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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Oblivion'

Movie review in the Friday, April 19 Oregonian....

 

In a lot of ways, "Oblivion" plays like a vastly superior second draft of director Joseph Kosinski's previous film, "Tron: Legacy."

(This sounds like faint praise -- given that "Tron: Legacy" was a gorgeous but uninvolving mess full of dangling glow-in-the-dark plot threads * -- but bear with me a sec.)

Both "Oblivion" and "Tron: Legacy" feature polished surfaces, Kubrick-aping compositions, terrific soundtracks by French electronic bands, and digital threats in abandoned worlds where characters question the very definition of "life." But "Oblivion" has a cleaner concept, a (mostly) stronger story, subtler performances, better-shot action, and, as a bonus, actually makes some sort of vague logical sense. It ends quite a bit doofier than it starts, but it's entertaining enough, and it is very, very pretty.

"Oblivion" is cowritten by Kosinski from an as-yet-unpublished illustrated novella the director conceived a few years back for Radical Studios. It's set on a future Earth devastated by an alien invasion that destroyed the moon and buried the human race in the resulting earthquakes and tsunamis.

The only humans around seem to be a two-person maintenance crew (Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough). They have a sexy magazine-spread version of WALL•E's job. Cruise goes out in the field to repair lethal robot drones that guard massive factories. The factories pump the water out of Earth's oceans; apparently this will somehow fuel a mass off-planet migration by humanity's survivors.

The postapocalyptic world is stark, gorgeous and crisply designed, and easily the best thing about the movie. Cruise and Riseborough survey a largely buried New York City from a gorgeous Apple Store of an apartment 3,000 feet in the sky, and make love in its glass-bottomed swimming pool in the movie's most beautiful sequence. I desperately want to vacation there; it's like the apocalypse happened except that they somehow saved IKEA.

But then a NASA spaceship crashes nearby. It contains a woman (Olga Kurylenko) who wakes up, barfs, and seems to know Cruise's character by name. Cruise had been having dreams about this woman. The robot drones want to kill her. Riseborough is jealous of her. Notions of history and self suddenly get a little fluid.

From here, "Oblivion" gets all plotty and revelatory and tries for a love story, and it loses much of the haunting quality that made its first half so cool and evocative. The film doesn't completely un-man itself like, say, "Tron: Legacy" did -- but it does go from creating a unique world to riffing, in solid B-movie style, on ideas and images from other, better sci-fi films. Cruise and the rest of the cast (which comes to include Morgan Freeman rocking sunglasses and a cigar) do solid work here, deploying more nuanced facial expressions than are strictly necessary in a popcorn flick, which is nice.

Kosinski has an advertising background and a knack for the clinical frame composition -- though I'm beginning to wonder if he's a really high-end version of Roland Emmerich, who proved with "Independence Day" that you can make an entire entertainment out of nothing but shameless references to past sci-fi hits. I'm wondering this because Kosinski's visual nods to Kubrick get sort of hilariously on-the-nose toward the end -- up to and including making the drones look like armed versions of the "2001" space pod and having one character literally float around in the Star Child pose for a second.

But man, "Oblivion" sure is Moebius-comic gorgeous and it sounds great, especially the loud nervewracking honks the drones make when they're weighing whether or not to shoot you. I suppose that's a surface appeal. But it's a nice surface.
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* "Tron: Legacy" is actually a pretty great viewing experience if you just leave it on in the background with the volume turned all the way down while playing the Daft Punk soundtrack CD on repeat -- conveniently removing the expository dialogue that makes the movie so exasperating. "Legacy"'s ideal presentation may be playing silently on TVs mounted in the backs of modernist bars, basically.
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(124 min.; rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, brief strong language, and some sensuality/nudity) Grade: B-minus

'Oblivion' (The Oregonian, Friday, April 19, 2013)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Sapphires'

Movie review in the Friday, April 12 Oregonian....

 

The hugely entertaining comedy-drama "The Sapphires" is an old-school crowd-pleaser.

