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1 star

Rock of Ages – 1 star

March 27, 2013
1 star, Musical
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I saw the original Broadway play, which was fun, silly and wholly dedicated to some of the worst hair metal and pop of the 1980s. The play sensed your patience and came in at 90 minutes. The movie is an interminable 2 hours and actually adds more awful tunes, playing many of them straight.

The film takes the tongue-in-cheek silliness of the play and reduces it to reverential lip synching and air guitar. I was immediately reminded of Julie Taymor’s underrated Across the Universe, which cut a swath through the 60s with Beatles hits and brilliant, kinetic choreography, and still just came up a little short. Here, we get crappy tunes played with sincerity and nary a dance sequence beyond finger snaps and flash mobs. Alec Baldwin, Paul Giamatti, Russell Brand and Catherine Zeta Jones (a zealot Tipper Gore bent on shutting down the latter’s rock and roll world and club in LA) camp their way lazily through this thin flick, with a few winks (isn’t Michael Jackson getting pale?) and not much more. Glee blows this away, and Glee sucks (director Adam Shankman actually graduated from directing this awful film to directing . . . Glee). Tack on the star crossed leads, two nobodies so boring I didn’t bother to look them up for this review, and the disaster is complete. The one star is for Tom Cruise’s turn as Stacee Jaxx, the dissolute rock god, who busts his ass in a lost cause. He always gets an A for effort.

Hello I Must Be Going – 1 star

February 12, 2013
1 star, 2012, Comedy, Drama, Romance
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Poor little rich girl, Amy Minsky (Melanie Lynskey) is in her early 30s, recently divorced, depressed and living at her parents beautiful, opulent home in Westport, CT.  My how times change. When Jill Clayburgh did it, she was An Unmarried Woman and it was kind of a big deal because she had to face economic dislocation, romantic inexperience and societal reproval.

Here, Amy is surrounded by the usual troupe of insensitive caricatures who serve to make us feel she is really the good one, and in case we forget, she is juxtaposed against her ambitious parents, high school friends who have not moved on, and a would-be suitor utilized to show that though Amy presents as a wallowing mope, at least she’s not a loser like him.  And she’s a photographer, no less, but she gave it up for love. Odds on a return to that vocation by the end of the film are, obviously, high.

The character is too fortunate and too dull to gin up any sympathy or interest.  She flings with the 19 year old son of friends of her parents (Christopher Abbott), whose charming little quirk is that he is an actor who hates acting (Abbott’s character ends up going to Oberlin, which, coincidentally, is where his character in HBO’s Girls matriculated).  They bemoan their uncool parents, Westport, and their sad stations (his second quirk is pretending to be gay for his mother because she is “into being accepting”). Minsky’s Mrs. Robinson experience does not make her more compelling.

Expectedly, the film sports precious acoustic music and a pile of Lilith Fair ditties to cement its indie bona fides (Liz Phair should sue Laura Veirs, but I guess there ain’t a lot of money there), and in most other respects is as cookie-cutter as any studio assembly line production.

It does have one good line, when her ogre of a mother (at least, as played by Blythe Danner, she is supposed to be an ogre) upbraids her for her laze and self-pity with, “What did you think life was going to be, one ribbon cutting after another?”

But that’s like after an hour.

Somewhere – 1 star

January 21, 2013
1 star, 2010, Drama
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Sofia Coppola’s fourth feature is a return to the lackadaisical moodiness of her breakout film Lost in Translation, but instead of a disconnected and lonely established actor (Bill Murray) in Tokyo, we get a young Hollywood star (Stephen Dorff) when he is not working, every bit as disconnected. He lives in the Chateau Marmont, beds beautiful women regularly, spends time with his daughter (Ellie Fanning), and fights ennui. Unlike Lost in Translation, however, Dorff and Coppola don’t have jet lag or the outsider in a foreign land to explain or sustain the languid pace and feel. Dorff is also no Bill Murray. The latter registered pathos and bemusement in an understated manner, while Dorff (Blood and Wine, City of Industry, Feardotcom), who normally plays the heavy, lacks the chops and just seems tired.  He is not aided by Fanning, who seems adrift, and the two fail to convey any familial connection.

The result?  Coppola has made a film about a bored person that is boring. While the director is intrigued by long repetitive scenes (identical twin strippers who perform for Dorff, Dorff’s daughter performing a routine on ice, lots of freeway driving), the feeling is not mutual, and the scenes play interminably. Most others just feel like your own day if you were a dull Hollywood actor.

This doesn’t even work as the anti-Entourage. Mood pieces can be nice, but you need some meat on that bone, and Coppola’s paltry output (4 features in 11 years) is perhaps explained by the fact she has little to say.

