Anchorman 2 – 3 stars

April 22, 2014
2013, 3 stars, Comedy
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Anchorman 2's Ron Burgundy: Five Funniest Viral Marketing Stunts - Variety

Seemingly improvised throughout, the sequel is alternately lazy and uproarious, but by the end, more the former. The Channel 4 news gang (Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, David Koechner, and Paul Rudd) have reunited, moving from San Diego to New York City, to take the helm of the graveyard shift on the first 24 hour cable news channel. Soon, Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy is back on top, discarding his friends, cementing his fall (he is even stricken blind), only to return triumphant.

In the first film, Ferrell’s bosses (Fred Willard and SNL alum Chris Parnell) held their own as comedians, contributing to the fun. Ferrell’s new boss is the sassy, Pam Grieresque Meagan Good, who is placed in the film for a painful scene where Ferrell visits her family and tries to “act street.” She’s not funny, but she’s not alone.  Harrison Ford, Drake, Kanye West, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron Cohen and others appear, most for a reprise of the first film’s news team rumble, but the melee is woefully disappointing. Gone are the unexpected trident and grenade, the scores from Star Trek and West Side Story, replaced by celebrities who just wanted in. Sure, Ford turning into a werewolf is pretty cool, and who doesn’t laugh at an unexpected minotaur, but these guys aren’t very funny.  And Liam Neeson and Marion Cottilard? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Will Smith?  He wasn’t even funny in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Even Vince Vaughn’s return as Wes Mantooth is a little dull. Speaking of dull, Kristen Wiig as Steve Carell’s love interest is Sominex.

Director Adam McKay also tries to deliver a lesson about the degradation of the news. He usually appends his simplistic political tracts to the end of his goofy movies, so you could walk out of The Other Guys or The Campaign while the credits rolled and he lamented Wall Street greed or the Citizens United decision.

Other bits fare better, including Ferrell’s interactions with his young son and his bottle feeding of a baby shark; Carell’s panic at the loss of his legs on a green screen; and especially, the news team’s smoking of crack on the air.

Raging Bull – 4 stars

April 21, 2014
4 stars, 80s, Classic, Drama
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Raging Bull (1980) - IMDb

Martin Scorsese’s film is visually captivating and anchored by Robert De Niro’s mythic performance as the tortured pugilist Jake LaMotta. The feel of 40s and 50s New York is made more authentic by Scorsese’s use of black-and-white, and as boxing movies go, there is none better at conveying the bloody brutality of the sport. All these gifts, however, come with the stench of a major character who is, through and through, a dim, vicious brute. A recent film with a similar infirmity is Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which had myriad other problems, but which also asked the audience to invest in Joaquin Phoenix, a jet fuel slurping, brainless, dypso thug who comes under the sway of a charismatic. Who cares? Similarly, in an otherwise brilliant film, Scorsese asks us to engage with an animal, a one-note beast. After the fourth scene of LaMotta becoming violent and/or obsessively compulsive over the fidelity of his blond bombshell of a wife (Cathy Moriarty), the yawns become harder to stifle. It’s a testament to the charms of the picture that you happily stick with it.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula – 4 stars

April 15, 2014
4 stars, 90s, Scary
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Francis Ford Coppola’s take on the Dracula story is wild, campy, and brisk.  It also has a few scares, but one gets the sense Gary Oldman’s operatic Transylvanian count is not to be taken too seriously.

After all, Oldman appears in, by my count, 7 guises, including a nifty pile of rats, and he is just short of hammy in all.  Not to be outdone, Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Van Helsing is near giddy in his thirst for scene-chewing and vampire heads.

In its first half, the picture feels very Baz Luhrmann meets Saturday-at-the-movies serial. It settles into a more leisurely pace in the middle, as Dracula attempts to take root in London and his opposition grows.  The picture is a gas, and Coppola’s rejection of an overly serious, brooding vampire is welcome. Perhaps it is not quite a rejection, as Oldman tries so hard to be otherworldly and tortured, he may be the last one in on the joke.