Adapted from Tony Briggs' play, it's very loosely based on the true story of Briggs' Aboriginal mother and aunt, who left behind racist 1960s Australia to sing for American troops in Vietnam. The movie unfolds in pretty much the exact uplifting and unsurprising manner you'd expect -- but its real pleasures lie in its terrific pop-soul soundtrack and especially in its frequently funny performances.

"Sapphires" introduces us to three Aboriginal sisters -- Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Jessica Mauboy) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) -- who live in New South Wales' Cummeragunja mission and may love singing more than they love each other. It's 1968, and they're covering Merle Haggard country ditties and facing indifferent audiences in a bigoted Australia.

At a two-bit talent show, they're spotted by drunk keyboardist Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd, channeling '70s Bill Murray if '70s Bill Murray were Irish). "You're the best Aboriginal girl group -- sorry, you're the only Aboriginal girl group -- I've ever seen," Lovelace tells them, before offering the women (and himself) a ticket out of obscurity and Australia: He'll become their manager, change their set-list to soul covers and get them performing for U.S. infantry in 'Nam.

"Country is about loss," he tells them while convincing them to change their repertoire. "Soul is about loss, but they're struggling to get it back."

The sisters recruit their honey-voiced cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) -- who was forcibly removed from the Cummeragunja mission by officials years earlier to be raised by a white family -- and take their act (and their ferocious arguments) into a literal and sometimes very personal war zone, albeit one peppered with hit songs and the odd romance.

Director Wayne Blair uses the music and comedy to keep things surprisingly light and high-spirited, given that "The Sapphires" also trafficks in firefights, war-wounded, civil-rights struggles, and burning resentments created by the Australian government's appalling child-removal policy -- a policy that separated Kay from her family in the movie and thousands of Aboriginal mothers from their children in real life from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The lightness primarily comes from O'Dowd (of "Bridesmaids" and "The IT Crowd" fame), who makes the movie with a cannonade of self-deprecating zingers. His bickering chemistry with the group's two-fisted leader and eldest sibling (Mailman) is such that I can happily imagine a future in which Mailman gets to kill it in many more comedies.
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(103 min.; rated PG-13 for sexuality, a scene of war violence, some language, thematic elements and smoking; playing in Portland at Regal Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus

'The Sapphires' (The Oregonian, Friday, April 12, 2013)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Ginger & Rosa'

Movie review in the Friday, March 29 Oregonian....

 

"Ginger & Rosa" is a potent little period drama from writer/director Sally Potter ("Orlando") about rebellion, fear, compromise, and the wildly inappropriate things adults can do while using their "ideals" as an excuse.

But most viscerally, it's about Potter keeping her camera tightly trained on every tiny expression by Elle Fanning, who gives a stunning performance as Ginger -- a teen put through belief-quaking emotional changes in a threadbare 1962 London.

Ginger and her wild-child best pal Rosa (Alice Englert) were born on the same day in 1945. Seventeen years later, they're casting about for identities in a world shaken by pop-culture shifts and the ever-present fear of atomic doom.

Potter does delicate work capturing the way Ginger and Rosa hover between child- and adulthood, the way they try on grown-up behavior like they're playing dress-up -- clutching teddy bears (and each other) and playing patty-cake between bouts of smoking, drinking, hitchhiking and the occasional bus-stop snog.

The teens are also rebelling in an effort to avoid the fates of their unhappy mothers. Ginger's mother (Christina Hendricks) gave up everything in a bid for domestic normalcy, but now she's fighting against the word-twisting of Ginger's father (Alessandro Nivola) -- a self-centered intellectual who behaves horribly while hiding behind his "free spirit" ideals.

Ginger -- her head full of her father's exhortations to be "an activist, not a supplicant" -- gets caught in the middle. The threat of intimate and global catastrophe tests her belief system -- even as Potter pushes closer to capture every quiver on Fanning's face.

