A German couple’s joy at meeting their adoptive son in India is temporary as they learn that Kolkata’s crowded streets are an easy place to lose someone. The film becomes a cultural window into the vast gulf between a poor country and a rich one, and the way a crisis can reveal one’s values. Probably the best of the five nominees for the Oscar for best live-action short.
viewed 2/17/12 9:35 at Ritz Bourse [Oscar-nominated live-action shorts program] and reviewed 2/18/12
Showing posts with label swindler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swindler. Show all posts
Friday, February 10, 2012
Friday, November 4, 2011
Tower Heist (***)
Ben Stiller plays Josh, the hotshot in this movie. You can tell he’s a hotshot because the movie has one of those hotshot sequences, wherein the character is introduced with a bunch of quick cuts, fast talk, and a bunch of other characters greeting him (rarely her), imploring him, interrupting him, and so on. Also, the movie takes place in Manhattan, where all movie hotshots reside. Josh is a residential building manager in charge of all the other employees who make the lives of the wealthy residents easier. In particular, they make the life of Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) easier. Shaw is a big-shot investor, and when he turns out to be a fraudster too—think Bernie Madoff—the big shot and the hotshot become enemies.
Their decision to become criminals is slightly more believable than in Horrible Bosses (which was produced by this film’s director, Brett Ratner), but the execution is much less so, since that comedy reminds us that most criminals, let alone dilettantes, aren’t good at it. Here, the defrauded workers turn, too easily, into some kind of Ocean’s Eleven. Cowriter Ted Griffin wrote the screenplay for the 2001 version of Eleven, so that makes sense.
Call this Stiller’s Six, counting his costars Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña, Casey Affleck, and Gabourey Sidibe. Murphy, recalling his earliest roles in Trading Places and 48 Hours, plays the petty thief recruited to aid their plan. The comedy is about average (“don’t talk to me for the rest of this robbery” is one of Stiller’s lines). The heist is pretty ridiculous, but it has some great visuals in which the tower comes into play.
viewed 10/12/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/12/11
Their decision to become criminals is slightly more believable than in Horrible Bosses (which was produced by this film’s director, Brett Ratner), but the execution is much less so, since that comedy reminds us that most criminals, let alone dilettantes, aren’t good at it. Here, the defrauded workers turn, too easily, into some kind of Ocean’s Eleven. Cowriter Ted Griffin wrote the screenplay for the 2001 version of Eleven, so that makes sense.
Call this Stiller’s Six, counting his costars Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña, Casey Affleck, and Gabourey Sidibe. Murphy, recalling his earliest roles in Trading Places and 48 Hours, plays the petty thief recruited to aid their plan. The comedy is about average (“don’t talk to me for the rest of this robbery” is one of Stiller’s lines). The heist is pretty ridiculous, but it has some great visuals in which the tower comes into play.
viewed 10/12/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/12/11
Friday, September 4, 2009
Extract (***1/4)
This is the third film from Beavis and Butthead/King of the Hill creator Mike Judge. Office Space, his first, flopped at the box office but became a cult classic via cable and video, while Idiocracy barely even received a theatrical release, but wasn’t bad. Extract sort of inverts the viewpoint of Office Space, in which underutilized white-collar workers rage against dull or foolish middle management types. Here a factory owner (Jason Bateman) is the mild-mannered hero, with a motley assortment of blue-collar types nursing petty gripes and falsely accusing the new guy, a Latino, of stealing. Frustrated by supervising this bunch and by a nearly sexless marriage, he longs to find a buyer for his business and cash out.
Add in a pretty swindler (Mila Kunis), a flaky bartender (Ben Affleck), a wifty giglo, and an assembly-line mishap and you have most of the comedic ingredients. It has a lot of the feel of Office Space in being dense with unpredictable plotting, which I won’t give away, and memorable characters. I haven’t even mentioned JK Simmons as Bateman’s second in command, who refers to most of the employees as “Dingus,” Kristen Wiig as his wife, and a creepy Gene Simmons (of KISS) as a sleazy lawyer. As with Judge’s other two films, it’s these supporting characters that make the film distinctive. That’s not to say Bateman is dull, just that he’s playing the normal character that keeps the movie from getting too silly.
There’s something about all three of Judge’s movies that makes me want to watch them again, and I never watch movies again. They’re sort of easy to watch. I wouldn’t say any is quite hilarious, but each of them features a bunch of set pieces that continue to amuse even after the movie is over. The running subplot with an unctuously annoying neighbor is one such for me, the character being a less-original counterpart to oily boss Bill Lumberg in Office Space. I’d rank this just behind Office Space overall, too. But I bet if if this comes on cable one day, and I turn it on in the middle, I’ll probably sit down and watch a few scenes and not even worry that I missed the beginning.
IMDB link
viewed 9/05/09 at AMC Loew’s Cherry Hill and reviewed 9/06/09
Add in a pretty swindler (Mila Kunis), a flaky bartender (Ben Affleck), a wifty giglo, and an assembly-line mishap and you have most of the comedic ingredients. It has a lot of the feel of Office Space in being dense with unpredictable plotting, which I won’t give away, and memorable characters. I haven’t even mentioned JK Simmons as Bateman’s second in command, who refers to most of the employees as “Dingus,” Kristen Wiig as his wife, and a creepy Gene Simmons (of KISS) as a sleazy lawyer. As with Judge’s other two films, it’s these supporting characters that make the film distinctive. That’s not to say Bateman is dull, just that he’s playing the normal character that keeps the movie from getting too silly.
There’s something about all three of Judge’s movies that makes me want to watch them again, and I never watch movies again. They’re sort of easy to watch. I wouldn’t say any is quite hilarious, but each of them features a bunch of set pieces that continue to amuse even after the movie is over. The running subplot with an unctuously annoying neighbor is one such for me, the character being a less-original counterpart to oily boss Bill Lumberg in Office Space. I’d rank this just behind Office Space overall, too. But I bet if if this comes on cable one day, and I turn it on in the middle, I’ll probably sit down and watch a few scenes and not even worry that I missed the beginning.
IMDB link
viewed 9/05/09 at AMC Loew’s Cherry Hill and reviewed 9/06/09
Friday, May 22, 2009
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
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
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