On paper American Gangster sounds like a home run. It stars two charismatic Oscar winners, re-teams Russell Crowe with his Gladiator director Ridley Scott and is written by the Oscar winning screenwriter behind Schindler’s List. That‘s all good right? Well, not exactly. Based on a true story—just like recent big winners Walk the Line, Ray and Capote—it is the kind of late-year release that seems almost guaranteed to garner Academy attention, but in reality American Gangster is less than the sum of its parts.
Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, the one-time driver for a Harlem mob boss who rises to the top of the drug world by flooding the streets of Manhattan with cheap, high grade heroin smuggled into the United States in the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Vietnam. He’s a dichotomy, bloodthirsty and ruthless, he also attends church every Sunday with his Mother.
On the other side of the street is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a cop whose honesty makes him an outcast in his corrupt precinct. When his former partner dies from a drug overdose Roberts relentlessly devotes himself to ridding the streets of Lucas’s heroin.
Inevitably their paths cross as their worlds become intertwined.
Scott takes his time with the story, laying it out over the course of 157 minutes. Length is not necessarily a bad thing as Roger Ebert once pointed out—“No good movie is too long,”—and many other crime dramas have epic running times—The Godfather is 175 minutes long, Goodfellas just slightly shorter at 145 minutes—and remained compelling right through to the end credits, but American Gangster feels like it is 157 minutes.
The difference between Scott’s movie and The Godfather or Goodfellas is that they were masterfully paced, blending the crime elements of the plot with carefully tailored stories of family life and the importance of loyalty. American Gangster tries for the same richness of story, but succeeds only in presenting a rambling first hour, cluttered with subplots and meaningless, although beautifully shot, scenes that add little to the overall story.
For instance, a fair amount of time is spent on Roberts’s troubled personal life and a drawn out custody battle. It struck me that the whole family drama aspect of Roberts’s life belonged in another movie. Excising that story thread from American Gangster could easily save half-an-hour and some wear and tear on our already strained backsides and bladders.
Sir Ridley puts some lipstick on this pig, tarting it up with great cinematography, nice attention to the 1970s period detail and well cast, although underused actors like Cuba Gooding Jr and Chiwetel Ejiofor, in supporting roles. For all its angels, however, American Gangster is simply too ambitious for its own good and is in need of a talented editor to bring out the important aspects of the story and snip the rest.
I think Billy Bob Thornton is one of the best actors working today. He too often falls back on his comfortable grumpy-drunk-guy persona in movies like Bad News Bears and Bad Santa, but when he breaks free of his tried and true tricks the results can be impressive. In the new movie from filmdom’s only twin co-directing siblings, The Polish Brothers, Thornton hands in a moving and inspirational performance as a man with his head quite literally in the clouds.
Charlie Farmer (Thornton) is an engaging eccentric, an inspirational American folk hero who won’t let anything stand between him and his dreams. A former NASA employee, he had to leave the astronaut program to run his family’s farm after the death of his father. An engineer by trade, he ran the cattle farm by day and by night built a giant rocket ship in his barn. Framer may have left NASA but his dreams of visiting outer space didn’t stop there. Farmer, his wife, (another supportive wife role for Virginia Madsen), and children become media darlings when the FBI swoop down on his operation, looking for WMDs and leak the story to the press.
The Astronaut Farmer works on several levels. The Polish Brothers have stepped out from behind the art house veneer that informed their past work to make a film that has one foot in the mainstream, but doesn’t betray their roots. The movie is beautiful to look at, with a soft glow that feels timeless and nostalgic, but is also subversive.
When asked “Mr. Farmer, how do we know you aren’t constructing a WMD?” by a NASA Committee Member, Farmer replies, “Sir, if I was building a weapon of mass destruction, you wouldn’t be able to find it,” with a cutting charm that wouldn’t be out of place in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The Astronaut Farmer is a warm family film that breathes new life into the hoary old “follow your dreams” storyline.
Arthur and the Invisibles is a whimsical kid’s movie that blends live action with animation. It’s a story about a young boy (Freddie Highmore from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) with a vivid imagination left to live on a Connecticut farm with his grandmother (Mia Farrow) while his parents search for work in the big city. The boy passes his time reading his missing grandfather’s diaries and daydreaming about the older man’s adventures in deepest Africa with two tribes—one giant, one small, known as the Minimoys.
