A couple of knowing chuckles, and two laugh-out-loud moments are in the trailer to this coming-of-age-late comedy about a women rebelling against adulthood (Keira Knightly) who falls in with a teen (Chloe Grace Moretz), which doesn’t please the teen’s dad (Sam Rockwell).
The great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson is having a good laugh remembering the
opening scene from the new movie “Frank.” A musically-inept young man is humming
and thinking up lyrics — BAD lyrics — as he walks home from work.
“That is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen,” says Gleeson, who was
Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter pictures and star of “In Bruges” and “The
Grand Seduction,” a man who knows funny. “That lad, he made me laugh and
laugh.”
“That lad” is somebody Brendan Gleeson is unusually proud of. He’s not just a
redheaded Irish actor, like himself. That’s Domhnall Gleeson, 31, son of
Brendan. “Frank,” which stars Michael Fassbender as a quirky artist who fronts a
band — Soronprfbs — while wearing a gigantic fake head that he never, ever
takes off, allowed Domhnall to expand his musical horizons.
“The very first line of that song, ‘The endless, rolling waves carry me to
you…’,” Gleeson-the-Younger explains, “that was in the script. But the lyrics
and the pain of coming up with them, not realizing how bad they are, I came up
with sitting with (music director) Stephen Rennicks up in his apartment, playing
at the keyboards. I wanted to write the worst possible song, the most boring
personal theme song for this fellow. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, I could write a
song.’ So few of us can.”
“Frank,” a darkly quirky comedy about an uncompromising artist and the
oddballs (Maggie Gyllenhaal also stars, and plays theremin in Soronprfbs) is
opening to some of the most generous reviews of the summer. “Weird and
wonderful,” Variety said. And Variety isn’t alone.
Domhnall Gleeson is the audience’s alter ego in the film, the outsider
reluctantly “welcomed” into the band, the guy who learns about Frank directly
from the big-headed weirdo’s mouth. But acting opposite a famous film star
wearing an enormous head — “That’s really him in every scene. You can tell from
the simple physicality of his performance.” — wasn’t the biggest challenge.
Everybody in the film has to play an instrument, something they demonstrated
when Fassbender, Gleeson, Gyllenhaal and the others performed on Stephen
Colbert’s “The Colbert Report.”
“We play the music live, in the film, so playing ‘Colbert’ was just like that
— not dubbed, not touched up or anything like that,” Gleeson, who learned to
play keyboards, says. “People might not believe us, so even though we hadn’t
played together in a year and a half, since making the film, we got back
together, rehearsed for a day, and did it. Not bad.”
“Frank” isn’t the only film this rising star has out at the moment. His
father plays a priest in John Michael McDonagh’s dark allegory, “Calvary,” and
Domhnall read dad’s copy of the script and knew he wanted a piece of that. He
won over an admittedly-reluctant writer-director and ended up dyeing his hair to
play a convicted murderer, a former altar boy that Father James visits in
prison.
“We fought really hard in that scene, battled each other fiercely,” Domhnall
says.
“We were like two sparring partners, buddies, forced to get into the ring and
throw punches for real,” his father, Brendan, recalls. “Go back to your corner
in between takes and do what you’ve got to do.”
Brendan says that got to the point where they couldn’t discuss the scene or
the characters any more and had to back away from each other. Domhnall confirms
this, but relished the chance “to see my father in all his glory, taking his
blows and hitting back at him. There’s danger in the air with him.”
Brendan just laughs and says “It was nice to have him back, at the end of the
day.”
While it’s hard to see much of the gruff and garrulous father in the son’s
performances, Domhnall is quick to reflect his father’s pride in his burgeoning
career back at the Old Man, “who is so generous that he makes every day on the
set a blast.” And Brendan?
“I’m fascinated by what Domhnall’s going to get up to next, which is a lovely
place for a young actor to be.”
