SOUL KITCHEN

There was a time when people used to go to the movies to see something good. Really people like to make it hard for themselves. How many times do you see your friends and neighbors going to see a movie where they get exactly what they expect they will get, and allow their low standards to stay at mild simmer? Soul Kitchen, a German film with English subtitles and a universal spirit, is a chance again for a smart adult comedy that skirts the expected but shoots off the rails to elevated realms of the heightened senses. Ahh, what it was like to be young and horny again, not to mention, hungry! The actors themselves? Start salivating.

Now the filmmaker Fatih Akin, a Turk raised in Germany, has been acclaimed for his previous films “Head-On” (2004, great love tragedy) and “The Edge of Heaven” (2007, great multi-chain ensemble cast drama) which are both highly recommended by me. With "Soul Kitchen," his first comedy, he proves himself a filmmaking virtuoso. Akin's eclectic and rambunctious comedy concerns the woes and crises of fat decision-making of a young thirty-something restaurateur Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos, very appealing, almost a beefier Jim Morrison type with a Keanu Reeves incarnation of Zen).

It’s a great food movie, too, but you get sucked in for love of its characters. Zinos’ girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan, temperamental but sexy) has just flown off to Shanghai on professional assignment and can’t quite make it out to see her, so he tries to reinvent his casual greasy spoon eatery into something more trendy, until it becomes a restaurant-techno-pub with a control freak top chef (Birol Unel) who insists on changing the menu to a fancy cuisine. You can’t have a German hip-hop themed restaurant and make it work without a little marketing, so cue the advertising ideas quick, please.

As a man compulsive with quick-fix solutions, Zinos tries to turn his business into a self-supporting enterprise that would require less of his presence. He makes frantic efforts to change everything fast up until he injures his back with a very health-threatening sprain that requires care and rest. Cue the cute and awesome physical therapist Anna (Lucia Faust) who relieves the pain and pushes Zinos to take better care of himself, alas, they start chit-chatting in a way that’s just a remove away from flirting. Anna takes a good guess that Zinos has a crush on her, but he’s trying, well, not to look so obvious. Zinos is all guilty feelings about that, which makes him even more want to abandon his entire restaurant so he can go fly out to see his real girlfriend Nadine, who is an impatient girl with questionable fidelity.

Which leaves Zino the question of whether to leave the restaurant in the hands of his ex-con thuggish brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu, “Run Lola Run”), who has the passion but not so much maturity to handle such a task – he’s also too bored to be just a server, he wants a manager title. In addition, Illias has a unprofessional and untimely crush on one of the waitresses. A childhood friend of Zinos is Neumann (Wotan Wilke Mohring, a damn good snide villain), who feigns help and support, but is actually out to backstab Zinos so he loses the restaurant and property. Cue the health inspector, arghh. The most riotously funny sequence involves all of Zinos’ patrons being intoxicated by an aphrodisiac hidden in the food, which is also consumed by the health inspector, on an all hip-hop night that turns ribald.

Hopefully by this point you can tell that this movie is just plain fun. Sophisticated comedy of this breed is so rare. I actually received a lot of flak from people for recommending the very broad and very silly “Dinner for Schmucks” earlier this summer, although my review said (or at least implied) very broad and very silly is what you should expect. It seemed to be my fault that it was a stupid comedy, although how knowingly it was about stupid people. Recommending that film I regret nothing. I know, I digress.

But if smart comedy is what you have been waiting for than you have no excuse, you have to go to “Soul Kitchen.” This is the kind of comedy for those people who appreciate such smart comedies like “Sideways” or “Burn After Reading” or geez, “Waitress” or “Muriel’s Wedding,” and this euphoric high of a film should be ranked in the middle of those titles (I'm only trying to gauge your similar likes). Yes all those films are of different execution and intent, but they all have a brain in common. Now even I have a stronger preference for a film like “Soul Kitchen,” one of the year’s best, over “Dinner for Schmucks.”

