The Heat (**)

The only novelty in this buddy-cop comedy is that both partners are women. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy are the leads, one a by-the-book New York FBI agent with a reputation for smugness, the other a potty-mouthed Boston street cop who bullies suspects and superiors alike. No points for guessing who plays who. Forced together by circumstance, they’re trying to catch a drug dealer, and all credit to anyone who after seeing this, can remember much more of the plot than that. Since Boston has lately become a geographical representation of keepin’ it real (see Mystic River, The Town, The Departed, Gone Baby Gone), that’s where the action takes place. (Here, real should be understood as “working class/unpretentious” rather than “realistic,” which it ain’t.) It comes from director Paul Feig, best known for the overrated (but superior) Bridesmaids, and screenwriter Katie Dippold, best known for her work on the (far superior) sitcom Parks and Recreation 

McCarthy, as she did in Bridesmaids, plays another out-of-control character (though not necessarily a similar one), but in this movie that makes her the heroine rather than the comic foil. Here, threatening suspects always gets truthful intelligence (and is always the best way to do so), and adultery (albeit with a prostitute) is an offense punishable via extrajudicial means. Not merely distasteful, the movie also isn’t that funny, though McCarthy makes the most of the material. Feig mixes and matches scenes in which the women clash and scenes in which they bond, including the standard get-blackout-drunk-together scene. Villains come and go. An albino character is also on hand for the purpose of being mocked. At some point, both women are about to be tortured, but there’s no feeling that they’re scared, because there are no real feelings here. Nor is the way they get out of it especially original, believable, or surprising.

There is nothing truly awful about the comedy here. The set pieces can be funny when they don’t feel forced. However, besides being an excellent argument for drug legalization, this is a pretty pointless and truly formulaic Lethal Weapon retread.

IMDb link

viewed 5/23/13 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/24/13

Ted (**3/4)

Someone described this to be as perfectly geared to the sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy, although any such boy might have trouble seeing it without a parent or guardian. This person, neither 14 nor male, wasn’t meaning that as a compliment, yet couldn’t keep from recounting a few of the funny parts. It’s that kind of movie, about what you’d expect with a plot about a man living with a foul-mouthed teddy bear that came to life when he was a boy, especially if it’s directed by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane. I've always found that Fox show more outrageous than actually funny, and some of the humor here, like the mildly homophobic gay jokes and ethnic humor, falls into that category. And some of the humor is basically watching a two-foot stuffed bear smoke pot and talk with a potty mouth…which can be funny, for a little bit. The bear, incidentally, has pretty much the same voice as McFarlane uses for Family Guy’s Peter Griffin.

The main human character is played by Mark Wahlberg. An overgrown child, he disappoints his employer and his girlfriend (Mila Kunis), though he has a good thing going in each case. Basically, he’s Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, but with an animated bear in place of the three roommates and a non-pregnant girlfriend. Adult-male roommates don’t complain about not having a penis, but some of the funnier moments are non-toy related. In one, Wahlberg rattles off about four dozen “white-trash names” in half a minute trying to guess who his best friend is dating. (Thus the complaint about the missing appendage.) Since there needs to be a story arc, eventually Ted finds himself in jeopardy. I suppose McFarlane is trying to pull off the same trick as in Lars and the Real Girl in which the absurd premise — dating a blow-up doll — becomes kinda sorta heartwarming. He doesn’t quite manage that, although it’s kind of sad to see even a non-talking stuffed bear lose a limb. On the other hand, notwithstanding that Lars had a sex doll as a main character, Ted has way more dick jokes. Beats it easily, in fact. If that sounds like a recommendation, you’ll enjoy this.

IMDb link

viewed 7/14/12 8:20 at Riverview and reviewed 7/21/12 and 7/24/12

The Company Men (***)

Wearing its earnestness on its sleeve, John Wells’s downsizing drama stars Ben Affleck as Bob, a suddenly laid-off sales manager for a large corporation based in Boston. Wells, a veteran TV writer/director (ER) splits his film between Bob and his former colleagues. These guys—and one can’t help but notice the dearth of women (or non-whites)—may have had more than most of the people who lost their jobs in the recent recession, but then, as research shows, losing what you have feels worse than not having had it in the first place. And so, cocky Bob, with a nice house, nice car, and a golf-club membership, has a lot to lose if the severance pay runs out. His nice wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) urges him to cut the expenses, but he doesn’t want to admit defeat.

Back at his old corporation, his older colleague (Chris Cooper) tries to hang on. His old boss (Tommy Lee Jones), head of the shipbuilding division, tries to convince the CEO (Craig T. Nelson) not to lay off even more workers, but is told, “We work for the shareholders now.” Later, Wells plunks Affleck and Jones down in an abandoned shipyard so Jones can trot out a hoary we-don’t-make-stuff-here-anymore speech. Wells has a habit of hammering home his anti-corporate message this way, including my point above about losing stuff. In the same shipyard scene, the older man laments that, having acquired so many things, men like him are “terrified of losing them.”

