Monthly Archives: August 2012

Review: “Lawless”

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

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

“Flawless?”

Grade: C+/B- (RENT IT)

A FAMILY THAT bootlegs together stays together, right?  At least that was the motto of the Bondurant brothers, a feisty frat servin’ up moonshine in Franklin County, Virginia, and the centerpiece of John Hillcoat’s new crime drama “Lawless.”  Benoit Delhomme’s camerawork, pitched to a dusty brown, and the twang of Lucinda Williams, effectively transport us to those dusty days of the Depression.  The year is 1931 and the major players are the hard-bitten Forrest (Tom Hardy), war veteran Howard (Jason Clarke) and baby brother Jack (a beefed-up Shia LaBeouf).  With the help of Cricket, their disabled friend played by Dane DeHaan, the Bondurants operate a successful watering hole in the back hills of Apalachia.

Jack has his eye on Bertha (Mia Wasikowska), a preacher’s daughter just dying for a ride in his flashy convertible and the intoxications of Jack’s outlaw image.  The spectacular but sidelined Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “Take Shelter”) plays Maggie “Red” Beauford, a former dancer turned barmaid who helps the brothers sling their white lightning.   They all maintain amicable connections with the authorities of Franklin who look the other way while taking a few sips themselves.

That is until Chicago lawman Charlie Rakes (an eyebrow-less Guy Pearce) arrives on the scene to demolish the boys’ American pastoral and false sense of invincibility.  Who kicks a man when he’s down?  Special Deputy Rakes does and viciously so.  The locals murmur that Rakes wears perfume and as he gores Jack across his own backyard, he worries that he’ll bloody his crisp pinstripe suit and swimming cap of pomaded hair.  Jack recovers, tensions mount, and during a first date gone terribly wrong, Bertha happily trades in her head scarf and church-going clothes for the yellow, strawberry-patterned dress Jack has brought her.  All around them, meanwhile, Rakes and his corrupt cronies are bearing down.

The consummate charmer, LaBeouf is known for his effortless chemistry with female costars and though he (and costar Hardy) are in desperate need of dialect coaching, “Lawless” broadens both actors’ likability.  More so than the chirpy LaBeouf, Hardy croaks his lines as he did as the dog-muzzled Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”  His dialect coach had to have been a bullfrog with a double tracheotomy.  More problematic than the performances, the script is from Australian rocker Nick Cave, known for his violently balladry, and based on “The Wettest County in the World” by the Bondurant brothers’ descendant, Matt Bondurant.

“Lawless” is a scrambled egg of a script.  One particular sequence, which move from Forrest’s throat being cut in the dirt, an offscreen sexual assault on Maggie, to the aftermath of both these horrors, is as disjointed as the surrounding scenes.  Gary Oldman, as Floyd Banner, even shows his villainish face, but he remains, puzzlingly so, on the margins of the Cave’s plotline.  Pearce’s Rakes is more than enough villain to go around, but the role written for him is a despicable cliché: a sadistic fop who, aside from hating to be called out for his effeminacy, has no real motivation.  You half expect him to victimize Cricket in other ways when he finally gets his manicured hands on him in the woods, and the punishment he has coming to him by the vengeful Bondurants, is both predictable and lacking in dramatic purpose.   The bloody fate that Deputy Rakes faces should have been staged in a more intimate fashion with dialogue rather than just bullets exchanged.

Thus “Lawless” ends with another familiar feeling:  Chicago, it’s a hell of a town.

Review: “The Campaign”

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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

“Attack Lads”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

THE PHRASE “DIRTY POLITICS” acquires a new meaning in the amusing but ultimately frivolous “The Campaign,” directed by Jay Roach (“Meet the Parents”) based on a story by Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights”).  The film is a veritable raunch-o-rama that makes strange bedfellows of the already strange Zack Galifianakis and Will Ferrell.  No one will be surprised to learn that they have great comedic chemistry together though the script is cynical and ultimately too silly to really leave a black-and-blue.

As political opponents Marty Huggins and Cam Brady, respectively, the pair square off as congressional candidates in North Carolina and along the way, poke fun at the emptiness of political rhetoric in America today – Brady runs on the platform “America, Jesus, Freedom” but confesses off-stage that he doesn’t believe it much less know what it means – while satirizing the hypocrisies of campaigning and the deep pockets that make it all possible.  Pulling the strings, and downing brandy after brandy, are the film’s villains, John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, who, as Glenn and Wade Motch, mirror the real-life Koch brothers, the Tea-partying billionaires who abominate President Obama.  There’s also Dylan McDermott as the Motch’s errand boy and, in Brady’s bunch, Jason Sudeikis, as a campaign strategist.

