Gulliver's Travels
You have not lived until you've watched people get peed on in 3D.
You have not lived until you’ve watched people get peed on in 3D. I certainly never thought I’d live see it, least of all in a PG movie, but thanks to Rob Letterman’s execrable Gulliver’s Travels, the latest installment in Hollywood’s ongoing “Gang-Raping the Classics” series, I can now cross it off my bucket list. Merry Christmas to me.
The scene in question occurs in the film when Jack Black's title character is confronted with a raging fire in the tiny town of Lilliput which threatens to consume its castle and much of its miniature citizenry. Being Jack Black, he improvises the only solution we can expect from a character played by Jack Black: He drops trou and unleashes the contents of his own firehose, thus extinguishing the fire and becoming a hero to the Lilliputians, who appear far too pleased to be doused in urine. They're downright giddy, in fact. It’s by far the film’s most memorable scene (indeed, I fear it is permanently etched on my brain), and it’s cause to wonder: Since when are golden showers considered PG-appropriate? Has the MPAA been suddenly overrun by creepy sex fetishists and water sports fanatics? If so, perhaps the producers of Caligula might with to have their film re-evaluated.
Black might as well have pissed on Jonathan Swift’s grave for all the reverence he and director Letterman display for the author’s source material. Swift’s story, about a traveler who becomes marooned on an island filled with people one-twelfth his size, has been re-worked as a vapid vehicle for its star’s antic stylings. His Lemuel Gulliver is a slacker man-child (sound familiar?), a mailroom attendant at a New York newspaper who bluffs his way into a gig writing about the Bermuda Triangle. But somewhere along the way to the mysterious place, he’s swallowed up by an inter-dimensional portal and transported to the Lilliputians' island nation, where he lives as a god-clown among them. A variety of misadventures ensue, some of which rival the aforementioned urine-soaking scene in their transcendently anti-comic impact, until Gulliver finally learns the value of telling the truth and growing up. And we discover that some lessons aren't worth the pain involved in learning them.
I genuinely adore much of Jack Black’s work, but he seems determined to personally prove the Theory of Diminishing Returns, and dreck like Gulliver’s Travels is nigh-impossible to defend. Perhaps I doth protest too much. Perhaps it’s pointless to get so worked up over what’s essentially a harmless family film. Then again, if this is the kind of thing that entertains families these days, perhaps society might conceive of a better use for them.
The scene in question occurs in the film when Jack Black's title character is confronted with a raging fire in the tiny town of Lilliput which threatens to consume its castle and much of its miniature citizenry. Being Jack Black, he improvises the only solution we can expect from a character played by Jack Black: He drops trou and unleashes the contents of his own firehose, thus extinguishing the fire and becoming a hero to the Lilliputians, who appear far too pleased to be doused in urine. They're downright giddy, in fact. It’s by far the film’s most memorable scene (indeed, I fear it is permanently etched on my brain), and it’s cause to wonder: Since when are golden showers considered PG-appropriate? Has the MPAA been suddenly overrun by creepy sex fetishists and water sports fanatics? If so, perhaps the producers of Caligula might with to have their film re-evaluated.
Black might as well have pissed on Jonathan Swift’s grave for all the reverence he and director Letterman display for the author’s source material. Swift’s story, about a traveler who becomes marooned on an island filled with people one-twelfth his size, has been re-worked as a vapid vehicle for its star’s antic stylings. His Lemuel Gulliver is a slacker man-child (sound familiar?), a mailroom attendant at a New York newspaper who bluffs his way into a gig writing about the Bermuda Triangle. But somewhere along the way to the mysterious place, he’s swallowed up by an inter-dimensional portal and transported to the Lilliputians' island nation, where he lives as a god-clown among them. A variety of misadventures ensue, some of which rival the aforementioned urine-soaking scene in their transcendently anti-comic impact, until Gulliver finally learns the value of telling the truth and growing up. And we discover that some lessons aren't worth the pain involved in learning them.
I genuinely adore much of Jack Black’s work, but he seems determined to personally prove the Theory of Diminishing Returns, and dreck like Gulliver’s Travels is nigh-impossible to defend. Perhaps I doth protest too much. Perhaps it’s pointless to get so worked up over what’s essentially a harmless family film. Then again, if this is the kind of thing that entertains families these days, perhaps society might conceive of a better use for them.
How Do You Know
Clever lines and a fine performance by Owen Wilson aren't enough to redeem this flat and oddly unnerving comedy.
