Tag: Bruce Willis

CIFF Review: Lay the Favorite

I still don’t know what the title “Lay the Favorite” means. It’s a term used by bookies and gamblers to bet against the odds, but it doesn’t make any sense. It’s empty fast-talking, it’s not memorable and it’s not funny. I keep thinking the movie is called “Pay it Forward” or something because everything about this movie is generic, forgettable and tepid.

It’s a disappointing, personality-less comedy from the otherwise interesting Stephen Frears and this dynamic cast. Rebecca Hall, who is usually womanly and relatable, here plays Beth, an air-headed stripper from Tallahassee with ambitions to be a cocktail waitress in Vegas. Her talents include twirling her hair, being chipper and wide-eyed and wearing Daisy Dukes, but in an instant she lands a folksy and wise best friend with a Southern accent and a job at Dink Inc.

The company is called Dink Inc. because Dink sounds like dick and it allows the movie to repeatedly say Dink Inc. The owner of Dink Inc. is of course Dink (Bruce Willis), a professional gambler who briefly explains the ropes to Beth and offers her $20 an hour.

The movie is about always being trustworthy in an untrustworthy business, and so she is. Willis acts sunny around her and she falls in love with him as a father figure, but she’s fired when Dink’s wife Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones) gets jealous.

Beth goes to New York with a boy toy (Joshua Jackson) she met hours earlier, makes it big with another bookie (Vince Vaughn), gets into some trouble and later lives happily ever after.

It’s a movie without stakes, which is bad for a movie about gambling. There’s no chemistry, nothing interesting about these characters, no reason to care for them and nothing funny about their dialogue. The Vegas gamblers all have this dopey mobster mentality and thick accent, as if talking fast and tough makes it so.

“Lay the Favorite” is an empty, lightweight film that could’ve come from anyone. What makes me so disappointed by it was that it was the secret screening at the Chicago International Film Festival. Anticipating “Lincoln,” “Life of Pi,” “Les Miserables” or even just “Skyfall,” I can’t even express how much of a let down this was.

2 stars

Looper

“Looper” is a polished action sci-fi about time travel with enough stylish coolness, emotional depth and narrative elegance to be an instant classic.

Most time travel films fall flat because the rules of the sci-fi are so dense that they collapse under the weight of their own paradoxes. Rian Johnson’s (“Brick”) film makes the characters, their story and their psychology the most important parts, allowing the film’s rules to become an integral part of a well-oiled machine.

In the future, when the mob needs to dispose of a body, they use time travel to cover their tracks, sending a victim back in time to be murdered where the body can’t be traced. The hit men responsible for these killings are Loopers, people on a contract with the mob until a set time when that person is sent back in time to be killed by their past selves, thus closing the loop of responsibility.

The youngest Looper in 2046 Kansas is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and he discovers that a new mob boss in the future is terminating all the Looper contracts. When his future self (Bruce Willis) comes back in time to be killed, he hesitates, and Future Joe escapes, launching him on a mission to kill the mob boss responsible for killing his wife by stopping him before he comes to power.

There are many ways this plot could veer and become something other than the accessible, exciting genre picture it is. Continue reading “Looper”

Moonrise Kingdom

As “Moonrise Kingdom” begins, a boy is listening to a record of Benjamin Britton classical music compositions intended for children. A high-pitched, nonthreatening kid’s voice interrupts the song to explain the intricate layers of Britton’s piece, and the boy appreciates it all the more.

Wes Anderson’s seventh feature film is much like this record: an art house picture pieced together and slowly revealed to us like an elaborate opera. It has characters, themes and a silly tone that a child could embrace, and yet its presentation has complexity and maturity that may be beyond most adults. In this way, “Moonrise Kingdom” is one of the wackiest, most inventive, and most notably, the most heartfelt film Anderson ever made. Here then is a movie about growing up, independence, living above your age and loving the beauty of the more challenging and sophisticated pleasures of the world.

“Moonrise Kingdom” is the romance fairytale of Sam and Suzy (newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), two preteens who escape their parental care to elope on a hidden cove on their small island home of New Penzance. Sam is a nerdy orphan, the most unpopular boy amongst his summer camp Khaki Scouts (by a significant margin), and yet a skilled mountaineer and adventurer. Suzy is the oldest child in a dysfunctional family, and she’s at an age where her needs cannot be met by her two unhappy parents. The couple is tracked by the lone island cop Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), Sam’s camp counselor, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), and Suzy’s two parents, Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Continue reading “Moonrise Kingdom”