Certain movies ask for the viewer to take a leap of faith when the theater goes dark and the show goes on. This is the world of make believe and creation, so it’s important for a film addict to consider that when walking into any film. Jason Reitman’s latest film, Labor Day, is a film that the cynics will have a field day with but a story that old fashion romantics like myself will step out of their seat and participate in this real life slice of escapism.
Paramount Pictures
I credit Kate Winslet’s performance as the highlight of this film. When we first meet this single mom, Adele, she seems wounded and allergic to human interaction and exposure to conversation. Griffith, who plays her son Henry, is the only man in her life and this bird needs more love than that to take flight. Throughout the course of the film, Winslet runs the gauntlet of human emotion, from fearless happiness to complete sadness. It’s a marvelous and restrained performance. When an actress can show restraint and still convey a heavy dose of emotion, that’s a special event. (more…)
Let’s try something new. Movie reviews in less than 250 words. When people look for movie reviews, they don’t want to worn down with prose. It’s not a best selling novel on their agenda. Give the goods and do it quick. So let me run over some recent films I have watched in 200 words or less.
Digging For Fire(directed by Joe Swanberg)-On Demand/Redbox/ITunes
Lucky Coffee Productions
Drinking Buddies > Digging for Fire. Swanberg’s last(Olivia Wilde’s best performance) was so much better that this new indie barely registers.
This isn’t a bad movie but so little happens. A group of friends find buried bones and a gun, go digging and search for themselves amidst marriage and relationship issues. A film where the characters in the movie are so realistic that it’s boring to watch them do ordinary things. How do you make 80 minutes seem so long?
Jake Johnson, Rosemarie DeWitt and the rest of the cast are good actors but they can’t save a script that is bland and ultimately a lackluster attempt at hipster cool. Orlando Bloom shows up and may be the best part of the movie. That’s not a good thing.
The Intern(directed by Nancy Meyers)-Hits DVD on January 19th
This is a sweet film, a Meyers special. She makes sweetly romantic comedies that go down like a fine lager on a fall evening. Anne Hathaway and Robert DeNiro have perfect chemistry as the CEO of a fashion website and a senior intern who changes her life.
You may see what’s coming or you may not, but this comedy is so easy moving and confident that it won’t matter. Great acting tromps original scripts in the right film. You’ll appreciate the change of pace turn from DeNiro and Hathaway’s maturation as an actress comes off like a 20 foot jump shoot here.
The Intern is a perfect film to watch with the relatives gathered into your home so find it in a theater somewhere or look for it in the coming weeks.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens(directed by J.J. Abrams) In Theaters
Whatever you hated about the prequels, you will love about J.J. Abrams kickback to the Return of the Jedi days here. By bringing back old legends like Han Solo(Harrison Ford having a lot of fun) and Leia(Carrie Fisher) and introducing new heroes like Rey and Finn(Daisy Ridley and John Boyega), Abrams is spreading the appeal of the franchise to all ages. Don’t be surprised when it shatters all box office records Monday. When you pick up a popular piece of fiction and do it right with some respect, greatness can happen. The Force Awakens is a nostalgic blast.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation(directed by Christopher McQuarrie) New release on Redbox/DVD/ITunes
The best spy film in 2015 wasn’t Spectre or Kingsman. It was Tom Cruise’s fifth stop as Ethan Hunt, the death defying super agent who won’t quit until everyone in the audience is satisfied.
Just like Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation did what MI flicks do best. Breathtaking action sequences, versatile casts with a few new faces, and Cruise dominating the entire operation by putting his neck and soul into the role. Ask me and this is his best character. A place where he is most at home in. Action and adventure. If Furious 7 had a brain, it would be called Mission Impossible.
The Ref(directed by Ted Demme) ITunes/Amazon for 2.99
Underrated Christmas movie. When the kids go to bed this holiday week, get the grownups together and watch the marvel Denis Leary work a script like a boxer does an overmatched opponent for 12 rounds. The comedy maestro plays a thief who kidnaps a couple and runs into the night of his life when they turn out to be bickering maniacs and their family is even worse.