The Perfect Storm – 1 star

January 1, 2013
00s, 1 star, Action/Disaster, Drama
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Image result for The Perfect Storm crew

A Gloucester fishing boat captained by George Clooney goes out to get some fish and is soon in “the perfect storm.” Based on Sebastian Junger’s best-selling book about the fate of the Andrea Gail, the visuals are occasionally impressive but this is no Captain’s Courageous. The characters have a working class look but not the feel, and Clooney, who normally chooses well, is too damn dreamy to be the salty sea dog (he would have been better as the telegenic and wide-eyed meteorologist who captures the storm on his Doppler).

A better skipper would have been John Hawkes, the crewman furthest to the right above, who was nominated for an Oscar for Winter’s Bone and should be nominated again this year for The Sessions.

Junger’s book delved deeply into the precarious, brutal and chancy world of commercial fishing, but the script elects to show hard drinkin’, hard lovin’, misunderstood men of the sea while on land, and on the water, a boring band of brothers. The screenplay is either hackneyed or just plain dull.

Here’s a taste.

“This is the the moment of truth”

“Billy, you’re not gonna’ like this but I’m gonna’ say it anyway.  You be careful.”

“I always find the fish.  Always.”

“Last night was worth it. There’s nothin like sleepin’ with you… just sleepin’… lyin next to you… all warm and sweet… Me wishin’ the mornin’ would never end.”

“You just caught me on a good night. I’m doing what I was made to do – and I’ve got a feeling I’m going to do it even better this time.”

And when crew member John C. Reilly is about to drown, he doesn’t scream or panic. Instead,  being a man of the sea, he says to no one in particular, “This is gonna be hard on my little boy.”

Hard on the audience as well, John.

There’s also a lot of forlorn women looking out the window for these good men of the sea (Diane Lane is completely wasted). Old Spice commercials are filled with greater verisimilitude.

Director Wolfgang Peterson made it to Hollywood on the strength of his gripping U boat drama Das Boot, but since then, he’s gone to sea twice, with The Perfect Storm and the even worse Poseidon.

He needs to stay on land.

 

Lawless – 1 star

December 29, 2012
1 star, Crime/Mystery, Drama, Historical
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Lawless (film) - Wikipedia

I wonder how a movie like this gets made these days.  Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, and Shia LeBeouf can’t open it, the milieu (1930s backwoods of Virginia) doesn’t relate, it can’t be cross-marketed with a soundtrack, and the script, which could override all of the above if it were really good, is not.  In fact, there is not a memorable exchange in it. Hardy is colorless (he resonated stronger with a mask in The Dark Knight Rises), Chastain a stock dancer with a heart of gold, and LeBeouf showy, always “acting!”

The Bondurants are bootleggers in Franklin County, Virginia.  On principle, they won’t pay off the authorities, which smacks of stupidity more than honor or savvy business sense.  The authorities hire Guy Pearce to shut them down. Pearce must have sensed what a dreary endeavor this was to be, so he took on the affectation of a sexually dysfunctional dandy/germaphobe.

And he hates hillbillies.

Character developed!

Pearce goes too far, Hardy brings hell and damnation with him, and it ends with an underwhelming shoot-out and an interminable voice-over coda by LeBeouf.

Die Another Day – 1 star

December 29, 2012
00s, 1 star, James Bond
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Pin on Jinx

Even Halle Berry cannot save the ridiculously coiffed, barely interested Pierce Brosnan in the last of his four Bond films (her love scene with Brosnan makes you uncomfortable, like watching your father dance to a pop song at a wedding). Shockingly, even though Austin Powers had been released five years earlier, this Bond film amped up the cheese, provided a cartoonishly mwahahaaa villain (Toby Stephens), an ice fortress, Duran Duran video slow-motion, enough sexual double entendres to shame Roger Moore, Halle Berry uttering the line “read this bitch!” to baddie Rosamund Pike, and perhaps the most laughable stunt in the series.

Bond gains entrance to the villain’s lair because a guard takes a leak at an inopportune time.  You can hear the toilet flushing.  Hilarious.

Daniel Craig arrived in the nick of time.

Titanic – 1 star

December 9, 2012
1 star, 90s, Action/Disaster, Historical, Romance
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Writer/director James Cameron’s blockbuster is lovingly grand and its atmospherics and visuals breathtaking.  But a single scene exemplifies the failure of the picture.

The moment before the lookouts spot the iceberg that would seal their fates, they’re dicking around watching Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) smooching on the foredeck.  As a result, a plausible argument can be made that the two leads sank both the ship as well as the film, because their insipid teen love affair is at the heart of this movie.

