‘Tis the season to be heart warming. In the coming weeks the movies will pull out the tinsel and sentiment in an effort to give you the Yuletide feel-goods.
“The Night Before” is not one of those movies. Sure, it’s filled with the spirit of Christmas past, present and future, love and other familiar themes, but this Seth Rogen movie also puts the X in Xmas.
The story begins fourteen years ago with the deaths of Ethan’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) parents. Alone and sad on Christmas Eve, his best friends Isaac (Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) rally around him, beginning a December 24th tradition involving karaoke, Chinese food, playing the giant piano at FAO Schwartz and, because this is a Seth Rogen movie, lots of drinking and drugs.
Isaac and Chris are the only family Ethan has, but as the years pass the guys grow apart. Today Isaac is a lawyer with a wife (Jillian Bell) and a baby on the way. Chris is a superstar athlete while Ethan is still struggling. Recently dumped by his girlfriend (Lizzy Caplan) he picks up catering gigs (dressed as an Elf) as he tries to get gigs for his band. The guys plan one last Christmas Eve together and when they score tickets for the best party in NYC, the Nutcracker Ball, the night is poised to become one for the ages.
“The Night Before” is profane and probably sacrilegious but it’s also the funniest and in its own foul-mouthed way, sweetest Christmas movie of recent memory. It’s a fairy tale of sorts that borrows heavily from “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol” but forges its own path. It believes in all the usual Christmas clichés, but updates them with outrageous antics that some will find hilarious while others may find extreme. Either way, the one thing that is not subjective is the spirit of kindness that manages to peak through, past the swearing babies and drunken, brawling Santas.
The three leads are likeable, funny and keep things flowing nicely but it is Michael Shannon in an extended cameo as a drug dealer whose weed provides “surprisingly accurate visions of the future” who steals the show. Surreal and slightly menacing, he’s Clarence Odbody for a new generation.
“The Night Before” could become a beloved Christmas classic… if Justin Trudeau finally makes marijuana legal in Canada. It’s a stoner comedy that is nuttier than Grandma’s fruitcake but just as sweet.
“The Walk,” a new film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as French high-wire artist Philippe Petit, harkens back to an era when Evel Knievel was a superstar and human achievement wasn’t measured by how many Instagram followers you have. Even though we know how it ends—it’s a matter of historical record in the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary—the last half hour packs some vertiginous thrills.
Unsurprisingly of the story of a man who became famous for staging a 1974 tight rope walk between the world’s tallest buildings is unabashedly theatrical. When we first see Petit he’s setting up the story perched atop the Statue of Liberty with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center looming in the background.
His narration is as straight and taut as a tightrope strung between two poles, walking through the narrative step-by-step. The story begins with the young Petit learning his trade at the feet of high wire maestro Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), through to meeting his beautiful muse Annie (Charlotte Le Bon) and hatching a plan to illegally string a wire between the two towers and perform a walk on “the most spectacular stage in the world.”
“It’s impossible,” he says, “but I’ll do it,” and he does, with the aid of several accomplices, in spectacular fashion.
“The Walk” is based on a true story but presented as an urban fairy tale, the story of a man determined to show the world that anything is possible. It’s a tall but true tale. Gordon-Levitt swings for the fences with a big, exuberant performance. He’s high strung, charming and arrogant, the kind of guy who says, “For me to walk on the wire is life. C’est la vie.” He’s also a dreamer, a man whose passions demonstrate for the rest of us that art still has the power to instil wonder. It’s a lovely message told in a shambling way.
Director Robert Zemeckis takes his time getting to the walk. He treats the story as a procedural, although a whimsical one, that tries to slide by on charm for two thirds of it’s running time. It’s certainly the first major movie of the year to future mime, and just to make sure we get the dreamy, mischievous feel he’s trying to portray, lilting snippets of the “La Dolce Vita” soundtrack can be heard in an early sequence.
When he gets to the end, the ascent to the top of the tower and the walk itself, the film becomes a thriller with 3D visuals that should come with a vertigo trigger alert. Anyone with a fear of heights be warned, “The Walk” has a ‘You are there’ feel as soon as Petit takes his first step on the rope. It’s a beautiful, lyrical and visually stunning sequence that is worth the wait through the film’s slow start.
“The Walk” takes too many tentative steps in it’s first hour and is a bit on the money in its storytelling—for instance “I Want to Take You Higher” blares on the soundtrack when Petit sees the Towers in person for the first time—but Gordon-Levitt’s relentless charm offensive, Le Bon’s charisma and a breathless climax provide a tribute not only to the power of art to elate but also the to the buildings that set the stage for Petit’s feat.
