On Blu-ray/DVD/VOD: IRRESISTIBLE (2020) and ROGUE (2020)

IRRESISTIBLE
(US - 2020)

As seen with SILVER CITY in 2004, SWING VOTE in 2008, and THE CAMPAIGN in 2012, timely political comedies usually seem to pop up during election years. Written and directed by Jon Stewart and produced by Brad Pitt, this year's IRRESISTIBLE was another COVID-19 theatrical casualty that saw its intended wide summer release relegated primarily to VOD, which was probably the best venue for it (as you can see to your left, Focus Features really went all out on that poster design). It's a generally bland and forgettable attempt at being Frank Capra with a mean streak, and its satirical digs are toothless and obvious. Stewart's old DAILY SHOW colleague Steve Carell stars as Gary Zimmer, a top Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and is looking for redemption. He finds his shot in Col. Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), an ex-Marine and small-town Wisconsin farmer whose YouTube-captured takedown of Republican Mayor Braun (Brent Sexton) convinces him that he's the next face of the Democratic Party. The town--which runs about 95% Republican-- has fallen on hard times, conservative Col. Hastings doesn't think Braun is getting the job done, and it doesn't take much prodding for Zimmer to convince him to run as a Democratic challenger, calling the folksy Hastings "Bill Clinton with impulse control." Zimmer's machinations get the attention of the media, and the story of a little mayoral election in nowhere Wisconsin blows up enough that Republican strategist and Zimmer's 2016 Trump campaign arch-rival Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne) is sent in with unlimited financial backing to work Braun's re-election.

Carell gets to do a lot of his Michael Scott schtick from THE OFFICE, usually dismissing the townies as easily-manipulated rubes, while Cooper and Mackenzie Davis (as his daughter) do the idealistic, salt-of-the-earth "real Americans" bit when they object to Zimmer launching a smear attack on Braun. IRRESISTIBLE gets its biggest spark from Byrne, who dives into her role with gusto in some extremely vulgar ballbusting with Carell (Zimmer, finding Faith at the local coffee shop: "You know how I knew you were here?" Faith: "Your pussy tingled?"), but for someone as astute with the merging of politics and comedy as Stewart, this really errs on the side of cornball and formulaic, right down to its generic title. It's trying to say something about issues of too much money in politics, but it just never catches fire and rarely finds its inner WAG THE DOG, even with a twist ending that just magnifies the sense of cornpone Americana in the guise of contemporary satire. Stewart's barely-released 2014 directing debut ROSEWATER wasn't very good either, so maybe filmmaking just isn't his ideal medium. The supporting cast features familiar faces like Topher Grace and Natasha Lyonne as members of Zimmer's strategist team, and couple of political talking heads put in cameo appearances, but who knows what to make of Bill Irwin's bizarre cameo as a billionaire George Soros-type Democratic donor that sends things into absurdist DR. STRANGELOVE territory for about 45 seconds. It's a genuinely odd, out-of-nowhere gag that's funny but is wasted in this kind of middle-of-the-road "TV-movie with F-bombs" that uses Bob Seger's "Still the Same" over the opening credits and during a later "Hastings catching up on Braun in the polls" campaign montage. (R, 102 mins)




ROGUE
(South Africa/UK - 2020)

It seems like Megan Fox was everywhere in the late '00s, but other than starring in the TMNT franchise reboot a few years ago and joining the cast of Zooey Deschanel's NEW GIRL for a couple of seasons, she's kept a pretty low profile of late compared to her TRANSFORMERS and tabloid overexposure heyday. She's back in a starring role in the action/horror film ROGUE, not to be confused with the other ROGUE, a pretty terrific 2008 Australian killer crocodile flick that didn't get the attention it deserved. This ROGUE deals with a team of mercenaries trapped on a seemingly abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere in Africa after a botched extraction, only to find themselves at the mercy of a very pissed-off lioness who starts picking them off one by one. It's hard to tell what's less believable here: the CGI lioness, or Fox as Sam, the tough-as-nails leader of the black-ops merc unit. Sam and her team were hired by a beleaguered governor after his daughter (Jessica Sutton) has been abducted by an Al-Shabaab terror cell and human trafficking ring led by Zalaam (Adam Deacon). They rescue the girl and two others, but when their chopper arrives only to be blown out of the sky by Zalaam, they're forced to take the girls and run for their lives, ending up at a farm that's been deserted except for one territorial lioness who doesn't take kindly to intruders on her turf.

Director MJ Bassett, best known for SOLOMON KANE and her TV work with episodes of ASH VS. EVIL DEAD and STRIKE BACK (her 2007 survivalist thriller WILDERNESS is an underseen gem), co-wrote the script with her daughter Isabel, who plays one of the other kidnapped girls, but despite its noble intentions in offering a female-focused genre film, ROGUE fizzles with slack pacing, entirely too many predictable jump-scare kills that won't fool anyone who's seen DEEP BLUE SEA, and Fox just not even remotely convincing as a mercenary. Bassett, who most recently directed the surprisingly not-completely-terrible Universal 1440 DTV sequel INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED, does get a fun performance out of STRIKE BACK star Philip Winchester as Sam's wisecracking second-in-command, and his running gag involving the Backstreet Boys isn't bad, nor are a few decently-crafted action sequences that don't rely on the amateur-night CGI. The digital lioness is so awful that it seriously looks like a placeholder effect that someone forgot to finish, and it looks even sillier in a couple of scenes where Fox's Sam tries to negotiate with her woman-to-woman, or rather, bitch-to-bitch to reference the star's climactic quip that falls so flat that if you listen closely, you can probably hear the crickets chirping on set. (R, 106 mins)

In Theaters: VICE (2018)

VICE
(US - 2018)

