Hot Pursuit

Posted on May 7, 2015 at 5:51 pm

Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon are both talented, beautiful actresses with savvy business acumen and strong entrepreneurial energy. Witherspoon’s accolades in 2014 included more than a Best Actress Oscar nomination for “Wild.” She also produced it, and another Oscar-nominated film, “Gone Girl.” Both Witherspoon and Vergara produced the vastly less ambitious “Hot Pursuit,” a high-concept, low-octane road movie filled with chases and shrieking that cannot disguise the soul-numbing vacuousness of its screenplay.

Our fun couple consists of Cooper (her first name is a who-cares third act reveal), a by-the-book, second-generation cop played by Witherspoon, and Mrs. Riva, the wife (and very quickly, widow) of a Colombian drug dealer, with ethnic attributes less subtle than Charo crossed with the Frito Bandito. She keeps hanging on to her roller bag filled with sparkly stilettos.

Cooper has a lot to prove when she gets her first chance in the field after a mishap involving the tasering of a teenager who yelled “Shotgun” because he wanted the front passenger seat in a car. When Riva and her husband need police escorts to court so they can testify against the big drug kingpin, Cooper gets assigned to Mrs. Riva. But before they can leave the Riva’s home, two different sets of assassins show up, one pair masked.

I wonder if they will turn out to be people Cooper did not realize were untrustworthy! We haven’t seen that before!

Cooper and Mrs. Riva are very different people with very different views of the world and very different goals. The one goal that they share is not getting killed. After an APB is issued for their capture, they go on the run, arguing, hiding out, stealing, abandoning, and crashing vehicles, and all kinds of exhausting and unfunny hijinks.

It is particularly disappointing that this movie was produced and directed by women. If men foisted so many lazy jokes about Vergara’s lush figure on an audience looking for a little light entertainment, we’d decry them for sexism. Well, if the sparkly shoe fits….

Parents should know that this film includes crime and law enforcement violence, with characters injured and killed, peril, chases, explosions, drugs and drug dealing, strong language, sexual references, and some gender and sexual humor.

Family discussion: Does this movie make fun of stereotypes or perpetuate them? When did the characters’ views about each other change?

If you like this, try: “Outrageous Fortune” and “Midnight Run”

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True Story

Posted on April 16, 2015 at 3:20 pm

A reporter in disgrace for fabricating details of a story sits across the table from an orange-jumpsuited prisoner, accused of murdering his wife and three children. They have more in common than either of them expected. They are both outcasts. They are both unable or unwilling to explain their actions.

And they both used the name Michael Finkel. The reporter was given that name at birth and it appeared on the byline of his stories in the New York Times Magazine, including the one that cost him his job and his reputation. The man who murdered his family used that name when he fled to Mexico to escape capture. The real Michael Finkel, in seclusion at his home in Montana following his humiliating dismissal, got a phone call when the murderer was arrested, asking him for comment. With nothing else to do, and with the thought that this might be the kind of big story that get him back to a job in journalism, the real Michael Finkel, or as real as sometime just fired for lying can be (Jonah Hill), drove to Oregon to visit the man who was accused of killing his family. His real name, by the way, was Chris Longo (James Franco).

Co-writer/director Rupert Goold has a lot of ideas to explore in this film, and some work much better than others. The focus should be on the parallels between the two men, what links them, the ways they tried to use each other, and the resentments and differences that separate them. But Goold wastes Felicity Jones (“The Theory of Everything”) as Finkel’s girlfriend, with distracting diversions like an ominous shot of her running (for exercise) through the woods. She does as well as possible with a scene where her character confronts Longo, but it is artificial and stagey.

Franco perfectly captures the superficial charm that occasionally slips to reveal fierce underlying anger and self-justification. Hill is a bit out of his depth, or more likely the Finkel character is underwritten. We should be able to see his anger and self-justification, too. And he is lost in the scene where he is grappling with a moral dilemma or trying to consider the rights of anyone but himself. He is better at showing us Finkel’s arrogance and his need for approval. When Longo says he took Finkel’s name because he was a fan, Finkel is unabashedly complimented. After his humiliating dismissal, he gravitates toward approval like a moth toward a flame. And we know how that turns out.

