Love Actually – 0 stars

December 20, 2014
0 stars, 00s, Romance
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Original review

A banana split, with two pounds of cane sugar dumped on top, followed by a generous ladling of chocolate syrup, dropped in a bucket of melted cotton candy and deep fried in maple butter, then placed on film.  That is . . .  Love Actually.

The only thing that recommends this monstrosity is Billy Bob Thornton playing an American president as an uncanny mix of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  Even this brief treat is spoiled by his counterpart, British PM Hugh Grant, who apparently reverses relations with the U.S. solely because he caught Thornton feeling up his secretary.

It’s all too precious. Avoid the tooth decay and bellyache, even in the judgment altering season that is Christmas.

2022 Update: I took a few years off from my annual autopsy of this festering corpse, and lo and behold, the film celebrated a 20th anniversary. I must concede, it never occurred to me that this trite, candied, filmic effluvium could have been worse in an earlier incarnation, but it appears the editors exercised unknown restraint.

That cute kid who learned how to drum and fell in love? Liam Neeson’s darling little urchin?  Turns out, as originally envisioned, he was a gymnast, and he was going ballet his way through the airport to greet his love.

This is akin to creating a highly toxic disease that infects the public but then announcing, “Well, before the lab leak, we did manage to contain the flesh-eating variant”.

Um . . . thanks?

Apparently, in test screenings, the mass retching created a significant liability issue, so they cut it.      

Prior entries: 

2015 Update:  Look, this is a gruesome film, substituting true emotion and pathos with a staggering falsity.  If you ever met anyone in your life anywhere near as quaint and darling as any of the characters in this bucket of marshmallow and melted gumdrops, it’s likely they are an enemy of the state infiltrating our ranks for a low purpose.  Before you feel your heart swoon and your mouth say “awwwwwwww”, run. Run for your damned life.

2016 Update:

Think about how creepy it would be for a person who long-pined for you to show up at your door with cue cards (one of which has semi nude women on it) to reveal his long held love immediately after you have chosen another. Keira Knightley seems to think this is charming, but in point of fact, she should have called the cops. This weirdo is now going to do . . . what, exactly?  Go off to Tahiti because mere proximity to his lost love is too much for him to handle?  Go to his apartment thinking that his gambit may pay off, that Knightley might think to herself, “Hmmmmmm.  He must really love me.”  Hang around, quietly watching . . . waiting . . . hoping . . . tinkering with her husband’s brake lines.

This scene is emblematic of this stupid film because it trades a sentimental ball of goo moment for what should have been a larger and more generous gesture. The dude should have simply left Knightley to her new husband and their life, which would have been stoic and laudable.

But nooooooo.  Let’s make this icky.

Married women, think of you, at home, newly betrothed for a few weeks, snuggling with your husband. Then, his best friend of decades comes to the door with cue cards and professes his long love for you.  Now, remove the gloppy music, the cobblestones, and the holiday lights and Love Actually becomes . . . . Play Misty For Me?  When the stalker says, “Enough.  Enough now,” I sensed menace, crazy shit going on in his head like the dog haunting Son of Sam’s noggin. Had he gone back in the townhouse and killed them all, it still wouldn’t save this vile film, though it would have been an improvement.

Also, how dumb is the husband?  The boom box is supposed to be a substitute for carolers, but it is a professional singer with some harmonists and an orchestra.

Sorry, Keira. The guy you chose is a moron and the one you did not is going to kill you.

Also, one of the loon’s cards says “And at Christmas, you tell the truth.”

Ludicrous.  You no more tell the truth at Christmas than on Easter or Arbor Day. 

2017 Update:

This year, let’s delve into this kid, so precocious, so darling, and just so articulate!

“Do you really want to know . . . even though you won’t be able to do anything to help . . . the truth is, actually, I’m in love?”

Couldn’t you just eat him . . . . . I mean, eat him up.

