Brighton Rock (Monday, July 25, 2011) (58)

Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock is an adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene (which he also adapted into a screenplay for a film by the same name in 1947). As is typical of Greene, the film deals with the underbelly of society and with Catholicism. This is a generally good reexamination of the book with a slightly simplified structure that focuses more on the central characters and relationships (also typical of Greene).

Pinkie (Sam Riley) is a young thug rising up the power ladder of the Brighton underworld in the early 1960s (the book was originally set in the 1930s). He seems to have absolutely no ties to society, no family or friends and no ability to trust anyone of his mobby cohorts. He is, however, a Catholic, at least in name, though he seems oblivious to sin or any sort of real religious practice. He's a total wild card who might strike out violent at any moment.

As the film opens, he witnesses the murder of his gang boss and mentor by a rival gang and decides to kill the assailant. When he does this, a naïve young woman, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), sees him and he decides the only way to protect himself and his gang is to get her to fall in love with him to make sure she won't tell the cops what she saw. As the two start spending time together, Rose's boss in her tea house, Ida (Hellen Miren), begins to understand that Pinkie is dangerous for Rose, though she can't convince her to dump him.

As all the mob action is going on, there's a war between the Mods and the Greasers, with a totally over-the-top Vespa-riding sequence ripped out of Quadrophenia (or The Young Girls of Rochefort). Though this really doesn't relate well to the greater story, it does allow for more gang violence and looks pretty cool.

Almost everything we see in Brighton is dirty and ugly. There's a scrappy quality to both Rose and Pinkie, her hair is always disheveled and never looks washed, his room in his boarding house and the apartment she lives in with her parents are totally falling apart and filthy. Its hard not to notice that Britain was in the middle of very tough economic times during this era. Meanwhile, Joffe does a great job, though of showing how Pinkie and his gang live in squalor, while the rival gang boss, Colleoni (Andy Serkis) lives in the posh environment of a fancy, sleek hotel.

There is a constant sense that Pinkie is dangerous and unbridled by "societal norms". He cuts people and takes power without any sense of decency or morals. He speaks to Rose about his Catholicism (though much less then he does in the book) and how it's the only thing that makes sense to him, the only thing that he finds reliable. It's never totally clear, however if he's doing this to sell himself to her (and her family) or if he really believes it.

He seems to be like the character of the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, where he's got religion figured out to use it for his dark ends. I can imagine Pinkie explaining that he'll be forgiven for his sins when he dies, but in the meantime, he will keep killing. Sadly, he never seems self-aware or deep enough to have such an interesting thought.

The acting throughout the film is fantastic, most notably Riley and Riseborough. They both seem like kids who are in love. She has no self-confidence and understandably things that Pinkie is the best she can get; he's conniving in the short run and thinks he can out-maneuver anyone who comes his way. They're a great pair, filled with young angst and a bit cheeky that they know what they're doing is wrong.

Joffe really does bungle the ending here, drawing it out to a silly 15 minutes, when it could end in one and then giving us a sad and disconnected idea of Rose's victimhood. I wish he had ended it about four times before he did (or rearranged the kicker into a different part of the script). Really the whole second half of the film (after the Mods and Rockers riot) is a forgettable mess, though it still looks good and has some redeeming elements.

Joffe does admirable job directing this film, using really great editing to give a constant sense of violence lying just below a peaceful surface and updating the film noir model. His real problems here are in his script (well, his adapted script), where characters are underwritten and scenes are misplaced in the narrative or unnecessary altogether.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Inspector Bellamy (Monday, November 29, 2010) (150)

On it's surface, Claude Chabrol's Inspector Bellamy is a murder mystery investigation movie, a story of a cop who gets pulled out of his vacation and into a twisted tale of a crime of passion. It is really not that at all, but rather a tale of love, lust and aging, an examination of family ties and devotion to loved ones.

In Chabrol's final film (having died in September) we see Paul Bellamy (Gérard Depardieu), a famous detective who has written about his years on the police force, is on vacation with his wife Françoise in the South of France. He is contacted by a man who explains a very complicated romantic story involving the apparent murder of a homeless man, insurance fraud, facial reconstruction surgery, and a passionate extra-marital affair. The man hopes Bellamy can investigate his story and prove that he is not guilty of murder.

Bellamy is close to retirement and he and his wife are looking to spending more quiet time together, doing crossword puzzles and having dinner with friends. Bellamy's drunk, ne'er-do-well brother, Jacques, barges into their quiet life at this moment and begins to stir up their regular lives. Bellamy is a consummate cop, always digging, never trusting, never shitting down.

Depardieu gives one of his best performances, probably his best since his wonderful performance in Berri's Jean de Florette. He's an old man who still has a lot of life in him (and quite a sex drive). He's bitter and cynical, but very sympathetic and sometimes very funny.

We cannot forget that the film is the work of a master filmmaker. Chabrol takes the whole mystery genre and uses the structure as a McGuffin, a cinematic red herring. The film is not really a mystery at all (at least the mystery is rather the secondary story), but a story of a man coming to terms with the third season of his life and the messed-up nature of humanity. The script by Chabrol and Odile Barski is really wonderful, full of depth, love and humor.

Chabrol uses a wonderful a wonderful score written by his son Matthieu to set a rather sweet, nostalgic and light tone to the film. He uses lots of playful first-person point-of-view shots, somewhat ironically, as if we are Bellamy, walking through his house. The cinematography by Eduardo Serra is simple and straightforward, but very nice.

This film is really about nostalgia and old age, I think. It's about a man coming to terms with his own mortality, his own history and his own humanity. It has a slightly unusual structure (most of the film is the mystery story, but that is really the background), but is very sweet and interesting.

Stars: 3 of 4

Carlos (Sunday, October 17, 2010) (136)

Just a quick note about this film before I begin: I saw the full three-part 5.5-hour version of this film. I know there is a shorter 2.5-hour version of it and I cannot comment on that. All I will say is that I can't imagine it would be improved by being shorter and I do think it would run the risk of truncating some of the longer-format story development. Having seen the full version, I don't know what could be obviously cut out. I'm sure one could pull out several chapters from a long book and read them and enjoy them, but that would not be tantamount to reading the whole book.

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas and written by Dan Franck and Assayas, is a very long and beautiful film. It follows the life of Carlos the Jackal, a 1970s-era super terrorist whose life story is almost a high crimes and espionage version of Forrest Gump. He was directly involved in or very closely connected to some of the major terrorist crimes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Born in Caracas, he was educated in Moscow and ultimately in London. He ultimately got involved with the group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was trained in their camps in the Middle East and ultimately rose up their ranks through a series of violent crimes.

The first part of the film follows Carlos as he beings his work with the PFLP and gains traction with an assorted band of Leftists (from the Japanese Red Army to the German Revolutionary Cells). They are basically the gang that can't shoot straight and despite their devotion to the liberation of Palestinians and anti-Zionist rhetoric, they mostly screw up their attacks, rather than executing them well. This doesn't stop Carlos who is wildly self-impressed and sees himself as one of the most significant people in the political world of the era.

The second part of the film shows the gang's highest profile job, taking over and kidnapping the 1975 OPEC meeting. This was a job paid for by Saddam Hussein in an effort to wrest control of the organization away from the Saudis and bring it closer to Baghdad. After the get-away was bungled by Carlos, he was demoted by PFLP head Wadie Haddad. It was because of this demotion that Carlos was not involved in the PFLP hijacking of a plane that ended in Entebbe, Uganda (an operation that was also screwed up).

The third part of the film focuses on Carlos trying re-group and operate is organization from Budapest. He was becoming more and more a mercenary-for-hire, once taking a meeting with the KGB and top officials from the Iraqi regime to organize the assassination of Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Ultimately Carlos found no safe harbor and after he was booted from Hungary (who had previously turned their back on the fellow communist comrade) and then Syria, he moved to Sudan, where he was ultimately captured by French officials.

Assayas' story here is really about a wild psychopathic narcissist. The film opens with Carlos (played beautifully by Edgar Ramirez) posing naked in the mirror and marveling over his beautiful body. He continues this self-love throughout the film (despite his ever-growing and shrinking waistline), never catching on to the outside world's feelings about him, never self-aware enough to know how his friends and allies fear or hate him. Sadly, there is not a lot of depth to the character development throughout the film. Carlos is in the end exactly what he was at the beginning, a self-diluted maniac with a strong self-righteous streak of violence.

Technically the film is beautiful. The photography by Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir is beautiful and moves beautifully from the slightly richer palette of the late 1960s (somewhat reminiscent of New Wave films of the era) to the more washed out colors of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Assayas also uses a rock 'n' roll soundtrack throughout the film, frequently employing punk rock to convey an emotion and not just a time marker. When we hear The Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer" played over a montage of Carlos' gang getting ready for an attack, it's more an aesthetic connection to wildness, freedom and youth (Carlos was only in his mid-20s at the time) than it is a time marker of the late 1970s.

Somewhere in the moments between part 2 and part 3, Carlos' tone changes a bit and he becomes a bit darker than he had been before. This is a bit of a shock and makes this guy who is previously very charismatic and compelling into a supreme self-centered asshole. He speaks nonstop of himself in glowing terms, not realizing that by this point, in the late 1970s, he has already become almost totally forgotten.

There is an interesting scene that takes place in Damascus in the early 1990s where Carlos goes on a diatribe about how George H.W. Bush is out to ruin him, to which one of his friends explains that they are dinosaurs and have been entirely relegated to history books. This scene is particularly reminiscent of the scene in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall, where Hitler is planning on his final attack against the allies, to which his generals and associates have to tell him that the war is lost. Carlos is so wrapped up in his own cult of personality (to which he is the only subscriber), that he has lost track of the fact that he is no longer a political radical, but merely a former thug who won't throw in the towel.

Throughout the film I was struck by the similarities in how Assayas dealt with Carlos' psychopathology and how David Fincher dealt with Mark Zuckerberg's sociopathology in The Social Network (whether he is or is not a sociopath, I think Fincher presents him as one). Both directors gave us fully formed psyches in their lead characters right out of the gate. These are characters who never totally grow or change much throughout their stories. Clearly Zuckerberg was not as dark and violent as Carlos, but both of them are diluted by their own strong feelings of themselves. In both cases we see the characters at the end almost exactly as they were when the films began. I think this is a bit of a disappointment in both cases. I would have preferred to see some growth or development in each one. Perhaps this is the nature of such character disorders, that they don't change much, but it doesn't make for the most interesting film.

What this film did very well, though, was to tell a very long and complex story in a very straightforward, beautiful way. We are never confused about who different characters are and what their motives are. Considering the grand scope of the picture, it is impressive that everything makes perfect sense.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Town (Friday, September 17, 2010) (117)

The Town is Ben Affleck's latest Boston-based crime/action film and much like his last film, Gone Baby Gone, it is adapted from a novel by him (and a few others). Having not read the (Prince of Theives by Chuck Hogan) it is hard to say whether what is wrong with the script is Affleck's fault or if some of the problems are also in the novel. What is clear is that this is a decent film with a really bad, facile script that I've seen a million times.

Part of the problem with the film is that there are just too many parts to the story. Doug (Affleck) is a bank robber who lives in Charlestown, Boston, a neighborhood known for producing some of the most prolific thieves and criminals in the area. He and his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) along with a few friends have a successful operation, knocking off banks in the Boston region. At one point when a robbery goes wrong they kidnap bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall) only to let her go a few blocks away. Once they discover she lives around the corner from them, Doug moves in to romance her and try to find out what she saw of them during the stick up. Of course the two fall in love and begin dating.

Meanwhile the gang is being pursued by FBI agent Adam Frawley who is hot on their heels, but always comes up just short. He basically has no leads on them, but they make his job easier and easier by continuing to rob places under his nose. There are a few other sorta dumb and unnecessary plot items: Blake Lively plays Jem's sister who has had an on-again-off-again thing with Doug and has a young kid who is maybe Doug's kid, but probably isn't; Pete Postlethwaite is some sort of mob/gang boss who organizes the robberies and then hands them off to Doug; Chris Cooper plays Doug's dad who is in jail also for robbing banks.

Mostly this is just a really messy story with way too much going on. At it's core, it is pretty dull fare that is not all that interesting. Doug is hiding his identity from Claire in a pretty pitiful way - and we watch knowing that at some point the truth will come out and ruin the relationship. There is a thing with the "one last score" that Doug and Jem will run before Doug retires from his criminal life and moves to Florida where he can spend his stolen money alone. Ugh. (Oh - and sorry to ruin it, but the last score is in Fenway Park - possibly the holiest place in Boston. Nothing like being careful. What a dumb mess.)

I think the acting is pretty good throughout the film, despite the silliness of the story. Rebecca Hall is very good and pretty sympathetic. We see her getting bamboozled into her relationship with Doug and know that she's just a victim of her own situation. Affleck is also good, though his character is much more straightforwardly dull.

The film moves pretty well, but is just so recycled that it becomes frustrating. Did Doug never watch movies as a kid and see that the "one last score" is never as easy as it sounds? If he doesn't have that perspective and I do, why do I have to watch him making the same mistakes I've seen hundreds of times before in other movies and books?

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Machete (Sunday, September 5, 2010) (113)

Machete (co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis) is a gonzo B-movie spoof based on a trailer for a phony movie in the middle of the Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse from a few years ago. Machete (Danny Trejo) is a renegade Mexican Federale who runs into the powerful world of Mexican drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal).

He escapes to Texas a few years later and is hired by a guy named Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Senator McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro) (who, it turns out, Booth works for), an anti-immigration demagogue gaining strength in the polls for the upcoming election. When the shooting goes wrong, Machete must go underground into a network of Mexican immigrants (called The Network!) to save his skin and fight back against a rising tide of anti-immigrant venom coming from McLaughlin and the renegade border sheriff Stillman (Don Johnson).

Typical of a good B-movie, he is assisted along the way by scantily clad hot women with big boobs (who are all too happy to show them). Machete not only kills people but he's a prolific fucker, bedding the head of the Network, Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), as well as the head of an I.C.E. task force, Sartana (Jessica Alba), who herself is conflicted about her position on immigration. (He also has a brief three-some thing with Booth's daughter, played by Lindsay Lohan, and wife - who are both thrilled to strip nude as well).

This is a totally fun and hilarious film to say the least. The ridiculous story seems to have more and more levels of intricacy as a way of thumbing us in the eye and keeping us focused on the immediate actions of characters rather than the bigger picture. The dialogue is full of amazingly written horrible one-liners, very self-aware of how they will be received. The main problem with the script (written by Rodriguez and his cousin Alvaro), and with the film overall, is that it is too long. Clocking in around 105 minutes, it should have been cut to closer to 90-minutes as it drags significantly in the middle third.

This is not a "smart" movie, per se, despite the rather heavy-handed pro-Mexican, pro-immigrant political text. This is a ridiculous gorefest where people are chopped apart by blades and blown up by bombs as a matter of fun. It very cleverly plays with genre conventions and constantly alludes to schlocky B-films, Blaxploitation pieces and bad crime flicks (think of Machete as a more rugged and Latin Shaft). It is not for everyone - if you don't get it, you're just not going to get it - but I think it's really enjoyable.

Stars: 3 of 4

The American (Sunday, September 5, 2010) (112)

Anton Corbijn's The American is very similar stylistically and emotionally to his 2007 piece Control. On paper the two films would seem like complete opposites. The latter is a very small biopic of the moody and suicidal Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis shot in black and white. The former is an action flick from a major studio about an assassin played by one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood.

I guess it is an achievement that Corbijn is able to put so much angst and pathos in a film that would otherwise be so superficial, but it really just comes off as a funny marriage more than anything. Guns, car chases and explosions are not a good match for such long, slow, emotional scenes we get in The American. It mostly makes us keep looking at the movie stub thinking went into the wrong multiplex theater.

George Clooney is a mysterious hit man who doesn't have much of a past that we know about. As the film opens he's in some Swedish wilderness with a hot and naked girlfriend as a gang of bad guys roll up on him and try to shoot him dead. Of course he kills them (and the girlfriend for good measure) and escapes to Rome. There he meets his boss who tells him to go to a remote mountain town to wait for further instructions.

He goes to the town and quickly begins a romantic relationship with a prostitute (who is totally appropriately businesslike with all her clients, unless they look like George Clooney, of course). He then meets a woman who has him design a special gun for her - a gun she presumably needs for a murder job she has coming up. He gets to work on the gun, continues his relationship with the hot hooker and tries to dodge the pesky Swedish gang who has followed him to Italy to finish the job they started in the snowy North.

This is a very, very slow film with much more silence than dialogue. It plays almost like an art film (like Control) than it does a summer blockbuster movie. We don't really know anything at all about Clooney or what he does. Is making guns just a side project that goes with assassinations or is that his main gig? Does he have some particular pain in his past - like a dead wife or a mistake that killed a friend? We really don't know much of anything. (And, by the way, why the film is called The American is also unclear - he is American, but so what? He's also got some tattoos and likes doing push ups and staying in shape. Why isn't it called The Gymrat?)

Clooney is seen with a butterfly tattoo on his back and clearly knows about the creatures (he actually reads a book about butterflies at some point too). This seems way too blunt for my tate - that the guy is obsessed with these creatures that metamorphosize from one thing into another and then die quickly. Do you get it? That's what he does too! Oh!

The structure of the film is also problematic as we see Clooney getting the assignment to be in this small village in Italy and then nothing happens for about an hour. At the very end there's an action sequence, but it's very late in the game. This slow pace would work much better on a movie not about crime and guns, but it doesn't work well here. I was dying for something to happen through most of the film.

I was very surprised by Corbijn's use of basically totally unnecessary nudity throughout the film - mostly with the whore (though Clooney gives a show to those who would like his rippled body). A few times we see her stripped naked waiting to screw him - entirely unneeded for the course of the story (not that I minded, but it was weird and again, more "art house" than "multiplex").

I appreciate what Corbijn was trying to do here, but I think it's the wrong fit for this story. I think a more traditional fast-paced flow would have suited this film much better. George Clooney is not Ian Curtis (for a lot of reasons) and there's no reason to make him so similar and morose.

Stars: 2 of 4

Mesrine: The Killer Instinct (Saturday, August 28, 2010) (109)

The Killer Instinct is the first of a two-part biopic on French super criminal Jacques Mesrine who tore across France and Quebec from the late 1950s through the 1970s robbing banks, kidnapping billionaires and killing scores of people.

The story opens as Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) is in Algeria in the late 1950s torturing a few insurgents along with his fellow French soldiers. When he gets back from the war, his loving father has arranged a nice, respectable job for him in a factory. He wants none of this and falls back in with his childhood best buddy, Paul, who introduces him to crime-boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu).

Mesrine stars running small jobs for Guido (robbing houses, beating up rogue pimps) and builds his reputation and his lust for blood and violence. At some point he goes to Spain with Paul and knocks up a woman there who he marries and has three kids with. Ultimately he has to leave France on the lam and ends up in Montreal with his new girlfriend Jeanne. There they keep robbing, kidnapping and killing, ultimately getting caught and locked up in maximum security prison. Mesrine breaks out, of course, and then returns to the prison to take out his frustrations on the warden.

More than a proper narrative, the story is simply a string of action pieces, one leading to the next, leading to the next. There is very little motivation for these sequences. Mostly he commits a crime, gets away from it, and just when you think he'd be wise to stop, he commits another crime - as if addicted to the thrill. Characters come and go with little explanation (only minutes after his wife leaves him to return to Spain, we meet Jeanne who picks up with him on a robbery with no explanation), and locations change dramatically from one moment to the next.

Vincent Cassel is good in the role, however the writing of the character is so limited there's not very much for him to work with. We never really understand what drives Mesrine or what he gets out of the violence. We see that he gets bored with a simple domestic lifestyle, but we never totally understand why he does what he does. Depardieu is also a good enough actor to make Guido work enough, but in the end he is just another banal "type" - the crime boss - and not really three-dimensional.

Director Jean-Francois Richet has some very elegant moving camera moments and adds some rather nice touches to the work. At moments in the early going of the film, it feels like we're watching Goodfellas. We see the back-room deals that run the crime world and see the access that criminals have in Paris (especially with pimps and whores). What follows is mostly fun, but it's all over the place and hard to follow. I would hope the second film will have a bit more structure and a bit more insight. At least it will have a lot more Ludivine Sagnier. Thank god for that!

Stars: 2 of 4

Animal Kingdom (Saturday, August 14) (103)

Animal Kingdom tells the story of Josh who moves in with his grandmother and four uncles after his mother ODs on heroin. His extended family, who he does not know very well, are all drug pushers and gangsters. His grandmother, Janine, is a weird lady who seems to not be upset if her kids die from their life of violence and substances. Her oldest son, Pope, is wanted by the cops for any number of things and comes and goes when he things the coast is clear from them. Three other sons work as deputies to Janine and Pope in their world of crime.

Josh is taught how to survive and work inside this family. He has a girlfriend who seems oblivious to what is going on - and he likes it that way. He pretends that he has a normal life as a way to guard against the chaos he actually lives in. When a murder by his uncles goes wrong, he is interrogated by and becomes friends with detective Leckie, Guy Pierce, who wants to break his family's crime ring for good.

The film has a good-looking style and visual look, with lots of interesting, quiet set-ups, but the script by writer-director David Michod is mostly trite and uninspiring. The movie plays much to slow and way too long. By the end it seems like there are about four false endings, one more dull than the next.

Perhaps the worst part of the film is that it's hard to identify with any of the characters. Clearly we are supposed to align with Josh, but he's so quiet and internal with his thoughts and actions that it's hard to feel much sympathy for him. His uncles and grandmother are all bat-shit nuts so it becomes hard to understand why he sticks with them at all. By the end it seems like we're watching this family through a dirty window, rather than being inside the family, which I think would have been a much more effective view.

There isn't really that much crime in this crime movie. By the time we're up and running in the family house, most of the uncles are already done with their violent lives and looking to get out of the game. We see about three illegal acts, but we don't see all that much that would lead them to become such a serious target of the police. That we don't see how totally bad these guys are from the outset really hurts our conclusions about them.

This is just a very slow, boring and banal crime movie. There is nothing very special about it. The acting is good enough, but most of the characters are under-developed and weird (especially Pope and Janine) and that gets in the way of any real positive or negative feelings about them. At then end of the film I was mostly happy that it was over at all rather than happy or upset with the way the story ended (which felt rather random and unnecessary, by the way).

Stars: 1 of 4

Brooklyn's Finest (Wednesday, August 4, 2010) (92)

Brooklyn's Finest is the most recent heap from turd-factory Antoine Fuqua. In this, there are three consecutive cop stories that never totally connect as well as they should and just add up to another dull movie about mostly bad cops and how "the system" and New York City are bad.

The first story is about Sal (Ethan Hawke) who is a generally good guy with a loving wife and a bunch of kids. He is way underwater financially and lives in a house that has mold that is killing his wife (as she's pregnant with two more kids). He decides that his only way out is to steal drug money that he would otherwise report when he and his team go into a drug den. For him it's a very moral thing - he's using the money to get a new, clean house, and if he didn't, the money would go into the system and be lost. At some point he raids houses and "loses" runners just to steal a few more bucks.

The second story is about Eddie (Richard Gere) a 22-year veteran cop who is about to retire. He has never done anything particularly good nor anything particularly bad. He's been only a decent cop and the experience has lowered his opinion of humanity. He has to train a bunch of rookies about what he has learned, but he hates their young passion for justice. He's in the process of divorcing his wife, he's in a somewhat domestic relationship with a whore and considers shooting himself in the head about once a day.

The third story is about Tango (Don Cheadle) an undercover cop working in a bad housing project under the drug lord there, Caz (Wesley Snipes). Tango tells his police contacts that he's getting too deep into the organization and that he's having doubts about nailing Caz, who is a long-time friend of his. He says he wants out, but the cops running the show on the outside (and the DOJ) have other ideas for him.

None of these stories are particularly interesting and most fall back on very trite material - some of it directly taken from other movies. Eddie's story is basically Fuqua's Training Day, where and old cop teaches a young cop how things work. Tango's story is basically a bad Donnie Brasco story - or Donnie Brasco meets the first season of The Wire (Michael K Williams, Omar, is even in this part).

I guess the story Fuqua is telling is that all cops have their sins and the police department is messed up because of this. It's not particularly hopeful, nor very original, really. "So what?", is my question. Why do I care that a bunch of cops in Brooklyn are bad guys (or good guys). The film ends so elliptically that it's not really clear what Fuqua is getting at.

Are we supposed to feel bad for Sal because he takes matters in his own hands? Are we supposed to feel bad for Eddie because he's reached the end of his rope? Are we supposed to feel bad for Tango because nobody will listen to him and he's stuck in a no-win situation? I don't really care about any of these things. They all fall particularly flat and don't really do much of anything interesting.

Stars: 1 of 4

44 Inch Chest (Tuesday, July 13, 2010) (74)

44 Inch Chest is written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the duo that also write the clever Brit crime film Sexy Beast. There is a good amount of that earlier film in this (it is a story about the domestic lives of underworld wiseguys, there's a lot of talking about mundane stuff, the characters are clearly dark and dirty), but overall it lacks the brightness and joy of that first film.

This is a one-room play that I could easily imagine having been adapted from the stage to the screen (although I do think it's original). Colin (Ray Winstone), a criminal, is furious that his wife has decided to leave him for a younger guy. He panics and goes crazy tearing apart his house. His underworld buddies, Meredith (Ian McShane), Archie (Tom Wilkinson), Peanut (John Hurt) and Mal (Stephen Dillane) all sit with him around their clubhouse talking about his options (kill the guy who slept with his wife or let him live) and razzing one another. Ultimately they get the guy into the house and beat him up before talking more about other stuff.

There is almost no action in this film and it is super talky. It's a writers/actors piece with very minimal directing. The cast is clearly fantastic and they are all really good in their roles. McShane's character is gay, apparently, and he talks about fucking men and the relative sizes of their dicks. This is sorta funny, but is really just cheap, though his delivery is fabulous. John Hurt, who looks older than his 70 years, is very funny and and very good. This might be the perfect role for him now, as he gets to be old, cranky, drunk and swear a lot for it.

There is basically no violence in the picture, despite the crime world setting. By the time we see the guy who cheated with Colin's wife, he has already been beaten up and has dried blood caked to his face. This is certainly not nice to see, but it's interesting the way it's presented (this clearly is good work from director Malcolm Venville) so we only get the talking and shouting after the hitting, but not the action itself.

I think I wanted more out of this film. It's really not bad at all, it's just not what I expected. It's pretty funny and clever, I think it's just a bit boring. I like what it's trying to do, but I'm not sure I love the execution. It seems like a bit showy to have such a big cast and just have them talk the whole time in a single room. I guess there's nothing wrong with this, but I think it could have been more.

Stars: 2 o f 4

Holy Rollers (Saturday, May 22, 2010) (42)

I will admit that I went to this movie because I thought the trailer was ridiculous and terrible. Jesse Eisenberg, the lead actor, looks like he's wearing a terrible wig (though after watching the film, I do think it's his real hair) and the story looked silly and over-earnest. I was basically not wrong at all. This is a ridiculous movie that tries too hard to make me give a crap about an utterly boring story.

Eisenberg plays Sam Gold, a Hasidic kid in his late teens/early twenties living in his parents' house in Brooklyn in the late 1990s (I think it takes place in Williamsburg, though it's never really clear - which is one of the many problems with the film. I guess it could be Crown Heights, but I don't think so). Sam is rather bored with his life and looking ahead to marrying the neighborhood hottie (who he, of course, can't speak to because, well, they're Orthodox and all) and ultimately becoming a rabbi or taking over his father's fabric store on the Lower East Side.

His best friend and next door neighbor is Leon, a super gooddie-two-shoes who is the star of the rabinical class they take together. Leon's brother Yosef is a misfit and soon recruits Sam into his business of smuggling extasy from Amsterdam into the the U.S.

At some point Sam is making more money than he knows what to do with, has lost the chance of a good marriage, has been kicked out of the house by his family and has become much more successful at drug running than he ever would have been, had he gone down a good path.

I guess the tension throughout the film is based around the split between Sam's Orthodox religion and the free, modernness of his life style - including pushing drugs that specifically lead to sexual liberation. The problem I had with this dichotomy is that Sam never comes across as all that serious a Hasid in the first place. He does not want to become a rabbi - that's what his parents want him to do - he wants to work for his father in the secular world. He screws around in his Yeshiva class. He's smart and knows talmudic stuff, because he's a smart guy, but he's never really seems like a true believer.

What you get, then, is a guy who is basically just going into an illegal business - and doing well at it. So what? Why is that interesting to watch? I never really saw that he was all that regretful that he was doing what he was doing. He was much more interested in the new crazy lifestyle he was leading and the new access he had to sex and women.

It really seems that he is only incidentally Hasidic - that that is not really a relevant part of his character. Before he gets involved in the drugs, he does the things he supposed to do and says the things he's supposed to say, but we never really get a view of why that the Hasidic lifestyle is bad or good - or anything. That he is Hasidic is almost a punch-line it's so irrelevant to the events of the story.

Some details don't make much sense to me - and really hurt my connection to the story. For reasons that I couldn't figure out, Sam's family only speak in perfect English to one another. I can say from living near Hasids for awhile in Brooklyn that most that I see on the subway speak Yiddish to one another or some other Eastern European language. When they speak English, it is with a pretty thick accent (as English is their second or third language). That Sam's family at the dinner table sounds exactly like my family at the dinner table is weird.

And then there's the hair. I am sure that Jesse Eisenberg's payas were his own and not clip-on, but they are terrible. I guess this happens with curly-haired Jews (I'm sure I would have bad payas too), but these really looked like a joke. Also - is Jesse unable to grow facial hair? At what point to hassids start growning beards? Jesse remained baby-faced through the whole thing which felt weird even if it isn't.

The film is slow and dull throughout with a very predictible and uninteresting storyline. At no point was I interested in an emotional level to the story or worried that one thing or another would happen to Sam. On top of everything the execution of the film is sloppy. Director Kevin Asch and writer Antonio Macia really do a bad job with this one. It's not even fun to watch and laugh a the hair-dos. I't just boring.

Stars: 1 of 4

Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (Saturday, November 21, 2009) (165)

To simply dismiss this film as a trite cop melodrama would be to miss a great deal about it. Let me be clear: this is not a great movie. It is over-the-top, silly and cartoonish - but that is all done on purpose. It is a Film Noire genre farce, and much better understood as a tongue-in-cheek view of the cop drama than as a pure mystery man-hunt scenario. Director Werner Herzog is one of the smartest people in (or out of) Hollywood and if you watch this film as poking fun at banal shoot-em-up Hollywood fare it will be much more enjoyable.

More than a sequel to Abel Ferrara's 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant, this is a re-invention of a similar story - a corollary to the original. Much like Harvey Keitel in the earlier one, here Nicholas Cage plays the eponymous policeman who is addicted to any number of narcotics and pain meds, has a hooker for a girlfriend (played by Eva Mendes), has a bad gambling habit, enjoys forced-sex with out-of-luck civilians, is on the take from any number of underworld bad guys. All the while he gets promoted for what appears to be his totally legal and ethical work. The main drama here has Cage hunting a New Orleans drug lord who killed an immigrant family who stepped into his territory, but as he gets closer to an arrest, he loses track of the case because of his own messy life.

Herzog does a very nice job of holding the narrative together well and telling a pretty good story. It does not drag too much, nor does it fetishize Cage's problems. He re-interprets some of the most salient moments from the first movie, as a nod to what came before, but does not replay them exactly. At one moment, Cage shakes down white clubbers for drugs (for his own use) and then forces the girl to have sex with him, threatening her with jail time if she refuses. Cage's lieutenant is similar to Keitel's in his love of vice, but is ultimately a new character entirely. Herzog also has a few wonderful moments seen from Cage's toxified eyes - drug-addled fantasies that are beautiful and hilarious. Throughout the film, a dusty, oldish visual look gives the film a cheesy, almost 1990s quality that helps show the actions as foolish and silly.

My main problem with understanding this film is Nick Cage's performance. He is normally such a bad actor that it is not clear that he's in with Herzog on his joke. It almost feels like Cage is doing his normal, terrible super-earnest over-acting style here (think: The Weather Man or World Trade Center). In fact, his terrible acting partly adds to the wonderful terribleness of the picture. He is every bad big-name actor who has ever played such a screwed up cop. He is Denzel Washington in Training Day (yes - I know he won an Oscar for that, but he was terrible in that horrible film), Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon or Daid Caruso in Kiss of Death.

Viewed as a totally sarcastic story, this movie is mostly enjoyable - though not at all perfect. It is nearly post-modern and pretty funny. Part of the reason I like it is because it is so terrible - lovably terrible. I do hope it doesn't become a franchise and that this is just the second of a limited set of these movies. (God help us if not!)

I guess that after having said all of this, the film could be for Herzog what The Rainmaker was for Francis Ford Coppolla or what Jade was for William Friedkin - a sign that a once great artist is willing to make a movie to put food on the table and is happy to sell his craft for peanuts. I don't think it is one of those cases; I think this is a great, smart director thumbing his nose at the cliches of a tired genre and laughing to himself that there are people who won't pick up the subtlety.

Stars: 2 of 4