Drive Angry 3D (2011)

Drive Angry is the kind of movie 3D was made for: ridiculously violent, filled with objects that fly towards the audience, bouncing body parts (hint: they come in pairs), explosions, supernatural mumbo-jumbo, and vintage muscle cars. In short, it's an unapologetic B movie, a bit of souped-up, turbo-charged grindhouse pulp that is the rare example of a movie in which the 3D is both overkill and an enhancement.

It's a B movie with an A-list actor. That would be -- who else? -- Nicolas Cage, the best actor to routinely and unironically slum it in cheesy genre movies. Cage is the poetically named John Milton. The name is a hint as to his recent place of residence, a little joke inserted for the blank verse fans in the audience. Anyone who follows Cage's career closely will note the frequency with which he appears in movies with otherworldly themes. This one is no exception. There is, however, tremendous variety to his follicular prosthetics -- in Drive Angry, he sports a ragged thatch of straw-colored locks. Milton gets the movie off to a roaring, angry-driving start by gunning down some nameless bad guys, but not before they direct him to Louisiana where an infant girl is in peril. 

The title of Drive Angry is a bit misleading, for it suggests a far simpler and more straightforward plot than this movie actually delivers. Indeed, things get complicated fast for Milton. He meets a feisty waitress named Piper (Amber Heard) who can talk trash and throw a mean punch. She's also got a sweet ride: a 1969 Dodge Charger. Despite serious and compelling reasons not to, Piper rides along with Milton on his quest to rescue the baby -- his granddaughter -- from a satanic cult led by Jonah King (Billy Burke). King's a slippery, sleazy, messianic devil, and has plans to sacrifice the baby on the full moon in order to create Hell on earth or some such nonsense. It doesn't really matter. This is not the kind of movie where anyone can seriously believe that the baby is in any real danger. As props go, the movie pays less attention to the infant than to the curves of all-American automotive steel; the baby is the reason Milton drives from point A to point B, but the growling, purring cars are more importantly how he does it.

King's got lots of followers drinking the satanic kool-aid (and from the looks of them, smoking the satanic meth too), and his henchmen are chasing Milton, while Milton is chasing King. Consequently, there are a lot of car chases and explosions, and lots of killing. There's also some sex, and some sex during a shootout. Milton is an able multitasker, although he stays pretty focused on dispensing vengeance and death. Piper, I am happy to report, is not in the movie to be a romantic and/or sexual object. She's there for the girl-on-girl fighting. While Milton and the Lucifer-lovin' rednecks are making with the epic battles, an elegant, occasionally sadistic fellow who calls himself The Accountant (William Fichtner) is also looking for Milton. The Accountant is unflappable, and seemingly invulnerable to everything except a super-duper antique gun --the bullets have a latin inscription -- that Milton totes. (I love movies that give you a latin lesson along with a show.)

 Drive Angry, directed by Patrick Lussier (who cowrote it with Todd Farmer), is trashy, campy overkill, and a lot more fun than it really ought to be. The plentiful action sequences are delivered with wit and ingenuity, and the movie has low aspirations, which it easily achieves, and then some. Fichtner, as the enigmatic Accountant, gets the funniest lines in the movie, and he makes the most of them with a tranquil, poker-faced performance. As for Cage, give the guy credit, he never phones it in. He can bring the crazy to whatever level of craziness is required. As the dead serious, unholy avenger Milton, he offers up a deadpan performance with nary an ironic wink, even when reciting hokum like "Hell already is walking the earth." Cage is an apparent aesthetic egalitarian who seems to take every role equally seriously. He doesn't always elevate trash to treasure, but he's usually worth watching.

03Mar2011

The Eagle (2011)

According to the prologue to The Eagle, a second century Roman legion thousands strong was lost in battle somewhere in the wilds of north Britain. Lost with the Ninth Legion was a golden eagle, a symbol of Rome's might. The emperor Hadrian thereafter built his famous wall to mark off the border between the Roman Empire and no man's land. So begins The Eagle, a sword and sandals/western/buddy movie, about young Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum), whose father led the Ninth Legion and lost the eagle. Marcus becomes a centurion, leads his men on a daring rescue mission, and is severely wounded, thus ending his military career. 

While recuperating at his Uncle Aquila's villa, Marcus is impressed by the bravery of a slave named Esca (Jamie Bell), and saves his life. Uncle Aquila (Donald Sutherland) promptly buys the slave for Marcus. Esca is indebted to Marcus, and swears his loyalty (despite, presumably, the whole awkward slave/master thing). Then Marcus decides to take Esca to the north, to search for the lost eagle, and learn the fate of his father. Esca is a Briton, and speaks the language of the northern savages. Patrician Uncle Aquila cautions against the plan, warning Marcus that Esca will turn on him because "he is a slave." Uncle Aquila is kind of old school in his reasoning.

