COP OUT

If you are one who says that you have discerning taste then by all means avoid Cop Out. This is the crappiest film in awhile to feature major stars, in this case action movie icon Bruce Willis and TV star Tracy Morgan, crappy and horrendous in every way that a movie can be horrendous. On the brighter side, the movie begins with OK shtick and that is where it peaks.


This is a buddy cop movie with one well dressed cop and another cop who looks like he dresses at Mervyn’s. Usually the icon cop is assigned a nincompoop partner at the beginning of these movies and the tolerance improves with time. The difference here in this buddy cop film it’s that these mismatched guys, Willis as Jimmy Monroe and Morgan as Paul Hodges, have been partners for nine years.

The duo is long accustomed to each other but that doesn’t keep them from learning new things about each other. Get ready for potty jokes, private parts jokes and porn movie lingo (101 porn terms, nothing new). Interspersed into the lame comedy are by-the-numbers action scenes that are sloppily edited together. They say cops have eyes in the back of their heads, but Morgan is such an incompetent cop that twice within the first act terrible things happen when he’s not looking.

But that is of course the joke of the movie. Casting Willis (last seen in the underappreciated “Surrogates”), you have the leading machismo presence to headline a cop movie. By contrast, the entire comedy depends on co-star Morgan’s childlike personification (I liked him as Astronaut Jones on “SNL.”). On TV, he has been funniest when he puts on that 12-year old voice and subsists in that squishy man-child posture with just a hint of hidden anti-social rage simmering underneath ready to thump anyone who misunderstands him.

The funniness and funkiness of Morgan is that he is always playing that 12-year old who thinks he is the center of the universe. He does that in the movie, and he doesn’t for a second look like he could have hung in there as a law enforcer for nine years – he’s so incompetent that he gets somebody killed, too, within no time, and his entire modus operandi is quoting from other cop movies. Oh, and it looks like his momma does the shopping for him at Mervyn’s.

In last year’s staggering and audacious comedy “Observe and Report,” the film took Seth Rogen’s bi-polar disorder problem seriously then satirized contemporary white trash reality. I wish that “Cop Out” could have addressed Morgan’s childish narcissism and dealt with it in a way that reflects the real world. Instead, the movie doesn’t want to tweak reality, but instead be this (vulgar and profanity-strewn) meta dirty-boys fantasy for nearly two hours and stick to boilerplate plots. In other words, be a big-screen TV sketch comedy.

This is the kind of stinker where Bruce Willis chases down bad guys to retrieve his stolen baseball card, a plot that just happens to crossfire with Mexican drug dealers the whole police department has been longing to shakedown. In smaller parts, Rashida Jones (“I Love You, Man”) is a welcome attractive walk-on as Morgan’s wife, but I could have done without another one of Fred Armisen’s stereotyped caricatures.

But here I am trying to look around for something else to mention. But the truth is that I don’t feel the need to go look for further excuses. I hated this film, and that should be enough. I will mention that the film is directed by Kevin Smith (“Clerks”), in his first effort where he didn’t write the script, but it’s as typically clunky as his rest. But it’s certain that Smith without a doubt encouraged his actors to ad-lib jokes about the size and smells of certain body parts, which pervades through the rest of his films, too.

Go to the official site at http://copoutmovie.warnerbros.com/
 
Grade: D

SHUTTER ISLAND

The discordant assembly of images in Shutter Island are haunting and distressing. At first sight you believe that the film will take place entirely on an island that lodges the criminally insane, circa 1954. What gradually creeps in are flashbacks of American G.I.’s liberating Jews from a Nazi concentration camp, as well as our hero’s nightmares of his former wife cremating to ashes before his eyes. While in the present, the weather is constantly harsh and unforgiving, lending to cracking and shattering of walls and windows.


Before the first images of the film even roll, movie lovers will be instantly turned on by the use of the same György Ligeti music that was used in “The Shining.” Director Martin Scorsese, with his first dramatic feature since his Oscar-winning “The Departed” (2006), prioritizes foremost in creating an ominous and foreboding atmosphere. He lets us know immediately, through visual and aural suggestion, that the island will be a trap where violence and hysteria will be difficult if not impossible for his protagonist to escape from.

