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. 

In Theaters: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013)

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG
(US/New Zealand - 2013)

Directed by Peter Jackson.  Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro.  Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom, Benedict Cumberbatch,  Luke Evans, Evangeline Lilly, Cate Blanchett, Lee Pace, Stephen Fry, Ken Stott, James Nesbitt, Aidan Turner, Sylvester McCoy, Graham McTavish, Jed Brophy, Mikael Persbrandt, Ryan Gage, Manu Bennett, Lawrence Makoare. (PG-13, 161 mins)

The second installment of Peter Jackson's HOBBIT trilogy is a no-expense-spared visual stunner, but again suffers from the bloat of Jackson and his writing team padding a 300-page book into what will amount to somewhere around nine hours of cinema.  I'm not saying there's an etched-in-stone rule for film adaptations of books, but if you can read the book in less time than it takes to watch the movie, you might be overdoing it.  Jackson was able to convey the entire epic LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy in three films, but the recurring--and justified--criticism of this latest venture is that The Hobbit is a comparatively smaller-scale, less grandiose novel, but it's still taking him three overlong films to tell the story thanks to the addition of material from Tolkien's The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.  There's simply no reason other than the greed of getting fans to pay for three movies that this couldn't have been one three-hour film.  This frequently becomes a problem when a visionary filmmaker unveils a game-changer and is then granted carte blanche to do whatever they want.  He may not be the insufferable asshole that James Cameron is, but that doesn't make Jackson's self-indulgence any less problematic and off-putting.

Harsh words, perhaps, but I didn't dislike THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.  It looks terrific (I saw this in regular 3-D instead of the stagy-looking High Frame Rate 3-D, which is Jackson's preferred vision), the performances are excellent, and there's some inspired set pieces, most notably the barrel escape from the castle of Elvenking Thranduil (Lee Pace).  That's just one stop on the journey of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), who's accompanying a group of dwarves led by the heroic Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) to obtain the Arkenstone from the dragon Smaug, who long ago took control of Lonely Mountain from Oakenshied's ancestors.  SMAUG really consists of a handful of set pieces stretched out to extreme lengths.  Whatever spectacle is achieved--the giant spiders, the barrel escape, and eventually, the showdown with Smaug (wonderfully voiced and the face motion-captured by Benedict Cumberbatch)--each goes on forever.  Before the heroes end up imprisoned in Thranduil's castle, they cross paths with elves Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly).  Legolas, a fan favorite of the LOTR books and films, is the son of Thranduil but was not in Tolkien's The Hobbit, and is only here to make Bloom part of this trilogy as well (he's also been given that distracting, waxy CGI sheen that the original trilogy's returning actors got in AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY to make him look younger, though considering Legolas is already several hundred years old, it hardly seems necessary).  Tauriel is a character completely invented by Jackson, and much time is devoted to her mutual crush on dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), a subplot that the audience will find almost as irritating as Legolas does.  So, it's not enough that he's bloating the novel into three films by incorporating material from other Tolkien works, but now he's creating additional characters and plotlines?    Just adapt the book, Mr. Jackson.  I'm no Tolkien purist and it's been years since I've read it, but you're fixing something that isn't broken.

Amidst the endless and eventually exhausting action sequences--yes, Jackson resorts to that zoomy, circling video-game look with characters pinballing around the frame--there's a lot to appreciate in the performances.  Freeman is spot-on as Bilbo and Armitage is again a strong Oakenshield.  The camaraderie among the dwarves is nicely-handled, Luke Evans does some good work as Bard, a widowed, down-on-his-luck boatman who helps smuggle the crew into Esgaroth, and Stephen Fry is amusingly hammy as the callous Master of Lake-town, a sort-of Middle-Earth one-percenter prone to bitching that the commoners want food, shelter, and work.  Jackson made some late-in-the-game editing decisions and bumped some scenes to next year's THERE AND BACK AGAIN, resulting in Hugo Weaving (Elrond), Andy Serkis (Gollum), and Christopher Lee (Saruman) getting cut from SMAUG, and Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) reduced to one shot.  Presumably, these changes affected Ian McKellen's Gandalf as well.  McKellen gets top-billing here but only has a few scenes.  After leaving Bilbo and the dwarves to attend to other business, he runs into Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) and has a confrontation with the Necromancer (also Cumberbatch), and...that's it.  Absent for long stretches of time, McKellen's got maybe 10-12 minutes of screen time here, and it's one of the film's major letdowns.  He owns this character and it's an absolute joy watching him relish playing it.  But hey, at least we've got a budding romance between Kili and Tauriel to look forward to in the next film.