The late director Ted Demme had a gift with actors and could create a tone that slowly boiled over into laugh out comedy. Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis are perfect foils for Leary’s maniac type hilarity and the film doesn’t need to stop when the credits roll. In the middle of the dark comedy clouds, you get a few well timed sentimental moments that Grandma will appreciate. This is a film to watch during the holidays.
Touchstone Pictures
That’s it. Short to the point movie reviews that can be read in the same amount of time it takes to check an email or have half a cup of coffee. Come back next week for five more movie reviews in 200 words or less.
When I left this movie, the first thing I wanted to do was go home and hug my son. The second thing I wanted and needed to do was inform everyone within a ten mile radius how important it is for this movie, Prisoners, to be seen. Easily one of the year’s best films, French Canadian director Denis Villenueve’s spellbinding tale will get inside your bones and stay there a while. Few movies have the power to be present you with a moral dilemma and take the necessary time to lay out their story while inserting every scene with authentic tension. Never mind the trailer that some believe gives away too much. What you get there is a basic setup that covers a third of the film’s running time. Prisoners is full of juicy compelling moral questions and features the best ensemble cast of 2013. Let’s dig in.
Hugh Jackman’s work as Keller Dover deserves Oscar attention. It goes without saying that the actor is as versatile a talent in Hollywood as one can find, but here he puts on display his best screen work to date. He turns it all up a notch. Forget his Oscar nominated work in Les Miserables last year. That is surface imitational work compared to what he does here as Dover, a father who won’t be stopped until he finds out where his daughter is. A survival specialist who keeps natural selection close to heart, Dover won’t be stopped and Jackman electrifies with his portrayal. This is the same man who grows claws out of his hands as Marvel’s Wolverine and dances on Broadway. Jackman is astounding and the emotional glue that holds the film together. (more…)
In 2009, Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner starred in a throwaway romantic comedy called Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past. Watching the film, you had a feeling these two actors were capable of higher quality filmmaking. Fast forward to November of 2013 and that wish of mine has been granted. McConaughey and Garner share the screen here in Dallas Buyers Club, in one of the better films of 2013. Dare I say it isn’t an outstanding film because the directing and writing isn’t as memorable as the performances but the overall impact here creates a crowd pleasing film that will win at the box office.
Make no mistake, though, it’s not often that a film like Dallas Buyers Club comes along and rocks your soul without manipulating it first. The greatest thing about this movie is that it is powerful without really trying to be and that happens because two actors, McConaughey and Leto, give Oscar worthy performances and the writers and director don’t get in their way. What the film lacks in sophisticated storytelling and direction, it makes up for with brilliant transformative performances.
The movie tells the story of Ron Woodroof, a Texan infected with the AIDS virus who takes matters into his own hands by finding his own cure and not just helping himself but developing a system that helps fellow victims of the virus as well. In 1985, there wasn’t a cure for AIDS and all people could do was hope to land themselves in an ill-fated drug trial. If you got it, you had 30 days to live in agony before expiring. Woodroof was far from a perfect man but wasn’t going to just wither away. The movie is an understated gut punch because the story is powerful enough to get into your senses and electrify you for 2 hours. Some true stories have to acquire a loud musical score, actors who overact and screenplays that use a Kleenex box as their defense mechanism. Dallas Buyers Club doesn’t want your sympathy. It wants your attention and the material speaks for itself. The mood is grim yet doesn’t shy away from a comedic moment and the look is gray yet allows a few colors to pop in the process. (more…)
Care for an entertaining fleeting dose of action packed cinema this summer! Welcome to the land of the purge, where people get 12 hours to set free all their animalistic demons and unleash evil on the streets. DeMonaco assembles a new cast of characters for this second go around in a series that is likely to only grow with the coming years. Ethan Hawke anchored 2013’s original, and while it made a ridiculous premise stand up inside a home invasion setting, the ending left more to be desired. The Purge: Anarchy delivers on the promise of the original by taking the action to the streets and putting the badass better than ever Frank Grillo at the center of the action.