What follows, in this movie based on Rosemary Sutcliff's novel The Eagle of the Ninth, is a humorless adventure in which Marcus and Esca slog through the mud, eat rats, and get captured by the Seal people, a tribe of fur-wearing, mohawk-sporting warriors who cover themselves with grey mud and live in muddy huts. Scotland was apparently quite muddy back then, and the natives worked with what they had. I don't know how they kept the mud on with all the rain. The Eagle is basically a muddy cowboys and indians picture, with the Seal people playing the part of the fearsome Apaches. They dance, they hallucinate, they wear animal hides, they're excellent trackers, they're ruthless, and they can run like the wind. Horses are no match for the fleet-footed Seals. They don't much care for Romans.

What's interesting about The Eagle is the master-slave relationship between Marcus and Esca, and how that relationship subtly changes once the pair leave the confines of the Roman Empire. There's probably a fascinating story to be told about how relationships are altered by geography -- cross an arbitrary boundary like Hadrian's Wall, and the slave becomes free, and the master becomes a dependent. It could have been an interesting avenue for The Eagle to explore (particularly in light of current geopolitical complexities), but the movie doesn't make much of it, beyond supplying a few situations that test the loyalties of Marcus and Esca. The focus of the story is Marcus's fixation on restoring his family's honor by retrieving the golden eagle. Tatum gives a serious performance that had me convinced Marcus really cared about getting that eagle back, without convincing me that I should care actually about it myself.

And there's the catch with The Eagle. The movie hints at Roman atrocities, but it is ultimately sympathetic to the Romans, going so far as to refer to a massacre site as a "killing field" where Roman officers were sacrificed by bloodthirsty savages. It would have you side with Marcus, the slaveholder, but also with his noble slave Esca, who has every reason to hate Romans. The various anti-Roman tribes of the movie seem to have a genuine beef with the empire, but they are depicted as brutal primitives with wild, unruly hair and a single personality trait: they kill Romans. 

Eventually, as such stories must, this one ends in a battle -- an epic battle, of course -- with lots of slashing, clinking swords and spears, and a great deal of splashing, since this battle takes place in a river. In many ways, The Eagle is a very retro movie, one in which actual actors rather than digital avatars slog through actual scenery -- dark, damp, cold, muddy scenery by the looks of it -- and fight without the assistance of special effects (other than a lot of fast editing and a little slow motion). They perform human-sized feats in what is a human-sized story. The Eagle aspires to be an old fashioned kind of adventure story of manly heroism (there's hardly a woman in the movie) and military glory. It might have been better, and more captivating, were it not so old fashioned in its simplistic, chauvinist depiction of the northern natives. The Eagle is retro and not revisionist in its history, but a little hindsight and cultural insight would have been enlightening.

24Feb2011

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011)

If you're a young girl, or the parent of a young girl, chances are you  have to see Justin Bieber: Never Say Never in the near future. Fear not. This documentary about the You Tube phenom who became, almost overnight, an international superstar, follows the teen dream singer as he prepares for a sold out show at Madison Square Garden. The film includes lots of home movie clips that recount Bieber's precocious musical youth, and his meteoric rise to stardom. Bieber is cute in exactly the right way to make the little girls love him, and he's genuinely talented, which makes him not bad company for 105 minutes.

There are a few too many interviews, not all of them interesting, with various people in Bieber's retinue of handlers, managers, coaches, and family, but Bieberphiles will eat up every bit of information they can get on the boy wonder. The concert footage is the usual stuff -- swooping cameras, razzle dazzle, fireworks, singing and dancing, with assorted musical guests (Usher, Miley Cyrus, Sean Kingston, Ludacris). The best part of the film is the fans -- all those screaming, crying, excited girls having the best time ever, being crazy and obsessed in the wholesome way only adolescent girls can manage. There's even a bit of humor thrown in there for the 'rents: a weird slow motion scene of Bieber flipping his famously swooshy hair while Etta James sings "At Last." It makes about as much sense as Snoop Dogg giving Bieber hairstyling tips -- that happens in the movie too.

13Feb2011

Blue Valentine (2010)

Blue Valentine is a love story, but it's a strange kind of love story. It starts at the end -- at the end of love, that is. It moves back and forth between the beginning of love, and the end of it, leaving the middle something of a mystery. 

