Author: Don Malvasi

Closed Circuit promises more than it delivers, simmers rather than sizzles, all the while tiptoeing around topical issues. Sparks missing, its well-acted competency merely instigates a curiosity about the highly relevant challenges of government surveillance and cover-ups. While it often whets the appetite, it ultimately goes for a paint-by-number approach–preferring to mostly duck rather that confront.

An all-powerful British secret intelligence agency, MI5, decides to put on trial a suspected ringleader of a terrorist suicide bombing that took out scores of victims. Unlike most trials, a lot of evidence will be kept secret and presented in a closed court by a seperate defense attorney from the one handling the defense in open court. A very good Rebecca Hall plays the former; Eric Bana, the latter. The law requires them to not only not have any previous ties but to stay completely clear of each other during the trial. A gaping plot hole asks the viewer to believe an all-powerful MI5 would completely miss the couple having previously had an affair. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Hall and Bana will naughtily join forces during the movie but you may want to ignore the obvious fact that if an all-powerful government security force with something to hide was this desperate to keep secrets, they would have avoided a trial in the first place.

Cliches abound. Bana’s associate commits suicide just before the trial, forcing him to take over the case. More characters will briskly die; allies will prove to be corrupt, and Bana and Hall will manage to miraculously avoid detection–despite the omnipresent cameras–by retreating to a luxurious luxury apartment where they fall just short of physically reigniting their relationship….

…You could say the film also falls short by allowing them to do anything heroic about their situation. Closed Circuit attempts to gain validity with the subtle conclusion that we’re all just powerless pawns. It’s not hard to buy that point but it makes for rather dull entertainment. A quite-good-as-usual Jim Broadbent and the talented Ciaran Hines and Rid Ahmed (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) can only help out to a point. Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) commands our attention as she seems shellshocked that the good guys don’t always win.

2.5 Big Government’s Watching Us (out of 5 stars)

If you’re on your way to the multiplex in search of that great new end-of-the world comedy you’ve heard about, be careful you don’t confuse the hilarious This Is The End with the new Edgar Wright film, The World’s End. You’ll still garner more than a few laughs with the final installment to the trilogy that includes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but you wouldn’t want to miss the real deal.

It’s not that The World’s End is mediocre, though. To the contrary, it’s one of the summer’s more refreshing comedies. Genre-bending rarely gets this good. What starts out as a middle-aged buddies flick morphs into a robot-horror send-up as abruptly as you can say, “There’s blue ooze coming out of their heads instead of blood.” Credit the comic skills of British TV comic star Simon Pegg with keeping the film soundly tongue-in-cheek as he portrays a 40-ish lout with loads of charisma to match the unchanging fact that this guy is an unequivocal load. He manages to look up four old friends who’ve all gone on to a respectable uniformity of establishment success and to somehow convince them to reenact a pub crawl they attempted a couple of decades back. He lies, cajoles, and makes them feel guilty until they comply to revisit their hometown, Newton Haven.

When they get there something is amiss, apart from the fact the first two pubs look identical, or”Starbucked,” as one of them says. Old friends and acquaintances don’t seem to recognize them.
Pretty soon, they’ve got a bunch of young, eerie lads staring at them.

Enter, round two, when the movie goes 180 degrees onto robotland and an endless array of fight scenes. The comedy still comes, but it begins to slow down. The talented interplay between Pegg and Nick Frost, as a stuffy financial type who goes off the wagon mid-film, can only partially save the proceedings. Rife with repetitiveness, this could have been a better film with a little tweak here and a few less fight scenes there. (It’s funny the first time when our heros at the drop of a dime develop superb brawling skills; after the dozenth, not so much.)

Despite its flaws, there’s a lot go like here, not least of which is the superb soundtrack featuring 80s British faves Sisters of Mercy, The Beautiful South and many very good Manchester bands. Paddy Considine and Eddie Matson lend their not inconsiderable acting talents to the mix, although the usually superb Considine is largely wasted here. And the eye candy couldn’t be better: Rosalind Pike transcends the patronizing role of designated female, easily outdoing Emma Watson in her brief scenes in This Is The End.

By my personal laugh count, you should see this film. After you see This Is the End.

3 Simon Says See This Film (out of 5 stars)

In The Spectacular Now, a rich, original screenplay and two strong lead performances form a refreshing coming-of-age yarn–one that will likely stick in your mind for a long time. Avoiding cliches of the teen-film genre, director James Ponsoldt and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber ((co-screenwriters of (500) Days of Summer)) are no dummies when it comes to offering a portrait of high school angst that ultimately has little to do with high school and much to do with life. Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) will pluck your heart without getting too gooey.

