Tarsem Singh Dhandwar may have a highly developed sense of humor. I say may because I don’t know. Judging strictly by his work, it’s hard to tell. His features, “The Cell,” “The Fall” and “Immortals” weren’t exactly laugh riots. His new movie, “Mirror Mirror,” a comedic retelling of the Snow White story, doesn’t shed any light on the matter either. It is as amusing as you might expect from the man who brought us REM’s po-faced Losing My Religion music video.
Julia Roberts plays the narcissistic evil step-queen to the young and beautiful Snow White (Lily Collins). After Snow’s father, the King (Sean Bean), mysteriously disappears, the Queen goes all Marie Antoinette, indulging her every whim, bringing the country to the verge of bankruptcy. In her quest to be the fairest in the land, she also locked Snow away from prying eyes, but when the young princess attracts the attention of a wealthy young prince (Armie Hammer) the Queen considered to be husband material, she orders her bungling servant Brighton (Nathan Lane) to kill Snow. I told you she was evil.
Brighton can’t bring himself to off the young girl, and sets her free in the forest where she is found by seven dwarfs who help her find her inner strength and recapture her birthright.
As with all of Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s films “Mirror Mirror” is beautiful to look at. He certainly has an eye for set decoration but in this case I wish they had spent the money on gag writers rather than lavish sets.
To be fair, “Mirror Mirror” is a family movie, but even five year olds deserve better than the old hat slapstick and word play on display here. Even the seven dwarfs on their spring-loaded stilts can’t put any bounce into this fractured fairy tale.
It’s cast well enough, Collins is picture perfect as Snow White—she bears an uncanny resemblance to the cartoon version—and Armie Hammer, should his career survive the dreadful dog impression he has to do here, has a future playing handsome princes. Julia Roberts is the headliner here and while her comedic timing is in place, the lines she has to say don’t connect.
“Mirror Mirror” is a misfire, ninety minutes that feels like seven years of bad luck. To quote a line from the movie, “Snow White? Snow Way.”
If I had to choose one word to describe “Man on a Ledge,” the new heist drama starring Sam Worthington and Jamie Bell, it wouldn’t be thrilling or even breathtaking. No the word that best sums up the movie is implausible. Your enjoyment of the film will depend on how often you are willing to suspend your disbelief.
Worthington plays Nick Cassidy, a former cop sentenced to twenty-five years at Sing Sing prison for a diamond heist he may or may not have committed. After a daring escape he launches an elaborate plan to prove his innocence. Step one is perching himself on the ledge of the twenty-first floor of a Manhattan hotel. From that vantage point he orchestrates a “Mission: Impossible” style scheme to uncover the plot that sent him up the river.
“Man on a Ledge” is not what Hitchcock called a Refrigerator Movie. That is, one that seems to make sense while you’re watching it, but later, when you’re at home in front of the fridge thinking about it, the inanity of it becomes clear. Nope, this one is loud and proud in its complete lack of logic.
Plot wise so many things don’t add up that according to this movie’s way of thinking one plus one must equal five. But, as I said earlier, if you can suspend disbelief and go along for the ride “Man on a Ledge” proves not to be a bad movie, just a silly one.
Stereotypes abound—there’s the ruthless reporter who knows that jumpers are good for ratings, the troubled cop, the coldblooded businessman—and an overly elaborate plan that plays itself out just a little too easily. Add to that a bit too much talk about “how far you would go to clear your name” and one scene of completely gratuitous almost nudity and you end up with a poorly plotted time waster that skates by on the strength of its characters.
“Margin Call,” a new Wall Street drama with an all-star cast including Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons and Demi Moore, deserved a better run at the theatres. Now on DVD and download, this overlooked movie of the beginning of our recent financial crisis has a compelling story and great acting but didn’t find an audience theatrically.
A fictionalized account of what may have happened at Lehman Brothers et al, “Margin Call” is set at a Wall Street firm following a brutal round of layoffs. Using information passed on by one of the outgoings execs an analyst, played by “Star Trek’s” Zachary Quinto, discovers that the firm is wildly overleveraged. Saving the company will affect not only the employees but the entire economy of the United States.
The way I have described it would sound melodramatic if it wasn’t bound so closely to fact and that’s the beauty of the movie. It takes complex financial transactions, dramatizes them and presents them in a way that makes sense and shines spotlight on the terrible mess the greed of these Wall Street firms caused.