The movie begins in the morning, as Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling), puffy-eyed and tired, wake up with their young daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka) and start a working day. Their dog is missing, which is just the first thing that goes terribly wrong over the next 48 hours. 

Cindy is a nurse in a medical clinic; Dean is a house painter. They've been together about six years, but when the film toggles back to their first meeting, it's clear the years between have been hard on them. Cindy was in college then, and determined to become a doctor. Dean worked for a moving company. He was a nice guy, a loyal, sweet guy, which at that moment, was what Cindy most needed and wanted in her life. So what happened?

That is a question that writer-director Derek Cianfrance (who co-wrote the movie with Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne) is fundamentally not interested in answering. Blue Valentine is about the troubled beginning of the story of Dean and Cindy, and the troubled end, but it skips the middle. What happened in the middle? (Trouble would be the obvious guess.) In some sense, nothing happened, and that, the movie hints, is precisely the problem. For Cindy, something was supposed to happen. Things were supposed to change. Dean liked everything just as it was. Somewhere along the way, they pulled apart, got out of synch. 

The movie creates a sense of distress and discomfort by getting too physically close to the characters. The cinematography by Andrij Parekh is invasively intimate, going for closeups that cut Cindy and Dean into pieces -- part of a face, a torso, a thigh. It's a visual technique that heightens emotion and ups the anxiety level in a film already loaded with both. The backgrounds are only vaguely there -- they're cut into little bits too, into glimpses of a shabby home, a minivan, and the cheesy motel room where Dean tries in vain to rekindle their romance. This visual dismemberment and dissection doesn't especially reveal what's going on inside the characters, but it emphasizes that Blue Valentine isn't a portrait of a romance or a marriage so much as it is a post-mortem.  

The difficulty with the cut-out-the-middle approach to the narrative is that, while Dean and Cindy are well-defined in the scenes from their youthful romance, the people they become only a few years later -- he with his receding hairline, she with her weariness and frustration -- seem a little disconnected from their former selves. That may be partly a function, too, of how little time -- a couple of days in the now, a few months in the past -- the movie spends with them. A lot happens in that little time -- not all of it is revelatory, and some of it is not very surprising. Williams and Gosling, both very good actors, bring a lot of emotional intensity and nuance to their roles, which fills in some of the blanks, but also has the effect of leaving you wanting to know more.

But there is no more. Blue Valentine is less about how they got to their unhappy place, and more about that they got to be disconnected, disappointed, and discontent. 

13Feb2011

Sanctum (2011)

The 3-D in Sanctum is so aggressive and in-your-face it's more like 3 1/2-D. Hallucinatory, annoying, demanding, it all but yells "Look at this!" even when the thing it demands you look at is nothing particularly special. The story of Sanctum could have been told just as well without the 3-D effects. The real problem with Sanctum isn't the 3-D, however, but the one-dimensional characters. For most of the characters, that dimension is insufferable.

The plot is, according to the opening titles, "inspired by a true story." I'm going to guess that the screenwriters, John Garvin and Andrew Wight, embellished the truth a bit, because nobody ever has or ever could talk the way the characters in Sanctum talk. They don't converse so much as spout cliches and bromides, and offer such pearls of wisdom as "Panic's the vulture sits on your shoulder." Weird grammar aside, if a vulture were sitting on your shoulder, it would probably be appropriate to panic, but since Sanctum takes place almost entirely in a subterranean cave, there aren't any vultures about. Lucky for the vultures.

The story takes place in Papua, New Guinea, in a deep, heretofore unexplored cave system called Esa Ala. A team of Australian cave divers is exploring the caves. According to Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), the millionaire who is financing the expedition, "There's no other place on the planet left to explore." I highly doubt that, and I reckon there are lots of places left to explore, but this is the sort of hyperbole the people of Sanctum are given to. Carl is a jerk, in any case, and he brings his mountain-climbing girlfriend Victoria (Alice Parkinson) along on the expedition even though she has no diving experience. She has even less cave diving experience. On the other hand, expedition leader Frank (Richard Roxburgh) has loads of cave diving experience, which has made him an unforgiving S.O.B., a heartless fatalist, a lousy father, and quite unpleasant to be around. "We're bits of dust passing through," he tells the gang, by way of a pep talk. Frank's son Josh (Rhys Wakefield) hates his dad, and for good reason. The only guy who kind of likes Frank is Crazy George (Dan Wylie), who operates a remote-controlled submarine camera called Virgil. (Virgil was probably named after Virgil Brigman, a character in The Abyss, James Cameron's vastly superior underwater adventure movie. Cameron is an executive producer of Sanctum, which makes sense, given the combination of three things he loves: water, diving, and 3-D.) 