Teller and Woodley play opposite numbers. He’s a brimming-with-confidence charmer; she’s an uneasy, demure nerd. When Sutter Keely (Teller) wakes up passed-out on the lawn of Aimee Finicky (Woodley), their meeting starts off slow and gradually takes on steam. She’ll tutor his under-achieving academic side, overlook his increasingly apparent drinking problem, and make him promise to go hard after the withheld information on the whereabouts of his long-absentee father. In short she’ll whip him into shape (except for the drinking) while pinching herself that this life-of-the-party dude actually seems interested in her.

Rebounding at the film’s outset from a break-up with the more conventionally attractive Cassidy (Brie Larsen) Sutter pretends at first that Aimee doesn’t mean squat to him in any serious way. Before we know it he’s asked her to the prom, or was that just the contents of his ever-present liquor cask talking?
The film diverges as Sutter hunts down his pop. Hardly a crock, although teetering on melodrama, these scenes also resonate, largely due to Kyle Channel’s convincing performance as the estranged dad who’s, er, lost his way some. The ever-dependable Jennifer Jason Leigh is on hand as Sutter’s mom–long the protector of Sutter from his dad.

The prowess shown by both Teller and Woodley conjures up pangs of recognition of what it felt like growing up. (The 21-year-old Woodley, won’t be off the radar for long. She’s signed for the lead in forthcoming filmizations of the widely popular teen novels, Divergent and A Fault Of Our Stars.) The Spectacular Now is commendable in not trying too hard, for not getting lost in a thicket of “big moments.” The small and the meaningful, both challenges and joys, come to the fore in all of their despairing confusion. Woodley, who along with the rest of the cast won a Special Jury Award at Sundance, is wonderful. Clue for viewers: these two characters are about as real as it gets.

4 Let’s-Live-For-Today’s (out of 5 stars)

This observer counts himself among the luckiest of the lucky after seeing Cate Blanchett capture Blanche Dubois onstage, in a performance for the ages, at BAM in Brooklyn during a teasingly short run a few years ago. In Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, a gem of a film that twists the themes of A Streetcar Named Desire into a snarly, brilliant tour de force, Blanchette shines in an equally genius performance.

Allen, now 77, has lately directed some of his very best films since 2005’s Match Point marked a poignant comeback for a career that looked like it was heading into the shadows. Blue Jasmine is solidly among the top quarter of his 40-odd films. Like vintage Woody, it is certainly funny in spots, but hardly a comedy. What is parallel with Streetcar is we get a run-down has-been of an elegant woman who remains alluring despite her inability to coinicide her imagined past with her real one. What is different from the Williams play is we get a deftly superimposed Bernie-Madoff-esque plot with a slick Alex Baldwin appearing in flashbacks as Jasmine’s former husband Hal–who brought her to ruin, only she hasn’t admitted it yet.

At the film’s outset, we get a distracted, frazzled Jasmine talking the ear off of a woman at an airport luggage terminal. We soon realize that she just met the woman, who can’t wait to get away from her. Jasmine might as well have been talking to herself–something, incidentally, she will be prone to do throughout the film. It’s Blanche’s madness gone not a little berserk. We watch Jasmine plop herself down at the San Francisco apartment of her cheery sister, Ginger (a very good Sally Hawkins), who remains socially miles away from the stratified circles to which the the formerly wealthy, pampered Jasmine was accustomed. A flashback sets the tone of how emotionally remote the two adopted sisters were when Jasmine was a queen of the ball. Additionally, Hal pulled a financial scam on Ginger and her former husband (Andrew Dice Clay, not a bit out of his league here). Thus the irony that, now down on her luck, Jasmine shows up at Ginger’s door–a situation that does not go unnoticed by Ginger’s blue-collar boyfriend, Chilli (Bobby Cannavale), who’s been dying to move in with her and now faces an amusingly preening and pompous Jasmine as a short-term house guest turned potentially long-term fixture. It’s not long before Jasmine meets up with a witty and wealthy diplomat (Peter Sarsgaard). She can’t wait to gain back her status. Her reliance on her ever-present Vodka bottle and Xanax to steady herself while she makes her big play doesn’t seem to increase her chances. Yet she’s a hard one to fault. Her shaky judgement always seems to come from a place with its own internal logic.

Much of the tension surrounds Jasmine’s grip on reality–or the lack of it. Blanchard is a joy to watch as she forces the viewer’s full empathy on a complex character who’s admirable and pitiful, noble and devious. I fully expect the character Jasmine to stay with me indefinetly–much as her literary precursor Blanche. Both serve to remind us of human frailty. In all its splendor.

