Category: Reviews

In Good Company is not actually a comedy. Easy to be fooled, considering that it was marketed as one. Really, though, it’s a light drama about a hotshot young executive who’s risen too quickly for his own good. I wouldn’t represent it as deep, or anything, but it’s charming and — here and there — touching.

There’s a kind of division of responsibility going on. Topher Grace is the guy who gets character development; he’s the wunderkind who becomes Dennis Quaid’s boss when Sports America is purchased by a big megacorp. He gets to find out what it means to be an adult. Dennis Quaid is the guy who gets to act, which perhaps was not the intention of the director, but he does have the harder job. Topher is supposed to be callow, a bit shallow, and he spends a lot of the movie putting on a game face despite being terrified. The plot falls apart if Dennis Quaid can’t be angry at Topher while coming to care about him. Fortunately, Quaid turns in one of those excellent worn performances he’s capable of doing when he puts his mind to it, and thus grounds the film.

Topher is, mind you, pretty good. He hasn’t quite gotten the trick of shaking the mannerisms he uses in That 70’s Show, but they work well in this context and he can act his way out of a paper bag or two. I feel obliged to note his uncanny resemblance to a young Kyle MacLachlan while I’m at it. He could walk right into Twin Peaks and pick up the role without, I think, missing a beat.

Also, there’s Scarlett Johansson, who plays the same luminous unattainable that she played in The Man Who Wasn’t There, Girl With A Pearl Earring, and Lost in Translation. This is sort of a complaint on my part, but on the other hand, she’s really good at it.

On the whole I liked it. It had generally good acting. It had Philip Baker Hall, always a plus. It told a story without being overly sentimental; it had the courage to reject the romantic comedy tropes. If you were so inclined, you could watch first this, then Lost in Translation, and very easily pretend that the one was the sequel to the other — Paul Weitz is not as melancholy a director as Sofia Coppola, and he wasn’t making an indie flick here, but he’s drawing on the same material.

Although there are differences in philosophy. The most unexpected thing about In Good Company, for me, was that it declines the opportunity to take a general stance against corporations and men in suits. You might expect Dennis Quaid, who’s been working for Sports America for decades, to wind up taking a daring stance as the scales fall from his eyes and he realizes the evils of working in sales. You’d be wrong. What he says is that you should do what you love, and that you should do what you believe in. He happens to believe in sales.

It’s not as if the burdens of responsibility are a fresh new theme in Hollywood movies. Quite possibly I’m simply charmed because it’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie that addresses them in the corporate context without irony. Welcome, the new sincerity! But — despite my own irony — I enjoyed it.

One final critique. Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” has now been used on two motion picture soundtracks, In Good Company and Vanilla Sky. It’s already cliched, and nobody should ever use it again.

In 1981, Steve Martin took on his second starring role in a motion picture in Pennies From Heaven. It was not exactly what was expected from the guy who’d just starred in The Jerk. People went in looking for broad slapstick, and found themselves in the middle of a deeply cynical musical. Instead of using the musical numbers as uplifting emotional high points, Pennies From Heaven recasts the musical number as an unhealthy fantasy. This goes beyond the musical work of Sondheim, who broadened the emotions depicted by the musicial number to include angst and despair, and subverts the entire concept of the musical. Pennies From Heaven uses the musical form to critique the musical form. It is unclear to me how this ever got greenlit; I suspect MGM was just caught up by the idea of reviving the musical.

Regardless of that, however, Herbert Ross managed to get himself a 22 million dollar budget (in 1981) and made a hell of a movie with it. The art direction is stylized and passionately beautiful; the dance numbers are lush, as they must be in order to effectively subvert themselves. Steve Martin’s Arthur Parker needs to believe utterly and completely that he can escape his drab Depression-era life by entering the musicals of the period; he needs to really think that the homeless accordion player can alleviate his poverty by launching into the title song. Without the contrast, the movie would fail.

At the same time, the grim needs to be properly grim. It is. Steve Martin is perhaps the weakest link here; he was young, and at times his comedic persona got in the way of his acting. Jessica Harper, playing his wife, had primary responsibility for embodying the reality of the Depression; she’s the only main character who never gets to escape. They were good together, but not great, and that for me was the only real weakness of the movie. There wasn’t quite enough tension; we never saw the possibility that Arthur Parker would find his feet on real ground as opposed to the dance floor. He had no reason to come back to his wife.