But without great characters a movie solely about the crisis wouldn’t be necessary in the wake of Inside Job,” the Oscar winning documentary that covered pretty much the same ground.
Luckily “Margin Call” abounds with interesting characters even though doesn’t exactly avoid the stereotypical portrayal of Wall Street types—there is the de rigueur associate obsessed with his colleague’s pay cheques, the over indulgent CEOs. But despite its occasional typecasting, actors like Spacey, Tucci and Simon Baker imbue their characters with humanity, creating multi-layered people concerned with the ethics of what they are doing.
Perhaps “Margin Call” flopped because people don’t want to be reminded of the financial meltdown that left tens-of-thousands of Americans stuck with sub prime mortgages and made foreclosure signs the hottest landscaping feature of the 2008-2009 season. Perhaps it was because the star wattage of Stanley Tucci and Kevin Spacey wasn’t enough to put bums in seats. Whatever the reason, “Margin Call” remains a gem that will hopefully find its audience on the small screen.
Like a cat, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), the indestructible secret agent star of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” has nine lives. Maybe more. He packs more death defying hero activity into one afternoon than… Scaling buildings and crashing cars, he’s always on the go.
There’s the usual assortment of exotic locations, international intrigue, beautiful assassins, clocks ticking down to zero, subtitles in various languages, but despite all that, MI4 makes WAY more sense than its predecessors. Clarity of story has never been a strong suit of the MI series, but “Ghost Protocol” trims down the convoluted plots of the first three movies.
The IMF—that’s Impossible Missions Force for the uninitiated—is disavowed after Ethan Hunt and his team Jane (Paula Patton) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are accused of bombing the Kremlin. Under the rules of Ghost Protocol they are left on their own with no support and must go rogue to clear their name.
“Ghost Protocol” is by no means a comedy but there are more light moments–usually courtesy of Simon Pegg–than in all the previous movies combined. There’s even a short joke at Cruise’s expense.
The jokes are place holders for the wall-to-wall action. If nothing else Ghost Protocol will make you chew your popcorn a little faster. Spectacular set pieces, like Cruise repelling down the outside of the tallest building in the world, and a car chase in a dust storm, should satisfy any action fan.
The various subplots may not, however. Too much time is spent on Jeremy Renner’s back story, a long-winded tale of combat fatigue that reveals a connection to Hunt. The movie is best when it is running and jumping and while the story doesn’t slow the overall momentum, it feels unnecessary.
In the end “Ghost Protocol” has everything you expect from a MI movie. There’s action galore, a cool gadget for every occasion, the patented Tom Cruise Run–hands extended, determined look on face, hair blowing from the sheer velocity of his stride–and sneering bad guys
The Oscar battle of the biopics is in full swing with the release of “My Week with Marilyn.” Michelle Williams hands in exactly the kind of performance the Academy loves. As Marilyn Monroe she turns the camera on Hollywood, playing one of its biggest stars at the peak of her career.
Based on two books by Colin Clark, “The Prince, The Showgirl and Me” and “My Week with Marilyn,” the movie’s main character isn’t Munroe, but Clark (Eddie Redmayne), the third assistant director on “The Prince and the Showgirl” starring Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Munroe. It was the summer of 1956 and Clark was a twenty-three-year-old, who, like the rest of the planet, was smitten with Monroe. The two form a bond, and for a few days it looks like his love for her might actually be reciprocated. Perhaps this should have been titled “The Week I Almost Made It with Marilyn.”
Everyone has been predicting Oscar success for Williams and rightly so, she’s very good, but the bulk of the movie is carried by Redmayne. It is his coming of age story that really fuels the movie’s dramatic arc and his youthful excitement at meeting and, possibly mating with, the movie star is infectious. Of course he’s playing against Williams and Branagh in much showier roles, so I suspect he’ll get the sort shrift attention wise.
As for the above the title stars, Branagh shows two sides to Olivier, the flamboyantly theatrical public persona contrasted against his testy frustration of having to work overshadowed the unprofessional movie star from America. “She’s all instinct, no craft,” he says.
Branagh is very good, but when placed against Williams’s Monroe his work seems to lack the soul she brings to every frame of film. He does have many of the film’s best lines, however. His delivery of lines like, “Trying to teach Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger,” is letter perfect and adds much to the movie.
