624 – Moneyball (***)
Billy Beane (Brad Pitt, nominated for an Oscar) is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a team with a small payroll that must compete with bigger-market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. The Athletics are not unsucessful, but they can’t quite win it all. When three of their big stars leave via free agency one off season, Beane decides to replace them with players who are not only affordable but who can offer, in composite, more return than the departing trio. Beane’s reasoning is that in order to win, a team must score runs. To score runs, a player must get on base. Getting on base is the single most important part of winning. So while other teams make use of players who can hit home runs and steal bases (and pay said players countless millions), Oakland goes after players who can simply get on base.
That this is anathema to the Way the Game Is Played would be an understatement. No one’s really paid attention to the more obscure statistics, like OBP (on-base percentage), because who cares? Give me 40 home runs and a 120 RBI, and we’ll win. Well, Oakland can’t afford that guy, so how about three guys who combined make less than that guy but get on base more often. That’s more practical.
Beane is assisted by virtually no one. His manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) despises Beane’s attempts to manipulate the batting order to his liking. His scouts are all stuck in the mud of 1932 and refuse to change. Even the players are a little skeptical. But Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, also nominated for an Oscar), gets it. A true stats nerd – he majored in economics at Yale – Brand understands the weaknesses and strengths better than any general manager, field manager, or player ever could, because he’s crunched the numbers and has data to back up his assertions.
Pitt and Hill are both amazing and have excellent on-screen chemistry. That’s not a sentence I figured I’d ever type. Hill isn’t playing just some nebbish who cowers in front of Beane or a player; he’s his own man, just a little withdrawn and seemingly out of his element. Both actors take great pains to involve the audience in their stories; otherwise, this would be just a movie about pencil-necked geeks playing simulated games on a computer and expecting the real world to do the same.
The movie takes place in 2002 and is based on fact, but even so I won’t spoil the ending for you now. But I will note this much for sure: Beane’s overall philosophy has been adapted to such a wide extent over the past decade that Oakland now must find a new angle to exploit that the bigger teams haven’t yet found. The very idea that there are more important stats than the typical power numbers turns baseball upside down, shakes it hard, and collects the loose change. To use a cliche, this was a teachable moment for baseball executives across America, and although it took a while for many to catch on, catch on they did.
Even if one removed the many baseball scenes, the movie would still work. It’s honest, true to itself, and doesn’t digress into meaningless side plots, like forced romance or witty banter. But the baseball action, the result of Beane’s work behind the scenes, sells it completely.
Moneyball: ***
623 – Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol (***)
Posted by frothy in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol on January 16, 2012
Image from 3.bp.blogspot.com. Yes, it's another hot half-naked chick.
In Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is imprisoned in Serbia. We don’t know why, but maybe we’ll find out later. Unsurprisingly, he’s busted out by fellow agents Benji (Simon Pegg) and Carter (Paula Patton). It seems some bad guy has his hands on a nuclear device and needs only the launch codes, but when Hunt and his team infiltrate the Kremlin to retrieve them… well, the place blows up. The Impossible Missions Force is blamed and disbanded, as the U.S. president (fearing repercussions from Moscow) invokes Ghost Protocol, and the team is left on its own to Save the World.
The events take place sometime after those in M:I 3, in which Ethan Hunt quits the IMF. Well, here we are again, so perhaps that was just a decoy, huh? But it’s not a simple matter of trying to make the audience forget Hunt had quit; that plot idiosyncracy is explained. Luckily for us, it’s not a driving force behind the plot, which is just a long-hand way of saying that although this one follows that one and refers to events in that one, it doesn’t negate that one at all – it plays off it. Trust me, it’ll make more sense once you see the movie.
The must-find-bad-guys-to-save-self/save-the-world plot is not really new, but the way it dovetails with the subplots (i.e., what happened to Hunt after M:I III and other pieces) is surprisingly well done. Added to the mix is an analyst, played by Jeremy Renner, who finds himself sucked into Hunt’s mission and who may not be who he says he is. It’s a movie in which we’re not left guessing about the big things (e.g., who’s the bad guy, what’s he up to) but rather about the small things (what does X have to do with Y, what does Y know that we don’t).
