The A-Team

Posted on December 15, 2010 at 12:20 pm

I love it when a plan comes together.

And I love it when a summer movie delivers all of the chases, crashes, explosions, wisecracks, and sheer exuberant fun that we have a right to expect when the weather gets warm. “The A-Team,” based on the television series of the mid-1980’s, may be silly but it is purely enjoyable.

We get to see how the fearsome foursome first met. That’s Hannibal (Liam Neeson), the cigar-chomping leader, driver and fighting powerhouse B.A. Baracus (Ultimate Fighting Champion Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson), mentally unstable pilot Murdock (District 9‘s Sharlto Copley), and social engineer (okay, con man) Face (Bradley Cooper). As frustrated Lt. Sosa (Jessica Biel) says, eight years and 80 successful missions later, they specialize in the ridiculous. Characters hang from a helicopter. They slalom down a skyscraper. They crash many vehicles and they blow many things up. This is a movie with a flying tank. Well, technically, as one character says, not flying. It’s actually hurtling to the ground after the plane that was carrying it exploded. Why? Could that really work? Don’t ask. This is not that kind of movie. Just pass the popcorn.

There are some understated shout-outs to the original, including a clever disposition of the beloved van and BA’s knuckle tattoos — “PITY” on one hand and “FOOL” on the other. And be sure to stay to the very end of the credits for one last salute.

After the prologue, we are brought up to date. Our team has completed 80 missions in eight years, all successful. Now, American troops are packing up to leave Iraq. One piece of unfinished business is a briefcase filled with engraving plates for U.S. currency. If they get into the wrong hands, our enemies could print money and destroy our economy. And there are a lot of wrong hands out there, possibly including the mercenaries/government contractors who think they’re all that and who are assigned to the retrieval operation.

This provides opportunities for many stunts, ably directed by Joe Carnahan, who co-wrote. Co-screenwriter Brian Bloom is electrifying as Pike, the leader of the contractor team. Biel does her job: fuming or melting, she is very pretty. And the quartet of actors in the lead roles are an A-Team of their own, bringing their own screen chemistry and sense of fun to the characters they play. Neeson chomps on his cigar with panache. Copley makes Murdoch’s proficiency with accents and languages both evidence of his instability and his mastery. Jackson makes BA’s soul-searching feel real without throwing the entire movie off-kilter by making it too serious. Early on, when Face gets punched in the jaw, Cooper’s eyes widen in delight and he says, “Now it’s a party!” Yes, it is.

Opening this Week: ‘The Karate Kid’ and ‘The A-Team’

Posted on June 9, 2010 at 8:00 am

Karate Kid Poster.jpg It’s “I Love the 80’s Week” as the summer kicks off into high gear. I call these “Lunchbox Movies” because I believe the only reason remakes like this get made is that the now-grown-up studio executives were such fans as kids that they carried the lunchboxes. That’s why we have “The Karate Kid,” more a re-imagining than a remake of the 1984 original, with Jaden Smith (son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith) as an American kid in China who learns Kung Fu (so maybe it should be called “The Kung Fu Kid,” but oh, well). Instead of Japanese Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) in the original, this one has martial arts superstar Jackie Chan as the handyman who happens to be a kung fu master.
And then there’s “The A-Team,” based on the 1983-87 television series starring George Peppard, Mr. T, Dirk Benedict, and Dwight Schultz as members of a ragtag team of former military operatives, wrongfully accused and dishonorably discharged, who go around righting wrongs and kicking butts — and blowing things up, big time. The movie version stars Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, District 9‘s Sharlto Copley, and Ultimate Fighting Champion Quinton “Rampage” Jackson.
Reviews coming soon — stay tuned!

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Opening This Week

Valentine’s Day

Posted on May 18, 2010 at 8:00 am

Ladies and gentlemen, let the record show that the Twitter movie has arrived.

“Valentine’s Day” consists of a bunch of incidents and concepts and indications that in our omni-media world are taken for stories, though all of them would fit within Twitter’s 140-character limit. And it would take less time to list the people who are not in this movie than the people who are. The opening credits, with one name at a time, threaten to continue for the first hour of the movie. I’ll save time with this summary: just about anyone in Hollywood who has ever been described as cute or adorable is in the cast, with a full complement of Jennifers plus a Jessica, a Julia, a couple of Taylors, four Oscar winners, and a Queen.