Then again, maybe that’s just Dennis Potter — the screenwriter — being Dennis Potter.

Anyway, it’s a fairly challenging movie and it’s an angry movie, although I’m not certain who it’s angry with. Everyone, maybe: Arthur and his fantasies, his wife and her inability to indulge desire, Christopher Walken and his slick corruptive influence, and Bernadette Peters for falling into whatever path is the most exciting. A lot of people find it worth watching just for Walken’s dance routine and striptease, and I think I’d have enjoyed that even if I wasn’t fascinated by the rest of the movie. It’s definitely a cult movie and perhaps an acquired taste, but the cast and crew knew just what they wanted to do and they more than accomplished it.

It would be unkind to assume that the choice of water as a metaphor for magic in Constantine was made so as to enable multiple shots of Rachel Weisz preparing for a wet dress shirt contest. Unkind, but probably accurate. On the other hand, the cheesecake was balanced by the way the movie handled the sexual dynamic between her and Keanu. You win some and you lose some, which rather summarizes the entire experience.

The script was a lose: it took a little from Hellblazer and a little from Prophecy and whenever the screenwriter struck out on his own he fell flat on his face. The directing was a win — flashy and assured and with a good sense of visual style. I don’t know who to credit for the production design, but I note that David Lazan (the art director) and Naomi Shohan (production designer) worked together on Training Day and American Beauty, and Lazan in particular has a bunch more good-looking movies under his belt. You won’t find a better visualization of Hell anywhere.

I don’t have any complaints about any of the acting. Keanu goes deep and pulls up about as much affect as we can expect from him; I thought it worked very well for Constantine. The character is understated and unflappable by choice: Keanu is up to that, plus he puts a nice desperation in his eyes when necessary. Weisz is OK. The supporting characters are, for the most part, supportive — Shia LaBeouf wasn’t much to write home about, but his character (Chas) was brutally short-changed by the script, so it’s hard to blame him.

Tilda Swinton is superb, of course. Christopher Walken’s Gabriel could beat up her Gabriel in a fist-fight, but I wouldn’t want to bet against either of them in a battle of supercilious wit.

Man, though, the script. I mentioned poor Chas and how the script did him wrong. It was kind of as if the writer had heard of the subplot where the sidekick is eager but unready and wanted to put one of those in the movie, but wasn’t quite sure how to make the pacing work. Thus, Chas vanishes after a few minutes of showing no promise whatsoever, and doesn’t come back until the end of the movie. Plus his lines suck.

I had no objection to the Americanization of the movie. It’s not the comic book; while I’d like to see a movie of the comic book someday, this isn’t that movie. If it had sucked, I’d be more annoyed (which doesn’t entirely make sense, I know). Since it was a decent movie, I had no objection. Hey: sometimes inspiration is enough.

I did object to the random interjection of psychic powers into the movie. Possibly this is just me, but I think that it’s unwise to mess up the perfectly serviceable Catholic mythology with a whole bunch of ESP and clairvoyance and so on. What they’re trying to say is that some of the characters have the ability to see demons. Such powers arise from magick, often involving Thelemic sigils and the like. Insert a cursed bloodline or two and you’ve completely obviated the need for this talk of psychics.

There were a few nice tricks involving a flattened mise en scene. Once or twice, a conversation begins in one set and teleports without interruption to a set several miles across Los Angeles. It accentuated the general sense that Los Angeles — all of Earth, in fact — was just a backdrop as far as Heaven and Hell were concerned. One might also consider the journey of Jesse Ramirez’ scavenger from somewhere in Mexico to Los Angeles: he has no purpose other than to carry a certain item from there to here, his journey is told in snapshots, and he does not have a name.

I’m glad I saw it, because on the whole it was enjoyable and I’m glad it made enough money this weekend to make a sequel fairly likely. Possibly next time they’ll hire a real screenwriter as opposed to a fanboy.

Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus has, in something more or less akin to order: samurai, samurai zombies, convicts, gangsters, mysterious women, zombie gangsters, zombie convicts, cops, and mutants. Most of them wind up fighting each other. I won’t try to list the arsenals; rest assured that if you like guns, blades, fists, or feet you’ll be happy.