I saw this movie in an IMAX theater, and for once the effect is well used. Here’s a prime example. Ethan Hunt needs to get to a computer server room within the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Trouble is, he can’t access it from the inside. In case you’re not familiar, the Burj Khalifa is 2,716.5 feet tall. That’s more than half a mile. Ethan needs to scale it (although, luckily, not the entire height). He uses these suction gloves: thwop, thwop, thwop. And while he’s doing this, we’re treated to a dizzying look at the skyscrapers below him; because of the huge screen, it really felt as if the theater were tilting, rather than the camera. Excellent work. Every explosion, every pounding is amplified; when glass shatters, you duck – and the movie’s not even in 3D.
Cruise is Tom Cruise. He is not, as I am fond of saying, an actor – he is a movie star. Ethan Hunt is a hugely successful character for him, but he’s not without some flaws. In fact, I think it can be said that there’s more to Hunt in this installment than there was before, and somehow Cruise is able to make us feel, well, concern for him. Sure, he’s in charge, but he has his demons. Cruise doesn’t overact here. In fact, he even slows the tempo down a bit, as if he’s realized that sometimes saying nothing is better than saying something. Sure, he grits his teeth and defies all laws of physics, but he does seem to be bringing a little more to Hunt’s character, psychologically, than we’d seen before. Big plus.
Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol is a near-perfect action/spy thriller. There is plenty of intrigue, and you shouldn’t be able to guess it all at first blush. It is a plausible, if not remarkable, plot. Its stuntwork – some performed by Cruise – is staggering to behold. If there ever was a movie that made your jaw drop at times, it’s this one. They even manage to mix in a huge sandstorm, which is in itself a little scary. (Side note: how do real Dubai people deal with these things? In the movie they appear to be driving off the road as if they’d never seen one before.) Tom Cruise updates his usual Action Man character with some mental issues, and it works. He has an able supporting cast – great comic relief from Pegg, as usual, and the delectable Patton as a woman with issues of her own – and boggling special effects to move things along. This is definitely a movie best appreciated on the big screen.
Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol: ***
622 – Shame (*1/2)
Image from About.com.
Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is supposed to be a porn addict who has gigabytes of the stuff on his PC at work and his laptop at home, plus a lot of magazines; he has anonymous sex with anyone he can find. He’s a bit of a nihilist, not moving through life so much as wafting through it like an unpleasant odor. But his sex addiction, let’s be frank, is really rather tame. There are probably millions of loner males who indulge in the same behavior. That is, this ain’t the same guy played by Christian Bale in American Psycho or by Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Brandon, a well-off exec at some Big Company, simply finds outlets for his desires, sometimes tempting danger, but never resorts to crime or anything requiring emotion. We’re meant to take that to mean he’s repressing something.
Enter his sister, named – seriously – Sissy (Carey Mulligan). Our first glimpse of Sissy is her emerging, startled, from Brandon’s shower; she’s arrived unexpectedly (to stay) while he was at work. She is naked, and we see it all. We’re supposed to be shocked, and we are. After all, Carey Mulligan is an up and coming star, and this is no stand in. Brandon’s reaction is a little more of the enraged type, but he merely bottles it up and stomps away after closing the door. There’s a lot of door slamming in the movie.
Over the course of the movie, we get some clues to the nature of the siblings’ relationship. They have been out of touch for some time, although Sissy does have her brother’s apartment key. She’s flirty and works as a torch singer in various New York clubs. He seems to be perpetually seething at her immature behavior. Is it because she’s disrupting his happy fun time, or is it something more…decadent? The movie’s title gives us an idea.
The movie promises to be intriguing. Why have these two been apart? Where has Sissy been, and why does Brandon hold her in such contempt? We’re supposed to assume that his constant masturbating and hooker-engaging portends something, a way perhaps of acting out an emotion or two. But what? We’re never told. The hints are there, and one can make an educated guess to the root of the problems, but it’s a fool’s errand. It’s not just that we might not find out the entire truth, we might not find out anything, period. That leaves us with two opposite characters who, under less-profane circumstances, could have starred in a buddy sitcom about mismatched roomies.
