt to deal with his unfaithfulness to his unseen wife, who is home juggling the kids and the household. He briefly further laments the taking of a job as a lead in a fictitious Michael Mann movie that will keep him away from home for an even greater length of time but as soon as these more serious subjects come along they’re just as quickly set aside for more jokes and impressions. Coogan’s fictitious teenage son joins the pair toward the end of the trip, and Coogan makes an attempt to bring the two, who’ve been less than close, into a more meaningful space. Without these asides, there is essentially no plot here. With them there is a plot unsatisfying in its half-baked attempt at pathos. But, boy, those impressions!

Winterbottom’s impressive film catalog brags a variety of styles, from the excellent documentary The Road To Guantanamo to the nefarious X-rated 9 Songs. Here he’s managed to make a film about two guys visiting one of the most beautiful areas of the world, sharing a camaraderie yet squabbling every chance they get, affectionately bickering while also managing to earnestly critique each other and themselves. Of course, the how-much-of-it-is autobiographical question is the elephant in the room. The pair use their real names to make more immediate their intriguing exploration of male competitiveness and vanity. They have a go at mortality as well. Much is made of their retracing sites important to the lives of romantic poets Byron and Shelley, both British expatriates who died at 36 and 29 respectively. Brydon recalls many tidbits of their lives, including their intemperate personal lives. When he recites lines from Shelly in the perfect voice of fellow-Welshman Richard Burton, it’s both hilarious and poignant.

Now for a couple of spoilers. The funniest bit may be Brydon donning a man-in-a-box voice and carrying on a conversation with the plaster cast of a dead Pompeiian locked in a glass case. The funniest joke: Coogan, who throughout the film has been lamenting his own waning sexual attractiveness: “She has a lovely gait.” Brydon: “Probably padlocked.”

4 Celebrity Impressions Gone Wild, With A Dash of Pathos (out of 5 stars)

Family values, family values. It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. There’s no “I” in team. The wording of these bromides is changed slightly but they come thick and heavy in When The Game Stands Tall. Jim Caviezel plays high school coach Bob Ladoucer whose team at De La Salle high school has won 151 straight games, and he turns into a twitching teapot of repressed rage at the mere mention of “the streak.” It’s enough to give you a heart attack, something coach Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel)) experiences early in the film. The Bible he often quotes makes no endorsement of the cigarettes Bob sneaks after practice but, unlike his team, he’s not perfect.

His perky wife Bev (Laura Dern) finds him distant and ignoring of his kids in favor of all the football. Banned from coaching by his doctor, he’s given a chance by the heart attack to get closer to his teenage son, a wide receiver who finally is ready to move into a starting role on the team. Not so fast. “When I needed a father, I got a coach. Now that I need a coach, I get a father,” he complains. Sounds like his son needs to fill out one of the “commitment cards” coach Bob has his players compose.

Cazaviel has some fine moments, especially in dealing with a subsequent tragedy that befalls the team. Mostly, though, the former star of The Passion Of The Christ comes off pure vanilla and often listless. Bev tells him a story that his father, a clergyman, relays to her just before he died: if he wasn’t wearing his collar and she encountered the two men, she would definitely think his son was the minister. Yet Bev’s own leanings are anything but secular by film’s end when she righteously straightens out an obstreperous parent of a player. Yep, in a tall tale concocted just for the film, the star running back of the team is at odds with his dad. Chris Ryan (Alexander Ludwig) buys the team-first message but dad (Clancy Brown) keeps pushing him to think of himself and break an individual scoring record of which he’s within shouting distance. The dad is such an overwrought character director Thomas Carter might as well have had him in military gear brandishing a revolver while he robs little old ladies. He’s a brute even more menacing than an enormous defensive lineman named Buster, one of many 300-pounders who line up for the Long Beach Poly team that is De La Salle’s climactic foe in the film.

To give you an idea of the film’s religiosity, the time frame of this legendary game between the two powerhouses is drastically altered. In reality it was played in 2001, during DeLa Salle’s massive streak. In the film it is moved up three years to well after the team begins to lose. Without the change, this is just another sports movie, albeit one with dramatically well-done football sequences thanks to veteran stunt coordinator Allan Graf. With the change, the screenplay, based on the book by Neil Hayes, can proceed to drag out the old saws of male bonding, self sacrifice, and piety. Not that the film isn’t entertaining. When De La Salle players celebrate championships by sliding head first into the end zone, or coach Bob admonishes Ryan for a somersault over the goal line, the film creates sparks of adrenaline produced by the best of sports films.

