Say “Heller!” to the new Alex Cross. The last time we saw the forensic detective on screen he looked a lot like Morgan Freeman. This time out, in the new thriller “Alex Cross,” he looks a lot like a famous mischievous grandma named Madea.
Tyler Perry has stepped into the role and where Freeman played the character with a gravitas and dignity in “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider,” Perry brings a stoicism to Cross that may make the character very attractive to woodpeckers.
Cross is a modern day Sherlock Holmes, a know-it-all who inspires his co-workers to say things like, “Just once I would like it if you got something wrong, ‘cuz this is getting annoying.” When a young, wealthy woman turns up dead, her house littered with murdered security guards, Cross begins to untangle the clues which will lead him to the crazed killer (a skeletal Matthew Fox). As he gets close, he makes a rare mistake in judgment that ends up changing his life.
I’m not a fan of picking apart a movie on the finer details. If the story is really clicking along I think audiences will be engaged enough in the plot to accept some irregularities. “Alex Cross,” however, never connects, so all the story’s inconsistencies suddenly become blinding. For instance, bad guys swapping cars to avoid being followed is nothing new, but here it rings false because the second car is a cab waiting to pick him up in a remote indoor parking garage. In a good movie it would be a blip. Here it contributes to the overall feeling of disbelief.
Disbelief aside, the problems are many, starting with a script peppered with dialogue that sounds TV movie ready. Ed Burns plays a cop whose girlfriend describes him as “just the kind of guy my father told me to avoid,” and later a character advises, “you don’t play the game, the game plays you.” It doesn’t feel like a script, it feels more like a greatest hits of the most over-used lines in movie history. The only cliché that goes unused is, “I’m too old for this ****,” but with the movie’s sequel-ready ending, I’m sure screenwriters are already crafting that line into “Alex Cross 2: My Name’s Not Madea.”
The main problem, the nine hundred pound elephant in the room, though, is Perry. It’s next to impossible to buy into the actor as an action star, let alone one so wooden that I found myself staring at his skin, searching for knots. He’s not given much to work with, that’s for sure, but nor does he elevate the material.
“Alex Cross” is the kind of movie that makes you wish Morgan Freeman was twenty years younger, and still agreeable to chasing down bad guys.
These days the only movies that get screened at midnight are big Hollywood blockbusters hoping to squeeze a few extra bucks out of fanboys and girls with added showings in the middle of the night. There was a time, however when midnight movies were Midnight Movies, with capital m’s. Years ago the term referred to mind-bending fare like “El Topo” and “Eraserhead,” counterculture movies that brought together like minded—read stoned—people for singular movie experiences.
“A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman” is a Midnight Movie, a film that would benefit from the altered states that characterized the classic midnight viewing experience.
Graham Chapman was many things. A gay Cambridge graduate, physician, writer and actor, but it is as a founding member of Monty Python that he is remembered. “A Liar’s Autobiography,” directed by Python Terry Jones’s son Bill and based on Chapman’s book of the same name is an animated, impressionistic, surreal portrait of the comedian, that doesn’t focus on the funny.
Chapman was a complicated man. An alcoholic who drank four pints of gin a day to dull the pain of his insecurities, he rebelled against the “airlock” of fame, while hanging out in Los Angeles clubs with Keith Moon and Marty Feldman.
The film begins with a brain freeze on stage then cuts to his birth in Second World War England. At three years of age he witnessed a wartime incident when his street was littered with body parts. “Oh come on mum, this must be one of my major formative experiences!” he says, although we never really find out whether it was or not. Instead we are treated to a series of impressionist biographical tidbits that only loosely hang together.
The formation of Monty Python is set in a Monkey Zoo, fame is portrayed as being in outer space and his journey to discover his sexuality is shown as a rollercoaster. It’ll keep your eyes dancing, but isn’t very satisfying as a narrative.
Aping the anarchistic spirit of “Monty Python,” the style of animation switches every few minutes, which keeps things lively, but also adds a disjointed feeling to the story. The cumulative effect of the imaginative visuals is meant to create a fitting portrait of Chapman’s raucous life, but only succeeds in splitting the viewer’s attention one too many ways.
