VICE (US - 2018) Written and directed by Adam McKay. Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Jesse Plemons, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Fay Masterson, John Hillner, Paul Yoo, Joseph Beck, Tony Graham. (R, 132 mins) ANCHORMAN director and Will Ferrell BFF Adam McKay took the leap to "serious filmmaker" with 2015's THE BIG SHORT, an angry and irreverent autopsy of the housing market collapse. He takes the same approach and nets less consistent results with the Dick Cheney biopic VICE, which covers the life of George W. Bush's vice president from his days as a hard-drinking college dropout and all-around fuck-up in 1963, through the events of 9/11 to his heart transplant in 2012. Regardless of how one feels about Cheney and where you stand politically, the one thing everyone can agree on in these more-divisive-than-ever times is that Christian Bale completely disappears onscreen and all you see is Dick Cheney. Sporting Oscar-worthy makeup and an extra 45-50 lbs, the Oscar-winning actor, known for his startling transformations in past films like THE MACHINIST, THE FIGHTER, and AMERICAN HUSTLE, absolutely becomes Cheney. Bale carries VICE on his shoulders, and it's a good thing he does, because without the level of obsessive, Day-Lewisian dedication in his performance/metamorphosis, the film's shortcomings and inconsistencies would be a lot more glaring than they already are.
Counting Ferrell and Brad Pitt among its producers, VICE is entertaining, but McKay too often succumbs to Michael Moore agitprop with all the subtlety of a jackhammer or, perhaps, Ron Burgundy. Tonally, it's all over the place, with the grim seriousness of 9/11 juxtaposed with the kind of meta jokes that wouldn't have been out of place on something like MR. SHOW or FUNNY OR DIE (like a focus group stopping the movie to address its liberal bias). There's a ruthless, Lady Macbeth quality to Lynne Cheney, played here by Amy Adams, leading to Adams and Bale playing an entire scene in emphatic, scenery-chewing Shakespearean dialogue. McKay also takes the story into a hypothetical direction about 40 minutes in, just prior to Cheney accepting an offer to be Bush's VP where he, Lynne, and their extended family live happily ever after as historical footnotes, never to be heard from again as an inspiring score cue swells and the closing credits begin rolling before abruptly resetting and bringing the film back to reality. There's a scattershot, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to VICE that's worked for McKay in the past (ANCHORMAN, THE OTHER GUYS) and has also completely backfired (ANCHORMAN 2). It splits the difference here because it is funny, but the comedy only spotlights the fact that VICE is never sure what it wants to be. Bale is diving into this and losing himself in the way he deftly captures everything about Cheney physically and psychologically, while Adams is stuck playing a one-dimensional Lynne Cheney who's defined almost exclusively by her shrewd opportunism and the Cheney image (when their daughter Mary, played by Alison Pill, comes out as gay, it's Dick who immediately embraces her and offers his support while Lynne stands there, already questioning how this affects Dick's political career). Others are doing convincing impressions that look like SNL on a good night, like Steve Carell's obnoxious and loathed-throughout-DC Donald Rumsfeld, Tyler Perry's Colin Powell, Eddie Marsan's Paul Wolfowitz, and Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush, seen here as an easygoing goofball who only seems to be in politics to earn his dad's respect.
There is a clever framing device involving an onscreen narrator (Jesse Plemons), and the story jumps back and forth through the years, chronicling Cheney's time as a protege of presidential adviser Rumsfeld in the pre-Watergate Nixon White House, and his eventual return as White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford (Bill Camp) in the 1975 "Halloween Massacre," a gig he gets after swooping in to scavenge for table scraps left by everyone tainted by the Watergate fiasco. He's also the Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush and the film glosses over his tenure as CEO of Halliburton before he's persuaded to be George W. Bush's running mate. Throughout VICE, Cheney is accurately depicted as a Machiavellian mover and shaker, fixated on finding loopholes and reinterpretations to skirt around the Constitution and the law to find ways to grant the executive branch previously untapped levels of power, secrecy, and unaccountability. He's always working behind the scenes, quietly plotting, and never drawing attention to himself, qualities that come into play when he manipulates the younger Bush into letting him take on a much more significant role in policy and day-to-day operations than VPs have historically played ("The president and I have an understanding," he says whenever someone asks him if he's overstepping his boundaries).
