People are very fond of the Christopher Reeve Superman series. Both on and off screen Reeve proved to be a hero and embody the kind of courageous spirit that Superman represents. So the pressure is on director Bryan Singer and neophyte actor Brandon Routh (rhymes with South) to top the Reeve movies, while at the same time being respectful of them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk but Singer and company have succeeded.
Superman Returns picks up the story five years after 1981’s Superman II. The Man of Steel has returned to Earth after a five-year exile on the remains of his home planet. In Metropolis he tries to resume his old life as Clark Kent. The Daily Planet gives him back his job as a mild mannered reporter, but he is heartbroken to discover that his old flame, Lois Lane, has a hunky boyfriend, a son and a Pulitzer Prize for her article “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.”
Meanwhile, cue-ball-headed criminal Lex Luthor, fresh from a prison stint, has also returned to Metropolis with a monstrous plan to use Superman’s alien “crystal technology,” to create a new continent in the Atlantic, flooding North America and leaving him with the only—and most valuable—inhabitable land. Superman must stop him before several million people are killed by his insidious plan, but first he has to sort out his romantic life with Lois.
Almost thirty years ago the tagline for the Superman: The Movie was “You will believe a man can fly” and back then, before the “wow” period of special effects the sight of someone convincingly soaring through the stratosphere was enough to satisfy many viewers. In 2006 though we’ve seen men fly, giant apes made of pixels and binary code and we’re jaded. We take it for granted that Superman can fly and it will look cool.
Singer knows this and he doesn’t skimp on the action—Superman’s rescue of an air force jet plane is breathtaking and his deflection of a bullet is just plain cool—but while your eyeballs are dancing he’s reeling us into the engaging story, balancing scenes of a lovesick Superman with the spectacle that we expect from a big summer movie.
As for the character of the 2006 Superman, well, he’s adopted several human traits—he’s smarting from Lois’ rejection, and longing for his dead father—but Singer wisely keeps him on the straight and narrow. Portraying virtue on screen may not be as exciting as Batman’s tortured thirst for vengeance or exploring Spiderman’s tragic side but Singer doesn’t tamper with the core of the character in an attempt to update the character or add a contemporary twist on his psyche. He is still a Christ-like alien to Earth sent to help human beings in need. It may be corny but in an era where people’s dark sides are so readily on display it is refreshing.
As Superman newcomer Brandon Routh had big tights to fill. He’s the same age as Reeve was when he took on the role, and could easily win a Reeve look-A-Like contest, so comparison is inevitable, but Routh holds his own. He’s a bit stiffer than Reeve, but he has a face that looks like it was torn from the pages of the original Superman comic book and exudes an all-American charm that enhances the character.
Kevin Spacey crafts Luthor as an insecure megalomaniac who will stop at nothing to get his way. He says he based his portrayal of evil genius Lex Luthor on Ken Lay of Enron. Less successful in a supporting role is Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane who proves to be the film’s only hint of kryptonite. She just doesn’t exude the kind of personality that we expect from Lois Lane, the hard-bitten (but really a bit of a softie) reporter. Her namby-pamby work made me long for Margot Kidder’s sexy, sharp-tongued portrayal of Lois Lane.
In the last year or so there has been no shortage of flying and fighting superheroes in the movies. Batman began again. Daredevil dove, Elektra irked, the X-man excited and Catwoman crashed. Now Superman returns to the big screen after a nineteen-year absence, bringing the best of the old with him and combining it with new and exciting technology. Superman Returns works as a popcorn movie and as something a little deeper.
In the first decade of his career, Kevin Spacey made 20-plus movies and appeared in dozens of TV shows. In the process he took home two Academy Awards — Best Actor for American Beauty, Best Supporting for The Usual Suspects — and became one of the best known actors in Hollywood. But these days he’s not as ubiquitous a presence on screen as he once was, and that’s by design.
“I made a choice that I was going to focus on theatre for 10 years,” he says on the line from his home in London, “because I had focused on film for nearly 12.
“I got to a point where I thought, ‘That went better than I could possibly have ever hoped. Now what? Am I going to spend the next 10 years chasing the same dream?’ I thought, A: I don’t need to top myself and B: I’d like to take all the incredible personal good fortune and attention that came to me and put it toward something that isn’t about me. That is about putting myself back into something that has always been my first love.”
