Author: Don Malvasi

Once upon a time Robert Downey Jr.’s considerable  talent and moxie was enough to protect even the most insipid project from total abomination. Alongside his numerous achievements (Iron Man, Chaplin, Tropic Thunder, and the underrated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Two Girls and a Guy), Downey has been able to buffer numerous lesser films from a far worse fate. No more. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, like a Republican debate or any other vintage train wreck, is pretty much beyond redemption.

Director Guy Richie, fallen from grace even faster than David Gordon Green, throws out a thumb-in-your-eye structural sensationalism as the film’s central core in lieu of a plausible plot or any in-depth theme or characterizations.  A veritable position paper for self-conscious special effects as the film’s raison d’etre, Sherlock is Richie as Baz Luhrmann with Conan Doyle as Shakespeare.

Unlike Richie’s first Holmes film where the iconoclastic modernizing vision of his hero had some wisps of wit to stir in, the newest entry in the franchise begs what the director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch and one of the most savvy actors in Hollywood are doing in this homily to hollow action.  It’s ironic a character so loaded with intellectuality in the Conan Doyle  novels and previous cinematic versions is so bereft of anything remotely cerebral here.  The banter between Downey and Jude Law as Dr. Watson  lags behind the earlier Holmes film’s dialogue and it isn’t the best thing about this film, it’s the only worthy thing.

A Game of Shadows also stars Noomi Rapace, who played the Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (looking mostly shellshocked as if she’s just seen the opening week box office number for the American Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and a limp Jared Harris as Dr. Moriarity. Tune Harris in on Mad Men and you’ll be way ahead.

I could bore you with a description of the film’s plot but let’s be real–you’ve got some holiday shopping to finish and I doubt you’d want to hear it anyway. No wonder Downey’s drinking embalming fluid in the film’s first scene.

3 Embalming Fluids (Out of 10)

The trouble with a flawed film, whose good parts and core “feel” are head and shoulders above most movie fare, is viewers with limited moviegoing time are tempted to dismiss it. Take the case of Young Adult, the new Charlize Theron film directed by Jason Reitman (Up In The Air, Juno) and written by Diablo Cody. Detractors are carrying on about the film’s screenplay lacking the full believability of, say, Cody’s Juno. Stressing that they’re partially correct would be to miss the point.

First of all, if Theron’s gleaming, cheeky portrait of an insecure yet totally charismatic narcissist isn’t the year’s best performance by a lead actress, it’s got to be damn close. Movie heroines these days tend to be all great or all bad. Theron’s Mavis, a former high school beauty, is bad to the core, yet since it is easy to recognize a little bit of ourselves in her every declaration and act of selfishness, we are wooed into liking her. Mavis is not above doubting herself, and does so with a self-mocking, wan gusto that is completely infectious. We’ve all known self-assured prima donnas like this. Mavis’ version exaggerates their inherent vanity into the realm of the tragic. Which brings us to the script’s “flaws.”

Theron, on a whim, returns to her Minnesota hometown upon learning her former high school beau (Patrick Wilson) has just become a father. We soon learn her goal is to no less than seduce him into leaving his family. How wrong of her to assume that’s even possible, you say. Yet her self-image is, from the film’s outset, projected as, well, exaggerated. Now living in the big city (Minneapolis) she prides herself on her status as a children’s author, yet we soon learn she’s no more than a ghostwriter. Propelled by her big-fish-in-a-small-pond resurgence onto her previously conquered domain, she proceeds to act like no years, let alone marriages and baby births, have gone by the wayside. Keeping her honest, or trying to, is Patton Oswalt, as the former picked-on kid from high school who was seriously injured in a bullying incident.  Mavis, not recognizing him at first, is soon reminded he had the locker next to hers and she never bothered talking to him.

