A Brian Wilson biopic that doesn't follow the standard formula of music biopics, LOVE & MERCY is an original and often deeply moving look at two significant periods in the life of the Beach Boys mastermind. Director Bill Pohlad, a busy producer (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, THE TREE OF LIFE, 12 YEARS A SLAVE) helming his first film since 1990's barely-released and long-forgotten OLD EXPLORERS, and screenwriters Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) and Michael Alan Lerner structure LOVE & MERCY as two parallel, GODFATHER PART II-type narratives as we see the beginning of the 1965 psychological breakdown of young Wilson, or "Brian Past" (Paul Dano) with the fragile shell of a man that is "Brian Future" (John Cusack) in 1988. The cracks are already starting to show with Brian hearing voices in his head before retiring from touring in 1965 to work exclusively in the studio on the Beach Boys' landmark Pet Sounds, which drives a wedge between him and bandmate/cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel). In 1988, an awkward and eccentric Brian stops into a car dealership to impulsively buy a Cadillac and meets salesperson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), when a team of handlers headed by his therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) arrive to escort him out. As Brian and Melinda grow closer, she sees Landy's mistreatment of Brian--misdiagnosing him as a paranoid schizophrenic, overmedicating him, psychologically abusing him, and bringing along his own group of hangers-on to essentially live off of Brian's fortune, even taking over Brian's larger beach house and moving him into a smaller one nearby.
Telling two stories with two different actors playing the same role (shades of the multiple Bob Dylans in I'M NOT THERE) is an unusual choice that pays off. While Dano strongly resembles Brian Past, Cusack looks nothing like Brian Future, but it doesn't matter. Dano handles the breakdown while Cusack plays the result, with their performances brilliantly complementing one another. In his best role in years, Cusack inhabits Brian Future through halting and nervous body language that never crosses the line into becoming a mannered Brian Wilson impression. He approaches the role not unlike Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford on SNL--he looks and sounds nothing like the person he's playing, but he uses his skills to bring the character alive in a way that's accurate and very believable. Many actors would've turned it into an Oscar-baiting tic-fest, but Cusack is effectively understated, reminding you what a terrific performer he can be when he's not slumming it and vaping his way through bad VOD thrillers. While Dano and Cusack are the dramatic focus, Banks also does career-best work as the emotional core of LOVE & MERCY, the woman who would become his second wife (one of the film's few missteps is the short shrift given to Brian's first wife Audree, played by a barely-there Joanna Going). Giamatti is fine, though he's largely playing "Paul Giamatti," with Landy prone to outbursts of blustery rage, which works as Landy was accurately the villain in the Wilson story, along with, to a lesser degree, the unsympathetic Love and the stern, impossible-to-please Wilson patriarch, played here by Bill Camp (COMPLIANCE). A minor word-of-mouth sleeper hit over the summer of 2015, LOVE & MERCY is, thus far, one of the standout films of the year, with performances from Cusack, Dano, and Banks that deserve to be remembered come awards season, and one that refreshingly avoids the pitfalls and cliches of the music biopic genre. (PG-13, 121 mins) WELCOME TO NEW YORK (France/US - 2014; US release 2015)
NYC auteur Abel Ferrara is no stranger to unflinching provocation and getting his actors to bare their souls and more--he is, after all, the mad genius who directed Harvey Keitel's legendary performance in 1992's BAD LIEUTENANT. A long way removed from his '80s and '90s flirtations with commercial film and television, Ferrara has spent most of the last decade and a half making documentaries and little-seen films that didn't even get any US exposure beyond a sporadic festival screening. 2012's bohemian end-of-the-world drama 4:44: LAST DAY ON EARTH was the first narrative Ferrara film to get US distribution in a decade. WELCOME TO NEW YORK finds Ferrara reaching back to his BAD LIEUTENANT side for a not-very-thinly-veiled account of the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, when the French economist, politician, and IMF managing director known to his friends and the media as "DSK" was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel employee who arrived to clean his suite at the Sofitel New York Hotel. Charges were eventually dropped due supposed credibility issues of the accuser and that much of the evidence was inconclusive, but DSK soon faced other allegations in France in what seemed to be a behavioral pattern. Gerard Depardieu stars in WELCOME TO NEW YORK as the DSK figure, here named "Devereaux," a high-powered exec at a French financial behemoth who's in NYC for one day on business. Once that's done, he decompresses in his hotel suite with an all-night-long parade of prostitutes. The next morning, a maid (Pamela Afesi) enters the suite, announces she's from housekeeping, but a showering Devereaux doesn't hear her. Once he's out of the shower, he drops his towel and pushes her down to her knees, grunting "Do you know who I am?" He's on his way to JFK Airport when he realizes he's left his phone at the hotel, so the cops, already taking the maid's statement, intercept him at the airport under the guise of returning his phone and arrest him, forcing his long-suffering wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) to fly over from Paris to bail him out and set up a legal team while he's equipped with an ankle bracelet and confined to a $60K per month apartment she's rented.
All the while, Devereaux remains calm and relaxed, spending his house arrest watching movies under the assumption that something--his constant invocation of diplomatic immunity, his wealth and privilege, the ambitious Simone's political connections, his attorneys' manipulation of the media--will get him off the hook. Of course, he assumes correctly, but at the same time, Ferrara presents a portrait of a man both entitled and ill, who's convinced himself he's done nothing wrong while admitting he's powerless to combat what he is. Similar to the fearless work he got from Keitel in BAD LIEUTENANT, Ferrara convinced Depardieu to abandon all illusions of shame and modesty and literally let it all hang out. Whether he's being strip-searched or attempting to force himself into the maid's mouth--during which a shot from behind captures the legendary actor's dangling scrotum--Depardieu throws all of himself into WELCOME TO NEW YORK in ways he hasn't done for many years. Likewise for Bisset, who first appears around 40 minutes in and quickly becomes the focus of the film. Simone is a woman with social and political aspirations for her and her husband (cue obvious Clinton analogy) who comes from money but is fully aware of what kind of man she married. She accepts his excesses--the booze, his predilection for prostitutes, his sex addiction--because they need each other. Simone doesn't buy Devereaux's claim that the rape accusation is false, and his excuse of "I just jerked on her! I just jerked on her mouth! That's all!" doesn't win him any sympathy. Ferrara goes for ultra-realism in the early going, in terms of the profoundly uncomfortable sequence between Devereaux and the maid, and with the police pursuit of him, where Ferrara makes the decision to cast the roles of the Port Authority and NYPD cops with real Port Authority and NYPD cops, who do a very good job of lending a gritty immediacy and not coming across like amateur actors. The first half is a riveting tour de force for Depardieu and represents some of Ferrara's best filmmaking since his early '90s heyday. There's a bit of a shift once Bisset arrives and she gets a couple of astonishingly vicious tirades to remind us that she's a terrific actress who hasn't been used to the best of her ability over the years.
Things bog down a bit in the home stretch, with some ponderous voiceover by Devereaux and some arguments with Simone that start to get repetitive. The cranky Ferrara loudly complained about both US distributor IFC and French co-producer Vincent Maraval preparing a 108-minute, R-rated US cut and not releasing Ferrara's 125-minute cut that was slapped with an NC-17 rating. While some of the more salacious material may have been eliminated, mostly from an early orgy sequence (we still get Depardieu's nutbag, however), WELCOME TO NEW YORK could still use some trimming near the end, which seems a little draggy even in the cut version. The only other weakness in the film is Ferrara's odd choice of showing a prologue that has Depardieu as himself being interviewed by reporters about why he chose to take this role--it's not even a real interview, as one of the reporters is played by Ferrara's girlfriend and associate producer Shanyn Leigh, demoted to bit player after her terrible lead performance in 4:44. While what's here was released under vehement protest by its maker, WELCOME TO NEW YORK is still a welcome return to vintage form for Abel Ferrara and, if you're so inclined, an opportunity to see more of Gerard Depardieu than you ever thought possible. (R, 108 mins) ELIMINATION GAME (Australia - 2014; US release 2015)
ELIMINATION GAME was released in its native Australia as TURKEY SHOOT, much like the film it remakes, Brian Trenchard-Smith's 1982 cult classic TURKEY SHOOT, released in the US in 1983 as ESCAPE 2000. A future dystopian take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, ESCAPE 2000 was a mean and ultra-violent exploitation film that became a huge hit on cable throughout the '80s. The remake, which counts Trenchard-Smith among its producers, is an abomination: amateurishly-made and thoroughly shameless in the way it cribs from other, better movies. More of a satire on reality TV along the lines of THE RUNNING MAN and Paul W.S. Anderson's DEATH RACE, ELIMINATION GAME finds disgraced Navy SEAL Rick Tyler (a more lifeless-than-usual performance by former PRISON BREAK star and new Yoplait pitchman Dominic Purcell) rewarded for taking out a Libyan dictator (ESCAPE 2000's Roger Ward) at the behest of his commanding officer Gen. Thatcher (late 1970's TV Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond) and US President Sheila Farr (Carmen Duncan) by being thrown under the bus and sentenced to death for fabricated war crimes. Three years later, he's given a chance at freedom: being the target on "Turkey Shoot," the world's most popular TV show, which pits him in a fight for his life as expert assassins try to take him out, all for the entertainment of a global audience. Of course, Tyler manages to emerge victorious against his foes or there'd be no movie, and he's keeping top killer Ramrod (LONGMIRE's Robert Taylor, trying to make something out of nothing) alive for a reason.
ELIMINATION GAME wants to think it's perceptive satire, but its targets--vapid TV show hosts, bitch-on-wheels programming executive, corrupt government officials--are pitifully one-dimensional and obvious and its attempts to win over the audience with ESCAPE 2000 references--Ward's cameo, a scene from the 1982 film visible on someone's TV--just makes you want to watch ESCAPE 2000 instead (speaking of references to better movies, legendary Ozploitation producer Antony I. Ginnane has a cameo as Australasian president Charley Varrick). Purcell has never been worse, though putting yourself in his position, would you try? The lumbering lummox is defeated by any number of things, whether it's director/co-writer Jon Hewitt's tired use of shaky-cam, endless DOOM-like first-person shooter POV shots and crummy CGI, or letting whole sequences play out through CCTV footage and security cameras. The editing is very choppy and whole chunks of story seem to be missing. Also, for "Turkey Shoot" being as popular as it is, we never get enough of a sense of the outside world or how everyone would drop what they're doing to watch it. All of this would be petty nitpicking if ELIMINATION GAME was even reasonably clever or entertaining, or offered anything remotely worthwhile. There's no shortage of dark-humored avenues to travel if you're going to roast the concept of reality TV, but this is lazy and uninspired on an almost Friedberg/Seltzer level, and it easily supplants Mark Hartley's well-intentioned but botched PATRICK as the worst remake of an Ozploitation classic. When the best moment of your remake is a shot of the film it's remaking seen on a character's TV, then that's all the evidence you need to confirm that you really needn't have bothered. (Unrated, 90 mins)
It's a sign of the times that WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD got publicity less for being the latest film by a genuine 1990s indie auteur who's never gone Hollywood and has happily remained on the fringes, and more for being the "Shailene Woodley gets naked" movie. Gregg Araki, who made his name during the '90s indie explosion with THE LIVING END (1992), TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993), THE DOOM GENERATION (1995), and NOWHERE (1997), isn't a young man anymore and at 55, he seems to have mellowed with age. Based on a novel by Laura Kasischke, WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD is a puzzling film from Araki--not in the sense of its content, but in its presentation. It's essentially a straightforward, commercial thriller filtered through the ethereally dreamy haze of Sofia Coppola's THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (2000). Taking place from 1988 to 1991, WHITE BIRD centers on Kat Connors (Woodley, of THE DESCENDANTS and the DIVERGENT series), a 17-year-old high school student with typical teenage ennui. School sucks, the town is a drag, and her parents--milquetoast father Brock (Christopher Meloni) and mentally unstable mother Eve (Eva Green)--are lame. The miserable Eve has steadily gone off the deep end as Kat has gotten older, become more independent, and likely to be out with her stoner boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) instead of hanging out at home with Mom. Eve feels life has passed her by and she takes turns blaming Kat, who has learned to ignore her, and Brock, who crawls inside of his shell or, if he's in the mood, hides in the basement to jerk off to his Hustler stash. One day, Kat returns home from school to find her father waiting for her. Eve has vanished. Kat isn't alarmed, as this apparently isn't the first time it's happened, but this time, Eve doesn't come back. Brock files a missing persons report with hunky local cop Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane), with whom Kat starts a casual fling when things cool off with Phil. Three years go by and there's no sign of Eve, but life has gone on. Kat is in college and Brock is dating May (Sheryl Lee), a co-worker at his office. Everyone's grown accustomed to Life After Eve, at least until a troubled Kat finally addresses the glaring absence of her mother in her life and faces a nagging suspicion that there's something being overlooked in her disappearance.
I haven't read the novel, but I do know that Araki drastically--and I mean drastically--changed the ending for the film in a way that makes you question everything that came beforehand. In that way, it's the kind of crazy and unexpected twist ending that's all too commonplace in most standard thrillers today. It works in the context of the film--and in being a Gregg Araki film--even if it totally alters the intent of whatever points Kasischke wanted to make with her novel. I did like the mood and the aura Araki establishes throughout, brilliantly abetted by a mix of '80s goth and alternative (Cocteau Twins' "Sea Swallow Me" perfectly kicks off the opening credits, and there's also songs by The Cure, Talk Talk, Depeche Mode, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, among others), and a dream pop-ish score by avant-garde musician Harold Budd and Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie. It's a thriller that disguises a coming-of-age drama when Kat, haunted by dreams where her mother cries out for her, finds she's unable to move on with her life until she knows what happened. It's not even that she necessarily misses her mother. No one seemed all that broken up about her vanishing. Even the police investigation seemed to go through the motions. Eve is a profoundly troubled woman prone to irrational tantrums and uncomfortable competitions with Kat, especially when it comes to getting Phil's attention (connoisseurs of cringe will have to look away during a flashback when Eve puts on a tight miniskirt and struts around the basement rec room where Kat and Phil are trying to do their homework). Eve is brought to vivid life by Green's patented crazy-eyes, psycho-bitch routine, seen in its full glory throughout her flashback sequences but never more haunting than when she looks at herself in a mirror and turns a dead stare into a wild-eyed, maniacal grin to the tune of Love and Rockets' "A Private Future". With her terrifying glare, Green's ability to throw herself into these kinds of characters has a history of single-handedly elevating mediocre trifles like DARK SHADOWS and 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE into must-see movies. Eva Greeniacs won't be disappointed with her work here, and she's in danger of typecasting even though this seems to be the niche she's chosen to carve for herself. The biggest surprise is Meloni, terrific in an unexpected role as a meek, slumped-shouldered doormat psychologically destroyed by his shrewish wife and quietly happy that she's decided to abandon them. There's some logic issues that pop up late in the game that beg the question of just how the cops did such a sloppy job with their investigation, but WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD is a low-key and very compelling film from a much less abrasive and in-your-face Araki, who doesn't work as frequently these days as he did in his '90s heyday--it's his first film since 2010's KABOOM, and the first I've seen since 2005's MYSTERIOUS SKIN--and gets fine performances from his cast, with a genuinely surprising finale, though serious fans of the book probably won't be as forgiving about the changes he's made. (R, 91 mins) JESSABELLE (US - 2014)
SAW VI and SAW 3-D director Kevin Greutert trades torture porn for jump scares in yet another JU-ON/THE GRUDGE-derived "vengeful ghost" saga that also serves as a Blumhouse Productions assembly-line revamp of the already-forgotten 2005 Kate Hudson chiller THE SKELETON KEY. A few weeks before JESSABELLE's release, distributor Lionsgate cancelled its nationwide rollout and instead went the limited release/VOD route, a good indication of how little faith they had in it. They've certainly made hits out of far worse films than JESSABELLE, but the story is dull despite an overstuffed plot courtesy of screenwriter Robert Ben Garant, whose past writing credits includes such horror classics as THE PACIFIER, HERBIE: FULLY LOADED, and BALLS OF FURY. Garant works in a wheelchair-bound woman in peril, voodoo, doom-filled tarot readings, messages from beyond the grave courtesy of some VHS tapes (points docked for blatant pandering to horror hipsters), and a couple of spectacular OMEN and FINAL DESTINATION-style deaths, but it does nothing to stand out from the crowd. Jessie (Sarah Snook) moves in with her estranged father (David Andrews) after a car crash claims the lives of her fiance and her unborn child and keeps her in a wheelchair while she undergoes physical therapy. She finds a box of VHS tapes left for her by her mother (JUSTIFIED's Joelle Carter), who died of cancer in 1988 when Jessie was a baby. In them, her mom gives her tarot readings that indicate a presence doesn't want her in the house. Soon, Jessie starts seeing apparitions of a screeching specter with long dark hair (Amber Stevens) and her father accidentally sets himself on fire in a tool shed that locks itself when he tries to burn the videotapes. Jessie reconnects with her now-married high-school boyfriend (Mark Webber) and they dig into the mystery of who this ghost is and why it's so adamantly against Jessie's presence in the house. Greutert goes for a bit of a slow-burn feel in JESSABELLE, and the bayou atmosphere is well-handled. It's a harmless and thoroughly average PG-13 fright flick that's by no means terrible, but you've seen it a hundred times before, you'll spot every jump scare several seconds before they happen, and it just evaporates from memory as soon as it's over. Australian actress Snook, so good in the recent PREDESTINATION, is a very appealing heroine and definitely a talent to watch. Hopefully she lands a breakout role soon and moves past these pay-your-dues gigs. (PG-13, 90 mins)
VIKTOR (UK/France/Russia - 2014)
Since Liam Neeson struck gold with TAKEN five years ago, aging leading men have been attempting to score hits by hitching a ride on the 60-ish Action Guy bandwagon. In the wake of Neeson's unexpected second career, we've had 59-year-old Kevin Costner in 3 DAYS TO KILL, 61-year-old Pierce Brosnan in THE NOVEMBER MAN, and 59-year-old Denzel Washington in THE EQUALIZER in 2014 alone, along with 68-year-old Sylvester Stallone, 67-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger, and 72-year-old Harrison Ford in THE EXPENDABLES 3. Everyone's getting in the game. But VIKTOR might feature the Geriatric Asskicker subgenre's most unlikely addition yet with 66-year-old Gerard Depardieu as Viktor Lambert, just paroled after serving seven years in a French prison and heading to Russia to tear Moscow apart in search of those responsible for the recent murder of his son. It seems Viktor's son got involved with drugs while working as a diamond runner for ruthless crime lord Belinski (Denis Karasov). Viktor teams up with his retired, out-of-the-game partner Suleiman (Eli Danker) and rekindles a romance with his old flame, posh club owner Alexandra (Elizabeth Hurley) in his obsessive quest to destroy Belinski's criminal empire and make everyone in his organization pay with their lives. Sample dialogue from Viktor to Belinski on the phone: "I just wanted you to hear the voice of the man who's going to kill you." Then, Belinski to his goons: "Breeeng mee heeez hee-yed!"
Written and directed by DTV vet Philippe Martinez (WAKE OF DEATH), VIKTOR is surprisingly well-shot on location in Moscow and some outlying areas. But Martinez's script is as routine as it gets (Russian mobsters! Again!) and the pacing is absolutely laborious. Other than Hurley, it's difficult to understand most of the cast due to the garbled accents of actors for whom English is a second language. Ten minutes are likely added to the running time just by the camera lingering on Karasov--who quite obviously is not fluent in English--valiantly struggling to say his lines phonetically. Hurley, appearing in just her second feature film in the last decade, still looks stunning, though she has a hard time selling Alexandra's insatiable lust for Viktor. Martinez spares us the explosive erotica of a Depardieu-Hurley sex scene but does offer Alexandra giving Viktor a post-coital shoulder-rub while kissing his neck. Despite his size being in the the ballpark of late-career Brando, Depardieu still has enough gravitas to convincingly to sell this character if he wanted to, but he just doesn't look like he cares. The film doesn't even get any dramatic mileage from the tragically poignant real-life parallel of Depardieu being a grieving father offscreen, having lost his 37-year-old son Guillaume in 2008. In several scenes, the French acting legend mumbles like Steven Seagal, his wandering eyes give away that he's reading cue cards or a teleprompter, and he doesn't even take part in the obligatory climactic showdown at an abandoned warehouse, instead having some guys crash into the warehouse and bring Belinski to him. It's here where Martinez completely drops the ball, as the entire film could've been redeemed had it been Depardieu crashing an SUV engulfed in CGI flames through the warehouse doors while hanging out of the window shooting at everyone. The $10 million VIKTOR didn't quite do for Depardieu what TAKEN did for Neeson: it opened on ten screens in the US with no publicity whatsoever last October and grossed just $623 in its first and only week of release. (Unrated, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
Quentin Tarantino cited this Israeli import as his favorite film of 2013, and it's no wonder. It's not only the work of a directing team (Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado) that obviously loves movies, but it's also frequently a slobbering fan letter to Tarantino himself. Not only is there a foot chase that replicates some shots of the Marcellus/Butch chase in PULP FICTION, but the second half of the film is essentially an extended homage to the RESERVOIR DOGS torture scene. Despite no hard evidence, loose cannon cop Micki (Lior Ashkenazi) is convinced that mild-mannered schoolteacher Dror (Rotem Keinan) is the pedophile serial killer who's been raping and killing young girls, decapitating them, leaving the bodies for the cops, and burying the heads in a secret place. Micki and some thuggish cops take Dror to an abandoned warehouse to beat a confession out of him, but a kid hanging around films them and posts the video on YouTube. After he's read the riot act and busted down to traffic--burly captain Tsvika (Dvir Benedek) actually says "I'm gonna bust you down to traffic"--Micki starts tailing Dror on his own time, and is given a wink and silent approval by Tsvika to "deal with" Dror in any way he sees fit. Micki's plan is derailed by Gidi (Tzahi Grad), the enraged father of the latest victim, who has his own plans for Dror and won't let Micki get in the way. Gidi follows Micki following Dror, incapacitates both men and takes them to a house in the woods in the middle of nowhere, a house he bought for the sole purpose of taking Dror there to torture him and put him through what all of the dead girls have gone through. He agrees to split the duties with Micki, at least until Micki realizes Gidi is a madman and instead forms a shaky alliance with Dror, the man he was going to kill on his own in the first place. Then things go from bad to worse when Gidi's aging father Yoram (Dov Glickman) unexpectedly shows up.
