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The Departed – 4.5 stars

August 23, 2012
00s, 4 stars, Crime/Mystery
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Cinemascope: The Departed [2006]

A meaty, engrossing crime picture, right in Martin Scorsese’s wheelhouse.  Jack Nicholson is a Boston crime boss who has a quasi-adopted son/mole in the Boston PD (Matt Damon).  In that same department, a small unit (headed up by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg) is set up to get Nicholson, and they recruit a police academy trainee (Leonardo DiCaprio) who has one leg in the tough streets of Southie (his dad’s side) and another in the upper crust of Boston (his mom).  Meanwhile, a second task force, headed by Alec Baldwin, is also trying to get Nicholson and can’t get a handle on why they are thwarted at every turn.  DiCaprio is “erased” from police files, purposely gets arrested, and infiltrates Nicholson’s organization, which is populated by colorful, brutal goons (Ray Winstone, David O’Hara), in order to identify the mole.  Meanwhile, Damon keeps screwing Baldwin’s pooch.

A cat-and-mouse hunt ensues, as Damon searches for DiCaprio and vice versa.  Damon is also dating a psychologist (Vera Farmiga) who treats cops and ex-cons, including DiCaprio.

Almost to a person, the performances are rich and rough.  DiCaprio is now in full bloom, grown out of the Titanic baby face and having just previously offered two nuanced and substantial performances in The Aviator and Blood Diamond.  Nicholson is bloody and funny, and, well, Nicholson.

All the supporting characters are strong and natural save for Farmiga (she’s too feminine for the role and when she becomes infatuated by a clearly unstable DiCaprio, it is unconvincing) and Wahlberg, who, ironically, was nominated for best supporting actor.  He yells an awful lot and delivers a few speeches, but volume and line memorization do not deserve a nomination.  Wahlberg seems uncomfortable and masks it with rage.   And once again, Matt Damon does all the heavy lifting and gets none of the credit.  His turn as the fatherless boy who is being manipulated by Nicholson is alternately frightening and heartbreaking, yet he remains a very charming sociopath.

The picture whizzes by.  Scorsese effortlessly paces what could have been a morass of a story, providing his signature quick-cut expositions to perfectly chosen music (The Stones, Badfinger, Allman Brothers).

J. Edgar – 1 star

August 22, 2012
1 star, 2011, Drama, Historical
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Clint Eastwood’s biopic is lovingly photographed.  Washington, D.C., and other venues, from the teens through the 1970s, are regal, warm and classic. Unfortunately, Eastwood has populated his pretty film with a dull collection of historical figures, none of whom have much to offer. Eastwood also mostly punts on the nature of Hoover, and as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, the character is little more than a one-note old windbag, constantly going on and on about the same thing – the enemy within.  Eastwood’s vehicle for Hoover’s reminisces – Hoover is dictating his memoirs to an ever-changing number of aides- does not help.  As one is replaced, you can almost hear the jettisoned aide saying, “Thank God! What a snooze!”  Oliver Stone’s Nixon gave us a ridiculously lustful and evil Hoover, played by Bob Hoskins, but at least he wasn’t tedious.

Naomi Watts is wholly wasted as Hoover’s long loyal secretary.  Armie Hammer, as Hoover’s long loyal number 2 Clyde Tolson, does a poor version of a young Brendan Fraser (Hammer was last seen in The Social Network playing the Winkelvosses).  Judi Dench’s turn as Hoover’s overdoting mother is predictable.  Josh Lucas’s take on Charles Lindbergh is foggy.  In fact, the only decent performance is a brief appearance by Jeffrey Donovan as a trumped Bobby Kennedy.  Donovan thankfully avoids the standard “Haaaaaaaaahvaaaaaads” and “Baaaaaaahstons” endemic to the role.

Eastwood portrays Hoover as a repressed homosexual, no question.  Which makes Mom upset and Tolson bitter.   And Hoover seems most bothered by Martin Luther King because he overheard King having sex on a wiretap.  Not much of a motivation.  Eastwood even gives in to the dubious cross dressing story, but ennobles it because Hoover gets gussied up in Mom’s clothes after she dies.  Another punt.

Another problem.  DiCaprio’s makeup as an older Hoover is very good.  Hammer and Watts, however, look ridiculous, very similar to the characters in “Star Trek” when they age decades in hours.