The film is also surprisingly erotic, as is evidenced by poor Jonathan Harker’s seduction at the hands of Dracula’s babes and the complete, sensual overload delivered to Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost as they fall under Dracula’s sway and then use all of their wiles to get at necks.

Speaking of, Harker is played by Keanu Reeves, who was then fresh off of two Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure movies.  If you thought Kevin Costner had problems with an English accent in Robin Hood, you have to check out this performance (both Costner and Reeves are listed in the Top Five Most terrible British Accents, and rightfully so.  Reeves can hold his accent – barely – for one line, and then, he’s one syllable away from San Dimas and “duuuude.” Then, he’s back to a dramatic and unconvincing “Carfax Abbey” only to drop it again, as if he knows how silly he sounds. Ultimately, Reeves appears so uncomfortable, he retreats into the implacably unaffected stoner no matter what Oldman and Hopkins throw at him, a treat all in itself.

Great, grandiose soundtrack as well.

Oculus – 3.75 stars

April 14, 2014
2014, 3 stars, Scary
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The trend away from gore porn and toward chilling, moody scary movies remains welcome.  Oculus is a worthy fingers-over-the-eyes addition, in the mold of The Conjuring, and sporting a clever storyline that tracks, and intersects, the childhood trauma of two kids whose house was haunted by a spooky mirror and their attempts as adults to destroy it.  The execution is crisp and even ingenious, and the child actors (Annalise Basso and Garret Ryan) are superb.  As to the flaws, there is one, and it is a rather big one, but I can’t reveal it without telling too much.  Suffice it to say that it falls under the “Well, if X, then why the hell would they do Y?” variety.  It’s a testament to the skill of writer/director Mike Flanagan (born, I shi** you not, in Salem, Massachusetts) that I was able to shelve the issue and just sit back and enjoy the film.

Nebraska – 5 stars

April 11, 2014
2013, 5 stars, Comedy, Drama
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Alexander Payne’s black-and-white portrait of a geriatric mid-westerner (Bruce Dern) intent on getting from Montana to Nebraska to collect a sham $1 million sweepstakes prize is patient, lyrical and loving.  The film evokes David Lynch’s The Straight Story in its pathos, but it also contains a wry sense of humor, largely provided by Dern’s suffering younger son (SNL alum Will Forte) and his brutal, loudmouth but ultimately protective wife (June Squibb)  Lesser films would have played up the wackiness of the extended family, who now believe Dern is flush and are making their claims, or they would have provided Dern the platform to release his Korean war demons or his crushed dreams to his son on their journey.  There is none of that easy bull here.  Instead, Payne presents an authentic portrait of a stoic rural family (Dern seems to have 7 brothers, all of whom watch the NFL with nary a quiver) steeled by time and want, with the very true message that most people don’t really know much about their parents, and that their pasts grow more foreign to us every day.  This film is a lesson in restraint, and Payne (The Descendants, Sideways, Election, Citizen Ruth) has cemented his place as a writer/director with a unique, American voice.

Taxi Driver – 5 stars

April 3, 2014
5 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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I was surprised to see several things in my recent re-viewing of Martin Scorsese’s classic, including Albert Brooks as the exact same character he has been playing for nearly 40 years; Scorsese himself making a Hitchcockian appearance in the background, but then taking a significant one-scene role as a lunatic in the back of Travis Bickle’s (Robert DeNiro) cab, suggesting he changed his mind about how much time he would spend in front of the camera; and the effectiveness of the score, which was Bernard Herrmann’s last one.

