With news organizations under fire from all sides these days along comes a movie about journalists who spoke truth to power. “Shock and Awe,” the new film from director Rob Reiner, details the efforts of the Knight Ridder journalists who questioned the reasoning behind the 2003 Iraq War.
The main thrust of the narrative begins on September 11, 2001. As the press struggle to find the real story behind the terrorist attack, George W. Bush’s White House begins a campaign of misinformation, shifting the blame from Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden to secular leader Saddam Hussein. Knight Ridder reporters Warren Strobel (James Marsden) and Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) sense something is not quite right with the story, even though many of their colleagues eat up the Bush administration story of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Their insiders suggest the White House is deliberately trying to start a war with Iraq, forging a connection between Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
When Knight Ridder papers like The Philadelphia Inquirer decline to publish their reporting editor John Walcott (Reiner) reaches out to a big gun, Bronze Star-winning war correspondent Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones), for help. “We don’t write for people who send other people’s kids off to war,” says Walcott. “We write for people whose kids get sent to war. You only have one thing to ask: Is it true?” With Galloway’s support Landay and Strobel burn shoe leather to support their “Donald Rumsfeld is lying” angle.
There is not much either shocking or awesome in “Shock and Awe.” The story should be edge of your seat stuff but feels muted. Part of the trouble is the amount of exposition particularly a speech from Strobel’s love interest Lisa (Jessica Biel) that sums up 4000 years of Iraq history in just under two minutes. It doesn’t make for good drama, despite the explosive nature of the true events.
Perhaps the movie’s indignation about politicians and media not valuing the truth feels blunted in this time of Fake News. Or perhaps it is lost in the film’s breezy nature. Either way, the result is a movie that has its heart in the right place but isn’t angry or intrepid enough.
Is Kristen Wiig the most daring actress in Hollywood? After having been an all-star utility player on “Saturday Night Live” for 9 years and the massive success of “Bridesmaids” she could have written her own ticket. She could have reteamed with Melissa McCarthy to make the expected follow-up to “Bridesmaids,” or even played a Marvel superhero. She could have paired off with Will Ferrell and made big budget big screen comedies or elbowed Sandra Bullock out of the way and starred in “The Heat.”
Instead she has kept a low profile, making challenging, quirky films that mix mirth with melancholy and are unlikely to gross even “Bridesmaids’s” catering cost.
She returns as Alice Klieg in “Welcome to Me,” a dark comedy about a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder and a dream of being on television. Divorced, she lives in a small apartment, sleeping in a sleeping bag on top of the bed, in front of a television that hasn’t been turned off in eleven years.
She mouths along with Oprah reruns and dreams, one day, of sharing herself and her ideas with the world. Her dream becomes a possibility when she wins an $87 million lottery. Using the facilities of a failing TV infomercial studio run by Gabe (Wes Bentley) and Rich (James Marsden), she buys herself a show unlike anything that has ever been seen on TV. Titled “Welcome to Me,” it’s a puzzling glimpse into her life. “Today I woke up and there was a public hair on my pillow shaped like a question mark,” she says introducing a segment called Unanswered Questions. For a week straight she neuters dogs live on air. The show, which airs so high on the dial it’s just above the Alien Channel, becomes a mini sensation with people tuning in to see the unusual mix of tortured revelations and performance art. One student credits her with the invention of “the narrative infomercial.”
As the show gains in popularity Alice’s ego bloats but success doesn’t make her happy, and eventually she is stripped bare, both emotionally and physically.
Brave, dynamic work like this separates Wiig from the pack. In a high wire performance she balances playing someone dealing with severe mental health issues while earning laughs along the way. It’s tough to do, but in what is her best work yet she rides the line, never backing off the tough stuff but also frequently taking a sideways step toward the laughs.
Other characters aren’t given as much of a chance to shine–Jennifer Jason Leigh as the show’s designer is cut adrift but Joan Cusack makes the best of an underwritten role as the show’s director—but as Alice’s best friend Linda Cardinelli is equal parts warmth and frustration, and perfect in the role.
Richard reviews “Chappie,” “Unfinished Business,” “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken” with “Canada AM” host Marci Ien.
“Unfinished Business” is a good title for a movie that feels fragmentary. It has a beginning, middle and end, so it technically qualifies as a story, but its reliance on mawkish sentimentality and non-sequiturs to forward the plot and an overload of narration to tie the loose ends together leave it feeling unfinished, unsatisfying and worst of all, unfunny.
Vince Vaughn plays Dan Trunkman a consultant who impulsively left a high powered job rather than take a pay cut. Now in business for himself—“I only have two employees,” he says, “one’s too old and one’s too young.”—he’s on the cusp of the biggest contract of his career. The oddball trio—Trunkman, Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkenson) and the unlikely named Mike Pancake (Dave Franco)—travel to Portland, Maine in what should be a routine trip to close the deal.
But because this is a Vince Vaughn screwball comedy there is nothing routine about the trip.
Upon arrival he finds himself in a Davey and Goliath situation as his former boss, Chuck Portnoy (Sienna Miller), is pulling out all the stops to snag the business for the multinational company Dynamic Progressive Systems. Out gunned and on the verge of bankruptcy, Trunkman pulls out all the stops by flying to Berlin to meet with the top brass and show them a good time in hopes of winning their goodwill and the business. Instead they end up in a tiresome tour of Germany’s fetish bars, rave scene and unisex saunas.
