From Paris With Love

Posted on June 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm

John Travolta loves to be bad. And so he is clearly having a blast — in both senses of the word — in this film, playing a bald guy with an earring who likes to shoot first and think later. As Charlie Wax, a top ops guy who loves to break rules and mess with heads, he gives new meaning to the word trigger-happy.

If only it was as much fun for the audience. But this movie was clearly more about entertaining the star than the ticket-buyers. Wax arrives in Paris noisy and obnoxious, arguing with security about bringing his “energy drink” into the country. Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a straight-laced, chess master, embassy aide who is hoping for a promotion to black ops, slaps a diplomatic sticker on Wax’s bag to get him through. Then they are off for an odd-couple buddy-cop joy ride that involves drug dealers, terrorists, and many opportunities for shooting first and not sticking around to ask questions later. For no particular reason, Reece ends up carrying a vase filled with cocaine through many different locations like takeout.

Even by the low bar for this genre, “From Paris With Love” feels under-scripted. There are a few good set-ups from director Pierre Morel (“District B13”), including a scene in a stairwell where our updates on the action come from the bodies falling past a stunned Reece and a shoot-out in a warehouse filled with mannequins lined up like terra cotta warriors. But it misses when it asks us to take Wax even a little bit seriously as a good guy. The title’s reference to James Bond and a painful reminder of Travolta’s better days in “Pulp Fiction” just ring hollow. Return to sender.

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The Square

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 8:06 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violence and language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive and graphic violence including guns, arson, and car crashes, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	May 7, 2010

When the first 10 minutes of film introduce us to an illicit affair, a kickback scheme, and a hidden bag filled with money, we know we’re in for a twisty thriller, and “The Square” delivers.

Brothers Nash and Joel Edgerton have been compared to the Coens, and “The Square” is in some ways a tribute to the Coens’ “Blood Simple,” with its theme of the tangled web of deception and betrayal. Ray is a successful construction manager working on a resort project, comfortably married but having an affair with Carla (Claire van der Boom), a pretty, young hairdresser uncomfortably married to a man who has never told her about the hidden bag of cash in their laundry room ceiling and doesn’t know she knows about it.

Carla tells Ray she will get the cash so they can run away together. But in order to deflect suspicion from them, they will have to make it look like the money was burned in a fire. Ray hires Billy (co-screenwriter Joel Edgerton) to burn her house down while they are all enjoying a Christmas picnic and therefore thoroughly alibi-ed. Things start to wrong, and then wronger, and then, well, if you’ve ever read a novel by James M. Cain (or tried to make a cell phone call with a fading battery or leave a message with an unreliable person) you know that things will spin sickeningly out of control with the inevitable logic of a nightmare.

The noir-ish plot works well in the sunny Australian setting. It’s summer in December Down Under, which adds to the disorienting tone of the film for Northern Hemisphere-ites. The Edgertons keep us wavering from support of the characters who are our on-screen representatives to horror as they cross over line after line, finally giving up any pretense of rationalization as each step gets them more directly involved and more deeply enmeshed. Every encounter leaves them more culpable, their victims less deserving. No wonder Ray doodles row after row of men in claustrophobic little boxes stacked on top of each other. They look like tiny prison cells, or maybe the filmed frames of a movie thriller.

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Crime Drama Movies -- format

The Lovely Bones

Posted on April 19, 2010 at 6:25 pm

Peter Jackson, whose film versions of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy could be a textbook example of how to adapt a literary work for screen, could find his latest film, “The Lovely Bones” as the example on the next page of how not to. His sincerity and artistry are there, but unlike Tolkien’s triology, Alice Sebold’s book-club favorite is not essentially cinematic. What made the book successful with critics and the public was not the story but the language. Jackson’s efforts to translate the graceful, lucid prose into images loses all of the story’s delicacy and becomes cloying and dissonant. Instead of a poetic meditation on life and the human spirit it becomes more like “CSI” if one of the detectives was dead.

As in the book, we know right from the beginning that Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan of “Atonement” and “I Could Never Be Your Woman”) is dead and telling us her story in a tone of calm, slightly distant regret. She was 14, the oldest daughter in a happy, loving family. She had a crush on a boy named Ray (Reece Ritchie). She and her father made meticulously constructed boats in bottles. And then, one night, walking home from school , a neighbor invites her to see a cool clubhouse he dug beneath the cornfields, filled with candles and snacks and board games. And he kills her.

In the movie’s best scene we and Susie both think that she has escaped the killer (Stanley Tucci) as she bursts out of the underground room and races through the streets. But then we realize just before she does that it is only her spirit that survives. Susie has been murdered. She will watch the rest of her story from a personal heaven, an in-between place for a soul that is not ready to let go.

But the lyricism of the book translates on screen into under-imagined images that look like stock photos used for screen savers or the discreet artwork of a mid-range hotel. Leafy trees, aquamarine skies, fluttering fields, and of course spa music (from Brian Eno) and quavery voice-overs.

Ronen is breathtaking, and Susan Sarandon adds some life as the boozy grandmother who steps in when the parents are devastated by Susie’s loss. The script softens the brutality of the story and irons out some of the sub-plots. But it gives us too much information about the less interesting parts of the story and not enough about what we really care about. But we are never sure whether we are there to see justice done or to put Susie’s soul to rest and by the time Susie meets up with her murderer’s other victims and returns to fulfill one last human longing, it feels more like a campfire ghost story than a meditation on love, loss and the enduring human spirit.