Grillo is a re-invigorated 51 year old action hero dropped into a plot that suits all his strengths. You have noticed him stealing scenes in films for the past few years. The trainer in Warrior, the sergeant in End of Watch and the wandering ex-con in Joe Carnahan’s captivating survival flick, The Grey. Grillo plays Leo, a man hitting the streets for a different kind of purge. Leo wants to cleanse his soul of deadly revenge, and when he stops to help a group of innocents on the verge of slaughter, he picks up the film and carries it for the entire running time.
In case you haven’t heard, Grillo was born to play Frank Castle, the Punisher, one of the roles Hollywood still hasn’t done right in two attempts. As my colleague, Max Foizey, proclaimed after the credits, “The Punisher was dropped into The Purge.” That is basically the ticking heartbeat of this film. Grillo unplugged! (more…)
“There is no devil. I think some people die here and they go see God and he tells them no, you can’t come in. You will be alone…forever.”-Bob Saginowski
Tom Hardy is amazing and carries the latest Dennis Lehane joint, The Drop. The movie is a equal parts gangster thriller, subtle romance and quiet character study. It will be known as James Gandfolfini’s last completed work but let it be known that the film belongs to Hardy, rocking ANOTHER accent here as Bob Saginowski, a quiet calculating man who tends bar for Gandolfini’s Marv, a old lion still trying to play the criminal hustler game.
Michael R. Roskam’s direction, along with Lehane’s adaptation of his short story entitled Animal Shelter, keeps you off balance. The first half of the film is slow building and resembles the increasingly fast shaking of a tree. Little plot points fall to the ground throughout the 105 minute running time, but you don’t really know the characters until about halfway through. That’s good filmmaking and even better acting.
You have no clue what to make of Hardy’s Bob and that is the way it should be in this pot boiling thriller. Is he slow witted or slow? Is he up to something or is he just plain? Why is he so quiet yet observant? Hardy spins a cobweb around his character and keeps the viewer a distance. Like Russell Crowe or Clive Owen at their best, Hardy lets his facial expressions do the heavy lifting. A stare down with Belgium marvel Matthias Schoenaerts contains about four lines of dialogue but the way the two men stare at each other makes it seem like paragraphs are being recited. In this movie, dialogue doesn’t have to spoken for actions to be expressed. The actors don’t need to bore us with words. I felt like I knew these guys in one life and had no clue they existed in another. There is a darkness in Hardy’s Bob that I couldn’t put my finger on until the climax of the film, when a bomb suddenly detonates inside the plot and springs the film towards its final resting place. (more…)
“They won’t care about what you wrote because the press will make YOU the story.”
Diagnosis-Kill The Messenger is a fierce reminder that important films can still be made in Hollywood if the right people come together to make them happen and there is an audience ready to digest serious material. A lot of films are good but few actually teach you something vital about history and the way America was built. This film gets the facts straight, taking the pages of a novel and fusing them into blunt strokes of filmmaking.
Jeremy Renner powers a well-balanced cast of actors born to play these roles and puts another gold star on his acting resume with his unforgettable performance as Gary Webb, a hard charging journalist in the 90’s who pushed too hard. Webb wrote for the San Jose Mercury News and uncovered a story that connected the War on Drugs and Nicaragua drug dealers to the CIA. Webb wrote it and when bigger newspapers got mad that they weren’t the first to break the story, the flack flew back at Webb and his paper. The golden rule of newspapers (at least among the bigger ones) is simple. Be the first to break a controversial story or be the first to break it down.
