WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Excessive but bullish entertainment. Michael Douglas is at once a reformed and the same old Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which throws in newly introduced characters rather than recycling old ones. The original “Wall Street” (1987) is the most brilliant and shrewd of all big business films. Oliver Stone has returned to co-write and direct the sequel, and he restores all the juicy jargon. Stone lets his characters get sucked into greed and there’s lots of talk on big numbers and big losses. There are shares of relationship turmoil, too, much of it integrated suitably, but the surplus of conflicts turns this into a long movie.

The film is likely to receive lots of negative reviews by pretentiously cerebral critics that want to trump it in order to make themselves look like brighter, more tech market academic geniuses. The film is likely to be disliked by any audience that has a preemptive dislike for anything that is by Oliver Stone. Also, you may ask, does the select brainy material get compromised by a few patronizing commercial elements? Well duh.

With a prologue opening in 2001, Gekko is released from prison after an eight year sentence on insider trading and securities fraud charges; he has retrievable items such as a silk handkerchief, money clip, Rolex gold watch and an ancient mobile phone as heavy as a barbell. A limo pulls up and we think, along with him, that it is for him. The snide joke is that the limo and an entourage are meant for a rapper also released on the same day.

Jump forward seven years and we are in 2008, and – beware the hokey intros and cumbersome David Byrne soundtrack – young trader Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) is smooching it up with Winnie (Carey Mulligan), the estranged daughter to Gekko. Jake’s mentor is his boss Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) of the investment bank Keller Zabel investments that is supposed to resemble the real Bear Stearns, and its collapse. After the bumpy exposition, the movie starts to get good again as soon as we start seeing the PowerPoint graphics and boiler room madness, although this boiler room has changed its appearance into something sleeker in comparison to years previous. Within a few well-played scenes, Louis becomes a fallen man and Jake blows his huge commission earnings after playing the stock market on margin.

The nemesis Bretton James (Josh Brolin, a swarthy, thrill-seeker rich man performance) makes sure Louis doesn’t get a bailout so his financial empire can buy it up for fractions of its worth. Jake is ruined, too, and he hates Bretton for all that is merciless and unfeeling. But when Jake gets a job proposition from Bretton, he takes it, mostly out of self-preservation (who else will hire him after his last job’s fiasco?) Meanwhile, Jake seeks out Gordon Gekko on advice on his impending wedding to his daughter and on finance, and they develop a “trading” favors relationship.

Tucked into two hours and ten minutes is a lot of savvy financial talk that incorporates contemporary issues of bailouts and sector bubble bursts, of a nation addicted to borrowing on credit and a nation with nothing left to sell, of banks selling illusions of an idea and selling unproven technology for fast boom bucks. Jake though thinks he is ahead of the curve on fusion technology and seeks capital investors. He also thinks he has won Bretton on his side but there are no moral allegiances only moral hazards when it comes to money and investment, and the film explores that meaning of economic self-interests.

The movie stuffs in a lot while attempting to be a social mirror to recent economic history. Gekko gives a lecture not to Teldar paper on how “Greed is good” but instead to a forum of college students on how “Leverage is bad.” In order to create believable transitions to explain and justify character, Stone just adds new scenes and new developments on top of old ones. His writing is not redundant, just extraneous. Added annoyance: Jake too quickly forgets the burn of losing his big commission in the first act of the film.

There is a perceptively snotty charity banquet halfway into the film. Rich men from all over seem to attend in order to find their rivals and cut them down to size. Rich women are competing with each other in fashionable appearance. The feeling is a certain egomaniacal vacuity in the sense that nobody cares what the charity is actually for. Stone dramatizes how the charity benefit is just an excuse for a Gatsby party soaking in greed and narcissism. It also entrances Charlie Sheen, the best cameo in the film and his transformation after twenty-plus years sums up to more than just a conceit.

Outshining the rest in charisma and swagger, Douglas gives a performance that should prove durable with passing years. He is beyond caricature. Another sequel could easily put him front and center, although good box office returns or not, this is probably the last “Wall Street” movie.

Go to the official site at http://www.wallstreetmoneyneversleeps.com/
 
Grade: B

THE TOWN

Fierce entertainment. In a leap career improvement, Ben Affleck turns in a sturdier and shrewder lead performance than his usual. Affleck as director makes head-banging efforts to make the bank robberies in The Town different from other larcenies we’ve seen, and he makes Boston his own degenerate cesspool. Double-crosses, twists, the binds (and snaps) of loyalty exceed expectations – it is more than a one-note crime movie. A few warts keeps the movie from becoming a total triumph. But all the familiar elements of robbery movies are ecstatically amped up dispensing regularly satisfying thrills.

This is an actor’s showcase. Affleck feels (Boston) rooted in his part as bank robber Doug MacRay, Jeremy Renner is Jem, his hothead cohort ready to unload his weapon on innocent people if need-be, Blake Lively is the trashy and easy girl, Pete Postlethwaite is the florist who moonlights as the crime architect, Chris Cooper is the dad in a one-scene showstopper, and Jon Hamm is the dilligent FBI man who enjoys nabbing scumbags.

Hamm is the only refined character of the film. This is a fresh career move for the actor known, with raves, for the award-winning TV series “Mad Men.” Hamm is a stiff, straight-arrow lawman, but while stiff sounds like a criticism, it should serve more as a compliment. He is rugged enough for the field, but a stiff no-nonsense interrogator. He even gets a few scenes with the ladies. But he is dealing at the core these Boston bad boys led by Affleck and Renner. These are the kind of hardened guys who will get themselves into a brutal street scrimmage just to retain self-respect.

