Love and Mercy (4/5 Stars)

(This has got to be some kind of record for me. I saw this movie a month ago and am only now writing the review. It is lapse of time that does not do the movie justice as I may have simply forgotten much of the movie. I do not think I have but of course if I had forgotten it how would I know I had?)

“Love and Mercy,” is a biopic of the musician and composer Brian Wilson of the “Beach Boys.” The musical biopic has become its own subgenre by now with Ray, Johnny Cash, James Brown, and even N.W.A. amongst others getting their own movie. The formula became so cliche that it was notably parodied in “Walk Hard” with John C. Reilly playing a fake musician called Dewey Cox who, like all the other musicians, struggles with childhood tragedy, crafts a big hit that makes him famous and pulls him out of the poverty, becomes addicted to drugs and overcomes his addiction, and has a back and forth relationship with the woman he will finally come to marry and love. “Love and Mercy” is a welcome innovation to this genre. We are spared the rote genre storylines and instead are presented with two stories that interweave with each other. The first is Brian Wilson’s studio creation of his masterpiece “Pet Sounds,” and his subsequent fall into mental illness amidst the hallucinogenic drugs of the sixties. The second is about how the love of a good woman saved a domineered and overmedicated Brian Wilson from a corrupt psychiatrist.

It is a tribute to this movie that the second story is in ways more interesting than the first even though Brian Wilson is not composing or performing any music in it. It is an odd unsettling scenario of the lash between an overly sensitive musical prodigy and the wildness of the counterculture. I bet the case of Brian Wilson, gone mad after one genius album, was a cautionary tale to the entire industry. The two stories inform each other nicely in a way good times/bad times way until the third act when it turns into bad times/bad times for awhile before settling into a satisfying conclusion of bad times/good times.

Young Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano. It is an interesting choice given that Dano does not have a classically good voice. However his acting skills aptly demonstrate the notion that emotional control counts more than versatile skill in delivering the goods. The movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, presents the music in an educational way. He does not merely play the hits, he goes into the studio and has the individual musicians play their parts by themselves. Thus the many layered orchestrations of Brian Wilson are deconstructed in a way that better shows their genius. The best example of this is when Dano plays and sings “God Only Knows” on the piano by himself. That song has a really counterintuitive chord progression that I never noticed until now.  Interestingly “Pet Sounds” was composed entirely Brian Wilson in a studio with a studio band called “The Wrecking Crew” while the other Beach Boys were on tour in Japan. So besides the voices of the other Wilson brothers, the actual Beach Boys weren’t really there for it. Which may have been a good thing as Wilson was sensitive and introspective and simply not ready for the craziness that came with the rock band experience. This reality hits home hard when the story cuts to a future Brian Wilson broken down, isolated, and misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

John Cusack plays old Brian Wilson. It is a fine unshowy performance which is perfect for a character that is defined by being under the influence of larger characters. That would be his doctor Eugene Landy who is played by Paul Giamatti, a consummate character actor if there ever was one. Landy is at once sweet and then conniving and then very scary. Giamatti is particularly good at all of those things. Against Landy is a Cadillac saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) whom Brian Wilson meets one day as he shops for a new car. The movie hinges on this character. She is presented with a very delicate situation. Brian Wilson asks her out on several dates and they hit it off. She is particularly attracted to his kind and humble manner. And then as the story progresses she slowly realizes that he is being abused in a very real way by his psychiatrist. And so she has a choice. Is she going to insert her life into this other person’s troubles? What exactly is her responsibility here?

I have had the pleasure of reviewing Elizabeth Banks many times in the past decade. I have seen many of her movies and written reviews for eight of them. In fact she was in the first movie I ever reviewed “The 40-Year Old Virgin” even though I did not mention her or much else in that review. This role is the best work yet and coming off her revelatory work in The Hunger Games franchise as Effie Trinket, a character that easily could be played much worse by lesser actresses, she is hitting a stride in her career. The career of Elizabeth Banks is a great example of miscasting and likewise a good example of the shallow amount of good roles for women in the movie industry as a whole. For much of her career, Elizabeth Banks minimum amount of comedic chops and her great looks got her miscast in a lot of comedic roles as neurotic losers or else as the mean/mature girlfriend playing straight man to whatever comedian got the interesting role. Like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson she is hard to write for because she escapes the cliché’s of the characters she looks like. She is a beautiful blonde but not vapid or conceited. And she can play subtlety, morality, and grace but roles exploring that side are generally lacking. So she is often seen as mean and exasperated or in the other direction lacking self-confidence neither of which give her the ability to show off her acting capacity. She has received much work (a lot of the time at the expense of not as good looking but better comedians) but very few ideal roles. I would confine those to 30 Rock’s Avery Jessup, Hunger Games Effie Trinket, and now this one. It is finely nuanced performance that never misses a beat and I think she should get an Oscar nomination for it. 

