On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: THE JESUS ROLLS (2020) and ARKANSAS (2020)

THE JESUS ROLLS
(US/France - 2020)

The Coen Bros. have made it clear that there's never going to be a sequel to their beloved 1998 cult classic THE BIG LEBOWSKI, but they did give John Turturro their blessing to move forward with his labor-of-love spinoff THE JESUS ROLLS. Turturro's Jesus Quintana, a trash-talking bowling rival of The Dude, Walter, and Donny and a convicted pederast ("Eight-year-olds, Dude"), only had a couple of scenes in THE BIG LEBOWSKI, but the actor turned a minor character into a fan favorite, complete with his teasing lick of the bowling ball, his triumphant strike dance, and his catchphrase "Nobody fucks with the Jesus!" Jesus was funny in those two very small doses, but is there enough there to carry his own movie? Turturro certainly thought so, and spent years writing this during his downtime between other projects before finally shooting it way back in 2016. The fact that it took this long to get a limited release followed by VOD is the big red flag that this is decidedly not THE BIG LEBOWSKI II: THE JESUS ROLLS. It is, however, a remake of Bertrand Blier's controversial 1974 French film GOING PLACES, about two road-tripping buddies and petty criminals (one of them a young Gerard Depardieu) and their sexual exploits, with the two of them eventually sharing a young hairdresser's assistant who tags along on their aimless journey.

In THE JESUS ROLLS, Jesus is paroled from Sing Sing (wasn't it Chino in LEBOWSKI?) after serving six months for indecent exposure, with a farewell conversation with the warden (Christopher Walken, dropping by for two minutes to play "Christopher Walken") revealing that the whole pederast charge was a misunderstanding when an eight-year-old kid two urinals over in a men's room caught a glimpse of Jesus' huge dick and asked him about it. Greeted by his ex-con buddy Petey (Bobby Cannavale), the two immediately steal the muscle car of obnoxious hairdresser Paul Dominique (Jon Hamm) and take his girlfriend Marie (Audrey Tautou) with them. So begins an episodic road movie, with homoerotic overtures between Jesus and Petey (Jesus tries to seduce him at one point, telling a reluctant Petey "Take it easy, man...it's OK between friends"), and the two eventually forming a throuple with Marie, who's slept with 374 men but has never experienced an orgasm (among those 374 is Jesus' bowling sidekick Liam, who's mentioned but never seen). They get separated on a few occasions--Jesus and Petey end up having an expensive dinner and a motel threesome with "767" (Susan Sarandon), who's just been released after a long stretch in a women's prison, and later touch base with her just-paroled son (Pete Davidson), who becomes the first man to bring Marie to orgasm.

THE JESUS ROLLS

GOING PLACES

You think Turturro showed this to Joel and Ethan Coen? Because I'd pay to see their reaction to it. Watching the Coens watch THE JESUS ROLLS has to be more entertaining than just watching THE JESUS ROLLS. There's just one moment in its seemingly endless 85 minutes that I found even remotely amusing (Petey looking at a porno mag and declaring "Vanessa Del Rio is underrated!"), and it's hard telling why Turturro thought dropping Jesus into a ponderous remake of GOING PLACES was a good idea. Did he really want to direct a remake of GOING PLACES but found that shoehorning Jesus Quintana into it was the only way he could secure funding? You think it's a bad sign that THE BIG LEBOWSKI, arguably the most quotable comedy since CADDYSHACK, gets a spinoff with a memorable character and still takes over three years to find a distributor? The closing credits still display a 2017 copyright. Turturro tries to placate the LEBOWSKI superfans, blowtorching through Jesus' greatest hits in the early-going with numerous references and callbacks to give everyone what they came for (there's the mention of Liam, and Jesus says "Nobody fucks with the Jesus" twice, threatens to stick a gun up someone's ass and "pull the fucking trigger till it goes 'click,'" and does his cunnilingual bowling ball tongue move). But once he fulfills those obligations, THE JESUS ROLLS just becomes a miserable slog and an utterly pointless Turturro vanity project. A little of the Jesus goes a long way, and even the always-charming Tautou grates in the worst performance of her career. Turturro called in some favors from actor friends (Sarandon, Walken, Hamm, JB Smoove as a mechanic, Sonia Braga as Jesus' prostitute mother, Gloria Reuben as a restaurant owner, Michael Badalucco as a store security guard, Tim Blake Nelson as a doctor), but the ill-advised THE JESUS ROLLS--which technically isn't a sequel but still deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other decades-late, legacy-defiling hosejobs like EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK and RAGING BULL II before its court-ordered title change to THE BRONX BULL--is a tedious, self-indulgent, borderline unwatchable disaster. Turturro shouldn't have fucked with the Jesus. (R, 85 mins)


ARKANSAS
(US/UK/Luxembourg - 2020)

Based on a 2009 novel by John Brandon, ARKANSAS belongs to that moody BLUE RUIN and BAD TURN WORSE subgenre of dark crime films. It wears its influences on its sleeve, with its Tarantino-inspired multiple narratives jumping between 1985, 1988, and the present day, and being a bleak Southern noir with doomed and frequently dim characters making bad decisions, it recalls the bleakly comedic crime sagas of the Coen Bros. It's also not the kind of film one would have expected to be the writing/directing debut of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE/late-period OFFICE co-star and hipster dweeb Clark Duke. A man-bunned Duke also co-stars as Swin who, along with Kyle (Liam Hemsworth), are two low-level drug couriers for Frog, a feared crime lord in the Dixie Mafia (described by Kyle as less an organized crime outfit and more "a loose affiliation of deadbeats and scumbags") who they've never even met. They're taking a shipment from Little Rock to Corpus Christi when they're intercepted by Bright (John Malkovich, who also starred with Hemsworth in the 2015 Coen riff CUT BANK), a Frog associate who uses his full-time job as a park ranger as cover. Under Frog's orders, Bright puts the two of them to work at the park, but a series of incidents--starting with the idiot grandson (Chandler Duke) of a Louisiana drug distributor (Barry Primus) deciding to follow Kyle and Swin back to Bright's house and retrieve the money they collected--sends things south. Complicating matters is that, despite being told to avoid socializing with the locals, the irritating Swin has taken up with cute nurse Johnna (Eden Brolin, Josh's daughter), after a meet-creepy in a Piggly Wiggly, in what co-writer Clark Duke and director Clark Duke no doubt thought was the perfect plot development for the character played by Clark Duke.