Cult Classics Revisited: VIOLENT CITY (1970)

VIOLENT CITY
aka THE FAMILY
(Italy/France - 1970/1973 US release)

Directed by Sergio Sollima.  Written by Sauro Scavolini, Gianfranco Galligarich, Lina Wertmuller, Sergio Sollima.  Cast: Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Jill Ireland, Umberto Orsini, Michel Constantin, Ray Sanders, Benjamin Lev, Peter Dane, George Savalas, Goffredo Unger. (R, 109 mins)

Charles Bronson (1921-2003) was a late bloomer when it came to mega-stardom.  A working actor in movies since 1951, he became a reliable supporting actor throughout that decade, acting under his real name "Charles Buchinsky" until 1954.  With small roles in classics like HOUSE OF WAX (1953) and VERA CRUZ (1954), and countless TV gigs, he made his presence known and in 1958, got his first lead in Roger Corman's MACHINE GUN KELLY.  But it was still mainly supporting roles after that, though he found some degree of fame as part of ensembles in blockbusters like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963).  Even as Bronson was co-starring in big-budget extravaganzas like BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), he was still doing TV guest roles and felt like he was spinning his wheels.  After two more supporting roles in the 1968 westerns VILLA RIDES and the French/Italian/Mexican co-production GUNS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN, Bronson opted to test the waters of the European film industry and it proved to be the best move he could've made.  With his career stalled at home, European audiences embraced the veteran journeyman actor and turned him into a superstar.  1968's FAREWELL, FRIEND (better known these days as HONOR AMONG THIEVES) paired him with French icon Alain Delon, and he had one of his signature roles as Harmonica in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969), a film that bombed in the US when released but is now considered one of cinema's essential westerns.  Over the next few years, Bronson occasionally dabbled in American films like YOU CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL (1970) or the British LOLA (1970), which gave the 49-year-old actor one of his strangest roles as a 38-year-old writer falling in love with a 16-year-old (Susan George), but his run of generally Italian and/or French films from 1969-73 made him the top box office draw in Europe.  Most of these films would open in the US--often belatedly--and some, like 1971's RED SUN and 1972's THE VALACHI PAPERS, would become hits, but never on the level that they did in Europe.  Bronson was the king of the European box office and by 1972, he gradually started to work his way back into American films with that year's THE MECHANIC and 1973's THE STONE KILLER.  1974 was the turning point of Bronson's career:  on July 17, MR. MAJESTYK opened, and a week later, the vigilante thriller DEATH WISH was released.  DEATH WISH provided a template for every vigilante film that followed it, and it became a blockbuster smash and a hot-button controversy that addressed very real concerns of crime in 1970s NYC.  Over two decades into his career and at 53 years of age, Bronson was finally a Hollywood A-lister, global megastar and, it's worth mentioning, aftershave pitchman for the Japanese market.

Telly Savalas' career path was remarkably similar to Bronson's in many ways, even intersecting in BATTLE OF THE BULGE and THE DIRTY DOZEN.  Savalas (1922-1994) was another jobbing actor who spent a lot of time in supporting roles and on TV and didn't even make his big-screen debut until he was 39 years old.  He got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for 1962's BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ, his fifth film, and even played nefarious 007 villain Blofeld in 1969's ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.  Savalas' Oscar nomination (he lost to Ed Begley in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH) kept him busy but didn't really open any doors to stardom for him, and he was back on TV the next year (though one of those TV roles was in the legendary TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Living Doll," where he's a cruel disciplinarian stalked by his stepdaughter's angry doll Talky Tina).  Usually cast as villains and psychos, Savalas was in constant demand but, like Bronson, grew frustrated with the predictability of the work.  He spent most of the early 1970s in Europe, where he still played villains and psychos (his performance in 1972's REDNECK has to be seen to be believed), but was granted the VIP treatment that came with being a big-name American guest star in European genre fare, which explains why a lot of aging American actors of that era (Joseph Cotten, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer, etc) logged a lot of time in Eurotrashy projects that were usually beneath them.  Savalas' career was all but dead in America until he took the lead in the CBS TV-movie THE MARCUS-NELSON MURDERS (1973), playing tough NYC cop Lt. Theo Kojak.  The movie was a ratings hit and it spun off into the hugely-popular TV series KOJAK, which ran from 1973 to 1978.  With his signature lollipop and his "Who loves ya, baby?" catchphrase, "Kojak" became virtually interchangeable with Savalas himself, and the actor comfortably coasted on that image for the rest of his career.

Bronson and Savalas becoming American pop culture icons at roughly the same time led to an extensive backlog of their European movies flooding US theaters and drive-ins as late as 1976.  That, coupled with the success of 1972's THE GODFATHER, led to the tardy US release of Sergio Sollima's VIOLENT CITY, a 1970 Italian/French gangster thriller that paired the two for the third time.  Retitled THE FAMILY, with one-sheet art blatantly copying the GODFATHER font, the film was given a small rollout in 1973, then expanded nationwide in 1974 to capitalize on DEATH WISH and KOJAK being all the rage.

Opening with a killer Ennio Morricone score and an impressive Virgin Islands car chase that's hampered somewhat by some rear-projection work from inside the car that pays close attention to continuity but still looks a bit shoddy, VIOLENT CITY has professional hit man Jeff (Bronson) and his girlfriend Vanessa (Bronson's wife and frequent co-star Jill Ireland) pursued by hit men, with Jeff shot and left for dead by his friend Coogan (an uncredited actor whose identity has never been verified), who runs off with Vanessa.  Hospitalized and sent to prison, Jeff is eventually paroled and obsessed with finding Vanessa and Coogan.  He does this against the advice of his lawyer Steve (Umberto Orsini) and with the help of his smack-addicted hitman buddy Killain (Michel Constantin, dubbed by the gravelly Robert Spafford).  Coogan, a champion stock-car racer, isn't too hard to find and Jeff shoots out his tire during a race at Michigan International Speedway, causing a fiery crash and explosion.  But someone took pictures of Jeff in the act.  He's being blackmailed by the minions of New Orleans crime boss Al Weber (Savalas), who's been trying to lure the fiercely independent Jeff into his organization.  Jeff has no interest, but placates Weber by hearing him out only to discover that Weber's hot young wife is Vanessa.  Steve, who essentially functions as Weber's consigliere, knew this all along, and was trying to keep Jeff from finding out.

