Parkland

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2345112/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Unable (and unwilling) to escape the hype of the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I couldn't wait to see Parkland, an hour-by-hour account of what happened to various individuals who were directly impacted on the day’s events. There are some good performances, but, overall, is a screenplay that just isn't up to its subject.

The neat stuff that assassination nerds will be interested in is done well. Abraham Zapruder’s (Paul Giamatti) reaction as he films away is startling. The young resident (Zac Ephron) who must act first when the president’s body reaches the ER at Parkland Memorial Hospital leaves us with the sense of unprepared hopelessness that must have overcome the actual doctor on that day. Billy Bob Thornton is the secret service agent trying to keep the crisis from turning into something worse. But the best part of the film is the previously noted best-actor-in-an-obscure-yet-pivotal-role James Badge Dale as Robert Oswald, the shooter’s (?) brother who must now contend with the lifelong infamy.

One of the more touching scenes belongs to Giamatti as he negotiates with the folks from Life magazine for his film. His chief concern is preserving the president’s dignity.  (In fact, the film was never shown in public while Zapruder was alive.) Too bad the filmmakers weren't similarly inclined. They spend too much time with too many stories and never tell us much about what they think it all means, nor give us much to draw our own conclusions.

Graciously, they skipped nightclub owner Jack Ruby’s story although I wonder if it simply wasn't cut out. In so doing, they scrimp on the main figures, with forgettable faces (Jackie, LBJ, Oswald) in key historic roles. Watching this film, one might never know that Texas Governor John Connally was also seriously wounded.

The historic bits reproduced include the well-known and literal tug-o-war over the casket containing the 35^th president between members of the Secret Service and the Dallas coroner’s personnel. With armed police in route, the agents spirit the president’s body back to Love Field for a hasty departure. Another nice touch is the actor portraying the priest who gives last rights.

Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti) makes movie history.

All in all, this film offers little that is new and will be of little interest to folks who aren’t JFK assassination nerds, like me.  This is the kind of film you might watch once on a dreary day when there’s not much else on, but I doubt you’d watch it a second time. Paul Giamatti, excellent as usual, saves this from being a total flop and that’s why I’m giving it one Wilder out of four.

   

This week’s Overlooked Film of Significance:  The House of Yes is a macabre examination of the cult of personality that surrounds the days of Camelot.

Gravity

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/combined

Sandra Bullock, in Gravity, gets the chance to reassert her megawatt stardom in a role that commands your attention from beginning to end. She gets to stretch her acting legs in a marathon performance that could well be the cornerstone of her career. Whether she’s out in space or out of her spacesuit, in homage to Barbarella (1968), this movie is all-Sandra, all-the-time and she’s open for business. 

In the emotional department, she can break you down with a glance and keep you cheering for her even when her character’s spirit wanes. She also handily demonstrates that the best way to overcome gravity is with the help of some of the best surgeons money can buy. I could go for that kind of work if I could come out the other side looking as good as she does.

Sandra Bullock gives her best Jane Fonda impression in this shot from Gravity.

No doubt about it, she’s real and makes you want to jump up on the screen and tell her everything’s going to be okay. This is easily her best film to date and certainly has the substance lacking in many of her most popular films.

Alfonso Cuarón directs. If you aren't familiar with his landmark films Y Tu Mama, Tambien or Children of Men, you've doubtlessly seen his work when he directed the Harry Potter/Azkaban installment. What he presents on the screen is some rare high-drama and some mind-blowing special effects that make a whole new, and valid, argument for the 3-D process. If you’re not a sufferer of motion sickness or vertigo, you must see Gravity in this format.

I don’t know a lot about the details of working in the zero-gravity environment, but everything seems to fit the science as I understand it. Perhaps I’ll hear from some experts in this area.

In many ways, Gravity is the perfect date movie. Women get to watch the reigning queen of chick flicks do her empowering thing while guys don’t get compared to Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling, Richard Gere or Ashton Kutcher. They do have to measure up to George Clooney, but only his face, formidable as it is, because the rest of him is covered up by thick bulky space suit. Even this slight portion of him might be enough to earn him some Oscar attention early next year as Sandra undoubtedly will.

This is the kind of movie where everybody gets what they come to see. Unlike films like Alien or Prometheus, I can’t tell if it will be as interesting ten years from now and for that I’m giving Gravity three and a half Wilders.

   

Our Overlooked Film of Significance for the week: Children of Men. This is the rarest of scifi movies – a British scifi film that’s actually watchable. More than that, it's a minor masterpiece with a really hard-to-believe story that's pulled off with wit and expert film making  Not unlike French rock-n-roll, the Brits haven’t been able to produce (m)any noteworthy scifi movies since Kubrick was in his prime.

Prisoners

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392214/combined

Prisoners tries real hard to be the epic kind of thriller that The Silence of the Lambs was, but falls way short. Although nicely photographed and generally attention-grabbing for about two and a half hours, there’s just too much missing for it to be the movie it wants to be.

