Monthly Archives: July 2012

Review: “To Rome with Love”

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“La Dolce Vita”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

FOLLOWERS OF WOODY ALLEN’S long and important career have likely found themselves haunted by a tennis ball.  Central to his last great drama, “Match Point” (2005), the tennis ball is seen during the opening credits, being batted back and forth, with the film’s killer intoning: “People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck.  It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.”  So much depends upon where that unpredictable little ball lands, and matched later by a wedding ring (a crucial bit of evidence which helps the film’s homicidal anti-hero to escape unpunished), Allen’s “Match Point” suggests that chance, rather than religious notions of prescribed order and continuity, governs the universe.

If “Match Point” milked the related roles of chance, luck, and contingency for murder and existential mayhem in “Match Point,” Allen’s new comedy, “To Rome with Love,” plays the selfsame themes for laughs.  If you sense the film’s big idea – that romance, too, is determined by the undeterminable – you’ll be grateful Allen has furthered developed his atheistic world-view but in gentler ways.  “To Rome with Love,” which follows on the heels of last year’s best film, “Midnight in Paris,” is comprised of at least thirteen major characters and four parallel narratives.  Even the combination of those disparate but related stories is driven by randomness.

First, there’s Ellen Page as Monica, a seductive actress who threatens to come between two American students studying in Rome (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Greta Gerwig).  (Actresses are duplicitous divas to be avoided in all of Allen’s films.)  Second, there’s Judy Davis and Woody Allen himself as tourists visiting their daughter and new Italian beau Michelangelo whose name Allen can’t pronounce correctly (Alison Pill, who played Zelda Fitzgerald in “Midnight in Paris” and Flavio Parenti, respectively).  Third, there’s Leopoldo, the Italian pencil-pusher who inexplicably becomes a celebrity overnight, and lastly, two more Italians (Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi) also threatened by another woman (a prostitute played with panache by Penélope Cruz).  For once, someone has written a role for an Italian actor that doesn’t typecast them as the erotic tiger.  These two, not to mention the always excellent Eisenberg, don’t make the mistake Will Ferrell did in 2006’s “Melinda and Melinda” by channeling rather than simply impersonating Woody Allen’s famous persona.

Most, if not all, of these storylines revel in silliness.  Allen plays a former opera director who hears Michelangelo’s father singing in the shower and insists that he take stage despite the fact that Giancarlo (played by real-life operatic tenor Fabio Armiliato) will need an actual shower on stage to overcome stage-fright.  As Leopoldo, Roberto Benigni helps to blur the boundary between romantic comedy and satiric farce; he wakes up one day, à la “Groundhog Day,” to find himself suddenly in the spotlight where the most mundane details of his day, like whether he likes he bread toasted or not and where he scratches himself, attract national scrutiny.   As an older version of Jesse Eisenberg’s character, Alec Baldwin is something of a characterological question mark: is he the guardian angel Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or a Shakespearean spectre?  All the great films of 2012 thus far have been comedies – “Bernie,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” and now this – but I doubt you will spot a smarter meditation on happenstance this year.

As with “Midnight in Paris,” wherein the City of Lights is as much a character as the spellbound humans contained inside it, Rome itself is undeniably a player here.  At one point, Alessandra Mastronardi is as turned-around and lost as Owen Wilson’s Gil is in “Midnight,” and Darius Khondji’s splendid camera (also turned-around) pulls a 360 to show us the tawny exteriors of the Eternal City, always somewhere between ruins and romance.   Who else but Woody Allen keeps giving us that very modern feeling of being every bit the flaneur?  That being said, not all of “To Rome with Love” is perfect: just a little of Benigni clowning around in the street is more than enough and the film’s loose-ends take too long to wrap up.

One third of that terrific trifecta – Spielberg, Scorsese – Woody Allen has been writing love-letters to his favorite cities for some time, and though “To Rome with Love,” may not rise to the unmatched “Manhattan” (1979) or even the London of “Match Point,” his latest is still a thinking person’s Roman holiday.

Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 31 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Bane Capital”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

in memory of the victims of the Century 16 tragedy in Aurora, Colorado

THE PROBLEM WITH “The Dark Knight Rises,” Christopher Nolan’s final chapter to the superb series he rebooted in 2005, is that its titular Knight fails to rise at all, or at least, it takes two full hours for the caped crusader to land on his feet.  The fact that Master Wayne (Christian Bale) spends most of the movie in bed is just one of the puzzles at the heart of this inert ending.  Never has an superhero film felt so atrophied by a listless and lifeless lead, all its action postponed until the final thirty minutes, which is too little, too late.

At a staggeringly long 164 minutes – you’ll feel every sluggish minute of the first hour – Nolan seems intent on draining, bat-like, the life out of Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego.  Why end the popular series this way?  Its starter, “Batman Begins,” was devoted to Wayne’s gradual evolution from a Gotham orphan into a Bhutanese ninja, but here, for some odd reason, Nolan appears intent on rolling back the clock to return us to those early days of self-doubt, followed by gradual self-actualization. “The Dark Knight Rises” should have gone out with a bang, with Batman/Bruce Wayne at the top of his powers.  Instead, we’re given a bat in need of a blood transfusion.

Cinematographer Wally Pfister dims the lights low to match a mirthless script by Nolan and his brother Jonathan. “The Dark Knight Rises” not only leaves a sour aftertaste, but the nostalgic wish to return to the campy antics of Tim Burton’s finer “Batman Returns,” now twenty years old.  Remember the waddle of DeVito’s Penguin and the cattiness of Michelle Pfieffer’s Selina Kyle?   You won’t find any of that fun here despite an ensemble of A-list actors: Michael Cane as the faithful Alfred, Gary Oldman as commissioner Gordon, Morgan Freeman as Bruce’s prop-man, the ravishing Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate, a philanthropist and executive at Wayne Enterprises.  The two stand-outs are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a do-gooder policeman, John Blake, and the only breath of fresh air in this gloomy spectacle: Anne Hathaway as cat-burglar Selina Kyle.  But why gesture, at the end, toward Blake’s future identity if Nolan plans to end it there?

It’s eight years after “The Dark Knight” and having taken the blame for the death of Harvey Dent, Batman has retired his rubber suit.  A new threat menaces Gotham, however, and demands that Batman once again take flight though, here, he is slow, very slow, to heed the call. As the arch-nemesis Bane, Tom Hardy wears a pressurized dog-muzzle and sounds, laughably, like a cross between the Swedish chef and Darth Vader. The film’s most exciting sequence, which may correct your slouching sleepily in your seat, is his terrorist attack on a football stadium, but even that spectacular assault is followed by Bane’s muted address to the terrified sports-goers.  I couldn’t help but identify with Bane’s audience at that moment: trapped, they appear more bewildered than enthralled.

Not for nothing, the constant threat that Bane poses to Gotham City is a network of bombs ready to detonate.  Whether you catch it in Imax or 35-millimeter, “The Dark Knight Rises,” a misnomer of epic proportions, is set on that shaky ground: it’s a bomb that never goes off.  More accurately, it’s the shell of a bomb that can’t find its fuse.

Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Over the Moon”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

“FICTION IS ABOUT what it means to be a ******* human being,” said the late, great David Foster Wallace.  I have censored the post-postmodern author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again only because Wes Anderson’s newest opus, “Moonrise Kingdom,” not only delivers on Wallace’s challenge to all contemporary ironists to rise about their sometimes stilted aesthetic and to show some heart, but because, at Camp Ivanhoe, the summer scout camp setting of Anderson’s adolescent romance, cursing is forbidden.

So, too, is running away from home (and camp), the double infraction of the comedy’s twelve-year-old couple, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward).  She’s a little runaway, carrying a suitcase of obscure books and a pair of scissors for lefties.  Remember, however, that “Moonrise Kingdom” is a Wes Anderson movie, which means that the couple beats to their own drum and moves at the pace of molasses. Think of Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers after the pair had given blood and/or ingested a large-animal tranquillizer.

Sam and Suzy’s escape throws Khaki Scouts’ leader, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) into his bloodhound mode and hot on the young couple’s trail, he enlists the support of Suzy’s parents (Andersonians Frances McDormand and Bill Murray).  Yet “Moonrise” follows a higher law: Walk, Don’t Run!  There’s no real hurry in Anderson’s world: Scout Ward pauses to smoke, sip scotch in his plaid, zippered tent and record his reflections.  Co-written with Roman Coppola, “Moonrise Kingdom” excels because it delights in the fascinations of childhood and the complexities of adulthood in equal measure.  Enter Bruce Willis as Captain Sharp, whom Suzy’s mother has been seeing extramaritally, and as much as Suzy fights her mother, we can’t help but notice the major way in which she becomes her by the film’s end.

