Two film critics, three movies, thirty seconds! Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as me and myself review three movies in less time than it takes to chew a stick of Doublemint gum! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about twofold De Niros in “The Alto Knights,” the return of “Snow White” and the dramedy “Bob Trevino Likes It.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” for “Booze & Reviews!” This week I review Robert De Niro’s “Klump” style performance in “The Alto Knights” and open Al Capone’s cocktail vault.
Listen to Shane and I talk about how Michael Fassbender’s 007 audition resulted in Daniel Craig getting the gig HERE!
What cocktail did Al Capone order after a day of mayhem and murder? The answer may surpriuse you. Listen to “Booze & Reviews” and find out!
SYNOPSIS: Set in the 1950s, and based on a true story, “The Alto Knights” stars Robert De Niro in the double role of gangsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese and their battle to control the streets of New York City.
CAST: Robert De Niro, Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci, and Michael Rispoli. Directed by Barry Levinson.
REVIEW: A story of friendship and betrayal, “The Alto Knights” is the tale of gangsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, one a violent hothead, the other a cautious diplomat, both played by Robert De Niro.
Director Barry Levinson keeps De Niro busy, but this isn’t exactly “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” which saw Eddie Murphy play five of the Klump family members in the same scene. De Niro is the star X 2 of the show, the fourth wall-breaking narrator, and even appears as the de-aged Costello.
It’s a whole lotta De Niro, which his fans may enjoy, but you can’t help but think he’s breathing new life into two old characters.
His Frank Costello plays like “Casino’s” Sam “Ace” Rothstein with a few years more experience while his Vito Genovese feels like a riff on Joe Pesci “Goodfellas” role. It’s a fun gimmick, but De Niro’s double the fun approach doesn’t add much to the film overall.
De Niro differentiates the two characters with vocal inflections, and Vito usually wears a hat, but other than that and their temperaments, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of who is who.
Written by Nicholas Pileggi, whose book “Wiseguy” was the basis for “Goodfellas,” it covers familiar ground. According to IMDB, the rivalry between Costello and Genovese, and the resulting busts at the famed The Apalachin mob boss meeting, have been part of no less than 22 other productions.
A deeper dive into their relationship as kids and ultimately, their Cain and Abel conflict—we are mostly told about the past through Costello’s expository narration—may have freshened things up, raised the stakes to and turned “The Alto Knights” into a human drama of power and betrayal rather than a retelling of a shop-worn tale.
“The Alto Knights” is a slick movie, with nice period details, but the shallow look at the relationships of the protagonists and a repetitive, drawn-out script blunts the power of the story.
The opening moments of “The Humbling” are a fever dream, an anxiety-ridden nightmare. As stage superstar Simon Axler (Al Pacino) prepares to perform “As You Like It” his mind wanders, and soon we see him locked out of the theatre, refused reentry by a series of ushers and stagehands.
In reality he’s safe in the womb of his dressing room, but unease and insecurity wins out and he imagines the worst; an actor barred from the theatre.
It’s a glimpse into the mind of a lion in winter, an actor whose abilities are diminished. His crisis crescendos when he tries to commit suicide on stage after fumbling lines in front of a sold out house.
“You get all the awards, the accolades, the special treatment and what do you do? You end up throwing yourself off the stage, trying to pull some Hemingwayesque suicide.”
His flip into the orchestra pit lands him in rehab where he befriends Sybil (Nina Arianda), a troubled woman who thinks Simon, because of some of the roles he played on film, might be the right man to kill her husband. Later, at home, things get even stranger when he begins an affair with his goddaughter Pegeen (Greta Gerwig), a free spirited lesbian who has had a crush on Simon since she was a little girl.
His emotional recuperation is complicated by Sybil’s unexpected visits, Simon’s bad back and a quickly depleting bank account.
“Why don’t you get me a deal writing my memoirs?” he asks his agent (Charles Grodin). “Isn’t that what washed up actors do?”
Instead he gets another shot at the stage, a Broadway adaptation of “King Lear.”
What is never completely clear is how much of the story is a dream, the product of Simon’s mind playing tricks on him, and how much is real. It’s a provocative setup for the story, a sex farce about a older man and much younger woman, fuelled by the insecurities of a man falling apart professionally and personally, but it doesn’t always work.
Pacino goes all in as Axler. He’s both majestically Shakespearean and pathetically pathological but the movie’s uneven rhythms don’t do him any favors. He’s in almost every scene, but director Barry Levinson (working from a novel by Phillip Roth, adapted by Buck Henry) can’t make up its mind whether he is making a comedy, a psychological drama, romance or portrait of a crumbling man, and Pacino feels cut adrift from scene to scene.
It’s an entertaining performance in a diverting movie but as a statement on aging or insecurity or the folly of infatuation, it never sheds much light on what King Lear called, “this great stage of fools.”
Director Barry Levinson describes The Bay, his new found-footage film, as “a busy in-your-face movie.” The story of a Fourth of July eco disaster in the Eastern Seaboard town of Claridge has the shocks you expect from a horror film, but the scariest thing about the story is its plausibility. Levinson spoke about the film at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The beginning: “It came up when I had a meeting about doing a documentary about the Chesapeake Bay. That was the first time I had heard that it was forty percent dead, that it is seriously polluted; has dead zones in it. It is a toxic soup. They asked if I would do the documentary so I started to do some research, and part of my research was learning that PBS had already done a done a documentary and given all this information. I was like, ‘Holy god, this is amazing. What a terrific documentary.’ But somehow people didn’t seem to be all that concerned.
The next step: “I think there is so much clutter that we just sometimes don’t pay attention. Then I thought, maybe we need to take all that science, all of those facts and put it into a storytelling mechanism. A film, with characters struggling on that given day and maybe that makes the facts more interesting because we’ve given a real context to it all. People will die. This will happen. That’s what led to the idea of doing The Bay.”
The “found-footage” set-up: “If it was going to be a documentary why don’t we shoot it as though we collected all the footage from all these different people? That just by its nature seemed to be the way to go about it. That made the most sense. Then you have to use unknown actors because if you use really well known actors it kills all the credibility. Even though we’ll know it’s a movie if you try and say this is actual footage shot by these people and it’s Brad Pitt, it kills all credibility.”
“Found footage is normally pretty contained. It’s in a house. You’re in the woods. Here you’re all over the place. You’re underwater, you’re above water. It has a bigger canvas to it. But it was the footage that was collected to make sense of what happened and who didn’t do what they should have done, etc.”
Natural disasters in beachside communities have been the stuff of movie plots for years. Bruce, the great white shark from Jaws, terrorized Amity Island, eating swimmers and killing the tourism business. The good folks (those who survived, anyway) of Claridge, the small Maryland resort town of “The Bay,” however, would probably welcome Bruce to their town given the biological terror that befell them.
Using found footage unearthed by a WikiLeaks style website a journalist pieces together the horrific events of the 4th of July, 2009 in the Eastern Seaboard town of Claridge. The seaside town is the quaint kind of place where they crown a Miss Crustacean during the annual Crab Eating Spectacular. Little do the folks and families gathered to enjoy a day in the sun realize that a toxic soup of chemicals in Chesapeake Bay is unleashing a plague that may soon wipe out the entire town. When people start breaking out in a rash the local doctor is concerned. When his hospital is overrun by townsfolk with boils and something that appears to be eating them from the inside he calls the Centers for Disease Control for advice. When they tell him to leave the hospital, he knows the situation is out of control.
The found footage phenomenon in horror has, for the most part, played itself out. This year alone at last eight films have used the construct to offer up no-budget scares and wobbly camera work. Typically in those films a main character films the action, steadfastly refusing to turn off his camera despite imminent danger. Director Barry Levinson (“Diner,” “Rain Man” and “Wag the Dog”), however, has assembled an eye-catching array of fictional news footage, phone camera images, surveillance videotape, Skype and “homemade” videos to tell the story.
He uses the form to bring a sense of immediacy to the film. The narration, supplied by a newbie journalist who survived the infestation, is straightforward, a detailed account that blends the right balance of “fact” and shock. But it isn’t the narration that drives the movie, it’s the visuals and some tricky editing.
Multiple visual formats are missed and matched, but the most effective moments see (or rather hear) Levinson use overlapping news reports to capture the scope and horror of the situation.
“The Bay” is a lo fi horror film, clocking in at under ninety minutes, but its natural performances and plausible story of an eco-apocalypse provide some good chills.