The film's second half focuses almost entirely on the post 9/11 era, with the the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, "enhanced interrogation," Cheney's vengeful outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and other decisions that resonate to this day (the infamous incident where Cheney shot a guy in the face is also shown, along with a reminder that the only apology that ever came from it was from the victim to Cheney), but therein lies the core problem with VICE: you're not going to leave the theater knowing anything you didn't already know going in. And to that end, it's rather shallow and superficial, and lacking the focused rage of THE BIG SHORT (the most vicious jab is aimed not at Dick Cheney, but at the apathetic and easily-distracted general public, and it comes at the very end, so stick around for that stinger that comes early in the closing credits). It's a triumph of makeup and a testament to Christian Bale's many gifts as an actor and his complete devotion to his craft. He makes efforts to show Cheney's human side and doesn't play him a cartoonish Bond villain, but a long, "no apologies" monologue near the end might make you wonder if this wouldn't have made a more insightful film if it was a one-man show like James Whitmore as Harry S. Truman in 1975's GIVE 'EM HELL, HARRY! or Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's 1984 film SECRET HONOR.
ARRIVAL (US - 2016) Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Eric Heisserer. Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Tzi Ma, Mark O'Brien, Russell Yuen. (PG-13, 116 mins) It's easy to see the trailers and the advertising for ARRIVAL and write it off as another alien invasion sci-fi movie, but it has bigger goals in mind and is ultimately about something else entirely. Having said that, the path it takes to get to where it's going borrows from a variety of sources. You'll easily spot ideas from other movies--CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and CONTACT immediately spring to mind, and the imagery of spacecrafts hovering over cities invokes INDEPENDENCE DAY and DISTRICT 9 among others, while its somber mood and its focus on the deconstruction and composition of language and communication takes things into an alien invasion PONTYPOOL realm. Though it's all a primer for a surprise third-act revelation that packs a wallop and shows ARRIVAL's true intent, even that has distinct echoes of both a no-budget cult classic from a decade or so ago as well as a certain '90s sci-fi mindbender, albeit with less apocalyptic implications.
Twelve shell-like spacecrafts appear at various points around the world, with one of them in Montana. Linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is brought in by the US Army's Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) as a consultant to attempt to establish communication with the visitors and decipher their language. Largely withdrawn from the world following her 12-year-old daughter's death from a rare form of cancer, Louise immerses herself in her work and still has military security clearance from some translation work she did for a counterterrorism operation a few years earlier. She's joined by theoritical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) as they enter a gravity-free portal at the base of the "Shell" and very slowly open a line of communication from behind a giant glass divider in the ship with a pair of large, heptapod beings that they dub "Abbott & Costello." It's a slow process--too slow for Weber and irate CIA agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose main goal is to ascertain the threat level and who demonstrate little patience for the curiosity of linguistics, physics, and the wonder of scientific discovery, even though Abbott & Costello have done nothing aggressive. A growing sense of paranoia and too much of an Alex Jones-type right-wing TV pundit gets the better of a few renegade soldiers who try to blow up the shell while Louise and Ian are in it, their lives spared when Abbott & Costello use their gravitational powers to force them down the portal after unsuccessfully trying to warn them about the explosive device. They clearly mean no harm, but neither Louise nor Ian can convince Weber and Halpern of that, and the global operation goes south when paranoid Chinese military leader Gen. Shang (Tzi Ma) issues an ultimatum to the Shell over China, threatening to blow it up if they don't retreat. Various countries, working together, soon go off the grid and stop sharing information with one another as talks break down, humanity grows impatient and violent, and Louise is haunted by recurring dreams and visions of her dead daughter.
Quebecois INCENDIES director Denis Villeneuve, who crossed over into the mainstream with 2013's PRISONERS and 2015's SICARIO, isn't as commercial this time out, with one shot in particular a winking nod to his bizarre 2014 Cronenbergian indie ENEMY. With its chilly, cerebral tone, ARRIVAL occasionally has a Cronenberg feel to it, or at least looks a lot like what might've happened if an in-his-prime Atom Egoyan made an alien invasion movie. It's a film that's not particularly interested in accommodating those looking for action and special effects, but it's still accessible enough for the multiplex. Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer (LIGHTS OUT), who adapted Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life," don't seem to bother pretending to camouflage ARRIVAL's obvious influences, but it finds its own voice quite unexpectedly, and what initially appear to be plot holes, contrivances, and corner-cutting actually make sense once all is revealed. Whether that makes ARRIVAL legitimately clever or very smooth at pulling off some bullshit dei ex machina may be one of the many post-viewing discussion topics. Even with its unexpected late-film developments, ARRIVAL isn't quite the instant classic that many reviewers are making it out to be, but it manages to accomplish a lot more than most genre films that opt to travel down a road paved with the ideas of so many movies that preceded it.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (US - 2016) Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer. Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Tao Okamoto, Callan Mulvey, Harry Lennix, Christina Wren, Kevin Costner, Michael Shannon, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Ralph Lister, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher, Michael Cassidy, voice of Patrick Wilson. (PG-13, 151 mins) There's no getting around the fact that the awkwardly-titled BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is a disjointed, bloated mess that still feels incomplete even at two and a half hours (a three-hour, R-rated version will be released on Blu-ray in July, though I can't imagine that being much help). The reviews have been devastating and the toxic response from critics would lead some to believe that the film is some kind of cinematic Ebola. I'm not especially keen to engage in a round of "reviewing the reviewers," and some of the vicious reviews make their points in a professional, even-handed manner but it's obvious that a lot of the critics had their reviews pretty much written before they even saw the film. As if workshopping jokes for a Comedy Central roast of director Zack Snyder, many no doubt jotted down their snarky comments and nit-picky complaints and pithy zingers and constructed their reviews around them to fit the narrative that was constructed the moment the project was announced.