How Do You Know, the latest dramedy from writer/director James L. Brooks (As Good As It Gets, Spanglish), pulsates with strangeness. Characters talk at each other, blathering on about their various problems, in conversations punctuated by uncomfortable pauses, shot at odd angles by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (!) and set to a unnervingly sentimental score by Hans Zimmer (!). Jokes are set up and not delivered, or delivered without any set-up, making you wonder whether they were intended as jokes in the first place. Is How Do You Know deliberately strange, or accidentally so? If it weren’t so dreadfully boring, I might care to know.
The story centers on two people cast adrift by recent career bombshells: Hardy softball star Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) is rudderless after discovering she’s been cut by the National Team; earnest but neurotic businessman George (Paul Rudd) is floored by federal indictment which exiles him from the company his father (a weary, laryngitic Jack Nicholson) heads. Lisa and George are meant to end up together — at least this is what Brooks tells us, without ever making a convincing argument as to why — but their eventual pairing is delayed by Lisa’s meandering relationship with Matty (Owen Wilson) a pitcher for Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals.
In Matty, one finds How Do You Know’s most compelling feature. As a successful professional athlete, he is polyamorous by nature — it’s the only life he’s known. But he’s no scheming womanizer a la Tiger Woods. An accidental — and exceedingly polite — narcissist, beautiful women flock to him, offering sex without strings, and he graciously welcomes their company. In Lisa, he’s found someone with whom he genuinely wants to settle down, but he can’t seem to figure out how to square it with is existing values system. Love, the monogamous variety, is a legitimately alien notion to him. It’s a role perfectly suited for Wilson, looking a tad weathered but still chock full of easy charisma.
Love — or the expression of it, at least — is not a problem for George. He absolutely adores Lisa. We know this because he informs her of this, repeatedly. Other times, he simply stares at her for extended periods. Why Lisa would find such palpably creepy overtures appealing, we’ll never know. Certainly, Brooks never bothers to explain. With How Do You Know, he has achieved what many thought impossible: He has drained Paul Rudd entirely of his charm. James L. Brooks is Rudd’s kryptonite.
Much of Brooks’ career has been predicated on The Zinger, and at this late stage, it may be all that he has left. There are certainly several memorable lines to be found in How Do You Know — enough to make for a convincing trailer at least — but they achieve a fraction of their intended impact, mainly because Brooks seems too tired to provide much context for them, or to add layers and depth to the characters uttering them. And there are aren’t nearly enough of them to sustain a film that has precious little else to offer.
Tron: Legacy (PG)
A landmark achievement in visual effects, sound and production design, and a disappointment in almost every other respect
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The problems with TRON: Legacy can be traced back to its origins. According to lore, Disney execs spent years kicking around various ideas for revisiting or remaking TRON, Steven Lisberger’s groundbreaking 1982 sci-fi flick which, among other achievements, originated the concept of CGI, but nothing stuck and the project stagnated until producer Sean Bailey happened upon an effects test reel created on spec by Joseph Kosinski, a commercial director by trade and architect by training. Disney, wowed by the reel and encouraged by its enthusiastic reception at Comic-Con, agreed to move forward on a big-budget sequel with Kosinski at the helm.
In other words, TRON: Legacy didn’t come into being because of a must-read script or a compelling story treatment or even a clever logline; it came into being, at a reported cost of nearly $200 million, because of a video clip that looked really, really cool. This is rarely the stuff of which classic movies are made.
But it does look really, really cool. A marvel of production design, TRON: Legacy’s aesthetic delivers on the promise of Kosinski’s test reel and more, enveloping the audience in a glossy world of black and teal and amber. But, like so many Hollywood creations, it is drop-dead gorgeous (especially in IMAX) and yet utterly insubstantial, a glittering facade built around a largely hollow core. The principle duty of its script, from veteran Lost scribes Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, is to provide just enough of a plot to occupy us as Kosinski readies his next opulent set piece. But the film’s story and design elements interact awkwardly, and the film is often weighed down by ponderous exposition and flashbacks. It's almost as if its director and writers are running incompatible operating systems.
As the film opens, software pioneer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has been missing and presumed dead for over two decades. In truth, he is not dead or missing but trapped inside The Grid, an alternate universe, first envisaged in the 1982 film, where computer users interact with software programs (or their humanoid avatars, at least), ride motorcycles that travel on ribbons of light, and wage death duels with electronic frisbees.
But The Grid has fallen on hard times since its founding, as Flynn’s orphaned son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund), a 27-year-old adrenaline junkie with an anarchist streak, learns when he drops by the place in the hopes of locating his long-lost dad. Sure, there are still the lightcycle races and frisbee fights, and the infrastructure has undergone a welcome cosmetic upgrade — snazzy, skin-tight leather uniforms have replaced the old plastic circuit-board suits — but it’s now become a neo-Roman dictatorship, ruled by a maleficent program called CLU. Short for Codified Likeness Utility, CLU was created by Flynn to serve as his surrogate, but he eventually turned on his master and grabbed The Grid for himself.
