The Company You Keep

Posted on April 11, 2013 at 6:13 pm

I can’t help thinking that even though this movie is based on a novel by Neil Gordon, it is primarily a trip down memory lane for director/star Robert Redford. Shia LeBeouf plays Ben, an idealistic investigative reporter a la Redford in “All the President’s Men.” Redford himself plays a “Three Days of the Condor”-style guy on the run from the government and the aging radical living under another name from “Sneakers.” There are the buried family tensions of his first filmas a director, “Ordinary People.” And let’s not forget — no matter how much we try — the long debates about philosophy and policy in his last directing/starring movie, Lions for Lambs, For a moment, I thought he was going to jump off a cliff a la “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

There’s nothing wrong in wrestling with the same themes, especially themes as meaty as the conflicts between our larger responsibilities as citizens and our responsibilities as family members and friends and when the ends justify the means — or when the means just make you into the same kind of bad guy as the people you are fighting.

Redford plays a single dad and small town lawyer who, it turns out, has been living under an assumed name for longer than he lived under his own. When a suburban mother of two teenagers (Susan Sarandon) turns out to be a long-missing fugitive sought by the FBI for her role in a bank robbery that led to the felony murder of a guard (himself a father of two children). The robbery was the last act of a splinter group from the anti-war Weather Underground. (Apparently, this fictional theft was inspired by the 1981 Brinks robbery by members of the Weather Underground and Black Panthers.)

Ben, a reporter at a failing newspaper called the Albany Sun-Times, does some research and discovers that the man known as Jim Kent (Redford) is really Nick Sloan, also a fugitive accused of participating in the robbery. Jim/Nick leaves his 11-year-old daughter (singing sensation Jackie Evancho, sweetly natural) with his brother (Chris Cooper), and goes on the run, contacting the old gang (including Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, and Julie Christie), none of whom are very happy to see him.

Meanwhile, both the FBI (Terrance Howard and Anna Kendrick) and the reporter are chasing after Jim/Nick with all kinds of high-tech surveillance (FBI) and looking at old microfilms for the kinds of esoteric newspaper archives and property records that are not even online (reporter).

There is some talk about protest here, with a pause for a professor’s lecture to his class about determination to make absolutely sure we do not miss the point. And there is more talk about parents and children and how they change the calculus of responsibility and a great big metaphor of a character who is supposed to represent all of that.

Like “Lions for Lambs,” this is a talky film, but the balance this time is more on the side of story, and the non-stop parade of top-tier actors hold our interest. The title is as much about our relationship as long-term fans of these masterful performers as it is about the characters who have been hiding out as they come to grips with their failures and betrayals.

Parents should know that there are glimpses of wartime and protest violence and characters use strong language. The movie includes drinking and drug dealing.

Family discussion: How did having children make people evaluate their options differently? Do you agree with Ben’s decision at the end? How did the characters show their different ideas of loyalty?

If you like this, try: “Running on Empty” and “Steal This Movie”

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 8:00 am

Oh, dear. #TransformerFail

I truly loved the first Transformers movie. It was everything you need in a big summer explosion movie, with stupendous special effects, shot through with heart-thumping adrenaline, with just enough character and storyline to allow us to catch our breath and keep us interested. Our hero, high school senior Sam (Shia LeBeouf), is befriended by a car that turns into a friendly robot called Bumblebee, one of a cadre of good-guy transforming robots who fight against the bad-guy robots, called Decepticons. He is aided by a beautiful girl who is very good with cars (Megan Fox) and an armed services division led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel).

This sequel has some great special effects, but the story and the characters are poorly handled and the pacing is a mess. When the robots give a better performance than the humans, we have a problem. When the action is so complicated we can’t figure out who is where and in some cases why they are there, we have a bigger problem. When the characters are so irritating we begin to consider rooting for the bad guys, well, you know what kind of a problem we have. And when the racial humor gets so completely out of hand that it becomes uncomfortable at best and genuinely disturbing at worst, it’s a serious problem.

LeBoeuf is always appealing, Fox looks good stretching over machinery, and the movie briefly takes an interesting turn when both human and transformer characters show that they can learn from their mistakes and switch over to the side of the good guys. A stop at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum leads to Jetfire, an engaging junkpile of an autobot.

But it is too loud and it all goes on much too long. The bloated running time is well over two hours, overstuffed with pointless and increasingly annoying attempts at comedy — Sam’s mother accidentally gets high and talks about his sex life, Sam’s father doesn’t get high but talks about his sex life, good guy robots talk like the end men on a minstrel show, and Sam’s college roommate is a loudmouth who wants to get with some ladies and shrieks like a little girl when he is scared, which happens a lot. There’s another series of confrontations between a clueless bureaucrat and our know-better heroes. But the last movie’s clueless bureaucrat somehow switches sides. I would complain that this is not adequately explained, but I don’t really care. By this point, I began to think the Decepticons might have a point about how they could do better with our planet than we could.

Eagle Eye

Posted on December 23, 2008 at 8:02 am

A promising premise, some intense action, and a lively appearance by Billy Bob Thornton might have been enough to squeak this one by as a summer movie but when the days grow shorter and the wind blows chill we ask for a little more in our movies and this one does not make it.

The always-appealing Shia LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, whose job as a “copy associate” requires him to greet customers, “Welcome to Copy Cabana; how can I help you?” He is behind on his rent and gets an “insufficient funds” notice when he visits the ATM. After his brother’s funeral, he suddenly has three-quarters of a million dollars and an apartment full of weapons. And then he gets a cell phone call telling him that the FBI will arrive in 30 seconds to arrest him and he needs to run. He stays put, the FBI arrives, and he finds himself being interrogated by Agent Tom Morgan (Thornton). He gets another call with instructions to escape and this time, there is no alternative. Meanwhile, Rachel, a young single mother (Michele Monaghan) who has just put her little boy on a train trip to Washington with his school band, gets a call with instructions, too, threatening to kill her son unless she goes along. They meet (“Who are you and why are people shooting at us?”).

Pretty soon, they’re on the road together, doing that bickering/personal revelation/impressing each other/building trust dance amidst chases, explosions, and shoot-outs, with Agent Morgan and an investigator from the Air Force (Rosario Dawson) on the trail.

I’m always up for a good paranoid thriller, and these days the incursions on privacy from both increased technological capability and Patriot Act-era transparency provide some plausible and nicely creepy possibilities to explore. What if someone could track all of our conversations, even when our phones were off and process all of the data stored about us, our families, and our friends, at work, at the bank, at the insurance company, in the IRS files. It turns the enemy into something between Hannibal Lecter, the Borg, and the Terminator, with resistance futile in the face of such an implacable and all-knowing foe.

So far, so good. There are some inventively staged moments, especially one that looks like a live-action variation of the climax from “Monsters Inc” with a chase scene in an airport cargo conveyor system. Thornton brings some twisty humor (and, given the variation in quality, his skill as a writer to his own dialogue) to the story. But the thinness of the premise and the even greater thinness of the characterizations kick in and it all begins to fall apart. I can’t really explain how dumb the resolution is without spoilers, so I am invoking the legendary “Gothika Rule” and will give away the surprise ending to anyone who sends me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com. Let me just say that it doesn’t take an eagle eye to figure it all out.

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