This is a recurring issue with the films of the much-maligned Snyder, a guy nobody had a problem with when his surprisingly solid 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD got good reviews and 2007's influential--for better or worse--300 became a surprise blockbuster. Then around the time he directed 2009's WATCHMEN, critics and internet fanboys decided it was time for him to pay because that was a treasured property that frankly, nobody could've done in a way that would've satisfied its most obsessive fans. 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, one of the strangest and most original major-studio, big-budget movies of the last decade, got eviscerated and Superman fans took it as a personal attack that he was chosen to helm 2013's MAN OF STEEL. The response to BVS is indicative of a recurring problem in today's film criticism: the pile-on. A Hitfix article listing 20 "baffling questions" that BVS "refused to answer" gets several of the details completely wrong. Did the author of that article watch the movie or were they watching how the Rotten Tomatoes percentage was dropping? Does the author know that an unanswered question isn't necessarily a "plot hole"? Is BVS a good movie? Eh, it has its moments, but it's OK at best. There's plenty of legitimate beefs with a lot of what's here. But is it as offensively godawful as you've been led to believe? Not even close. Nevertheless, the pile-on is the most intense since Ridley Scott's THE COUNSELOR, a film so unjustifiably lambasted ("Meet the worst movie ever made," crowed one particularly smug review) that its reputation improved and a cult following had formed before it even left theaters. So here's BVS, and like the villagers storming Castle Frankenstein, here's critics, fanboys, and message board mouth-breathers victoriously celebrating an imagined defeat--this had a $166 million opening, so it's not as if a movie like this depends on good reviews--with the tone being set by the "Sad Ben Affleck" viral sensation over the weekend.
Essentially a feature-length prologue to Warner Bros' DC Extended Universe franchise, BVS also functions as a reboot of the Christopher Nolan DARK KNIGHT trilogy and as a sequel to MAN OF STEEL (Nolan gets an exec producer credit here). It bites off more than it can chew taking on too many responsibilities, and it shows in the choppiness (Jena Malone was completely cut from this version of the film) and the frequently confusing developments. Opening with yet another replay of young Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents (Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan), the action cuts to MAN OF STEEL's climactic battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Zod (Michael Shannon) and the destruction of Metropolis (played by Detroit, MI) witnessed on the street by Bruce Wayne (Affleck), who sees a Wayne Enterprise building collapse in yet more of the standard-issue 9/11 imagery. Blaming Superman for the mayhem, Wayne vows to bring down the Man of Steel with help from his faithful butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons). There's a lot of plot, usually involving a globe-trotting Lois Lane (Amy Adams) constantly getting into trouble and Superman bailing her out, and the evil plot of Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, more on that shortly) to, well, get some Kryptonite from the bottom of the Indian Ocean and do something to revive Zod and take on Superman. It's never really clear why Luthor hates Superman, but he actually gets the edge on the Man of Steel when he kidnaps and threatens to kill Martha Kent (Diane Lane) if he doesn't kill Batman, which leads to the brief title showdown, followed by about 17 endings.