CLU sends Sam to the gladiator arena, and he seems destined to die there until a spirited vixen named Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the last living representative of a spontaneously evolving digital species (not worth going into), swoops in and rescues him, then reunites him with his dad. Father and son make an odd pairing. Hedlund, who is now shooting an adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road, speaks in sort of a tired, throaty monotone, perfect for a beat poet but less so for an action star; Bridges, meanwhile, has reinvented his character as a digitized Dude. Steeped in Zen wisdom, he muses about "knocking on the sky to listen to the sound" and making "bio-digital jazz, man," and advises his son that "the only way to win the game is not to play." Sound advice, but it doesn't do much to move the plot along. So Sam heads off to take on CLU, and the old man soon has little choice but to join him.
In CLU, one can find no more perfect embodiment of TRON: Legacy’s fatal flaw. Voiced by Bridges and animated with computers using state-of-the-art motion-capture technology, the character is meant to appear as a mirror image of a younger Flynn, so close in resemblance that his son wouldn't know the difference. But it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even close. CLU may be a technical wonder, but it's unconvincing as Bridges' digital doppelganger. The filmmakers fell in love with the technology without considering whether it fulfilled its intended purpose — which, in this case, it clearly doesn’t.* But damned if it doesn't look really, really cool.
TRON: Legacy will probably be a big hit with technology fetishists, and it could very well end up a 420 staple, but it won't likely inspire the kind of furious dorm-room debates that Inception did, mainly because its plot doesn’t hold up against the most elementary of logical stress tests, the most obvious of which is: How did The Grid survive all these years while the computer servers that hosted it were powered down? (And don't even bother to ask what happened to Cillian Murphy's character, granted all of one line of dialogue in the first act.) Questions like this might seem inconsequential to Kosinski, but they are essential to us. TRON: Legacy represents a landmark achievement in visual effects, sound and production design, but it's a disappointment in almost every other respect.
* The filmmakers also appear to have ignored the fact that our voices change with age, just as our appearances do. CLU may resemble a younger Jeff Bridges, but the timbre of his speech is unmistakeably that of the current, older version. For an illustration of what I mean, listen to the Beach Boys' original, 1966 rendition of "Good Vibrations," then compare it to Brian Wilson's 2004 re-recording of the song. Then, if you really want to have your mind blown, listen to Mark Wahlberg's version.
'The Tourist'
"'The Tourist' is rather empty and cosmetic."
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The Tourist is about as difficult to get through as spotting the vowels in the name of its director. Florian Henckel von Donnersmark was last seen receiving a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2007 for The Lives of Others, which was about a couple living in East Berlin who were being monitored by the police of the German Democratic Republic. Its positive reception made way for the assumption that Donnersmark would continue to populate the USA with films of seemingly otherworldly and underrepresented themes. But his current project is saddening in its superficiality and total implausibility.
The film’s only real upside is its stars: two of our most prized Americans. Johnny Depp plays Frank Tupelo, a math teacher from Wisconsin who travels to Europe after his wife leaves him, presumably because of his weakness and simplicity. While en route to Venice, he meets Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie), who situates herself in his company after she receives a letter from her criminal lover, Alexander Pearce (who stole some billions from a very wealthy Russian and the British government), with instructions to find someone on a train who looks like him and make the police believe that he is the real Alexander Pearce to throw the authorities and the Russians off his track. Elise picks Frank, and after they are photographed kissing each other on the balcony of Elise’s hotel, everyone begins to believe Frank is the real Pearce and so begins the chase.
While Donnersmark could not have picked two better looking people to film roaming around Venice, his lack of faith in the audience is obvious. Every aspect of the characters is hammed up again and again as if Donnersmark felt burdened with the task of making us see his vision. Doubtful that we’re capable of getting to where he wants us, he has crafted a movie completely devoid of subtlety. Elise’s strength and superiority over Frank are portrayed by close-ups and repeated instances of men burping up their lungs upon seeing her (as if her beauty is in any way subjective?). And in case we forgot that Frank is the victim in this story -- even though he’s been tricked, chased and shot at - Donnersmark still felt the need to pin him with a lame electronic cigarette to puff on. Frank and Elise somehow manage to lack mystery even though we get very few factual details about each of them.
Nothing extraordinary comes to us in the way of the film’s structural elements, either. There is very little of the action that The Tourist’s marketing led us to believe, and the dialog is often painful. The plot itself is almost shockingly unbelievable, especially when we’re asked to believe that Elise falls in love with Frank after a combination of kissing him once and her disclosed habit of swooning over men she only spent an hour with (yes, that was on her CV).
