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There's a little something vaguely familiar about the perky, sweet, tuneful teen romance Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. What's cool about the movie, though, is that the vaguely familiar stuff --like the pretty, popular mean girl, and the stock angsty teen torments -- get persistently swept aside to make room for characters that aren't caricatures and kids who are alright, when all is said and done.
What's said and done in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is said and done in a single, fleeting night, in a city that never sleeps. It's the kind of night you can have when you're young and don't need to sleep, when time both careens forward, and stands still, and a few songs and small epiphanies can change your life. The restless city is Manhattan, where hordes of invading teens from the Jersey 'burbs are in search of fun, love, and an elusive, enigmatic band called Where's Fluffy?, rumored to be playing somewhere in the city. Among the hordes are Norah (Kat Denning) and Caroline (Ari Graynor, a relentless scene stealer). Norah's there for Where's Fluffy?, and to keep an eye on Caroline, who tends to get passing-out drunk when she's out on the town. They run into frenemy Tris (Alexis Dziena), the popular mean girl, at a show where The Jerk Offs, a queercore band, is playing. What a coincidence it is that Nick (Michael Cera) is the Jerk Offs' guitarist, and the only straight member of the band, and the heartbroken shlub that Tris recently dumped. He's also the author of mopey, thematic mix CDs that Tris trashes and Norah adores. Nick and Norah are entirely simpatico in their musical tastes, and in their utter devotion to Fluffy, and thus begins a complicated night of shenanigans, awkward romance, and assorted sortings out of feelings, exes, lifeplans, and other matters of great importance to high school seniors. Much of it is done in an unreliable Yugo.
The Yugo is a lemon -- or maybe a pumpkin -- but it's a fitting carriage for the stop/start, frequently stalled, roll backwards, jump forwards relationship between Nick and Norah. They've got issues, those crazy kids. They're ironic, sarcastic, cool, and dorky hipster geeks with an endless capacity to gab about matters of grave importance (on the relative merits of The Cure, for instance), and about nothing at all. They're also full of adolescent self-doubt, and they're basically decent, sweet people. Norah, whose father is a famous record producer, can get into any nightclub in the city, but she's never sure if anyone likes her for that, or for herself. (Maybe she should stop hanging around with mooching musicians.) Nick isn't over Tris, and Tris is a high maintenance, mixed-signal-sending girlfriend, even when she's an ex-girlfriend. Nick's cutie-pie bandmates act as infinitely patient matchmakers throughout the night for Nick and Norah, the obvious and oblivious soulmates. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist treats these emotionally charged relationships with the kind of seriousness and sympathy that they rarely get in movies, which tend to view the complex and messed up relationships of adolescence as a passing and ultimately insignificant phase (and a source of puerile humor) rather than as a permanent part of the human condition.
Ah, but the movie's not all serious. There's fun to be had too, and the infinite playground is an enchanted, sparkling version of the city, filled with like-minded, club-hopping kids in an über-tolerant, ebony-and-ivory-and-everything-in-between, gay-straight, drunk-sober melting pot in which the secret ingredient is the shared love of music -- the more insidery and alternative, the better. The worst things that can happen to a reckless kid in the big city -- the things that keep the parents of teenagers awake all night -- never do happen, and can't possibly happen, because Nick and Norah's sugar-sprinkled neon city is a fairy tale place open only to teenagers, with their fierce hearts and fearless ability to dance on the border between carefree childhood and careworn adulthood. (Caroline descends into the yuckiest, grungiest depths of the enchanted kingdom -- the Port Authority Bus Terminal -- in a scene that is suitably and hilariously disgusting.) It's a place of infinite possibilities when viewed through the filter of an authentic (but charmed) high school sensibility. Director Peter Sollett avoids teensploitation prurience and moralizing finger-wagging, maintaining a breezy and benign aimlessness that recalls how an all-nighter can feel all-too-brief when you're young and (maybe, kinda, possibly, starting to be) in love.
6Oct2008
A murder mystery is one of several plot elements in Spike Lee's sprawling World War II movie. Miracle at St. Anna is not a sprawling war movie like, say, The Longest Day. That's the John Wayne movie that an old man watches on television at the start of Miracle at St. Anna. The old man tells the movie star, "We fought for our country too." By we, it turns out, he means the Latino and African American "Buffalo Soldiers" he fought with, in segregated units, during with war. When the old man, a postal worker named Hector Negron, shoots a customer trying to buy a 20 cent stamp, it is seemingly for no reason. A cub reporter for the Post (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) tries to get the story out of him.