VIOLENT CITY finds Bronson in what would become his typical "vengeance" mode, but rather than taking out some punks who harmed his family and friends, a motif that would come to define his screen persona post-DEATH WISH, his Jeff is more of an enraged, heartbroken sad sack.  His quest for revenge becomes more of a suicide mission as he plots to take out Weber's entire organization, all as a buildup to his revenge against Vanessa.  Spaghetti western vet Sollima (THE BIG GUNDOWN, RUN MAN RUN) and his co-writers (among them a just-starting-out Lina Wertmuller) pull a nifty bait-and-switch by making you think Savalas' Weber is the antagonist, but it's really Vanessa.  Weber is just another of her victims.  Never a particularly strong actress and largely dismissed by critics because she was Bronson's wife and acted almost exclusively in his movies after she left MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum for him, Ireland delivers what might be her best performance in VIOLENT CITY.  Vanessa is revealed to be a classic femme fatale who destroys every man with whom she comes into contact.  Witness the way she turns the strutting, larger-than-life Weber into a cuckold in dorky Coke-bottle glasses that constantly keep sliding down the bridge of his nose.  Savalas plays this subtle shift beautifully, introduced with a completely self-aggrandizing monologue to Jeff and all but begging for his life when he realizes that he never really was in charge once he married Vanessa.  But Sollima saves the best for the climax, a beautifully filmed, mostly silent set piece with Vanessa and the bottom-feeding Steve--who becomes her latest doomed paramour once Weber's out of the picture--in a glass elevator as Jeff, now the subject of a citywide manhunt after Weber's murder, takes them out from the top of a nearby building...and calmly waits for the inevitable.  You could argue that Bronson is miscast in the role--he seems too old at times, especially when Weber and Killain both make references to his youth and inexperience in mob life; Bronson was a year older than Savalas and three years older than French actor Constantin.  Sollima has said that the script was first offered to Jon Voight, then riding high on MIDNIGHT COWBOY, but when he declined, it made its way to Bronson, with whom Ireland came as a package deal.  Putting Voight in the role of Jeff, things probably make a lot more logical sense, but Bronson obviously works because he's Bronson.

With its fusion of the gangster and film noir genres, its scenic New Orleans location shooting, and Morricone's memorable score, VIOLENT CITY easily ranks alongside Rene Clement's RIDER ON THE RAIN (also 1970) as the best of Bronson's star vehicles during his European sojourn.  It became a modest hit throughout 1974 in the US after being retitled THE FAMILY, and aired in prime-time on CBS in 1975 before becoming a regular late-night TV offering in syndication in the '80s.  After DEATH WISH, Bronson had the clout to make the kinds of films he wanted to make, which resulted in oddities like the romantic western FROM NOON TILL THREE (1976), which of course co-starred Ireland, but fans wanted him in DEATH WISH mode.  After a string of box-office disappointments like LOVE AND BULLETS (1979), CABOBLANCO (1980), BORDERLINE (1980), and DEATH HUNT (1981), Bronson relented and gave the fans what they wanted with DEATH WISH II (1982), and while he continued to make entertaining actioners for B-movie icons Golan & Globus (most notably 1985's insane DEATH WISH 3), he rarely exerted himself after that and as his fans got older, the action heroes got younger, and the movies got bigger and louder, nobody was going to see the geriatric Bronson in things like MESSENGER OF DEATH (1988) or KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS (1989).  After the drug overdose death of his stepson Jason McCallum in 1989 and Ireland succumbing to a long battle with breast cancer in 1990 at just 54, Bronson's heart really wasn't in movies anymore.  He went to the vigilante well one more time with 1993's tired DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH, and took a stab at being a character actor with a small role in Sean Penn's 1991 directorial debut THE INDIAN RUNNER, playing the father of the two protagonists (David Morse and a young Viggo Mortensen). Bronson only has a couple of scenes early in the film, but he's quietly powerful and undoubtedly drawing on his own grief as his character commits suicide after the death of his beloved wife.  It was the first time in years that he was actually required to act, and though his screen time was brief, it was enough to show that he still had it.  After turning down the role of Curly, the intimidatingly leathery trail boss in CITY SLICKERS--quite angrily, according to Billy Crystal--only to see Jack Palance get an Oscar for it, Bronson then appeared in a handful of made-for-TV movies, eventually retiring from acting altogether by the late '90s.  Always private even at the height of his fame, Bronson's final years found him completely off the radar, and only near his 2003 death was it revealed that he was in the final stages of Alzheimer's.  Bronson remains a screen legend, and while most of the films from his European phase have fallen through the cracks over the years (you don't hear much about COLD SWEAT, CHINO, or the underrated psychological thriller SOMEONE BEHIND THE DOOR these days), they were vital in challenging him as an actor and for establishing the Bronson that we knew for the last 30 years of his career.