Love, Actually-style — or, actually, Love American Style-style, this is a bouquet of skits that are variations on the themes of love — old, new, familiar, surprising, poignant, frustrating, and joyous. I do not use the terms “deep” or “unpredictable” or “witty.” Like a dime store box of valentine chocolates, it is not fancy, and some of the ingredients may not be ideal, but they are still tasty.

At the heart of the story is Ashton Kutcher as Reed, an idealistic and kind-hearted florist who starts off Valentine’s Day by proposing to his career-focused girlfriend (Jessica Alba) and is overjoyed when she agrees. As he goes on through his busiest day of the year, taking orders and making deliveries, he encounters many of the other characters observing the holiday in their own ways. A young boy needs flowers for the most beautiful girl in school. A doctor needs flowers for both his wife and his girlfriend.

Also — a teacher (Jennifer Garner) decides to surprise her boyfriend by flying out to see him. A young man newly in love and an older man married for decades must cope with disappointing revelations. A football player (Eric Dane) and a sportscaster (Jamie Foxx) think about what they are missing by being alone as a publicist (Jessica Biel) wonders if anyone is coming to her annual “I Hate Valentine’s Day” party with its ceremonial bashing of a heart-shaped pinata. A young couple finds that no matter how carefully they have planned their first sexual encounter, they cannot anticipate every problem. And a US Army captain (Julie Roberts) and a businessman (Bradley Cooper) seated next to each other on a 14-hour flight, talk about life and love and how precious the time we spend with those we love can be.

Some of the segments work better than others and a few sour moments intrude when the movie wants us as well as its characters to shrug off certain choices that to my mind are unsettling. The revenge of a woman who was cheated on is more creepy than vindicating. And I thought I made this clear, people: NO MORE RACING THROUGH AIRPORT SCENES IN ROMANTIC COMEDIES.

Director Garry Marshall keeps things moving so that by the time you realize one story is not working very well we are on to the next. He tosses in many bits of pop songs throughout just to make sure we don’t miss anything (the first-time couple drives off to “Feels Like the First Time,” get it?). There are too many participants for the performances to be anything but competent, though it gets some energy from sheer star power, especially from Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, and Marshall perennial good luck charm Hector Elizondo. Taylor Swift clearly has some fun as half of a high school couple believably described as “full of promise, full of hope, ignorant of reality.” Distracting winks at the audience (Taylor Lautner’s character says he is uncomfortable taking his shirt off in public, we see a poster for Love, Actually, and in the closing credit sequence Roberts reprises some dialogue from the movie she made with Marshall, “Pretty Woman”), however, are just about always an acknowledgment that the movie needs some artificial stimulants to keep the audience feeling entertained. But watching pretty people fall in and out of love is not a bad way to spend a winter evening and there is so much going on that at least one relationship will touch just about anyone.

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Date movie Romance

The Hangover

Posted on December 15, 2009 at 8:03 am

When things go wrong for us, it’s tragedy. When they go wrong for someone else, it’s funny. As Alan Dale says, comedy is a man in trouble. This comedy gives us four men in a lot of trouble following a debauched, drug-fueled bachelor party in Las Vegas who wake up with no recollection of what happened and no idea what has happened to one’s missing tooth, another’s missing mattress, and, most significantly, no groom. The one whose wedding is being celebrated, the one whose wedding is taking place the next day, has disappeared.

Meanwhile, there are some items in the trashed hotel room with the still-smoking chair that no one recalls having seen before, including a chicken, a tiger, and an infant. At the beginning of the evening, they toasted “to a night the four of us will never forget.” By the next morning, the three remaining guys cannot remember anything that happened, and the rest of the movie has them racing all over to figure out where they went, what they did, and how the groom managed to disappear without a trace.

In one respect, it’s just a cheerfully outrageous comedy, with much of the humor coming from our discovering along with the hapless trio of boy-men chafing at the bonds of civilization just how appallingly they have violated every possible standard of appropriate behavior and good taste. It’s your basic best of both worlds comedy where we get to see our most childish wishes fulfilled and then get to see the characters on screen suffer the punishment for it. But it is also a whacked-out variation on “The Wizard of Oz,” with characters in need of a heart, a brain, and courage going on a journey to an exotic land and learning that there’s no place like home.