The only thing that could make this scene work is if a bunch of shady Eastern European thugs showed up, grabbed the boy, attempted to sell him into white slavery, and Liam Neeson started on the Taken series quite a bit earlier.

Then, this sweetums might know what is indeed worse than “the total agony of being in love.”

2018 Update:

Let’s talk about the secretary, Prime Minister Hugh Grant’s love interest. She is referred to as “chubby” by another aide and she herself explains that her boyfriend “said no one’d fancy a girl with thighs the size of tree trunks.”

First, I can’t believe this kind of fat shaming allows for enjoyment of this film by any decent person.

Second, I really don’t give a rip about fat shaming. But the woman is not in the slightest bit fat. It is a ridiculous conceit. It makes absolutely no sense. She is buxom, one of the few enjoyable aspects of this filmic turd pile.

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So, the movie is abusive and retrograde, which I for one will not let stand even at the expense of your enjoyment. Perhaps worse, it doesn’t even know what a fat person looks like. Ridiculous.

2019 Update:

In this years’ entry, let us take up the Martin Freeman-Joanna Page story line.  Apparently, these two meet while playing body doubles on the set of a porn flick.  This seemed absurd, but I did my legwork.  As confirmed by the screenwriter and much of the commentary, they are, indeed, supposed to be on the set of a porn flick.

I have learned about pornography solely for purposes of this review, and be it hardcore or arty soft core, one of the genre’s principal draws to a producer is the low to non-existent production costs.

Yet, by the looks of the sets and the crew and the fact that there are stand-ins for the actors who will be performing the actual sex act on camera, this appears to be a multi-million dollar production.

Worse, not only are Freeman and Page forced to endure an assistant ordering them to shift mechanical poses and pretend to be having sex, he has them do it in the nude, which would seem completely unnecessary, except, and this is a quote, “lighting and camera want to know when we will actually see the nipples”.

Apparently, the “real” actors are cooling their heels in the green room while the stand-ins work to make the shots just so.

So, for purposes of super cute chit-chat, we are presented with two of the most pathetic characters in film history. They won’t even be receiving wages for having actual sex on camera, but rather, the pay will be for standing in and simulating sex for other people who will be simulating or having sex on camera, i.e., the stars!

What could that amount be?  A couple of quid?

This is a job . . . okay, it’s not a job, because this premise is so mind-boggling lazy and ridiculous, but were it a job, it is one for meth heads.

Not Bilbo Baggins and Joanna Page.

This movie even perverts porn.  Is nothing sacred?

Bad Santa – 5 stars

December 19, 2014
00s, 5 stars, Comedy
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It’s difficult to resist a dissipated, alcoholic, and profane Billy Bob Thornton as a Santa Claus who works department stores to crack their safes, especially when he meets an eternally cheerful but clueless grade schooler (Brett Kelly) left alone with his addled grandmother (Cloris Leachman) in their tony Arizona suburban ranch home.  In true Christmas spirit, Thornton discovers the boy is essentially alone and defenseless, moves right in, raids the liquor cabinet, and trysts with a slutty barkeep (Lauren Graham) who has a Santa fetish.

Santa is so bad he rips open the kid’s Advent calendar to get at some chocolates.  He pisses himself on the job.  He beats up children.  He engages in sodomy in the dressing rooms of the Big & Tall Women’s section of the department store.  He looks in the cherubic faces of all those blessed children who revere him and  . . . well, see for yourselves.

Is there redemption for Bad Santa? Kind of. But Thornton is a character who could endure three Dickensian ghosts and conclude, “Eh. Fuck ’em.”

Bad Santa is the ultimate anti-Christmas flick and a holiday favorite.  Thornton is brutally acerbic (especially when dealing with a host of bratty kids on his lap), Graham is indescribably hot, and John Ritter and Bernie Mac (as mall security and management) contribute significantly to the humor (Ritter’s repulsion/fascination with Bad Santa is inspired; what a loss he was).