I have forgotten to really say or reveal anything that happens in the third act of “Soul Kitchen,” but why should I? You should really go and discover for yourself why this is the wildest comedy of the year, the most adult-geared entertainment, an intoxicated sexy flambé of a movie. Arouse your senses and dig in.

Opens August 20th in New York, September 3rd in Los Angeles

Go to the official site at http://www.soul-kitchen-film.com/?l=en

Grade: A

THE EXPENDABLES

The Expendables gives you more or less what you would expect from it, nothing more. But with that lineup roster that may be enough for action movie die hards. The hulking dialogue is as meathead processed as any script since “Con Air,” and when we get to those comparisons, we know we should be talking guilty pleasure here. Big laughs and lots of firepower – it delivers with a bang. Who cares about logistical holes?

Sylvester Stallone has contrived a scene where both Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger can share a cameo, the three of them bop around the worst dialogue known to steroid man. Yet the scene is riveting how each actor takes one consecutive worst line after the next and twists it into a delivery of manly badass cool (Bruce, I think, wins this contest). Later, Mickey Rourke, as a tattoo artist and biker, takes his boilerplate dialogue and yet approaches something like Brando doing “Reservoir Dogs.” As Eric Roberts says later in the film, it sounds like “bad Shakespeare.”

Mostly Stallone’s outfit are mercenaries who travel the world, doing violent jobs for hire. Among them are Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren who can’t be bothered with being solely good. There’s a new assassination job in Baja where the bad guys are involved somehow in drug trafficking, but if you’re looking for complex revelations in illegal trade, then pick another movie. The Expendables go head to head with Roberts, David Zayas and former Royal Rumble champion Steve Austin who is nearly the giant that Lundgren happens to be. Austin does a lot of the dirty work, but there are some no-name actors who are also as brute as a UFC contender.

The glaring oversight is that Stallone doesn’t put all these guys in the same room often enough. For awhile, it’s the Sly Stallone / Jason Statham show, and their repartee certainly has a mentor warrior / protégé warrior relationship. The peak action scene, midway, has Stallone flying a plane while Statham climbs onto the nose of the plane to engage in close-sight machine gun annihilation of dozens of baddies lined up on the docks. Awesomely ridiculous heroics, that’s for sure. It’s not until the second trip to Baja does the rest of Stallone’s crew really get involved.

The second half of the movie is about saving the girl, who is played by Giselle Itie. She would be Stallone’s interest. Charisma Carpenter is Statham’s interest, a wavering relationship that needs a new rekindling. But the movie is lunkhead in the romance department. There is no final love scene as the girls are missing from it, as it all boils down to macho dudes hanging out and drinking too much – the merriment of testosterone.

“The Expendables” is a throwback to ’80’s style run and gun action, bone-crunching fistfights, and muscles-in-motion stunts. And it gets the big guys going blow to blow to each other, and Jet Li – why not – in a brawl going up against the biggest guy. The whiplash editing is a little rough, but it’s still easier to follow – and more fun – than “The A-Team” and “Knight and Day” and whatever other computerized chunky-junk action the rest of the summer has offered through now.

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

Grade: B

ANIMAL KINGDOM

You know you are in store for a good movie when the first scene grips you with a brand new perspective you haven’t seen before. You’re in the hands of a director – in this case writer-director David Michod – who knows what he’s doing. Animal Kingdom is an Australian crime movie that turns a teen character into an observer, then reluctant participant, and because of that, he becomes a cautionary tale.

In the first scene, our perspective shifts about what we think is happening. J (James Frecheville) watches television in a stupor while his mother is spread out on the couch. Simple two-shot has us believe they are having family time in front of the television. The police arrive, the paramedics as well, which reveals that the mum is dead – she overdosed on drugs. J has nowhere to go as a 17-year old, so he calls his estranged grandmother Smurf Cody (Jacki Weaver, a mesmerizing schizoid performance) to house him. This turns into a life-changing mistake. Her whole family consisting three criminal sons are sociopaths and thieves and dealers.