It's not particularly subtle, especially toward the end. But it's quietly psychologically brutal -- and the solid-to-devastating performances by Fanning, Englert, Hendricks, Nivola, Annette Bening, Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt make the movie.

Potter takes a hard look at the tension between the personal and the political -- at the way you can lose yourself worrying about an imagined apocalypse while a very real one is happening to the humans you love, at the way basic human desires for freedom and love get twisted up in activism and compromise. And Potter is merciless about the harm men can do to those closest to them while those men are railing against "mindless obedience" and "the rules."
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(89 min.; rated PG-13 for mature disturbing thematic material involving teen choices -- sexuality, drinking, smoking, and for language; playing in Portland at Regal Fox Tower) Grade: A-minus

'Ginger & Rosa' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 29, 2013)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone'

Movie review in the Friday, March 15 Oregonian....

 

"The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" feels compromised on many levels. It's an intermittently funny comedy about feuding Vegas magicians that feels committee-rewritten within an inch of its life. And the movie's prevailing vibe of indecision infects Steve Carell's lead performance.

But before getting into the frustrating, potential-wasting details, it's worth noting that Jim Carrey pretty much kills it every time he shows up in his supporting role as street magician Steve Gray.

Gray is a David Blaine / Criss Angel-style performance artist who's less interested in sleights of hand and more interested in increasingly perverse feats of endurance and self-abuse -- holding his urine for days, sleeping on hot coals, letting children hit him with sticks until he vomits piñata candy -- all in the service of some vaguely defined truth-is-pain audience-shock philosophy. Carrey was more or less engineered in a lab to spout Gray's brand of nonsense, and it's great to see the actor revisit the masochistic slapstick that made him famous.

Unfortunately, the rest of "Burt Wonderstone" exists firmly in Carrey's shadow. The victims of the overshadowing include, unfortunately. Mr. Wonderstone.

Director Don Scardino and his screenwriters are more interested in stringing together gags of varying success than they are in telling a story. But in broad strokes, the movie details the falling-apart of the glitz-choked magic act of Burt (Carell) and Anton (Steve Buscemi), thanks entirely to Burt's arrogance and loss of love for the audience, stagecraft and possibly himself.

Irrelevant in the wake of Steve Gray's faux-gritty success, Burt enters a wilderness period that includes humiliation, an ambitious youngster (Olivia Wilde), and a cranky old-school mentor (Alan Arkin). Roots may be revisited, etc.

The movie has a couple of problems. First, a couple of characters feel like they were added to the script late in the development process without the screenwriters bothering to remove older characters competing for the same space. But the movie's central problem is that it's impossible to invest in the cartoony travails of Burt Wonderstone because (a) he's not just unpleasant but unpleasant and uninteresting, and (b) the normally on-the-ball Carell never quite figures out what sort of part he's playing.

For half the movie's running time, Burt is a sequined, out-of-touch idiot with hair extensions and a funny voice. For the other half (usually when bonding with poor Olivia Wilde or rediscovering the joys of magic), Burt is a more subdued, slightly smarter character with shorter hair and "heart" who speaks in something like Steve Carell's normal voice. Carell sometimes seems to be shifting between these two characters mid-scene, and it left me wondering why the man who gave us Brick Tamland and Michael Scott couldn't commit whole-hog to a single take on his role.

The larger film suffers along the same lines. The crueler spoofy jokes mostly connect -- especially anything involving Carrey or the more criminally weird magic tricks attempted by Burt and Anton -- and Arkin's always fun to watch. The broadest stuff also satirizes the tension between classic and "edgy" magicians in a way that almost feels like an idea. In its best moments, the movie approaches the mid-list success of something like the 2007 Will Ferrell vehicle "Blades of Glory." But these moments are Franken-stitched together with more earnest but less-confident material, in a way that suggests a half-finished draft full of half-used characters.
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(100 min., rated PG-13 for sexual content, dangerous stunts, a drug-related incident and language) Grade: C

'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 15, 2013)

PIFF MOVIE REVIEW: 'American Winter'

Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of the 36th Portland International Film Festival....

