Networks and assassins
Movies seen late winter 2010.
Originally written: December 2010
Red
The Town
The Social Network
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Wild Target
Eat Pray Love
Date Night
Hot Tub Time Machine
The Hangover
She's Out of My League
Very frequently the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences voters get it wrong. From The Greatest Show on Earth to Titanic, they have demonstrated a flawed judgment. How else to do explain the inexplicable overlooking of Citizen Kane, Heat and, most recently, The Dark Knight? Fortunately, the academy governors occasionally provide balance with Lifetime Achievement Awards, as they did in the case of the best actor never to win a Best Actor Oscar, Peter O'Toole. Last year they made up for such oversights by honoring Gordon Willis (the premier cinematographer of his time), Lauren Bacall and Roger Corman. This year they have finally acknowledged the contribution of Eli Wallach, who at 95 continues to perform at the highest level in films. Never nominated for an Oscar despite great performances in films like The Magnificent Seven, How to Steal a Million, Nuts and, most recently, The Holiday (which he stole from Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet), Wallach deserves recognition for his work, as well as his longevity (and the longevity of his marriage to Anne Jackson, whom he married in 1948). The most recent performance I recall was a particularly good, and poignant, one as the aged, formerly blacklisted writer in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. By now he knows that he'll never be sent back to Tars and Spars.
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Vintage reds age well
There must be two version of Red, one in the US and a different one in Australia. That's one explanation for what is a strange dichotomy: a movie that was pretty universally panned in the States has been well-reviewed here. Another theory is that the Yanks just got it wrong. Perhaps the movie was just too subtle for them. Hard to believe though. Based on a graphic novel, which has been altered somewhat I understand, it is one of a number of recent old fogey action movies gracing the cinema. And probably the best. It demonstrates again that Bruce Willis is one of the best action stars, especially when his role has a less than serious tone, and he is given decent sardonic dialog. Here he is Frank, a Retired Extremely Dangerous (RED) CIA agent living in suburban Cleveland, flirting with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a telephone worker at his retirement fund, until assassins come after him and, in a truly over the top scene, destroy his house. Soon enough he's kidnapped Sarah and is rendezvousing with former colleagues Morgan Freeman, a planner in an old age home, and John Malkovich, a paranoid explosives expert hiding in the bayous, and the CIA has assigned Eomer to kill him. Sarah, infatuated with spy potboilers, moves quickly from antipathy to active support for the old fellows, who are soon taking the offensive to find out why the company wants them liquidated. Added to the mix are Helen Mirren, another old mate, an elegant hit man, and Brian Cox, as a former Soviet adversary. Like Salt, the story itself doesn't always make a lot of sense but the action keeps coming. When you add Richard Dreyfuss, Rebecca Pidgeon and Julia McMahon to the mix, you get a stew that's pretty tasty, provided you are happy to park your quibbles at the door, and you enjoy your thrillers liberally spiced with humor and, in Malkovich's case, broad comedy. Willis is undoubtedly the star, but Parker and Malkovich match him most of the way. Mirren is of course in a class of her own, although the script gives her little to do. It was also good to see Pidgeon, previously a member of David Mamet's ensemble, in a key role as the calculating CIA controller. Red is not perfect but it keeps its logic together right to the end and resolves its plot without the necessity of an overly bloody shoot-out - and Sylvester Stallone is nowhere to be found. Enjoyable.
Affleck takes the heat
The Town demonstrates that Ben Affleck is a lot better actor in a movie when he co-writes and/or directs. Another film set in the suburbs of Boston where crime is a way of life, the movie is a very good one. My enjoyment of it was lessened by its apparent derivative nature: perhaps unfairly I can only see it as a slightly less successful version of Heat. When you consider the elements, it seems like a clone: most obviously it is a cops and robbers film in which there are three featured heists; the film is built around a smart crew outsmarting the cops in the way they pull off the robberies, until each is given away by an informer. This leads to surveillance by an equally smart group of cops, but having the surveillance slipped by an even smarter crew. There is an external planner who provides the crew with the gen they need, an innocent woman who becomes involved with the crew's leader, who falls in love, altering his behavior (here more so than in Heat). Partway through the movie there is a direct confrontation between the lead cop and the crew leader and the climax is a huge shoot out between the cops and the robbers, leaving the leader as the sole uninjured survivor. In the anti-climax of both movies, a sign to ward off the lover is used by a woman who is being used by the cops to bag a robber. The differences are equally interesting: Affleck is not yet the director that Michael Mann is, although this movie indicates that he has the talent and skill to be an excellent director; Ben Affleck and John Hamm are not Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, so the confrontation doesn't carry quite the same weight and, without going into spoilers, there is a decidedly different ending. In fact The Town is something more than just a clone of Heat, even though the coincidences kept bothering me. As I said it is a pretty good heist movie, although the now traditional reliance on the shoot out to resolve the plot difficulties in the third act is as annoying here as it is in similar contemporary film. Of the actors, Rebecca Hall is very good as the girl and Jeremy Renner is frighteningly good as Affleck's offsider. John Hamm, graduating from Mad Men is effective as the head cop. I enjoyed the noir overtones of The Town and hope that Affleck moves more towards making his own movies.
