Nicolas Sparks is to romance writing what Buckley’s cough syrup is to a tickly throat. They both get the job done, but leave a sickly sweet aftertaste.
“The Lucky One” sees Zac Efron play Logan, a Marine with three tours of duty in Iraq under his belt. After one deadly night raid in which several Marines are killed, he finds a photo of a beautiful woman with the words “Stay safe” written on the back. The mystery woman becomes his guardian angel when a bomb explodes seconds after he picked up the picture. If he hadn’t left his post to retrieve the photo he would have been killed. He tries in vain to find the owner of the photo and when he is transferred stateside his search takes him to North Carolina and Beth (Taylor Schilling), the girl in the photo.
Sparks-isms abound in “The Lucky One.” The pen behind stories like “Dear John” and “Nights in Rodanthe” gives us characters with soap opera names like Drake and Logan, people who say things like, “You should be kissed every day, every hour, every minute,” and lovers making out in a shower. Unfortunately there isn’t anything here nearly as memorable as “The Notebook’s” lake full of swans scene. Instead we’re given a collection of starry-eyed Sparksian banalities strung together in place of a story.
The story, such that it is, is so slight, so predictable that it has to be fleshed out with musical montages and scenes that don’t forward the story, but simply reinforce what we already know about the characters. We get it, Logan is troubled, but he likes dogs, reads philosophy and plays piano, so he can’t be a bad guy.
That’s as deep as the character study gets in this romance. The characters are black and white—there are no shades of grey. The good people are pure and virtuous; the bad people are corrupt and mean.
If watching good looking people fall in love is enough for you—and that’s OK—then spend your money on “The Lucky One.” But I couldn’t help but think that Efron, when he says to Beth, “I know you deserve better than this,” was actually speaking to the audience.
The star of “Me and Orson Welles” should be Zac Efron, the “High School Musical” heartthrob who makes his non-singing-non-dancing debut here. His Disney good looks have made him a star and he’s an agreeable presence on screen but he is overshadowed by another actor playing a man who died many years before the core audience of this movie was even born. Newcomer Christian McKay plays Orson Welles with such panache that Efron becomes a supporting player in his own movie.
Efron is Richard Samuels, a teenager with dreams of being on stage. So far it doesn’t sound too different from “High School Musical,” I know, but in this case the year is 1937 and the stage in question happens to be at the Mercury Theatre on Broadway. After an impromptu audition—he plays drums and sings a Wheaties jingle on the street in front of the theatre—Richard is hired as a bit player for Orson Welles’s (Christian McKay) landmark production of “Julius Caesar.” He is given little rehearsal and only one piece of advice; don’t criticize Orson Welles, ever. It is, he’s told, a privilege to be “sprayed by Orson’s spit” on stage. When Richard falls for pretty production assistant Sonja Jones (Claire Danes), however, he puts himself in the cross hairs of the temperamental Welles.
“Orson Welles and Me” is set years before Hollywood beat the stuffing out of Welles. Here he’s still a boy wonder—a maverick (before Sarah Palin came along and ruined the word for everyone else) and womanizer who financed his theatre company with the money he made as a radio actor. McKay is pitch-perfect in a role that has defeated other good actors in movies like “The Cradle Will Rock” and “Fade to Black.” The British actor, who played Welles in a one man show before making the film, looks the part and really gets inside the head of this brilliant but difficult man.
When McKay isn’t on-screen, however, the story tends to sag a little. Efron and Danes do some good work and director Richard Linklater dies a nice job of showing the chaotic week leading up to the opening night of “Caesar,” but when the story leaves the theatre it becomes much less interesting. The backstage machinations, on-stage work—we see a hefty chunk of the play during the film’s climax—and attention to period detail—people actually say “Yowza!”—elevate it beyond a typical coming-of-age story but it really only comes to life when MacKay is front and center.
There is a shorthand film critics use at TIFF time to identify movies. Deep into the festival, when all the movies start to run into one another we rarely use the title of a film, instead we’ll pick up on the most notable scene or theme and do a quick synopsis.
It goes like this:
“Are you going to see ‘The Paperboy’?”
“Which one’s that?”
“The one where Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron.”