Miracle at St. Anna is sprawling in the sense that the movie dwells on several key themes: race relations in America, Fascism and racism in Europe, miracles and supernaturalism, religion and superstition, innocence and cynicism, the futility and cruelty of war. Any one of those themes would have been adequate for an average movie, but Miracle at St. Anna aims to be more than an average movie. The murder mystery, which tangentially involves the head from a broken Italian statue, and takes place in New York in 1983, is a framing story around a core wartime story, which is told in flashbacks (with the occasional flashback within a flashback), and which begins with a devastating friendly-fire incident. The man connecting the two stories (or the many stories) is Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), a devoutly Catholic, Puerto Rican soldier from New York, and one of four Americans who penetrate enemy lines and find themselves in a picturesque Tuscan village in 1944.
The village is divided into intermingling partisans and fascists, including partisan sympathizer Renata (Valentina Cervi, in a deeply implausible role), and her fascist father Ludovico (Omero Antonutti). Renata's family billets the four Americani and a small, troubled boy named Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi). Angelo, who appears to have supernatural visions and powers, was rescued and adopted by the deeply superstitious Private Train (Omar Benson Miller), an oversized man-boy who carries the statue head around for good luck. Sergeant Stamps (Derek Luke) and Sergeant Bishop (Michael Ealy) make up the rest of the platoon -- they squabble constantly, about the trustworthiness of their white commanders, about the racial contrasts between Italy and America, and about Renata.
The screenplay by James McBride (based on his novel), has a tendency to underline its themes with speeches and arguments which can get a little preachy. Lee clearly has in mind to make Miracle at St. Anna the war movie that should have been -- but never was -- made about the overlooked members of the "greatest generation," the soldiers of color who wore the same (color) uniforms and bled the same (color) blood as their more frequently lauded white counterparts. To that end, Miracle at St. Anna is meant to be a long overdue counterpoint to movies like The Longest Day. The point is well-taken, even if the delivery is overly obvious (where subtlety would have done just as well). It's a lot to ask of a movie that it set such a long and consistently whitewashed record straight, and Miracle at St. Anna wants to do a whole lot more in addition to that, so moments of heavy-handedness may just make the point faster, if not better.
The Tuscan village is surrounded by Germans who, as the war draws to a close, have apparently adopted a scorched earth policy towards Italian civilians, although they are also doggedly pursuing a vendetta against a partisan known as "The Butterfly" (Pierfrancesco Favino). Lee stages several dramatic and wrenching scenes of wartime massacres and battles -- they give the movie gravitas and weight that helps to balance some of the fluff. Much of the fluff comes via the odd story between Angelo and Train, which veers the movie from sturdy, solid, and powerfully effective realism into the airier domain of magical realism, and, even worse, sappy sentimentality. Lee has always been a somewhat idiosyncratic filmmaker, and his idiosyncrasies are evident here, although they mostly work for the film rather than against it. Miracle at St. Anna at times seems to meander and lose focus, but it does so in ways that give it a warmth and humanity that puts the inhumanity of war into sharper focus.
29Sep2008
Once upon a time, oh, thirty years ago, Pacino and DeNiro were names you could trust, so to speak. The two actors were in on the ground floor of the auteurial renaissance of the 70s, and could be seen in some great movies. Sure, there were clunkers (anyone remember Bobby Deerfield?), but far, far more good than bad. It wasn't until 1995 that the two actually appeared together (in Michael Mann's Heat). Alas, here they are, in a different century (still waiting for the next renaissance) reunited in Righteous Kill, a movie that has very little going for it once you get past the names above the title. File this one under F, for forgettable.