The Many Looks of Captain Kirk - IGN

Dustin Lance Black’s (Milk) script ends in treacle and nonsense.  Out out of nowhere, Hoover turns moralistic, the man who would stop . . . Nixon!  This prefaces a melodramatic conversation between an old Hoover and Tolson that is straight up “One Life to Live.” When Tolson, doddering in his ridiculous makeup, finds the dead Hoover, it comes close to bringing laughter.

At one point, DiCaprio asks Watts, “Did I kill everything I love?”

Oh if she’d said, “No Edgar.  That was Michael Corleone.  You just bored them to death.”

The Campaign – 2 stars

August 15, 2012
2 stars, 2012, Comedy
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Two dumb Southerners vie for a North Carolina congressional district, one a Democrat (Will Ferrell), a randy Bill Clinton wannabe, and one a Republican (Zach Galifinakis), who is essentially Ned Flanders. But they are of the same bent, using appeals to God, country, morality, patriotism and the like to sway the voters, who, being Southern, are borderline mentally retarded.  After an unscrupulous campaign that features baby punching, grudge wife screwing and near-maiming, we are all served a lesson in civics.

There are a few very funny gags — Ferrell accidentally leaves a message for his mistress on a phone answering machine while an unsuspecting family is having dinner; Galifinakis uses a book (“Rainbowland”) Ferrell wrote in the second grade to suggest Ferrell is a socialist because, in Rainbowland, everything is free; the baby punching; and Ferrell’s tortured rendition of The Lord’s Prayer at a debate.  But much of it is derivative, either of earlier Ferrell vehicles or the fim itself.  Worse, Ferrell so over-relies on his own brand of wild man antics that you can feel the air release from the movie.  Quite something when it clocks in at a mere 90 minutes or so.  When Ferrell engages in the gibberish-spouting freakout scene, I’m reminded of the story about the late Chris Farley, who once shoved a pool cue up his own ass to get yucks. Ingenuity or desperation? You make the call.

To compensate, we get some political instruction, presumably from producer Adam McKay, who must actually believe that vehicles created for the delivery of fart jokes will also suffice for ideological lessons (he did the same thing in the seminal Ferrell pic The Other Guys, which ended with a primer on the evils of TARP).  In this movie, the Citizens United Supreme Court case is actually cited, and stand ins for the Koch brothers (John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd reprise the roles of Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche from Trading Places) are wasted when provided with no funny material. There’s also much that is not funny, including a gag where an Asian housekeeper is made to talk black . . . again and again.

Advise and Consent – 5 stars

August 8, 2012
5 stars, 60s, Drama
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Otto Preminger skillfully presents Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize winning political potboiler (published in 1959), the story of  a senatorial nomination (Henry Fonda, who is tapped to be Secretary of State)  gone bad under the weight of McCarthyite tactics, vicious blackmail, and a dying president.  The story is intricate, but Preminger, ever the pro, handles it with ease.  For example, if there is an issue of senatorial procedure, it is cleared up in a clever discussion with foreign tourists, who receive a crisp and unobtrusive explanation as to parliamentary procedure and the role of the vice president in American government.

It is decidedly not an all-star cast, but it is a very good one.  Franchot Tone, as the tough and dissipated president, wields his waning power with as much vigor as he can muster.  He has a wonderful scene where first he tries to smooth-talk the chair of the subcommittee handling the nomination (Don Murray) into reporting it out and when the senator does not budge, his flash of anger is actually a little terrifying.  Walter Pidgeon plays the Senate Majority leader, tasked with shepherding the nomination through, and Charles Laughton hams it up wonderfully as the Strom Thurmonesque senator who opposes the nominee.  Lew Ayres, as the in-over-his-head vice president, is a perfect combination of insecure and decent.

Having been born in Washington, D.C., the shots of the nation’s capitol in a more innocent and uncluttered time are worth the viewing in and of themselves.  And look close, because Will Geer (Grandpa Walton) plays the Senate minority leader and Betty White also has a role in that august body.

