Archive | March, 2013

You Can Count on Me

20 Mar

You Can Count On Me

Laura Linney creates a breakthrough role as a woman suffering from single-mother dysfunction in upstate New York. Sammy, free of her marriage to a redneck creep, struggles to be a caring parent and make ends meet in a dead-end banking job. She has a new anal-retentive boss (Matthew Broderick) who relishes paperwork, and her on-again, off-again boyfriend finally wants to get married. Things seem to take an upswing when her wayward brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo), returns to the family homestead and helps out with the care of Sammy’s eight-year-old son, Rudy, (Rory Culkin, even cuter than Macaulay). But though Terry’s the family screw-up who’s spent time in jail, it’s Sammy who acts the part as she wavers on the marriage proposal and starts sleeping with her dickhead boss, who’s married and expecting a baby.

Writer/director Ken Lonergan (he wrote the script for Analyze This) was decorated at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. His four leads, especially Linney, are superb, and though Lonergan at times betrays his players with forced situational entrapments and highbrow dialogue, his dark, witty depiction of small-town motherhood is affectingly bittersweet. 

— Tom Meek

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The Pursuit of Happyness

20 Mar

The Pursuit of Happyness

 A career-capping performance for Smith

By TOM MEEK  |  February 20, 2007

Not what you’d expect given the title or star Will Smith’s wholesome persona — no, not at all. Based on the real-life travails of Chris Gardner (featured on a 20/20 segment), Happyness is a rags-to-riches yarn that latches onto the dark underside of the journey. Smith plays Gardner in circa 1980 San Francisco. Not much is going right for Chris. His medical-sales business is tanking (he sells bone-density machines door-to-door and no one’s buying), he can’t pay the rent, and his wife (Thandie Newton giving a lot of depth to an unsavory role) leaves him. Not to mention he has a five-year-old son (Smith’s son, Jaden, who steals a few scenes from his dad) to look after. Chris needs money, and fast. The answer arrives when he sees a smiling, happy stockbroker driving a Ferrari. He schemes endlessly to land a job at Dean Witter, and when he does (by solving a Rubik’s Cube and telling a great story about why he showed up to the interview looking like a garbage picker), he learns that it’s an unpaid internship and that at the end of six months only one from the flock of interns will be hired.

That’s just one of the many cruel realities that keep pushing Chris toward the gutter. His daily juggling act is a harrowing ordeal: drop son off at day care, make cold calls at Dean Witter, sell scanners on lunch break, make more cold calls and fetch higher-ups coffee, pick up son and try to find a place to sleep at night. Yes, Chris and his son are homeless throughout most of the story, and just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do. But through it all he keeps his eyes on the prize. His perseverance and resourcefulness are infinite, admirable, even uplifting.

The issues of race and ’80s greed never overtly raise their head, but their sphere of influence is palpable. Smith turns in a career-capping performance, and director Gabriele Muccino ingeniously turns the material inward, cautioning us all to be grateful for what we have, for we’re closer to the edge than we think.

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The Incredibles

20 Mar
THE INCREDIBLES

AN ADULT-SAVVY DYNAMIC: underneath the superduds, it’s just Bob and Helen and the kids.

Pixar, the animation studio behind Toy Story and Finding Nemo, adds to its laurels and then some with this tale of a family of costumed crimefighters. Writer/director Brad Bird’s witty take on the domestic lives of superheroes is set in a cheery, postmodern society where frivolous litigation (collateral damage and personal injury) against superheroes had become so rampant that the heroes — much like the mutants in X-Men — were legally required to suppress their superpowers and fit in with everybody else. As the film opens, it’s 15 years later: Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), now plain old Bob Parr, has traded his six-pack for a beer gut and is pushing a pencil at an insurance company, and his wife, Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), now Helen Parr, has become a stay-at-home mom supervising a rambunctious trio of super-charged children. Sick of the mundane malaise of suburbia, Bob puts on his Mr. Incredible tights and joins his former sidekick, Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), in parlaying their bowling night into an opportunity to revive their superhero escapades. One thing leads to another, and without telling Helen, Bob accepts an invitation to a remote island to battle a peevish megalomaniac (Jason Lee) and his omnipotent über-bot. Mr. Incredible proves not as incredible as he used to be, and an angry Helen and the kids have to bail him out. Sure, the world hangs in the balance, but it’s the adult-savvy everyday dynamic between Bob and Helen that saves the day. (115 minutes)

BY TOM MEEK

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Finding Nemo

20 Mar
FINDING NEMO
BY TOM MEEK

FINDING NEMO: Dory and Marlin try to avoid becoming fish sticks for great white shark Bruce.

