Month: February 2015

It’s one thing to encounter a film with an imaginatively playful screenplay that takes occasional liberties with common sense. It’s quite another to have your intelligence insulted in a manner as blatant and as numbing as the new Will Smith movie, Focus. Just when we are asked to fall for one outrageous scenario, another one doubly nonsensical is sure to arrive. With a tone and look like a slickly designed commercial, the miracle is that Focus somehow manages to be mildly entertaining despite all its contrived jive.

Nicky (Will Smith) is a con man who goes along with being the target of an entrapment scheme perpetrated by Jess (Margot Robbie) and an accomplice–only to interrupt their gambit in mid-enactment. Smith has seen it all and done it all, so a little halted sexual encounter in order to blackmail him is small potatoes. Before you can say “coed mentor/student buddy film,” Nicky, a master con man, is giving tips to Jess on how her sting might have been successfully accomplished. She’s smitten and wants in on his game. He gives in.

Next we’re they’re off to New Orleans to rip off Super Bowl suckers ready to have their pockets picked seemingly en masse. Nicky’s ridiculously huge posses includes a very funny Adrian Martines as Farhad, who has most of the movie’s best lines. In a scene that goes on about three times as long as it should have Nicky and his Super Bowl luxury-box host each just happen to have over a million dollars in cash on them to set up the next scam. And that’s not the most credulity-bending part of the set-up. Focus has little shame in stretching our patience as thin as the mental acumen of its script. Yet somehow amidst the happy horseshit ad nauseam there are surprising moments that make the film almost agreeable–

–Almost. The film’s good moments are probably about the chemistry between Smith and Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street). Those expecting a Smith as vibrant as he was in Six Degrees of Seperation, however, will be disappointed. Nicky’s dad didn’t call him “Mellow” for nothing. It’s the kind of film where Nicky, after a several-years breakup with Jess finds himself on a new continent only to bump into her inexplicably cozying up to his very important mark in a major scam that has to do with motor racing, and, also, makes no sense. Jess’s appearance is treated as if it’s a mere common coincidence. Then in the film’s climax, a twist occurs that is so dismally outrageous it makes everything before it seem uplifting. Were Focus a spoof, it’s ending might almost fit….Co-directors and writers Glenn Ficara and John Requa made a better film in last year’s Crazy, Stupid Love, and co-wrote a far better one in Bad Santa. And if it’s a great caper film you want, check out House of Games instead of getting conned for your $12.50 by this film.

Will’s Swill … 2.0 (out of 5) stars

The intermittently uplifting yet just as often pompous The Last Five Years contains hardly any spoken dialogue. Pleasantly containing several songs of depth and wit, the film struggles with the thinnest of storylines and its too-pleased-with-itself structure.

Anna Kendrick, who is very good, presents her character Cathy’s story backwards from the film’s end, while Jeremy Jordan, only fair as Jaimie, goes along in a standard front-to-back arc. (They meet in the film’s middle for their only duet, performed at their wedding.) The chronological device is more cute than terribly effective, and as good as some of the songs are, they fail to overcome the natural obstacle of converting a basically two-character theater construction into a breathing film.

Still, it’s fun to watch Cathy get silly in “A Summer In Ohio,” a tune that sends up her plight as a struggling actress forced to do summer stock. Although Jordan is much less convincing as a hotshot novelist, February filmgoers could do a lot worse than this. The popular off-Broadway production by composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown should add a boost to the rising career of Kendrick, who has been gradually rising up to star status.

You Go Backwards and I’ll Go Forwards….3 (out of 5) stars

A woman vehemently refuses to put on gloves (recently required) while selling fish in an outdoor market. A group of young men play fake soccer (recently banned) as they run around with an imaginary soccer ball. A coed group of friends risk playing live music (also recently banned) despite a potentially stringent penalty. The scene? Mali in West Africa. The occasion? The change from centuries-old traditions to the superimposed doctrine of Taliban-like invaders.

