Month: April 2016

Is there any doubt Ernest Hemingway would have deplored the gross sentimentality displayed in Papa: Hemingway in Cuba? Short of being merely misguided, this sloppily mounted biopic of the gifted writer in 1959 Havana commits the even greater sin of not seeming to care about its subject. The first film shot in Cuba since that same year of 1959 was hampered during production by having to cut corners in its budget to satisfy falling under a trade embargo cutoff. Yet its occasional out-of-focus shots are the least of its worries: its screenplay seems to have wandered onto the set straight from a nonchalant high school writing workshop.

Written by Denne Bart Petitclerc, a confidant and friend of Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) who died in 2006, Petitclerc is changed in the film to a character named Ed Myers (Giovanni Ribisi). Director Bob Yari, a veteran producer with minimal directing experience, presumably chose to have much of Petitclerc’s script rewritten over the long decade since his death. Why else would Myers blurt out in the newsroom, “Give me some background on this Castro fellow” nearly halfway through the film after several trips to Cuba? Would Petitclerc on his own actually have undermined not only the stature of Hemingway but that of himself as well?

The film also regretfully reveals some of the fan boy text of the letter Myers initially writes to Hemingway. The prose isn’t pretty. Neither is the device that has Myers’ fellow journalist girlfriend actually mail to Hemingway one of the letters Myers keeps tossing in the wastebasket. In fact, the entire subplot of Myers and his girlfriend (Minka Kelly) who stays behind while he flys off to adventures with Papa is not only stale formula but also a needless diversion in a film full of them, including interminable nude swimming scenes and shots of typewriters.

Part capable travelogue (Hemingway’s Havana residence, Finca Vigia, now a museum, is prominently displayed), part exaggerated thriller (Hemingway and Myers manage to dump off Hemingway’s boat a load of weapons meant for Castro’s rebels just seconds before federal agents mount the vessel looking for them), and part Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? parody (Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary do a great deal of verbal sparing here–little of it convincing), Papa: Hemingway in Cuba painstakingly begs for our attention. Yet Hemingway here might as well be James Patterson for all the insight on his character the film exudes.

Painted as a gruff and heartless drunk who repeatedly bullies Mary only to subsequently casually apologize, the complexities of the historical figure of Hemingway remain shunned here. Plagued with a hereditary manic depressive nature; many head, spinal and intestinal injuries suffered from a lifetime of accidents and boxing injuries; and chronic untreated alcoholism, Hemingway was nonetheless apparently a much gentler soul than this film depicts. As biographer Paul Hendrickson asserts in “Hemingway’s Boat,” “Underneath there was a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done, and finding it harder with each passing year.”

A Scornful, Boilerplate Biography Sadly Neglects A Literary Icon’s Complexity…1 star (out of 5)

Forget Apocalypse Now. Toss aside Conrad’s venerated Heart of Darkness. When it comes to obtaining a vivid realization of the essence of Amazonian culture, check out Ciro Guerra’s amazing Embrace of the Serpent. The stunningly shot black-and-white Colombian Oscar nominee frames two separate interactions, 40 years apart, between a pair of white explorers and an Amazonian shaman. The shaman, Karmamakate the World Mover, is simply one of the most memorable film characters in recent years.

Both actors who portray Karmakate are riveting. In the early 1900s, an ill German scientist, Theo, approaches Karmakate (Nilbio Torrres) seeking the sacred, mysterious drug yakruna. Decades later, another white man, Evan, an American, wishes to follow in the footsteps of Theo. The last survivor of his Cohiuano tribe, Karmakate (Antonio Bolivar) is no longer the vibrant young force he was previously. but a weakened shell of his former self. In many ways, Embrace of the Serpent will trace his remarkable evolution during the second trip, tracing a growing willingness to help in his approach to Evan.

The film intertwines two seperate river voyages taken by the men. In the first Karmakate is clearly in charge. For example, he forbids the sick man to eat certain foods out of a respect for the universe. By the second journey, Karmakate is at first a broken man struggling to remember his former powers.

Throughout, Karmakate possesses a vitality to be reckoned with. On several occasions he bemoans the white man’s attachment to all his “things,” which he says make him crazy. He encourages Theo to toss his bulky cases into the river. Theo protests since they contain valuable diaries and drawings, which he declares will give his fellow scientists knowledge of Karmakate’s people and their beliefs.

Later, when visiting a tribe, Theo has his compass stolen. Upset, he frets to Karmakate that it was his concern the tribe’s natural navigation instincts would be compromised if they possessed such a device. Here the same Karmakate who decried the white man’s “things” takes a different tack. He waves off Theo to let it be. Depriving the tribespeople of the knowledge provided by a compass wouldn’t be fair, he asserts.