The movie looks grimy and feels slimy. You want to take a long bath afterward, not a cold shower – despite the frequent sex and nudity. Sometimes, the movie shows us one thing, leading us to one conclusion, and then shows us a different conclusion. Whammo, you’ve been hit by a red herring. There’s more depravity in here than there was in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant but without the compelling plot. Novice director Steve McQueen (no relation) seems to have little idea on how to end a scene, as long silences seem pointless rather than pointed. People stare at each other, then off into space, as if this meant something. Maybe it does. You won’t care.
Shame is an ugly mess. It’s an unhappy, inconsolable wreck of a movie. It’s not a train wreck from which one cannot avert one’s eyes; it’s just a generic wreck that is faceless, dispassionate, and distant.
Shame: *1/2
621 – The Artist (****)
Image from Poptower.com
First, let me explain about the mechanics of the movie. Like its ancestors, it is not really silent; music accompanies just about every scene. Sometimes title cards appear to indicate what a character has said, but these are employed infrequently. Even ambient noise, like a cup being placed on a table, are not heard. Each actor “speaks” his lines, and the most basic ones are easily understood by the expressions. It’s not as difficult to follow as it may sound.
In The Artist, Jean Dujardin plays a silent-film actor named George Valentin (sort of a cross between Rudolf Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.). He is the star of his time and makes a good living. He’s married to his frequent costar, played by Penelope Anne Miller, and he has an adorable Jack Russell terrier (a nod to the Thin Man movies). In an instance of kismet, he meets fan/aspiring actress Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), for whom he finds a job as an extra in his movie as a dancer (her name itself is probably a nod to the great Ann Miller). And meanwhile, his wife Doris is, shall we say, unhappy with George, noticing the chemistry between him and his new friend.
Reminiscent of A Star Is Born, Peppy becomes popular while, with the advent of talkies, George becomes less employable. No one wants to hear people talk, he rants at his boss (John Goodman). He vows to make his own movie – silent – with his own money. It opens on the same date as Peppy’s big film, and it doesn’t do well.
The plot is a simple rise-fall-rebirth drama. Its lack of complexity is a huge asset here, as so much must be expressed visually. And what visuals! The elegant shots from cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman evoke sympathy, stark reality, compassion, humor, and love almost effortlessly. The music is beautiful and well selected. This is a movie about movies, after all, and, much like Singin’ in the Rain was about one actor’s approach to the new-fangled talking pictures, The Artist shows us a different approach: George Valentin, realizing his career as he knows it cannot continue, simultaneously understands that he is not fit for the future, either. He cannot change, can he? Who, indeed, would want to hear him talk?
I mentioned earlier that virtually no words are spoken. As in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, there is some dialog near the very end of the movie. But Dujardin and Bejo are so astounding, graceful, and sparkling onscreen that no sound is needed, let alone actual words. They are a remarkable couple, she with the big eyes, coquettish wink, and impish personality, and he with the debonair stare, the chiseled chin, and all the raging self confidence that a stylish leading man should have. They are perfect in this movie.
I cannot stress how powerful and moving this movie is. It’s a stunning achievement and wildly entertaining. It’s enthralling, capturing a far-off time with impeccable, glistening accuracy. Director Michel Hanzanavicius doesn’t miss a step in directing his cast – some of whom are quite seasoned. There’s Goodman as the studio head and Miller as the wife, and other familiar faces show up, such as Missi Pyle, James Cromwell, Ed Lauter, and Malcolm McDowell. Hanzanavicius’ movie isn’t just evocative of the old 1920s films – it really seems to transport you to a theater in the early part of the 20th century. It’s a lavish, loving film that is absolutely packed with emotional scenes. It is, at turns, joyous and devastating, but it is always, always a huge treat to watch. It is, most definitely, one of the very best films of 2011.
