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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