In Theaters: NEBRASKA (2013)

NEBRASKA
(US - 2013)

Directed by Alexander Payne.  Written by Bob Nelson.  Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Rance Howard, Mary Louise Wilson, Tim Driscoll, Devin Ratray, Angela McEwan.  (R, 114 mins)

Bruce Dern, with his odd mannerisms and twitchy presence, is the kind of actor who only could've become a leading man in the more adventurous 1970s, the last time when the idiosyncratic, the offbeat, and the challenging were widely accepted in mainstream cinema.  Dern was never cut out for the blockbuster films that took over in the 1980s.  Even in his A-list heyday, he was usually called upon to play creeps and psychos, and in a rare instance when he was the hero, as in Walter Hill's THE DRIVER (1978), you still couldn't put your complete confidence in him as a good guy.  Like most actors of his generation, Dern started out in TV in the early 1960s and moved into supporting roles (HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE and HANG 'EM HIGH among others) and eventually became a fixture in biker and hippie films of the late 1960s, such as THE WILD ANGELS, THE TRIP, PSYCH-OUT, THE CYCLE SAVAGES, and THE REBEL ROUSERS.  Dern's career really took off in the early 1970s, when he shot John Wayne in the back in 1972's THE COWBOYS, and with the same year's sci-fi cult classic SILENT RUNNING.  Dern also attracted much critical attention with a pair of collaborations with friend Jack Nicholson, who appeared with him in some of those earlier biker/hippie outings before his EASY RIDER breakthrough:  1971's DRIVE, HE SAID (directed by Nicholson) and 1972's THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS.  Neither film was a commercial success, but they, along with the general momentum he had going, were enough to catapult him to stardom and leave the drive-in movies behind with prestige projects like 1974's THE GREAT GATSBY and 1978's COMING HOME, which earned a him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod (he lost to Christopher Walken in THE DEER HUNTER). To this day, Dern has never stopped working, but his time in the spotlight was short.  By 1981's TATTOO, his days as a headliner were essentially over and he moved into character and ensemble parts in projects of varying quality.  He could've just as easily turned up in supporting roles in films like 1990's AFTER DARK, MY SWEET and 1992's DIGGSTOWN, or in post-nuke junk like 1988's WORLD GONE WILD.  In recent years, he appeared on the HBO series BIG LOVE and assorted indie dramas and horror movies, usually typecast as a standard Dern-like weirdo.

Alexander Payne's NEBRASKA offers Dern the kind of late-career triumph desired by any 77-year-old actor who's been schlepping it for over 50 years and has been out of the spotlight for years. In a role first pitched to the likes of Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and Robert Forster, Dern is Woody Grant, an 80-ish Billings, MT man who seems to drift in and out of coherence.  He's convinced he's won $1 million in one of those magazine sweepstakes mailers, and is determined to get to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his prize.  He keeps trying to walk there--several states away--which frustrates the local cops and his blunt, tells-it-like-it-is wife Kate (June Squibb).  Out of frustration but thinking maybe a couple days of entertaining the fantasy might make his dad happy, Woody's son David (Will Forte) decides to take a few days off work to drive him to Lincoln.  On the way, they stop at Hawthrone, Nebraska, the small town where Woody grew up.  This leads to an impromptu family reunion with Woody's brothers, and even Kate and their oldest son Ross (Bob Odenkirk) make the trip.  David, Ross, and Kate repeatedly try to convince Woody that he hasn't won anything, but he'll hear none of it.  Soon, his extended family and the rest of the town, including Woody's glad-handing old business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) start swarming around Woody like vultures, not even masking their eagerness at getting a piece of the prize winnings.

Written by Bob Nelson, NEBRASKA has a lot in common with past Payne films like ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002), SIDEWAYS (2004), and THE DESCENDANTS (2009) with its road trip and family squabbling.  Payne's decision to shoot NEBRASKA in black & white serves to llustrate the stark emptiness of the decrepit farm towns in this part of the country.  Many of the shots achieved by cinematographer Phedon Papamichael could almost function as still photographs.  Visually, it's beautiful and haunting, and the story is powerful yet simple in its execution.  David is a grown man stuck in a rut who has never really understood his father.  It's mentioned by a relative that the Grant boys (meaning Woody and his brothers) "don't talk much," and there's some dark humor to be found in the scenes of several of these old guys sitting around, silently watching a football game with nothing to say, until one (Rance Howard) pipes up, asking another "You still have that Chevrolet?" and the response being "Never had a Chevrolet...had a Buick back in 1979."  David's never really talked to his dad and during this trip, finds that there's a lot he doesn't know about him.  There's no big twist or huge revelation, but rather, it's a quiet and very perceptive little film about life, choices, regrets, unfulfilled dreams, and family dynamics that will resonate with many.

Of course, Dern is the show here, but it's almost fitting to his entire career that he's nearly upstaged by his supporting cast.  SNL vet Forte demonstrates some chops here that you would've never suspected if you just knew him as MACGRUBER and "The Falconer."  Keach and Odenkirk are both terrific, but it's 84-year-old Squibb who steals every scene she's in as Kate.  Opinionated and never suffering fools gladly (Ed: "Kate always was kind of a bitch"), Kate insists she can't put up with Woody anymore but she obviously still loves him.  Squibb finds a perfect balance between being a mouthy smart-ass and a loving matriarch, and does so without resorting to the old "senior being raunchy" standby.  Her cutting remarks toward departed family members during a cemetery visit ("There's your dad's sister Rose...she was a whore...don't get me wrong, I loved her dearly but my God, she was a slut!") and the bit where she goes off on Woody's greedy relatives are absolutely priceless.  Beautifully shot, intelligently-written, excellently-acted, thoughtful, and darkly hilarious, the low-key NEBRASKA is one of the 2013's best films and a potent reminder of what a gifted actor we have in Bruce Dern.  He shouldn't have had to wait this long for the role of his career.