A documentary like Inside Job does a better job of critiquing recent corporate greed. The story of Bob and his family is the richer one here, including a subplot about the evolving relationship between Bob and his blue-collar brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), which might be a metaphor for Affleck’s career. The brother-in-law doesn’t much like Bob at first, but eventually Bob wins his respect. Similarly, with his directorial efforts (Gone Baby Gone and The Town) and roles like this, Affleck seems determined to win some respect of his own, as well as turn Boston into a film-making town.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/17/11

The Town (***1/4)

I never thought Ben Affleck deserved his reputation as a mere pretty boy, having co-written Good Will Hunting and appeared in a number of smart films like Changing Lanes and Chasing Amy. But this, his second effort as a writer-director, confirms that, and shows that Gone Baby Gone was no fluke. (Affleck, adapting a Chuck Hogan novel, shares the screenplay credit with Peter Craig and Gone Baby Gone’s Aaron Stockard.) This is slightly more of a crowd-pleaser, being about boys causing mayhem, not the kidnapping of a junkie’s daughter. There’s even a car chase. But Affleck, who also stars, retains the intelligent approach he took before.

Take the opening sequence, where Affleck’s character Doug robs a bank with his three masked accomplices. Director Affleck keeps the music down, cuts back and forth from the victims to the perpetrators, and even shows the security cameras. It’s done in a way that shows the excitement of the robbers, but also the fear and confusion of the victims. One of them is a bank manager played by Rebecca Hall, whose expressive face conveys everything Affleck is trying to show. That Doug will wind up courting her—albeit without disclosing his profession—is the crux of the plot.

As with Gone Baby Gone, the film takes place in a Boston neighborhood, Charlestown. There, bank robbery is practically the chief source of employment, a profession handed down from father to son. Doug’s father (Chris Cooper in a small role), is in prison. The use of location is key to both the feel and the plot of the movie.

I’d say this falls just short of the earlier film, if only because it slightly sentimentalizes Doug in a not entirely convincing way. The more overt brutality of his partner and childhood pal (Jeremy Renner) seems meant to make Doug more likable by comparison, although Doug is happy enough when they’re shooting at police after a car chase. Meanwhile, the police detective played by Jon Hamm isn’t exactly a villain, but the character is (under-)written almost as if he’s someone nursing a mysterious grudge rather than one trying to protect the public. His badass line is “This not-fucking-around thing is about to go both ways.” But most of the time the movie is more subtle. Affleck, who went Hollywood, has come back strongly.

IMDB link

viewed 9/14/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/17/10

Edge of Darkness (**3/4)

Movies about murdered and imperiled children are often stories about grief when the main character’s a mother (e.g. Changeling, The Deep End of the Ocean, Dead Girl), but are usually about revenge when it’s a man. Liam Neeson in Taken and Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, for example, follow a line that goes back at least to Charles Bronson’s vigilante in Death Wish and through another Gibson thriller, Ransom. Unlike in that movie, the kid can’t be rescued, because she’s been shot by someone apparently targeting Thomas Craven, Gibson’s police detective character. I should say that the “kid” is Craven’s adult daughter. Murdering actual children seems to be one of the few things that are still off limits in mainstream thrillers. Adapted from an acclaimed 25-year-old British miniseries (by the same director, Martin Campbell), this isn’t a slick action film like Taken, or even Live Free or Die Hard, but neither does it weave the murder into a broad narrative, as in, say, Mystic River. Instead, it’s a midtempo potboiler in which a stoic Craven solves the crime as a means to work through his grief, which slowly curdles into rage, with payback his goal. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Payback.)

While nothing seems to be obviously out-of-place or missing from having distilled the five-hour-plus BBC film into a mere 117 minutes, there are hints of condensed storylines. The scheme Craven discovers, involving a corrupt senator and a government contractor, might have been meant as some kind of comment about rapacious corporations, environmentalism, or the role of money in politics, but pretty much gets reduced to a generic paranoid fantasy. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Conspiracy Theory.) One suspects that the mysterious “fixer” played here by Ray Winstone probably made a little more sense in the original production. And when another character implies that Craven hadn’t stayed that close to his daughter before she was killed, that’s another thread that gets dropped. Instead, we see repeated home-movie flashbacks of Craven and the pre-teen version of his daughter. Who knows what happened to the family camcorder in her teen years, or to the girl’s mother, for that matter.

Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale) films his remake with the somber tone of one trying to make a serious movie, but merely winds up with a modestly diverting, occasionally unpredictable mystery.