Written and directed by Adam McKay. Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Jesse Plemons, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Fay Masterson, John Hillner, Paul Yoo, Joseph Beck, Tony Graham. (R, 132 mins)

ANCHORMAN director and Will Ferrell BFF Adam McKay took the leap to "serious filmmaker" with 2015's THE BIG SHORT, an angry and irreverent autopsy of the housing market collapse. He takes the same approach and nets less consistent results with the Dick Cheney biopic VICE, which covers the life of George W. Bush's vice president from his days as a hard-drinking college dropout and all-around fuck-up in 1963, through the events of 9/11 to his heart transplant in 2012. Regardless of how one feels about Cheney and where you stand politically, the one thing everyone can agree on in these more-divisive-than-ever times is that Christian Bale completely disappears onscreen and all you see is Dick Cheney. Sporting Oscar-worthy makeup and an extra 45-50 lbs, the Oscar-winning actor, known for his startling transformations in past films like THE MACHINIST, THE FIGHTER, and AMERICAN HUSTLE, absolutely becomes Cheney. Bale carries VICE on his shoulders, and it's a good thing he does, because without the level of obsessive, Day-Lewisian dedication in his performance/metamorphosis, the film's shortcomings and inconsistencies would be a lot more glaring than they already are.

Counting Ferrell and Brad Pitt among its producers, VICE is entertaining, but McKay too often succumbs to Michael Moore agitprop with all the subtlety of a jackhammer or, perhaps, Ron Burgundy. Tonally, it's all over the place, with the grim seriousness of 9/11 juxtaposed with the kind of meta jokes that wouldn't have been out of place on something like MR. SHOW or FUNNY OR DIE (like a focus group stopping the movie to address its liberal bias). There's a ruthless, Lady Macbeth quality to Lynne Cheney, played here by Amy Adams, leading to Adams and Bale playing an entire scene in emphatic, scenery-chewing Shakespearean dialogue. McKay also takes the story into a hypothetical direction about 40 minutes in, just prior to Cheney accepting an offer to be Bush's VP where he, Lynne, and their extended family live happily ever after as historical footnotes,  never to be heard from again as an inspiring score cue swells and the closing credits begin rolling before abruptly resetting and bringing the film back to reality. There's a scattershot, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to VICE that's worked for McKay in the past (ANCHORMAN, THE OTHER GUYS) and has also completely backfired (ANCHORMAN 2). It splits the difference here because it is funny, but the comedy only spotlights the fact that VICE is never sure what it wants to be. Bale is diving into this and losing himself in the way he deftly captures everything about Cheney physically and psychologically, while Adams is stuck playing a one-dimensional Lynne Cheney who's defined almost exclusively by her shrewd opportunism and the Cheney image (when their daughter Mary, played by Alison Pill, comes out as gay, it's Dick who immediately embraces her and offers his support while Lynne stands there, already questioning how this affects Dick's political career). Others are doing convincing impressions that look like SNL on a good night, like Steve Carell's obnoxious and loathed-throughout-DC Donald Rumsfeld, Tyler Perry's Colin Powell, Eddie Marsan's Paul Wolfowitz, and Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush, seen here as an easygoing goofball who only seems to be in politics to earn his dad's respect.

There is a clever framing device involving an onscreen narrator (Jesse Plemons), and the story jumps back and forth through the years, chronicling Cheney's time as a protege of presidential adviser Rumsfeld in the pre-Watergate Nixon White House, and his eventual return as White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford (Bill Camp) in the 1975 "Halloween Massacre," a gig he gets after swooping in to scavenge for table scraps left by everyone tainted by the Watergate fiasco. He's also the Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush and the film glosses over his tenure as CEO of Halliburton before he's persuaded to be George W. Bush's running mate. Throughout VICE, Cheney is accurately depicted as a Machiavellian mover and shaker, fixated on finding loopholes and reinterpretations to skirt around the Constitution and the law to find ways to grant the executive branch previously untapped levels of power, secrecy, and unaccountability. He's always working behind the scenes, quietly plotting, and never drawing attention to himself, qualities that come into play when he manipulates the younger Bush into letting him take on a much more significant role in policy and day-to-day operations than VPs have historically played ("The president and I have an understanding," he says whenever someone asks him if he's overstepping his boundaries).

The film's second half focuses almost entirely on the post 9/11 era, with the the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, "enhanced interrogation," Cheney's vengeful outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and other decisions that resonate to this day (the infamous incident where Cheney shot a guy in the face is also shown, along with a reminder that the only apology that ever came from it was from the victim to Cheney), but therein lies the core problem with VICE: you're not going to leave the theater knowing anything you didn't already know going in. And to that end, it's rather shallow and superficial, and lacking the focused rage of THE BIG SHORT (the most vicious jab is aimed not at Dick Cheney, but at the apathetic and easily-distracted general public, and it comes at the very end, so stick around for that stinger that comes early in the closing credits). It's a triumph of makeup and a testament to Christian Bale's many gifts as an actor and his complete devotion to his craft. He makes efforts to show Cheney's human side and doesn't play him a cartoonish Bond villain, but a long, "no apologies" monologue near the end might make you wonder if this wouldn't have made a more insightful film if it was a one-man show like James Whitmore as Harry S. Truman in 1975's GIVE 'EM HELL, HARRY! or Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's 1984 film SECRET HONOR.