Nowhere in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu is the juxtaposition of the old and the new more starkly contrasted than the plight that befalls a nomadic tent-dwelling herder, Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), his wife and 12-year-old daughter. Seemingly worlds away from the chaotic strife in the nearby city, Kidane will soon become enmeshed in a tangled web of his own. Sissako pulls no punches in depicting the harshness of the tyranny of megaphone-wielding thugs, yet his superb styling does so with an ironic subtlety. Outstanding imagery shows admirable restraint and a keen depiction of detailed character traits tailor the events to the most human level. There’s plenty of horror here, yet an absence of heavy-handed agitprop.

Ironies abound. Despite representing the heart and soul of the film, Kidane has a tragic flaw of his own. He’s rooted in a rigid adherence to a moral code that reminds one of that of his very oppressors’ similarly stiff conduct. Those in authority, with their overarching self-appointment as special agents of God, seem to operate in two spheres. Their public persona adheres to rigidity and cant. In private, Sissako’s Islamist renegades turn to a more introspective mulling, albeit one that contains no practical consequence for changing their group think. Sissako recognizes the villains’ humanity within a brazenly inhuman undertaking. His presentation of their halted soul-searching is not an apology for them, but more an additional source of frustrating sadness.

A highly powerful nominee for Best Foreign Film Oscar … 4.5 (out of 5) stars

Director Matthew Vaughan (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) sends his fetish for over-the-top chuckles and mayhem into an orbit of mostly unfunny inanity in the spy-flick send-up Kingsman: The Secret Service. Colin Firth, typically prim and proper and even more properly dressed, makes a valiant attempt to save the material from the abject failure it might have been in the hands of a lesser lead. Lisping villain Samuel L. Jackson brings no recollection of his sterling performance in Django Unchained to these proceedings. He seems to be going through the motions here as much as his nearly omnipresent TV commercial endeavors of late. Then there’s Michael Caine, who seems to be in a dozen movies a year of late, essentially playing the same character. In Kingsman he has a penchant for fine cognac and vapid, huffy dialogue.

The set up is this British spy agency that operates in the secret back room of a London Savile Row haberspdashesy. Thus we have eroding umbrellas, expensive shoes with hidden blades and all sorts of other sartorial wonders. Entering the fray is young street kid Eggsy (a good Taron Egerton) who, sitting in jail, calls upon Harry (Firth) an associate of Eggsy’s late father. Harry owes the boy’s dad, so he takes the lad under his wing. This includes a slot in a training program to be a Kingsman, the name of the secret spy agency in which his father and Harry are employed. Here we get a few amusing moments as the working class Eggsy competes with mostly snot-nosed upper-class brats. Some of the exercises devised by Kingsman Mark Stron are so crazy they’re wittily amusing.

Trouble is, the film soon graduates into a wearisome plot to overcome Valentine (Jackson) and his female sidekick (Sofia Boutella), who sports leg prosthetics that are actually a pair of sharp blades that whenever she gets angry. When she ends up taking on the forces of good in the film, Vaughan goes into slo-motion revery. Valentine’s game is to provide free wireless SIM cards to the whole planet and thereby drug each and every consumer into savage-alike behavior thus to induce population control and, of course, profit. When Harry himself becomes possessed while he’s undercover in a fundamentalist church pew, the resultant bloodbath is sure to provide a litmus test on whether or not you find this film mildly amusing or uproariously hilarious. With Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird on the soundtrack, Harry unwittingly wipes out the entire church. Coupled with a pretty amusing sodomy joke involving a Scandinavian princess near the film’s end, these scarce laughs will have to be enough to get you through this overlong, overwrought indulgence.

A Shaky But Not Stirring Spy Cocktail … 2.5 (out of 5) stars

It’s no wonder Kolya (a memorable Alexey Serebryakov), the main character of Leviathan, swigs vodka like it’s water. After witnessing an arbitrary and stiff, motor-mouthed reading of a local court ruling against him, it is no wonder an individual like Kolya comes to feel isolated and utterly powerless. It is not just that the insolent, antagonizing mayor of Kolya’s town is forcing Kolya to sell his seafront house in order to tear it down for profitable redevelopment. Adding insult to injury is the utter contempt and hatred the bloated-face thug of a mayor directs toward Kolya, matched in its intensity by the indifference of the legal system. Welcome to Putin’s Russia.