The script has one shameless, far-fetched stretch: Rebecca Hall (just fine), as Claire, is abducted by the guys during the first robbery of the film, and when the guys learn of her Charlestown residence from her driver’s license (which is their hometown) they want to surveillance her. Only that during the tailing, Doug runs into a consoling dialogue with her, and within a few scenes, falls for her. Once you suspend your disbelief with this development, you can accept the rest of the story.

Of course, Jem doesn’t like Doug’s involvement with Claire one bit. He is ready to rub her out if any corroborating evidence spills to the FBI. Claire is the first normal, non-trashy, non-bad girl and dignified romantic relationship in his life. Doug, of course, doesn't want to be slummin' all his life and Claire represents, err, a new flowering. Doug continues to set up and execute robberies while lying to Claire about his extracurricular activities. Will Claire ever find out that she is going with a man who held her at gunpoint? Claire finding out his real identity is inevitable, whether it be real life or just Hollywood plot mechanics. “I was never going to hurt you,” he confesses.

The guys start taking swings at each other and the grudges turn into suspicions about who will sell out whom. Doug wants out of the business but the livelihood of others becomes threatened so he has to stick with it. This leads to the final big score robbery, a set piece assembled with bravado. The ads promised robbers in nun masks, but the costumes vary each time, and better yet, what also varies is how much tougher these guys get on the bystanders. The final shootout is a real viciously charged street battle, although, one wishes that guys with double-barrel shotguns didn’t miss from ten feet away.

The camerawork bursts with energy during the big action scenes sprawling over a lot of spontaneous, anything-can-happen territory. The film ends on a satisfying, more than half believable note. Affleck is so good that he nearly gets to forget his career garbage like “Pearl Harbor” and “Daredevil.” He is also becoming a real legitimate director coming off the heels of his debut “Gone Baby Gone.” Maybe the permanent 5 o’clock shadow is working for him, or his Nike leather jacket is working for him (street cred!). Renner also deserves props for injecting sleaze and a violent mean streak into his wild card character. On a double bill, “The Town” should be the opening act and “The Departed” should be the main event.

Go to the official site at http://thetownmovie.warnerbros.com/
 

Grade: B+

HEARTBREAKER (L'Arnacoeur)

The French romantic comedy with Heartbreaker (L’Arnacoeur) should be a guilt-free joy if you are already predisposed for love conquers all stuff. It borrows “Ocean’s 11” jazzy rhythms but instead of a heist film it is a love hijack. Romain Duris (“The Beat That My Heart Skipped”) is Alex, a professional couple-wrecker who drops in to seduce and save women before they take the plunge with the wrong guy. Overprotective fathers are often the clients that pay Alex and his team to intercept. On his latest assignment, Alex falls in love with the bitchy heiress Juliette (Vanessa Paradis).

Like other popular imports “Priceless” and “The Girl from Monaco,” this is another high-gloss comedy set at a five-star French Riviera hotel. Luxurious setting, perky performers and more garter belts than in an American film. For a touch of cute, Juliette has a soft spot for “Dirty Dancing” which means that Alex must brush up on Patrick Swayze moves, imitate the swagger and slide of a legend. Also means he must sing like George Michael.

Alex has a week to break up Juliette’s wedding before she ties the knot to a supposed boring guy. Alex will pose as her bodyguard so he can follow her every shopping and spa salon move. On his side are two surveillance experts, his brother Marc (Francois Damiens) and his wife Julie Ferrier (Melanie). Damiens is a goofball – not a ladykiller like Alex, and his key role is to play the A/C repairman who deliberately puts the cooling system on the fritz. As for Ferrier, she has a fetching cougar quality. Her character slips into hotel receptionist, cleaner, waitress, etc.

Juliette has one of the biggest suites in the hotel, and Alex the would-be bodyguard is right next door. Just when Juliette dismisses Alex from duty, she gets attacked by a (would-be) thief, and Alex saves the day. Things start to look rosy, but then Juliette’s fiancé shows up. It becomes harder to predict in how Alex is going to be able to pull this off but if he can steal Juliette away for a few minutes in a cool yellow sports car and make the bachelorette party about him…

As the love interest, Paradis has a stiff face that somehow can look pretty once she gives Alex the time of day, which she is not so willing. If you have ever found beauty under a hard shell of woman then Paradis will make your day. As for Duris, he is like a cheeseball Colin Farrell trying to be John Travolta or Patrick Swayze. The movie itself is suave, snobby around the edges, and a smidgen delightful by the climax.

Go to the official site at http://www.heartbreakermovie.com/
 
Grade: B

THE AMERICAN

In response to the new film The American, some audiences are going to find its meditative distance and ambiguity to be mesmerizing and some will find that because it slows its pace down to the rituals of real life, it is boring. George Clooney, in full undeterred grimace, is a hitman trying to get away and stay low. The methodical pace lets you concentrate on the realities of a hitman’s life rituals, and if you accept, the frequent pauses benefit the style and atmosphere of the story.

The title of the original novel was better apt. Martin Booth’s 1990 novel “A Very Private Gentleman” was the name, and it probably contained terse conversations and internalized anguish as well. For the book to be adapted, it must have needed star power to attain commercial purposes. Clooney is a star that happens to be an actor first, and here he makes silence magnetic with his protagonist Jack, who sometimes goes by Edward. Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) is his only regular speaking buddy in the first half of the film. If you are enrapt by the film’s visual storytelling and by the mystery of Jack’s enigmatic background, then you will probably wish that there were even less speaking scenes between these two.

The story begins with a shocking ambush. The title cards tell us that Jack and his lover are in Sweden. But how serious can a guy like Jack, in his line of work, take love? “Make no personal friends, Jack. You used to know that,” is what Jack’s shadowy contractor Pavel (Johan Leysen) tells him. Jack abandons his lover like he abandons tube socks with holes. When Jack relocates to Castle del Monte, a region in Italy, he accepts another job. “You don’t even have to pull the trigger,” he is told.