There’s also rambunctiously zestful overacting. It’s pretty great.

It’s sort of hard to figure out what else one can say about this movie. It’s not that it’s plot-light — there’s a ton of plot, to the point where some of the plot kind of spills out the sides and runs down the edge until Kitamura remembers to go clean it up. It’s not coherent plot, but it’s plot. There’s also a ton of style; Kitamura loves his electronica and he really loves rotating the camera around a fight scene. The fight scenes are good. All the characters have enough cool to freeze a smallish ocean.

So it’s not that there’s nothing to talk about; it’s more that the volume of the movie is cranked so far up that it’s difficult to talk about it rationally. (“And there were ZOMBIES!”) I liked the movie from the first scene, and I knew I was in for a great ride about ten minutes in after one of the yakuza calmly conducts a science experiment. It’s a long way from perfect; the last half an hour drags a little, and the camera rotates somewhat too much. But it’s a blast of an action movie. It’s easy to see why this made Kitamura a star director (his latest movie is Godzilla: Final Wars, the last Gozilla movie for at least a decade).

Make popcorn first.

It’s my belief that the next wave of action movie innovation — or at least excitement — is going to come from France. Luc Besson made the initial pass at this back in the 90s with La Femme Nikita and Leon before a couple of regrettable US failures — but now he’s back in France producing movies like Wasabi and the Taxi series and Haute Tension and so on. The guy has his own little action movie empire over there.

You also have people like Florent Emilio Siri, who directed the brilliant Nid de Guepes; he’s got the director’s chair on the next Bruce Willis flick, Hostage. You’ve got Unleashed, a French production starring Jet Li, Bob Hoskins, and Morgan Freeman — which looks like it’s going to be the best Western Jet Li movie to date. (Written, as it happens, by Luc Besson. He pops up all over the place.)

And then you’ve got the just-released Assault on Precinct 13, a remake of the John Carpenter classic. It was directed by Jean-Francois Richet, who has not done much of anything of note, and it is absolutely smoking hot.

Not perfect or anything. I’m still wondering where the forest in the middle of Detroit came from. But these young punk French directors really seem to like what they’re doing, and Richet has a great feel for the uses of violence as punctuation to a tense scene. His sensibilities are different enough from mainstream Hollywood that when the movie turns a corner and something dire happens, it’s a shock rather than being just another cat leaping out of a closet.

Also he’s very crisp. Come to think of it, I don’t recall any cats jumping out of closets in Assult on Precinct 13. When something loud happens, it’s someone shooting at someone rather than a false alarm. It’s direct and snappy and immediate.

Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne aid and abet this effort. Hawke’s got a nice tense depth to him as the tortured cop, and Fishburne plays the deadly gang lord with that cool Fishburne poise that is so very convincing. The tension between them is the core of the movie — well, besides the action — and it helps immensely that Fishburne makes us believe he doesn’t understand Hawke’s motives; it helps immensely that Hawke makes us believe that he’d see saving Fishburne as a means of redemption.

It’s just a loud action movie, and it did kind of get dropped in the middle of January where bad movies go to die, but if you want to see a good action movie then you ought to catch this one. Five years from now, you’ll be able to talk about how you were into French action directors before they were cool.

You ought, perhaps, to be watching Boston Legal.

Yeah, it’s a David Kelley show. He’s flashy and he goes for the cheesy drama too often and he allows his shows to slip into the precious. What’s worse, this one co-stars William Shatner, the very avatar of kitsch. Can the acting stylings of James Spader overcome these handicaps? Surely not.

But yes, because it’s fucking brilliant. Let me tell you about last Sunday’s episode.

The key plotline all season has been the relationship between Spader and Shatner, both lawyers; Shatner is a partner at the firm. He is becoming senile; the other partners are worried about the effect this will have on the firm, but Shatner is also the best rainmaker they have, so they can’t push him into retirement, and as a partner he can’t be stopped from taking cases. Spader is his only ally, and clearly his closest friend.

Last episode, Shatner took a case on his own, forgoing any assistance so as to prove a point to the partners. (Rene Auberjonois and Candice Bergen, by the by, who are quite good as always.) Spader, at the behest of the partners, asserts himself as second chair and flatters Shatner’s ego until he gives in. They’re defending a doctor who prescribed an unapproved weight-loss medication in order to keep his patient from dying of a coronary. Shatner does a great job, a surprisingly great job, of defending the client.

