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Get Ready, Get Ready to Jump

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22 Jump Street

by Hope Madden

I’m not sure how it is that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller keep surprising us. By now, no matter how inane the project may sound, we should expect big things from the directors of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. And yet, who’d have guessed they’d deliver the goods yet again with their sequel, 22 Jump Street?

Self-aware without being glib, and fueled by the same good-hearted energy that marks the duo’s work, the film is both a hilarious send up of sequels, and the natural progression of a bro-mance. Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) go undercover in college, where a new drug has killed a kid and may go global if it isn’t contained. This, except for the college part, is the identical plot of the first installment. Of course, that’s on purpose.

The meta-sequel is short on character development, but does take some time to explore a relationship that may have grown stale, that spark in their partnership starting to dim. Is it time for Jenko and Schmidt to investigate other suspects?

Rampant silliness continues to be the driving force in the franchise, and Hill and Tatum – as the doughy neurotic and chiseled dunderhead, respectively – are enjoyably, even masterfully silly. Again.

Expect a lot of the same, but enough differences to make the bumbling police work fun, and more than enough sight gags and wordplay to distract you from any other weaknesses. A little slam poetry, one walk of shame, and an unexpected Benny Hill bit are some highlights from a film absolutely littered with jokes. Some hit, some miss, but they just keep coming.

The always-dastardly Peter Stormare lends his talents in the villain role, while Jillian Bell (Workaholics) and Nick Offerman contribute their share of deadpan laughs. There are some pretty great cameos, as well, but I cannot tell you how much I hoped to see James Franco when the investigation headed to the beach for Spring Break.

Besides that missed opportunity, 22 suffers from a few lags in its otherwise frantic momentum. It would have behooved Lord and Miller to trim about 10 minutes from the effort – just not the ten that play over the credits, brainstorming assignment after assignment, sequel after sequel, in glorious fashion.

Whatever its faults, like its predecessor, 22 Jump Street is no classic but it is good for a lot of laughs. Few have made “more of the same” look so good.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

 

Outtakes

Countdown to Lazaretto

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Lazaretto, Jack White’s new album, drops today. We’re pretty excited. So excited, we thought we’d spend some quality silver screen time with the mad genius to fully prepare us for the oncoming awesomeness. In case you’d like to do the same, here are some highlights.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

White’s music has been used in dozens of films, often to great effect. Even the god-awful School for Scoundrels benefitted from a couple tunes. But White’s “Fell In Love with a Girl” added so much to this excellently played finale dance number that it needs to be noted.

Cold Mountain (2003)

Holding his own in an impressive (if globally confused) cast, White plays a young man avoiding Civil War conscription, living off the land with other runaways. He brings a recognizable, impish spark to some pretty heavy scenes.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story  (2007)

Jack White is Elvis. What the hell more do you want from a movie? His take on the King is indecipherable genius in an underrated spoof on rock’n’roll biopics.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

Jim Jarmusch, who is both awesome and Ohioan, strings together a series of vignettes with a handful of the world’s coolest people chatting over a beverage and a smoke. Like Bill Murray and Wu-Tang Clan. Who doesn’t want to sit in on these conversations?! Among the most fun is the bit where Jack shows Meg his Tesla coil.

It Might Get Loud (2008)

Somewhere between An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman, documentarian Davis Guggenheim ambled away from the path of the political into the backstage of the awesome, chronicling three generations of guitar players: Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. It is loud, and fun, and White, in particular, is fascinating.

 

 

 

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Flirting in the Teacher’s Lounge

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Words and Pictures

by George Wolf

 

What the? A summer movie aimed squarely at adults?

Where are the superheroes? Where are the explosions? Where’s the teen angst?

Even with its faults, Words and Pictures feels like a cool breeze in July, as clever repartee and winning performances combine for a throwback to classic, feel-good romance films of decades past.

And true to that spirit, our romantics start out as sparring adversaries.

Jack (Clive Owen) teaches honors English at a prep school. His promise as a writer is a distant memory, and he eases the self-loathing with constant word-game challenges to his fellow teachers, and plenty of alcohol. His antics on both fronts have led to his job hanging in the balance.

Dina (Juliette Binoche) is a respected artist struggling with failing health. She arrives at the school to teach honors art, and is immediately put off by Jack’s confrontational nature.

The confrontations escalate once Jack’s students tell him the new art teacher’s mantra:  pictures are more vital than words.

Oh, no she dih-eh!