4.5 Woody Topping Himself With A Gem (out of 5 stars)

While it set my expectations admittedly low, We’re The Millers mildly surprises with a not bad laugh quotient. If you ward off its cheap sentimentality, you can do far worse for a summer comedy in a year of Identity Thief and numerous other turkeys.

Much has been made of 44 year-old Jennifer Aniston playing a stripper. She and neighbor Jason Sudeikis, hardly a match made in heaven, play wife and husband in a fake family designed as a disguise to aid Sudeikis’ sudden need to smuggle an SUV full of marijuana in from Mexico. There’s a gaggle of sit-com enriched jokes, some zany, some crusty (Aniston doing a half-baked, nudity-free strip tease to throw off a mean drug lord). Ed Helms, who has a pet killer whale, nevertheless never seemed less menacing–yet as Sudeikis’s supplier he manages to get him in a tizzy over a drug debt that sets up the border caper. The inevitable cartoon Mexican villains also soon emerge.

Sudeikis only deals pot and never to kids. Nobody in this fake family seems to ever smoke it. The two parentless teenagers they “adopt” for their enterprise are hopelessly innocent (Will Poulter) and bittersweet-streetwise (Emma Roberts looking more like Sarah Michelle Gellar everyday). The actual straight family they encounter includes the brilliant Nick Offerman, (see his his marvelous turn in The Kings of Summer), and Kathryn Hahn as eccentric middle-of-the-roaders who have in tow a daughter that is conveniently Poulter’s age. He blows his first chance with her, however, when she catches him receiving kissing lessons from his fake sister and mom.

The actors play off each other rather well, there’s good timing to the better jokes, and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) keeps it all from falling too far into Dumbland. Sudeikis and Aniston are especially good at demonstrating just how clashing their characters’ personalities are. Nothing stupendous here, for sure, but its callous and sharp enough to keep its edge while the drip, drip, drip of screenplay cliche intermittently threatens. Even a rather erotic-free Aniston makes up for an absence of hotness with dependable comedienne chops.

3 We’re The Makers of a Decent Laugh-fest in a Summer of Comedy Dreck (out of 5 stars)

Amidst a thicket of buddy bantering and ridiculous plot twists, 2 Guns strenuously goes after the violent and the coy at every turn. Individual scenes work despite all the heavy lifting, but the end result falls short of a satisfying thriller. About two crooked buddies short.

Meet Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington. Oh, you’re plenty familiar with them? Here they seem to be experiencing a secret glee at the special camaraderie they enjoy as two wisecracking hoods. When two such pros get together, things are pretty likely to go entertainingly, right? Mark’s a Navy guy, Denzel a DEA agent–both gone rogue soon after they rob a bank together while their identities are still unbeknownst to each other. They’re up against two mean asses in Edward James Olmos and Bill Paxton, as a drug lord and a mysterious villain with an especially noteworthy sadistic streak. With actors like this around what can go wrong? How about a blah of overkill?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll still see anything Denzel and Wahlberg decide to do. I’ll even put up with a scene, as I did here, that depicts the two of them trying to crash their pickups into each other, then reaching into each other’s windows to grab each other, then finally rolljng around on the ground with thier arms clenched around each other’s throats. It’s even OK they seem like an old married couple much of the time–finishing each other’s sentences and the like. And when Olmos pees on his hands before getting ready to slaughter the both of them, you know he’s serious. But no less pissed off than Paxton, who keeps playing his own unique Russian roulette with his victims, including an undaunted Denzel. Paxton’s trying to figure out what happened to the $43 million Mark and Denzel robbed from the bank where he had a few bucks tucked away. Nobody has any idea where the money ended up, least of all the viewer. But don’t worry. The plot’s just an excuse for scenes like the one where Wahlberg sneaks up on a Navy agent trying to kill him. He goes under the car that agent’s leaning on and sneaks up on him by sliding under his crotch with his gun aimed you know where. Needless to say, the agent gives up. There are plenty of other crotch jokes, like the one where Wahlberg tells Denzel if he wants his car keys, he can find them down–….you get the idea.

Director Balthazar Kormakur follows up his previous Wahlberg film, Contraband, with this adaptation of the BOOM! Graphic novels series. Paradoxically, the movie’s greatest strength–the charisma of its two leads–somehow stifles the otherwise technically proficient proceedings. It’s as if with actors this good, every plot crevice and screenplay silliness is that much further exposed in bold contrast.

2 1/2 Buddies in A Wild Goosechase (Out of 5 stars)

Valedictorian Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) has one new-fangled, obsessive goal: to tackle her brash laundry list of explicit sexual escapades as if it were just another academic achievement. Shaking off her nerdiness is another matter entirely.