At one point, a bespectacled Sam (replete with Scout badges and coonskin hat) exclaims, while fishing with Suzy: “Fish on hook!  Reel him in slowly!”  That instruction could serve as an apt metaphor for Anderson’s method, more self-satisfied than eager-to-please. A storybook-like plot and excellent ensemble cast (including Tilda Swinton and Jascon Schwartzman) reel the viewer in and in and in.  Again, Anderson doesn’t like to be rushed.  The reason why “Moonrise Kingdom” succeeds whereas his most dissatisfying deadpans such as “The Darjeeling Limited” and worse, “The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou,” did not, is that adulthood is shaky ground for Anderson; his adult characters come across as precocious children whereas his children are more like puerile adults.  As paradoxical as it may seem, “Moonrise” is a fully mature work about immaturity.  Who else but this auteur could give us an over-stylized scene in which Sam’s foster father’s yellow shirt matches a yellow fan, a yellow refrigerator and a yellow rotary phone, and exchanges like this one, concerning the death of a dog named Snoopy:  “Was he a good dog?” Suzy asks of Sam to which he replies: “Who’s to say but he didn’t deserve to die.”

Meanwhile, it’s safe to say that “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s best film since “The Royal Tenenbaums” a decade ago, is the most uncampy fun you’ll have at the cinema this summer.  Walk, don’t run.

Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”

05 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Arachnophobia”
Grade: C+ (SKIP IT)

THE BOY WITH a serious case of sticky fingers returns to the summer blockbuster scene with something between a bang and a whimper.  Ten years have passed since Sam Raimi’s stellar start to the “Spider-Man” trilogy, and just five since “Spider-Man 3” bombed out the franchise and Toby Maguire hung up his blue-and-red tights 2.5 billion dollars later. Peter Parker by day and Spidey by night, Andrew Garfield is now in the title role with Emma Stone (“The Help”) as girlfriend Gwen Stacy.  These fine young actors keep director Marc [“(500) Day of Summer”] Webb’s take from being two-hours-of-bummer.  (Last month, I saw a truly amazing Garfield hold his ground in the face of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Willy Loman in a Tony-nominated role on Broadway.)

Nevertheless, since the arachnid is best known for its eight appendages, here are eight reasons that “The Amazing Spider-Man,” which doesn’t quite stick to its title, is a dead bug:

8.  At a longish 136 minutes, you’ll want an escape-hatch.  Oh what a lengthy web they weave.

7.  The plot’s contrivances pile up high and fast.  It isn’t enough that love interest Gwen Stacy is an intern in the very bioengineering lab (Oscorp) run by Dr. Curt Connors (“Rhys Ifans of “Notting Hill”), Peter’s departed father’s partner in biology.  Small world!  Oh no, Gwen Stacy’s father is also a Police Captain in pursuit of Peter, making the family dinner to which Spidey in plainclothes is invited awkward indeed.  That’s not so much a tangled web but an improbable one even by comic book standards.

6.  Total Recall.  The lady selling popcorn at the concessions stand said it all when, discussing “The Amazing Spider-Man” with me afterwards, said: “It’s just about new faces.”  Indeed, there is very little new or freshly inspired in this fourth  filmic take on the Marvel classic imagined by comic book artists Stan Lee and Steve Ditko back in 1962.  Eight long years elapsed between “Batman & Robin” and Christopher Nolan’s 2005 reboot; in the case of Spider-Man, we’ve experienced just five spider-less years since the negligible “Spider-Man 3.”  Too soon?

5.  Sally Field Never Leaves the Kitchen.  Peter Parker is the abandoned son of Richard and Mary Parker (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz) left with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May (Martin Sheen and Sally Field).  The gender parity in this film is a throwback.  Not only does Gwen garner laughs rather than respect when she throws a lab-coat over her mini-skirt and knee-highs but the only other female figure in the film, Aunt May, surpasses the status of homebody: she’s a shut-in who offers only meatloaf and weak words of advice.