Like many of us of a certain age, screenwriter Gerald Di Pego is clearly chagrined at how society devalues not only the classic works of art and literature, but their very building blocks: images and prose. That complaint may not be new, but Di Pego finds some fun while pointing out that it’s still very relevant.

His script still has minefields aplenty – contrived situations, superfluous subplots and oversimplified personal demons – and Fred Schepisi’s lackluster direction doesn’t help, but Owen and Binoche are good enough to rise above it. They make every one of their scenes together a sublime delight.

You’ll have no trouble figuring out where Words and Pictures is going, but the witty wordplay and frisky chemistry of two veteran talents make it worth seeing through.

 Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehQimFhQmQg

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Romance Porn

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The Fault in Our Stars

by George Wolf

With Don Jon last year, Joseph Gordon-Levitt wondered if maybe, idealized romance fantasies can be as harmful to actual relationships as pornography.

The Fault in Our Stars is just the latest example to make his point.

Based on the best seller by John Green, it centers on an ordinary teenage girl (who of course narrates, to reinforce the feeling for the teenage girls watching that it’s their story, too). But she’s not really ordinary, she’s just waiting for that dreamy boy to come into her life and instantly see the special snowflake that she truly is, forsaking everything in his own life to make sure she feels special every special second of every special day.

Shailene Woodley stars as Hazel, a young cancer patient who dreads her support group, but goes just to make her parents happy. Then, one day, Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) comes to group, takes one look at Hazel and is instantly infatuated.

So, this time, the young lovers have to deal with cancer, adding an extra layer of manipulation opportunity to be explored.

Early on, Hazel expresses disdain for those unrealistic stories where “nothing is too messed up that can’t be fixed with a Peter Gabriel song.” Then, guess what? Some of those songs on the soundtrack are nothing more than bad Peter Gabriel rip-offs.

Woodley is a gifted actress, and does manage to bring some depth to Hazel, who admittedly is the most well-rounded character in the script. Augustus is a one-dimensional mess, and Elgort (“Tommy” in the recent Carrie remake) can do little more than cast adoring glances and mug for the camera. But really, that’s what he’s there for, anyway.

Movies like this (and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Spectacular Now, and…) want you to believe their characters are unconventional and their message is insightful, when the exact opposite is true.

The Fault in Our Stars is the same old bill of goods.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

 

 

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Don’t Call It Lip Service

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Burt’s Buzz

by Hope Madden

Burt Shavitz does not measure success the way most of us do, but if you like old hippies, bees and golden retrievers, he may have just the movie for you.

That bearded kisser that graces the little tins of Burt’s Bees creams and jellies belongs to Shavitz, and filmmaker Jody Shapiro hopes to get behind those rheumy eyes with his new documentary, Burt’s Buzz. He’s not the only one. His film is littered with folks – Burt’s brother, his caretaker, his marketing contact in Taiwan – who would dearly like to make a personal connection, get to know the real Burt.

It turns out, the man is a bit of a conundrum, a walking contradiction, even – which should come as no surprise from the guy who uses his own ugly mug to hawk beauty balms.

Shapiro’s film is most engaging when it lets itself simply capture the contradictions: the septuagenarian Mainer living without electricity or hot water as he’s greeted by throngs of screaming, bee-costumed fans in a Taiwan airport; the fella too frugal to fix his hot water heater, complaining that the marketing folks didn’t bring Turkish coffee, but regular. But Burt is an eccentric old cuss and, more than anything, he is not what you expect and doesn’t care.

For many, including Shaprio, the film might seem a likely expose on the hostile takeover that forced beekeeper Shavitz from his company in the Nineties, when his then-partner in life and business Roxanne Quimby bought him out, only to later sell the company to Clorox for epic riches. (Yes, the international bleach company owns the earth-friendly Burt’s Bees. This film breathes these little ironies.)

But pity is not appropriate. Shavitz walked away from corporate wealth as a youth when he turned down the chance to run his family business, and walked away from prestige and fame in the Sixties when he quit his successful venture as a photo journalist to move to an abandoned barn in Upstate New York.

It’s hard to tell whether Shapiro is impatient with his subject, or whether he’s afraid the audience will be, but when the filmmaker can just settle down and let the cameras roll, you finally get a feel for who Burt Shavitz is. It’d be too patronizing and myopic to call his a simple life – I haven’t been to Taiwan, I never photographed Malcolm X, I never lost a multimillion dollar company, and none of that seems simple to me.

He isn’t simple, isn’t quaint, and is not likely to be what you expect. Except when he is.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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Deja Cruise

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Edge of Tomorrow

by George Wolf

Remember how badass Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens battle suit was back in ’86?