Righteous Kill belongs to that category of films with a plot twist at the end, and not much else. I've got nothing against a surprising twist at the end of a movie, as long as (a) the plot supports the twist, and (b) it is actually surprising, and (c) the other 90 minutes of the movie are worth watching too. But there's an unfortunate trend (I personally blame The Sixth Sense for it) in which otherwise lousy movies exist only to build up to the big reveal. I see plot twists. And any halfway savvy viewer will see the twist in Righteous Kill coming about twenty minutes into the movie. This movie, written (surprisingly) by Russell Gewirtz, who also penned Inside Man, a good movie with a good plot twist, tops off the unsurprising surprise ending with an instant replay of the events leading up to the big reveal. This is (a) insulting to the intelligence of viewers who were paying attention and saw it coming a mile away, and (b) a tacit admission that the movie wasn't really worth paying attention to after all, and (c) padding a movie everyone's had enough of already. It keeps the editor busy, however, and director John Avnet depends heavily on editor Paul Hirsch to give *Righteous Kill* a touch of visual interest with his occasional spasms of jittery little jump cuts.
Righteous Kill goes to great but ultimately futile lengths to conceal the inevitable and obvious. One diversionary tactic is that the two main characters are known only by their nicknames, Rooster (Al Pacino), and Turk (Robert DeNiro). Given that his partner is called Rooster, one can only assume Turk is short for turkey. They're police detectives who strut around the barnyards of New York City, halfheartedly scratching at the dirt to find the serial killer who is murdering felons and other lowlife types. A couple of other detectives, Simon Perez (John Leguizamo) and Ted Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) -- disappointingly not named after farm animals -- think Turk's the killer. Rooster spends his time trying to convince them otherwise. Turk's girlfriend Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino) is a fellow detective who is in the movie primarily to wear lingerie and be kinky. There are a couple of other women in the movie, but they're also essentially paper dolls who get dressed up, bent over, and tossed aside once their clothes have been ripped. Rapper 50 Cent turns up as a drug dealer/nightclub entrepreneur named Spider. The webs he weaves are not very tangled, and the same is true of the movie, which strings together a whole lot of cop movie cliches and psychobabble, while giving two potentially magnificent actors nothing to do that's worth doing.
22Sep2008
Joel and Ethan Coen, the filmmaking siblings, have a niche. They make crime films. Specifically, they make crime capers, mostly comedies, about bumbling criminals who make mistakes. These mistakes generally have dire consequences, both for the criminals and for the various bystanders who get pulled into the ironical Coen vortex of multiplied miscalculation. The Coens sometimes make masterpieces (Fargo and No Country for Old Men), and sometimes they make movies that are a lot of fun (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), and sometimes they make movies that are kinda fun, but which suffer a bit from the Coens' cool detachment and misanthropy. Burn After Reading falls into that last category. Not the best of the Coens -- it's a crime/espionage caper in which the bumbling criminals get no love from the filmmakers -- but it's adequately entertaining.
Burn After Reading features a lot of bad hair. Brad Pitt's got a poofy, bleachy-tipped skunk 'do. Frances McDormand's got a blonde pageboy bob that's just a hair better than the scary bob sported by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Pitt's Chad Feldheimer is a personal trainer at a gym called Hardbodies -- he's a fitness-obsessed airhead who's big on hydrating. Pitt brings a funny, dopey sweetness to Chad -- he frequently shines in roles as the energetic sidekick, and he, along with Richard Jenkins (as Ted, the lovelorn, melancholy manager of Hardbodies) gives Burn After Reading a bit of heart and human interest in what is otherwise a frantic, complicated tangle of sex, lies, deceit, vanity, money, and bad intentions. McDormand's Linda Litzke works at Hardbodies too, although she doesn't appear to do anything but make personal phone calls, mostly to complain to her insurance company because they won't pay for the cosmetic surgery she is convinced will change her life. Linda is the unlikely and highly unqualified criminal mastermind of Burn After Reading. Her motive is a grim combination of narcissism and self-loathing, goosed by loneliness and a mania for self-improvement. The attempted crime is simple extortion -- a disk containing possible top secret spy information is found in the gym.
The victim is Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), an ex-CIA analyst now writing his memoirs. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney, playing his third Coen movie idiot), a U.S. marshal and playboy who likes to jog after his sexual assignations. Apparently everybody knows everybody here in the buffoon-filled 'burbs of Washington, DC, so the various parties all become ensnared, in one way or another, in a tangled web of coincidence, contrivance and conceit. (J.K. Simmons is a hoot in a small part as a CIA chief trying to untangle the mess and apply some high level Cover-Your-Assification to it.) Bad things happen, although they happen more because of bad luck and bad timing than bad will. Cruelty and absurdity are the Coen comedy doctrine: the (relatively) innocent suffer the most, and mostly by misadventure.