From the perspective of an adult here’s how I would describe the new Robert Rodrigues film: “An exercise in extreme neo-noir aesthetics, the movie resembles a graphic novel sprung to life.”
Here’s how my fourteen-year-old self would express his thoughts on the same film: “WOW. Eva Green is naked. Did I mention she has no clothes?”
Neither description gets it wrong. “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is the most heavily stylized movie of the year, maybe the century so far. Rodrigues and co-director Frank Miller (the comic book legend who created the original “Sin City” series in print) have created a dark vision of a shadowland known as Sin City, a corrupt place where crime is a way of life for both citizens and all femmes are fatale.
Four stories interweave. The thread that ties them together is Marv (played by noted Putin booster Mickey Rourke), a massive hulk of a man who aids Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) in his efforts to free his former flame Ava Lord (Eva Green) from her abusive husband. He also helps stripper Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) settle an old score with a corrupt senator (Powers Booth), the same man who savagely beat gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to teach him a lesson about power.
“Sin City” A Dame to Kill For” feels like it was made by someone with an eye for the aesthetics of noir but the interests of a 14-year-old boy. It’s an exercise in style over substance that will make your corneas tingle, tickle your prurient side and provide an experience that may be memorable (especially if you are a fourteen year boy) but not particularly rewarding.
These unendingly grim crime stories aren’t so much hard-boiled as they are over-baked. Rodrigues and Miller’s outlook is as bleak as the stark black-and-white palette they use to illustrate the movie. “Death is just like life in Sin City,” they say, hammering the point home that the only relief from the ennui many of these characters live with is a bullet to the head. The characters seem to welcome it. “He’ll eat you alive,” a bartender tells Johnny about the senator. “I’m a tough chew,” he replies, playing chicken with his life.
The directors try to distract from the cynical goings on with hyper-German Expressionist cinematography and the abovementioned Ms. Green’s wardrobe, or lack thereof, but no matter how much style or skin are exposed, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” remains a slickly styled exercise in pointlessness.
Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.
Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.
“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”
When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.
For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”
In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.
Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”
Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”
Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”
George Lucas said it brought a tear to his eye, describing it as “one of those moments in history, like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call.” Weepy George isn’t talking about the cure for cancer or the map of the human genome. No, the waterworks tuned on at the sight of the test footage of the computer generated dinosaurs created for Jurassic Park, the film that for better and for worse ushered in an era of reliance on computer generated images.
Of course filmmakers have been using computers to manipulate film imagery at least as far back as 1973’s Westworld, the Yul Brenner movie which exposed audiences to the first 2D computerized images, but this photo realistic dinosaur was unlike anything anyone had seen before.
It was exciting, a giant leap forward, and I think, one of the worst things to happen to the film industry since Odor-Rama. It ushered in an anything-is-possible epoch, which gave us The Matrix’s uber-cool bullet time effects, the Toy Story movies and Alien Resurrection’s unsettling accelerated aging of Ripley’s clone.
Striking images every one, but I couldn’t help but think, as I ho-hummed my way through this weekend’s Green Lantern, a movie painted head to toe by unnecessary computer technology—did Ryan Reynolds’s silly little green mask REALLY need to be computer generated?—that the “wow” phase of computer manipulation is over.
We’ve become so used to seeing the impossible on screen that our collective sense of wonder has been eroded away. Look Ryan Reynolds can fly. Who cares? Look Jim Carrey is dancing with penguins. Yawn. Those scenes are simply a collection of binary codes banged together, and because we know there’s nothing real about the action it fails to amaze us.
The main perpetrators of CGI overkill are blockbusters, the silly season movies like the upcoming Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But even director Michael Bay, no stranger to digital trickery, seems to realize that less is more. For sure the movie will be a CGI-fest, but one spectacular set piece features people base jumping off the Sears Tower and gliding through the streets of Chicago for real.
The most exciting images I’ve seen on screen in recent years haven’t been generated via computer algorithms.
The car chase from Death Proof worked because stunt woman Zoë Bell actually hung on for dear life to the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger as it careened around the back roads of Lebanon, Tennessee. The real danger translated into excitement.
Christopher Nolan, director of the Batman series, doesn’t like CGI and avoids it whenever possible. His Inception has a fair amount of computer work but the most memorable scene is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s MC Eischeresque gravity defying fight scene. It was shot on a rotating stage without enhancement and it is a mind blower.
In July Attack the Block, a low budget English stunner of an aliens attack film, opens complete with old school ETs—actors in furry suits resembling the lovechild of a gorilla and a bear with glowing green teeth—which really deliver thrills and chills.
So here! here! to filmmakers who understand audiences recognize when something authentic and organic is happening in front of them. Mazel tov to those trying to bring back the human touch to the big screen.