You might get the sense that this is going to be one of those downbeat and nothing goes right crime sagas where are good boy falls into the trappings of criminal code, and you would be correct with that assumption. This is one of those movies that will keep you watching as it engrossing gritty docudrama, even though there are no new lessons that you haven’t learned before.

The Cody boys are played by Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton and Sullivan Stapleton, and if you’ve never heard of them that’s okay. All you need to know is that they create screen personas as natural born bad boys. When the cops shoot one of them without regards to procedure, which incites the Cody boys to go on their own cop killing spree. They get J to steal the car that will be used to deceive two other unwitting cops.

At this point no Australian film can be without either Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce, but this one features Pearce. As a seasoned and diplomatic cop, he wants to package together a case against the Cody boys. As detective Nathan Leckie, Pearce is sincere and steadfast, but most of all, tough. But he has a concern for J, and he wants him to bring together evidence against his relatives but remain safe doing it. Also in the mix is J’s new girlfriend Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), an innocent girl who deserves none of the mess that she stumbles into. It would have been better if J never had a girlfriend in the first place. The Cody boys end up tearing her apart, in ways that are more than just figurative, and force her to make a disgraceful decision.

The 17-year old J has to make some adult, and some potentially gruesome decisions. This is the first full-length feature by Michod, who has a number of award-winning short films to his credit (his short “Crossbow” is supposedly his most celebrated). He has with “Animal Kingdom” made a crime film with true to life density, the kind that American filmmaker Michael Mann (“Manhunter,” “The Insider”) gets praised for. Not so life-affirming as entertainment, but it’s impressive in how it makes you glue your eyes to the screen.

Go to the official site at http://www.weareanimalkingdom.com/splashpage.html

Grade: B

PEEPLI LIVE

Suicide for Natha and its benefits becomes national news in the Indian import Peepli Live. Every moment in this satire or protest drama (whatever you want to call it) first-time filmmaker Anusha Rizvi has a very intense interest with her subject, and she wants the world to see the real poverty that engulfs India today. This is not big city Delhi or Mumbai, this is a rural desolate area.

First-time actor Omkar Das Manikpuri plays Natha, the Indian farmer on the verge of bankruptcy. If he defaults he will have to give up his property. This would not please his wife Dhaniya (Shalini Vatsa), whom of course, puts a harangue on her husband. His brother Budhia (Raghubir Yadav) is also in a similar predicament. They hear of a government aid that pays benefits to indebted farmers who have killed themselves, which will leave their family survivors well-off.

Star reporter Nandita Mallik (Malaika Shenoy, in a plum performance) rushes her crew out to interview the camera shy Natha. Boy, is Natha ever camera shy or what. The cameras take pity on him, and so does the rest of India. The character of Natha becomes a platform issue for many politicians up for re-election. The story becomes about them. Hence, the film transforms into a media satire.

This actually helps the film because Natha is not so much of an interesting character, he just remains in a constant haze. Nandita inspires donors to come to the rescue of Natha and his family. Other news organizations want her story. As the story builds, it benefits everyone’s news-entertainment interest if Natha remains pathetic. There is a morbid suspense built into the story on whether Natha will really kill himself or not, but the demise of the film as a whole is how frenzied it all gets. Natha’s story catalyzes a real tragedy indirectly.

This messy, overblown conclusion reveals how filmmaker Rizvi is trying too hard to get us to feel the outrage. The film remains intriguing in its little details. It’s curious to see the locals overload a bus transit and ride in back of it. It’s curious to see Natha berated for borrowing money from a government institution instead of a local loan shark. It’s doubly curious to see how a loan shark can be a mortgage lender. And last, how about the rest of the unemployed non-farmers who sit around all day, joke and sing songs? Life is still far from doleful for the local people who have nothing and yet care little that they do.

“Peepli Live” finds deeper characters than Natha, but it’s worth seeing more for the little details. The movie has a jittery immediacy in its “satire” bits, but is not overly shaky. Though it is far from smooth, except for a bravura closing montage where the camera backs up and travels reverse in automobile speed that shows India, and more of India, and more of India… the lower rungs of rural and city India you have rarely observed before. Those rural men find jobs in construction in the city.