Even almost fifty years after her death Monroe is still one of the best-known actresses in the world. Her famous face adorns everything from wine bottles to Volkswagen commercials, and yet Williams manages to bring something new to someone we thought we knew so well. Her off-screen life, as dramatic as anything she ever did on screen, is tenderly portrayed here but the story isn’t as interesting as the performance.
Williams plays Monroe as a coddled woman-child, crippled by nerves, insecurity, but long on instinct but she goes beyond the little girl lost act so often associated with Monroe. She digs deep, cleaving the role into two parts—the sex-bomb and the vulnerable real life counterpart.
“Shall I be her?” she asks Colin as a crowd descends on them in public. She then shifts effortlessly from the private to the public Marilyn, blowing kisses and turning the flirt up to eleven. But when she is behind closed doors the performance glows. While some of the dialogue is a bit too Psyche 101—“Why do the people I love always leave me?” she pouts at one point—the complexity behind her eyes isn’t.
Williams has perfected playing dour characters in movies like “Blue Valentine,”—so it is a bit of a revelation to see her smile here—but this is something else—well rounded and revelatory.
“My Week with Marilyn” feels a little old-fashioned. The show biz story about, as they say in the film, “a great actor who wants to be a movie star and a movie star who wants to be a great actor,” is overtly theatrical, but Williams brings real soul and heart, handing in the Oscar worthy performance that eluded Monroe in real life.
Near the end of “Melancholia,” the latest film from professional crank Lars Von Trier, his star Kristen Dunst wonders aloud if anyone would grieve if the world was gone. It’s the great existential question in a film which may be the most audience friendly study of depression ever.
Von Trier breaks the film into three portions. A montage of strange slow motion images and soaring symphonic music serves as a prologue. In its final image Von Trier lets us known how the story will end, establishing a tension that runs through every frame of the film.
Part One starts off happily enough with a young couple, Justine (Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), on the way to an opulent wedding reception at the home of (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine’s sister. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that all is not right. Justine’s inability to feel happiness and her family’s recriminations at the reception ruin the day.
Part Two shifts the focus to Claire. She is obsessed with the news that a newly discovered planet, Melancholia, may be making a bee-line to planet Earth. In this half Justine takes a more passive role as Von Trier explores Claire’s fixation.
I’ve kept the synopsis sketchy because the plot details are less important than the sense of gloom Von Trier builds slowly over the course of the movie’s 135 minute running time. From the haunting images of the prologue to Dunst’s gravely restrained performance the film creates slow grind suspense. It’s a disaster movie in which the end-of-the-world theatrics are secondary to the disastrous relationships on display.
Dunst has rarely been better, and Von Trier’s muse, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is a coiled spring of emotion, and even if they aren’t believable as sisters—they look and sound nothing alike—the strained relationship between them feels real.
They are the film’s centerpieces, and the best used of all the actors, although Udo Kier as a testy wedding planner steals a scene or two.
“Melancholia” is, undoubtedly, Von Trier’s attempt to visualize his very public struggle with depression. It’s a feel bad movie, heavy with symbolism—Justine literally bathing in the light of the oncoming destruction for example—and in no hurry to explain itself, but in its own claustrophobic, closed-down way is a naturalistic and compelling look at people in distress.
“Machine Gun Preacher” is set in a world where the line between mercenary and humanitarian is very thin. Gerard Butler plays the title character, a man who preaches fire-and-brimstone and can shoot the tail feathers off an ostrich at fifty yards.
When we first meet Sam Childers (Butler) he’s a tough guy fresh out of jail. He finds that old habits die hard—especially old drug habits. When his hell raising ways catch up to him something remarkable happens; he finds God. The former biker shifts gears and becomes a model citizen, even funding and building his own church. A sermon about the plight of Sudanese children prompts him to become a crusader for thousands of orphaned African children. He earns a reputation as a gun toting savior but his faith is severely tested when all his efforts to save the children seem to be for naught.
“Machine Gun Preacher” is based on the real life story of Sam Childers, a former trigger-happy biker who founded the Angels of East Africa orphanage. It’s a very compelling story, almost in the territory of stranger than fiction, but this fellow’s colorful life hits a few rocky patches in its translation to the screen.
In an effort to hit all high points of Childers’s life director Marc “Monster’s Ball” Forster speeds through the early part of the story, the transformation from hellion to angel, very quickly. The conversion is a crucial plot point and if we don’t buy into it we’ll have a hard time being on side for the rest of the story.
