Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Pass the Salt…Bitch!

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by George Wolf

 

So, how was your family get-together over the Holidays?

If secrets and dinner plates weren’t tossed about like a salad dressed with obscenities, you’ve got nothing on the Westons, the dysfunctional brood at the heart of August:  Osage County.

Screenwriter Tracy Letts adapts his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and the sublime wordplay in his dark, rich comedy is brought to life via an exceptional ensemble cast. Only tentative direction from John Wells holds the film back from its full potential.

Meryl Streep rules the roost as family matriarch Violet Weston, who..ahem…”welcomes” her children, siblings and assorted other team members back home after a family crisis.

There isn’t much time spent on niceties before the barbs start flying. Old wounds are exposed, and new secrets are uncovered as the family struggles to deal with the effect their past has on their present.

At the heart of the conflict is Barbara, the oldest Weston daughter, fully realized by Julia Roberts in, hands down, the performance of her career.

Barbara’s contempt for her mother is on hilariously full display, while bubbling underneath is the fear of becoming her mother, a fear she tries to hide through angry outbursts. Stealing a movie from Meryl Streep is no easy feat, but damned if Roberts doesn’t do it.

In fact, the film is wall to wall with fine performers, including Chris Cooper, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor, and Margo Martindale (who shows a fantastic chemistry with Streep, giving their scenes together an added air of mischief).

The problem is, director John Wells seems a bit intimidated by who, and what, he’s working with. The characters are too often on their own island, as when a soap opera cuts from a close up of one deep sigh to a completely different storyline.

These characters are under one roof for much of the movie, yet we don’t feel the cohesiveness of any shared connections, just a series of histrionics often left swinging in the venomous breeze.

It’s not the material. Letts also wrote Bug and Killer Joe, both adapted into brilliant movies by the skills of legendary director William Friedkin. Wells, a veteran TV director, doesn’t provide the nuance needed to make a successful cinematic leap.

August:  Osage County boasts all the ingredients, and is certainly entertaining, but ultimately feels like a missed opportunity for something special.

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

 

New In Theaters

Is the Viewer who is Watching Confused?

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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?

by Hope Madden

There are some who would take an interview with Noam Chomsky – philosopher, cognitive scientist, linguist, all around smartypants – and try to simplify it, make it easier for the audience to understand.

Not Michel Gondry. The French filmmaker best known for the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind pairs Chomsky interviews with his own wildly abstract, hand-drawn animation with a purpose that is certainly not clarity.

In his documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Gondry invites the audience to puzzle through the words of the genius who believes the world is a mystery and that we are all the better for it. The director, therefore, goes out of his way to ensure that we are befuddled, because, according to Chomsky, that’s the only way to go through life. If we believe we understand, then we don’t probe, question, challenge.

So, Gondry creates a challenge. Indeed, the obstacles to comprehensibility are either alarming or hilarious. Abstract animation can be tough to understand. So can Gondry’s thick French accent. So can Chomsky. Gondry piles on with intentionally distracting camera noise and, on occasion, the obscuring volume of background music.

If all this seems frustrating, strangely enough, that’s not the effect Gondry achieves. Eventually, the filmmaker’s wonder and the subject’s challenges to puzzle out what’s happening wash over you, and you let go of your own instinct to predict what comes next in order to comprehend what is happening. You achieve your own sense of wonder at the befuddlement of it all.

The secret is Gondry himself, who is trying and failing to keep up. It’s endearing, but it’s also a relief. You’re not the only one.

People looking for an informative document of Chomsky’s life will be wildly disappointed. This film is not about what you want to see. It’s about what Gondry always wanted to ask Noam Chomsky if he ever got the chance. Plus cartoons!

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

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Imagination + Love = Her

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Her

by Hope Madden

Is Spike Jonze the most imaginative American filmmaker working today?

Yes. Need proof?

This is the guy who turned the beloved, 10-sentence children’s book Where the Wild Things Are into the most heartbreaking and wondrous film of 2009. The guy who could make the act of adapting existing work into the most original film of 2002 (Adaptation).