The delightful Plaza (Parks and Recreation, 2012’s excellent Safety Not Guaranteed) plays off her intelligent, straight-laced yet sardonic character in spades. Let’s face it. Without her knowing performance (and that of several supporting players here) The To-Do List would likely be exposed as a rather mundane, often out-of-tune screenplay. With this exciting actress, however, we find ourselves with a refreshing comedy–big in raunch and only minimal in throwing down the requisite-for-the-genre sentimental bathos.

Being a virgin, even in 1993, carries a peer-pressure stigma alright. Brandy aims to solve the dilemma by composing a soup-to-nuts checklist of sexual endeavors, then filling out the name of her partners-in-crime as she crosses off each “step” to the ultimate goal of losing her virginity. You may be reaching for your phone to look up the slang for some sexual practices that are mentioned here but graciously left out of the film. Brandy doesn’t turn into a toad for mentioning teabagging and assorted other activities but director Maggie Carey dropped such items like hot potatoes. We’re left with relatively commonplace hijinks that gain an extra edge since it’s the gal who’s the aggressor here and the guys are often awkward bystanders.

Sure, we’re on usually male turf here so part of the considerable fun is getting all this smut from the female perspective. Carey nearly blows it by occasionally creeping over into farcical excess but Plaza repeatedly comes to the rescue by having Brandy handle it all like a perfectly balanced adult. Plaza may be 29 in real life but this is far from easy going given the screenplay’s habit of sliding in and out of inanity. Happily, genuine laughs are abundant–no less when Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader is onscreen as Brandy’s slacker boss at her summer job at a public swimming pool. Fellow SNL regular Andy Samberg appears and impresses in an at first unrecognizable role. Rachel Bilson is also quite good as Brandy’s more experienced and way more cynical older sister. Clark Gregg, fresh off Much Ado About Nothing, mugs it up as Brandy’s squeamish Dad, who reads Rush Limbaugh and bristles at the mere thought of his daughter having sex.

All-in-all The To-Do-List holds down its concepts well enough. Just when it teeters off the edge, the adorable Plaza brings it back. It the telltale sign of a talented actress is being able to lift up ordinary material Plaza is well on her way to further success on a to-do list of a whole different sort.

3* Loads of Sexually Explict Chatter Buoyed By A Sheer Absence Of Any Nudity (out of 5*)

The Conjuring raises the sort of havoc horror fans will be quite familiar with yet director James Wan, sticking mostly to old-school terror devices, has fashioned a crafty, often exciting hair-raiser. The stellar Vera Farmiga and reliable Patrick Wilson portray real-life 1970’s paranormal investigators Lorraine And Ed Warren–famous ghostbusters in the Amityville Horror case. Lifting from flicks like Poltergeist and The Exorcist Wan is quick to tone down both the blood-and-guts and CGI aspects of the current-day horror film. Instead his tone is straight out of traditions of even earlier films that knew the wisdom of the power of suggestion in keeping up the suspense levels.

Wan, who used Lorraine Warren herself as a consultant for the film, doesn’t let what horror cliches may be present here to cheapen or get in the way. Yeah, the family dog won’t go inside when Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and lug husband Roger (Ron Livingston) and their five daughters move into a new (old) house in Rhode Island. Birds are soon crashing into their house, clocks all stop at the same time every night, Carolyn finds herself waking up with mysterious bruises on her body, and there’s a basement where cryptic machinations seem to spring totally randomly. For good measure the youngest daughter begins chatting with–well, you’ll just have to see the movie. Luckily, not much of it is unintentionally farcical.
Wan throws in nice touches like 8mm film projections of the Warrens schooling their students on past cases.

Farmiga (Up In The Air) never stoops down to shtick, but throws down a highly nuanced, resonating performance. As a medium her desire to help these innocent victims is complicated by her own psyche having been damaged by a horrible vision from a previous case. She is a main reason this film steps it up a notch from Wan’s previous effort, Insidious. In that film, also an effective throwback to the old-school horror genre, the climax partially went for the playful. Here Wan is able to stay consistent with the Conjuring’s prevalent thread. A music box with a pop-up clown that grins like a Cheshire cat once we get a hold of what appears in its mirror, is on the spot. It reminds the next time you see a present-day horror flick you’ll probably think back on The Conjuring as that rare specimen of what scary films used to be like.

