If the idea of a show-tune singing suicide bomber doesn’t make you laugh, then perhaps the new satire American Dreamz might be a bit too heavy handed for you. It takes on the things that we are all reading about in the newspaper everyday, depending on which section of the paper you look at—the war in Iraq, terrorism, American Idol worship and the nasty talent scout Simon Cowell. Each are American obsessions and each are skewered.
The movie is actually made up of four stories that are tied together by the televised talent show American Dreamz. Under the guidance of its producer and host, a smarmy Hugh Grant, it has become the number one show in the world. It’s so popular that in story number two the President of the United States has to beg to secure a spot as a guest judge, a move bound to raise his popularity a few points in the polls. Plotline number three sees a young singer who will stop at nothing to win the competition, and the fourth and final piece of the puzzle involves the aforementioned show-tune singing suicide bomber.
The movie is a good-natured send-up of current American pop culture, skewering everyone from the President on down, and while there are laughs, none of them have the same edgy bite as those on an average episode of The Daily Show.
Generally good performances from the cast, including Dennis Quaid as the President who doesn’t know what the word placebo means to Willem DaFoe as his right hand man—a hybrid of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove—and Hugh Grant as the pompous television host really sell what humor there is in the script.
American Dreamz is bound to be controversial, but I think it would have been a better film if they had pulled out all the stops and really gone for it. A director like Mel Brooks in his prime would not have ridden the fence with a film like this. Think of the comic anarchy of Blazing Saddles or the original Producers. Those were movies that delighted in offending the audience to make them think. By not mining the full potential of the material American Dreamz filmmaker Paul Weitz makes us giggle but doesn’t make us think.
Akeelah and the Bee plays like Rocky crossed with Good Will Hunting. The latest in a string of spelling bee movies—is there a stranger genre—and coming hot on the heels of the hit documentary Spellbound and the drama Bee Season, Akeelah and the Bee is a story designed to make you cheer for the underdog.
Akeelah is a shy young girl from South Central Los Angeles who has a gift for spelling. It seems her late father had instilled in her a love of language and word games—don’t bet against her in a Scrabble match—but she tries to keep her etymologic endowment a secret in school, explaining that if she appears to be too smart the only word she’ll have to know how to spell is n-e-r-d. With some encouragement from her principal—the guy who played Booger in the Revenge of the Nerds movies—she enters the school’s spelling bee. After an easy win at her school she takes on a tutor—the brusque Lawrence Fishburne—a former champ who trains her for the national bee.
Akeelah and the Bee is a sentimental story that occasionally feels over calculated, as though writer / director Doug Atchison is trying to cram every after school special cliché into one story—we have the virtues of hard work, good sportsmanship, following one’s dreams and of course the ever popular love conquers all, to name just a few. The story is emotionally uncomplicated, some of the characters come directly from central casting, and it doesn’t have the clout of Spellbound but there are a couple of elements that elevate this movie, making it worthy of a big screen treatment.
Clichés aside the movie does have good messages for young people. Akeelah starts her journey as a shy young girl and gradually gains confidence in her abilities and learns to trust not only herself, but also those around her. Her character teaches kids that they can opt for any path in life, and work towards any destination they choose.
The movie’s secret weapon is Keke Palmer as the wonderful wordsmith. Palmer is a natural talent who brings new life to a character that we’ve seen on-screen many times. Her performance is so guileless that it really feels like you are watching a real kid working through Akeelah’s issues. Her authentic sensitivity blunts some of the more obvious emotional manipulations and earns the film a recommendation.
A Prairie Home Companion’s story is very simple. A large company has bought the theatre and radio station that has been home to A Prairie Home Companion, a thirty-year-old homespun Mid-Western radio variety show, hosted by the eccentric GK. Week after week the tightly knit cast has told corny jokes and sung songs that range from old hat to heartfelt for a faithful audience. It is the end of an era but GK refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the night. “Every show is your last show,” he says. “That’s my philosophy.” Luckily director Robert Altman does imbue the proceedings with some weight.