On Blu-ray/DVD: LAST FLAG FLYING (2017) and THE SQUARE (2017)

LAST FLAG FLYING
(US - 2017)

LAST FLAG FLYING, the latest film from director Richard Linklater, is a "spiritual sequel" to Hal Ashby's 1973 classic THE LAST DETAIL, the common denominator between both films being novelist and screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan (whose other credits include CINDERELLA LIBERTY, TAPS, and VISION QUEST). Ponicsan adapted his own 1970 novel The Last Detail for Ashby, and in 2005, published a sequel with Last Flag Flying, showing the same characters 30-plus years later. In adapting Flying for the screen, Ponicsan (his first screenwriting credit since 1999's RANDOM HEARTS) and Linklater changed the names of the characters and switched them from ex-Navy to ex-Marines. As a result, the non-sequel sequel LAST FLAG FLYING functions as a standalone film but anyone who knows the backstory and is a fan of THE LAST DETAIL will clearly recognize the three protagonists as the same guys several decades on. Set in 2003 in an America where the wounds of 9/11 are still open and raw, mild-mannered Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell, formerly Randy Quaid as Lawrence "Larry" Meadows) is a recent widower who's just been informed his son was killed in action in Iraq and will be buried in Arlington. A despondent Doc then seeks out two old Vietnam buddies--crass, crude bar owner Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston, formerly Jack Nicholson as Billy "Badass" Buddusky) and recovering wildman alcoholic and now-devoutly religious pastor Richard "Mauler" Mueller (Laurence Fishburne, formerly Otis Young as Richard "Mule" Mulhall)--to accompany him to receive his son's body.

Along the way, they argue, bond, reminisce, bust each others' chops, and confront long-suppressed demons from Vietnam that have quietly haunted them. It starts fine but more or less plateaus once they learn that Doc's son's death didn't go down like the Marines claim and they decide to transport his body back home themselves. This results in an uneven mix of gut-wrenching drama and goofy comedy that's equal parts somber character study, GRUMPY OLD MEN, and PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES. Carell does some of his best dramatic work yet and really looks like a guy who's endured just about all he can handle after losing his wife to cancer and his son to war in quick succession, but Linklater really needed to rein in Cranston a little. A little of Cranston goes a long way here, and he's trying way too hard to emulate Jack Nicholson, not by doing a hacky Nicholson impression but by playing most of the film so broadly that his late shift from smartass to serious never rings true. Fishburne provides a nice balance to compensate for Cranston's playing to the cheap seats with his obnoxious behavior and routine invocations of "Hey, I got your (noun) danglin' right here!" bit. Cranston is a national treasure, but his work here is both broken and bad as he turns Badass Buddusky into Dumbass Sal. 93-year-old Cicely Tyson has a nice cameo as the mother of one of their other buddies who was killed in Vietnam, and LAST FLAG FLYING does display some genuine heart on occasion and shows a bit of a cynical streak in terms of the way the government and the military aren't above manufacturing fiction when it comes to telling families that a loved one has paid the ultimate price for their country, but it's kind of all over the place. Carell, Cranston, and Fishburne are great actors, but it doesn't seem like Linklater has them on the same page, and the entire film feels like it's arrived a decade too late, assuming THE LAST DETAIL needed a "spiritual sequel" in the first place. Amazon and Lionsgate gave this a big promotional push in the early fall as an awards season contender but ultimately backed off, canceling its expanded rollout and stalling it on just 110 screens at its widest release, for a gross of $965,000. Obviously they weren't feeling it either. (R, 125 mins)




THE SQUARE
(Sweden/Germany/France/US/Denmark - 2017)

"The Square" is an exhibit at a renowned Swedish art museum where a plaque declares it "a sanctuary of trust and caring," and adds "Within its boundaries, we all share equal rights and obligations." THE SQUARE is writer/director Ruben Ostlund's follow-up to his wildly overpraised FORCE MAJEURE. It was awarded the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and is currently an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, even though a good chunk of it is in English. There's often a sense of groupthink when it comes to critical praise and it's a problem that's only gotten worse in the era of Rotten Tomatoes. In short, I can't recall the last time I've felt this disconnected from what critics are saying about a film and my reaction to it as it unfolds. The most insufferable Palme d'Or winner since UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES, THE SQUARE focuses on museum curator Christian (Claes Bang, whose name is the best thing about this) and a series of distractions that begin with him being conned in the street and having his phone, wallet and cuff links lifted off of him and ends with an ill-advised marketing scheme that shows a little girl being blown up by a bomb while standing at The Square. Christian also has a one-night stand with an American TV news reporter (Elisabeth Moss) that results in a potentially messy tug-of-war with a used condom, and a black-tie museum gala flies off the rails when human exhibit Oleg Rogozjin (Terry Notary) mimics an ape, rampaging through the dining area, attacking an artist (Dominic West) and nearly sexually assaulting a woman while everyone idly watches the "art" unfold.

