The Broadway musical Rock of Ages comes to the screen – a love story of hopeful young performers set on the seamy Sunset Strip in the age of Journey, Styx, Bon Jovi and the ever popular Whitesnake. It really doesn’t matter that there is only a barest shred of a plot – this is a musical, after all, and we just need an excuse to break into song.
The two young leads are fine, but the laughs come from the impressive crew of supporting actors: Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mary J. Blige and Bryan Cranston. Cruise self-mockingly plays an Axel Rose type rock star, only more unreliable.
The inspired musical production numbers are staged ironically (there’s no other way to do a Quarterflash song). You haven’t really heard Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is until you’ve seen Tom Cruise really selling it. At one point, Brand’s rockers belt out We Built This City in a duel with Zeta-Jones’ pastel clad church ladies singing We’re Not Going To Take It. All lighthearted and funny; it’ll be a good DVD/stream pick in a few months.
The Intouchables is the second most popular movie of all time in France – and it’s easy to see why. It’s an odd couple comedy that’s a real crowd pleaser.
A very, very rich French aristocrat has become a quadriplegic due to a hang gliding accident and hires a Senegalese good-for-nothing street hood as his caregiver. The plot, really just a series of set pieces, mines familiar territory as the poor guy learns about living in a mansion (see Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and revitalizes the rich guy’s zest for living. But it’s really well done and very funny.
The rich guy is played by the great Francois Cluzet (Tell No One), who gives a tremendous performance using only his head and neck. Omar Sy plays the poor guy and actually edged out The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin for France’s top acting award last year; that’s hard to figure, but Sy is very funny in The Intouchables. Overall, it’s a very satisfying comedy.
Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge. What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).
In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system. The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.
Don’t think too much about the premise. The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here. We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters. And the space monsters are damn scary. The final sequence, however, makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.
If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.
Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk. Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.
Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.
3D or not 3D? If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.
Your Sister’s Sister wastes a promising premise and the talents of three good actors, one of whom gives a superb performance.
A young man (Mark Duplass) is grieving a loss and his friend (Emily Blunt) suggests that he spend some time at her family’s remote island getaway cabin. Unbeknownst to them, her sister (Rosemarie Dewitt) is already staying at the cabin. The guy and the sister get drunk on his first night at the cabin, and the friend shows up unannounced the next morning. Each of the three does not know a key fact about the other two. So far so good.
In fact, it’s an excellent dramedy for two-thirds of the movie until the sister bursts out with something like, “I wouldn’t have [spoiler] if I knew that [spoiler]”. At this point, writer-director Lynne Shelton runs out of creativity and resorts to the dreaded musical interlude, in which each of the characters stomp or bike through the rainy Northwest as the music swells to set up an ending that drew loud derisive hoots from the theater audience.
Too bad, because the actors are very good. Mark Duplass plays the smart, talented, underachieving, goofy and sweet big lug usually played by Jason Segal or Seth Rogen. Emily Blunt plays the sarcastic, funny, smart, vulnerable and adorable cutie usually played by Emily Blunt. But Rosemarie Dewitt creates a wholly original and utterly authentic character that looks like a real person, someone we know in real life. All of her actions and reactions are completely authentic, whether she’s drinking way too much tequila, pondering her failed relationship or tasting her own vegan pancakes. Dewitt was also very good as Rachel in Rachel’s Getting Married, and her performance is so good in Your Sister’s Sister that I can’t wait to see her on screen again.
Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the under appreciated Fat City (1972) on June 18. Stacy Keach plays a boxer on the slide, his skills unraveled by his alcoholism. He inspires a kid (a very young Jeff Bridges), who becomes a boxer on the rise. Keach and Susan Tyrrell give dead-on performances as pathetic sad sack barflies. Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
The great director John Huston shot the film in Stockton, and Fat City is a time capsule for the Central Valley in the early 70s.
Wes Anderson’s wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom is well worth seeing. Bernie, a very funny dark comedy by Richard Linklater, shows off Jack Black’s talents in a whole new light. The story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is much more than a fish-out-of-water comedy, and has deservedly become they year’s biggest indie hit.
