$10 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

A STORY BETTER LEFT UNWRITTEN

There is one thing a little creepy about “My Week with Marilyn,” the Simon Curtis – helmed account of the making of “The Prince and the Showgirl,” the 1957 movie produced and directed by Laurence Olivier, who also starred in it opposite Marilyn Monroe.  It is voyeuristic.  Colin Clark, who was the 23-year-old third assistant director on the Olivier picture, wrote the books on which pic is based, “My Week with Marilyn” and “The Prince, the Showgirl and Me,” both based on the diary he kept during the making of the 1957 film.  An English gentleman of his generation did not publish intimate details about the lives of women.

It’s no secret that Monroe, played ably by Michelle Williams working with far better material than she had in the awful “Blue Valentine” in 2010, was unstable.  Between the pills, the booze, the dreadful childhood, the creep of a husband in writer Arthur Miller (played by Dougray Scott), and the method acting coach (Zoë Wanamaker convincingly cast as Paula Strasberg), Monroe was a mess.  Her “illnesses” were legendary.  She rarely made it to the set on time.  She could do one thing well:  She could project on screen the sultry seductress with an overlay of innocence that was pure comic genius.  The only thing she knows how to do is “be” Marilyn Monroe.  In the presence of fans she throws a switch and goes from insecure to the public Marilyn.  She was emotionally fragile, and she needed someone to mind her whom she could trust.  Enter Colin Clark, played here by Eddie Redmayne.  The pair develop an intimate but not sexual relationship.  He befriends her.  He learns her innermost secrets.  They go skinny-dipping.  He helps her through a miscarriage.  In your critic’s opinion publishing the details of their relationship is a betrayal.  It’s not the only betrayal of Monroe in the picture.  Husband Miller lets her get hold of his notes for “After the Fall,” a tragedy based on her life which opened on the stage two years after her death.  It devastates her.  This would be a five-star comedy if your critic did not feel the need for a shower after watching it.

Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh (played by Julia Ormond), had played the Monroe part on the London stage, but she was recast by her husband (played here by Kenneth Branagh, who, like his character has played his share of Shakespeare) for the film by Monroe, arguably the biggest female star in Hollywood at the time.  It drove him crazy to work with her, but Branagh clearly conveys his admiration for her on-screen ability in scenes watching the rushes.

The contrast between British actors trained on the stage and a Hollywood star cannot be more stark.  Monroe travels with an entourage.  Toby Jones is notable as her rumpled public relations man.  She has to “create.”  The Brits hit their marks and say their lines and make very little fuss about it.

Other than the train wreck that was Monroe off screen, “My Week with Marilyn” is notable for a noteworthy cast, especially Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike, who played the dowager queen in the 1957 comedy, Emma Watson as Clark’s girlfriend, Lucy the wardrobe mistress whom he neglects in favor of Monroe, and Derek Jacobi as Sir Owen Morshead, head archivist at Windsor Castle and Clark’s uncle.  Thanks to the family connection, Marilyn gets a private tour of Her Majesty’s library.  There’s also a neat bit of trivia.  Colin Clark who died in 2002 at age 70 (he was seven years younger than the then 30-year-old Monroe) is the son of Lord Kenneth Clark, the narrator of the noted TV series, Civilisation, and younger brother of the late Alan Clark, a noted car guy and the English Minister of Transport under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Pic benefits from a straightforward screenplay by Adrian Hodges, sure-footed direction by Curtis, competent lensing by Ben Smithard, sound recording that leaves little to be desired, and a score by Alexandre Desplat that is perfectly integrated into the material.  Williams proves her vocal chops at warbling some tunes made famous by Monroe in Hollywood musicals.  Best of all, pic does not drag.  Its 99 minutes virtually fly by.  That’s good, because although it is a comedy, the underlying tragedy of Monroe and her unfortunate demise only a few years later could make it a sluggish weeper.  Thank Adam Recht for some discipline in the cutting room.  Williams really does not have the physical equipment to play Monroe, but she gives it a good go, and the make-up and costumes help.

“My Week with Marilyn” is a period piece set and shot in England.  Few places have changed as much as England in the past 50 years.  Kudos to production designer Donal Woods; even the period cars are spot-on.

Pic is rated “R” for some language and adult themes.  The kids won’t understand most of it.  Leave them with the babysitter.

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My Week with Marilyn

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

NOT QUITE ‘JUNO’

Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said that most people criticized his plays by preferring “Earnest” as in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”  Scribe Diablo Cody has the same problem with “Juno,” her breakthrough hit.  “Juno” is a tough act to follow.  That said, “Young Adult,” a comedy which opens stateside in December, is not by any means a bad picture.  It stars the formidable Charlize Theron as a high-school homecoming queen, now a ghost writer of serialized teen fiction who has moved from a small Minnesota town to Minneapolis, failed at a marriage, and ended up as a lush, albeit one who does not look like a lush.

Like another current release, Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” “Young Adult” moves from the surreal to the absurd.  Unlike “Carnage”, “Adult” does it not in one continuous movement but in fits and starts, alternating one genre for the other.  It works.  Kudos go to helmer Jason Reitman, who also collaborated with Cody on “Juno.”

The principal characters, in addition to 38-year-old Mavis Gary (Theron) are
Patton Oswalt as Matt Freehauf, a guy crippled in high school by a gang of jocks who thought he was gay; Patrick Wilson as Buddy Slade, Mavis’ high-school boyfriend; Elizabeth Reaser as Beth, his wife; and Collette Wolfe as Sandra Freehauf, a registered nurse and sister of Matt, with whom she lives.

The 94 minute pic, which is by no means too long, could stand cutting the final scene.  The payoff comes in the antipenultimate scene.  Penultimate scene is icing on the cake.  Said final scene, between Mavis and Sandra, merely confuses pic’s dénouement.  Unlike “Juno,” Cody uses an old cinematic device to explain an otherwise inexplicable plot:  She saves pic’s main revelation for its end — or at least close to its end.

Cody’s dialogue is typically witty.  Theron turns in a tour de force as the dissipated high-school homecoming queen who ends every night on a bender and still looks fabulous.  She is one of the few actors of star caliber who can go unrecognized in almost any role.  She almost channels her character’s persona.

Oswalt gets his share of punch lines and sarcasm, which he delivers with biting grace.  J.K. Simmons, who played Juno’s dad, is underused as a voice on the phone in the role of Mavis’ boss.

Plot is straightforward.  Mavis returns to her hometown after a succession of one-night stands and benders to reclaim Buddy Slade, her long-lost love, to the Christening of whose first child she has just been invited.  If one knows their back story, the invitation would appear to be a tad out of place, but one doesn’t, at least not yet.  Set aside the socially inappropriate premise.  This is a movie, remember?

It is quickly revealed that Mavis was the totally coolest chick in high school, the girl that all the other girls hated and all the guys wanted.  She was also totally full of herself.  Being full of herself has since turned into an offensive defense.

Once back in her hometown, Mavis encounters Freehauf, now manager of a sports bar and secret distiller (in his garage) of knock-off whiskies.  The two of them quickly hit it off.  She needs his hooch.

Mavis comes on to Buddy so strongly that she makes a fool of herself.  She does this in front of his wife, who, it is later revealed, is so secure in her marriage that she lets Mavis get away with it.  Unknown to Mavis, Beth actually pities her.

A chance encounter with her parents makes for one of pic’s most delectable digressions into the absurd, but it’s really there to move the plot along by illuminating some back story.

Then comes the Christening.  Mavis primps for it in the painstaking way that Alfred Hitchcock prepared his story boards.  She makes her move on Buddy, who is more than happy in his new life.  He shoots her down.

Pic’s dénouement comes in the form of a humiliating (for Mavis) and utterly inappropriate to the occasion confession to the assembled guests as to what she wished her life with Buddy had been.  Although drunk as a skunk, she manages to convey explicitly the life-changing event that triggered their breakup.  She has spent the intervening two decades running from it.  It is at this moment that Cody and Reitman prevent “Young Adult” from descending into bathos, thanks to Mavis’ horrifically stained dress and some surreal dialogue from the Christening guests.  It’s no mean feat.

Here is the problem:  Mavis’ issue is one that has confronted women from the beginning of time.  It is not easy to overcome, but it is also not an excuse to turn one’s life into a mission to erase it.  Cody uses the ultimate Mavis-Sandra scene to drive that point home.  It does not need to be driven.  Between the Christening and the Mavis-Sandra scene, however, there lurks a brief interlude which in part accounts for pic’s “R” rating.  Anyone in the audience who has a brain will know it is coming, but it still delivers when it arrives.

Tech credits are competent.  Dana E. Glauberman’s cutting is spot on — other than for the directorial choices your critic mentioned above.  Kevin Thompson’s production design is totally believable.  Lensing by Eric Steelberg leaves little to be desired.  Rolfe Kent’s soundtrack got kudos from an audience of critics, but your critic found the sound recording of the music less than up to par.

Pic probably deserves its “R” rating.  Some parents and children will have issues with alcohol use, sexual situations, and Theron’s nearly naked body — at which filmmakers managed to poke fun — talk about accomplishments!

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$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

SHAKESPEARE SET IN THE TIME OF TV

The most annoying thing about Ralph Fiennes’ cinematic adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy, “Coriolanus,” is the British pronunciation of the title.  It sounds like a body part.  Other than that, adapting a six-hour Shakespeare play to a 130 minute movie without dropping too many plot elements is no mean feat.  Kudos go to Fiennes in his debut directing himself in the title role and to screenwriter John Logan for knowing what to cut from the Bard’s dialogue without gutting it.

Pic is hardly stagebound, and that’s not bad for a play that is about 400 years old.  Part of the accomplishment is due to locations.  For financial reasons filmmakers made use of the former Yugoslavia rather than Shakespeare’s setting, ancient Rome.  As a result they got the use of the Serbian parliament building as the Roman Senate chamber.  They also got a good many bombed out buildings in which to stage pic’s battles.  Extras in battle scenes are mostly the Serbian anti-terrorist police.  The present-day setting is credible.

More credit for filmmakers’ success goes to an ingenious device.  In Shakespeare’s day, news of battles was conveyed on stage by messengers.  In Fiennes’ and Logan’s adaptation, news from the front is conveyed by omnipresent television screens tuned to a cable news channel.  Messengers’ lines are put in the mouths of field reporters, supers, and talking head commentators.  It works.

“Coriolanus” is a tragedy.  Accordingly the star is a tragic figure brought down by his own pride and disdain for the common folk.  Fiennes’ Coriolanus is a life-long soldier, now a general, putting down first the bread riots in Rome (in which he suspends civil liberties) and later an attack by the Romans’ sworn enemies, the Volsce, led by Gerard Butler as Tullus Aufidius.  As a reward for his success in battle, Rome’s Patrician party nominates him successfully for Consul.  Coriolanus may be up to the job, but he is hardly up to socializing with ordinary citizens.  That, and a pair of Tribunes of the People played by James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson, are his undoing.  The Tribunes are convinced that Coriolanus will become a dictator.  They stir the citizens against him.  Coriolanus is banished from Rome and turns traitor, joining the Volsce.  Heck, he could have gone to Greece and hung out on the islands until his mom, Volumina, ably played by the formidable Vanessa Redgrave, fixed it for him to return.

Note to actors:  Avoid at all costs acting in the same frame as Redgrave.  You will be overwhelmed.

But the Greek Islands would have made “Coriolanus” a comedy.  No.  Coriolanus has to screw up everything royally.  He turns traitor and joins his sworn enemy Tullus Aufidius in an assault intended to pillage Rome.

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s play needs no further comment on the plot except to say that Menenius (head of the Patrician party and close friend of Volumina), played by Brian Cox, slits his wrist on the banks of the Tiber after his every effort on Coriolanus’ behalf in politics and eventually in ending the Volsce war against Rome comes to naught.  Shakespeare did not write that.

Unfortunately, except for some pivotal scenes, pic lags in its first 90 minutes.  One could blame this on the dead guy, Shakespeare.  Among the early highlights are a scene in which Volumina bandages Coriolanus’ battle wounds.  His wife, Virgilia (Jessica Chastain), passing by the bathroom, sees this, but unseen herself, passes by.  She conveys a lot with a facial expression, which is a good thing, because her part is relatively small.  Another is a bedroom scene where Coriolanus is just too stiff, too rigid (no pun intended) to respond to Virgilia’s romantic overture.

Pic’s turning point is set in a TV studio where Coriolanus shows his colors.  There, before a studio audience to dispel accusations that he cares little for the people and would be a dictator as consul, he loses his temper and falls right into the trap set by the Tribunes.  It is brilliant.  And remember that the dialogue is in verse.

Ultimately Rome is saved by Volumina.  Vanessa Redgrave carries tremendous force on stage and screen.  Given Shakespeare’s words to address Coriolanus at the gates of Rome, she shatters him with a power that few other actors can bring to a role.  Fiennes showed tremendous courage in casting her against himself.

There are a few quibbles:  Coriolanus’ head is shaven, making him look like Mussolini.  According to Fiennes the likeness was not a conscious choice, merely a fashion statement.  It works.  It makes Fiennes, who hardly appears to be dangerous, look menacing.  But given the 20^th century historical connection, it distracts.  Volumina often appears in military uniform without explanation.  Final quibble is location.  The former Yugoslavia may be cheap, but Belgrade bears no resemblance to the grandeur of the Roman Republic.  Filmmakers work around it by using tight shots whenever possible.

Lensing by Barry Ackroyd gets the point across without excessive special effects, much as if Shakespeare, himself, had access to modern cinema.  Cutting by Nicolas Gaster could be a tad more cold blooded.  Coriolanus’ traitorous journey to the Volsce takes too long.  Fiennes could have a future as a helmer.  Sound recording leaves little do be desired, which is a good thing since 99% of the dialogue was written in 400-year-old English verse.  Much of the credit has to go the superb, classically trained, cast.

“Coriolanus” is rated R largely for violence and some situations that young people may not understand.  A huge box office is hardly to be expected, but your critic predicts that Fiennes’ first attempt at directing himself will become a bit of an evergreen.

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Coriolanus on Netflix

$7.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

YOU’LL NEED A SCORECARD

German-born director Roland Emmerich is best known for helming epics.  According to IMDB, his three favorite movies are “The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Towering Inferno,” and “Earthquake.”  For those with short memories, each is a disaster flick with a cast of thousands.  The trick to making epics is to keep the plot simple.  ”The Poseidon Adventure” centered on a band of plucky passengers making their way out of a capsized ocean liner.  “The Towering Inferno” was about saving folks in a cocktail party atop a blazing San Francisco skyscraper.

“Anonymous,” however, while centered on the premise that William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him, is about court intrigues, love affairs, religious politics, obsession, and incest in the reign of England’s Elizabeth I.  It moves so quickly between about four eras in which characters mostly are of such disparate ages that the same one has to be played by three or four different actors.  In a cast of thousands, just about every guy sports a Van Dyke beard and wears either tights or a velvet robe.  A scorecard and baseball uniforms would help tell who is playing whom.

That is unfortunate because any picture in which Vanessa Redgrave appears is a must-see.  The most legendary living actress of the English-speaking theater never fails to command a stage or screen.  As the aged Queen Elizabeth I she proves that she can subordinate her star power to ensemble acting.

Bookended by Derek Jacobi as himself, opening and closing a Broadway play about Shakespeare, plot moves largely through flasbacks culminating with a flash forward.  A nobleman, who turns out to be one of several bastard sons of Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Oxford, played by Rhys Ifans in maturity, has neglected his estates to write plays.  He kidnaps Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) and offers the latter a deal he can’t refuse:  Produce my plays, and I will make you a star.  Just keep my name out of it.  If not, may woe befall you.  Jonson, having read the first script he is given, is afraid that the censors will arrest him.  He enlists a drunken actor, William Shakespeare, played by Rafe Spall, to front for him as the author and director.  He needn’t have done so.  The plays are all hits.  Will Shakespeare becomes the toast of London.

Oxford & Co. run afoul of the Cecil family, whose patriarch, William (David Thewlis) functions as a sort of fixer and prime minister to the queen.  He and his son, hunchback Robert (Edward Hogg), who inherits his role after the former’s death, are also puritans who think the theater is an evil (in contrast to the queen) and promote King James of Scotland as her heir.

