Movies

THE ZERO THEOREM: visually arresting sci-fi meh

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THE ZERO THEOREM
THE ZERO THEOREM

Zero Theorem2
Terry Gilliam directed The Zero Theorem, which tells you that it’s going to be visually arresting and Way Out There.  Former Monty Python member Gilliam wrote and directed Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus – all much better movies than The Zero Theorem (which he did not write).

The Zero Theorem takes place in a dystopian future world where the powers that be completely control everything that they need for the economy (what you do, how continually you work and how little you get paid), but allow individual freedom to consume crappy consumer goods and follow phony religions. Those that are too troubled to be productive are left to fend for themselves on the filthy streets, free of public services.   It’s the realization of Antonin Scalia’s world view.

Christoph Waltz plays a poor workaday Everyman who just wants some time off to look after his deteriorating health.  He’s literally a wage slave to a malevolent character named Management.  A professional numbers cruncher, Waltz is attacking a very fundamental mathematical discovery.  And that’s the whole movie –  as he hacks away on his keyboard, he is battered and abused by The System, cajoled by an obnoxious middle manager (David Thewlis – very funny) and distracted by a sexually available temptress.

For what it’s worth, Waltz is pretty good as the protagonist, a perpetual victim.  Matt Damon and Tilda Swinton show up in brief parts.  Melanie Thierry, a very beautiful actress of limited range (see The Princess of Montpensier), plays the hottie.

All in all, it’s just not Far Out enough and the story – stretched to feature length – is tedious.  You’re better off watching one of Gilliam’s good films, or Lost in La Mancha, the documentary on his snake-bitten attempt to make a movie out of Don Quixote.

The Zero Theorem releases tomorrow in theaters, but is already streaming on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video, among others, including your cable/satellite On Demand.

The first Orange Is the New Black – coming up on TV

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Hope Emerson and Eleanor Parker in CAGED
Hope Emerson and Eleanor Parker in CAGED

Want to see the prototype for Orange Is the New Black? On September 6, Turner Classic Movies airs the 1950 Caged. Eleanor Parker (who died last year) played the naive young woman plunged into a harsh women’s prison filled with hard-bitten fellow prisoners and compassion-free guards. Parker was nominated for an acting Oscar, but her performance pales next to that of Hope Emerson, whose electric portrayal of a hulking guard also got an Oscar nod. Caged also features the fine character actresses Thelma Moorhead, Jane Darwell (Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath) and Ellen Corby (Grandma Walton here as a young woman). Sixty-four years later, Caged might still be the best women’s prison movie ever.

THE TRIP TO ITALY: wit, more wit and amazing food

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in THE TRIP TO ITALY
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in THE TRIP TO ITALY

The smart and hilarious The Trip to Italy showcases the improvisational wit of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, along with some serious tourism/foodie porn.   As in The Trip, the two British comics are sent off on a hedonistic road trip to review spectacular restaurants – this time in Italy’s most stunningly beautiful destinations.  Along the way, they needle each other and virtually any occurrence can trigger a very funny riff.  As in The Trip, they compete for the funniest Michael Caine impression; but this time, their funniest impression is of a harried Assistant Director trying to give notes to the mask-wearing Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises.

And – if you enjoy travel and fine dining – the restaurant scenes are unsurpassed.

LOVE IS STRANGE: gentle and poignant, but contrived and random

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John Lithgow and Alfred Molina in LOVE IS STRANGE
John Lithgow and Alfred Molina in LOVE IS STRANGE

In the almost satisfying romantic drama Love Is Strange, Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play New York City men who, 39 years into their relationship, marry and then are separated by circumstance. By far the best part of Love Is Strange is that Molina and Lithgow develop unique characters, credible and truthful, neither a stereotype in any way. It’s a pleasure to watch these guys, and their embrace on a rainy night is shattering. Another good part: they have a teen nephew, and there’s some truth in the movie’s depiction of the difficulties of being a teenager and raising a teenager.

Unfortunately, Molina’s and Lithgow’s talents are left high and dry by co-writers Ira Sachs (who directed) and Mauricio Zaharias. The set-up to split up the couple’s living arrangements is contrived and unrealistic. Several plot points range from random to confusing (why do some characters steal some library books?), and some fade out without any resolution. Sachs also makes some directorial missteps. There’s a concert scene in which we are jarred with closeups of four or five non-characters (and, I think, non-actors) that really can’t be explained unless these are vanity shots of the movie’s investors. And a climactic shot of a character crying in a stairwell goes on one count, two counts, then twenty counts too long.

Love Is Strange is not a bad movie – and it does contain the splendid performances by Molina and Litgow – but it sure ain’t a Must See.

