This is a treat. Before he made “Coraline,” director Henry Selick made the enchanting “James and the Giant Peach,” based on Roald Dahl’s classic book and featuring the voices of Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, and “Frazier’s” Jane Leaves.
It’s now out on eye-popping Blu-Ray for the first time, and each one includes a DVD as well. Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with James in the subject line and tell me your family’s favorite Roald Dahl book. I will pick three lucky winners on August 7.
NOTE: Prizes provided by Disney. All views are my own.
The weather is getting warmer, which means it must be time for some movies about BLOWING STUFF UP!
And so we have “The Losers,” based on a comic book originally set in WWII but updated by Andy Diggle. The name originally signified that they were all officers who had lost men in the war, but now it means they’re the usual motley crew of lovable rag-tag tough guys as quick with a quip as they are with the various mechanisms they have for creating mayhem, and almost as quick as they are to come to each other’s aid or defy authority. These guys are the fists and fury equivalent of a boy band, each member with his own adorable quirks, awesome proficiency, and cool call sign name that makes them sound like extras from “Top Gun.” And there’s just enough variation among them that you can pick your own favorite. There’s the sharpshooter who’s silent, but deadly (Óscar Jaenada as Cougar). There’s the scary-looking guy with the scar who seems to have a rather short fuse (Idris Elba as Roque). There’s the cute computer whiz with a taste for whimsical t-shirts (Chris Evans as Jensen). There’s the sweetheart family man who can master any known vehicle on land, sea, or air (Columbus Short as Pooch). And big daddy, the mastermind (Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Clay).
It’s sort of “Mission Impossible” and “The Three Musketeers” crossed with “The A-Team.” There’s the sniper, the weapons expert, the techie, the transportation guy, and the leader. They got mad skillz so they are only brought in on the blackest of black ops, so secret it’s amazing even they know who they are.
We meet them in Bolivia, where they are on a mission to tag the hideout of a drug dealer so that it can be air-bombed, under the direction of a Charlie of Charlie’s Angels mysterioso they’ve never seen named Max. But when they see that the dealer is using children as mules to transport the drugs it turns out the big old tough guys are also big old softies. Can our hardy little team fight off a zillion Bolivian bad guys with AK-47s and rescue 25 cute little kids, one with a teddy bear (presumably not being used as a place to hide cocaine)? As a former Vice Presidential candidate might say, “You betcha!”
But it’s a set-up. Things go terribly wrong and The Losers are framed and believed killed. When a mysterious woman named Aisha (“Avatar’s” Zoe Saldana) offers to get them back to the US if they will help her go after Max, they agree.
The Losers have brash, raffish charm, the action scenes are well-staged, the explosions are really big, the bad guy (Jason Patric) is entertainingly twisted, and nobody takes themselves too seriously. Pass the popcorn!
If you have some affection for the 1980’s-era buddy cop movies (the “Lethal Weapon” series, “Running Scared,” “48 Hours,” etc.), rent one of those. Don’t try to re-create the genre by seeing Kevin Smith’s tired re-tread, “Cop Out,” starring Bruce Willis and Tracey Morgan. This is the first film Smith has directed without writing, and once again the suits got it backward. Kevin Smith can write, but he has never been much of a director. Remember his first film, “Clerks?” He basically set up the camera in one position and let the characters talk for 92 minutes. And it was that talk — the relishing of banality, the tsunami of TMI — that made the movie successful.
The check-list items are here. It begins with our not-so-lovably bickering heroes getting into trouble, being chewed out by a choleric police chief and dissed by a higher-ranking team (Kevin Pollack and Adam Brody). Denuded of guns and badges, they still have to figure out a way to save the day not just in locking up (or, mostly, shooting down) the bad guys but also in resolving their personal problems. Jimmy (Willis) has to figure out a way to pay for his daughter’s $50,000 wedding and Paul (Morgan) is hyper-jealous and has installed a nanny-cam in a teddy bear to find out whether his pretty wife (Rashida Jones) is cheating on him. Of course they run into an obnoxious small-time crook who will help them catch the bigger crooks (the Joe Pesci role — with a bit of Jason Mewes — goes to Seann William Scott). They are constantly nattering at each other but always having each other’s backs. And they mess everything up, in many different locations, until they don’t.
On the meandering way to the conclusion, we also see ambitious Mexican drug-dealers, a foul-mouthed kid, a valuable collectible, and a beautiful woman who has been in the trunk of a car for two days, as she repeatedly reminds everyone.
Willis looks like he is just running out the clock until his next project. Morgan and Scott try their best to stay afloat and there are some inspired improvisational riffs, but the script and direction keep getting in their way. The bad guys don’t do much but squint and call everyone “homes” all the time. Smith brought in Harold Faltermeyer, composer of the unforgettable “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack (he also provided the music for “Fletch” and “Top Gun”), occasionally amusing but mostly just pointlessly retro. And the movie perpetuates the least appealing element of its predecessors by giving its female characters nothing to do. Michelle Trachtenberg looks goth-pale and scary-thin as Jimmy’s daughter, Jones feeds Morgan straight lines and looks very pretty as Paul’s wife, and Ana de la Reguera is stuck in a typical spitfire (with real spit) role. Only Susie Essman (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) is able to make the most of her brief appearance as a pistol-packing homeowner.