It happens that Elizabeth does not know that the Earl of Oxford is her son.  The young Elizabeth, played by Joely Richardson has an affair with him which produces yet another son, the Earl of Southhampton (Xavier Samuel), who in adulthood gets involved with the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid) in some sort of intrigue to oust the Cecils.  Those familiar with British history will note that the Cecil family endures to this day and produced Arthur James Balfour, Tory Prime Minister early in the 20^th Century and later Foreign Secretary in the coalition government under David Lloyd George during the First World War.

The key to thwarting the Cecils is a one-time performance of a Shakespeare play, calculated to incite the mob.  Jonson rats out the plot to the Cecils and both Essex and Southampton are arrested and sentenced to death.  Oxford, having been informed of his progeny by the Cecils, now intervenes with the queen to plead for their son’s life.  Talk about an oedipal moment!  At least he doesn’t blind himself after learning that Jocasta is his mother.

Once auds have digested all pic’s complications, this 130 minute, PG-13 rated epic at least ends in a neat dénouement.  Conspiracy theorists, such as Oliver Stone, may go to their graves believing that its premise is fact.  Five hundred years and countless productions later, does it really matter?  Who actually wrote some of the greatest works of the English-speaking theater is historical trivia.  The author died centuries ago.  The plays live on.

Tech credits excel.  Kudos go to Sebastian T. Krawinkel for very convincing set design.  Lensing and sound recording are more than up to par.  But despite the PG-13 rating and the swordplay, kids won’t understand it.  They will need a scorecard.

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 Anonymous on Netflix

$10.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

‘A STAR IS BORN’ GETS THE SILENT TREATMENT — WITH LAUGHTER

“The Artist,” which unspooled for critics recently at the New York Film Festival, may be the ultimate high concept film.  The pitch would be something like this:  “We remake ‘A Star Is Born’ as a silent movie in black and white but with one major twist — it’s a comedy.”

That is exactly what helmer/scribe/cutter Michel Hazanavicius did — right down to the touches.  “The Artist” boasts credits in an art deco font, the 4 to 3 aspect ratio in use during the silent era, black and white photography, and title cards for dialogue.  Pic, set in Hollywood, is a French production, and the title cards are in English.  The silent treatment works for this comedy.  The broad gestures common to silent film lend themselves to sight gags.  “The Artist” gets a laugh about every 90 seconds.

Plot is fairly straightforward.  Matinee idol George Valentin, played by French actor Jean Dujardin, is at the height of his fame in 1927, making picture after picture which are variations on the same swashbuckling theme.  The opening reel sets the stage.  Valentin holds the black tie audience for the premiere of “A Russian Affair” in the palm of his hand as he takes his bows, putting his dog, a too-cute-for-words Jack Russell Terrier who appears in all his films, played by movie dog Uggie, on stage before his co-star, Constance (Missi Pyle), girlfriend of studio head Al Zimmer (John Goodman).  For this Constance punches Valentin off-stage.

Although full of himself, Valentin still oozes charm.  And he is kind to small animals.  Uggie accompanies him everywhere.  Since his wife, Doris (Penelope Ann Miller), is colder tham — well, you get the idea — their breakfast scenes remind one of the breakfast scenes from “Citizen Kane,” it seems that other than chauffer Clifton (James Cromwell) Uggie is Valentin’s only friend.

Enter Peppy Miller, played by the deliciousment gamine Argentine actress Bérénice Bejo (who happens to be married to helmer Hazanavicius) who slips through a police line at the premiere to have her picture with Valentin land on the font page of Variety under the headline, “Who’s That Girl?”

A dancer with ambition, she lands a part as an extra in one of Valentin’s films, and promptly gets fired by Zimmer, who complains that because of her picture, his picture was not mentioned in Variety until page five.  Valentin sticks up for her and saves her job.  Extra for film buffs:  There is thoroughly Marxist dance scene leading up to that event.  It resembles the looking glass scene between Harpo Marx and Groucho Marx from “Monkey Business” which was reprised years later on television by Harpo and Lucille Ball in an episode of “I Love Lucy.”

Peppy’s career takes off.  Then come talking pictures in 1929.  Peppy embraces them and becomes Hollywood’s biggest star.  Valentin has nightmares in which he can’t talk.  It comes at about mid-pic.  Everything else can be heard, but Valentin cannot utter a sound.

Valentin refuses to do talking pictures.  “I am an artist,” he says — or at least that’s what the title cards say he says.  “People come to see me, not to hear me speak.”

Valentin’s career tanks.  His wife throws him out.  He loses everything in the stock market crash.  Anyone who has seen “A Star Is Born” knows the rest.  Valentin hits rock bottom.  On the way down there is a scene of nitrite film going up in flames that reminds your critic of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 “Cinema Paradiso.”

But this is a comedy, not a tragedy!  Peppy is revealed to have been backstopping Valentin throughout his slide.  A Hollywood ending is mandatory, and Hazanavicius does not disappoint.  Final reel offers pic’s only scene with full sound and therein reveals it’s shaggy dog (apologies to Uggie) aspect for a double payoff.

Your critic has just one quibble.  Pic is full of period automobiles, but they are just a tad too new for the period — by about three to five years.  Valentin’s Lincoln would not have been made by 1927, and Peppy’s 16 cylinder Cadillac which is supposed to be driven in 1932 actually is a product of 1934 to ‘37.

Tech credits are superb.  Lensing by Guillaume Schiffman rises to the heights.  The musical score by Ludovic Bource is up to carrying 98 percent of pic’s audio, and Laurence Bennett’s production design is spot-on.  Hazanavicius could have cut about ten of pic’s 100 minutes.  Valentin’s decline is a tad overdone.  Thesps (including Malcolm McDowell in a brief appearance as a studio extra) are more than up to the task.

“The Artist” is rated PG-13.  One suspects that it would have been PG if not for Valentin’s drinking and an attempted suicide.  Take the kids.  If they know anything about movies, they’ll love it.

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$8.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

AMUSING TRIFLE IN THE SPIRIT OF “CARRY ON” MOVIES

“Johnny English Reborn,” the latest vehicle for British comic actor Rowan Atkinson, is an amusing trifle of a spoof of James Bond movies.  The sequel to the 2002 “Johnny English” in which Atkinson also played the title role, pic, helmed by Oliver Parker, and written by William Davies, Hamish McColl, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade, features all the usual shtick one has learned to expect from Atkinson down to the funny faces.  Atkinson’s English is the thespian brother of Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart.

Plot is straightforward, Johnny English, now the most disgraced agent in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, has gone on a retreat to Tibet to get his mojo back.  Opening scenes set pick’s slapstick tone.  Unfortunately for the new MI-7 (what happened to MI-5 and MI-6 is a dangling participle), there is a plot against the life of the Chinese premier (Lobo Chan) who is scheduled to meet shortly with the English prime minister (Stephen Campbell Moore) in Switzerland for secret discussions about keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of rouge states in Southeast Asia.  The only lead MI-7 has is former CIA man Fisher played by Richard Schiff, who gets killed in the second reel.  The only British agent he will see is Johnny English.  Accordingly English is grudgingly recalled to duty (he had been booted after spectacularly screwing up an assignment in Mozambique) and sent on a mission to Macau with sidekick Tucker (Daniel Kaluuya) to glean what afflicts Fisher.  Enter the Killer Cleaner played athletically by Pik Sen Lim, the first ethnic Chinese actress ever to appear on British television.  A master of disguise, Killer Cleaner will appear again and again, often shooting the wrong guy just as English unwittingly ducks.  There are three pieces of a key.  The key unlocks a deadly and banished mind control drug, which enables one to control its victim for several minutes before death.  That is how Vortex, the murder-for-hire group of three of which Fisher was a member, plans to do away with the Chinese premier.  After botching his first assignment by losing Fisher’s piece of the key, English is sent to foil Vortex’s plot.

Pic is a showcase for Atkinson’s bumbling brand of comedy.  He’s the puffed up, egocentric, often-wrong-but-never-in-doubt (think of TV’s Bill O’Reilly as a secret agent), and bumbling side of James Bond.  If he succeeds, it is sheer luck.  On the way, there are more sight gags than one can count.  In that regard, “Johnny English Reborn” is very much in the tradition of the famous “Carry On” series of films.

Gillian Anderson does a workmanlike job as Pegasus, the new, politically correct head of MI-7.  Rosamund Pike shines as MI-7’s behavioral analyst and unlikely love interest for English.  Dominic West is both charming and menacing as Ambrose, the Aston-Martin driving MI-7 agent secretly turned traitor, and his scenes with Atkinson are almost worth the ticket price.  Daniel Kaluuya convincingly plays comedy with a straight face.  And kudos go to the special effects department for keeping things low key yet funny — especially with a motorized wheelchair and a talking Rolls Royce.  Tech credits are more than up to par in this 101 minute, PG rated pic.  Kids will love it.  Even adults will laugh out loud every two minutes or so.  Atkinson’s brand of physical comedy is a wonderful antidote to a crummy economy.

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$7.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

SUBTITLE THIS THING

“London Boulevard,” a British thriller cum filme noire which was released in video-on-demand stateside before going into theaters on 11 November, would be a four-star movie if it were not for the sound recording.  Your critic doubts that even most Brits can understand the South London gangster-speak of Ray Winstone’s mob boss Gant, not to mention that of his many hangers on.  It falls to Irishman Colin Farrell’s Mitchell, an ex-con who wants to go straight, to enlighten audiences via his diction.  Where are subtitles when you need them?

Other than that, the mix is fairly simple.  Take Mitchell, who has just finished three years as a guest of Her Majesty, add a bunch of guys led by Gant and fronted by Mitchell’s best buddy Billy Norton (Ben Chaplin), a small time hustler and collector, who all want to bring him back to his pre-prison life (shades of Al Pacino in “The Godfather: Part III”) sprinkle with a two-bit connection, Briony played by Anna Friel, to an English Hollywood star, Charlotte played by Keira Knightley, who is pic’s female lead, add a dash of relentless paparazzi, and a stoned best friend/protector to said Hollywood star (Jordan played by David Thewlis), and you have a potentially bloody stew.

Pic does not disappoint.

Briony, who is not exactly the best of best-friends, puts Mitchell wise to a job looking after Charlotte, who spends her days holed up in a London mansion hiding from paparazzi. Exactly why she doesn’t just stand up and pose is not explained.  One rule of celebrity photography is that if the picture is easy to make, no one wants it.

Mitchell eventually takes the job for Charlotte.  They fall for each other and make plans to meet in Hollywood.  It’s Mitchell’s ticket out of South London gangs.  Charlotte is damaged goods.  She was raped by an Italian producer on a shoot, who ended up dead from his own stash of Quaaludes thanks to Jordan, who may be a stoner but packs a pretty good punch.  Her husband does everything in sight and eventually gets picked up for DUI in Spain.  An escape to Hollywood is exactly what she needs.

Meanwhile, Gant is strong-arming Mitchell to go to work for him.  Mitchell is a guy with heart and a sense of justice.  It will be his undoing.  In pic’s opening reel, Mitchell comes on a bogus blind guy who lives under a bridge.  He’s a buddy.  Said buddy gets beaten close to death by a couple of young thugs.  Mitchell takes him to hospital and arranges for his (ultimately unsuccessful) treatment.  Mitchell’s tragic mistake is that he must avenge his buddy’s death despite the latter’s advice to forget it.  Considering all the other stiffs that Mitchell creates before heading off to Hollywood to join Charlotte, he could have omitted the last two.  Instead they bite him in the behind in the same way the unlikely bartender dispatches John Wayne at the end of “The Shootist.”

In case anyone thinks that London gangsters are any less dangerous than the Russian mafia, consider this:  A trail of dead bodies leads all the way to Mitchell’s drug-addicted sister, Penny (Ophelia Lovibond).  Mitchell is responsible for just under half of them, some of whom richly deserve it.  Winstone’s Gant is pure sociopath.

The final reel hammers home pic’s message, if there is one, in a pool of blood.  The violence has to end somewhere.  And sometimes it is the last shot one takes, the last person one offends, the least likely bête noire that is one’s undoing.

“London Boulevard” is a tightly wrought thriller that would be a lot better if it were not for the obscure (to American ears) South London accents.  Lensing is on the money.  Performances are spot-on.  Editing is economical, and pic runs a mere 103 minutes.  Helmer-screenwirter William Monahan adapted a crime novel by Ken Bruen.  Monahan has a firm hand at the throttle.  It is too bad that, absent subtitles, he did not bring some thesps into the sound booth to loop a number of unintelligible lines.

This R-rated pic (sex, violence, language, drug use) may be best remembered as the movie that proves that Keira Knightly is smoking hot without makeup, if one believes the press materials.  Don’t think of taking the kids.  But if you are ordering video-on-demand and have closed captioning on your TV, you could do worse than spend an hour and 43 minutes watching “London Boulevard.”

—30—

London Boulevard on Netflix

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

OLIVER STONE MEETS LENI RIEFENSTAHL

Imagine that Oliver Stone and Leni Riefenstahl had a love child and that the kid grew up to become a filmmaker like his parents.  That would be Chris Paine, director and co-writer (with P.G. Morgan) of “Revenge of the Electric Car,” which goes into limited release in New York and Los Angeles beginning October 21.  Make no mistake.  “Revenge” is a documentary, not Christine with a battery pack.  It’s the sequel to “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” Paine’s 2006 opus which centered on the recalls of Honda’s EV and General Motors’ EV-1, both pure plug-in electric automobiles.  Both are propaganda films, but “Revenge” marks a change of heart for Paine.  It also marks a change of thinking for the automobile industry.  In “Who Killed?” there are hints of conspiracy between automakers and big oil to stifle electric car development (think of Oliver Stone’s “JFK”).  “Revenge,” shot only five years after “Who Killed?,” is more a celebration of progress by the big automakers.  In the prequel, Paine got little cooperation from the automobile industry.  In the sequel, his crew followed everyone involved in electric cars from Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn to Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an internet billionaire who may be on his way to becoming the Henry Kaiser of the 21^st Century.

Pic’s real star, however, is the redoubtable Bob Lutz, the septuagenarian former key executive of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and BMW.  Lutz is unusual among current lights of the car business.  He’s a car guy, not an accountant.  His extensive collection of automobiles, including a 1955 Chrysler 300, has been widely reviewed in car enthusiast magazines.  He is also a former US Marine Corps fighter pilot and counts fighter planes among his toys.  Lutz’s change of thinking regarding the electric automobile puts him at the leading edge of the electric car movement among major automakers.  In a telephone interview he predicted that in a decade, at the current rate of advancement of battery technology, a pure plug-in electric car practical for family use which can go up to 300 miles on a three-hour charge, will be on the market.

That’s pretty heady stuff for the electric car crowd.  As Lutz pointed out, many of the claimed ranges for pure electric cars depend on ideal conditions, and in the real world, many such ranges including a claimed 130 mile range for one electric crossover vehicle, may be closer to half the manufacturer’s claim.  It was progress in technology that made Lutz the booster of Chevrolet’s Volt, a hybrid gasoline-electric car that can also be plugged into the electrical grid for a charge.  The gasoline engine charges the batteries when it is not practical to wait for a plug-in charge.  Much of Paine’s footage of Lutz surrounds his 2010 introduction of the Volt.  What Paine misses is a fundamental tenet of automobile marketing.  Appearance sells cars.  According to Lutz, a car has to be attractive to look at in order to be sold.  “Nowadays, all cars will go 100,000 miles without a serious breakdown,” he said.  “They all have fuel mileage mandated by the government, and they’re all built to a government mandated safety standard.”  It’s the looks that set one car apart from another.  Lutz, who shepherded the Volt project through General Motors, made sure that his bridge between the gasoline engine and the pure electric car would look stylish enough to appeal to a mass market.  A decade ago, Lutz was not a proponent of the electric car.  It wasn’t ready for prime time.  Paine paints him as a visionary.  Your critic would say he is a realist.