That aside, it holds up as the classic it is considered (47 on AFI’s Top 100). Scorsese’s New York is a modern hell.  He shoots the city so it almost reeks. Steam pulses out of the grates, rot is everywhere and kindness is non-existent (I couldn’t get a fantastic book, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning” out of my mind).  The viewer is immediately in kinship with Bickle’s voiceover, “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Bickle is a Vietnam vet who can’t sleep and teeters on the edge of sanity. When he falls for a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd) merely by viewing her through a plate glass window, it seems creepy only until he approaches her, and then there is charm and hope. He is similarly touching with teen prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster), passionately replying to her taunt that he is a square: “Hey, I’m not square, you’re the one that’s square. You’re full of shit, man. What are you talking about? You walk out with those fuckin’ creeps and low-lifes and degenerates out on the streets and you sell your little pussy for peanuts? For some low-life pimp who stands in the hall? And I’m square? You’re the one that’s square, man. I don’t go screwing fuck with a bunch of killers and junkies like you do. You call that bein’ hip? What world are you from?”

But they are from the same world. Bickle is not wired right, he sabotages himself with Shepherd, and soon, he retreats into the mode of a dangerous and unstable assassin, one who has gone from observer of the inferno to an extinguisher. Ahead of its time, Bickle’s would-be John Hinckley gets a Bernie Goetz makeover, cementing Scorsese’s theme that in the jungle, there’s often but a hair between hero and lunatic, moral beacon and dysfunctional threat. Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine doesn’t seem a natural comparison to Taxi Driver, but in essence, when it ends with Cate Blanchett in rumpled clothes, talking to herself in the park, the directors are exposing the same reality.

The Silence of the Lambs – 5 stars

April 2, 2014
5 stars, 90s, Crime/Mystery, Scary
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The Silence of the Lambs - July 11th, 2020 at Lefty's Drive In!

My son is headed off with his pals to see The Silence of the Lambs tonight, courtesy of AMC theaters’ occasional screenings of older films. I saw it with him a few weeks back and I think he’s looking forward to watching it again in the theater as much as witnessing the reaction of his friends.

Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece is one of the few films that focuses on the serial killer but doesn’t give way to excess. What we know about Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) is simple: he is locked up for eating people; he is brilliant and fascinating; and he is lethal. When a serial killer, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) starts to plague the Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia area, FBI profiler Jack Crawford (Scott Glen) sends a trainee, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), to elicit any advice from Lecter. Starling and Lecter use each other for their own ends, engaging in a thrilling psychological dance that is one part therapy and one part mental combat; she seeks to stop Buffalo Bill while he waits for a slip-up.

The Silence of the Lambs is so well-paced and taut that on occasion, you are near-breathless. There is only one pause in the film’s very serious, unrelenting tone (when Starling is “hit on” by two geek entomologists with whom she is consulting). The pressure is not only from Lecter and Buffalo Bill, but from Starling’s lack of experience, harrowing childhood, and even her gender and diminutive physicality.  The odds seem uncomfortably stacked against her.

The exchanges between Hopkins and Foster are electrifying. You can see just how dangerous Lecter is and near curse yourself for being charmed by him. Yet, you root for the seemingly overmatched Starling, and when she stumbles, you feel the sting of her awkwardness. When Lecter so easily assesses her background and her sexual desires, it is excruciating. Yet Starling comes up to speed and achieves a plausible parity.  Levine is also expert as the tortured, frightening Buffalo Bill, and his transformation to “normal” when he is questioned is a chilling addition to this “monsters among us” story.

The picture is one of only three to win Academy Awards in all the top five categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and deservedly so.

Bad Words – 4.5 stars

March 25, 2014
2014, 4 stars, Comedy
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Jason Bateman’s directorial debut is bracingly cynical and consistently funny. Bateman stars as a jerk who has found the loophole that allows him to enter and win kids’ spelling bees, making it all the way to the nationally televised (on PBS) Golden Quill finals. On the way, he torments the journalist covering/funding his story (Kathryn Hahn), the competition director (Allison Janney), its founder (Phillip Baker Hall) and various parents, but he also befriends a young competitor (the wide-eyed and charming Rohan Chand). At just under 90 minutes, it never nears wearing out its welcome, and Bateman’s hand is steady. There are a few flat notes. Rachael Harris reprises her role from The Hangover as another repressed, psychotic type, and again, her performance is too much (as is her comeuppance). Bateman’s engagement with his child’s competitors is brutally funny, but his treatment of one girl, while a testament to his commitment, is perhaps too painful to endure. These, however, are minor problems. Bateman has depth beyond being a mere crank, and Chand’s insouciance blends perfectly with his deadpan amorality.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 0 stars