The Tourist is rather empty and cosmetic. It’s worth seeing if you’re a superfan of Jolie or Depp, but don’t expect to walk out of the theater with anything more than the stub you came in with.
'Tangled'
A lively comic twist on the classic 'Rapunzel' fairytale.
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Having only recently revived its cartoon fairytale division, Disney abruptly announced earlier this week that it’s leaving the business for good. Which is a shame, because few cinematic staples have proved more consistently entertaining -- or more effective as a babysitting tool. With its final fairytale adaptation, Tangled, a lively comic take of the classic Rapunzel fable, the venerable studio can at least say that it’s exiting the genre on a high note.
Tweaks have been made to the original Brothers Grimm story, most notable of which is that Rapunzel’s (Mandy Moore) trademark golden locks are now imbued with magical powers -- specifically, the ability to halt or reverse the aging process -- that are activated, conveniently enough, whenever she serenades them with her dulcet voice. Born a princess, she was plucked from the cradle by a capricious crone, Mother Gothel (Broadway star Donna Murphy), who locked the child in a tower and raised her as her own daughter. Obsessed with preserving her youthful looks, she employs Rapunzel as her own private botox clinic while taking steps to ensure that her little Patty Hearst never learns of her true royal heritage.
As befitting current social mores, this Rapunzel is not the proverbial damsel in distress, waiting patiently for a prince to come rescue her. Modern-day fairytale heroines simply must be more proactive. Though preternaturally naïve, she's impressively well-read for a child abductee, and she brims with curiosity about the outside world. On the eve of her 18th birthday, she desperately longs to experience it first-hand, despite the many dire (and entirely fabricated) warnings from "mother" about its inherent dangers.
Rapunzel's opportunity to escape comes when a wily bandit named Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi) attempts to hide out in her tower, only to be knocked out and taken captive by its plucky resident, who coerces him into acting as her bodyguard during an impromptu tour of society at large. This flip of the traditional script sets the stage for the kind of climactic clash of opposites that can only ever result in eternal love.
Lyricist Glenn Slater and Oscar-winning composer Alan Mencken, both Mouse House veterans, collaborated on the Tangled soundtrack, and while the film’s musical numbers aren’t likely to inspire a blockbuster Broadway musical (though I’d love to see how all that hair would fare on-stage), they partner nicely with the script’s buoyant comic tone, moving the narrative forward instead of distracting us from it, as musical numbers so often do. The story falters a bit in the third act -- especially during its disappointing climax, during which Rapunzel suddenly discovers that her hair possesses Lazarus-like abilities -- but not enough to bring down the film as a whole.
What impressed me most about Tangled was its visual aesthetic, which effectively marries the charm of the old-school hand-drawn style with CGI's unsurpassed ability to awe. (All sorts of innovations were required to properly render Rapunzel’s 70-foot mane, which shimmers and glows with a life of its own.) Wrapped together in a wondrous 3D package, it serves as a fitting farewell to a fine filmmaking tradition.
'Burlesque'
Approximately 10% of you are going to LOVE this movie.
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The term “burlesque,” for the uninitiated, refers to a specific brand of female striptease that incorporates flamboyant costumes, elaborate choreography, kitschy songs, and various other elements to which heterosexual men are largely indifferent. But it’s wildly popular in other circles -- so much so, in fact, that it has earned its very own film, titled, oddly enough, Burlesque.
Written and directed by music video veteran Steven Antin, Burlesque is fashioned loosely as a camp homage to the 2000 film Coyote Ugly. Stage and screen legend Cher, brought to life by an innovative blend of animatronics and CGI, stars as Tess, the brash, tough-as-nails proprietress of Hollywood's almost unbearably fabulous Burlesque Lounge. Despite the obvious popularity of its musical revue, the club is plagued by money problems, which makes it the target of acquisitive real estate developer Marcus Gerber (Eric Dane), a man whose name alone carries all sorts of ominous Teutonic implications. But Tess, determined diva that she is, refuses to sell. She's not about to let years of gross financial mismanagement kill her dream of providing a haven where scantily clad women can dance provocatively without fear of encountering men who’d like to sleep with them.
Potential salvation arrives in the luminous, top-heavy form of Iowa-bred Ali (Christina Aguilera), a vision of wide-eyed innocence and vaulting ambition in soft focus. Immediately upon entering the Lounge, she is struck by the sudden realization that her lifelong dream is to become a burlesque superstar. Unfortunately, Tess doesn’t initially recognize Ali’s potential, and the poor girl is forced to slum it as a cocktail waitress in the bar area, where she’s embraced by the club’s straightgay bartender Jack (Cam Gigandet), a southern transplant whose own showbiz dream involves making it as a songwriter. (In accordance with songwriter tradition, he takes pains to ensure that every inch of his chiseled frame is bronzed and waxed. Just like Bernie Taupin.) In her free time, Ali devotes herself to the study of burlesque, and when her opportunity arises, she seizes it without hesitation.
