Category: Reviews

The World's End

“The World’s End” is a wacky fun throwback comedy with a real sense of nostalgia.

Earlier this year, “This is the End” served as something of a finale on the man-child comedies that have defined the last 10 years or so of Hollywood comedies. It did so in such spectacularly silly fashion that it seemed as though no movie again should try and top it.

“The World’s End” too marks a different conclusion. It’s the last in the Cornetto Trilogy, a series of Edgar Wright parody films that started with “Shaun of the Dead,” continued with “Hot Fuzz” and took a break during “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.” Writers and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost along with Wright branded a completely new approach to the parody film, one that was slick, stylish and action heavy.

But like “This is the End,” the juvenile fun and spastic, hyper kinetic style seems to be behind Wright, Pegg and Frost. The characters in “The World’s End” are more mature, the consequences and emotions are more genuine, and the film seems less like an homage to apocalyptic movies and more like a heartfelt throwback.

Pegg plays Gary King, a wonderfully soliloquizing pack leader trapped in his teenage glory days. In an AA meeting, he reflects upon an epic bar crawl from his last day of high school: 12 pubs, 12 pints, but one he never finished. He now seeks to return home and finish the quest with four of his old mates, all of whom have matured and settled into comfy jobs and families while he’s kept his old car, cassette player and selective memories.

He’s completely glossed over a harrowing accident that almost killed his best friend Andy (Frost), one that’s never shown but only hinted at as the group gets drunker and more candid. Continue reading “The World's End”

Drinking Buddies

“Drinking Buddies” is a minimalist romantic comedy made perfect by Olivia Wilde’s charming performance.

If the term “mumblecore” has lost whatever initial meaning it had, it now simply refers to a minimalist style. Joe Swanberg, one of the pioneers of the filmmaking movement, has with his latest film given way to name actors while still trimming the fat of Hollywood rom-coms. “Drinking Buddies” is edited with the crackling urgency of something in the French New Wave while retaining the charm and warmth that will make it a hipster classic.

Olivia Wilde has acquiesced perfectly into the indie scene as Kate, a communications lead at Chicago’s Revolution Brewing. She has a more-than-just-friends relationship with Luke (Jake Johnson), one of the brewers, and they’re perfect together. Yet the practical impasse to their being together is a pair of serious relationships that are healthy, but not nearly as picturesque.

Each of them bring their respective significant others to a cabin in Michigan, and the already obvious attains some added sexual tension. Chris (Ron Livingston) is a bit older and more mature than Kate, and Jill (Anna Kendrick) is dorky and cute, but not always in the cool way, and she doesn’t gel with Luke nearly as well. Continue reading “Drinking Buddies”

Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchett is stunning in “Blue Jasmine,” Woody Allen’s portrait of the have-more culture.

 

In a year filled with movies about the have-more culture, Woody Allen has laid bare how the upper half lives. Cate Blanchett is magnificent in “Blue Jasmine,” Allen’s dramatic “Streetcar named Desire” inspired portrait of a crumbling woman amidst infidelity, deceit and blissful ignorance.

I wrote recently about “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” how women in movies tend to keep their composure better than men when faced with a personal crisis, and Jasmine has this down flat. Jasmine is the ever so prim and proper housewife of Hal (Alec Baldwin), an obscenely wealthy businessman and trader who turns out to be a massive crook. She’s been driven out of her home to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) after Hal is arrested, and yet that complication doesn’t stop her from carefully micromanaging her life story such that she can stay in her protective bubble of wealth and stature.

Jeanette is Jasmine’s real name, but the floral connotation had a better narrative. She met Hal while “Blue Moon” played, but then even this appears to be a clever fabrication. Now she aspires to be an interior designer with a license she can obtain if she only figures out how to use “computers.” This will be perfect as it allows her to continue to adorn herself in glamour and luxury without having any inherent skills. Heaven forbid she bag groceries like her sister. Continue reading “Blue Jasmine”

Jobs

“Jobs” reduces Steve Jobs’s visionary ideas to melodramatic monologues and Apple’s greatest hits.

Steve Jobs was an inventor, innovator and artist, but he was a businessman, and he sold and marketed computers for a living. He was not a filmmaker, painter, sculptor, musician or anything of the sort, and yet people would not bat an eye at calling him the Michelangelo or the Picasso of our day. The biopic “Jobs” is set only on portraying him as that mad genius. It replaces what he stood for with glossy eyed monologues and his backstory with Apple’s greatest hits.

Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) as seen here was a tyrant, a brilliant tyrant who demanded perfection and dreamed up the non-existent but was held back by the investors who didn’t applaud him, the shareholders and board members who ousted him and the team members who didn’t share his lofty ambitions. He hastily fired those who disagreed with him, neglected his friends like Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) who helped him build Apple in his parents’ basement and infuriated the people like Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) who showed up on his doorstep one day and bankrolled his visionary ideas.