The Artist: ****
620 – My Week with Marilyn (***1/2)
Posted by frothy in My Week with Marilyn on January 7, 2012
Image from Fox News.com
By 1957, Monroe was a Movie Star. But she yearned to be an actor, not just a sex symbol. This led her to accept the lead in Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl. Now, imagine this for a moment. Imagine you’re a good little worker bee and suddenly get a promotion to interact with the bigwigs at your office. They expect you to be at least as good as advertised – only you’re too overwhelmed and terrified to do anything other than wreak havoc. This is sort of what happened when Monroe arrived, belatedly, on set. She brings along her publicist and, more importantly, her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, wife to Lee Strasberg. Monroe was habitually late to rehearsals and read-throughs and frequently flubbed her lines, causing much consternation among the cast the crew – and certainly most of all to the movie’s director and star, Olivier (Branagh). It is during this most turbulent time in her life that she chances upon a lowly “third assistant director,” played by Eddie Redmayne, who’s simply happy to be there.
Monroe and Colin (Redmayne) develop a rapport. The public image of Monroe, of course, was that she was all about sex. Sex and being sexual were her top priorities, right? And yet she was trying so hard to become more than just a curvy beauty. She desperately wanted to be accepted by her peers and knew that the pedigree that Olivier and many of his cast carried could be very helpful to her career, if not her pysche. But almost immediately, she runs into trouble. Why? Because she is a movie star who wishes to become an actress, and the stage-trained actors around her wish they were movie stars. On top of that, Olivier himself was no babe in the woods and was himself trying to regain his lost youth, believing that working with Monroe would help reinvigorate him.
The friendship that Colin and Monroe enjoy is, for the most part, platonic. Monroe feels that Colin understands her and is sympathetic to her plight. She feels boxed in, with no one to trust, nearly alone on foreign soil among some of the best actors in England. And, of course, already starting down the path to physical ruin by taking pills to sleep, pills to stay awake, pills to exist. But somehow she senses assurance, support, and most of all, love from her younger friend. (In an amusing line, Monroe tells Colin that she’s the first man she’s kissed who’s younger than she is.)
Williams’ singular performance is breathtaking and will simply blow you away. She captures the heart of the character so impeccably, infusing her simultaneously with almost casual elegance and raw vulnerability. Marilyn Monroe has been portrayed many times by many fine actresses, but Williams seems to redefine the character not as an actress and not as an ingenue, but rather as a loving, feeling woman suffering from acute stress.
The supporting cast is more than capable, too. Redmayne has this dullard look about him, true, but he is a perfect match as Colin for Williams’ Monroe; he’s naive without being innocent, never self-righteous and willing to risk consequences to help a person in need. Branagh is terrific as the aging Olivier (in 1957, even!), a man used to getting his own way but who had never been up against the likes of Marilyn Monroe before. Dame Judi Dench, as Dame Sybil Thorndike (a legend on the London stage) is properly rebellious as always, supportive of Monroe for all the right reasons.
My Week with Marilyn – again, based on a true story – is a spellbinding, must-see movie. You don’t have to be a movie fan to love this movie. At its heart, it is about relationships among people with different sets of problems, some seeking solace and some offering support. It’s a terrific film.
My Week with Marilyn:***1/2
619 – The Tourist (**)
Image from rlsbb.com.
Johnny Depp plays Frank Tupelo, the titular traveler who has an “accidental” interaction with a femme fatale named Elise Clifton-Ward, played by the ever-luminous Angelina Jolie. Thankfully, for once Jolie doesn’t play a Lara Croft character who is Just Plain Awesome at everything; her Elise is certainly more worldly and in command than Depp’s Frank, but she’s not necessarily a superwoman/robot, if such a thing existed. (I think it does.) Elise involves Frank in an intricate spy-versus-spy plot in which he’s unwittingly being tapped to impersonate her husband, who’s wanted by gangsters, Scotland Yard, Interpol, and probably his local library. Because Elise is so outlandishly gorgeous, Frank just dumbly goes along with it. I don’t blame him for it. He follows her around, does what she says. If Angelina Jolie told me to come with her to an expensive hotel in Venice, I could definitely see myself giving it careful consideration, for sure.