The entire set-up with Patrick Wilson inviting her over for a dinner with his wife and baby borders on the highly flammable in terms of credibility.  Yet given its farcical conceit, the films works largely due to Theron’s amazing performance but also because the screenplay is uncannily adept at interjecting poignant vignettes along the way.  These devices may occasionally seem jarring,  but they gradually give Mavis a depth that we don’t see at first.  She’s still incorrigible and delusional, but she’s starting to get it.  She plumbs to the lowest depths of a character steeped in depression, then bounces back from her ordeals at least a little stronger.  You don’t often see a character as striking and memorable as this one.  Theron glides through it all completely owning every nuance and detail.  Oswalt gives a restrained performance in a role that could have easily gone bonkers.

Reisman, quickly becoming a master of the “small” scene that makes a large impact, has tackled a film that had to be a risky undertaking.   Young Adult’s mantra could easily be The Animal’s “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” Speaking of which, Young Adult may be the most musically sophisticated movie in some time.  Its use of Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” will give you goosebumps as surely as Theron’s performance and character will be solidly etched in your memory.

8 Narcissists (Out of 10)

Is the stress of ludicrously manipulative films getting on your nerves? Had it up to here with the canned, filtered and processed holiday dreck that is a Garry Marshall movie? By all means stay away from his latest, New Year’s Eve, unless you’re able to make a deal with the movie theater and allow them to let you in just for the outtakes during the closing credits. You can sneak them in on your way to one of the many bonafide quality end-of-year films that are out there plentifully. And, mercifully, you will have seen the only good parts of New Year’s Eve, which if it isn’t the year’s worst film, is certainly the most offensive to any sensibility higher than that of, say, the average lemur.

Small-minded sure comes to mind in searching for a description of this cinematic tour bus of copious Hollywood stars all in search of a shred of plot, character, one iota of depth, anything. Robert DeNiro isn’t the only big name who’s fallen so low here he may never get up. There’s Sarah Jessica Parker, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Seth Myers, Jessica Biel, Zac Ephron, Katherine Heigl, and, creepers, Jon Bon Jovi (rest assured your sister is a better actor than him). And while I don’t want to spoil it, there’s a mysterious character named Ingrid who you may not be able to identify until the closing credits. She’s a former A-list actress who gives a genuinely formidable performance in the face of the overwhelming odds here. Her surprise kiss from the much younger Ephron at the stroke of midnight is diffused by Ephron subsequently announcing it as no more than a checked-off New Year’s Eve resolution. Prone to play it safe above all, and pander to the most potentially “tasteful” outcomes of a scene, Marshall insults our intelligence by teasing with provocation and a hint of realism, only to descend into mind-numbing dumbness is very short order. Parker’s daughter (Abigail Breslin) finally negotiates going out unchaperoned, yet, as a Marshall safety valve, the mom of a girlfriend is not so subtly spying on her in every nook and cranny. Myers and a pregnant Biel compete to win money by giving birth to the earliest baby delivered after midnight, then their fierce bickering with the other father (Til Schweiger) inexplicably fizzles when it’s revealed he has two other kids. Myers, without any scene provided to explain his sudden empathy other than shots of Schweiger’s kids, recapitulates and lies about his wife’s delivery time so Schweiger can have the prize. Come to think of it, there couldn’t have been an extra authenticating scene inserted there. This film has so many alternate stories Marshall and “screenwriter” Katherine Fugate, barely have time for much besides switching back and forth. See, if you can switch to the next story, then the next, you can avoid having to come to that crux when something resembling a slither of depth is required.

So check out this wussed out, flabby, and pretentious excuse for a feel-good holiday movie only if continuous cringing, rolling your eyes, and shaking your head is your idea of a good time. Myself, I wanted to throw a bowl of yogurt at the screen.

2 Eye Rolls (Out of 10)…Woulda been a “1” if not for the mystery actress.

To quote a phrase: if you look up “sex symbol” in the dictionary, a photo of Marilyn Monroe would stand alone. (And Probably take up the whole page) Her myth endures despite the nearly 50 years since her death of an overdose of sleeping pills. Part indomitable goddess, part vulnerable child-woman, nifty actress, insoluble enigma. Who the hell’s going to play her onscreen?

