Don Jon (***)

A word that is never used in the movie, and is often regarded as derogatory, will nonetheless, I suspect, quickly come to mind for many people watching this movie. It’s title character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt — macho, fit, masculine, Catholic, Italian American, living in north Jersey — fits every stereotype attached to the word guido, except maybe that he talks a lot about masturbation — at least in the copious, but often funny, narration. And in the confessional booth. Not so much to his pals when they’re trying to score some female companionship. He talks, in voice-over, about porn a lot, and, for example, how annoying it can be when the camera suddenly focuses on the guy when you’re about to…you know.

Truth be told, Jon likes porn better than real women, despite his skills at attracting them. Naturally, he meets the one woman (Scarlett Johannson) who might be the exception. This leads to a wave of shame, and lying, and, for a change, self-reflection. He’s also helped along by an odd, unhappy woman (Julianne Moore) he meets at one of his college courses. She’s what I call a convenient character, one whose appearance in the story seems useful to the plot, in this case to provide a contrast to the other woman. Moore’s terrific, funny and sad, in the part; I’m just not sure I found it believable the way she gloms onto him. I’m also not sure that sex addiction is necessarily a manifestation of some deeper hole in one’s life, as suggested here, but maybe sometimes. I did like the way the story develops, and the family dynamic, worthy of a sitcom. Tony Danza and Glenne Headly plays the parents and there’s a sister (Brie Larson, of the concurrent Short Term 12) character who never takes looks up from her phone, or says anything — until it counts.

The performances are good all around. Gordon-Levitt might have made his mark in the innocuous show 3^rd Rock from the Sun, but has gone for more unusual, sometimes challenging characters as an actor, and here he has additionally made his debut as writer and director. It’s not the serious work one might have expected, but I found it more interesting than 2011’s sex-addiction drama, Shame. (Sex addicts also feature in another 2013 comedy, Thanks for Sharing.

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viewed 6/4/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East and posted 9/26/13

The Oranges (***1/4)

Lots of adults have a childhood best friend with whom they grew apart. For Vanessa (Alia Shawkat), who narrates this dramatic comedy, that friend was Nina (Leighton Meester), who eventually fell in with a more popular crowd and left the North Jersey suburbs for more glamorous places. But Vanessa has kept up with Nina because her parents (Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener) are the neighbors and best friends of Nina’s parents (Alison Janney, Oliver Platt). The theme of friends growing apart is regrettably minor; instead, the main plot involves Nina’s quickly discovered romance with David, who is Vanessa’s father (Laurie).

The older actors don’t look like the parents of the younger ones playing their daughters, but they’re all pretty good, and all of the characters are fairly sympathetic, though the prime trait of Janney’s is being overbearing. Meester does both the wayward daughter thing and the flirty seductress thing well. You can tell how much fun Nina is having when David introduces her to friends they run into at a restaurant. Nina invites the surprised couple to sit down; their awkward declining of this offer is as amusing to Nina as it will no doubt be to viewers of the film. The potentially heavy subject matter is generally given this sort of light touch, as befits a film that is mostly a comedy. However, the story concludes realistically and in reasonably satisfying fashion.

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viewed 10/11/12 7:10 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/11/12

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (***3/4)

Movies involving the destruction of humanity — yes, the title is quite literal — compose a very small subgenre of films, but one among them, the 1998 Canadian film Last Night, is among my favorites in any genre. This is almost as good.

Last Night neither explains why Earth will be destroyed nor ever suggests that it might not happen. In this movie, an asteroid is the cause, and there is only the barest suggestion (in the behavior of some characters) that it might not happen. Last Night has an ensemble cast and explores the many different ways — hedonism, denial, despair — that different people might deal with this. This movie features all of those reactions, but is mostly about two apartment-dwelling neighbors who meet less than two weeks before the end.

Dodge (Steve Carrell) is an insurance agent whose wife has literally walked away from the marriage when the last hope for saving Earth has failed. Carrying his sadness around with quiet dignity, he has the demeanor of someone trying not to be a bother to anyone. (Of course, we never get to see what drove his wife away.) Penny is an emotionally expansive, but generally cheerful figure of contrast. And so, for reasons I’ll leave to the film, off they go.

One reasonable objection to this movie might be the relatively minimal breakdown in society. Some rioting (a key plot point) and some other odd behaviors are certainly seen. Yet very close to the end, roads are passable, a convenience store is open for business, most houses are undamaged, and a lonely anchorman continues to appear on television, which continues to be watchable. However, because Dodge and Penny’s behaviors seem real (in light of the , and because this was not a techno-thriller or docudrama, I was willing to forgive the perhaps too-rosy view of the end of days and the one or two scientific improbabilities. 