The Coens, as always, demonstrate visual cleverness and fine craft, but this spoofy spy caper could stand a few real characters and real connections. Instead, it's a clever catalogue of caricatures that's more self-amused than amusing.
15Sept2008
When she bought her video camera, aspiring rapper Kim Rivers Roberts didn't plan on becoming the star of a documentary movie. She wasn't planning on spending the next few nights in her attic either, but as it happened, she did. Roberts bought her camera the day before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, her hometown. The day before the levees broke and spilled torrents of water through Roberts' Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, Roberts cruised around on her bicycle, with her camera, chatting up the neighbors, most of whom lacked the transportation and means to follow the mandatory evacuation orders issued by the city. She kept on shooting as the storm raged. When the waters came, filling their house, Kim and her husband Scott went to the attic, taking stranded neighbors -- and the camera -- with them. To hear the neighbors tell it later, Kim and Scott saved their lives.
In Trouble the Water, documentarians Tia Lessen and Carl Deal follow Kim and Scott as they try to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the storm. Loud, gregarious Kim finds the filmmakers and offers them her video footage -- there are eerie, wrenching scenes of rising waters and a disappearing city, but also scenes of neighborliness and heroism, and a do-it-yourself spirit that extended to saving lives when no one else could, or would, do it. It's not just Roberts' video footage of the storm that makes Trouble the Water an engrossing, unique film, however. It's Roberts herself, and her outsized personality, her natural charisma, her remarkable resilience, her boundless optimism, and her indefatigable, enthusiastic chatter. She's a star about to be born (you can hear her rapping over the closing credits), a whirlwind of energy, and dogged about getting her story out there.
There's more than one story there, and Trouble the Water deftly weaves the tale of Kim Roberts' difficult childhood and wayward youth (she was 24 at the time of the storm) together with her Katrina footage, creating a portrait of a strong but interestingly imperfect woman, and how she got that way. Lessen and Deal, both of whom have worked with Michael Moore in the past, intercut Roberts' one-of-a-kind footage with news footage of the storm and its aftermath, along with fascinating coverage of the strange, tense interactions between NOLA residents and the military troops occupying their city. Unlike Moore's work, Trouble the Water is not especially polemical or didactic, nor does it have to be. The pictures of the human tragedy that followed Katrina pretty much tell the story, and scenes of then-FEMA director Michael Brown (fiddling while New Orleans drowns) defending his agency, or the president defending his lack of action (and attention), don't require any additional commentary to make the blood boil and the heart ache all over again. Roberts' quickie video verite portrait of her world -- a part of New Orleans neglected both before and after the storm -- is vibrant, lively and homey, revealing a neighborhood troubled by crime and poverty, to be sure, but also a place filled with families and friends, a genuine community. It's a particularly intimate look at exactly who and what were lost when the waters raged. It reveals, like nothing else can, the exact toll of the storm on the people who paid that toll.
When the Robertses, with a newfound friend Brian, return to the Lower Ninth Ward, they find a ghost town full of houses stripped to their bones, utter devastation, and dead bodies. The film follows them as they try to make a clean start somewhere else -- they hope that, just as the storm obliterated their neighborhood, erasing the Lower Ninth Ward from the map, it might also erase their pasts, and transgressions they'd just as soon leave behind them. Trouble the Water looks forward, with the Robertses, and looks backwards too, revealing just how it is that an event as terrible as Hurricane Katrina could be, for those who have nothing to lose, both a blessing and a curse.
8Sep2008
Traitor is a movie that's all over the place, literally, and figuratively speaking. On the one hand, it's a globe-trotting spy thriller that moves from Sudan to Yemen to Paris to Toronto to Chicago. On the other hand, it tries valiantly not to oversimplify terrorists and the so-called war on terrorism, to add dimensional shades of grey to the stock black and white, good versus evil story of Islamic terrorists and the FBI agents trying to catch them. It is, in the end, a complicated tale of complicated people wrestling with moral and political ambiguities.
It's also a decent thriller, building suspense, withholding and revealing just enough information to create a narrative that is just plausible enough to be engaging, even while it asks the audience to sort out a complex tangle of motives, allegiances, and sympathies. It does this without flashy action sequences, and at a deliberate, unhurried pace.