What does it all mean? Who knows? Who cares? Seen too late to be included on my Worst of 2017 list, THE SQUARE is the kind of movie mainstream subtitle-phobes think of when they hear someone say "It's a subtitled art film." Like the equally overrated and oppressively long TONI ERDMANN, just because something's mostly subtitled and has a couple of mildly transgressive scenes doesn't make it an instant classic. It's allegedly a comedy, though I don't recall laughing once, even at various cringeworthy situations. The much-ballyhooed tug-of-war with the condom was described by hyperventilating critics as nothing short of a brilliant, tour-de-force comedic set piece. Was it a Blake Edwards-esque display of game-changing genius that forever altered our perception of comedy? No, it was over after a couple of tugs in about ten seconds.  After watching, I looked at some reviews to try and understand what it was that I was missing, and a reviewer for Vox wrote "One moment, in which a chef hollers for a stampede of museum donors to stop moving so he can meekly tell them the buffet's offerings, is one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie." Really? Surely, you can't be serious? THE SQUARE lazily takes aim at fish-in-a-barrel targets: pretentious art exhibits (including one that's a room filled with piles of debris and a neon light flashing "You Have Nothing," and a creaking stack of chairs that seems ready to collapse at any moment), vacuous benefactors, unqualified people in charge, the Ice Bucket Challenge, the Comic Sans font, people with Tourette's, and cynical marketing strategies just to name a few. Christian is ultimately in a no-win situation after the public outcry over the terrorism-inspired marketing ploy goes viral, but he's then pilloried by purists for caving to censorship. Also, Moss' character has a large chimpanzee roommate with a moderate level of artistic talent. which is just something we're supposed to roll with because apparently it's clever and not at all stupid when there's subtitles. I'm assuming the joke here is that even a monkey can create the kind of art that's met with enthusiastic accolades by those in the scene--so wait, is Ostlund actually proving that with THE SQUARE?  Maybe the possibility exists that this whole thing is a total stunt but it speaks to Ostlund's stunning lack of focus with this aimless, tedious film that after it screened at Cannes at 142 minutes, he decided to tweak and tighten it and it ended up running nine minutes longer when he was finished. The general message is that while The Square promotes the idea of altruism and empathy among society, everyone around it is a self-absorbed hypocrite. Pretty insightful stuff. Maybe for Ostlund's next film, he can explore and deconstruct the satirical implications of poseur Von Triers and bargain-basement Bunuels and the pitfalls of believing your own hype. (R, 151 mins)

In Theaters: CAFE SOCIETY (2016)

CAFE SOCIETY
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Woody Allen. Cast: Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively, Kristen Stewart, Jeannie Berlin, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll, Ken Stott, Sari Lennick, Stephen Kunken, Sheryl Lee, Paul Schneider, Anna Camp, Douglas McGrath, Tony Sirico, Richard Portnow, voice of Woody Allen. (PG-13, 96 mins)

CAFE SOCIETY is the annual Woody Allen obligation, 2016 edition, and it's his strongest work since he directed Cate Blanchett to an Oscar in 2013's BLUE JASMINE. Latter-day Allen, particularly in this decade, is wildly inconsistent, ranging from his biggest commercial success in decades with 2011's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS to two of his career worsts with 2012's completely phoned-in TO ROME WITH LOVE and 2015's embarrassing IRRATIONAL MAN. Mainly, late-period Woody consists of mildly enjoyable trifles that are forgotten soon after watching. His 47th film as a director in 47 years (1981 was the last year he took off), CAFE SOCIETY isn't top-tier Allen by any means, but it's better than a lot of what he's done in the last ten or so years, exhibiting a bit more ambition and depth to go along with the requisite Windsor font-opening credits set to a scratchy jazz standard (most of the compositions are new recordings by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks). Working for the first time with the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (LAST TANGO IN PARIS, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE LAST EMPEROR), Allen achieves one of his best-looking films with the digitally-shot CAFE SOCIETY, which has a lot of laughs but is never played too broadly, with a melancholy streak that grows more apparent as it goes on.

In late 1930s Hollywood, idealistic young Woody surrogate (Allen himself narrates the film, and the 80-year-old legend's voice is starting to sound a little frail) Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) arrives from the Bronx, hoping to land a job with his uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent-to-the-stars. A relentless name-dropper ("I'm expecting a call from Ginger Rogers," he says to anyone who will listen at a posh party), Stern wheels and deals and can barely make the time for his nephew, but he does get him some gofer work delivering messages and driving people around. Bobby eventually works his way up to script reader for a big studio and falls head over heels for Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), one of Phil's secretaries. Vonnie is flattered by Bobby's attention, but she's already in a relationship. Unbeknownst to all parties--initially--Vonnie's boyfriend is the much-older Phil, who's ready to leave Karen (Sheryl Lee), his wife of 25 years. When Phil decides he can't break his wife's heart, Vonnie and Bobby become a couple and it isn't long before they all realize their connection, and Phil finally walks out on his wife, insisting he'll kill himself if he can't be with Vonnie.

This plotline takes up most of the first hour of CAFE SOCIETY before Allen does a bit of a time jump in which Bobby has left Hollywood and has moved back to NYC, working as a manager at a swanky club owned by his older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a mobster gaining notoriety in the city. We see a vastly different Bobby from the shy, nebbishy, Woody-type we saw in Hollywood. He's cool, confidant, and a player. Allen does some clever misdirection here with the presentation of this "new" Bobby, almost as if a chunk of the movie was missing. And just when you're thinking this change in Eisenberg's performance seems forced and lacking in credibility, that's because it is. When the Hollywood past comes blithely strolling into his brother's Manhattan nightclub, that facade immediately vanishes and Bobby is Bobby again: awkward, hesitant, unable to look someone in the eye. The only difference is that it's now accompanied by a palpable anger. Eisenberg has done some great work (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, THE SOCIAL NETWORK), but when he gets too "Eisenberg"-ish, he can be an acquired taste (his dreadful performance in BATMAN V SUPERMAN is a perfect example). His Allen impression in the first half is among the better ones Woody's commissioned for his films (remember Kenneth Branagh's cringe-inducing Woody in CELEBRITY?), but the actor is able to build the Bobby character using the Allen persona as a starting point, and the abrupt switch from man-about-town Bobby to the real Bobby is some of the most convincing work Eisenberg's ever done. This is his third pairing with Stewart, after ADVENTURELAND and AMERICAN ULTRA, and they really click here, as do Eisenberg and Blake Lively, who turns up in the second half of the film as a new object of Bobby's affections. Jeannie Berlin steals every scene she's in as Bobby's mother, taking the "harping Jewish matriarch" stereotype and running with it, along with Ken Stott as Bobby's grumbling father, who's always complaining about his brother-in-law Phil ("You don't just walk out on your wife because a newer one comes along" he tells his wife, adding "You're not winning any beauty contests, but I stuck with you!"). CAFE SOCIETY is as thematically and stylistically formulaic as almost every other Allen film, but there's a little more substance to this one than he's demonstrated in his more recent offerings. Judging from the pattern, Woody's 2017 film should be a disappointment, but in the meantime, CAFE SOCIETY shows the legendary filmmaker in pretty solid form.