Doug (Justin Bartha) is about to get married and so his two best friends take him to Las Vegas for one last bachelor blow-out. They are Phil (Bradley Cooper), a teacher who is married with a son and says that he hates his life in need of a heart, and Stu (“The Office’s” Ed Helms) an uptight dentist who is about to propose to his controlling, unfaithful shrew of a girlfriend, who needs some nerve. That leaves Alan (comedian Zach Galifianakis) who is lacking brains. He’s along for the ride because he is the bride’s brother. And the gorgeous mint-condition Mercedes convertible is what they are riding in, thanks to what is inevitably going to be shown to be a very foolish gesture on the part of the prospective father-in-law. The wicked witch part, of course, is shared by nearly every woman on screen.

Cooper is a comic actor trapped in the very appealing body of a leading man and Helms (who gamely had his fake tooth removed for authenticity) provides able counterpoint as the conflicted Stu. Galifianakis looks like a cross between a Hobbit and a garden gnome and a little of him goes a long way, but he manages to be less obnoxious than expected. And they run into an engaging variety of characters along the way including an emergency room doctor, a drug dealer (Mike Epps), an effeminate gangster, an earthy wedding chapel manager, and of course an “escort” with a heart of good (a very game and, as ever, alluring and adorable Heather Graham).

The film’s most disappointing element is its casual sexism. Aside from the escort, all of the women come across as shrewish and narcissistic. But other than that, like predecessors “Superbad” and “Pineapple Express,” the movie has an essential sweetness that disinfects its raunchiest moments.

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Comedy

All About Steve

Posted on September 3, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Somewhere deep inside this movie, like the little tiny pea in the bed of the princess, is an idea that could have been an interesting movie. Unfortunately, as with that bed of the princess, it is smothered in 20 mattresses of awful and 20 more mattresses of just plain dumb. Warning: the screenplay is by Kim Barker, who was also responsible for the execrable “License to Wed.” Two strikes and Barker should be out for good.

Sandra Bullock produced, so she is responsible for both Barker and casting herself in the lead role, plays Mary Magdalene Horowitz, a cruciverbalist (constructor of crossword puzzles) who has gone way past endearingly quirky and well into the land of the annoying oddball. It could be kind of goofily charming that she wears the same red boots all the time. It could be sort of intriguing that she has some of that Adam-style social dyslexia. But instead she is the kind of person who recites endless random arcana and then, when told to be quiet, lists several entirely audible synonyms for silence. As happens so often in this movie, she gets the letter but not the spirit of what people are saying to her.

So, when she sees Bradley Cooper (the title Steve), a news station cameraman, she immediately jumps on him, which he quickly realizes is too good to be true. He scrapes her off like gum off the bottom of his shoe, and she then commits career suicide and follows him to a series of increasingly un-funny news stories he is covering. Even the always-welcome appearances of top character actors like Beth Grant (glammed up for once), Thomas Haden Church (as a cliched self-centered television correspondent), Ken Jeong (relatively calm for once), D.J. Qualls (bringing class to a barely-written role), and the delightful Katy Mixon (doing more than I would have thought humanly possible as a cliched hick) cannot breathe any life into this soggy story. The best that can be said about Cooper is that he escapes unscathed, a tribute to his true talent and star power.

Bullock is producer, too, and once again she seems to gravitate toward roles that run contrary to conventions of romantic comedy, and I respect that. She likes to play characters who are socially clumsy (“Miss Congeniality”) or incapable in relationships (“Forces of Nature”) and she does not always go for the happily ever after pairing off at the end of the movie. But here the story spirals past edgy into disturbing, with comic references to an infant’s deformity (and the idiocy of the public response) and an accident involving deaf children. While the film is making fun of the media circus about the rescue, it commits the same crime it is satirizing in its treatment of one of the children. The problem with this movie is not the cluelessness of Bullock’s character; it is the cluelessness of the script.

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Comedy Date movie Romance