When an evil real estate developer tries to foreclose on his grandmother’s land Arthur hatches a plan to use his grandfather’s papers and maps to uncover treasure buried on the property. With just 48 hours before bulldozers raze the house Arthur follows his grandfather’s instructions, shrinks himself to microscopic size and enters the world of the Minimoys to search for the treasure.
Here the movie gains some steam. Insects are as big as airplanes and one Rastafarian Minimoy sounds an awful lot like Snoop Dogg. Arthur, now equipped with a shock of white hair that makes him look more like Billy Idol than a superhero falls for a princess voiced by Madonna, does battle with a bad guy whose name no one dares utter and finds out why his grandfather mysteriously disappeared.
While it’s a relief to find a computer-animated movie that isn’t about talking animals on a quest to get home / back to Africa or fractured fairy tales Arthur and the Invisibles only delivers up to a point. A little over-long at 2 hours, the movie is exciting during its chase and action scenes but borrows a little too heavily from familiar fare like The Wizard of Oz and even Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to feel completely fresh.
I don’t need a calendar to tell me when January has arrived. I have a special sense that has nothing to do with the weather or the Christmas trees left on the curb. I can tell by the movies that get released. It’s the dog days of the movie biz, a time when movie studios empty out their closets and quietly release oddball movies.
Some are so bad that they don’t actually get released… they escape, while most fall into the ho-hum category and would make better rentals than theatrical releases. Such a movie is Alpha Dog that features pop star Justin Timberlake as a tough guy who lives with his father.
Directed by Nick Cassavetes, who romanced audiences with The Notebook a couple of years ago, Alpha Dog is based on the true story of a young thug with the unlikely name of Jesse James Hollywood. Hollywood and cohorts—all renamed for the movie—impulsively kidnap the brother of a psychopathic drug runner who owes them money. Without a firm plan the kidnapping doesn’t go as planned and panic sets in.
It’s an odd little movie. One that seems to on one hand condemn the thug lifestyle portrayed by these suburban wannabes while at the same time exploiting it by throwing in many scenes of violence and nudity. Like the great cheesy exploitation flicks of the 50s and 60s Alpha Dog tries to portray a certain kind of morality, while offering up plenty of examples of how NOT to behave. It makes for kind of a schizophrenic viewing experience.
Also odd is Cassavetes’s decision to frame the movie as a documentary. It starts with an interview with the main character’s drug dealer father (well played by Bruce Willis), and unnecessarily flits back and forth between the story and the documentary elements. The story stands on its own and doesn’t need these intrusions that don’t really accomplish much except to take the viewer out of the story.
But no one is going to see this movie for its morality or style choices. The audience for this movie, and the reason, I suspect that it didn’t go straight to video is Justin Timberlake. His big screen debut, Edison, only earned a limited release in Europe and a half-hearted DVD release in the rest of the world, but that was before his last album went stratospheric and his relationship with Cameron Diaz became hot gossip. I’d bet Universal is banking on his audience to put bums in seats for this movie.
Timberlake acquits himself well enough in the movie, although as I watched I couldn’t help but wonder why he seems to be drawn to roles that seem so inappropriate for him. In Edison he played a tough guy reporter, here he plays a suburban wannabe gangster who has probably watched Scarface one too many times. He’s a charismatic performer, so he gets by in both these films relatively unscathed, but next time I’d like to see him play toward his strengths and perhaps do a romantic comedy or at least something with a lighter touch.
It’s easy to find reasons not to go see the new Mel Gibson film. His transformation from lovable leading man to movie mogul has been rocky, marked by incidents of anti-Semitism and strange behavior. In discussing Apocalypto I’m choosing to put aside the filmmaker’s controversial behavior and file this review under “Judge the Art not the Artist.”
shares some of the characteristics of Gibson’s last film, The Passion of the Christ—the violence, the dialogue in a long extinct language and exacting period detail—but most of all it offers up the same passion. Gibson takes the conventions of a Hollywood action movie and transports them back to pre-Columbian Central America with gusto. Instead of a standard car chase a jaguar tracks the hero. Gone is the urban jungle replaced by a real one. Apocalypto really is a thrill ride from frame one until the end.