In Theaters: THE BIG SHORT (2015)

THE BIG SHORT
(US - 2015)

Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock, Adepero Oduye, Karen Gillan, Jeffry Griffin, Byron Mann, Billy Magnusson, Max Greenfield, Stanley Wong, Tracy Letts, Wayne Pere, Al Sapienza. (R, 130 mins)

Based on the book of the same name by Moneyball author Michael Lewis and a good companion piece with J.C. Chandor's 2011 film MARGIN CALL, THE BIG SHORT chronicles the disparate group of hedge fund oddballs and outsiders who predicted the bursting of the mortgage bubble and bet against the American economy when it became apparent that the crash was inevitable. Directed and co-written by frequent Will Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, THE BIG SHORT treats a serious, devastating subject with cynical and often scathing humor, with an offbeat and occasionally anarchic sensibility that's used conservatively enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome. For instance, when the Wall Street verbiage gets a little too technical for the layman, narrator Jared Vennett (a smooth, sarcastic Ryan Gosling) will break the fourth wall to introduce a celebrity and say something like "And now, to explain this in everyday terms, here's Margot Robbie drinking champagne in a bubble bath," or "Here's world-famous chef Anthony Bourdain..." though at times it opts for the easy route and has an incredulous character say "OK, wait a minute...let me get this straight...are you saying....?"

The film, which changes the names of the major players from Lewis' book except for Dr. Michael Burry, centers on a small number of individuals who took the time to separately analyze data to conclude that the global economy was a Jenga tower with a foundation of dubiously unstable subprime loans. In 2005, Scion Capital head Burry (Christian Bale), a socially-awkward former neurologist-turned-hedge fund wunderkind with a glass eye and Asperger's and a penchant for ultra-casual dress and air-drumming to Master of Puppets-era Metallica and Pantera in his office, is the first to notice the initial signs of trouble and of course, no one listens to him. He risks becoming a Wall Street pariah when he invests his firm's money into betting against subprime mortgages (known as a "credit default swap") that he anticipates collapsing beginning in 2007 ("Everybody pays their mortgage!" overconfident bank execs say repeatedly). Vennett is another hedge fund cowboy who overhears news of Burry's maverick actions and finds his own analysis comes to the same conclusion. A wrong number by Vennett ends up bringing him into contact with the abrasive Mark Baum (Steve Carell), an outspoken trader with an axe to grind against big banks, and the head of FrontPoint, a small outfit within Morgan Stanley that's referred to as "the world's angriest hedge fund." Vennett and Baum discover that clumps of bad loans are being repackaged as CDOs (collateralized debt obligation) with inaccurate AAA ratings or just flat-out fraudulent "synthetic CDOs" and it's not only being condoned but encouraged. At the same time, a pair of idealistic young hedge funders from Colorado, Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), also get word of what Vennett and Baum are up to and want a piece of the action. They secure the assistance of legendary trader Ben Rickert (co-producer Brad Pitt, who had a big success with the movie version of MONEYBALL)--a paranoid semi-recluse who grew so disgusted with Wall Street's dishonesty that he quit the business and retired with his millions to Colorado to live off the land. Rickert informs them that the mortgage collapse will make them millions, but it also means millions of middle-class Americans will lose everything in the process.

That's the message at the heart of THE BIG SHORT. Wall Street's illegal antics and unending greed created a housing bubble that everyone got a piece of until reality set in and the bill came due. It takes a year longer for the bubble to burst than Burry predicted, mainly because the banks were withholding vital information and not being honest about what was really happening as they continued to turn no one down for a home loan ("Immigrants are the best," one broker brags, adding "They don't even know what you're saying!"). To its credit, the film doesn't make its characters into heroes, at the most painting them in shades of gray: they profit from the collapse of the evil financial institutions, but it's still the public that pays the price, especially with the inevitable taxpayer bailout ("They knew this was coming and they did nothing to stop it because they knew the taxpayers would bail them out," Vennett seethes). The ensemble cast is terrific, though only Carell and Gosling have any scenes together (with the exception of a shot where he walks by Carell and Gosling at a convention, all of Pitt's scenes are solo or with Magaro and Wittrock; and Bale never crosses paths with any of them), and the script by McKay and Charles Randolph (who also wrote the absurd THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE) is filled with zingers and quotable dialogue (Vennett to one of Baum's partners played by Jeremy Strong: "That's a nice shirt...do they make it for men?") that almost function as a protective shield from all the devastation on display. There's a good amount of humor ranging from dark to laugh-out-loud, but also gut-wrenching poignancy, as when Baum's partners find entire subdivisions of homes left abandoned when the owners simply walked away from the house, sometimes leaving almost everything behind ("This looks like Chernobyl...all they took was the TV"), and in some cases leaving unlucky renters in the lurch ("He hasn't been paying the mortgage?  But I've been paying my rent!" says one tenant whose family is living in a van by the end of the movie). Easily McKay's most mature work to date, THE BIG SHORT is a bleakly funny, laugh-so-you-don't-cry autopsy of an economic clusterfuck that reinforced the cynicism of today's world: as Vennett says "Only one banker went to prison, all the executives got fat bonuses, and everything was blamed on immigrants and the poor." The end credits tell what the principals have been up to since the events depicted here. The most telling is that Burry's repeated requests to interview Wall Street investment honchos, bank CEOs and government officials about the crash have all been declined and since 2008, the IRS has audited him four times.