Edge of Tomorrow remembers it, along with a few other things about that movie and others, weaving all its inspirations into an entertaining slice of summer escapism.

As Lt. Col. Bill Cage, Tom Cruise is also battling aliens, albeit from a safe distance. Earth has been invaded by “mimics,” and Cage never met a TV talk show he didn’t see as a perfect chance to flash a handsome smile and sell the merits of a war that someone else will fight.

Until, that is, he’s suddenly fitted with his own super suit and made part of a doomed mission. After dying, he wakes up back at boot camp, reliving the same events over and over, death after death, until he can figure out how to break the time loop.

Cage’s first step toward an answer is meeting Rita (Emily Blunt), a celebrated war hero who admits she not only knows his story, she’s lived it.

Cruise’s latest is the smart sci-fi adventure that his last so badly wanted to be. Though Oblivion did boast more truly eye popping visuals, Edge of Tomorrow scores with sharp writing, crisp direction, vivid imagination and one damn good co-star.

Truly, Blunt classes up any project, from awful (The Wolfman) to awesome (Looper) to in-between (The Five Year Engagement). Here, she not only gives Cruise the strong female counterpart his movies often lack, she makes Rita the strongest personality, and the film is better for it.

For his part, Cruise shows some welcome range early on as a cowardly chickenhawk, slowly falling back into autopilot mode the more Cage becomes battle-hardened and heroic. Either way, his charm never wavers.

The team of screenwriters gives a sleek adaptation to Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel “All You Need is Kill.” Yes, we’ve seen these elements before, but the film carries a wise self-awareness about the familiarity, and is even able to toe the line between questioning the folly of war and respecting the sacrifice of soldiers in battle.

Director Doug Liman (Go/The Bourne Identity/Fair Game/Mr. and Mrs. Smith) again proves he knows his way around an action scene. Moreover, he handles the “Groundhog Day” transitions skillfully, injecting some humor and varying scene structure so that the repetitive events don’t feel repetitive.

Look past the isn’t-that-the-name-of-an-SNL-soap-opera-parody title, and Edge of Tomorrow delivers.

 Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

 

For Your Queue

Beautiful Losers for Your Queue

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Available today on DVD and Blu-Ray is the utterly unseen but stingingly lovely portrait of American poverty, The Motel Life. Boasting beautiful performances from Emile Hirsch, Dakota Fanning and, in particular, Stephen Dorff, this story of brothers, hope, and the bad choices that kick survival in the teeth is worth checking out.

Motel Life, at times, feels reminiscent  of Gus Van Zant’s 1989 tale of rambling cons and druggies Drugstore Cowboy. Spun from the haunted existence on the fringes, with dusty small towns and cheap motels, populated by broken people making poor decisions, Drugstore Cowboy is another breathtaking image of the fight to change your direction.

Outtakes

Countdown: The Best Sports Commentators on Film

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Oh glorious days! When was the last time we had a whole weekend of gorgeous weather? After eight straight months of snow, it was just awesome to make it through May without any icy accumulation – unless you count those hail storms from a couple weeks back. But that’s all over, and we had a whole weekend of sun for baseball (Clippers double header, Indians sweep!). Hell, even the Memorial golf tournament enjoyed perhaps the best weather in its history. It was like a whole weekend needed some kind of announcer to color commentate. It all put us in the mind of some of our favorite onscreen sports announcers.

5. Fred Willard, Jim Piddock: Best in Show (2000)

Christopher Guest’s drolly hilarious send up of dog culture gets, as is so often the case, splashes of lunacy from Fred Willard. In this case, his ignoramus color commentary during the Mayflower Kennel Dog Club Show opposite the perfectly dry Jim Paddock punctures the proceedings perfectly.

4. John C. McGinley: 42 (2013)

As famed sports announcer and voice of the Dodgers Red Barber, McGinley had big shoes to fill. His spot-on delivery added to the historical context 42 was hoping to articulate, and also pointed to Barber as an unflappable pro with a sense of humor and a fluid, soothing delivery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEBPl-OxklU

3. Gary Cole/Jason Bateman: Dodgeball (2004)

The Dodgeball straight man/color commentary duo of Cotton McKnight (Cole) and Pepper Brooks (Bateman) from ESPN 8: The Ocho brought that classic bout of titans the gravitas it deserved. Bateman’s as over-the-top as he has ever been in his career, and consummate pro Cole hits dead pan gold as the play by play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84cwztN3nms

2. Bob Uecker: Major League (1989)

If there is one thing that makes Major League a timeless classic (it is, too!), it’s Bob Uecker’s hilarious play by play announcer. Fed up, feisty and probably drunk, his Harry Doyle kept the film’s pace high and the laughs continuous.