Michelle Williams!?!?

Much as I loved Williams in Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine, and Brokeback Mountain, this observer and many others were skeptical she could pull it off. The glamor quotient was something she hadn’t previously displayed. While very easy on the eyes, did she have the right kind of looks? Could she pull that grace off on screen? I was mistaken in ever thinking she couldn’t

My Week With Marilyn Williams is a hands-down Oscar nominee and deservedly so. Some might say that the rest of the film strikes one of “peanut-butter-and-jelly” alongside Williams’ foie gras and truffles. But the moment Williams walks on screen the screen the movie continually scintillates and provokes.

The Movie Star Marilyn “illusion” Williams puts out, while never synthetic, balances perfectly with her private Marilyn’s self-awareness regarding her own fragility. She seems ready to fall apart totally one moment, then snaps into a totally in command flirtation mode, complete with a knowing wink and giggle, whether the object is the adoring public or press, or this film’s main character, Colin Clark, third director on Monroe’s new film, The Prince and The Showgirl. There is an art to projecting a multi-facted personality, especially one of this magnitude, without caving in to cliches or mockery. Williams’ Marilyn always seems of a whole cloth while effortlessly segueing from glamor queen to emotionally bruised damsel and back again.

The Prince and The Showgirl was directed by the legendary Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branaugh), who is also Monroe’s co-star in the film. Much is made of the tension between Olivier and his classically trained cast (including a sympathetic-to-Marilyn Judi Dench) and the absent-minded, struggling Monroe, who uses the newfangled method acting style and actually brings a protective coach with her on the set. Branaugh’s preformance is either likely to be brushed aside and taken for granted or overpraised. His Olivier, while witty and perceptive, doesn’t exactly imbue the character with depth, although that is largely the fault of Simon Curtis and Colin Clark’s screenplay, based on Clark’s memoir from the 1990s. Olivier’s wife, the renowned actress Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormand) is shortchanged even further, reduced to a jealous, petty shrew.

My Week With Marilyn, had it strived for more than a snapshot sketch (albeit an intriguing one) might have overshot its mark. Limited by the confines of an earnest (and embellished?) account of a stranger to Marilyn who’s suddenly given intimate proximity, the film is able to approach its subject at a comfortable distance looking in. Yet since this isn’t a “real” biopic, the lightness of so much insider movie-making (while well-done) and huffiness on the part of Marilyn’s advisers often overshadow Marilyn herself. We couldn’t care less about Curtis (Eddie Redmayne) except his bringing us to Marilyn, yet he’s in what seems like an interminable number of scenes without a trace of Marilyn.

Luckily, Williams takes the proceedings up several notches. As the story unwinds, her seriousness and faith in her subject both sustain the film and give the viewer the feeling that, yes, Marilyn could very well have been much like this. At first a puzzle inside of an enigma, but by the conclusion of My Week With Marilyn, a Norma Jeane Baker, who’s at once absurd, complex, and finally, capable of being understood.

8 sex symbols (out of 10)

In the The Descendants the line between comedy and pathos forms a perfect tightrope that has stretched through all of Alexander Payne’s films from “Election” to “Sideways.” George Clooney, Hawaiian shirt and boat shoes in tow, faces a dilemma: his self-professed role as “backup parent” is about to swiftly change. His wife is suddenly in a coma and he’s got 10- and 17-years-old daughters to quickly figure out and nourish. In the meantime, as lawyer and principal heir to a potentially fortune-yielding plot of land, he’s also dealing with ambitious cousins who want to sell. Since they’re practically strangers he deals with them at a careful distance.

And because it’s Payne and Clooney, you find yourself knowing that despite the Hawaiian shirts and native music on the soundtrack that neither will do anything of the sort of corny slapstick to which a lesser director and actor would easily succumb. Before long, any physical comedy here will be perfectly balanced by a higher order of mature human introspection.