You’ll never see that on a marquee, but for weary festival goers it’s a lot more evocative than the movie’s actual title.
The film begins with a 1969 murder in a South Florida town. It’s actually what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, an event that isn’t really all that important to the story, but is more the catalyst for the action to follow. The upshot of the killing is that a man named Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack) is arrested thrown in jail and sentenced to the electric chair (all off camera).
Here’s where the real story starts.
A Miami-based investigative journalist named Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey), and his writing partner Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), are convinced the man was wrongly convicted and decide to have a closer look at the case. Complicating the investigation are Jansen’s family ties to the scene of the crime—his father publishes the local newspaper—and his brother Jack’s (Zac Efron) obsession with Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), the convict’s jailhouse bride-to-be.
“The Paperboy” is an odd film. It’s an art house thriller—meaning that there aren’t many thrills—in which each of its stars do some fairly intense envelope pushing.
Efron works hard to shake off the early teen idol gloss that made him famous, and mostly succeeds, although director Lee Daniels’s camera caresses the actor, taking full advantage of Efron’s effortless appeal.
Kidman is sultry an over-sexed Barbie doll indulges in the above-mentioned scene (it’s a remedy for a jelly fish sting) who explains her attraction to the prisoner with the words, “Hilary ain’t so bad, and I ain’t so good.” What also ain’t so good is a strange sex scene between the would-be lovers in a prison waiting room. The “keep your hands where I can see them rule” isn’t going to stop these two from having a funky good time.
McConaughey continues to move away from the romantic comedies that defined the last decade of his career. He’s now acting with his clothes on (and without Kate Hudson) in movies that show what he can do.
They are all good—Kidman is particularly interesting—but it is John Cusack who makes the biggest impression. As swamp man Hilary he forever erases the image of sweet Lloyd Dobler and his boom box. It’s an intense, dirty performance in an off kilter movie filled with nice work.
“The Paperboy” isn’t a movie for people who like to pigeonhole their movies. It’s a dark, impressionistic look at race, sin and how (but not really why) people make connections. It’s filled with great performances but doesn’t seem to know how to tell the story in a truly compelling way.
In 17 Again a mysterious angel asks Matthew Perry if he would be happy turning back the clock, literally going back in time to high school. “Of course I want to live in the past,” he says, “it was better there.”
Was it really, Matthew?
Often Hollywood romanticizes high school, forgetting that for 98 per cent of us it was a gruelling experience. Here’s a list of keywords that popped up when I let my mind drift back to the dark days of secondary education: acne, the strap, swirlies, girls that didn’t look like Vanessa Hudgens or Ashley Tisdale, smelly lockers, pop quizzes and bullies who thought wedgies were the funniest thing since Woody Allen discovered neurosis.
You couldn’t pay me to relive my teen years, but for decades Hollywood screen writers have been fixated on sending people who survived high school (and all the torments listed above) back into the fray as a way of re-examining their lives.
17 Again gets considerable mileage from Zac Efron (as a 37 year-old man in a teenager’s body) trying to navigate the treacherous waters of high school life. Of course in the end he does alright, because, well, he’s Zac Efron and anyone so impeccably coiffed, so perfectly sculpted is probably going to be able to sidestep the pitfalls of hallway culture, but it’s not always easy heading back to class.
Take for instance Back to the Future. When Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) time travels 30 years from 1985 to 1955 he accidentally prevents his parents from meeting, and jeopardizes his own future. Worse than that, he has to deal with bullies who stuff him in the trunk of a car and the mind-bending idea that his future mother “has the hots” for him.
George Burns doesn’t have it much easier in 18 Again. After swapping bodies with his teenaged nephew (Charlie Schlatter) he discovers how tough the younger man has it in school — he’s bullied by his schoolmates and track coach and ignored by the girl of his dreams. Based on Burns’ 1980 country hit single I Wish I Was 18 Again, this one is more punishing than spending Saturday detention with Emilio Estevez.
It’s not all high school horror, however. In Vice Versa, (another of the age switcheroo movies from the late 1980s along with Big, 18 Again and the atrocious Like Father, Like Son) father and son Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage’s minds magically enter each other’s bodies, causing them to swap identities.