While Frank and his team are down there exploring, a cyclone floods the caves, trapping them inside, and forcing a grueling, miserable, claustrophobic, and deadly trek through terra incognito. Also aqua incognito. Lots and lots of aqua. (It would be a good idea to not order the large drink if you're going to see this movie.) They climb, crawl, swim, dive, rappel, grunt, yell, complain, cough, argue, and one by one, one way or another, die. 

Director Alister Grierson and cinematographer Jules O'Loughlin do an effective job of creating a sense of confinement and doom, and there's some lovely underwater camera work. I appreciate, as well, the effort to explore the mindset of the danger-seeking adventurer, and the different moral landscape encountered in the bowels of the earth, where a mercifully quick death may be the only help available. I could appreciate it much, much more if it had been executed with some insight, subtlety and sensitivity, rather than with bombast and banal platitudes. If only it could have been done without all the cliches, the stereotypes, and the laughably bad dialogue, I might have actually cared whether any of the characters lived or died. A silent, non 3-D version of this movie would be better, so it'll be passable entertainment on DVD, with the sound turned off, particularly for anyone interested in knowing how many different ways there are to die in a big, watery cave. Falling and drowning are the major ones, but you'd be surprised how many lethal hazards there actually are down there.

6Feb2011

The Mechanic (2011)

I suppose there could be, in fact, professional hitmen of the sort portrayed by Jason Statham in The Mechanic. Cool, detached people who are paid to kill other people they neither know nor care about. As long as there are people out there who need killing, and people who want them killed, there will be other people willing to do the deed. The movies, however, seem to be rather overpopulated with professional assassins. Just last year, George Clooney played one in The American, a movie with more than a few superficial similarities to The Mechanic. Clooney's movie offered much less bang for the buck than The Mechanic, which provides a lot of bang, and not much else. 

One consequence of the abundance of elite assassins in movies is that they inevitably must turn on each other. Apparently there aren't enough of us non-assassins who need to be whacked to keep the pros in gravy. Or at least, there aren't enough of us so worth killing that anyone is willing to pay for it. I suppose that's good news. It's a pretty safe bet that in any movie about an assassin, he or she will eventually become the target of another assassin, usually hired by the very same low-down double-crossing people who employ the first assassin, which is what happens in The Mechanic. Which is to say that if you've seen one movie about an elite hitman, you've seen The Mechanic. (You might also have seen the1972 Charles Bronson movie on which The Mechanic is based.)

Statham is Arthur Bishop, an assassin who specializes in murders-for-hire that don't look like murders. Drownings, heart attacks, and apparently random street crimes are among his specialties. He's knowledgeable, efficient, and discreet, and he is rewarded handsomely for his skill and lack of qualms. But in case the audience has any qualms about the murder-for-hire biz, the victims of Arthur's expertise are all cartoonishly and vaguely bad people who might deserve to be professionally and efficiently dispatched. Arthur fancies himself an aesthete, living in a spectacular house in a Louisiana swamp, listening to his hi-fi, and rebuilding a vintage car. ("Mechanic" is a euphemism for assassin, but Arthur's also an actual mechanic, which might have seemed more interesting on paper than it is on film. The extent of his automotive activity is to give a socket wrench a couple of twists.) Arthur's detachment extends to his sex life: he prefers the uncomplicated company of prostitutes, although he pays them well. 

Arthur's tranquil life gets complicated when he gets an assignment he doesn't want: killing a personal friend (he doesn't have many of them). Then there's another complication: the dead man's son Steve (Ben Foster), not knowing who killed his father, wants to learn Arthur's trade. The kid doesn't have much going for him, so Arthur takes him under his burly wing. Much of The Mechanic involves Arthur teaching Steve the ropes, in a series of assassinations that don't go as smoothly as planned. Murders that go off without a hitch are kind of boring, I guess. The ones that go badly end up in fisticuffs and shoot-outs and spearings, with people rappelling down skyscrapers and getting thrown through windows and other exciting stuff. Steve, who lacks Arthur's sangfroid and nose for trouble, tends to get into difficulty rather more than is healthy for an assassin who plans to make a career of it. Steve, with his emotional neediness and daddy issues, is also more interesting and sympathetic than Arthur.