The film starts with an ominous quote from Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The internal rot that quote refers to is a tribe of vicious Mayans who pillage villages, destroying entire communities before kidnapping the survivors to use as human sacrifices. One strong willed captive, Jaguar Paw, narrowly escapes a grisly sacrificial death and is pursued through the jungle by a team of killers hell bent on capturing him and “wearing his skin as a suit.”
The bulk of the film is taken up by the chase as Jaguar Paw races to return to his homeland, rescue his pregnant wife and son who were left hiding is a giant crater and avoid capture.
It’s a bloody and nail-biting sequence. Gibson doesn’t shy away from the violence—there are decapitations complete with rolling head point-of-view shots, a nasty jaguar attack that could have been featured on When Animals Go Crazy and lots of cutting and jabbing followed by spurting blood. It’s strong stuff, but in amongst the blood and guts is a strong eco message and some timely political comment about leaders who lie (Rumsfeld anyone?) and don’t always act in he best interests of their people.
We’ve finally reached the tipping point where casting Robin Williams has officially become a liability. A case in point: August Rush is a perfectly acceptable modern fairy tale about an orphaned young boy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Freddie Highmore) who feels that his love of music will reunite him with his parents one day. It is a sweet idea, and Highmore with his sad eyes and apparent vulnerability is perfectly cast. If you buy into the idea that this neo-Oliver Twist could truly believe this airy-fairy idea about the magical power of music, then August Rush will work for you. Work for you, that is, until Robin Williams comes along with his Bono-wannabe hat and all his usual bluster and completely throws the movie off the rails.
Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers play Lyla and Louis, musicians from two different worlds. He’s a poor rock singer, she a rich cello prodigy. They meet on a rooftop overlooking NYC’s Washington Square Park, spend the night together and conceive a child. Her overbearing father conspires to keep them apart, and following a tragic car accident tells Lyla that the child was killed, while, in fact, secretly putting it up for adoption.
Eleven years later Lyla and Louis have moved on. She’s now a music teacher, unaware that her son is still alive; disillusioned he’s given up music completely. The child, convinced he can locate his parents, escapes the orphanage where he has grown up and makes off for the big city. He comes under the spell of a “musical Fagin” named Wizard (Robin Williams) who imparts new agey wisdom like “music is the harmonic connection between all living beings” and teaches the boy how to play the music that may eventually reunite him with his parents.
You have to have a strong willingness to suspend your disbelief to buy into August Rush’s storyline, but if you can you’ll find lots here to like. Highmore is a charmer on screen, Russell and Meyers are the very definition of star-crossed and director Kirsten Sheridan gives the proceedings an agreeable fairy tale feel, but whenever Williams hits the screen it’s as though this fable’s Ogre has awoken to chew the scenery and destroy any of the good will the movie had already accrued. He’s so annoying, and in the later half of the movie, so unnecessary to the plot, that the term “over-the-top” scarcely does him justice.
August Rush is a well-meaning but clichéd film with a nice message and decent music, but is almost done in by its casting.
Unlike The Kid’s Are Alright, the seminal 1978 Who documentary which was basically a pop art pastiche of clips and performance pieces strung together, Amazing Journey appears to have been made by sensible people. It doesn’t have the raw rock and roll energy of the first film, but what it lacks in “in-your-face” bravado it more than makes up for in biographical detail and rare footage.
Tracing the history of The Who from their humble beginnings as The Detours and The High Numbers through to their early successes as the go-to band for London’s hip young Mods, the film takes pains to explain the genesis of the band and the reasons why they became successful. There is nothing much new in the band’s overall biographical information, but what is new is the perspective of guitarist Pete Townsend and singer Roger Daltrey, the two surviving members of the original four piece combo.
The pair who once sang, “I hope I die before I get old,” are now rock’s elder statesmen, able to look back on their lives, careers and relationships with their late band mates with a kind of perspective that is often tinged with humor but underlined with a sense of melancholy. When they speak of wild man drummer Keith Moon’s death by misadventure at the age 32 there is more than nostalgia involved, but a real sense of loss that comes from years of reflection on what went wrong.