Night Moves – 4 stars

December 16, 2014
4 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery
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I was alerted to this film by David Thomson’s tribute to its writer, R.I.P. Alan Sharp, a Writer Too Dark for Hollywood.  Thomson credited two Sharp films, Ulzana’s Raid and Night Moves:  “Neither of them was nominated for anything, and only Ulzana’s Raid did any business.  But if you want to experience the richness of American films in the early 1970s, they are worth tracking down. You will be surprised how complex they are and how tense. They seem to understand movie narrative in a way so few films do today: He used mystery to draw audiences into his stories, trained them to answer the small puzzles, and then had them ready to grasp the implications he preferred not to underline. And both films are tough, bitter, and bleak, bearing the imprint of an unusual and talented outsider.”

Whenever we watch a movie from the 70s, my wife sighs and asks, “Is everybody going to die in this one?”  Night Moves is indeed a dark film, but Thomson is also dead-on in identifying its allure.  Gene Hackman plays a former pro football player turned private detective who is hired by an aging Hollywood not-quite-a-star (a dissipated but crafty Janet Ward) to find her wayward 16 year old daughter (Melanie Griffith, reprising her jailbait, tart role in The Drowning Pool, minus the malevolence).  Griffith has taken flight, bouncing between movie sets in Arizona and her creepy stepfather’s (John Crawford) compound in the Florida Keys.  In the meantime, Hackman discovers that his wife (Susan Clark) is having an affair, so he is in essence conducting two investigations, only one of which is really private.  The picture is leisurely and intricate, until, as Thomson notes, a “deeply upsetting” end.

Hackman turns in an interesting version of the traditional private investigator, part canny but part limited.  He is clever, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  He’s also very human, a vulnerability.  Along with Elliott Gould’s Phillip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Hackman’s p.i. is a marked and welcome departure from the type.

Sharp’s dialogue is noteworthy, especially in some of the exchanges between Hackman and Clark as they confront the state of their marriage and the import of her infidelity.  Hackman is also given some wonderful lines:

Ward: Are you the kind of detective who, once you get on a case nothing can get you off it? Bribes, beatings, the allure of a woman…

Hackman: That was true in the old days. Before we had a union.

* * *

Paula: How do you resist Delly?

Hackman: Oh, I just think good, clean thoughts, like Thanksgiving, George Washington’s teeth.

* * *

Crawford: (on his nubile stepdaughter Griffith)  You’ve seen her.  God, there should be a law.

Hackman:  There is.

 

 

 

 

 

Animal House – 5 stars

December 15, 2014
5 stars, 70s, Comedy
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We were invited to the 50th birthday party of an old friend this weekend, and the theme was Animal House. In preparation of attending as Boon (Peter Riegert) and Katy (Karen Allen), my wife and I watched the movie to identify what they wore in the hopes of being identified as the characters. Our specific goal was delayed by our enjoyment of the movie, which neither of us had seen for twenty years or more.  It is sharply written, consistently inventive and enhanced by dozens of astute comic performances.  John Belushi’s physicality tends to get the lion’s share of accolades, but I’ve always been a bigger fan of Dean Wormer (John Vernon), who was chosen after Jack Webb turned the part down, and the pot-smoking Professor (Donald Sutherland), who took a $50,000 paycheck instead of the offer of 15% of the gross, a decision I’m certain haunts him to this day (the movie went on to gross $141 million).  His plaintive plea to his class is still one of my favorite moments of the movie:

Perhaps the greatest joy in these repressed, politically charged times is its dogged insistence on political incorrectness. Today, there would be a line of $46-an-article on-line ‘zine shitheads excoriating the film for its casual racism, sexism, insensitivity to the mentally disabled, and homophobia.   I can see the clickbait banners now:

“Animal House: The Genesis of the UVA Scandal”

“Nearly 40 Years Later, and We’re Still Laughing at Animal Cruelty”

“Animal House: A Frat Guy’s Birth of a Nation”

Belle – 2 stars

December 11, 2014
2 stars, 2014, Drama, Historical
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Image result for Belle film

A promising period piece based on the true story of the illegitimate, black daughter (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) of a British naval officer, given to the care of his aunt and uncle (Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson) as a child in the late 18th century. Dido Elizabeth Belle is raised with a foot in two worlds — with title, means (200 pounds a year) and support yet still divorced from full status (for example, she may not dine with the family when guests are present). Complicating matters is the fact that Wilkinson is the Earl of Mansfield and the Lord Chief Justice, deliberating over a fraud case in which slavers may have thrown their sickly human cargo overboard for the insurance proceeds.

