Month: December 2014

Rife with colorful characters and brimming with the signature rhyming banter of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Into The Woods is the closest thing this Christmas season to a rewarding family film. Just don’t expect things to come with a ribbon wrapped around them. If the mashing of familiar Grimm fairy tales into a not-so-conventional tale sounds like your idea of good fun, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Although the Rob Marshall adaptation of the 1987 stage production loses some steam in its second half, it is a well-cast showcase for the likes of Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Johnny Depp (as the Big Bad Wolf), and especially the amusing Tracy Ullmann and the excellent Emily Blunt.

Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel all blend together in a tale that goes for a darker sum than any of its parts. Yet even its most featured villain, The Witch (Streep) isn’t all bad. She may have kidnapped and imprisoned Rapunzel, sister of the baker (James Corden), but there’s a like-ability to her nonetheless as she pops up, time and again, with a seething impatience that seems almost tongue-in-cheek. And when she performs the heartfelt letting-go-of-a-child ballad “Stay With Me,” we are surprised by her sudden compassion.

Sondheim and Lapine are set on turning upside down deep-set expectations. Much has been made of the relative harsh direction the book takes–it seems to go further and further into despair as it gies along. Yet what Into The Woods does best is saunter back and forth between spoof-like merriment and somber reflection on the human condition (“No One Is Alone” may be its most memorable song). In stirring up the primal emotions unleashed long ago in the fairy tales of our youth, the story and the songs head in strange and often stirring directions. One moment, there’s a perfectly light scene between The Baker’s Wife (Blunt) and the playboy Cinderella’s Prince (Pine). The next moment the bickering, surviving members of the cast are banding together to fight off the villainous female giant. Throughout, the magical forest, which seems like a creature itself, contains strange, sudden winds and trees who have a life of their own. The atmosphere may be ominous but it is essentially forgiving.

Kendrick (see her as the lead in the forthcoming musical Five Years Left) is quirky fine and in great soprano voice as an almost anachronistic Cinderella, who seems far more contemporary than those around her. Streep, heavily made-up with witchy ugliness until a second act transformation, displays her usual command, and Ullmann, as the cranky, nagging mom of Jack, reminds us of her incredible range as a comedienne. Blunt continues her climb into the uppermost ranks of film actresses. As The Baker’s Wife, she takes charge of the film’s central “plot,” a scavenger hunt for the likes of a slipper, a cape, a cow, and a lock of hair. Despite the relative lack of memorable melodies, her acting and vocals are a large reason the film works as well as it does.

3.5 This Isn’t West Side Story But It’s Pretty Damn Good…3.5 out of 5) stars

Even before the release of Unbroken, Angelina Jolie had already enough of a track record to discredit Sony honcho Amy Pascal’s recent hacker-leaked statement that Jolie was “minimally talented.” Jolie’s acting work has been more than adequate, and occasionally has exhibited great strengths. Her first directing job, In The Land Of Milk and Honey, whose subject was The Bosnian War, showed a filmmaker with a good eye for depicting pain and suffering, and the abject miseries brought on by 20th Century warfare. Her spotlight on an innocent woman caught in a trap and forced to decide between equally horrible options, was moving and empathetic.

In Unbroken, an adaptation of the popular book by Laura Hillenbrand, Jolie carries over some of that empathy. She doesn’t exactly misfire as much as she seems to be coasting along. The film contains all the right elements–World War II true story, high seas survival tale, soldier camaraderie, Japanese POW camp brutalities, cinematography by Roger Deakins–yet something is missing. Like the film adaptation of another Hillenbrand book, Seabiscuit, the film plays it too safe. Even a screenplay by The Coen Brothers seems plagued with a light touch all too wrong for the subject matter. The boldness and majesty the Coens brought to the remake of True Grit is mostly absent here.

Playing Louis Zamperini (who died earlier this year at the age of 97) Jack O’Connell, who was brilliant in the 2014 prison drama Starred Up, does a very decent but not overtly inspiring job. Shot down in The Pacific and forced to survive on a life raft for 47 days, Zamperini provides enough moxie for himself and his two pals, who are, in turn, morose and preoccupied. Once in the POW prison, his cheerfulness turns into defiance. He repeatedly refuses to look in the eye of his babyfaced tormentor, known as The Cat (Japanese rock star Miyavi). No beating is great enough to temper his steadfast pride. Yet I kept longing for someone like Kirk Douglas to suddenly inhabit the role and liven things up a little. Jolie’s husband Brad Pitt wouldn’t have been bad either. In this year’s Fury, Pitt had more charisma in one scene than O’Connell has in this whole film. The actor who dazzle us in Starred Up seems oddly restrained here. His best scenes are when he and Jolie manage to powerfully convey the trauma Zamperini faced. Although the film stops at the end of World War II, he went on to suffer from and battle back from PTSD. Meanwhile, the pure weirdness of The Bird, whose choirboy good looks only intensify his sadism, lingers long after the rest of the film fades.