It may be that the contemplation of the end of humanity is such an inherently poignant circumstance that it biases me toward liking any movie with this theme. (I think here also of Lars von Triers’s Melancholia and Steven Spielberg’s A.I., at least its last segment.) However, there is a believability to the primary characters and the performances, particularly Dodge/Carrell’s slow emergence from his forced stoicism. Writer-director Lorene Scafaria (her most prominent credit being the screenplay for Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) is an original talent, and I hope she’ll get to make other movies despite the unimpressive box-office performance of this one.

In stories such as this, there is always a tension between what the viewer will want to happen and what, dramatically and logically, ought to happen, though sometimes those are the same. I’m not sure if Scafaria gets it right or not, but in any case, she winds up in a similar place to Last Night’s ending, which sets aside the comedy and represents the poignancy of the universal desire for intimacy.

IMDb link

viewed 7/16/14 on HBO on Demand and posted 7/17/14

Win Win (***1/2)

Thomas McCarthy’s thing seems to be scooping together unlikely strangers. In The Station Agent it was the loner title character, a gregarious hot dog vendor, and a depressed artist. In The Visitor, it was a depressed professor and a pair of illegal immigrants. Here, it’s Paul Giamatti and a runaway teenager. Giamatti’s character here is not depressed. He’s just been getting panic attacks lately, due no doubt to a struggling legal practice. He specializes in poor elderly clients. He and his wife (Amy Ryan) have a family to support.

And it’s these circumstances that lead him into some shaky ethical territory as well as into the path of the young man who might also be able to help out with the inept high school wrestling team he also coaches. (Jeffrey Tambor plays his assistant.) In his other two films, McCarthy carves paths of connection for his lonely male main characters. This one, on the other hand, plays out the main character’s internal struggles, not only about his treatment of a client with mild dementia (Burt Young) but also about how to deal with the unexpected arrival of the man’s grandson.

McCarthy handles this with a lot of humor, deft plotting, and a minimum of preachiness. Anyone who liked his other movies should like this one too, but the pacing is probably a little faster. It has strong characters and good acting—wrestler-turned-actor (Alex Shaffer) gives off a nice laid-back vibe as the young man who quietly seethes with anger toward the mother he ran away from. Bobby Cannavale, The Station Agent’s extroverted snack-cart vendor, plays a more suburbanized version of the same character. The men get most of the screen time, but Melanie Lynskey’s fairly brief role as the mother allows her a lot of range. Yet the film is not as self-conscious a character study as The Station Agent or The Visitor, and so might appeal to a wider audience.


IMDB link

viewed 4/27/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/3/11

The Brothers Bloom (**1/2)

The greatest trick in any film about con artists is to get the audience to buy the tale. Alas, in writer Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, they may not. That the brothers are played by non-lookalikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo doesn’t help; nor do they look like the child actors in the opening sequence. But that’s not a big deal. More significant is that in that sequence the two boys look like bowler-hat-wearing twits, and their elementary-school swindle is not rendered convincingly. The first scene with the adult brothers—still conning—is rendered in such a stagy fashion that I expected the camera to pull back and reveal that Brody and Ruffalo had become actors in a play.

I liked the movie somewhat better once I got used to its rhythm. There are two other members of the brothers’ team. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel), as their mysterious, nearly mute Japanese explosives expert, is equal parts cute and coy, even if her role is contrived. And Rachel Weicz does well enough with the character—the wealthy mark—who actually has the most dimensions. She’s supposedly an expert in, among other things, several musical instruments, a martial art or two, juggling, and unicycling, and speaks multiple languages. Except for the last, she doesn’t get to use any of these abilities. Now why have such a character and not use that? Of course, her primary function is to pair up with Bloom, the brother played by Brody, but if you don’t figure that out immediately you may have never seen a movie.

So the usual questions get raised. Will Bloom choose love or money? Will his brother Stephen the supposed genius of the operation, let him decide? And what is real and what’s just a con? All of the ingredients of the classic caper film, but The Sting it’s not. Johnson can evoke a style, but it never feels very organic. I thought the same thing about Brick, in which high schoolers used 1930s detective-novel slang, although plenty of people seemed impressed. Here, Johnson has Stephen drawing elaborate diagrams and using Herman Melville novels (no, not Moby Dick) as inspiration for his con jobs, but they never seem as clever as they’re supposed to. It would also have been nice if the grand finale, in which all of the themes (finally) come together with more action than the rest of the movie, had actually been comprehensible. Stephen says, in the movie’s best line, that the best cons are the one that leave everyone feeling they got what they want. And if you want to give the audience what it wants, you need to let them feel like they’re in on the action.


