The Hangover Part II has its moments (the buddies lose a little brother on a wild night in Bangkok) , but is just not as gut-busting funny as The Hangover. Not so much sequel as photocopy, the same story loses its impact the second time through. Right from the start, when they awake memory-free in a trashed hotel room, their discoveries just don’t match up to the comic value of the missing tooth, the tiger and the baby in The Hangover. The revelations in Part II are just as extreme, but they just don’t register as funny.
The one original thought is when we see what’s in the socially retarded Zach Galifianakis’ brain – and we learn that he sees the buddies as his crew of 13-year-olds. But that’s really the only imaginative part of the movie.
The top picks this week are Incendies, Midnight in Paris and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m still urging people to see the searing drama Incendies, the year’s best film so far. Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets. As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks. We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.
Woody Allen’s sweet and smart Midnight in Paris is his best comedy in twenty-five years. Owen Wilson accompanies fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where she is intrigued by pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, leaving Wilson to explore midnight Paris and time travel back to the Paris of the Lost Generation.
Don’t miss Cave of Forgotten Dreams while it can be seen in 3D; Werner Herzog explores the amazing 30,000 year old Chauvet cave paintings.
13 Assassins is brilliantly staged and photographed, and is one of the best recent action films; an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to hack their way through a psychotically sadistic noble’s 200 bodyguards.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best. Meek’s Cutoff is a disappointing misfire.
On June 10, we’ll get a chance to see The Tree of Life. Every ten years Terrence Malick directs a film that critics call a masterpiece: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World. At Cannes, audiences found The Tree of Life at once visually stunning, confusing, brilliant, trippy, profound and self-important. Brad Pitt plays a 1950s Waco dad who is both caring and brutishly domineering. Sean Penn plays his grown up Baby Boomer son reflecting on his childhood (without much dialogue). From the music in the trailer, you can tell that this movie takes itself very seriously.
Also releasing June 10 is Beginners. Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet. As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway. But then he meets Melanie Laurent (and they meet cute). Directed by Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).
On the same weekend, we’ll also have The Trip, a reportedly very funny movie in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take a foodie road trip through the north of England. Along the way, they snidely battle each other with their impressions of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Woody Allen, Al Pacino and the like.
The next weekend, June 17, we have Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times. This contender for the year’s best documentary is a peek inside modern journalism at a troubling time.
And now for some sexy silliness. Director Gregg Araki created the brilliant and searing Mysterious Skin, but here he’s just having fun. In the first hour of Kaboom, I lost track of how many characters had sex with each other – it’s just about non-stop and guy-on-guy, girl-on-girl, guy-on-girl, guy-and-girl-on-guy, etc. I would characterize the sex as casual, but that would make it seem that the characters were having even a modicum of difficulty in finding partners. Anyway, the chaotic sexathon is very funny. The last twenty minutes takes the film into a campy version of a paranoid apocalypse film, before an abrupt (and I mean abrupt) ending. Did I mention the bad guys in the animal masks? It’s fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Have two cocktails and then pop in the DVD.
With Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has made his best movie since 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s a funny and wistful exploration of the nostalgia for living in another time and place – all set in the most sumptuously photographed contemporary Paris.
Successful but disenchanted screenwriter and would be novelist Owen Wilson accompanies his mismatched fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where he fantasizes about living in the artistically fertile Paris of the 1920s. Indeed, at midnight, he happens upon a portal to that era, and finds himself hanging out with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Stein. He meets Marion Cotillard, a 1920s gal who is herself nostalgic for the 1890s.
Midnight in Paris shines because of the perfectly crafted dialogue. McAdams’ every instinct is cringingly wrong for Wilson. She is enraptured by the pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, who couldn’t be more insufferable.
As usual, Allen has attracted an excellent cast. Owen Wilson rises to the material and gives one of his best performances. Corey Stoll is hilarious as Hemingway and Adrien Brody even funnier as Salvador Dali. Cotillard is luminous.