The early going is interesting enough, and Malkovich gets to Malkovich it up in his brief screen time, but ARKANSAS really comes alive when Duke goes for two long flashbacks to 1985 and 1988, showing the establishment of Frog's criminal empire. Frog is played by Vince Vaughn, who appears in the present day scenes a mystery man running a junky pawn shop, and though the viewer knows he's Frog, Kyle and Swin do not, and while Duke might've thought that would be a source of suspense, it's an aspect that sort-of fizzles. But it's the flashback sequences detailing Frog's origin story that are the best parts of ARKANSAS, showing his almost accidental rise from running a tiny pawn shop/flea market in West Memphis to becoming a major player in the Deep South drug trade under the tutelage of fireworks store owner Almond (Michael Kenneth Williams). Duke really establishes a hypnotic mood in these sequences, augmented by some hauntingly ethereal and strangely eerie Flaming Lips covers of Hank Williams Jr's "A Country Boy Can Survive" and "In the Arms of Cocaine," and The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The film's tone and style give it the same feel that a lot of movies have nowadays--that of an entire season of a cable series that's been whittled down to two hours--but Vaughn's character is so intriguing and his sections so well-executed (The Flaming Lips really need to release these songs on a covers album) that the rest of ARKANSAS can't help but pale in comparison when Duke returns to the comparatively ho-hum main plot involving Kyle and Swin. Some occasionally funny dialogue helps (Kentucky-born Swin complaining about how his many sisters are destined to be working in a strip joint and quipping "One's already named Cinnamon!"), but it's hard to watch this and not think a stronger film could've resulted had it just been about the rise of Frog, as Vaughn does a much better job of commanding the screen than either Hemsworth or Duke. Originally intended to screen at the 2020 SXSW before the festival was canceled over coronavirus concerns, ARKANSAS was ultimately relegated to a same-day VOD/DTV release by Lionsgate. It's a mixed bag when it's all over, and while it doesn't always work, it makes a much more credible case for itself than you'd expect from Clark Duke directing a downer crime saga more in line with a Jeremy Saulnier or a Macon Blair. (R, 117 mins)

In Theaters: MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
(US - 2019)

Written and directed by Edward Norton. Cast: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Michael Kenneth Williams, Leslie Mann, Ethan Suplee, Dallas Roberts, Fisher Stevens, Josh Pais, Robert Ray Wisdom, Radu Spinghel, Peter Lewis, Stephen Adley Guirgis, DeShawn White. (R, 144 mins)

If it seems like MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is the kind of film that's been frozen in ice since 2002 and is just now getting thawed, that could be because director/writer/star Edward Norton has been shepherding it through a nearly two-decade development since he purchased the movie rights to Jonathan Lethem's acclaimed novel shortly after it was published in 1999. But it's also because this is the kind of prestige piece that's becoming an increasingly rare commodity in multiplexes these days. A complex NYC noir with echoes of CHINATOWN and a generous helping of the kind of big-city corruption that's reminiscent of Sidney Lumet, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN probably would've received a more welcome reception as a period HBO or Netflix miniseries, where it would've earned significant acclaim and cleaned up at the Emmys and the Golden Globes. But in theaters, it's a different story. Warner Bros. even seemed to lose confidence in it as the release date approached, knocking it down to 1300 screens in the days before it opened, even after a relentless TV ad blitz in the preceding weeks. The sad fact is that times have changed, and in an era when everything has to be a blockbuster, this kind of modest, mid-level production doesn't bring in the crowds anymore, whether you want to call it a movie for "grownups" or one that's geared toward "older audiences," or simply, a "dad movie." There's plenty of explanations--the trend toward mega-budget franchises, the fact that it'll be on VOD and Blu-ray in three or four months, and that, let's be honest, Norton hasn't headlined a hit movie in a long time. Even though it's a top-notch "dad movie," it's still a small miracle that MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN is in theaters at all.

Norton takes so many liberties with Lethem's novel that one could argue the film is its own separate thing. Two major changes: he moves the setting from the then-present late 1990s to the late 1950s (his feeling being that the use of hard-boiled dialogue in the present day worked on the page but would seem too ironic and gimmicky on the screen, and he's right, since BRICK already beat him to it), and he invents a major character exclusive to the film in one Moses Randolph, a venal political power player inspired by notorious Manhattan city planner and parks commissioner Robert Moses, whose post-Depression projects ran up debt and seemed insidiously designed to isolate black neighborhoods, thus propagating the long decline in areas that became slums and ghettos in the ensuing decades. As loose as Norton plays with Lethem's source work, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN works as a well-made, leisurely-paced, and very character-driven film that unfolds like a good book, with a memorable hero in Lionel Essrog (Norton), who has Tourette's and can't stop shouting inappropriate things at the wrong time. On one hand, this feels like another chance for Norton to do his PRIMAL FEAR/THE SCORE schtick, but fortunately, Norton the actor is kept in check by Norton the director, who's careful to avoid turning his long-gestating pet project into a self-indulgent vanity project.