Focusing on Chapman’s often troubled personal life rather than his on stage and screen work with Python means that “A Liar’s Autobiography” isn’t simply a greatest hits packages of his best known work, which is interesting, but it doesn’t quote work as a bio either.
We are given some insight—the narration and many of the voices are supplied by Chapman, taken from recordings made before his 1989 death—about coming out—he invited all his friends over to announce he was “a bit bent”—his alcoholism, sexual appetite and problems with fame, but a movie about Chapman should be funny, right?
But it’s not. It works best when gentle humour mixes with and insight—a sequence about “Niven-ism,” the Hollywood disease characterized by name-dropping, is letter perfect.
Lately we’ve grown used to seeing Christopher Walken in comedic roles—almost veering into self-parody—so it is refreshing to see him not rely on tricks and produce a layered, heartfelt and emotionally rich work. In “A Late Quartet” he delivers his most poignant performance in years.
Walken is Peter Mitchell, cellist and senior member of The Fugue, a world famous string quartet. For twenty-fives years and 3000 performances he has helped to define chamber music with first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette Gelbart (Catherine Keener) on viola. When Peter is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and decides to hang up his cello, the Fugue friends are thrown into turmoil.
Walken’s illness and retirement are the catalyst for the film’s look at how people deal with change, but it also provides the heart. Many of the situations are melodramatic—an affair, an inappropriate romance among them—but it isn’t so much about the events themselves as it is about how change affects people.
Each of the three remaining musicians become different people once they have been cut loose from the watchful eye of their friend and mentor. The overall effect is more interesting than the mechanisms of it. The affair and the plot machinery that keeps the story going are there simply to serve great performances from a powerhouse cast.
Hoffman, Keener, Ivanir and Imogen Poots as Robert and Juliette’s college-age daughter Alexandra are uniformly strong, but the maestro here is Walken.
Subtle, nuanced and heartbreaking, his portrayal of a man confronting old age and an uncertain future is first class, a virtuoso turn.
“A Late Quartet” could have been a downer film about classical music and mortality, but instead it’s funny, melancholy and touching.
How do you breath life into the withered lungs of a period piece that has been told time and time again? If you’re “Anna Karenina” director Joe Wright you honor Leo Tolstoy’s book while staging the story of deception, honor and love at the intersection where reality and fantasy cross.
Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s classic story of love, honor and deceit in 1974 Imperialist Russia begins with a family in tatters because of marital transgression. St. Petersburg aristocrat and socialite Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) travels to Moscow to visit her womanizing brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) and his long-suffering wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). Her council saves their marriage but the trip proves to be the undoing of hers. She becomes smitten with the affluent Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a handsome military man and begins a torrid affair. Soon, however, she discovers that her indiscretion isn’t as easily dismissed as her brother’s.
The story itself is rather simple and has been told many times, what distinguishes this version, aside from the cast (more on that later), is the sumptuous staging. Every frame of the film drips with beauty, from the sets to the clothes to Knightley’s cheekbones. But that’s to be expected from a big retelling of the story. What really captures the eye–and the mind–is the unconventional way Wright has chosen to tell the tale.
The film opens on what appears to be a stage production of “Anna Karenina.” We see musicians, dancing and backstage activity. To further blur the line between reality and illusory we see Anna, Oblonsky and others going about their day. Imagine watching the “Anna Karenina” opera and you get the idea.
It is a brilliant piece of staging for a story that has enough passion and tragedy for two operas. More importantly the style doesn’t overwhelm the substance. The baroque tone established early on sets the stage, literally, for screenwriter Tom Stoppard’s sweeping story of betrayal, forgiveness and death. It is an epic but human story about the best and worst of behavior.
Leading the cast Knightley proves a natural for period pieces. She has a face meant to be framed by fur hats and veils but apart from looking the part she carefully modulates Anna’s descent from socialite to outcast with grace and dignity while allowing notes of frustration and misery to seep through.
Knightley has the showiest role but Jude Law also makes an impression despite showing considerable restraint in his take on Anna’s beleaguered husband Alexei Karenin.