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Barcelona- 5 stars

August 7, 2012
5 stars, 90s, Comedy, Romance
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With only five films to his credit (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, Love & Friendship) and all but one of them in the same milieu (upper class young people in comedies of manners), Whit Stillman is overlooked in discussions of  great American filmmakers who are still working.  This despite the fact that Stillman has written and directed all five of his films, and all have been critically acclaimed.  

Barcelona, Stillman’s second picture, reprises two actors from Metropolitan as different characters.  Taylor Nichols plays Ted, a neurotic salesman in 1980s Barcelona. Chris Eigeman plays his cousin, Fred, a naval officer and freeloader sent ahead of the Sixth Fleet in the midst of a wave of anti-Americanism.  Both negotiate their acrimonious relationship, borne of childhood injuries inflicted by Eigeman, a truly obnoxious sort who as a visitor begins to stink after a day (unlike, as Nichols observes, the fish who takes three).  They discuss religion, women, anti-Americanism, sales, history and shaving, all the while falling in and out and in love with various Catalan women.

Nobody writes quite like Stillman. His dialogue is distinct and erudite, but his characters have such a surface forthrightness that what could seem contrived comes out as wholly honest and fresh. Stillman is particularly impressive in presenting a funny, incisive culture clash between the mildly ugly Americans and the bemused, mildly antagonistic Spanish. Both treat each other as curious, and even hostile interactions over politics are amusing and revealing.

Again, Stillman has no bad films on his resume’,  a rare honor.  Paul Thomas Anderson comes close. Though the second half of Magnolia is bad, the sheer perfection of the first half of that film and its overall audacity generally gets him a pass, but The Master is a long, very hard slog.  Scorsese is a great, but Gangs of New York and Shutter Island are very, very bad films, and his later sycophantic rock documentaries are downright embarrassing.  Coppola has some late career dreck (Jack, The Rainmaker) and have you even heard of his last three efforts (Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt)?  Eastwood has his share of humdrum work (J. Edgar, Bloodwork, Space Cowboys).  Try as I might to suggest otherwise, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic is haphazard at best.  Even the Coens, David Fincher, Gus van Sant, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Steve Soderbergh have at least one dog (see A Serious Man, Alien3, Psycho, I Heart Huckabees, Bad News Bears, Solaris).

Woody Allen is closer to Stillman in style but Allen also makes some really horrific pictures (less so now that he’s not acting in them as much), redeeming himself with a great surprise just when you’ve written him off.  Take this list of Allen movies – Hollywood Ending (2002), Anything Else (2003) and Melinda and Melinda (2004).  All pretty bad.  Ballgame, right?  But then, Allen offers a smart Hitchcockian crime movie, Match Point (2005), and he is resurrected.  Two more sh** sandwiches follow in 2006 and 2007 (Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream), but in 2008, Allen comes off the canvas again with the charming and seductive Vicky Christina Barcelona.  And last year, after another pair of clunkers (Whatever Works, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), the best original screenplay Oscar goes to Allen for Midnight in Paris, a movie I hated, but I defer to the Academy. 

Stillman deserves better.

Broadcast News – 4 stars

August 6, 2012
4 stars, 80s, Comedy, Romance
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Broadcast News - Rotten Tomatoes

James L. Brooks has the ability to make you laugh out loud just before he brings a tear to your eye, a skill he has honed in Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets. His missteps (How Do You Know, Spanglish) still contain very funny dialogue, even if the whole doesn’t work.  But to be fair to Brooks, Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspooon, Adam Sandler and Tea Leone are not very formidable substitutes for Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine, and Debra Winger.

In Broadcast News, Brooks melds a love triangle with a story about journalism and ethics that is prescient.  Holly Hunter is the producer of the Washington bureau of a major news network, Albert Brooks is a gifted but un-telegenic correspondent, and William Hurt is the new up-and-coming golden-boy, groomed to replace the current anchor (Jack Nicholson, in a hilarious cameo).  Hurt is attractive but shallow (as Brooks says, he is against everything Hunter is about).  But Hurt is also sweet and in his own way, genuine.  He fancies Hunter and when Brooks tries to anchor the weekend news in an effort to save his job, Hurt is there, giving him advice, some of which is excellent (“punch” a thought in each sentence) and some of which makes Brooks very uncomfortable (“Just remember that you’re not just reading the news, you’re narrating it. Everybody has to sell a little. You’re selling them this idea of you, you know, you’re sort of saying, trust me I’m, um, credible. So when you feel yourself just reading, stop! Start selling a little”).  Hunter becomes infatuated with Hurt, and as they grow closer, Brooks professes his long love for Hunter and reveals the ethical threat that is Hurt.