Unlike many other movies in which the protagonists race around wildly from gorgeous locale to gorgeous locale, pausing only to make out a little bit here and there, this one has the twist – using that loosely – that Elise’s husband hasn’t been seen in a long time and is presumed to have changed his appearance through extensive surgery. So you can see how Depp can just step in and fill his shoes.
If you watch this movie, you’ll be enraptured with the lead performances and little else. Depp plays clueless rather well, and Jolie is probably the Elizabeth Taylor of her generation. Taylor always seemed to be known first as a pretty face with unbelievable violet eyes and then as a damn fine actress. Jolie’s the same in many respects. I don’t think she knows how to phone in a performance. Okay, maybe The Bone Collector. Anyway, at least she gets to don several beautiful, expensive outfits.
The ending just doesn’t feel right, either. It sort of makes you feel as if you’ve been had, and that’s the worst kind of ending: a gyp. These spy movies can be complex, wheels-within-wheels ordeals, but that can work if the little details you overlook at first add up to something in the end. If you get a complex story that winds up being made out of papier-mache, then it’s a sad, unfit ending. This is the kind of movie whose ending makes you slap your face with a “Oh, THAT’s what I get?” That’s not a compliment.
The Tourist: **
618 – Fair Game (***)
Image from the Christian Science Monitor
Fair Game, based on the true story of the outing of an undercover CIA operative, is set less than a decade ago. Our innocence of government-as-our-protector is long gone; so, too, is our faith in the media to cover issues thoughtfully, to uncover true corruption. That’s just how our perspective is now. In forty years, things may have swung the other way entirely.
Because many aspects of life are now so very polarized, we approach a movie like this much differently than its predecessors. Here are the facts: a war was unleashed based on faulty information. A man who had been sent to verify that information (and found it faulty), angered that his assessment was twisted, wrote an Op-Ed article explaining himself. It turned out that the man’s wife was an undercover CIA agent and that she had been asked to recommend his mission to verify the information. In apparent retaliation for this act, certain powerful people revealed the real name and address of the covert agent. Had this issue been presented in 1973, our lonely eyes would have turned to the press to sort it out, as Woodward and Bernstein did with Watergate (through a lot of hard work). Those days are gone, and we are left to decide for ourselves what is true and what is not.
The movie certainly has a slant to it. Most viewers will have already decided for themselves whether that slant reflects reality or fantasy, as these events were not small scale and under the radar. My personal belief is that the movie is factual (to the degree at which it is trustworthy), and that itself depresses me. That’s because, unlike All the President’s Men, this story not only has no happy ending, it’s an ongoing tale that, as it progresses, makes one feel worse by the second.
This is the kind of movie that Warren Beatty would have been in during the 1970s – it has a good Parallax View feel to it – and its star, Sean Penn, is no stranger to voicing his opinion on matters politic. If you find his view unsettling, then this movie has nothing to offer you. We know the ending (to date). We know the results. So how much we enjoy this movie depends wholly on how much we identify with the viewpoints of both Penn’s character (former Ambassador Joe Wilson, sent to verify the information) and that of Naomi Watts (the outed agent). Are they themselves trustworthy? Do you sympathize with them, or do you feel they brought their own problems onto themselves? We know what the movie wants us to believe. What we wind up believing is probably going to differ from moviegoer to moviegoer.
The movie is prefaced by a short speech to the camera by the actual former agent, Valerie Plame, and concludes with her actual testimony to Congress on the matter. But this is not supposed to be a documentary, and I presume that some of the facts have been fudged to make things more cinematic. I can live with that. What does that leave us, then? Passion, compassion, the validity of truth, the arrogance of power, and other writ-large themes. And, it should be mentioned, two terrific, heart-felt performances by Penn and Watts, who as usual inhabit their roles, becoming less actors and more players in a drama that’s beyond their comprension.
