FLICKERS

review: "2012" (from Village Voice)

      

2012

Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), taking down famous landmarks has become Emmerich’s cinematic signature, but ever since summer audiences cheered the White House being blown to bits by space aliens in the former, demolished historic sites aren't what they used to be.

     2012 is alien free, but there are tidal waves galore, as well as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and blinding dust clouds, all due to a sudden, radical heating of the Earth’s core. A planetary realignment and an over-stimulated sun are the villains in a scenario that a real-life 7^th century Mayan prophet is said to have predicted. So take note, humans: life on Earth will end on December 12, 2012. Plan your Christmas shopping accordingly.

       “It’s kind of galling when you realize the nutbags with the cardboard signs had it right all along,” declares Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), Chief of Staff to the President (Danny Glover), as he watches news reports of panicked plebeians running from a shaking ground and thundering sky. Anheuser has been planning for the final day since 2009, when Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a mid-level government scientist, thrusts a red alert report into his hands at a fancy Washington party. Helmsley’s dire warnings lead the world’s superpowers to band together and secretly build six giant “arks” designed to save the rich, the powerful, and the mostly-white from Armageddon. Launch site: China!

       As if made by the gods to suffer for its movie-making sins, Los Angeles is the first city to split apart and slide (literally) into the sea. In a ridiculous but bravura sequence, Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a failed sci-fi novelist/limo driver, begins his long, convoluted journey to China and those precious arks by dodging crumbling L.A. freeways and falling skyscrapers while his two kids, ex-wife (Amanda Peet), and her new husband (Tom McCarthy) scream in the limousine’s backseat. The two hour and 40 minute 2012 is overstuffed with special effects set-pieces, but the Curtis family’s mad dash out of town is the closest the movie gets to actually being fun, if only because it’s easier to relate to a man navigating bad traffic than one trying to outrun a newly formed volcano.

       “How did they do that?” is the question Hollywood always wants moviegoers to ask, but in watching 2012, I couldn’t help but wonder if today’s audiences, especially the very young, ask that question as often as those of the past. When the ill-fated cruise ship of The Poseidon Adventure (1972)—a film Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser reference here more than once—was capsized by a tidal wave, my 10-year-old self may have understood that flesh-and-blood stunt men, not actors, were hanging off those upside down cocktail tables, but I still feared for them, and by extension, for the film’s characters. Today's CGI effects are undoubtedly more impressive but also more soul-numbing. Millions of people die in this movie, among them a few we’ve come to know, but not one of those deaths is affecting or memorable, even in an overly sentimental, B-movie way. Where is Shelley Winters when we need her?

       As with Emmerich’s other films, what’s likely to linger in the public memory is a singular scene of iconic destruction that’s been the centerpiece of the 2012 ad campaign: The aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, after being swept up by a gigantic tidal wave, flips over and comes crashing down—brief pause for irony—onto the White House. Goodbye Rose Garden. One wonders: Is the disaster king suddenly getting political? Probably not. So for the widest audience possible, we suggest that Columbia Pictures release an alternate take, with the democracy-crushing aircraft carrier this time being the USS Ronald Reagan. (Chuck Wilson)

review: The Damned United

THE DAMNED UNTIED

We call it soccer, but for the Brits it’s football, and it’s damn serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly as sweet as getting to take over Leeds United, a top-tier team previously managed by Clough’s archenemy, Don Revie (Colm Meaney). In this terrific film, screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and television director Tom Hooper (John Adams), making his feature debut, use a series of elegantly staged flashbacks to trace Clough’s and Taylor’s rapid rise to fame, and the hubris that led Clough to stumble badly when he got to Leeds, while also wounding his lifelong friendship with Taylor. A movie about soccer that doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that’s enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby’s team owner. These actors are good at what they do—like those players who dodge and weave with effortless grace. (Chuck Wilson)   

review: Paranormal Activity

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

For Katie (Katie Featherston), a San Diego college student, things have been going bump in the night since she was 8-years-old and a ghost attached itself to her. The unseen being that has been benignly haunting her for years thrills Katie’s loving but skeptical boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), who sets up a video camera to capture any supernatural goings-on. For his debut feature, reportedly shot in seven days at a cost of 15 grand, writer-director Oren Peli works wonders with stationary camera footage of the sleeping couple: the bedroom door moves, slightly, lights in the hallway go on and off, a shadow passes the bed. As the nights go by, the presence, seemingly annoyed at being recorded, begins upping the ante, and soon it appears that poor Katie is on the verge of channeling her inner Linda Blair. Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theatre, is refreshingly blood-free; the fact that its old-school scares caused seemingly jaded twenty-somethings at a recent midnight screening to squirm in their seats suggests that there’s hope for the world after all. (Chuck Wilson)

review: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH HIDEOUS MEN

"Everything I write ends up being about loneliness," said the late writer David Foster Wallace in a 1999 interview on the radio show "Bookworm." In that conversation, Wallace was trying to get at the core of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a four-part short story he wrote as a series of monologues, which, in turn, are presented as a transcription of interviews that an unnamed woman conducted with dozens of men. In a dizzying whirl of language, Wallace's fictional men explain how they feel about the women they've loved or, more often than not, have failed to love.

