The Adjustment Bureau

Posted on March 3, 2011 at 5:54 pm

The first great movie of 2011 is thought-provoking, exciting, and swooningly romantic. Writer/director George Nolfi takes on the biggest questions of all — faith and doubt, fate and free will, God, love, the meaning of existence — with an absorbing story about who we are and why we do what we do.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a popular politician with a bad habit of losing control that has just cost him an election. As he gets ready to deliver a safe and appropriate concession speech, he has a brief meeting with a young woman and feels an immediate connection. And then he gives the concession speech and it is frank and outspoken and of course, appealing to the voters who find his candor refreshing. His political prospects are bright again, but he can’t stop thinking about the girl.

We’re used to seeing people, especially people in power, surrounded by fixers, arrangers, smoothers, tweakers — publicists, managers, agents, advisers, lawyers. David has those, including his best friend/campaign manager. But there is something different going on. There are men in hats giving each other odd directions with a strangely compelling sense of urgency, as though they are organizing a rocket launch. But why would someone be deployed to spill coffee on David’s shirt?

To keep him off a bus, for one reason (though the deeper reason will not be revealed for a while). But the coffee isn’t spilled in time. He gets on the bus. And the girl from election night is there. Her name is Elise (Emily Blunt). She is a dancer. And David is besotted with her.

The men in hats are from an Adjustment Bureau. They have enormous power and a secret system of doorways that allow them to bypass miles in a few steps. The hat men step out of the doorways like a less cheery version of the minions who keep things running smoothly at Disney World.

The Adjustment Bureau doesn’t want David and Elise to be together, and they are acting on the highest authority. But even that authority cannot stop the most powerful force in the universe.

A knockout cast and imaginative visuals provide a sumptuous setting for the romance. Anthony Mackie, moving with the graceful economy of a cheetah, is the Adjuster who has come to care for his charge. Other Adjusters include “Mad Men’s” John Slattery as a harried bureaucrat and Terence Stamp as the ruthless enforcer brought in when all else has failed. Damon makes David intelligent, brave, sensitive, vulnerable, curious, and great-hearted, and Blunt makes Elise everything a man like that would be willing to risk it all for. There are a few surprising rough edges for such a well-crafted story. Elise’s reason for being in the men’s room where she meets David for the first time is oddly off-putting, a loose end that is never explained. And a story David tells about his political inspiration would have to have occurred about 15 years before he was born, unless he is the youngest-looking baby boomer in history. But what does work in this movie works exceptionally well, a bracing engagement with the reason for everything that gives us a good reason to remember this movie for a long time.

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Beastly

Posted on March 3, 2011 at 5:49 pm

It’s the great challenge for all the versions of “Beauty and the Beast” that no one seems able to overcome: the beast is always a far more interesting, appealing, and yes, attractive character than the good-looking but bland prince he wants so desperately to return to. When handsome, wealthy, arrogant prep school senior Kyle (“I Am Number Four’s Alex Pettyfer) is cursed by a witch his “beast” face, covered with exotic scars and tattoos, is more expressive and somehow more real than the pretty boy he was before.

In this latest re-telling of the French fairy tale that dates back to the 18th century, Kyle gets into trouble when he runs for the presidency of the school’s Green Club even though he admits in his campaign speech that he is only doing it because it will look good on his college applications. “Don’t vote for me for my commitment to the environment,” he tells his fellow students. “I don’t have one.” Despite an opposing speech from a gothy-looking girl named Kendra (Mary Kate Olsen), he is elected. But beating her isn’t enough. He plays a cruel prank on Kendra, humiliating her in front of her classmates. And so she curses him. He will look like a beast, as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside, unless within one year he can persuade someone to say, “I love you.”