 

"American Winter"

This earnest, message-driven documentary from the creators of HBO's "Taxicab Confessions" checks in with eight Portland families over the winter of 2011-12 as they struggle to make ends meet and navigate various public-assistance programs in the wake of the Great Recession. Visits with each family as they suffer the humiliations and threats of unemployment, foreclosure, eviction, hunger, utility shut-offs and moving back in with their parents are interspersed rhythmically with stat-filled title cards, musical interludes and talking-head interviews with Portland Commissioner Nick Fish and social-service advocates and workers.

I understand the number of families visited shows the terrifying cross-cultural scope of the crisis, but frankly wish co-directors Joe and Harry Gantz had spent more time with fewer subjects, allowing us to dive deeper into each family's struggles and history. But it's hard to argue with the doc's larger point -- a forceful, direct argument that it's much smarter to invest in helping people in need before they hit rock bottom.

The doc debuts on HBO on March 18.
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B; United States; 90 minutes [ official PIFF listing ]

Showtimes:

• 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17, Whitsell;
• 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 18, Cinemagic

'American Winter' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Identity Thief'

Longer cut of a review in the Friday, Feb. 8 Oregonian....

 

The deadly dull action-comedy "Identity Thief" is an infuriating waste of everyone's time, on all sides of camera and screen. I did not know I could yawn angrily. This movie somehow proved it possible.

There's the promise of a timely paranoid comedy in the premise, at least. Mid-level account manager Sandy (Jason Bateman) has a third kid on the way and makes barely enough to pay his bills. He's one of those quietly terrified middle-class wage-earners who manage to ski just ahead of financial avalanche. His career upswing is endangered when a Florida grifter (Melissa McCarthy of "Bridesmaids" fame) steals his identity and racks up credit-card bills, petty arrests and bail-skipping in his gender-neutral name.

For roughly five minutes, "Identity Thief" plays with a comedically exaggerated version of the very real helplessness the victim feels in that situation -- the way identity theft visits an unasked-for second career of name-clearing on the injured party. After the police finally stop arresting Bateman's character for McCarthy's misdeeds, they start fobbing off responsibility to other jurisdictions and promising to clear things up in maybe a year. And the police attention creates just enough suspicion among Bateman's new employers to endanger his career in finance for no other reason than the suggestion of possible untrustworthiness.

But then Bateman decides to head to Florida and drag McCarthy back to Colorado himself to face charges. And the movie suddenly devolves into a tired road-trip comedy that gets lazier and stupider and more weirdly violent with each precious passing second.

Bateman is justly revered for perfecting the deadpan everyman in "Arrested Development" and elsewhere. McCarthy blazingly reinvented herself as an over-the-top comedy actor in "Bridemaids." Director Seth Gordon made a hilarious documentary in "King of Kong" and didn't embarrass himself with the uneven but frequently funny "Horrible Bosses." Which makes it all the more painful when this trio works off a screenplay by Craig Mazin ("The Hangover: Part II," "Scary Movie" 3 and 4) and ends up reaching for comic fruit that's hanging so low, it's more or less gathering flies on the ground.

How low does the fruit hang, you ask? How about multiple repeating lazy gags about Sandy's "unisex" name, McCarthy's loud outfits, McCarthy throat-punching people, McCarthy telling strangers outlandish stories about Bateman that invariably involve the mangling of his genitals, and McCarthy badly singing Kelis' "Milkshake" (twice)? (I'll also direct readers to this Gawker post that gets into "a huge problem with 'Identity Thief': The premise of so many of the film's jokes is that McCarthy is fat and isn't that hilarious?" She's better than this.)

The filmmakers pad this dreck out with an unearned late-film lurch into treacle and a fairly violent action subplot in which McCarthy is chased across the country by a bounty hunter (Robert Patrick) and two organized-crime enforcers (T.I., Genesis Rodriguez). Along the way, McCarthy absorbs levels of abuse that should turn her body into a crushed bag of marbles -- which would be fine as slapstick, except that the movie sometimes tries to play its action beats semi-straight for a second before pulling its punches.