The 29-year-old actor John Krasinski reports that participating in a staged reading of Wallace's story while a Brown University student inspired him to pursue acting as a profession. In the years since, as he rose to fame in The Office, he has been developing the stories as a feature, which he would write and direct. The resulting film has clearly been made with a deep reverence for Wallace, who was surely the most gifted writer of his generation, and who took his own life one year ago this month, at age 46. All of which makes it even more painful to say that, as a film, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a disaster.

In his crazily ambitious adaptation, Krasinski has brought to life the female interviewer, who is invisible in Wallace's stories. On-screen, she has become Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a New York grad student who asks the men around her to speak about their relationships with women. At first, the talks take place in a bunker-like room, with the men sitting at a table in front of an ugly concrete wall. Krasinski begins with Subject #14 (Ben Shenkman), who has a goofy sexual problem. He is followed by one other (a funny Michael Cerveris as a blue-collar worker with performance issues), and then, as if he can't stand the idea of staring at that bleak gray wall for the length of a film (an 80-minute one, at that), Krasinski sends Sara out into the world, where men at restaurants, parties, and theaters begin telling their stories, sometimes to her face, sometimes not.

The effect is distractingly theatrical—and confusing. Sara leaves her apartment and passes a man (Will Arnett) in the hallway, who is delivering a monologue about abandonment through the closed door of his girlfriend's apartment. That's a clever enough idea on paper, perhaps, but the setup ends up undercutting the message—his words don't land. Later, in a coffeehouse, Sara listens from two tables away as a businessman (Christopher Meloni) tells his friend (Denis O'Hare) about an odd, Cheever-esque encounter he had with a newly jilted, hysterically crying woman in an airport. Ever in search of a way to open up the film, Krasinski cuts away to a poorly executed flashback of the encounter, set to Meloni's voiceover. Again, excess staging overwhelms content, and all is lost.

It's easy to see why actors would be drawn to Wallace's Hideous Men monologues: They're funny, profane, often scarily intense, and, at all times, deeply emotional. Yet, Wallace was not writing a play. He was writing fiction. For the page. And so the plot specifics of each man's story—the who, what, and where—are secondary to the clutter of language with which the men surround their testimony. Wallace used language—often ornately academic—as a kind of protective padding for his interviewees, and the reader, at his own pace, must dig deep to find the essential truths.

Filmmakers, even great ones, are always battling the clock, a dilemma that left Krasinski little choice but to cut each monologue down to its core events. The stilted storytelling that results often rings false, and in the end, the monologues—delivered by some very good actors (Timothy Hutton, Bobby Cannavale, Josh Charles), who come across as first-year theater students acting out scenes from their favorite novels—don't add up to much. If Krasinski had an overarching theme in mind—be it the loneliness that Wallace spoke of, or something else—we're not getting it. And whatever it was about Hideous Men that so deeply affected Krasinski the college student has been lost in translation. (Chuck Wilson)

 

review: "Whiteout" (from LA Weekly/Village Voice)

WHITEOUT

In this earnest but muddled Antarctic thriller, a masked man kills research scientists who may have stumbled upon a valuable object hidden beneath the ice. Figuring out the murderer’s identity falls to U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), with help from the research station’s doctor (Tom Skerritt) and a shady U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht). Carrie is a good detective tortured by memories of a Miami drug bust gone bad, and in a regrettable blunder, director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia, Gone in 60 Seconds) and his four credited screenwriters have chosen to stage that failed arrest in a series of hokey flashbacks that always end with Sena cutting back to a zoned-out Carrie, who literally shakes her head to clear away the bad vibes. One feels for Beckinsale, a B-movie action queen badly in need of a comedy and a script that doesn’t require, as this one does, that she strip down to her skivvies in the opening scene. It could be said that Whiteout is an honest attempt to set an old-fashioned whodunit in an exotic locale, but the mystery at the film’s core is so hopelessly dull that one begins to long for a third-act cameo by the Abominable Snowman. (Chuck Wilson)

