EXPOSED is one of those films with two parallel storylines that finally converge in the closing minutes. In a predominantly Latino neighborhood in NYC, Dominican-born Isabel (Ana de Armas) has a strange hallucination of a levitating albino while waiting for the subway at the very stop where a cop (Danny Hoch) is killed the same night. That dead cop's hard-nosed detective partner is widower and anger-management case Galban (Keanu Reeves), who focuses his investigation on local drug lord Black Jones (Big Daddy Kane). Galban digs deeper, ultimately getting romantically involved with his partner's widow (Mira Sorvino) and uncovering evidence of police corruption and his partner's extracurricular, outside-the-law activities that must involve Isabel or there'd be no movie, and perhaps there shouldn't have been. The chaotic backstory of EXPOSED is far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen. Originally shot as DAUGHTER OF GOD, the film was an indie drama about, among other things, the plight of poor immigrants, violence against women, the lasting trauma of child abuse, and the effects of the war in Afghanistan on the families of those who serve. Making his feature writing/directing debut, Gee Malik Linton lucked into the involvement of Reeves following the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was originally cast as Galban and knew that it was intended to be a small role. Reeves, who became one of 30 credited producers and whose presence helped secure funding and a Lionsgate distribution deal, brought his KNOCK KNOCK co-star de Armas onboard, and all was well until Lionsgate saw Linton's cut.
DAUGHTER OF GOD got positive reaction from test audiences, but Lionsgate insisted they were promised a commercial Keanu Reeves thriller, and no one was going to confuse DAUGHTER OF GOD with POINT BREAK, SPEED, or JOHN WICK. They proceeded to take the film away from Linton, gutting it from 126 minutes to 102, losing much of the cultural elements--most of DAUGHTER OF GOD was in Spanish with English subtitles--and eliminating entire subplots and characters. The biggest change they made was cutting down the screen time of those who remained in the film while keeping everything with Reeves, who signed on for what was to be Hoffman's small supporting role--a big-name actor doing a solid to help out a new indie filmmaker--but was now the co-lead with as much screen time as de Armas. A "source" claimed Reeves supervised the overhaul, first called WISDOM and then changed to the more lurid EXPOSED, though Reeves' rep insisted he had nothing to do with it. Realizing he was fighting a battle he had no chance of winning, Linton successfully petitioned to have his name removed as director, with credit going to Alan Smithee protege "Declan Dale," while remaining credited for his screenplay under his own name. It should go without saying that EXPOSED, in its released form, is almost cataclysmically awful and borderline unwatchable, the logical end result of trying to turn a low-key and largely foreign-language art-house drama into a mainstream cop movie. Disjointed and dull, with fantastic elements that make appearances as random as those of the recognizable character actors in the supporting cast (Christopher McDonald plays Galban's captain, and Michael Rispoli appears a couple of times for some reason), and with the war in Afghanistan and child abuse subplots now looking exploitatively wedged in and quickly abandoned, the film makes no sense at all and more or less just ends in the least satisfying way possible, topped off with the bonus of glacially slow closing credits to inflate the truncated running time by another ten minutes. It's certainly a possibility that Linton's director's cut of DAUGHTER OF GOD is a worthwhile film, though considering he named an inner city, African-American crime lord "Black Jones," one shouldn't be too quick to assume it's a lost masterpiece. Lionsgate dumped EXPOSED on VOD and in as few theaters as contractually required with no publicity at all. Welcome to Hollywood, Gee Malik Linton! (R, 102 mins)
YOUTH
(Italy/France/UK/Switzerland - 2015)
Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returns with a spiritual cousin to his Oscar-winning THE GREAT BEAUTY, set at an almost tomb-like resort in Switzerland. Like the guests, the film never seems to leave that location, at least until the final scene, with the primary focus on two elderly friends, both artists, both feeling the effects of a lifetime of love, loss, regret, and age, with the looming feeling that death is waiting just around the corner. It's a film of much sadness and melancholy, but it's not a depressing downer, and is in fact quite funny at times, even if it's not what US distributor Fox Searchlight seemed to pass off as a GRUMPY OLD MEN for the art-house crowd. Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a legendary composer and conductor, now retired and refusing an offer by an emissary of the Queen to be knighted and to perform his most famous piece, "Simple Songs," at a gala event for the Royal Family. Fred's best friend of 60 years is renowned filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel, in his best role in years), who's working with four young screenwriters on what he intends to be his final masterpiece, his "testament" to a life in cinema. You can already sense the Fellini homages in the form of nude bodies--young, old, toned, and flabby--posed in pools and saunas in an almost still photography fashion, coupled with Visconti shout-outs in the ornate but dreary resort that's still a draw for the jet-set but, like its central characters, has seen better days.
