Review: Cop Out (2010)

Released March 18, 2010

A game Tracey Morgan and a bored Bruce Willis in Cop Out

Kevin Smith’s (Clerks, Chasing Amy) peculiar blend of witty dialogue-driven humour and sly observation is completely absent from this tired attempt to revive the buddy-cop genre. Those movies, epitomized by minor classics of the 80s such as 48 Hrs. and Beverly Hills Cop, worked both as action and as comedy. Cop Out works as neither, and can’t decide if it would rather be a homage or parody.

Take Tracey Morgan. Playing a variation of his manic 30 Rock character, in one scene he’s playing the good cop during an interrogation, endlessly quoting movies in an improvised sequence that could have been born as a Saturday Night Live skit. In another dramatic (TM) scene, he’s having a heart-to-heart with his wife (Rashida Jones), whom he suspects of cheating with their hot-and-single neighbour. This juxtaposition could have worked if either were (a) funny or (b) dramatic, but neither is the case.

Both Morgan and Bruce Willis, who sleepwalks through his role as the more sensible partner, are likeable stars at the whim of a mediocre script by Robb and Mark Cullen. Why Kevin Smith was inspired to make this his first directorial effort from material other than his own is baffling. He admitted that it was “not MY movie,” but “a movie I was hired to direct.” In which case, I would ask, why bother at all?

If it was a test of his directorial ability, then the pacing and sloppy handing of the few action scenes reveal areas for improvement. The plot, meanwhile, is based around the coincidence of Willis’ search for his missing baseball card – worth over $40k and to fund his daughter’s wedding – and a drug dealing ring.

Despite its problems, I didn’t want to flee from the theatre. Both Morgan, and Seann William Scott as a childish petty thief, have their moments, and the score by 80s-synth master Harold Faltermeyer is a snug fit. But Smith, at his best, is capable of greatness, whereas the best I can say of this soulless project is that it lives up to its title.

News: Top Ten Movies of 2009 - #9

9. A Serious Man

Larry Gobnick and his reaction to the universe

The Coen brothers have always been adept at creating dark, inquisitive comedies with an intellectual edge, and A Serious Man is no exception. It tells the story of Physics professor Larry Gopnick, an ineffectual man with more questions than answers. The movie is structured around his increasingly futile attempts to understand why the universe seems to have it in for him. All he can come with, as is suggested by friends, rabbis and his insensitive wife (who would rather be with a pretentious nitwit by the name of Sy Ableman) is “accept the mystery.”

A Serious Man works on several levels: as a satire of Jewishness, as a philosophical treatise, and, if one has the stomach for awkward situations, as a comedy. It’s also the Coens’ most personal film, set in their home town of St. Louis Park, Minnesota and based on experiences of their childhood. The cast is superb, with relative unknown Michael Stuhlbarg (robbed of an Oscar nomination) the standout as Larry, the bewildered and passive Serious Man of the title who is of good intentions but no conviction.

I first saw the movie at the Canberra Film Festival and the partisan crowd was already in on the joke. But it’s easy to see how audiences could be perplexed by its blacker than black comedy. Who can blame them when the sum total of Larry’s pleadings to the powers that be is, not a catharsis of answers, but an ominous, gathering storm.

News: Top Ten Movies of 2009 - #10

If there’s one thing movie geeks love to do it is to create lists. Everyone’s doing them. Top ten of the year. Top ten of the decade. Top ten blockbusters with the worst CGI. It’s completely perfunctory of course, and ranking them is, especially, absurd. But it satisfies our natural human instinct to ensure everything is categorized and easily referenced. With that spirit in mind, I will be revealing my Top Ten Films of 2009, in order, each weekday, beginning now with J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek.

10. Star Trek

Kirk and Spock on the iBridge

From the outset of 2009, Star Trek as a film series, and as a TV franchise, was dead. The last two films (Insurrection and Nemesis) were awful, and Enterprise was a valiant, but failed attempt to make hip a property widely known for the opposite. Leave it to J.J. Abrams, the skilful TV auteur behind Alias and Lost, Mi:III and, in concept at least, Cloverfield, to achieve just what Enterprise failed to do: make Star Trek cool again.

Hardcore fans may be upset that Abrams has fashioned Trek into an action-driven space-opera more akin to its fanboy rival, Star Wars. I am not, nor have ever been a serious Trek fan, my familiarity with series extending no further than many: First Contact, The Wrath of Khan and the odd episode of TNG or DS9. In other words, precisely the audience at which the 2009 revisioning takes aim.

With a gleeful energy and abundance of lens flares, this new Trek seamlessly blends thrilling action with a well drawn Spock/Kirk origin story. After Abrams, it is a success is largely because of its cast, especially Chris Pine as Kirk, paying homage to Shatner but making it his own, and Zachary Quinto, a surprisingly good Spock given his bland work as Sylar on the troubled Heroes.