The glacial, no facial tics mood of the film can be captivating. You wonder, “Who is going to double-cross who in this small Italian village?” We wait for Jack to be contacted about the details and necessities of this latest job. A mysterious dirty-blonde haired man starts to follow him but mostly hangs out in his car.

This film by Anton Corbijn, his second film, is a film steeped more in tenseness than intensity. He lets the film breathe and saunter in anxiety. He creates a mood, a space, wandering languor, and then surprises us with sudden bursts of action and excitement that come out of nowhere. On a television screen, Corbijn shows “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) but not “Le Samourai” (1967, French) as a homage. Corbijn has made a lone wolf art film, like the aforementioned ’67 French classic. But it is one with certain fatalistic noir pleasures: sex and bang-bang.

During all of the hushed cinematics, the story interjects a sexual relationship between Jack and a whore named Clara (Violante Placido, rendering complexity out of a potentially thin role) which takes place in a sleazy cathouse saturated in red lighting. Jack has the money to pay more for a tastier, hotter girl like Clara (her breasts are even prettier in the natural sunlight away from cathouse stench) although we can only guess how much extra a john would have to pay. During the sex scenes where money is exchanged, Jack and Clara’s bodies slosh each other in graphic rhapsody. They have bedroom chemistry. Jack temporarily fulfills his sex needs without making any committed attachments.

Clara is a very beautiful girl, with possible well-groomed religious roots. But with no other industrial talents she somehow ended up as a whore. But she does have the talent of manipulation. Clara sees Jack as this tall handsome stranger who tips big, behaves in worldly self-confidence, and decides that he could be a candidate to help her exit out of her sordid lifestyle. She doesn’t know what he does for a living, but surely whatever it is, his occupation is awesome. Clara knows if there has ever been a man, Jack is the right person to trick into having a date outside of the cathouse. No money exchanged, she is thinking, let’s just see what he can do for me.

As the film develops, we suspect there are spies or amateur spies plunking around. Father Benedetto and Clara are trustworthy allies to Jack, because they are simple people. But Clooney has a magnificent scene where his distrust is so incandescent that you can see his expert foresight into lies and deceit within a clench of an eyebrow. Why is Father Benedetto so insistent about talking about the sins of lives during the most seeming remissive morning hours? Why is Clara so willing to get so full-frontal nude – is it because she wants Jack nude and defenseless, too? And what is the symbolic meaning of the butterfly? Is the key answer supposed to be revealed in the final shot of the movie? You bet. If you find “The American” entertaining it is probably because you enjoy guessing motives of ambiguous and emotionally enfolded characters.

Go to the official site at http://www.focusfeatures.com/film/the_american/
 
Grade: B+

GOING THE DISTANCE

You have to be in the right time of your life to enjoy Going the Distance, a long distance rom-com with Drew Barrymore and Justin Long (a real-life couple). You also have to be willing to accept bawdy foul language. Long’s character Garrett is a music biz guy in New York City, Barrymore’s character Erin is a six-week stint newspaper intern who returns to San Francisco to finish up Stanford studies. The rapport between lovers and buddies is sometimes over-scripted, sometimes natural as bunny love.


Flick is bound to get prevailing negative reviews by critics who already decided they don’t like romantic comedies. This is not Alexander Payne, it is a better than usual Generation X crowd-pleaser and fairly comes off as socially relevant. And if you are a guy reading this, the Liv Tyler-like girl next door will probably like this movie. It has recognizable moments for anyone who has ever been in an impractical relationship but struggled, compromised and waited to make it work.


In all of these kinds of rom-coms, the leads get support by built-in friends and family. Garrett’s friends are played by Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day. Erin’s family support and friends are played by Christina Applegate, Jim Gaffigan, Natalie Morales and Oliver Jackson-Cohen and maybe a few others. This supporting cast gets more than the usual chances to impromptu their idiosyncratic gifts.


Variant segments of the film deal with their separation on both coasts. The movie deals with online travel quotes, and when tickets go for the $2,000 ballpark it means that they will miss a major holiday together. Text messages come up in animated bubbles. Energetic and thoughtful moviemaking starts to run itself into the pits in the third act by just a tad. An example of a misfire segment is the split-screen phone sex: it goes for awkward miscommunication which will be uproarious for some viewers and just merely awkward for others.


When Garrett and Erin do get together, lots of hand-holding, live band music, joking about sex, having sex and then the eventual argument of who will leave what job behind so they can relocate to be together. The movie also works in slob humor, how mustaches can be a sexy attribute, “Centipede” the video game, bar trivia, “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Top Gun” as favorite movies (“I like all homoerotic fighter pilot movies.”), and bong hits.


I repeat, this movie contains slob humor, dirty sex jokes and other sexual situations. The actors make all of this acceptable by having something of a balanced wit. Sometimes smart people like to slosh around, drink beer and talk about stupid stuff to counterbalance the rigidness of their everyday work-for-a-paycheck lives. Besides Applegate and Gaffigan, none of these characters are rich. It is never said aloud in the film, but economics and politics is what keeps young hard-working and sharp-thinkers down and is what keeps many unable from elevating the status of their relationship. Characters like Garrett and Erin have to deal with the frustration of being three-thousand miles apart – if this was a sane world Garrett and Erin would be able to move next door to each other tomorrow if they could without encumbering tremendous sacrifices.