Characters drift in and out of the story--Rachel Weisz is Lena, Fred's daughter and assistant, who's just been dumped by her husband (Ed Stoppard), who happens to be Mick's son; Paul Dano is a Shia LaBeouf-like American actor, deeply focused on his art and working with the most important European filmmakers but unable to escape the fact that everyone knows him from a big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster where he played a robot; and Jane Fonda as an aging, embittered Hollywood legend, star of 11 of Mick's 20 films, who flies all the way from L.A. to Switzerland to tell Mick a lot of things he doesn't want to hear--but Caine's Fred and Keitel's Mick are the foundation. The two icons are magnificent together, whether they're lamenting the inevitability of the end, or reminiscing about a girl they both loved 60 years ago and clearly still think of often (leading to one of Keitel's most unexpectedly poignant scenes). YOUTH can be downbeat (Weisz spits out a devastating monologue where Lena unloads on her father for leaving her mother decades earlier) and cynical (a cinema purist who dedicates the film to Francesco Rosi, Sorrentino doesn't have much use for television), but it's also very funny. Fonda's only in the movie for five minutes, but she makes every second count, whether she's emphatically stating that she had no problem blowing producers to get a foot in the door 50 years ago or telling Mick "Stop licking my ass" when he's overselling how great she looks. Her character is crass and vulgar ("She's only read two books her entire life, and one of them was her autobiography written by a ghost writer," Mick tells Fred), and Fonda plays it to the hilt with very little screen time. Fred and Mick start their days bitching about how they can't piss and are later shocked when they're out on a walk and happen upon to elderly resort visitors screwing up against a tree. Like the classic Italian cinema that Sorrentino adores, YOUTH is artsy and surreal, whether Fred sits in a field of cows conducting a symphony played by their cowbells, or Mick is confronted by all of the heroines from his movies. The most outrageous bit comes from Dano's brooding method actor, prepping a Hitler biopic and deciding to get in character by spending his remaining days at the resort walking around in full Hitler makeup and costume to get the feeling of alienation and being hated, which seems like exactly the kind of idiotic, attention-seeking stunt LaBeouf would pull. YOUTH is a lovely, hypnotic film that deserved more exposure than it got, even though "Simple Songs" got an Oscar nomination, which is odd considering it's an almost sublimely awful composition, perhaps intentionally so. (R, 123 mins)
LEGEND
(US/UK/France - 2015)
Peter Medak's 1990 film THE KRAYS was a mean, tough chronicle of twin British gangster siblings Ronnie and Reggie Kray played by two-years-apart brothers Martin and Gary Kemp, best known as, respectively, the bassist and lead guitarist of the '80s radio staple Spandau Ballet. LEGEND--what a terrible title--is based on John Pearson's book The Profession of Violence, and tells essentially the same story, with Tom Hardy playing both roles. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (PAYBACK), who won an Oscar for his L.A. CONFIDENTIAL screenplay, LEGEND has Hardy turning in two distinctive and vividly exceptional performances as the gay, hot-tempered, paranoid schizophrenic Ronnie and the ostensibly more focused and level-headed Reggie, but one of the key facets of the film is how their personalities eventually cross over to the point where Reggie gets so out of control that an on-his-meds Ronnie is the one who has to calm him down. LEGEND doesn't have much to go on other than Hardy's performances. Helgeland is content to let his star carry the weight of an otherwise rote and routine gangster movie that borrows liberally from Scorsese, right down to a long GOODFELLAS tracking shot when Reggie takes his girlfriend and eventual wife Frances (Emily Browning) to a nightclub, and pissed off British mobsters constantly calling each other "cunts" instead of "jerkoffs." The time element in LEGEND isn't handled very well--we know the Krays ruled London from the late '50s to the late '60s, but the film seems to start in the late '60s and we see their ascent in the nightclub scene after a partnership with Philadelphia-based gangster Angelo Bruno (Chazz Palminteri shows up for a couple of scenes), a top underling of Meyer Lansky. There's conflict with the Krays' cash handler Leslie Payne (David Thewlis) and hapless flunky Jack McVittie (Sam Spruell), whose brutal murder at the hands of an enraged Reggie is what would eventually be the beginning of the end for the Krays, with Reggie sentenced to life in prison in 1967, though he'd get a "compassionate release" in 2000, when he was dying of cancer and had only a few weeks to live (Ronnie would succumb to a fatal heart attack in prison in 1995).