There's also Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, and it's hardly a spoiler at this point to mention she's Wonder Woman. First seen looking sleek and mysterious and crossing paths with Wayne at a Luthor fundraiser, Diana doesn't figure much into the story until Bruce figures out her long-buried secret and she ends up helping Batman and Superman take on a late-arriving, Luthor-generated villain in the climax. Gadot's first appearance as Wonder Woman doesn't take place until after the two-hour mark, but it's a highlight of the movie and she gets what's by far the biggest response from the audience, but the way she's shoehorned in is clunky. Speaking of clunky, Gadot is also integral to one of the film's clumsiest scenes, where she opens an e-mail with video files of future JUSTICE LEAGUE franchise players Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) in a five-minute sequence that stops the movie cold and cumbersomely plays like Gal Gadot watching movie trailers on her laptop. Cavill looks the part and doesn't really do anything wrong as Superman, Adams is too smart an actress to play someone so perpetually helpless, and Affleck is an ineffectual Bruce Wayne/Batman, speaking in a dour monotone and mumbling a good chunk of the time. He's trying to go for that Christian Bale intensity but he honestly just looks bored. Others appear throughout: Irons as the most cynical and tech-savvy incarnation of Alfred yet to be seen (he functions more like Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox from the Nolan trilogy), Laurence Fishburne as a blustering Perry White, and Holly Hunter as the head of a Senate panel investigating Superman (another underdeveloped subplot that doesn't make much sense) as well as standing in the way of Luthor's master plan, but they don't really get to make an impression. Oh, and for some reason, Jimmy Olsen (Michael Cassidy) is now a covert CIA agent posing as a Daily Planet photographer. He's killed off early when he's made by terrorists, the first tip-off probably being that he was still using a camera with film in the year 2016.
For all its flaws--the messy structure, the inconsistent performances, the frequently ugly and smudgy look of the whole thing (closeups look really bad)--BVS is never dull and there are some spectacular action sequences and somewhat better CGI than the destruction porn that dominated the botched second half of MAN OF STEEL. The film's biggest obstacle, and one thing about which critics have been completely right, is the truly mind-bogglingly awful performance by Eisenberg, who plays Lex Luthor as an obnoxious, insufferable trust-fund brat. Eisenberg's whole approach to Luthor seems to have been to study Heath Ledger's Joker and filter it through his Mark Zuckerberg repertoire. He flails his arms, twitches, smirks, preens, poses, and breaks up and punctuates his sentences with "hmm"s like Deltoid in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. It's a grating, appalling, Razzie-ready spaz attack of a performance, one of the most off-putting and abrasively unpleasant in recent memory. Eisenberg is never convincing and never threatening, never coming off like a feared megalomaniacal villain but rather, an attention-seeking, spoiled little shit in dire need of a time-out.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, has been universally panned but everybody's still going to see it. The sizable crowd with whom I saw it didn't seem to hate it. They loved Wonder Woman. They laughed at the very few intentionally funny lines. There's the oft-mentioned disconnect between critics and audiences, and while it's got a surplus of flaws and dubious decision-making, it never succeeded in pissing me off at any point, and I can't say the same about MAN OF STEEL and its second-half implosion. Let's face it, whether it was the casting of Affleck or the decision to bring back Snyder or the various ways it deviates from the comic books (I've never been into comic books, so these filmmakers can do whatever they want with the material, I don't care), the trolls and the haters were never going to give this a chance. Going back to Tim Burton's BATMAN in 1989, has there ever been an initially positive response to any announcement of who's playing Batman? Do comic book fans ever not have a hissy fit and react to these kinds of things in a way that makes THE SIMPSONS' Comic Book Guy the most accurate. Representation. Ever? Critics don't need to sink to that level. The trolls and the haters will always be there because what else do they have? But they shouldn't be the ones making a living as objective reviewers resorting to clickbait tactics in a dying field whose continued relevance is constantly being questioned. Maybe it's lowered expectations, but this movie isn't that fucking bad, and if film criticism is going to continue to be a thing, everyone--from career reviewers to hobbyist bloggers--needs to step up their game. Leave the irrational pile-on to the IMDb message board denizens.
Directed by David O. Russell. Written by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell. Cast: Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Pena, Shea Whigham, Alessandro Nivola, Elisabeth Rohm, Paul Herman, Colleen Camp, Anthony Zerbe, Barry Primus, Said Taghmaoui. (R, 138 mins)
In his "fictionalized" chronicle of the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal, director David O. Russell wears his love of Martin Scorsese on his sleeve, shooting much of the film in that same propulsive, electrifying style that's made GOODFELLAS one of the great American movies. Imitating Scorsese is nothing new, but the trick is to not let the hero worship trump everything else. Paul Thomas Anderson got that with BOOGIE NIGHTS and Russell accomplishes it here. Working with screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (who wrote Tom Tykwer's underrated THE INTERNATIONAL), Russell reassembles most of the main actors from his last two films (2010's THE FIGHTER and 2012's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK), changes the names of the principles involved in the scandal, and creates one of the most vividly compelling films of 2013: it's suspenseful, hilarious, brilliantly-acted, filled with rich characters, bad fashions and horrible hair, and mostly succeeds in capturing the period, except for one major gaffe where a character mentions reading Wayne Dyer's The Power of Intention, which wasn't published until 2004. Oops.