Dry your eyes George, we shouldn’t shed any tears at the end of overwhelming CGI in movies.
I couple of years ago I had the soul crushing bit of bad luck to have to sit through movies with names like “Just Go With It,” “Friends with Benefits,” “No Strings Attached” and “New Year’s Eve.”
Romantic comedies. Rom coms. Whatever you want to call them, it was a punishing year spent watching good looking do the same thing over and over again—meet cute, fall in love, then fall out of love before walking off into the sunset, happily ever after.
Kathryn Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Timberlake, Kate Hudson and Chris Evans not only tested my love of movies, but my love of love in that grim year.
At the time I declared the rom com dead.
I suggested it could be resurrected if someone like Quentin Tarantino came along and completely reinvented the genre, but the chances of that happening were about as great as Kristen Bell finding herself alone as the end credits roll.
Then along came Joseph Gordon-Levitt and “Don Jon.” Tarantino must be too busy reinventing the grindhouse genre to bother with rom coms, but the former “Third Rock from the Sun” star isn’t.
Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed, stars as Jon Martello, nicknamed Don Jon because he is the godfather of meeting women in bars. He and his pals (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) troll nightclubs in search of “dimes”—perfect tens—but in secret Jon prefers the company of his computer. Addicted to porn sites, he spends an inordinate amount of time surfing the net, looking for the perfect video to “lose himself in.”
He can’t even give the habit up after he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful, gum snapping Jersey girl who thinks people who watch porn are sick. She encourages him to go back to school, to better himself, which he does, all the while watching porn.
The porn addiction (SPOILER ALERT) eventually drives a wedge between them, but he soon learns about true intimacy when he meets an older woman (Julianne Moore) at night school.
“Don Jon” is a rom com is disguised as a character study. Jon’s romantic dalliances are a context for his intimacy issues, but the romance comes in unexpected places, subverting the formula that makes movies like “Sweet Home Alabama” so predictable.
The comedy comes from the characters. Imagine all the guys from “Jersey Shore” rolled into one porn-obsessed lothario and you have Gordon-Levitt’s foul mouthed but spot on portrayal of Jon.
Johansson, who swallows her words in what may go down as one of the greatest Jersey accents ever to be captured on celluloid, is the movie’s McGuffin. She appears to be the girl of his dreams, but she is simply the physical embodiment of his bombshell porn dreams come to life. It’s because he doesn’t love her that he learns what love actually is.
Cudos also go to Tony Danza as Jon’s father. He’s a carbon copy of the hot headed horn dog, and living proof that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“Don Jon” is a stylish, crude look at romance with loads of laughs. It shows off Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s promise as a filmmaker, but more importantly it reinvents the rom com in a fun—although vulgar—way.
Conventional Hollywood wisdom these days has it that audiences only want to see remakes, retreads and rehashes of old ideas. This summer has seen a seemingly endless parade of movies with the number 2 in the title and films based on 80s TV shows. Some have made money some have not, but every once and a while a movie comes along that proves Hollywood wrong. Last December “Avatar” showed that audiences would flock to a movie that wasn’t based on a videogame, existing novel or television show. It broke every box office record going and yet since then there has been a stream of derivative films clogging up the multiplex. Until now. Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is a startlingly original film.
Set in a world where technology can invade people’s dreams, “Inception” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, the leader of a corporate espionage team who specialize in stealing valuable secrets from within people’s subconscious for profit. Cobb is an international fugitive tormented by dreams of his late wife (Marion Cotillard) who sees a way out of his personal nightmare if he takes on one last job offered to him by Saito (Ken Watanabe), a powerful businessman who can arrange for Cobb to skip past immigration and get back into the United States. All Cobb has to do is perform an “inception;” plant a thought in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) CEO of a global corporation. (One writer has called it “the Great Brain Robbery.) Cobb and his team—Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Eames (Tom Hardy), Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architect who becomes Cobb’s new dream weaver—set out to implant the idea of dissolving his multibillion-dollar business into Fischer’s dreams.
“Inception” is the most innovative sci fi film to come out of Hollywood since “The Matrix” way back in 1999. It’s a movie that takes ideas very seriously—ideas drive the plot—and, as a result, takes its audience seriously. It never talks down to the crowd and in return demands viewers to pay attention. For those who do there are many rewards, and for those who aren’t willing to get drawn into the surreal story there are still many pleasures. That’s how finely crafted this movie is.
“Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan (who also wrote the script) proves he can blow the doors off with the action—Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s MC Eischeresque gravity defying fight scene is a mind blower—and also handle the cerebral stuff.