Under the direction of Simon West (Con Air), The Mechanic is a pretty good looking movie, with briskly paced and sporadically imaginative action. (In one scene, Arthur and another hitman go at it on an airport shuttle bus, turning various bits of quotidian transport into deadly weapons.) That's not really enough to make this movie worth watching. One problem is Arthur. He is not interesting or likable. You wouldn't want to spend time with the guy. While the movie tries to make an issue, of sorts, out of the ethics of assassination (hey, every profession has its professional ethics), if Arthur is capable of deep thought about such things, he doesn't let on. Statham is a fine physical specimen, but aside from a lot of intense glowering, he doesn't betray any emotion. He's like a pilot light that never gets lit -- nothing gets to Arthur, and so, there's really nothing to Arthur. Foster is better as the callow, reckless, and emotionally ragged Steve, and Donald Sutherland is quite good in a small role. Sutherland keeps getting cast in little roles in unmemorable (or terrible, or occasionally good) movies -- would somebody please give this guy something worthwhile to do?

If we wait long enough, all the movie assassins will eventually kill each other, until there is only one left. Maybe Donald Sutherland will play him.

30Jan2011

The Fighter (2010)

Boxing movies tend to have a pretty rigid and predictable structure. Down and out fighter gets beat up and knocked down, in the ring and by life. Fighter works hard, fights back, gets a shot at a comeback, redemption, and... gets beat up and knocked down again before triumphing in the end. This is also the basic structure of most kung fu movies, and most sports movies too. (But not most sporting events. Just ask the New York Jets.) It's more or less the basic plot of The Fighter, based on the true story of "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a welterweight boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts whose career conveniently followed a course made for movies. 

Micky's bouts in the boxing ring are a cakewalk compared to his family life. Start with his motormouthed half brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a once-promising boxer whose career peaked when he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, an accomplishment he is quick to recount to anyone who will listen. Micky grew up idolizing his big brother, and remains loyal to Dicky even though he's a crackhead. With Dicky as his trainer, and his mother Alice (Melissa Leo) as his manager, Micky's chances of success are slim. To call Micky's family dysfunctional -- in additon to Dicky and Alice there are his seven furious, fractious sisters -- is an understatement. Micky's a fairly quiet, passive guy. It's easy to imagine him spending his whole life never getting a word in edgewise, and getting shouted down every time he tried. He's not so different as a boxer -- he lays on the ropes, and takes a beating, wearing down his opponent and waiting for a chance to strike. The question for Micky, the central question of The Fighter, is whether Micky will ever find it in himself to get off the ropes and fight his family.

There are good reasons to think he should. Family matriarch Alice clearly favors Dicky. Dicky, for his part, is more interested in his own comeback than in guiding his little brother. Micky's a surrogate, fighting not so much for himself but to give his grandstanding brother a second chance at glory, and it's not at all clear that anyone has his best interests at heart. Enter Charlene (Amy Adams), Micky's girlfriend, a scrappy, tough-talking barmaid who stands up to Alice and her seven daughters when Micky can't. She can also throw a mean punch when she has to.

The Fighter is less about boxing than it is a love story, a family drama, and a complicated tale of fraternal love and sibling rivalry. It's crazy, funny, sad, profane, and sometimes profound, and a nimble, lively, psychologically complex story. There are really a multitude of fighters in The Fighter, and the obvious one, Micky Ward, is the least pugilistic of the bunch.

Bale's performance -- he seems to reinvent himself for every role -- is quite extraordinary. He's gaunt, wild-eyed and energetically frantic, revealing not only the ravages of Dicky's drug addiction, but also the athlete he once was. Dicky runs, punches, spars, and never stops talking, as if willing his body to do things it really shouldn't be able to do. He's a clown, a raconteur, a fighter, a mama's boy, a mentor, a charmer, and smarter than he looks -- he never stops thinking about strategy, even though most of his personal decisions, impaired as they are by drugs and drug-seeking, are quite bad. 

Leo's Alice is in the dubious company of other mythically terrible movie mothers -- she chain smokes, she badgers, she storms, she hurls kitchenware, she denies and defames, she roars. She undermines Micky's career even while she exploits it for money and attention. Micky, it is clear, can never be better than his big brother in Alice's eyes, and whether she does it intentionally or not, she sees to it that he never quite succeeds. Only Charlene dares to face down the harridan and her vulgar, vicious daughters who, between them, use enough hairspray to keep the ozone hole open for business. (That the family cooperated with the filmmakers is interesting, to say the least.)