“Unfinished Business” in its current unfinished-feeling state will make you wonder what could have happened if someone like Judd Apatow had been allowed to have a crack at the same material. Apatow is a master at finding the balance between heartfelt social commentary and socially inappropriate fratboy jokes. It’s the tone director Ken Scott, in his sophomore effort with Vaughn after last year’s charming-but-slight “Delivery Man,” seems to be going for but falls short on. Way short.
The gags mostly involve poking fun at Pancake’s reduced intellect, gay panic and tone-deaf sex jokes. It is occasionally amusing to see the usually oh-so-serious actor Tom Wilkinson let it rip as a randy old man and Nick Frost make the best of a bad situation, but for the most part the laughs feel like leftovers from a rejected “Hangover” script.
As a look at modern life it hits on some hot button topics, like bullying and providing for a family in a world where full time employment can be elusive, but even the serious stuff, meant to give the movie some heart, veers to the saccharine side and is about as insightful as a philosophical debate on twitter.
Ultimately the failure of “Unfinished Business” falls on Vaughn’s desk. He’s the boss at the center of the story but not even his natural charisma can salvage this very bad day at the office.
1971 was a watershed year for new cinema. Films like A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable on the silver screen. None are passive films. Each brims with the obsessions of their makers, and for that each was the subject of controversy and censorship.
Eventually they became accepted by the mainstream. A Clockwork Orange has become a cultural touchstone, with everyone from Lady Gaga to David Bowie to Kylie Minogue, who dressed in a black bowler hat and a white jumpsuit on tour in 2002, paying tribute. It was even played at the Cannes Film Festival and released on Blu Ray to mark its fortieth anniversary. Dirty Harry is on constant rotation on television and Rod Lurie’s remake of the Sam Peckinpah film Straw Dogs hits screens this weekend.
The movie stars James Marsden and Kate Bosworth as David and Amy Sumner, a big city couple who move back to her hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Tensions with some of the locals (including True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgård) bubble to the surface and soon boil over into violence.
“If you look at a movie like Straw Dogs, which was heavily influenced by a book called The Territorial Imperative,” says Lurie, “Peckinpah seems to be saying that violence is in the genetics of all men and therefore we must be aware of it so we can control it. It was extremely fascist thinking but that also seems to be the thing with Dirty Harry.
“A Clockwork Orange is a much more clinical look at that but I think artists were trying to provide the answers top what society was asking then. It was a very, very violent era.
“This was an era in which people were searching for answers to the madness that was going on around them,” Lurie continues, “and filmmakers were trying to provide some of the answers. You had everything from the assassinations of Kennedy and King to Vietnam to the Whitman murders to My Lai. I think all of society was trying to understand how human beings could do such things.”
Katherine Heigl, star of the hit hospital dramedy Grey’s Anatomy and last summer’s blockbuster comedy Knocked Up may be the new Meg Ryan, or possibly even Julia Roberts for the next generation. She’s beautiful, likeable and has a knack for romantic comedy. Too bad then that 27 Dresses, the story of a young woman doomed to be a bridesmaid forever, is none of those things.
Heigl stars as Jane, an eager-to-please assistant to the world’s most perfect boss (Ed Burns). She’s secretly in love with him, but is too insecure to allow her private feelings to become public. When we meet her she’s shuttling between two weddings on the same night, changing in the cab as she zips between the two ceremonies. It’s a pretty good scene, one with some energy and good comic possibilities.
When she hires the cab she offers $300 for the night provided he doesn’t peek while she is changing. At the end of the night she gives him $120 and says, “You know what you did.” Funny stuff, and well played by Heigl and the cabdriver (Michael Ziegfeld) who both make the most of the slapstick possibilities of the sequence. From there on in, however, it’s mostly like the rubber chicken served at most weddings—you know what it’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t quite taste right.
The story, such that it is, involves terminal bridesmaid Jane, who has stood up for 27 of her friends, having to arrange the quickie wedding between her model sister and her boss, the man she secretly loves. Things get more complicated when the New York Journal sends the dashingly handsome Malcolm Doyle (James Marsden) to cover the wedding for their Commitments page. Sparks don’t immediately fly between Jane and the cynical reporter, but somehow you just know that they will eventually work out their differences.
The trouble doesn’t lie with Heigl, she’s trying her best with a script that is duller than most wedding speeches. Penned by the same screenwriter as The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses has none of that movie’s biting wit or clever plotting. Even the workplace scenes—certainly the greatest pleasure of Prada—aren’t particularly interesting, save for Judy Greer as Jane’s caustic friend and co-worker Casey.
27 Weddings isn’t so much a movie as it is a premise, a one line story pitch—with the odd funny line: “I feel like I just found out my favorite love song was written about a sandwich,” Heigl says about one of life’s disappointments—that really needed more thought before becoming a full length movie.
With news organizations under fire from all sides these days along comes a movie about journalists who spoke truth to power. “Shock and Awe,” the new film from director Rob Reiner, details the efforts of the Knight Ridder journalists who questioned the reasoning behind the 2003 Iraq War.