Full picture on Facebook
Aaron Sorkin has never seemed to be a real fan of the internet. Episodes of The West Wing, particularly the "lemonlyman" incident, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, show some inherent animus. That he has written the script of a new film about the founding of a major aspect of the modern web, The Social Network, does not bode well for a balanced coverage. Despite these assumptions the film turns out to be a fascinating examination of how web developments (perhaps any innovation) become a part of the landscape and how the obsessive nerd deals with those around him. In this case the central geek is Mark Zuckerberg, at the time a student at Harvard. While the film is largely a chronological tale of Zuckerberg's journey from disappointed suitor playing a juvenile prank on the women of Harvard, a prank that crashes the uni's computer network, it is framed by extracts from depositions in two law suits brought against him: one by his initial business partner, Eduardo Savarin, and the other by the Winklevoss twins and their partner Divya Narendra. After Zuckerberg's escapade with the Facemash prank, the twins ask him to help them develop a website for Harvard students that will create a sort of online social network. The idea inspires the programmer, who moves to a much more encompassing idea, but one with a germ from the original plan. Eduardo underwrites the costs. At the depositions, and in the narrative, Zuckerberg's largely anti-social nature is revealed and the irony that one who cannot establish a meaningful social relationship becomes the founder of the primary online social network is reinforced on a number of occasions. As Zuckerberg's friends' network expands to more universities, the twins try to stop him, and Eduardo tries to find some way to monetise the program. What really lifts the film a notch is the entrance of Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, who becomes a key adviser to Zuckerberg, alienating Eduardo. As you would expect from a Sorkin script, the film is very dialog based. Director David Fincher has done an excellent job in corralling this dialog, and the intercut scenes of the depositions and the development of Facebook, as the site comes to be called, combine into a coherent story that both makes sense and gives us an insight into the characters. The extent to which the characters in any way reflect their real-world analogs is an open question (Zuckerberg says they don't) but this is at best a semi-non-fiction, obviously dramatised, and with some non-canonical characters (mostly the women) added. But it is a fascinating film nonetheless. There are a number of outstanding performances, including Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, but the one who steals the honors is Justin Timberlake, whose portrayal of Sean Parker hits all the right notes and is rightly likely to see him award nominated. There is also talk of other awards for this film, including for its script, direction and production. Certainly it's good enough for such nominations, but it is nowhere near as good a movie as Inception, and I hope that a film about a nerd, which is good and serious in an Oscar-worthy way, does not displace in people's minds a movie for nerds that pushed the outside of the creative envelope in a way that this more traditional narrative never tries.
Dark days at Hogwarts
The first half of the last episode of the Harry Potter saga is now upon us and it says something about how successful the series has been thus far that, despite it being a good film in its own right, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is a tad disappointing. While the film is somewhat loyal to the plot of the book, its omissions and emendations don't add anything to the story and, if anything, make it hard for anyone who hasn't read the book to understand. The film concentrates, as does the book, on the adventures of the main three characters as they try to come to grips with the quest Dumbledore has set Harry to find and destroy the Horcruxes. Because Krum doesn't appear at the wedding, and because Harry's nightmares are somewhat truncated, the material about the Hallows and their connection to the rest of the tale is somewhat rudely interpolated when the three meet with Xenophilus Lovegood. This too somewhat stultifies the narrative flow. But these concerns are not unique to the film; they arise from the film being loyal to the structure of the book. The real problem I had with the last book was with the first half of it, when Harry, Hermione and Ron spend a lot of time sitting around Grimauld Place, or in the countryside, talking about what they are going to do, and how they are going to find the Horcruxes, but not doing much about achieving their goal. The book really takes off after their escape from the Malfoy mansion, and is fairly non-stop after that. But all of that - and the finding of the last four Horcruxes and of the identification of the Deathly Hallows - is going to be in the second film, leaving this film as establishing the scene with little to compensate the viewer. As a result director David Yates has substituted a number of non-canonical chase scenes: the escape from Privet Lane (where the Dursleys are the first of a plethora of characters given very short rations in the film) becomes a pseudo-car-chase; and the attempted escape from the Snatchers in the woods uses hand-held camera techniques that seem completely out of place within the usual cinematic confines of the Potter series. Still, this is in essence a bridging film that focuses on Harry and his chief allies, rather than on the large number of luvvies that form the supporting cast (to which Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans are added this time), and what it demonstrates is that Emma Watson has to carry (and is able to carry) the bulk of the dramatic heavy-lifting. This is not to denigrate Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint (well only a bit), it is just that her character seems to have the bulk of the dramatic action on her shoulders. As noted earlier, the background characters come and go, without enough to do, except for Helena Bonham Carter, who shows how the art of coarse acting is not dead, and Dobby the house elf. Without edging into spoilers, I'm afraid that the climactic scenes in this film reminded me of Dorothy Parker's comment in her Constant Reader column: "It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up." The attempt to pull the heartstrings derogated from the film that hadn't been up to snuff to begin with. It's not a bad film, the first part of the climax of the Potter films, but it suffers from the producers' decision, made I suppose on economic grounds, to divide the book into two parts. I am hopeful of better things in the sequel.