It's lame, and I hope everyone involved has projects lined up that feel less like coasting, potential-squandering cash-grabs.

Also recommended: Drew McWeeny's taking of this flick to the proverbial woodshed.
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(108 min., rated R for sexual content and language) Grade: D-plus

'Identity Thief' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 8, 2013)

PIFF MOVIE REVIEW: 'Ginger & Rosa'

Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of the 36th Portland International Film Festival....

 

'Ginger & Rosa'

This potent little period drama from writer/director Sally Potter ("Orlando") is about many things -- rebellion, compromise, and the horrible inappropriate selfish things adults can do while using their "ideals" as an excuse. But most viscerally it's about Potter keeping her camera tightly trained on every tiny expression by Elle Fanning, who gives a subtly stunning performance as Ginger -- a teen put through belief-quaking emotional changes in dingy 1962 London.

Ginger and her bad-influence best pal Rosa (Alice Englert) are each rebelling against their unhappy mothers. One teen craves activist freedom, one craves domestic stability, and their intense closeness is tested during a time of intimate catastrophe and global near-catastrophe that has each of them flailing for a grown-up identity. It's quietly brutal stuff, beautifully acted by Fanning, Englert, Christina Hendricks and a word-twisting Alessandro Nivola.
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A-minus; Great Britain; 90 minutes [ official PIFF listing ]

Showtimes:

• 6 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9, Whitsell
• 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 10, Regal Lloyd Center 10

'Ginger & Rosa' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 8, 2013)

PIFF MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Sapphires'

Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of the 36th Portland International Film Festival...

 

'The Sapphires'

PIFF's biggest crowd-pleaser will likely be this hugely entertaining comedy-drama -- adapted from Tony Briggs' play and loosely based on the true story of Briggs' Aboriginal relatives (fictionalized here by Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell) who form a soul-singing girl group and leave behind racist 1960s Australia to perform for American troops in Vietnam.

The movie unfolds in pretty much the exact uplifting manner you'd expect, but its real pleasures lie in its terrific '60s pop-soul soundtrack and especially in its frequently funny performances. Chris O'Dowd ("Bridesmaids," "The IT Crowd") is a cannonade of self-deprecating zingers as the group's drunken manager, and his bickering chemistry with the group's two-fisted eldest sibling (Mailman) is such that I can happily imagine a future in which Mailman gets to kill it in many more comedies. When "The Sapphires" gets a wider release later this year, I'll be shocked if it isn't a fairly huge art-house hit.
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B-plus; Australia; 99 minutes [ official PIFF listing ] 

Showtimes:

• 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 8, Whitsell
• 5 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 10, Cinemagic

'The Sapphires' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 8, 2013)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Warm Bodies'

Movie review in the Friday, Feb. 1 Oregonian....

The zombie rom-com "Warm Bodies" is a bit like its lead character -- the movie takes a little while to find its voice. Once it does, though, it turns out to be a surprisingly sweet and well-acted (if slight and unsubtle) riff on "Romeo & Juliet," in which Romeo just happens to be an undead kid in a hoodie with an evolving taste for vinyl records and brains.

The film -- written and directed by Jonathan Levine ("The Wackness," "50/50") from an apparently quite-good novel by Isaac Marion -- opens on our hero, "R" (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie with a weirdly articulate inner life.

R wanders around in a zombie-occupied airport, frets in voiceover about his inability to connect and taste for human flesh, and grunts one-word pleasantries at the airport bar with his only pal (played with far more conviction than you'd expect by Rob Corddry).

While out foraging for human snacks, R runs into Julie (Teresa Palmer), daughter of the leader (John Malkovich) of a walled city of human survivors. Having just eaten Julie's boyfriend's brains and thus uploaded the boyfriend's memories, R can't bring himself to kill Julie. Instead, he drags her to his airport lair and attempts to woo her, mostly with his LP collection and yearning stares. Lucky for him, Julie apparently has a taste for guys on the absolute extreme end of the emo-and-inarticulate spectrum. The relationship changes him in surprising ways.