The screenplay (by blockbuster go-to team Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) has its contrivances, but it’s also deft at establishing over a half dozen characters, and doing so with clever nods to the original series. Star Trek is not a great film, but it’s an exciting and polished refashioning of a beloved property, and that’s why it’s my tenth best film of the year.

Review: Brothers (2009)

Released March 18, 2010

The bad brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) and good wife (Natalie Portman) in Brothers

This remake of the Susanne Bier’s critically acclaimed drama has little new to say about the effect of war on its participants. What it does have are three strong performances from big Hollywood stars and a smattering of raw, emotional truth.

Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is a solider about to embark on another tour of Afghanistan, leaving behind his loving wife Grace (Natalie Portman) and their two daughters. Sam is the favoured and high-achieving son of the grouchy Hank (Sam Shepard), an alcoholic Vietnam-vet who would prefer to ignore the existence of his other trouble-making son, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Sam heads off to war but is quickly captured. His family presumes him dead –but of course, he’s not – and when he eventually returns, psychologically damaged from his ordeal, he resents the tight family unit that has formed in his absence.

The second half of Brothers is an emotional sucker punch, with a series of powerful yet oddly manufactured scenes. While tapping into a timely problem facing many military families, the characters feel more like movie creations than living, breathing entities. This is despite a nuanced performance from Portman, who is wonderful in an underwritten role; the frightening frenzy of Maguire’s paranoid veteran and, most real of them all, Gyllenhaal’s well-meaning but dysfunctional Tommy.

Brothers is not a war movie, but a family melodrama about guilt and acceptance. Its heightened emotions, minimal score and austere direction are a difficult mix. Director Jim Sheridan knows this, and cleverly uses the gentle humour of the family's delightful young girls to offset the tension. It's just enough, together with the performances, for Brothers to maintain its delicate balancing act, but it remains less than the sum of its quite substantial parts.

News: The Oscars 2010

Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and Greg Shapiro lap it up

Here we are again, another year, another Oscar ceremony, one that is possibly destined to go down in history as the one where Avatar did not win best picture. It certainly won't go down as one of the more memorable, with little drama outside of obnoxious producer Elinor Burkett stealing the microphone from Best Documentary Short winner Roger Ross Williams, who won for Music by Prudence. Even Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's jokes fell flat (except for a pearler about Christoph Waltz's Jew hunter having arrived in Hollywood at "the mother lode") and were seemingly reading off a telepromter and without their usually spot on comic timing.

Are they looking for jokes which are actually funny?

But it wasn't a total loss.

Memorable moments include:

- Neil Patrick Harris' Busby Berkeley opening number

- The dances to the original score nominees, the first bunch in years to actually be good scores.

- Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. presenting together, the only paring to achieve any sort of zing.

Tina Fey and Robert Downey, Jr. making with the funny

- Best score winner (for Up) Michael Giacchino telling budding artists to ignore the naysayers and that creativity is not a waste of time.

- A tribute to (American) Horror movies. Roger Ebert (in a live tweet from the show) called it "Shameless pandering to fanboys & girls." Accurate maybe, but it's still good to see them getting some love.

Christoph Waltz, due next to star in Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet

- Chistoph Waltz's "uber-bingo!" Was it ever even in question?

- Every cut away to George Clooney looking bored.

- The tribute to John Hughes. I've barely seen any of his movies, but the heartfelt words given by Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald, among others, make me want to.

Less memorable moments or moments memorable for the wrong reasons:

- Elinor Burkett's aforementioned mic-stealing incident.

- Jeff Bridges for best actor. Well deserved (and received with a standing ovation), but as George Clooney joked on the red carpet, "Well, he's gonna win, right?"

The Dude with his prize

- Avatar for cinematography? Virtual cinematography over the old-fashioned film of Inglourious Basterds? Tarantino must be flipping out.

- Sandra Bullock's Best Actress for The Blind Slide. Expected, yes, but with her winning a Razzie the previous night for All About Steve, one can't help but feel this is a newcomer vote for starring in a popular tear jerker. But too her credit she joked about it in her acceptance speech, "Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?" Kudos.

Moments that made you say WTF?

- Precious' adapted screenplay win over In the Loop? District 9? An Education? AND Up in the Air? The first three perhaps were never going to win (though In the Loop is the most hysterically foul-mouthed linguisting masterpiece in memory), but Jason Reitman's sublime Up in the Air? That great film got no love at all. Precious' win however, did give screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher the chance to give the most heartfelt speech of the night.

A surprised and moved Geoffrey Fletcher

- The Hurt Locker win for original screenplay is more understandable, though I wish Tarantino had gotten more love for his dialogue heavy WW2 yarn.