Rose is unhappily slotted for a marriage to a well-heeled snob (Billy Zane).  She intends to fling herself off the ship, but she is saved by and falls for roustabout Jack.  As the ship continues its doomed voyage, these two chuckleheads moon at each other, while blithely noticing things that are important:

Andrews leads the group back from the bridge along the boat deck.

                                   ROSE
Mr. Andrews, I did the sum in my head, and with the number of lifeboats
times the capacity you mentioned… forgive me, but it seems that there are
not enough for everyone aboard.

                                  ANDREWS
About half, actually. Rose, you miss nothing, do you? In fact, I put in
these new type davits, which can take an extra row of boats here.

                        (he gestures along the eck)

But it was thought… by some… that the deck would look too cluttered. So
I was overruled.

                                    CAL
                       (slapping the side of a boat)
Waste of deck space as it is, on an unsinkable ship!

                              ANDREWS
Sleep soundly, young Rose. I have built you a good ship, strong and true.
She’s all the lifeboat you need.

Not enough lifeboats, you say?

Soon, Rose is posing nude for Jack (he is a portraitist) and shortly thereafter, they’re going at it hot and heavy.  Zane is infuriated and sets his goon (David Warner) on Jack, leading to an implausible  cat-and-mouse chase through the ship while it is going under (Warner is truly Employee of the Century).

There are many, many other problems.  DiCaprio could not be more wrong for the part.  He looks as if he just started shaving, so his turn as a man-of-the-world is laughable.  It’s an Aidan Quinn role given to a near pre-pubescent.

 Rose, did you see where I put my Bubble Yum?

Cameron’s script is also unbearably overt.  He trusts his audience not, as early exposition demonstrates:

HAROLD BRIDE, the 21 year old Junior Wireless Operator, hustles in and
skirts around Andrews’ tour group to hand a Marconigram to Captain Smith.

                                   BRIDE
Another ice warning, sir. This one from the “Baltic”.

                                   SMITH
Thank you, Sparks.

Smith glances at the message then nonchalantly puts it in his pocket. He
nods reassuringly to Rose and the group.

                                   SMITH
Not to worry, it’s quite normal for this time of year. In fact, we’re
speeding up. I’ve just ordered the last boilers lit.

Andrews scowls slightly before motioning the group toward the door. They
exit just as SECOND OFFICER CHARLES HERBERT LIGHTOLLER comes out of the
chartroom, stopping next to First Officer Murdoch.

                                LIGHTOLLER
Did we ever find those binoculars for the lookouts?

                           FIRST OFFICER MURDOCH
Haven’t seen them since Southampton.

Iceberg, speeding up, and no binoculars?  Uh oh.

The film unravels at the end.  The idiocy of Warner hunting Jack and Rose as the ship nears its final peril can no longer be ignored.  Meanwhile, Cameron becomes enamored of what he can do on his broad canvas.  Tragedy becomes an action caper as the director starts bouncing hapless victims off of fantails.

In the final scene, an aged Rose (Gloria Fisher) looks longingly into the icy waters that took her Jack, and throws a massive jewel in.  Leaving your last thought as, “That damned thing could have fed Sub-Saharan Africa for a few months.  What a selfish old hag!”

Carnage – 1 star

December 3, 2012
1 star, 2011, Drama
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Image result for Carnage movie winslet

Roman Polanski’s film version of the Broadway play God of Carnage pits affluent parents Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly against Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz after their sons get into a fight at a Brooklyn park.  What starts as an awkward meeting at the apartment of Reilly and Foster (their son had two teeth knocked out in the fight), with Winslet and Waltz contrite and beleaguered, ends up a full-blown donnybrook as the couples engage in a long, silly serial judgment of each other.  When liquor is introduced, for a time, the men gang up on the women, and, inevitably, the fractured marriages are exposed.

As a stage play, this might have been better (the original cast included Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden and all four actors were nominated for a Tony).  But as a film, Polanski puts us right up close on the actors, and for the most part, they are not up to the task.  Reilly, as the slightly hip and groovy peacemaker, has suffered from his idiot roles in broad Will Ferrell comedies.  Gandolfini would have communicated the hidden rage of a man’s man living in the p.c. world created by his wife.  Reilly just seems goofy.

As an over-protective, liberal, Cry-for-Darfur, “your son must take some responsibility” mother, Foster gives a performance so brittle and unreal it’s Razzie-worthy, playing her character at an 11 (I was reminded of Annette Bening’s cartoonishly gruesome turn in American Beauty).   She contorts her face, has nears-convulsions, and so tightens and clenches her jaw, she appears to be in perpetual physical pain.  Her character is so one-dimensional and unyieldingly p.c., any good jabs taken at the archetype come off as cheap and unkind.