Burlesque is principally the Cher and Christina Show, and the film thrives when their respective talents are on display. (“Talents,” obviously, gaining a dual meaning in regards to Aguilera.) Surrounding them are a smattering of stock characters pursuing forgettable story arcs, the lone exception being the always excellent Stanley Tucci, adding a pinkish hue to his incomparable wit in the role of Sean, Tess’s long-suffering, boa-clad second-in-command. He and co-star Alan Cumming are two sides of the same sassy coin, but Cumming is little more than a bitchy bit player in Burlesque, poking his head into the frame on occasion to deliver a biting one-liner. Then again, that description could apply to any number of characters in the film.
It appears that Antin, true to his music-video pedigree, conceived of Burlesque with the song-and-dance pieces in mind first, then set about building a story around them. (The opposite is generally preferred.) The musical set pieces are lavish, sexy, and at times truly dazzling, especially when Aguilera takes the stage, but they do little to advance the film’s plot. Consequently, Burlesque’s running time swells to almost two hours to satisfy the demands of a story that, frankly, seem hardly worthy of such an effort.
'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1'
Though considerably less rousing and whimsical than previous 'Harry Potter' installments, this solemn prelude to the franchise finale is just as absorbing.
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Perhaps Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows should have been a trilogy. Splitting the sprawling finale to author J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard saga into three parts — as opposed to its chosen two-part incarnation — might have come across as shameless profiteering (admittedly, a not-uncommon practice in this town), but it wouldn’t have been without merit. At 759 pages, Rowling’s source novel is said to be a rather dense work, plot-wise; surely it could have easily warranted another installment?
I only say this because Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, though certainly a decent film, clearly strains from the effort required to fit the book’s proceedings into a two-act structure. While Part 2, slated to open approximately six months from now, is alotted the story's meaty parts — namely, the spectacular Battle of Hogwarts and its emotional denouement — Part 1 must bear the burden of setting the stage for the grand confrontation between the forces of Light and Dark magic and framing the predicament of its three protagonists, teen wizards Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), in suitably dire terms. And it's quite a heavy burden indeed.
As the film opens, the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), having assumed control over Hogwarts since the events of the preceding film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has wasted no time in initiating his reign of terror. As far as historical evil-dictator analogues are concerned, Voldemort appears partial to the blueprint laid by Stalin as opposed to that of his genocidal pact-pal, Hitler. Enemies of the Dark Lord's regime are prosecuted in dramatic show trials, presided over by the Grand Inquisitor, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), while muggles (non-magic folk) and half-bloods are denounced as "undesirables" and “mudbloods” in Soviet-style propaganda posters and forced to register with the authorities.
As the only viable threat to Voldemort’s dominion, Harry and his allies are hunted vigorously by Bellatrix LeStrange (Helena Bonham Carter), and her goon squad of Death Eaters. The Boy Who Lived, now fully grown and in more or less complete command of his powers, is still no match England's nasally scourge. Labeled "Undesirable No. 1" by the Gestapo-like Ministry of Magic, he's is forced to go on the lam, where he labors, along with Ron and Hermione, to solve the riddle of Voldemort’s immortality.
For those not well-versed in Rowling’s source material, the film’s opening act is a frustrating blur: After an all-too-brisk update on the bleak state of affairs in Hogwarts, we are hastily introduced (or re-introduced) to a dozen or so characters, the majority of whom are never seen again. A few even perish off-screen. Had we gotten a chance to get to know them, we might be able to mourn them as our heroes do; instead, we’re left racking our brains trying to recall who they were, and how they figured in the plot.
Rowling's flaws as a storyteller — the over-reliance on deus ex machina devices (in this case, we get both a doe ex machina and a Dobby ex machina), the ponderous downloads of information (not unlike those of that other uber-anticipated and somewhat overrated 2010 tentpole, Inception), the annoying ability of characters to simply teleport (or "disapparate") away from danger, etc. — are more evident in this film than in previous chapters. And rather than obscure these flaws, director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves, both franchise veterans, arguably amplify them.
