Everybody’s Fine

Posted on February 24, 2010 at 8:00 am

Parents try very hard to protect their children and at the same time teach them to be independent. And then we struggle to accept the consequences. That is what has happened to Frank Goode (Robert DeNiro), a recent widower preparing for a visit from his four grown children. When all four of them cancel, he decides to get his suitcase out of the attic and go see each of them. Well, he goes to visit each of them — without calling to let them know. But seeing them will take a little longer.

Based on the 1990 Italian film “Stanno tutti bene,” this is a quietly moving story of a family struggling to re-connect. Like many families, this one had one member, the mother, who operated as a communications hub and mediator. Without her, the grown children feel that their primary obligation is to protect their father, in part because that is what their mother did and in part because no one seems to know how to tell him that one of his children is in terrible trouble.

Frank takes the train, telling the other passengers that he helped to create the miles of telephone wire they are passing by. A million miles of wire to raise his family. And now, his children are constantly on cell phones that communicate without the tangible connection of wires. And no one is communicating with him.

What Frank thought of as encouragement they now see as impossibly high expectations, and each of them is afraid of letting him down. When Frank first arrives, he sees the children as they were. The married woman with a teen-age son (Kate Beckinsale) appears to him as a little girl (Beckinsale’s real-life daughter, Lily Mo Sheen). Director Kirk Jones adds a dreamlike, poetic tone to the story with these encounters, especially one near the end of the film when Frank sees the family gathering he was hoping for, with his sons and daughters appearing to him as the children they were, but letting him see and tell them the truth. Jones, who also wrote the screenplay, makes good use of the vast and varied American landscape as a metaphor for the distances and the connections between the characters. The simple, direct mode of the telephone lines Frank covered so carefully has splintered into a dozen ways of staying in touch — ways that can just as easily be frustrating just-misses that make us feel even more isolated. The movie gently shows us the challenges of maintaining those connections and the inevitability of getting it wrong sometimes — but also that even with that certainty, the importance of trying is what keeps everybody fine.

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Fame

Posted on January 12, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Less a movie than a mosaic, this remake of the 1980 classic with the Oscar-winning title anthem about the high school for the performing arts has been re-imagined for the hyper-linked and just plain hyper 21st century. As in the original, we follow the stories of aspiring performers from their first audition through four years of high school. But this time, so many characters are thrown at us that we never connect with any of them. This film is as much an artifact of its era as the dancing-in-the-streets first one, perhaps in ways it did not intend. It is a revealing reflection of its target audience: kids used to keeping up to date via tweets and Facebook status lines, the generation that cannot see the line between access to information and understanding the information’s context and import.

It indicates more than it shows, not because it is subtle, but because it is frantic, trying to follow the lives of ten students over four years in less than two hours. Narrative is pushed to one side. Even the too-brief but excellent musical numbers are chopped up and intercut not so much as an artistic statement as a recognition that society as a whole now meets the clinical definition of ADD.

The talented cast passes by so quickly it is like watching a 107-minute trailer. Naturi Naughton makes a strong impression in vocal numbers that include “Out Here on My Own” from the 1980 film. Kay Panabaker has a sweet honesty that comes across well on screen and more than any of the others she shows us the difference in her character as she grows up and gains confidence. An exceptionally strong cast of adults adds some depth to the faculty roles, including “Will and Grace’s” Megan Mullally and “Frasier’s” Bebe Neuwirth and Kelsey Grammer along with movie and theater veteran Charles S. Dutton. If only they had been able to sit down writer Alison Burnett and director Kevin Tancharoen to give them the kind of stern pep talk about craft and discipline that they give to their students, this would have been a better movie.

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Musical Remake

Sherlock Holmes

Posted on December 24, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some startling images and a scene of suggestive material
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, sedation
Violence/ Scariness:	Action violence, hanging, martial arts, guns, poison gas, and various Victorian weapons, explosions, some grotesque and grisly images including corpses
Diversity Issues:	Strong, independent, capable (if criminal) woman
Date Released to Theaters:	December 25, 2009

Perhaps even the great detective himself could not solve the mystery of why Sherlock Holmes holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for having been portrayed on screen than any other fictional character, with more than 75 actors in more than 200 movies. And it would be hard to find any movie and television detective who does not draw something from Holmes’ mastery of the power of observation (“Lie to Me,” “The Mentalist”). There is something endlessly fascinating about the idea that someone could look at us and see what others are hiding from us, and even about the idea that he could see what we are hiding, too.

So here we are again with another Sherlock Holmes, this one from Robert Downey, Jr. and director Guy Ritchie. And that means an edgier, grubbier, somewhat younger Holmes. While stage and screen versions of the stories have generally focused on Holmes as a sort of hyper-controlled super-brain with little emotion or physicality, this version expands on a reference in the original Arthur Conan Doyle texts to Holmes’ being adept at “baritsu,” a form of martial arts and has a two-fisted Holmes who fights bad guys and even mixes it up just for fun. It also focuses on the books’ notion that Holmes was good at detection because he was bad at everything else and that unless he was completely involved in a case he considered worth his attention he does not have any other way to interact with the world.

Dr. Watson, portrayed as a bit stuffy and more of a biographer than a partner for Holmes, in this version is played by the not-at-all-stuffy Jude Law as someone who struggles with his own demons (a gambling problem) and loves the adrenaline rush as well as the sense of justice and the fun of fighting along side his talented friend. But things are changing. He has met a woman he wants to marry and that means moving out of the flat on Baker Street he shares with Holmes and less time for crime-fighting.