Levine and Hoult pull off a neat acting trick here, starting with R's near-silence and gaping hungry gawks and slowly adding words, expressions and speed to the character. The movie wakes up with him. The first half is a bit frustrating in that it can't seem to decide if it's going to fully embrace "Zombieland"-style farce or take a serious stab at the relationship between these two kids (who resemble Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart more than a little). Once the story commits to the romance, it hits a nice B-movie young-adult groove.

I don't want to oversell "Warm Bodies" -- this is, ultimately, a movie in which Julie bonds with R by making him try on sunglasses during a music montage (which is later followed by another music montage in which she puts makeup on him so he'll pass for human). But it's got a big heart and high spirits on a low budget and actors who refuse to phone it in.
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(97 min., rated PG-13  for zombie violence and some language) Grade: B-minus

'Warm Bodies' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 1, 2013)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Broken City'

Longer cut of a movie review in the Friday, Jan. 18 Oregonian....

 

Quality-wise, the crime drama "Broken City" lives in a frustrating mid-range area: It's too complicated and competently crafted to totally dismiss as junk -- but it's also nowhere near sharp enough to work as the serious grown-up detective movie it clearly wants to be.

The story (as scripted by first-timer Brian Tucker and directed by Allen Hughes) at least has the promise of bite, introducing a trio of characters slopping about in the murkier areas of New York governance. A disgraced NYC cop (Mark Wahlberg), on trial for gunning down a bad kid under suspicious circumstances in the projects, gets a break from the mayor (Russell Crowe) and a police captain (Jeffrey Wright).

Cut to seven years later. Wahlberg is on the wagon, struggling as a two-bit private eye, with an actress girlfriend (Natalie Martinez) and a wisecracking secretary (Alona Tal). The mayor -- in danger of losing an impending election to an idealistic challenger (Barry Pepper) -- hires Wahlberg to spy on the mayor's possibly unfaithful wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). From there, it gets complicated.

Or rather, it only gets half-complicated. And because the movie's complicated stuff feels at odds with its uncomplicated stuff, it leaves "Broken City" feeling deeply mediocre.

True to the genre (and no, I'm not really spoiling anything), Wahlberg's shamus stumbles onto a larger corruption. It's a fairly convoluted scenario involving lots of players, betrayals and pieces of paper. And even on coast, the all-star cast is certainly up to the task; it's fun to watch Wahlberg and Crowe fence a little.

But then every so often the filmmakers will drop in something that's insultingly simple-minded by comparison. Lame '80s-TV-caliber detective work. Rote action beats. The do-gooder mayoral challenger literally having the last name "Valliant." Wahlberg and Martinez suddenly having an out-of-nowhere problem spurred by something stupid because the story needs Wahlberg to be embittered and hard-boiled and fall off the wagon, or something. (The scene also suggests that Wahlberg's character has no idea what being an actress entails, seven long years into his relationship with one. Seriously?) Also, the character interrelationships get so dense you'd think there were about six people living in New York City.

But mostly, the problem is just that the dialogue is on-the-nose and not nearly as sophisticated as the story's ambitions. There's a lot of this:

Wright: "It appears he wants justice."
Mayor Crowe [grinning evilly]: "Well, nobody gets that."

Or this painful bit of "banter":

Martinez: "When you going to stop coming home looking like a slice of bloody meat?"
Wahlberg: "I thought you liked bloody meat."
Martinez: "I'm a vegetarian."

[Rimshot]

These bouts of mild dopiness result in a workmanlike drama with less-than-total command of its tone. And thus a corruption-damning actor's showcase becomes something you dismiss with a shrug.
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(109 min.; rated R for pervasive language, some sexual content and violence) Grade: C

'Broken City' (The Oregonian, Friday, Jan. 18, 2013)