What gives? Is an advocate of upholding tradition to the point of claiming that dreams provide a fuller guidance for man than science, suddenly reconsidering? The film’s skillful nuances provide a deeper complexity to the tensions between the two men. When a starving Theo, still in frail health from malaria, spears a fish and ravishes it raw in defiance of Karmikate’s edict, our sympathies are with him. His logic that his efforts to spread the word regarding this nearly lost society’s insights should be important to Karmakate also seems justified.

Yet make no mistake. Embrace of the Serpent’s greatest strengths are displayed when it contrasts the innocence of the native culture with the predatory nature of the outsiders. In parallel scenes in both journeys, the travelers encounter a Christian missionary who flogs the young children under his care. In the latter, the degradation of invasive Western ideas grows even worse. Unlike the unwavering vision of Karmakate, the mutation of Christian doctrines presents itself in full force. A messiah figure who wears a crown of thorns, seems right out of Ken Russell’s The Devils. I won’t spoil where he is headed, but it’s enough of a shock to have Karmakate and Evan bolt out of his compound in the middle of the night.

There is an enormous amount of food for thought in Embrace of the Serpent. Karmikate’s mistrustfulness of the white man is nicely offset by his parallel compassion. His Cohiuano tribe is a fabrication (as is yakurna) yet the universality of this film’s vision cannot be denied.

Embrace of the Serpent takes a jolting turn when it embraces trippy scenes straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet it does not pretend to be a wild-eyed Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 odyssey depicting a mad Westerner’s attempts to bring an opera house to the jungles of South America. It does pose a pivotal question: are Western outsiders prisoners to a linear way of thinking in their ethnocentric dismissal of cultures like the Amazonian one depicted here? What is mankind losing
as a result? One look at Karmakate and it should be clearly apparent.

Mind-Altering Film In Pursuit of A Mind-Altering Drug….4.5 (out of 5) stars

Everybody Wants Some!! is Richard Linklater’s most deceptive film. On its surface it is light as a feather but hang out with it for its 100-minute (and far too short!) length and its 11 unique characters leave an indelible impression. Linklater, the director of numerous classics (Before Midnight, Boyhood) is also adroit at the offbeat (Bernie) and the pure entertainment, such as Dazed and Confused, his excellent look at high school in the 1970s.

Dubbed by former college baseball player Linklater as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! (named after a Van Halen song) takes place at a Texas university in 1980. Its subjects, the college’s acclaimed baseball team, inhabit two houses on campus. The team’s two ringleaders couldn’t be more different from each other yet they share a swaggering confidence. Finnegan or “Finn” (a superb Glen Powell) is a rabble-rousing firebrand. McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) suffers the role of the severe competitor, coiled as tight as a cobra.

Maneuvering through the tangle of camaraderie, is the film’s narrator, Jake (Blake Jenner), a wide-eyed and fearless freshman. When he walks into the team house for the first time, Jake encounters McReynolds, (a mustached Keith Hernandez lookalike), who promptly declares “I hate pitchers” when he finds out Jake’s position. Thus begins a whirlwind of witty posturing, raucous bickering, and even some honest-to-God hazing. This stuff only works when the dialogue is crisp and the editing sharp. Linklater, as savvy a filmmaker as there is, provides both in spades, and uses a well-chosen, varied soundtrack (everything from Rapper’s Delight to Stiff Little Fingers) so integrally edited, it seems like another major character.

When the film’s lead female character Beverly (Zoey Deutsch), (a theater major!) enters the scene, she barely alters the guys’ chemistry, except, of course, Jake’s. He’s clearly smitten yet appears to be taking a lesson from the film Swingers in waiting a while to make his move.

It’s at least somewhere around the halfway point when this hilarious coming of age comedy that rivals Barry Levinson’s Diner actually ventures onto the ball field. Here, in a brief serious turn, the film assumes an assured feel for the leadership and mental preparation crucial in the makeup of a successful baseball team. All the crazy head games surrounding the constant pursuit of sex and laughs and drinking suddenly coalesce into meaningfulness. When McReynolds goes in the batter’s biz against the off-the-wall major league pitching prospect Jay Niles (Justin Street) and subsequently lectures the 95-mph-fastball-tossing egoist on what it means to be on a team, he speaks with a deep-rooted authority directly pulled from his sense of community. This excellent scene is about as far away from the cliches of a sports movie as it gets.