If there’s one short-coming in Dad’s raising of star-in-the-making, it reared
its head when Domhnall heard about J.J. Abrams and Disney re-visiting “a long
time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”
“I had not seen ‘Star Wars,’ as a boy,” Domhnall chuckles. That could have
made it hard to land a role in the new “Star Wars” film. It didn’t. “Had to go
out and watch those earlier films before I met J.J., just to be safe. So if I
hadn’t gotten the part, we’d be blaming Dad for that!”
Zach Galifianakis — talk show co-host (with a fern), hairy hedonist, and in out of Vegas, comic and sage.
Which one will show up when we chat today?
He’s played the madman man-child more times than one can count, but his turn in the Matthew Weiner screen comedy “Are You Here” (Aug. 22) is a nice twist on that type casting. No driving Robert Downey Jr., Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper or anybody else to distraction. He’s a guy who inspires loyalty, compassion, envy and deep thoughts.
In the movie, at least.
Questions for Zach? I’m looking for help. Post them as comments below. Thanks.
Antonio Banderas pretty much steals “The Expendables 3.” But at this stage in that winded franchise, that amounts to petty theft.
Adding the chatty, animated and action-friendly Banderas and Wesley Snipes as new “Expendables” and Mel Gibson as an arms-dealing villain amounts to a significant trade-up from the likes of Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris, mercifully missing in action.
Banderas is hilarious, mainly in the third act, and Snipes is welcomed with a decent action opening. He plays a guy they break out of some former Soviet prison. His offense?
“Tax evasion!”
And Harrison Ford lets only a hint of embarrassment sneak into his turn as the new guy who gives the team of C.I.A.-hired mercenaries their missions.
But it’s when the film deviates from the “bunch-a has-beens trying to be hard” formula that “Expendables” is most disposable.
After one of their number takes a bullet, Barney (Sylvester Stallone) lays them off and rounds up younger recruits — played by Kellan Lutz, MMA star Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell — to go catch the murderous arms dealer (Gibson) that Barney thought he’d killed years ago.
The recruiting the new team bit is dull and jokey, as Barney rides around the country with some “finder” played by Kelsey Grammer. And the new kids’ trial by fire is strictly routine.
But Banderas, as a Spanish chatterbox named Galgo, is the wild card, a man hungry for a mission. He’s like the Toshiro Mifune character from “Seven Samurai,” the comical self-inflated warrior that nobody wants. Galgo is also too old for this sort of work.
“Ees like I dee-SCOVER the FOUN-tain of youth!” he exults. Every scene, every “Puss-n-Boots” line, the guy kills. Even when he’s killing, and there’s a lot of that, because this movie has the highest body count this side of “World War Z.”
Gibson, tanned and twisted, dives into the bad guy trash talk.
“I’ll open up your meat-shirt” and do something “with your heart,” he hisses. We buy it.
But we also buy what Trench, the Arnold Schwarzenegger middle-man character says, midway through the picture.
“Hurry up. It’s boring.”
Traipsing from former Soviet republics — yes, the Putin-esque still make the best villains — to Mogadishu and Bucharest, there’s too much talk, too many lapses in logic in between the three epic firefights, the last of which is just laughable.
It’s obvious that the stunt men are doing most of the heavy lifting here. The one person truly at home in her fights is Rousey, and she’s too green to be anything other than a stiff as an actress.
Running gags about who is best with a knife, Christmas (Jason Statham) or Doc (Snipes), or Drummer (Ford) griping that he can’t understand the Brit Christmas’s accent, Dolph Lundgren moments, Terry Crews gags, Jet Li jokes — none of it adds up to much.
Until Banderas pops back up — fighter, parkour stunt jumper, flirt — he has the best lines and he makes the most of them.
“I am the BRIDEgroom…of DEATH!”
But it’s not really scene-stealing when everybody else just shrugs and takes their label, “expendable” so literally.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence including intense sustained gun battles and fight scenes, and for language
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Ronda Rousey, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger
Credits: Directed by Patrick Hughes, screenplay by Sylvester Stallone, Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. A Lionsgate/Millennium release.