Smith, smarting after a couple of failures, decided to play safe with a studio movie when what he needs to be doing is to stop putting all of his creative energy into funny tweets and go back to writing scripts with heart and humor and memorable characters. Anything else is a cop out.
Jennifer Aniston is a beautiful and talented woman, but this film had me thinking some very mean thoughts about her, thoughts like, “She is too old for this kind of movie” and “Probably not a good idea to make a movie that seems like a lesser version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, best known for documenting her real-life husband falling in love with his co-star.”
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen this movie: battling exes squabble as he (Milo the bounty hunter played by Gerard Butler) tries to take her (Nic the journalist played by Aniston) to jail while she tries to persuade him that she’s working on an important and very dangerous story. Will they get shot at? Will there be chases? Will there be a romantic interlude interrupted by a mis-communication? You don’t even have to see the trailer to have seen this movie. You already know everything that’s going to happen.
Aniston is too old for this movie. Butler looks pudgy-faced and uncomfortable. Despite rumors of an off-screen romance, there are no sparks between them and we never get any sense of what brought them together or any relationship between what we are told about their issues and any aspect of their behavior toward each other or anyone else. This is one of those films where if anyone behaved in a rational manner, the whole thing would have been over in 20 minutes.
It does have a good chase scene at the beginning and a couple of briefly interesting goons (Milo owes some gambling debts). But it lets us down repeatedly by wasting the time and talents of the fabulous Christine Baranski (as Nic’s glamorous mother), SNL’s Jason Sudeikis as Nic’s co-worker, and Carol Kane (with a new set of teeth) and Adam LeFevre as bed-and-breakfast owners. It is supposed to be heartwarming and humorous that Nic’s mother has some boundary issues when it comes to Nic’s romantic life. It’s just icky. It’s supposed to be funny that her co-worker keeps trying to persuade her to get romantic with him. It’s just icky — until he is mistaken for Milo and gets beat up by the goons, when it becomes not just icky but ooky. It’s even supposed to be funny that Nic tases Milo. Nope. This falls into that category of movie that exists to be perpetually playing on airplanes — because when the pilot interrupts to tell you to look out the window you won’t miss anything.
The star and director of the last two “Bourne” movies are back and much is the same — the gritty, intimate, documentary feel, the sense of peril and dynamic staging of action, the able but conflicted leading man. But there is an important difference. “Bourne” is based on a series of novels, but “The Green Zone” is based on a non-fiction book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, about the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in post-Mission Accomplished Iraq.
The “Bourne” movies were more than the usual slick spy story. Bourne was spying on his own past and what was revealed did not match real-life events but it resonated with them, giving the films some extra heft. “The Green Zone,” however, bases the story in recent events. It tweaks the names and some of the circumstances of the main characters, but not enough to establish a separate, consistent reality, just enough to be distracting. Audiences will look at the Wall Street Journal reporter played by Amy Ryan and stop to whisper, “Is she supposed to be Judy Miller? Is there a reason that a different character’s name is Miller? And who is that other guy supposed to be?” Those who are up on all of the details of the Iraqi war will be distracted by what is missing. Those who are not will be distracted by what is included.
As Damon and his men chase through crumbling buildings on blown-up streets, chasing and being chased, we see that all of their crack training and cutting-edge technology are no match for a situation that does not meet any previous military definitions or capacities. There are no foxholes or battle lines. Like the Light Brigade, they are expected to charge forward, “theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do & die.” But when a Chief Warrant Officer (Damon) finds that he is repeatedly risking his life to retrieve weapons of mass destruction that do not exist, he wants to find out why the intel is so consistently unreliable. And then, when no one else seems to care about that, he wants to find out why. Shock and Awe seems to have deteriorated quickly into a quagmire.
His quest takes him though a crumbling palace, chandeliers incongruously shoved aside, to an even more surreal location in the American compound, with girls lounging in bikinis by a pool, being served pizza and beer. He meets a local with a prosthetic leg (Khalid Abdalla, excellent as “Freddy”), who leads him to the man who is the Jack of Clubs in the war criminal deck of cards. But it turns out that his mission is not what he had thought. “Democracy is messy,” a Pentagon official (Greg Kinnear) tells him. “We’re here to do a job and get home safe,” another soldier says. “I thought we were all on the same side,” the Chief Warrant Officer tells the CIA representative (Brendan Gleeson). “Don’t be naive,” he responds. It turns out hardly anyone is on the same side as anyone else. Both sides have splintered into factions with shifting loyalties and murky motives. And the wall of the prison where Iraqis are being tortured says, “Honor Bound to Serve Freedom.”
But this script’s attempts to be intricate underscore how much it simplifies the reality, especially with a gesture at the end that is supposed to be cathartic but instead just makes us question the reliability of everything we’ve seen. Over-simplified and under-played, this movie wants to be more than the fictional Bourne series but ends up being less. I’m betting that this was a studio-imposed effort to make the film more marketable after a series of disappointing box office returns for Iraqi war movies. Some day, maybe, there will be a director’s cut that will recognize that like democracy, some movies need to be messy, too.
by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, about the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in post-