In the big game Long Beach Poly suits up 100 players on a 100-degree day while De La Salle’s roster contains less than half as many. Since some exhaustingly play both on offense and defense, Ladoucer appoints the team trainer to actually make the second-half substitutions, informing him that under no circumstance will he sacrifice any player’s health for a win. Enter Arturo (Matthew Frias), a Rudy-like character who weighs closer to 100 pounds than 200. You can guess what happens.

What is less easy to foresee is the resolution between Chris and his cartoonish dad. It’s so preposterous it’ll have you scratching your head. (It’s even more preposterous that the film substitutes the white Chris Ryan for the black Maurice Jones-Drew, who played for De La Salle in the big game and is currently an Oakland Raider). Interestingly, controversial former Eagle wide receiver DeSean Jackson played at Long Beach Poly just after the big showdown with De La Salle. For a sequel, Bray could focus on a rematch between the two teams with Jackson giving Ladoucer one of his infamous gang salutes that helped him get in Chip Kelly’s doghouse.

Based On A True Story With A Lot Of Made Up Stuff… 2.5 (out of 5 stars)

As a chaser to Richard Linklater’s monumental Boyhood, take a peek at this Sundance award-winning documentary profiling three destitute white kids from rural Missouri. Their level of poverty and all-around impoverishment makes Linklater’s screen kid look like he’s part of the Trump family.

Three distinctively different kids emerge. One is all-get-out upbeat, another, mostly dour misanthropic; the third, an interesting mess of charismatic, vain, and simpleminded. They hook you.

Directors and first cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo return to a town that Tracy’s dad grew up in, and whose mom was a pillar of the community as an influential teacher. Trust was granted and it shows. When kid #3 (Harley) reveals a big secret mid-film, you get the idea he felt safe doing so–something that was certainly not part of his prior worldview. He sleeps on a couch at his paternal grand mom’s. When it”s time for Halloween trick-or-treating, even though he’s 15 and a little old for it, he designs an ingenious Insane Clown Posse costume. All this repressed creativity going to waste. He makes a point to ask grandma to make sure she captures him smoking a cigarette as she takes photos….

….Kid #2 (Appachey), who’s only 12, also smokes like a chimney. His mom is quite distant although we understand. She explains she jumped from growing up herself at 17 years old at her mom’s house to becoming a mom herself shortly afterward. Near the conclusion of Rich Hill, as her son is headed off to a hearing that will likely send him to a juvenile detention center, she suddenly wakes up and offers him solace. Is she propelled to offer kindness once she’s alleviated of the nuisance of having to deal with this monster on a daily basis?

Kid #1 (Andrew, 14), meanwhile, perseveres despite his family moving their residence what seems like weekly. We wait for a shoe to drop on this kid–it all seems too good to be true. He bonds with his twin sister and even offers his own infirm mom a little parenting. The farthest he goes in losing his positive spirit is a contemplative moment when he wonders aloud if God will see fit to include him in his plans. Meanwhile, his itinerant Dad seems content with pursuing a musician career pipe dream as a Hank Williams impersonator, and with idle dreams of “prospecting for gold.” As a parallel, Appachey dreams of working in China as some sort or art history adept even though he shows no academic chops whatsoever.

Meanwhile Droz Tragos, who won an Emmy for the 2004 documentary Be Good Smile Pretty, spreads the Terence Malick dust a little too thick. While subsequent Fourth of July celebrations bookend the film, there’s a little too much meandering in filler shots of nature that may offer a cultural context alright but seem excessive. But I quibble. Rich Hill is a hell of a documentary. It will have you wondering what happens to these kids as time goes on. It also convincingly portrays American poverty as anything but an urban-and-black exclusive enterprise.

4.0 Rural Poor Kids You Won’t Soon Forget (out of 5 stars)

The goal: get rid of suffering and dissension and along with them, any shade of diverse thinking. First, trash emotion–have everyone pop pills everyday to suppress it. Leave out books, animals, and any changes in the weather while we’re at it. Now eliminate color. Yes, color.

Such is the world of The Giver, the new film based on the 20-year-old enormously popular Lois Lowry young reader novel. It’s a classless (and apparently race-free) society where everyone is so robotically numb that no one seems to notice the presence of the establishment’s shackles on their every thought and emotion. Jonas (a bland Brenton Thwaites) is chosen as the one young person who will get lessons in the old ways of the world, as The Receiver of Memory if you will. (Strangely, he’s not even a teenager yet in the book, yet here he’s of college age).