Not that there aren’t, as in all of Payne’s films (even the equally sober-subject terrain of About Schmidt) a generous portion of funny scenes and lines throughout. Payne is so assured in his comedy because he goes after life’s little details with uncanny casualness. His contagious confidence in his characters seems to arise out of an all-knowing perceptiveness regarding their often offbeat reactions Before we know it, another, more grating problem arises for Clooney and his total attention to solving it in the light of his greater difficulties, is the stuff of great comedy here. And ultimately, convincing drama.

Clooney (an Oscar nomination seems likely) plays so well off the 17 -year-old daughter (a superb Shailene Woodley), her preposterous yet totally believable slacker boyfriend (Nick Krause), his amusingly tough but clueless father-in-law (Robert Forrester, looking more like Robert Blake everyday), and his laid-back nemesis of a cousin (Beau Bridges). Distinctive veteran character actor Judy Greer plays a pivotal small role with unnerving acuteness.

Pulling the comedic out of the serious and vice-versa is no easy task. We like to think our often absurd daily lives have a rich poignancy despite their utter messiness. In Payne’s films our best wishes are persuasively confirmed.

9 luaus (out of 10)

A little way into Tower Heist you are lulled into feeling you’re watching a pretty good funny movie. Eddie Murphy’s actually back in a groove reminiscent of his heyday. Alan Alda plays a Bernie Madoff-type character. Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick, Casey Affleck, Tia Leone, and Judd Hirsch are all around for good measure….Then the baloney begins to unfurl.

Soon quelling the laughs, a big fat set of cliches drops in your lap. Before you know it, what looked like a production that could have made a significant comic statement on “the one percent” very rich and their victims plays it safe and bland. A car perposterously dangling from a high floor of Trump Tower over a Macy’s Day Parade personifies the film’s turn to jelly. Director Brett Ratner’s encore has us believe Ben Stiller and his band of Robin Hoods actually sneak past the Tower’s security because they’re too busy being mesmerized by the parade. More parade shenanigans ensue but I won’t bore you.

Shame, because the movie has some worthy moments. Murphy’s so good you almost forget his largely unmemorable preformances in the past two decades. Playing a role similar to Jamie Foxx in Horrible Bosses, he’s asked to bring a bunch of (white) hapless would-be-criminals up to the task of performing some serious mischief. He quickly rounds up Stiller, Broderick (admirably deadpan), Affleck, and Michael Pena to a mall and asks them to all steal at least $50 worth of stuff and report back to him. He also takes their wallets so they won’t be tempted to pay. The timing of his lines and the frenetic mania of his character reminds us how strong a comic actor he was in films like Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop. One particular scene in Tower Heist opposite Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) is especially brilliant but by the film’s second half, Murphy’s presence is diminished and we’re left with the caper itself, a heist to rob Alda’s secret stash. He evokes a frighteningly affable monster who steals pension investments from his building’s workers while swimming in a penhouse pool with an engraved image of a huge $100 bill. Also keeping a rare Ferrari inside his apartment, he soon gets nabbed by FBI agent Leone and goes under house arrest. Stiller, feeling especially responsible since as building manager he led his minions’ money go you in smoke once in Alda’s grasp, decides to take revenge.

Not quite a stellar cast entirely wasted but one who could definitely have used a better screenplay. It’s like signing up the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals to play a sandlot softball game. And as far as the Wall Street persona and what got us here, you’d be far wiser to catch the current flick “Margin Call” if you’re really interested.

5 Ferraris Over a Parade (Out of 10)

As historical enigmas go, none can top J. Edgar Hoover for sheer cuckoo quotient. The story of how an insecure, repressed man who transferred his neuroses onto an entire country ought to make a grand story. In Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, what we get instead is an occasionally well wrought study that tiptoes around its subject often to the point of inducing somnolence.

Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) play a shadow game of substitute musical chairs. Wanna know about Hoover’s ability to basically blackmail presidents into leaving him alone? All his meetings with several presidents take place off-camera. Instead we get a face to face with a hammy Bobby Kennedy as Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) outlines his clandestine file of Jack Kennedy’s extramarital affairs as backup that Bobby shouldn’t mess with him. Heard about Hoover’s strident opposition to homosexuality (gay FBI agents were summarily dismissed if discovered)? The film substitutes Hoover objecting to things like facial hair and pinstripe suits. Heard something about Hoover enabling Senator Joe McCarthy’s red baiting tactics? Left out of the film in favor of broader bromides regarding Hoover’s longstanding distaste for communism.

Even Hoover’s fixation on Martin Luthe King’s sex life, while somewhat artfully addressed in the film, is handled circuitously, as is the very subject of Hoover’s own gayness. The film acknowledges Hoover’s longtime attachment with FBI underling Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, The Social Network) as a restrained, chaste affair on Hoover’s part. His fixation on his mom (Judi Dench), who he lives with until her death, also figures prominently in his makeup. However, another type of makeup, of DiCaprio and especially Hammer’s, as gloopy-looking septuagenarians, rears its somewhat ugly head often. Only Naomi Watts (as Hoover’s longtime secretary and confidante) wears her ghostly makeup well enough to satisfactorily depict the transition to middle-aged. Unfortunately, a stretch-the-truth scene of her and Hoover’s early dating soils our perception of her for the rest of the film.

Hoover was not a nice man. There was practically nothing he wouldn’t resort to (blackmail, fabricated documents, the planting of false stories in the press, illegal deportations) to keep his power, which he justified by the steadfast assertion that he was keeping the country safe from threats both external and internal. J. Edgar gives us an under-baked glimpse into what motivated such an over-the-top personality but it should have been much more.

A noteworthy saving grace is an astutely multi-dimensional performance by DiCaprio that is all the more startling for its effectiveness despite the obstacles surrounding him. His effort propels a curiosity about Hoover that the film does more to launch than to satisfy.

5 Secret Files (Out Of 10)

First-time director Sean Durkin has created one of the year’s most beguiling films, which is not to say it is free of bewilderment.

MMMM is a moving portrait of the mental and emotional disintegration of a refugee from a rural “cult” of young people (mostly women) drawn into the clutches of an older, tyrannical male leader (John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone).

Elizabeth Olsen, in a razor-sharp performance of nuanced understatement, portrays Martha, the vulnerable victim. After two years as an incommunicado exile only a few hours away, Martha decides to call her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and flee the kinky and increasingly bizarre commune. A mutual detachment soon exists between the two that enables an utter lack of communication. Lucy walks on eggshells, merely tiptoeing around the subject of where the hell Martha has been and what happened that is making her act so strangely. Meanwhile Martha (Hawkes dubs her Marcy May) goes into a shell only to come out long enough to fantasize her disconcerting past at the farm. In the back and forth’s between Lucy and her husband’s dreamy Connecticut vacation house, and flashbacks to the Manson-like Hawkes’ bevy of prey, dream and reality begin to blur for her. The filmmaker’s restraint roller coasters from inertia to Martha’s unexpected outbursts and back again. Durkin sure knows how to edit. His juxtaposition of dream/fantasy sequences are jarringly smooth and coincide perfectly with Martha’s mind state to the point that the flashbacks feel more like daydreams and reality seems not really… all there.

Olson, only 22, is an actress to keep an eye on. The younger sister Of The Kate & Ashley Olsen twins, she eschewed child acting despite her proximity to opportunity. It wasn’t until a stint as an NYU theater major that she was ready to take it on and take it on she does. She dives into the character from the get go exposing herself, literally and metaphorically into a character that not many 22 year old actors can even begin to grasp. The nuanced acting, the details, the brilliant distance she creates is fascinating to watch and engulfing to the viewer.