Wahlberg's performance is quiet, like Micky. He seems to be waiting for something, and watching from the outside as Charlene and the Ward and Eklund families duke it out. What they're fighting over is, of course, Micky's destiny. Micky's personality, and Walhberg's performance, parallel the progress of the story, which is, in the end, about a quiet, passive, non-aggressive man who finds the fighter in himself, and finally discovers something worth fighting for.

The Fighter, filmed in Lowell, is appropriately gritty and grimy, with the hardscrabble working class town looking as desperate and ground down as its fabled son Dicky. Director David O. Russell nicely captures the shabby weariness of this former industrial town, and the poverty that blighted it in the 1990s, when this story takes place. Russell (*Three Kings*, *Flirting with Disaster*) doesn't make anything pretty in The Fighter -- not the town, or the people. The fights are brutal, and that goes double for any fight involving Alice and her flock of harpies. Russell's directing style is energetic and fleet-footed, and the movie is lively, thoughtful, hilarious, and moving, and frequently veers in unexpected directions. Russell aims to reimagine the boxing movie with The Fighter, to both conform to boxing movie conventions, and to upend them. In doing so, he both satisfies the expectations of the genre and moves beyond them, to create a movie that's richly complex, moving, and genuine.

24Jan2011

The Green Hornet (2011)

I had a Hornet car once. It was green. I also had, simultaneously, a cat named Kato. I didn't name the cat; he was named by a friend who was a Bruce Lee fanatic. Lee played Kato in the 1960s Green Hornet TV series. But the durably long-lived Green Hornet himself dates back to a 1930s radio show. In virtually every version of The Green Hornet (radio, movie, TV, comic book), the Hornet is the alter ego of Britt Reid, do-gooder publisher by day, vigilante by night, aided by his faithful sidekick/chauffeur/manservant Kato.

As imagined by star and screenwriter Seth Rogen (who co-wrote the movie with Evan Goldberg), the 21st century Britt Reid is a layabout, a hard-partying, fast-talking, spoiled brat who inherits a newspaper when his stern father (Tom Wilkinson) dies. Britt discovers the amazing talents of his father's car mechanic and personal barista Kato (Jay Chou), a skilled engineer, artist, and inventor. Britt engages in some vandalism, gets into hot water, and hatches a scheme to become a masked crimefighter who poses as a criminal. It's not really clear why he feels it necessary to pose as a criminal, but the plot is the weakest link in The Green Hornet. It barely makes sense, but it also barely exists.

The Green Hornet has a cool car, called Black Beauty, that's tricked out with nifty features like machine guns, flamethrowers, missiles, and bulletproof glass. (My green Hornet didn't have any of that stuff, which is probably for the best, although we will never know now.) Kato, the brains behind the Green Hornet, and also the brawn, created the car, the name, and the masks. He also does all the crimefighting while Britt does all the talking. Britt talks pretty much nonstop, is generally inept, and frequently requires rescue, since he lacks even the most rudimentary of crimefighting skills. The running gag of The Green Hornet is that Britt Reid is a doofus superhero who can't do anything right, and his sidekick does all the work. And gets the girl.

The girl is Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz), Britt's overqualified secretary. The Green Hornet's nemesis is Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz), a criminal kingpin suffering a midlife crisis. There's also a corrupt district attorney (David Harbour) who turns out to be a villain as well.

A lot of action movies lack characters. They're filled with explosions and fights and car chases, and the people in them have plenty to do, but they lack dimension as characters. The Green Hornet is full of car chases and fights and explosions, and the characters have loads of personality, although, strangely, they don't have much to do because the movie is a more or less random series of incidents that are connected primarily because they've been spliced together by an editor (Michael Tronick).

And yet, The Green Hornet can be fun. Rogen, who can be fairly irritating, uses that quality to good effect, since Britt is a fairly irritating guy whose principle accomplishment is that he irritates bad guys. He should be called The Mosquito. Rogen and Chou (a major Taiwanese pop idol) have a funny, loose rapport. Chou speaks as slowly as Rogen speaks quickly, and is low key, quiet, and graceful, while Rogen is loud and awkward. Waltz, who was terrifically funny and terrifying as Colonel Hans Landa in *Inglourious Basterds*, is funny in The Green Hornet too, although he's playing a character who is like a lite version of Landa. Chudnofsky is merciless, and surrounds himself with yes-men (no-men don't last long); he's an insecure criminal mastermind, one who worries that he's not scary enough, and ponders ways to be taken seriously. He's not so different, in that way, from Britt, who also just wants to be taken seriously.