Not Exactly A Broken Film But an Oddly Meek One…3.0 (out of 5) stars

If you’re looking for a crowd-pleaser among the handful of films released nationally on Christmas Day, look no further than The Imitation Game. Benedict Cumberbatch gives one of the year’s best performances as the genius dork with zero social skills and a heavy dose of what we would now recognize as Asperger-like traits. Appealing in an unconventional way, Turing is lovable for his directness, his candor, and his wit. He’s an odd mix of detachment and hyper vigilance. His obsessiveness seems entirely inner-directed as if he is responding to a mysterious force within himself. Not afraid to insult those who are his intellectual inferiors, he also constantly gets himself in trouble.

Focused on deciphering Nazi codes, Turing finds himself at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England, joining a team of Enigma Project code breakers, who thus far have had little luck in succeeding. Turing immediately builds a towering, whirring machine–actually a very early computer. He names it Christopher, after a childhood boyfriend who appears in flashbacks. Directed by Morten Tyldum (the excellent Headhunters) with a screenplay by Graham Moore, the film also flashes forward to a time in 1952 when Turing is interrogated after being arrested for indecency. Although the rest of the world would not find out about Turing’s heroics until the 1970s, he spills his story to the interrogating policeman, who, we are to believe, accidentally stumbles across the incident of “indecency” while investigating Turing as a possible spy with Soviet sympathies. (While the United States was fully engaged in leading the way in the witch hunting of McCarthyism, Great Britain was actually jailing thousands for homosexuality.)

Let’s get a few fact-checked, roll-your-eyes scenes out of the way:

1) The film takes poetic license in depicting Turing as having received a breakthrough moment after writing no less than Winston Churchill himself a plea to allow TurIng to proceed with his plans despite skepticism from his immediate supervisors. (False.)

2) Turing and his gang reach an eureka-moment at a pub after an innocent comment from a secretary provides the missing clue to crack the codes. (Also false, but great fun as the normally reticent motley crew celebrate their breakthrough.)

3) The member of Turing’s crew who proved to be a spy for the Russians was never a member of Turing’s group. (Another whopper, but also one that compresses events in a manner that allows the film to address a very immediate problem during the war.)

4) Christopher was actually named Victory and wasn’t nearly as huge and silly-looking as the one in the film. (What’s wrong with stretching the truth in the name of film visuals–especially if they’re also funny?)

Turing’s relationship with fellow cryptanalyst Joan Clark (a very good Keira Knightley) provides the film with a rock-solid subtext. Plagued with prejudices brought against her for being a woman (she, for instance, was not permitted access to classifies material), her fight against her predicament nicely parallels Turing’s own struggle with oppression directed at his homosexuality. While The Imitation Game is often slick or awkward, their relationship soars above the film’s occasional lapses into simplemindedness. When all is said and done The Imitation Game captures the spirit of a man who personally shortened the war by months if not years–only to find tragic, and unnecessary, payback.

A Tragic War Hero You Need To Discover…4 (out of 5) stars

A down in the doldrums Andre Allen (Chris Rock) makes a serious film (“Uprize!”) about a Haitian slave rebellion. He intends to deflect the lingering stereotype associated with years of making dumb “Hammy The Bear” movies, in which he actually wears a bear suit. In the best tradition of art imitating life, Top Five, also written and directed by Rock, actually has the distinction of being a film about Rock himself wishing to rise above the usual comedic themes. But more about the film’s serious side later. Top Five is one hell of a funny film.

Sassy and full of grit, the seriously well-casted film is a diffuse bag of Chris Rock tricks. While not always hitting the mark, they succeed in wringing the most out of a familiar-feeling concept. Allen encounters a New York Times reporter, Chelsea Brown, (an excellent Rosario Dawson) eager to do a story on him. He demurs, at first, because her fellow Times scribe, a film critic, has over the years rather cruelly trashed his Hammy series. What follows is a sequence of scenes between the Rock and Dawson where the repartee is often exceptional. Rock not only surrounds himself with comedic heavyweights–along for the ride are JB Smoove, Cedric The Entertainer, a hilarious Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart, and small roles for DMX, Whoopi Goldberg, Adam Sandler, and Jerry Seinfeld–he also has a knack for making those around him better characters.