Paine can be forgiven for some suspect editing, such as a cut of former GM CEO Rick Wagoner which implies that Wagoner believes that recalling the EV-1 from the market was the biggest mistake his team at GM made.  “Revenge” marks progress both for Paine and the automobile industry, but it is not Paine’s mea culpa for “Who Killed?”  Lutz confirmed that the EV-1 was a rolling test bed for technology in the real world.  The prototypical GM electric car was leased with the caveat that it could be recalled at any time.  GM lost a billion dollars on the experiment, Lutz said.  That the EV-1 was beloved by many celebrity drivers, such as Danny DeVito and Ed Begley Jr., folks who can attract media attention to a pet peeve, created a PR black eye for GM when it retrieved its EV-1 from the field test.  With the EV-1 GM was treading uncharted ground.  America is a litigious society.  GM had no idea what could go wrong with a ten-year-old EV-1 and what its product liability might be.  It also had to get the cars back to analyze wear and tear.  All of the foregoing was published in the automotive press at the time, but going there might have been too much for Paine to swallow.

“Revenge” is an entertaining, PG-13 rated, 90 minutes.  In attempting to offer a little drama, Paine spends a lot of footage on tsuris at Tesla Motors, including a few family scenes with Elon Musk’s kids and trophy wife (their stepmom) as well as the ups and downs of some build-to-order electric car jobbers, one of whom converts vintage Porsche 356s to run on batteries.  (Forget about trunk space.  You and your significant other will not use one for a weekend getaway.)  The compilation of archival footage and new material is ably narrated by Tim Robbins, who stands out as one of the most compelling documentary voices in Hollywood.  Tech aspects are up to par.  And to Paine’s credit, pic runs less than half the length of his spiritual father’s “JFK.”

–30–

>

DOUBLE FEATURE

“The Kid with a Bike” & “Real Steel”

The Kid:  4 ½ stars out of five; $12.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

Real Steel:  4 stars out of five; $11.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

IN ONE, THE KID DOESN’T STEAL THE SHOW

At age 36 Cécile De France may be the hottest actress in French cinema today.  Certainly it was impossible for your critic to take his eyes off her whenever she was on screen in “The Kid with a Bike” (“Le Gamin au Velo”), the drama cum buddy film screened for the press at the New York Film Festival.  She is a star.  However, in “The Kid,” the kid (Thomas Doret) is the lead.  De France is not even introduced until near the end of pic’s first reel although she is the kid’s major protagonist.  In the 2010 “Hereafter” where she starred opposite Matt Damon (and worked in English as well as French), she was the total glamourpuss.  In “The Kid” De France is a hard-working hairdresser who lives over the shop.  Still, it is impossible to dress her down sufficiently to suppress her glamour.  She is one of those statuesqe western European women whose fine facial bones, height, fabulous figure, and unwillingness to succumb to the blandishments of plastic surgery make her irresistible.

“Real Steel” is also a buddy film.  The 127 minute comedy/fantasy/sci-fi adventure directed by Shawn Levy features the too-cute-for-words Dakota Goyo as Max Kenton, the 11-year-old estranged son of Hugh Jackman’s Charlie Kenton in a futuristic, come-from-behind, underdog skein that should have been the summer feel-good movie of 2011.  Why it is being released in the fall is anyone’s guess.  Maybe US distributor Disney feared it would bomb.  Pic is notable for more product placement than your critic has ever seen.  Disney-owned ESPN figures prominently.  At least it is not out of place as a TV sports network in a movie where sports is central to the plot.  Not so much can be said for bing.com, Sprint, and others.  At least their excuse is stadium signage.

Although it is set about a decade or more in the future, the storylines of “Real Steel” have been done to death.  It is a tribute to the filmmakers that they can still wring some audience emotion out of these tired warhorses.

Plot is fairly simple.  Ex-boxer Charlie Kenton is a loser who travels the country in an ancient International Harvester truck which serves as home and machine shop in addition to wheels.  He owes money everywhere, and he is too prey to his own recklessness to make a go of it in robot boxing, the sport which has replaced human boxing in the future-world where the public’s blood lust has become too much for mere flesh to handle.

In the first two reels he blows through two robots, one of them a $45,000 star of the circuit from Japan.  In the midst of his hard luck some old acquaintances arrive to tell him that his girlfriend of more than a decade ago is dead and the he is now responsible for their son, Max.

Now the fun begins.  Max has a few issues — like a dad who was not around for a decade — and the last thing Charlie wants is a kid.  His ex’s sister, however, wants custody of Max.  Charlie cons her wealthy husband into a deal — the couple get custody in return for $100k.  The catch is that Charlie has to look after Max for the summer until the couple return from Tuscany.

The rest is easy.  Max has brass ones.  He also speaks Japanese — thank video games.  And he’s a computer genius who is totally addicted to robot boxing.  He commands the Japanese robot in Japanese and re-programs it to understand English.  Instead of staying with struggling gym owner (remember that there are no longer human boxers) Baily Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) who is both hot and too plucky for words, Max forces Charlie to take him on the road.  It’s a rough ride.  Max starts calling Charlie’s shots with the robots.  It turns out that Max is right, much to Charlie’s chagrin.  They get beat up over one of Charlie’s bad gambling debts.  They almost get themselves killed.  And then, at pic’s most dangerous moment, they find Atom in a junkyard.  Atom, buried under sludge, is an older robot with a couple of very advanced features:  Speech recognition and visual shadowing — in other words, if Atom is programmed to follow a person’s movements, it will.  To give the special effects guys credit, Atom is the most endearing of anthropomorphic robots.  And just wait until you see Max and Atom dance!

Charlie and Max bond, despite the many speed bumps.  Atom, which Charlie dismisses as junk, turns out to be more than a viable competitor in the ring.  Max emerges as a star who can command a stadium audience.  And before you know it, Charlie, Max, and Atom are in the title fight.  Of course, it all hinges on whether Charlie can reconcile with Max after turning him over to his aunt and uncle.  All Max ever wanted was for Charlie to fight for him.  Max has abandonment issues.

Jackman’s Achilles Heel in “Real Steel” is Goyo.  As Max, Goyo steals every scene he plays.  Hope Davis as Max’s aunt and James Rebhorn as her wealthy husband are there only to move the plot along.  The bad guys, more caricatures than characters, are more interesting.  Lilly is underutilized.  She provides Charlie’s backstory and what could be a love interest, but by the final reel, she is more or less part of the scenery.  However, the rags-to-riches story accompanied by an unabashedly romantic soundtrack and cuts to characters in tears in the final reel, telegraph to auds what they ought to feel.  Other than overdoing it more than a tad, all the cheap shots work.

Special effects are subtle enough not to distract.  That is a lot to say for a special effects movie in 2011.  Jackman is convincing both physically and as an actor as the washed up boxer turned two-bit hustler.  But pic’s best scenes feature Max and Atom, the robot.  Lensing by Mauro Fiore is more than up to par.  Sound recording leaves little to be desired.  Set design is another matter.  The State of Michigan must have extended enormous tax breaks to “Real Steel.”  New York scenes were shot in Detroit, and it shows.  Pic’s only concession to the future, other than some fancy holographic computer screens (sporting the HP logo), is the Cadillac Sixteen which made the rounds of the auto shows a few years ago.  It still looks futuristic.  Way to go, GM!

“Real Steel” carries a PG-13 rating.  That is amusing for a pic whose star is supposed to be 11-years-old.  There is a little language (including some uttered by Max), but really nothing in pic will fly over the heads of kids or offend them.  They may actually like the robotic boxing matches.

“The Kid with a Bike,” is a far darker and ultimately more satisfying story.  Thomas Doret as Cyril Catoul, like Max of “Real Steel,” has abandonment issues.  His mother is dead.  His father, Guy Catoul (Jérémie Renier) is in financial difficulty.  Guy has consigned Cyril to an orphanage following his custodial grandmother’s death.  He’s about the same age as Max.  And like Max he has brass ones.  The similarities end there.

Cyril is not funny.  He is sullen and dangerous.  He is on a mission to get his dad back, but his dad has done almost everything possible not to be found.  He has even sold Cyril’s most prized possession, his bike.  Cyril acts out, and to Doret’s credit, most of it is believable.  Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne share director and writer credits in this Belgian production which seems to be set in France.  All the dialogue is in French with English subtitles (most of which are better than average translations) for American auds.  The pair coaxed a far above average performance from a child actor, and got all thesps to work with total credibility.

Pic’s theme might be the cycle of violence or the law of unintended consequences.  The incident which brings protagonists Samantha (De France) and Cyril together is an incident at a clinic where Cyril tries to escape his orphanage guardian.  He clings to Samantha, a patient in the waiting room, too tightly, it seems.  There he blurts out his story about the missing bike.  De France is so convincing an actor that without uttering more than two sentences, she totally conveys onscreen her vulnerability to Cyril.

Accordingly it comes as no surprise that when she tracks down Cyril’s bike and returns it to him, Cyril asks if he can stay with her as a foster child on weekends, and she agrees.  Cyril’s request is a plot to find his dad, and Samatha becomes his partner in crime.  Samantha’s loyalty to Cyril develops rapidly.  It has to.  Pic runs only 87 minutes — half an hour shorter than “Real Steel.”  Kudos to the directors for knowing when to yell “Cut!”

Cyril is a handful.  His resentment at abandonment, his bad manners, his anger, all get him into trouble.  They also cost Samantha her boyfriend.  It doesn’t hurt that the same kid steals his bike twice.  (Note to Cyril:  Get a bike lock.)  The second time, he beats up the bicycle thief, who is a bigger kid, in front of the latter’s gang, and gets the attention of gang leader Wes (Egon Di Mateo) as a plausible petty criminal, earning the nickname, “Pitbull.”  Pic offers some suspense in the burgeoning relationship between Cyril and Wes.  It looks at first like a slightly older pedophile seducing a younger boy.  It is anything but.  Wes wants Cyril to do robberies for him.  Cyril is an apt pupil.  With a baseball bat, Cyril dispatches both a news agent and his son and makes off with several hundred Euros.  Unfortunately, they see his face before passing out.

Cyril’s dad has a new job as a chef, and he says, at Samantha’s insistence — she won’t let the guy lie to his kid — that there is no room for Cyril in his new life.  As a sort of votive offering, Cyril offers his cash from the robbery to his dad — “I stole it,” he says.  Dad dispatches both him and the money fearing a prison sentence for himself.

From this point forward, dénouement comes quickly.  It’s a chain reaction.  Violence begets violence.  The cops are onto Cyril as soon as he returns as a last resort to Samantha, whom he had injured with a scissors trying to escape her for the blandishments of Wes.  Wes goes to prison.  Cyril is forced to apologize to the news agent at a hearing, and Samantha agrees to pay damages on his behalf.  So far, so good.  She takes full custody of Cyril, but the seeds of destruction have been sown in the form of the news agent’s implacable son.  A chance encounter with Cyril sets him off.  At first it appears that he kills Cyril.  His dad concocts a cover story in case Cyril is dead.  Actually Cyril is just passed out and bruised, much to the relief of news agent and son.

The restraint shown by the filmmakers at this point is one of pic’s finest achievements.  It is an equivocal ending, not a neatly wrapped package, but it is fitting for a pic that is neither comedy nor fantasy.  Somebody has to end the violence.  To their credit, filmmakers let the screenplay speak their message softly rather than hammer it home.  Perhaps they give too much credit to auds for intelligence.

Tech credits, including lensing by Alain Marcoen, cutting, set design, and sound recording, are all top notch.  Costume and makeup are credible.  Only one significantly jarring note stands out, although it may be useful for certain auds:  Following each of pic’s turning points the soundtrack features riffs from the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto for piano and orchestra.  Sophisticated auds do not need the audio cue.  Pic is not yet rated for America, but it may be a tad too subtle and more than a tad too thought provoking for kids.  Leave them at home.

Jackman is the star power in a Hollywood version of the abandoned child film, which, despite its flaws and hackneyed story works well largely thanks to his and Goyo’s comic chops and Goyo’s charm.  It doesn’t hurt that the special effects are under the top.  Disney should have doubled down on this one.

On the other hand, the far more realistic and more disturbing counterpart from Belgium engages auds in a way that they will think about long after they have forgotten “Real Steel.”  And it doesn’t hurt that Cécile De France gets a lot of screen time.

–30–

Real Steel on Netflix

DOUBLE FEATURE

The Kid:  4 ½ stars out of five; $12.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

Real Steel:  4 stars out of five; $11.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

IN ONE, THE KID DOESN’T STEAL THE SHOW

At age 36 Cécile De France may be the hottest actress in French cinema today.  Certainly it was impossible for your critic to take his eyes off her whenever she was on screen in “The Kid with a Bike” (“Le Gamin au Velo”), the drama cum buddy film screened for the press at the New York Film Festival.  She is a star.  However, in “The Kid,” the kid (Thomas Doret) is the lead.  De France is not even introduced until near the end of pic’s first reel although she is the kid’s major protagonist.  In the 2010 “Hereafter” where she starred opposite Matt Damon (and worked in English as well as French), she was the total glamourpuss.  In “The Kid” De France is a hard-working hairdresser who lives over the shop.  Still, it is impossible to dress her down sufficiently to suppress her glamour.  She is one of those statuesque western European women whose fine facial bones, height, fabulous figure, and unwillingness to succumb to the blandishments of plastic surgery make her irresistible. 

“Real Steel” is also a buddy film.  The 127 minute comedy/fantasy/sci-fi adventure directed by Shawn Levy features the too-cute-for-words Dakota Goyo as Max Kenton, the 11-year-old estranged son of Hugh Jackman’s Charlie Kenton in a futuristic, come-from-behind, underdog skein that should have been the summer feel-good movie of 2011.  Why it is being released in the fall is anyone’s guess.  Maybe US distributor Disney feared it would bomb.  Pic is notable for more product placement than your critic has ever seen.  Disney-owned ESPN figures prominently.  At least it is not out of place as a TV sports network in a movie where sports is central to the plot.  Not so much can be said for bing.com, Sprint, and others.  At least their excuse is stadium signage.

Although it is set about a decade or more in the future, the storylines of “Real Steel” have been done to death.  It is a tribute to the filmmakers that they can still wring some audience emotion out of these tired warhorses.

Plot is fairly simple.  Ex-boxer Charlie Kenton is a loser who travels the country in an ancient International Harvester truck which serves as home and machine shop in addition to wheels.  He owes money everywhere, and he is too prey to his own recklessness to make a go of it in robot boxing, the sport which has replaced human boxing in the future-world where the public’s blood lust has become too much for mere flesh to handle.

In the first two reels he blows through two robots, one of them a $45,000 star of the circuit from Japan.  In the midst of his hard luck some old acquaintances arrive to tell him that his girlfriend of more than a decade ago is dead and the he is now responsible for their son, Max.

Now the fun begins.  Max has a few issues — like a dad who was not around for a decade — and the last thing Charlie wants is a kid.  His ex’s sister, however, wants custody of Max.  Charlie cons her wealthy husband into a deal — the couple get custody in return for $100k.  The catch is that Charlie has to look after Max for the summer until the couple return from Tuscany.

The rest is easy.  Max has brass ones.  He also speaks Japanese — thank video games.  And he’s a computer genius who is totally addicted to robot boxing.  He commands the Japanese robot in Japanese and re-programs it to understand English.  Instead of staying with struggling gym owner (remember that there are no longer human boxers) Baily Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) who is both hot and too plucky for words, Max forces Charlie to take him on the road.  It’s a rough ride.  Max starts calling Charlie’s shots with the robots.  It turns out that Max is right, much to Charlie’s chagrin.  They get beat up over one of Charlie’s bad gambling debts.  They almost get themselves killed.  And then, at pic’s most dangerous moment, they find Atom in a junkyard.  Atom, buried under sludge, is an older robot with a couple of very advanced features:  Speech recognition and visual shadowing — in other words, if Atom is programmed to follow a person’s movements, it will.  To give the special effects guys credit, Atom is the most endearing of anthropomorphic robots.  And just wait until you see Max and Atom dance!

