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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

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pgmFAOgm5E

Outtakes

Creature Feature Countdown

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Godzilla made a pretty impressive return last weekend, thanks mostly to director Gareth Edwards‘s ability to spectacularly realize monster fight chaos. The old reptile deserved it, really, having been hashed and rehashed in dozens of ways since his birth in 1954. It put us in the  mood for other great creature features, so here is a perusal of some of our modern favorites.

5. The Host (2006)

In 2006, Korea’s Joon-ho Bong took his own shot at the Godzilla fable. The sci-fi import The Host, which tells the tale of a giant mutant monster terrorizing Seoul, has all the thumbprints of the old Godzilla movies: military blunder, resultant angry monster, terrorized metropolis. The film’s often comedic tone gives it a quirky charm, but seriously diminishes its ability to frighten. Host does generate real, claustrophobic dread when it focuses on a missing child, though. Along with its endearing characters, well-paced plot, and excellent climax, it makes for a worthy creature feature offering.

4. King Kong (2005)

That’s right, we are dismissing the 1933 original and, obviously, the 1976 debacle in favor of Peter Jackson’s remarkable feat of intimacy and CGI. Andy Serkis offers a stunning heartbeat for the giant ape, and Naomi Watts performs better with a green screen than most actors do with flesh and blood colleagues. Even Jack Black proves his mettle in an effort that reminds audiences of the surprising universality of the old tale.

3. The Thing (1982)

Another reboot makes the list. In 1982, John Carpenter reconsidered the old SciFi standby The Thing from Another World from a Cold War terror into a claustrophobic, icy bloodbath. A beard-tastic team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic takes in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland offering barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.

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

2. Alien (1979)

After a vagina-hand-sucker-monster attaches itself to your face, it gestates inside you, then tears through your innards. Then it grows exponentially, hides a second set of teeth, and bleeds acid. How much cooler could this possibly be? Ridley Scott married haunted house tropes with SciFi creature feature scares to create maybe the greatest alien horror of all time.

1. Jaws (1975)

Thanks to a cantankerous mechanical shark and a relentlessly effective score, twentysomething Stephen Spielberg was able to create mounting dread like no one before him by relying on the audience’s imagination and showing little of his creature. It may have been partly unintentional, but the effect – along with maybe cinema’s greatest buddy threesome of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss – created the most beloved, most influential creature feature of all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCjDa44S3kI

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A Road Trip Like No Other

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Locke

by Hope Madden

Give him the chance and Steven Knight will restore your faith in low budget filmmaking. All you need is a well written script, a car, hands free mobile, and Tom Hardy.

Actually, maybe all you really need is Tom Hardy.

In writer/director Knight’s Locke, Hardy plays Ivan Locke, and he and Knight invite you to spend 85 minutes in the car with him. The entire duration of the film takes place inside that car, alone with Ivan, who handles a crisis at work and a crisis at home simultaneously, all on the phone. Roll credits.

While it may sound boring as hell, please give it a chance, because Tom Hardy – and probably only Tom Hardy – has the natural charisma and bone-deep talent to keep every second of the film riveting.

Lucky Knight’s such a fine writer. Having penned the Cronenberg masterpiece Eastern Promises as well as Stephen Frears’s darkly winning Dirty Pretty Things, Knight’s proven to be a nimble storyteller. Locke offers none of the sinister, international dread that saturates those other efforts. Rather, like the driver of the car himself, we are trapped and yet propelled forward in a story confined to the immediate decisions and potentially disastrous effects spilling at the second.

It doesn’t just give Locke a powerful sense of immediacy. The simplicity of conversation and traffic and moments of silence between calls offer an undiluted image of action and consequence situated in such a familiar setting that it can’t help but feel universal.

Ever the chameleon, always an actor who leaves himself behind and utterly inhabits a character, Hardy’s performance here is nothing short of an education. He reveals more with less than any performer you’ll see this year.

He feeds off the talent of the ensemble – all vocal talent only – and it’s truly like nothing else onscreen. He establishes a character, authentic and whole, and though you are ostensibly trapped with him as he grapples with the collapse of his painstakingly crafted life, you cannot look away.

I can imagine no better antidote to a summer of monsters, mutants, super-this and exploding-that than a film so simple and powerful as Locke.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

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Slumdog Maguire

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Million Dollar Arm

by Hope Madden

Disney – the studio who brought you Miracle, The Rookie, and Invincible – needs a family-friendly sports movie for the summer. It must be based on a true story. It requires one or more underdogs, a romantic subplot, and plenty of opportunities for lessons learned. Fish out of water are a plus.

