Author: Don Malvasi

Venemous comes to mind when attempting to describe this jittery new “buddy” comedy with Will Farrell and Kevin Hart. Followed closely by clueless.

A stillborn yarn about a super-wealthy stuffed-shirt, James King (Farrell) who suddenly finds himself sentenced to time in prison, Get Hard is a barrage of hollow sketches sewn together with racism and homophobia. King, seeking to toughen himself, asks Darnell (Hart), the guy who washes his car. King figures if Darnell’s black, he must have spent time in prison.

Then the film goes even further downhill faster than you can say, “I’ll do anything to avoid getting raped in prison.” That two comic actors as talented as Farrell and Hart would stoop so low as to sign on to such a dirt-ball premise is surprising even considering their collective track record for settling for less.

Hart briefly shines when he portrays three different characters in a scene that play-acts what King could be facing in a prison yard. While Hart deftly goes back and forth between black, Hispanic, and gay personas, the bit contrasts harshly in quality with the rest of the film and is a stark reminder that there was little more than a Saturday Night Live-length comedy sketch here. Attempts to inflate it to the size of a film incur wince-producing results at every turn. If it’s not King’s exaggerated, stereotyped ex-girlfriend, it’s her father, (a wasted Craig. T. Nelson), King’s boss at the firm, who drag the proceedings. But they’re a pleasure to watch compared to King when he hits a gay bar to force himself to learn fellatio since Darnell has declared him a failure at self-defense. I’m not making this up.

Just when it’s apparent the film’s three screenwriters have pulled this script out of their ass, King does just that–removing shivs and a gun from his anus before we’re allowed to go home. With jokes like these, who needs a horror movie?

The screenplay isn’t satisfied until it introduces a superfluous quasi-mystery subplot and a subsequent action-movie scene that’s painful to sit through. Oh, wait, there’s Farrell again getting punched by someone and, oh, there’s a quick-edit and his face is still immaculately free of any sign of punishment. Unfortunately the viewer will have no similar protection from this glib dreck.

Not least, when black characters appear in the form of gang members, Get Hard reverts to still more stereotypes. Is any of this funny? A tiny handful of chuckles is about all you’ll get. You’ll probably be too numb to even groan properly. Meanwhile, your IQ could be in danger of dropping a few points if you sit through this film. It’s about as far from a guilty pleasure as watching Ted Cruz declare for the presidency while simultaneously taking glee that he gives himself enough rope to hang his chances.

Stiflingly Insipid Trash Talk ….1 (out of 5) stars

Beginning with a chills-inducing Twilight Zone-esque vignette aboard an airliner and ending with the quintessential disrupted wedding reception, Wild Tales was a deserved Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film. Superbly directed with a jaundiced eye by Argentinian Damian Szifron, its six separate stories share a penchant for the perverse side of human nature. Overflowing with a cornucopia of black humor, the film is spiked with outbursts of startling if cartoonish violence. I don’t think I’ve had more fun watching a film this year.

Wild Tales takes on road rage, frustration over unfair parking authority practices, revenge at a roadside diner, the corrupt sense of priviledge of the very wealthy, and a newlywed’s strange discovery during a wedding reception of her partner’s infidelity. The common denominator in each story? A character feels grossly victimized by injustice. Yet this movie is about as far from a bleeding heart social drama as a film can get. Szifron, so adept at staging a realistic romp, averts any uneasiness over his possibly having too much fun mocking perfectly reasonable human beings who simply suffer from an overdose of misguided passion.

Each section features a hard-as-nails centerpiece character. A stern music critic, Salgado (Dario Grandinetti) anchors the airline scene–the less about which you know going into the movie the better. Next is the elderly diner cook (Rita Cortese) who pushes a revenge-seeking yet cautious waitress (Julietta Zylberberg) to transform her disgust with a victimizer from her past into grotesque action. In the bizarre chain of events (details of which I’ll also refrain from revealing) on a lonely highway emerges another tough customer (Walter Donado) who is totally off the wall yet consistently credible. Characters in Wild Tales come to find themselves in situations where seemingly innocent events suddenly give them far more than they bargained for. In the next story an obsessive character (veteran actor Ricard Darin) with anger issues goes up against surly public servants enforcing usurious towing fees. He seems to unravel, even ends up losing his job and wife, yet somehow finds a reservoir of special nastiness to fight off ostensibly unbeatable foes. Similarly, when a bride (Erica Rivas) discovers at her wedding reception that one of her female guests was indeed her husband’s mistress, her reactions and the resultant chaos produce both surprise and laughter, and, also, a reluctant identification with her razor-sharp zeal for payback.

Is Szifron finally conceding his aloof stance from all this degradation in the segment where a wealthy man (Oscar Martinez) tries to buy his way out of ruin and disgrace after his son is involved in a hit-and-run accident? In this one tale where humor is conspicuously absent, greed trumps itself with several twists that produce an eerily serious, ultimately sick feeling that humanity’s worse impulses are indeed even far worse than ever imagined. The scene soberingly frames in a different light the rest of the film’s outrageous hilarity. For a moment….Yet the wedding scene is so flat-out depraved and ironically life-reaffirming that Wild Tales ends on a note that perhaps redeems us humans after all.

