Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 1

This hasn’t been the strongest holiday movie season I’ve experienced (how could it be without the Coen brothers or George Clooney?), but it’s a pretty strong one with a few entertaining epics, a couple of decent comedies, and one big overwrought musical competing for movie-goers attention.



So let’s take a look at what’s currently playing as the year is ending:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 

(Dir. David O. Russell)

Although it must be stressed that this is ultimately a best-case scenario rom com, this tale of a bio-polar Bradley Cooper getting together with Jennifer Lawrence as a neurotic widower has a punchy screenplay that’s energetically (and very loudly) delivered by the leads, including Robert De Niro, in one of his most invested performance in years, as Cooper’s Philadelphia Eagles superfan father. Chris Tucker, who keeps popping up after repeatedly escaping from Cooper’s former mental institution, adds to the film’s already plentiful laughs. Director and screenwriter Russell's last film, 2010's THE FIGHTER, was a winner as well, so here's hoping he's on a roll.

HITCHCOCK 

(Dir. Sacha Gervasi)   



Sacha Gervasi’s (2008's rock doc ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL) second film as director boasts a stellar cast - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collett, and Danny Huston – but a not so stellar story. The conceit that every good idea that went into the making of the classic 1960 thriller PSYCHO came not from the Master of Suspense, but from his wife Alma falls flat in the midst of these fine actors being put through T.V. movie-ish motions. Read my full review here.



THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson takes us on another sweeping slog through Middle Earth in this prequel set 60 years before THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim on the mockumentary sitcom The Office [UK], stars as Bilbo Baggins who reluctantly finds himself on a quest with an unruly band of dwarves to overtake what looks like the Paramount mountain. I saw it in HFR (Higher Frame Rate) 3D, but, although it looked exquisitely sharp, it wasn’t as immersive an experience as I’d heard. Probably would’ve been just as well off with the 2D version.



There are some amazing heavily CGI-ed sequences, including battles and chases inside an elaborate underground city that comes off like THE TEMPLE OF DOOM times 100, but you can really feel its length (169 min.), and the idea that this is just part one of another trilogy seems to come more from greed than pure inspiration. 



But that's too cynical of me. This is really for the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t get enough of this stuff and will love spending more time with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, and getting cameos from Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Ian Holms as the older incarnation of Bilbo who presents the story as a flashback. What I enjoyed most was Bilbo's cave encounter with the slimy creature Gollum (once again beautifully played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis), which is nicely faithful to the original Tolkien text.

 DJANGO UNCHAINED 

(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)




Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western is also a long-ass film (165 min!) that could’ve been served by better editing (sadly his long-time editor Sally Menke died in 2010), but it’s still a hugely entertaining epic that tackles revenge, slavery, and possibly contains the most excessive use of the “N-word” in cinematic history. 



Jamie Fox stars as a slave who gets freed by a former dentist played by Christoph Waltz who offers Fox a new job as a bounty hunter. Together, they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the brutal yet charming Leonardo DiCaprio. The film drags a bit in DiCaprio’s company, which includes Samuel L. Jackson as his cruel conniving house slave, but when its “on” it's a blast. Read my full review here.

Coming soon: Part 2 of Film Babble Blog's Holiday Season 2012 Roundup.



More later...

HITCHCOCK Has The Chops, Yet Doesn’t Quite Cut It

Opening today at a motion picture palace near you:

HITCHCOCK (Dir. Sacha Gervasi, 2012)

Anthony Hopkins’ impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock is effective in small doses, like, say in this “Turn Your Phones Off” PSA, and in some short scenes early on in Sacha Gervasi’s new biopic HITCHCOCK, but the longer the camera lingers on him, the more he’s just Hopkins in a fat suit with prosthetic make-up.

The makeup, mainly by Howard Berger, is good, some of the best I’ve seen in a recent movie, but I could never forget that it was Hopkins; he doesn’t disappear into the part like, say, Daniel Day Lewis does in LINCOLN, he just does a good but far from pitch perfect impression of the master of suspense, and the best I can say is that it’s slightly better than Toby Jones’ in the HBO movie THE GIRL, which premiered on the channel to little fanfare last month.

But Hopkins’ close-but-no-banana approximation of the movie-making legend isn’t one of the factors that makes this movie an often deadly dull melodrama.

Director Gervasi, who co-wrote one of Steven Spielberg’s worst films THE TERMINAL, yet made the excellent band bio-doc ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL, working from a screenplay by John J. McLaughlin focuses on Hitch’s (hold the cock as he says it), relationship with his wife Alma Reville, splendidly portrayed by a sly Helen Mirren, during the making of his controversial masterpiece PSYCHO in 1959-60.