Go to the official site at http://going-the-distance.warnerbros.com/

Grade: B-

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP

Zhang Yimou, China’s best filmmaker (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “Ju Dou”), is so sure he has come up with such a hip idea that he doesn’t realize how he has negated it to cheese. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop takes the Coen Brother’s classic “Blood Simple,” their 1985 debut that played like a Southwest honky tonk noir, and spits it out into a Chinese western where they use guns and bows and arrows. Yimou puts together a really annoying gallery of quirky and loud characters all dressed in gaudy kimono silk, and one badass crooked lawman who doesn’t say much at all. You have to really have a neverending fever for Chinese exoticism to get wrapped up in this flick.

Just like the Coen’s tale, the suspense concoction involves a missing loot, dead bodies that need hidden, a bury-a-person-alive scene and other assorted methods to cover tracks. The witless beauty (Yan Ni, nice slutty lips) is two-timing her husband (Ni Dahong) with a klutzy coward (Xiao Shenyang) who works at their noodle shop. The police roam the desert lands, but that doesn’t stop the cuckold husband from hatching a plan to knock off his wife. The story takes place in a desert land in a time long ago (no surveillance, no witnesses should make this easier than it is as long as hubby has an alibi).

One remorseless cop (Sun Hunglei, he thinks he is starring in “Westworld”) is hired to do the killing, but he wants more money, so his greed triggers a series of events that result in tireless bloodshed. Not only are the poorly named and poorly defined characters less interesting than they were in the Coen’s work, but the plot is harder to follow in the scrabble-mad approach that Yimou has come up with. For some reason, Yimou found it important to put in some very loud horse galloping, and the sounds effects of foot running are also needlessly hyperactive.

The best one can do to get through this is to fake half-hearted amusement until it’s over. If you are looking for Yimou’s crucial miscalculation, in the worst film that he has ever made, it’s this: When you set a film in a time and place that is not remotely real then nothing that happens in the story is going to matter. What we see is caricatures set against a cardboard abstraction of a time period.

Go to the official site at http://www.sonyclassics.com/awomanagunandanoodleshop/
 
Grade: D+

SOLITARY MAN

Solitary Man is Michael Douglas’ best performance in years, which is an edgy, slick-talking movie that is simultaneously wicked and funny, and yet more than anything, it is as uncompromising as it promises. Douglas is going the route where other aging actors of his generation – Jack Nicholson, Sean Connery, Mel Gibson – have gone themselves. Douglas plays the untamable playboy who lusts after younger chicks and finds no moral error in his behavior.

Luckily, Douglas’ character Ben Kalmen happens to be a very rich guy. But the catch is that writers and directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien (they wrote “Rounders” and “Ocean’s 13” together) make Ben a guy who has smashed his own reputation and is dangerously close to losing his luxuries, like his high-rise New York penthouse. He spent all of his money buying his way out of jail, he explains. This implies that Ben’s lawyers kept him away from dire fraud charges over his auto manufacturing business. But whatever happens, Ben is dressed to kill. Or at least to thrill. Ben is so narcissistic that he thinks as long as he is present in the room, he is a thrill to everybody.

Barely besides him in his life are his ex-wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) and his daughter Susan (Jenna Fischer), yet it’s the daughter that puts up regularly with listening to Ben’s lewd sexual conquests. But everywhere Ben goes, he thinks he has the right to invade in on other conversations. Ben’s current girlfriend Jordan (Mary Louise Parker), asks him to escort her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to a college university orientation, and Ben hardly misses a beat to bust in the younger frat boy turf.

The uncompromising aspects of the story involve how Ben, not only tries to get laid over the weekend, but that he actually does. Which trickles is a domino effect of bad luck and backfiring – risking reputation, respect of family and a bank loan which he is relying on – which sends Ben nosediving. He’s left leaning on Jimmy Marino (Danny DeVito) to give him a job at a diner, and college kid Daniel Cheston (Jesse Eisenberg) who needs the aging bachelor to mentor him in the art of talking to girls.

When a rich guy like Ben though falls down hard it’s enough to make him want to change his ways around, at least according to the usual Hollywood screenplay. But Ben still wants to hit on girls, and now that he resorts to a campus town, that means 19-year old girls. The Humbert Humbert perv in Ben doesn’t want to let up. But he doesn’t want to see that he is now woefully out of place at college parties.

Douglas, whom judging on this colorfully grandiose performance, is getting to the age to play a perfect Robert Evans if ever given the opportunity, that former Paramount studios honcho and ladykiller that fell hard after a string of flops and personal bad publicity. Playing Ben, he’s still the kind of Basic/Fatal character that made Douglas an icon 20 years ago, except that “Solitary Man” happens to be a story emboldened by harsh revelations and consequences. Yet at the same time, it is fun to see Douglas revel in a character steeped in slick, lecherous conduct because he is so damn persuasive in action. Do guys like Ben ever enter 12-step programs as long as they still remain wealthy?

There are some select readers present that still crave anti-commercial movies when they become available. So far this year, I count three really good ones for you: “Greenberg,” “Chloe,” and “Solitary Man.” These are the movies that feature characters that sound like real intelligent people, the kind of people with grey shadings of good and bad behaviors. But if any of you out there that ever thought that Michael Douglas was a great actor denied a challenging role, well, then this is the challenging role he was born to play.

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

Grade: B+

PLEASE GIVE

Chick flick has for some time now, maybe two decade’s worth, had a derogatory slant to it. Maybe it is because most of them, either starring the likes of Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey or maybe the two of them together, stink of moldy cheese. But if there exists one stable reliability to the genre it is writer-director Nicole Holofcener who has never made a bad feature. Her latest film is Please Give and once again Catherine Keener is her star subject.

During her career, Holofcener has made “Walking and Talking,” Lovely and Amazing” and “Friends with Money.” Her latest film opens with a graphic montage depicting the tragedy of mammograms. Not really a tragedy, that’s overstatement, but it takes a delicate beautiful thing and makes it, uh… makes you want to close your eyes at the indignity. These opening seconds are the least appealing element of the film. But maybe it was meant solely for the female audience to identify with (and not me). It used to be men that gave women a hard time in Holofcener movies, now you can add the doctor’s office.