On DVD/Blu-ray: JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR (2013); BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2013); and MAN OF TAI CHI (2013)

JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR
(US/Russia - 2013)

Billy Bob Thornton hasn't had a lot of luck behind the camera after his 1996 breakthrough SLING BLADE.  Harvey Weinstein sent DADDY AND THEM straight to cable in 2003 after five years on the shelf.  In 2011, Thornton made THE KING OF LUCK, a documentary about Willie Nelson, and it's still waiting for distribution.  The tactlessly-titled JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR is Thornton's first narrative directorial effort since Weinstein forced him to cut over an hour from 2000's ALL THE PRETTY HORSES.  He needn't have bothered.  Reuniting with his writing partner Tom Epperson, with whom he scripted 1992's ONE FALSE MOVE, 1996's DON'T LOOK BACK, and 2000's THE GIFT, Thornton hits bottom and drags a great cast down with him.  This is a complete embarrassment for all involved.  It's poorly-written, atrociously-acted, and hardly a scene goes by without some mind-boggling disaster.  It's hard to tell what any of these people were thinking, but I hope they had a better time making it than anyone will have watching it.  Released on just 11 screens after gathering dust for two years, JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR may not be the worst film of 2013, but it's likely the most wasteful of a quality ensemble of actors.

In small-town Georgia in 1969, cranky patriarch Jim Caldwell (Robert Duvall) gets word that his ex-wife has died.  She left him and their four adult children 20 years earlier, married Brit Kingsley Bedford (John Hurt) and moved to England.  Her dying wish was to be buried back home, so Bedford and his children--Philip (Ray Stevenson) and Camilla (Frances O'Connor) are on their way to Georgia.  This doesn't sit well with Jim or his uptight eldest son Jimbo (Robert Patrick), though the other two sons, battle-scarred war vet Skip (Thornton) and aging hippie Carroll (Kevin Bacon) seem to welcome them.  Jim has spent 20 years hating Kingsley, but the two bond over their love of the same woman (Tippi Hedren played this character, but Thornton ultimately granted the legendary Hitchcock muse the dignity of having her scenes cut) and talk of Jayne Mansfield's decapitated head when Jim takes Kingsley to an exhibit where the actress' alleged death car is on display.  Meanwhile, Skip falls for Camilla, convincing her to strip naked and recite prose in her British accent while he masturbates, and the Caldwell boys' sister Donna (Katherine LaNasa) is drawn to Philip as she grows tired of her blowhard, ex-football pro husband Neal (Ron White).  JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR tries to be a culture-clash character piece, Vietnam-era period drama, and raunchy comedy, botching all three and only succeeding in being one of the most appallingly ill-conceived pieces of cinema in recent memory. Character behavior makes no sense from scene to scene and Thornton seems to almost intentionally sabotage any momentum he gets going.  Stevenson has a terrific scene where Philip defends himself against his father's drunken accusations of cowardice in battle, but then Thornton has Jimbo and his wife (Shawnee Smith) start making out on the couch for no reason while everyone watches.  Skip walks into his dad's bedroom at one point with his war medals pinned to the dead skin on his burned and scarred chest, and all Jim can say is "Why don't you go get yourself some ice cream?"  Who are these grotesque people?  What planet do they live on?  Duvall is a national treasure, but even his reliable "crusty old coot" act is played-out and tiresome here.  It's the kind of film where, after seeing the Jayne Mansfield death car, old Kingsley gets philosophical and mutters "We all have a crash of some sort awaiting us."  Indeed.  That's some advice Thornton would've been wise to heed before he shit the bed with this unbearable misfire.  (R, 122 mins)


BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO
(UK/Germany - 2012/2013 US release)

Not so much a straight-up homage to the Italian giallo as much as a mood piece inspired by the subgenre, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is an impenetrable puzzle that fascinates and frustrates in equal measures.  Writer/director Peter Strickland is clearly a fan who obviously did his homework in terms of period detail and the work that went into producing an Italian horror film in the 1970s, but it does have some tedious stretches.  Gilderoy (Toby Jones), is a meek, introverted British sound mixer hired to supervise the dubbing and foley work for an Italian horror film titled THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX.  With his sound-mix work history primarily in nature documentaries, Gilderoy can't quite figure out why director Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) is so eager to hire him.  Gilderoy doesn't mesh well with producer Francesco Corragio (Cosimo Fusco) or the rest of the Berberian Sound Studio staff and can't seem to stop unintentionally offending them, whether he's adjusting some equipment or getting the run-around on being reimbursed for his plane ticket.  He can't even eat a grape without pissing someone off ("it's a custom to swallow the seeds here").  With the lecherous Santini distracted by young starlets and tensions mounting with the bottom-line-watching Corragio, the homesick Gilderoy finds comfort in letters from his mum and starts growing increasingly paranoid and seems to begin losing touch with reality.