Then it’s time for his closing. William Shatner stands up, and braces himself, and tells the jury that he is at risk for Alzheimer’s. And then he looks down, and he’s embarrassed, and he pushes his way through it. He tells them that they wouldn’t know what it’s like to be losing it, to be slipping. He meets their eyes and you believe that it’s only because he has to. He tells them about the unapproved prescription drug he’s been taking, and how it feels to get your memory back. He finishes and walks away both relieved of a burden and weighed down by a new one, a burden he has taken voluntarily. It was great acting, lifted above the merely good by the conscious appropriation of Shatner’s typecasting. You come into this show expecting Shatner to play an aging egotistical goofball, and Shatner quietly works from that base to show you how much more there is to the character he’s playing.

It’s going to get too cute for its own good in a season or two, because it’s a David Kelley show and that’s how these always go. It’s almost too cute right now: Al Sharpton’s been a guest star twice, playing himself both times. But man, those first seasons? Those are always a rush, and this one has James Spader and William Shatner, and the older man is focused like a laser on the job of burning away everything we always laughed at about him. And he’s using his own reputation, his own myth of whimsical senility to do it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I liked Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events more than I thought I would, for several reasons. First, Jim Carrey played a role which a) allowed him to stretch out and use his immense gift for physical comedy in a way which served the movie, rather than detracting from it. By my count he hasn’t been able to do that since 1997, in Liar Liar, which is a borderline success; really the only time before this that we’ve seen a perfect match of gift and role is The Mask. But in Unfortunate Events, Carrey’s playing an actor and it’s a surrealist world anyhow, which means that his mugging is in perfect tune with what you’d want him to be doing.

Second, the kids are charming.

Third, it is a quirky kid movie without Danny Elfman music. I like Danny Elfman but it is time we branched out in our choices for soundtracks for quirky kid movies. Thomas Newman, the composer, has a nice career that is not restricted to the quirk and I loved his score for this one.

Fourth, Luis Guzman cameos. So does Dustin Hoffman.

Fifth, there are aspects of genuine tragedy to the movie which are not quickly papered over. People die. It’s grim!

I think that about covers it.

Ocean’s 12 isn’t really a heist movie, unlike Ocean’s 11. Rather, like the original Rat Pack film, it’s an excuse for a bunch of highly charismatic stars to pal around and crack wise. But hey, they do it really well, so I’ve got no problem with that. Bonus points for the beautiful scenery, Vincent Cassel’s virtuoso martial arts dance, Robbie Coltrane’s gangster, and Catherine Zeta Jones.

Then while that’s going on, Soderbergh is making one of his indie films. Ocean’s 12 has all his trademarks: the over-exposed cinematography, jerky time sequences, offbeat camera angles, and so on. He caps it all off with an extended homage to Full Frontal that almost justifies Julia Roberts’ presence in the movie. I got the distinct impression that Soderbergh decided to sneak in his subversive frame-breaking cinematic ideology under the cover of a frothy star vehicle. (See also Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) Kinda cool.

Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn: great, unrelentingly great, ought to be an easy choice for Best Supporting Actress. Great directing, unsurprisingly. The rest of The Aviator: merely pretty good.

The thing is, Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t up to the role. I still think he’s a decent actor, but he doesn’t have the gravitas necessary to play this part and — like Tom Cruise and his smile — he’s allowed one physical tic to overtake and overshadow his acting. By the end of The Aviator, I badly wanted Scorsese to sneak into DiCaprio’s trailer and inject him with Botox. Anything to get rid of that little crease between his eyes; anything to keep him from substituting a furrowed brow for action. Whether he was portraying concentration, unhappiness, madness, anger, concern, confusion.. it’s all the squint and frown. This was particularly painful when contrasted with Cate Blanchett’s ability to convey a novel by blinking just so.

I’m being a little unfair, because DiCaprio brought great energy to the young Hughes. The movie opens with the three year Hell’s Angels shoot and there’s nothing lacking in DiCaprio’s portrayal of Hughes’ boundless optimism and his love of cinema. Still and all, he’s not the guy to show us a descent into madness. Matt Damon, say, could have been pitch perfect in this part, and he’s just the first actor who comes to mind.