As pure entertainment, Fair Game isn’t at the top of the heap. It’s not that it drags, it’s that it’s hanging its hat on events in progress, a moving target of a point. It never meanders, but its endgame is obvious and knowable. What really saves it, believe it or not, are two crucial scenes near the end, scenes that are powerful in their circumspection and their emotion. Watching those two particular scenes wasn’t easy; both Penn and Watts have a way of grabbing you with their characters here and embracing you – not in an effort to get you on their side but simply to feel something, anything.
Fair Game: ***
Actual search query for this site:
Posted by frothy in Housekeeping on December 22, 2011
“little miss piggy having sex with a mr piggy”
617 – Magic Trip (***)
Posted by frothy in Magic Trip on December 19, 2011
Image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
It’s 1964. The sixties, we’re told, didn’t really begin in 1960 (or 1961) but rather in November of 1963, when Kennedy was killed. The nation’s innocence was lost, and the younger souls – our baby boomers – looked for something to help guide them into the future. The plastic days of picket-fenced houses and nuclear families were disappearing. People needed something new. That something new, it turned out, was LSD – a perfectly legal substance at the time.
Ken Kesey was the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a writer of some reknown. In ’63, he and a few friends were visiting New York City and witnessed the preparations for the following year’s World’s Fair. Kesey, who lived in Oregon, determined on the spot that he’d grab some people and make a trip across America to the fair. The group would up too big for a station wagon, so an old International Harvester bus was procured and customized, including plenty of filming equipment. The bus was painted in an array of bright, friendly, psychadelic colors, and off they went.
The group called itself the Merry Pranksters, and everyone had his or her own nickname. Along for the ride was Neil Cassady. Never heard of him? You should read Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road; the character of Dean Moriarity was based on Cassady. Cassady was a real character, a speed-taking oddity who drove like a maniac and had zillions of stories to tell. All he needed was an audience.
Like most documentaries, this movie will be enjoyed best by those who were present during that era and by those who wish they were. If you’re not emotionally invested in the story, you might think you’re watching a bunch of wackos on drugs careen about the country, having sex every three seconds and dropping acid. You’d be right, but you might not enjoy it much. And surely not as much as the participants did.
If I recall, the movie uses nothing but the footage shot during the trip to New York, with some new narration by actor Stanley Tucci. This lends quite the feel of veritas to the proceedings; it’s exactly like watching home movies, at least if your family is a little deranged. But drugs or not, what’s interesting is that we see hardly any real conflicts – people get along, for the most part, even when some leave the trip before reaching the final destination. It’s a good-vibe film, and none of it feels manufactured.
I guess that’s what I find most appealing about Magic Trip. It’s honest, and it’s fun. It gives you a glimpse into those sometimes twisted times – times, it should be noted, look like a cakewalk compared to what we have now. In ’64, we weren’t even heavily into Vietnam, and the anti-hippie tone had yet to sweep the nation. The bus got pulled over numerous times, but since hippiedom was so new, cops just figured the occupants were college kids out having fun. Ah, for those times now.
Magic Trip: ***
616 – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (**)
Posted by frothy in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on December 14, 2011
Image from IndieWire.
Smiley (Gary Oldman) is a recent retiree of The Circus, the nickname for Britain’s intelligence operations. More accurately, Smiley was forced out, along with the operations’ leader, Control (John Hurt) when a mission in Hungary went horribly wrong. But now Britain suspects that a mole has infiltrated The Circus – and it’s residing at the top of the metaphorical food chain. Smiley is brought in on the down-low to find out who the mole is and what he’s up to.
If it seems like a standard spy film, that’s because it really is. Except that in this case, Control has figured out that one of five men – the tippy-top of The Circus – is the mole. Already, then, our list of suspects is narrow.
Because of this, you might expect the movie to include plenty of distracting action, perhaps some crazy chase scenes, people dangling off landmarks, that sort of thing. But it’s not to be. Instead, we get a somewhat painful slog through Smiley’s endless detective work. There’s hardly any action at all; there’s a lot of thinking, which is logical given the chess-like nature of the spy business, but it doesn’t often make for good cinema. In fact, there are long stretches where Smiley hardly utters a word, even in voiceover. This makes things a little tougher to follow, and I found myself overthinking the plot. The story turns out to be a lot simpler – and more simplistic – than I’d imagined.