Lionel works as part of the investigative crew of Brooklyn gumshoe Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who affectionately calls him "Brooklyn" and makes use of Lionel's ability to remember even the most trivial of details. The crew--which also consists of Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee), and Danny (Dallas Roberts)--have been with Frank since they were kids, when they were all in an orphanage and he took them under his wing. When Frank is killed (aaaand...exit Bruce Willis 15 minutes in) during a dangerous meet in a fleabag hotel with some mystery men--where Frank hid a phone in a dresser drawer so Lionel could listen at a pay phone across the street--Lionel becomes fixated on piecing together the puzzle of meaningless words and phrases from the conversation to find out what Frank was up to and why he wouldn't clue them in. Lionel's pursuit of numerous disparate leads--Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a legal aid for civil rights and gentrification activist Gabby Hurwitz (Cherry Jones); a jazz club owned by Laura's father (Robert Ray Wisdom); a worldly jazz trumpeter (Michael Kenneth Williams); a disgruntled engineer (Willem Dafoe, midway through growing his LIGHTHOUSE beard) who's fallen on hard times; and Randolph (Alec Baldwin), who runs a dozen powerful city offices but remains an unelected public official with enough juice to bully the mayor (Peter Lewis) into bending to his will--eventually comes together, though he gets roughed up several times by a group of Randolph goons led by Lou (Fisher Stevens) and lets things get personal when he realizes that Laura's life is in danger.

Norton's tic-filled performance can be big but it's never hammy, and it's a welcome approach that everyone seems to understand that there's something wrong with his head that makes him act the way he does. He often has to explain that "It's like a piece of my head broke off and is just joyriding me," followed by something like "Giant faggot munchkin meat!" or "Tits on a Tuesday!" or, if he gets really worked up, a loud "IF!" accompanied by a wild head thrash. Even though the other guys in Frank's office call him "Freakshow," it's a term of endearment among them, as they demonstrably take his insights and opinions seriously. Norton's Lionel is a real character instead of a series of awards-baiting outbursts. The creation of Baldwin's Moses Randolph serves to add social and historical commentary to the story line with the dead-on Robert Moses parallels, as well as an obvious, and maybe slightly ham-fisted modern political allegory, with Baldwin's performance being a significantly less cartoonish interpretation of his SNL Donald Trump impression (Randolph even quotes him nearly verbatim at one point, arguing the semantics of rape and stating "When you're powerful, you can do anything you want"). The Trumpification of Robert Moses into Moses Randolph helps MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN become a film of its time in ways that it couldn't have had Norton made this 20 years ago, though, admittedly, die-hard devotees of Lethem's novel probably won't be enthused about these additional layers.

"Bruce, I said I'd *try* to get you out of here
in one day, but I never made any guarantees." 

At 144 minutes, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN may run a little long, but it's always engrossing, and the only weak spot is the perpetually inconvenienced Willis, continuing to give Steven Seagal a run for his rubles as the laziest actor alive. It's really something to watch the way Norton has to shoot Frank's meeting with the four Randolph goons in a gimmicky way to cover for Willis obviously not being there with Fisher Stevens and the other actors. The hotel room is dark and shadowy and the image drifts in and out of focus in an almost hallucinatory fashion for no reason, with Willis obviously doubled from the back (the guy's head isn't even shaped like Willis') and his close-ups are always just him with no one else in the shot when he's responding to someone's questions. This sequence is in the first ten minutes and it actually gets the film off to a clunky start because it looks like Norton is going for some pointless auteur wankery right out of the gate until you realize that it's this way because Willis can't even be bothered to show up for work on good movies, let alone Lionsgate's landmark, ongoing "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series. When Norton was on the dais of Comedy Central's roast of Willis last year, with MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN already wrapped, he wondered if he could get away with the things Willis does: "Could I just leave the set of a movie after my close-ups are done and have my co-stars act opposite a C-stand with a red X taped to it while a script girl reads my dialogue to them?" Gentle ribbing or spoken from experience?

On DVD/Blu-ray: TIME OUT OF MIND (2015); NASTY BABY (2015); and GUNS FOR HIRE (2015)

TIME OUT OF MIND
(US - 2015)

A long-planned pet project for Richard Gere, TIME OUT OF MIND is anchored by one of the veteran actor's most committed performances. Gere is the focal point and is in every scene as George Hammond, a homeless man on the streets of NYC. Introduced squatting in a vacant tenement and kicked out by the landlord (Steve Buscemi), George makes his way around the city, asking for spare change and trying to find a place to sleep. He has his rituals, like sitting in the park and selling his coat for beer money only to stop by a donation center at a church to grab a new one. He wants to reconnect with his estranged bartender daughter Maggie (Jena Malone), who wants nothing to do with him. The film is largely plotless and seems to go where George's day takes him, though we learn bits and pieces as it goes on: George's life started to collapse over a decade earlier when he lost his job and his insurance, then his wife got sick and he was unable to get her proper medical care. After she died, he handed Maggie over to be raised by his mother-in-law, and he's been surviving on the streets since, unable to pull his life together and admittedly living in a ten-year-long blur. Gere and writer/director Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER, RAMPART) aren't really interested in telling a linear story as much as they are getting inside George's head. Moverman often plants the camera on Gere as we hear all the sounds that surround him, going in one ear and out the other: fragments of chatter and phone conversations, passing cars, horns, sirens, construction, and the general sounds of NYC. Moverman often goes for old-school guerrilla filmmaking, keeping the camera stationary and from a distance--perhaps from inside a business establishment--to observe Gere-as-George asking passersby for change, rummaging through trash cans, or sleeping on the sidewalk as actual NYC pedestrians are unaware that the homeless man they're passing is a famous Hollywood actor. It feels a little gimmicky at times, and at 121 minutes, it's an extremely slow-moving exercise in verite minimalism that's a good 30 minutes longer than it really needs to be (there were walkouts when it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 2014), but it's an ambitious experiment on Gere's part, and he gets some solid support from friends who appear in cameos, like Kyra Sedgwick as a homeless woman, Michael Kenneth Williams as a guard at the shelter, and, in his best role in years, Ben Vereen as a homeless former jazz pianist (or so he claims) and nonstop chatterbox befriended by George at the shelter. With no concern for mainstream appeal (IFC had this on 18 screens at its widest release) and no real drive to the story, it's most certainly not for everyone. It's absolutely the kind of film you need to be in the mood for, but it's a must-see for Gere fans and if you brew a pot of strong coffee ahead of time, it has its rewards, particularly in its powerful final shot. (R, 121 mins)