What saves the film are Rowling's three greatest achievements: Harry, Ron, and Hermione, who, along with the actors who play them, have evolved beyond the material. The film's narrative gains its emotional footing during the heroic threesome's exile, ostensibly a series of camping trips — with tents and everything — during which they reflect on their journey together, the challenge that awaits them and the sacrifices it will require. Though they occasionally verge on tedious, these excursions into Gethsemane allow us precious quality time with these characters that we've grown to adore over the course of seven films, even if the plaintive air is spoiled a bit by some rather puzzling attempts at product placement. In their rush to flee the Dementors and Death Eaters, it seems that they at least took care to pack the latest in fall fashion:
'Unstoppable'
Denzel can stop a speeding train, but can he stop a frantic Tony Scott?
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If the railway thriller Unstoppable looks familiar, it’s only because its director, Tony Scott, and star, Denzel Washington, partnered just over a year ago on another railway thriller, The Taking of Pelham 123. In Unstoppable, the train is granted a bigger slice of the narrative pie than it received in Pelham, serving not only as the film’s principal setting but also its primary villain. Stocked with a payload of dangerous chemicals, Train 777 (that’s one more evil than 666!) hurtles, unmanned, towards a calamitous rendezvous with the helpless residents of Stanton, Pennsylvania. Surely an upgrade over a hammy John Travolta, no?
On whom can we depend to put a stop to this massive killing machine, this “missile the size of the Chrysler Building,” in the ominous words of Rosario Dawson’s station dispatcher? Not the entry-level clods (Ethan Suplee and T.J. Miller) whose ineptitude originally set the train on its fateful path. (In a chilling testament to the potential dangers posed by the obesity epidemic, a chunky Suplee runs to catch up with the coasting train in the hopes of triggering its emergency brake before it leaves the station, only to collapse in a wheezing heap, unsuccessful.) Certainly not their supervisor (Kevin Dunn), a middle-management goon more concerned with impressing his corporate superiors than ensuring proper rail safety. And most definitely not the parent company’s feckless, golf-playing (the nerve!) CEO, whose disaster-containment strategy is dictated purely by stock price.
No, sooner or later, the burden of heroism must fall on the capable shoulders of our man Denzel. As Frank Barnes, a resolutely competent locomotive engineer on a routine training assignment with a reluctant apprentice (Chris Pine, unshaven), he emerges as the only force capable of preventing the Train of Doom from reaching its grisly destination. Of course, in any train-related emergency such as the one depicted in Unstoppable, a litany of things must go wrong before the task of averting disaster becomes the sole responsibility of the engineer of another train. And screenwriter Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard), trooper that he is, takes care to cycle through every single one of them, lest we question the believability of such a scenario. Because believability is so important in films like this.
Denzel’s most formidable foe in Unstoppable, it turns out, is his own director. As an alleged “old-school” filmmaker, Tony Scott largely eschews the usage of CGI, but he embraces almost every other fashionable action-movie gimmick, occasionally to nauseating effect. When the camera isn’t jostling about or zooming in and out jarringly, it’s wheeling at breakneck speed across a dolly track; countless circling shots of key dialogue exchanges give the impression that we’re eavesdropping on these conversations from a helicopter. No static shots are allowed, and cuts are quick and relentless, giving us nary a moment to catch our breath or recover our equilibrium.
These are the tactics of an insecure director, one with startlingly little faith in his material or his performers. As Unstoppable nears it climax, we’re invested in the action not because of the incessant play-by-play of the TV reporters who’ve converged on the scene — a ploy mandated by Scott’s frantic style, which by this point has left the story teetering on incoherence — but because of our almost accidental bond with the film’s protagonists who, despite the director’s best efforts, have managed to make just enough of an imprint on our consciousness that we’d prefer they not perish in a fiery train wreck.
'Morning Glory'
Morning Glory doesn't reinvent the wheel, but takes it for a pleasant spin around town.
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Morning Glory, like its director Roger Michell’s most notable film, Notting Hill, doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but takes it for a pleasant spin around town. He trades the grey skies of London for the skyscrapers of Manhattan with a fun if formulaic romantic comedy that boasts an impressive but underused cast, including Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Jeff Goldblum.
Of course, the real star of the show is Becky Fuller, the behind-the-scenes boss of fictional network IBS’ (what a name) fledgling morning show Daybreak, played by America’s newest sweetheart Rachel McAdams. She gives Becky spunk, sexiness and a strong resolve to succeed in a business that isn’t kind to new recruits. Her task is simple to grasp but hard to execute: revive the show and boost its ratings. Had she been working with Matt Lauer or Diane Sawyer, the job would’ve been easy but the film would’ve missed out on the possibilities for screwball workplace comedy.