Decked out in blonde curly hair Aaron Taylor-Johnson is almost unrecognizable from his best known role, playing John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy,” but as Count Vronsky he convincingly plays a confident man who allows self-gratification to ruin his life and Anna’s.
A lighter note is supplied by Matthew Macfadyen, whose élan and rakish charm turns the womanizing Oblonsky into one of the film’s high spots.
“Anna Karenina” is a grand film, both in story and style.
On the surface New York hedge-fund king Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is the model of success. At sixty years old and married to Ellen (Susan Sarandon) he’s preparing to hand over his empire to his Chief Investment Manager, who also happens to be his daughter Brooke (Brit Marling). He’s so rich he doesn’t even know what an Applebees is. Cracks appear in the façade, however, when an accident involving his mistress, French art-dealer Julie Côte (Laetitia Casta), threatens to uncover the dark side of his life, including a $400 million fraud.
“Arbitrage” has already earned Richard Gere a Golden Globe nomination and may be the role that finally lands him an Oscar nod. He’s terrific as the morally ambiguous banker (is there any other kind in the movies?), a cold—so chilly you want to put a scarf on when he’s in the room—calculating but charismatic wheeler-dealer whose motives are not always immediately clear. It’s a complex performance that shows the balance Miller has over his lives as a business-person versus family man.
His two powerhouse scenes are intimate ones, there’s nothing flashy about them, they simply moments of reckoning for a man between his wife and father with daughter. They are quiet, powerful passages in a sophisticated movie about deceit and flawed characters.
It’s a twisty, turny plot kept interesting by the uniformly strong performances. Tim Roth’s Det. Michael Bryer, the street-savvy cop trying to get to the bottom of Miller’s complex web of lies, is Columbo-esque, but he manages to make it his own.
Sarandon and Marling (who has a bachelor’s in economics in real life and becomes the movie’s conscious) shine, but it is Nate Parker as the Jimmy Grant, the son of one of Miller’s friends, who almost steals the show from Gere. He’s the only character with a developed sense of right and wrong, and it almost lands him in trouble.
“Arbitrage” is an intricate, gripping crime drama populated by relatable, although not very likable, characters.
“30 Rock,” the beloved but low rated comedy is gone now, having passed on to the great boob tube in the sky, but Tina Fey fans can get their fix of her trademarked brand of witty and wise humor in “Admission,” a “mom com” co-starring Paul Rudd.
Fey is Portia Nathan, a mildly compulsive Princeton admissions officer—they jokingly call her their “golden retriever” because of her record of recruiting a-plus students—who leads a quiet, ordered life with professor Mark (Michael Sheen). They share a love of poetry, hatred of kids and not much else. Her well ordered life is thrown into disarray when John Pressman (Rudd), a free-spirited former classmate and now teacher at an alternative school, introduces her to Jeremiah Balakian (Nat Wolff), a brilliant young man who may be the child she gave up for adoption seventeen years ago.
Fey didn’t write “Admission,” but it is firmly in her wheelhouse. Like “30 Rock” before it, “Admission” takes a recognizable style and subverts it with smarts. It’s a female driven romantic comedy, but there isn’t a rom com clichés in sight. Instead there are René Descartes jokes and Bella Abzug sight gags, but what else, exactly, did you expect in a movie set at Princeton?
But it also more than that. It’s a big studio comedy—the first half-hour is hysterical and then it evens out, although Lily Tomlin as Portia’s militant mom is hilarious throughout—that has all the laughs but none of the vulgarity (unless you’re offended by the line, “You’re not the only one who smells of cow placenta”) of the recent Hollywood amusements.
Fey fans will remember “Baby Mama” and the late season “30 Rock” motherhood storyline, so Portia’s maternal development completes the trilogy of motherhood movies, except, that like in those other stories, not everything works out exactly as planned.
As a recruiter Portia uses the line, “What’s the secret to getting in? I can’t tell you—you have to find out for yourself,” in her pitch to students. Those words also echo her character arc—she must find independence to find herself. That’s a heady concept for a rom com and pretty much the opposite of every romantic comedy plotline every written.
There she goes again subverting the genre.
“Admission” is familiar enough to not jar the sensibilities of undemanding rom com fans, but there is more here than immediately meets the eye.
