Author: Don Malvasi

Hardly a calculated stunt, Joss Whedon’s home-movie take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing wisely casts a sparkling Amy Acker as Beatrice. Whedon’s ensemble cast, familiar to fans of his TV work (Angel, Firefly, Buffy Te Vampire Slayer) rollick their way to a giddy yet formidable modern-dress re-imagining of the bard’s comedy. Long on commentary regarding the battle of the sexes, the play’s durability is on display in vivid black-and-white (the seond quality film in b & w this month, following Frances Ha).

Whedon adds on a good dash of slapstick, mostly effective, and a present day L. A. setting, albeit one where the men incongruously wear conservative suits. The shifting allegiances, double crosses, misadventures and general shrewd mayhem come across light and fluffy but wholly charming. The film’s tone is consistent with Whedon’s actors’ countervailing nerdiness, presumably an antidote to the dustiness some present-day audiences might wrongly come to expect from a filmed Shakespeare. (For a fine straight version of the play, see Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version.)

If it all seems a little too pleasant, that’s precisely the point. Despite the requisite happy endings, these Elizabethan comedies were anything but soulless. In stark relief to the funny stuff, Much Ado About Nothing’s depiction of the humiliation of Hero at her wedding altar reaches a pinnacle of important feminist issues regarding women’s subservient role in society. Her own father, Leonato (Clark Gregg) at first takes the side of bumbling, duped Claudio (Franz Kranz) for no apparent reason other than he’s a man. Beatrice provides the perfect “Oh, God, that I were a man” soliliquy as a further exploration of the topic.

As Benedick, Alexis Denisof takes some getting used to. Overshadowed by Acker, he plays the role cute and pronounced, somewhat exaggerated. Saving the day is Whedon regular Nathan Fillion, dead-pan hilarious as Constable Dogberry. Whedon shot the film in his own house on a paper-thin budget in 12 days while on a break from working on The Avengers. All in all, a hearfelt good time.

3 1/2 Love Gods (out of 5)

Reacting to the occasionally interesting knuckleheads in The Bling Ring an odd weariness sets in. These four teenage girls and one guy who break into Hollywood celebrity homes to steal, but mainly to gloat at, an enormous display of glitzy possessions, aren’t exactly supposed to break our hearts. More like give us the creeps while we (and director Sophia Coppola) keep a safe distance. If it all gets a little too eerie, well, the thinking goes, Coppola is striving to take us out of our comfort zone. Meanwhile look for no directorial editorializing, thank you. Paris Hilton’s inner sanctum as a sick sight of consumerism overkill? Or just normal for a star of her magnitude? Aren’t these kids (including Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame) demented–no wait–heroic…just sad…maybe a lot like the rest of us? Coppola might as well be shooting through a pair of binoculars for all she’ll tell us about her perspective. Her non-manipulation is itself a peculiar sort of manipulation

An effective filmmaker, Coppola’s craftsmanship keeps it interesting, and Watson top-shelf performance as Nicki is not only good, it’s extra jarring that this Harry Potter kid has not only grown up but finds herself caught in this unsavory mess. Not that she and the rest of her crew aren’t enjoying themselves. They hop over security fences, find open sliding doors by the omnipresent swimming pool or keys left under doormats for heaven’s sake, after internet research by Marc (Israel Broussard) tells them the celebrity is not home on a particular evening. They pick the most vacuous and therefore ostentatious stars and never seem to get caught (more on this later). Hanging out in the same nightclubs as their prey, our merry band squander most of the profits derived from their bling loot. Cocaine and nightclub bottle service seem to be the best they can dream up for the cash they also steal. They even set up a lemonade-stand- style table at their Calabasas high school to sell off a little of the excess brand-name bags and shoes and scarves Mostly, though, they just get off on wearing the stuff, including Marc.

Based on real events depicted in a Vanity Fair article (at the film’s conclusion Coppola films the interviews), The Bling Ring is a weird mix of docudrama and sheer fantasy. Exaggerated in its depiction of the scope of these crimes, the film would have you believe security alarms haven’t been invented yet and none of these stars so much as leave a maid at home when they go out (doubly bothersome since even Watson’s middle-class home contains a house servant–conveniently the only one in the film).

Despite strong performances from everyone, the film far too often feels as empty as its subjects. Look for no mythopoetic construct here; The Bling Ring is not exactly Frank Perry’s The Swimmer. Had Burt Lancaster encountered this bunch of crazy kids, in fact, he would have been even more puzzled by Hollywood’s barren culture than he was in the 1968 film where he roamed in swim trunks from Southern California pool to pool looking for
a sliver of humanity. Here he would find a lot of shiny objects in search of a clue of meaning.