First, there are hero issues. There are too many. Two fathers, one and a half mothers, a cop and a suspect are all involved with two girls who vanish in broad daylight. Father #1, played, maybe over-played, with intensity by Hugh Jackman and Terrance Howard’s more believable Father #2 go after the first suspect they come across. Then a cop played by Jake Gyllenhaal gets assigned to the case and wants so badly to make the lambs stop screaming he’s willing to bend some rules.

Then Mother #1, Viola Davis, gets involved with what the dads are doing while Mother #2, Jackman’s wife, retreats into a pharmaceutical fog. All of this is fine as far as thrillers go and the director does keep us interested in these people far longer than the story should allow. There are just too many characters to root for and no one really ends up earning our admiration or support. It might be Jackman’s 16-year-old son who is having a tough time living up to dad’s hyper-masculine countenance. You might feel sorry for Paul Dano as Suspect #1, but then again, he probably could have solved the whole thing for us in the first hour and we all could have gone home. Bad differently-abled character - no sympathy for you.

 Hugh Jackman begins his assault in Prisoners

In addition to having no hero worthy of Clarice Starling, there’s no villain in sight to compare with Hannibal Lector. What we get is a bizarre kind of B-movie, People Under the Stairs styled denouement and a shady priest with corpses in the closet thrown in for additional ickiness and to help add another hour to the film. (Fans of Sweeney Todd, the play-not the movie, might appreciate Len Cariou in the role of the priest.)

The worst… The very worst… After 160 minutes there are a lot of holes that don’t quite get filled in, if you’ll excuse the expression. It’s a shame because the movie looks great and there are some fine actors in roles that simply weren’t completely fleshed out. These lapses caused me and some others in the audience to leave the theater scratching our heads and then scratching each other’s heads for camaraderie.

This is the kind of movie you might rent for a buck or just wait for it to come to cable to watch on a rainy day when there’s nothing else on. And for that I’ll give it one Wilder because I did like looking at the pictures.

 

Our Overlooked Film of Significance for the week: Just see The People Under the Stairs. It’s a schlocky, cheaply-made, B-movie that somehow rises above its pedigree, with more substance than you might expect.

World War Z

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816711/combined

Scifi movies create a set of unbelievable circumstances and draw you into a world where the rules of reality do not apply. Great scifi movies do this by following their own rules set down in the beginning and keep you spellbound without violating any of these. The worst walk all over these rules as if you’re just supposed to accept whatever comes at you as some strange new (anything goes) world. Somewhere in between is World War Z.

This film is the baby of megastar Brad Pitt. The unrelenting action and terrifying situations endured by Pitt just to get it finished and in theaters (and now on DVD) could be a movie all its own. The credits list numerous writers and the resulting rewrites of previous writers’ works. This is usually a bad sign. Then the film was tested and taken back to have a different ending re-shot and spliced onto the film just days before release. Generally critics await such films with sharpened knives.

Whether it’s the fact that the source material was so good or Brad Pitt has learned enough from some of the best directors is hard to tell. Pitt was involved in all aspects of the film up to and including the final re-shoots  I think he taped up the box with the final print to get it off to the lab for duplication. He had a lot riding on his success. The overall result is satisfying, but it’s no Bladerunner. For Pitt, the world continues to say ‘yes’ so we can all rest more easily at night.

 World War Z

Based on the novel by Max Brooks, son of Mel, the story begins quickly with an outbreak of a bad case of zombieitis and proceeds at breakneck speed with the hero trying to find a cure. I’ll let those people Hitchcock referred to as The Plausibles to point out the few flaws in the film’s logic. None is enough to make the whole thing crash like a zombie-filled jetliner.

I’m not familiar with the source material, so I don’t know how much of what is right with movie comes from the original author and how much can be attributed to the good acting and eye-popping CGI scenes. The special effects are a major part of the film but somehow fail to overshadow the humans at the center of the story. That’s about the best compliment a special effects film can get.

Pitt is always great as a hero even with his straggly hair and mangy beard. He can play a tender father and then effortlessly convert into a world-saving scientist. Ultimately he’s driven to find the solution more to save his family and less to save the world, but as long as he’s on the job, we’re all better off.

I do want to point out the appearance by James Badge Dale who had a lead role the fine mini-series, The Pacific. In recent years, he has played a number of obscure-yet-key characters in films like Iron Man 3 and Flight. As I watched his scenes, I made a mental note that he’s taking on roles that were once a specialty of David Morse. I’d no more than thought this when the film introduces a burnt-out, crazed ex-CIA guy, played by David Morse! I guess they’re following in the footsteps of Strother Martin, Dub Taylor and Chill Wills. If you don’t know the names, Google them. Chances are you’ll recognize their faces.

World War Z is the kind of movie you want to see when you want to be carried away to another reality and forget about yours for a while. For that, it gets three Wilders out of four.

  

This Week’s Overlooked Film of Significance: Go to your library, Amazon or maybe even Netflix and take a look at A Boy and His Dog, my all-time favorite scifi movie. A horny teenager and his telepathic dog wander post-apocalyptic Phoenix looking for canned food and good times. The film has some great things to say about survival and even patriotism and never violates its essential premise while telling a very compelling story.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1327773/

Forrest Whitaker is one of those special actors who can totally immerse himself in a role with enough pathos and unfulfilled longing that you feel his pain, even when his character’s actions aren’t particularly noble. Turns out, Oprah Winfrey eventually achieves the same result. They’re just two of the great performances that blanket The Butler like a field of ripe cotton.