Holding the center is a subtle performance by Don Cheadle as Samir Horn, the Sudanese-born son of an African father and an American mother. Samir is a devout muslim who questions the goals and methods of Islamic extremism yet who falls in with an international network of suicide bombers plotting a major attack against the U.S. Samir is recruited by Omar (Said Taghmaoui), with whom he engages in a vigorous, thoughtful moral and religious debate about war and jihad. Samir remains, for much of the movie, less an extremist than an extremely ambiguous character, a man of faith and conscience who walks in many worlds, and is at home in none. That he will be a traitor to someone is given away by the movie's title -- what isn't clear, even by the end of the movie, is just who and what he betrays.
To say that Traitor is evenhanded in its portrayal of Islam and Islamic extremism is an understatement. It tries very hard, and mostly succeeds, in portraying the people involved in terrorism as complex human beings with, for the most part, sincere beliefs about the necessity and righteousness of what they do. This is not to say there are not fanatics and hypocrites among them, but they can be found working for the other side as well. Samir is seemingly pushed towards extremism by an encounter with FBI agents Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Max Archer (Neal McDonough). They suspect him of terrorist activity before he is ever involved in terrorist activity. Clayton and Archer, too, are examples of evenhandedness on the part of writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff. Archer is the bad cop, given to abusing prisoners and cracking wise about the Bill of Rights, while his good cop partner Clayton has a Ph.D. in Arabic Studies and is the thoughtful, soft-spoken son of a Southern preacher who somehow ended up working in counterterrorism.
The movie trips a bit as it hops needlessly from one location to another, meandering along with Samir and his compatriots while piling on additional characters like Samir's ex (Archie Punjabi), a shadowy intelligence contractor (Jeff Daniels), and assorted spooks, leaks, suicide bombers, and terror financiers. It is overly expansive, and overly ambitious, in trying to give a big picture look at the complex problem of terrorism, but it is at its best when it narrows its focus to Samir, to the psychologically, politically, and ethically compelling drama of a mysterious man and his moral dilemmas. It's only within the context of that small, intimate picture that the big picture can ever hope to make any sense.
1Sep2008
On a misty morning in August 1974, a man walked off the roof of the World Trade Center, and into history. He spent the next 45 minutes dancing on air, capering across a tightrope that stretched between the two towers, more than 1300 feet in the air. Philippe Petit, a french daredevil and tightrope walker, had dreamed, planned, and schemed for years, plotting this "artistic crime of the century." It was indeed a crime -- trespassing and disturbing the peace, to be exact -- but as James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire reveals, it was also an artistic achievement.
Petit was only 17 when he saw a news story in a French newspaper, announcing the construction of the world's tallest buildings. He became possessed by a feverish desire to walk between those twin towers. The fulfillment of his dream would have to wait while the towers were built, during which he notoriously walked a tightrope between Notre Dame's steeples, and over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, becoming, in the process, an international (petty) criminal and man of mystery.
The aptly named Petit, an impish, elfin figure (who currently lives in Woodstock), wrote of his great escapade in *To Reach The Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between The Twin Towers*, which served as the basis of Marsh's thrilling, moving, utterly delightful film. Structured like a heist movie, Man on Wire (the title comes from the inelegantly phrased police report following Petit's arrest) features interviews with Petit and his partners in crime, including his then girlfriend Annie Allix, and his right hand man, Jean-Louis Blondeau, as well as a few loosely organized associates in New York, including Barry Greenhouse, their "inside man" in the World Trade Center. The planning of "le coup," as they called it, took years. The logistics of the feat were daunting -- nothing like it had ever been done before -- and yet, for Petit, the entire project, from inspiration to execution, was summed up by a simple line, casually drawn between two sketches of the twin towers. Just like that. Dream, scheme, do. The execution of the plan took nerves of steel, but also youthful enthusiasm, artistic zeal, lots of rope, and, in the end, a leap of faith.