Director Michel Gondry (Be Kind, Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) makes his first foray into action movies, after a career making quirky, brainy, highly imaginative movies and music videos. The Green Hornet shows little of Gondry's usual lightness and inventiveness, but it pops up from time to time in some of the more imaginatively staged action sequences, like the extended car chase that literally stops the presses when it ends up at Britt's newspaper offices. Gondry's goofy, slapsticky approach to kung fu fighting and bromantic comedy enlivens The Green Hornet, but the movie is an atypical entry in the director's oeuvre, one that offers few opportunities for the quirky beauty and emotional intensity of his best work. Gondry's affection for the characters shows, and he gives Britt and Kato lots of cool, unusual toys to play with, but as a director and writer, he tends to work with trippy, unconventional narratives and stories that slip and slide between layers of reality, and The Green Hornet really needed someone with the will to bend its freewheeling riffing into a more conventional narrative. (This movie features slapdash, anemic 3-D. It was not originally filmed in 3-D -- the studio decided to convert some scenes to 3-D in post-production, and it's nothing to write home about. It's a scam to get a few extra bucks out of the audience.)

16Jan2011

The King's Speech (2010)

Cruel fate conspires against poor Prince Albert, son of King George V. He grows up with a stammer, but, being the Duke of York, he is sometimes required to speak publicly. That humiliation is bad enough, but then radio comes along and amplifies his every stutter and agonizing silence, and sends it to the four corners of the British Empire. Fortunately, he is in little danger of ascending to the throne, as the crown is to sit on his brother David's head. But his brother, the man who would be King Edward VIII, is head over heels in love with an American divorcee. He famously abdicates for love, thus sticking Albert with what feels like a crown of thorns. Oh, and there's a world war looming, too.

Fate has a sense of humor too. The King's Speech, directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler, recounts how Albert reluctantly ascended to the throne and grew into the role of king with a little help from a quirky therapist. Albert, or Bertie (Colin Firth) as he is known to his family (he has no friends), has sought numerous cures, from numerous quacks, for his speaking problem. His patient and sympathetic wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), the future Queen Mum, finds an unorthodox speech therapist named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian who promises to cure the monarch. He also promises to ruffle the royal feathers by insisting, among other things, that therapy sessions be held in his shabby office, and that he and Bertie be on first-name terms. Bertie finds him irritating and impertinent, but also effective.

Lionel's plan is to dig up and expose the root of Bertie's problem, something the reserved, private prince prefers not to do. What follows is part comedy, part therapy session, part odd couple story as Bertie and Lionel talk and confide and bicker. Lionel, whose opinion of the monarchy is low (though he holds Bertie in high esteem) occasionally oversteps his bounds. Bertie resists Lionel's efforts to probe into his painful childhood and family life, until circumstance -- that troublesome, impetuous, lovestruck brother -- forces him to confront everything all at once: his past, his future, Hitler. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, indeed.

For all that heaviness, for all Bertie's anger and anxiety, The King's Speech is a mostly lighthearted movie that primarily aims to entertain, and so it does. There's a bit of a history lesson squeezed in for good measure, but the hammy (in a good way) performance by Rush, and Firth's ability to maintain a stiff upper lip while letting fly with a stream of stutter-free expletives (which inexplicably earned the sex-and-violence-free movie an R rating) make this an enjoyable romp through a dark period of history.

The movie gives little time to the crisis that was nearly Bertie's (and maybe the monarchy's) undoing: brother David (Guy Pearce), and his affair with Wallis Simpson (Eve Best). In only a few scenes, the movie slyly hints at the perhaps perverse nature of their relationship, the unconventional power dynamic between them, and David's unwillingness, or inability, to give up Wallis for honor, for power, or for country. Pearce reveals much about David's temperament, his intemperance, his imperiousness, his whingeing and sense of victimhood, and his cruel torture (both intentional and unintentional) of his brother. There's an interesting movie to be made about *that* guy (and if they cast Guy Pearce to play him just as he does in The King's Speech, all the better). If the monarchy is good for nothing else (and that's a distinct possibility), it's good at producing dysfunctional families and high drama.

