Review: ‘Chronicle’ This!

Chronicle is the latest in ‘found footage’ films – where a story unfolds from video ‘found’ of an event so big that people were compelled to document the moment.

Directed by Josh Trank, the story follows 3 high schoolers – Andrew (Dane DeHaan), Matt (Alex Russell) and Steve (Michael B. Jordan) – who stumble upon a mysterious and unexplained shaft in the middle of the woods. Curious, they explore the tunnel and discover a glowing, alien-like life form.

Cut to the next scene and they suddenly have telekinetic abilities and they can seemingly do anything, getting more powerful throughout the film.

At first, they are loving it – who wouldn’t? – but it soon becomes too much for Andrew and he goes all Dark Phoenix.

This film is right up my alley. Since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed of something like this happening to me so I was totally looking forward to this. But, sadly that didn’t happen.

First of all, the set-up of the story takes too long. How many times do we need to be told that Andrew has an awful home life? We got it the first 5 times you told us. And we get that Matt is smart (or trying to make it seem like he is); having him constantly spout off quotes by Pluto and Jung only makes him seem like a douche. How many high school kids do you know who do that?  Read more

Review: ‘The Woman in Black’

If you’ve been looking for an old-school ghost story, well then this weekend, you’re in luck.

In The Woman in Black, Daniel Radcliffe stars as Arthur Kipps, a widowed lawyer who is sent to a remote English village to sort out and then sell the home of recently deceased eccentric. 

When he arrives, he finds that he’s not the most welcome person to grace the town and slowly, he realizes that they are hiding a long held secret: The house is haunted by the ghost of a woman who is determined to destroy the lives of each family by killing their children in horrible, deliberate accidents. But with the help of Sam (Ciaran Hinds), the two set out to rid the town of the evil and hopefully save the lives of the ones that they love. 

Set in the year 1888, the film is everything you want it to be for that period; it’s rainy, foggy and moody, filled with characters who are cloaking secrets and just enough mystery to let you be suspicious of everyone.

Radcliffe, in his first on-screen role since the Harry Potter series ended, does a great job of washing away that character. I never once thought of him as Harry. Yes, the two characters do have things in common – they are both brave, headstrong and have great hair (Don’t tell me they don’t!) – but Radcliffe has developed into such a wonderful character actor that each character is totally different.

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Review: Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Haywire’ is Gut-Punchingly Good

“You shouldn’t think of her as a woman. That would be a mistake.”

The woman in question is MMA star Gina Carano, who plays Mallory Kane (great character name) in Steven Soderbergh‘s brutally realistic espionage thriller, Haywire.

Kane is a highly trained operative who works for a secret government contractor. After she and a fellow operative, played by Channing Tatum, rescue a kidnapped journalist she is asked by former boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) to do one more job for the agency.

She’s quickly double-crossed and in an effort to save herself, she devises a plan to get back at those she once trusted.

Haywire is a no-nonsense, ultra-real film with some of the best fight scenes I’ve seen in years.When the action takes place, there is no music that the filmmakers rely upon. It’s just the noise of flesh hitting flesh, head’s hitting walls and crashing into glass. This draws you into the scene and into the action so much more than it would if there were music behind it.

There is music – think of the Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films and you’ll get the idea of what the soundtrack is – but the film adds it where most other films wouldn’t it. It’s almost a flip-flop of conventional action flicks; action scenes – no music. Normal (what else do I call it?) scenes – music. Read more

Review: ‘Red Tails’ – It Took George Lucas 23 Years To Make This?

George Lucas, recently went on The Daily Show and told host John Stewart that it took 23 years for Red Tails, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, to get to the big screen.

“It’s because it’s an all-black movie,” he said. “There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all-black action pictures ever made.”

The fact that it’s one of the first all-black action films may be true but I think the main reason that studios didn’t bite on the project was because the script is horrible.

After 23 years he couldn’t get a better screenplay? Filled with stock characters, terrible dialogue and plot points you can spot a mil away, Red Tails is only worth your time for the action sequences.

In 1944, a group of African-American pilots stationed in Italy are itching for some action in the war. Because they’re “Black soldiers” and looked upon as unfit to fight alongside white troops, they are given missions that belittle they’re skills.