The problem is that “The Campaign” doesn’t exactly rise – or is it sink? – to the level of great satire; its best bits involve what you have likely already seen in the previews (Ferrell taking an accidental swing at a baby on the campaign trail) and Sudeikis coaching his boss through a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which Ferrell botches badly but with brilliance.  A crazy-eyed Ferrell is little more than a haircut here and the Bush impersonation he does so well distracts.

As Huggins, the great Galifianakis gives us another of his effeminate manchild personae – he does essentially the same shtick in the road-trip comedy “Due Date” – that makes you wonder if he is parodying gay men for cheap laughs or, more subversively, playing it “straight” to ultimately undo masculine gender norms.  [New York Times film critic A.O. Scott raises the question in his review, asserting: “Marty is squeaky-voiced, easily flustered and just a wife (Sarah Baker) and two sons (Grant Goodman and Kya Haywood) away from being an egregious gay stereotype” (8/10/12).]   You half expect his macho enemy, Cam Brady, to out Galifianakis’ character and though that doesn’t happen, it is hard to know what Galifianakis wished to achieve with this queer performance and whether he is sending a knowing wink-wink to the audience.  The joke could be that the American mainstream demands a put-on masculinity.  “The Hangover” remains the apotheosis of man-cinema and yet no one talks about how the character of Alan deviates from the hetero-dullness of the typical buddy film.  The rest is simple: Galifianakis is the most dynamic comic actor of our time with the hardest working facial hair in show business.

If not for him, however, and Sarah Baker as his bewildered wife, “The Campaign” might even further lose the race.  It could have been a contender – and it packs in the laughs, for sure – but winds up as something of a minority leader.

Review: “Total Recall”

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

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

“Where is my Mind?”

Grade: C (SKIP IT)

REMEMBER, BACK IN THE NINETIES, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was gladiatorial and not yet gubernatorial, and two words, “Sharon” and “Stone,” spelled the very apex of the filmic femme fatale?  They were all there in Paul Verhoeven’s “Total Recall,” based on a Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and adapted by the writing team that gave us “Alien.”  The film grossed over a quarter-million dollars over the summer of 1990 and the sequel, in true sci-fi style, transmuted itself not into “Total Recall 2” but into Speilberg’s “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell.

The latter actor now leads “Total Recall,” a remake not exactly worthy of the suffix “2.0” due to its repetitiveness and lack of inspiration. The premise remains a fascinating one and something of a Lockean nightmare: what if an authoritarian form of neuroscience could reduce its enemies into a tabula rasa with just the flip of a switch?  As everyman Doug Quaid, Farrell has only vague memories of being a secret agent in the ongoing war between Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan “Breaking Bad” Cranston) and a resistance led by a wasted Bill Nighy.  Visiting a laboratory called Rekall, the scientist tells Quaid: “Tell us your fantasy and we’ll give you the memory.”  Outside the lab, a chemical attack has cleaved the earth into the Fall, a version of Great Britain, and an imperialized Australia known as the Colony.  All the Marxist animosities between workers and over-lords would appear to be in place, but are soon squandered in a film that clings to flying-car chases and endless sequences in which Farrell and sidekick Jessica Biel fall from rooftops.  Even more nightmarish is the idea that in the distant future, in a decimated London-like metropolis, “Phantom of the Opera” is still being advertised on double-decker buses.

Directed by Len Wiseman, from a script by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, this “Total Recall” is a gumbo of other, better, films:  Cohaagen’s synthetic drones look like the Storm Troopers of “Star Wars” and the Colony resembles the LA of “Blade Runner” (only wetter).   Wiseman should have wised up to the fact that the Verhoeven’s original was full of grotesque splendors: triple-breasted prostitutes, red-hot martian sands, and a human face that came apart like a Rubik’s cube.  This was Verhoeven after “Robocop” but before “Showgirls,” and he brought a campiness to the original sadly absent in the reboot.

Then again, Kate Beckinsale (also Mrs. Wiseman) goes for the throat as Quaid’s wife, but if it’s Beckinsale karate-chopping her way through a film you’re after, the “Underworld” franchise will better whet your appetite.  Alongside Farrell and Biel (not so much a thespian yet but a very high pair of cheekbones), the cast is comprised of some of Hollywood’s blandest actors: poor Farrell is a hard worker, but he has an empty coolness that keeps him from truly vaulting himself into mega-stardom once and for all.  Here, the cast is upstaged by gadgetry, especially a glowing cell phone implanted in the palm.  Talk about keeping a phone on hand.

The best bit of dialogue transpires between him and Beckinsale with the query: “If I’m not me, then who am I?”  “How do I know?” she replies, “I just work here.”  Despite this, however, the sour irony of “Total Recall” is its total forgettability.