Charlie and Max bond, despite the many speed bumps.  Atom, which Charlie dismisses as junk, turns out to be more than a viable competitor in the ring.  Max emerges as a star who can command a stadium audience.  And before you know it, Charlie, Max, and Atom are in the title fight.  Of course, it all hinges on whether Charlie can reconcile with Max after turning him over to his aunt and uncle.  All Max ever wanted was for Charlie to fight for him.  Max has abandonment issues.

Jackman’s Achilles Heel in “Real Steel” is Goyo.  As Max, Goyo steals every scene he plays.  Hope Davis as Max’s aunt and James Rebhorn as her wealthy husband are there only to move the plot along.  The bad guys, more caricatures than characters, are more interesting.  Lilly is underutilized.  She provides Charlie’s backstory and what could be a love interest, but by the final reel, she is more or less part of the scenery.  However, the rags-to-riches story accompanied by an unabashedly romantic soundtrack and cuts to characters in tears in the final reel, telegraph to auds what they ought to feel.  Other than overdoing it more than a tad, all the cheap shots work.

Special effects are subtle enough not to distract.  That is a lot to say for a special effects movie in 2011.  Jackman is convincing both physically and as an actor as the washed up boxer turned two-bit hustler.  But pic’s best scenes feature Max and Atom, the robot.  Lensing by Mauro Fiore is more than up to par.  Sound recording leaves little to be desired.  Set design is another matter.  The State of Michigan must have extended enormous tax breaks to “Real Steel.”  New York scenes were shot in Detroit, and it shows.  Pic’s only concession to the future, other than some fancy holographic computer screens (sporting the HP logo), is the Cadillac Sixteen which made the rounds of the auto shows a few years ago.  It still looks futuristic.  Way to go, GM!

“Real Steel” carries a PG-13 rating.  That is amusing for a pic whose star is supposed to be 11-years-old.  There is a little language (including some uttered by Max), but really nothing in pic will fly over the heads of kids or offend them.  They may actually like the robotic boxing matches.

“The Kid with a Bike,” is a far darker and ultimately more satisfying story.  Thomas Doret as Cyril Catoul, like Max of “Real Steel,” has abandonment issues.  His mother is dead.  His father, Guy Catoul (Jérémie Renier) is in financial difficulty.  Guy has consigned Cyril to an orphanage following his custodial grandmother’s death.  He’s about the same age as Max.  And like Max he has brass ones.  The similarities end there. 

Cyril is not funny.  He is sullen and dangerous.  He is on a mission to get his dad back, but his dad has done almost everything possible not to be found.  He has even sold Cyril’s most prized possession, his bike.  Cyril acts out, and to Doret’s credit, most of it is believable.  Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne share director and writer credits in this Belgian production which seems to be set in France.  All the dialogue is in French with English subtitles (most of which are better than average translations) for American auds.  The pair coaxed a far above average performance from a child actor, and got all thesps to work with total credibility. 

Pic’s theme might be the cycle of violence or the law of unintended consequences.  The incident which brings protagonists Samantha (De France) and Cyril together is an incident at a clinic where Cyril tries to escape his orphanage guardian.  He clings to Samantha, a patient in the waiting room, too tightly, it seems.  There he blurts out his story about the missing bike.  De France is so convincing an actor that without uttering more than two sentences, she totally conveys onscreen her vulnerability to Cyril.

Accordingly it comes as no surprise that when she tracks down Cyril’s bike and returns it to him, Cyril asks if he can stay with her as a foster child on weekends, and she agrees.  Cyril’s request is a plot to find his dad, and Samatha becomes his partner in crime.  Samantha’s loyalty to Cyril develops rapidly.  It has to.  Pic runs only 87 minutes — half an hour shorter than “Real Steel.”  Kudos to the directors for knowing when to yell “Cut!” 

Cyril is a handful.  His resentment at abandonment, his bad manners, his anger, all get him into trouble.  They also cost Samantha her boyfriend.  It doesn’t hurt that the same kid steals his bike twice.  (Note to Cyril:  Get a bike lock.)  The second time, he beats up the bicycle thief, who is a bigger kid, in front of the latter’s gang, and gets the attention of gang leader Wes (Egon Di Mateo) as a plausible petty criminal, earning the nickname, “Pitbull.”  Pic offers some suspense in the burgeoning relationship between Cyril and Wes.  It looks at first like a slightly older pedophile seducing a younger boy.  It is anything but.  Wes wants Cyril to do robberies for him.  Cyril is an apt pupil.  With a baseball bat, Cyril dispatches both a news agent and his son and makes off with several hundred Euros.  Unfortunately, they see his face before passing out. 

Cyril’s dad has a new job as a chef, and he says, at Samantha’s insistence — she won’t let the guy lie to his kid — that there is no room for Cyril in his new life.  As a sort of votive offering, Cyril offers his cash from the robbery to his dad — “I stole it,” he says.  Dad dispatches both him and the money fearing a prison sentence for himself.

From this point forward, dénouement comes quickly.  It’s a chain reaction.  Violence begets violence.  The cops are onto Cyril as soon as he returns as a last resort to Samantha, whom he had injured with a scissors trying to escape her for the blandishments of Wes.  Wes goes to prison.  Cyril is forced to apologize to the news agent at a hearing, and Samantha agrees to pay damages on his behalf.  So far, so good.  She takes full custody of Cyril, but the seeds of destruction have been sown in the form of the news agent’s implacable son.  A chance encounter with Cyril sets him off.  At first it appears that he kills Cyril.  His dad concocts a cover story in case Cyril is dead.  Actually Cyril is just passed out and bruised, much to the relief of news agent and son. 

The restraint shown by the filmmakers at this point is one of pic’s finest achievements.  It is an equivocal ending, not a neatly wrapped package, but it is fitting for a pic that is neither comedy nor fantasy.  Somebody has to end the violence.  To their credit, filmmakers let the screenplay speak their message softly rather than hammer it home.  Perhaps they give too much credit to auds for intelligence.

Tech credits, including lensing by Alain Marcoen, cutting, set design, and sound recording, are all top notch.  Costume and makeup are credible.  Only one significantly jarring note stands out, although it may be useful for certain auds:  Following each of pic’s turning points the soundtrack features riffs from the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto for piano and orchestra.  Sophisticated auds do not need the audio cue.  Pic is not yet rated for America, but it may be a tad too subtle and more than a tad too thought provoking for kids.  Leave them at home.

Jackman is the star power in a Hollywood version of the abandoned child film, which, despite its flaws and hackneyed story works well largely thanks to his and Goyo’s comic chops and Goyo’s charm.  It doesn’t hurt that the special effects are under the top.  Disney should have doubled down on this one. 

On the other hand, the far more realistic and more disturbing counterpart from Belgium engages auds in a way that they will think about long after they have forgotten “Real Steel.”  And it doesn’t hurt that Cécile De France gets a lot of screen time

— 30 —

$7.25 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

ALL THIS DRAMA OVER A LITTLE BDSM?

“A Dangerous Method,” which was screened recently at the New York Film Festival, is less than the sum of its parts.  Directed by David Cronenberg and based on the eponymous book by John Kerr, Christopher Hampton’s screenplay is almost totally devoid of comic relief.  It could use some.  What little it gets is clearly unintentional.

The 99 minute drama proposes to tell the story of pioneering psychiatrists Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).  It actually tells the story of Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, a wealthy, beautiful, and intelligent young Russian Jewess played ably by Keira Knightley.  Skein has it that Spielrein was Jung’s seminal psychoanalytic patient, a girl brought in great distress to the Swiss hospital where Jung was employed as a physician dealing with mental disorders in 1901.  Pic covers the period from then to 1916.  Epilogues are consigned to title cards.  Freud, who played the pivotal role in the development of psychoanalysis, is a supporting character.  It’s too bad, because he conveys far more than Fassbender, whose performance seems restrained to the point of constipation.  Maybe it’s the writing.

Plot is actually the progress of two intersecting love triangles:  Jung, his wife, Emma (Sarah Gadon) and Sabina in one and Jung, Sabina, and Freud in the other.  For those with prurient minds, Jung, Sabina and Freud do not have more than an intellectual affair.

Jung, an Aryan Swiss, has it easier than Freud, the Viennese Jew.  Jung also has a wealthy wife, which makes his progress less harrowing than Freud’s.  The latter is ever conscious of anti-Semitism and fears that abandoning the empirical for the spiritual in psychoanalysis will discredit it.  Jung veers off into the spiritual, if not the occult, leading to a break with Freud.  All of this is well known.

But before Jung goes off the rails, he brings Sabina back from a psychotic break and encourages her to enroll in medical school, where she becomes a star pupil.  In the course of his treatment of her, he discovers that her father hit her and humiliated her regularly when she was a child and that she became sexually aroused by it.  In other words, she is a natural sub in a Dom/sub relationship.  Maybe this was a big deal shortly after 1901, but nowadays it is a tad ho-hum.  Go to “Paddles,” for crying out loud.  Sabina’s arousal over the humiliation was the source of her psychosis.  She felt dirty and worthless for liking it.

Guess what?  A hop, skip, and a jump later Jung is whipping Sabina, who is getting off on it, and the two of them are in the midst of a torrid affair — or at least as torrid as “A Dangerous Method” can conjure.  “Nine 1/2 Weeks,” this is not.

Nowadays, Jung would lose his license to practice medicine and probably face prison time for becoming sexually involved with a patient.  Back then all he faced was guilt and two competing campaigns by his wife and by Sabina to keep him.  The fact that he seriously endangered Sabina’s stability by engaging in and then breaking off their affair is barely addressed.

Pic’s payoff does not entirely surface in the final reel of action.  Jung is clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown in 1916 as he receives his final visit from Sabina.  She is pregnant with her new husband’s child.  Jung says that the baby ought to have been his.  Sabina agrees.  Potential dashed on the rocks of bourgeois morality!  Good Heavens!  Some of this is too trite for words.

Title cards at the end bring the stories of Sabina, Freud, and Jung to their historic conclusions.  The latter two are well known and need not be dealt with here.  Suffice it to say that Sabina went on to become one of the most prominent psychiatrists of the Soviet Union before meeting a bad end in the Nazi invasion of 1941.

Tech credits are adequate.  One could rave if pic were not such a dirge.  Credit goes largely to Knightley, whose Russian accented English is most credible, and whose performance is well above par, and to Mortensen for reasons already addressed.  Fassbender sleepwalks through the picture.  Cronenberg’s direction is technically proficient but dramatically lacking, as is the screenplay.  Cutting, shooting, and sound recording are workmanlike.

Pic carries an “R” rating largely for explicit sexual situations.  Don’t take the kids unless they have trouble sleeping.

—30—

A Dangerous Method on Netflix

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

FROM THE SURREAL TO THE ABSURD, STAGEBOUND

Any picture from director Roman Polanski is bound to generate buzz.  Such is the case with “Carnage,” which unspooled at the New York Film Festival.  For his adaptation of the play, “God of Carnage,” in which he shares screenwriter credit with playwright Yasmina Reza, Polanski assembled a stellar cast:  Jodie Foster as Penelope Longstreet, a Brooklyn Heights writer and mother of two married to John C. Reilly as Michael Longstreet, a distributor of hardware and household fixtures; Kate Winslet as investment broker Nancy Cowan, and Christoph Waltz as husband Alan Cowan, a partner in a PR agency whose biggest client, a pharmaceutical company, is about to be exposed for marketing a toxic drug.  The quartet are brought together by an incident in which the 11-year-old Cowan boy took a stick to the 11-year-old Longstreet boy and rearranged the latter’s face.  Pic is comedy disguised as drama.

Action takes place in the Longstreet’s apartment, where the Cowans have arrived to make peace between their sons.  Peace, in this case, is not a bad idea.  Criminal charges could be filed.  What starts with surreal undertones of hostility beneath a veneer of civility quickly degenerates into the absurd.  Alan is constantly on his mobile phone trying to defuse his pharmaceutical crisis.  It turns out that Michael’s mother is taking the drug at issue.  Penelope wants an in-person apology from the Cowan boy to her son.  Cobbler is brought out.  So is the scotch and, much to the annoyance of Penelope, the cigars.

A bizarre dynamic develops between the four.  The seams and stitches of both marriages are laid bare amid projectile vomiting (Winslet) and an assault on Alan’s mobile phone.  After sufficient scotch, Alan tells Michael’s mother on the phone to stop taking the tainted drug.  Silly stuff, like drying art books which have been puked on with a hair dryer and then spraying them with cologne, abounds.

But what emerges from this ménage a quartre is a truth that Jean-Paul Sartre stated eloquently in “No Exit” (Huis clos), “Hell is other people.”  Beneath the veneer of civility Alan believes in the god of carnage; Michael was once part of a street gang; Nancy has little use for anybody; and Penelope cares more about her art books on the coffee table than she does about her kids.

Performances by the principal thesps are spot-on.  Foster’s role is perhaps the most difficult because she plays totally against type.  Winslet nails the stockbroker mother, and Waltz offers no trace of his native Austrian accent.  Sharp-eyed viewers will remember Waltz as the bad guy in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.”

Sole knock against pic is this:  As an adaptation of a play it is stagebound.  One can almost imagine a three camera, Desilu style shoot before a studio audience.  Since Roman Polanski for legal reasons cannot work in the United States, the Brooklyn exteriors are all special effects.  Interiors were shot in France.  Pic offers little by way of dénouement, but an ultimate long shot of two boys in a Brooklyn park suggests that the combatants settled their differences better than their parents did.

Alexandre Desplat’s minimalist score leaves little to be desired.  Lensing by Pawel Edelman is more than up to the task.  Sound recording is fine as all dialogue is audible.  Editing by Hervé de Luze is workmanlike.

“Carnage” is rated “R.”  Aside from some language, there is little to upset children.  They may even enjoy seeing their parents’ generation act like fools.

—30—

Carnage on Netflix

$8.25 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

ARISE, YE SLEEPER CELLS!  YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR LOVED ONES!

At 62 years old, Richard Gere is just about the perfect age to play retired CIA man Paul Shepherdson in “The Double,” a spy/crime thriller that goes into limited release on 28 October and opens in more US cities on 4 November.  He’s not quite a par on a par with Cary Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill in “North by Northwest,” and helmer/co-writer Michael Brandt is no Alfred Hitchcock, but plenty worse has been said about directors, actors, and roles, even by your critic.  “The Double” is a fairly tightly wrought spy thriller that moves along at a good clip.  It offers significant entertainment value despite a few loose ends.  And with Topher Grace cast against type as a heavy and the versatile Martin Sheen as Shepherdson’s former CIA boss, Tom Highland, one could do a lot worse for one’s ticket money.

Plot centers on the search for the killer of a US Senator (Edward Austin Kelly) found dead in Washington, DC.  The CIA bigfoots the FBI because the murder bears the hallmarks of Cassius, a KGB assassin thought to be long dead.  The bigfooter is Martin Sheen at the murder scene.  The same day, Shepherdson, on his way home, stops to watch kids play little league baseball.  He chats with one of the mothers in the stands.  Herein lies pic’s first loose end.  She asks him if he has a kid in the game.  He doesn’t.  He just likes to watch kids having fun.  In 2011 any mother of a little leaguer confronted with such an answer from a lone, older man would be on the cell phone to the vice cops in a heartbeat.

Next loose end:  How is it that neither the CIA nor the FBI recognizes murder by garrote?  Duh?  That’s how US Senator Darden is killed, and the spooks are acting as if his throat were cut by a knife in a pattern used only by Cassius.

Once auds have got past the loose ends, pic’s action satisfies but requires close attention.  Between present action and flashbacks there are more twists and turns than on a back road in Connecticut.

Because Shepherdson was the CIA man on the tail of Cassius, Highland recalls him to duty and teams him with young FBI man Ben Geary, played by Grace.  Put aside for a minute any confusion between “Gere” and “Geary.”  We are sure it is purely coincidental.  Highland is sure that Cassius is back on the job.  Shepherdson insists that he killed Cassius eons ago.  The Mutt & Jeff pairing portends a buddy film, but “The Double” is anything but.  Geary wrote a thesis on Cassius which attracted not only the attention of the FBI and CIA, but also of Shepherdson.  That’s how he got the FBI job.  He also speaks fluent Russian.  The guy is just too good a geek to be true.  Stuck at a desk job, he ostensibly can’t wait to get into the field with Shepherdson.