On DVD/Blu-ray: FOXCATCHER (2014) and THE CAPTIVE (2014)

FOXCATCHER
(US - 2014)

It couldn't have been that difficult to put together a riveting true crime drama about the events leading up to the 1996 murder of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz at the hand of billionaire philanthropist John du Pont. Du Pont, played here by a prosthetic nose attached to Steve Carell, was the heir to the Du Pont chemical company fortune who dabbled in all sorts of professions--he was best-known as a respected ornithologist who published several books on birds--but had a passion for wrestling. In 1986, Du Pont contacts Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), the younger brother of Dave (Mark Ruffalo), both of whom won gold medals in wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, about running a training facility for potential Olympic wrestlers at du Pont's Foxcatcher Farms compound in Wilmington, DE. Mark, depicted as a bit of a dumb lug, has grown tired of living in Dave's shadow, and since Dave is contractually tied down to his college coaching gig, Mark sees this as his chance to establish a legacy of his own, even though, as he constantly has to remind everyone, "I won a gold medal, too." A father-son bond forms between du Pont and Mark, though their relationship gets rocky, especially once Dave eventually joins the Foxcatcher team at du Pont's insistence, though it's not helped by du Pont's increasingly erratic behavior, including firing a gun in the gym and goading the impressionable, eager-to-please Mark into recreational cocaine use.

Director Bennett Miller (CAPOTE, MONEYBALL) and screenwriters E. Max Frye (SOMETHING WILD) and Dan Futterman (CAPOTE) play entirely too fast and loose with the facts of the case, so much so that it's hard to say which is the most egregious offense. It could be that the film seems to portray the events as taking place from 1986 to just after the Seoul qualifying tryouts in 1988, when in fact, the time period was 1986 to 1996. It could be the depiction of Mark leaving Foxcatcher after du Pont and Dave become chummy and Mark falls out of du Pont's good graces, when in fact, there was no sibling rivalry in regard to du Pont because the Schultz brothers didn't live or coach together at Foxcatcher--Dave moved his family to Foxcatcher a year after Mark quit following his last falling out with du Pont. It could be du Pont's mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and her disapproval of his wrestling fixation and the creation of Foxcatcher Farms, but in fact, she died before du Pont even created Foxcatcher Farms. Dramatic license is to be expected, but it's very vague exactly what the filmmakers are trying to show here. Essentially, it's about a rich, manipulative, socially inept weirdo whose mother had to buy friends for him when he was a child, and his codependent relationship with a none-too-bright wrestler who was tired of getting the leftover table scraps of his more popular brother. It's about a guy who develops an obsession with coaching wrestling so he can both please his disapproving mom and finally get a chance to be one of the guys, even if he has to drive a wedge between two loving brothers to achieve it. Except that du Pont didn't drive the brothers apart. FOXCATCHER is smoke-and-mirrors Oscar-baiting at its most cynical, starting with the stunt casting of Carell. Sure, it's a dramatic departure for a guy generally known for comedy, but since everything about FOXCATCHER is empty and meaningless, there's nothing there beyond the distracting fake nose. It's mind-boggling that this received five Oscar nominations, including acting nods for Carell and Ruffalo, who's good because he's Mark Ruffalo and he's always good, but this is hardly a standout performance in his career. Miller's direction and Frye & Futterman's script were also nominated, while the one legitimately great thing about FOXCATCHER--the revelatory work of Tatum--went ignored. In a textbook example of an internalized powderkeg of a performance, Tatum almost single-handedly makes the inexplicably feted FOXCATCHER worth enduring for 134 excruciating minutes. It's these kinds of performances that go unnoticed by awards outfits because they're too subtle and low-key, not like Carell acting all creepy with a ridiculous phony schnoz. FOXCATCHER is proof positive that Tatum can act, but otherwise, it's one of the worst awards-season prestige films in years. (R, 134 mins)



THE CAPTIVE
(Canada - 2014)

Coming quickly on the heels of his utterly superfluous West Memphis Three chronicle DEVIL'S KNOT, the once-great Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan continues his decade-long slide into irrelevance with the maddeningly uneven THE CAPTIVE. With only 2008's ADORATION showing signs of the Egoyan of old, the filmmaker has spent most of his time over the last ten or so years making documentaries and short films as passion projects while keeping food on the table by directing commercial thrillers like WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (2005) and CHLOE (2009), an erotic thriller that felt 15 years old the day it was released. Egoyan tries to have the best of both worlds with THE CAPTIVE and while the film has its moments, it just doesn't work as a whole. Most of THE CAPTIVE is made up of the same kind of fractured, non-linear narrative that old-school Egoyan fans will recognize from his 1990s masterpieces EXOTICA and THE SWEET HEREAFTER. In the outskirts of Niagara Falls, ON, 21-year-old Cass (Alexia Fast) was abducted eight years earlier by Mika (Kevin Durand) and kept in a locked basement room. Mika allows her webcam access to function as a "gateway," luring other young girls into a vaguely-defined underage kidnapping ring. Cass' separated parents, Matthew (Ryan Reynolds) and Tina (Mireille Enos) are shells of what they once were, and Tina blames Matthew for Cass' disappearance (he stopped at a bakery to get a pie for dessert that night as 13-year-old Cass was taken while lying down in the backseat of his truck). The cops, led by crusading Dunlop (Rosario Dawson) and hot-headed Cornwall (Scott Speedman), seem pretty set on the idea that financially-strapped Matthew is behind Cass' disappearance, at least until Dunlop herself goes missing after a benefit dinner for a charity organization that helps victims of child sex trafficking.