You may complain about the film’s thwarting finale. But if you’re feeling cheated, you missed the whole point of the film. Durkin’s end is only to emphasize the point of what the film is truly about, paranoia. Not a slasher horror tale.

9 Utopias (out of 10)

– You’re an 11-year-old boy living in a home for orphans.
– You’re insistent on finding a way to ecape at every turn.
– You’d do anything to find your father who abandoned you.
– You stumble on a local hairdresser willing to take you in on weekends.

So begins the latest heartwrenching odyssey from the fabulous Dardenne brothers (La Promesse and the wonderful L’Enfant).

Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the antithesis of the adorable movie kid (I.E. Super 8). Self-centered, resentful, and violent, he has one thing on his mind: finding his Dad (Dardenne regular Jeremie Renier). The hairdresser, Samantha (Cecile De France, Hereafter, Mesrine), enables his wish and we’re off to the races. What ensues is a compassionate tale of abandonment, forgiveness and unconditional love. Cyril, willing to take whatever scrap his penniless and shabby father offers, finds only disillusionment. He soon gets into trouble hanging around with a wrong element of older kids. Samantha, at wit’s end, copes with the most extraordinary of challenges.

The Kid With A Bike’s depicton of character transformation is breathtaking. The directors use an economy of style that borrows heavily from their early years as documentary filmmakers. Able to avoid the mawkish, they parlay a harsh realism with an uncanny empathy for their characters, no matter how frightful their actions. The ferocity of Cyril’s intense focus is nothing short of remarkable especially at the moment, one specific scene where his personality turns 180 degrees. It will floor you. Doret gives the best performance by a child actor in recent memory. Those kids from Super 8 have nothing on him.

9.5 Gears (Out of 10)

Everywhere you look these days new films are tackling mental illness, the end of the world, or both. Leave it to provocateur, Hitler commentator, and visual poet Lars Von Trier (Dogville, Antichrist, Breaking The Waves) to tie the two subjects together with an uncanny verve and a vision which, while pitch-dark, contains more than a shred of hope.

In the best of the film’s many excellent performances, Kirstin Dunst (Cannes Best Actress) plays Justine, a new bride who’s experiencing acute depression, which she refers to as feeling “a little sad.” The first half of the film is a brilliant Bergmanesque study of the most primal elements of a dysfunctional family to end all dysfunctional families. There’s a toast from Justine’s raggedy father (John Hurt) that ignores the bride and groom and directly slings an arrow at his shrew of an ex-wife (a stone-cold (fox) Charlotte Rampling). Her reply to the couple is “Enjoy it while it lasts. I hate marriage.” They never get to find out since shenanigans bordering on the surreal soon take place, including an incident with the bride in an uncompromising position with a co-worker on the sprawling front lawn of her sister and brother-in-law’s mansion. Before we know it Rampling’s son-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) is throwing Rampling’s belongings out the front door and Dunst tells off her advertising agency honcho boss (a perfect Stellan Skarsgard)–all before the cake is even cut. Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood, Stellan’s real life son) plays the clueless groom, not accidentally an American.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Dunst’s toe-the-line older sister, is highly memorable as Dunst’s protector and rival. During the film’s key second half her character changes most dramatically as the planet Melancholia heads for a possible collision with The Earth. Gainsbourg is increasingly fretful for her young child despite Sutherland telling everyone not to worry. Science assures the dreaded collision won’t happen. It’s no spoiler to unveil he’s mistaken. His ostensible voice of reason throughout the wedding fiasco as the patriarchal domineering head of the family comes up short, paving the way for the increasingly demented Justine to provide a genuine way of coping with The End. Like Genevieve Bujold in King of Hearts her madness provides the creative sanity for the monumental crisis. The film’s use of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” is a true thing of beauty and Von Trier’s stunning visuals enhance this frightening yet cathartic allegory of life and death. The film’s ending is one of the most moving finales imaginable.

Just try to imagine it…….. it’s better than that.

9 Mad Apocalypses (Out of 10)