by Dean | Jul 21, 2013 | General
Actor Vince Vaughn (a libertarian Republican?) knows perfectly well we have a sub-par economy these days and has co-written, and stars in, The Internship (2013), about two watch salesmen whose company folds and thereby leaves the gents jobless. Afterwards Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) decide to become unpaid interns for Google—oh, let us glorify Google; wall-to-wall product placement is here—in the hope of getting hired by the lucrative company. The pair learn a thing or two about computers and how to sell the Internet while blithely taking the young interns who are their co-competitors out of their insulated digital world for a while (not invariably in ways I condone).
Shawn Levy directed, and it is an indubitably superior flick to Levy’s Date Night (2010). Alas, to me it is not much funnier than Date Night but neither is it a total loss as comedic cinema. Far from it. The cast is fun, Vaughn and Wilson most of all—and pretty Rose Byrne and Tiya Sircar are on hand. A few hokey bits pop up, and I regret that the Byrne character is such an easy lay for Nick, but the movie is good at thrusting us into the Contemporary Scene, consisting of young adult worries about employment no less than of computer apps. It’s a genial piece with workmanlike directing, editing and cinematography behind it. In addition, I’d call it . . . libertarian.
English: Vince Vaughn at CMJ Festival 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jul 19, 2013 | General
A 1970 Robert Altman film, M*A*S*H is a war comedy too desultory and frivolous, not to mention unrevealing about character. We learn very little, really, about Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and nothing about Trapper John (Elliott Gould). It has some of the most casually presented material I’ve seen in a movie.
Further, the film is mockingly sacrilegious and—any feminists who dislike it are right to do so—flatly degrading of women. Sally Kellerman’s Hot Lips doesn’t stand a chance.
As far as I’m concerned, no one should give this movie a chance.
Cover of M*A*S*H (Widescreen Edition)
by Dean | Jul 14, 2013 | General
The comic movie Bachelorette (2012) is slight. Not slight-but-good, in my view; just slight. And it shouldn’t be.
The three main women in the film (based on a play by Lesyle Headland, the movie’s director) are obnoxious and distasteful, two of whom (Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan) are cokeheads and one of whom (Kirsten Dunst) is simply bitchy. Motivations for Fisher’s drugged-out behavior are naught but a mystery, and not much is done with Dunst’s character either. Some of the movie’s scenes are amusing, and the acting is spot-on, but too often the film tries to get its laughs merely through obscene talk. It’s a unremittingly profane film. Indeed, profanity or not, for Regan (Dunst) to urge an overweight friend to adopt a vindictive “F**k everyone!” attitude is, or should be, offputting.
The very pretty Miss Kirsten is a good actress now, deserving better pictures than she has been in lately, Bachelorette included.
Kirsten Dunst (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jul 12, 2013 | General
Notwithstanding I am one who never wants to see chickens escape their farmyard concentration camps, I had a good time observing the efforts of all the freedom-seeking fowls in Chicken Run (2000), by the creators of the well-known “Wallace and Gromit”—viz. Peter Lord and Nick Park.
A family picture, it serves up conventional and wholesome humor as well as clay animation not exactly at its most attractive (I’m thinking of the chickens). Oh well. Nearly everything about CR comes off. Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick manages the one-liners skillfully. Consider: it is a frightful, awful place, this chicken farm, and by and by the fowls find out they are to be ruthlessly transformed into chicken pies. “I don’t want to be a pie,” blurts out a dumb but sweet chicken called Babs. “I don’t like gravy.” Even funnier are many of the nonchalant utterances of Rocky, an American rooster on whom the chickens depend for salvation. I note that he’s American because all the other animated figures are British, which leads me to an observation: Emanating from Brits, this picture depicts British know-all and American muscle (Rocky’s), but never American know-how.
Cover of Chicken Run
by Dean | Jul 10, 2013 | General
River’s Edge, a 1987 film directed by Tim Hunter and scripted by Neal Jiminez, is a mankind-bashing drama which borrows its subject from an incident in Milpitas, California in 1981. A teen boy has just strangled his girlfriend and left her naked body on a riverbank. All but one of his teen buddies keep mum about it, and to be sure the adults in the film hardly inspire confidence regarding the disclosure of such information. . . A bitterly tragicomic concoction, this, but one whose plot is very rickety and essentially unsatisfying—and whose musical score is intrusively bad. It’s fine that Jiminez hits the adults as hard as the kids, but this doesn’t mean the adults are represented intelligently. They aren’t.
Pauline Kael was right that River’s Edge is “a slack mixture of ‘important’ and mediocre.”
Seal of Milpitas, California (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jul 7, 2013 | General
World War Z (2013)—Z stands for zombie—is a war movie. Or, at any rate, it is until it reaches the World Health Organization facility where it proves itself to be a medical thriller as well. But, yes, the film displays the continual military firing upon fast-moving zombies, as if Allied warriors were fighting supernatural Nazis.