To that end he took over one of England’s oldest theatres, the Old Vic, as artistic director in 2003, creating a company of actors and educational programs. It’s work that keeps him busy.
“Let me tell you the honest truth. I don’t have time to make movies that often, so I’m not offered that many movies. Sometimes I get the feeling from journalists that they think you sit around and decide which movies you’re going to do. I’ll let Tom Hanks do that one and George Clooney can do that one but I’m going to do this one. That’s not the way it works. There are only two reasons I do movies. One, because they offer it to me and two, am I available to do it. There’s no great design. Trust me, I’m not sitting around with a magic wand picking my parts like I have a deli in front of me of choice. That’s a myth. It’s a nice myth, but it isn’t true.”
He took a break from the stage long enough to play one of the evil employers in Horrible Bosses, a new comedy co-starring Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston.
“I love all these actors,” he says, adding, “It’s great fun to pretend to be a horrible person for a couple of weeks.”
For Kevin Spacey the release of Casino Jack must be bittersweet. On one hand it is a return to form for the actor, who has received much praise, and a Golden Globe nomination, for his work playing disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
On the other hand his director, George Hickenlooper, who passed away suddenly last October, isn’t around to bask in the acclaim the film is earning. “That Casino Jack turns out to be his last, the pride I feel in it—in his direction, his ideas and the final results—has soared,” said Spacey in a prepared statement.
In an interview taped a month before the director’s untimely death Spacey discussed playing Abramoff, a one-time Washington high flyer later convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy.
“I chose not to start my research about him until after I met him,” the actor told me. “But then, after we met I began the process of looking at a great deal of the material that had been written prior to, during and after his trial and conviction, and it was like, ‘Wow, they really made him out to be the devil incarnate.’ But then you look at Abramoff and you go, ‘OK, so wait a minute. He wasn’t buying houses. He wasn’t buying helicopters. He wasn’t buying limousines. He wasn’t taking fabulous vacations with his family. What was he doing?’ He was giving money away to people who needed it. He was trying to build a Hebrew school. He wasn’t even paying his own mortgage. So wait a minute, the greediest man in Washington DC wasn’t spending any of the money on himself!
“So how do you play that because it is certainly not black and white? Did he consider himself to be the Orthodox Robin Hood? What is that all about? That’s where you hope an audience can lead themselves to their own conclusions.”
Spacey, as one of the film’s producers—“When you are a producer on a film you actually have a voice that can be listened to,” he says—was in a unique position to help mold not only his performance but also the structure of the film to help people get a fully rounded portrait of Abramoff.
“It was an interesting process of putting the film together because once we shot it and I looked at the first cut of it I remembered thinking, ‘Recount [his award winning 2008 account of the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent recounts in Florida] began with an event; a voter in a voting booth on Election Day, voting. But there is no event in this film and I remember saying to George, ‘I know this is going to sound crazy to you but I think the event is Jack Abramoff and we have to start with him. And there is a scene that’s playing an hour and forty minutes into the movie that I think we should start the film with.’
“And that is why the film starts the way it does. It gave you him at the moment just before he was about to be indicted. I felt like that has to move up because otherwise it will take us too long to have any grip on him. We had to start the movie with a scene that makes you say, ‘That guy! Wouldn’t mind watching a movie about that guy. He’s out of his mind doing a monologue into a mirror.’”
Spacey got close to the character so I ask if he would consider turning his take on Abramoff into a one man show at the Old Vic theatre in London where he is artistic director and frequently seen onstage.
“No… no… no,” laughs. “Generally, because I tend not to repeat myself and also, I don’t think it would play for our Old Vic audience.”
“Casino Jack” is a dark look at the American dream. Based on the true story of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s rise and fall, it recreates the heady days of DC’s greediest decade.
Director George Hickenlooper (who died last year at age 47) lays out a complicated story of how Abramoff peddled his influence on Capitol Hill in return for large cheques. The trouble really starts when he defrauds a Native American tribe out of millions of dollars that he then invests in a floating casino. Add to the mix a crooked mattress salesman (Jon Lovitz), a psychopathic gangster (the late, great Maury Chaykin), a kosher restaurant and a trophy wife or two and you get the essence of Abramoff’s strange tale.