The rest of the movie skips and jumps around as well, as though it was cut down from a much longer movie. Luckily it moves along at such a clip that the strange blend of revenge and religion is never given the chance to settle for too long. That’s a good thing because it’s an uncomfortable mix. One minute he’s preaching, the next he’s gunning down Sudanese rebels. He’s Rambo with a bible.
The movie is inspirational and shines a light on some poignant issues, but feels more movie-of-the-week than serious drama about a man’s transformation.
Butler brings some intensity to the role, but Michael Shannon and Michelle Monaghan, as the junkie biker who learns to walk a different path and the born again ex-junkie stripper wife respectively, are wasted in roles that give them little to do.
“Machine Gun Preacher” suffers from playing fast and loose with the events that lead up to the story’s main thrust—one man’s ability to change not only his life, but the lives of people around him—and as a result the transformation doesn’t have the impact it should.
“Moneyball,” the new sports drama starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, begins with the Mickey Mantle quote, “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about a game you’ve played all your life.” The legendary New York Yankees outfielder and first baseman played eighteen seasons in the big leagues but likely wouldn’t recognize the game as played in this behind-the-scenes drama.
Based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, Pitt plays Billy Beane, the real life General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Faced with having to piece together a pro team with a budget a fourth as large as the New York Yankees he breaks with one hundred years of baseball tradition—using scouts, instinct and guts—to find a scientific method to build a team on the cheap. With a Yale trained economist (Jonah Hill) he creates sabermetrics, a mind boggling combination of facts, figures and computer algorithms to recruit his team.
It all sounds very dry, but so did “The Social Network” before you actually sat down and watched it. “Moneyball” takes what cold be a dry subject of baseball stats and spices it up with complex, interesting characters, a compelling human story while leaving the usual sport’s movie clichés behind.
It moves at about half the speed of “The Social Network” but that’s OK we’re not dealing with the fast moving world of cyber space here but the more relaxed pace of America’s favorite pastime.
But this isn’t a baseball movie. Pitt and Hill, in a rare serious role, dominate the movie with their behind the scenes stories. Like “The Social Network” “Moneyball” places the onus on the characters and not the technology that drives the story. We’ve seen baseball movies before, but we’ve never sent the game from this angle. It’s a new take on the game, one that may leave Mantel scratching his head but should leave audiences rapt.
“Monte Carlo” sees three small town girls thrust into a world of Polo, fancy balls and good looking princes with exotic accents. It’s a buddy comedy plus one, (3 is the new 2 in comedy duos!) showcasing the talents of Disney star (and Bieber BFF) Selena Gomez, and Gossip Girls’ Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy.
Gomez is Cinderella… er… Grace, a recent high school grad who saved four years worth of tips from her waitressing job to pay for her dream—a trip to Paris. Along for the ride are her free-spirited best friend Emma (Cassidy) and evil step sister Meg (Meester). Instead of finding the new life she was expecting in France she finds nothing but pushy tour guides and fat men in berets until she is mistaken for heiress Cordelia Winthrop-Scott. For a few days she lives Winthrop-Scott’s glamorous life—it’s not stealing, she says, “it’s seizing the moment”—with her two American ladies-in-waiting before real life brings her crashing back to earth. But, because this is based on a fairy tale you know that by the end all three will wind up with the Prince Charmings they deserve.
Try as it might “Monte Carlo” doesn’t have the joie de vivre it should have to go along with its screwball premise. Mistaken identity is one of the cornerstones of the screwball genre, yet this movie is not screwy enough by half to be really entertaining. There’s some slapstick and attempts at comedy, but the pace is so s-l-o-w it sucks the funny out of what could have been an amusing little tween romp.
The Lisa Kudrow-esque Katie Cassidy gives it a go, bringing some spunk to the proceedings and Leighton Meester can do earnest rather well, but the film’s heavy lifting is left to Gomez who, as a lead actor, proves she’s charismatic, but not quite ready to headline a film.
For Gomez’s fans the setting, romance and clothes may be enough to sell the movie but anyone old enough to not know what “Wizards of Waverly Place” is may have a harder time finding enjoyment here.
“Monte Carlo” doesn’t fall down because of the predictable story—if you can’t figure it out on your own the trailer pretty much spells it out for you—or because of Gomez’s appalling English accent. No, it’s the film’s blandness that brings it down. If you’re in the mood for rags-to-princesses stories this weekend better off to rent either “The Princess Diaries” or “What a Girl Wants” instead.