Then there is the human consciousness. Kate (Keener) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) are in the business of buying the vintage antiques of the recently deceased, sometimes buying apartments of the deceased. Kate and Alex live in a high-rise unit, next to a unit inhabited by the elderly Andra (Ann Guilbert). She is cared for by her granddaughters Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), who share a range of good and bad opinion of Kate and Alex, whom in essence, are bargain-hunters.

The fizz in Kate and Alex’s marriage is deflating their sense of worth. Perhaps the problem is that they share every waking minute together (can marriage and occupation co-exist?). They have an overweight and generally insecure teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), whose self-esteem would boost if only somebody bought her a two-hundred dollar pair of jeans. But Kate doesn’t buy her jeans, or buy her skin care. Not when there are starving homeless people on the street. Alex could also step in and buy for his daughter, but he invests elsewhere too, in the lives of strangers.

This story is as much a marriage deconstruction as it is a portrait of the two granddaughters next door. Rebecca is an attractive and hard-working radiology technician who barely gets out to date (she prefers guys that are the cute type, like Thomas Ian Nicholas who plays Eugene), while Mary doesn’t date she does get around in various meaningless flings. But the story set-up is that Rebecca and Mary are neighbors to a married couple they don’t like because they look like they want to leech on their grandmother as soon as she passes.

Then the surprise is that Rebecca and Mary make friends with them, only it is made in a singularly paved way. Rebecca becomes closer to Kate, while Mary becomes closer to Alex and their daughter Abby. Defined by different avenues, each friendship becomes its own privatized confessional. Kate leaks out her guilt to Rebecca for what she does for a living. Alex pours out his frustrations on lack of excitement in his marriage to Mary. And Mary becomes Abby’s skin care specialist, and lousy advisor on beauty since to her beauty is skin deep and nothing else. Rebecca carries all the guilt between the two sisters. Seething is this unspoken rivalry between sensitivity and shallowness.

But all of this description fails to convey what a talented writer Holofcener is who cares too much about her characters to give them false objectives. Shall I reaffirm to you that the film ends in the humbling, realistic way it should end without being hammered with overblown dramatic ploys? What’s criterion is that Holofcener writes jokes worthy of Woody Allen in the 1970’s, but with a pro-feminist spark interpolated into it. She writes characters that are real and rounded, vulnerable and neurotic, smart and courageous – at least courageous for contemporary New Yorker types. And she finds varied and individual details in her characters. Holofcener puts the brains back in chick flicks and reinstalls the idea that at least a few chick flicks out there are made for the grown-up thinking person.

Go to the official site at http://www.sonyclassics.com/pleasegive/
Grade: B+

KICK-ASS

How charmless is the superhero movie Kick-Ass? Nicolas Cage, in his first scene, is setting up to shoot his pre-teen daughter in the chest with a caliber pistol. This is, of course, not a lethal exercise, he’s merely trying to test the body armor. Chloe Grace Moretz, takes the bullet with pride. But I can’t help but wonder about her pigtails. Did dad, or the director, not consider he might shoot off her locks of hair?


Oh, the charmless part, in my opinion, was the entire scene seeped in such loudness that you’re supposed to hear, and feel, the ripples of that discharged bullet. But the movie gets more gratuitously brutal. I especially felt rotten after a turncoat mobster gets “microwaved” to death. But Moretz, as Mindy Macready a.k.a. Hit Girl gets battered viciously in the last act of the film, like she was just one of the guys. Her age is 11.

At this point in my review, I’ve made it sound like this father-daughter duo is the core of the movie but I have misled you. Aaron Johnson is the high school outcast who narrates the movie, who just wants to make a difference. Whether it’s a difference to the world or a difference to himself, does it really matter? He wonders why no ordinary people have ever tried to become a superhero. He wants to try, but with zero imagination, no helpful gadgets, it is no surprised he gets pummeled in his first two outings.

Charisma is everything to the movies, or at least used to be everything. It doesn’t help that Johnson has about one-tenth of the charisma of Jay Barouchel, and being compared to Barouchel is not flattering in the first place. He’s just an unhappy young man whom I guess is pounding out his frustrations by being a superhero named Kick-Ass. He’s no nice, charismatic kid like Peter Parker. Somehow, even with his superhero ineptness and ambiguous intentions, he gets a girlfriend in this movie.

The genre requires an evil genius, but you will have to settle for a stock character villain. The kingpin of the movie is Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and he tries to keep his business from his son Chris, who will become Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the McLovin’ kid). Red Mist has the moxie to join Kick-Ass and Hit Girl, but with fidelity to his father’s business, only joins them to lure them to their capture. Let the slashing and gashing begin. Cage, who becomes the alias Big Daddy, gets brutalized in quite an awful way. His daughter Hit Girl is bummed, I guess, but somehow we think she will survive this ordeal with a next day brush-off.

This isn’t courage being mounted as message, it’s all displays of dehumanized behavior. This movie is for undiscerning viewers who enjoy overstylized ultraviolence for the sake of it being, uh, gnarly and way cool. Most moviegoers don’t know the names of the director responsible, but I take part in my duty to know so. Watching “Kick-Ass,” I at times thought I was watching “Natural Born Killers” as directed by the Wachowski Brothers, and repackaged with a smiley face for general young audiences. The name of the director is actually Matthew Vaughn, and he is now on my hate list. I am glad that I saw “Date Night” and “Death at a Funeral” recently, as an antidote, because after those two I can now add to my love list.