The novel was adapted into a BBC miniseries in 1979. I have not seen this miniseries, which starred Alec Guinness as Smiley, but I have to imagine that because it was shown in seven parts, more time was devoted to fleshing out the characters and their motivations. It’s a little easier to provide subtle details in a longer format, after all, and this big-screen version skimps on the subtleties and leaves us with dull, somnolent machinations, some of which are obvious red herrings.
Oldman, of course, makes a great George Smiley, and it’s interesting how much he looks like a younger John Hurt, who here plays his superior. I don’t think of Oldman as, pardon the pun, an old man, and he is only 52 years old. But he adapts a quaint, stooped mannerism to Smiley that evokes a man who’s always thinking two steps ahead of his opponents.
But it’s not enough, not even with the capable supporting cast, which includes Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Toby Jones. There’s just not a lot to figure out, and when it’s figured out, it’s too tidy – especially the ending, which is so obvious that it can be viewed from outer space, as the saying goes. Side note, though: this version contains quite a bit more blood than you’d expect (even with so little action); the level of gore in those scenes approaches the overall tone of, say, Seven. So be warned – this ain’t for the kiddies.
Overall, the adaptation is a bit of a disappointment, given the source and the talent. It manages to take a spy thriller and remove the thriller part. Less thrilling doesn’t taste great.
615 – Due Date (**1/2)
Image from Cheri-movie.com
Peter Highman (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an architect who’s attempting to fly out of Atlanta back home to Los Angeles to be with his wife Michelle Monaghan, who’s about to give birth. But thanks to a bag mixup with a fellow traveler named Ethan Trembley (Zach Galifianakis), Peter finds himself stranded in Atlanta, placed on the national No Fly list (minor misunderstanding, of course). Ethan offers him a cross-country ride in his rental, and off we go.
The movie uses the trope of mismatched people enduring a common experience. Peter is uptight, dithering endlessly about what to name his newborn. Ethan is, well, flighty. In fact, Galifianakis seems to be playing the same character he played in the two Hangover films: childlike, maybe psychopathic and/or sociopathic, not all there. He’s wildly misinformed about such things as the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, but he is heading west to try to make it as an actor in Hollywood. Oh, and did I mention he’s carrying the ashes of his deceased father in a coffee can to dispose of along the way? Well, there’s that, too.
You and I both know that there’s no way Peter and Ethan will make it from Georgia to California without any problems. But Peter has no choice – his wallet was confiscated at the airport, and his bags are on their way to LA. He has no cash and no ID. It could happen to anyone. So he’s essentially at Ethan’s mercy. Along the way, we learn much about the characters and what makes them tick, but whereas the earlier Planes, Trains got melancholy without getting maudlin, this one achieves no such feat.
Downey, Jr. and Galifianakis give it their best shot, and to tell the truth they’re not bad. They make an okay team; it’s just that it’s a teaming we’ve seen before, and much better. Steve Martin and John Candy got into their share of situations that would never happen to a normal person, but they also ran into problems with which we could all relate; here, it’s more of the former than the latter. It’s as if the movie keeps daring itself to get weirder and weirder.
The final, near-fatal flaw of the movie is that it really doesn’t give you anyone to root for – except of course at the end. It’s a comedy, after all. But these guys do some rather nasty things to each other, and not in the oh-no-he-didn’t sort of way, either; rather, in the scowling, almost hateful way. It’s a little disconcerting at times. But the actors do their best, as I said, and you could do worse.
Due Date: **1/2
Frothy Ruminations
- 624 – Moneyball (***) January 27, 2012
- 623 – Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol (***) January 16, 2012
- 622 – Shame (*1/2) January 12, 2012
- 621 – The Artist (****) January 9, 2012
- 620 – My Week with Marilyn (***1/2) January 8, 2012
- 619 – The Tourist (**) January 2, 2012
- 618 – Fair Game (***) January 1, 2012
- Actual search query for this site: December 22, 2011
- 617 – Magic Trip (***) December 20, 2011
- 616 – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (**) December 15, 2011
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