His father (Peter Krause of “Parenthood” and “Sports Night”) is a television personality who believes that “people like people who look good.” He finds an apartment for Kyle with a housekeeper (Lisa Gay Hamilton) and a blind tutor (the always-terrific Neil Patrick Harris) to care for him and leaves him alone. Kyle sulks and refuses to talk to anyone for five months. (In one of the movie’s cleverest conceits, everyone at school accepts his absence without question because they think he is at rehab.) But Lindy, the quiet scholarship student (“High School Musical’s” Vanessa Hudgens) gives him a reason to want to go out. And more important, she gives him a reason to think about someone else — taking care of her and being close to her. She gives him a reason to want to be liked. And that means being seen.

I liked the way the story plays with the framework of the fairy tale, giving Lindy a reason to have to move into Kyle’s place, isolating them both.

Pettyfer, a very limited performer in his earlier films, has a looser, more confident, more genuine feel here. He even handles Kyle’s funny lines well; he admits how he found the poem he wants to share with Lindy: “I Googled ‘modern poetry’ and ‘impress girls.'” In an era of bullies and mean girls, “Gossip Girls” and “Pretty Little Liars,” it’s nice to have such a tenderhearted fairy tale.

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Take Me Home Tonight

Posted on March 3, 2011 at 5:44 pm

This is the movie John Cusack never made, a loving tribute to the 1980’s and especially to the music and movies of the era from “Say Anything” to “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” “Take Me Home Tonight” doesn’t go for cheap “had we but known” or “how could we be so cheesy/wear that/like them?” jokes (I’m talking to you, Hot Tub Time Machine) but instead relies on our nostalgia for the 80’s and for what we did to muddle through them. It takes us home to “I Love the 80’s” land with the opening shot: “Video Killed the Radio Star” played on an enormous boom box.

Twins Matt (Topher Grace) and Wendy (Anna Faris) Franklin have recently graduated from college and are still living at home. Wendy is on the brink of the next step, with a serious boyfriend (her real-life husband Chris Pratt) and applications to graduate school. But Matt seems stuck. He has a job behind the counter at Suncoast Video. And he is still dreaming of the girl he had a crush on in high school, golden girl Tori Frederking (Teresa Palmer). If only, Matt tells Wendy and his best friend Barry (Dan Fogler) so often that they recite it along with him — if only there had been an opening for him to pursue her back at Shermer High School (yes, the name comes from “The Breakfast Club”). And then, Tori walks into the store.

In a spasm of fear, desperation, and longing, Matt impulsively tries to act like the kind of person he thinks would impress Tori. He pretends not to remember her. And, when he finds out she’s working for the (now-defunct) financial firm Drexel Burnham, he pretends to be working at Goldman Sachs. They agree to meet up at a big party, cuing up all of the ingredients for a very wild night.

It has shoulder pads for girls and blazer sleeves pushed up to the elbow for guys, “Come on Eileen,” Wang Chung, and “Straight Outta Compton” (sung by Matt and Barry as they steal a car to impress Tori) and a trampoline scene like Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins in “Big.” It’s all with such unabashed affection for the era and its characters that it is hard not to share it.

Grace, who produced the film, is one of Hollywood’s most likable leading men with comic timing unmatched since (while we’re talking about the 80’s) Michael J. Fox. The scene where Matt thinks the worst has happened, only to find that more bad news is ahead, works far better than it has any right to. As Matt’s unconstrained id counterpart, Tony-winner Dan Fogler spends a lot of time out of control (and some of it coked out as well), but he manages to give Barry some sweetness, too, whether competing in an impromptu dance-off or mingling lust and terror at an invitation from what 20 years later would be called a cougar. Faris is underused but a pleasure to watch as always and Palmer brings a pleasant freshness and decency to the underwritten dream girl role. It won’t make anyone want to go back to the 80’s, but it might make them want to see Grace’s next film.