March 18, 2014
0 stars, 2012, Action/Disaster
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Cards on the table, I never read Tolkien, and I associate people who did (and do) with weirdos from high school who played Dungeons and Dragons and/or attend Renaissance festivals. I realize this is a blinkered view, but there you have it. I also watched the first two Lord of the Rings movies in the theater, fell asleep in both, woke up, and then fell asleep again (only two other films have elicited such a reaction – Gandhi and Passage to India – which suggests a weariness brought on by geography rather than production). I turned off the third Lord of the Rings DVD when the good guys enlisted very large trees and un-killable ghosts as their allies.

Since that time, my son has grown up, and he urged me to watch The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. My initial try was on a flight to LA, but after a decent setting of the scene (the dwarf king gets gold fever and a big dragon with a bigger gold fever fucks his kingdom up), the film quickly became wearying, as dispossessed dwarves arrive at the home of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), eat all his food, sing a sad song and head off on what promised to be a very long, tiresome adventure. I tried again with my son on Sunday, and we got perhaps an hour into the film when Bilbo and the dwarves run into three giants (they look like the troll in Harry Potter, but they talk about what they are going to cook and eat in silly voices just south of Jar Jar Binks). A big fight ensues.  Dwarves are tossed about like ragdolls yet never injured, and the trolls are furiously hacked but never bleed. Bilbo is captured and a Mexican standoff ensues – the dwarves have to drop their weapons or Bilbo will be ripped to pieces. The dwarves drop their weapons, and in the next scene, half are being slow-roasted over a spit and the other half are trussed up for later cooking.

That was the deal these idiots made? Spare Bilbo and in return, the giants can slow roast and eat ALL of you?

I had no intention of continuing with this unexpected adventure any further. It didn’t help that my son qualified his recommendation with ”it’s a good movie if you’re in those great lounge chairs at the Courthouse theaters and you have all the Coke and candy you want and you have nothing better to do.” Or that after that very scene, he remarked, “still about 2 hours to go.”

The Drowning Pool – 3 stars

March 17, 2014
3 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery
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After seeing Harper as part of the AFI Silver LA Modern series, me and my son watched Paul Newman’s follow-up turn as Ross McDonald’s P.I. in 1975’s The Drowning Pool.  Lew Harper finds himself in New Orleans in the middle of a scandal involving an ex-love (Joanne Woodward), a sleazy oil man (Murray Hamilton) and a protective local police chief (Tony Franciosa).  Newman again gives an infectious star turn as the cynical but funny private detective brought into to town by Woodward to get to the bottom of her being blackmailed.  When Franciosa is impressed by his $150 per day plus expenses rate, Harper explains that it isn’t all that much when you work four days a year.

But the picture lacks too many elements that made its predecessor so good.  New Orleans ain’t LA, and while there is a certain fish-out-of-water charm to Harper’s investigation, the setting feels off.  The score is also very cheezy, alternating between musical interludes worthy of a Mannix or Barnaby Jones and an annoying symphonic riff of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”.   Worse, Joanne Woodward’s Louisiana drawl is borrowed straight from The Long Hot Summer.  She’s ridiculous in her theatrics and a terrible replacement for Janet Leigh as Harper’s love interest. Hamilton does his best to give his character some flavor, and an 18 year old Melanie Griffith is an alluring near-jail bait, but most everyone else is either histrionic or blah.

While Woodward is a step down, Griffith as the poisonous Lolita is a significant upgrade from Harper’s Pamela Tiffin.

And a reminder of the horrors of plastic surgery.