THE ONE I LOVE: a relationship enters the Twilight Zone

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Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass in THE ONE I LOVE
Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass in THE ONE I LOVE

Opening tomorrow, The One I Love is one of the year’s most original stories – a romance, dark comedy and sci-fi fable rolled into one successful movie.  Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss play a couple in that place in their relationship where quirks have become annoying instead of endearing, some trust issues have emerged and the two are just generally misfiring.  Their couples therapist recommends a weekend at an idyllic, isolated vacation cottage, which also has a second (presumably unoccupied) guest house.  The beautiful setting is enhanced by a bottle of wine and a reefer, and the desired rekindling of romance and intimacy occurs.  So everything goes as we would expect for this first nine minutes of the movie, and then – WOW – a major plot development that involves the guest house.

As soon as one of the characters explicitly references TV’s The Twilight Zone, the story becomes what would have been a perfect episode in that Rod Steiger series.  Screenwriter Justin Lader pulls off a What’s Gonna Happen Next? story that has its moments of creepy thriller and madcap comedy.  But, at its heart, the story explores these questions:  what is it about our partners that keeps us in or drives us out of a relationship?  How do we stay in love with someone who has changed from who we fell in love with?  Or who hasn’t become the person we had projected?  The One I Love is only 91 minutes, so the tension and the thoughtfulness can slowly build while keeping us on the edges of our seats.

Moss and Duplass are simply remarkable here – these are two great performances.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT: Both Duplass and Moss play other characters in this movie – and they excel at creating subtle differences in the characters that are revealing, thought-provoking and scary.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR : how could so much sex and violence be so tiresome?

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Eva Green in the poster for FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR
Eva Green in the poster for FRANK MILLER’S SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

Wow, was this ever a disappointment. I loved the first Sin City from co-directors Richard Rodriguez and Frank Miller (the graphic novelist).  And I’m in Sin City’s prime target audience because I love noir sensibility, hard-boiled dialogue and stylized violence in my movies.  But Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is just not engaging.

None of the three story threads is particularly thrilling.  The dialogue is so consistently lurid that it’s just overblown. Powers Boothe – always a wonderful villain – snarls his menacing smile so often that we expect him to grow mustaches and twirl them.  The movie violence is of the splatter variety, and the bloodbath unleashed by Rosario Dawson and Jamie Chung is just silly.  The ultra-sympathetic Denis Haybert is miscast as a monstrous superthug.  Jessica Alba does a convincing job as a stripper but not as an alcoholic.

The whole thing is a stunning waste of a fantastic cast, including Boothe, Haybert, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple and Christopher Meloni. In particular, Meloni and Liotta are not given much to do.  Temple shines as usual as a mistress-for-hire, and Christopher Lloyd sparkles as a particularly unsanitary surgeon.

One remarkable thing – Eva Green (whose character is The Dame to Kill For) plays much of the movie in full frontal (and back and side view) nudity; I can’t remember seeing the body of a major female star displayed so clinically. Now she looks really good naked, but the sheer screen time of her nudity is unusual.  Of course all the women in the movie are objectified – and other than Green’s malevolent and slutty femme fatale, Alba’s stripper, and Temple’s mistress, the female characters are all prostitutes.

If you like noir, then the film looks great: almost all black-and-white except for, occasionally, cherry red cars and vivid lipstick, hair and dresses on the women.  The best I can say about Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is that it’s nasty, brutish and 102 minutes short.

D.O.A.: racing the clock to solve his own murder

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Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.
Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A.

On August 27, Turner Classic Movies has the gripping film noir whodunit D.O.A., which opens with a man walking into a police station to report HIS OWN MURDER. The man (Edmond O’Brien) finds out that he has been dosed with a poison for which there is no antidote – and that he has only a few days to live. He desperately races the clock to find out who has murdered him and why – all in a taut 83 minutes. Much of D.O.A. was shot on location in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and one SF scene has one of the first cinematic glimpses into Beat culture. The little known director Rudolph Maté gave the film a great look, which shouldn’t be a surprise because Maté had been Oscar-nominated five times as a cinematographer. The next year, he followed D.O.A. with another solid noir, Union Station, with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald.

(This 1950 version with Edmond O’Brien is the one you want to see; avoid the 1988 remake with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan.)

CALVARY: dark, tense and mesmerizing

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Brendan Glesson in CALVARY
Brendan Gleeson in CALVARY

The superbly written drama Calvary opens with a startling line, which kicks off the unsettling premise.  Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard, The Grand Seduction) plays a very good man who is an Irish priest, Father James.  In the confessional, a man tells him that – in one week – he will kill Father James.  Having been molested by a priest (now dead), the man will make his statement against the Church:  “There’s no point in killing a bad priest. I’m going to kill you because you’re innocent.”