Go to the official site at http://www.kickass-themovie.com/

Grade: D+

DATE NIGHT

Date Night is far from great but in terms of being a feel-good entertainment it gives you probably what you would want out of a Steve Carell and Tina Fey aging-dorks pairing. Feel-good is a relative term these days against a sour onslaught of releases, it’s also a sign that this fairly light comedy doesn’t do anything that you would label as abrasive. It’s a rare comedy that didn’t make me want to puke once.

What a compliment, I know. Actually, I found myself giggling at Carell’s repeated failed attempts at masculinity and Fey’s inhibited nerd who is a tad too simple for the Big City. Carell, in a regular “Dan in Real Life” type of role, is well-suited for that “too-nice” guy. Fey is just as funny here as she was in “Baby Mama” but this is a role with more insecure frailty. They play the Fosters, a New Jersey couple, whom decide to go out on a much needed date night in New York City in order to reboot their romance for each other.

They hit a very swank but uppity restaurant-club named Claw, and since they don’t have a reservation, they steal one when the hostess calls out for the Triplehorns who are nowhere to be seen. Complications demand that the Fosters are now mistaken for somebody important, and two thugs take them to the back alley to shake some information out of them. They escape from under their wing and spend the rest of the movie running, and searching for answers, too.

Due to predictable elements, the movie’s outline is drawn for you before you’re halfway through it, and the two thugs – a scruffy white guy and a bald black guy – are nincompoops that can’t shoot straight. These are unrecognizable character actors playing one-note characters. But other actors on board include Ray Liotta as a big crook, William Fichtner as a white collar crook, Taraji P. Hensen as a detective, James Franco and Mila Kunis as a nutty couple in hideout, Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig as a couple on the fritz, and Mark Wahlberg as a Bruce Wayne-type stud. The supporting cast hit their marks breezily and satisfyingly.

What is startling, in the best sense possible, is that Wahlberg is able to do almost nothing and yet is very funny. His character’s persona is macho conceit, and when our date couple duo enter his sexy pad, Carell becomes instantly jealous of Fey’s leeriness for Whalberg’s pecs (biggest laughs of the movie). When they leave Wahlberg’s condo and go on route to their next destination, the two take a timeout to evaluate their marriage. The interplay dialogue brings up this issue: With two kids, two parallel careers and a mortgage how will they ever have time to spike excitement into their boring marriage?

The rest of their after hours adventure is nothing but exciting, if at least once, preposterous. Carell, after commandeering a sports car, locks horns with a taxi cab – their vehicles, that is – which becomes a two-car wrecking derby through the streets of New York while good cops and trigger happy cops pursue them. The idea of the bumpers of two cars sticking together as the way portrayed in the movie is, well, a crock, but for the time-being it gives the producers of the film something to put in the marketing trailer. I worked up enough good spirits to at least chuckle at the preposterousness.

Most of the other adventures are sane, and yet exciting, but the best trick of the movie throws Carell and Fey into an adult club which prompts them to perform the most deliberately bad pole-dancing that you ever saw. You wonder for a few minutes afterwards if Carell and Fey attempted to be good and if that was it, if that was really their best. But that’s the appeal of them anyway, two dorky actors tackling naughtiness and turning it into something charmingly naive. Their sweetness shines through in the final shot of the film, the coda, of a couple who have been chased through the night and yet survived ’til sunrise. And the end credits cookies reveals that these two really enjoyed each other’s company in the making of their movie.

Go to the official site at http://www.datenight-movie.com/#/home
 
Grade: B

CLASH OF THE TITANS

Get ready for a battle between kings and gods, mortals and immortals in an action spectacle that impacts you with a thunderbolt. Clash of the Titans is Greek mythology updated, with a sense of verve and excitement (and a tad too many rattling edits and shaking cameras), for 21st century action-hungry audiences, but it keeps its criteria mission and objective in order: to tell a grand centuries-old story.
Gloriously, the filmmakers put the camera in the sky in many of its rousing scenes, but because we know we live in an age of CGI special effects, we know it is not really the sky. But it feels like we are really floating up there along with our hero Perseus (Sam Worthington), who was born of a god but raised in the man, and thus here is a fantasy film that does the exceptional job of suspending our disbelief.

With only a few scenes of actors standing around and waxing rhetorically, this new remake of the 1981 film (this is a forward leap improvement narrative-wise than the original), moves with brisk pacing while exceedingly following through on its foreshadowing. When the film promises well in advance a difficult battle to the death encounter with Medusa, whose hair is writing with snakes, the actual battle is a fantastic showdown that hurls with acrobatic ferocity.

Also included in the adventure is Perseus’ capture of the flying horse Pegasus, duels with gigantic scorpions, encounters with Stygian witches with eyeballs in their palms, various winged demons and gargoyles, and Kraken the sea monster that is so colossal in size that he can prompt tidal waves capable of ravaging ancient Greek cities. Two things missing from the original is the mechanical owl (good omission, also a good self-aware laugh) and the two-headed wolf battle (a sorely missing omission). Perseus does not begin as the principle leader of the band of warriors, that authority belongs to Mads Mikkelson (“Casino Royale”) as Draco in command, but surely enough he ascends to leadership.

This is also another successful vehicle for Worthington who has become a major star within the wingspan of a year. He brought much-needed gravitas to ill-conceived “Terminator: Salvation” and was the star of the worldwide box office behemoth “Avatar.” Worthington is hardly the tallest man on screen, visibly shorter to Mikkelson, but he is as hard as a rock. And he brings integrity to the screen – in various times he appears he would die for a goddess simply because it is the right thing to do, the right thing for the better of mankind. He loves goddesses for what they represent to the foundation of the world, and Worthington’s Perseus makes himself feel less than who they are. Worthington turns martyrdom into a masculine art.