As pic’s flashbacks illuminate, Shepherdson is Cassius.  He was a double agent during the cold war, spying for the CIA and doing contract hits for the KGB.  His cover was so good that almost no one knew his real identity.  When the KGB killed his wife and infant daughter, Shepherdson settled scores and smoked every KGB guy who knew who he was.  He also ended the double agent thing and worked full time for the CIA until retirement.

As said revelations unfold, Shepherdson and Geary play cat and mouse with each other.  Since he is Cassius, Shepherdson knows that the murder of Senator Darden was a copycat job designed to smoke him out.  He starts retracing his steps, sometimes with Geary and sometimes without.  This leads to a bunch of unpleasant places and unsavoury people, some of whom have motive to kill him.  Richard Gere is at his best in such a role.  His heavily lined face reveals little.  And he conveys much with nuance.  A little bit of surveillance on Geary reveals that he communicates in an old KGB code.  That’s his tell.  Shepherdson confronts him and extracts from him that he is a traveler placed in the US by the KGB, whose job is to facilitate the work of Russian agents in America.  Geary and his family were sent to America when he was eight years old.  The successor to the KGB activated him two years before pic’s action.  Geary is the Double.

But like Shepherdson, Geary has his Achilles’ Heel.  It’s a beautiful wife and kid in a suburban house on a tree-lined street.  Once the shooting stops, Geary has to make a choice.  It’s not exactly a Hollywood ending, but if auds have paid sufficient attention to this complicated flick, it is a satisfying payoff.

At 98 minutes, pacing and cutting are good.  Lensing is more than up to par, and sound recording leaves little to be desired.  Set design is appropriate to the material.  Freshman feature director Michael Brandt has a background as a writer and editor.  He co-wrote the screenplay with Derek Haas.  Years at the keyboard and in the cutting room may have contributed to his discipline at the throttle.  “The Double” is rated PG-13 largely for violence.  An astute kid should be able to follow the plot.

–30–

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BASED ON A TRUE STORY, ALAS

Any picture starring Brad Pitt is bound to get some buzz.  Such is the case with “Moneyball,” the second feature film from Bennett Miller in which Pitt stars as Billy Beane, general manager of baseball’s Oakland A’s in one year — the 2001 playoffs to the 2002 playoffs.  Unfortunately, the strength of “Moneyball” is also its Achilles’ Heel:  The facts.

“Moneyball” is based on a true story, Michael Lewis’ book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”  It’s the chronicle of how Beane and a chubby computer geek, Peter Brand (the name was changed), played by Jonah Hill, rebuild the A’s after the team is picked clean of its star players at the end of the 2001 season.  Peter Brand is based on Paul DePodesta, currently Vice President of player development and scouting for the New York Mets.  He is thin, not chubby.  But Jonah Hill’s girth works in his favor dramatically.  He joined the A’s in 1999, not 2001 as the movie maintains, but as a dramatic device joining the A’s right after its 2001 playoff elimination works better.  Score one run and a double for Hollywood.

Brad Pitt is a good actor.  He is far better as a comedian than in a dramatic role, but his dramatic chops are improving.  That said his rapid-fire classic comic moments in “Moneyball” are among his best on film.  What he should avoid is playing scenes opposite attractive children.  He gets creamed in every scene with Kerris Dorsey as his shy, musically talented, charming 12-year-old daughter Casey.  Your critic imagines that Pitt does not mind much being overshadowed by so talented a newcomer.

Plot is simple:  Beane encounters Brand as an assistant to the GM of the Cleveland Indians on a visit to trade players.  The Indians’ GM listens to the kid as if he were the Grand Lama of Tibet.  Beane zeros in on him wanting to know just what intelligence he imparts to his boss.  It’s computer analysis of statistics.  It’s also deceptively simple:  The more a ballplayer gets on base, the better his team’s chances are of winning.  This flies in the face of the collective wisdom of veteran baseball scouts, who rely on observation and instinct.  It also flies in the face of A’s manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman in a role that was made for him).  Instead of buying players, Beane buys Brand from the Indians and makes him Assistant General Manager.  Brand’s corollary is that players who get on base a lot are often undervalued by fans and more so by front offices who underpay them because they possess some unfashionable element — maybe they’re fat, or a pitcher has a strange looking throw, or a runner has a goofy stride.  Brand’s statistics show that the teams whose player’s get on base more than the other teams’ players win more games than the other teams.  If the theory is true, it accounts for the success of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

Beane’s drama is this.  The A’s have a payroll that is about one fourth that of the Yankees, baseball’s richest team.  The Oakland A’s are at the bottom of baseball’s financial heap.  That’s where the money in “Moneyball” comes into play.  The Yanks can pluck just about any player they want from any other team as soon as a contract expires.  The A’s cannot compete financially.  They need some other edge.  Brand’s statistics provide it.  They enable the A’s to assemble a team that defies conventional wisdom at a price they can afford.

The drama is pretty simple.  The A’s scouts revolt.  The owner will not up the budget.  Art Howe refuses to play the lineup that Beane provides him.  The A’s lose game after game in the 2002 season until Beane stages a palace coup which forces Howe to use the players that Beane has hired.  There follows the greatest winning streak in the history of Major League Baseball:  20 games in a row go to the A’s.

It’s not The Natural (1984), but when it finally gets moving, about halfway through its 133 minutes, it offers some suspense.  Brand’s strategy appears not to be working.  In fact, it has been sabotaged by Art Howe.  Beane’s palace coup clears the way for Brand’s statistics to have a chance at success.  In a way, baseball fans may not be pic’s ideal audience.  It helps if one does not know what happened in the 2002 baseball season.  It’s not the curse of the Bambino.  It’s the curse of The Facts.  It’s based on a true story, remember?

Structure is straightforward.  Opening cards indicate the difference between the payroll of the A’s and the Yankees.  One could not set the stage more unequivocally.  Title cards specify dates and events.  Flashback’s to Beane’s early life as a full scholarship winner to Stamford who is seduced at age 18 by a large check from the New York Mets could be dispensed with.  Beane’s history doesn’t matter much to the story although helmer Miller thinks it does.  The subplot with daughter Casey and ex-wife Sharon (Robin Wright) provide sufficient backstory.  Pitt is at his best wheeling and dealing for players and cash.  He works the phones the way Isaac Stern played the violin.

In the end, however, pic fails to satisfy.  It’s the fealty to the facts.  Epilogue cards, wherein pic’s dénouement is revealed should have been omitted.  It would be better if auds were left to wonder whether Billy Beane accepted the $12.5-million offer from the Boston Red Sox to be General Manager.

Tech credits, including sound recording, editing by Christopher Tellefsen, production design by Jess Gonchor, and lensing by Wally Pfister are more than up to par.  Supporting players leave little to be desired.  There is one jarring note in the final reel:  It’s the lyric of a song burned onto a CD by Casey for Billy in which she sings to her dad.  One could call it the “Anti-Hollywood Ending.”

“Moneyball” is rated PG-13.  It’s a tad long, but other than some language, there is nothing in it to offend the kids.  Despite its flaws, it gets by on star-power, a good underdog story, and some witty dialogue by Aaron Sorkin.  As baseball flicks go, it is by no means the worst.  But perhaps it would have been better served by a little more “Damn Yankees!” and a little less History Channel.

–30–

$12.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

NEW TWIST ON THE BITTERSWEET LOVE STORY

Any picture that tries to be all things to all people is in for tough sledding.  In the case of Gus Van Sant-helmed “Restless,” the result is the film equivalent of an Olympic ski race.  Pic is at once romantic comedy, weeper, drama, coming-of-age fable, and ghost story.  What’s more, pic treads well trod ground, notably in the 1976 telemovie, “Griffin and Phoenix: A Love Story,” starring Peter Falk and Jill Clayburgh.  It also borrows elements of “Harold and Maude” (1971).  It does so largely without significant star power.  The bar is set pretty high.

Portland, Oregon, teenager Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper) is a funeral crasher.  In the opening reel — at a funeral — he encounters Annabelle Cotton (Aussie thesp Mia Wasikowska), an utterly charming, gamine, teen who revels in nature studies, 1960s chic, and the occasional “Annie Hall” look, mostly in the hats.  Her closely cropped hair is an immediate hint to plot’s underlying tragedy, but Annabelle exudes enough buoyancy to throw off even the most seasoned film-goer.  She certainly throws off Enoch, who, at first, spurns her advances, until she rescues him from being rudely ejected from a funeral they both crashed — separately.

The inevitable friendship blossoms.  Other than being loners and having a thing about death, they seem to be polar opposites.  Enoch’s undercurrent of anger, stubbornness, and irritability is the perfect counterpoint to the upbeat Annabelle.  Every now and then it erupts, and she brings him back to earth with ease.  She is infatuated with Darwin, the natural world, life, and death.  She also has an infectious sense of adventure, which quickly cracks Enoch’s shell.

Exposition, which involves revelations, is seamlessly woven into plot without flashbacks, a neat trick more filmmakers should learn.  Kudos to scribe Jason Lew.  Action takes place in the fall and early winter of one year in the present day, and in that time it is revealed that Enoch’s parents were killed in an automobile crash with a drunk driver, that Enoch spent three months in a coma as a result, and that he holds unexpressed hatred for his late parents (for abandoning him) and for his aunt Mabel (Jane Adams) with whom he lives in a house that looks a lot like The Munsters’ residence at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.  He blames aunt Mabel for his parents’ fatal trip to Seattle.  They went there to see her accept a literary award.

He also has a ghost (think “Harvey”), which may or may not be real depending on one’s point of view.  To their credit Van Sant and Lew leave it to auds.  The ghost is a young Japanese kamikaze pilot, Ryo Kase as Hiroshi Takahashi, who succeeded in his mission.  Hiroshi spends most of pic dressed in his pilot’s uniform and is either sent from Heaven to guide Enoch or is Enoch’s imaginary companion, again depending on one’s point of view.  One of pic’s best sight gags has Hiroshi accompanying Annabelle and Enoch on Halloween — Enoch is also dressed as a kamikaze while Annabelle emerges as a very attractive Geisha.

Special effects are few, simple, and effective.  Hiroshi appears and disappears.  So does his final letter to his girlfriend, written in 1945, which he never sent.  It is in Japanese, so despite a couple of tight shots of it, non-Japanese speakers will have no idea what it says until he reads it aloud in English.

Pic even offers a few surprises.

However, the nature of its underlying drama is not one of them — unless auds are not paying attention to clues.  Annabelle has a malignant brain tumor.  Within pic’s first half-hour it is revealed to her, to her overly-protective sister Elizabeth (Schuyler Fisk), to her alcoholic mother (Lusia Strus), and to Enoch that all the treatments have failed and that her condition is terminal.  The docs give her three months.

If ever anyone had a right to “The Bucket List” it’s a beautiful, charming, brilliant teenage girl with three months to live.  Annabelle is going to make the most of every moment.  Again to filmmakers’ credit, protagonists at first go at their remaining time together with brio.  This is no “Love Story.”  Eventually, however, the “Boy meets girl; boy gets girl despite being a jerk; boy loses girl because he can’t stop being a jerk, and …” well, you know the rest, scenario has to play out.  And it does, with a welcome twist involving some role-playing gone awry.  Who knew that two teenagers, one terminally ill, could out role-play the protagonists of “Fool for Love”?

This leads to one of pic’s darker reels, in which Enoch goes into crisis, acts out his anger, and Annabelle’s illness becomes more acute.  It also introduces one of pic’s few flaws.  Death from a brain tumor is not as smooth a transition as Annabelle’s.  The illness causes seizures.  Annabelle has on.  It also robs the patient of motor function, feeling, and eventually cognition and personality.  Annabelle goes just a tad too glamorously to be believed, but it makes the plot work (think “Dark Victory”) and sets up the penultimate scene, in which Hiroshi returns (after disappearing following a pivotal confrontation with Enoch).  Hiroshi returns dressed like the Japanese foreign minister who signed the surrender documents in 1945 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay — complete with morning coat and top hat.  The outfit looks a little comical on a teenager, but heck, he is a ghost.  Maybe the tailors on the far side are not as good as their earthly counterparts.  It is the first scene where Annabelle can actually see Hiroshi.  This is her Josephine Hull moment.

We really don’t know if he has come back for Annabelle because, as he says, “It’s a long trip.  I though she might like the company,” or if his appearance at her death bead is just Enoch’s imaginary way of coping with the loss of Annabelle.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.  Auds can take “Restless” for what they bring to it.  It is a well made film, which is touching to watch, features attractive protagonists who convey volumes in a glance.  It boasts excellent lensing by Harris Savides, spot-on editing by Elliot Graham, equally good production design by Anne Ross, and a sound track that leaves little to be desired.  Van Sant clearly has a fine touch with actors and crew.  Savides shoots in a slightly washed-out, almost sepia tone.  It is perfectly suited to the material.  One or two lines of dialogue are tough to understand, but other than that the sound recording is better than average.

Pic’s dénouement, which follows Hiroshi’s final bow, is at once poignant, understated, and a little funny.  It is neatly tied to the opening reel, and it is a wonderful example of how less really can be more in film.

“Restless” carries a PG-13 rating and runs a very fast 93 minutes.  Nothing in it should offend anyone.

—30—

$6.75 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

SHERLOCK HOLMES IT’S NOT

There is a flaw common to a great many mainland Chinese movies that are released outside China.  They tend to be larded with message — or propaganda, depending on one’s point of view.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, which stars the redoubtable Tony Leung Ka Fai as Shatuo Zhong, a top Chinese cop of the seventh and eighth centuries, A.D., could be a great detective picture with some discards.  As it has been released, at least to western auds, it tries to be all things to all people.  Its underlying detective story is overlaid with political intrigue, social morality, legitimacy of the state, Chinese nationalism, fealty to history in the story of China’s first Empress, Wu Zeitan (Carina Lau).  It tops that off with a healthy dose of mysticism in the form of shape-shifting characters.  It’s just too much for one movie to carry.

That’s too bad because “Detective Dee” is a well acted, well shot, well designed, and well choreographed (by Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, a.k.a. Sammo Hung) film.  Special effects, which are essential to the plot, are anything but cheesy.  Pic is reported to have cost $13-million US, and in Hollywood it would have cost at least five times as much to make.

Plot is anything but simple:  China’s regent, Wu Zeitan, has successfully plotted to become its first Empress.  The dynasty she overthrew has a problem with this.  There are multiple plots against her including a couple of armies.  Meanwhile, a giant Buddha is being built within spitting distance of the palace, ordered to be finished in time for the coronation, to which it is a monument.

Unfortunately, the guys in charge of construction have a bad habit of dying from what looks like spontaneous combustion.  If the giant Buddha falls, it will land on the site of the coronation, killing the Empress and everyone in attendance.  One can see why the Empress has a problem with these inexplicable deaths.

Meanwhile Detective Dee is serving hard labor in a maximum security prison for resisting the Empress’ coup.  Snatched from prison, he is brought before the Empress and ordered to resume his role as Chief Judge of the Supreme Court of China, which was the ancient equivalent of the American FBI.

The soon-to-be Empress is not stupid.  She assigns Detective Dee a babysitter, the impressive Li Bing Bing as Shangguan Jing’er, a sort of ancient Secret Service agent with a knack for martial arts.  Jing’er is one of pic’s shape shifters, but more on that later.

Detective Dee accepts the assignment and begins to investigate the bizarre deaths.  In the process he goes where the Empress and his babysitter don’t want him to go.  Good cops have connections.  Really good cops keep them even after eight years on the inside.  Really, really good cops don’t lose their knack for martial arts, and this being a Chinese action film of a sort, martial arts comes in handy more than once.

It is just as essential to “Detective Dee” as it is to any film noire that the folks who hire the detective have secrets to keep from him.  Uncovering those secrets, however, is essential for Detective Dee to uncover the plot against the Empress to be.  Your critic was guessing for a while that it had something to do with her Mr. Spock eyebrows, but it is nonetheless a fiendish plot.