NASTY BABY
(Chile/France - 2015)

Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva (the 2012 Michael Cera stoner oddity CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS) wrote, directed, and stars in this largely improvised--at least for its first 2/3--comedy-drama that remains effective despite never really settling on what it wants to accomplish. In a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood, gay couple Freddy (Silva) and Mo (RACHEL GETTING MARRIED's Tunde Adebimpe, also the frontman for the band TV on the Radio) are trying to become parents with the help of Freddy's friend Polly (Kristen Wiig), who desperately wants to be a mom, with the trio planning to raise the child in an unconventional but loving home. Freddy's low sperm count prompts Polly to plead with Mo to be the donor, which he initially declines but eventually agrees to do. As they go about their daily lives, with performance artist Freddy planning an absurdly awful multimedia exhibition called "Nasty Baby," where he sucks on a pacifier and rolls around on the floor like a helpless infant while video of Mo, Polly, and Freddy's assistant Wendy (Alia Shawkat) doing the same plays on video monitors around him, Silva establishes an occasionally rambling improvisational feel in the relationship and interaction between Freddy, Mo, and Polly and how their lifestyle choice affects those in their lives. They get support from fatherly neighbor Richard (a rare nice-guy performance by veteran character actor Mark Margolis), who's also gay, and there's some static from Mo's opinionated sister about their "disregard" of tradition.

But their biggest obstacle is "The Bishop" (Reg E. Cathey), a homophobic and mentally unstable neighborhood nutjob who fires up his leaf blower at 7:00 am, hurls anti-gay slurs at the couple whenever they pass him on the sidewalk, and also repeatedly gets in Polly's personal space and physically grabs her from behind, but the cops won't arrest him because his mother is a prominent judge. Throughout the film, the Bishop's increasingly aggressive and antagonizing presence provokes a discomforting sense of unease to what otherwise feels like any number of self-indulgent mumblecore indie rom-coms, Indeed, the final third offers one of the most abrupt, jarring, and audacious plot shifts in recent memory, sort-of like how Robert Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TILL DAWN went from a kidnapping thriller to a vampire movie at its midpoint. Even with the Bishop's irrational behavior, you still won't be prepared for what Silva does--for better or for worse--with the character in the late stages. There's certainly an argument that NASTY BABY is an uneven, unfocused mess (and despite what some thinkpiece-type reviews might say, I don't see it saying one thing or another about gentrification), but after getting to know these characters for an hour and change, and suffering through Freddy's cringe-worthy demonstrations of his idiotic presentation (surely, Silva is satirizing pretentious, hipster performance artists with the ludicrous "Nasty Baby" project), the shocking development that dominates the last third and sends it into blood-splattered, SHALLOW GRAVE territory prompts you to question what you really think of them and what they think of themselves (you can see the self-doubt on Freddy's face in the final shot). Silva and Adebimpe make a likable couple, a wild-eyed Cathey is intimidating and terrifying, and Wiig continues to surprise in her post-SNL/BRIDESMAIDS career choices that include the blockbuster THE MARTIAN and the upcoming GHOSTBUSTERS remake, but also have her spending a lot of time in small, under-the-radar indies like this, HATESHIP LOVESHIP, and WELCOME TO ME. NASTY BABY is a weird and ultimately unsettling little movie that sneaks up on you and veers wildly down roads you never see coming. It's hard to tell if it's some kind of slyly brilliant head game or a last-ditch, desperation Hail Mary to keep the story going, but regardless, it sticks with you. (R, 101 mins)


GUNS FOR HIRE
(US - 2015)

You really have to sit back and admire the astonishing straight-to-DVD hosejob that is GUNS FOR HIRE. It's practically a throwback to the days of old when people were duped into seeing movies that were nothing like the misleading posters. One can't entirely blame the writing/directing team of Donna Robinson and Katherine Brooks. After all, GUNS FOR HIRE was a last-minute title change for a film shot as the more docile-sounding THE ADVENTURES OF BEATLE. It's a quirky character piece that was obviously never meant to be thought of as the gun-toting action thriller that the GUNS FOR HIRE artwork is selling, with the recognizable faces of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Ben Mendelsohn, Tony Shalhoub, and Orlando Jones on display (all have supporting roles that range from minor to, in Shalhoub's case, a brief cameo). It almost looks like some kind of SMOKIN' ACES knockoff or something along those lines. But as you watch the movie, it doesn't take long to figure out that something doesn't seem right and something is very off, particularly with the appearance of Mendelsohn, whose craggy, sad-sack visage has been seen in several noteworthy films of late and the Netflix series BLOODLINE, but he looks distractingly young here. Then Morgan turns up, and he looks both younger and a little heavier in the face than he's been in recent films. Though it completed post-production in 2013 and has some 2013 and 2014 copyrighted songs by unknown bands in the credits, principal photography on what was called THE ADVENTURES OF BEATLE was done all the way back in 2006. In other words, the film now being released as GUNS FOR HIRE has spent nearly a decade on the shelf before being given a justifiably silent DVD burial.

Well, I've got news for Robinson and Brooks: this thing still doesn't seem to be ready for public consumption. The credits are video-burned; the opening credit roll lists Robinson and Brooks as co-directors but the closing credits only give Robinson director credit; prominently-billed Brooke Adams (the 1978 version of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE DEAD ZONE) has a nanosecond of screen time as a secretary, another character whizzing by her as she gets up from her desk and has a door slammed in her face with her back to the camera, only allowing you to ascertain that it's Adams if you hit the pause button; and even better than that, Ivana Milicevic (RUNNING SCARED, CASINO ROYALE) is credited with playing someone named "Friday Green" and isn't even in it. GUNS FOR HIRE follows lesbian tow-truck driver and part-time assassin Beatle (Michele Hicks, who was on THE SHIELD at the time), and the story is told in flashbacks as she's being interrogated by angry cop Holt (Raffaello Degruttola) over her association with sleazy crime kingpin Kyle Sullivan (Mendelsohn). Athena (Ever Carradine) is a suicide case being pursued by Sullivan's psychotic hitman Bruce (Morgan), but instead hires Beatle to kill her first. Of course, they fall in love but not before endless psychoanalyzing and Cassavetesian discussions that turn the film into a talky remake of BOUND that plays like it's being staged by the world's worst acting workshop. That's bad enough, but then Robinson and Brooks pull two laughable whoppers of plot twists out of their asses that take a merely boring, pointless film and turn it into an inexcusable, infuriating one. Even factoring out the retitling and the marketing and looking at it as simply THE ADVENTURES OF BEATLE, this is an amateurishly-made, badly-acted, and thoroughly unwatchable collection of scenes that might make a lot of noise, but goes nowhere and says nothing. GUNS FOR HIRE wasn't so much completed as it was abandoned. It obviously ran into some huge problems on the long--but not long enough--road to release to be kept on the shelf for so many years (a 2014 BEATLE trailer got a polite but vague response from Morgan on Twitter), but this is such a hopelessly lost cause that not even a vigorous and sweaty Hicks/Sarah Shahi sex scene in the early-going can keep it from being the worst 2015 film I've seen so far. You're off the hook, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2, MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT, and THE VATICAN TAPES. (Unrated, 82 mins)

In Theaters: INHERENT VICE (2014)

INHERENT VICE
(US - 2014)

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, Joanna Newsom, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Thomas, Michael Kenneth Williams, Martin Donovan, Sacha Pieterse, Sam Jaeger, Timothy Simons, Jordan Christian Hearn, Hong Chau, Jeannie Berlin, Michelle Sinclair, Peter McRobbie, Keith Jardine, Andrew Simpson, Jefferson Mays, Christopher Allen Nelson. (R, 149 mins)

INHERENT VICE, Paul Thomas Anderson's long-planned adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's most accessible, commercial novel, is a wildly careening, frequently meandering shaggy-dog/stoner noir set in the fictional SoCal haven Gordita Beach in 1970. As it plays out, it certainly brings to mind what might happen if someone remade CHINATOWN with Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes replaced by Jeff Bridges' The Dude, or perhaps The Big Sleep if authored by Kurt Vonnegut. While INHERENT VICE has its share of laugh-out-loud scenes and quotable dialogue ("Molto panacaku!") and comparisons are perhaps inevitable, it's a much darker film than THE BIG LEBOWSKI, almost filled with as much somber sadness as absurdist humor. With its twisting, turning, labyrinthine plot at times akin to trying to watch THE TWO JAKES without ever seeing CHINATOWN, INHERENT VICE is likely to frustrate many moviegoers who think it's the wacky comedy the trailers and TV spots are selling.  It is, for the most part, but it's also distinctly the work of Anderson, the guy who gave audiences a cast sing-along and a storm of frogs at the end of the three-hour MAGNOLIA, a film they expected to be a Tom Cruise vehicle, and whose PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE had Adam Sandler fans demanding refunds when they realized it wasn't an Adam Sandler movie. You can draw a straight line from the "Regret" deathbed speech by Jason Robards' Big Earl Partridge in MAGNOLIA to hippie private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), whose days spent in a weed-induced haze are primarily his way of getting over the one that got away.

That would be Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Sam's daughter), who suddenly reappears, walking through Doc's front door a year after they split. She's gone semi-establishment, with a sugar daddy in wealthy real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). Wolfmann is missing, and Shasta tells Doc that she was offered a chance to take part in a haphazard plot by Wolfmann's wife Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas) and her boy-toy Riggs Warbling (Andrew Simpson) to orchestrate Wolfmann's disappearance and ship him off to a mental institution. Fearing for her own safety, Shasta leaves Doc's and promptly disappears herself as Doc soon becomes embroiled in a complex plot that inevitably leads back to Shasta. Drifting in and out of the story are Doc's chief nemesis, raging, flat-topped detective and part-time actor Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin); Sortilege (Joanna Newsom), Doc's imaginary Girl Friday who functions as his conscience and the voice that brings Pynchon's prose to life; ex-con Tariq Kallil (Michael Kenneth Williams), who points Doc in the direction of Wolfmann's neo-Nazi bodyguard Glen Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who turns up dead; Charlock's sultry sister Clancy (Michelle Sinclair, aka porn star Belladonna), who's only into doing two men at once; Doc's current girlfriend and assistant D.A. Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon); session saxophonist and recovering drug addict Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who's forced into being an informant by both the cops and the FBI; Doc's attorney Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), whose specialty is maritime law; coke-snorting, sex-addicted dentist Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short); runaway rich girl Japonica Fenway (Sacha Pieterse); incompetent, nose-picking FBI agents Flatweed (Sam Jaeger) and Borderline (Timothy Simons); and various shady figures like Japonica's wealthy father Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), drug lord Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie), and Aryan Brotherhood strongarm Puck Beaverton (Keith Jardine); and a huge shipment of heroin swiped from Golden Fang, a corporation used as a front for the nefarious Indo-Chinese drug trade.

At the heart of INHERENT VICE is the relationship between Doc and Shasta, and one of the highlights of the film is a long and extraordinarily erotic sequence that should likely make a star out of Waterston (you'll know it when you see it). Phoenix is in every scene, and displays some comic chops and timing that really allow him to stretch and cut loose in ways you've never seen before. His banter with cartoonish supercop Bjornsen is often screamingly funny, and whether he's bellowing at diner cooks, kicking down doors, or delicately eating a frozen chocolate dipped banana in a way that bears an alarming resemblance to fellatio (with Phoenix's dismayed expressions looking like those of a disgusted Benny Hill) or tacitly dissing Smilax (working as Doc's criminal defense lawyer) with "Don't you practice marine law?  Well, we've got kidnapping and murder, but we can throw some pirates in if it makes you more comfortable," Brolin has never been better than he is here. Amidst the drug humor and the increasingly ridiculous situations in which Doc finds himself, there's a downbeat streak of melancholy running throughout the film, from exterior elements like political upheaval and societal horrors (the Manson family is invoked on a couple of occasions) with characters lamenting the passage of time, opportunities squandered, and love lost.

That's not to suggest it goes as deep as a MAGNOLIA or a THERE WILL BE BLOOD, but INHERENT VICE, like THE MASTER, is an Anderson film that probably can't all be taken in on one viewing. Where THE MASTER was often impenetrable and cold, it markedly improved on a second and third viewing, once the plot was known and the more intricate details could be studied. With INHERENT VICE, it's due not to thematic complexity and deeper meaning, but simply because there's so many characters weaving their way through the impossibly complicated storyline, which mostly hangs together but occasionally feels like one of those BIG SLEEP situations where the plot is so tangled that the screenwriters adapting Raymond Chandler's novel weren't even sure who killed one of the victims, forcing them to seek the guidance of Chandler himself only to find out that he didn't know either. At two and a half hours, INHERENT VICE marks the first time that an Anderson film actually feels long. Perhaps because it's mostly an engagingly silly stoner comedy (this may have more blazing than the entire Cheech & Chong filmography), the epic length does make things drag at times...not enough to deem it a buzzkill, but for a guy whose past films never feel as long as they are (how many 189-minute films move as briskly as MAGNOLIA?), the bloat doesn't always feel justified here. Still, minor missteps aside, INHERENT VICE is a very good film by a director usually counted on to deliver great ones, one of the few filmmakers whose every new work is a legitimate event, and in the current American movie scene, Anderson's "very good" is still better than most filmmakers' "best."

In Theaters: THE GAMBLER (2014)

THE GAMBLER
(US - 2014)

Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Written by William Monahan. Cast: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Brie Larson, Michael Kenneth Williams, George Kennedy, Andre Braugher, Anthony Kelley, Emory Cohen, Alvin Ing, Domenick Lombardozzi, Richard Schiff, Simon Rhee. (R, 111 mins)

In remaking the Dostoevsky-inspired, James Toback-scripted, Karel Reisz-directed 1974 cult film THE GAMBLER, screenwriter William Monahan (THE DEPARTED) and director Rupert Wyatt (RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) initially make a sincere effort to stick to the gritty, character-driven ideals of the source. Many scenes in the early-going are almost defiant in the way they let dialogue-heavy interactions and conversations go on with little concern for audience restlessness and in no hurry at all to move at the quick-cut, short-attention-span pace of most of today's multiplex offerings. In many ways, it's part of a current throwback movement to the 1970s as seen in recent films like THE DROP and A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES. THE GAMBLER '74 had the rock-solid foundation of James Caan entering the post-GODFATHER pinnacle of his career, all cocksure swagger and Sonny Corleone rage as Ivy League-educated, NYU literature prof Axel Freed, who's in debt to loan sharks to the tune of $44,000. Toback's script was largely autobiographical and THE GAMBLER '14 lacks that personal touch and its '70s aesthetic has a certain artificiality to it as the film goes on (gifted prodigies acting out against suffocating family expectations would be a theme Toback explored further in his brilliant 1978 directorial debut FINGERS). While films like THE DROP and A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES have a '70s mindset in the present day, THE GAMBLER '14 strays from its source as it progresses, becoming more beholden to commercial expectations and predictable character arcs, and despite drastically higher stakes thanks to inflation, it never really feels like L.A.-based literature prof and one-and-done novelist Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) is in any serious danger.

Hailed as a bold new voice in fiction in 2007, Bennett never got around to writing that second novel and instead berates his students for their lack of inspiration and effort and not possessing the talent to do so anyway. Amy (Brie Larson), his one student with potential, knows his secret life: she's a waitress at a seedy gambling den owned by Korean mobster Mr. Lee (Alvin Ing), who staked over $100,000 to Jim, who promptly lost it all in one doomed spin of a roulette wheel. These early scenes establish the purely suicidal self-destruction of the character in the same way as the 1974 film, and both Axel Freed and Jim Bennett seem to be rebelling against their family wealth and privileged upbringing. Wyatt wrings considerable suspense out of intensely stomach-turning scenes of an addicted Jim at a blackjack table, $80,000 on the line, angrily demanding another card when he's already at 18. Of course he loses it all--Jim's only really satisfied when he loses it all, and he seeks out the most dangerously shady people imaginable for extra cash, whether it's powerful crime lord Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams) or God-like loan shark Frank (John Goodman, who's terrific). The film opens with Jim visiting his dying grandfather (George Kennedy sighting!), the 17th-richest man in California, who refuses to leave him any money because he needs to build his character. Once Jim is $260,000 in debt to both Mr. Lee and Neville, and turns down a stake from Frank because he refuses to meet Frank's demand of admitting "I am a piece of shit gambler," and "I am not a man," he hits up his wealthy mother (Jessica Lange), who gives him the money, after which he drives to Vegas with Amy and almost immediately blows it all at a blackjack table.

The relationship that develops between Jim and Amy is one of the more problematic elements of Monahan's script. Monahan tries to draw a parallel between Jim and Amy's alcoholic mother by showing that she's inherently drawn to the addicted and the damaged, but at the same time, her actions and decisions never really feel plausible. She knows what kind of guy Jim is and the sorts of people with whom he's entangled--she even works at an illegal casino--but the character as shown is too level-headed and smart to so easily fall for a shit magnet like Jim. It doesn't help that the film loses track of her as it goes on, and Larson (robbed of an Oscar nomination for last year's SHORT TERM 12) is too good for such a muddled and sketchily-written role. Her attraction to Jim would make a lot more sense if Wahlberg was playing the part like Caan played Axel Freed. Where Axel publicly possessed a magnetic sense of indestructible, self-confident bravado no matter how much money he lost, Wahlberg's Jim is disheveled, glum and glowering, with a constant Joe Btfsplk dark cloud hovering over him from the moment he's introduced. Axel Freed tried to make it rain, it blew up in his face, and he defiantly asked for more, while Jim Bennett just shrugs and places another five-figure bet on one hand. Both are committing slow suicide, but Wahlberg's characterization doesn't have the same sense of consequences-be-damned kamikaze fervor, regardless of how good he is in the role. Caan's Axel Freed came off like a dumbass, but he was a dumbass with balls. Wahlberg's Jim Bennett just comes off like a dumbass.

The change in the main character's mindset probably has more to do with Wyatt and Monahan needing to do something different in order to avoid a straight scene-for-scene remake, but all the changes do is put a spotlight on what worked so well in 1974. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climax, after which Jim has talked one of his students, a star basketball player and guaranteed NBA prospect (Anthony Kelley) to shave points in a game in order to settle his debt with Neville. Reisz and Toback had Axel Freed celebrate by going to the wrong side of town looking for a fight, getting one, and ending the film in an ambiguous, nihilistic fashion that shows there's no limit to his mad quest to take increasingly dangerous risks, essentially gambling himself to death. Wyatt and Monahan, in accordance with THE GAMBLER '14 being a major-studio movie released at Christmas, have to give Jim a crowd-pleasing happy ending. It doesn't gel with the tone of what came before, and Jim's done nothing to really make the audience care about his shot at redemption. On top of that, too much of the film feels like Scorsese-lite, from the DEPARTED-style soliloquizing of the characters to the classic rock soundtrack, with incongruous reggae covers of Pink Floyd's "Time," and "Money," a Billy Bragg version of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and Scala & Kolacny Brothers' take on Radiohead's "Creep."

Whatever the extent of THE GAMBLER '14's problems, the performances aren't among them. A scrawny-looking and obviously committed Wahlberg reportedly dropped 60 lbs and does a solid job with an often unplayable role, and while Amy is a woefully underwritten character, the promising Larson still shines--Wyatt gives her a great and very odd little scene where she's doing this strange walk/dance in slo-mo while heading to class and the actress' goofy facial expressions are guaranteed to turn you into a Brie Larson fan; it's a throwaway moment that almost looks like it's edited together from a set of outtakes, but turns into her best moment in the film. THE GAMBLER '14's biggest strengths come from its supporting cast, with Lange getting a couple of devastating scenes as Jim's mother, torn between her disgust with her son and the hole into which he's dug himself, but also remorseful that maybe his upbringing, her shrewdness, and her obsession with wealth are what drove him to be the fuck-up that he is. Goodman sinks his teeth into his role, frequently seen holding court in a steamroom, telling Jim how to play it smart and get himself to a "Fuck you" position in life, and unable to comprehend Jim's story about how he was once up $2.5 million and lost it all on one hand. It's great seeing 89-year-old Kennedy, an Oscar-winner for 1967's COOL HAND LUKE, back on the big screen again, though his prominent billing and his one minute or so of screen time probably indicate he had a larger role at some point. It's also worth noting that veteran character actor Leland Orser's name turns up in the credits but he's never seen--he was cast as a rival lit professor in a subplot that appears to have been completely excised, along with most of Andre Braugher's scenes as the college dean (he has one brief bit talking to Jim in a hallway), all of which point to some eleventh-hour editing still going on shortly before the film's release (Orser is briefly seen in the trailer). As far as remakes go, you can do a lot worse. THE GAMBLER '14 has its strong points, but ultimately, it pales in comparison to THE GAMBLER '74, which still held up beautifully as of a revisit a month or so ago. The original GAMBLER came out 40 years ago and is still held in high regard today.  Will people even remember the remake of THE GAMBLER 40 days from now?