IMDB link

viewed 6/6/09 at Tilton 9 and reviewed 6/7/09

The Wrestler (***1/2)

This is, I suppose, the gritty, indie version of Rocky. Or Rocky V, perhaps. At any rate, it’s the story of an old-timer (Mickey Rourke) who’s seen the big time come and go, and now serves as a journeyman athlete-entertainer. Barely affording a North Jersey trailer home with income from a second job, he spends a good deal of of his non-working time preparing—pumping iron, dying his hair, doping, and acquiring props for use in the ring. Ex-boxer Rourke and director Darren Aronofsky beautifully depict this weekend warrior.

Aronofsky is known as the writer-director of such films as Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Here and in his forthcoming Robocop remake he works from someone else’s (here, Robert D. Siegel) script. This will likely seem a wise move if you’ve seen 2006’s muddled The Fountain, which confirmed Aronofsky as a better visual stylist than a writer. The story here isn’t fancy, and, surprisingly, neither is the camera work. The only time I really noticed the camera was in the beginning, when for at least five minutes it follows Rourke without showing his face.

Matching his character, Rourke’s is a face many won’t have seen for some time, although he has had supporting roles in some big movies like The Rainmaker and Sin City. Obviously we are to be shocked by the sight this powerful, muscular yet grizzled 50 year old, whose scars may come from Rourke’s days in the ring. Randy “The Ram” Robinson has lost (most of) his fame, all of his money, and his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), with only a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold (Marisa Tomei) to turn to. If this sounds perilously close to cliché, that’s about right. It is Sunset Boulevard with an athlete, or Raging Bull without the rage, except that “the Ram” isn’t chasing past glory, only the next paycheck and chance to entertain the crowd. Aronofsky and Siegel stay on the good side of sentimentality by keeping things in the present. Except for an opening montage, we merely infer Ram’s history.

Rocky Balboa is a good comparison because there the appeal is much more based on watching the character behave than the plot. For most of The Wrestler, this is more than enough. Since they make more movies about boxing than pro wrestling, the background scenes are especially intriguing. I know absolutely nothing about the sport, but the easy camaraderie among the fighters, the casual drug use, and the way they informally plot out the way the fight will go (it seems to be assumed who will “win”) seem true. The brilliantly shot fight scenes depict how the matches are faked (or choreographed, perhaps) as well as the extremely real physicality the fighters bring. (In one scene that’s both humorous and horrifying, an upcoming opponent asks Ram if he minds having a staple gun used on him.) One gets an inside-out, athlete’s-eye view of the match.

In the end, the movie sort of paints itself into a corner; plot-wise, all options are clichéed or dull. And so it simply ends. But the Ram is among the least forgettable of characters in 2008 cinema, and, despite the somber tone, this is easily the most entertainment I’ve ever gotten out of pro wrestling.

IMDB link

viewed 1/12/09 at Ritz Bourse; reviewed 1/18/09

Be Kind Rewind (**)

Michel Gondrey’s kooky comedy has a funny premise that, as executed, seemed too silly for me to accept. Mos Def plays Mike, a video store clerk in Passaic, New Jersey, who has to improvise when his friend Jerry (Jack Black) accidentally erases all of the tapes. See, Jerry’s become magnetized, and the store is still dealing strictly in VHS. A dollar a day is the price, which helps explain why the store’s owner, played by Danny Glover, is about to lose the store. So the solution to the erased tapes is that Mike and Jerry will team up, with some help from the locals, to re-film all of the movies that customers want to rent. Oh, and there’s a whole thread running throughout the story about how the store was once the home of early jazz great Fats Waller, which gives you some idea of why the movie didn’t make it to the multiplexes.