3 Harry Potters Meet Paris Hiltons (out of 5)

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, on first impression often too busy being busy, endeavors to bowl you over with its postmodern scope. A carefree amalgam of narrative, documentary, and several styles of animation, it can be mistaken for an undisciplined tour-de-force. With its stentorian second-person narration (Reg E. Cathey from The Wire), self referential film-within-a-film, stop-action, inner monologues, asides, collages, freeze frames, subtitles and intertitles, is this a student film ready to go over the edge any moment?

Yet for the most part it reins in its excesses admirably. A soulful street-wise tone emerges, antithetical to all the intellectual semi-hogwash that goes down. What we have is not so much a braggart epistle to a lost love (Nimik Mintor who’s prominently in the film) as an endearing tribute to the same that is paradoxically heightened by all the jibber-jabber.

In what often still feels like a way-too-brainy exercise, kudos must be given to the film’s technical marvels, which are plentiful, and to its heart, which shines through the density. Director Terence Nance juggles his genres with an ambition that’s scarily impressive for a first film. He almost bowls you over.

3 1/2 Wacky Art Films (out of 5)

Comedy may be in the eye of the beholder but chances are unless you’re a bonafide fuddy-duddy you should find This Is The End hilarious and audacious, if crude and low-brow. What saves it is the running joke of filmstar comedic actors playing themselves. Celebrity culture may never have been lambasted this believably. Throw in a well-timed horror motif as a credible backdrop and there’s a fine balance of “real’ horror and what looks like a lot of improvised fun from six talented leads. Seth Rogen (who also co-directed with Evan Goldberg), James Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, and Craig Robinson all fearlessly out-indulge one another. (It’s hard to pick a favorite but McBride really kills.)

Baruchel visits pal and fellow Canadian Rogen for a little relaxation only to find himself dragged to a party at the house of Franco. Emma Watson, Rihanna, Channing Tatum, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Kevin Hart, Mindy Kaling and a hilarious Michael Cera (who’s a real lothario here) are hopping around the party. A supercilious Hill, who rubs Baruchel the wrong way, trys to ingratiate himself to him. Time for a stroll to grab some munchies, Baruchel tells Rogen and the two embark on an innocuous-seeming jaunt interrupted by what turns out to be a, er, natural disaster?

Not so fast. We’ve got sinkholes leading to fiery pits of lava and blue beams leading to the heavens, Rapture-style. Destruction reigns. Skedadalling back to Franco’s crib, the duo meet their four brethren, watch Cera endure a cringe-worthy fate, and before you know it everyone else has either split or vanished. Then the four begin a survival odyssey, using their rationed household stuff like so many props of hanging fruit and their innate cameraderie like so much of a twisted guilty pleasure. Before long a horned devil with flailing genitalia will be menacing poor Hill, who’ll subsequently be in need of an exorcism. Book of Revelation metaphors galore will meet this mock-documentary square on, while Rogen and Goldberg (co-writers of Superbad) explore the vagaries of male bonding gone apeshit.

Hysterical trashiness prevails. The audience mostly roars; a few walk out. Sloppy, juvenile lunacy–what more do you want? I doubt there’ll be a comedy as uproarious the rest of the year.

4 Tastelessly Insane Stars (out of 5)

Both the funniest and darkest of the films in the Before trilogy, Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight is a stunning portrait of a relationship enduring a serious rough patch. Starring the incredible leads Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, both who also co-wrote with Linklater, the film takes place another nine years down the road traveled by an American man and French woman, now on vacation in Greece, their twin daughters in tow.

Jesse (Hawke) is now an acclaimed novelist, who apparently borrowed from Celine (Delpy) for his lead female character in both books. Hank, his teenage son from a previous relationship is, at the movie’s outset, just leaving Greece to return to Chicago, where he lives with his mom. We learn she’s unsympathetic to her ex-husband’s new life and she and Hank will come up during the film as a source of resentment and unfulfilled dreams for Hawke. Celine, at the brink of starting a promising new job in Paris, faces the question of throwing it all away to uproot herself for a move to America, so Jesse who feels he has no shot at custody, can be close enough to see Hank on alternate weekends.