Sporting a gut and an unsightly combover, Christian Bale is Irving Rosenfeld, a small-timer who owns a dry-cleaning chain, mainly as a front for his con jobs, primarily in art forgery and the bilking of gullible investors. His partner-in-crime is Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who puts on a flawless British accent to pose as one Lady Edith Greensly, a supposed tangential member of the Royal Family. The pair met at a party years earlier and bonded over a shared love of Duke Ellington, with a romance blossoming even though Irving is married to the unstable, needy Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) and is a devoted father to their young son. Irving and Sydney fall into the web of ambitious FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who busts Sydney for embezzlement but offers both of them a way out if they agree to set up a sting involving Camden, NJ mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner, looking a lot like Steve Lawrence), a politician fiercely devoted to the people of his city and one who understands that palms need to be greased and under-the-table deals need to be made and if his corruption is for the greater good, then so be it. Along with a Hispanic FBI agent (Michael Pena) posing as a sheik, Richie, Irving, and "Lady Edith" try to get Polito to coordinate a business deal between some rich Arabs and an Atlantic City casino, which gets complicated when aging Florida mobster Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro) wants in on the action and tells them that the Sheik has to be a US citizen for any casino deal to happen. This leads to the increasingly edgy, reckless Richie and his bosses (Louis C.K., Alessandro Nivola) launching a larger operation to bust Tellegio, a top capo to Meyer Lansky, along with the bribing of several Congressmen under the guise of getting US citizenship for the Sheik. And if that wasn't enough, Rosalyn is enraged about her husband's involvement with Sydney and starts seeing one of Tellegio's underlings (Jack Huston) and, as is the norm with the manipulative Rosalyn, starts talking way too much about the things she knows and even more about the things she doesn't
Russell's use of music, narration, and long tracking shots are pure Scorsese, and the editing team of Alan Baumgarten, Jay Cassidy, and Crispin Struthers do a spot-on imitation of the rhythms and momentum established by Scorsese and his regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It doesn't have the continuity errors that plague even the undisputed Scorsese masterpieces (because he and Schoonmaker go for the takes that "feel" the best and he isn't overly concerned with continuity), but the film has the loose, improvisational feel of vintage Scorsese while also exhibiting the discipline and vision of the master filmmaker. In lesser hands, this could've turned into a pale imitation, but Russell very credibly brings it to life with a cast that's at the top of their game. Few of today's actors can disappear into a role like Bale (an Oscar-winner for THE FIGHTER), whose Irving has layers of humanity and a conscience beneath his dodgy, fast-talking exterior, and Cooper, who just a few years ago had "rom-com lightweight" written all over him, continues to show impressive range under the guidance of Russell, who directed him to an Oscar nomination in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Adams (nominated for THE FIGHTER), Renner, and Lawrence (a winner for SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK) are expectedly top-notch, as is De Niro in his one scene (he's both a Russell vet and the very embodiment of Scorsese's films), but another standout is C.K. as Richie's exasperated, bottom-line-watching direct supervisor, who gets a running gag about not finishing an ice-fishing story (also keep an eye out for Cooper's dead-on impression of C.K., which feels like an ad-libbed moment and it works beautifully). Though he doesn't go as far as to include Scorsese's favorite song, the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (and he mercifully excludes Blondie's "Heart of Glass," which is a seemingly mandatory inclusion for any film set in the late 1970s), Russell's song selection is impeccable: America's "A Horse With No Name," Chicago's "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" Steely Dan's "Dirty Work," Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," Tom Jones' "Delilah," ELO's "10538 Overture," and "Long Black Road," a new song from ELO leader Jeff Lynne, plus Lawrence shrieking Wings' "Live and Let Die" while cleaning the house in a blind rage. AMERICAN HUSTLE, which was conceived under the title AMERICAN BULLSHIT, is hypnotically, relentlessly fast-paced entertainment that hooks you in from the first grainy shot of the 1970s Columbia Pictures logo and never lets go. One of 2013's very best films.
Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by David S. Goyer. Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Antje Traue, Ayelet Zurer, Christopher Meloni, Harry Lennix, Richard Schiff, Michael Kelly, Dylan Sprayberry, Cooper Timberline, Julian Richings. (PG-13, 143 mins)
It's only through sheer luck that Zack Snyder, the director that fanboys love to hate, hasn't become a Hollywood pariah of M. Night Shyamalan proportions. Love him or hate him--and if internet message boards are to be taken seriously, most movie fans fall under the latter--there's no denying that Snyder's got balls. This is a guy who not only had the chutzpah to remake a classic like George A. Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, but shocked even the most doubtful naysayers (myself included) when that 2004 remake turned out to be surprisingly good. After his 2006 blockbuster 300, Snyder helmed 2009's WATCHMEN, an ambitious fool's mission that had no possibility of pleasing fans of the legendary graphic novel, but works very well taken on its own terms, especially in the 186-minute director's cut. Following the 2010 animated film LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE, Snyder unveiled his most divisive film yet with 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, which opened to devastating reviews in what looked a lot more like a critical pile-on rather than an objective analysis of the film. It's amazing that Snyder got a major studio to bankroll his bizarre pet project, especially considering that WATCHMEN didn't live up to box-office expectations. SUCKER PUNCH is one of the most misunderstood and unjustly maligned major-studio films in recent years, and if you got caught up in the rabid bloodlust that took it down, it might be worth another look. In just two years, it's already acquired a fervent cult following, and if there's such a thing as "Zack Snyder's masterpiece," I'm almost certain it will be SUCKER PUNCH.