This is mostly cute and charming, like Gondrey’s last movie, The Science of Sleep, and there is some visual whimsy, though not quite as much as in that film. Black’s personality keeps it from becoming too precious, and I liked Melonie Diaz as the third partner in the cinematic enterprise. But the main thing for me was, even if I believe that Mike and Jerry could make these movies in a few hours, that not for a moment could I suspend my disbelief that these short versions of Hollywood hits would be something people would want to watch, though the ultra-low-budget filming techniques do provoke some laughter. But even though I sort of liked the story’s community/power-of-cinema-affirming ending, it seemed too unreal. You can go to the movie’s web site to judge the results for yourself; the feature merely shows short bits. Maybe Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums) or somebody could have made the whole thing work. But the combination of absurdism and small-city charm here didn’t mesh for me.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 3/19/08

American Gangster (***1/2)

The seemingly generic title of this drama actually reflects a central fact about its subject, one Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). This was not, as you might imagine, his race, though he was a black man who came of age during the civil rights movement. No, it’s that Lucas’s would be a quintessential American success story had his success not been based around illegal activities. Lucas had been the driver for his predecessor, a mentor of sorts, but by applying a time-tested principal—buy low, sell high—he was able to expand considerably and came to dominate New York City’s heroin trade in the early 1970s.

Racial issues do play a part in the movie, but around the edges. When Lucas wants to expand, he finds it helpful to have a white partner in the South. On the other hand, having a black-run organization, involving his younger brother (Chewetel Ejiofor) and other family members, seems to have kept him under the government’s radar for a long while. This brings us to the other primary character in the movie, the New Jersey police detective played by Russell Crowe. Despite the title, the movie is more or less equally about the gangster and the man trying to bring him down. Crowe, reuniting with his Gladiator/Good Year director, Ridley Scott, has the more intriguing character in some ways, since Lucas never really changes throughout the movie. Tapped to lead a narcotics squad while also finishing law, the detective operates among shady characters while trying to remain honest. He also has an ex-wife and a young son. Though we don’t learn much about his past, Crowe’s performance and accent betray both a working-class background and the desire to transcend it.

Steve Zaillian’s reliably intelligent script is built more around its two main personalities than its time and place. In this way it is different from Gangs of New York, the Martin Scorcese movie Zaillian wrote, or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, both sweeping epics. Nor is it like Goodfellas, which dwelt much more on the brutality of gangsters. As the first scene of the movie makes quite clear, Lucas was perfectly willing to deal out violence when it was useful, which is perhaps the other American thing about this story. But the suggestion is that Lucas did this, like most everything he did, with cool logic, only when necessary to make a point.

The same could be said about the movie, in fact. Compared to Scorcese’s gangster movies it’s sedate, and there is really only one action sequence of any consequence. But the storytelling is clear and tight, covering a fair span of time without feeling like it’s skipping ahead too much or becoming confusing. While I didn’t feel like I was watching something completely original, as with Godfather or Goodfellas, to be a notch below those is not bad.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07

Rocket Science (***)

Stuttering high school senior Hal Hefner joins the debate team in Spellbound director Jeffrey Blitz’s first non-documentary feature. Blitz himself was a stutterer and a debater, and it shows in the empathatic portrait of his lead character, convincingly portrayed by Reece Thompson. Hal speaks eloquent volumes inside his head, like the smooth-voiced narrator who makes his story sound like a fable. On the outside, though, he can barely communicate to the cafeteria lady whether he wants pizza or fish. Hal gets recruited by speed-talking overachiever Ginny (Anna Kendrick), who says she senses possibilities in him. Flattered, or smitten, he agrees. Just like in Spellbound, the story is centered around an annual competition, with detours into Hal’s home life. (His father has left his mother.) The stuttering aside, this is the setup for a very typical teen comedy. Without giving away too much, let’s say that Blitz subverts most of the expectations the setup would imply. This is the sort of movie where the high schoolers actually look like teenagers. Skip it if you’re looking for a feel-good movie with a clean plot.

For my taste, the supporting cast seems to overload the movie with strained quirkiness. A school therapist tells Hal that if only he had ADD he’d be able to help. Hal befriends an nerdy boy whose parents play cello/piano duets of a Violent Femmes song and brag about trying all the positions of the Kama Sutra. I also thought no one could speak in debate-team arguments all the time like Kendrick’s super-self-possessed Ginny, but was still intrigued enough to want to see more of her. Hal himself is an original and honest character, though.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/7/07

Gracie (***)

Back in the early 1970s, actress Elisabeth Shue was a rarity, a female soccer player who had to become one of the boys to play, because there was no girls team. Shue plays the mother of a character inspired by her experience as well as a family tragedy she shared with brother Andrew, who plays a teacher and collaborated on the story with director Davis Guggenheim, who’s married to Elisabeth. Got that? Actual teenager Carly Shroeder plays the title character, a Jersey girl who gets serious about wanting to play after her brother dies in an auto accident. (Unfortunately, the male actors she plays with are in their 20s and thus unrealistically large.) While it pretty much follows the formula for an inspirational underdog movie, it avoids some of the worst excesses. Dermot Mulroney manages to pave over some of the inconsistencies in his working-class dad role, and Shroeder’s a delight.

