M. Night Shymalan is the Dr. Frankenstein of movies. He created the monster of “bet you didn’t see that coming” and since The Sixth Sense, he has had to keep upping the ante, each plot more preposterous than the last.
A stylish revamp of the Jack the Ripper saga. It has many things wrong with it. Here are a few:
1) Johnny Depp, the lead Ripper investigator, is a psychic, which comes in handy;
2) The Ripper entices prostitutes with grapes, a neat fact the investigators choose to withhold from potential victims (as well as the fact that the Ripper is an educated man);
3) Heather Graham is about as convincing as a Whitechapel prostitute as I might be as the lead in “The Clint Eastwood Story.”
4) Every murder (and every autopsy/crime scene) is shown. Each more bloody than the next. Exhausting.
The crime of it is not the gore, tedium and heavy hand, but the fact that this Hughes Brothers picture (the Hughes Brothers of the classic Menace II Society) was the end for them until 9 years later, when they helmed The Book of Eli.
It is bad enough that Hollywood would hand a period piece to a couple of young directors who made their bones on the verisimilitude of modern South Central LA. But after they botch it, nine years later, they’re given The Book of Eli?
Not fair.
Me, Myself and Irene. Wretched. Unfunny, disgusting, self-indulgent poop from the Farrelly Brothers, who, apart from the inspired There’s Something About Mary, have delivered such dreck as Dumb and Dumber, Outside Providence, and Kingpin. The movie – a formless miasma that makes the plot to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective look like Chinatown – is ostensibly about Rhode Island Highway Patrolman Jim Carrey, who has been taking crap for so long that he develops a psychotic condition replete with a mean alter ego. It has one funny running joke (Carrey’s three black sons, who speak Hollywood jive but sport high IQ’s to the effect of “Shit, you be one dumb mutherfu**er, not knowing the speed velocity of the inverse quantum theorem, bitch”) that gets run into the ground, and Carrey’s physical comedy can occasionally make you laugh. Otherwise, it is unwatchable.
Babel. A self-important message picture, the message being, “If you are an illegal alien, you shouldn’t take your employer’s kids into the Mexican desert” or “If you’re having trouble with your wife, don’t think a tour bus trip through hot and unpleasant Morocco will help matters” or “You are so hot when you pee in a bucket.” The picture is boring and over-hyped, ostensibly about big issues, and therefore, the Oscar nomination is explained.
A Serious Man. I consider Fargo and No Country for Old Men to be two of the best films ever made. The only resemblance the Coen brothers’ Oscar-nominated film, A Serious Man, bears to those films is attention to detail and the potential evocation of outrage from a distinct group (in Fargo, Minnesotans took umbrage at their farcical portrayal; here, it should be Minnesotan Jews circa 1967). A Serious Man beats up on its protagonist, a Jewish professor with cretins for children, a disloyal shrew for a wife, cartoonishly unhelpful religious guidance, and various other unpleasant people who vex him, including a disgusting uncle with a cebacious cyst he must drain on a regular basis. Apparently, the protagonist is cursed, a curse handed down from his Polish ancestors, but the curse appears to be the fact that he’s Jewish. The moment it appears he can get out from under, the curse strikes again, and the film ends abruptly.
This is an unpleasant, frustratingly tedious film that may have served as some sort of the therapy for the Coen brothers (they grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, in the 60s). It has few other attributes and they shouldn’t have worked out their issues on us.
I picked up The American mainly because it starred George Clooney and he had a gun in his hand on the DVD cover. So, on me.
There is a lot wrong here. Foremost is Clooney, miscast as an emotionally detached killer-sort. Steve McQueen, sure. But not Clooney, who mistakes emotionally detached with catatonic.
He plays a killer and/or facilitator for killers who has to hide out in the most picturesque town in Italy. There, he demonstrates that he is a spartan and a loner, because, well, he is alone, has no pictures in his apartment and does a fair amount of sit-ups and push-ups. Of course, he strikes up a friendship with a priest, who pushes him a little morally, and a prostitute, who, given how attractive she is, should charge $50,000 a roll.
And, yes, he decides it is time to “get out.”
The film is overbearingly serious, and chock full of tropes, like, oh, he kissed a prostitute on the mouth and went down on her = love. And then he was in a shoot-out and won, and got in the car, and . . . is that blood? Oh my God! He was so in shock and it was all so crazy, he didn’t even know he’d been shot in the gut until he was driving a a mile out of town.
This guy is really . . . detached.
And “they” won’t let him “out.” Why? Unsaid, unexplained. Apparently, it’s enough to say “I’m out” and then some really serious French dude makes arrangements for you to be offed.
I wish I could have gotten out too. But no.
Similar films about dysfunctional and barely interesting people. In Cyrus, poor John C. Reilly has the good fortune to start dating Marisa Tomei. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill (Cyrus) is Tomei’s babied adult boy and what ensues is a muted power struggle played a little too seriously when there were more laughs to be had.
Greenberg is another filmic form of torture from Noah Baumbach, who has made quite a career of making movies about unpleasant, self-centered wretches (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale; Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding). The sad center of Greenberg is Ben Stiller, a just-out-of-the asylum condescending dick who is house-sitting for his brother in L.A. Thankfully, unlike the prior films, Baumbach doesn’t put children front and center for the abuse he finds so illuminating.
To give credit where it is due, both Hill and Stiller do well with their appointed tasks, which is to squeeze a little humanity out of such creepy, crappy characters. And while Cyrus ends up unconvincingly sweet, Greenberg is coyly ambivalent.
But really, do we care whether an ass like Stiller may find love at the end of the day?
We do not.
Relentless, way too slick and patently absurd. The film gave me a vicious headache and I soon felt like the rat (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the maze of the insane asylum.
Martin Scorsese begs us to ask – is DiCaprio crazy or isn’t he?
You won’t care. You’ll do most anything to make it stop.
Scary and interesting only up and until three things happen: you see the CGI little gnomes who are causing the trouble (they look ridiculous); Katie Holmes bashes your sensibilities into submission with her leaden acting; and you realize there is no adequate backstory for why the house is haunted by CGI gnomes. It just is.
I confess, I got punked. I saw Guillermo del Toro’s name associated with the picture. He directed The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos , which were spooky, atmospheric and rich.
Alas, the movie says Guillermo del Toro presents, not Guillermo del Toro directs.
George Clooney took his run at McQueen in last years’ dull, arty The American. At least Clooney was old enough to play a weathered “man-with-no-name” zombie. This year, it is Ryan Gosling’s turn in Drive.
Dull, arty and ridiculous, the addition of a grating soundtrack, gratuitous and utterly pointless violence, and Gosling, who has sublimated his personality to play an automaton.
You see, he drives.
For a minute, one wonders if he is the lethal, charmless version of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
No such luck.
The film is also marred by plot twists that make no sense. For example, a professional killer stalking Gosling in an elevator allows our hero to give his gal a loving, long kiss, during which he could have stabbed Gosling in the back. As a result of his inexplicably polite waiting, he gets his head stomped into a bloody pulp. Later, Gosling chases a career criminal onto the beach, said criminal being strangely unarmed, and then, said criminal attempts to escape — by sea.
Mix in scenes chosen for the picturesque, Brian Cranston phoning it in as the old codger who gets Gosling “in too deep”, and Albert Brooks as an offbeat heavy, and the entire endeavor seems forced and inauthentically hip.
I love small crime movies, particularly moody and elegant ones like Layer Cake or The Limey or The Way of the Gun or Sexy Beast.
Drive isn’t a third of any of those films.
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