Men In Black 3 is delightfully entertaining, as Will Smith time travels back to 1969 and meets the young Tommy Lee Jones (nailed by Josh Brolin). Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark. HBO is still broadcasting its new epic Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman.
I haven’t seen these films which open this weekend: the contemporary Russian noir Elena, the Broad to screen Rock of Ages and the Emily Blunt indie dramedy Your Sister’s Sister. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick this week is the Denzel Washington paranoid spy thriller Safe House.
In the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom, two 1965 twelve-year-olds fall into profound platonic love and run away together, with a cadre of sadly weary adult authority figures in comic pursuit. Director Wes Anderson has had some quirky hits (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and some quirky misses (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but he’s always original. This is a hit.
While very funny, the story is deeply sympathetic to the children. As Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com put it,
Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.
We know that we’re watching something unique from the very first shot, in which the camera swivels to show each room in a home as family members enter their spaces and define their relationships to each other. As The Wife, pointed out, we look into the family home as would a child looking into a dollhouse.
In a year that is especially rich with able child film actors, the kids here (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman) are excellent. Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are also very good as the sad, burnt-out adults. Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel show up briefly in broad comic roles.
Since Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, Baby Boomers will appreciate the Mad Men moments – a portable record player, a coonskin cap and adult indifference to a kid simultaneously holding lighter fluid and a flaming torch. The girl’s books have cover art typical of the era’s quality young fiction (a la A Wrinkle in Time).
This is an excellent movie – and one that you haven’t seen before.
Safe House, the first big Hollywood movie of 2012, is a fine paranoid spy thriller. Ryan Reynolds is a green but determined CIA agent who finds himself isolated in South Africa and forced to bring in rogue superspy Denzel Washington. Like Hannibal Lector, Denzel’s character Tobin Frost over matches everyone he faces; it takes entire teams of elite commandos to trap and transport Frost, so Reynolds has his hands full. Not to mention that more teams of elite commandos keep popping up, trying to kill them both. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa keeps his pedal jammed to the floor, and this two hour movie flashes by in what seems like 90 minutes.
It takes a screen presence like Denzel’s to make Tobin Frost, with his unique mix of charisma, menace and lethal skills, credible. Reynolds holds up well against Denzel, and the always excellent Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson and Sam Shepherd round out the cast.
I wouldn’t rate Safe House at the very top of the genre. Espinosa didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to flesh out the characters played by Farmiga, Gleeson and Shepherd, who all end up playing oft-recycled types. And there are some holes in the plot that you’ll recognize in the few moments when you can catch your breath (See spoiler below the trailer).
But the action and thrills are there, and the extremely well-paced Safe House is a satisfying watch.
Spoiler alert: Since the CIA knows about Reynolds’ girlfriend, why don’t they kidnap her or at least tap her phone to help them track down Reynolds?
Judi Dench, Tom Wilkenson and Bill Nighy in THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL
Man, there are some good movies out right now! My top pick is still Polisse, the riveting story of the police child protection unit in Paris.Bernie, a very funny dark comedy by Richard Linklater, shows off Jack Black’s talents in a whole new light. The story of aged Brits seeking a low-budget retirement in India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is much more than a fish-out-of-water comedy. I also really like the Norwegian dark comedy Headhunters, with Aksel Hennie as a smug corporate headhunter/art thief who panics when a high tech commando hunts him down.
Men In Black 3 is delightfully entertaining, as Will Smith time travels back to 1969 and meets the young Tommy Lee Jones (nailed by Josh Brolin). Hysteria is a breezy, feminist lark. HBO is still broadcasting its new epic Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. Where Do We Go Now? is a Lebanese comedy about village women who go to extreme lengths to extinguish the sparks of sectarian violence.
I haven’t yet seen Moonrise Kingdom, which opens widely this weekend, and which is already looking like an indie hit. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick this week is Rampart, with a sizzling showcase performance by Woody Harrelson as a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail.
And don’t forget to watch the short film On S’Embrasse? (Can We Kiss?) on my site HERE.