Nighy is the Victor
Bill Nighy may be the quirkiest actor in films. His arthritic condition, which cripples the use of his ring and little finger on each hand, would you think see him absent from action movie that require their lead to shoot guns and drive fast cars. Wild Target proves that theory wrong. Calling it "an action movie" might be a slight exaggeration - perhaps a thinker's action movie in which the action is intermittent. Nighy is Victor, an emotionless hit man, in the family business, who lives alone, now his mother has been moved into assisted living. His target is Rose (Emily Blunt), a thief who has ripped off the wrong gangster. Rather than kill her, Victor becomes her protector, and also enlists the support of street kid Tony (Rupert Grint, trying to leave Ron Weasley behind). The addition of a very different Martin Freeman, as Hector, Victor's smarmy rival, and Eileen Atkins as Victor's dotty mom, provide other dimensions, so that there is something more going on than the internal adjustments of the lead trio. As the runaway trio try to hide, Hector is on their trail, at the behest of gangster, Rupert Everett, who may be playing his first ever straight role - and is not that good. Gregor Fisher, who was Nighy's fat manager in Love Actually, is another comedy element as Everett's incompetent muscle. As you might imagine, the end result is, while entertaining enough, never quite sure what it wants to be. The original, French, material, which stressed the farcical nature of the killer-thief relationship, suffers in being adjusted to the personas of the lead characters. Freeman and Atkins carry the broad comedy; Grint is running hard just trying to keep up - and looks it; Blunt, who is emerging as a good, if subtle, comedy actor, as she showed in The Devil Wears Prada, keeps Rose believable. Which leaves Bill Nighy, whose Victor is a complex and interesting creation. Yes Minister co-creator Jonathan Lynn directs and that may in the end be the major problem: his films (Nuns on the Run, My Cousin Vinny and The Whole Nine Yards, for example) have never quite made it. Good but no cigar. Wild Target, despite the presence of a sublimely perfect Nighy, is good but it could have been better.
A trip too far
Glee creator Ryan Murphy has shown through that show that he is not afraid of the outre and is not risk-averse. Yet the problem with his rom-com Eat Pray Love is that it is far too conservative and never takes the risks it needs to in order to succeed. Based on a best-selling novel, and built around Julia Roberts, the episodic movie should be a lot better than it has ended up. Roberts is Liz, a married travel writer but unhappy; she has an affair with a smart and sexy younger man but seems no happier; and she spends her savings to buy herself out of the marriage. Then she comes up with a run away plan: she'll spend a year away, eating in Rome, on religious retreat in India, and with a healer in Bali. The three visits are cunningly replicated in the film's title. Julia eats a lot in Rome, in cooperation with a Swedish tourist and bunch of locals. Her sheer exuberant enjoyment here is contrasted with the struggle involved in coming to terms with the conditions in an ashram in India, and the discipline she is asked to undergo. Here she is assisted by "Richard from Texas" (the increasingly reliable Richard Jenkins giving the outstanding performance in the movie), whose own adjustments help her to come to terms with herself. The Bali section is where the true romance develops and where Liz comes to know herself - integrating the Dionysian (Rome) with the Apollonian (India) to form a new synthesis. The catalyst is Javier Bardem, rather than the healer or any other of the locals. Much of the last section is a little too predictable. From Ryan Murphy something more imaginative might have been anticipated. My disappointment with the movie arises from the bland and overlong introductory sections and the bland and predictable final segment in Bali. In between the movie is a lot more acceptable and a lot less traditional. Eat Pray might have been a good movie.