While not a giallo, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO uses giallo tropes to ambiguously detail Gilderoy's slow descent into madness, eventually seeing himself in the film in events that just happened moments before, and already dubbed into Italian.  Strickland does a masterful job at capturing the details of sound editing, particularly in the way the Italian film industry had to dub everything in the days of no direct sound on-set.  We never actually see any footage from THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX, a film ostensibly about the supernatural vengeance of a condemned witch (though Strickland does cleverly show its opening credits instead of BERBERIAN's opening credits; in retrospect, the first hint that fantasy and reality will fuse), but we see its profound effect on an increasingly disturbed Gilderoy as he hacks watermelons to get the right sound effect of a hatchet slicing through flesh, or recording the sound of sizzling grease to replicate the sound of a hot poker going into an accused witch's vagina.  The horrors of THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX are never shown, but heard with precision and clarity, and if nothing else, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is a triumph of cinematic sound.  Jones, Fusco, and Mancino are excellent, Strickland undoubtedly knows his giallo history, and the score by Broadcast is very effective, but the film's languid pacing and general obfuscation sometimes do it a disservice.  Highly recommended for cult film enthusiasts and those interested in the more technical aspects of filmmaking and genre history, but those looking for a mainstream horror film might find it a bit of an endurance test.  (Unrated, 92 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


MAN OF TAI CHI
(US/Hong Kong/China - 2013)

A surprisingly straight-faced and credible directorial debut for Keanu Reeves, MAN OF TAI CHI is a martial-arts film that doesn't go the predictable route of snarky, reference-drenched, tongue-in-cheek homage but rather, plays it largely legit and serious throughout.  He even went with Chinese and Hong Kong co-producers and a good chunk of the film is in Cantonese with English subtitles.  Universal put up some of the $25 million budget, but perhaps following the tepid response to RZA's '70s kung-fu homage THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, opted not to distribute the film in the US, where the Weinsteins' B-movie wing Radius-TWC acquired it and dumped it on 110 screens for a paltry $100,000 gross.  Drawing from such influences as the "to the death" tournament video games and film genre and John Woo-inspired Hong Kong cop thrillers and fashioning it into a good vs. evil morality play, MAN OF TAI CHI has the titular student, Tiger Chen (Chen-Hu, who worked on the MATRIX stunt team), forgetting the peaceful Tai Chi ideals of his fatherly mentor (Yu Hai) as he's sucked into the underground fight club world overseen by the nefarious Donaka Mark (Reeves), an almost Satanic figure of such power that he can pause what's running on TV simply by pointing at it.  Initially participating to get some quick cash so he can pay to restore his master's Ling Kong Tai Chi temple, which has been hit with code violations (!), Tiger gives into his violent impulses and becomes an increasingly vicious fighter in Donaka Mark's high-tech realm, where the fights are broadcast online to his obscenely wealthy clients.  Will Tiger hit bottom and see that he's being led down the wrong path?  Will he cleanse his soul and find redemption in a fight to the death with Donaka Mark?  Have you ever seen a martial-arts flick before?

Working with legendary fight coordinator Yuen Wo-Ping, Reeves has put together an unexpectedly solid film, perhaps a bit overlong and draggy in spots, but the veteran actor must have been picking up tips from his directors all these years, because he makes MAN OF TAI CHI look like a film that cost much more than $25 million.  Reeves probably could've trimmed 15 minutes from it and tightened it up a bit, and there's one laughable CGI car wreck, but he deserves some credit for being handed a large amount of money and not dicking off and turning it into an insufferable vanity project, opting instead to keep the focus on Tiger and only occasionally indulging himself with some overacting or an odd facial expression here and there.  Also with Karen Mok as an obsessed Hong Kong cop trying to bust Donaka Mark, Simon Yam as the police superintendent, and THE RAID: REDEMPTION's Iko Uwais as one of Tiger's opponents, MAN OF TAI CHI is no classic, but it's better than anyone would've guessed upon hearing that Keanu Reeves was directing an Asian martial-arts epic.  (R, 105 mins)

In Theaters: OUT OF THE FURNACE (2013)

OUT OF THE FURNACE
(US - 2013)

Directed by Scott Cooper.  Written by Brad Ingelsby and Scott Cooper.  Cast: Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana, Sam Shepard, Tom Bower, Bingo O'Malley, Dendrie Taylor. (R, 116 mins)

Initially planned as a Ridley Scott film starring Leonardo DiCaprio (both stayed on as producers), OUT OF THE FURNACE is the second effort by CRAZY HEART director Scott Cooper, and it's an ambitious, often very subtle mood piece disguised as a revenge thriller.  Set in the mid-2000s to the present day, FURNACE takes place in a small, blue collar Pennsylvania town and Cooper does a marvelous job of conveying that unique atmosphere of a town where smoke and steam are constantly billowing through the air, everyone works at the same mill, drinks at the same bar, and everyone knows everyone.  It's the kind of place where time is not exactly frozen, but it seems to be about a decade or two behind.  Generation after generation works at the mill, and no one ever really leaves.  Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck) tries to leave by joining the military and serving multiple tours in Iraq, but he comes back a damaged, broken man.  He doesn't want to work at the mill, even though it was good enough for his older brother Russell (Christian Bale) and their dad (Bingo O'Malley sighting!), who's dying of cancer.  When playing the ponies only ends up with him deep in debt to local loan shark John Petty (Willem Dafoe), he decides to be Petty's fighter in a bare-knuckle brawling ring.  Rodney takes a dive to help settle Petty's debt to Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), a snarling, almost demonic meth kingpin and "inbred Jersey" crime lord who's so vicious and dangerous that even the cops--both local and state--are afraid to go after him.  Needless to say, things don't go as planned.