Go to the official site a thttp://www.peeplilivethefilm.com/

Grade: B-

THE OTHER GUYS

The Other Guys is a two-man vehicle but one that has got to be more important to Mark Wahlberg than it is to Will Ferrell. For Wahlberg, he has never been the headliner in such a broad, swing low comedy. Ferrell has done ’em and done ’em plenty, and at a certain point you wonder if he cares whether or not audiences are sick of his same routines. Wahlberg has to compress that trademark forehead-as-hot-iron intensity of his into for once not drama, but in comedy. Ferrell is the squirrely by-the –books cop professional who prefers accounting to crime scene work, but he has the inner ham rage to unload, the kind we’ve seen a dozen times from him (egomania rage in “Step Brothers,” his ultimate apogee).

Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson put on the works as the movie starts. It begins in one of those hyper-explosive car chases that’s so over-the-top that it is a parody of parodies, and surely it’s funny, but it might have been even funnier if the camerawork wasn’t so shoddy. After cleaning crime, the bad boy duo get their limelight speech at City Hall. Then we get introduced to Wahlberg resurrecting his “The Departed” fever, and Ferrell doing his dull guy routine behind the desk. All this works. Especially because we got a mismatched buddy cop movie where they are mismatched to the funny or die extreme.

Of course Wahlberg’s character Detective Terry Hoitz doesn’t want to be saddled with Ferrell’s Detective Allen Gamble. Terry wants to be a cop like the ones he saw on TV growing up. One mistake on duty has now disgraced Terry, for it involved crippling Derek Jeter of the Yankees in the tunnel on the way out to the dugout. Allen makes a mistake before our eyes, performing a desk pop (didn’t mom say don’t discharge your weapon at home)! But at home, Allen has an outrageously gorgeous wife played by none other than Eva Mendes (“Hitch”), who is slavering to his needs but oh so underappreciated.

One more highlight: Michael Keaton, as Captain Gene of police headquarters, gets to discharge his comedic gifts in at least three scandalously funny scenes, one where he complains about paying for his son’s NYU admissions so his son, can well, blasphemously underachieve. Beyond that, the second half of the movie becomes an entirely different kind of movie, a different kind of comedy and a different kind of thriller. The thriller stuff is less than thrilling, more incompetent if anything, making “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” look like a model of classical filmmaking by comparison.

The funny stuff is overrun by a complicated, long-winded, and poorly told plot centering on white collar crime with Steve Coogan as the outfit, his character rich enough to compete with the fortunes of Trump Plaza. Some critics in 2008 accused the very funny Coogan for squandering his talents in “Hamlet 2,” but boy, were they wrong. That was a very goofy, daffy film where Coogan sputtered in comedic desperation on all cylinders, but here, he is utterly squandering.

But it’s director Adam McKay (“Step Brothers”) who has no idea how to streamline a plot, and you can tell where the lack of rewrites in his script (co-written by Chris Henchy) took place, more to boot, it’s possible these guys don’t believe in story rewrites. McKay sends his two cops hopping around hopelessly in one scene to the next, and there is a boardroom shoot-out where, even in Mexican standoff proximity, no one gets hurt.

It is not Wahlberg who goes off the deep end, for it is Ferrell once again reprising the narcissistic personality disorder as the foundation of his character and once again going off the deep end. But as Ferrell goes into a self-centered mode that dominates screen attention, it offsets any chance for Wahlberg to shine. Yet as substandard as “The Other Guys” is it won’t kill him. Wahlberg has been funny within his dramatic roles like “Boogie Nights” and “Three Kings,” and it’s still not impossible to conceive that he will get another shot at a full-blown comedy again sometime.