Joshua Michael Stern’s film acknowledges that Jobs was a controversial figure, even an asshole when it came to management, but it never doubts that he was a mastermind. It begins with Jobs introducing the iPod to his staff. Lens flares abound, an orchestra swells, and at the mention of having created a music player, the room bursts into applause. Continue reading “Jobs”

Fruitvale Station

Ryan Coogler’s debut drama “Fruitvale Station” depicts the true story murder of Oscar Grant in the Bay Area in 2008.

The Trayvon Martin incident stirred such outrage recently that any film released in its aftermath might be expected to incite a similar amount of anger. “Fruitvale Station,” this year’s Sundance Audience Award winner, depicts a similar incident that occurred in the Bay Area on New Year’s Eve in 2008. Although deeply rooted in racial roots and the plight of America’s working class, Ryan Coogler’s debut film invokes empathy and solemnity over political fervor.

“Fruitvale Station” is pure melodrama, a biopic of a man wrongly murdered at the BART train station after a misunderstanding with the police, some racial profiling and a cop too loose on his trigger finger. In an opening cell phone video of the actual event, we see police berating some not exactly docile black men. One of them stands and is pinned to the ground with the cop appearing to drive his knee into the back of the man’s skull. People on the train shout, “That’s not right man!” and “Let him go!” before a gun shot goes off and the video cuts to black.

One wonders what exactly happened on the day George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. And yet something like this shows that there is still some ambiguity.

Coogler’s film taps into that nuance and makes a slice of life profile of a man, 22-year-old Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), who wasn’t quite a saint and might’ve even provoked his killer, but probably didn’t deserve this fate either.

It’s not as though Oscar’s life is riddled with tragedy or a fine example of how racism is alive and well. Coogler depicts little more than the day in the life of this man, and to see how ordinary and unsuspecting “Fruitvale Station” is provides the key to its power. Continue reading “Fruitvale Station”

Elysium

Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” is a smart sci-fi heavy on parallels to contemporary American social politics.

The futuristic sci-fi “Elysium” may be the most modern and topical movie of the year. With tense action movie thrills and a jaw-dropping CGI backdrop, it not so subtly refers to the political hot spots of immigration, the poverty divide, the environment and universal healthcare in modern America. That it doesn’t forget to be a creative and compelling sci-fi in the process is part of the fun.

In the early 22nd Century, the wealthiest humans have fled the now deeply polluted and over populated Earth to an orbiting space station known as Elysium. In their space resort, the synthetic grass is green, the pools are shimmering blue and healing pods have effectively eliminated death, disease and aging.

Meanwhile on Earth, specifically in Los Angeles, everyone is poor and working class, “Soylent Green” levels of people roam the ghetto and abusive, snarky robots police the streets. This life is not the apocalypse; it’s simply the new normal.

That “Elysium” feels less like dystopia and more like an extension of contemporary ills will be the dividing line between those feeling Director Neill Blomkamp is beating a dead horse and those prepared to accuse it of a socialist agenda. Continue reading “Elysium”

Man of Steel

“Man of Steel” neglects to provide Superman with personality or a sense of wonder in its depiction of doom and gloom CGI mayhem.

If Superman’s outfit were not originally a bright blue and red, in Zack Snyder’s world it would be gray. It would be dampened and washed of color along with the sky palace vistas on the planet Krypton, the vast Kansas prairies and even Amy Adams’s hair.

Red and blue do not represent the doom and gloom Snyder is trying to convey in “Man of Steel.” And although the “S” on Superman’s chest is actually a symbol for hope, “Man of Steel” is more content to bludgeon us with tragedy and CGI devastation to the point that it neglects a compelling origin story, a sense of wonder or even the idea of heroism.

Superman’s origin story is inherently richer and darker than that of say, Spiderman, and producer Christopher Nolan has imbued in it the same grim overtones that he did in his Batman trilogy. Rather than childhood bullying and crushes on redheads that live next door, Superman’s origin begins with the destruction of his home planet, the tearful abandonment from his parents as he is jettisoned to Earth and the military coup by General Zod (Michael Shannon) that leads to the death of his father Jor-El (Russell Crowe).

And yet after Krypton implodes in spectacular display and engulfs his mother in horrifically apocalyptic images, the movie does not dial back to a time when Clark Kent, now of Kansas, is at peace. Rather, Snyder’s idea of melodrama is cataclysm, with a pre-teen Clark being forced to rescue his classmates from drowning in a crashed bus, followed by a teenage Clark watching his father (Kevin Costner) die in a tornado and finally an adult Clark with a healthy beard (Henry Cavill) rescuing workers from an exploding oil tanker. Continue reading “Man of Steel”

Rapid Response: Shoot the Piano Player

“Shoot the Piano Player” is Francois Truffaut’s goofy, oddball noir sandwiched between his two masterpieces, “The 400 Blows” and “Jules and Jim.”