4.  Predictability.  After 30 minutes, you may be wondering who the villain will be and hiding in plain sight, herpetologist Dr. Curt Connors is a contender. The lizard nemesis here is a cross between the Hulk and Godzilla lacking the fire and muscle of either.

3.  Paging Dr. Ock!  The lack of real action in the film’s first hour left me thinking of Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius, that is, Doctor Octopus, so brilliantly embodied by Alfred Molina in “Spider-Man 2” (2004) with those mechanized tentacles that sent taxi-cabs crashing through coffee shop windows.  Importantly, it was Dr. Octavius’s grief over his dead wife that drove his rage, and in “The Amazing Spider-Man,” there is a total lack of pathos.  The villain in this instance is cartoonish.

2. Andrew Garfield’s pompadour.  As Parker and Mary Jane, Maguire and Kirsten Dunst had just the geeky vulnerability, not to mention working-class backgrounds, to fit the bill.  Here, Garfield and Stone are just too, well, pretty.  Mary Jane was the girl-next-door, literally behind the clotheslines strewn with Uncle Ben and Aunt May’s laundry, whereas Gwen Stacy…well, didn’t I already mention her costuming?  Part of Peter Parker’s appeal – say that seven times! – is that he’s a superhero by night but a lowly super-zero by day, and there’s no way Garfield could ever look the part.  He’s the lovechild of James Dean and a  No. 2 pencil.

1.   There’s a mightier superhero to anticipate this summer and that’s the bat-suited one in Christopher Nolan’s third and final installment to his noir series, “The Dark Knight Rises” (July 20).   What Nolan has done there – aided greatly, of course, by the fabulous horrors of Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger – is retool the familiarities of the DC Comics series and give us something dark indeed.  It is not for nothing that twice in “The Amazing Spider-Man” you hear ol’ spidey say, after a fight: “You should see the other guy.”  Bring him on.

Review: “Magic Mike”

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

“Showguys”

Grade: A-/B+ (RENT IT)

CHANNING TATUM’S NIPPLES appear on screen a split-second before the rest of his body as he slides from a crumpled bed in which not one but two ladies lay felled from the night before.  These are the first indications that Steven Soderbergh’s new film “Magic Mike” is immersed in the body electric.  How could it not?  The narrative centers around an ambitious male stripper in Tampa, Florida who takes a college dropout named Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing and onto the catwalk.  (Tatum was born to play this role, literally: penned by his production partner Reid Carolin, the dramedy is inspired by the actor’s own experience as a stripper in the Sunshine State.  Since that time, Tatum has been busy making tepid movies like “The Eagle” and “The Vow,” but here, he holds his own with newfound, leading-man likability.)

The real revelation of “Magic Mike” isn’t Tatum, however, nor is it Pettyfer, or even a repitilian Matthew McConaughey as club-owner Dallas, but newcomer Cody Horn as Adam’s sister, Brooke, who provides her brother with a sofa to sleep on while he learns the ropes at Club Xquisite.  “I don’t judge him, I love him,” she tells Mike.  Horn brings some much-needed sarcasm and gravitas to “Magic Mike,” which is skin-deep in terms of character and plotting.  Anyone familiar with the best (and worst) of hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tales like “Showgirls” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (not to mention “Klute,” “Boogie Nights,” and “Detachment”) will know that Adam will have to get knocked down before he gets up again.  There is a sweetness to Pettyfer’s naivete, especially when, wide-eyed, he remarks to Mike after a wild night out: “I think we should be best friends.”

The banal title notwithstanding, “Magic Mike” is elevated by Soderbergh’s Midas touch; in keeping with “Contagion,” the film is lit in tawny, almost sepia, colors except for when the dancers at Xquisite are gyrating in tear-away chaps and thongs.  Still, from the director of “Sex Lies and Videotape,” “Magic Mike” is surprisingly chaste; it could be the first unsexy movie about male dancers and the libidinal ladies they drive wild.  Amongst those admirers is adult movie star Sasha Grey (no link provided!).  If only “Magic Mike” had gone the full monty and thought of Dirk Diggler as its sleazy muse.

Regardless, audiences don’t seem to mind much.  Otherwise known as “the stripper movie,” “Magic Mike” raked in 39.2 million dollars during its opening weekend, a record for an R-rated film, and it cost just seven million to make.  That’s an awful lot of singles.