With this fish tale about family ties, director Andrew Stanton and the animation brain trust at Pixar (Toy Story and Monsters, Inc.) do it again. Sure, the plot about a father’s odyssey to save his imperiled son is old hat, but it’s the clever details, enchanting emotional nuances, and cheeky humor that make Finding Nemoswim.

One of those sublime details is the “lucky” (undersized) fin that the neophyte of the title (voiced by Alexander Gould) is blessed with. As a result, the little white-and-orange-striped clown fish (the species is supposed to be funny, but Nemo’s dad can’t tell a joke to save his tail) isn’t a very good swimmer and isn’t supposed to leave the safety of the reef, but when he does, he’s nabbed by a diver and relegated to an aquarium in a dentist’s office. Marlin (Albert Brooks), Nemo’s widowed father, sets off to retrieve his son, forming an unlikely alliance with a batty blue tang fish who’s impaired by short-term memory loss (deftly done by Ellen DeGeneres). Along the way they encounter a trio of sharks who are trying to give up their piscean diet (“Fish are friends, not food”) and a 150-year-old turtle who articulates in affected surfer speak (“Yah dude!”). You know exactly how this one ends; yet getting there is such an enjoyable delight.

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Ghosts of Mars

20 Mar

GHOSTS OF MARS

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GHOSTS OF MARS: Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube exchange views on the latest from Jay-Z.

Director John Carpenter returns to his slash-and-squirt roots with this Martian horror thriller. On the surface it’s derivative of many a deep-space chiller (think Alien 3, Event Horizon, and Supernova), but it’s really a retooling of his 1976 cult classic,Assault on Precinct 13.

The year is 2176, and Mars has been turned into an atmospherically correct mining colony. Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge, who does the Sigourney Weaver bit in her undies and tiny tank T) leads a crew of rogue and rookie cops on an extradition mission to extract notorious murderer James ” Desolation ” Williams (Ice Cube) from a remote outpost. When they arrive, they find all the inhabitants either missing or butchered in the most unspeakable fashion; yet hanging tight in lock-up are Desolation and a few other wayward souls. In a flash, cops and cons are thrown together as a ghoulish horde of miners turned punk-rock marauders launch a gory and never-ending onslaught. How and why the sadistic berserkers came to be is pure cockamamie, but that doesn’t detract from the campy fun of seeing Henstridge’s babe commando hold Ice Cube’s bristling thug under her thumb while doing battle with the minions of a bloodthirsty incarnation.

BY TOM MEEK

Issue Date: August 30 – September 6, 2001

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Event Horizon

20 Mar

Event Horizon

This dark, eerie, genuinely creepy outer-space thriller is hardly original, yet director Paul Anderson manages to blend the archetypal elements of horror and science fiction into a stomach-fluttering experience that maintains its suspenseful edge from the opening thump to the final ka-bang.

It’s set credibly in the near future, with Sam Neill starring as the creator of the Event Horizon, a spaceship equipped with a gravity drive designed for interdimensional travel. The ship has been absent for seven years, so when it resurfaces, Neill requisitions Laurence Fishburne’s deep-space search-and-rescue unit to aid him in his Ahab-esque quest. At the far recess of the solar system, they encounter the Event Horizon, crewless and dormant. But something unfathomable has returned with it. First apparitions appear and rattle the team’s sanity — imagine The Exorcist or The Shining remade on the set of Alien. Then, after more inexplicable goings on, the carnage begins. The why and what of the destructive force is never quite explained, which is annoying, but this film is really about mood, set design, and crisp editing, all of which Anderson achieves with a master hand. Nothing too inspirational here, just plenty of well-orchestrated frights.

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Offside

19 Mar

Offside

A game of universal humanity

By TOM MEEK  |  April 25, 2007

070419_inside_offside
IT’S ANYBODY’S GAME: But Jafar Panahi’s pro-feminist drama actually scores.

As it did the director’s pro-feminist 2000 neo-realist drama The Circle, the Iranian government has banned Jafar Panahi’s latest contemplation of the oppression of women in Iran. Offside takes a lighter tack as it challenges the law barring women from public sporting events. Six disparate females — ranging from shy and mousy to acerbic and tomboyish — dress up as boys (one audaciously as a soldier) and get caught as they try to sneak into Iran’s World Cup 2006 qualifier against Bahrain. They’re relegated to a makeshift holding pen atop Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, able to hear the roar of the crowd with cutting clarity but just a few tantalizing feet from seeing the game (which Iran won, 1-0). Instead they engage in a debate with the young soldiers guarding them; the men aren’t happy about enforcing the law, but they fear reprisal if they show any leniency. Amid the back and forth of the game, Panahi taps into universal humanity and delivers a liberating twist in the contest’s aftermath.