When they finally get they’re chance to show what they are made of, they take to the skies and make a mockery of the Germans and they’re pilots.

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Broadway Review: ‘Lysistrata Jones’

With a book by Douglas Carter Beane and music and lyrics by Lewis Flinn, Lysistrata Jones, based on Aristophanes Greek comedy, follows the awful Athens University basketball team who haven’t won a game in years. When Lysistrata jones transfers to the school, she joins the cheerleading squad and then challenges the girls to stop “giving it up” to their player boyfriends till they win a game.

Go see this show now!

Because it’ll probably be closing very soon.   

The show was originally staged last summer in a church gym in downtown New York. It had great reviews and was quickly scheduled to move to the Walter Kerr Theatre where it opened on December 14^th. But, in the move uptown, it lost its magic.  Read more

Review: ‘J. Edgar’

Up until a couple of years ago, I really never knew anything about J. Edgar Hoover. When news of him being a possible cross-dresser and gay man, I became interested.

I’m fascinated by contradictions in people, and Hoovers public and private life were just that. The fact that he was keeping files on (and at times, threatening to expose) politicians and entertainers for doing the very same indiscretions he was doing makes him ripe for exploration.

Unfortunately, with Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar, this muddled film never really goes deeper than surface level.

Don’t get me wrong, I think you should see it. But only for one reason: Leonardo DiCaprio. He was, as usual, fantastic. His performance propels the mostly by the numbers film as he plays Hoover from his early 20′s to his ultimate death in 1972 at the age of  77.

I lay partial blame on screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. I hate to call out someone with the same name as me (we Lance’s have to stick together) but the script is so lacking in any true emotion that when one does finally happen, you want to laugh. The moment I’m talking about is when Armie Hammer‘s Clyde Tolson lashes out at Hoover for going out on a date with a woman when he thought the two had an ‘understanding’. It’s sudden and loud and the two fight and break things but you just want to chuckle because the scene is so ridiculous. The script seems to hit on the supposed greatest hits of Hoover’s life but never delves deeper into him as a closeted man who despises himself and tries to make the lives of others miserable.

The other half of the blame lies on Eastwood. His directing is fine but it also seems like it’s just a job for him. There’s no passion on the screen. He doesn’t get you to care for any of the characters and in fact, paints Hoover in a mostly good light. As my Dad told me, “He was an asshole.”

As the characters age, the actors begin to have makeup plied upon their faces. With DiCaprio’s makeup, it’s far less intrusive. He still knocks it out of the park, no matter what age he is in the scene but poor Armie Hammer fares less well. His makeup restricts him so much that you just feel sorry for him anytime he plays the elder Tolson.

I wanted to like J. Edgar so much… no, I wanted to love it but all I got was a boring history lesson.

 

Review: Craig Brewer’s ‘Footloose’

I hate remakes.

I especially hate remakes (or re-boots) of movies that had an impact on me when I was a kid. I remember watching the original Footloose on my parents VCR probably 1,000 times. I wanted to be as cool as Kevin Bacon. I wanted to have a friend as funny and loyal as Willard (the late Chris Penn) and a girlfriend as hot as Ariel (Lori Singer).

My only problem was that I didn’t want to have anything to do with dancing. So, I sympathized with the good ole’ Reverend. But that’s my issue.

So, when I walked into the theater extremely skeptical. I did really like Director Craig Brewer – he directed Hustle n’ Flow and the pilot to my favorite TV show ever, Terriers -  so, I was at least knew it wouldn’t be awful.

But hell, guess what? I really liked it. I liked it a lot.

The film starts off with an homage to the original opening credits. Close-ups of dancing feet are shown as the original Kenny Loggins Footloose song blares. Kids are dancing in a field, having a great time. Then wouldn’t you know it,4 of those kids get into their car and meet the business end of a truck, killing themselves and ruining the fun for everyone in the town of Bomont, Texas.

Turns out, like in the original, one of those kids was the son of the town’s Reverend (Dennis Quaid) and he’s not too happy about this.

Cut to three years later and the town council has outlawed loud music and dancing. When Ren (Kenny Wormald) arrives in town, thats all about to change.