The film is lush and has a Downton Abbey feel. Unfortunately, it’s about as subtle, anachronistic and schmaltzy as Downton Abbey.  Belle must contend with the easy racism of her time, racism represented by an odious, money grubbing family that includes scheming Miranda Richardson and her eldest son, Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy from The Harry Potter movies, who is really evil; you can tell because he was a member of Slytherin House and he sneers in every scene). Everything is spelled out for the audience, and there is no nuance to any character. Belle’s true love, played by Sam Reid, is the abolitionist son of a minister, so ardent and well-meaning you want to punch him. And as Wilkinson agonizes over his court decision and rails against the impudence of Reid, Watson reminds him that she once knew a young man who wanted to change the world.  Guess who that young man was?

The case at the heart of the picture is also decidedly and unnecessarily dull. So dull that in real life, the owners dropped the claim against the insurance company amidst a storm of bad publicity. Yet, the real Earl of Mansfield presided over a case much better suited to the film, that of a slave who had been brought to England, escaped, was caught and then was forced onto a ship bound for the West Indies. The slave owner argued his right over property, but the Earl set the slave free, judging that colony slave laws were of no force in England and concluding, “The state of slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it.”

Such an interesting life deserved a better picture.

3 Days of the Condor – 3.5 stars

December 9, 2014
3 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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An effective spy thriller, in keeping with the post-Watergate cynicism and paranoia of so many American films (The Parallax View, Executive Action, The Conversation, Winter Kills). Robert Redford is a lowly CIA analyst at a New York City agency front (a historical society) who comes back from lunch one day to find all of his co-workers gunned down.  Redford goes on the run, commandeering Faye Dunaway, and as he flees the hitmen (led by Max Von Sydow) and negotiates with the Agency rep (Cliff Robertson), he woos Dunaway and uncovers the reason for the murders. Needless to say, that reason is of the times.

There are problems. Redford can be intense, but he cannot be harried or excitable. As such, he handles some pretty shocking developments in a discordantly world-weary way. As far as the plot, despite all the cloak-and-dagger, it’s very bare bones. The film is also horribly scored, sporting a 70s saxophone that makes the dullest love scene ridiculous. Redford and Dunaway don’t seem to be having sex so much as playing the “who blinks first” game.

Dunaway, however, is quite good, managing to convey a captive’s ability to bond with her captor, and as an Agency “contractor”, Von Sydow is understated and interesting. Robertson is also given respect, even though he’s ostensibly the government baddie. His speech to Redford at the end is a fair defense of the dirty tricks spy trade:

As Director Sydney Pollack noted about Robertson’s character, “I’m much more interested in the CIA guys who are trying to help us and do something [widely considered] immoral than I am about guys who are just immoral because they want to sell dope and make money. That’s boring to me. It’s much more complicated to say, here’s a bunch of guys whose job it is to protect us and they’re saying there’s no way we’re going to sell the fact that the Middle East [states] control the oil and if we don’t get control of the oil and they [seize its production], we’re going to end up with what we have now.”  Now, juxtapose Pollack’s view of Robertson with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street creation, Gordon Gecko, who at the height of his megalomania, answers a question as to why he wants to wreck a company with, “Because it’s WRECKABLE!” and you’ll understand why that film travels so poorly.