Go to the official site at http://www.theotherguys-movie.com/
 
Grade: C

MIDDLE MEN

Unsavory and without family values, but in this case, the filmmakers do not and should not care to be coy about a searing and potent subject: Middle Men depicts how the world was different after 1997, when porn sites began to populate the information highway. The film spends several years following Jack Harris (Luke Wilson), and other composite fictional accounts, on what happened speculatively in the early years in internet pornography and with the arrangement of online credit card charges. This sleazy and titillating film has lots of hardened and disaffected naked chicks, but its men like protagonist Jack and the Russian mobsters backing the industry, that are given personality in the film. Only two women in the film register, to be later mentioned.

Only an actor like Luke Wilson could have made the damned lead character likeable or sympathetic (or at least believably apologetic) – he is the Texas businessman who gets sucked into porn commerce. He flies to Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the early scenes in effort to transform the schemes of two dirtbags – Wayne Beering and Buck Dolby (Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht) – into a legitimate business model. After scanning pictures onto the internet and filming girls at a strip joint, they take the material and post online. Jack is the consultant who turns the enterprise into a smoother practice. He suggests to Wayne and Buck instead of filming your own girls, become the middle men, let pornographers send you the material, and set up credit card transactions within a discretion system – in essence, a billing company.

Back home, Jack has a classy and naïve wife (Jacinda Barrett, “Ladder 49”) and children to care for but his appearance in Los Angeles becomes routine as the industry sky-rockets. Financial and infrastructure betrayals are rampant, and this requires Jack to oversee and run everything himself. Over the course of the years, Russian mobsters are repeat backstabbers, a crooked Vegas lawyer (James Caan) connives Jack’s partners into shadier dealings, and there is a 23-year old porn star named Audrey Dawns (Laura Ramsey) who makes a seductive case of why Jack should desert his wife – this is where the drama of temptation between confused men and opportunistic women takes a formidable grip. Jack deludes himself into believing that he can lead a double-life successfully without losing the sanctification of family life, but learns gradually that is an impossible thing to do. Jack is the good family man gone to the dark side.

Directed and co-written (along with Andy Weiss) by George Gallo, his film is a “GoodFellas” Jr. on internet porn history, at rates sensational and phony, in-depth and broad, tantalizing and addictive, and perpetually probing in regards to business and to the cultural shift in ever-changing modern sexual attitudes. The movie is also exceptionally wise about how, as conveyed through analog quasi-documentary narration by Jack, that the triangle of money and power (and sex) is a hard to curb and hard to acknowledge addiction because the consequences can be bought off. Ordinary life such as kids’ baseball games and barbecues become strange to a guy like Jack after awhile.

What the movie leaves out, or barely hints at, is the difference between hard-core and soft-core porn – the porn starlets in the film are typically plastic surgery-enhanced bimbos. Audrey Dawns is supposed to be the flipside, the naughty angel of worldwide web porn, but the script would make you think she is the only one. The script would also make you think that Jack Harris is the only entrepreneur, and the film’s suggestion that he had a monopoly on internet porn enterprise is a stretch.

Holes aside, the movie has an ambitious canvas, is swaggeringly entertaining (punchy editing, hot to trot dialogue), and a little ballsy with its Scorsese-like aspirations. The peephole drama of sex and schemes has a kaleidoscopic quality, it catches the seediness of the era while at the same time answering as to why straight-arrow fellows like Jack get attracted to vice. If the movie doesn’t hit in theaters than it will certainly reach a cozy fate similar to porn itself: a bustling DVD afterlife where viewers can watch non-judged in the comfort of their own homes. This certainly has multiple viewing potential written all over it.

Go to the official site athttp://www.middlemenmovie.com/nohtml/index.html

Grade: B+

GREENBERG

Greenberg is a movie about repellant people that just so happens to be fascinating, but only if you are into movies about extreme head cases. “I am really trying to do nothing for awhile,” Roger says, “I am doing nothing deliberately.” Stiller, as the title character Roger Greenberg, hasn’t been doing anything for years. He’s in his forties now, and hasn’t been on the verge of success since he was 25, when he almost signed a record deal but refused to cave in on the label’s compromises. The movie isn’t about his music.