An engineer in charge of the construction of the giant Buddha spontaneously combusts before the opening credits.  The top cop in China then catches fire suspiciously while investigating the death.  That’s the cue for Dee’s entrance.

Dee’s investigation takes him everywhere, mostly accompanied by the attractive Jing’er.  But it is without Jing’er that Dee solves the crime.  It seems that Jing’er shape shifts into the high priest of the imperial court, who speaks through conveniently appearing deer via ventriloquism.  The deer’s utterances are alleged to be guidance from Heaven.  This is about 1250 years before the Merritt Parkway was built — accordingly these deer are not road kill.  It is a capital offense in the China of the film to visit the residence of the high priest of the imperial court.  The other shape shifter is a doctor on the lam.  He lives in an underground bazaar.  The doc, who is a friend of Dee, reveals to him the existence of fire beetles whose touch imparts a poison that combusts in contact with sunlight.  He also reveals that the high priest had something to do with finding them once upon a millennium.  Then they are alleged to have fallen into the hands of bad guys.  This necessitates Detective Dee’s visit to the high priest, who is revealed then to be Jing’er, who turns herself into a guy for the visit.  In other words, the Empress’ big secret is that there is no high priest.  The high priest is her bodyguard in disguise.  It is in the Empress’ interest for her subjects not to know if the Empress uses the alleged words of the alleged high priest to disguise her own decisions as word from Heaven — in other words that she is the man behind the curtain.

The fire beetles nail about five guys before Dee figures out who is using them.  It’s a plotter against the Empress to be.  It seems that she made a few enemies on her way to the top, some of whom are not as loyal to the state as Dee.  The fire beetles are not the crime.  They’re the cover-up.  The plot is exposed by the architectural drawings of the giant Buddha, which reveal its design flaw.  Anyone who might give it away needs to be disposed of.  This is not to say that the architect was crooked.  He wasn’t.  Since he was the guy most likely to spot the sabotage, he was also killed by spontaneous combustion.  Some of the plotters managed to get hired into the construction crew.  They messed with the structure of the Buddha.

When Detective Dee uncovers the plot, nails the head plotter in a martial arts fight, and then saves the imperial court just in the nick of time, one would think that helmer Hark Tsui would have yelled, “cut!”

Instead auds are treated to a Chinese civics lesson.  In a Hayes Office movie the Empress would have died for her crimes.  In “Detective Dee” it’s her bodyguard, Jing’er who dies in her arms.  In China it evidently is frowned on for the head of state to die for crimes, but it is OK for her bodyguard to take a bullet for them.  Having saved the Empress, Detective Dee then resigns his job, lectures the Empress on the need to restore China’s rightful dynasty and to end terror tactics against the people.  A title card at pic’s end says that she does just that.  He gets away with it because he saved her life.  Mere mortals don’t get that privilege.  Pic would be front page news, however, if the Peggy Lee who gets a producer credit were the eponymous singer.

What could have been a fine 100 minute detective story is instead larded to 119 minutes in order to create a propaganda film for Chinese legitimacy.  The lard should have been discarded in the interest of entertainment.  Blame goes to helmer Hark, scribes Kuo-fu Chen and Jialu Zhang, and editor Chi Wai Yau.  As it stands, the whole is less than the sum of the parts.  One could interpret the ending as kudos for the recovery of Hong Kong and Macau and an exhortation to retake Taiwan.  That’s an awful lot to ask of a detective movie, and it is the undoing of “Detective Dee.”  Pic carries a PG-13 rating, largely for violence.  Don’t take the kids.  They won’t understand the propaganda.  Heck, unless they are familiar with Chinese politics, adults won’t either.

–30–

$3.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $$13.50

THE BIG CHEAT

There are several things wrong with “Contagion,” the latest from helmer Steven Soderbergh.  The most egregious is Warner Bros.’ US marketing campaign which uses taglines including “The world goes viral September 9,” “Don’t talk to anyone,” “Don’t touch anyone,” and the heroic “Nothing spreads like fear.”

Oh, please!

This is nothing more than a cynical attempt to hypo a less-than-average big-budget picture featuring a big-name cast who could have been used far better in another vehicle — almost any other vehicle.

Plot revolves around a pandemic, worse than SARS, worse than H1N1, and probably worse than AIDS, although none of the creators has the fortitude to say so in as many words.

Structure takes its cue from some successful pics, such as “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” “Crash” (2004), and “Babel,” wherein several storylines are intercut and woven into one.  Title cards help the exposition, of which pic is bedeviled by too much.

The big cheat comes into play in the final reel, where the origin of the pandemic, which is not exactly a mystery, is revealed in flashback.  To make matters worse, said revelation is no more than a bit of mudslinging at multinational corporations and at China.

Your critic has not brief for or against cross border businesses.  He couldn’t care less unless he owns stock in one of them.  The fictional corporation unwittingly at the heart of the “Contagion” pandemic is no more than a straw man set up in the final reel to give “Contagion” a degree of social significance — and create a villain for auds to hate.  Pic also takes a low view of Chinese agricultural hygiene, which shares blame for killing something like two or three percent of the world’s population.  Your critic also has little to say about China other than what Noël Coward wrote in “Private Lives”: “Very large.”  Malthusians should love this picture.  “Contagion” is sort of a bad version of “The Andromeda Strain.”

“Contagion” is billed as an action, sci-fi thriller.  Two out of three aren’t bad.  It falls short in the thriller part.  It does, however, boast a very attractive cast of stars including Matt Damon, pic’s sole sympathetic character, who appears to be immune to the disease, Marion Cotillard, who appears to be on her way to becoming the French Charlize Theron in that she never looks the same in two pictures, as a World Health Organization official, Kate Winslet as a US public health field agent, and Laurence Fishburne as the Centers for Disease Control honcho (also her boss) who directs the US end of the investigation into the pandemic.  Also central to the plot is Gwyneth Paltrow, who gets to appear without makeup, a mistake she should never again make in any picture, and who is central both in the opening and final reels to the denouement — even though she dies in pic’s first 20 minutes.  Jude Law appears in an unlikely role as a corrupt blogger attempting to profit from the pandemic.  His character’s name, Alan Krumwiede, is blatantly allegorical.

Give the filmmakers credit for sledge hammering home a point:  Paltrow in the opening reel is in Hong Kong on the phone with her boyfriend in Chicago discussing a tryst.  Her wedding and engagement rings take center screen.  If anyone thinks that this scarlet letter has nothing to do with pic’s action, he or she should go back under his rock.  This is about the most blatant giveaway your critic has ever seen.  She plays the Minneapolis-based Damon’s wife.

Another significant plot element is the official Chinese penchant for covering up disasters, even of the epidemiological sort, such as SARS.  Your critic had the benefit of the very attractive amateur film critic who makes her living as a doctor in international practice to confirm that pic is correct on the Chinese behavior as well as the medical facts.  Filmmakers at least got the context right.  But as the beautiful doctor also said, “If they found a guy like Matt Damon who was immune to the virus, they would have been all over him.”  “They” in this case are the US public health authorities.  In pic, Damon is more or less ignored or treated as a nuisance.

Unfortunately, in this ensemble pic, Damon is wasted to the extent that as its most sympathetic character, he does not get enough screen time.  Augmenting his role might have given auds someone for whom to root.

But pic’s biggest waste is the legendary Elliott Gould.  He gets only one fabulous moment, about half an-hour into pic, as a San-Francisco based epidemiologist who violates CDC orders to destroy his virus samples and gives the world its first real insight into the nature of the bug that kills almost without warning.  Note to filmmakers:  If you cast Elliott Gould, at least give him enough to do!  If you don’t believe your critic, have a look at “The Caller” (2008).

In pic’s favor are staccato scenes, one right after another, which move the plot along.  It has no fat.  It is short on character development, but it is clear that other than Jude Law, pic’s bad guy is the germ, and it’s tough to write dialogue for a microbe. Title cards help put pic’s action in chronological context.  About two thirds of the way through, “Contagion” develops a breakdown of society, a theme Fernando Meirelles handled so much more eloquently in “Blindness.”  Unfortunately, Soderbergh does not rise to Meireilles’ hights.

“Contagion” carries a PG-13 rating.  It runs 105 minutes but feels longer.  Editing by Stephen Mirrione is crisp.  Lensing by director Steven Soderbergh, himself, is workmanlike but displays a few flaws.  Sound recording could be better.  Some key lines of dialogue are inaudible.  Production design is more than adequate, and kudos go to Howard Cummings for keeping it simple and straightforward.  Thesps all turn in above par performances.  It’s a pity that Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay and Soderbergh’s direction make “Contagion” less than the sum of its parts.  It will depend on star power, which it has in spades, for revenue.  Take the kids.  They’ll probably laugh at the unintentional humor in a picture utterly devoid of comic relief.  A professional screening audience did.

–30–

IF ONLY PAUL NEWMAN WERE STILL WITH US

“Blackthorn,” the 42-year-later sequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) is an extraordinarily well made picture.  It benefits from superior acting, workmanlike writing by Miguel Barros, painterly shooting by Lucio Godoy, set design to die for, superior sound recording by Dani Fontrodona, a believable plot, natural beauty, and a really good act to follow.  Unfortunately the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.  That does not mean that people should not see it.  Anyone interested in film should have at least a peek.  But there are two flaws, and they cost this picture greatness.  As it is, it is at least interesting in advancing the Butch Cassidy story.  One imagines that “Blackthorn” was made because nobody every got fired for greenlighting the sequel to a huge hit.  The original was made for an estimated $6-million and grossed over $100-million in the US alone.

Pic is set in Bolivia in 1927 with flashbacks to the story of how Cassidy got there and what he did there until he went straight.  It can be said that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the male progenitor of the 1991 “Thelma & Louise.”  There is a similarity between Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis driving a T-bird off a cliff on the lam from the cops and banditi Paul Newman (Butch) and Robert Redford (Sundance) jumping off a cliff in the face of the Bolivian Army in 1908.

Pic is at once a Western, a weeper, an adventure story, a buddy film, a blast from the past, and a tale of redemption.  That’s a lot to cram into 98 minutes, but it’s also a clue to pic’s biggest problem.  It feels as if it is an hour longer than it is.

Sam Shepard, who appears to be padded, pace Shelley Winters, is Butch Cassidy living on a modest Bolivian ranch breaking horses under the pseudonym James Blackthorn.  He has a mistress, the impressive Preuvian actress Magaly Solier as Yanna, and correspondence with a son or “nephew” (we are never quite sure whether the kid’s father is Butch or Sundance) in San Francisco.

To figure this out, one needs to have seen the prequel.  The beautiful Katharine Ross (who is now 71-years-old and has no feature film credits since 2006) was Etta Place, the mistress of either Butch or Sundance depending on one’s point of view.  The ambiguity persists in the sequel.  Place was pretty good with a gun, and this fact is crucial to the sequel.  Flashbacks, which intermittently explain the backstory for those who have not seen the prequel, inform auds that Etta has died of TB in San Francisco and left a 20-year-old son.  She was pregnant when she left Bolivia, according to one of the flashbacks.

In the sequel, Place is played creditably by the attractive Dominique McElligott, an Irish thesp most recently seen in The Guard, recently reviewed on http://tedflicks.com.  Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, an actor much younger than Sam Shepherd plays the young Butch in the flashbacks.  Padraic Delaney is convincing as the young Sundance, who dies in Butch’s arms (in an act of euthanasia) shortly after faking his own death in 1908.

Evidently the Bolivian Army of 1927 held grudges.  This is also crucial to the plot.  Butch is on his way to San Francisco to meet the son or “nephew” he has never seen.  He liquidates his holdings, turns his ranch over to Yanna, and sets out with US $6,000 (about $120,000 in 2011 money).  Along the way, he is accosted by Ing. Eduardo Apodaca, smarmy mining engineer played by Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega, who alternates between being a pirate and a whinger.

Apodaca claims to have stolen 10,000 Pounds Sterling (about US $2,000,000 in today’s money) from a ruthless mining family.  In accosting Butch, he has also scared off his horse carrying his supplies and his US $6,000.

Then, with all the reluctance Shepard can muster, begins the buddy film portion of this picture.

One gunfight follows another as the pair are tracked and become annoyingly closer.

Eventually, they find their way to a town where a Pinkerton man named McKinley (Stephen Rea), who had tracked Cassidy and his crew a generation earlier, is now the honorary consul, pace Graham Greene.  McKinley recognizes Cassidy through his alcoholic haze and via some sort of aborted attack of conscience tips off the Bolivian Army and at the same time assists Cassidy in getting away.

In the process, he explains to Cassidy exactly what he has done in helping out  Apodaca.  It seems that Cassidy has successfully lived under a rock and missed the biggest news story of the generation in Bolivia.  The mine that Apodaca robbed had been handed over by the Bolivian judiciary to the miners.  The 10,000 Pounds Sterling he stole (back when Sterling was a little over four to the ounce of Gold), belong not to a mining magnate but to the Indian miners.

The miners are the folks tracking down Apodaca and, by extension, Butch.

In his own strange way (at least as strange as what the Bolivian Army does to McKinley, a diplomat with immunity) Butch metes out justice to Apodaca.  One wonders whether it is conscience or anger at being duped.

Pic, which is not rated, ends equivocally.  There could be a sequel.

But here is its problem:  Helmer Mateo Gil in his third feature as director, scribe Miguel Barros, and cutter David Gallart, are compelled to spell everything out to the point where not only do auds get the point, but the point is hammered home.  A little more brio in the screenplay, the direction, and the cutting room, would have been most welcome.  As it is, the cast, gathered, according to the financing from American, European, and South American actors, do a fabulous job, despite the images of Indians 90 years ago with perfect teeth, a characteristic not even common to rich people back then.

And in contrast to the prequel, wherein jokes were tossed off with abandon, humor in the sequel is deadpanned, primarily by Shepherd, who is effective in the role, but hardly Friars Club Abbot Jerry Lewis.  Nor is he Paul Newman, the original Butch Cassidy.

Dialogue is in English, Spanish with subtitles, and some South American Indian languages also with subtitles.

Aside from a little language and some blood, which is handled with discretion, there is nothing in pic that will corrupt kids.  Technical aspects are excellent.  But it takes a pretty good understanding both of film and pop history to appreciate it.  Given Shepherd’s track record at the US box office, modest domestic success should be expected.  Pic will most likely garner its most significant coin overseas.

—30—

Blackthorn on Netflix

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

THE VAMPIRE NEXT DOOR

“Fright Night,” the recent sequel to the two eponymous films of the 1980s, makes absolutely no sense from a business standpoint.  Neither of the 1980s flicks made much money at the box office, and the sequel has a tough act to follow.
Roddy McDowall was the vampire hunter Peter Vincent in the original, and Chris Sarandon was Jerry, the vampire.  Sarandon has a cameo in the new “Fright Night.”

However, the current iteration joins a slew of R-rated comedies, most of which have been making decent coin this summer.  That does not appear to be the case with “Fright Night,” but it is likely to find its revenue in pay-per-view.

In case anyone hasn’t yet figured it out, this 106 minute epic is a comedy-horror flick.  It runs only two minutes longer than the original, and the cast do a creditable job playing hilariously funny stuff without mugging for the camera.

Colin Farrell plays Jerry the vampire like a Marlon Brando  knockoff from “A Streetcar Named Desire” complete with tight T-shirt.  Jerry moves into the house next door to real estate broker Jane Brewster (Toni Collette of “Little Miss Sunshine” fame) in a Las Vegas suburb.  Across the street lives pole dancer Doris (Emily Montague), whose righteousness attracts both Jerry and Jane’s teenage son, Charley Brewster, played by Anton Yelchin.  Enter Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Ed, Charley’s high school friend and the school geek.  Ed is also obsessed with the occult.  High-school kids have been vanishing from the town at an alarming rate.  Jerry is seen only at night.  The windows of his house are blacked out.  He is strangely menacing in a double-entendre sort of way.  He must be a vampire.