But the film isn't about Rodney.  It's about Russell, and one of the strong points of the script is that it takes its time building the characters and circumstances.  It's a good hour before the crux of the plot is set in motion and it works because it helps you know these people.  It's uncommon in a lot of today's mainstream cinema to be this character-driven.  It's the kind of construction that was commonplace in the '70s but has little place in today's multiplexes.  To that end, you can probably file OUT OF THE FURNACE in that same burgeoning "refusing to give the audience what it wants" subgenre of low CinemaScore grades along with KILLING THEM SOFTLY and THE COUNSELOR.  At least for a while, that is.  But more on that in a bit.

Russell has always felt the need to bail his little brother out of trouble, and that's still the case well into adulthood.  He wants to settle down and marry his girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana), but after one too many drinks at the bar where he goes to settle another of Rodney's debts with Petty, he gets in a car accident that kills the occupants of the other vehicle (including a child).  The crash wasn't completely Russell's fault--the other car was backing out of a driveway and didn't see Russell's truck--but he was driving under the influence, and is sent to prison for five years, during which time his father dies and Lena leaves him for police chief Barnes (Forest Whitaker).  When the shit hits the fan between his brother and DeGroat and the police prove predictably useless, family does what family does, and Russell and his Uncle Red (Sam Shepard) decide to take matters into their own hands.

Barnes makes an interesting comment to Russell at one point, trying to talk him out of going vigilante and explaining that DeGroat and his hillbilly brethren have "entire generations who have never come down off that mountain."  You could probably say the same thing about the Baze family and their friends and neighbors.  The script doesn't really explore those parallels since we don't learn much about DeGroat's clan.  Once Russell and Uncle Red decide to take action, the film becomes inconsistent and skids a bit.  It's never believable for a moment that Russell and Uncle Red gain such easy access to DeGroat's meth headquarters and are permitted to walk out upright.  Nor is it plausible that DeGroat would just bring one flunky with him to meet a mystery man who's threatened him over the phone.  The actors are almost all superb across the board, particularly Bale who, the disastrous HARSH TIMES excepting, can disappear into any role and accent, and a terrifying Harrelson, who's introduced in the opening scene and only appears fleetingly for the next hour or so, but his powerful presence is felt even in his absence.  Shepard, who's aged into one of our finest character actors (if you haven't seen the barely-released BLACKTHORN, you're missing one of the best films of the last few years that no one's heard of), is a performer who can speak volumes without saying a word, and he's perfect as Russell's voice of reason.  The only real botch in the casting is with Whitaker, who starts using some bizarre grunting voice midway through his performance that completely derails every scene he's in from that point.  It's almost like he's trying to use Bale's Batman voice.  Whitaker has historically been a fine actor and the guy's got an Academy Award.  I haven't seen LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER yet, but this is another in a string of embarrassing performances by the actor, who at some point apparently forgot how to act.

And then there's the ending.  Without spoiling anything, Cooper has said that the final shot is an homage to THE GODFATHER PART II.  Maybe it was in the script, maybe it wasn't, but if the film ended one shot sooner, it would be remarkably more effective.  The terrible final shot destroys the ambiguity of what just came before it--which is where it should've ended--and feels not like an homage to a classic film but rather, a focus-group-suggested decision by the studio to spell everything out for audiences who want definitive closure.  The shot before the final shot wasn't quite on the level of THE SOPRANOS as far as open-endedness goes, but it would've been a much more powerful experience if it ended there.  In short, there's much to appreciate in OUT OF THE FURNACE, but some bumbling and stumbling in the second half unquestionably do it some irreparable harm.

On DVD/Blu-ray: ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (2013) and THE FUTURE (2013)

ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE
(US - 2013)

A cult movie simply by virtue of an absurdly belated US release, the slasher thriller ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE was shot in 2006 and shown at that year's Toronto Film Festival, where it was acquired by Dimension Films and promptly shelved by the Weinsteins following the disappointing box office reception of GRINDHOUSE.  It was released in most of the rest of the world in 2008 and Dimension sold the US rights to the doomed Senator Entertainment, who went bankrupt not long after that, leaving the film in legal limbo.  Years later, the Weinsteins re-acquired the film--long available in bootleg circles--and finally dumped it on VOD and in a few theaters in September 2013.  Debuting director Jonathan Levine, who has since gone on to make THE WACKNESS (2008), 50/50 (2011), and WARM BODIES (2013), and first-time screenwriter Jacob Forman really try to fashion a sort of self-referential slasher film, but unfortunately, the end results aren't all that different or any deeper than any random post-SCREAM or I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER knockoff.  The story centers on a group outing at an isolated ranch where, among the expected group of unlikable teenagers, is one Mandy Lane (Amber Heard), an unattainable virgin who's lusted after by all the boys, from the jocks, to the stoners, to the dorks.  Nine months earlier, one such boy--an overconfident football star looking to impress her--drunkenly took a dive off of his roof at the goading of Mandy's platonic best friend Emmett (Michael Welch, who went on to the TWILIGHT films).  The in-crowd blames Emmett for his death and even Mandy distances herself from him.  Meanwhile, out at the ranch, someone is offing the group--which includes Luke Grimes, who was recently cast in FIFTY SHADES OF GREY--one by one in various gory ways in an apparent quest to prove their love for Mandy Lane.