Foster is awful, but Winslet is not much better.  Her role requires she be drunk, and she is not a very convincing drunk.  She is, however, a very convincing vomitor (she pukes all over the coffee table, a contrivance that forces the couples to stay in proximity as she recuperates and they clean up).

Waltz comes off the strongest, but he plays a sarcastic, droll, high-powered NYC lawyer, so his contributions are less histrionic, making him more bearable.

The script has some sharp exchanges and points up certain base impulses bottled up by modern convention as well as the conceits of the urban affluent, but a few well-written rejoinders do not make up for the overall assault on your senses.

Quadrophenia – 1.5 stars

November 5, 2012
1 star, 70s, Drama
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Me and my boy are scheduled to see The Who playing Quadrophenia from beginning to end next week, so we prepared by watching Franc Roddam’s directorial debut, a story of a miserable 1960s London “Mod” (Phil Daniels) eternally at war with his parents, his job, the girl he fancies, rival “Rockers” and all that bourgeois b.s.

Daniels is a punk, through and through, and increasingly, it appears he is mentally disturbed.  He either laughs goofily or snarls, and at no point do we feel empathy for his not particularly difficult plight.  He has a job, a super cool Vespa, a gang of friends who are pleasant and tepid, and a fondness for readily available pills.  His life is also soundtracked to The Who, fer crissakes (poorly, though – it’s clear the director didn’t know how to fit the music into the film and with the exception of the final scene, the musical contribution of band is distracting rather than evocative).

There are some charms to the movie.  It was filmed on location in London and Brighton and the final scene (where Daniels either kills himself or he doesn’t) is a pretty impressive (though overlong) helicopter shot of a precarious ride along the Brighton cliffs.

If you look close, you’ll also see a boatload of very young Brit actors who went on to solid careers, including Tim Spall, Ray Winstone, and Phillip Davis.  It’s a shame one of them didn’t get the lead, because Daniels appears to have been chosen solely for his likeness to Pete Townsend.

Sting is also featured.

Dark Shadows – 1 star

October 13, 2012
1 star, 2012, Comedy
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image

Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows starts out with a crisp recap covering how Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp), the scion of a Maine fishery and lord of the manor at Collinsport, was laid low by a spurned scullery maid witch (Eva Green) and cursed to a life buried in the ground as a vampire. 200 years later, he is unearthed by a construction crew building a McDonalds.  Very thirsty, he slaughters them all, and heads on down the road to his manor to reestablish the family’s supremacy.  So far, so good.  Burton’s economical use of flashback harkens to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and this looks to be a lot of fun.

It is not.  Barnabas in 1972 is rather a bore, and Burton does just about everything you’d expect Dennis Dugan to do as a director.  Barnabas marvels at electricity, commands the demons in the TV to show themselves, reads and quotes from Eric Segal’s Love Story and watches Scooby Doo and observes that it is a very bad play.  None of it is funny.

Nor is any of it engrossing.  Green now runs the town as the executive of a lead cannery, low ambition indeed for such a powerful woman, and Barnabas challenges her – by opening a competing cannery.   In the meantime, Barnabas has a series of lame encounters with the surviving Collins’s, who include a droll Michelle Pfeiffer as the matriarch, a wasted Jonny Lee Miller as her brother, a couple of pointless kids (Chloe Grace Moretz and Gulliver McGrath), Burton’s wife Helena Bonham Carter as a live-in psychiatrist, and Jackie Earle Haley as groundskeeper Willie.

There is also a love interest (Bella Heathcote), the boy’s nanny, for whom we have to suffer a second, less interesting flashback showing that she was institutionalized when she was a child because she commiserated with ghosts.

One gets the sense Burton knew this was a hopeless mess and found himself desperately piling on more and more visual wonder and absurdity in the hopes of saving the picture.  Hence, Barnabas has a ball for the town and arranges for Alice Cooper to perform (allowing him to say that she is the ugliest woman he has ever seen); Carter tries to transfuse the vampire blood out of Barnabas and then just decides to give him a blowjob; Barnabas and Green have a hate mating and fly about the room and up and down the walls, destroying everything, but at least breaking the tedium; and inexplicably, Moretz turns out to be werewolf.  There are also two musical sequences, the tactic of the lazy.

We eventually limp to a lengthy showdown between Collins and Green that is all Robert Zemeckis.  Statues come to life, ghosts intercede, and millions are spent wowing us with spectral visions.  All wasted, making you nostalgiac for the one-take, live-to-tape format of the original soap opera.

There is a hint at the end a sequel may be forthcoming, though with a production budget of $150 million and a domestic take of about half that, we may be spared.