The filmmakers want to invoke a sense of Israel's history, and the occasional appearances by an affable Arab man on horseback ("Why do you Jews always think that we all want to kill you?") pay lip service to that, but really, BIG BAD WOLVES is just another vigilante movie, complete with broken and smashed appendages, cutting and slicing, yanked fingernails and toenails, and various blowtorchings, and while it's better than most, being in Israeli with English subtitles doesn't add a layer of arthouse cred or meaningful depth. There's no denying it's a very well-made film anchored by four terrific performances, and the directors get things off to a hypnotically powerful start with a hauntingly graceful De Palma-esque sequence of kids playing hide-and-seek. There's also some amusing bits of dark humor throughout--the Arab stranger, circumstances forcing Micki to ride a kids bicycle, Tsvika and his young son ("It's take-your-child-to-work day") tearing into Micki over his initial handling of Dror (Benedek is a real scene-stealer)--and while some will decry it as little more than torture porn, it's a bit above that. I don't think there's as much substance here as the filmmakers believe there to be, but enthusiastic filmmaking, an unabashed love of cinema, top-notch performances, and many instances of genuine suspense give BIG BAD WOLVES much credibility just as a solid, straightforward thriller, albeit one that's quite wince-inducing. (Unrated, 110 mins) A FAREWELL TO FOOLS (US/Romania/Belgium/Germany/France - 2013; US release 2014)
Based on the novel The Death of Ipu by Titus Popovici, who scripted the original 1971 Romanian film version THEN I SENTENCED THEM ALL TO DEATH, A FAREWELL TO FOOLS is a heavy-handed WWII-set morality tale that has too many mood swings to work effectively. The grim subject matter doesn't really mesh with the frequently comic presentation, complete with a bouncy, lighthearted score that sounds a lot like the sequence in THE GODFATHER PART II when young Vito Corleone and Clemenza broke into a house to steal an expensive rug. In a relentlessly hammy performance, Gerard Depardieu is Ipu, the idiot in a Nazi-occupied Romanian village who lives with a bullet from WWI lodged in his head and is regarded as a genial goof by the rest of the citizens. Ipu farms and does fix-it jobs and spends his free time playing war with lonely, mischievous orphan Alex (Bogdan Iancu), who lives with his aunt Margherita (Laura Morante) and minister uncle Johannes (a seriously miscast Harvey Keitel). On the edges of the village, a friendly German soldier (Andrei Seusan) lets Alex ride his motorcycle, and when Alex finishes taking it for a brief spin, he finds the soldier lying dead with his throat slit. The Germans in charge demand a confession from the guilty party or ten of the village's top authority figures and their wives will be executed at 5:00 the next morning. Rather than investigate the murder, Johannes and the rest--Margherita, the mayor, the police chief, the doctor, the notary public, etc., hatch a plan to invite Ipu over for dinner, butter him up, fill him with food and drink and convince him to take the fall, even though Johannes admits "Ipu was working with me all afternoon" when the soldier was murdered.