You all know the rest of the story so I won’t rehash it here but as the movie progressed I started to fall for it.

Damn you Craig Brewer!

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Review: ‘Closer’ at the Sargent Theater (NYC)

It’s typical for a small theater company to present original work – so typical that you could see a dozen off-off Broadway originals in New York without seeing something truly captivating.  It takes a lot of guts – not to mention talent – for a small company to perform an award-winning play that was later turned into an award-winning film starring Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Clive Owen.  There’s an added level of intense pressure to perform for an audience that comes in prepared with expectations of a work that they may have seen before done on a much higher budget with faces they recognize in the lead roles. 

For a theatre company like The Seeing Place, which is currently performing Patrick Marber’s Closer at the Sargent Theater, it means making an audience focus on what’s going on in front of them and not the preconceived impressions they walk in with.

Closer can be a grating, tedious play as we watch the four characters self-destruct their emotional lives by jumping into sexual relationships without considering the consequences.  As a result, a poor performance by any of the actors could turn this play about four generally unlikable characters into an unbearable whine-fest.  This is a challenge that The Seeing Place obviously considered before deciding to produce Closer, and the strength of the four actors makes the occasional tedium of the source material moot.

The play – which demonstrates that there’s nothing more emotionally childish than trying to be “adult” about extraneous sexual relationships – demands the actors to drive their performances with the subtleties of body language and pained expressions, which often say a lot more than the actual dialogue (shouted or otherwise).  All four of the actors more than adequately fulfill the challenge.  Brandon Walker, as the obsessive obituary writer/failed writer Daniel easily jumps from devastated to being drunkenly obnoxious whenever he is unhappy with his current relationship status (which is often).  Much of this emotion is focused on Alice (Elyse Fisher), the subject of his novel and whom he is indecisive about his love for.  Alice is the central character, but despite have an enigmatic past she is the least interesting character (through no fault of Fisher, who has the coquettish charm of the type of sexually uninhibited dream girl who seems to only exist in fiction).  Rounding out the cast is Erin Cronican as Anna, who as a woman torn between two men has the heaviest role although Cronican shows an incredible range of emotion with her expressive voice and features, and Nick Velkov as Dr. Larry, who has fantastic timing with some of the play’s best lines which allows you to ignore his obvious issues with maintaining a consistent accent (it’s difficult to figure out if he’s supposed to be English like the other characters or something else entirely).  The entire cast maintains undeniable chemistry despite the fact that all four characters never seem to interact as a whole group during the entire play.

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Review: ‘Moneyball’

Brad Pitt might not want to make plans Oscar weekend because I’m betting that he’ll be one of the 5 guys named for Best Actor.

Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller from a script by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, Pitt plays Billy Beane, a former Major League Baseball player who is now the General Manager for the Oakland A’s. Yes, it’s a sports movie but you don’t have to like baseball or even know anything about it to really get into the heart of this film.

The film opens on October 15th, 2001 with the elimination game between the struggling A’s and the New York Yankees.

Cut to the A’s stadium; it’s empty and silent. Pitt sits in the stands alone, stressed and concerned as he listens to the game on a little portable radio.

Minutes later they’ll lose.

The story then starts with Beane now back at square one. A new season looms and his best players have defected for the Yankees and other big money teams. He begs the owner for more money saying if he doesn’t get it, we become “a farm system for the Yankees.”

There is no money so he and his band of baseball experts begin to assemble a team with the money they have. They talk about possible players and debate everything from how many hits they had last season to the looks of his current girlfriend or wife. If she’s not attractive, the player “lacks confidence.”   Read more

Review: ‘Drive’ is almost the perfect ride

A man we’ll only know as ‘Driver’ looks out over the Los Angeles skyline, talks into his phone and says, “I’ll give you 5 minutes.”

We then get a tense, harrowing heist scene that has Driver (Ryan Gosling) racing and hiding through the streets of downtown LA. The scene is quiet; there’s hardly any sound except the ambient noise of the streets and vehicles. And it’s energizing.

Gosling has quickly become one of my favorite actors and his performance here has catapulted him to the very top. Driver is all instinct and Gosling has almost no dialogue and when he does, it consists of mostly 1 or 2 words sentences.

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