The only surprising thing about Million Dollar Arm is the group of people who convened to answer Disney’s ad for a blockbuster.

Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) and screenwriter Thomas McCarthy join a talented cast who, collectively, have no business making a predictable crowd pleaser like this. McCarthy, in particular, had a flawless resume up to now, having written and directed the brilliant Station Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win and having written the Pixar masterpiece Up. What’s going on here?

The two inexplicably crafted a film from the true(ish) story of down-on-his-luck sports agent JB Bernstein (Jon Hamm) and his plan to find the next great MLB pitcher in India. And while Million Dollar Arm is equal parts Slumdog Millionaire and Jerry Maguire, and is obvious as all get out, it’s somehow pleasant and appealing.

The filmmaking duo seem to embrace the cliches of their topic, and they manage to expose some ugly realities – sports capitalism, for instance – while they’re at it. They are aided immeasurably by a cast that, too, has far too much talent to be involved with this film.

Jon Hamm embodies the flawed humanity of his character beautifully. While his romantic entanglements are as unmistakable as the hard-won lessons in his near future, his grace and humor provide enough distraction to almost overcome the lack of surprise.

Likewise, neighbor/love interest Lake Bell and potential MLB phenoms Suraj Sharma (Life of Pi) and Madhur Mittal (Slumdog Millionaire) charm in roles that could easily have been one-dimensional. Instead, the three develop a sweet chemistry and find a little believable complexity for their characters.

Alan Arkin, on the other hand, offers the same performance we’ve seen from him in his last 20 or more films, while Bollywood star Pitobash settles for broadly drawn comic relief.

Together it’s a mish-mash effort that has no business entertaining as much as it does. Even penned inside a formula, McCarthy can write, Hamm can act, and Gillespie can make it all appear fresh regardless of the fact that we know from the opening credits exactly what we’ll see by the time those credits roll again two hours later.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shXQwUdJRU

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Oh No! There Goes Tokyo!

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Godzilla

by Hope Madden

Movies love to depict our fear of science, a trend that dates back to Edison’s 1910 rendition of Frankenstein. But the real frenzy came with the onset of the atomic age.

Among the countless “creature features” spawned by our global fear of the destruction science had wrought, Godzilla reigned supreme. Ishiro Honda’s Hiroshima analogy simultaneously entertained and terrified as it tapped our horrified fascination with the destruction, once unthinkable, that was suddenly an ever-present danger.

Back in 2010, visual effects maestro Gareth Edwards tread similar ground of societal guilt, dread and terror with his underseen alien flick Monsters. More than anything, though, that film clarified his aptitude for creature action, a talent that serves him well for his Godzilla reboot.

He’s assembled a phenomenal cast for the monster mash up, though I’m not sure why. Award-winning actors Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Juliette Binoche and Aaron Taylor-Johnson appear onscreen (and do little else) as we wait for the epic battle between Godzilla and two new creatures with a taste for radiation.

Taylor-Johnson is a military bomb defusing expert who leaves his wife (Olsen) and their son behind in San Francisco to fly to Japan to bail his crazy scientist/grieving widower father (Cranston) out of jail. He’d been caught trespassing on a site quarantined for 14 years – ever since the nuclear reactor disaster that killed his wife.

Well, there’s more to that story than meets the eye.

The talent-laden cast doesn’t get the opportunity to flesh out their characters, so there’s little human drama to cling to as chaos approaches. Perhaps even more damaging, Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham’s screenplay fails to truly lay blame for this behemoth blood match on mankind.

Flaws aside, Godzilla delivers the creature feature goods. Few summer blockbusters contain such gloriously realized action sequences, gorgeously framed images of disarray, or thrillingly articulated beasts.

Edwards never hides his inspiration (the lead’s name is Brody, for God’s sake).  While he draws from Jaws, Aliens, Close Encounters, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and any number of previous Godzilla efforts, the amalgam is purely his own.

This is an easy franchise to take in the wrong direction. Who remembers Godzuki? But Edwards brings a competent hand and reverent tone to breathe new life into the old dinosaur.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

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Write it Down, Nic Cage Acts

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Joe

by Hope Madden

After seven years of exploring the big budget, big star world of Hollywood, filmmaker David Gordon Green revisits his ultra indie roots. He hasn’t returned alone, though. For his newest effort, Joe, he brought with him Hollywood staple and Internet joke Nicolas Cage. And God bless him for it.