The heartiest laughs are provided by supporting characters like Ty Burell’s Paul McVee, who is more entertaining to watch in his ten minutes of screen time than the majority of the core cast throughout the film’s 102 minute run. Not every character is meant for comic relief, though, like Ford’s growling curmudgeon Mike Pomeroy, a hard-nosed, award-winning journalist and relic of the past in a world more interested in “fluff” over facts. Pomeroy is strong-armed by Becky into Daybreak co-hosting duties because of a clause in his contract, and he does everything he can to make her life a living hell. His reluctance to cooperate is eventually undermined as a result of a “mutual understanding” between the two, but it feels unauthentic as he betrays his own ideals for a barely developed friendship.
Even more phony is the virtually useless love angle between Becky and Adam Bennett (Patrick Wilson), a fellow producer at IBS who advises her not to hire Pomeroy based on his own negative experience with the seasoned commentator. You could remove the character from the film completely without affecting the end result. Unfortunately, the same can be said for Keaton’s co-host, Colleen Peck, whose arc mirrors Ford’s but who arrives at the finish line first. It’s a shame, really, because both are fine actors who could have done a lot more with characters with a bit more depth.
Its message about the sad state of American media aside, depth isn’t what Morning Glory is about. This is a cheery comedy with a few chuckles and plenty of charm. Sure, it’s silly, but it’s definitely not stupid and doesn’t get overly sentimental. The script, courtesy of The Devil Wears Prada scribe Aline Brosh McKenna, is sharp enough to entertain if you don’t think too hard about it. It may not be the most memorable movie you’ll see this winter, but it’ll surely bring a smile to your face.
'Due Date'
Downey and Galifianakis mine big laughs from a well-worn premise in this rollicking road-trip comedy.
Trailer| Photos| Movie Info| Showtimes & Tickets
In his new film Due Date, director Todd Phillips (Old School, The Hangover) stages a rather audacious cinematic experiment, placing two enormously talented actors, Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis, on a mostly deserted island, handing them an assortment of blunt and broken tools, and charging them with constructing a free-standing, fully-functioning Hollywood comedy.
To his credit, Phillips was at least considerate enough to supply his comic Crusoes with a detailed blueprint. An odd-couple/road trip movie hybrid, Due Date unapologetically mimics Planes, Trains and Automobiles, one of the John Hughes' rare “grown-up” comedies, in which Steve Martin starred as a straightlaced family man forced to travel cross-country with a gratingly affable slob, played by John Candy, in order to make it home for Thanksgiving. (Surely there have been other such films before and since, but Hughes’ work is the one Due Date most vividly recalls.)
The film’s script, co-written by Phillips and Adam Sztykiel, adds a handful of 21st-century twists to the formula: A baggage snafu while boarding an airplane leads Peter Highman (Downey), a type-A architect with a history of anger-management issues, into a confrontation with a Federal Air Marshal that subsequently lands him on Homeland Security’s no-fly list. Stranded without reliable transport, lacking the means by which to procure any (he left his wallet on the plane), and desperate to be reunited in L.A. with his pregnant wife (Michelle Monaghan) in time for her scheduled c-section, he reluctantly agrees to hitch a ride with the same tubby schmuck, Ethan (Galifianakis), who moments earlier was the catalyst of his security debacle.
The unlikely travel companions embark on a calamitous road trip from Atlanta to L.A., during which Ethan proves to be something of a disaster magnet, with Peter bearing the brunt of the damage that occurs. Their navigator, Phillips, lazily guides them through an uneven obstacle course of comic scenarios, some of which are embarrassingly predictable (Ethan stores his beloved father’s ashes in a coffee can, and they’re later accidentally used to make coffee!), all of which are designed to showcase Downey’s caustic wit and Galifianakis’ sublime daffiness.
Few actors today deliver choice insults better than Downey, and even fewer absorb them better than Galifianakis. They make for a truly marvelous collision of opposites, and their interplay is what elevates Due Date above its often puzzlingly flat material. (That, along with Galifianakis’ gift for physical comedy; no actor outside of the Jackass crew can better sell a collision with a car door.) The film's supporting cast, meanwhile, criminally underachieves. Conspicuous cameos from the likes of Danny McBride, Juliette Lewis, and Jamie Foxx are either unfunny, unnecessary, or both. On this road trip, they’re little more than baggage. Thankfully, Downey and Galifianakis are more than capable of shouldering the burden.
'RED'
An amusing action-movie romp, 'RED' features a stellar ensemble which more than makes up for its director's deficiencies.