The ironic title reminds us that we can never really know the true story; there are always too many conflicting versions, too much that is just unknowable. And yet the difference between Finkel, who violated the most fundamental principles of journalism by combining the details of the Africans he met to tell it as a story about one individual, and the movie of his own story is that fiction is supposed to convey larger truths. It is not at all clear that this one does.

Parents should know that this film concerns the murder of a wife and children. There are some disturbing and grisly images, as well as child slavery and discussion of beatings, deception, some strong language, and drinking.

Family discussion: Why did Jill visit Chris? How did Chris and Mike try to con one another and who was most successful?

If you like this, try: “Capote” and “The Jinx” and Finkel’s book, Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa

Run All Night

Posted on March 12, 2015 at 5:24 pm

Two guys with the understanding of what they have lost and what they have paid to be where they are that only comes with sit opposite each other, drinks on the table between them. They must, at last, reckon with the truth that can no longer be avoided. That would be Ed Harris and Liam Neeson, who must be asking themselves how two such accomplished actors in so many prestige projects got stuck in this dumb bang bang crash bang of a movie that only takes time away from its various dumb shootout scenes for its various dumb talking scenes. We already knew from the use of a mournful soloist singing “Danny Boy” in the trailer — for a movie about Irish guys and crime? How refreshing! — that this was going to be a tired old retread. But it’s a very, very tired old retread.

Harris and Neeson play Sean and Jimmy, two old Irish guys from New York. They are lifetime friends who literally know where the bodies are buried. They have both sinned in order to survive, betraying those closest to them. Both sinned to prevent the greater sin of not being able to care for their families. Now Sean is prosperous and powerful, still paying off most of the local police force to stay out of his way. Jimmy is a burn-out, still under Sean’s protection because of old times. Sean promises Jimmy that at the end they will “cross the line together.”

Both men have grown sons. Sean’s son Danny is a cocky cokehead who is trying to persuade his father to to business with some Albanian drug dealers. Sean says he is now completely legitimate and turns them down. Danny, who clearly has not ever watched “The Godfather,” disagrees with his father in front of the Albanians. He has also already not just taken money from them to make this deal, he has spent it.

Jimmy’s son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) is a law-abiding citizen, who wants nothing to do with his father. He has a beautiful pregnant wife and two adorable daughters, just to ramp up the emotional heft in as obvious a manner as possible. He ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, seeing the wrong things. Danny tries to kill Michael, so Jimmy kills Danny to save Michael’s life.

Sean tells Jimmy that he is going to “come after Michael with everything I got.” Once Michael is dead, he will kill Jimmy, too. So, the rest of the movie is basically just run with a gun stuff.

The shootouts are staged pretty well, but yikes, they cannot stand up under the constant intrusion of a string of you-gotta-be-kidding-me moments. I’m not talking about details like where the endless ammo comes from, or how Michael got to be adept at using a gun. I’m talking about the detour to visit someone in the hospital, or the isn’t-that-convenient discovery of an old photo of trip to the kind of remote location you might send someone to get away from danger with the address helpfully written on the back. And then there’s the way Jimmy snaps back into super-assassin mode despite being severely impaired and near delirium tremens only an hour before. And there’s a weird John Henry vibe when Jimmy has go up against a high-tech hitman with all kinds of nifty laser aiming devices, plus flack gear and bluetooth police channel receiver, and all Jimmy has is a shotgun that might have been left behind by Daniel Boone.

Harris and Neeson look exhausted. It is not because their characters are worn down by all the bad choices they have made or by how much their sons hate them, or because the actors had to work so hard to make any part of this dumb mess watchable. The most the accomplish is making their previous AARP action films like “Taken,” “Man on a Ledge,” and even “Non-Stop” look better by comparison.