Who would do such a thing, risking life, limb, and the certainty of jail, for no profit? It's the fundamental mystery behind Petit's highwire act, but Marsh doesn't address the question directly, instead letting the answers reveal themselves, to the extent that they do. Can a fundamentally irrational act ever be explained or justified in a rational way? Any attempt to provide a straightforward and comprehensive explanation for Petit's guerilla performance would lead only to banality where profundity is called for. Instead, Man on Wire pulls the viewer in, like a painting, or a novel, to experience the ups and downs and ins and outs of Petit's quixotic quest. The story is pieced together from still photos, tantalizing bits of home movie footage, and Marsh's clever, humorous reenactments. When Petit finally steps into thin air (or the abyss), it is terrifying, exhilarating, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring to watch. Even knowing that Petit survived, it is impossible not to get weak in the knees when he makes his great leap. What must it have been like, for people on the ground on that August morning, to see the tiny speck of a man balancing between the modern marvels of architectural excess? What was it like for Petit to stand on top of the world, and then step off?
In still photos, Man on Wire recalls the birth of the World Trade Center, in the place now known as Ground Zero. It's impossible not to think, fleetingly at least, about the death of those towers when you see the hole in the ground from which they sprung up, which looked then remarkably as it does now. Marsh doesn't dwell at all on the eventual fate of the towers. Man on Wire is not about death, nor even, strictly speaking, about a death-defying act, but about life, and the joy of being, and the need to walk and to live on the thin edge, without a net. It is also about the immortality of art -- and the film leaves no doubt that what Petit did was in some way a crazy, liberating, life-affirming, glorious work of art, an achievement for the ages. Petit's highwire act was but a fleeting moment in the life of man, and the life of the city, but, as with the buildings that inspired him, the spirit behind it is eternal, enduring long after the physical evidence is gone.
25Aug2008
Those who are easily offended by broad satire aimed at easy targets would be wise to avoid *Tropic Thunder*. When early trailers of the film showed Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface, that seemed a likely target for uproar and indignation. Instead, it is a scene in the movie in which the R word is used liberally that has sparked protest and a boycott on behalf of the mentally disabled. The joke is, of course, that writer-director Ben Stiller isn't actually making fun of the cognitively challenged in that scene, but rather actors and assorted Hollywood types who are cognitively, emotionally, psychologically, ethically, and physically stunted human beings who will do anything to make a buck or win a coveted award. And so, there's plenty of offense to go around in *Tropic Thunder*: African Americans, Jews, Asians, Method actors, movie executives, drug addicts, the overweight, the hirsute, and the recently deceased can all get in line... but nothing in this movie is meant to be taken seriously, and the glancing blows delivered have all the force of powder puffs.
The contentious scene features Downey's Kirk Lazarus, a white Australian Method actor so committed to his craft that he has a skin-darkening procedure to play the role of a black soldier. Lazarus explains to Stiller's Tugg Speedman -- an action star who made a few too many sequels and lost his audience -- why his performance as a bucktoothed mentally retarded man in a movie called *Simple Jack* was not Oscar-worthy. The underlying joke is that Speedman isn't very smart. This joke is delivered by a very serious man in blackface, which gives the whole scene an extra absurdist zing. Lazarus explains why *Forrest Gump* is Oscar bait and *I Am Sam* isn't, and methinks he's actually on to something there.
The scene is one of the less extreme in a movie of extreme comedy -- and like most of Stiller's comedy, it is meant to cause discomfort. Stiller's comedy is mostly about humiliation -- usually the humiliation of Stiller's own character (and that happens here) -- but that humiliation is supposed to make the audience cringe a little bit too. There's plenty to cringe about in *Tropic Thunder*, and most of that cringing is accompanied by laughter. Lazarus and Speedman have their informative talk while trekking through the jungles of VietNam. Their director (Steve Coogan) has put them there to shoot his war movie -- also called *Tropic Thunder* -- guerilla-style in order to motivate and/or punish his preening actors. They're accompanied by Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a comedian who specializes in fart jokes; a hip-hop entrepreneur named Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) who shills for an energy drink called Booty Sweat; and minor supporting actor Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), whose major contribution to the movie is a scene in which he is disemboweled. The disemboweling of Sandusky is kid stuff in a movie in which hands are blows off and shredded, heads roll and are stuck on rifle barrels, and then the dangly bits are... oh never mind. The point is, if Stiller were a murderer instead of a movie director, he would shoot a guy, stab him, cut off his limbs, decapitate him, kick the head around, and then poke him with a big stick to make sure he's really, really dead. Since he's a movie director instead, he kinda does the same thing to a joke -- he makes sure it is really and truly dead before he's done with it. Which is funny right up to the point where it isn't anymore, although exactly where that boundary lies may be subjective. Or maybe it isn't. I bet George Carlin knew, but I'm not convinced that Stiller does. Still, *Tropic Thunder* is funny more often than it isn't.