The King's Speech is a film that's eager to please, even when it must delve into the royal family's unpleasantness. The movie creates an effective sense of Bertie's options diminishing -- he seems forced to navigate many long, narrow corridors, and to confront an increasing number of microphones that, in the way that inanimate objects like 1930s mics can do, seem to scowl at him. (Unlike most dramas about royals, The King's Speech abjures palatial opulence, making the monarchs look practically middle class.) There's a growing sense of both necessity and desperation, and Firth's portrayal reveals King George VI to be a man who will do what he must for his country, even speak to it. The title refers to Bertie's speech in general, but also in particular to a crucial speech he must broadcast, informing England and the world that they are going to war against Germany. It's an important, defining moment, both for the man and the country, and The King's Speech effectively and movingly shows how the two are one, their fates intertwined. The king's little story of overcoming personal adversity will be mirrored in the courage and solidarity that Britons famously exhibited during the war. In some ways, the stories that The King's Speech implies but doesn't tell promise to be even more interesting than the one it does tell, but it is nonetheless a poignant and interesting personal drama, and a diverting, fun, juicy historical drama as well.

9Jan2011

True Grit (2010)

Vengeance may be a dish best served cold, but the actual serving of it tends to be a hot mess. This is especially true when Joel and Ethan Coen are involved, as they have, over the years, specialized in tales of killings and crime where things tend to go awry, with violent consequences. In True Grit, a remake of the 1969 film that starred John Wayne and Kim Darby, there are a lot of killings, and most of them are pretty messy. Death doesn't come quick and painless when knives and rifles are involved. True Grit is based on the novel by Charles Portis, and as before, its a comic Western that goofs around with the heroic Western archetype. When John Wayne played US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, he played against an archetype he'd embodied for much of his career. When Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, he shuffles and stumbles and slurs, and exhibits little of the dignity one might expect of a storied lawman. On the other hand, his "one-eyed fat man" surely looks like a fellow who spends days in the saddle and weeks sleeping in the dirt, with nought but a bottle of whisky for company. It's probably a lot closer to the reality of being a frontier lawman than the classic movie image of clean-shaven men in buckskin suits and boots with jangly spurs.

There is a fellow in buckskin and spurs in True Grit. That'd be Texas Ranger LaBeouf, a pretentious man with a big mustache and a high opinion of himself. That opinion is not shared by Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who compares the fashionable lawman to a rodeo clown. Mattie is a 14 year old girl from Arkansas, who has hired Rooster Cogburn to hunt down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the miserable, no 'count man who murdered her father. LaBeouf (who pronounces his name "La Beef," in the Texas way) is also tracking Chaney, and has in mind to collect a large bounty for him back in Texas. Mattie seeks justice and vengeance for her father, and she's heard that Cogburn is not particular about whether he brings outlaws back dead or alive, which suits her just fine. She wants Chaney dead, whether it's by the bullet or the noose, so long as it's in Arkansas.

Revenge is sweet, but Mattie is not. She's smart as a pistol, and all business, whether she's negotiating the sale of some ponies to a crooked horsetrader, or settling on Cogburn's fee. She's tough through and through, and she won't be trifled with, which makes she and Cogburn kindred spirits of sorts. Steinfeld is terrific in her feature film debut (I predict an Oscar nomination), playing Mattie as a humorless but nonethless hilarious, steely little fast talker who makes up for her small size with a very sharp tongue. Bridges and Damon are also quite good -- Damon's LaBeouf suffers numerous indignities, and turns out to be more complicated than he at first seems.

The script by the Coen Brothers is terrific -- wordy, witty, funny, profound, taking numerous digressive detours and meandering along on an unexpected trail to revenge and redemption. This is a Western uncharacteristically built on words -- these are characters who tallk and tell tales, who weigh and consider and negotiate, whether it's about the price of a horse, or the worth of a human life.

The Coens' previous Westerns (No Country for Old Men and, arguably, Raising Arizona), were set in modern times, but in True Grit, they work within the Western genre in a more traditional, though still revisionist way. In some ways, True Grit is a step backwards from No Country for Old Men, which, for my money, capped off the genre. True Grit shows that the Western well hasn't totally run dry -- there is still more to say on the subject of outlaws and lawmen, complicated good and unrepentant evil. The movie isn't particularly stylized or quirky, which is to say that it is not a typical Coen brothers movie, although I'm not sure there is a typical Coen brothers movie anymore. They have matured into very complete and complex filmmakers -- good storytellers, masters of the visual, with a sense of history and purpose, and also a sense of humor. There are no cheap laughs in True Grit, and the Coens don't make fun of the characters. There are odd flourishes here and there, and strange characters who turn up from time to time. But what makes True Grit unique and so interesting is that it's a serious and thoughtful film about serious people who mean to lay some Biblical, eye-for-en-eye wrath on a ne'er-do-well -- the movie can be violent and bloody -- but it's also extremely funny and entertaining. That's not an easy combination to pull off, but in True Grit, it is pulled off to perfection. 

25Dec2010