4.0 Old-School Terrors (out of 5)

Devoid of the wrongheaded sentimentality of the typical coming-of-age movie, The Way, Way Back claws back to the little moments of adolescence with a surehanded robustness. From its dynamite opening scene to its gleaming, touching last shot, it infuses the viewer with his or her own recollective pangs of identification with its 14-year-old protagonist’s rocky road to self-discovery.

The misfit, inert Duncan (Liam James) sits in the very back section of the station wagon of his mom’s boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell). Trent nervingly asks the kid to “rate yourself from one to ten.” When the stunned Duncan at first doesn’t answer and then lets out a soft sheepish “Six'” Trent is quick to respond “I think you’re a three,” a response that will be repeated back to Trent in a far more disapproving context later in the film. Duncan and Trent are on the way to a summer shore house likely somewhere in Massachusetts, along with Duncan’s timid mom, Pam (Toni Collette) and Trent’s teenage daughter, who treats Duncan as if he were an obnoxious vermin.

We’re introduced to a wacky neighbor (an excellent Allison Janney) who’s a boozy motormouth who’s about half as witty as she thinks she is, and a couple (Amanda Pete and Rob Corduroy) who serve as enablers for Trent and Pam to channel their own inner adolescence in terms of acting silly and shallow. This sets up the need for Duncan to get away from them as soon as possible. It’s a need exacerbated by his near-catatonic attempt to socialize with his peers at the beach.

Enter Sam Rockwell as Owen, who comes to be Duncan’s mentor once he runs off to a water park, The Water Whizz, where Owen works. Rockwell puts a sizzling and brazen sheen on every scene he’s in. His rough-and-tumble empathy is the polar opposite of Trent’s smarmy pomposity. Carell, refreshingly playing against type, is just right, as is the always savvy Collette, as a mom, who, like her son, also must overcome an inability to assert herself. Side plots involving Duncan and Janney’s daughter, and Owen and co-worker Maya Rudolph wisely aren’t overdone.

Co-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (recent Oscar winners as screenwriters for The Descendants) appear as comical Water Whizz employees but it’s Rockwell who’s gut-busting hilarious. The Way, Way Back is refreshingly light when it needs to be while making its deeper point seamlessly. The fine afterglow of its symbolic double-entendre ending lingers with a singular resonance.

4.5 Sam Rockwells (out of 5)

At the beginning of The Heat, Melissa McCarthy, in the middle of busting a prostitution transaction, grabs a john’s cellphone and brusquely calls his wife with the news of his shameful activity. Later, her trashy Boston cop character will play Russian Roulette with her gun pointed at a drug dealer’s crotch, take FBI agent Sandra Bullock into a nightclub restroom to cut away some of her clothes and make her sexy so she can get close to a suspect and plant a bug in his phone, harass and insult every supervisor without any apparent repercussions, and generally keep stretching the Melissa McCarthy persona. That persona–the perceptive slob–has already deteriorated into caricature (the terrible Identity Thief earlier this year) so you could say there was no where to go with it but upward.

Directed by Paul Feig, The Heat survives mostly on the back of the considerable chemistry between its leads. Less effectively, it introduces the novel concept of the female buddy-cop concept. Problem is, substitute lesser comedic actors in these roles and The Heat would be a pitiful followup to Feig’s and McCarthy’s earlier film, Bridesmaids, whose screenplay went the extra mile toward female empowerment. Here the broad strokes and formulaic trifling bar any loftier ideas from emerging. A likable summer comedy that goes gross but holds back just enough to let you know it’s really only kidding, it reaches out for action film components that merely further dull the clowning.

So it comes down to what you make of McCarthy. Her schtick certainly amuses but two hours feels at least a half-hour too long for its own good. Feig felt the need to give McCarthy a large Boston family that seems like nothing more than a crammed-in, exaggerated version of the one in The Fighter. Jane Curtin (of Saturday Night Live fame) plays McCarthy’s wickedly funny mom, who is still pissed McCarthy arrested and jailed her own brother (Michael Rappaport). For all the screen time this family hogs, the brilliant Curtin is in maybe two scenes…Then there’s a totally superfluous scene involving a tracheotomy (don’t ask).

Bullock’s a perfect foil–buttoned-down and in need of a liberating partner, she’s often as good a “straight man” as Art Carney’s Ed Norton. Maybe I’m reminded of the Honeymooners because the heavy-set McCarthy bullying a smaller partner conjured up something in my subconscious. It certainly wasn’t because this film in any way bears a qualitative resemblance to that classic of early TV. And while McCarthy’s no Jackie Gleason, she’s a surefire talent with a knack for timing. The dam may have burst in setting her up with credible screen roles, however. Once you start franchising rudeness even it runs the risk of going dull.

3 There Are Worse Films Out There (out of 5)