Downey effectively stomps Method acting into the ground in a role that is much funnier than it really ought to be, all things considered. The presence of Alpa Chino helps -- his primary mission is to mock Lazarus, his soul brother pretensions, and his faux pigmentation. Despite all that, Downey's Lazarus is quite possibly the most authentic character in the bunch, and pulling off an authentic blackface character is something -- although it's not that he comes off as authentically black (whatever that means), but as authentically human. Maybe Downey found the real soul in his fake soul man, but it comes as a surprise that his character manages to be both the most pretentious and the least ridiculous, an actual character among caricatures.
Speaking of caricatures, there must, I suppose, be mention of Tom Cruise's turn as Les Grossman, a grotesque, foul-mouthed, murderous movie executive in a hairy fat suit. It is a funny performance only if hardbodied Tom Cruise dancing lewdly in a hairy fat suit is inherently funny, which it isn't. So why is Robert Downey in blackface funny when Tom Cruise in a fat suit isn't? Again, George Carlin would probably know the answer. *Tropic Thunder* is that kind of movie -- randomly, inexplicably and unexpectedly funny, and then just as randomly, not so funny. It's funny when it's smart, funny when it's smart about actors who are not smart, funny when it's about how dumb movies are, and -- here's where you're supposed to squirm -- funny when it's smart about why audiences fall for dumb movies. The movie kicks off with some very funny fake trailers for movies that are just bad enough to be real, and coming soon to a theatre near you. If there's one thing Hollywood loves more than a movie about the mentally disabled, it's a movie about movies. I smell an Oscar.
18Aug2008
These are high times for Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, the producer and screenwriter, respectively, of *Pineapple Express*. Their long collaboration took flight with last summer's *Knocked Up*, in which Rogen's stoner/slacker dude confronted impending fatherhood and (gasp!) adulthood. In *Pineapple Express*, Rogen (who cowrote the screenplay with Evan Goldberg) is a stoner/slacker confronting murderous drug dealers, which may or may not be scarier for his Dale Denton than the prospect of fatherhood and/or adulthood. At any rate, *Pineapple Express* eschews family bonding for male bonding, as Dale and his dope dealer Saul (James Franco) become BFFs over their mutual love of weed and continued existence.
The "Pineapple Express" of the title is some supercharged grass of which Saul is the sole supplier. Boys and girls, if you don't think drugs kill, just ask Dale, who witnesses a murder committed by a drug kingpin named Ted (Gary Cole) and a rogue cop (Rosie Perez). Dale, a doughy process server, sees Ted shoot a rival drug lord, and gets so fatutzed that he drops his telltale supergrass roach, which is how Ted is able to track him back to Saul. Saul's ever-so-polite supplier Red (Danny McBride, consistently funny) gets involved in the shenanigans too, when the kingpin's muscle (Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robertson) leans on him. Red sings like a bird, and Dale and Saul end up running for their lives, which does not stop their reefer madness at all.
As Dale observes in a rare moment of clarity, marijuana is not a performance-enhancing drug. It's loaded with comedic potential, however. There is by now a well-established (if not venerable) tradition of pothead comedies, which combine drug-induced cognitive impairment with a goofy buddy/road picture shtick -- think Cheech & Chong cross-pollinated with Crosby & Hope. If you can conceive such a combination, and you think stoners and their misadventures are funny, then *Pineapple Express* is the movie for you. *Pineapple Express* might have been even funnier if it didn't devolve into a knowingly dumb, intentionally excessive shoot 'em up at the end, when it tries to walk the fine comedic line between parodying a dopey action movie and actually becoming a dopey action movie. It certainly gets the dopey part right.