Sandwiched in between two of Francois Truffaut’s most famous and enduring classics, “The 400 Blows” and “Jules and Jim,” was a movie that resisted classification in much the same way those two did, but did so without any of the granular realism or genre bucking ideas. “Shoot the Piano Player” was released in 1960 and was Truffaut’s specific way of going against the grain of “The 400 Blows,” a movie that was mostly noir but had a dash of humor and more than a few lapses in coherence.

Of course that’s all intentional on Truffaut’s part, and the film crackles with urgency, personality and style through its visual aesthetic and editing techniques, all of which pay heavy homages to the history of cinema.

Look no further than an image that features not one, but three pinhole shots in the frame, a little visual joke on Truffaut’s part. There’s also long, unbroken tracking shots of people walking and talking down the street, a camera that bobs and weaves around the bar and an eye that edits with alacrity as to keep the pace high. It’s a playful, detatched, even unique film to watch, but it maintains some of the down to Earth naturalism that would make the French New Wave what it was.

“Shoot the Piano Player” tells the story of Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), a piano player in a dive bar performing trashy soft shoe music each night. When his brother Chico (Albert Remy) comes in one evening on the run from two gangsters, he reveals that Charlie has a deep past as a virtuoso pianist and a hidden secret. He tries to keep this hidden from the bar’s waitress Lena (Marie Dubois) but as they get more involved, she becomes a target for the two gangsters pursuing Charlie’s brother.

Truffaut’s knack is not so much blending genres and styles but mashing them together. Charlie’s first walking date with Lena drifts from sinister to comical to solemn in a flash, with Charlie’s inner monologue tensing the mood until he begins silently counting until it’s long enough for him to make a pass at her again. In the mean time, the gangsters are following behind, but the movie seems to forget their presence as quickly as they arrive.

That energy makes “Shoot the Piano Player” so much more than intellectual and arty; it’s genuinely visceral, invoking back stories and shootouts and nonsense lyrics to a bar sing-a-long that beg to interpreted less seriously than “400 Blows.” That it achieves that goal and feels no less inconsequential as a film is a testament to Truffaut’s wonderful gift.

The Spectacular Now

James Ponsoldt’s “The Spectacular Now” channels John Hughes-era dramas but is challenging, thought provoking, touching and has a rich subtext.

I’d like you to meet Aimee Finicky. She’s the girl you didn’t notice in high school. She doesn’t wear makeup, but she also doesn’t wear glasses like you maybe expected. She’s nice, smart, responsible, has never had a boyfriend and enjoys reading manga comics. Aimee is kind of adorable in her own way, but then she’s also fairly soft-spoken, timid, without any quirks or real passionate interests. She’s like the anti manic pixie dream girl, which is its own special blessing.

So who is Aimee? What’s her thing? “I’d like to think there’s more to a person than just one thing,” she says, which is a more mature, adult thought than any high school kid will give her credit for.

James Ponsdolt’s third film “The Spectacular Now” is filled with such universal wisdom. It channels John Hughes era dramas but embeds its coming of age tale with challenging, thoughtful and moving subtext that makes it anything but a “teen movie.”  It’s a light, good-hearted, beautiful and romantic film that feels spectacular both now and forever. Continue reading “The Spectacular Now”

Stoker

“Stoker” is a twisted, perverse thriller of sinister and sexual undertones all accomplished through precise filmmaking.

The best scene in Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is not one of its several murders or Hitchcockian set pieces or psychotic outbursts. It’s a piano duet between its two leads, the timid teenager India and her creepy, suspicious uncle Charlie.

She starts, and he joins in, silently squeezing his way onto a cramped piano bench. They play with speed and beauty, stealing glances at one another when not focusing on the keys. Suddenly, he crosses her body to reach the high octave, and the sexual tension is palpable as the music continues. Considering their relationship, it’s a twisted, perverse sensation that turns out to be a dream sequence, but it begins to hint at the tingling feelings of something worse than naughty, and “Stoker” does so with the precision of a ticking metronome.

“Stoker” is the first English film from Director Park, whose “Oldboy” is a recent cult classic that currently sits at #83 on the IMDB Top 250 and is being remade this year by Spike Lee. His violent legacy runs deep, and although “Stoker” minimizes on some of the bloodshed, it’s effortlessly textured with horror movie staples and Hitchcock set pieces. A butcher’s knife, garden shears, an ominous person-long freezer in a dark cellar and a hazy, flickering chandelier lamp paint a familiarly sinister world.

Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” serves as inspiration on a narrative level as well. On India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) 17th birthday, her father is tragically killed in a car wreck. At the funeral, she meets her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a perpetually smiling, unblinking young man with an attractive face and disarming voice. Immediately something rubs the timid, spiteful, skinny and goth India the wrong way, more so because her mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) has gotten over husband’s death a bit too quickly with Charlie’s arrival. Coinciding with his arrival, a housekeeper and visiting relative suddenly vanish, and India slowly sinks into even more vicious behavior. Continue reading “Stoker”