After much prodding and a little blackmail, Ed enlists Charley to his cause.  They’re going to nail the vampire.  The result is a disaster.  Jerry attacks Ed and turns him into a vampire.  Charley then adorns his house with garlic and crosses in what must be one of pic’s funniest moments.  His anxiety over the vampire next door even causes a rift with his girlfriend, the righteous Amy (British-born 22-year-old Imogen Poots), who shows increasing desire for Charley and way too much patience for a chick as hot as she is.

Mother Jane takes a shine to Jerry, much to Charley’s alarm.  Picture functions on about three levels, one of them Freudian.  It’s also a spoof of everything vampire.  For example, we learn that vampires cannot enter an occupied house unless invited in.  (That factoid and the disastrous state of today’s Las Vegas housing market may be partly why Vegas was selected as the setting — there are plenty of vacant houses.)  That is a new one on your critic. The Strip being open all night doesn’t hurt a vampire who wants to earn an honest living while the sun doesn’t shine.  All vampires seem to have superhuman strength in all vampire movies, so that one is nothing new.  Also vampires have a problem with sunlight, even with number 300 sunscreen.  As in the Brad Pitt vehicle, “Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles,” they turn to dust when exposed to sunlight.  What we didn’t know, and this comes in a confrontation between newly minted vampire Ed on the dark side and Charley and Amy on the light, is that vampires can live and fight with all of their superhuman strength while partially dismembered.  What we didn’t know is that when a vampire is killed by a stake blessed by Saint Michael, all his victims are restored to health.  Also, forget about silver bullets.  Amy fires four of them into Jerry’s chest, which he pulls out saying, “for werewolves.”  Holy water, however, is quite another matter.  A splash will slow a vampire for a while as whatever part of his body begins to melt.  “For vampires,” says Amy as Jerry’s face begins to melt.

That’s just one of pic’s many cliffhangers and climaxes, one of which takes place after Jerry forces Jane, Charley, and Amy to flee their house and then takes off after them in a high speed automobile chase.  Evidently running over a vampire with a car does not necessarily kill him.

As in all good vampire flicks, blood spatters everywhere, especially in the climactic fight scenes.  Said scenes happen mostly in the penthouse of TV vampire expert Peter Vincent (David Tennant), who also hosts a vampire stage show on the strip with his wife, Ginger, played by the attractive Sandra Vergara, sister of TV star Sofía Vergara.  Vincent, who lives life in as drunken a haze as he can muster, turns out to be the orphan child of parents who were killed by vampires — hence his obsession with things vampire.  His penthouse is practically a museum of anti-vampire weapons.  Reluctantly he is sucked into Charley’s fight against Jerry.

A goofy vampire sendup would not be worth its celluloid if the vampire did not score with the hero’s girl, and Jerry does, turning Amy into a vampire.  He also nails Vincent.  The ending is pure Hollywood, dreamed up, no doubt, by a stuntman with literary ambition.  It involves Charley donning a fireproof suit and setting himself on fire with Vincent, who has not completely turned, as his partner in crime.  It’s a gutsy move:  Charley has to live up to the cojones displayed by his girlfriend, Amy.

Director Craig Gillespie has a firm hand at the throttle.  Pic benefits from just one screenwriter, Marti Noxon, whose credits are an arm long.  Tom Holland, who wrote the original “Fright Night,” gets story credit.  Reports have it that his original will be re-released soon on Blu-Ray taking advantage of the promotion for the sequel.

Lensing by Javier Aguirresarobe is up to par.  Cutting by Tatiana S. Riegel is economical.  Special effects — including an explosion of Charley’s house courtesy of Jerry after the former has learned too much — are just cheesy enough to work in a spoof and not so cheesy that auds will laugh at their cheapness.  And the production design by Richard Bridgland is a good fit.  Sound recording leaves a little on the table, but not much.  Forget the R rating.  Take the kids.  They’ll laugh out loud.

—30—

Fright Night on Netflix

$13.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

WOODY ALLEN TIES UP THE LOOS ENDS OF A LONG CAREER

There is a moment in the career of a great filmmaker when the definitive statement is made, the flowering of everything that has gone before it.  Woody Allen makes comedies and tragedies.  “Midnight in Paris” is a romantic comedy and a fantasy, but it draws on the best that Woody Allen has made in a feature film career stretching back over 45 years.

In the interest of full disclosure, your critic is an unabashed Woody Allen fan.  However, he did with great regret pan “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” — it’s a turkey.  Fair is fair.

But this sudden explosion of Allenist creativity starring Owen Wilson (of all people) as Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who tries his hand at a novel, deserves all the encomium heaped on it and all the box office it has been getting.  According to press reports it is Allen’s highest grossing pic ever, surpassing the 1986 “Hannah and Her Sisters.”  It is also the first picture in which Owen Wilson has appeared wherein he has not annoyed your critic.  Think of it as the polar opposite of “The Darjeeling Limited.”  Kudos to Allen for coaxing an endearing performance from Wilson!  Allen gets both writer and director credit.

Plot is simple.  Gil and fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams, one of America’s hottest Canadian imports), visit Paris with her parents, John (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy).  He’s a wealthy businessman in town for a deal.  She’s an interior decorator.  Inez is just righteous and spoiled.  Gil is overwhelmed by Paris.  The other three aren’t.  They spend a good deal of their scenes with him insulting him to his face and the French to him.  Enter Paul and Carol (Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda) as friends of Inez.  He’s a professor full of himself.  She’s there to move the plot along.  Inez’s enthusiasm to socialize with them does not extend to Gil.  He’d rather stroll the streets of Paris at night.  Heck, there are plenty worse things to do at night — especially in Paris.

There must be magic in Paris.  Allen captures it before the opening credits in a spectacular shot down the Avenue des Champs Elysée toward the Arc de Triomphe.  Magic was present in Allen’s 1996 “Everyone Says I Love You” set in Paris but not to the extent it is here.  As the bells toll midnight on a street in Montmartre, an ancient Peugeot sedanca de ville pulls up.  Its passengers call out to Gil to enter.  The car traverses not only the streets of Paris but also the decades, wafting Gil from 2010 back to about 1928.  Gil finds himself at a party for Jean Cocteau where he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), where Cole Porter (Yves Heck) croons his own tunes at the piano, and where, to get away from it, Scott & Zelda bring him to a club where Joséphine Baker (Sonia Rolland) performs.  Wilson gets it across to auds that Gil can barely believe what he sees.  Later, at a bar, he meets Ernest Hemingway, nearly channeled by Corey Stoll, who even speaks in literature.  Think of a young Stacy Keach in the role.  Hemingway refuses to read Gil’s novel about the owner of a nostalgia store but does offer to show it to Gertrude Stein, played with aplomb by Kathy Bates, who also gets to utter the sort of global statements on life and art that Martin S. Bergmann did with unadulterated nihlism in 1989’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  The difference is Allen’s outlook.  It has become a good deal more positive and hopeful in the past quarter century.  (One has to ask if the many bullets he ducked in that time had anything to do with his change of mind.)  Along the way, Gil encounters people on the cutting edge of the arts in the era in which he wishes he lived:  Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), his mistress Adrianna (Marion Cotillard), photographer Man Ray (Tom Cordier), filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van), and Salvador Dali, who is pic’s second act of channeling played as flamboyantly as the original by Adrien Brody.

Midnight after midnight Gil waits on the winding Montmartre street for the Peugeot.  And it arrives without fail.  Eventually he gets tips on the novel from Stein, and even Hemingway reads a few chapters.  The omens are good.  Said novel is autobiographical in that the proprietor of the nostalgia shop is based on Gil, who wants to quit Hollywood and move to Paris, much against the wishes of Inez and her parents to indulge his wish to be close to Paris of the 1920s.

Hemingway’s only criticism is that it is implausible that the protagonist in the novel does not know that his fiancée is having an affair right under his nose.  This is the impetus for Gil to confront Inez, who eventually admits to sleeping with Paul.  If there is one thing apparent at pic’s outset it is that Gil and Inez are not a match made in Heaven.  It’s a neat plot device delivered by Bates’ Stein which splits up the couple and leads to an unexpected dénouement.

Meanwhile there are glorious touches.  “Midnight in Paris” has at least two Marshall McLuhan moments.  In both Gil calls out Paul on his hot air.  The second is priceless and is set up by a scene of Gil in Stein’s living room where she criticizes a painting of Adrianna by Picasso with the artist and the model present.  Later, in the present day, at a private museum tour hosted by Paul, Gil shuts him down after he totally incorrectly identifies the model and Picasso’s intent in the very same painting that stood in Gertrude Stein’s living room.  Scholars can refer to “Annie Hall.”  The time travel device in which fantasy and reality intersect is a wonderful development of the theme from “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

The writer’s block and the encounters with his idols are right out of “Deconstructing Harry,” in your critic’s opinion one of the greatest Woody Allen pics of all time, where a writer’s characters come to life, and “Play It Again, Sam.”  Toward the final reel Gill suggests the premise for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” to Buñuel, arguably the latter’s definitive pic.

These touches are nirvana to the film buff.

But it is in Owen’s performance in a part that Allen, himself, would have played 20 years ago, as well as the musical score, where it all comes together.  Owen conveys the angst, the neuroses, the indecision — all the annoying characteristics that defined Allen in so many of his comic roles — with a subtlety often missing from Allen’s own broad acting.  Every now and then one gets a hint of the early Allen from Owen and wonders how Allen would have played the part if he were a younger man.  It is a credit to Allen as a director that he could bring Wilson’s often typically over-the-top, Allen-esque performance (think of the Mayonnaise scene in “Hannah and her Sisters”) down to the point where it is both funny and sympathetic.  Pic hinges largely on the relationship between Gil and Adriana.  This is where time travel comes in handy.  Gil stumbles over Adriana’s diary in a present day flea market.  He buys it and asks a museum guide (French first lady Carla Bruni) to translate a few key passages.  It’s almost an unfair peek into a girl’s mind, but your critic doesn’t know a straight guy who wouldn’t take advantage of it.  It also leads to the scene where pic comes closest to slapstick.  Pic’s publicity maintained that Bruni had only a walk-on, but her role is bigger than that and critical to its plot.

Adriana, who lives in the 1920s, pines for the belle époque of the 1890s.  A horse drawn carriage takes the pair to Maxim’s (think “Gigi”) where Adriana encounters Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin, and Degas.  She decides to stay there, 30 years earlier.  It’s the light bulb moment for Gil.  He realizes that one’s present never measures up to one’s fantasy about the past and that if one could choose to live in the past, it would become one’s present, with all the ho-hum that it involves.

Anyone familiar with Allen’s choices for film scores knows of his fondness for early jazz.  His pic’s employ it almost to the point of cliché.  But in “Midnight in Paris” Allen has the vehicle that is not only time-period correct for his favorite music but also one in which his favorite music is crucial to the plot — especially the music of Cole Porter.  Auds should keep a close eye on another actress whose role is about the same size as Carla Bruni’s.  She’s Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle, a salesperson of old phonograph records and equipment.  In a picture full of polar opposites, she is an opposite of the aimable sort.

“Midnight in Paris” benefits from superb writing, deft casting, spot-on performances by the major players, brilliant set design, fantastic lensing, and what may be the best direction of Allen’s career.  It also has conversations in French and Spanish which are not subtitled.  It is a credit to Allen and the cast (as well as the sound recording) that the absence of subtitles detracts nothing.

Pic is rated PG-13.  It runs 94 minutes in keeping with Allen’s rule that a comedy should not exceed 100 minutes.  There is nothing that will corrupt the kids, but given today’s culture, it is likely that a lot of it will fly over their heads.

—30—

 Midnight in Paris on Netflix

$7.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

TO INJURE A MOCKINGBIRD

“The Help,” a two hour and 15 minute weeper cum chick flick cum civil rights commercial based on the eponymous novel by Kathryn Stockett and adapted for the screen and directed by Tate Taylor in his second outing as a feature helmer, answers the question begged by Crazy, Stupid, Love., “Can 22-year-old Emma Stone act?  The answer is “yes.”  She nearly carries pic.  She can also hold her own in scenes with the redoubtable Viola Davis (51-year-old maid and nanny Aibileen Clark), although her part is more “Scout” than “Atticus Finch.”  In other words much of her action is to play tabula rasa to Davis and other African-American actors who play the maids to spoiled white housewives in upper-middle-class Jackson, Mississippi of 1962-64 at the height of the Civil Rights movement.  Notable among the maids is Octavia Spencer as the voluble Minny Jackson.

Other than its length, pic’s weaknesses are its predictability and its cardboard cutout male roles — not to mention its allegorical female roles.  Make no mistake, “The Help” pushes every self-righteous, moralistic button it can among allegedly liberal New York auds confronted with a Southern morality tale.  There are no bad blacks.  There are few good whites.  This is not to diminish the American struggle for civil rights for all.  It just belies human nature.  There is a con man or woman — or transgender — in every story if one looks hard enough.

On the plus side, pic benefits from good acting and strong characterizations from Stone as Skeeter, a budding writer fresh from university, Davis, who carries pic’s other half, Spencer, Allison Janney as Skeeter’s social climbing mom who ultimately sees the light, and notably Bryce Dallas Howard as evil personified in racist social arbiter Hilly Holbrook.

Pic also benefits from some really spot-on scenic design — from the newsroom at the Jackson paper where Skeeter lands an $8 per week job as the housecleaning columnist — to the 1950s Modern suburban houses to the cars — the cars are spot on — right down to Skeeter’s 1962 Cadillac convertible.  It’s also a walk down memory lane for your critic to see so many bouffant hairdos.  How easy it is to forget welded hair!  In your critic’s opinion only Ladybird Johnson pulled it off convincingly.

Plot is deceptively simple.  Set against the background of the famous march on Washington, DC, by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the shooting of Medgar Evers, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy — set up by contemporary TV news footage — Skeeter sets out to write a book.  Raised by a black maid, Skeeter wishes to write down the stories of the maids, to look at life in the south from the point of view of those whose points of view were ignored by the power elite.  It would be a first of a sort.  At first she encounters predictable resistance.  One outrage after another against the community’s black maids turns them.  Skeeter ends up with a roman à clef that sets Jackson on its ear and lands her a job offer from Harper & Row editor Elain Stein (in a brief but delicious star turn by Mary Steenburgen).  The maids dish the dirt with abandon, including one incident in which the obnoxious Hilly got her comeuppance in the form of a homemade pie.  Cicely Tyson turns in a touching performance as Constantine Jefferson, the elderly maid who raised Skeeter, and her sad end is the tome’s finale.  Sissy Spacek provides about half of pic’s comic relief as Hilly’s outspoken, alcoholic mom.  One can almost see in her the fun she must have had on the set.

So, other than predictability, why does a potential five star movie come in at three stars?  Simple:  Tate Taylor leaves no loose end untied.  There are several points in pic’s final half-hour where he could have wrapped it, and the result, while satisfactory, would not have been quite so annoyingly pious as it is.  Final scene is a bit of a leap of faith as one woman declares her independence from servitude.  There is one other sore point:  In dealing with dialect, one must be very careful to record it, especially crucial lines, so that auds can understand them.  In this regard “The Help” falls short.  That’s too bad, because other than editing, which is indulgent, other technical aspects are up to the star level of the performances.

“The Help” is rated PG-13.  As a morality tale for children it may work.  Certainly there is very little language (with one notable exception involving Hilly’s comeuppance) which should discourage parents from bringing the kids.  And there is enough comic relief to keep them interested.

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The Help on Netflix

$4.50 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

A SUMMER TURKEY

Crazy, Stupid, Love, which opens today, is really not a summer movie.  It is far better suited to the fall, especially Thanksgiving weekend.  It is a turkey.

There are four creative elements, each of which can destroy a picture:  the screenplay, the acting, the direction, and the editing.  If any one of them goes awry, it is enough to kick a potential four star flick into turkeyville.  There are more, but they are technical and need not be addressed here.  In the case of “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” three of the four go south.

Two guys get director credit, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa.  Call it omen no. 1.  “Too many cooks” is never good.  Dan Fogelman’s screenplay is at best trite despite a rather promising opening which recalls helmer/scribe Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman.”  That’s omen no. 2.  It’s mostly downhill from there.  Omen no. 3 is the acting.  It is inconceivable that a cast which includes Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei, and Ryan Gosling could fall flat on its respective faces, but this one does.  Your critic suspects that not even these talented thesps could make this material work.