1. Bill Murray: Caddyshack (1980)

‘It’s in the hole!” Proving that he can do anything at all, Bill  Murray puts tears in our eyes as assistant greenskeeper Carl Spackler, imagining his own Cinderella story of coming out of nowhere to win the Masters.

 

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Terrific Texas Trio

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Cold in July

by Hope Madden

Pulpy, seedy and hot with hidden dangers, Cold in July is that uniquely Southern crime drama that moseys at its own pace as it unveils its lurid details.

Michael C. Hall turns in his Dexter lab coat  in favor of a mullet and short-sleeved button down as Richard Dane, the Texan family man who startles a burglar and accidentally puts a bullet in his head.

Thus begins our investigation of Texan ideas of manhood.

Hailed a local hero, Dane is troubled by his own actions, but even more troubled when the dead boy’s ex-con father (a delightfully salty Sam Shepard) shows up looking for revenge.

Nothing’s as it seems in this twisty yarn that weaves through corruption, deception and the elusive honor in masculinity.

Here and in several other recent turns, Hall has proven a cagey character actor able to slip on the skin of wildly different characters and find an authentic human heartbeat. Shepard, a seasoned pro, also performs admirably, but both are routinely outshone by the sheer joyous swagger Don Johnson brings to his role as a flamboyant  Texas P.I.

With Johnson comes some much needed wry humor. His character’s entrance also alters the trajectory of the story, and while the film benefits from the change of course, it also never fully resolves the questions brought up during its first act.

Paternal anxiety fuels the sometimes questionable decisions made by the threesome, and the sordid, conspiracy-riddled mess they find themselves in is pure Joe R. Lansdale (Bubba  Ho-Tep!).

That great (and often mediocre) purveyor of pulp wrote the source material that’s adapted here by director Jim Mickle and his creative partner, co-star Nick Damici.

The duo have honed a storytelling style that never ceases to compel, with previous efforts (Stake Land and We Are What We Are, in particular) worth seeking out. This effort takes too long to find its path and its pace, feeling in the end like two separate films sewn together. Questionable character motives don’t help matters. But, together with a gripping trio of performances, the filmmakers have crafted a potent, unwholesome little thriller.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

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No Badass is Safe

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Maleficent

by Hope Madden

Hey, thanks a lot Wicked.

For those of us who love a good villain for their terrifying villainy, the popularity of the stage musical Wicked has created a bit of a problem: the neutering of the greatest of the greats. Gregory Maguire started it when he gave the Wicked Witch of the West a political backstory that exposed her self-sacrifice and good nature.

Now Disney wants to turn their greatest and most terrifying villain, Sleeping Beauty‘s Maleficent, into another role model.

Bah!

I’ll give them this. They can cast a lead.

Angelina Jolie has always cut an imposing, otherworldly figure, and Maleficent’s horns and leather look right at home. She offers the chilly elegance, dry humor and shadowy grace needed to bring the animated evildoer to life.

Plus, she looks great. And the film looks great – we’d expect nothing less from first-time director, longtime visual effects and set design maestro Robert Stromberg. But it’s not enough to save the effort.

The truly talented Elle Fanning struggles in an anemically-written role while Sharlto Copley flails, saddled with a character whose descent into madness is articulated with little more than overacting.

The basis of the problem is a toothless script by Linda Woolverton. Less the girl-power theme that elevated Frozen (another Wicked rip off) and more a bitter pill about untrustworthy men, the film feels mean in all the wrong ways. Woolverton’s also littered the enchanted landscape with forgettable or annoying characters – the three pixies of Disney’s ’59 animated film devolve from adorable, amusing pips to annoying, useless caregivers.

Stromberg’s plodding pace helps little. He forever undercuts any tension he builds, and the film suffers immeasurably from lack of momentum.

He and Woolverton could have learned a lot from the flawed but watchable Snow White and the Huntsmen (2012), a film that sought to update the old fable with a larger focus on its great villain without de-fanging her bite. Instead, Maleficent takes the very strongest element of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale and weakens it.

Look out, Darth Vader. At the rate Hollywood is corrupting our great villains, you’ll be singing show tunes in no time.

 

Verdict-2-0-Stars

 

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?