All of this plot is parsed out in bits and pieces as Egoyan jumps around the eight-year timeline. It gradually comes together like it does in his best work, and in that best work, attentive viewers begin piecing the puzzle and marveling at Egoyan's expert story construction and devastating emotional impact. THE CAPTIVE has the puzzle part down, but not so much the expert story construction and the devastating emotional impact. Once the pieces are in place, Egoyan doles out one ludicrous and often laughable contrivance after another. Mika is one of these limitlessly wealthy psychos who has the time and the technological wherewithal to plant cameras in the rooms of an entire floor of the hotel where Tina works, for the sole purpose of leaving Cass' childhood trinkets and mementos--a hairbrush, an ice-skating trophy, baby teeth--in plain sight for her to see, taunting her from afar as he watches her on a row of monitors on a control panel at his mansion. It doesn't help that, as in DEVIL'S KNOT, Egoyan has directed Durand to go hammy, playing Mika broadly and completely unbelievably. Like Sharlto Copley in Spike Lee's remake of OLDBOY, Durand doesn't even seem to be in the same movie as the other actors, looking like an anachronistic, erudite David Niven/Errol Flynn-type and behaving like a cartoon character, but somehow never drawing attention to himself and never becoming a suspect, even though he visits one other busted member of a pedophile ring in jail. Also, when Dunlop is roofied and taken from the gala benefit, she's at the same table as Mika and a strange woman (Christine Horne) in an obvious wig, and nobody seems to notice that the guest speaker is stumbling and bumbling and needs to be helped out of the building and into a waiting limo by this mystery woman. Is there an entire secret society of child abductors in this town? And are they less interested in pedophilia and more focused on using high-tech surveillance to spy on their parents and the cops?  How in the hell does Mika have remote access to turn on the webcam on Cornwall's laptop so he can spy on Cornwall and Dunlop discussing their investigation? If Egoyan were ever to direct an episode of LAW & ORDER: SVU, it would probably look a lot like THE CAPTIVE, right down to the detectives standing around the office and chiming in with bits of exposition as the camera moves around them. The only thing missing is Dunlop calling in Richard Belzer's retired John Munch to consult on the case. Witness this stunning exercise in textbook Dick Wolfery:

Detective 1: "Maybe there was a watcher."
Detective 2: "Or watchers."
Detective 3: "A whole new class of freaks."

More than a little reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve's PRISONERS, THE CAPTIVE could've worked one of two ways: as a total throwback, give-the-arthouse-nerds-what-they-want Atom Egoyan film (fixtures like Bruce Greenwood and Egoyan's wife Arsinee Khanjian have minor supporting roles!) or as a ludicrous-but-just-roll-with-it multiplex thriller, where the contrivances and the silliness could've been easier to overlook, and a moment like Cornwall, one of the most unjustifiably cocky cops you'll ever see (he's always wrong!), finally getting clocked by an enraged Matthew would've served as a real crowd-pleaser. But Egoyan is just lost. He comes up short at both ends of the spectrum and seems to have no idea what he's doing or who his films are even for anymore. Egoyan is too smart to let the rampant stupidity of THE CAPTIVE's second half even happen, especially after making such a concerted effort to present the first half as quintessential Egoyan. I'm a sucker for depictions of cold, snowy, desolate Canada and the film does succeed on that front, and Egoyan does get two strong performances from Reynolds and Enos, both of whom seem to dominate the "smart" portions of the movie, but THE CAPTIVE is yet another sign that a slumping Egoyan desperately needs to locate his apparently abducted mojo. (R, 112 mins)

In Theaters: ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES (2013)

ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES
(US - 2013)

Directed by Adam McKay.  Written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.  Cast: Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, Christina Applegate, Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Dylan Baker, Meagan Good, Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, Josh Lawson, Judah Nelson,  Fred Willard, Chris Parnell, June Diane Raphael. (PG-13, 120 mins)

Back in 2004, the $25 million ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY made more than triple its budget but never topped the box office and dropped out of the top five after two weeks.  The film became a modern comedy classic on DVD and cable, where it amassed a devoted cult following when people discovered how consistently hilarious and quotable it is.  Star/co-writer Will Ferrell left SNL two years earlier and had the hits OLD SCHOOL and ELF, but it was ANCHORMAN that would become the defining work of his big-screen career and his partnership with director/co-writer Adam McKay, though I contend that 2010's THE OTHER GUYS is their masterpiece.   It's nearly a decade later, and after what must be the longest, most aggressive, and all-encompassing marketing campaigns in cinema history, ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES arrives just before Ferrell resorted to going door-to-door across America in his Ron Burgundy wardrobe.  With double the budget, probably to accommodate the increased star power and salary requirements of Ferrell and Steve Carell, it's obviously a bigger movie.  And a louder movie.  It's also bombastically self-indulgent as Ferrell and McKay seem to be making it up as they go along.  Nine years ago, they had enough outtakes and abandoned subplots from the first film to assemble the straight-to-DVD spinoff film WAKE UP, RON BURGUNDY.  There's no such restraint here.  Running nearly 30 minutes longer than the first film, Ferrell and McKay gather up seemingly every discarded comedy idea they concocted since the first entry and throw everything against the wall to see what sticks.  Its rapid fire assault of gags might sound ambitious but it comes off as sloppy and desperate, almost like they could be working on a higher level than we're expecting but more likely they're just punking us with an almost Sandlerian level of audience contempt.  There's no doubt the coming weeks will find passionate defenses of the film and you'll see terms like "anarchic," "absurdist," "subversive," "Dadaist", and maybe even, and I can't believe I'm writing this, "Bunuel-ian" tossed about with wild, pretentious abandon as if there's some deeper shit going on, but even as a fan of Ferrell, the first film, and absurdist humor, I found ANCHORMAN 2 to be jaw-droppingly unfunny and a dumpster fire of a movie, the kind of catastrophically awful train wreck where it's not hyperbolic to suggest that it's Ferrell and McKay's GIGLI or THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH. 