IMDB link

viewed 1/30/2010 at Riverview and reviewed 2/1–4/10

The Invention of Lying (***)

Years ago I read a novel called The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin that brilliantly extrapolated the results were a foolproof lie detector ever to be invented. This movie comically turns that premise on its head. Instead of lies being always detectable, no one thinks to tell one. Which, in turn, means that if one is told, no matter how absurd, it will not be detected.

It begins with a date. The gentleman, Mark, tells the lady, played by Jennifer Garner, that she is pretty. She tells him she’s just masturbated, and that he is sub-nosed and chubby. Since Mark is played by Ricky Gervais, this is true. Yet this begs the question, if lies cannot be told, does this require telling every truth? (It does in Liar Liar, somehow.) Is there something that actually requires the lady’s mother, when she calls, to ask a question to which the answer is, “I won’t be sleeping with him tonight. Nope, probably not even a kiss.” Apparently not, because other scenes show characters revealing truths that they were perfectly capable of not speaking for years earlier. And why, if such harsh truths are spoken routinely, does Mark’s boss hesitate to carry out his intention to fire him?

And if she was going to have to be telling him that she’d just masturbated beforehand, might not she have avoided doing so? But then, perhaps embarrassment over such things would be bred out of such a society. On the other hand, wouldn’t they stop asking each other “How’s it going?” when they really didn’t want to know? Some other tidbits are funny, but not really what would be likely in even a non-lying society. A Pepsi ad slogan is “When they don’t have Coke.” Mark’s mom lives in a place named “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.” Wouldn’t nursing home still work?

Having said that, I love presentations of hypothetical realities, even imperfect ones, and much humor comes from watching how people behave when the plot frees them from the need to observe social norms. As the title promises, most of the plot proceeds from when Mark realizes he can make up things. The funny part is not that he is able to tell lies, but that doesn’t even need to explain even ones that seem transparent. Of course , his ability to do so hinges precisely on everyone else’s credulity. In other words, he succeeds because no one else has a bullshit detector, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The lies are not the source of bliss; ignorance is.

Simultaneously, I found the film clever and illogical. In this world, Gervais’s narration tells us, even fictional films would be seen as lies, yet hypotheticals—what would you do if you could change the world?—are apparently not. However, the ability to conjure up a what-if scenario is the ability to imagine something that isn’t true. And if people would not lie, then surely they would make mistakes, and thus say things that were not true, and so the liar might yet be caught, and thought delusional. Yet there are not even words for true or false in the world of this movie.

The clever part is there, though, because Gervais is the cowriter and codirector (with Matthew Robinson). (In his prior star vehicle, Ghost Town, he just acted.) For once, he himself plays the nice guy, but in the movie’s best scenes, as in his series The Office and Extras, the humor comes from unintended cruelty, like how Mark’s love doesn’t want to be with a guy whose children will be chubby and snub-nosed. Some people have criticized the character for being too shallow to be a worthy love interest, but I think the point is that even good people have this side, only hidden. Nonetheless, when Mark tells her how kind she is, the supporting scenes are missing, and Garner’s twin facial expressions—adorable smile and look of bewilderment, won’t convince you that she’s Mark’s ideal woman.

Too much of the last third is devoted to what ends up being a conventional love story, and is less funny. I would have rather seen how, say, politics would be in a world without lies, but I suppose a world with honest politicians would be so unlike ours that to show it would only highlight the tenuous premise. So no politics. But what Gervais suggests about the role of God in such a world is the most provocative thing about the film.

IMDB link

viewed 4/17/10 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 4/18/10

The Forbidden Kingdom (**3/4)

The big deal here is that martial arts stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li appear together for the first time. Chan has shifted between Chinese-language and American fare, but his best-known movies, like the Rush Hour series, emphasize comic elements as much as action. Li has also split his career between Chinese films, like the mythical Fearless and Hero, and mainstream Hollywood action films such as War and Cradle 2 the Grave, but isn’t at all known for comedy. So I was curious to what approach a movie with both would take, and the answer seems to be a little of everything.

Presumably helping to sell the movie to a younger audience is the presence of Michael Angarano as a kid who, in a remarkably cheesy opening segment, is magically transported from present-day Boston to long-ago China. I liked Angarano in Snow Angels, but here I kept thinking he was Shia LaBeouf. Maybe that was because his character was so petulant, though. At first he wanders around confused, with everybody speaking English. Encountering Chan’s character, he goes, “I can’t understand you,” like everyone’s being rude by not speaking modern American. But then Chan says, “That’s because you’re not listening,” and magically everyone now speaks English. And so the rude teen learns about the mythical Monkey King (Li) and his battle against an evil warlord, and becomes the student of the old master (Chan). There’s practically a Karate Kid homage, although luckily no one is forced to catch flies with chopsticks. The movie also vaguely recalls Chan’s old role as the drunken master; his character is supposed to be eternal, but only so long as he drinks.