In terms of awards, there are not enough Oscars for the cast of Lee Daniels’ The Butler. I guess this speaks best for the script and there is an award for that. Terrance Howard, David Oyelowo, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz fill out the amazing cast along with all the celebs gathered to play the presidents and first ladies The Butler served.

For a person my age, it’s gut-wrenching to experience again the racial inequalities and desperate battle to overcome them that marked the post-WWII period peculiar to our nation's history. It’s likely necessary so people born after 1980 can see why there’s so much bitterness in current events such as the OJ Simpson trial or the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

As with Forrest Gump (but not as hokey), the historical contrivances get to be tiresome toward the end of the film, but are a necessary evil, I guess, to advance the story,

Even amid the daily indignity of the Jim Crow era, attitudes not entirely confined to the south, many blacks of the era were able to eke out a decent middle class living, as long as they were willing to withstand a constant barrage of indignities -- separate facilities for eating and going to the restroom or being treated like an animals -- by whites.

 Lee Daniels' The Butler

The frustrating part of race relations in our country is that a sizable portion of the nation doesn't really know what racism is. It’s not using certain words, acting with rudeness and malice nor even committing senseless acts of violence. These are just symptoms. Racism is a stain on the human heart. The afflicted always view the object of their dread and distrust with a jaundiced eye while unable to perceive the hatred tearing their souls apart. I don’t know if it’s curable, but films like this can’t hurt.

This is the kind of movie you’d want to take your children to see so they can comprehend not only our mixed history on race but understand that there’s a struggle that continues for the essential human dignity of our fellow Americans. It’s likely to be the most discussed major film of the year and for that I’m giving it three and a half Wilders, taking half off for the Forrest Gump exigencies.

   

This week’s Overlooked Film of Significance:  Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. I’m guessing that a good chunk of the country that made The Butler the top grossing film two weeks in a row may have missed this earlier film by the same director. I resisted for a while. Who wants to see a movie set in a ghetto?. But I was blown away by how good it is, defying stereotypes and making a heroine from a youth struggling against great hardship.

A Good Day to Die Hard      

         

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606378/

For fans of Bruce Willis and the Die Hard series, this is a movie you’ll love. All your favorite bits are there, the hilarious one-liners, the incredible action sequences,  the slow motion death of the bad guy  in a painful way. There’s even the de rigueur ‘Yippee-ki-yay motherfucker’ (if a little half-hearted). So run out and rent it and thanks for reading…

Are they gone?

Okay, if you’re still reading you’re either A) someone who doesn't especially like Willis/Die Hard or B) know what de rigueur means; or both A and B.

Essentially, this movie blows. Willis phones in his performance having been down this road so many times he could do it in his sleep. Actually, I think he was nodding off during many scenes. I’m sure he got his 20 million payday, or maybe 50 million, but the real ‘hero’ of this film is the writer(s) who had to come up with a new way to insert a New York policeman into a plot by the nasty-de-jour  without coming up with something so embarrassing he wouldn't want to attend his upcoming 10^th frat reunion at UCLA.

 A Good Day to Die Hard

What he comes up with is bad enough. Policeman John McClane can’t find his son so he goes looking for him in…  (wait for it) … Moscow.  Really! The Russian one. After driving around a few hours he finds the boy who just happens to be in the middle of a deep –cover CIA operation to spirit a guilt-ridden nuclear arms dealer out of the country.  Hey, I’m couldn’t make this up. McClane, wanting to have a heart-to-heart at the first opportunity, promptly screws up the entire operation forcing father and son to move about Russia as if they were taking part in a weekend golf scramble.

Their journey through Russia eventually takes them to that goldmine of B-movie plots, the  sealed nuclear power plant at Chernobyl. Let’s not get into the fact that our heroes as well as the bad guys would need to cross an international border to get there which happens to be in Ukraine, not Russia, and hasn’t been part of the Soviet Union for some 20 years. Of course, a knowledge of international affairs has never been a prerequisite for enjoying this cinema genre and we’ll just sweep all that under the carpet, sorta like the soviets did at Chernobyl.

In the end, McClane, pere et fils, make things right, save the day and make it back to the good ole U.S.A. for a hero’s welcome. Cue Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Prior to one particularly harrowing stunt, McClane quips, “The things we do for our kids.” It might have been more appropriate if he’d said, “The things we do for our fans.” That is if Bruce Willis even has an iota of integrity left, which is about as likely as John McClane getting a broken rib or concussion. This is the kind of movie you’ll come across while channel surfing late one night and wonder whether this was the last one or the one where he goes looking for alien terrorists in the jungles of Peru. Bad movie, no Wilders!

This week’s Overlooked Film of Significance:  If you've never seen it, try to find a copy of Local Hero. It’s a rare movie about somewhat real people, including a visitor from Russia who isn't bent on destruction or robbery, or look like an ignorant fool.