The picture is loaded with crisp, witty dialogue, and at its best, it evokes the great Grant/Stewart/Tracy v. Hepburn romantic comedies. The picture also injects something of substance (the deterioration of the news), not with the acid cynicism of Network, but gently, so as not to get in the way of the story and humor.

There is also great physical comedy, provided by Joan Cusack as a gawky assistant producer, and Brooks, who endures the great humiliation of flopsweat during his shot at anchor.  The scene is one of the funniest in film history.

The movie has one problem, but it is a big one.  Holly Hunter is so mannered and quirky that you simply cannot understand Hurt’s attraction to her, much less that of Brooks. Sure, the good looking neophyte might be intrigued by the neurotic but fascinating “other” ala’ Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were.  But Hunter takes “odd” up several notches, and in many scenes, her facial expressions approximate her work in the live cartoon Raising Arizona.  Her temper is also so volcanic as to suggest mental illness.

Certain lines cannot be crossed in a romantic comedy.  I was reminded of the awful Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock vehicle Two Weeks Notice, wherein Bullock has an attack of diarrhea on the highway and Grant has to commandeer a stranger’s RV so she can relieve herself.  This may work for Will Ferrell and Zach Galifinakis.  But no romantic lead can be shown in such an unflattering light.  Hunter does not sink to such depths here, but her portrayal does border on the grotesque and it detracts.

There is also the weakness of the import of Hurt’s great journalistic sin (he recreates a moment of emotion in an interview) .  There is no question – the act was unethical.  But in the context of some of the other stagey and easy shortcuts engaged in by Hunter and Albert Brooks, their high dudgeon (which is critical to the picture) rings hollow, and the film never gives them a comeuppance on this point other than Hurt’s rebuttal to Hunter after she accuses him of crossing the line — “It’s hard not to cross it.  They keep moving that little sucker, don’t they.”

Farewell My Queen – 3.75 stars

August 5, 2012
2012, 3 stars, Historical
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Image result for Farewell My Queen

Downfall, but instead of Hitler and his bunker, it is Versailles and the French Revolution.  Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger) is pampered by a coterie of attendants, including her reader and our protagonist (Lea Seydoux) a quiet but determined girl who adores her queen.  Her adoration never wanes, even after the queen asks her to take flight and pose as a more favored courtier, Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) with whom the Queen has developed a near romantic attachment.  Seydoux knows this could be her head, but out of a childish need to please, a desire for purpose, and ultimately, the chance to at least play both above her station and the queen’s favorite, she agrees.

Shot at Versailles, the film is beautiful, even as it deglamorizes its locale (mosquitos, rats, vicious gossip, heat, and dank cellars take precedence over finery and gold).  The depiction of life at court from the vantage point of rank-and-file staff has an “Upstairs, Downstairs” feel. Kruger plays Marie with the right mixture of caprice and entitlement. Seydoux is a bit tedious, however, because she is written as little more than a teen with a crush.  Though her scene in the carriage as she pretends to be Polignac is moving (she waves to the peasants, one of whom makes a throat-slitting motion and even that does not dissuade her from fully indulging in her moment of glory), following a teen with a crush for an entire film can be a little boring. At its most dour, I yearned for Sofia Coppola’s dizzying and silly Marie Antoinette.

Friends with Kids – 3 stars

August 3, 2012
2011, 3 stars, Comedy, Romance
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Romantic.  Comedy.  Can one be successful with only a little bit of both?  The Jennifer Aniston-Vince Vaughn vehicle, The Breakup (2006), fell into the category, as it depicted the deterioration of a relationship primarily built on convenience and a shared apartment.  The scenes between Vaughn and Aniston were so arch and cringe-inducing you wondered, ‘where the hell is the ‘rom’ much less the ‘com’?'”