In the interest of full disclosure, your critic loves romantic comedies.  Unfortunately, also in the interest of full disclosure, he does not recommend wasting money on this one.

Here’s the silly plot.  Skein recalls the 2010 “Valentine’s Day” except that the action of “Crazy, Stupid, Love” takes place over one year while “Valentine’s Day” adheres to the Aristotelian unities.  There are three couples, or potential couples, with a number of guys and gals on the side.

First are Cal and Emily (Carell and Moore) married 24 years with three kids (although auds know only of two until the penultimate reel, which is a really cheesy plot trick).  Then there are Jessica, the 17-year-old babysitter (Analeigh Tipton) and Robbie (Jonah Bobo) the couple’s 13-year-old son.  He is ridiculously hung up on her.  She is hung up on his dad.  Next are Jacob and Hannah (Gosling and Stone).  He is a pickup artist who befriends Cal after Emily blurts that she wants a divorce and confesses to sleeping with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) — she could have done worse.  Hannah is a soon to be attorney who thinks her boss at a law firm is in love with her.

Jacob humiliatingly coaches Cal on how to pick up women.  Cal catches on.  His first conquest is Kate (Tomei), a very horny woman who turns out to be Robbie’s high school English teacher (a fact revealed at a parent teacher conference attended by Cal and Emily at about pic’s midpoint) who turns in pic’s best performance, a tour-de-force which stands out from the static portrayals her colleagues turn in.  In their defense, Tomei’s part is the best written.  At least Fogelman got the “woman scorned” part right.

Cal’s goal is to get Emily back.  Emily thinks she made a mistake and wants Cal back.  Pic is about the banana peels they drop before themselves on the way to possible reconciliation.  The rest is one cliché after another.

Jacob meets Hannah and falls for her — long before auds find out that she is the daughter born to 17-year-old high school sweethearts Cal and Emily and the reason the pair married.  When Cal learns of his oldest’s relationship, he freaks.  He wants that pickup artist nowhere near his little girl.  The predictable happens, and it happens just as Cal is working out a fabulously romantic reconciliation with Emily.

The Robbie-Jessica-Cal triangle offers some amusement.  Jessica shoots nudes of herself to send to Cal.  They end up in her parents’ hands with predictable results — at the same time as Cal confronts Jacob over Hannah.  The resulting fight is unworthy even of The Three Stooges.

Adding insult to injury, sound recording, particularly of some critical lines, leaves something to be desired.  Both your critic and his companion, the attractive and incisive amateur critic, asked each other, “What did he just say?” more than once.

Ultimately, Cal and Jacob enjoy a bit of role reversal.  Other than the opening reel, it’s Carell’s best moment.  Unfortunately it is punctuated by Hannah’s utterance, “This is going to be fun.”  Note to Fogelman:  This is a movie, not a sales presentation.

Lensing by Andrew Dunn is up to par for a major Hollywood production.  Lee Haxall’s work in the cutting room is one of pic’s few saving graces.  Direction, however, leaves a lot to be desired.  To cast Steve Carell and Julianne Moore as a couple in the same picture and draw absolutely no chemistry out of them is close to being a Nuremburg crime against humanity.

Pic carries a PG-13 rating.  There is nothing, other than bad execution, to offend the kids.  Run time is 118 minutes.  If this gets a decent box office, it will be because of its star-power.

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$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

SUCKER PUNCHED BY A HUMMINGBIRD

Helmer Jon Favreau seems to have found his métier as a director of sci-fi flicks.  That may be good for his bank account, but not so good for auds.  Favreau is a very talented guy who has done just about everything that one can do in film and largely done it well.  A few box office hits in the sci-fi genre with bankable stars in the cast (Iron Man and Iron Man 2) have shown him the light.  It’s not exactly the headlight of an oncoming train at the end of the tunnel, but he could do better.

Cowboys & Aliens, which opens Friday, July 29, is a silly movie.  That is not to say that it isn’t fun to watch.  Even the 1936 propaganda film, “Reefer Madness” (a.k.a. Tell Your Children) offers a degree of amusement.  But watching “Cowboys & Aliens” is akin to ordering from a Chinese buffet menu — One from column A, two from column B.  Pic is a blend of clichés from high-tech sci-fi pix (think “Aliens,” “Priest,” and “Super 8”), a morality tale, and a western, topped off by a sucker-punch to auds delivered by a hummingbird.

It also stars Daniel Craig as bandito Jake Lonnergan who has a bad case of amnesia and Harrison Ford as former Union Army Civil War Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde and current local cattleman and padrone of a one-horse town in the wild American West of 1873.  In other words, it was bankable.  Dolarhyde is a greedy bastard who has trouble showing emotion.  He also has a son, Percy (Paul Dano) who is the local bully.  Keith Carradine is perhaps one of pic’s two or three most convincing thesps as the local sheriff.  And Olivia Wilde graces the screen as a good space alien — which explains why her eye makeup withstands explosions, physical attack by bad space aliens, and plunges into deep water.  Max Factor, eat your heart out!  At least she gets a better part than she had in “Priest.”

Throw in a cast of thousands including a plucky kid (Noah Ringer), a loyal dog, a tough-talking minister (Clancy Brown), and an Indian chief (Raoul Trujillo), and a bunch of bad space aliens who look like a cross between the thing from “Super 8” and the acid-blooded creatures from “Aliens,” and shake until the mixing glass is frosty.  You get a movie of sorts.

What little humor “Cowboys & Aliens” offers comes from some deadpanned punchlines uttered by Craig, Carradine, and Brown.  Dialogue is not pic’s strong suit.  Best lines seem to go to Trujillo who allegedly speaks only in the Apache language.

There is a moment in an adventure or crime movie when an experienced filmgoer will say to himself — or to the very attractive and incisive amateur critic seated to his left), “I knew that was going to happen.”

“Cowboys & Aliens” has more than a few.

Pic opens with a wounded Craig waking up in a desolate landscape wearing an odd metal bracelet and being set upon by a trio of bad guys.  He dispatches them with super-human dispatch, a gift which serves him well throughout pic’s 118 minutes.

Arriving in the one-horse town, he dispatches the local bully and gets the attention of gun toting Ella (Wilde) and the sheriff, who recognizes him from a “Wanted” poster.  What Craig doesn’t remember is that he has stolen gold from Ford and that he was abducted and escaped from the bad space aliens.  Evidently amnesia is one of the after-effects of alien abduction.

Just as Craig and Percy the bully (who accidentally shoots a deputy) are about to be handed over to U.S. Marshalls, Ford arrives to spring his kid.  At the same time, the bad aliens attack the town with what appear to be jet fighter-bombers.  In the process they kidnap about half the inhabitants.

The rest of pic centers on a few revelations (Craig’s memory slowly returns thanks to Ella and some Indian mysticism) and the need for banditi, greedy guys, a good space alien, and the Apache to join forces to defeat the aliens before the planet is taken over for its gold deposits.  The bad space aliens arrived on a rocket-powered space ship which contains both gold mining and refining equipment.  Like Nazis, they even pull the gold teeth from their captives.

Ending is totally predictable.  Harrison Ford’s shell cracks.  The “Wanted” poster is forgotten.  The bad aliens appear to be dispatched, some good guys die heroic deaths, and the plucky kid comes of age early.

Pic’s sucker punch comes in the form of a hummingbird, a special-effects hummingbird, no less, connected to Ella, which appears to Craig first as he regains his memory and again in the final reel only to scream a figurative “sequel!”

“Cowboys & Aliens” offers more than a few good action scenes.  Special effects, save the bad aliens, are not bad.  Best effect is Wilde emerging buck naked from a funeral pyre set for her by the Apache.  In order to keep pic’s PG-13 rating Craig covers her with an Indian blanket before any more than her fine backside appears on screen.  Have no fear in taking the kids.

The morality tale, utterly politically correct in today’s climate, is that greedy people have to set aside their greed and unite with their erstwhile enemies for the common good.

A final note:  “Cowboys & Aliens” boasts a list of writers, producers, executive producers, and production companies almost as long as its cast of thousands.  With that many cooks, it is no wonder that the stew verges on mish-mash.

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 Cowboys and Aliens on Netflix

$10.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

THE FORMULA STILL WORKS

It is sometimes amazing to see a well-worn Hollywood formula repackaged for the umpteenth time and still work.  Such is the case of “Friends with Benefits,” a star vehicle for Justin Timberlake (art director Dylan) and Mila Kunis (headhunter Jamie).  Before the opening titles there are two breakups:  Dylan’s girl in LA dumps him and Jamie’s boyfriend in New York dumps her — just as both are dragging their tardy guys to their favorite chick flicks.  Via a cute bit of editing (kudos to Tia Nolan) auds are led to believe briefly that it is one breakup — Dylan and Jamie — until the bi-coastal synchronicity sets in.  Both battle scarred veterans retire from the field.  No more romance for them.

Jamie lures Dylan to New York for a job interview to be the new art director of GQ Magazine.  He aces the interview.  The pair become fast friends — as in we like each other but there’s no sex.  That changes when Jamie utters, “God!  I want sex.”  Can two great friends have a sexual relationship that is “no relationship, no emotions, just sex, whatever happens?”  Auds will quickly figure out the answer.  As Stephen Sondheim wrote in one of the lyrics to A Little Night Music, eventually the nets descend.  The questions for “Friends with Benefits” are “How long will the arrangement last?”, “When will the nets descend?”, and “What happens after the inevitable breakup?”

While skein is busy answering said questions, pic reveals itself as a valentine to New York City, which is as much a character as any of the cast.  In the opening reel Jamie takes Dylan on a tour of New York to sell him on leaving LA.  It’s full “fish out of water” Angelino in Gotham jokes, but it works — both cinematically and as a plot device.  Dylan is sold.  Good thing, too, because by the time they get to the “just sex” part, pic is on to its second reel.

It’s nice to see Timberlake in a non-smarmy role, which he handles convincingly, but it is Kunis who steals her scenes as the tough, fast-talking, wisecracker.  Supporting roles are notable.  Patricia Clarkson does a star-turn as Jamie’s goofy, ex-hippie mom wherein there is a running gag about the nationality of Jamie’s dad.  Woody Harrelson has the unenviable task of being comic relief in a comedy.  His over-the-top gay sports editor sports more cliché gay jock jokes than your critic imagined exist.  To his credit, he plays the role big, bold, and farcical — think of Zach Galifianakis minus the annoying aspects.  Richard Jenkins as Dylan’s dad suffering the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and Jenna Elfman as sister Annie anchor pic’s serious scenes.  Jenkins comes across as sympathetic rather than pathetic.  Elfman has the least to work with but does well with what scribes Harley Peyton, David A. Newman, Keith Merryman and Will Gluck (who also directed) give her as the primary caregiver for dad and her son, a ten-year-old tuxedoed magician (Nolan Gould) whose trick failures are another one of pic’s myriad running gags.  In this regard “Friends with Benefits” bares careful scrutiny.  There are no loose ends.  Everything that happens in the picture happens for a reason and will probably happen again to move the plot along — or at least leave auds saying, “I knew that was coming.”  Sharp-eyed viewers will notice Paul Mazursky’s 1969 sexual revolution comedy, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” unspooling on a TV in the background of one scene.  It is one of pic’s many inside-film references.

Plot hinges on the overheard conversation, a truly shopworn device, but it gets the point across.  Jamie, unseen by Annie and Dylan, listens to Dylan argue with his sister that there is no relationship between Jamie and him; that the girl is damaged goods.  This leads to the inevitable breakup which takes place on Independence Day weekend at Dylan’s oceanfront boyhood home in what appears to be Santa Barbara.

Rest of pic’s 109 minutes are spent keeping auds guessing whether it will end as a romantic comedy (“Before Sunset”) or a weeper (“The Break-Up”).  Dénouement’s impetus comes from two characters both unlikely given their backgrounds and at the same time very likely given Hollywood tradition:  The parents.  Jenkins’ Mr. Harper in a lucid moment, punctuated by a perfectly timed gag, clarifies Dylan’s thinking.  Goofy, unreliable Lorna (Clarkson) does likewise for Jamie.  This plot trick has been done to death, but here it enjoys a resurrection.

“Friends with Benefits” is rated R.  For once the R rating is right.  There’s plenty of language and some pretty hot sex.  Children won’t understand it.  However, for adults it offers good lensing, adequate sound, and about a laugh a minute — even in the serious scenes.

—30—

Friends with Benefits on Netflix

$8.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

SURREAL FILM NOIRE DISGUISED AS COMEDY

There must be visceral fear of surrealism among American film distributors — a fear so strong that if they billed a surreal film for what it is, they are scared that no one will buy a ticket.  Such is the case of “The Guard,” the latest feature from Irish writer-director John Michael McDonagh.  It’s publicity materials mistakenly bill it as a “comedic fish-out-of-water tale”.  It is not a comedy, although it has a good deal of comic relief crammed into its 96 minutes.  And its “fish-out-of-water” element is no more than a few scenes in which Don Cheadle as by-the-book FBI agent Wendell Everett (seconded to Ireland) encounters some Gaelic speakers on the west coast of the Irish Republic.

“The Guard,” which gets its title from “Garda,” the Gaelic word for “Police,” is a surreal film noire in the tradition of the 1956 French feature, “Bob le Flambeur” (Bob, the Gambler).  But in a nod to television, “The Guard” is shot in color.

Brendan Gleeson is police Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a middle-aged, overweight, wisecracking no-nonsense copper who frequently rubs the brass the wrong way.  He’s also about to lose the most important person in his life, his mother (Fionnula Flanagan), whom he visits daily in hospice.  In other words, this single, childless cop is a guy with nothing to lose.

Throw in an Irish drug gang about to land on an Irish pier what Wendell Everett, the FBI man, calls a “half-billion dollars” worth of cocaine, a British gang with whom they do suspicious business, a trigger-happy hit man who divulges his psychiatric issues freely, and a precocious kid who knows where missing IRA guns can be found.

Add to the recipe a police force so corrupt that one knows not who is working for what crook, a couple of good-looking prostitutes who have more than a passing acquaintance with Boyle, and light the fuse with two murders, and you get a pretty good police story that will keep auds guessing.  No one is quite who they seem to be.

There is a second amusing subplot involving Rory Keenan as Officer Aidan McBride (Boyle’s sidekick) and Katarina Cas as his Eastern European wife in what Americans would call a “green card marriage” (Aidan is gay) which really touches off the fireworks.  It seems that Aidan has detained the Irish drug gang in a routine traffic stop and got shot for his trouble.  The Irish gang may as well be “the gang who couldn’t shoot straight” (pace Jimmy Breslin).  Even with most of the police force on the payroll, they leave so many loose ends and make so many screwups, most with a straight face, that it is difficult to imagine them not getting caught.  It’s the straight faces in the face of absurdity that make the surrealism of “The Guard” work.  Tightly wrought plot centers not only on Boyle’s attempted takedown of the drug gang but also on the relationship between Cheadle’s Everett and Boyle.  In other words, there is a bit of buddy film going on.  Auds should pay close attention to props and seemingly extraneous plot details.  The final real wraps them neatly into a seamless package.  Kudos to McDonagh.  Kudos also go to Chris Gill for a fine hand in the cutting room and to lenser Larry Smith for well framed shots.

Pic’s Achilles’ Heel, at least for stateside auds, is the thick, West Irish accents.  The Gaelic is subtitled.  In that regard, auds know more than the non-Gaelic speaking Everett.  Problem is that a good deal of the English could use subtitles.  The accent may not be a problem for natives of the British Isles, but it seriously detracts from the ability of US auds to follow the plot.  Another problem is the casting.  All the thesps are fine, but too many of them look a lot like each other.  This only adds to the difficulty.

At least the firefight in the final reel, which screams “sequel” (even the Irish have caught the franchise bug), is a worthy payoff to the action leading up to it.

“The Guard” is rated “R” for sexual content, violence, and language.  The rating may be a tad over-the-top.  Kids will fail to understand only one scene, Boyle’s day off with his prostitutes.  Nothing in pic will corrupt them.

—30—