ARMY ARCHERD 1922-2009

w/Marilyn, 1960

Variety columnist Army Archerd, who had a 56-year exclusive on what was happening on film sets the world over, died today at age 87, and let me tell ya, kids, I think this marks the official end of old Hollywood. Archerd may have been our last link to the studio age, and to celluloid idols that built this town. It's often said that there wasn’t a star in the pantheon, no matter how reclusive, who refused a call from Army, and that’s because he was movielover as well as a journalist, and as such, never printed a mean or catty word, a lesson many a contemporary blogger and movie critic could learn. They should exhibit Army Archerd’s Rolodex — surely worth its weight in gold — in the Smithsonian, right next to Archie Bunker's chair and Dorothy's ruby  slippers. (Chuck Wilson)

review: "All About Steve"

ALL ABOUT STEVE

In this refreshingly quirky comedy, Sandra Bullock is Mary Horowitz, a Sacramento crossword puzzle writer who’s geeky and hyperactive and generally too much to bear. When her parents fix her up with a handsome cable news cameraman named Steve (Bradley Cooper), Mary pounces, but quickly scares him away with talk of “destiny.” Undeterred, she begins following Steve and a washed-up reporter (Thomas Haden Church) as they head across America, covering ratings grabbers such as a baby with three legs, and a mine shaft cave-in that’s stranded a dozen hearing impaired children. Writer Kim Barker (License to Wed) and first-time director Phil Traill aren’t afraid of big jokes (deaf kids down a well) but they also pay attention to the small details of character. As if to suggest that Mary finds solace in a nerd-friendlier time, her bedroom décor is strictly 1969-70, while her much-discussed go-go boots are a seeming nod to the kooky brainiac Barbra Streisand portrayed in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). Although Bullock initially struggles with a character she’s probably too old to play, she ultimately makes Mary funny and sympathetic without softening her innate weirdness. The actress earns points too for daring to co-produce a Hollywood comedy that isn’t about a wedding. (Chuck Wilson)   

HALLOWEEN II

Serial killer Michael Myers, it turns out, has mother issues. In this disappointing sequel to his intense and much underrated 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween, rock star turned filmmaker Rob Zombie sends Michael (Tyler Mane) on another killing spree at the urging of his now-dead mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), who appears (all too frequently) as a beckoning ghost standing next to a white horse. Once again, Michael hunts baby-sitter extraordinaire Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), who’s living, one year after the first film’s murders, with the town sheriff (Brad Dourif). In his 2007 movie, Zombie dug deep into Michael’s screwed-up, white trash family history, a process which humanized Michael and made his subsequent brutality all the more unsettling. This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, and so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore. As evidenced by his previous Halloween flick and 2005’s astonishing (and irredeemably brutal) The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie has talent to burn, but he’s slumming here, and one suspects that he knows it. (Chuck Wilson)

Pauline Kael on "All Fall Down" (1962)

Pauline Kael on “All Fall Down” (1962)

 

“…But the film turns out to be a portrait of the writer as an adolescent (Brandon deWilde plays the part) who grows up—“matures”—when he learns that the older brother he idolizes (Warren Beatty) is an empty wreck. Does anybody really grow up the way this boy grows up? He learns the truth, squares his shoulders, and walks out into the bright sunlight, as Alex North’s music rises and swells in victory. How many movies have pulled this damned visual homily on us, this synthetic growing-into-a-man, as if it happened all at once and forever? Suggested party game: ask your friends to tell about the summer they grew up. The one who tells the best lie has a promising career ahead as a Hollywood screenwriter.”

Review: G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (from Village Voice/LA Weekly)

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

Credited as the first “action figure”, G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes—one for each branch of the armed forces—and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes have evolved into an international band of soldiers seeking to bring down the evil Cobra Command. In the first of what’s likely to be a lucrative new film series, director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy series, Van Helsing) outfits actors Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in “accelerator suits” that allow them to jump cars and busses in a single bound as they and their team attempt to retrieve a suitcase containing nano technology that a lunatic billionaire (Christopher Eccleston) plans to use for world domination. After a first hour that plays like a bad TV show, Sommers hits his groove with an over-the-top Paris chase sequence that in turn leads to an underwater finale that’s absurdly overproduced, momentarily diverting, and then instantly forgettable. The script—by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett— is full of embarrassingly bad dialogue, but a recent midnight screening audience laughed benignly, as if to say that they hadn’t exactly been expecting profundity and wit from a summer season toy soldier flick. (Chuck Wilson)