Friends with Kids makes The Breakup seem like Love Actually.  Three couples form the center: the unmarried, platonic sister-brother like duo (Adam Scott and Jennifer Westfeldt); the canoodling, just pregnant, earthy types (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd);and the sizzling, “just had sex in the bathroom” couple (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wigg).  We meet them at a fancy dinner in Manhattan and then fast forward four years to a second meal at the home of Rudolph and O’Dowd.  Scott and Westfeldt are unchanged, but Rudolph and O’Dowd are now sloppy, harried and laden with kids (she screams at him for doing nothing, he does less, and their kids scream all around them).  Hamm and Wigg bring their own newborn, who appears to be just one source of tension in their quietly crumbling relationship.  Scott and Westfeldt survey the wreckage, determine they can do it better, have their own baby while maintaining their independence (and separate apartments in the same building) and live happily ever after.

Well, no.  Westfeldt is in love with Scott, and Scott has absolutely no clue – he’s bought into their experiment.  In the meantime, they go on a ski trip with their friends, each bringing a new beau (Megan Fox and Ed Burns).  Hamm and Wigg implode, and Westfeldt realizes that her love for Scott is so strong she must profess it.

So, let’s tally.  The first scene of mayhem and bitterness (the four years later dinner) is depressing.  The scene of Scott and Westfeldt trying to make years of friendship square with sex to conceive is uncomfortable.  The scenes of Scott casually mentioning how awesome Fox is to Westfeldt are brutal.  The ski trip is akin to the dental examination in Marathon Man.  And Westfeldt’s profession of love, which is spurned by Scott, will open the vodka.

I liked the picture, but it ain’t no rom-com.  Scott, as always, is perfect, both wry and when it is called forth, impressively anguished.  What is funny in the picture is largely due to the crude banter between Scott and Westfeldt.  The other characters play well, save for Westfeldt, who also wrote and directed.  She is so pitifully earnest, it didn’t seem a fair fight.  And the exchanges between the couples are often illuminating.

The film is also quietly traditional.  Scott and Westfeldt do appear to be doing well on the outside with their arrangement, but as the fissures show, during the ski trip from hell, Hamm, in his own deteriorating marriage with Wigg (note: the mastermind of Bridesmaids provides not one single laugh in this picture) delivers an angry, vicious broadside against their hubris.

Scott delivers an effective rebuttal, which, of course, cements Westfeldt’s love for him:

You think that we don’t love each other? You know, I have loved this girl for nineteen years, Ben. That is fully half my life. I know everything there is to know about her. I know the mood she’s in when she wakes up in the morning – always happy, ready for the day. Can you imagine? I know that she is honest; she won’t even take the little shampoo bottles from the hotel room, or sneak into the movie theater for a double feature. She always buys a second ticket. Always. I know that we have the same values, we have the same taste, we have the same sense of humor. I know that we both think that organized religion is completely full of shit. I know that if she is ever paralyzed from the neck down, she would like me to unplug her – and I will. I know her position on just about everything, and I am on board. I am on board with everything about her, so you tell me, Ben. What better woman could I have picked to be the mother of my child?

Nonetheless, the film culminates in Scott’s realization that Hamm was right – you can’t just craft a perfect bubble of domestic bliss by jettisoning the inconvenient parts, such as “’til death do us” and fidelity.

Still, this movie can be a trial.  And the picture is not too traditional.  It is probably the only film to conclude with the line, “Fu** the sh** out of me.”

Dick – 4 stars

August 2, 2012
4 stars, 90s, Comedy
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This is a very funny parody of the unraveling of Richard Nixon, by this story, at the hands of two high school girls, one of whom lives at the Watergate and happens upon G. Gordon Liddy and the gang during the break-in.  To shut them up, the girls are given jobs as dog-walkers at the White House and become seminal in our nation’s history.

Dave Foley (from “Kids in the Hall”) is hilarious as H.R. Haldeman, Dan Hedaya is a workable Nixon – not quite as sweaty as Anthony Hopkins and nowhere near the master of all Nixons, Frank Langella, but still, he’s appropriately shifty and skulking.  Priceless is one girl’s fantasy about Nixon – she has fallen in love with “Dick”, who supplants Bobby Sherman in her world – and in one fantasy, Hedaya rides up on horseback on the beach to tell the girl “Pat understands”.

Bruce McCullouch (also from “Kids”) and Will Ferrell are laugh-out-loud as a fey and bickering Bernstein and Woodward.