Insomnia is director Christopher Nolan’s first film since last year’s Memento, and it is a stunner. In this remake of a Norwegian film made in 1998 by Erik Skjoldbjaerg, Nolan has cast three Oscar winners – Al Pacino and Hillary Swank play police officers chasing down a dangerous psychopath played by Robin Williams. Nolan set the film in Alaska, and makes good use of the location, particularly in the opening credit sequence as the camera follows a two-engine prop plane across the unforgiving jagged ice ridges. A foot chase on moving logs provides excitement, but the best thrills here are psychological. This is a film for adults. Insomnia is a serious thriller that relies not only on action, but on issues of guilt and morality to propel the story. Al Pacino hands in his best performance in years, although his accent seems to change from one scene to another. Robin Williams impresses, playing the homicidal Walter Finch with a chilling intensity that should forever put an end to the Mrs. Doubtfire typecasting pit he fell into in the 90s. Swank as the smart small-town cop delivers a multi-layered performance that is completely believable.
Man of the Year is an odd movie. It follows the campaign and eventual election to the office of President of the United States by a Jon Stewart wannabe, played by Robin Williams. The strange thing is, though, the campaign appears to be happening in Canada. Specifically Toronto. Apparently Presidential Debates are now held at the University of Toronto.
That was just one of the things I learned while watching Man of the Year. I also found out that you can spot the Canadians in big budget American films made here because they’re the ones without any lines. I also now know that films starring Robin Williams are likely to include reaction shots of people laughing, kind of like a laugh track to cue the audience to start giggling at his insane improvised rants.
Man of the Year re-teams Williams with director Barry Levinson. Levinson has figured out how to blend the Williams the improv comic with Williams the actor by only casting him in roles that contain some kind of performance element. In Good Morning, Vietnam he was able to riff on the radio in between the earnest emoting that earned him an Academy Award nomination. Here Levinson allows him to run wild on the campaign trail, essentially letting him do his stand-up routine at debates and stumping stops. We get a taste of Williams the actor, but much of Man of the Year is akin to an HBO Special with a message.
But it’s not just that, and that is the film’s fatal flaw. Man of the Year contains some pretty good, although pretty obvious, comments on the American political system, but it isn’t content to be a political satire like Bulworth, or even Levinson’s Wag the Dog. Instead Levinson has created a mixed bag of a film that is part comedy, part action, part industrial espionage and part thriller without ever settling on any one. The film’s trailer promises a few laughs, and they are there, sprinkled throughout an uneven story involving a large company that invents a computerized voting booth. When Laura Linney’s character discovers the computer program’s glitch she is fired and made to look like an unstable crazy person by her former employers who are more concerned about their stock options than the accuracy of the election.
I say pick a story. Either one will do. Is this an industrial espionage story or a political satire? I’ve seen the movie and I still don’t know.
“Old Dogs,” the new comedy starring John Travolta and Robin Willliams as two middle aged men who discover the importance of family, clearly knows what its demographic is. With a boomer soundtrack heavy on hits from the 60s and 70s and a gaggle of incontinence jokes and prostate jokes it’s aimed directly at the crowd who can remember what they were doing when Kennedy was shot.
Williams and Travolta play Dan and Charlie, lifelong friends and business partners on the verge of their biggest deal ever. Dan is a business minded divorcee, who is “allergic to anything under four feet.” In other words no kids—doesn’t have them, doesn’t want them. Just as well, he doesn’t really need children when Charlie is around. He’s still a big kid with an ultramodern apartment full of toys and a habit of flirting with every woman he meets. Their carefully manicured lives are turned upside down when Vicki (Kelly Preston) re-enters Dan’s life. With her are her two kids, the result of a one night stand Dan had with Vicki in Miami seven years before. When Daddy Dan and Uncle Charlie take the kids for two weeks while Vicki serves a jail sentence for environmental activism (how au currant!) they learn that business doesn’t always come first.
“Old Dogs” is the broadest played comedy since “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze.” It’s filled-to-bursting with funny faces, slapstick humor and not one, but two crotch shots. It’s mostly by-the-numbers—except for a strange “body puppet” sequence featuring the late Bernie Mac—that relies on Williams and Travolta to bring a little something extra to a script that may have been a laugh-free-zone in lesser hands. Williams wrings whatever laughs there are to be found in a spray tan catastrophe scene and Travolta finds the funny as an over medicated man at a bereavement pot luck. Also packing a few laughs are Luis Guzmán as the hungry childproofing expert and Matt Dillon as the hard line camp leader.
“Old Dogs” works best when it is going for laughs, unfortunately the slapstick is interspersed with mushy moments that seem to come out of nowhere. One moment Dan has lost all depth perception and is playing the wildest game of golf since Adam Sandler and Bob Barker threw it down on the links in “Happy Gilmour,” the next Williams is using his earnest “Patch Adams” eyes, staring at the camera, fretting that he’s not cutting it as a dad. The sudden shifts are a bit jarring, but for every sentimental scene there are four sciatica jokes, or a grand-pa gag.