The storyline is largely a behind every great man there’s a woman scenario as Mirren’s Alma provides Hopkins’ Hitch with every great idea that he needs to make his classic, right down to the idea to kill off the leading lady after the first 30 minutes. The leading lady is Janet Leigh, played by Scarlett Johansson, who doesn’t strongly resemble Leigh, but still captures her iconic image. James D’Arcy has a more accurate depiction of Anthony Perkins going on, but we spend so little time with him that it doesn’t make much impact.

Hitch has to deal with resistance from the studio, because of, you know, “Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!” in the form of evil caricatures of Paramount studio heads (played by Richard Portnow and Kurtwood Smith sneering with all their might), which forces him to have to fund the film out of his own pocket.



This, plus Mirren’s flirtation with writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), strains the marriage, but the stakes never feel very high here.



We don’t believe that Mirren is actually going to cheat on Hopkins, and we don’t think his fantasies about his blond leading ladies is going to be anything but fantasies, so, despite both brilliant British actor’s ace acting chops, neither story-line has much pull.



Only in a scene set during PSYCHO’s premiere, in which Hitch from the theater’s lobby, mimes conducting the audience’s screams along with Bernard Herrmann’s score in the film’s famous shower murder scene, does HITCHCOCK have fun with its material.



Otherwise, it feels like a standard movie made for TV (just a notch above the HBO biopic I previously mentioned), with very little cinematic oomph. 

This is extremely evident in the film’s framing device involving Hitch breaking the fourth wall and addressing the camera like on his  Alfred Hitchcock Presents to open and close the film, and in a running thread that has Hitch being haunted by Michael Wilcott as serial killer Ed Gein, the inspiration for PSYCHO’s Norman Bates. These are nice ideas, but like everything else here, they never go anywhere.


You don’t need to have seen PSYCHO in order to follow what’s happening in HITCHCOCK, but if you haven’t seen PSYCHO, then what are you doing considering going to see this mediocre movie, this glorified dramatization of a “making of” featurette? Go watch PSYCHO!

More later…

THE DEBT: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at nearly every multiplex in Raleigh and the Triangle area:



 THE DEBT (Dir. John Madden, 2011)

How can a film that features impassioned performances from such acting heavyweights as Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Sam Worthington among others, be such a dreary drag?



I believe it has something to do with the plotting. THE DEBT goes back and forth from 1966 to 1997 to tell the story of 3 Mossad secret agents (Mirren, Wilkinson, and Ciarán Hinds) who have been keeping a secret about the fate of a Nazi war criminal (Jesper Christensen) they had once kidnapped in East Berlin.



Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas play the agents in the '60s who track Christensen who is known as the Surgeon of Birkenau. When he escapes after a brutal fight with Chastain, they agree to lie about his death. 30 years later they learn that Christensen may still be alive, so Mirren travels to the hospital he's reportedly in to finally finish him off forever.



The movie miserably goes through the motions, with no sense of a compelling narrative. It's perplexingly tension-free especially considering the subject matter. There is a strand about a love triangle between the 3 leads, but it's handled in such a murky unaffected manner that it feels like it doesn't matter. Maybe that's because it doesn't.



It also has one of the most unsatisfying endings of a drama that I've ever seen.



The premise of revenge on an aging Nazi war criminal is really tired at this point too. I sure hope it was handled better in the 2007 Israeli film that this is a remake of. As gritty as it is with solid work by a fine cast, THE DEBT adds nothing notable to the genre.



The studio (Focus Features) must have known that too by dumping it into theaters now (on a Wednesday for some inexplicable reason) instead of waiting for closer to Christmas when movies dealing with monsters of the holocaust usually drop.





More later...

ARTHUR: Not Completely Artless, But Still Extremely Annoying

ARTHUR (Dir. Jason Winer, 2011)




The one and only improvement that this remake of the fine but slight 1981 Dudley Moore comedy contains is that rich drunken playboy Arthur Bach doesn’t cackle obnoxiously at his own jokes throughout the entire movie.

That’s not to say that Russell Brand isn’t obnoxious in the role, don’t get me wrong. He really is.

Brand's schtick gets increasingly more annoying as the film progresses through its lazily arranged set-pieces, that stick closely to the original’s basic plot points, even recycling key dialogue, and even touches on elements of the 1988 sequel (i.e. Arthur tries to get sober and get a job).

The film does have a handful of decent one-liners mostly in the exchanges between Brand and Helen Mirren as Arthur’s nanny, but they’re not enough to justify this rancid re-imagining.

So Arthur is stuck in the pickle of having to marry a woman he’s not in love with (Jennifer Garner) or else losing his family fortune of $900 million. Indie “it” girl Greta Gerwig gets mixed up in this in the role formerly played by Liza Minnelli, but the character is now an unlicensed NYC tour-guide instead of a shoplifting waitress.