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Based on a book Crime Drama

The Informant!

Posted on February 25, 2010 at 8:08 am

Like some of the food made with the substances produced by the corporation at the heart of this story, this movie is pleasant but leaves a sour aftertaste. It is inspired by the real-life story of one of the most massive cases of corporate corruption and crime in US history. Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) paid the then-record antitrust fine of $100 million and its top executives went to jail because of a global conspiracy to fix prices and production in violation of antitrust laws. None of this would have been uncovered without the cooperation of a top executive named Mark Whitacre. This film’s decision to present the story as farce and to focus on Whitacre and his flakier qualities is entertaining but unsatisfying.

Matt Damon plays Whitacre with an extra 30 pounds and a toupee that looks like a bird’s nest. He is a PhD but he is less an absent-minded professor type than a free-association, mind-like-a-pinball machine type, and we are privy to his thoughts as they go off in an almost random assortment of directions, often missing the point of what is going on around him as he muses about various questions and reassures himself. When the FBI is brought in to investigate an extortion attempt he reported, Whitacre tells the agent (“Star Trek’s: Enterprise’s” Scott Bakula) that he knows about something much bigger. This leads to an undercover operation spanning years and continents as Whitacre wears a wire to tape more than 200 conversations. He was one of the highest-ranking corporate officials ever to work as an informant. He was also embezzling millions of dollars and having a breakdown, possibly as a result of the stress of leading a double life.

Director Steven Soderburgh also gave us a moving drama about the feisty heroine Erin Brockovich, whose failings were quirky and endearing. Now he brings us a story about another real-life whistleblower presented as farce, with a bright, sit-com-y score by Marvin Hamlisch and the pacing and fonts of a 70’s comedy, familiar faces from television (including Tom and Dick Smothers), and seems to do everything possible to keep us from caring about the squirrelly main character. Whitacre, an accomplished man with a PhD (and now has several post-graduated degrees) who was a rising star at the company, comes across as clumsy, clueless, and narcissistic. We hear his random thoughts about an incongruous variety of topics. They come across as the musings of a doofus but they also show us his scientific curiosity and analytic distance. And we see how both contribute to his success and his downfall.

The film touches on the incongruity of his being sentenced to a jail term more than twice that of the executives responsible for crimes many times the order of magnitude in size and impact, but the reaction it seems to expect from us is a “what do you expect” rather than any sense of outrage. Once again, those who steal a small amount from hundreds of millions of people receive nominal consequences while those who steal a substantial sum from one place take the fall. Economists estimated that the cost to American citizens of one price-fixing case involving electrical equipment in 1961 was greater than all of the robberies of that year. The cost of the ADM price-fixing, based on the explicit view that “the customers are the enemy,” is incalculable. This film perpetuates the lack of understanding about these crimes in favor of cheap shots at the life-shattering impact of the investigation and the enabling, even exploitive behavior of the law enforcement officials who used him and then left him to deal with the consequences. Worst of all, it leaves us with a feeling of smug superiority when it should be illuminating the kind of thinking from both corporate and government officials that led us to the current financial collapse.

District 13: Ultimatum

Posted on February 4, 2010 at 10:07 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some violence, language and drug material
Profanity:	Some strong language (a lot of s-words)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drugs, alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant action violence, martial arts, guns, explosions, missiles, crashes
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, inter-racial romance
Date Released to Theaters:	February 5, 2010

Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle make a sensationally appealing team in this follow-up to their hit film “District B13.” Belle is the creator of “parkour,” a stunt spectacular that turns an entire city into an obstacle course. It has become popular — the opening chase scene in “Casino Royale,” real-life competitions, and thousands of of do-it-yourself videos — something between gymnastics, acrobatics, and levitation as people jump through windows and between buildings. Raffaelli is the best movie martial arts guy since Jet Li. And they have a great chemistry as a loner and a special forces cop who join forces against pervasive institutional corruption.

There is a pointed reference to real-life institutional corruption (including a government-connected mega-corporation called “Harriburton”) but let’s be honest, this is all about the bang-bang and the bang-bang is done with a wink and a boatload of style.

It is 2016. The undesirables of Paris live in a walled section of the city, District 13. Belle plays Leito. He operates on his own but he has cordial relationships with the various ethnic factions. Raffaelli plays Damian, something of a super-cop, who brings down a powerful drug lord using his skills as a detective, strategist, fighter, and something of a disguise artist as well. When he is framed by corrupt cops and Leito comes across evidence of a set-up to start a riot in District 13, they team up.

Damian takes on batches of baddies at a time, once while protecting a priceless Van Gogh. Leito leaps across rooftops with the hang time of a helium balloon. Later on a crime boss named Tao (Elodie Yung) joins in when they assemble a coalition of gangs to prevent their home from being destroyed by missiles. Sort of.

Okay, no one is taking any of this too seriously. But the stunts and fight scenes are electric and entertaining and the film-making is kinetic and a lot of fun. For the character’s sake, I hope that happy ending holds, but for my own, I’d like to see another bunch of bad guys so Raffaelli and Belle — and Yung — can go after them again.