Helgeland sticks to the standard-issue tropes and basics here, with a lot of time spent on Reggie and Frances' crumbling marriage while curiously glossing over Ronnie's relationship with "Mad Teddy" Smith (KINGSMAN's Taron Egerton). He also utilizes the hackneyed device of having the film narrated by a dead character, and even resorts to a sneering Reggie confronting dogged Scotland Yard inspector Nipper Read (Christopher Eccleston) with the obligatory "Ya know, we're not all that different, you and I" speech. Hardy is exponentially more effective as the Krays than the Spandau Ballet siblings were, but THE KRAYS is the overall better film even though it took some liberties with history. THE KRAYS had a vicious and ominously sinister LONG GOOD FRIDAY feel, along with a WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?-esque freakshow of a performance by the great Billie Whitelaw as the Krays' harridan mother, a character who barely figures into LEGEND and mainly just makes a couple of dismissive remarks about how Frances can't make a decent cup of tea. By comparison, LEGEND just feels like an overlong Scorsese retread in a London setting. A much bigger success in the UK than in the US, where its planned nationwide release was busted down to a limited run at the last minute, LEGEND inspired two cheap, Asylum-worthy British knockoffs with this year's THE RISE OF THE KRAYS and THE FALL OF THE KRAYS, as movies about the Krays are apparently to the UK what Coco Chanel biopics are to France. (R, 132 mins)
The recent Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Language Film is equal parts majestic and ponderous, profound and obvious. It's often stunningly beautiful, and purposefully reminiscent of the legendary likes of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. Like its characters, THE GREAT BEAUTY overstays its welcome and probably would've been more effective had there been maybe 20-30 minutes less of it, but the things in it that work, work extremely well. Directed and co-written by acclaimed Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (IL DIVO), coming off his little-seen, Weinstein-buried English-language debut THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, which featured Sean Penn in probably the strangest role of his career, THE GREAT BEAUTY could almost be seen as the later years of Marcello Mastroianni's LA DOLCE VITA character. Sorrentino's favorite actor, the chameleon-like Toni Servillo (think of him as Italy's Daniel Day-Lewis), stars as Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old journalist who's always seen where it's important for society's elite to be seen, where people are famous for being famous. Jep wrote a legendary novel 40 years ago and never wrote another, instead choosing to pen puff pieces and live the celebrity life ("I wrote one book 40 years ago and no bookstore carries it!"). He's no longer able to mask his contempt for his assignments, openly mocking interview subjects like pretentious performance artist Talia Concept (Anita Kravos), whose entire schtick is stripping nude and head-butting a concrete wall. He's grown increasingly misanthropic with age and can always be counted on to deliver a scorched-earth screed if he's prodded enough (his dressing down of a friend who chastises his "novellette" over drinks at a party provides some unforgettable cringe). When he's informed by the devastated husband (Massimo De Francovich) of his teenage first love that she's recently passed and her diary reveals she carried a torch for him for nearly 50 years, it forces Jep to re-evaluate his life and what's he's done with it. He feels emotion where a sardonic crack once sufficed. He considers writing that second novel and trying to find the promise that once was, saying "I'm at the age where I can't waste any more time doing the things I don't want to do."