He creates and juggles several worlds—dreams within dreams, worlds within worlds—until it becomes difficult to tell what is real and what isn’t. Each of these worlds comes complete with their own rules—five minutes in real life equals one hour in dream time, for instance—and is populated with well rounded, complex characters. The visuals are very cool—check out the streets that defy physics and curl over on top of one another—but amazing effects don’t mean much if the people interacting with them aren’t interesting. Nolan has put a great deal of effort into the look of the movie and its ideas but he never forgets the characters, who are the film’s single biggest asset.
Like the very best sci fi “Inception” is thoughtful, intelligent, audacious and humanistic. It’s also one of the year’s best films of any genre.
The movie “Looper” looks at what happens when the older and younger versions of the same person end up in the same time? Of course, anyone who has seen an episode of “Star Trek” can tell you it is bad for the space–time continuum mojo.
In the twisty-turny world of “Looper” time travel doesn’t exist. At least not yet. Set just a few years from now, the film is the story of “loopers,” people who execute criminals from the future. What?! Told you it was mind-bendy.
Thirty years in the future time travel is illegal. The only people who use it are criminal organizations when they need to get rid of someone. Chip implanting has made getting rid of bodies difficult, so they send undesirables back to the past to be disposed of. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an experienced looper—or present day trigger-man—slowly stashing his pay so one day he can retire and live in France. He doesn’t count on a crime lord from the future, the Rainmaker, ordering his loop be closed. That is sending his future self, Old Joe (Bruce Willis), to present day to be executed. When Joe hesitates Old Joe gets away and sets in motion a chase to determine the fate of not just one, but both Joes.
It’s two, two Joes in one. As the younger Joe Gordon-Levitt has a fake nose and an uncanny knack for the cadences of Willis’s voice. Willis is Willis, but a world-weary one, who wears each and every of the thirty-year age gap on his face and in his bearing. Both hand in solid performances, as does Emily Blunt as a protective mother whose son (Pierce Gagnon) is on Old Joe’s hit list. Ditto Jeff Daniels who takes a break from “The Newsroom” to play the looper boss.
But the actor’s aren’t the star of the movie, the ideas are. ”Looper” harkens back to sci fi that is about concepts rather than space ships. Is it airtight? No, but that time travel movie is? The crime bosses of the future could have saved a lot of trouble by doing the killing themselves and sending the bodies back to be disposed of, but where’s the fun in that? We need the two Joes in one place to get the story revved. It’s what happens after that is interesting.
Director and writer Rian Johnson uses the sci fi premise to allow the character of Joe in both forms to examine his life, past, present and future, and discover what’s really important to him. It’s humanist science fiction that values the person (or persons) over special effects.
It’s also a wildly entertaining chase movie, with enough sci fi to keep the left side of your brain engaged while the right brain will thrill to the chase.
The Lookout is the strangest crime drama to come along so far this year. At the beginning of the film Chris Pratt, played by former Third Rock from the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the guy you love to hate—he has a rich father, a beautiful girlfriend, good-looking friends and a fast car. Life is perfect until he causes a car accident that claims his friends and leaves him with severe brain damage.
Years later Chris’ mangled mind leaves him confused and filled with anger. Simple tasks throw him and he longs for his past life, even though he can’t quite remember what it was like. Working as a night janitor at a local bank he muddles through his job with the aid of an ever-present notebook in which he makes the reminder notes that help him cope. When a charismatic former friend (Matthew Goode) maneuvers him into taking part in robbing the bank, Chris thinks he is taking steps toward controlling his life. He doesn’t realize he’s being manipulated until it is too late.
The shadow of Christopher Nolan’s Memento hangs heavy over The Lookout. The lack of short-term memory is a central plot device in both films. Memento’s hero using upside down tattoos and Polaroids to jog his memory while The Lookout uses a more practical, (although cinematically less exciting) solution: a notebook. The difference in the way the two characters jog their shattered memories is much like the difference between the movies. Memento is a much showier film. The Lookout is more low-key relying on the performances to propel the story rather than theatrics.
Gordon-Levitt has transformed from sit-com star to one of the best actors of his generation. Recent turns in Mysterious Skin and Brick show a young actor taking chances. In The Lookout, he goes further, deepening his work, creating a person whose character has been shattered. It’s a subtle, well-crafted performance that is always interesting.
Also interesting are Jeff Daniels as Chris’ out-spoken blind roommate, Isla Fissher as the moll with the unlikely name of Luvlee Lemons and British actor Matthew Goode as the charismatic baddie who lures Chris into hot water.
The Lookout isn’t, however, quite as good as the sum of its parts. The great acting and atmospheric cinematography aren’t enough to elevate a story that starts off promisingly but slowly works its way through to a hackneyed and labored ending.