Pollack also makes great use of grimy 70s New York City – the World Trade Center figures very prominently in the film. More Pollack: “I was looking for the logic of where the [Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)] might be [located]. I didn’t want to have a building that said CIA on it because I didn’t think that would exist. I figured they would want some kind of anonymity and that the best kind of anonymity are these two massive buildings with thousands of offices and you wouldn’t know who’s where.”

 

 

Cold in July – 2.75 stars

December 8, 2014
2 stars, Crime/Mystery
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After a promising start, this picture spins so wildly out of control it is almost impressive. Mild mannered Texas picture framer Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) shoots a home intruder, earning the enmity of the intruder’s fresh out of prison father (Sam Shepard), but they soon learn there is something bigger than the both of them connected to the killing. The first half of director Jim Mickle’s movie is tense and effective. But then, the picture abruptly shifts course, veering into the implausible. Hall and Shepard improbably team up together with the assistance of Don Johnson as a Houston private investigator (Johnson delivers a jokey performance that undercuts the film’s dark feel) and we get a bit of a buddy movie. The awkward shift in tone is accompanied by nonsensical plot points and an ostentatiously arty, bloody end that utilizes slow motion and a synthesizer rich soundtrack reminiscent of The Terminator without a hint of irony.

Post Dexter, Hall is as good as he can be, but the writers give him absolutely no real reason to become a confederate with a man who not only threatened his life, but that of his wife and child. The critics gave this 85% on rottentomatoes.com while the audience posted a 69%. The audience got it right.

Birdman – 5 stars

December 5, 2014
5 stars, Comedy, Drama
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Birdman is so visually audacious you almost lose focus on its engrossing performances, cutting sense of humor and ambitious breadth. It is Rope on meth, tracking, almost hounding, with very few cuts, our tortured protagonist (Michael Keaton) in, through and around Broadway’s St. James Theater as he seeks to revive an acting career defined by his iconic role as a movie superhero. His fortune and name are on the line, and he is beset on all sides by family (fresh out of rehab daughter Emma Stone, ex-wife Amy Ryan), his jittery manager (Zack Galifianakis), his needy female co-stars (Andrea Riseborough, Naomi Watts), his antagonistic male co-star (Edward Norton) and a vicious and even more antagonistic New York Times reviewer (Lindsey Duncan).

One other character gives him some trouble as well.  His alter ego, who at first is a voice in his head but soon appears in person, telling him that all this stage acting bullshit is just that, he needs to get his ass back in a Birdman movie, and he must “shave off that pathetic goatee. Get some surgery. Sixty’s the new thirty, motherfucker!”

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu collaborated with three others on the play-within-a-play script, which is a satirical series of verbal jousts on the topics of sex, relationships, acting, the stage versus Hollywood, machismo, art versus commerce and the impact of social media.  The clashes between Keaton and Norton (sell-out v. artiste’) and Keaton and Duncan (the sell-out virus stinking up the hallowed stages of Broadway v. the Lord Protector of those stages) are particularly sharp, but the entire screenplay is chock full of gems.  My favorite is Keaton explain how he is holding up under the strain:  “”I’m broke, I’m not sleeping and this play keeps hitting me in the balls with a tiny little hammer.”

The frenetic, adrenaline rush style of the film heightens the tension (the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubetzki, was the mastermind behind the dizzying tracking shot in Children of Men). The manic shooting makes the performances all the more impressive.  Keaton is superb.  His early trademark (ironically, before he became Batman) was a fevered, riffing style of acting, which could be spellbinding or just exhausting.  Older and more world-weary, Keaton internalizes his frenzy, struggling to bottle it in just as he struggles to keep Birdman at bay.  It’s a riveting turn.  Everyone else is excellent, and Norton deserves special mention.  As an actor with a history of being temperamental, Norton’s performance as a condescending, difficult, self-loathing actor is canny and knowing.  He damn near steals the film, which again, mirrors what is going on in the story.