This time the father (in his son’s body) uses his business smarts to outwit school yard bullies and finish an exam in only three minutes.
Who knew there was so much intrigue in the seed business? “At Any Price,” the new film starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron as father and son, features infidelity, shady dealings and even murder, all set against a bucolic Iowa background.
Henry Whipple (Quaid) is a second-generation farmer and seed salesman. His father built up the land and the business, and now Henry is trying to take it into the next level by buying more land and selling genetically modified seeds. His youngest son Dean (Efron) is more interested in racing cars than growing corn, but when the family business is threatened the clan reluctantly pulls together despite their personal differences and a dark secret.
As the title suggests, this is a story about the price of winning at any cost. To drive the point home director Ramin Bahrani clutters the story with unnecessary story shards that don’t add much to the movie except for length. At just an hour and forty-five minutes it still feels long, as though the core idea—a powerful tale of fathers and sons and the pressure to succeed—is stretched to fill the time, rather than serving the story.
Quaid and Efron rise above the contrived story elements to hand in good, if sometimes melodramatic, performances and it’s so full of atmosphere you can almost taste the corn—it’s just too bad that the corny stuff in this movie isn’t limited to the fields
You could be excused if you experience déjà vu while watching 17 Again. The story, about a depressed 37 year-old man (Matthew Perry) who magically reverts to his 17 year old self (Zac Efron), mixes and matches bits of Back to the Future, Big, Vice Versa and even It’s a Wonderful Life to come up with a plot that is as unimaginative as it is derivative. Luckily it has a secret weapon, and I don’t mean Efron’s abs, which are on display throughout. No, I mean Thomas Lennon, an actor you’ve likely never heard of unless you stayed up late and watched Reno 911 on cable television.
When the movie begins it is 1989 and Mike O’Donnell (Efron) is at the top of his game. He rules the basketball court, has a line on a university scholarship and goes out with Scarlett, the prettiest girl in school. He’s 17 and has the world by the tail. Everything changes when Scarlett gets pregnant and he chooses to give up everything to be with her. Twenty years later Mike (now played by Perry) is a pudgy, unhappy mid-level executive, alienated from his kids, on the verge of a divorce from Scarlett and about to be passed over for yet another promotion. Kicked out of the house he’s rooming with his best friend, the impossibly rich, but impossibly nerdy Ned (Thomas Lennon). “Of course I want to live in the past,” he tells a mysterious janitor / angel at his former school, “it was better there.” Fate gives Mike a second chance at happiness when he is astonishingly transformed back to the age of 17 (back to Efron). Will his trip back in time give him some perspective on life, or will he simply try to relive his best years?
17 Again is High School Musical star Efron’s first move from juvenile roles to young adult parts on his way to an adult career. He’s been quoted as saying that this role was a stretch for him because he had to play a 37 year old, but while he’s an agreeable screen presence in that shiny toothed teen idol way but doesn’t show any more range here than he did in the HSMs. He carries most of the movie and he’s the guy 99% of the audience is going to pay to see but the movie would be much less enjoyable without the unhinged comic presence of Thomas Lennon.
As Ned, former high school nerd—“a good day was when I didn’t get my head dunked in the toilet”—turned soft ware millionaire nerd. He’s the ultimate fanboy with a house full of light sabers, LOTR shields, comics wrapped in acid free plastic sleeves and a bed shaped like a space ship. He’s an outrageous character and Lennon doesn’t shy away from any opportunity to get a laugh, but his larger-than-life portrayal gives the movie some much need steam and cuts through the more predictable aspects of the story.
Chandler Bing… er… Matthew Perry is essentially playing his familiar character from Friends in what is really little more than an extended cameo. His appearances bookend the film and he disappears completely for more than an hour of the film’s 102 minute running time.
17 Again is an amiable movie that tries hard to please everyone, from the teens who have followed Efron from his HSM days—there’s even a short dance number or two—to the couples that may be drawn by the love story, but apart from Lennon’s gags and, for some, Efron’s abs, it was more enjoyable the first few times around when it was called Back to the Future. Or Vice Versa. Or It’s a Wonderful Life.