Seen on video
A plane trip to Hong Kong was an ideal opportunity to catch up on all the comedies I hadn't seen at the cinema. First cab off the rank was Date Night, a comedy using the television-honed talent of Steve Carell and Tina Fey. They are the Fosters, a suburban couple on the edge of losing their mojo who need a night to themselves on the town. Heading to a posh eatery, and finding themselves without a table, they impersonate the Tripplehorns, who haven't turned up to take their booking. Turns out that the Tripplehorns are in tsuris with the local mob and a couple of enforcers, who turn out to be crooked cops, are on the case to recover money owed to a crime boss. The Fosters are soon on the run through the city and the putative date night turns into a run for your life, as the Fosters try to find the Tripplehorns and square things with the mob before the bad cops do for them. Fey and Carell are very good in the lead roles, keeping the tone just right by not playing for laughs but letting the laughs emerge from the situation. In this they are helped by some good support performances, especially from Marky Mark, who plays a shirtless security expert to whom Claire Foster had once tried to sell suburban real estate. The actors help but the script is well-written by John Klausner, who's mainly written for animation previously, and Shawn Levy, the man behind the Night at the Museum franchise, directs here with a little more subtlety than you would expect from his c.v. This is good entertainment, not stomach-wrenching funny but amusing enough to keep you interested all the way through.
Dichotomies galore abound in considering whether to even contemplate Hot Tub Time Machine, which is the title of the latest film from John Cusack and his friends. The title comes perilously close to the ridiculous but, on the other hand, the presence of Cusack, particularly when a producer or writer, like say High Fidelity or Grosse Point Blank, is usually a sign of intelligence in a film. There's very little intelligence in this film, but it doesn't pretend to have much: rather it seeks to combine broad comedy with some nostalgia and a fair smattering of time travel paradox to create an interesting confection. Three old pals, and a twenty-something nephew visit a hotel in the snowfields where the three stayed a couple of decades back and, after some light intro, the four are transported back to that exact time and place. Their more mature selves get a chance to relive some pivotal events. Cusack is, as you would expect, good, providing the anchor for the movie. The humor is largely the responsibility of Rob Corddry, an alumnus of The Daily Show. He steals the movie and provides one of the great comic, gross-out performances. The rest keep up. The revelations are not that surprising and the anti-climax does not bear scrutiny in terms of the sophistication of time travel paradoxes these days. But the ride is pretty good - if you are not permanently alienated by the title.
The Hangover came with a reputation attached: it was a sleeper hit in 2009 and attracted some of the more laudatory reviews from that year. "Funny" was often used; "hilarious" even more often. You dread seeing movies like that because they rarely live up to their word of mouth - particularly when much of that word in USian. In this case, the disappointment never eventuated: The Hangover is just plain funny and has perhaps the best breakthrough comedic part since Animal House. The McGuffin is simple: four guys go to Vegas for a bachelor party; the next morning three wake up, with hangover and no memory of the end of the night, plus a baby, a tiger, a missing tooth, a chicken, a police car, and no groom. The film is about the search for the missing groom so that they can get him home for his wedding. Bradley Cooper is the best friend, as close to a straight man as there is in the movie. He is assisted by Ed Helms as the world's most hen-pecked dentist and Zack Galifianakis as the bride's brother, a man-child foisted on the party. He is hilarious, and reminded me of John Belushi's Blutarsky, both because of the craziness of his physical comedy and because he refuses to admit the logic of the real world. The plot elements, including a Chinese gangster, a hooker with a heart of gold and a retired boxer, are important in keeping this episodic adventure hurtling towards an ending that is perhaps the only predictable element of the plot. Given the script is by the guys responsible for The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and the director has graduated from second-rate comedies like Road Trip, the success of The Hangover is wholly unexpected.
A similar sentiment about She's Out of My League would be apposite. The film looks like it is centered on a group of man-children straight out of the Apatow school. The male lead, Kirk (Jay Baruchel), is thin and goopy looking, working in dead-end job where he and his mates try to have fun, and mocked by his family, and by his ex, who has adopted his family. Into his life through a meet-cute comes a "10", Molly (Alice Eve), who sees the sweet man inside the unprepossessing shell. He cannot believe his luck, his mates are gob-smacked (it is accepted wisdom that he is a 5 and she is 10, and all things being equal a jump of two is the maximum allowed), and her BFF is incredulous. There are a series of fairly predictable scenes (and some like Molly's first meeting with Kirk's grotesque family that defy expectations) that lead to the couple falling apart, before the inevitable reconciliation. The thing about this first-time feature from director Jim Field Smith is that it is sweet. Unlike most of the Apatow-clones the film doesn't degrade women and completely infantalise men. For that, and for the two leads, I give it a tick.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]