It’s not news that the French love Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) or that Terrence Malick can make a beautiful, profound and confusing film (The Tree of Life). And we’ll get to see Midnight in Paris for ourselves this weekend and The Tree of Life in a couple of weeks. But I’m especially looking forward to four more films screened at the festival: The Artist, Drive, The Kid with a Bike and Polisse.
The film that captured the most fans at Cannes is The Artist, a mostly silent film about a silent film star at the advent of talking pictures. By all accounts, it’s a visually and emotionally satisfying film. The French actor Jean Dujardin won Cannes’ best actor award; John Goodman, James Cromwell and Penelope Ann Miller also appear. The Artist will be released in the US by The Weinstein Company.
Drive is an action movie starring Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver by day, criminal getaway driver by night. It’s getting attention for the emotionally vacant character played by Gosling and the stylishness of the car chases and violence. Drive will be released in the US in September by FilmDistrict.
The Kid with a Bike is the latest from the Belgian Bardennes brothers, two of my favorite film makers (The Son, Rosetta). a 12-year-old boy wants to find the father who dumped him at a children’s home, but meets a woman who becomes his de fact foster mom. The Kid with the Bike will be released in the US by Sundance Selects.
Polisse is a reputedly riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit. It stars an ensemble cast led by Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out). Polisse will be released in the US by IFC Films.
I’m still urging people to see the searing drama Incendies, the year’s best film so far. Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets. As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks. We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.
13 Assassins is brilliantly staged and photographed, and is one of the best recent action films; an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to hack their way through a psychotically sadistic noble’s 200 bodyguards.
Don’t miss Cave of Forgotten Dreams while it can be seen in 3D; Werner Herzog explores the amazing 30,000 year old Chauvet cave paintings.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best. Meek’s Cutoff is a disappointing misfire.
Source Code is a gripping scifi thriller with intelligence and heart, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Vera Farmiga and Michelle Monaghan.Hanna is a rip roaring girl-power thriller starring Saiorse Ronan as a 16-year-old raised in the Arctic Circle to be a master assassin by her rogue secret agent father, and then released upon the CIA.
I haven’t yet seen Midnight in Paris or The Hangover Part II, which open this weekend. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is Kings of Pastry.
Movies on TV this week include the timeless drama The Best Years of Our Liveson TCM.
This documentary chronicles the physically grueling and emotionally draining three-day competition for the MOF, the highest designation for French pastry chefs. Amid impossibly towering sugar sculptures and delectable cream puffs and layer cakes, we see the essential cores of competition – aspiration, ambition, perseverance, commitment, desperation, heartbreak and victory. Kings of Pastry is directed by the brilliant documentarians Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker (The War Room).
Director Takeshi Miike’s take on the samurai movie is the best contribution to the genre since Kurosawa. Brilliantly staged and photographed, this is one of the best recent action films in any language or setting.
It’s a familiar set-up: an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to kill a psychotically sadistic noble. But first they must hack their way through the bad guy’s 200 bodyguards. What sets 13 Assassins apart is the inventively booby-trapped town and the frenzied pace of the climactic battle. It even has exploding boars!
Kôji Yakusho, a veteran with 72 acting credits, gives an impressive performance as the lead assassin. You may remember him from Shall We Dance? or Babel.
Bridesmaids is a funny movie, but one that could have been much better. In a role that she wrote for herself, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life. Instead, she wreaks havoc on her best friend’s wedding planning and is about to sabotage a sweet romance with Chris O’Dowd. So far, so good.
Producer Judd Apatow salted Wiig’s screenplay with some low brow stuff. Now, I like to see gals at an upscale wedding boutique puking on each other and shitting themselves as much as the next guy (and it was the guys in the audience that were laughing the most at that scene). But the Apatow additions didn’t quite mesh with the central story.
Still, we can conclude that Kristen Wiig has what it takes to carry a movie by herself. Hopefully, next time she’ll get her script greenlighted as is.