A lot of directors with more clout than Snyder would've been bounced off the A-list after a commercial failure like SUCKER PUNCH, but he's obviously got believers in his corner at Warner Bros., who tapped him to helm the SUPERMAN reboot MAN OF STEEL. Teaming with producer Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer, Snyder's revisionist take on the Superman saga tries to go for a dark and ultra-serious DARK KNIGHT approach and for about half of the film, it looks like they might pull it off. We don't really need another Superman origin story, but we get one anyway, and it doesn't really look or feel like any previous SUPERMAN outing. On the dying planet Krypton, scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) refuses to go along with a coup by irate military leader General Zod (Michael Shannon). Jor-El and his wife Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer) have just accomplished the unthinkable and had a child via natural birth, which hasn't happened on Krypton in 3000 years. That child, Kal-El, is sent to Earth with a device known as the "codex," which will be able to preserve the Kryptonian people.
30 years later, the infant Kal-El has grown into drifter Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), who works a series of odd jobs, never staying anywhere too long since hints of his true nature always start to manifest, as they have since childhood when his spacecraft was found in Smallville, KS by the childless Kents. Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and Martha (Diane Lane) raised Clark, living in constant fear that the government would come and take him away, but as Jonathan explains, "nobody ever came." Teenaged Clark's superhuman powers--demonstrated when he pulls a bus filled with students out of the river--make him a misunderstood outcast, and following Jonathan's death, he leaves Smallville on a quest to find himself. The secret to his nature lies in a frozen spacecraft where he learns about his true self from the holographic image of Jor-El. Meanwhile, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is chasing a story that brings her together with Clark, right around the same time that the banished Zod figures out that the codex is on Earth, and that Jor-El's son might be in possession of it.
So far, so good. Maybe not for the purists, but as a radically different take on a familiar subject, MAN OF STEEL gets off to a promising start. But once Zod arrives on Earth, Snyder seems to check out and the film becomes just another loud, blurry, ugly alien invasion epic with wall-to-wall video-game CGI and endless 9/11-inspired destruction porn straight out of a TRANSFORMERS movie. Throughout the film, but especially in the second half, Snyder uses--and overuses--an incredibly annoying shaky-zoom move in nearly every scene. I don't even mind the changes they made to the origin story. I don't read comic books and I'm not slavishly devoted to any of these characters or stories and filmmakers are free to show me any interpretation of them that they so desire. But the constant sense of destructive spectacle--and it's really not spectacular--just goes on forever and gets dizzyingly dull around the time the 43rd Metropolis skyscraper slowly collapses. The actors take a good chunk of the climax off, replaced by CGI doppelgangers who pinball all over the screen. I thought the CGI backlash and eventual moviegoer rejection of it would've happened by this point, but I guess I just need to put up or shut up. This is obviously just how movies look now.
Cavill is physically an impressive, imposing Superman, but we don't see much in the way of emotion beyond moody and sullen. Christopher Reeve is a tough act to follow in this role, and it's not Cavill's fault--he's just not working with much of a script. From a story and screenplay standpoint, Nolan and Goyer seem to be having a rare off-day here, or maybe the dark and grim post-9/11 motif just works better for Batman. Then again, Nolan's BATMAN films had some thematic depth to them and didn't turn into Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich joints in their second halves, so it's hard to say whether it was Nolan's or Snyder's call to dumb it down to lowest common denominator destruction. MAN OF STEEL starts strong but ultimately, there's just no story here. It makes the hero dull and uninteresting, and the villain one-dimensionally cartoonish, with Shannon's overacting a weak substitute for Terence Stamp's Zod from SUPERMAN (1978) and SUPERMAN II (1981), and he's not helped by a ludicrously distracting hipster goatee. Reliable pros like Laurence Fishburne (as Perry White), Christopher Meloni and Harry Lennix (as military officials), and Richard Schiff (as a scientist or something) are onscreen a lot but have little to do. Crowe makes an interesting, man-of-action Jor-El and has much more to do than in Marlon Brando's check-cashing interpretation of the character, which seemed scripted around how little work Brando really wanted to do while still getting top billing.