Soccer players will relish the emphasis on the training regiment and drills Gracie subjects herself to. Moms and dads will be pleased with the PG-13 (but close to PG) view of teen life as well as the vintage soundtrack, and teens and younger kids alike will respond to the heroine’s drive and independence. Yes, it probably wasn’t necessary to have half a dozen different characters speak variations of the “girls can’t do that” theme. We get it—there was discrimination. But, judging by the cheers I heard at my preview screening, the girls and boys in the audience probably won’t care about the cliché elements. Unlike the world of high school sports, family films are one area where girls are still struggling to achieve parity, so this may even things out a bit.

PS: Could someone please edit the scene with the mailbox saying “The Bowen’s” out of the DVD version? Ugh.

[reviewed 5/31/07]

IMDB link

Street Fight (***1/4)

Down-and-dirty politics is the subject of Marshall Curry’s un-flashy but compelling documentary about the 2002 Newark mayoral race.

Made on a skimpy budget and having aired last year on the PBS P.O.V. series, Marshall Curry’s nearly one-man production is the fourth of the five 2005 Best Documentary Oscar nominees to be shown theatrically in Philadelphia. It’s a look at the 2002 mayoral election in Newark, NJ, and if that doesn’t sound promising, at least Curry has a charismatic leading man in Cory Booker. Raised in a middle-class-suburb, the Stanford- and Yale- law educated ex-football jock seemed poised to raise a serious challenge to the dynasty of the incumbent, Sharpe James, a former councilman first elected mayor in 1986. A populist with a rags-to-riches personal story, James sold himself as the man who helped resurrect Newark with a flashy face lift of its once-moribund business district. Booker’s message was that this supposed renaissance had left the poor and working-class folks in town as bad or worse off than before.

But the film is about the campaign, not the issues facing Newark. Whether or not James was a good mayor, he and his people were clearly willing to fight dirty. The power of his office allows him to intimidate the opposition. His opponent’s lighter (but not white) skin allows him to race-bait. Despite the James campaign’s complete unwillingness to cooperate with him, Curry gets some footage that actually made me feel good about Philly politics by comparison. The Newark setting turns out to be a good thing. When I watched War Room, the 1993 film to which this has been frequently compared, the fact that I was already familiar with a lot of the issues the Bill Clinton campaign had had to deal with made it a disappointment. Here, I hadn’t heard of either candidate until I walked in the theater, and yet by the end I really wanted Booker to win.

IMDb link

posted 9/9/13

Just Friends (***)

A Hollywood hotshot tries again with the Jersey girl who rejected him in his high school nerd phase. A quasi-romantic comedy that isn’t much as romance but has some funny moments, particularly from Anna Faris as a bimbo-singer-songwriter.

This was a pleasant surprise, a relatively unheralded comedy about a formerly insecure fat kid (bland-some Ryan Reynolds) who returns to his New Jersey hometown and tries to escape the “friend zone” with the object of his high-school desires (Amy Smart). Having meanwhile become a Hollywood hotshot/babe magnet, he gets waylaid in Jersey while chaperoning a singer (Anna Faris, who also costarred with Reynolds in this year’s Waiting). Faris is a pastiche of Ashlee Simpson, Courtney Love, and Paris Hilton, which, gruesome as that sounds, was fairly comical. I think I wanted her to end up with Reynolds because the chemistry with Smart isn’t there. Which is to say, this is a decent comedy but not much of a romantic comedy. It’s more like a Farrelly Brothers version of Garden State, a shallower version, but funnier than recent Farrelly movies like Shallow Hal or Stuck on You. (Director Roger Kumble, who previously helmed the sickly Sweetest Thing, is a Farrelly pal.) A bit more of her point of view, or a single transition scene between then and now, would have helped, dramatically speaking. Or maybe that would have heightened the unreality of what’s basically a nerd wish-fulfillment fantasy. I did like the way Reynolds slowly reverts back to his old self as he interacts with his brother and his old classmates, and the way, once it provides the predictable ending, it just ends.

IMDb link

circulated online 12/1/05 and posted 9/20/13