“Old Dogs” is a sequel in spirit to Travolta’s “Wild Hogs.” Call it boomer porn if you like—it showcases older successful men, their beautiful younger wives and interesting lives—but at its heart it’s just an old fashioned family comedy.
In the last year Robin Williams has re-invented himself – Goodbye Patch Adams, hello Norman Bates. The frenetic comedian seems to have shifted 180 degrees away from the heroic nice-guy roles he became mired in and is now determined to scare us, or at least make us uncomfortable. In Death to Smoochy he was a foul mouthed lunatic bent on revenge. After that he played Walter Finch, a brutal killer and blackmailer in Insomnia. One Hour Photo sees Williams in his most introspective role yet, an obsessed photo-mart clerk on the verge of madness. Who knew Mork could be this creepy? As Sy Parrish, Williams lets go of his usual arsenal of acting tricks, and develops a powerful performance by internalizing the character’s pain. Parrish is very still, like a pot of cold water on the heat waiting to boil. Dressed head to toe in beige – even his hair is blonde – Parrish’s world is stark, boring. He knows he has no life, and has invented an intense imaginary relationship to the Yorkin family, based on the photos of theirs he develops. When he discovers that Mr. Yorkin is cheating on his wife, he springs into action. One Hour Photo is a taut thriller that will take you down unexpected paths.
What do the letters RV stand for? Most commonly they mean Recreational Vehicle, those gas-guzzling behemoths of the road that have come to represent the American Dream on wheels. In the case of the new Robin Williams movie, however, those letters could stand for Ridiculously Vacuous or maybe Really Vapid.
Robin Williams plays Bob Munro a mid-level executive with a psychotic boss. On the eve of a family vacation to Hawaii Bob is told by his boss that instead of taking time with his family he’ll have to report to Colorado for an important meeting. Torn between disappointing his family or getting fired, Bob tries to have it both ways. Rather than tell his family the truth he convinces them to take an RV “family” vacation to the Colorado Rockies—without telling them about the meeting.
Good comic premise, ripe with possibilities but instead we are treated to National Lampoon Vacation-Lite—twice the sweet stuff and only half the laughs. Like Chevy Chase in the National Lampoon series we are laughing at Robin Williams, not with him. The difference is Chase welcomed the laughs by arrogantly doing incredibly stupid things while Williams tries to be lovable as he bumbles his way through his vacation. He seems to be so desperate for approval that laughing at him just seems cruel.
Director Danny DeVito uncovers the soft underbelly of children’s television in this dark comedy starring Edward Norton and a manic Robin Williams. This is a mean spirited piece of work, so dark and profane you have to give Mrs. Doubtfire and the guy from Taxi credit for making it work. With a lesser cast and without a steady hand behind the camera this could have turned into an unredeemable mess. Instead DeVito and cast churn out a comedy that does something unusual, they remain likeable – particularly Williams playing against his recent family-man image – while delivering unpredictable laughs for those who like their humor with a mean streak. Maybe the “Posterboy for Bad Taste” Tom Green should study this movie before he writes his next screenplay.
We’ve finally reached the tipping point where casting Robin Williams has officially become a liability. A case in point: August Rush is a perfectly acceptable modern fairy tale about an orphaned young boy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Freddie Highmore) who feels that his love of music will reunite him with his parents one day. It is a sweet idea, and Highmore with his sad eyes and apparent vulnerability is perfectly cast. If you buy into the idea that this neo-Oliver Twist could truly believe this airy-fairy idea about the magical power of music, then August Rush will work for you. Work for you, that is, until Robin Williams comes along with his Bono-wannabe hat and all his usual bluster and completely throws the movie off the rails.
Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers play Lyla and Louis, musicians from two different worlds. He’s a poor rock singer, she a rich cello prodigy. They meet on a rooftop overlooking NYC’s Washington Square Park, spend the night together and conceive a child. Her overbearing father conspires to keep them apart, and following a tragic car accident tells Lyla that the child was killed, while, in fact, secretly putting it up for adoption.
Eleven years later Lyla and Louis have moved on. She’s now a music teacher, unaware that her son is still alive; disillusioned he’s given up music completely. The child, convinced he can locate his parents, escapes the orphanage where he has grown up and makes off for the big city. He comes under the spell of a “musical Fagin” named Wizard (Robin Williams) who imparts new agey wisdom like “music is the harmonic connection between all living beings” and teaches the boy how to play the music that may eventually reunite him with his parents.
You have to have a strong willingness to suspend your disbelief to buy into August Rush’s storyline, but if you can you’ll find lots here to like. Highmore is a charmer on screen, Russell and Meyers are the very definition of star-crossed and director Kirsten Sheridan gives the proceedings an agreeable fairy tale feel, but whenever Williams hits the screen it’s as though this fable’s Ogre has awoken to chew the scenery and destroy any of the good will the movie had already accrued. He’s so annoying, and in the later half of the movie, so unnecessary to the plot, that the term “over-the-top” scarcely does him justice.
August Rush is a well-meaning but clichéd film with a nice message and decent music, but is almost done in by its casting.