That early section of the movie, and the romance with Katherine Hepburn which follows, is clearly where Scorsese’s passion lies; it’s the story of early Hollywood from black and whites through two-strip Technicolor into the epic. And man, does Scorsese ever indulge himself, blending the looks of the various film processes seamlessly into his own movie. Perhaps my favorite sequence, technically speaking, is the Hell’s Angels opening night sequence: we go from early newsreel footage into black and white into full color as the scope pulls in from an overview of the street scene to Hughes and Hepburn. It’s just a virtuoso piece of directing and camerawork, and there’s plenty of it in the rest of the movie as well.

For better or worse, though, the movie segues into the equally relevant story of Hughes’s aviation endeavors. You can’t tell the whole Howard Hughes story without talking about TWA and the Spruce Goose and yeah, the insanity. Scorsese just doesn’t make it as compelling as the Hollywood story. Also, this is where DiCaprio’s lightness gets in the way; he can’t show us the bridge between the playboy pilot and the madman. There’s not enough context for Hughes as a whole, and when Ava Gardner lifts Hughes out of depression so that he can battle Senator Brewster in Washington, there are no clues as to how she (or he) manages it.

The problem is that Hughes’ life is too big. The Aviator doesn’t reach much beyond 1950, and even so it’s stuffed too full. Katherine Hepburn gets a lot of time; Ava Gardner gets very little. Howard Hawks doesn’t appear at all. Perhaps if Scorsese had picked either Hollywood or aviation — but then you don’t get the complete picture of the complex man. It’s a conundrum; maybe in the end The Aviator made the best possible choices. It’s definitely an ambitiously skilled movie, and it’s nothing short of a spectacle, albeit one with flaws.

While it’s still fresh in my mind, and because I want to be an early adopter as far as observations on the Buckaroo Banzai homage go: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Wes Anderson comes from Houston. That makes Bottle Rocket a small jump, just a skip into the air and thump back down onto the pavement. Rushmore is more ambitious; it’s set in a world far away from Texas. But Wes Anderson did go to a Texan prep school. Not a huge leap. The Royal Tenenbaums? Now we’re talking; sure, it’s still in New York, but it’s further up, further separated from the world in which we live.

The Life Aquatic breaks the bonds of reality and soars.

Or separates; separation is certainly the theme. Steve Zissou and his wife, Steve Zissou and Ned Plimpton, Steve Zissou and the earth. (David Bowie songs and the English language.) People go to the sea, traditionally, to run away; I thought I saw some of that in this movie. It is on the surface an homage to Cousteau, but underneath that, I think Wes Anderson is using the undersea documentary genre as the largest signifier of Zissou’s isolation. Nothing’s more isolated than a submarine underwater.

Some feel that The Life Aquatic is too precious. I think it’s precious on purpose; I think that sense of separation we feel is intentional. It’s a way of getting us into Zissou’s head, aided and abetted by Bill Murray’s quietly ironic acting talent. Besides which, the 70s Merimekko aesthetic is beautiful. The only misstep is towards the end; there’s a scene in which Zissou learns something about forgiveness, as a result of which he learns something about the human touch. Sadly, it’s not quite enough to get us through the wall, perhaps because it’s set underwater.

On the other hand, the final homage to Buckaroo Banzai helps make the point. For a moment or two I was considering the entire movie as a remake of Buckaroo Banzai, but that’s wrong: the homage is a moment of contrast. The Hong Kong Cavaliers were a family in a way that Team Zissou was not through most of the movie. It’s not a key moment in the movie, but it’s a telling grace note.

Speaking of families, the movie is not the ensemble piece that The Royal Tenenbaums was. It’s a movie about Steve Zissou learning to — something. Not feel, not care about other people. Learning to express those things, perhaps. Learning to act on them? I think that last. So while all the supporting cast is great, it’s not their story. Jane Winslett-Richardson doesn’t get a resolution. I didn’t feel that was a flaw, mind you, I’d just hate for anyone to get their hopes up for the kind of complex interweave we’ve seen from Anderson elsewhere. It’s a different kind of movie, more an heir to Rushmore.

I had been feeling a little worried that the American magic realism directors were losing their touch, given that I thought Adaptation, I ♥ Huckabees, and Punch-Drunk Love were somewhat disappointing. (Not bad, but disappointing.) I am now reassured.