At first, though, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) struggles to protect his family from the zombies in a well-executed busy street sequence. Later, Gerry is called upon by his old employer, the U.N., to help look for a solution, and sheer mayhem and desperate soldiering follow. An adaptation of a novel by Max Brooks, the story eventually becomes more far-fetched than it should—what makes Gerry so sure the people the zombies are leaving alone are sick?—but the good news is this:
1. The stupidity that exists in the entertaining Fast and Furious 6 does not exist here. 2. Director Marc Forster keeps the movie kinetically thrilling and visually compelling. The looted supermarket stuff is an example, as are the shots of undead critters climbing the high wall of Jerusalem and soon getting shot at by Israeli aircraft. Just as powerful, however, is a relatively quiet scene where Gerry tries to fend off a zombie at the WHO facility.
World War Z is quite the dreadnought. But, hey, Mireille Enos (The Killing) has too small a part as Gerry’s wife. Moviemakers, let’s see what Enos can do. We’ve long been aware of what zombies can do.
Brad Pitt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jul 5, 2013 | General
Written and directed by Neil LaBute, The Shape of Things (2003) is based on LaBute’s play of the same name. What the four-character piece tells us is that amatory love is squalid, innocence is repulsively assaulted, and contemporary art—yes, there’s even something about art—or pseudo-art is ludicrous, sometimes hurtful, folly. Indeed, it is something for the Messalinas of the world to obsess about.
Unfortunately LaBute has wrought a specious plot, thus causing a misshaping for The Shape of Things. But at least the film isn’t frivolous or boring. The bulk of the acting I l like since, for one thing, Gretchen Mol, like Rachel Weisz (the film’s Messalina), knows how to be nuanced. Paul Rudd, on the other hand, does not quite convince as a man who changes into something other than a shy naif.
Cover of The Shape of Things
by Dean | Jun 30, 2013 | General
Re Traffic (2000), I like this movie’s thoughtful rejection of the U.S. war on drugs, but not its relative lack of sophistication. Michael Douglas’s newly appointed drug czar has a teenage daughter constantly hungry to shoot up, and Douglas’s wife (Amy Irving) has known about it for months without breathing a word to her husband. Two DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) are stupid enough to let their sole informer in a big narcotics case get poisoned while eating breakfast. A married socialite (Catherine Zeta-Jones), attempting to protect her little son from her drug-dealing husband’s creditors, knows exactly how to deal with assassins and aggressive pushers. All this and more are too improbable to pass muster. One critic complained that Traffic is insufficiently exciting, but in my view the trouble is that it’s naively, immaturely written.
It’s ambitious, though, however indifferent I am to director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s gussied-up style. Not that this style is never powerful, what with its handheld camera, bright light and graininess. It’s just that it’s rather showy and generally unnecessary—in truth, neither good nor bad. By contrast, the acting is often superb. Cheadle and Guzman, to give two examples, offer some nice variation and even nicer facial play. Douglas and Benicio Del Toro are winningly manly, perfect as authority figures.
![Cover of "Traffic [HD DVD]"](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XHEJXKXVL._SL300_.jpg "Cover of \"Traffic [HD DVD]\"")
Cover of Traffic [HD DVD]
by Dean | Jun 27, 2013 | General
There is a lot of darkness in Francois Truffaut’s films, but he never had a well-developed sense of tragedy. We see that in 1972’s Two English Girls. He could certainly handle pathos, though, and we see this too in Girls’ terrifically lyrical framework. The film tells of Claude, a Frenchman who slowly becomes amorously and then sexually involved with Muriel and Anne, the two English girls of the title. It’s a lesser movie than Jules and Jim and even The Story of Adele H. (both by Truffaut) because it’s rather talky and most of the acting ranges from bad to mediocre. But, like other Truffaut films, it is guileless, humane and personal—in its own way, rewarding.
Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises) is based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche.
(In French with English subtitles)
Two English Girls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Jun 23, 2013 | General
The plot of the new Fast and Furious 6 (2013) has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s cop approaching Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his ex-criminal crew to help him vanquish the toughest, smartest international crime team, based in London, you’ve presumably ever seen. Dom agrees to it since this may be the only way he can reach his still-alive lost love, Lettie (Michelle Rodriguez), who seems to have some connection with the London-based baddies—and is now an amnesiac (!)
Not surprisingly, so much propulsive action goes on in Justin Lin’s lark that it ends up diluting its thrills. Yet some of this stuff is irresistible—the cutthroat fight between Lettie and a policewoman (Gina Carano), for instance. And the main villain’s act of blowing up the bridge the London police are standing on as they fire at his getaway car. As for the auto chase material, I loved the shot of Tyrese Gibson leaping from one speeding car to another and that of hapless Lettie getting flung into the air before Toretto’s silly, superheroic rescue of her. And the wicked tank is cool too.
Now this:
The movie has a way of making British folks look bad; what’s up with that? Dom is hypocritically religious, though it’s interesting that religion is in the film at all. Moreover, I found myself wishing Furious 6 was a little less stupid—Dom’s crew locates the tough, smart crew for a final battle with a bit too much ease (etc. etc.)—for all the fun it supplies.
I give it a B.
Fast and Furious 6 Premier 6 (Photo credit: ahisgett)