This is the Scorsese that I’ve been wanting to see since “Cape Fear” (1991), the Scorsese that will put a hypnotic spin on a big, fat American genre piece – film noir and psychodramatic horror – something that he could inject with his trademark skill and blustery. Scorsese continues to raise his game in technical perfection with his inimitable use of vivid angles and severe lighting. His visuals are gestating with silhouette and shadow patterns that alter his audience’s perceptions – we are at the mercy of what we think is real and what is imagined, and also perplexed by what point of view the film is adopting. Forget James Cameron. Scorsese is arguably the Film Master of the World.

In preparation for this film, Scorsese said that he was inspired by the silent classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) and the asylum melodrama “Shock Corridor” (1963). The former is a visually startling piece of German expressionism although dramatically limp by today’s standards, and Scorsese pretty much defuncts the value of the latter. What’s important here is that Scorsese draws from film history – the German expressionism of the 1920’s and the film noirs of the 1940’s primarily – and uses those techniques to make… a very frightening, bone-chilling thriller.

I will drop my explanation of Scorsese for a moment to talk about the actors. Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in “Revolutionary Road”) stars as the Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels who arrives at the island to investigate the disappearances of a schizophrenic murderess (Emily Mortimer, “Match Point,” provides the mug shots of the crazed woman). Teddy is accompanied by fellow marshal Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo, “Zodiac”) whose initial motivation appears to solely adhere to professional duty until perhaps, or perhaps not, be prompted to participate in conspiracies.

Teddy definitely has a number of agendas, including possible revenge on another inmate who may have been responsible for setting the fire that his wife died in years ago. Michelle Williams (“Wendy and Lucy”) plays Teddy’s dead wife, and her ghostly or dreamlike appearances loom steadily in his memory. Ben Kingsley (“House of Sand and Fog”) plays the seemingly benign chief doctor, Max von Sydow (“Minority Report”) plays an insidious-looking doctor who looks like a WWII descendent, and Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill of “The Silence of the Lambs”) plays the cruel warden whose verbal expressions seem to endlessly slant on sadism. Patricia Clarkson (“Vicky Christina Barcelona”) and Jackie Earle Haley (“Little Children”) are also featured in key roles in which the less said about them the better.

“Shutter Island” puts you in the thrall of gripping suspense, especially when you learn that missing patients might be guinea pigs in extreme experiments involving psychosurgery. Teddy, a probing detective who learns things that could be damaging to his livelihood, is reduced into a Kafka-esque rat in a maze. He gets various portentous messages “to run.”

Yet the film prospers less on traditional plot than it does on Scorsese creating a state of mind. Scorsese, the world master as he is, has self-criticized himself in interviews over the years that he is fundamentally a “narrative filmmaker.” This time he has created a mood piece, much like Stanley Kubrick did with “The Shining” or “Eyes Wide Shut” crossed with the claustrophobic dread of F.W. Murnau, the 1920’s pioneer of German expressionistic shadows and fog weirdness. Sample inspiration: While Kubrick created a scene of blood flooding from an elevator, Scorsese creates a nerve-rattling scene of rats scurrying from an island cove.

It hardly matters if you know these classic films or not. It matters that Scorsese knows what he is doing. He draws on German expressionism techniques to make it look better than it has ever looked before (at least with updating that style for a modern film). Just like Quentin Tarantino draws from classic films and manages to outdo the original source, Scorsese is doing the same but always with the sake of servicing the story.

Reality becomes fractured in this film, and we are left to question the sanity of the entire hospital staff and left to question the degrees of paranoia of our protagonist. As well as to if and why the hallucinations are being amplified (are they being triggered by unbeknownst inoculation of psychotropic drugs?). By the end, we are left questioning the schematics of the plot perhaps in justifiable terms, but if you are truly captivated then you will up to its last minutes questioning the malicious motivations of mid-20th century psychology and science. As well as guessing up to its last minute of whose projection of truth is reliable and which slate of characters are the true crazies.