As a basic point-A to point-B plot, THE GREAT BEAUTY is hardly innovative. Where Sorrentino succeeds is with the incredibly poetic way that the film plays out. Showcasing marvelous tracking shots, sweeping crane shots, and Kubrickian framing, it's LA DOLCE VITA with the hypnotic look of Alain Resnais' LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and the sense of melancholy for the gone forever past of Visconti's THE LEOPARD. It's a film that mourns the past, lost youth, lost time, missed opportunities, and fading memories, as Jep, from his spacious penthouse apartment overlooking the Coliseum, surrounds himself with the frustrating vapidity of a modern Rome that doesn't understand the beauty it once was. When we first meet Jep, it's at his birthday party, a garish rave populated by the vulgar, the cretinous, and the insufferable: Eurocult icon Serena Grandi appears as a bloated, haggard, coke-snorting ex-reality TV star, now reduced to jumping out of Jep's cake, and one pompous woman huffs "I wouldn't know her...I've never owned a TV," to which her sighing friend replies "You remind me of that at least once a day." Sorrentino gives the film a freeform structure that sometimes causes it to drag, especially in the second half, but the cinematography is gorgeous and the great Servillo is outstanding as always. (Unrated, 141 mins) THE PAST (France/Italy - 2013)
Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi ventures to Europe for this searing drama that functions as somewhat of a French-language companion piece to his 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner A SEPARATION. Like that film, THE PAST has lives intersecting in unforeseen ways with consequences the players never see coming. Farhadi has demonstrated his ability at building strong, believable, and very human characters in situations where all of the details are distributed in a deliberate but never hokey fashion. There are surprises and shocking revelations in THE PAST, but it's very organic in its construction and Farhadi avoids the easy pitfall of hackneyed melodrama. THE PAST is an excellent film but, through no fault of its own, it can't help but feel like a bit of a retread after A SEPARATION, even though its characters aren't in exactly the same scenario. Ali Mosaffa stars as Ahmad, an Iranian man who, in the midst of a severe depression, left Paris, his French wife Marie (Berenice Bejo of THE ARTIST) and her two daughters from a previous relationship, Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and Lea (Jeanne Jestin). Four years later, he returns from Iran at Marie's request to finalize their divorce. She's now involved with Samir (Tahar Rahim), who's moved in with his five-year-old son Fouad (Elyes Aguis). Ahmad doesn't expect to walk into a quietly dysfunctional powderkeg of tension, resentment, and other unresolved issues as he's drawn into the various conflicts existing in the household. Lucie is now a rebellious teenager who regards Ahmad like a father and objects to Samir being in their lives as another of her mother's men who will "just go away after a few years." Samir's wife has been in a coma for eight months for reasons that may or may not involve Samir and Marie having an affair. Fouad has a playmate in young Lea but is angry that he isn't living at his own house and that he has to share a bunk bed with Ahmad.
