Draft Day (***1/4)

There’ve been all kind of sports films about all kinds of sports, a few of them featuring Kevin Costner. Most have been about players and coaches, but more recently have come those whose focus is what might be called the sports-industrial complex. Jerry Maguire was about an agent; Trouble with the Curve was about a scout, and Moneyball, like this film, was about a general manager. Costner plays Sonny Weaver, the GM of football’s Cleveland Browns, and the entire film unfolds in the course of one day. Featuring virtually no on-field action, it may appeal to fans of game theory as much as sports fans.

Like the real Browns, the ones in the movie are a struggling team with a new coach (Denis Leary). Weaver is under pressure from the owner (Frank Langella) to make a deal that will excite the good folks of Cleveland, where, as his boss puts it, there are no hot babes on roller skates, so the citizens have only the sports teams to give them hope. So when Weaver gets a chance to trade for the number one draft pick, and thus draft the number one college quarterback, it’s a tempting offer. But this will mean antagonizing his coach, giving up future draft picks, and trusting that the quarterback in question will live up to his promise.

In the end, I’m not sure I believed what he ends up doing, but what the film gets right is the uncertainty. That is, Weaver acknowledges that he is only guessing, that no one can know which players will fulfill their early promise and which ones will flame out. This seems like an obvious truth, but so many sports films are about myth-making, with events seeming foreordained, or characters seeming to have magical abilities, as in Trouble with the Curve. Screenwriters Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman keep the focus on character and suspense. Director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, No Strings Attached) fills the screen with SportsCenter-style graphics, even using frequent split screens, but still keeps the drama on a human level. Paralleling Jerry Maguire, Weaver also has a tentative relationship with a coworker (Jennifer Garner), though this too is portrayed with a low-key realism. And so the film will appeal to those who like stories of people, not just sports.

IMDb link

viewed 1/18/14 7:00 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted

Kill the Irishman (***)

You’d think they’d run out of true-life gangster stories to tell, but they never seem to. Just last year brought the excellent two-film French saga Mesrine, which isn’t that much like this one, but begins the same way, with someone trying to kill the title character, then flashing back a couple of decades to see how it all went down. Jacques Mesrine moved around a lot, but Irish American Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) stays in Cleveland, his hometown. His rise from poor boy growing up to longshoreman to union boss is probably the best segment of the film and depicts the mixture of characteristics (a loan shark enforcer who worries about cholesterol—in the 1960s!) that made him such a force of nature. The second half of the movie covers the turf wars and deal-making that are typical of the genre.

As good at glad-handing as ass-kicking, though there winds up being more of the latter, the well-read Greene rose on both brains and brawn, as well as “brass balls,” a phrase that inevitably comes up in the film. With a suitably imposing screen presence and booming voice, Stevenson, of HBO’s Rome, is the other reason (besides the early part) to see the movie. Greene/Stevenson is so charismatic that he overshadows supporting roles played by better-known Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Tony Lo Bianco, and even Christopher Walken, although Walken is always memorable.

The beginning of the story is narrated by the Kilmer character, a police detective, and it seemed like the movie was going to be almost as much about the effort to catch Greene as about Greene himself. American Gangster pulled this off such a back-and-forth structure, whereas here director/cowriter Jonathan Hensleigh does the same thing as Ben Affleck does in The Town, making the lawman much less interesting. Kilmer’s detective does pop up now and again, evolving from a dead-set adversary into one with a somewhat clichéd grudging respect for him. The story skips ahead too much for this transition to be entirely convincing, and in the same vein, neither is the ending, which tries to give the Greene a kind of nobility that doesn’t quite fit with the fighting spirit he otherwise displays.

These and other scenes—for instance, the corny one in which an Irish-born widow-next-door (Fionnula Flanagan) gives Greene a lecture about Irish pride—gave me the sense of a miniseries that had been edited down to feature length. The movie is based on Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, by Rick Porrello, and it’s typical that the “crippled the Mafia” part is pretty much relegated to an epilogue. Undoubtedly, there was enough material in the book to create a two-part film, as with Mesrine. As it is, Hensleigh largely maintains a realism (including period news footage) that should appeal to genre fans, but it’s not a must-see.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11

The Rocker (**3/4)

Comfortably crafted to appeal to both classic-rock-loving baby boomers and their teen progeny, this comic vehicle for Office worker Rainn Wilson features the NBC star as a once-promising drummer who gets a second chance. Dumped by his band (think of an American Def Leppard) on the verge of stardom, Robert “Fish” Fishman doesn’t like the office, or his job, so much and winds up at his sister’s house when he loses it. Lo and behold, his nephew and a couple of high school friends have a fledgling band. The rest follows in a pattern too familiar to make the movie stand out, the central joke being that Fish is the least mature of the group, longing to trash hotel rooms and emulate rock stars of the pre-Bono era. The comedy benefits from Wilson’s physicality and some good lines given to the band’s crass manager (Jason Sudeikis). Among the kids, Emma Stone stands out as the tough-but-tender guitarist.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/19/08