Parents should know that this film has very strong and graphic violence, with many characters injured and killed, disturbing and bloody images, fire, drinking, smoking, drug use, drug dealing, car chases and crashes, and very strong language with crude sexual references.

Family discussion: Sean and Jimmy both have regrets about their choices. How do they respond differently? What could Sean have done to prevent what happened to his son?

If you like this, try: “John Wick” and “Taken”

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Action/Adventure Crime

List: The Best Movie Con Games and Grifters

Posted on February 26, 2015 at 3:45 pm

In honor of this week’s release of “Focus,” here are some of my favorite movies about con games and grifters. Remember that “con” comes from “confidence.” A con man (or woman) makes you believe in them and have confidence in their schemes. And cons make great movies. If you haven’t seen these, crank up your Neflix queue.

1. The Sting This Best Picture Oscar winner stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford — along with the Oscar-winning ragtime score.

2. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Michael Caine and Steve Martin play con men outdoing each other in this remake of “Bedtime Story” with David Niven and Marlon Brando.

3. House of Games David Mamet is fascinated by con men, and both this film and The Spanish Prisoner are about characters caught up in elaborate cons.

4. American Hustle The FBI did actually collaborate with real-life con men in a sting operation that ended up taking down Members of Congress. David O. Russell’s film stars Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and an unforgettable Jennifer Lawrence as one of the few people in the story who isn’t conning anyone.

5. Criminal John C. Reilly, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Diego Luna star in this remake of the twisty con story Nine Queens.

6. Confidence Dustin Hoffman gives one of his best performances as a crime boss whose bag man gets conned by Edward Burns.

7. The Music Man Professor Harold Hill sells band equipment and then skips town before it arrives, until he meets a pretty piano teacher named Marian in this most glorious of musical comedy romances.

8. The Rainmaker Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn star in the story of a farm community during a drought and the man who says he can make it rain.

9. Matchstick Men A con man struggling with OCD meets his daughter for the first time.

10. F for Fake Orson Welles is something of a con man himself in this documentary about two of the 20th century’s most notorious cheaters.

The Jinx: HBO Series About a Millionaire Murderer

Posted on February 8, 2015 at 3:57 pm

Robert Durst, heir to a vast fortune from New York real estate, has had a life has been punctuated by tragedy. When he was seven years old, his mother was killed when she fell off the roof of their home, a possible suicide. He says he saw it happen, but as with much of what he says, it is not clear whether that is true. The other tragic deaths around him may have been murders he committed, though he has only admitted to one and for that one he was found not guilty by a jury.

Durst’s beautiful young wife, a medical student, disappeared in 1982, and her body has never been found. Eighteen years later, the case was reopened but the key witness was murdered. That case has never been solved. In 2000, Durst moved to Texas and began dressing as a woman, apparently not to transition but just as a disguise. The following year, his neighbor in Texas, an elderly man named Morris Black, was murdered, cut into pieces, and thrown into the bay. Durst, who was later found to have the neighbor’s drivers license, was tried for murder. He acknowledged that he had In 2003, used a paring knife, two saws and an axe to dismember Black’s body before dumping his remains in Galveston Bay, but said he had killed the man in self-defense. The jury found him not guilty.

“The Jinx” is a new HBO documentary series from director Andrew Jarecki (“Capturing the Friedmans”) about the strange and murderous, probably multi-murderous, life of Durst, who was played by Ryan Gosling in All Good Things, also from Jarecki, who spoke to me about making the film. “If people say, ‘Why did you have her do that?’ We can say, ‘It actually happened.’ If they say, ‘It isn’t realistic,’ I say, ‘It happened. What’s your definition of realistic?’”

“The Jinx” is Jarecki’s documentary version of the story, with first-time interviews of Durst and his brother. It premieres tonight, February 8, 2015.

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Crime Documentary Television