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Comedy Romance

It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Posted on February 23, 2011 at 3:57 pm

A stressed-out teenager impetuously checks himself into a mental hospital in this semi-autobiographical tale based on It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. It is brought to screen by the talented writer-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have demonstrated their understanding of teenagers struggling with difficult situations in the understated “Sugar” and “Half Nelson.” Here, they show a more playful side, with witty and imaginative fantasy sequences that make the unabashed decency and kindness at its heart even more touching.

Keir Gilchrist plays Craig, a 16-year-old student at a Manhattan high school for high-achievers. He is feeling a great deal of pressure to succeed and frightened by thoughts of suicide. He visits the emergency room and when the doctor tells him he can go home, he pleads to be admitted, not understanding that it will mean he must be kept under observation for five days. “I thought you guys could do something quick,” he says. “I have school tomorrow.” Craig also does not realize that the area where the teenagers are treated is being renovated, so he will be staying on the adult ward.

Immediately dubbed “Cool Craig” by a friendly patient named Bobby (Zach Galifanakis of “The Hangover”), Craig discovers a through-the-looking-glass world that challenges the connections and assumptions of his “normal” life. The kind psychiatrist (Viola Davis) immediately recognizes that all Craig needs is some breathing room and reassurance. That gives Craig a chance to look around. He develops confidence when he sees many people far worse off than he is, and when he sees that he can give and accept help. Art and music therapy help him think of what he can express instead of how he will be evaluated. And a pretty fellow patient (Emma Roberts, with her aunt Julia’s lovely smile) is the best medicine of all.

Boden and Fleck, whose previous films had an understated naturalism, make the most of the heightened sensibility of the mental ward setting with sequences that take us inside Craig’s fantasies and memories. In one, we see Craig remembering an incident when he was five, drawing inside a tent in his parents’ living room. The present-day Craig is shown as a five year old, and then in his teen-age persona in the five-year-old’s pajamas. When pushed into being the vocalist in music therapy, Craig swings into a deliriously Bowie-fied version of “Under Pressure.” Boden and Fleck continue to show skill in casting and directing. Gilchrist, Roberts, and Zoe Kravitz as the classmate Craig wishes he could date are all first-rate, and Galifanakis leaves every bit of his stand-up persona behind to give a real performance with subtlety and grace.

It is a relief to see a movie about mental illness that recognizes the real pain but focuses on the real humanity of everyone involved, patients, staff, and Craig’s family. Craig first comes into the emergency room and tells the intake nurse that he wants to kill himself. When she hands him a clipboard and tells him to fill out a form it comes across not as callous but as reassuring. Treating his fear as routine is part of what makes him feel safe there. Boden and Fleck are now among the most reliable and promising film-makers around.

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You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Posted on February 16, 2011 at 3:58 pm

Unpleasant people behave selfishly until it stops, rather than ends, in this latest trifle from Woody Allen, who once again manages to persuade A-list talent to help him make a C-list movie.

It’s another romantic roundelay, with a divorced couple and their unhappily married daughter making a dreary series of bad romantic choices. Anthony Hopkins plays Alfie, a wealthy man who leaves his wife of 40 years because she makes him feel old, and marries a prostitute he’s known for two months (Lucy Punch). The ex-wife, Helena (Gemma Jones), comforts herself by consulting with a cheerful psychic (Pauline Collins) and dropping in uninvited on her unhappy daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), and her unhappier husband, Roy (Josh Brolin). Roy has struggled to fulfill the promise of his first novel. After a series of failures, he is desperately hoping his latest manuscript will be accepted by the publisher. And he is also hoping to find a way to meet the beautiful neighbor (Freda Pinto of “Slumdog Millionaire”) he spies on through her window. Sally is smitten with her boss (Antonio Banderas).

The movie has little energy and less sense of purpose. The story is inert and so are the characters. Every one of them is monumentally self-absorbed and not one of them is meaningfully different at the end of the movie than he or she is at the beginning. Or if they are, we don’t know as we have long since lost interest in anything other than seeing some of the finest actors in the English-speaking world struggle to make something out of these underwritten roles.

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Comedy Drama Romance