Tag: Russell Crowe

The Nice Guys

Shane Black directs Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in a noir comedy set in ’70s Los Angeles.

TheNiceGuysPoster2Across the “Lethal Weapon” movies and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” few directors have been as consistently successful with action comedies as Shane Black. In his latest film “The Nice Guys,” he’s combined that penchant for irreverence and slick action into a hilarious, scandalous, seedy noir in the vein of “L.A. Confidential” and a Judd Apatow bromance.

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling play private detectives trying to track down a missing teenage girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) in ‘70s Los Angeles, believing that her disappearance may be tied to the recent suicide of a notable porn star. Jackson Healy (Crowe) is an unlicensed tough specializing in roughing up perverts and collecting payments. Amelia is one of his clients, and he crosses paths with Holland March (Gosling) as March tries to locate her for a separate client. When Healy loses track of Amelia and gangsters come looking to kill her, Healy and March team up to protect her and uncover the scam brewing under the surface.

“You made a porno film where the point is the story?” March poses this question to Amelia as the complexities of their case get revealed. And in the same way, Black makes a commitment to story first above action or even comedy. Layered with intricate detail and mystery and littered with nostalgic, local color, “The Nice Guys” proves to be a great vehicle for Crowe and Gosling because it sets up stakes first.

It’s a buddy movie, yes, but the two of them together feed off their bad behavior and annoyance with the other. Crowe’s slack poise contrasts wonderfully with Gosling’s bouncy and twitchy façade. Crowe can be perfectly stoic and look as though he’s phoning it in, and then manage a perfectly timed sucker punch or even a spit take. Gosling on the other hand can barely keep himself composed, fighting with a bathroom stall door or fidgeting in a quiet panic as he bleeds profusely after trying to punch through a window. It looks so easy when other PIs do it!

But equally as engaging as “The Nice Guys’s” screwball mystery involves how Healy and March manage to redeem themselves amid their corrupt, wild, sleazy or idiotic behavior. The two each have their vices, with Healy being quick to anger and violence and March taking advantage of senile old folks or neglecting his tween daughter Holly (Angourie Rice).

Holly in particular brings the film together in surprising ways, with Healy forming a natural, yet unexpected bond with her as she looks to him to become a better person. Crowe of course has the dramatic depth to make such a character development convincing. But Gosling still manages the best chemistry. Holly sneaks along with Healy and March to a party at a porn star’s house and exclaims, “There are whores here and stuff!” Ever the perfect father, March says, “I told you not to say that word. Just say, ‘there are whores here.”

“The Nice Guys” doesn’t have too much to say about 2016, but this screwball trip back to the ‘70s is packed with nostalgia, sex, goofy fun…and stuff.

3 ½ stars

 

Noah

Darren Aronofsky’s Bible adaptation is ambitious but is all over the place.

Randy “The Ram” in “The Wrestler” abused himself in the ring just so that he could feel anything. In the end he brought himself to the brink of his strength. Nina Sayers in “Black Swan” tortured her body to achieve perfection and beauty and ultimately found herself battling her psyche.

Darren Aronofsky’s protagonists are conflicted souls, testing their minds, morals and beliefs in pursuit of something nobler. The biblical story of Noah finds his faith in God pit against mankind, forced to choose between innocence, justice and love.

Or at least that’s Aronofsky’s version. “Noah” is Aronofsky’s ambitious interpretation of the Bible tale, and unlike the surreal grittiness found in his previous films, his mix of fantasy and portent is a paradoxical mess. It’s a movie about beauty in which the colors have been sapped from all traces of the Earth. It’s one of human decency in which mankind is depicted as ravenous, ugly, violent, carnivorous or worse, flavorless. It’s a morality tale in which the hero is less given a moral choice as he is driven to madness. It’s a movie about faith, miracles and spirituality, but ostensibly avoids religion or even the mention of the word “God”.

Continue reading “Noah”

Man of Steel

“Man of Steel” neglects to provide Superman with personality or a sense of wonder in its depiction of doom and gloom CGI mayhem.

If Superman’s outfit were not originally a bright blue and red, in Zack Snyder’s world it would be gray. It would be dampened and washed of color along with the sky palace vistas on the planet Krypton, the vast Kansas prairies and even Amy Adams’s hair.

Red and blue do not represent the doom and gloom Snyder is trying to convey in “Man of Steel.” And although the “S” on Superman’s chest is actually a symbol for hope, “Man of Steel” is more content to bludgeon us with tragedy and CGI devastation to the point that it neglects a compelling origin story, a sense of wonder or even the idea of heroism.