The film's most human, sympathetic moments come from Lane and Costner. Costner only has a few scenes, all flashbacks, but he projects the same loving, fatherly warmth that Glenn Ford did so masterfully in only two brief scenes in the 1978 film, which handled Pa Kent's death in a way that seemed more authentic. [SPOILER] In MAN OF STEEL, it's an excuse for another big special effects scene, and no matter how heartbreaking that shot is of Costner holding his hand up and silently telling Clark to not save him, the circumstances are just too hard to buy [END SPOILER]. But therein lies the central problem with MAN OF STEEL: it has no heart and ultimately, no purpose after the midway point. After setting up what would seem to be a unique take on the Superman story in Snyder's typical expectations-be-damned way, it all gets chucked to make another faceless, soulless, instantly disposable Hollywood summer product, completely interchangeable with countless others that have come before it. Snyder has proven himself a fearless filmmaker, but in giving MAN OF STEEL the DARK KNIGHT treatment, he's made an intermittently interesting misfire that, when it's finally over, feels less like an auteur's vision and more like something that's been focus-grouped into immediate irrelevance.
Directed by Robert Lorenz. Written by Randy Brown. Cast: Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, Robert Patrick, Matthew Lillard, Ed Lauter, Chelcie Ross, Ray Anthony Thomas, Bob Gunton, George Wyner, Jack Gilpin, Peter Hermann, Scott Eastwood. (PG-13, 110 mins)
Four years since he last appeared onscreen in 2008's GRAN TORINO, Clint Eastwood returns in the first film he's starred in without directing since 1993's IN THE LINE OF FIRE. Longtime Eastwood assistant director/producing partner Robert Lorenz makes his directing debut with TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, and also demonstrates the same laid-back, leisurely-paced feel of many of Eastwood's late-career behind-the-camera efforts. Unlike a lot of non-Clint-directed films that he probably backseat-directed but didn't care enough to take the credit (meaning, THE DEAD POOL or PINK CADILLAC or anything supposedly directed by his decades-long pal Buddy Van Horn), Lorenz probably was in charge on TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, if for no other reason than its utterly generic, Hallmark Channel TV-movie feel, right down to the bland, manipulative score by the usually reliable Marco Beltrami. Eastwood's been composing his own jazzy scores for years. There's no way Beltrami's by-the-numbers score would be on this if it was Eastwood's movie.
TROUBLE finds Clint in his now-standard "Get off my lawn!" mode, playing crusty old Atlanta Braves baseball scout Gus Lobel. Gus is having prostate issues, needs a hearing aid, and his eyes are going bad, so the last thing he wants to deal with is the smug condescension of a snotty colleague (Matthew Lillard) who thinks he's an outdated relic and wants to push him out of the organization. Gus has the support of front office exec and longtime friend Pete (John Goodman), who cajoles Gus' tomboy, baseball-loving lawyer daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) into accompanying the old man on a scouting trip to observe a much-ballyhooed high-school prospect in North Carolina. Mickey's got plenty of unresolved issues with Gus, starting right after her mom's death in 1984, after which Gus sent six-year-old Mickey to live with an aunt & uncle.
The fill-in-the-blanks script by first-time screenwriter Randy Brown leaves no cliche unutilized and no heartstring untugged. It would be pretty hard to take if not for a cast of pros, all of whom almost certainly signed on without even reading Brown's script just to get a chance to work with Clint. And at this point in his life and career, all the man really needs to do is show up and be Clint and we're hooked. Even at 82, he's still got the same screen presence he had nearly 50 years ago in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and as he's gotten older, no one has cornered the market on gruff, crotchety old bastards like Eastwood. He doesn't try very hard here, because he doesn't have to, and he turns in a very natural performance that demonstrates a cozy familiarity that his fans, especially the now-elderly ones who've been with him since his TV days on RAWHIDE, clearly welcome.
But if you're looking for a realistic portrayal of "the game," this ain't it. Demonstrating a definite anti-MONEYBALL mentality, TROUBLE gets behind Gus and his disdain for "those damn computers" that can't replicate the gut feeling that an experienced scout gets while watching a prospect. Truthfully, TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE isn't very good, but it gets a tremendous lift from the believably lived-in feel of the performances of Eastwood and Adams, plus Justin Timberlake as a burned-out former Braves pitcher turned White Sox scout. There isn't a single plot development you won't see telegraphed 20 minutes before it happens. Chances are, you'll even predict the maudlin dialogue before the actors even speak it. But it just goes to prove how much a film can coast on someone as iconic as Eastwood. He initially planned to retire from acting after GRAN TORINO, and TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE does feel rather slight and frivolous considering how much of a perfect screen career capper GRAN TORINO would've been. But hey, it's Clint onscreen again, with his pants hiked up, chomping on stogies, scowling and bitching about everything, so why complain?