Who knew there was so much intrigue in the seed business? “At Any Price,” the new film starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron as father and son, features infidelity, shady dealings and even murder, all set against a bucolic Iowa background.
Henry Whipple (Quaid) is a second-generation farmer and seed salesman. His father built up the land and the business, and now Henry is trying to take it into the next level by buying more land and selling genetically modified seeds. His youngest son Dean (Efron) is more interested in racing cars than growing corn, but when the family business is threatened the clan reluctantly pulls together despite their personal differences and a dark secret.
As the title suggests, this is a story about the price of winning at any cost. To drive the point home director Ramin Bahrani clutters the story with unnecessary story shards that don’t add much to the movie except for length. At just an hour and forty-five minutes it still feels long, as though the core idea—a powerful tale of fathers and sons and the pressure to succeed—is stretched to fill the time, rather than serving the story.
Quaid and Efron rise above the contrived story elements to hand in good, if sometimes melodramatic, performances and it’s so full of atmosphere you can almost taste the corn—it’s just too bad that the corny stuff in this movie isn’t limited to the fields
After narrowly escaping jail, Scottish hell-raiser Robbie (Paul Brannigan) tries to create an honest life for his new family. Filmed and set in Glasgow, the first hour has a natural vibe; a rawness and realism that almost feel like a documentary but it switches in the latter half to a grimly funny caper film. It’s an unlikely feel good movie with good performances and loads of lyrical Scottish accents. The standout here is Brannigan who is so charismatic in his debut performance it’s hard to believe he’s never acted before stepping in front of ’s camera.
What do you call a Will Smith movie that’s not really a Will Smith movie?
A screening of his new film, the sci fi actioner directed by M. Night Shyamalan provides the answer. “After Earth” sounds like a great Smith vehicle—he not only acts in it, but produces and has a story credit as well—but it fails to take advantage of his greatest asset—his star power.
Big Willie is Cypher Raige, a highly respected general in the intergalactic peacekeeping organization Ranger Corps, based on the planet Nova Prime. He rose through the ranks fighting the Ursa, genetically engineered beasties who can literally smell human fear. They are POed because they consider the planet their home and the humans interlopers. By learning to overcome his fear—a technique known as “ghosting”— Cypher became invisible to them.
Unfortunately his son Kitai (played by his real life son Jaden Smith) is invisible to him. To try and mend family fences he takes the youngster on a mission to deliver an Ursa specimen for use in training ghost warriors wannabes.
But after Cypher breaks his leg in a crash landing on Earth, a planet uninhabited for a millennium, Kitai must navigate the unfamiliar landscape and battle the escaped Ursa and overgrown Earth organisms—everything on the planet has evolved to kill humans!— to retrieve an emergency beacon.
Herein lies the big problem with “After Earth.” Will Smith—one of the most charismatic movie stars of the day—may have his name above the title on the poster, but he’s the star in billing only. For most of the film he lays back, motionless and bleeding, allowing the light to shine brightly on his son Jaden.
It’s too bad, the listless “After Earth” needs the elder Smith driving the film, not taking the backseat over enunciating motivational lines like, “Recognize your power: This will be your creation.”
Jaden isn’t a strong enough actor to hold the center of a massive CGI movie. He’s charismatic like his dad but here he appears to have only a handful of facial expressions and rotates between anger, surprise, fear and some serious eyebrow acting for most of the film’s scant 90 minute (including credits) running time.
Shyamalan, whose forte is not helming big summer tentpole movies, doesn’t bring much to the screen visually. The look of the movie is generic sci fi, and for every cool scene—Kitai soaring through the air in a wing suit, chased by a giant eagle—there are obvious soundstage scenes and cheesy costumes. Then there are the accents—apparently all future people sound like Rolf Harris. And don’t even get me started on the logic leaps—how do flora and fauna survive on a planet that falls into a deep freeze every night, for instance.
On the plus side it does have a pretty great last line, and at least it isn’t in 3D. But at the end of the day “After Earth’s” main crime is placing Will on the sidelines, robbing it of a star that might have been able to make this journey interesting.