Love and Mercy is a fine movie. Interestingly it is the directorial debut of Bill Pohland but he is by no means a newcomer. He has produced many good movies before including ‘Into the Wild’ and ’12 Years a Slave.’ Apparently he thought he was qualified enough to hire himself this time. He was right.

Hot Tub Time Machine (4/5 Stars) March 31, 2010

“Am I going to be the asshole that suggests we got into this thing and went back in time?”
- Clark Duke

I subscribe to the philosophy that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a movie. It all depends on how you deliver it. I will concede however that some ideas are generally easier to screw up than others. A movie based on a Hot Tub Time Machine is one of those. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the subject matter. It’s just that when the creators of a movie named “Hot Tub Time Machine” hit a rough patch in the production process whether it be in writing, acting, or editing, there is always the temptation to be all like, “Well, only people with absolutely no standards would go see a movie with a title like this anyway, so why on earth are we trying to make it good? Let’s just half-ass it and hopefully these morons will think it’s a so-bad-it’s-good movie.” I’m glad to say that somehow that didn’t happen here. This movie could have easily gone down the tempting road to comedy hell known as “so-bad-it’s-good” but instead followed through on the noble ambition of actually being funny. It all has to do with delivery.

The movie starts off by introducing four losers played by John Cusack, Craig Robinson (The Office), Rob Corddry (The Daily Show), and Clark Duke (ubiquitous dude in the background of the party in Superbad). John Cusack just got recently divorced. Craig Robinson works in a degrading animal related job. Clark Duke, John’s nephew, spends his days in the basement, playing a much more athletic version of himself in a second-life computer game. That might be somewhat redeeming if his character wasn’t currently in prison. Clark spends all of his time telling himself* to do more simulated pushups. Rob Corddry is the worst of all of them. He’s a raging alcoholic, friendless, clueless, and apparently very stupid when drunk. He accidentally almost kills himself by gunning his car to Motley Crue in his closed-off garage. Confronted with the sobering idea that their old friend just tried to kill himself (which he vehemently denies), the gang gets back together in an effort to get their mojo back: They go to the ski resort they frequented when young to have a nostalgic weekend of drunken debauchery. Here they find the aforementioned hot tub, jump in, get blackout drunk, hallucinate about Reagan and Aids, and are transported back to a pivotal weekend in their lives in 1986.

The movie assumes you know all about the paradoxes of time travel, so there isn’t much time wasted with the ground already covered by ‘Back to the Future.’ The huge conflict is Clark Duke’s neurotic fear that if the old guys change anything they did that weekend, then a bunch of butterflies are going to attack and he will cease to exist. Problem is that this weekend wasn’t very good for the guys. Cusack got stabbed in the eye with a fork while dumping his then girlfriend. Craig had a very mediocre performance with his band that ended his musical career. Rob got his ass kicked twice by an asshole ski-instructor. After one night, there is no telling whether any of them will actually go through with the humiliation. Rob Corddry in particular is not prone to giving a shit about any undue influence on the time-space continuum.

The movie is directed by a young director named Steve Pink and written by a trio of writers. The story idea belongs to Josh Heald. It is his first. The two others, Sean Anders and John Morris, have been involved in other Cusack pictures like Gross Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. The movie’s humor is very broad, raucous, and scatological. But it treats it well. I have always felt that the best way to treat a throw-up joke is to tell it without buildup so it is a surprise and then go straight into something else. You don’t want to linger there. There’s a particularly good one involving a cute squirrel and Rob Corddry’s hangover reaction to it. The “punch-line” lasts about half-a-second. That’s a good time period. It doesn’t take the audience any longer than that to get the joke. These guys know what they’re doing. The entire movie is very fast paced. When there is a scene that doesn’t work entirely or isn’t incredibly funny, Pink moves onto something else fairly quickly. Hot Tub Time Machine never rises to the heights of something like “The Hangover,” but it does the best with what it has and when it notices that it might be losing the audience, it pumps out the volume, ramps up the pace, and gives the actors free rein to act as broadly and loudly as possible. 