The eighty-plus Altman has been making films for more than fifty years and is still one of the most distinctive filmmakers going. His style, with its long uninterrupted tracking shots with lots of over-lapping dialogue perfectly captures the chaotic goings-on backstage and the loping rhythms of the performers onstage. In a summer filled with slick action pictures Altman’s film feels old fashioned, handmade almost, and that’s a good thing. The movie is so easy going and so enjoyable that it doesn’t draw attention to how beautifully it is made.
Altman has populated the cast with eccentric characters—Guy Noir, the bumbling security guard who seems to have read one too many Raymond Chandler novels; Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, the two surviving members of what was once a family singing act and the Dangerous Woman, an angel who appears on earth in the form of a woman who died while listening to the show—but somehow manages to balance the real human drama with the more ephemeral aspects of the story.
A Prairie Home Companion is so much more than a radio variety show on film. Altman turns the simple story into an allegory about death –with jokes. It’s a touching portrait of the end of a simpler era made by an 81 year-old man who understands the past and is astute enough to look into the future.
In 1977 sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick wrote a nightmarish novel about drug-fueled paranoia, Big Brother style government surveillance and personal rights based on his own experiences as a drug addict. Prolific director Richard Linklater has taken pains with this material, turning the counter culture A Scanner Darkly into an intriguingly entertaining animated movie.
At the base of the story is a highly addictive drug called Substance D, so named for causing “dumbness, despair, desertion and death”. It appears that the government is weaning addicts off other drugs so they can then become hooked on the moneymaking Substance D, which the government controls the rights to. Caught in the web of the drug are the main characters, played by Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr and Woody Harrelson.
The actors didn’t simply lend their voices to the film, as is the case with most traditional animation. In this case the entire movie was shot on video and then rotoscoped, a time-consuming process in which each live-action frame is painted by hand. The result is a lurid dreamscape that lends an appropriately surreal tone to the story. The look of the “scramble suit,” a psychedelic cloak that alters the wearer’s appearance, is nicely rendered by the rotoscope process.
On the downside the animation flattens some of the performances. Reeves and Winona Ryder seem to get lost under the layers of paint. Only Robert Downey Jr’s manic performance can really transcend the animation. His energy is based on something more than simply his years of real-life experience with drugs; it is a funny, sad and intelligent performance from one of the best actors working today.
I’s been awhile since there’s been a good animated ant movie in the theatres. In 1998 there were two—Antz and A Bug’s Life—but ant lovers can rejoice as The Ant Bully comes to theatres today. Adapted from a kid’s book that the movie’s producer, Tom Hanks, used to read to his son, The Ant Bully is the story of a lonely ten-year-old boy who is bullied by the neighborhood kids so he takes out his frustrations on the only thing smaller than him—the ants in his yard. That is until the day the ants come up with a potion that cuts this anthropoid down to size—ant size. It’s kind of a Honey I Shrunk the Kids with insects.
Inventively animated—the director John A Davis seems to have taken his inspiration not from kid’s movies but from the great science fiction look of 1950’s films like The Day the Earth Stood Still—The Ant Bully features the standard moral lessons for kids about cooperation, equality and kindness, but sells those messages with a great deal of gentle humor.
The ant society is effectively compared and contrasted to the human world, displaying the differences in a hilarious scene featuring a firecracker that could be potentially devastating to the ants but makes barely a pop in the human world, and the similarities in the interpersonal relationships. The movie takes its first third to really get in gear, but with the voice work of Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin it soon finds its footing.
Voice work aside the best reason to see this movie are the incredible visuals. The inner workings of the ant colony are particularly well realized, as are the incredible wasps, which look like high-tech aircrafts as much as insects.
The release of All the King’s Men is the kick-off to awards season. When the weather cools and the leaves start to turn the blockbusters and popcorn movies that clogged up the multiplexes in the summer make way for more serious-minded movies, the kind of movies that win awards.
All the King’s Men is perfect Oscar-bait. It’s based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, which was turned into Oscar’s Best Picture of 1949. The new version features a cast with no less than a dozen Oscar nominations and a few wins between them. That’s quite a pedigree. Too bad the movie doesn’t live up to its legacy.