Initially, Worthington begins humble (too humble and grounded to be honest), having survived at childhood being washed at sea within a closed coffin. He nonetheless becomes a warrior, defying if not practically rejecting his god genetics, and places the “common” people at higher importance than the gods. He is unmoved, if full of refutation, when Zeus (Liam Neeson, succeeding and exceeding Laurence Oliver in the original role) arrives and announces himself as his father. If they happen to share the same ideals, they both in a way have different definitions of the same objectives.

What Zeus and Perseus, father and son, will have in common is the desire and need to wipe out Hades (Ralph Fiennes), the vengeful god with the intent to wreck and destroy humanity as well as to seize all of Zeus’ power and rule the underworld. The climax of the film is a little bit too “sensational” for its own good – with debris crashing, splashing here and there and everywhere – but as the camera swoops through the carnage and wreckage it inspires thrilling giddiness.

The film is playing in 3D in select theaters, but it is important to note that the film was not filmed in Real 3D but instead converted in 3D after studio test runs. The 3D glasses tint the film and the picture’s colors become diffused in a dissatisfying way. This is opposite to “Avatar” which was filmed in Real 3D with the planned conception to view it in 3D IMAX. What Warner Bros. proves with “Clash of the Titans” is that converted 3D is not a good idea, it adds nothing. See this in the original proper 2D projection. I unfortunately reviewed this in 3D, preferring the film when I took the glasses off.

Go to the official site at http://clash-of-the-titans.warnerbros.com/
 
Grade: B

CHLOE

The Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan ranges from mysterious and tantalizing entertainments to polemics that are laborious and impenetrable, but with Chloe he has simply made the most entertaining film of his career. If sex, deception, paranoia and the forbidden are objects of cinematic interest, then here’s a movie that is good enough to have come out in the Fall instead of in Spring.

This is a film that announces the setting of the rich and privileged within the opening scenes, with Julianne Moore as Catherine, a gynecologist and Liam Neeson as, David, a professor of music as owners of a post-modern glass house with plush beds and fireplaces and marble in every room. Invading their affluent lifestyle is high-paid escort Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) who sleeps with men for money but comes onto Moore at the ladies’ room of a posh upscale restaurant. David never seems as interested in his wife Catherine who ingratiates dinner guests but doesn’t bother a nod to his wife.

Further suspect of David’s disinterest is that on the night of his birthday he misses his flight back home which causes eyebrows to raise from all Catherine’s friends and associates who have attended a surprise birthday smash. David’s lack of apology is further troubling to Catherine. And then there is 17-year old Michael (Max Thieriot) who is sneaking a girl into his bedroom at night.

It is Catherine who is on the verge of a midlife crisis, ahem, this is a different take than putting a man on the spot every time. But shouldn’t she get some proof that her husband is cheating on her? In another incidental meeting with Chloe the idea of entrapment crosses Catherine’s mind. Catherine hires Chloe to meet David by chance in public, flirt with him, talk naughty with him… the ground rules are never specifically set, at least, not according to Chloe.

So Chloe is hired to go find David to see if he does anything bored married men with their heads down their pants do. But Chloe goes beyond the flirting by seducing him, groping him, taking him on a ride first at a menagerie and that at a hotel. Catherine angrily scalds Chloe for not following directions, but alas, she wants to hear more. And insidiously and ingeniously the film wraps us up in its decadent journey which is all the tastier once Catherine and Chloe begin a heated affair.

Egoyan is the director of such swanky sex-art movies as “Exotica” and “Where the Truth Lies” which dealt with obsession to the breaking point. With his new film he seems to be asking, “How deep and tangibly real is the actual obsession?” and he keeps us guessing with how mischievous David is, how reliable Chloe to sticking to her employer’s requests, and just how credible it would be to really analyze Catherine’s fears and insecurities. The outcome is sublime in its unpredictability, although the end result is more of a captivating entertainment than of a masterpiece of human dissection and dissertation.

What happens is certainly off the deep end from where it started, but Egoyan does fit in an erotic lesbian sex scene that’s too leering to resist. At his most contentious, Egoyan works too hard to put his characters in isolated corners in the final scene to underline their separation and detachment. So the film is not perfect. But the film keeps you buzzed in anticipation.

But it works at times nearly as good as the best scenes of “Eyes Wide Shut” and the films of Roman Polanski such as “Frantic” and “Bitter Moon.” The suspense of the film gets you lusting and the actors are so pitch-perfect in their tremulousness that you can practically feel their pulse.

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

Grade: B+

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

The gags splash left and right non-stop in Hot Tub Time Machine, but the gags do just that – they make you gag. Low brow humor is expected when you have such a knowingly cheesy title with the aspirations of a Farrelly Brothers’ brain fart. But instead of something fresh and newly imagined, the movie starts with vomit and dog poo depravity, then aims lower.


Three men and a barely post-teen virgin hit the slopes at a mountain resort and end up vacuumed into the time travel whirlpool that is their hot tub, sending them back to 1986 as their young selves, albeit, they only see their young selves when they look into a mirror.

The moments of trapped in the past recognition is, ah, tubular. The movie’s relish in bad taste is likeable for a few moments. The T&A shots are in full schwing. But the movie trades cool scores for blow chunks.

Eleven years after “American Pie” we have now arrived at what I think is the all-time grossest visual joke. (Spoiler alert) It involves a bet where the time travelers use their knowledge of sports history to their advantage, and the stakes are fellatio. If the time travelers win, a dude’s wife has to perform. If the time travelers lose (how could they?), they have to perform on each other. Let’s just say the butterfly effect (nods to the Ashton Kutcher flick “Butterfly Effect”), has changed the course of history.

The filmmakers didn’t forget the money shot, but one wishes they would have, and this being a turn of the 21st century comedy, of course there is going to be a nasty shouldn’t-have-gone-there money shot. Anyway, intermittently there are some laughs that are created out of that thing called witty dialogue. Not that it was likely that the script was sold on that virtue.