As with A SEPARATION, Farhadi slowly reveals layers of the story, methodically filling in the audience on the history of the characters and refusing to paint things in mere black and white. Almost everyone--Ahmad, Marie, Samir, and Lucie--provoke shifting alliances with the viewer. Is Marie a homewrecker? Does Ahmad relish the turmoil in which he finds himself? Though you may question the decisions they make, no one is completely right and no one is completely wrong, but they're unmistakably human and deeply flawed. It's hard to not compare THE PAST to the masterpiece that was A SEPARATION, but it's filled with powerful moments, committed performances (as he did with little Kimia Hosseini in A SEPARATION, Farhadi gets a movie-stealing performance out of a child actor, in this case the amazing young Aguis) , and Farhadi isn't afraid to let takes linger to the point where you're as uncomfortable as the characters. Witness the scene where Ahmad and Samir find themselves left alone at the kitchen table and just sit there, not with animosity--they aren't by any means chummy but they seem to realize they have no reason to dislike one another--but with the shrugging realization that they don't really have anything to say. (PG-13, 130 mins) THE GRANDMASTER (US/Hong Kong/China/France/Netherlands - 2013)
Legendary Wing Chun martial-artist and Bruce Lee mentor Ip Man (1893-1972) has been the subject of numerous films and a TV series in the last several years, virtually saturating the Asian market to become their version of Italian DJANGO westerns and French films about Coco Chanel. Donnie Yen starred in two hugely popular but highly fictionalized accounts, IP MAN (2008) and IP MAN 2 (2010) before declaring he was done because the Ip Mania was getting out of hand (he seems to have had a change of heart since he recently signed on for a third IP MAN, due out in 2015). There were also the competing IP MAN films THE LEGEND IS BORN: IP MAN (2010) with Dennis To, and IP MAN: THE FINAL FIGHT (2013) with Anthony Wong (because of its title, this is often mistaken as a sequel to the two Yen films), as well as the Chinese TV series IP MAN, which premiered in 2013 and starred Kevin Cheng in the title role. 2013 also saw the release of the most ambitious IP MAN project: Wong Kar Wai's THE GRANDMASTER, a more arthouse take on the legendary figure that was nonetheless controversially recut by US distributor Harvey Weinstein and sold as an action-centered kung-fu epic. Wong (CHUNGKING EXPRESS, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) had already released two versions, running 130 minutes and 123 minutes. Weinstein--allegedly with Wong's involvement--overhauled the film to 108 minutes for the US, adding some English captions to give a sense of perspective and exposition to American audiences not necessarily familiar with the Sino-Japanese conflicts that impacted Ip Man's life in the 1930s, and while that's helpful, the US release also makes further edits and rearranges some sequences. Wong wrote that it was a chance to "re-shape it" for a different audience while at the same time admitting that his 130-minute cut is his preferred version prepared with "precision and perfect balance."
Precision and perfect balance are not among the feelings you get watching the American cut of THE GRANDMASTER. It's a dazzling, sweeping epic (Philippe Le Sourd's cinematography got a well-deserved Oscar nomination), but its storytelling is muddled and confusing, even with the addition of English expository text and additional voiceover from Tony Leung's Ip Man. The purpose of Weinstein ordering the re-edit was to make Wong's film more linear, but the timeframe still jumps all over the place and there's still enough flashbacks and side stories that you're frequently unaware what year certain parts of the story are taking place. Covering Ip Man's life from 1936 to the early 1950s, Ip Man establishes himself as a great martial arts philosopher and practitioner and Grandmaster and is forced to leave Foshan after the Japanese invasion in 1938. The unwieldy plot also involves disputes between northern and southern China, traitorous Chinese martial artists selling out to the Japanese invaders, Ip Man's competitive rivalry/unrequited love with Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), the daughter of Master Gong Yutian (Wang Quigxiang), and how the Gong legacy is defamed and usurped by the treacherous Ma San (Zhang Jin) before Ip Man is forced to relocate to Hong Kong in 1950, where the film even tangentially involves Pu Yi, the subject of Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar-winning THE LAST EMPEROR (1987). What's odd--at least in the US cut--is how the last third of the film has Ip Man essentially step aside as a peripheral character in his own story. Zhang's Gong Er becomes the center of the plot in an extended flashback that details her reclaiming of the Gong dynasty in a brilliantly-shot fight sequence with Ma San, as Wong even works in an opium den sequence that's a straight-up homage to Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984), right down to the use of Ennio Morricone's famed "Deborah's Theme." Even in this truncated form, THE GRANDMASTER looks incredible--Wong really loves shooting epic fights in wind, rain, and snow--and the performances of Leung and Zhang are excellent, but there was enough of a cineaste backlash over this recut version that a domestic special edition Blu-ray release of Wong's 130-minute version is inevitable, so why not wait for that? (PG-13, 108 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)