If that makes the film sound mournful, it isn’t. This was one of the best live bands in the world, bar none, and the footage in Amazing Journey, starting with a never-before-seen clip of the band, still called The High Numbers, from 1964 and culminating with a an on-stage performance from 2007 reveals a band who burned brightest when their was an audience to entertain. Of particular interest is the movie’s spotlight (more fully explored in the excellent extras) on Keith Moon’s drumming. Best known as an offstage character that drove Roll Royces into swimming pools, the movie pulls the focus back to his musicianship, reminding us that his legacy isn’t in the path of destruction he left in hotel rooms all across the world, but the amazing sounds he created with his singular drumming ability.
Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who is probably best suited for Who fans, but people who only know the band as the guys who do the theme song for CSI will find a deeper appreciation for one of rock’s truly legendary groups.
Not since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has there been a novel so faithfully modified for the big screen. Atonement, adapted from the popular 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan—sometimes called Britain’s greatest living novelist—perfectly captures the tone of the novel reproducing many scenes and much of the dialogue directly from the book.
Set in pre-World War II England Atonement begins as an idyll. A rich family with two daughters, the fetching and flirty Cecelia (Keira Knightley) and 13-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan), are vacationing at their rural country home. The handsome son of the family’s housekeeper Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) is the object of affection for both girls, but he only has eyes for Cecelia. When Briony catches the two in a passionate embrace she is overcome by jealousy. To keep the young lovers apart she impulsively comes up with a childish, but devastating plan to accuse him of a crime he didn’t commit.
There are serious repercussions to her impulsive of jealousy and years later she must atone for her actions.
Leading the cast is James McAvoy in a role that should catapult him to the ranks of a-list stardom. His emotionally rich take on Robbie follows the character from youthful innocence to the hardened edge of someone who was forced to grow up too quickly. There’s a range here he has never displayed before and it is one of the best performances of the year. Knightley—who looks like she was born to play 30s era flappers—is her usual charismatic self and brings much sexual energy to her scenes with McAvoy. And yes, for fans of the book, the green dress is very much on display.
Atonement is an epic tale disguised as a human drama. At its heart it is a love story, but through the trio of main characters—Robbie, Cecelia and Briony—it also tells us of the class structure of mid-century England, how deceit and remorse can ruin a life and how, sometimes, love can win out. Directed with raw power and compassion by Joe Wright, the movie is chock full of big ideas but never loses sight of the romance that is at the core of the film.
Christmas will soon be here and with it comes the usual assortment of movies that seem to exist only to create a demand for stuffed toys, talking pens and soundtracks. First out of the gate this year is Alvin and the Chipmunks, starring Jason “My Name is Earl” Lee as a struggling songwriter who discovers three talented chipmunks—Alvin, Simon and Theodore—living in his house and rides their little furry coattails to the top of the music charts.
Brought to you by the director of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, Alvin and the Chipmunks is as good as you would imagine a movie from the director of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties to be.
A compact ninety minutes, it has the prerequisite ”heartwarming” family values message and is jam packed with all the stuff calculated to make kids laugh—loads of slapstick, poo jokes and goofy songs—the trouble is, the audience of kids I saw it with wasn’t laughing much. That’s because there’s nothing clever or interesting about Alvin and the Chipmunks. It’s aimed directly at kids, but feels more like the target is their parent’s pocketbook. The entire movie feels like a big-budget commercial for Chipmunk’s merchandise; a way to influence little Johnny’s Christmas wish list.
It’s ironic because the movie comes with a stern anti-consumerist message. In one of the most obvious postmodern examples of life imitating art, the big-screen Chipmunks are exploited by their evil manager who tries to suck every dollar out of their popularity by marketing Chipmunk’s dolls and other products. It all feels a bit hypocritical.
Alvin and the Chipmunks will likely do well at the box office trading on its family appeal and the nostalgic goodwill generated by the name, but despite its hip cast—Jason Lee, Justin Long, David Cross and Jesse McCartney—it is little more than a holiday money grab.
On paper American Gangster sounds like a home run. It stars two charismatic Oscar winners, re-teams Russell Crowe with his Gladiator director Ridley Scott and is written by the Oscar winning screenwriter behind Schindler’s List. That‘s all good right? Well, not exactly. Based on a true story—just like recent big winners Walk the Line, Ray and Capote—it is the kind of late-year release that seems almost guaranteed to garner Academy attention, but in reality American Gangster is less than the sum of its parts.