- El secreto de sus ojos winning best Foreign Film over the favourites The White Ribbon and A Prophet.

- The double Twilight presenting teams pandering to the young audience. The at best polite applause when Martin pointed them out in the audience speaks volumes (though Anna Kendrick is wasted in New Moon and magnificent in Up in the Air. She's the most talented of the quartet, by far).

The boys from The Hurt Locker in celebration

Overall it was an evening with few surprises and, despite many expecting James Cameron's epic to nab Best Picture (instead winning Cinematography, Art Direction and - gasp! - Visual Effects), it was Kathryn Bigelow's night. Her intelligent and sweaty-palm-inducing Iraq war film The Hurt Locker was a deserving winner, but one still wonders if her ex-husband's blockbuster won't have more lasting significance.

You can find the full list of winners over on IMDb.

Review: Green Zone (2010)

Released March 11, 2010

Matt Damon on the prowl in Green Zone

They might as well have called it The Bourne Zone. Reuniting that franchise’s star and director (Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass), Green Zone is a tense thriller set against the still ongoing war in Iraq. While flirting with the war’s politics and the false justification for the U.S. lead invasion, it is first and foremost an action picture, shot in the director’s typically ragged, hand-held style. Haters of the Bourne sequels’ shaky-cam be warned.

The title refers to the international safe zone in central Baghdad that at one time was the home of the transitional government. Set around 2003, it is there we find U.S. soldier Roy Miller (Damon) on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. He begins to question his intel when his MET – Mobile Exploitation Team – fails to find any of the offending devices. Surprise, surprise. The military’s source, he learns, is only known by the name “Magellan”, and has leaked information to an embedded Wall Street Journal reporter, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). Local C.I.A. chief (Brendan Gleeson) also feels something is amiss. A machine gun rattle later and Miller finds himself an ally-deprived rogue on a quest for the truth. Sound familiar?

Say what you will about his frantic style, but Greengrass knows how to construct visceral action. His hard-hitting, quick cut realism is just as effective, in its own way, as The Hurt Locker’s slow-burning suspense. Closely resembling the standard man-out-of-his-depth-and-doesn’t-know-who-to-trust thriller, Green Zone fictionalises and condenses years of revelations and debate about the Iraq war into an easily digestible and highly-entertaining format.

Aside from its telling final shot, the film is not interested in judging the war’s legality, only that it is deplorable to deliberately deceive and manipulate. Miller stands in for those courageous individuals who are unwilling to simply accept dogma without question or justification. Early on a seemingly honest Iraqi citizen tells him there's a meeting of high ranking officials up the road. An ambush could be feasible. Despite the danger, Miller chooses to take him up on his suggestion, to which one of his subordinates responds: “Chief, we’re here to do a job, the reasons don’t matter”. “They matter to me,” he replies. I don't think he's alone with that sentiment.

DVD Review: Mao's Last Dancer (2009)

Released March 4, 2010

The elegant lines of Chi Cao (as Li Cuxin) in Mao's Last Dancer

It's a shame that Mao's Last Dancer has been barely seen outside Australia. Only garnering a release in Germany (oddly) and appearing at a few film festivals, this DVD may be the first chance many have had to see Bruce Beresford’s latest, a broad biopic of ballet-dancer extrodinarre Li Cuxin.

Aside from his dancing exploits, Cuxin became well known because of his 21 hour long detention at the Houston Chinese Consulate in 1981. An exchange student reaching the end of his term, Li had fallen for his adopted capitalist home (not to mention, his pretty girlfriend) and wished to stay. The communist Chinese authorities did not approve.

His story, from a difficult childhood in 1960s China, to his training at the grueling Beijing Dance Academy, to his subsequent stay in the United States, is related in his autobiography which became the basis for Jan Sardi’s (Shine) screenplay.

Dramatic and uplifting, it is an enjoyable but conventional rags-to-riches tale. Beresford is not afraid to tug at the heartstrings or enounciate the blatant themes of race, culture and ambition. But it’s also weak, without the conviction of thoroughly depicting the hardships enforced on him as a child.

That would perhaps have been a better film. As it is the melodrama of Mao’s Last Dancer is painted in broad strokes with touching performances from Joan Chen as Li’s mother Niang, and company director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood, Star Trek), a soft fatherly figure and champion of his biggest star. Everyone else, including Chi Cao as Li are just servicable, though his dual-language role and superb dancing ability impresses.

Cinematography Peter James gives the Chinese scenes a grimy, grainy quality which contrasts well to the colourful dance sequences. The film’s biggest weakness is the superficial love story between our hero and attractive dancer Elizabeth Mackey (Amanda Schull), which seems to exist solely to allow Li to play marriage card when the communist officials come knocking.