Johannes and the others are a reprehensible lot, and it's rather amusing watching them realize that Ipu isn't as dumb as he seems, but that's another problem with the film: Depardieu has been directed to play Ipu as whatever a particular scene needs him to be: lovable oaf, mischievous scamp, shell-shocked battle vet, or sly, duplicitous manipulator. Given significant latitude by director Bogdan Dreyer, the actor is all too happy to oblige and chew the scenery throughout, and Depardieu's gregarious presence is enjoyable even when it doesn't always make sense. It's possible that Ipu has been playing them to some extent all along, but 30 years is a long time to keep a ruse going (it also doesn't help that, at just 84 minutes, the film feels like it's been hacked down). Morante does little more than shriek and act hysterical, while Keitel just looks tired, sounds hoarse, and has no business playing a Bronx-accented Romanian priest (Keitel has never been good with accents). A FAREWELL TO FOOLS isn't a bad film, it's just a confused one that never finds a balance between its wildly varying tones of downbeat drama, biting satire, and borderline slapstick. Filmed in 2011, this bombed in its European release and only made it to a few theaters and VOD during its US dumping in early 2014. (PG-13, 84 mins) WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (UK/US - 2014)
An overbearing would-be satire of office politics, WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE is noteworthy only for the presence of a self-deprecating Jean-Claude Van Damme. JCVD plays Storm, a survivalist hired by an advertising CEO (Dennis Haysbert) to take the underlings in his firm to a distant island for a weekend team-building retreat in the wilderness. The pilot keels over after they land, and Storm is mauled by a tiger, which prompts a battle of wills between nice-guy Chris (Adam Brody) and asshole Phil (Rob Huebel) as the staff splits into LORD OF THE FLIES factions. Phil rechristens himself "Orco" and turns the island into an orgiastic SURVIVOR nightmare that makes the Kurtz compound in APOCALYPSE NOW look cozy and inviting, while Chris, office hottie crush Lisa (THE BLACKLIST's Megan Boone), bunny-obsessed quirky girl Brenda (Kristen Schaal), and stoner Jared (Eric Edelstein) try to figure out how to get off the island. That description sounds a lot darker than the film really is, as director Rob Meltzer and writer Jeff Kauffman consistently go for the cheapest laughs, usually involving orifices and things that come out of them. The comparisons between cut-throat world of the workplace and "the jungle" are forced and obvious, and the early office scenes play like a tired retread of HORRIBLE BOSSES or OFFICE SPACE. There's nothing here other than the novelty of seeing Van Damme in a comedy, but the movie isn't that funny and doesn't make very good use of him as he's absent for long stretches--Storm survives the tiger mauling and turns up again later, only to disappear once more until the climax--which probably has more to do with the filmmakers only having him for a limited time (of course, as per his usual package deal, he's brought along the dead weight duo of son Kristopher Van Varenberg--one of the film's 29 credited producers--and stunningly untalented daughter Bianca Bree). The Chris vs. Phil plot line is bland and predictable, and WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE feels a lot like a rambling SNL skit that won't end. (Unrated, 94 mins)