The film begins with a bravura scene of Abramoff (Kevin Spacey) delivering a pep talk to the bathroom mirror that sets the tone for the rest of this fast talking film. The movie moves along like a rocket, propelled by Spacey’s performance. One quibble though, throughout the movie Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper) stop the action dead time after time by quoting, verbatim, scenes from other movies, complete with vocal impressions and facial tics. It’s annoying in real life when people do that and it is a device that wears out its welcome VERY early on in the movie.
Apart from those missteps there are good performances all round, although this is Spacey’s movie. The only actor who comes close to pulling focus away from the two time Oscar winner is comedian Jon Lovitz, who has a showy and funny role as a devil-may-care sleaze bag.
Hickenlooper pitches the tone of the entire movie around Spacey’s tightly wound performance. The movie is as playful as the performance, which is sometimes at odds with the story. Abramoff was a narcissistic and nakedly greedy character, not qualities to be admired, but the movie seems to be a bit too impressed with him nonetheless. It’s true that he was a complicated guy who gave away much of the money he illicitly earned but despite his occasional good works he isn’t the loveable scamp the movie tries to present. For a different, and more accurate portrayal, of him check out Alex Gibney’s documentary “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”
For most of us Las Vegas can be summed up in two words: lost wages. Everybody knows that the odds favor the casinos, but a new movie from the director of Legally Blonde would have you believe that if you are smart enough and cunning enough you can beat the house. 21 is the based on the true story of five MIT students who use their mathematical skills to bilk the casinos out of millions of dollars. It’s part Good Will Hunting part Cincinnati Kid with a little taste of The Sting thrown in for good measure.
The caper begins innocently enough with Ben Campbell (Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess) applying for a scholarship to Harvard Med. He’s a cerebral stud who has spent his entire life with his face buried in a text book in preparation for his dream of attending Harvard. When it comes right down to it though, he knows his chances of admission and scholarship would be better if he had some actual life experience.
Enter Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), math teacher by day, gambling guru by night. He runs a club of super smart students who specialize in an elaborate method of card counting that is virtually guaranteed to pay off at the blackjack tables. Every weekend they make a quick trip to Vegas, don disguises and pump up their bank accounts.
Micky, sensing Ben’s card shark potential tries to recruit him for the club. Ben is reluctant to join, but soon sees the blackjack scam as a fast easy way to make the $300,000 he needs for tuition. Once the money starts rolling in his standard issue school outfit of jeans and t-shirts is replaced with Armani threads and his old nerdy friends get swapped for new high rolling acquaintances.
Of course it isn’t all aces and face cards. Professor Micky turns out to be closer in personality to tough guy Mickey Cohen than Professor Higgins and when an ill tempered specialist in “loss prevention” (Laurence Fishburne) gets on the case Ben soon realizes that success in Vegas comes with a dangerous price.
21 is actually a few movies in one. It’s a caper story, a true-life drama (although the details have been changed considerably from what actually happened), a suspense and even a romance as Ben falls for blackjack wizard Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth in her third film with Spacey). Director Robert Lucketic, best known for fluffy comedies like Legally Blonde and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, deftly balances the film’s various tones, and nicely delineates the drab classroom drama of the MIT scenes from the considerably more glamorous “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” feel of the gambling story.
Of the older cast members, Spacey seems set to chew through the scenery but Fishburne brings just the right amount of old school Vegas menace to the role of a casino detective with a score to settle. Of course, nobody is going to see this movie for the senior members of the cast; this one is strictly aimed at a younger audience.
Heading the ensemble of card cheaters is Jim Sturgess, an unknown British actor who made a bit of a splash last year in Across the Universe, a little seen film based on the music of The Beatles. His odd, variable American accent notwithstanding, Sturgess does a nice job anchoring the cast with a performance that sees him change from nice guy to egomaniac blackjack stud. His appealingly Paul McCartney-esque good looks allow him to be believable as the nerdy student and the high roller, but it is his trip down the rabbit hole as he tries to cram a lifetime of living and frivolity into his weekend jaunts to Vegas that make his character interesting.
Unfortunately the rest of the cast of players aren’t quite as attention-grabbing. Kate Bosworth is pretty, but pretty dull as the, well pretty blonde member of the blackjack team, while Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira and Jacob Pitts aren’t given enough screen time to make much of an impression as the secondary members of the card counting crew. Only Josh Gad, a Jack Black look-a-like, stands out among Ben’s friends as a memorable character.
21 doesn’t roll as high as Ocean’s 11 but is a good bet for your weekend entertainment dollar.