As in the previous two films, which perceptively depicted their meeting and subsequent reunification after nearly a decade of being apart, Before Midnight glides through long takes with even longer, unforced and discerning conversations between the couple. A scene with their Greek hosts, an extended family led by an elderly wise man of letters, breaks up the talks between the couple. Their arrival at a Greek hotel later in the film ratchets up the mostly light conversation from earlier. Unbelaboredly yet as risky as can be imagined, the film culminates in a combative orgy of acrimony. Never losing its humor, it goes from enthralling to hypnotic. A deepened sensibility provides a flawlessly executed window to Celine and Jesse proudly protecting their individual identities while sharply yet sophisticatedly arguing up a storm. Sex, used as a catharsis in the previous films, is interrupted here for a different sort of intimacy. Role playing and the “time-machine” device also used in the previous films, help bring the couple to a by-no-means final truce. The realization, paradoxically, sets in that “romantic” has actually taken on a new meaning.

Before Midnight will stand on its own in case you haven’t seen the first two go-rounds. Taken as a whole, though, the films are a major achievement in cinema–a ground-breaking collaboration between three artists of the highest magnitude. As astute as any film about relationships you will see, Before Midnight is a date movie for the bold. Unlike the majority of films these days, it breathtakingly treats the viewer like an adult.

5 Highly Entertaining, Daringly Incisive Stars (out of 5)

If satire is intended in the screenplay of The Internship, it’s largely washed out by the film’s incessant mounting of a worshipful tribute to the gods of Google. Using deliberately drab color schemes in the film’s early scenes, director Shawn Levy ups the ante to only the brightest colors once his characters reach their destination of the company’s headquarters to begin serving internships. His film, sporadically amusing and regularly corny, makes no bones about spinning the tech giants in the best possible figurative light as well.

We first witness our heroes, Vince Vaughn (he also co-wrote) and Owen Wilson, attempting to make a big sale of, um, wristwatches. (Rumor has it hula-hoops and beepers were first floated as possible ideas.) If you have trouble buying the wristwatch thing, you’ll soon be asked to also swallow that neither of these guys has a laptop at home. Check out the Wedding Crasher dudes doing their cyber interview with Google not only at a public library but in the children’s room no less. This just after their wristwatch company boss John Goodman fails to let them know the company has gone out of business. Also el foldo are these dudes’ female relationships once they become unemployed. This frees up Wilson to strike up a fling with one of the Google managers (Rose Byrne) since every formulaic movie needs a romantic interest. And villains:

The perennially annoying Aasif Mandvi plays a didactic, showboating group leader, eager to insult our middle-aged Google Crashers. Max Minghella plays a young, mean and smarmy rival, also eager to insult the old guys. Then there’s a mixture of racially, ethnically and tempermentally diverse young interns who actually know something about technology. When it comes to Vaughan and Wilson imparting life lessons as a substitute for their paucity of any digitally impactful skills, the film shortchanges the viewer. We’re asked to take a leap of faith that these kids would actually be in any way enthralled by this dumb duo. Also, that Vaughan would be able to do a one-night tutorial with a mysterious character called “Headphones” and go from basics nincompoop to studied tech swami.

Now 17 years after the delightful Swingers, Vaughn at least has made a better film than last year’s dismal The Watch. The Internship, while not quite jelling, actually stabilizes during its second half. Since its first half is rather consistently flat, this helps harbor the illusion that it has actually recovered and saved itself from being lumped into that outsized pool of mediocre multiplex comedies. Which would be wrong.

2 1/2 Fledgling Google Crashers (out of 5)

Proving that bigger-and-faster and more elaborate are rarely better, Now You See Me foolishly wastes a talented star cast. Combining shiny computer-generated effects and car chases with a screenplay fraught with smoke and mirrors, it sheds very little light on the real mysteries of professional magic. For genuine insight on the subject, turn to the marvelous documentary on the life of conjurer Ricky Jay. Enlightenment and entertainment are evident in spades in what is a highly plausible look at a man who does things that are incredibly hard to believe.

If you happen to see the films back-to-back, you’d be advised to wash down the sleek and arrogantly preposterous Now You See Me with the Jay film, Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries And Mentors of Ricky Jay. To do it in reverse would needlessly upset a rarefied display of a man’s moving, lifelong dedication to a difficult yet mesmerizing art. Deceptive Practices provides a fine display of previous practitioners who were Jay’s mentors, including archival clips of probably Jay’s most influential mentor, Dai Vernon, who performed well into his nineties. You get the sense Jay, 64, is such a good illusionist largely due to the time and effort he’s devoted to such apprenticehips since Jay started magic at the age of four, at the encouragement of his maternal grandfather, himself an amateur magician.