Sean Penn plays Willie Stark, loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. When we meet Willie he is a hick-town county treasurer who risks his job to fight corruption at Town Hall. When he reveals that a construction firm used bribery to land a contract to build a school, a school with a faulty fire escape that collapsed, killing three children, he becomes something of a folk hero. When he is approached to run for governor, he accepts, running on a “man of the people” platform that wins him favor with a large constituency that had never been considered before—rural farmers and landowners. His fiery speeches and populist politics win him the election, but his flamboyant style earns him many enemies in high places. It soon becomes clear that Willie is as corrupt and power hungry as the men he replaced.
The first hint that All the King’s Men is being positioned as an important movie with a capital “I” is the overwrought score by James Horner. This is big, orchestral film music in which violins swell as if heralding the second coming. It seems out of place, considering much of the film takes place in rural Louisiana. Perhaps a score that utilized Cajun and blues music might have been more appropriate. A few accordions, an old washboard and a swampy guitar would have created a sense of place and atmosphere that booming violins cannot.
But the music isn’t the only thing that seems overwrought. Sean Penn is a fine actor, but here he is so over-the-top it is as if he is acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast. He gives us Willie Stark in a vein-popping, arm-waving performance that suggests that maybe he should lay-off the Red Bull.
Next to his eye-popping performance the rest of the cast kind of disappears. Jude Law is serviceable as Stark’s right-hand man; Anthony Hopkins turns in one of his patented old codger performances, but Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo are both wasted in small roles that require little from either of them.
It pains me to thrash All the King’s Men because I think it is a movie that aspired to greatness, that tried to have something important to say, and Hollywood could really use more movies that aim high. But in the end All the King’s Men’s lofty aspirations simply make its failure so much more acute.
A Mighty Heart dramatizes the manhunt launched in Pakistan when jihadists kidnapped Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002.
Based on wife Mariane Pearl’s memoir of the same name, the story begins with Pearl and his pregnant wife traveling to Karachi to investigating a possible tie between “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Sheikh Gilani. Despite repeated warnings to exercise caution and meet the Sheikh, who had connections with radical Islamic groups in the past, in a public place, Pearl is kidnapped and later brutally murdered.
The bulk of the film is Mariane Pearl’s account of the five week investigation that led up to her husband’s death. Call it CSI: Karachi, it is a police procedural with tension, excitement, but most of all, heart.
Director Michael Winterbottom’s gritty style and ever-moving camera gives the film a documentary feel and the sense of urgency of a current news story. Even though we know how the sad saga ends there is never a sense of resignation or inevitability to the story. It feels as though it is unraveling in real time, as if a news crew had unprecedented access to Pearl and the investigation. It’s harrowing, unvarnished stuff, but utterly compelling.
At the center of the film is a barely recognizable Angelina Jolie as Mariane. She is literally in disguise as Pearl’s wife—hair curled tight, minimal make-up and a French/Cuban accent—and leaves the well defined Angelina Jolie persona in the dressing room, handing in a forceful performance (maybe her best ever) that is sure to garner awards.
A Mighty Heart is a demanding film. Unsentimental, yet heartfelt, it manages to deliver emotion and realism without a hint of manipulation on the filmmaker’s part.
Ever since Broadway producers figured out that nostalgia starved baby boomers would pay big bucks to see the songs of their youth reinterpreted for their old age, shows based on rock and pop songs have sprung up with the frequency of grey hairs on Grace Slick’s head.
We Will Rock You stitches together Queen songs, Jersey Boys is the story of The Four Seasons, illustrated with the band’s top forty hits while Movin’ Out is the best of Billy Joel with dancers and an orchestra. The latest classic rock catalogue to be pillaged is one of the most sacred of all—The Beatles. Taking her lead from Broadway, director Julie Taymor takes us on a Magical Mystery Tour of the tumultuous late 1960s with a soundtrack by Lennon and McCartney in the new film Across the Universe. No actual Beatles were harmed in the making of this story, but I imagine Beatles’ purists will feel hard done by.
Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (the amazing Evan Rachel Wood) are from different worlds. He’s a dock worker in Liverpool who travels to America to find his estranged father; she’s a rich kid from Ohio whose brother Max (Joe Anderson) and boyfriend are drafted and sent to Vietnam. When her boyfriend doesn’t come back she becomes involved in the anti-war movement and along the way finds new love with the visitor from England.
The music of The Beatles is no stranger to the big screen. In recent years the I Am Sam soundtrack brimmed with covers of Beatle tunes while Happy Feet, Kicking and Screaming and countless others have cannibalized the Beatles catalogue. The most famous use of their tunes is likely the film that Across the Universe’s producers would most like us to forget—the ghastly, yet tortuously enjoyable Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Where that movie featured the likes of George Burns warbling For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, the new film has bona fide rock stars Joe Cocker and Bono making cameo appearances.
Across the Universe, it has to be said, doesn’t look like any other movie you’ll see this year. Taymor’s trademarked visual sense is very much on display and will knock the eyeballs right out of your head. Colors pop, an Uncle Sam poster comes to life singing I Want You (She’s So Heavy) and football players bash one another in a hilariously over-the-top ballet of athletic grace. A draft induction scene is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, and the song fragment She’s So Heavy is so laden with metaphor it’s as subtle as a wallop from Maxwell’s fabled silver hammer.
Unfortunately the movie isn’t nearly as interesting sonically as it is visually. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge set the bar very high in its use of pop and rock, grafting together songs and genres into a unique aural landscape that gave the movie much of its punch and vigor. Here the songs are laid out in a fairly straightforward manner. A gospel version of Let it Be is memorable, but many of the intpretations simply sound like Broadway fluff or, even worse, American Idol Does The Beatles!
The story lurches along, predictably, from one set piece to another, with no real purpose other than to give the exceptionally good looking cast a reason to burst into song. I’m still trying to figure out why the character of Prudence appears in the film other than to facilitate the singing of Dear Prudence. The underlying themes of the movie—the anti-war message and America’s renewed image as the beacon of violent imperialism—are timely for sure, but get muddled in the trite story and the haze of boomerititus that infects every frame of the film.
Given the success of other recent boomer rock musicals, the familiar tunes of Across the Universe should be enough to please fans of musical theatre and first generation Beatles’s fans, but it is the film’s visual flair that’ll make an impression.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (hereafter known simply as TAJJBTCRF) is a beautifully ponderous revitalization of one of the screen’s most popular genres. It is a western, complete with six shooters, saloons and horses, but it has more to do with the elegiac westerns of the 1970s, movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Heaven’s Gate than the recently released and action heavy 3:10 to Yuma.
TAJJBTCRF takes its time with the story of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), the man whose obsession with fabled outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) led to disillusionment, fear and ultimately the assassination referred to in the title. At 2 hours and 40 minutes TAJJBTCRF may seem overlong for the casual viewer, but the unhurried pace of the piece reveals many charms for those patient enough to sit through the whole thing.
Quiet and lyrical the movie is art house all the way. Beautifully photographed (on locations in Manitoba and Alberta) TAJJBTCRF focuses on character rather than action, trying to get a grip on why Ford shot James, not how. Through the intimate performances and narration we are given insight into the character’s motivations in a way that is usually absent from films featuring strong silent types.
Pitt shines as the conflicted Jesse James, a charismatic rebel who seems to come unwound as the film goes on, but it is the performance of Casey Affleck that steals the show. His sleepy-eyed take on Robert Ford, rife with a mix of insecurity and swagger is a star-making turn.
From the autumnal hues of the cinematography to the mournful soundtrack everything about TAJJBTCRF played in a minor chord, but despite the film’s hushed tone it quietly bristles with a sense of adventure and daring all too rare in mainstream film.
If the idea of a show-tune singing suicide bomber doesn’t make you laugh, then perhaps the new satire American Dreamz might be a bit too heavy handed for you. It takes on the things that we are all reading about in the newspaper everyday, depending on which section of the paper you look at—the war in Iraq, terrorism, American Idol worship and the nasty talent scout Simon Cowell. Each are American obsessions and each are skewered.