Superman’s origin story is inherently richer and darker than that of say, Spiderman, and producer Christopher Nolan has imbued in it the same grim overtones that he did in his Batman trilogy. Rather than childhood bullying and crushes on redheads that live next door, Superman’s origin begins with the destruction of his home planet, the tearful abandonment from his parents as he is jettisoned to Earth and the military coup by General Zod (Michael Shannon) that leads to the death of his father Jor-El (Russell Crowe).

And yet after Krypton implodes in spectacular display and engulfs his mother in horrifically apocalyptic images, the movie does not dial back to a time when Clark Kent, now of Kansas, is at peace. Rather, Snyder’s idea of melodrama is cataclysm, with a pre-teen Clark being forced to rescue his classmates from drowning in a crashed bus, followed by a teenage Clark watching his father (Kevin Costner) die in a tornado and finally an adult Clark with a healthy beard (Henry Cavill) rescuing workers from an exploding oil tanker. Continue reading “Man of Steel”

Les Miserables

There’s a big difference in seeing an actor’s face 50 feet high on the silver screen than seeing an actor just five inches high on a stage that’s a mile away. There’s definitely something to seeing and hearing that little person live, but there’s a lot of emotion and expression that we only get from the movies.

So part of the thrill of this new adaptation of the classic musical “Les Miserables” is in making the emotions of Jean Valjean and Fantine be as big as possible. Director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) has put them in an appropriately sized film that feels epic but not overstuffed, but did he really have to make their faces so big too?

Simply put, “Les Miz” is frustratingly un-cinematic. It achieves images that the stage never could but stifles the possibilities of what a camera can do and what an epically proportioned musical can and should look like. At every moment it emblazons these characters in intense close-ups and very little breathing room. Try as Hugh Jackman might to parade around the room of a monastery, the camera follows him mercilessly, refusing to break from a centered close-up of Valjean’s ill-fated face as though the camera were attached to a harness around his chest.

Hooper covers his tracks by chopping the movie to bits in the editing room. The average shot length is infuriatingly short, but not in the excessive Baz Luhrmann way either; Hooper simply doesn’t know when to stay put.

He does however realize that there’s true wonder in seeing the whole cast belt out a medley of themes during magnificent pop opera numbers like “One Day More,” and this is especially true when we get the opportunity to see them on stage together. Why then should Hooper separate each individual singer into claustrophobic boxes? Why does he refuse to let multiple characters share the frame at once? Why must it look like we’re watching this whole movie on a stadium Jumbotron?

It gets nauseating and delirious watching something so jarring. The makeup and hairstyles are garish, the lighting is dark and muddy, and the camera captures Parisian alleys and sewers with Dutch angles and a quivering hand. It can be as punishing as watching Fantine (Anne Hathaway) drunkenly stumble around in agony during the “Lovely Lady” number.

You long for the firm hand and intricate medium shots Hooper used to excess in “The King’s Speech” and “The Damned United.” How did this director change so thoroughly between films? Now Hooper’s close-ups are so intensified, they’d be boring to look at if Anne Hathaway weren’t pouring her heart and soul into “I Dreamed a Dream.”

She, amongst the rest of the cast, really are the saving grace of “Les Miz.” Hathaway’s Fantine is really just a minor character in this epic revolution drama, but amongst all the moments each character gets to themselves, hers is by far the most memorable, her face convulsing in agony and her eyes too sad to even care the camera is so close.

Much of these gripes won’t matter much to most audiences. They’ll be swept up in the way I was upon first seeing a touring production of “Les Miserables” in London, invigorated and inspired by the story’s themes of commitment, honor and spirituality. But to those who pay attention to cinematography and editing, least of all in a treasured musical where these things matter most of all, “Les Miz” will feel mighty clumsy.

3 stars

Rapid Response: L.A. Confidential

I’ve been playing the video game “L.A. Noire” for the last few weeks, and a game critic I admire said the game’s story borrowed heavily from the 1997 “L.A. Confidential.” I had seen the film before, but hadn’t remembered it for whatever reason. And the two stories do have their similarities, but the film’s rich characterization, stark yet colorful cinematography and gritty action sequences just can’t be beat by a video game.

It’s a story of the corrupt and broken Los Angeles police department in the 1950s when the actions of the police could still be brushed under the rug and their image manipulated within the press and how three completely different cops respond to that environment. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce are the three cops, each of them giving great performances and giving the film more memorable moments than almost any noir made in the ‘40s.

That’s not to say “L.A. Confidential” is the best noir of all time, but the reason it stands out as a unique example of a noir is because while it has the complexity of “The Big Sleep” and the sleazy characters of “Double Indemnity,” it also has the modern vigor and intensity of other ‘90s action films. Continue reading “Rapid Response: L.A. Confidential”