The small-scale simplicity of Jay’s stunts stand in contrast to the hectic indulgences of Now You See Me. While it may seem unfair to compare a dramatic thriller with a biographical documentary, these two current films loom as stark opposites: the one, a hollow showmanship that grows increasingly farfetched, numbing our curiosity; the other a carefully crafted glimpse into the world of a real-deal magician, uncolored by bombast.

Now You See Me doesn’t merely have rough patches. It’s a start-to-finish cartoon. Its screenplay exceedingly insistent on outgoing itself, which ends resembling a dog chasing its tail. A hearty streak of fine actors (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine) seem to be snickering under their breath. One of the stupidest final twists in recent memory vexes the situation further.

If you pull off these films together, you’ll stand witness to an additional important contrast. The history of magic and his own mentorships are as clear to Jay as how own stellar, amazing performances are to the viewer. His film controls the pace of his tricks, allowing only a sprinkling throughout the film. Now You See Me superfluously dissembles a time-honored art by high-teaching it ad nauseum. Deceptive Practice gently examines a modern-day genius of this art, surrounding Jay’s stunning feats with subtlety and historical context. As a nice bonus, the documentary out-entertains the “entertaining” thriller by wizardly leaps and bounds.

Now You See Me – 2 Glitzy, Bloated Stars (out of 5)

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay – 4.5 and-now-the-real-artist, thank-you-very-much stars (out of 5)

No more reminiscent of the Beatles’ tune than of Danish director Susanne Bird’s excellent prior films (In a Better World, Brothers), Love Is All You Need, well, could use a lot more movie. It wears its thinness like a badge of honor while basically showering us with cliches that seem proud they’re not part of a showy Hollywood-style rom-com sledgehammer, but remain cliches nonetheless.

We start out with a hairdresser, Ida (a very good Trine Dyrholm), coming home from a breast cancer treatment only to find her bag-of-wind husband fornicating on their couch with his young blond secretary. “Your illness is tough for me, too,” he defends. Too easily willing to forgive, Idea’s self-esteem couldn’t be any lower. Enter the rich Philip (Pierce Brosnan, who looks mostly bored here). Still remorseful after losing his wife in an accident, Philip is withdrawn, both from life and from his son, who’s getting ready to marry Ida’s daughter.

Only he and Ida, despite living in the same city, have somehow never met.

Soon he’s berating her in an airport parking lot after she smacks her car into his, and, lo and behold, they come to realize each other’s true identity before boarding the same plane to their kids’ wedding in Sorrento. Brosnan’s rustic villa there will soon entertain a cast of semi-stock characters looking to celebrate and finding it not so easy. Just when we think we might get a little more depth from the two main characters, Bier rolls out picture-postcard shots of the Amalfi Coast, or, worst, peels off a reprise of the film’s soundtrack theme: Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.” If you thought “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” had played itself out in the 25-year-old Moonstruck, so did I.

Not a terrible film, Love is All You Need mostly frustrates. Insights sneak in to remind us of Bier’s talent. Philip’s overbearingingly crass sister-in-law, Benedikite (a great Paprika Steen) gives Bronson a couple of scenes to entertainingly prove he’s more than a match for her cynicism. The film’s wedding “climax” is both heartfelt and amusing Yet love Is All You Need’s building blocks gain little traction. Too bad. Lost in its depiction of a family’s little rumpuses (Ida’s husband defiantly brings his shallow secretary to the wedding) is the film’s larger theme of two lonely opposite-personality types finding each other and overcoming fate’s ugly hand. More than once Philip and Ida simultaneously head out to parallel balconies in his villa yet both stare ahead, seemingly isolated from each other. Sure they eventually connect, but there’s a cagey, this-only-happens-in-the-movies feel to it all. Filmmakers as good as Bier, even when attempting to go light, usually have you believing rather than pretending.

2 1/2 Almost-Edgy Romantic Bromides For Baby Boomers (out of 5)

Purists be damned, Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby first soars with visual gymnastics, then knows enough to settle down for crunchtime. Swanky and gaudy, this version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic stays faithful to the text yet adds a dimension sure to piss off those who’ve sought to canonize the original text. Before you call Luhrman the insensitive brute who would disgracefully desecrate Fitzgerald with anachronistic flourishes like a Jay-Z-helmed soundtrack, though, remember the 1920s were culturally revolutionary like probably no other decade. Luhrman successfully jars the viewer into a stunned disbelief while beholding the spectacle. Cameras sweep and surge, confetti and fireworks and exaggerated (ARE they?) crowd scenes give reinventing a new meaning. None of it seems outside the theme of Fitzgerald’s holding a mirror to the opulent American spirit. He both celebrates the singular romantic vision of a reinvented rags-to-riches Gatsby and, finally, laments the hollowness of that idyllic-to-a-fault vision.