Running
The film version of “The Giver” is briskly directed in bright, confident strokes, scripted to emphasize its thought-provoking qualities and acted by players, young and old, who are “all in” on the future they’re portraying.
As adaptations of Young Adult sci-fi go, it holds its own against the many successes of this Teens Save the Future genre.
But coming after “Divergent,” “The Hunger Games,” “Ender’s Game” and “The Host,” it underlines the paucity of original ideas in this genre. Seriously, if Hollywood serves up one more spotless jump-suited crypto-fascist future where only a “Chosen One” can make us remember the humanity we have lost, I’m screaming “Logan’s RUN” and fleeing the theater.
Lois Lowry’s novel is about Jonas, played by Aussie actor Brenton Thwaites (“Maleficent”), a teen who, with his “best friends forever” (Odeya Rush, Cameron Monaghan) is about to graduate from childhood. They’re to be told what they’ll spend their lives doing, what they’re suitable for — everything from “Drone Pilot” to “Nurturer” (childcare specialist).
The Chief Elder (Meryl Streep) thanks each “for your childhood” in a big ceremony, and since they’re all medicated at the start of every day, nobody questions this. Everyone sees the world monochromatically — literally. “Sameness” rules their rules.
“I don’t want to be different. Who would?”
But Jonas is different. He’s got the mark on his wrist, and he’s to be a “Receiver.” In a world without strife, struggle, rudeness or even bad grammar — “PRECISE language!” — Jonas will be given that gift that few share — memory. He has to be strong enough to handle this collective history of the World before The Ruin.
It was a time, the sage “Giver” (Jeff Bridges) intones, “when things were different. When there was more.” More, we learn, can mean everything from races and religions to emotions and sensations (love, pain, music, dance) and even real estate. These perfect planned “communities” on the top of this cloud-shrouded plateau are the only world any of these people know. The Giver is the keeper of memories he passes on because his class is responsible for advising the elders on matters that keep this politically correct/strife-free Utopia Utopian.
Jonas absorbs the history and starts seeing the world in color, as it truly is. He gains a whole new appreciation for his “friend” Fiona (Rush). And he starts to develop morality, independent thinking and rebellious thoughts.
Streep plays the villain of this world, intent on preserving the order of things, the “Sameness.” She reminds us that the best villains don’t see themselves that way. Her Chief Elder is assisted by, among others, her Chief of Security, Jonas’s mother (Katie Holmes). No, she didn’t give birth to him. She and Father (Alexander Skarsgard) just raised him. Maybe that’s why she has no trouble ratting out her kid’s increasingly human tendencies. Doctor Dad, however, has flashes of humanity.
I love the literalness of it all, the Orwellian euphemisms Lowry cooked up for death (“elsewhere”) and the once-playful plush toys that quiet noisy babies (“comfort object”).
Bridges gives his voice age by making The Giver jowly-growly. But he’s never a cute old coot. He is a haunted man with an official mission, and a secret one — to make Jonas see beyond this world and what it lacks.
Philip Noyce (“Salt”, “Patriot Games”) reminds us of what hiring an accomplished director brings to one of these cookie-cutter movies, creating vivid flashbacks of memory — sledding from when there was snow, sailing from when they knew the ocean, the horrors of combat when the world was at war.
But all that said, this 96 minute long, self-contained drama is flatly undramatic. Lowry’s dystopia — she did four books set in this future — is richly allegorical (she won the Newbery Medal for this) but derivative, much imitated but imitative.
Everything from the costumes to the circumscribed PC speech (“I apologize.” “I accept your apology.”) feels over-familiar, and the quest summons up sci-fi deja vu.
So while “The Giver” scores points for being smarter and deeper than “The Hunger Games” or its inferior photo-copy (“Divergent”), coming after all those other versions of this plot does neither it, nor us, any favors. “The Giver” has nothing new to offer.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a mature thematic image and some sci-fi action/violence
Cast: Brenton Thwaites, Jeff Bridges, Odeya Rush, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, Taylor Swift, Alexander Skarsgard.