Downey is always at his considerable best with a character who has some boundary issues and his Holmes is as taut as the violin strings he plucks between cases. His eyes are the most expressive on screen since Al Pacino, large, liquid, knowing. Downey conveys the almost compulsive, almost Aspergers aspects of the Holmes character. In one scene, he waits for Watson at a restaurant, unable to stop noticing the dark, the sad, the painful at the tables around him. He seems to drink it all in through his eyes, ears, and pores on his skin. And his need to understand and conquer the worst of humanity outside him seems connected to a struggle within himself — and between him and Irene Adler, for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote, “the woman.” Here she is deliciously played by Rachel McAdams, suiting his description of Irene as having “the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men,” and fetching in bustle and boy-clothes.

Production designer Sarah Greenwood has done a magnificent job of creating Victorian London and part of the fun is seeing some of the now-iconic structures still under construction — always a handy place for a fight scene, too. Ritchie’s kinetic camerawork lends a muscular energy that keeps the story from feeling antique. And getting used to a young, energetic Holmes who can throw a punch is not as difficult as you might think.

But other parts of the movie do not work as well. Ritchie, whose best films celebrate the gritty underworld of big and small-time crooks, seems to be more comfortable for some of the mid-level thieves, arsonists, and hoodlums Holmes and Watson run into, and every time they leave the scene a little bit of the life of the film goes with them. Mark Strong is not given nearly enough to do as the villain (titled, of course) and the mystery is not clever enough to make the resolution satisfying. You don’t have to be a super-sleuth to see the holes in the plot. Downey is better detecting than he is trading odd couple banter with Law, but so would anyone. Who could have imagined that in a Sherlock Holmes movie the fight scenes replacing the deductions would ring truer than the dialogue replacing “Elementary, my dear Watson?”

The Taking of Pelham 123

Posted on November 3, 2009 at 8:00 am

This third version of the story of a hijacked New York subway car may be superfluous but it still delivers some zip thanks to Tony Scott’s music-video flash and even a bit of heft thanks to Denzel Washington.

The 1974 version had Robert Shaw (“Jaws,” “The Sting”) as the leader of a group of trigger-happy thugs and a bitter ex-subway motorman and Walter Matthau as the transit cop working for the safe return of the hostages. The film’s great strengths were its nicely twisty plot, its superb cast of character actors (including Jerry Stiller), and its gritty feel for the city at a time of great economic turmoil and municipal decay. Then there was a made-for-TV version in 1998 with Vincent D’Onofrio and Edward James Olmos. This time, it is updated for the era of cell phones, laptops, and failing financial markets. The leader of the hijackers is John Travolta, with a 70’s porn star mustache, a prison neck tattoo, and a whole lot of attitude. He starts out at the top of Mount CrazyAngry and pretty much stays there the whole time. At the other end of the phone is transit guy Garber (Denzel Washington), who has depth of expertise and some complications in his work situation.

Director Tony Scott knows how to deliver a cinematic adrenaline rush, and there are some impressive car crashes and chases. James Gandolfini is superb as the mayor, a cross between Giuliani and Bloomberg, and there are some nice up-to-the-minute touches for the era of cell phones, wifi, and Wall Street collapses. It sacrifices some of the original’s craftiest switch-ups for action but the biggest problem is that Travolta never really connects and Washington’s fully-realized portrayal of the troubled but heroic Garber makes even more obvious Travolta’s struggle to make his character work. Travolta may steal the subway car, but it is Washington who steals the movie.

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Action/Adventure Crime Remake

Land of the Lost

Posted on October 13, 2009 at 8:00 am

“Land of the Lost” features two funny actors and a criminally underused actress tramping around an alternate reality in search of comedy but not finding much for us to laugh at.
Too raunchy for kids, too dull for anyone else, this over-budgeted and under-scripted film wastes everyone’s time, especially the audience’s. The original television series about a forest ranger and his two teenage children in a time warp land with dinosaurs and lizard people called Sleestaks was best known for effects that could hardly be called “special,” even for the 1970’s. But it had innocence and charm, while the remake has neither. It is so carelessly written that when the humanoids don’t understand English but the dinosaurs do it feels more like laziness than an attempt to be funny. It is too busy coming up with a reason for Ferrell to douse himself with dino pee to try to, for example, give the female character any — what’s the word? — character.
Will Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a discredited scientist whose theories about the particles that control space and time are not taken seriously by anyone. Then Holly (Anna Friel), a young scientist from England, tells him that she has some proof that his theories are right. Led by Will (Danny McBride) a guy who sells fireworks and lives in a trailer, they go into a cave and find themselves catapulted into an alternate universe where they are chased by dinosaurs and befriended by a missing link ape-boy named Chaka (Jorma Taccone). Ferrell’s job in the movie (big surprise) is to vibrate between neediness, panic, and arrogance and run around in his underwear. Friel’s job is to know the answer to everything (she even speaks Chaka’s language), allow herself to be (literally) pawed, look very fetching in tiny little shorts, and gaze adoringly at Ferrell. The best moments in the film come from the always-hilarious Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express,” “Tropic Thunder”), the songs of “A Chorus Line,” and, surprisingly, from Matt Lauer, playing himself.

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