The only thing I can’t be kind about is the penultimate final shot of the movie. It’s a panning shot that underlines a symbolic object that no longer holds any weight after its true significance has already been revealed. Scorsese is also best when he is at his most merciless, and I feel he gets a tad too sympathetic with the wrong character. The climactic construction puts you through a bait-and-switch that makes you identify with its central characters in a new way, so this new sympathetic clutch is treacle.

But quibbles. “Shutter Island” is mesmerizing for the most part, and if you come out of it disappointed, I’ll gladly point you in the direction of Big Momma’s House 3 when it comes around, or something else that proudly aspires to be meaningless fodder and nothing more. But for true believers, count on “Shutter Island” on being the most adventurous and head-spinning movie treat that you will see for the next several months ahead of you, and then some.

Go to official site at http://www.shutterisland.com/#/home

Grade: A

VALENTINE'S DAY

Right off the bat the problem with Valentine’s Day, other than there are too many characters than the film can handle, is that there seems to be more storylines of jilted love than there are stories of actual love running through its intersections. Talk about traffic overload. In a movie loaded with stars, you stop counting smooches and start counting how many limited minutes each actor has in the film.

For the guys, Ashton Kutcher seems to be running through most of the intersections – popping in and out of other member’s storylines – perhaps because he is the supreme florist of Los Angeles and on Valentine’s Day everybody needs flowers. If Kutcher is the coach, then the guys on the bench include Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Topher Grace, Taylor Lautner, and George Lopez. Watch out – one of these guys is an irredeemable slimeball (I guessed right within four and a half minutes into the film). And then one of these actors makes a surprise coming out announcement that he is gay. Somehow this kind of announcement is becoming obligatory in large-ensemble romantic comedies.

For the pink team, Kathy Bates never once gets a Valentine but she’s definitely a coach for at least two characters. On the bench the roster includes Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Queen Latifah, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts and Taylor Swift as an airhead. I am not criticizing Swift in her acting debut, she’s really playing an airhead. That is not contestable. The rest of these girls are playing hopeless romantics, commitment-phobes or possess some kind of reputation-affecting secret – one of them for instance is an adult phone sex operator who speaks in lots of pseudo-sexy crooked accents.

There are no milestones in this rather cookie-cutter romantic comedy that just happens to be a bigger, puffier cookie made without any magical addicting ingredients. Except that one character must set a record for fastest roundtrip flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back again in order to spite a cheater in the nick of time. Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts must have both underwent Hollywood’s easiest film shoot with their participation, playing seatmates on an airplane. Then you have a competition as to whether any of the girls are more neurotic than Topher Grace. But I see here that this is no longer a discussion about milestones.

As if the standard generic story treatment for an all-star cast isn’t enough of a letdown, how about further lousy news that Los Angeles seems to have been photographed through a smog filter. Romantic comedies should be photographed in bright and glossy colors, and in not in such the muggy processed look that this film has been given.

Still the Cupid inside me wants to go out of the way to give out MVP honors to Jamie Foxx as the coolest dude in the cast this time playing a TV reporter, and Jennifer Garner as a Miss Old-Fashioned type looking very adorable as a grade school teacher. But let’s get to some generic and bland audience demographics. The girls will enjoy this film certainly more than the boys who will want to go off and watch sports somewhere. Let’s just not compare this to the ultimate Valentine-ensemble “Love Actually” (2003). That’s a movie for everybody.

Go to the official site at http://www.valentinesdaymovie.com/

Grade: C

THE WOLFMAN

After The Wolfman you would very much start to think that a full moon was every night, night after night, or that a screenplay can mandate sun and moon cycles as it pleases. But that is just one of many, many mistakes that this latest creature feature makes. It is far less crucial to its failure than its inability to make you concerned about its characters.

This is a movie where Benicio del Toro (“Traffic”) and Anthony Hopkins (“Meet Joe Black”) play father and son Talbot, both infected in one time or another, with… let’s just say a curse. They inhabit England in the late 1800’s, with dad the head of a castle manor that hasn’t been swept on the inside since the birth of mops and brooms. Somebody hire a professional leafblower.

But enough about housekeeping. How about the awful film editing? And I rarely say anything about film editing. The editing is so poorly arranged that in one scene I could not tell whether Hopkins was locking in or locking out del Toro from the perils of the night. The editing is so poorly punctuated that when del Toro has “visions” it is right out of a Japanese horror movie. The editing is so poorly executed that the final duel between beasts is a haphazard mess where we can’t tell who is shredding who.

In this sunless world that the movie portrays the one luminary is Emily Blunt who as the love interest is more astute at reading the torn behavioral cycles of del Toro than anyone else is. Blunt is one of these beauties that sees the inner beauty in others. The larger secondary cast are disposable and featureless personalities, with the exception of Hugo Weaving (“The Matrix”) as the detective who speaks his lines as if he knows he is the only one who could really be in charge.

Front and center, del Toro is a classic mumbler but that doesn’t begin to explain why he is so dull. The problem is with this leviathan actor is that he is only threatening when he plays an all-out madman with no soul (see “The Hunted”), but when he attempts pathos and sensitivity in a torn character he is not sterling nor compelling. Hopkins blabbers on with pseudo-intellectual diatribes, dispersing rhetoric with no rhythm or cadence, and the result is observing a thespian actor putting on a lazy performance.

Action and scares are inauthentic because we hear a manufactured ripping sound on the soundtrack while the wolfman raises his paws. That’s right, he mostly just lifts his paws up and down, and then you see blood squirt everywhere. You would think that his claws were made of buzzsaws. More story and technical hooey: When Hopkins’ manor catches on fire he appears non-chalant about it all as if he predicts the outcome within a couple of minutes won’t make the slightest difference.

The only thing that keeps this film from being a complete disaster is the fact that the photographic effects of shadows and fog, as implemented in scenes both of forest and city cobblestone, are rather nifty. That’s something, because the make-up effects (by Rick Baker no less) are not even that nifty. The Talbot transformation to wolfman is done well and more than adequately so, but come on, it’s nothing new.

Go to the official site at http://www.thewolfmanmovie.com/

Grade: D+

FISH TANK

You are immersed into a world of meanness by the third scene of the movie Fish Tank but that meanness is not earned. I’ve had enough of Mike Leigh’s (“Life is Sweet,” “All or Nothing”) subterranean slum dramas, the last thing I needed was a carbon copy by another filmmaker. This Andrea Arnold film tells the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a 15-year old girl living under an irresponsible drunk mother (Kierston Wareing) in a slum area where recreations and activities are limited. Mia has no friends, only an interest in hip-hop. Mia develops a crush on her mother’s boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender).


“Fish Tank” is one of these verité pieces that exist purposely to be as realistic as possible, except the fact there are at least two major developments that are hugely unrealistic. Connor, in the big revelation, has a secondary life pinned to commitments. But no man can pull off sleeping at a girlfriend’s house on consecutive overnight stays, so easily, when he has another domestic home life. It is also too apparent, or transparent, that Connor gets more dialogue-intimate scenes with Mia than the mother he is dating.

Second, a strip club would have seen that Mia is underage and dismissed her before she went on stage. The entire strip club audition is phony, with the filmmaker trying to get you to sigh pitifully at a vulnerable girl stumbling into an exploitation trap.

What makes this film different from say, the emotional powerhouse “Precious” is that film’s director, Lee Daniels, is an enormously empathetic filmmaker who felt he had the need to tell that story. We are getting works by other filmmakers, such as this one of “Fish Tank,” who put out these kinds of movies to show-off their filmmaking skill, to show how “gritty” they can be. “Fish Tank” is preoccupied with throwing obstacles at the heroine in the name of plot cleverness, not empathy.

Also, Arnold is one of these filmmakers who doesn’t know how to use a steady cam. One of the checkpoints of the movie, the big symbolic moment of this girl’s life, is when she drops an audition tape in the mailbox, a symbolically important moment. A true filmmaker would hold the shot on the mailbox, and hold it steady, to underline its significance. Arnold as a filmmaker swerves the camera around and thoughtlessly tracks onto the next “moment,” onto another scene that has less bearing.

That said, Michael Fassbender is one to watch and something can be learned from “Fish Tank” not from the story but of observing his talent. Fassbender, you might remember, played good guy Lt. Archie Hicox who gets a briefing by Mike Myers in “Inglorious Bastereds.” He’s as talented and charismatic as Ewan McGregor, or perhaps a brainier version of Matthew McConaughey.

Go to the official site at http://www.fishtankmovie.com/
Grade: C

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

The people behind the making of From Paris with Love wanted to make a sensational CIA intrigue action-adventure without caring whether or not the CIA details were accurate or realistic. The filmmakers’ intention is to create an entertainment that is a blast, a rip-roaring adventure that doesn’t need to mirror anything going on in real life. The clichés are ripped off from clichés from other movies.

Pierre Morel (“Taken,” which demonstrated concern with that thing called narrative) gets to play around with a couple of explosion scenes, meaning you get the sense that this is a director that loved putting together his sharp camera angles and smash-cut editing techniques. He gets two primary camera subjects: Jonathan Rhys Meyers (who we love from “Match Point”) and John Travolta (who we love from “Face/Off”). Kasia Smutniak (who you might know only if you spend a lot of time with French cinema) is the secondary camera subject, also known as the pretty girl.

James Reese (Rhys Meyers) is established early as a personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador in Paris. In addition to being an aide, he is also the Ambassador’s chess partner which is important for setting up a howlingly bad exchange of dialogue at the end of the movie which I dare not give away. Anyway, Reese’s dream is to become an operative for the CIA. He gets an on-the-field training day when he acts as escort to FBI agent Charlie Wax (Travolta) who transports firearms from the States and successfully gets them past French security.

For a whole half hour, I was uncertain what was going on plot-wise but off the track I was still amused by the male repartee. What I could gather was that Wax might be considered some kind of bad guy since he indulges in snorting drugs and cajoling with hookers. If there is a central mystery in the film – intended or unintended because I was never sure if the filmmakers had an agenda or not – it is whether or not Wax is a bad guy or simply a badass renegade. Like I said, I wonder if “mystery” was even intended within the screenplay.

What is apparent is that Reese is less an escort than a tag along, and the intensity of Wax’s methods is scary for him – Reese is not sure if he should trust Wax. Within two hours, the two of them are already engaged in a couple of shoot-outs or brawls. Within twenty-four hours, well, it’s bam-bam all over the place. The one-liners in-between the bullet frays can be described as either awful or priceless, or maybe it is both at the same time. I think screenwriters of action movies in the 1980’s tried harder to be witty. I do apologize for not having any dialogue examples for you, but perhaps just in case you see the movie, I wouldn’t want to spoil the ridiculousness for you.

I am going to be Mr. Obvious here: This is not a respectable movie but it is not trying to be. I can’t even begin to say how incoherent the plot is but I am amused by how unconcerned it was at being incoherent. The big whopper plot twist where the key woman of the plot turns out to have a double-crossing agenda isn’t mind-bending, it’s just contrived.

Oh, the action is preposterous, and laughable, but isn’t it fun to laugh? Isn’t ridiculous more fun than solemn? Sure, sometimes it is even if it is to a limited degree. I was shaking my head in disbelief, yet I wasn’t exactly bored.

My memory was a little fuzzy just a couple of hours after seeing the movie, but I do have a couple of favorite moments. I like the scene at the end where the French diplomat is irritated by the inconvenience of how delayed she is – didn’t she recall that just moments ago an oncoming car got hit by a rocket launcher that was intended for her? Then at the beginning, how about shoot-out at the Chinese restaurant scene with cocaine oozing through bullet holes from the ceiling. What was that about? I mean to say, What Was That About!!!

Go to the official site at http://frompariswithlovefilm.com/

Grade: C