As the eponymous Joe, Cage reminds us that he picked up that Oscar for a reason. He dials down the bug-eyed mania of many recent efforts in favor of a textured performance that emphasizes his natural chemistry with other actors, his vulnerability and barely caged rage, and his weirdly charming sense of humor.

Joe’s a good-hearted guy with a lot of issues, a volcano that’s never fully dormant. It’s part and parcel for a sun dappled, visually lovely film absolutely saturated in violence. While Joe bursts into less outright carnage than many films, the pervasive dread that violence could erupt at any second is the very air the film breathes.

In the middle of this modern Wild West atmosphere, Joe befriends a boy in need of a mentor. Gary is played by the increasingly impressive Tye Sheridan. With just three roles under his belt – Tree of Life, Mud, and Joe – Sheridan has proven to be an amazing natural talent. In his hands, Gary’s youthful exuberance is equal parts darling and tragic, given his circumstances. Sheridan’s performance is amazing, and his repartee with Cage is perfect.

Both are helped by an excellent ensemble, many of them nonprofessional actors. One particular stand out is a sinister Ronnie Gene Blevins as the oily Willie. But no one in the film can outshine street performer turned actor Gary Poulter. His turn as Gary’s drunken father offers more layers than anything a seasoned actor has offered yet this year, each one as believable as it is shocking. His performance is stunning, and it elevates the film immeasurably.

The film is not without its faults. Several characters are severely underdeveloped given their ultimate place in the story, and there are times when Cage cannot match the naturalism of the performers around him. The film also suffers from its resemblance to Mud, Sheridan’s 2012 cinematic of coming-of-age poetry.

But Green’s once-trademark touches – meandering storyline, poetic score, bruised masculinity – are in full bloom as he reworks Larry Brown’s novel into his own unique vision of low income Americans’ melancholy struggle. In doing so, he’s reestablished not only his own artistic authority, but Cage’s as well.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

For Your Queue

ScarJo X 2 for the Queue

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Releasing today on DVD is the most imaginative love story in a decade or more, Her. Writer/director Spike Jonze’s unique vision of the near future offers a compelling, tender peek at what may lie in store for a generation weaned off of intimacy by technology. Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix are perfection as the lovebirds, but Jonze and his imagination are the real stars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4

 

Another unusual take on romance worth checking out is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s writing/directing debut Don Jon. Coincidentally, the film also boasts a magnificent performance from Scarlett Johansson – just one of several great turns in delightful and loaded cast. Check out Tony Danza! JGL skewers a culture that encourages alienation and suppresses intimacy – two obstacles also facing the lovers in Her. It’s a confident, clever, surprising effort from a filmmaker to watch.

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A Few Missing Pages

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God’s Pocket

by George Wolf

Seedy neighborhoods, sad sacks and shady characters populate God’s Pocket, an uneven drama that gets a big boost from its strong ensemble cast.

An adaptation of Peter Dexter’s first novel, the film is the big screen directorial debut for veteran actor John Slattery (Mad Men). He does show a confident, generous hand with his performers, but Slattery’s instincts for tone and storytelling aren’t quite as polished.

Dexter (The Paperboy, Deadwood) based the story partly on his own experience as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, when he suffered a severe beating at the hands of a local gang angry over one of his pieces.

Set in a hard knock Philly neighborhood dubbed “God’s Pocket,” the film follows events set in motion by the death of Leon Hubbard (Caleb Landry Jones), a young slacker who is killed while working as a day laborer on a construction site.

Leon’s distraught mother Jeanie (Christina Hendricks) isn’t satisfied with the official version of the accident, and she pressures her husband Mickey Scarpato (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) to call upon his semi-connected associates and dig for more details. 

Right off, Jeanie’s suspicions seem desperate. Is there a reason she instantly thinks the death wasn’t accidental, or is it a convenient way to push her unsatisfying husband deeper into dangerous waters?

We never know, and ambiguous motivation is a problem throughout the film. These are interesting characters that beg for insightful backstory, but all we’re given is the neighborhood. Yes, we get that these are tough people who close ranks against outsiders, but this story needs more than vague cliches to truly resonate.

Slattery, who helped adapt the screenplay, also has trouble finding the appropriate tone to incorporate the black humor. It’s no easy feat, even for masters such as the Coens or Jim Jarmusch, and here we’re left unsure about feeling for these people, or laughing at them.

There’s nothing unsure about the cast. Hoffman, who reportedly wanted to move away from these “loser” roles before his tragic death, wears Mickey’s burdens like an old shirt you can’t bear to part with, only reinforcing how badly his talent will be missed.