A naggy reality-television-actress fiancé (Gabrielle Union) is also in the picture but she’s kept at distance from the central action. As she prepares for an imminent wedding, Allen explains to Brown that he feels he owes her since she helped him get clean of substance abuse. Brown confesses to her own battle with addiction and recovery, and lo and behold we’ve got a tidy subplot.

Top Five moves along at a roller-coaster fast pace. Dawson, not to be outdone, goes toe to toe with Rock. They spar delectably as they tackle cultural and racial issues as easily as they do Rock’s colorful past. His account of his “lowest point” before recovery is a hilarious tale of eventually getting arrested after encounters with an irrepressible Cedric The Entertainer and two hookers. Throughout the film Smoove, as Silk, Allen’s longtime friend and current bodyguard, wreaks havoc with every scene he’s in. The Curb Your Enthusiasm actor has developed into a full- fledged star.

Two scenes in the film stand out. When Allen returns to his old neighborhood to trade insults and quips with his live wire old crew, they all pile into an apartment. Not least among the merrymakers are Morgan, who professes to be much funnier than Allen ever was, and a harsh yet outrageously funny Leslie Jones, who berates Allen to “stay black.” Of course, that’s exactly what he’s trying to do in shedding the Hammy The Bear image. His new film seems like a destined-to-fail, equally inane crock of stereotypes–however more serious their intention. Allen faces an interesting crossroads. Top Five handles the dilemma well enough but if you come here looking for a serious statement perhaps a clearer one is the portrayal of celebrity, which the film handles how dead-on accurately.

As the scenes filmed throughout New York hold up a mirror to what it actually feels like to be in the limelight, the film’s other great scene captures the flip side of the excitement and perils of fame. When Allen visits his old neighborhood, an older man (Ben Vereen) calls him over teasingly, yet knowingly. After ribbing Allen in front of the old man’s friends, he comes to reveal a startling secret. It sets the tone for this subtly depth-filled film that manages to not only provoke loads of laughter but an unnerving sense of discomfort. Not all is at it seems but the world goes on, with laughter still the best medicine.

Chris Rock Stars, Directs, and Writes, and Has A Ton of Help = One Very Funny Film…4 (out of 5) stars

Reese Witherspoon, adeptly portraying Cheryl Strayed, author of the 2012 memoir of redemption, Wild, often seems distractingly preoccupied with her backpack. Scripted by English novelist Nick Hornby, and directed by Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club), the movie itself too often seems satisfied with rather meek surface things at the expense of going deeper.

Witherspoon is believable in the central role alright. Ever since the marvelous 1999 Alexander Payne film, Election, she has excelled at playing insuppressible characters. Yet something is missing in keeping Wild from going to the next level. Perhaps Hornby and Vallee were naturally stymied by the inherent challenges present in adapting a passionately written and very personal story.

Beset with heroin addiction and a recently deceased mom (Lauren Dern in an Oscar nomination-worthy performance), Strayed sets off in 1995 on an 1100-mile trek through California forest, desert and mountains. Interspersed with her struggle as a single woman hiker are flashback scenes with her estranged husband (Thomas Sadoski) and ones of her promiscuous affairs and drug taking. It’s all not uninteresting and occasionally poignant. Strayed at one point watches one of her boots fall into a canyon and proceeds to build makeshift footwear out of sandals and duct tape. Her determination extends to braving some close-call encounters with men hikers along the way. The whistle she carries to ward off unfriendly animals has no use against predatory men. Has the recovered addict merely replaced a new obsession, i. e., danger, for the heroin and casual sex?

We’re left to lo ponder a lot about Strayed. The wish here is that she were half as realized a character as Bobbi, her mom. Dern, always a very fine actress, outdoes herself here with a performance that excellently captures the various emotions associated with a single mom struggling with economic and personal poverty yet keeping a saint-like reserve for continuing to harbor the most vivid and alluring dreams. Her genuine affection for not just her daughter but for her very own existence, is palpable. Bobbi is a diamond in this not-all-that-rough, but certainly not-all-that-polished ode to a woman’s perseverance of human spirit. Strayed is a chip-off-the-old-block here but one whose resonance fades when placed side-by-side with her mom’s.

Laura Dern Steals A Just Good Enough Film ….3.5 (out of 5) stars

Stricken with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matthew Van Dyke nonetheless acquires a masters degree in Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University. Then a new obsession joins his old one. Lamenting his knowledge of the Middle East as one confined to the intellectual plane, Van Dyke sets off on a backpacking motorcycle excursion of the area. Covering 35,000 miles, the journey includes a video camera mounted on his helmet, capturing his every plight and adventure. No mere chronicler, he sometimes stages time-consuming photo shoots.