Opening in 1980 to the sounds of Christopher Cross' "Ride Like the Wind," the first of countless soft-rock tunes used where simply hearing them is supposed to be the joke, ANCHORMAN 2 finds news anchor Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and wife/co-anchor Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) relocated to NYC from San Diego, with their six-year-old son Walter (Judah Nelson).  When Veronica is called up to the network by boss Mack Harken (Harrison Ford), who subsequently fires Ron, their marriage falls apart.  After a botched suicide attempt, Ron is contacted by Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker), who's scouting for news personalities for Global News Network, a new 24-hour cable news network bankrolled by Australian billionaire Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson).  Lured by the promise of stardom and seeing it as another chance to do what he was born to do, Ron decides to reassemble his news team: reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), weatherman Brick Tamland (Carell), and sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner).  Saddled with the 2:00-5:00 am graveyard slot, Ron finds a rival in prime-time anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden), and comes up with an idea to give the audience the news they want instead of the news they need.  With his focus on vacuous entertainment stories, cute animals, high-speed chases, debates devolving into shouting matches, and smoking crack on-air, Ron becomes the country's biggest news star and inadvertently brings about the downfall of television news standards.

Those digs at today's cable news--which are obvious and don't really threaten to erase memories of Paddy Chayefsky and NETWORK--are about as thoughtful as ANCHORMAN 2 gets.  Aside from the use of early '80s radio staples, the film constantly utilizes future debacles and scandals as a source of easy, lazy humor ("Sponsored by BP:  Nature's Best Friend," and Brian cites O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, and Robert Blake as his posse who call themselves "The Ladykillers"), and it's funny once or twice, but by the 20th time, it's a little stale.  There's a certain expectation of callbacks and references when you're dealing with a comedy as revered as ANCHORMAN, and that film's first invocations of "Great Odin's Raven!" or "By the beard of Zeus!" were hilarious.  Not so much here, when Ferrell is bellowing nonsense like "By the hymen of Olivia Newton-John!"  What?  And I haven't even gotten into an extended subplot where Ron goes blind after a head injury and spends his days in seclusion at a lighthouse and bottle-feeding a shark before freeing it into the open water.  Ron Burgundy was always a pompous chauvinist, but here's he's just a bleating, tone-deaf asshole.  Sometimes, it's as if he's not even playing the same Ron Burgundy from the first film, but rather, an even more cartoonish parody of Ron Burgundy.  Indeed, ANCHORMAN 2 is so scattershot, random, and over-the-top that it makes the comparatively sophisticated ANCHORMAN look like BROADCAST NEWS.  When Ron gets involved with African-American, female boss Linda Jackson (Meagan Good)--this is after he first meets her and can't stop the Tourette's-styled barking of "Black!" at her--he has dinner with her family, where he steers the conversation to the level of her "stank" during sex and throwing out a "Say what?" to her mother.  Has Ferrell even seen the first ANCHORMAN recently?  Does he remember making it?

But that's nothing compared to what's happened to Carell's Brick Tamland.  Carell wasn't a star back in 2004 and was primarily known as a DAILY SHOW correspondent.  In the ensuing decade, he's had considerable success with THE OFFICE and several movies. Brick was a minor character with some funny bits in ANCHORMAN, but now that Carell is arguably as big a star as Ferrell, they probably had to give Brick stuff to do to entice Carell back.  What transpires is nightmarish.  Carell plays Brick not as a low-IQ, amiably naive man-child, but instead like a thousand-yard-staring psychopath prone to shrieking and screaming for no reason.  He gets an endurance test of a subplot where he falls in love with an eccentric, incompetent GNN secretary named Chani (Kristen Wiig), and their endless, laughless scenes play out like bad improv or an exceptionally awful 12:55 am SNL skit where you can almost hear crickets chirping in Studio 8H.  No one's having a good day here--it doesn't help that Rudd and Koechner have almost nothing to do, so they at least emerge from the wreckage largely unscathed--but there's simply too much of this reconceived Brick Tamland in this and Carell turns in what may very well be the worst performance you'll see in a major movie in 2013.

Even by the standards of a Judd Apatow production, there's too much of everything here--except comedy.  I get the "anarchic" spirit the filmmakers might be going for, but when I hear that term, I think of the action in BLAZING SADDLES crashing over into Buddy Bizarre's musical at the end.  Every rambling, overlong sequence in ANCHORMAN 2 plays like something that only the actors think is funny.  You can actually see Carell and Wiig almost breaking during some of their conversations, and I'm sure there's plenty of bloopers with the two of them losing it.  But what's onscreen is just not funny.  It's not even "weird" or "offbeat" funny.  Joke after joke after joke lands with a dead thud.  Did anyone at Paramount actually watch this, or did they just figure they'll get the $50 million back before the toxic word-of-mouth spreads?   Even the expected rival news crews Battle Royale--one of the original film's best scenes--is restaged here with a ridiculous amount of cameos and other out-of-nowhere additions (Brick hoisting a sci-fi ray gun?), but that's it.  Once you see the famous faces and all of Ferrell's buddies who showed up to hang out, there's not really anything else there.  So why not have John C. Reilly play the soul-sucking ghost of Stonewall Jackson or Harrison Ford sprouting fur and turning into a "were-hyena" for no reason?  Sure, it's insane but is it funny?  Ranking somewhere between CADDYSHACK II and SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT PART 3 on the comedy sequel scale, ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES is an excruciating Will Ferrell home movie where the legend of Ron Burgundy has gone to die.