*Pineapple Express* is funniest when its characters are shooting the breeze instead of bullets. For the most part, it's an amiable, mellow, occasionally hilarious tale of two addlepated dudes who can't say no to drugs. Franco is particularly funny, soulful, and winsome as Saul, the lonely dope dealer who has many visitors, but few friends. Saul is as wacky as his tobacky, giving voice to all manner of dingbat theories, tuned in to a wavelength all his own. Saul's gentle goofiness provides a nice counterpoint to Rogen's excessively excitable Dale. It's theoretically if not physically possible that Dale needs even more drugs. Despite his slacker ambitions, Dale manages to have both a job and an unlikely girlfriend (Amber Heard), a high school student who does not appreciate getting dragged into Dale's problems with the drug fiends.
Like any good road movie, the pothead road movie is more about the journey than the destination. *Pineapple Express* gets that mixed up for a while, but it hits the groove whenever it slows down and focuses (in an out of focus kinda way) on bud and blooming buddyhood.
11Aug2008
If not for the outrageous, unlikely events that took place in Florida in 2000 -- the events that put the current occupant in the White House -- the outlandish, unlikely events in *Swing Vote* might seem like so much high concept Hollywood nonsense. But darned if reality didn't go and make a movie about the presidential election coming down to a single vote and a single voter seem, well, actually plausible. Make that voter an uninformed, undecided, working class single dad named Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner), who apparently got his nickname from his favorite beverage. Add ravenous reporters, jabbering pundits, win-at-all-costs campaign directors, and a couple of presidential candidates willing to say anything to win, and you've got *Swing Vote*, a soft-boiled political satire about a guy who works in an egg factory holding the fate of the free world in his boozy hands.
Luckily, Bud's chief advisor is his daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll) who, although she is only twelve, is a civic-minded young liberal who firmly believes in the sanctity of the vote. Which is how she almost commits voter fraud when Bud passes out drunk, which, one electronic voting machine malfunction later, is how the presidential election comes down to Bud's vote, or revote. Bud, being the soul of discretion, lets it slip that he's the every-vote-counts guy when an ambitious reporter (Paula Patton) corners him, which is how every news network ends up camped out in tiny Texico, NM, and how president Andrew Boone (Kelsey Grammer) comes to park Air Force One there. His Democratic opponent Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) turns up too, both men trying strenuously to court Bud's vote. Problem is, Bud doesn't really have any opinions on the issues of the day, having tuned out and stopped caring years ago, and so the candidates wind up jumping through hoops of absurdity trying to win the vote of a guy who doesn't really know the difference between them. Ah, but there's the rub -- maybe the current political process grinds all the difference away.
Costner's Bud doesn't do much besides drink, although he does try not to disappoint his daughter Molly. He wears cutoff shirts and a grubby trucker's cap, and he'd rather go fishing than look for a job. Costner has played the laid back, middle aged shlub before, and he's good at it, and anything that keeps him from making a sequel to *The Postman* gets my vote. *Swing Vote* throws a little falling-down-drunk slapstick his way too. Carroll is terrific as Molly, playing the soul and conscience of the movie, and the brains of the Johnson outfit, and embodying the little d democratic ideal with a furrowed brow and the fierce conviction of a tween.
Director Joshua Michael Stern, who co-wrote *Swing Vote* with Jason Richman, sprinkles the movie with satirical faux political ads in which the Republican comes out in favor of gay marriage and the Democrat takes anti-abortion and anti-immigration stances. Their political advisors are played equally broadly by Stanley Tucci and Nathan Lane. If the politicians are spineless, their advisors are without conscience or conviction. As often happens of late, the movie blurs the line between reality and entertainment (much like the news networks do) by featuring cameos by celebu-pundits and info-tainers: Ariana Huffington, Aaron Brown, Bill Maher, James Carville, Larry King, Tucker Carlson, and Chris Matthews all turn up. To remind everyone that Bud's a good ole boy, Richard Petty and Willie Nelson make appearances too. (Bud used to front a Willie Nelson cover band, which gives a hint at where his political sympathies, such as they are, really lie.)
*Swing Vote* is hardly subtle satire, and it takes swings at only the biggest, most obvious targets, but it's bipartisan about it, taking shots at both sides pretty much equally. This is not to say that the movie doesn't have an agenda -- it does, although it takes pains to not be too obvious about it, at the risk of being as spineless as a presidential candidate. *Swing Vote* is a Capraesque, populist political farce that's eager to please, and somewhat hesitant to offend, which takes the sting out of the satire, and leaves only a modestly funny comedy.
4Aug2008