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers, Jesse Plemons, Rami Malek, Kevin J. O'Connor, Madisen Beaty, Christopher Evan Welch. (R, 138 mins)
Don't look for any straightforward storytelling in THE MASTER, easily the most impenetrable and difficult work yet from Paul Thomas Anderson. Drifting away from the kinetic, propulsive, last-third-of-Scorsese's GOODFELLAS-style structure of BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) and MAGNOLIA (1999) and feeling colder and even more stand-offish than his most recent film, THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007), THE MASTER is not something easily digested in one viewing or even five. I'm not even sure if I like it, and that's never been a reaction I've had after seeing a Paul Thomas Anderson film (BOOGIE NIGHTS is probably my favorite film of the 1990s). There's a lot to admire in THE MASTER, but it's a film that never lets you in, and not in the way of needing everything explained to you. It keeps you at a distance and really doesn't let you know entirely what's going on or what the stakes are or why some people behave the way they do.
Joaquin Phoenix, in his first film since his I'M STILL HERE/"retiring from acting to become a rap star" prank/debacle that claimed James Gray's excellent TWO LOVERS as a casualty, stars as Freddie Quell, a disturbed WWII vet trying to adjust to postwar life. He's belligerent, antisocial, drinks too much (making his own concoctions with distilled paint thinner), and seems to have an immature fixation on the female anatomy. His unpredictable, often violent behavior gets him tossed from job after job, and by chance, he stows away on a boat that's hosting an extended wedding party for the daughter of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Dodd is a doctor, a philosopher, and the guru of a new religious belief known as The Cause (intended by Anderson to represent L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, though the film isn't specifically about the religion itself). With nowhere else to go, and with Dodd enjoying his unusual beverage concoctions, Freddie becomes Dodd's de facto right-hand man in his quest to legitimize The Cause, even physically assaulting those who dare to question Dodd's teachings. From then on, the film focuses on the relationship between Dodd--"The Master"--and Freddie, and there's any number of interpretations to draw from it. Are they two sides of the same coin? Have they met, either in this life or in another? Is Freddie a spy who might turn on Dodd? Is Freddie welcomed into the Dodd family much like Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler became part of the family of Burt Reynolds' Jack Horner in BOOGIE NIGHTS? Is this all a complicated man-crush or is unrequited, or even forbidden love?
THE MASTER looks stunning, from the beautiful cinematography to the painstaking production design and period detail. Hoffman is a commanding presence, and he's matched by Amy Adams as Dodd's devoted, controlling wife Peggy, who may be more in charge of The Cause than Dodd's devoted followers think. You've never seen Adams like this before, putting a disturbing spin on her inherent red-headed feistiness to where Peggy is either very brainwashed or she the one really calling the shots. Is she jealous of Dodd's bond with Freddie? Why does she tell him he can do whatever he wants as long as she or people they know don't find out about it? And why does she do this while jerking Dodd off and calmly demanding "Come for me"?
It's Phoenix who gets the film's most difficult and problematic role, and he too often succumbs to hamming it up and going overboard with the tics and mannerisms, but he has to keep up such a tortured intensity between Freddie's contorted stature and his weird body language that the actor looks like he's in constant physical pain. It's a brave performance and an almost impossible role to play, and I'm still not sure whether my issues are with the character or with the way Phoenix is playing him. But there's no denying how brilliant he is in his "sessions" with Hoffman's Dodd, or when Dodd makes Freddie go through an entire day of repetitively walking across a room and describing the wall and the window, or in one amazing scene of sustained, top-of-their-voice shouting from Phoenix and Hoffman as their characters argue in adjacent jail cells.
I'm still not sure what to make of THE MASTER. On one hand, it's too original, bold, and inventive to dismiss, but on the other, it's the first time I've felt Anderson was being pompous and pretentious, and a "Slow Boat to China" serenade isn't quite "I drink your milkshake!" In equal measures brilliant and overwrought, ambitious and aloof, hypnotic and baffling, THE MASTER is like no other film you've ever seen (except maybe John Huston's long-buried 1946 documentary LET THERE BE LIGHT, from which Anderson quoted several lines of dialogue), which is what we've come to expect from Paul Thomas Anderson. And like it or not, he's made the film he wanted to make. I'm just not quite sure what he wanted.