Dare we say aloud what “Greenberg” is about or what Noah Baumbach’s last movie “Margot at the Wedding” was about? Hmm, no it takes too much nerve off the bat to say what it is really about. But I’ll offer my two cents later. Let’s first say that Roger’s aforementioned key quote, as implemented in the trailer, could be the attraction for audiences. Coming out of Stiller’s mouth, it sounds like a funny idea for a movie.

This is not a typical Ben Stiller movie (think 180 degrees opposite of “Zoolander.”) It is funny, but understand, it is mordantly funny. Most obviously is when Roger drafts letters to Starbucks and American Airlines as to why their superficial trendiness or small oversights in customer satisfaction merits renovation. The rest of the film’s humor is not so obvious, nor would some audiences find it funny at all. Not unless one has a taste for mordant humor.

Roger has just flown in from New York to housesit for his brother Phillip in the Hollywood Hills while he and his wife vacation in Vietnam for six weeks. The regular caretaker is the attractive and slightly plump blonde Florence (Greta Gerwig), nearly twenty years younger, whom Roger immediately leeches on. They are close to sharing intimate relations on a first and then second occasion, but then after Roger tells her “that is the dumbest story I’ve ever heard…” and “why tell me that?” he walks out on her with extremely bitter body language.

Other attempts in connection include former band mate Ivan (Rhys Ifans), the cool guy who might just be a little too beaten down by the man for Roger’s sake, and Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh) whom while on a lunch date makes the insinuation that it certainly will not be followed by a future dinner date. The body language she exhibits, panting the restaurant staff for the check, is priceless. She’s trying not to be rude to Roger, but she is, but it is for her better self-preservation.

The house dog Mahler gets sick, perhaps from rat poison that the gardener’s laid out on the grass. You can sense the large panic and distress in Phillip over the phone (you forget what Phillip looks like in the movie since the camera views only one side of the conversation). But Roger insists that Mahler will be okay, that he can handle the vet, and the animal hospital and that nothing will happen to Mahler. But Roger doesn’t drive. This means he has to call and rely upon Florence.

What a lovely, kind and attractive girl Florence happens to be. Roger keeps coming onto her, pressing onto her, then cruelly stepping away with a caustic insult. Florence is way too good for Roger, or for any of the Rogers in the world. Mordantly funny, in a way, that she is just too good of a person to ever say “no” to somebody. In a way, she is one to get stepped on and stepped on but always apologizes but never receives an apology. She is four years out of college, she explains, and feels that she is of no value in the world.

From a wider perspective all Roger has to do is to be a responsible housesitter for six weeks, watch the dog, and not cause any harm to anybody. But he can’t handle that little, as he causes much harm to others and to himself. This is the kind of harm that is less visibly apparent. When a couple of visitors throw a house party blowup regardless to permission, instead of Roger shooing people away he joins in on the drug usage, and other carnivalesque acts. Then he hurts his friends feelings, callously and cowardly, before retreating to his own self-loathing.

What is similar to Baumbach’s lead protagonist Roger as to Nicole Kidman as Margot in his last picture, is that both of them seek love and then engender cruel rejection of the people they sought love from. Similar also is their willingness to show sensitivity and tenderness for the sake of appearing as if they have those qualities, and then turning off those qualities when it doesn’t directly benefit them. These are the definitions of borderline personality disorder, a mental disorder that is not mentioned out loud and clear in Baumbach’s films, and yet this is what he has been exploring thematically within his films.

Then again I am not a head doctor, only a film critic. So I may have misspoken. It is not conventional for a film critic to make a diagnosis on mental disorders. I looked up dozens of reviews on the web however on “Margot at the Wedding” (more insufferable, less engaging than this new film) and a small percentage of reviews willingly marked Kidman’s character as a borderline personality disorder case.

I do however want to quote the long deceased Francois Truffaut. “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema.” With “Greenberg” Baumbach somehow gets you to laugh at the agony. Roger is a neurotic raging bull.

Go to the official site at http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/greenberg/

Grade: B+