The one revelation this movie has is Rob Corddry’s performance. I would liken it to Ed Helms’ performance in “The Hangover” last year. The guy has been funny forever on The Daily Show and in bit parts in other movies, but this is the first time that he has been given a substantial role that is custom tailored to his testorone-fueled sociopathic persona. He gives it his all and knocks it out of the park. This is the best work he has ever done. I’ve watched the guy for so long now that I felt kind of proud watching this movie. The ending of this movie is over-the-top, balls-to-the-walls, unjust, and uncalled for. But it works because it fits his performance perfectly. 

What I don’t really understand is what the hell John Cusack is doing in this movie. Lately he seems to be telling his agent to look for the craziest ridiculous movies he can possibly be in, like say 2012. Cusack has always been somewhat funny but has never been a comedian. His persona is too earnest and dare I say, normal. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. He was inexplicably also in such movies as Being John Malkovich, Con Air, and Bullets Over Broadway. I didn’t particularly think he fit into any of those movies either. I’m not saying he did a bad job in this one. It was just a little distracting. What the hell is John Cusack, who at one time used to be A-list, doing in a Hot Tub Time Machine? 

There are plenty of jokes and references to the 80s. Besides the parts where the characters point out Jerri Curls, leg warmers, and a black Michael Jackson, most are subtle like the iconic Sixteen Candles romantic framing, A Christmas Story inspired fight, and a direct homage to Back to the Future when Craig Robinson decides to bust out the Black Eyed Peas during his concert. Then there are supporting roles by such 80s stars like Crispin Glover and Chevy Chase as the comfortably unhelpful hot tub mechanic. The movie however doesn’t depend entirely on these references to make us laugh. It realizes that comedy requires more than just pointing them out and builds actual jokes off of the references. That’s the difference between a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie and an actually good one. The former requires an input of ironic awareness from the audience to make the jokes work. An actually good movie stands alone like say, this one.

2012 (3/5 Stars) December 1, 2009

The end of the world would be funnier, if everyone wasn't so serious about it. 

One of the special things about movies, besides the obvious entertainment value, is the window they open to certain times. Whether the stories they tell take place a thousand years in the past or several hundred million in the future the movie itself is ingrained in the very present year in which it was made. Thus, Star Wars may have been set a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away but everyone in the movie still used shitty 1970s computers. The movies of the first decade of this millennium saw an incredible renaissance in technological spectacle. When this movie’s director, Roland Emmerich, first set out to wreak large-scale destruction in Independence Day in 1995, he was still blowing up small scale set models of the White House, NYC, and LA. Now in 2012, armed with a decade and a half of new technology and several other disaster movies under his belt (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) Emmerich has finally succeeded in what may have been his mission all along: Not just the complete destruction of all major cities or the northern hemisphere, but the entire planet. 
I wonder what people in the future will think of our society in this time when they view the movies of the 2000s. In this decade we have seen ignoble trends that set this decade apart. The first started with the ultraviolent D-Day Beach scene in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Reasonably enough, that movie made it Okay to show violent gore as long as it was done responsibly and realistically. At first this type of gore stayed exclusively in war movies (Black Hawk Down, Enemy at the Gates) but sure enough it crept into other genres (Passion of the Christ, Kill Bill) until sure enough the horror genre took advantage of it. The success of the Saw franchise engendered the term ‘torture porn’ and spawned far too many copycats. Only now in 2009, did a Saw movie, Saw VI, not open with 30 million at the box office. The trend has definitely died too slow a death. The second trend is the vogue of apocalyptic movies of which 2012 is surely the king. These movies are cropping up everywhere nowadays (The Road, Knowing, I am Legend, The Happening, Terminator Franchise, War of the Worlds, Children of Men, Inconvenient Truth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Wall-E). There haven’t been this many end-of-the-world movies since the early 1960s when everyone was making movies about nuclear holocausts. There are two possibilities as to what this may mean: 
1) We are indeed going through hard times as a planet, people are very worried, and Hollywood is capitalizing on that feeling, or
2) The fast and unbroken technological advancement of the past couple decades is allowing Hollywood to make essentially the same movie over and over again, just a little bit bigger each time. That trend, which first started as disaster movies in the seventies, has culminated in the apocalyptic trend of the 2000s. (One can only guess how 2012 will be topped). 

In Emmerich’s case the second possibility is definitely true. I’ll let you decide if the first is also.