Hell, it’s the man who made his directorial debut telling the tale of a filing clerk who sells tickets into John Malkovich’s head. And the quality of his output has only improved, taking on a depth and beauty since he began writing his projects as well.

With Her, the first film Jonze has written entirely on his own, he’s crafted the year’s most poignant love story.

It sounds like the lead-in to a joke: A man falls in love with his computer operating system. Who, besides Jonze, could take a premise like and turn it into a masterful image of our times?

Joaquin Phoenix plays the lonely and emotionally bruised Theodore, in the not-too-distant-future Los Angeles. Still reeling from a break up, Theodore shies away from traditional intimacy, but finds himself attracted to the newest update in operating systems: the OS that evolves to meet every need.

Credit Jonze for sidestepping every imaginable cliché – and there are plenty – and instead exploring society’s current trajectory with surprising tenderness, perhaps even optimism. Yes, he notes the superficiality of relationships in the technological age, and the tendency toward isolation. But it’s not like he believes the machines are going to rise up and enslave us.

Not that he exactly rules that out.

What he does instead is almost magical. He introduces us to the very picture of humanity in Samantha, the operating system. Scarlett Johansson voices the character, and enough cannot be said of her performance. It’s easy to undervalue voice talent, but Johansson shows what can be done with nothing else to rely on – no facial expressions, no setting, no gestures. Her performance is an absolute wonder.

Likewise, Phoenix is magnificent, falling in love on screen with no physical being to perform against. His work is vulnerable and touching enough to take your breath.

A sparkling supporting group, including Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, a very funny Chris Pratt, fills out the cast, each making the utmost of the environment Jonze has created.

The film looks and feels amazing, with every detail of set design and script enhancing and deepening the impact of the love story. It’s a beautiful, imaginative, relevant image of love in the modern world.

Verdict-4-5-Stars

 

 

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Just Keeping It Real

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by George Wolf

 

From the opening moments of Lone Survivor, it’s clear writer/director Peter Berg kept one goal above all others: honor the Navy SEALS at the heart of this harrowing true life tale.

By most accounts he’s done that, and his adaptation of the 2007 memoir by SEAL Marcus Luttrell emerges as a single-minded war movie of both power and intensity.

In 2005, “Operation Red Wings” sent a four man SEAL team into Afghanistan to eliminate a  senior Taliban leader. The mission was compromised, a firefight ensued and an attempt to rescue the team turned tragic. Only Luttrell was left alive.

It’s a riveting tale, and Berg (Friday Night Lights/The Kingdom) anchors it with the brotherhood among the men involved, and the unflinching devotion to their duty. We don’t get intimate profiles of any of the characters, but we get enough to feel we know them, and more importantly, we see how deeply they identify with each other, with their team, and with their respective places in it.

Though Mark Wahlberg stars as Luttrell, Berg wisely does not tilt the screen time in his favor, and we fear for each member of his team equally, even though we already know what the eventual outcome will be. Credit Wahlberg, and co-stars Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, and Emile Hirsch with solid performances that are able to resonate collectively, yet still illustrate the anguish of a fallen comrade.

Berg’s touch with the battle scenes is equally focused, filming with an intentional frenzy full of gut-wrenching stunt work.  Keeping these sequences nearly absent of background music or superfluous pageantry, the unmistakable aim is to present this hellish scenario as the men themselves knew it.

Of course, as a war film, Lone Survivor carries instant baggage, seemingly destined to be labeled either jingoistic, un-American or misinformed. Clearly looking to avoid the “that’s not how it’s done” barbs slung at Zero Dark Thirty, Berg spent a month embedded with a SEAL team in Iraq, and his film offers no apologies for its abundant machismo or respectful salute.

The catch-22 is, this approach works at the expense of a layered dramatic narrative that makes movies such as Zero Dark Thirty so compelling.