Gonzalez Inarritu also gives the actors a great deal of space.  In Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson filmed a solid chunk of a drug deal going bad solely on the face of Mark Wahlberg.  The effect was powerful because in Wahlberg’s eyes, the audience could register the disaster unfolding before him.  Whenever I think of that classic film, I first remember that scene.  Of all the memorable parts of Birdman, there is a scene when Stone lashes out at her father, purposefully trying to hurt him.  In one of the few times the camera isn’t moving, Gonzalez Inarritu holds on Stone’s face as she delivers the cut and then as she sees its effect.  It’s a captivating moment in a film full of them.

Thus far, the best film I’ve seen all year.

The 30 Most Important Sex Scenes in Movie History

December 4, 2014
News and Articles
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I am seeing Birdman tonight. But I have to keep this blog energized, so I present, from Vulture. . .

The 30 Most Important Sex Scenes in Movie History.

I was surprised three movies were excluded: James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary; Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and Angie Dickinson in the shower in . . .

Dressed to Kill.

As far as the worst, it’s hard to beat John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment, a truly disturbing scene

 “Please, God, don’t come in here.”

“How can you resist?”

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Gone Girl – 4 stars

November 30, 2014
4 stars, Drama
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*WARNING – SPOILERS*

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel works as a procedural, a domestic drama, and a meditation on modern tabloid culture. It is patient, methodical and mostly interesting, though contemporaneous commentary notwithstanding, it has nothing serious to say of love, marriage or the waning of romance, which is what it purports to examine. Sure, there is perfunctory sex, Pike’s voiceover vituperation over the rigors of being the junior partner, and some suggested physical violence, all of little import.  In the end, it’s a monster movie, an elegant, crisp, well-acted monster movie in the hands of one of our more meticulous directors, but a mere monster movie nonetheless.

The monster’s victim is Ben Affleck, who is surprisingly savvy as the husband set up for the ultimate fall by his seemingly perfect wife (Rosamund Pike). Affleck is an apt choice for a weak man searching for a lifeline while his world crashes around him. Affleck the actor has often failed due to a lack of depth, a certain surface charm that has nothing beneath it, and here, he uses that to his advantage. He is complemented by Carrie Coon, who plays his loyal but disapproving sister, and Kim Dickens (Deadwood), the skeptical detective investigating the disappearance of Pike.

There are two strange casting choices, one that works out and one not so much. Tyler Perry has been trying to shake off Madea, and as a high profile, cable news ready criminal defense attorney, he does so, bringing some real wit to the role. As Pike’s former paramour, however, Neil Patrick Harris is thin, almost lost.  He is too strongly rooted in broad comedy and he works to overcome that persona with a deliberate, cautious performance that is creepier and more distracting than it should be.

The story, however, is riveting, told first from the vantage point of the increasingly beleaguered Affleck and the flashbacks of Pike as she narrates from her diary. Theirs is a storybook romance that eventually succumbs to the pressures of money, familiarity and recrimination. Except for one difference. Pike is nuts, a serial fantasist who destroys anyone who rejects her.

Pike’s predecessors – Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Bonnie Bedelia in Presumed Innocent – were in their own ways every bit as batshit crazy, but both women were decidedly more nuanced. Close’s jilted one-weekend stand refused to be ignored by Michael Douglas, but there was a discernible crack in her facade that made her sympathetic. Like Pike, Bedelia not only wanted to torture her husband and insisted upon his fealty after the fact, but her rebellion against the invasion of the impossibly attractive Greta Scacchi was sold as the aging frump protecting her castle and its king, Harrison Ford. Pike, however, is The Terminator (or maybe Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), so psychopathic that she sets up all her former paramours when they as much as back away. Accordingly, any observation she or the film offers on the nature of marriage or relationships are no more than the ravings of a lunatic, even if this particular lunatic is cool, calm and seemingly accomplished. She’s loathsome and it’s hard to care much about the fate of Affleck, who chooses to sally forth with her even after she tries to destroy him. Which makes for an ultimately silly movie, but one that is a great deal of fun arriving at its pointlessness.