Renner is amazing and the film hinges on our ability to find interest in his fight and his story. The papers did everything to smear his name and destroyed his life, and the transformation in Renner’s performance is crisp. When we first meet him, he is energetically tracking down a lead on a story and when we leave him, the entire façade of what he believed in has crumbled to the floor. Bringing to mind a younger and hungrier Sean Penn, Renner gets inside Webb’s head and shows us what made him tick and what led him to explode. (more…)
With all the big loud superhero flicks at the cinema right now, it seems a bit old fashioned to sit at home and watch a couple quiet indie dramas. That’s what I did this weekend, resisting the summer sizzle and instead reaching for something with a little more subtlety and grace. Here are fresh takes on Blood Ties and Joe, both currently available on demand and possibly on Redbox.
Blood Ties
The first effort from director/actor Guillaume Canet is a dark gritty crime drama set in the 1970’s and pitting two brothers(Clive Owen and Billy Crudup) standing on opposite sides of the law. Owen is Chris, a ex-con who just stepped out of jail after a 12 year stint for murder. Crudup is Frank, a noble cop who desperately wants to keep his brother out of jail and trouble. The women lurking around their lives, Marion Cotillard and Zoe Saldana, begin to play pivotal roles in their future. James Caan nearly steals the film as the two men’s father and Matthias Schoenaerts(Rust and Bone) turns in solid work as the worst kind of men. All the pieces come together in an unpredictable fashion in Canet’s film, which makes for a powerful experience. One can see why it didn’t get a wide release but the story was made for a home setting. Owen and Crudup are at the top of their game here, sparring off as siblings who have walked completely different lives while remaining close to home.
Owen puts a coat of Brooklyn on his well traveled British accent and Cotillard does her best with a role that many will call different but I call challenging and fresh. She is an actress that can easily go to dark places but here touches new ground. Caan shows that he still has the power to take over a film at his old age, playing an old lion staring at his two sons battling over psychological turf. The movie isn’t great and runs a little long. A big shootout occurs just over halfway in and throws the film into a completely new story that never sits right. Things happen that don’t make any sense while others come together too cozy. All is made right in the end when a delicious little twist sets(remember to knock) the film up for a final clash at a train station that is deft and perfect. Canet co-wrote the script with long time crime film artist James Gray(The Yards, We Own the Night) and you can smell Gray’s strokes all over the film, from the loud and brutally realistic gunfire to the romantic moments of the film. Blood Ties is solid cinema worth checking out at home.
Joe
The film starts out conveniently as we are introduced to Nic Cage’s Joe, the leader of a landscaping crew wiping out trees for a new housing development. His men respect him and they have a good working relationship. We are also introduced to a kid who has an abusive dad and his ongoing misery. Joe and the Kid will merge together in a way that is at once predictable, unique and deadly. There is more to Joe than a simple life and the kid is going to stir things up inside him that the older man thought he had buried. I won’t spoil any more of David Gordon Green’s latest film, a down and dirty drama about redemption, choices and the devil in all of us.
Cage reminds you once again that he is an Oscar worthy talent when he decides to be. He easily inhabits the cold tragic skin of Joe and injects his quirky wildness into a well rounded performance that resonates. Tye Sheridan played this sort of role well in Mud and takes it up a notch here with his character, Gary. Gary and Joe become friends and things start to happen. One thing that is constant in every Green film(except for the hilarious Pineapple Express) is a sense of dread that sits with every scene. The idea that something bad is going to happen floats through this film. The entire film as a whole doesn’t work completely work but there are fair portions of it that are beautifully filmed and acted. One of the highlights is Gary Ponlter, a homeless man Green hired off the street(the director does this a lot) to play Gary’s despicable father, Wade. He steals every scene he is in and does it with barely any dialogue. Poulter’s broken trash face sums up the type of world Green’s films live in. Poulter died a few weeks after filming concluded and his role in the film is powerful, disgusting and bittersweet at the same time. Joe isn’t a great film and the plot will drift from your memory, but the lingering morals of its characters and the struggle we all endure every single day will stick with you for a little while. The acting in it alone warrants it a viewing.
Thanks for digesting this latest dose. Come back for another.
Dose of Buffa 