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Gigli

19 Mar
GIGLI

BY TOM MEEK

Disregard the negative buzz: Gigli is woeful but not disastrous. Ben Affleck’s Larry Gigli (“pronounced like really with a G”) is a hit man assigned to kidnap and house-sit the DA’s simpleton brother (Justin Bartha) so the DA won’t proceed against Larry’s mob boss. Larry’s handler (a bug-eyed Lenny Venito) doesn’t trust him, so he sends in gorgeous back-up Ricki (Jennifer Lopez). She’s a lesbian, he’s a wanna-be player, and because the apartment is so small, they have to share a bed.

Written and directed by Martin Brest (Scent of aWoman and Midnight Run), Gigli is a banal exercise in vanity. Yes, Ben looks fetching, and yes, J. Lo gets to showcase her posterior, but the fashion shoot gets tired fast. Their big love scene is tepid and gets upstaged by the inane foreplay banter about turkey (“Time to eat. Gobble, gobble.”) and “heterolingus.” Christopher Walken and Al Pacino lend their mugs to this embarrassment. The one high point is Bartha, whose idiot savant is Rain Man infused with Eminem.

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Deep Blue Sea

19 Mar
Deep Blue Sea The Boston Phoenix
DIRECTED BY: Renny Harlin REVIEWED: 08-02-99
 

Jaws in triplicate and with brains — that’s the hook behind this horror-adventure vehicle that packs a few good thrills and sleek FX behind its nonsensical premise. Director Renny Harlin, back from the dead after the abysmal Cutthroat Island, places his cast of chum on a techno-cool atoll called Aquatica. The rig is an isolated research facility where the beautiful and brainy Saffron Burrows (The Loss of Sexual Innocence) enlarges the cerebellums of three sharks in search of an Alzheimer’s cure. After one of the lab sharks gets loose, the man with the money, Samuel Jackson, drops in on the clam shack to see how his dollars are working. A storm cripples the structure and everyone sits around waiting to become shark hors d’oeuvres.

The battery of piquant characters includes Stellan Skarsgård as the head scientist with a perilous desire to smoke and Michael Rapaport as the nervous technician. As the shark handler, up-and-comer Thomas Jane is an intriguing Mel Gibson-esque variation on Kevin Costner’s mariner from Water World; Burrows is in fine form doing Sigourney Weaver’s Alien bit in her undies; and rapper turned actor L.L. Cool J plays the preachy chef with enough mess-hall ingenuity to take on the watery wolves.

Harlin does keep the suspense strung tight, but the über-sharks’ omnipotence borders on cheesy, unintentional camp — though not to the degree of Jaws author Peter Benchley’s made-for-TV flop, Creature. If you want shark-with-smarts guffaws, try to catch the mid-’70s Saturday Night Live skit “Land Shark.”

 

–Tom Meek

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Any Given Sunday

19 Mar

R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 12/23/1999,

Any Given Sunday

Oliver Stone’s football fantasy is in some ways a locker-room rendition of All About Eve. Dennis Quaid plays the loyal, aging quarterback, Jamie Foxx is his cocky understudy, and holding the team (the fictitious Miami Sharks, ostensibly fashioned after the NFL’s notorious bad boys, the Oakland Raiders) together is Al Pacino as the old-school coach. Shades of Pete Carroll: the team struggles to make the playoffs and the coach’s leadership is challenged, both on the sidelines by the flashy upstart QB and from above by the franchise’s brassy new owner (a wonderfully bitchy Cameron Diaz).

Stone, for all his frenetic edginess, does a decent job of forging credible relationships among the leads — though Quaid’s QB uncharacteristically steps outside his persona to fuel the plot trappings. Foxx demonstrates a surprising range, and Pacino brilliantly toggles between tenacious warrior and beleaguered once-was. The ensemble supporting cast boasts a who’s who of Hall of Famers including Jim Brown, Lawrence Taylor, and Johnny Unitas. Stone indulges too much of his nauseatingly grandiloquent editing style, which takes some of the zip off the gridiron action. But if Any Given Sunday isn’t quite in the same league asNorth Dallas Forty or The Longest Yard, it’s good pigskin entertainment. Be sure to stick around for the credits; that’s when the film goes into OT and delivers the kicker.

— Tom Meek

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