MANDY LANE takes forever to get going and by the time it finally finds some momentum in the home stretch, it's too late to really care.  The killer's identity is so obvious--and Levine and Forman don't keep it a secret very long--that you'll have plenty of time to figure out the inevitable twist long before it's revealed.  The filmmakers wanted to make a John Hughes homage in the form of a slasher film, but with one foot in the art-house and the other in the grindhouse, it doesn't really work as either, and by the time Levine breaks out the '70s-style freeze-frames in the climax, you might find the hipster cred-pandering more annoying than anything.  There's an admirable nastiness to some of the brutal murders, and the camera does indeed love Amber Heard, but there's really nothing here--certainly not a long-buried cult classic waiting to be discovered.  Were it not for its bumpy ride to a US release, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (a great title, by the way) would be a long-forgotten straight-to-DVD title cluttering $3 DVD bins at Big Lots locations nationwide by now.  Instead, it'll be there by spring. (R, 90 mins)


THE FUTURE
(Chile/Germany/Italy/Spain/Switzerland - 2013)

Based on a novel by the late Chilean literary icon Roberto Bolano, THE FUTURE is an always-interesting but curiously empty art film that often feels like a present-day update to classic Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.  Taking place in an economically uncertain Rome, writer/director Alicia Scherson often channels the aura of Antonioni ennui and disconnect with its power lines, cell phone towers, and emphasis on artifice, while one of the central characters lives in the kind of decaying mansion-doubling-as-a-tomb that seems to come straight out of a Luchino Visconti/Burt Lancaster collaboration.  The film is called THE FUTURE, but everyone is haunted by the past, as 19-year-old Bianca (Manuela Martelli) and her younger teenage brother Tomas (Luigi Ciardo) find themselves orphaned in Rome when their Chilean immigrant parents are killed in a tragic car accident.  Given an orphans' pension, the pair continue to live in their family apartment as Bianca is declared Tomas' legal guardian.  The money isn't as much as they'd hoped, and Bianca is forced to get a job as an assistant in a hair salon, while Tomas, when he isn't picking up sex tips from watching porn courtesy of their illegal cable hookup, frequently skips school to help clean up at a local gym.  It's here where Tomas meets two new "friends," personal trainers Libio (Nicolas Vaporidis) and Bolones (Alessandro Giallocosta), a pair of dubious meatheads who basically move into Bianca and Tomas' place and take turns sleeping with Bianca.  As money gets tighter, Libio and Bolones hatch a get-rich-quick scheme:  have Bianca pose as a prostitute and ingratiate herself into the life of Maciste (Rutger Hauer), a blind and reclusive former Mr. Universe and '60s muscleman actor who's rumored to have a safe filled with a large amount of cash.  Maciste, who adopted the name of his character ("They changed it to Hercules in America," he explains), lives alone in a massive, decrepit mansion, surrounded by workout equipment and relics of his past, and becomes a sexual mentor to young Bianca, who finds herself falling in love with the worldly old man ("Don't be silly," Maciste grumbles) and wanting to back out of the plan to rob his safe.

Plotting isn't Scherson's primary focus with THE FUTURE.  It's more about mood and feel, with a mournful, elegiac sense of Rome's cultural history (Bianca takes a tour of Cinecitta and visits the sets of Maciste's old movies, and footage from 1962's THE FURY OF HERCULES has Brad Harris being passed off as a young Hauer/Maciste).  Bianca never feels at home in Rome, which gives her a spiritual kinship with Maciste, who came to Italy to work and simply never left, shutting himself off from the world after a car accident that cost him his sight.  Martelli is good in the lead and her frequent nude scenes, as Maciste drenches her in massage oil, should make her popular on Mr. Skin.  Hauer, so awful in Dario Argento's recent DRACULA, gets to display some genuine star power here.  He's done so many money gigs and C-grade trash over the years that it's easy to forget how terrific he can be.  As Maciste, Hauer gets to sink his teeth into a strong late-career role that any aging actor wants (it probably didn't hurt that he'd have a nude, oiled-up Martelli--30 but playing 19--straddling him for a good chunk of his screen time), and he delivers his best performance in years, even with a ridiculous line like "What's the color of my sperm?"  THE FUTURE is well-acted and lovely to look at it (have I mentioned the massage oil and the nudity?), and it's rare to see something these days that harkens back to the likes of Antonioni and Visconti, but it's not a particularly deep film, which is surprising given the complexity of much of Bolano's writing.  The few attempts at significance in some of Bianca's narration only succeed in coming across as hackneyed and pretentious.  Still, there's a lot to appreciate in THE FUTURE, and it should be required viewing for Rutger Hauer fans.  (Unrated, 99 mins)