This doesn’t feel like a written screenplay although it is credited to three writers. It feels like a compendium of lewd jokes and pranks that the writers might have put together after crashing some fraternity parties. Perhaps the writers did most of their work during a 4 a.m. bender while “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” was playing in the background.

On board in front of the camera are John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry who play three middle-aged friends all screwed up in their own formula-sealed ways. Right away, one notices that Cusack, with his low-key mood caught between hipster and neurotic, has the cleanest role in the movie. He is involved in less puke hi-jinks than anyone else. With titles like “Must Love Dogs” and “2012” on his recent filmography it is time for Cusack to get back to being a serious actor again.

As the gentle bear type, Robinson (TV’s “The Office”) is dealing with having become a cuckold, as in, his wife recently slept with another guy. When he blasts to the past, he feels guilty about cheating on his wife even though he has been the schlep. In an uproarious middle aged man whining episode, he calls his future wife (who is only 9-years old) and scolds the Dickens out of her. I also really liked another moment when Robinson channels the Black Eyed Peas on stage and the crowd gradually learns to pump to his (futuristic) jive.

The third guy, the loud mouth, belongs to Corddry (I enjoyed his intolerant government agent in “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”) whose sliminess practically drools out of the corners of his mouth. He’s less propelled by the promise of returning to the present time than he is with tracking down sluts. Corddry would have a chance to be funny if he wasn’t so lecherously creepy minute-to-minute. I almost forgot the dork (Clark Duke) who plays Cusack’s nephew who is the butt of all of Corddry’s jokes.

Stealing scenes as the bellhop is Crispin Glover (remember George McFly?), whose predicaments cross silent film era shenanigans of Buster Keaton and a post-modern Asian Extreme movie – we keep waiting for him to literally lose his arm. Chevy Chase is in this too, but has no funny lines. With or without these guys I’d still have the same reaction to the movie: I can’t recommend “Hot Tub Time Machine” not because I was bored but because I was grossed out unwillingly too many times.

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

Grade: C+

THE BOUNTY HUNTER

The word staggering is an odd double-sided one that can be used in two ways. The first way reminds me of when I discovered the mind-expanding films of Oliver Stone in my youth, or what I felt like after Darren Aronofsky’s first couple of pictures that I found so visually sensational that experiencing them became an out of body experience. It’s also a word that can be used disparagingly. Indeed I found the new Gerard Butler/Jennifer Aniston comedy The Bounty Hunter to be staggering, as in staggeringly awful. After it was over, I felt more than askew but actually frazzled – in an intensely agitated sort of way.


The genre is romantic comedy but the effect is feel bad, arghh, so many negative emotions are conveyed in this movie. Butler (“The Ugly Truth” rings a bell) and Aniston (“Management” rings a bell) are divorcees that find themselves cuffed to each other in a plot that could be solved in fifteen minutes before being squeezed out into one hundred and eleven minutes. Butler, as ex-cop Milo Boyd, is now a bounty hunter assigned to track down his ex-wife Aniston, as Daily News reporter Nicole Hurley, who has jumped bail.

The plot takes place up and around New Jersey and New York, and not cross-country, like that DeNiro bounty hunter classic “Midnight Run” (1988). So it should be a rather short escort job but instead it is stretched-out to gratuitous lengths (shouldn’t the car ride be less than an hour to police headquarters?). But instead of reaching destination, they throw the dice at an Atlantic City casino and also get shot at by goons on the highway. All this and ugly banter and not to mention proposed tattoo chair torture is what protracts the length.

What also rings a bell is the act of violence towards women, but also in store is persistent violence against wimpy, horny men. Jason Sudeikis (“SNL” current cast member) comes close to making the wimpy, horny and desperate guy almost funny but doesn’t quite pull it off even though his nerdy mustache is promising. But didn’t we come to the movie for a dose of machismo?

The real man of the movie, the marquee pull, is Butler with his buff meatloaf charisma. To his credit, Butler seems to have taken the cotton balls out of his mouth and talks more normal in this movie. He still has problems as an actor with conveying concern for anybody on the screen other than himself.

Aniston, with her meticulous suntan and sleeveless tops and skirts attire, is a generally attractive actress who is playing yet another woman who doesn’t play victim so easily. Although he-man Butler is the one who immediately locks her into a truck within minutes of meeting up with her in the movie. In a calmer mode, before bedtime, he handcuffs her to the least comfortable spot on the bedpost.

Now there are some people who wouldn’t recognize the violence towards women is perpetrated in this movie because they have become way too desensitized to see (generic) violence when it happens, and those are probably the same people who saw “Alice in Wonderland” and thought it was “beautiful.” We live in a pop culture zeitgeist right now when mean and malicious is what prevails as hip, and in a time when most people have never seen what a nice movie looks like.

All of this must sound like I objected to “The Bounty Hunter” because it is offensive in its objectivity of women, random violence, and violence against horny nerds. No, I object because the film is so idiotic that it makes “Ms. Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous” look crime-smart and savvy in comparison. Cathy Moriarty and Peter Greene look lost and disinterested as the bad guys navigating a non-sensical plot that has something to do with a key figure whose fake suicide was actually a murder.

What is supposed to happen at a romantic comedy is feel-good, as if you need to be reminded. And in this tale of ex-spouses who scuffle with each other, and spit insults, and then find commonality, rebirth and renewed love in their relationship, is not feel-good. I imagine it is enough to make you want to fall out of love with the person next to you at the theater, in resentment of that person for dragging you to this staggeringly awful movie.

Go to the official site at: http://www.thepursuitbegins.com/?hs308=BHR102
 
Grade: D-

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