When Kolya brings the matter to the court with the help of a a lawyer friend of his from Moscow, he already knows he hasn’t got a chance of beating such an impervious bureaucracy. He just happens to be sitting on some potentially damaging dirt on the mayor. As suspenseful as it is, Leviathan is not a thriller in the traditional sense but rather transcends traditional genre leanings with outstanding character studies and vivid glimpses of a society tightly wound in its oppressiveness. The Orthodox Church also contributes to the stranglehold, as depicted in intermittent scenes with a priest who, in declaring the separation of church and state, indifferently equates a church uncaring about social issues with one that holds itself above mere earthly concerns.

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Elena) places Kolya’s second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova, outstanding) front and center of the action. Her responses are an emotional array of frustration, confusion, and rage. Kolya is a temperamental, rigid husband and the more desperate he becomes the more unsettled Elena becomes over his increasingly erratic behavior. Kolya is at once a simple and a utterly complicated individual. His rebellion against the indomitable authoritarian forces never seems intentionally heroic but more part of an organic response from his unflinchingly principled character. His tragedy is that the goodness he possesses has no chance of ever driving out his demons as long as the sick society around him keeps pushing him further into despair.

Leviathan sneaks up on you. It’s a long, seemingly deliberate film that likes to cut to imagery like a menacing-looking whale carcass lying in the bay near Kolya’s home in a small fishing village on the Kola Peninsula, north of The Arctic Circle. As it progresses toward more and more numbing situations, Leviathan’s final twist is a total marvel and a finely jelling culmination of a portrait of a decaying society. It is no surprise the Russian cultural minister has had nothing but criticism for this film despite the critical acclaim it has received. In a ludicrous final irony, should Leviathan happen to win Best Foreign Film at next week’s Oscars, will the government’s statements about the film likely conveniently turn around 180 degrees?

Job Never Had It So Bad….4 (out of 5) stars

Time is the most precious commodity in the universe, says Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) of the moderately bizarre yet pompously predictable House of Abrasax family, rulers of the world if you will. Ironically, the notion of time–as in wasted time–kept occurring during the screening of this latest offering from Andy and Lana Wachowski, filmmakers once responsible for the quite good Bound and Matrix. Known more recently for their dim-witted Speed Racer and an interminable adaptation of Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis manage to scare up a not horrible sci-fi tale not dissimilar in its flaws from most of their films.

They treat art direction, costumes and special effects as their main thrust. Character, and especially plot, fall into a tar pit of monotonous excess. Many of the flying fight scenes, featuring Channing Tatum as Caine Wise (huh?), a bounty-hunting, genetically engineered “splice,” who’s actually part wolf, seem to go on endlessly. While Eddie Redmayne continues to demonstrate new dimensions of acting chops, his blubbering character, Balem, unfortunately seems to be high on opium the entire film. Title character Mila Kunis, a cleaning lady turned improbable “Her Majesty” and heir to planet Earth, bounces around from Kalique to her brother Balem, to third sibling, pretty boy Titus (Douglas Booth). All are bent on deceiving her, and all come to a threshold of having the omnipotent, protective Wise show off his directors’ technical flair in a series of improbable battles.

At one point during the film’s first battle, which takes place in Chicago, the Wachowskis inexplicably decide to go after a little World Trade Center reminder. Just when the viewer is getting uncomfortable watching the Sears Tower go down in a similar fashion, our clever directors have Wise tell the unknowing Jupiter, “Don’t worry; they’ll be rebuilt in minutes.” Even in a futuristic world where all is possible, this meager afterthought of an explanation comes up short as a cure for a woefully chosen image. Balem is up to no good–he feels it necessary to harvest a youth serum comprised of the essences of hundreds of murdered earthlings. Yet, just like the Sears Tower technology is no more than an opportune device to save face, Balem’s inability to harness the bothersome Wise seems rooted in the Stone Age given all the futuristic technology at his disposal. In the right hands, credibility in science fiction can surely be stretched without a whole lot of harm. In Jupiter Ascending, however, the overextending weighs on the brain like an anvil. The haircuts and costumes sure are pretty, though.

Fallen Directors Flailing Fitfully …. 2.5 (out of 5) stars