Horrible and Hilarious Stories From The Dark Side of Human Nature…4.5 (out of 5) stars

Marty Jackitansky is hardly a character who elicits empathy. I found his nihilism amusing but also wouldn’t have minded a bit if someone punched him in the face. To say he lacks ambition is to say Freddy Krueger lacks menace. Oh, by the way, there’s a running theme in Buzzard where Marty (Joshua Burge) not only occasionally dons a Krueger-mask, but he also designs a glove claw replete with Krueger-like fingernail blades. Marty’s violent streak is more of a sneaky one than a blatant one. He simply doesn’t care about anything enough to even get angry that often. He’s also a small-time con artist.

He insists on closing a small checking account and re-opening it to save $50 and seems to take delight (it’s hard to tell if this guy really enjoys anything at all) in insisting that any rules be waived that would prohibit him from doing so. He spends time haggling with telephone customer service reps to get things like free pizza. Then, in the first of increasingly implausible shenanigans, he routinely orders supplies for his mortgage company employer only to steal them and return them to an unsuspecting or uncaring sales clerk. When he is assigned to find and call the owners of undeliverable small-amount refund checks, he begins signing them over to himself. This guy is dumb (he had no idea what endorsing a check meant until his mom suggested he do so,with a check she sent him that was accidentally made out to her) but those who enable him are even more clueless.

Yet there’s more going in with Buzzard than the literally improbable scams. A sense of the absurd seeps in. After I was pissed off at this film’s inanity at its outset, about a half-hour in I burst out laughing. Marty is a consistently intriguing character. Director Joel Potrykus pushes the film into a deadpan rendering of a strange sort of social symbolism. He’s also his own worst enemy. Potrykus appears onscreen as Derek, Marty’s office co-worker and foil for yet more of Marty’s anti-social behavior. Derek is an eccentric nerd who prides himself on his “party zone” in the basement of the home that he shares with his ailing, offscreen dad. The film’s momentum is nearly toppled when paranoid Marty takes refuge from his work crimes in Derek’s basement. Two grown men play games such as seeing how many tossed Bugles can be ingested. They generally bicker, and dare each other. Meanwhile, Potrykus sees how many blackout fades he can amass.

The film finally gets out of the basement when Marty, on a dare from Derek, tries to con a sales clerk into accepting one of the bad checks, and is himself ripped off for a $5 quick-change scam by the clerk. Marty freaks out and before the cops can come, he’s off to nearby Detroit splurging with nearly the last of his money on a $180 hotel room. With the last of his cash (until he cashes a few more of the checks, which never seem to run out) he orders “$20 worth of spaghetti with chips.” In a long, Warholian take he devours the spaghetti with much of it running onto the bed sheets.

Despite it’s hinting at a topical subtext, Buzzard is more ironic stupidity than a political statement, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Loathsome characters with inexplicable charisma have a long tradition in cinema. Characters we love to hate but have something that holds our attention can save a film that would otherwise go flat. Buzzard could have been much more if it removed some of its flab, but as is, it’s a challenging vision of hopeless destitution–both of the pocketbook and the soul.

Low Energy Sociopath and his Lowball Scams Equal Highbrow Malevolence….3.5 out of 5) stars

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

French Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan (he made and starred in I Killed My Mother at 19) seriously gets in your face with the extravagantly jarring Mommy. The brutal arguments between tantalizing, violent-prone, just-released-from-juvenile-detention, ADHD 15-year-old Steve (Antoine-Olivier Platt) and his tough yet unconditionally compassionate single mom, Diane (a great Anne Dorval) have to be seen to be believed. Unencumbered by inhibition, Dolan displays an acute sense of knowing his characters, and allowing the viewer to get inside their fears and demonstrations of conviction. Steve yammers his way into his mother’s confidences one moment, strikes at her in a swift mood change the next, then washes it down with an all too believable vulnerability as he seeks placation. It’s at once heart-rending and totally disarming.

Dolan, 25, has an eye for marvelous shots and his use of the narrow 1:1 screen ratio, highly effective in itself, produced an anticipation of wondering just when he was going to spring the change of ratio to full-blown widescreen. He doesn’t disappoint. He also has a penchant for long scenes accompanied by an entire pop song. Oasis’s Wonderwall never sounded so good as it augments a particular scene that borders on the surreal.

Stylistic marvels aside, Mommy is essentially about a mother’s love against all odds. After Steve, who’s also been know to wet his pants, expresses fear to Diane that she’ll stop loving him, she replies, “What’s gonna happen is I’m gonna be loving you more and more, and you’ll be loving me less and less. That’s just the natural way of life.”

A harrowing, artistic view of a 15-year old who is a recalcitrant handful…4.5 stars (out of 5)