If you've been wishing we'd stop getting drunk on non-sequiturs and get right to the movie reviews for a change, then the final "Cort and Fatboy" podcast of 2011 is just for you. We talk about nothing but movies ... for 80 action-packed minutes.
Featuring reviews of "Tintin," "The Artist," "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "Hugo," and "We Bought A Zoo," among other things.
(Oh, and if you do like the non-sequiturs, wait for me to misuse the word "matriculate.") _______
"We Bought a Zoo" very loosely adapts a 2008 memoir by Benjamin Mee, who worked with his family to purchase and resurrect a decrepit zoo in rural England while dealing with a host of logistical and financial problems -- and, horribly, the death of his wife.
In the film, the animal park is located in rural California, and Mee (Matt Damon) is a recent widower who quits his newspaper gig and blows his inheritance on the failing zoo on impulse. This delights his young daughter (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) and pisses off his brooding teenager (Colin Ford). Father and son are provided with convenient parallel love interests from the zoo's movie-quirky staff -- in the form of an overworked zookeeper (Scarlett Johansson) and her lovestruck niece (Elle Fanning).
Thanks to a typically grounded performance by Damon and the general sun-dappled earnestness of the enterprise, "Zoo" is a modestly charming family crowdpleaser -- this despite (a) the too-broad characterizations by many in the supporting cast, (b) the film's tendency to create crises that are resolved in the very next scene, and (c) its additional tendency to lean on music, cute animals, and big-speech grandstanding like they were car horns. ("Zoo"'s high production value and good humor do trounce "Dolphin Tale," the last big entry in the kids-and-animals genre.)
The only thing that's sort of depressing is that a flick this utterly disposable was co-written and directed by none other than Cameron Crowe -- the former pop wunderkind who mixed music, big speeches, high emotion and genial characters with vastly more wit and finesse in "Say Anything...," "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous." People frequently narrate their profound feelings in showboat monologues in Crowe's films, but this time around it feels more self-conscious, and a lot less illuminating.
If you're a fan of those earlier films, "Zoo" sort of leaves you wondering if Crowe -- spooked by the mixed reaction to "Vanilla Sky" and "Elizabethtown" -- chose to play it safe, remixing echoes of his usual screenwriting devices in pursuit of a surefire hit. _____
"Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol," the Spielberg face, Fatboy's birthday, the Gary Oldman Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float, Bale Batman karaoke, shoulder-throats, "Skate-A-Roke," our fundraising drive for Dawn Taylor and her husband Patrick, and much more.
Did you enjoy the first Robert Downey Jr. "Sherlock Holmes" movie for what it was? More precisely: Did you enjoy it as a middlebrow, semi-steampunk, semi-forgettable buddy-cop action comedy that happened to star hawt bromance variations on Holmes and Watson -- with some nice nods to Holmes lore, a ramshackle Hans Zimmer score, a couple of clever action edits and a nice coat of bohemian grime courtesy of director Guy Ritchie?
Well, then you'll probably enjoy "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows." You might even find it an improvement as far as the villain is concerned.
"Game of Shadows" cherry-picks a few details from Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes story "The Final Problem," inasmuch as the film features Holmes squaring off against his intellectual equal: the math-genius "Napoleon of Crime" Professor James Moriarty (relatively underplayed by "Mad Men"'s Jared Harris). A bedraggled and manic Holmes (Downey) disrupts Watson's (Jude Law's) nuptials -- dragging the annoyed sidekick into an investigation of Moriarty-backed bombings. A Romani woman (Noomi Rapace), her missing brother, Holmes' brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry), and a remarkable variety of projectile weapons are rolled into a mystery that threatens to spark a world war.
The sequel has all the merits and demerits of its predecessor, only with a less-snarly antagonist, a more thoughtful final showdown and broader Holmes/Watson relationship jokes. (Law and Downey remain a lot of fun to watch together; the leads' chemistry covers a lot of silliness.) The filmmakers continue to distill Holmes' intelligence to hyper-edited sequences in which he predicts how he's going to punch people, and Ritchie continues to demonstrate a knack for staging oddball action beats, particularly during an artillery-filled chase through a forest.
The best and smartest 21st-century Holmes/Watson team is still Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (if you aren't watching the BBC's modern-day "Sherlock," do yourself a favor) -- but Downey/Law's "Lethal Weapon"-ish variation is still plowing its odd patch of soil with modest success. _____
... It starts with Mike recounting his days as a bare-knuckle fighter, schooled in the art of the shuck, and his one victory -- inside a Fred Meyer Electronics department. From there, he describes how HE would have programmed Gauntlet to be a pro-vegetable polemic, and wistfully reminisces on the year of 1999, widely recognized as one of the best years in film ever. News on the "American Psycho" and "Evil Dead" remakes is shared, Bane is almost as unintelligble as Batman is in the new movie, and "The Sitter" is offensively bad. But not as bad (meaning good) as "Gymkata." All that and "Action Jackson," too.