Who is the man?  (Father James figures it out before the audience does.)  Will the execution really happen?  Will Father James take steps to protect himself?  Tension builds as the days count down.

The character of Father James is wonderfully crafted.  Having come to the priesthood in midlife, after being married and having a secular career, he is seasoned and unburdened by high expectations of human nature – and has a wicked sense of humor.  Yet he is moral in the best sense and profoundly compassionate.  And Gleeson – always excellent – nails the role.  It’s one of the finest leading performances of the year.

We know that the killer comes from a very limited pool of villagers and would-be parishioners, played by Chris O’Dowd, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen, M. Emmet Walsh, Isaach de Bankole and Orla O’Rourke.  Their feelings for Father James range from fondness to indifference.  Their attitudes toward the Church, on the other hand, range from indifference to hostility.  (Moran is the best – playing a man grappling with his unhappiness, despite enjoying a fortune built by exploiting others. )

None of these characters is a stereotype.  It’s a quirky bunch – but not CUTE quirky.   There’s a lot of buried rage in this village – and dry humor, too.  Referring to his wife, one casually says, “I think she’s bipolar, or lactose intolerant, one of the two”.

But it’s not the the villagers that Father James must deal with.  He gets a visit from his occasionally suicidal adult daughter (Kelly Reilly, who is ALWAYS good); he loves and welcomes her, but she often contributes more stress. He doesn’t love his roommate, an idiotically shallow priest David Wilmot (the thug in The Guard who hilariously couldn’t figure out if he was a psychopath or a sociopath).  Then there’s a seriously twisted imprisoned killer (the star’s son Domnhall Gleeson), a foreign tourist numbed by a sudden tragedy (Marie-Josee Croze) and a scheming bishop (David McSavage).

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh (The Guard) gets the credit for populating his screenplay with enough unique and original characters for an entire film festival, let alone one movie.  After The Guard and Calvary, I can’t wait to see his next movie.

As one should ascertain from its title, Calvary ain’t a feel-good movie.  It plumbs some pretty dark territory.  But as we follow Brendan Gleeson’s extraordinary performance as a good man navigating a grimly urgent situation, it is mesmerizing.

Dylan Moran in CALVARY
Dylan Moran in CALVARY

ALIVE INSIDE: people astonishingly transformed by music

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Alive InsideAlive Inside is one of the most emotionally powerful documentaries that I’ve EVER seen.  Seemingly miraculously, Alzheimer’s patients are transformed by music.  The music doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s, but it pulls the patients out of isolation, helps them relate to other people and brings them joy.

Alive Inside tells the story of a solitary guy, Dan Cohen, and his tiny non-profit Music & Memory, which distributes iPods to Alzheimer’s patients.  Michael Rossato-Bennett filmed Cohen’s work to prepare a video for Music & Memory.  That original six-and-a-half minute video went viral.  Rossato-Bennett realized that he had the beginnings of a movie, and, several years later, Alive Inside is the result.

Alive Inside won an  Audience Award at Sundance, and I think that Alive Inside will be one of the two favorites for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.  It’s already on my list of Best Movies of 2014 – So Far.

All that aside, it’s a riveting film – and an example of the power of cinema.   It’s impossible not to be moved when people essentially recover their humanity.  And when you leave the theater, you’ll likely be thinking about making sure that your kids have your playlist.

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT: yes, there CAN be too much witty repartee

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Emma Stone and Colin Firth in MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen’s annual movie is the disappointing romantic comedy of manners Magic in the Moonlight. Set in the late 1920s, a master magician (Colin Firth) goes to the South of France to unmask a phony psychic (Emma Stone). Things do not go as he had been expecting.

There’s plenty of witty banter, especially between Stone and Firth. Both do well in their parts, and they both look fabulous in the period dress. There’s also a really wonderful (as in Oscar-worthy) performance by Eileen Atkins as the magician’s life-seasoned aunt.  The superb actress Jacki Weaver isn’t given anything to do except to beam some batty and vacant smiles.  The rest of the cast is not as deep as in other Woody Allen movies.

But the movie never reels you in emotionally, and it’s only about as entertaining as one of those British sitcoms playing on your local PBS station.  Albeit VERY briefly, I dozed off. Two scenes in particular are extended several moments too long, apparently just to accommodate more repartee.  And the empiricism vs spiritualism debate seems shallow, contrived and stale when compared to that in the recent sci-fi romance  I Origins.

It’s not unwatchable Woody like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.  But it’s not really good Woody, either.  So, if you MUST have a dose of Woody this summer, watch one of Woody’s masterpieces: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Midnight in Paris.  Or better yet, go see Boyhood or A Most Wanted Man or – beginning on Friday – Calvary or Alive Inside.