As I’m sure you’ve seen from the trailers, huge earthquakes and vast tidal waves destroy the world. Why? Do you really care? I didn’t. The movie attempts to give an excuse like the Mayan calendar ends and the earth aligns with the galaxy in some special way or whatever (neutrinos?). It really is beside the point. The point is that Emmerich has a new bag of digital tricks up his sleeve to unleash on his unwitting fictional humans. With that point of view an audience member can garner a good amount of enjoyment from this movie, in fact I was giggling throughout it. I viewed the entire movie as joke and all the characters in it as straight men, whose unsung job it is to play to the insanity around them as if it were comprehensible. Watching John Cusack trying to react to the oversized destruction around him was like watching someone try to engage in a conversation with Groucho Marx. It’s completely unbelievable but there is something awe-inspiring in watching the person making the attempt over and over again.

I was ready to give the movie 5 stars through the first 45 minutes of it. (My rating system is not really concerned on how great a film, but whether I think I could do it any better.) Given that the plot was about the destruction of the Earth, I could not have improved the first 45 minutes. The destruction of Los Angeles really was a spectacular spectacle. So was the volcanic explosion of Yellowstone. And I felt that John Cusack and Woody Harrelson in particular did a very good job of acting in relation to them. Then something happens that dooms most movies. The best character dies. In this case it was Woody’s crazy prophet of doom character. He met his fate while broadcasting live at the site of the Yellowstone volcanic eruption. A shame. Because with that character’s demise, so went the only person that had looked at the end of the world with any sort of joy. Frankly after Woody left, it just wasn’t as fun to witness the death of 5.9 billion humans.

I spoke of this idea somewhat in my review of Zombieland. When making an apocalyptic movie, it really hurts to take death too seriously. If you have too many sincere scenes where people say goodbye to each other before hurtling to their doom, well dude you’re gonna bum people out. And I do not go to movies that feature the complete destruction of the world to be bummed out. I come to witness some spectacle. Emmerich only half understands this for some reason. He provides the awesome spectacle and then expects us to want to be depressed about it. Like I said before, all the sincere moments would have been funnier if they weren’t so sincere.

Following the weird idea that this movie could possibly be a noble exercise in cinema, there is this really annoying scientist character named Adrian Helmsly (played by Chiwetel Ejoifer). He’s on the government side of the whole plot and spends the second half of the movie lobbying the White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) to be more humane in his effort to save the human species. In particular he doesn’t like how Anheuser basically auctioned off the seats in the Arks that the Chinese built into the Himalayas in order to finance the huge project. Anheusar has also been killing off any people that are about to give away the secret that the world is about to end. Reasonably enough, he feared that if people knew the truth then there would be mass chaos and everyone would die. This isn’t good enough for Helmsly who does some very moral grandstanding, including one speech at the end where he advocates a rather drastic change of course. He somehow gets people to agree with him and subsequently almost gets everyone killed. Point is, the guy is a complete moron and this movie’s attempt to make him into some kind of a hero is about as unrealistic and stupid as the Mayan conspiracy. I especially liked Anheausar’s bewildered response to one of his inane pleadings, “What? Life’s unfair?” He may have also added, “No shit Sherlock, the human race is being annihilated. You’re complaining about this, Now!.” Watching this guy made me more than annoyed. I would have given the movie a much better rating had Oliver Platt landed one right in his kisser during the middle of his dumb speech, especially right after he quoted a bargain basement author of an unknown book as inspiration. That would have been hilarious. That’s what Emmerich can improve on in his next movie about a black hole that eats up the entire galaxy.

Ice Harvest 12/07/05

Sometimes I really hate marketers. Especially when they put out trailers that aren't faithful to the movie they are promoting. That is an especially heinous act. They have one job and they purposely won't do it. If this movie wasn't especially good I think I would be more angry.
Okay so first of all, The Ice Harvest isn't a comedy. It's straight up film noir. Noone looking for only laughs ought to see this movie. There are funny parts but they're funny like the way Hitchcock is funny (Like an afterthought, but not the point). The point is film noir. The movie is suspense and murder and theft and femme fatales. Everyone drinks, everyone smokes. Not many people like each other and they inhabit sleazy strip clubs in the middle of a frozen over nowhere. The only man who seems to have some sort of decency is played by John Cusack. And he just stole 2 million dollars. The plot has twists and turns galore, and in many ways it's charm comes from how the characters pop in and pop out of the woodwork, staying just long enough for one to become interested but short enough for one not to get bored. (This movie is perfectly cast with large fat men who we all remember from previous movies as tall and skinny, and Connie Nielson as the oh-so-charming femme fatale.) One great part is given to Billy Bob Thornton, the friend of the thief. Or is he an enemy. Or is he his friend. Who knows, and you know what...when their crossing that bridge (you know where) the suspense was killing me.