To be fair, though, Lone Survivor never aims that high. It is a film that mainly wants us to understand what it takes to do a job that most of us can’t even fathom.

Consider that mission accomplished.

 

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

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Covens: Less Fun than TV Suggests

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Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

by Hope Madden

Covens are fun! Not to join – that would just be poor decision making on your part – but for sheer entertainment value, they make fine fodder. Just ask Jessica Lange.

And so it was with cautious optimism that I approached the 5th installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Marked Ones.

What do we know so far? There’s a demon. It likes Katie. It hates Micah (who doesn’t?!). It and Katie took Hunter. Back in the day, that demon knew the very wee Katie and her sister Kristi because of a coven. Back to present time, Katie and a weird little boy move in next door to a family, who meet the coven. (It doesn’t go well for family.) What next?

We now leave the inner Katie/Kristi/Hunter circle for a moment because the demon is casting a wider net, with the mysterious coven’s help. That net has nabbed Electronic Simon Game enthusiast Jesse (Andrew Jacobs).

Longtime PA screenwriter (and son of Highway to Heaven star) Christopher Landon takes on directing duties this go-round. Thanks to his writing beginning with the first sequel, the series has taken on a reasonable franchise narrative. Unfortunately, he is still saddled with the found footage gimmick that made the original so effective.

Jesse gets a camera for his high school graduation, and he and his BFF Hector (Jorge Diaz) film a lot of crap. While dancing with Jesse’s dog, they notice some nutty sounds coming from the downstairs apartment – where the witch lives. They investigate. Bad plan.

Landon evokes some decent scares, and has fun with the handheld while Jesse first learns of the otherworldly visitor who is much less fun than he originally seems. Bursting with the misguided belief in their own indestructibility, both Jesse and Hector seem realistically teenaged and their terrible choices actually feel relatively honest given the fact that kids are stupid.

The film takes some time to get rolling, and it saves too many of its scares for the third act – at which point the handheld camera becomes a real distraction because most people would put down the camera and flee.

Note to regular PA fans:  there’s no point waiting through the credits on this one, as there is no extra scene. That, coupled with the full circle aspect of the ending, suggests that PA5 might just put a ribbon on the franchise. Not likely – the series will release another installment in October.

Slow in spots and hardly groundbreaking, The Marked Ones still manages to entertain and startle.

It’s January. This may be the best we do for a while.

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

 

New In Theaters

Intriguing and Surprising…Until It’s Not

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Open Grave

by Hope Madden

The film Open Grave immediately brings to mind Adrien Brody’s underseen 2010 flick Wrecked. In it, Brody wakes from a car crash in a daunting patch of geography with no memory of who he is or how he got there, but evidence suggests that maybe he’s not the film’s good guy. We spend the next 90 minutes with him as he pieces together clues to his identity and situation and tries to survive pretty inhospitable circumstances.

Likewise, in Open Grave, Sharlto Copley awakens with no memory. He’s not in a car, though. He finds himself deep in a pit atop a heap of dead bodies.

The trajectory is similar, but director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego does not have a tense man-against-nature thriller in mind. He throws a lot of clues at Sharlto’s confused Jonah, all of them tinged with enough blood and barbed wire that our protagonist doesn’t just believe he may not be a good guy. He knows he may be a very, very bad man.

Jonah is not alone, though. In the house not far from the body pit is a rattled group of amnesiac survivors, all of whom are trying to puzzle their way through the gory evidence to figure out what the hell is happening to them.

There is one other film that clearly inspired Open Grave, but to mention it by name would be to give away too much because the grim clues, anxious sleuthing and varying possibilities keep this film suspenseful and queasyingly entertaining.

Copley, whose career has been an act of diminishing returns since his magnificent feature film debut in District 9, offers a solid, grounded turn here. His characterization evolves as his character’s experiences demand, and Copley conveys the proper instincts at each point in Jonah’s quest for survival.

Screenwriters Chris and Eddie Borey take the cabin in the woods premise and layer it with numerous additional horror tropes to pull together a surprisingly engaging picture. It’s full of grim twists and imaginative surprises….until it isn’t.