In Theaters: KILL THE MESSENGER (2014)

KILL THE MESSENGER
(US - 2014)

Directed by Michael Cuesta. Written by Peter Landesman. Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Tim Blake Nelson, Barry Pepper, Oliver Platt, Michael Sheen, Paz Vega, Michael Kenneth Williams, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Robert Patrick, Richard Schiff, Gil Bellows, Yul Vazquez, Lucas Hedges, Dan Futterman, Josh Close, Steve Coulter, Susan Walters, Clay Kraski. (R, 112 mins)

Though it has some flaws in its execution, particularly in its second half, it's a shame that the compelling KILL THE MESSENGER isn't finding an audience. That Focus only has it on 425 screens nationally isn't helping, but it's also indicative of the fact that smart films for adult audiences--films that used to be commonplace--are now largely relegated to art houses and limited/VOD releases. With just a $5 million budget and a sizable cast of well-known faces taking a pay cut to be onboard, KILL THE MESSENGER is obviously a project that the actors believed in and it'll find an audience eventually, but with its incendiary subject matter and a riveting performance by Jeremy Renner, it should be getting more attention than it's received thus far. Based on Gary Webb's 1998 book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's 2006 book Kill the Messenger, the film tells the story of Webb (Renner), a small-time San Jose Mercury News reporter who stumbled onto a story that blew the doors off the CIA's involvement in cocaine trafficking and the crack epidemic in South Central L.A. that helped fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

KILL THE MESSENGER opens in 1996 with Webb following the money in the trial of drug dealer Danilo Blandon (Yul Vazquez) and sticking his nose into the story to the point where the irate prosecutor (Barry Pepper) drops the charges. Webb figures out that Blandon is both a drug dealer and a paid CIA informant who needs to be operational in order to supply the agency with the information it needs. Acting on a tip from incarcerated drug runner Ricky Ross (Michael Kenneth Williams), Webb's detective work leads him to Nicaragua where imprisoned cartel boss Norwin Meneses (Andy Garcia) informs him of the CIA's involvement in the drug trade to fund the Contra rebels a decade earlier, which was the government's only way to secretly pay for a war that Congress wouldn't approve for President Reagan. As Webb's investigation deepens and ominous government officials strongly encourage him to back down, it only fuels the fire and when the story runs, Webb is the toast of the journalism world, much to the delight of his editors (Oliver Platt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead). His triumph is short-lived, however, as he soon realizes he's being followed, he spots a prowler in his driveway, and finds silent, sinister men in suits in his basement, rifling through his files. The CIA and other news outlets begin a smear campaign to discredit him, digging into everything in his past, including an affair he had while working at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which led to Webb moving his wife Susan (Rosemarie DeWitt) and kids to California to start over.

For its first hour or so, KILL THE MESSENGER is cut from the same cloth as ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976), SHATTERED GLASS (2003), and the Robert Graysmith investigative portions of ZODIAC (2007), the kind of newsroom nailbiter where the tension is cranked up and every conversation is an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Director Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.) and screenwriter Peter Landesman (the little-seen Kevin Kline drama TRADE) have studied the classics and the film is propelled by an excellent Renner, in maybe his best performance yet. But once Webb's bombshell of a story is published, the filmmakers keep the focus strictly on Webb, despite the explosive implications of the bigger picture. On one hand, I get that he's the central character and everyone--from his previously-adoring editors to jealous competitors to shady CIA operatives--is trying to throw him under the bus, but other than a Los Angeles Times editor (Dan Futterman) chewing out his staff for missing the boat on the story, we never get a grasp of just how much Webb's story has shaken things up. All we see is the effect on his job (he's busted down to the Cupertino office, which seems to be located in a strip mall) and the soap-opera subplots for his family, with his adoring teenage son (Lucas Hedges) sobbing "I'm disappointed in you," when he learns of the affair, and Webb telling his wife "I never stopped loving you" when they reunite after Cupertino. Though Webb's story should be told, the KILL THE MESSENGER story is bigger than just Gary Webb. Cuesta and Landesman (and probably Renner, for that matter) seem conflicted over lauding and paying tribute to Webb while trying to do the right thing and show him as a flawed human being. They wisely avoid the pitfall of devolving into grandstanding pontification and canonizing the protagonist (can you imagine if Oliver Stone directed this?). Webb has cheated on his wife and been forgiven, though Susan lets him know that she hasn't forgotten. His CIA/Contra story, while completely true and enough to have the top levels of the US government in a panic, isn't air-tight as far as sources go. If anything, KILL THE MESSENGER probably needed to be a longer film in order to include all facets of the story and not make the second half feel glossed-over and scaled-down, and the detours into Webb's personal life flow more smoothly.

Gary Webb (1955-2004)

Though Renner is front and center, he and the film get solid support from the fine ensemble, many of whom only have one scene but make it count. Garcia is terrific as Meneses (when he mentions an "Ollie," Webb asks "Ollie?  You mean Oliver North?" Meneses: "No, Oliver Hardy. Yes, Oliver North!"), Michael Sheen has a marvelous bit as a weary and disillusioned congressman who knows the story needs to be told but warns Webb that it will only ruin him ("They won't address the story...they'll just attack you"), and Ray Liotta has an odd scene that doesn't really go anywhere but allows him to serve as this film's Donald Sutherland-in-JFK. Until its midpoint, KILL THE MESSENGER is thoroughly engrossing, suspenseful filmmaking but it doesn't really follow through on its potential. Imagine ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN if it paused the Watergate digging and cut down the scenes with Jason Robards, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam to introduce subplots about Woodward's and Bernstein's personal lives. That's not to say it isn't worthwhile--it's a very good film that, for a while, flirts with being almost great. Though the focus shifts to Webb the man, it doesn't follow him all the way to his tragic end as the CIA released a 400-page report later in 1998, admitting its complicity and completely vindicating Webb, though that story received almost no coverage because the media was focused on the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. In December 2004, Webb was found in his apartment with two bullet wounds in his head.  His death was ruled a suicide.