It was an inspired choice, one of the film’s few, to cast the Oscar winning Mirren, in a gender/job title change from butler to nanny, as Hobson, the role that won an Oscar for John Gielgud way back in the day. Her stern and acidic performance really helps the film through some tedious stretches.

Gerwig does good work with what she’s given, but there’s zero chemistry between her and Brand. Her aspiring children’s book author character is just a convention, and the film really isn’t very interested in her. Nor Garner, whose part is pretty insulting especially in the film’s worst bit – a sitcom-style bedroom scene that has the actress in a metal corset stuck to the bottom of Brand’s magnetic bed.

For some reason Nick Nolte appears as Garner’s grizzled father, and I don’t think I’ve seen him invested less in a part. Ditto Geraldine James as Brand’s disapproving mother, a thankless role in a movie full of them.

None of those other roles matter, of course, because it’s Brand’s show. He gets to slosh around doing wacky things like dressing up as Batman with his chauffeur (an extremely mis-used Luis Guzmán) as Robin leading the police in a high-speed chase in the Batmobile, drive the BACK TO THE FUTURE Delorean (he collects movie cars, you see), and strut down the street wearing President Lincoln’s top hat, coat, and cane he just purchased at an auction.

Unfortunately none of this is very funny, and Brand can be funny (see FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL and bits of GET HIM TO THE GREEK), but this role which I admit looked good on paper, is just too broad, too obvious, and much too irritating to elicit genuine laughter. It’s just too painfully apparent and Brand just simply doesn’t have the ginormous charm that Dudley Moore had – I mean, the original was a vehicle completely built around that charm.

ARTHUR '11 is such a predictable conventional modernized rehash, that I’m surprised there wasn’t a remix of the theme song from the original (Christopher Cross’s “Arthur’s Theme ‘Best That You Can Do’”) with a well known hip hop artist rapping over it about his billionaire boy Arthur and how he rolls.

BTW this new ARTHUR does feature the inevitable cover of “Arthur’s Theme” by Fitz and the Tantrums, which now joins the film it graces in the bulging file of unnecessary remakes.

More later...

RED: The Film Babble Blog Review

RED (Dir. Robert Schwentke, 2010)

Sometimes it seems like every other movie opening this year at the multiplex is a comic throwback to ‘80s action movies or based on a graphic novel I wasn’t aware of before.

To its credit RED is both. But that’s the only credit I’ll give this unfunny overblown mess though.

RED is titled after the stamp on agent Frank Moses' (Bruce Willis) file, meaning "retired, extremely dangerous."

Willis leads a mundane life as a former Black Ops CIA agent who tears up his retirement checks just so he can continue to call customer service representative Mary Louise Parker because he has a crush on her.

Before you know it Willis is on the run from government assassins and he abducts Parker for the ride. She goes along with it in her typical jaded Weeds fashion, but the unbelievable and incredibly contrived nature of her role never convinces for a second.

Parker’s life before was boring and now she’s caught up in a world of espionage – I get it, but it’s such a cringing cliché with a capital C.

He re-unites his old crew – the all star cast of Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, Ernest Borgnine and John Malkovich – to fight the attackers and it’s one shoot-em-up after another.

The film is solidly staged but it’s a joyless affair with really poorly written dialogue and a distinct lack of laughs.

At this point in Willis’s career it’s surprising he would be attracted to this boring by-the-numbers material.

Willis just sleep walks (sometimes in slow motion) through a barely interesting plot handled with a hodgepodge of styles and clashing tones. The narrative involves a cover-up of Guatemalan slayings orchestrated by the Vice President (Julian McMahon).

There’s some seriousness in the seams but it’s overshadowed by cloying silliness. It’s also off-putting that the film has an unbearable sense of self satisfaction.

Malkovich as a jacked up explosives expert appears to be having fun with his role, but with such lame one-liners (none of which I can remember or else I’d quote one) that feeling is far from contagious.

Freeman, who is 73, plays an 80 year old ex-agent – a role that requires no heavy lifting, just his patented homespun delivery. Borgnine is 93 and like Malkovich he’s seems to be having a good time. Maybe he’s just happy to be anywhere these days.

Then there’s Dame Helen Mirren in a white evening gown firing a machine gun. That’s supposed to be a hilarious image, but it creaks like everything else in this misguided movie.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget Richard Dreyfuss, still channeling Dick Cheney from W, as a bad guy who is also saddled with lines that fall flat. “I did it for the money” Dreyfuss revealed in a recent interview. 

It sure shows.

I saw somebody on a message board refer to this film as THE EXPENDABLES but with people who can actually act.” I can go with that because just like that Sylvester Stallone all star vehicle, this is ultimately a lame package.

RED, which I think should stand for Really Excruciating Drivel, is a waste every way you can cut it.

More later...