Hendricks gives Jeanie a smoldering vulnerability, and enough mystery to justify the obsessive attention of Shellburn (Richard Jenkins), the boozing newspaper columnist whose life is awakened by her charms.  Jenkins, customarily excellent, cements Shellburn as the differing reference point the film needs.

God’s Pocket ends up resembling a book with too many missing pages. There are some fine moments here, all searching for a foundation strong enough to keep them from drifting away.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

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Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

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Neighbors

by Hope Madden

How do you feel about dick jokes?

Chances are, you’ll enjoy Neighbors regardless, but a particular appreciation for penis humor is definitely a plus. It’s a frat movie. What else were we expecting?

Here’s what you should expect: fully developed characters, solid performances, onscreen chemistry from the weirdest of pairings, clever direction, sharp writing, and pacing quick enough to make it tough to catch your breath between jokes. And, of course, dick jokes.

Nice, right?

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play new parents still adjusting to the boring responsibility of adulthood when a fraternity buys the house next door.

What Rogen lacks in range he makes up for in schlubby comic ability, particularly with a script so self-aware and custom-made to his strengths. At one point, when the couple is arguing over who’s to blame for their situation, Rogen’s Mac tells his wife that she has to be the responsible grown up. “Haven’t you ever seen a Kevin James movie?” he asks her. “We can’t both be Kevin James.”

While Rogen is reliably Rogen, Byrne explores new territory and conquers. She more than carries her comic load, and her chemistry with Rogen, in particular, is wonderful.

Truth be told, there’s not a one-note character in the lot. Neighbors never traps itself with old frat boy stereotypes. Sure, they’re all good-looking, vacuous partiers who abuse pledges – that is the basic conflict in the film, after all – but the characters themselves get a fuller treatment than what you might expect.

Zac Efron looks good without a shirt, but he also hits all the right notes, bringing a little depth and empathy to the role of frat president Ted. Dave Franco makes an excellent second banana, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse plays nicely against type as slacker stoner Scoonie.

The laughs are continuous, and while the film certainly has a heart, it’s not the kind of sappy last-minute-lesson-learned crap that derails most raunchy comedies. There’s an awkward tenderness and humanity that informs the film from start to finish that makes any lessons feel more honest and earned.

Director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) reigns in his tendency to toward excess, bringing the film in at a brisk 96 minutes. He crams those visually arresting minutes with as much deeply flawed human comedy as possible. And at least half that time is spent without mention or sight of a penis.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

 

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Definitely Likeship

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Hateship Loveship

by  Hope Madden

Ohio native Liza Johnson continues her impressive evolution as a filmmaker with her latest independent drama, Hateship Loveship. In it, Johnson balances plot threads and character arcs, giving each just the depth necessary to keep the action moving. Her tale itself just can’t quite keep up.

What’s most interesting about the film is that it announces Kristin Wiig as a dramatic performer. She plays Johanna, an observant but almost invisible creature raised on responsibility, hard work and solitude. She’s hired by the McCauleys to keep house and, ostensibly, keep an eye on the teenaged Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld). But when Sabitha and her best friend Edith (Sami Gayle – perfectly pitched mean girl) play a cruel prank, things get complicated.

Wiig mostly impresses in her first entirely dramatic role. She carries a lot of screen time and carves out an unusual but believable character. Johanna is a bit of an enigma, but Wiig finds a true center that makes her feel real. It’s a reserved, understated turn, but at times her performance can be blunt when nuance is called for.

Wiig’s blessed and cursed with a talented supporting cast. Blessed in that each actor brings vulnerable authenticity to the role; cursed because her performance feels sometimes less than natural in comparison.

The often underrated Guy Pearce does well with a role that could easily have become clichéd. Because his Ken is so likeable, even when his actions are not, emotions and tensions run uncomfortably high during the film’s most dramatic segments.

Steinfeld, saddled with a smattering of forgettable characters since her standout performance in 2010’s True Grit, finally gets the chance to shine again. She and Gayle articulate the emotional and moral roller coaster that is adolescence without ever feeling trite or predictable.

Nick Nolte also graces the screen as the benevolent curmudgeon, and the film is certainly the better for it.

Mark Poirnier’s screenplay adapts a short from Alice Munro. Their work understands the unpredictable resilience humans sometimes find, and when the focus is on the unraveling of the cruel joke, Johanna’s story is almost unbearably fascinating. But in drawing out the tale to a feature length running time, it begins to feel like a pile up of contrivances.

There’s a lot to like about Hateship Loveship, though, including performances that will help you overlook the flaws.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdI8RCyhhYg