Lopez-Gallego keeps his storytelling one step ahead of the audience for most of the journey, but when we catch up and are given the big reveal, the film has too little left to offer. It then falls back on nothing more than standard horror fare, providing an unfittingly clichéd ending to what had been a clever braiding of familiar threads.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

New In Theaters

An Intimate Battle

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by George Wolf

 

Rarely has the Battle of the Sexes been more confined than in Neil LaBute‘s Some Velvet Morning.

In fact. in writer/director LaBute’s latest look at the subject, all of the drama occurs at the tastefully decorated residence of one young woman.

Velvet (Alice Eve) is surprised one morning when Fred (Stanley Tucci) appears at her door, with several pieces of luggage in tow.  After four years, Fred has finally left his wife, he says, and he wants to again explore the chance of a life with Velvet.

Over the next 83 minutes, we learn about all the dark corners of their relationship. History is relived and ugly acusations are unfurled as Fred and Velvet take turns wielding the power in their exchanges.

That Tucci is wonderful should comes as no surprise, but it is Eve’s performance that should open some eyes to the depth of her dramatic talent.  Velvet is a young woman with secrets, and Eve strings us along deliciously in the emotional dance with her old flame.

At its core, the film is a return to LaBute’s early roots as a playwright, as his favorite theme of the dark, cynical nature of relationships is explored using just two characters, but from rotating perspectives that constantly surprise.

As the meeting escalates toward the ending you think you know, LaBute throws the ace he’s been holding back since Fred rang the doorbell, but it doesn’t result in quite the jackpot he may have been seeking.

Often absorbing and sporting two fine performances, the final reveal in Some Velvet Morning ultimately leaves you wondering if LaBute’s destination was worth the journey.

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

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BiggerLouderFasterMore

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by George Wolf

So, how rich do you want to be?

In the opening minutes of The Wolf of Wall Street, 26 year old Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) tells us making 49 million dollars in a year only pissed him off, because he really had his heart set on a million a week.

How did he ever pay the phone bill?

Belfort, the real life stock market wizard who hit it big in the 1990s and wrote the memoir the film is based on, was more concerned with paying for drugs, hookers, yachts and lavish parties, as well as staying one step ahead of the Feds who were looking to bring him down.

No doubt, the man has an incredible story to tell, and director Martin Scorsese tells it perfectly, uncorking a terrifically frenzied, wickedly funny three hour showcase of unchecked hedonism.

This is no hand-wringing reflection on the wages of sin, just a swaggering, appropriately superficial and completely entertaining lesson in the American dream.

DiCaprio is nothing short of electric, giving perhaps the most can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him performance of his career. He takes Belfort from a wide-eyed Wall Street rookie (under the unhinged tutelage of Matthew McConaughey in a priceless cameo) to a drug-addled zillionaire with the perfect blend of vanity and paranoia, always leaving you anxious for his next move.

As Belfort’s partner-in-crime Donnie Azoff, Jonah Hill again delivers a terrific supporting turn, and one particular scene with he and DiCaprio wrestling over a telephone, both characters locked in a quaalude stupor, is alone worth the price of admission.

Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter strike just the right tone with the story of Belfort’s rise and fall. They invite comparisons to both Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech and Scorsese’s own Goodfellas, then remind you this is another era entirely as DiCaprio breaks the fourth wall, speaking asides directly to the audience as if we were accomplices. Which, of course, we are.

The ridiculous degree to which America worships the uber-rich deserves the riotous, foot on the gas, keep up or get out approach Scorsese employs.  Belfort and his ilk knew only one credo:  bigger, louder, faster, more. That’s exactly what TWOWS delivers.

Sit down, shut up, and get ready for a helluva ride.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

New In Theaters

You’ll Hold a Grudge

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Grudge Match

by Hope Madden

It’s a tough battle. The late-life Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro battle hard. They sweat! They flail! They struggle against the stiff competition – I mean, do you remember RIPD? What about After Earth or Grown Ups 2? But, at long last, De Niro and Stallone walk out of that ring triumphant, in that they succeeded in crafting the worst film of 2013. Good on ya, guys!