Li has a double role as a fighting monk, and the fourth member of the anti-evil team is Sparrow, a revenge-seeking, lute-playing lass, because you always need an attractive girl. Oddly, although she has learned English like all of the other Chinese, she has sadly failed to learn first-person pronouns and so refers to herself as “she” or “her.” Li’s monk is philosophical in that he warns Sparrow about how her desire for vengeance can backfire, and that’s about as deep as the movie gets. She ignores the monk’s counsel, and when Chan mockingly calls him “master of sensitivity,” that’s almost as funny as it gets. The plot is a very simple good-versus-evil one. Chan does about three times as much kung fu as in his last three Hollywood films. Every significant character gets to fight, including an evil Jade Warrior who uses her long hair to lasso her opponents. The action scenes include realistic ones and also fantasies with flying effects. (Immortal characters know magic.) They’re fine, but none is as outstanding as the best ones in Fearless or Hero. But then, director Rob Minkoff’s best-known previous work was directing the Stuart Little movies and the Lion King. This makes sense, as the movie is simple enough to be enjoyed by children. (The violence is mostly mild, but there are bloodless stabbings.) The Forbidden Kingdom seems composed of parts of other movies and isn’t more than the sum of those parts, but is better than Chan’s lame Rush Hour 3 or Li’s turgid War, the stars’ most recent US releases.

IMDB link

viewed 4/20/08; reviewed 4/21/08

Reservation Road (***1/4)

A divorced father (Mark Ruffalo) accidentally kills a child while driving home from a Red Sox game with his own son. His split-second decision to drive away from the crime propels this story of grief, guilt, and suspense, directed and cowritten by Hotel Rwanda’s Terry George. Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly play the parents of the dead boy.

IMDB link

Gone Baby Gone (***1/2)

A lot of movies about children in peril start out with what I call the “good mother” scene. That’s the one where we see the mom (occasionally dad) see the kid off to school or some such and is there mostly to show what a great parent the main character is, and likely to justify mayhem later visited upon the villain. The kid will usually give the parent a deep hug or say “I love you.” But the mother in this story is not a great one, or even a good one, and the first thing we see is the little girl already gone, her aunt and uncle pleading with the TV cameras of Greater Boston for her return.

If the Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) pedigree didn’t already suggest it, you’ll have already figured out that this will be darker and less sensationalistic than a typical crime thriller. Casey Affleck, who is younger brother to the first-time director Ben, plays a private detective who teams with his girlfriend (Michell Monaghan) on small-time missing-persons cases. There’s something appealing about these two, who seem more like college kids than real detectives, but more like real detectives than TV ones. They are neighborhood folks, hired by the aunt and uncle to augment the police efforts. A gray-bearded Ed Harris plays the diffidently cooperative police detective on the case, while Morgan Freeman has a small but key role as his boss.

Ben Affleck,who co-adapted Lehane’s novel, was once a neighborhood guy too, and he has a real eye for the sort of seedy bars and nondescript eateries that make up working-class Boston, although a climactic scene takes place atop a tor outside of town. (The accents are authentic, too, and I missed a bit of the dialogue.) That’s not what makes the movie great, though, nor is it the machinations of the investigations, the quick pacing, the nuanced portrayal of the junkie mother, or the surprising turns of the plot. (If I was going to criticize anything here, it’d be that the kidnapper does not seem to have thought about the practicalities of his plan as much as I’d have thought.) It’s the ethical dilemma that anyone who sees the movie will be talking about.
For all the people who cast Ben Affleck as an acting lightweight, unfairly I think, it’ll be hard to pin that label on him as a director.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/18/07 and 10/19/07

The Game Plan (***)

A narcissistic football star learns to love someone else when a bright-eyed eight-year-old shows up at his door and says she’s his daughter. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson follows the path of other action heroes by trying to broaden his audience with a family comedy. He’s Joe “The King” Kingman, who fancies himself the Elvis of football and keeps a self-portrait on the wall. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, or Vin Deisel in (ugh) The Pacifier, the King is a reluctant caretaker. Obviously, that will change, but meanwhile, at least, the fart jokes are kept to a minimum and the characters are recognizably human. Joe actually knows hows how to cook and appears to have seen children before, although he’d just as soon not. Meanwhile, the daughter (Disney Channel star Madison Pettis) is as precocious as every other movie child, but quite often seems like a real one. (Johnson is also a better actor than his mesomorphic brethren.)

The ending gets treacly, for sure, but the kids won’t mind. This may not be a movie adults will seek out on their own, but it’s at least one they can take the kids to without feeling embarrassed, bored, or ripped off.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/30/07