Of course if you’re here for a movie and not a Great Books lesson, let your hair down and have a little fun.
When Luhrman drops Jay-Z for Gershwin, and finally introduces us to our main character, it’s as if God has arrived in West Egg. Partygoers, mostly who’ve never laid eyes on Gatsby, set up the grand entrance of Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s favorite frontman, and now easily the finest Gatsby to come to the screen in this, the fourth screen rendition of the novel. You’re probably looking at an Oscar-caliber performance. He makes a rare appearance at one of his over-the-top parties with the intention of meeting his new neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Come to find out, it’s Carraway’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan, who lives directly across the bay in old-money East Egg, who Gatsby has really got his eye on. Seems they share a past. As Daisy, Carey Mulligan nails both the vulnerability and ordinariness of Daisy. In the film’s pivotal scene, in the Plaza Hotel in New York, she gets figuratively tossed around like a ping pong ball by her all-or-nothing romantic pursuer Gatsby, and her brutish yet cleverly calculating husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). A victim of the age when women were virtually powerless to shape an identity independent of the men upon which they relied, she’s a tragic figure in her own right. It is sad yet plausible in its context, that she can no more live up to the impossible pedestal Gatsby places on her, than she can make a decision to save him from his fate at the film’s climax.

DiCaprio keeps us invested in his character until the very end. Like Nick, we get wrapped up in his optimism, his focus, even his pigheadedness. His gaze never leaves the green beacon emanating from Daisy’s place. Like a good magician, he distracts the viewer with His Act. It is only after his demise that we realize we’ve been duped. You can’t redo the past, after all. His partner in deception, Luhrman has a leering final word: while Carraway writes out his text in 3D splendor, he ostentatiously adds the word “Great” to his finished title and manuscript….Great as in grand rather than excellent? The same might be said for Luhrman’s best-yet film rendition of a book that, until now, one might have thought lent itself only to stodgy adaptations.

4 Hammering Yet Tender Takes on America’s Gatsby (out of 5)

Paint-by-numbers directing is a specialty of Mira Nair (The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding). In her new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she adapts the novel by Mohsin Hamid by taking one step forward with a noteworthy performance by Riz Ahmed as a Pakistani Princeton student who makes good working on Wall Street. Unfortunately she takes two steps backward by adding to the novel a largely bogus thriller element, and a superfluous romance with a dour Kate Hudson.

Ahmed almost saves the film. We witness in extended flashback his meteoric rise in the business world once his genius acumen encounters the mentorship of his new boss, Kiefer Sutherland. They go around the world assessing the value of companies and, just as often, breaking them apart. In scenes that seem interminable, he cozies up to art student Hudson. Back in the present, he is a Pakistani professor suspected of kidnapping a CIA agent, who is still at large. Spanning much of the film, his interview with a journalist (Liev Schreiber) is genuinely suspenseful. Did he or didn’t he? Hard to tell. Then, entering the scene like a sledgehammer, is a surveillance of the interview by CIA agents ready to pounce with a raid. In the novel the Schreiber character was ambiguous; here, we soon find out the side he is on. If she really felt she needed a thriller tacked on, at least make it a good one. The implausible finale is close to a joke.

When 9/11 happens and Ahmed’s world starts to cave in around him, the film sizzles. Previously friendly co-workers begin to look at him suspiciously. He’s asked walking through an airport to come in for questioning. He’s jailed in a case of mistaken identity after walking out of his work building. We see the glove coming out for the strip search. Yet the dramatic tension depicted in these scenes isn’t enough for Nair. In an absurd turn of events, Hudson, too, has a racist, malevolent surprise up her sleeve. Not leaving well enough alone, Nair swells her film to 140 minutes. Scenes with Ahmed wrap him in a glow so we don’t miss the point that he is a character to be admired. Even an exciting performance by Sutherland eventually gets lost in the shuffle.

Finally, there is a parallel drawn between greedy capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Sutherland’s rants don’t sound much different from those of a radical sheikh, and the damage done by his company can easily be viewed as a reason for the roots of radicalism. Had we not been hit over the head by the thriller and Kate Hudson elements of the film, we may have gotten that message clearer. Like much of the rest of the film, it’s blurred by bloatedness.

2.5 Two Very Fine Performances Stymied By A Misguided Film (out of 5)