De Niro has been whoring out – I mean, lampooning – his own image for decades, but it’s a row Stallone only accidentally began hoeing recently with his inadvertently comical The Expendables. Here, the two articulate the real tragedy of their waning professional years by reminding us all just how fine Raging Bull and Rocky really are.

In case you missed its countless ads, Grudge Match casts De Niro and Stallone as aging boxers lured into a rematch by Kevin Hart, who is actually funny. He’s not funny here, but there’s only so much a person can do.

Alan Arkin also tries really hard to salvage his scenes with his talent and solid comic timing. Unfortunately, he shares these scenes with Stallone, who is to comedy what Fox News is to journalism. The nine of us who saw Stop or My Mom will Shoot can attest to this – those of us unscarred enough by the experience to speak of it.

De Niro makes you weep for the glory of Raging Bull and the tragedy of lost artistic integrity. Meanwhile Stallone – whose artistic integrity was always pretty suspect – punch-jogs around urban Pennsylvania, trains with a curmudgeonly old man, drinks raw eggs. You see where this is going. It ain’t good.

But how can he go wrong with this script? Two old guys fighting! They don’t know what YouTube is – isn’t that hilarious? They probably have rotary phones and listen to 8 tracks, too. Comedy gold.

If 90 minutes of ridiculing our elderly isn’t entertainment enough for you, you will need to look elsewhere. In fact, the only reason you should be looking here is if you really hate Robert De Niro and/or Sylvester Stallone and ache to see them embarrass themselves for a paycheck, playing two men willing to embarrass themselves for  a paycheck.

So, I suppose you really could call Grudge Match the case of life imitating art, which is absolutely the only way the word “art” makes it into a description of this movie.

 

Verdict-1-0-Star

 

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Life As He Dreams It

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by George Wolf

 

The closing credits of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty inspired some immediate soul searching.

Why didn’t I hate this movie?

With generalized themes of empowerment strategically layered with soaring music, it has all the trappings of a shallow, follow-your-dreams retirement fund commercial that airs during the Super Bowl.

And yet, director Ben Stiller supplies enough visual style and unabashed earnestness to make his new adaptation of James Thurber’s classic story a surprising success.

Stiller also takes the lead role as the legendary daydreamer.  This Walter Mitty works in the photo department of Life magazine and secretly pines for co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) For years, Walter has handled the submissions from prized photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn), but as layoffs mount and the last issue of Life draws near, the image that O’Connell has earmarked for the final cover goes missing.

Leaving his mundane schedule behind, Walter embarks on an around-the-world search for the elusive photographer and the lost photo. Through the terrain of Afghanistan to the wilds of Iceland and beyond, Walter follows O’Connell’s trail, racking up incredible life experiences with each new day.

Setting a film about seizing the fullness of life inside the waning days of Life magazine sounds obvious and cheesy, right? Right, and left to its own devices, Steve Conrad’s script would keep the film comfortably in that neighborhood.

Credit Stiller for the vision to see the bigger picture. On the surface, it might seem more natural for Stiller, who brought a wonderful edge to Zoolander and Tropic Thunder, to return to the satirical tone of Thurber’s original story. Instead, he fully embraces the larger than life quality of this treatment, filling the screen with glorious on-location sequences and truly sublime visuals.

Stiller the actor follows suit with a restrained lead performance. The antics of Danny Kaye’s 1947 film version are long gone, as Stiller’s Walter is a true introvert learning to embrace change. Wiig also dials it down, replacing her trademark quirkiness with a quiet sweetness while Penn, in what amounts to little more than a cameo, has some subtle fun with his rogue persona.

Yes, Walter Mitty stages a calculated assault on your feel good bone, but with tactics this good-natured and timely, it doesn’t hurt a bit.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars