Category: Reviews

Contraband

Why is everyone in “Contraband” a smuggler, a screw-up, an idiot or all three? Better yet, why do these people from New Orleans talk with Boston accents?

“Contraband” is a thickheaded heist thriller with a laborious plot and a whole lot of contrived violence against women and children to make up for it.

Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is the best in the biz, and although he’s out of the game, he’s doing “one last job” (sigh) to pay back his kid brother-in-law’s debt after a drug run gone bad.

These guys are in love with the idea of smuggling. They call Chris the “Lennon and McCartney” of smugglers. They discuss their work with their wives, family and friends. They walk right into danger and plot an elaborate heist just because they can, and then they act surprised when things go horribly wrong.

I grew irritated at how many times Chris walked right up to his brother-in-law’s attacker, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), and then could think of nothing better than to run another job just to pay him his money.

Although, it was not as irritating as Briggs’s voice, an accent so thick and fake (“Say g’bye ta ya wiiife!”) his presence as a villain is laughable.

What’s more, Wahlberg’s tough, bad guy turned straight is getting weary. It’s a role he’s played so many times he better be getting a tax write-off.

Their dull performances do nothing to energize this ugly film shot in a cliché documentary style.

It’s often so slow and without vitality it has to concoct elaborate set pieces like a boat threatening to crash into a pier or a van dangling out of a high flying shipping container, none of which chalk up points for the film as intelligent.

Please let “Contraband” be the one last time Wahlberg does one last job.

2 stars

Carnage

When Alan Cowan’s cell phone vibrates, everything stops, or at least on the surface. Eyes still twitch and appendages fidget, and Alan doesn’t forget whose company he’s in. We wouldn’t want to be rude.

Yet the never ending, subtle anxieties nagging us in social situations, like wanting to drop Alan’s cell phone in a flower pot, make Roman Polanski’s “Carnage” so devilishly enticing. “Carnage” makes the compulsion to be rude immensely enjoyable.

Polanski’s 79-minute nugget of a film is based on Yasmina Reza’s play (she co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski) “Le Dieu du carnage.” It was “God of Carnage” on Broadway while I was in New York, and it starred James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. I didn’t get to see that version, so I was thrilled when I heard it was being made into a movie with a cast I admire even more.

Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play two married couples discussing what to do following Winslet and Waltz’s son attacking Foster and Reilly’s son with a stick. It’s a dark and dryly funny character study of society, civility and judgmental human nature in Western culture.

The families are on edge from the beginning, choosing their words carefully but making their honesty heard.

Michael and Penelope Longstreet (Reilly and Foster) are parents who know best; they have a belief for everything and a blind right to exact justice and understanding for their children. Alan and Nancy Cowan (Waltz and Winslet) are wealthy, busy and intelligent; they disagree but hold their tongues and condescend in private.

This is true at least for awhile, and although there’s a clear sense of how compelling this one-room drama could be on stage, Polanski’s camera show us the finer nuances in these characters’ social awkwardness. He carefully frames each at a variety of lengths and paired with a different partner, so what remains interesting is all that is not being said, the wonderful acting being done when they are not the center of attention and how the screenplay remains nimble and complex to allow changing allegiances.

If in its brief running time “Carnage” devolves to childish bickering too quickly, it’s a forgivable sin because of its naturalism. Perhaps unlike “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, to which it is often compared, “Carnage” is never strictly goofy or morose and never heavy or frivolous. It doesn’t monologue profound social philosophies and it doesn’t take sides.

“Carnage” is a balanced and delicate character drama that never stops spinning its tiny gears, even if a phone call interrupts it.

3 ½ stars

Review: Certified Copy

“Certified Copy” is a film that can hardly be spoiled by discussion. It demands to be seen and further discussed as soon as it completes casting its spell on you.

The painting “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugene Delacroix rests on the wall in the Louvre. When I visited there, I saw it and immediately thought of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.”

The symbolic meaning of the song associated with the fake image on the Coldplay album cover meant more to me than the symbolism behind the real thing. In fact I admired both equally.

The academic argument that serves as the initial basis of “Certified Copy” is that we often admire the copy of a work of art because in truth, all art is really just a representation of something.

But the miracle of Abbas Kiarostami’s film is in the seamlessly cinematic way he exposes the differences between what we think is real and what we think must be fake by staging stark and intertwining romances.

“Certified Copy” is a film that can hardly be spoiled by discussion. It demands to be seen and further discussed as soon as it completes casting its spell on you. Continue reading “Review: Certified Copy”

Friends with Benefits

The surprisingly clever and enjoyable “Friends with Benefits” was hampered this year by coming out five months after the much worse reviewed “No Strings Attached.” Who really wanted to see another lame casual sex movie with the OTHER girl from “Black Swan?”

Believe it or not, Mila Kunis would here give Natalie Portman a run for her money as America’s sweetheart. Her character Jamie is not just quick witted and tough but seems free of the hang-ups of the inherently cute and mildly flawed leading lady of most romantic comedies.

There’s a scene early on where Kunis meets her equally charming costar Justin Timberlake, and he catches her walking on the baggage carousel at the airport. What I like is that she doesn’t double take or make an awkward, embarrassed face and rather seems to shrug it off as a kind of funny circumstance.

The whole film is self aware in that way. It’s the kind that just rips on other rom-coms and how silly they all are and winks at the camera with how self-aware it is before totally not innovating in the third act. Oh well, what can you do?

The answer of course is to be silly about it. Kunis and Timberlake have magnificent chemistry and don’t seem to take a minute of their somewhat clichéd screenplay too seriously. They show such stability and comfort in their friendly relationship that they stave off the movie’s urge to rush into the sappy will they/won’t they ending.

Both Kunis and Timberlake are sexy, funny and never intentionally embarrass themselves for a dumb laugh. They rattle off dialogue and the cross cutting can be a headache, but rather than make obscure pop culture references at every turn they seem to have down the inside jokes of a naturally compatible pair of friends.

“Friends with Benefits” is also the sort of movie that makes you blurt out, “What the hell is Woody Harrelson doing in this movie?” I also exclaimed at the appearance of Nolan Gould from “Modern Family,” but the real standout is the completely irreverent Patricia Clarkson. This disturbingly sex driven mother could’ve been a nightmare in another actress’s hands.

Now you’re asking, “So Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are actually funny and likeable AND they take their clothes off?” Yes, who knew?

3 ½ stars

Margin Call

The Occupy Wall Street Protestors should watch “Margin Call.”

In fact, let the whole 99 percent watch it, as this intricate and cerebral character drama is not only an engaging dramatization of the start of the 2008 credit crisis but is also the finest 21st Century movie of the year.

It is possibly the finest fictional film yet made about the current financial crisis, and it is so because “Margin Call” makes out to humanize the 1 percenters that got us into this mess. It does not view these people as evil nor as idiotic, but as flawed, misguided and ultimately trapped people struggling like the rest of us.

As we attain pity for their sins, it has the power to educate us and immerse us in a realistic re-imagining of how this mess started.

The film focuses on a fictional investment-banking firm in a 24-hour period just as the markets began to collapse. Not afraid to spew jargon, “Margin Call” explains how the volatile derivative formulas that virtually no one in the firm can actually understand and yet governed the whole market ideology, proved to be completely wrong. It left the banks with bad mortgages and investments that had been bundled together and bought and sold globally to create a big housing and market bubble. Rather than simply tank and instantly bankrupt the entire company to ensue mass havoc, the banks disposed of all their bad investments in a fire sale, ruining everyone else in the process. Sorry to spoil that ending.

“Margin Call” views this action as a last ditch effort of these powerful people who now realize they have made a fatal mistake just to stay alive, even if it means compromising moral integrity and rational future business plans. And the film’s moral ambiguity coupled with its awareness of the inevitable fate in the future makes the film wonderfully compelling and poignant.

This is a strict dramatization, but one would like to think these ideas actually bounced around boardrooms. There are sinister ideas, but also feelings of remorse, panic and concern that make this screenplay by first time director and writer J.C. Chandor convincingly multi-dimensional.

What’s fascinating about “Margin Call” is how theatrical it is. You will not see graphs or numbers of any kind watching this film. At times the execs seem to understand as little as you do about the financial mumbo jumbo.

And everything about the film is calmly and carefully constructed drama befitting a play. Millions are being lost in seconds, and the movie does not devolve into mass panic and melodrama of bulls, bears, bells and whistles.

“Margin Call’s” star and producer Zachary Quinto is far from the young, hyper business student stock broker rattling off words at a mile a minute. He’s a cool and collected key in a marvelous, weakness free cast.

Jeremy Irons as the firm’s CEO is as commanding as he’s been on screen in years. Kevin Spacey is in full “Glengarry Glen Ross” mode. Simon Baker is a riveting Wall Street mogul that would give Gordon Gekko a run for his money and yet never feels too similar to that now cliché stereotype. Paul Bettany has two of the most memorable and poignant monologues together in one film this year. And Stanley Tucci is the most relatable of all as a manager who has just been laid off in a scene reminiscent of “Up in the Air.”

“Margin Call” is well aware of the now bleak economic future we live in, but in that way it is more relevant than ever. It provides the rationality that we have always and will always prosper and ruin ourselves in an endless cycle of capitalism.

As Kevin Spacey’s character does as the movie closes, the only thing left for us to do when it comes to expecting change in the market is to start digging our own graves.

4 stars

 

The Artist

“The Artist” is a whimsical, crowd pleasing film that succeeds on its style and love of the movies, not its story, but for a modern silent film, that’s wonderful.

I should be thrilled “The Artist” is such a winning, fun crowd pleaser of a movie, despite being a silent, foreign film. This movie should be box office poison, and yet it’s whimsical and well made, despite an ultimately flimsy and familiar plot that makes it overrated as a Best Picture frontrunner. Continue reading “The Artist”

War Horse

In “War Horse” Steven Spielberg has made a big, weepy, melodramatic, old-fashioned war epic that gave me giant, black, soppy horse eyes as I watched it.

Time and again its expansive locales, swimmingly patriotic John Williams score, folksy character actors, cloying tearjerker plot developments and dopey comic relief moments typically involving livestock recall how John Ford would’ve done it much better in a number of his movies, and Spielberg knows it.

Perhaps more so than “Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Super 8” or even “The Artist,” “War Horse” is a throwback to Classical Hollywood in so many ways that from a modern lens the film just feels so phony and unrealistic but oh so right. Continue reading “War Horse”

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

The action set pieces in “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” are so cartoonish it’s no surprise Brad Bird of “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” fame made it his live action debut.

It is the rare fourth movie capable of revitalizing a franchise by cutting down on the exposition, hyper stylization and melodrama of each installment and delivering wholesome action movie adrenaline. Continue reading “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”

My Week With Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe was an impossibly difficult actress to work with because she seemed so incompetent and insecure at every turn. But when she got it right, she made magic happen.

“My Week With Marilyn” makes a point of this numerous times. It adores the blonde bombshell so much that it drills her greatness into your head. And yet, Michelle Williams is so effervescent and captivating by rejuvenating Monroe’s presence that she makes lightning strike twice. Continue reading “My Week With Marilyn”

Weekend

Glen is an artist doing an audio profile on the other men he’s slept with. It’s not about sex, he explains, but a project on identity and uncertainty with personal transparency. “Straight people won’t come because it’s not their world.” This film on the other hand most certainly is.

“Weekend” is the most honest, intelligent and heartwarming romance of the year. It’s the delicate, touching story of two gay men who meet, have sex, talk and fall in love in one weekend.

The film by Andrew Haigh has been called the gay “Before Sunset” with its open book screenplay and two affectionate, stirring individuals discovering themselves. And while its homosexuality is its defining characteristic, this is a universal love story and bond between a couple whose insecurities, tensions, emotions and thoughts naturally blossom. Continue reading “Weekend”