Trailer| Photos| Movie Info| Showtimes & Tickets
RED, an entertaining if uneven action comedy directed by Robert Schwentke (The Time-Traveler's Wife) and based on a graphic novel by Warren Ellis, could be called Grumpy Old Spies, but that would be a tad inaccurate. (But damn if it isn't convenient!) The title is an acronym for Retired, Extremely Dangerous, a label applied in the film to former CIA agents Frank (Bruce Willis), Joe (Morgan Freeman), and Marvin (John Malkovich), and ex-MI6er Victoria (Helen Mirren), all of whom have officially retired from the espionage industry. Truth be told, only one of them, Marvin, appears particularly grumpy, and only because he was apparently fed massive doses of paranoia-inducing LSD by his employers back in the ‘60s. And involuntary brain-scrambling does have a tendency to breed bitterness.
Elders Joe and Victoria, for their part, are living out their golden years quite contentedly: he’s happy to spend his days ogling the female attendants at his nursing home, while she keeps busy with the occasional freelance assassination. Only Frank, the youngest member of their ranks, seems ill-at-ease with life after the Agency. Which is why he doesn’t look altogether perturbed when he discovers that he’s been turned into a target, framed for a bloody South American debacle that he'd helped clean up in the ‘80s. After calmly dispatching a dozen or so heavily-armed government goons sent to eliminate him, Frank sets about getting the gang back together and heading to D.C. to foil the conspiracy and clear his name. Along the way, he snatches up Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a chatty customer service rep/love interest whose life he inadvertently endangered when he revealed too much during one of their flirty phone conversations.
RED’s “badass old people” conceit isn’t entirely original, but with a cast this impressive it hardly matters. Parker, the lowest-billed member of the main ensemble, is the unsung hero of the film. Though her romantic subplot with Willis is never truly convincing, her brand of witty bewilderment is RED’s most endearing aspect, followed closely by the delightful presence of Malkovich, hitting his comic peak in the “crotchety crank” stage of his career. As a director, Schwentke’s action-movie sensibilities are a bit crude -- his favorite move is to simply crank up the volume and shower the screen with bullets -- but his comedic instincts are spot-on. And luckily for him, the foibles of RED’s punchy but unimaginative script, which too often goes from amusingly preposterous (Dame Helen Mirren with a machine gun!) to stupidly preposterous (its convoluted plot involves a war criminal-turned-Vice President and his defense-contractor puppetmaster), are redeemed by its venerable cast.
Shoah (NR)
Released: 12/10/2010
Documentary about the survivers of the Shoah (annihilation) of the Jews during World War II.
Movie Info:: http://www.hollywood.com/movie/Shoah/176207
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=176207
The Fighter (R)
Released: 12/10/2010
Life story of boxer "Irish" Mickey Ward and his trainer brother Dick Eklund, chronicling the brothers' early days on the rough streets of Lowell, Massachusetts through Eklund's battle with drugs and Ward's eventual world championship in London.
Movie Info:: http://www.hollywood.com/movie/The_Fighter/3464821
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=3464821
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (PG)
Released: 12/10/2010
Lucy and Edmund Pevensie return to Narnia with their cousin Eustace where they meet up with Prince Caspian for a trip across the sea aboard the royal ship The Dawn Treader.
Movie Info ::http://www.hollywood.com/movie/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia_The_Voyage_of_the_Dawn_Treader/4286976
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=4286976
The Tempest (PG-13)
Released: 12/10/2010
A cross-gendered version of the play by William Shakespeare involving forces of feminine magic, nature and mysticism.
Movie Info ::http://www.hollywood.com/movie/The_Tempest/5344450
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=5344450
The Company Men
Released: 12/10/2010
Ben Affleck stars as a businessman whose life is thrown into ruin when he's affected by company layoffs and has to work at his brother-in-law's (Kevin Costner) construction site in this drama by ER co-creator John Wells. Tommy Lee Jones co-stars in the Paula Weinstein-produced production.
~ Jeremy Wheeler, All Movie Guide
Movie Info ::http://www.hollywood.com/movie/The_Company_Men/6380843
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=6380843
And Everything Is Going Fine (NR)
Released: 12/10/2010
While Spaulding Gray was a gifted actor who gave fine performances in the films True Stories, The Killing Fields and King Of The Hill, he was at his best playing himself, without a supporting cast.
Movie Infohttp://www.hollywood.com/movie/And_Everything_Is_Going_Fine/6858334
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=6858334
Hemingway's Garden of Eden (R)
Released: 12/10/2010
Penned between 1946 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway's novel The Garden of Eden remained incomplete at the time of its author's suicide, but finally appeared in 1986, as the second posthumously-published Hemingway novel following the 1970 Islands in the Stream.
Movie Info:: http://www.hollywood.com/movie/Hemingways_Garden_of_Eden/7728631
Showtimes and Tickets::http://www.hollywood.com/movies/movie_showtimes.aspx?id=7728631
comments on these will be highly aqppreciated...thank you
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