Jonas, to his own surprise, is chosen as the one lucky person who will have the wizened The Giver (Jeff Bridges) as a mentor who will convey to him humanity’s old, abandoned ways….Before you start thinking, “Hey who,wouldn’t want Jeff Bridges as a teacher?” the film quickly warns that the last young person (a brief Taylor Swift cameo) who ventured into a tutorial with The Giver ended up going through some horrible experience. And just in case you’re feeling skeptical about all this foreboding, Meryl Streep is around as The Chief Elder, a high lord of some sort who goes through the film materializing holographically to repeatedly warn The Giver not to go too far. The Giver seems to have an immunity from receiving any real discipline from The Chief Elder, though. At least at first.

Before I get into just how badly this world of uber-conformity sucks, I can’t help but point out that the esteemed Bridges (coming off a starring role in the bomb R.I.P.D) seems out of sorts here. Maybe it’s the “accent” he curiously adopts for the film–a speech peculiarity that seems like either someone in desperate need of major dental bridge work or a far more pedestrian suffering from a mouthful of marbles. Streep is no less annoying. The woman who can usually do no wrong merely goes through the motions here. She seems as bored by this well-meaning but vacuous film as the rest of us.

Now imagine a world where emotions like love are never expressed, where people seem to all do the same things, where curfews exist, and sex, pejoratively referred to as “stirrings,” apparently rarely rears its head. (The screenplay never addresses it but the assumption is soon made that offspring are cloned in this “perfect” world). War and hunger have been eliminated but little of any worth remains. Everyone smiles, nonetheless, which seems extra strange since there’s no fun going on.

Essentially it’s a phony world but what especially stings here is the film itself does such an utterly
lousy job making this society believable. A world that discards its elders into a fuzzy “Elsewhere” ought to be bad enough to wake up a rebellious streak in Jonas once he stop taking his pills. However, not until until Jonas’ dad (Peter Skarsgard) is exposed doing an even bigger nasty, does Jonas feel compelled to act. By this time, he’s been given a magical gift from The Giver to actually be able to feel the very things missing in his world: love and joy but also war and racism. Unlike the novel, which conjured up micro portions of these forbidden experiences, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide decide to go macro. By the time Jonas is done with his experiment, he’s been to both the Tiananmen Square rebellion and under fire on the frontlines in a Vietnam.

Director Phillip Noyce’s The Giver, rife with undeveloped potential, sputters toward a climax and an ending that are both as laughable as they are gratuitous. They involve a baby and a sled and wads of misguided hooey. In case it’s all a bit much, comedic irony is aptly provided in the character of Jonas’ mom. Even more robotic than the rest of them, it’s none other than Katie Holmes. One can only wonder, given all the practice she received bearing the brunt of Tom Cruise’s Scientology claptrap, if this role wasn’t a lot easier to grasp.

A Toothless, Shabby Warning of What Visionless Conformity May Deliver….2 stars (out of 5)

The main thing I wished to grab hold of from a James Brown biopic was a facsimile of the incredible rush I’d received when I saw him live at The Arena in Philadelphia in the late 1960’s. Get On Up may not quite get all the way there there but it’s a more than adequate job given the Herculean task of an actor having to actually step into Brown’s iconic shoes and make magic. Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson in “42”) has the added advantage he doesn’t have to actually sing since the film wisely uses original, remixed Brown recordings. As far as the intense choreography and urgency of Brown’s stage movements, according to my memories of Brown live and from film and TV takes, Boseman gets about three-quarters of the way there on the energy scale. Brown at his peak may have been the most intense live frontman in the history of pop music, so that’s no small feat.

Boseman adroitly navigates the various spans of James Brown’s myriad career. Director Tate Taylor, however, skitters around a bit too haphazardly in his flashback-and-then-forward-again hopscotching between the various phases. The film’s continuity is hardly neat and clean yet what Taylor lacks in cohesion, he makes up for in drawing up dramatic scenes from a decidedly self-reliant and courageous life. Brown was not only Mr. Dynamite on stage, but he was an instinctive entrepreneur, a creative if controlling perfectionist as a musical arranger, and an almost comical mess in his personal life. Get On Up cuts through the clutter with an earnest attempt to explain communication and personal relationship failures with juxtaposed scenes of Brown’s terribly sad and nightmarishly brutal childhood.