With a background as a loner (“the only child of an only child of an only child”) and a coddled middle-class child, Van Dyke is no stranger to solitude. When he meets a few Middle Easterners while in Libya, he takes quite a shining to his new friends. Enough so that after returning to his stateside girlfriend after the trip, it’s not long afterward that he decides put his camera back on and go back and be a volunteer soldier. The occasion? The outbreak of the Libyan Civil War that seeks the ouster of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The underlying purpose? “To give myself a crash course in manhood,” Van Dyke says.

In Marshall Curry’s unique documentary Point and Shoot, the massive amount of raw footage (over 200 hours) shot by Van Dyke takes shape. Curry sometimes seems to be looking at Van
Dyke with a jaundice eye as if the self-indulgence of his project outweighs any merits of valor. Interspersing Van Dykes’s footage with a considerable number of interview scenes, he captures the weirdly disarming nature of Van Dyke’s personality, as well as his serious and admirably self-deprecating introspection. When Van Dyke gets captured by the Gaddafi forces and spends nearly six months in solitary confinement, Curry substitutes deftly done animation for the lack of Vandyke footage during the incarceration. Given that Van Dyke’s OCD condition includes serious germaphobia, the grimy conditions of his prison stay prove to be problematic. Curiously, we do not learn of the details surrounding his release. His decision to stay after his release despite warnings against it from a human rights activist, seems curious. Before long, as the fighting gets more immediate and increasingly dangerous, Van Dyke is asking himself, “Am I a soldier or a cameraman?” At one point, he declares he’s going to shoot his camera and it doesn’t sound like he’s joking.

Van Dykes’ scenes of warfare in the social network age chillingly include shots of many rebel soldiers yielding cellphones to capture images to send back home–as much for self-aggrandizement as for any historical record. Curry asks Van Dyke what propels him to take up arms and Van Dyke responds with what seems like a sincere reference to not being able to sit on the sidelines while his friends are at risk–friends the vast majority of us would regard as acquaintances. Thus, something seems off with Van Dyke. Is he a bona fide eccentric fighting against an oppressive regime? Or a foolhardy desperado pumping himself up with a pluck fueled by a grandiose yen for violence? Curry could have been a little more probing of Van Dyke in trying to provide an answer.

Or there may be an answer that’s contained in the film all along: Van Dyke’s friend from Tripoli, Nuri, a “peace-loving hippie” who transforms to join the rebels but never loses his warmth and humanity. Nori is the kind of character who will stay with this viewer a long time after the rest of the film fades. He exudes an amazing joie de vivre, an unflappable sense of humor all the more heightened by its irrationality in the face of potential imminent death. Perhaps their comradeship propelled Van Dyke in a way that enriched him in a way in which he was previously unaccustomed, and he’s not such a damn fool after all.

Probably The Year’s Strangest Documentary Poses Many Questions….4 (out of 5) stars

The horror genre gets a chilling redo with the critically acclaimed Australian film, The Babadook. Taking its cues from the 1950s and 1960s ghost stories that slyly suggested horror rather than threw it in your face, it also marks the feature directorial debut of Jennifer Kent. Much has been made that The Babadook represents a far different sensibility given that it is a film written and directed by a woman.

The film is presented from the viewpoint of its lead character, Amelia (Essie Davis), a woman with multiple issues and an overwhelming stress level. She parents a six-year-old terror, Samuel (Noah Wiseman, in one of the most memorable child acting performances in recent memory). Samuel harbors a streak of aggressiveness that can quickly morph into violence. He has a penchant for constructing rudimentary homemade weaponry, or throwing his cousin out of a treehouse. Yet, virtually the next moment, he also can be sweet and endearingly needy. At the heart of his anxiety is what he perceives as the very real presence of a pernicious children’s pop-up book character. He can’t keep talking about The Babadook, a snaggletoothed monster whose very mention causes his mother at first amusement, but quickly annoyance. By the time she throws the book away things have escalated to a point where her natural single-mom fragility has strengthened into a frazzled frenzy. Then when the book eerily reappears one day, things really begin to go haywire.

Essie Davis astutely captures the complexity of a mom who also must live with the memory of a deceased husband who died driving her to the hospital while in labor with Samuel. Survival guilt and Samuel’s frustrations concerning a dad he never knew but must be measured against, are the least of Amelia’s worries. Her natural resentment toward Samuel is played out with great care and detail. As the movie begins to blur the supernatural and the psychological we watch Amelia change into somewhat of a monster herself. Yet she remains one in control, the character’s verisimilitude never in doubt however far off normalcy she is forced to stray. The Babadook is that rarity: a film that will scare the hell out of you yet make you think. One can’t wait for Kent’s next project.

A Horror Film That Tenses You Up, Smacks You In The Face, Then Gives Food For Thought …4.5 (out of 5) stars