Everybody Wants Some!! earns its authenticity through Linklater’s ability to produce wonderful characters doing ostensibly ordinary things. Make no mistake, this film is shot through an idyllic prism. Realism tempered by 35 years of distance can certainly skew things entirely in the opposite direction. Although this film possesses such a romanticized slant it borders on tongue in cheek, Linklater, bracing his scenes with such a wealth of
believable detail, makes it impossible to want it any other way.

Let The Good Times Roll: 1980 Style (With Baseball)…4.5 stars (out of 5)

Unfortunately Don Cheadle, despite displaying savvy acting chops in playing the ever irascible Miles Davis, does a disservice to one of the 20th century’s leading jazz musicians. In Miles Ahead, which Cheadle directed and co-wrote, unmoored diversions plague what amounts to more of a made-up buddy/heist picture than a serious look at a complex man.

In his hope to get about as far away from boilerplate biopic riffs as possible, Cheadle often goes out of tune. There’s guns, drug deals, a freaking car chase, and even a made up felony here, but where is the desired backdrop demonstrating Davis’ musical mastery, especially his ability to constantly change musical directions while maintaining an uncanny quality?

Flashback references to his Blue Note-era bop days are flimsy, consisting of how he met his first wife, Frances Davis (Emayatzy Corinealdi) and his unfortunate harassment by police outside New York’s legendary Birdland nightclub. The best musical passage is at the end of the film, when we’re treated to a present-day band that includes septuagenarians Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. The only historic musical associate who receives much screen time is Gil Evans, who’s portrayed leading a recording session for the hardly groundbreaking Porgy and Bess album.

The main thrust of Miles Ahead is trying to get inside Davis’ angry head during a period in the late 1970s when he essentially went AWOL from the music business after suffering from degenerative hip disease and holed himself up in his Upper West Side New York City apartment. We encounter Ewan McGregor as a fabricated ostensible Rolling Stone journalist desperately trying to get an interview with Davis, and even more enthusiastically trying to steal a long-awaited demo tape from him. Then, after Davis pulls out a gun inside his record company’s office in pursuit of what he perceives to be $20,000 they owe him, we’re suddenly on our way to Rush Hour-land. I was hoping for more of a Clint Eastwood’s Bird scope here rather than an awkward mix of gangsta and watered down jazz sequences.

It’s somewhat of a shame since Cheadle’s acting is often frighteningly good. Due to his intensity, we do get it that Miles was a bona fide crazy son-of-a-bitch, and certainly a self-centered one, but it’s what the film leaves out that screams for attention. Miles Davis was also pretty much a genius, and while hagiography was certainly not called for here, a little more respect certainly would have been nice.

A lost opportunity…2.5 stars(out of 5)

It is all the harder to swallow the premise of this fanciful film when it starts out with its antihero (Jake Gyllenhaal) writing the first of a series of lengthy personal missives to the customer service department of a vending company that cheated him out of $1.25. This in the emergency room of a hospital where his wife was just pronounced dead.

Serving as a vehicle for Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) to eventually meet the vending company representative Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts) who reads his heartfelt letters, the writing of them sort of begins to make sense once the realization strikes that Davis is one tortured, looney dude.

Expressions of grief may take on all sorts of manifestations but in Davis’s case, he’s rather unique. He likes to dismantle things–expensive things, including a computer or two in the investment office where he works under his equally distraught, punctilious father-in-law (an excellent Chris Cooper). While the meetings with Karen progress from oddball cutesy to more pensive, Davis’s grieving graduates from taking things apart to busting them up.

The film’s funniest scene has Davis jumping out of his car clad in a suit and tie and offering to help a wrecking crew who are about to take down a house. After pleading to work for free, Davis eventually ups the ante and actually pays the crew the entire $141 in his wallet. The reactions of the cynical, flinching contractor is priceless.

Demolition is ultimately no comedy. Gyllenhaal, continuing to play the type of outsider, mentally fragile character he so well portrayed in Nightcrawler, does a great job in almost saving this movie from its excesses of fragmentary capriciousness. It’s a film of some fine moments even if its better impulses almost go up in flames in a series of somewhat manipulative plot turns during its finale. Davis’s scenes with Karen’s challenging 15-year-old son (Judah Lewis) mostly ring true.

What Demolition has to say about grieving is certainly insightful and oddly entertaining, yet those aspects seem distinct from, rather than overlapping with, its lighthearted, prosaic quirkiness. Director Jean-Marc Vallee previously helmed Wild and Dallas Buyers Club. Screenwriter Bryan Sipe also wrote the Nicholas Spark stinker The Choice.

Crazy On You (Sympathetic Mix) …3 (out of 5) stars