Abandoned by both parents, he went from a South Carolina sharecropper’s shack to growing up in a Georgia brothel, then spent nearly three years in jail for attempting to steal a man’s three-piece suit (he’d previously swiped a pair of shoes off a lynched man). The film connects the dots for us that Brown’s lifelong mistrust of people had an easily identifiable cause. When a middle-aged Brown is apprehended after a mad police highway chase scene, he finally gives up after finding himself cornered. The camera shifts from a plethora of cops with their guns cocked and pointed back to Brown’s stopped pickup truck. The adult man inside the truck who previously had been waving a loaded shotgun has suddenly transformed into Brown as a young boy (played alternately by the twins Jamarion and Jordan Scott).

Taylor also directed The Help and he again brings along Viola Davis (as Brown’s mom) and Octavia Spencer (as an aunt who runs the brothel), and some decently done emotional money shots. He makes sure Brown’s legacy doesn’t come in for too big a beating despite Brown’s practice of domestic abuse and his equally troubling bluntness toward his band mates, especially lifelong partner Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis). There’s an admirable appreciation here for Brown’s fresh charisma and essentially smart worldview as his saving grace. He doesn’t always play nice but he usually plays real.

Now back to those live scenes. It’s all here: the groundbreaking early 60s Live At The Apollo shows, the riot-preventing post-King assassination Boston concert, the splits, the jumps, the twirls. We’ll have to wait for the forthcoming “Mr. Dynamite” documentary to fully show Brown in action, but Get On Up is a great start to acquainting yourself with the Godfather of Soul, the most sampled musician of all time (4,000 samples and counting), and a one-of-a-kind unforgettable genius, personal flaws and all.

4 Slides Across this Stage Like Nobody Else Before or Since (out of 5 stars)

Colin Firth plays Stanley, a frenetic, highfaluting Houdini-like magician who performs in Chinese makeup and relishes debunking spiritual mediums in his spare time. In Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight, his 44th film, Stanley poses as an “import-export” businessman and goes after young spiritualist Sophie Baker (Emma Stone). Stanley, according to his fellow magician sidekick, possess “all the warmth of a typhoid epidemic.” We first encounter the steel-eyed, unflinching Wei Ling Su berating his employees after a magic show. Stanley provides us with a witty ride behind a swank 1920s French Riviera backdrop. He quickly attempts to unravel Sophie but before long the tables are turned and his armor of rationality loosens up–first gradually, then in a sudden epiphany.

Allen maintains his usual rhythmic finesse, perfectly balancing the metaphysical musings with his idiosyncratic counterpoint wisecracks. At first. As the film proceeds, however, the screenplays tightness gradually goes somewhat flaccid. One of the final scenes, an extended drawing room interplay between Firth and his aunt (a very good Eileen Atkins) goes on about twice as long as it might have. Firth and Stone also get caught in a rainstorm and need to take refuge in a curiously unoccupied, yet wide-open observatory (a blatant reprise from a similar scene in Manhattan.)

Allen’s bag of tricks, however, even when they skittishly drift into the formulaic (he’s been doing a lot of the same themes for 45 years) still deliver. Magic In The Moonlight, while hardly top-shelf Allen, is far from a dud. Stone, recently cast as a lead in Allen’s next film project, doesn’t miss a beat in picking up the Woody rhythms. Highly capable of non-verbal expressiveness, she entertainingly brings to life a unique character. Sophie is exotic not just because of her chosen trade, but also by virtue of being a working class American amidst a backdrop of monied Americans and Brits in Europe. The family who hosts her ooze wealth through their pores. The matriarch in the family happily anticipates Sophie’s seance conjuring up the spirit of her dead husband, while her son serenades Sophie with a ukulele and proposes marriage to her barely after meeting her.

Even when Allen gets a little stuck, plenty of transporting, intelligently sardonic observations sneak through. Serious spiritual themes (rationality versus spirituality) are allowed freer rein here than in previous Allen works, and it’s still fun to watch such a pro in action. And while the film’s ending may, to some observers, seem intellectually dishonest, or even a puerile form of consoling, it can also be viewed as ironically charming. Amidst the plethora of crap summer comedies so far, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

3.5 Amusing Debates On Rationality And Delusion With Quirky Allen Strokes (out of 5 stars)