Credits: Directed by Philip Noyce, based on the Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide. Based on the Lois Lowry novel. A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 1:34
The laughs are loud, lewd and low in “Let’s Be Cops,” a spoof of cop “buddy pictures” that is pretty much the definition of “an August comedy.”
The last month of summer is typically a dumping ground for titles studios don’t have high hopes for. Sometimes, that’s due to the lack of marketable stars. Sometimes, they’re just too hard to market period. And sometimes, if they’re comedies, it’s because the belly laughs are few and far between. All of those apply here.
Jake Johnson of TV’s “New Girl” is paired up with another generation of Wayans — Damon Wayans Jr. — in this farce about two Ohio losers losing their way through Los Angeles, a tough place to be a single guy with zero status.
Justin (Wayans) is a meek and mousy video game developer who is so passive that he gives off a feminine vibe. Ryan (Johnson) is an ex-jock who once quarterbacked for Purdue, but now spends his days roughing up kids in pick-up games on a local playground. Nobody gives either of these guys a second look.
Justin’s cop-centric video game may have been rejected by his bullying boor of a boss, but the police gear he has around the house is handy to have when he and Ryan want to drop in on an alumni “costume” party. People there mistake them for police. Women eyeball these manly men in uniform. And Ryan, who used to feel the love of the crowd, gets hooked.
“Let’s be cops!”
Next thing you know, they’re walking the streets, in uniform with fake guns and fake nametags — Justin is ‘Officer Chang.” The cute waitress he’d like to reveal his true identity/sexuality to (Nina Dobrev) checks him out, so he’s in. But Ryan is WAY in — trading his battered ’80s Camaro for an eBay police cruiser, adding decals and lights, boning up on police procedure, listening for real police calls on a scanner.
“The plan is we CONTROL the situation,” he growls. “That’s what the Youtube video says!”
Things get more and more out of hand, from domestic disturbances that turn out to be spirited sorority girl brawls, to tangles with the Russian mob. The psychotic head mobster Mossi (James D’Arcy) is not amused as “the new sheriffs in town.”
Co-writer/director Luke Greenfield (“Something Borrowed”) lets what few laughs there are in the script land. Johnson’s timing is sharp, and Wayans has that Wayans way with dopey under-reactions to crazy situations. Ask that raging sorority girl her name.
“Precious.”
“NOT your gang name. Or your stripper name. Your REAL name.”
The pairing of these two sometimes works, but Wayans has more of the name and the look than the edge or charismatic comic spark of his dad or his dad’s funnier family members.
Johnson has made a number of smart indie film choices that allowed him to shine — “Drinking Buddies,” “Safety Not Guaranteed.” This one is far more conventional and seriously short of zingers.
“What’s the WORST that could happen?”
The answer to that is, you could end up in a summer comedy that’s barely funny enough to warrant — ahem — release in the summer.
MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, some graphic nudity, violence and drug use
Cast: Jake Johnson, Damon Wayans, Jr., Nina Dobrev, James D’Arcy, Rob Riggle, Andy Garcia
Credits: Directed by Luke Greenfield, written by Luke Greenfield and Nicholas Thomas. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 1:44
Lauren “Betty” Bacall died today, TMZ just confirmed. She was 89 years old, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s film noir era, Bogie’s widow.
“You know how to whistle, don’t you?”
We do. “Key Largo,” “The Big Sleep,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” and “Pret a Porter,” a career that peaked with her years with Bogart, classics with John Huston, she was the very model of elegance, reason enough for Robert Altman to cast the ex-model and late-life TV pitch woman in his film about fashion.
I met her when that film came out, got her fashion advice (for the profile I wrote of her, mind you).
“First,” she intoned, in that regal, deliciously haughty voice she had later in life, “you DON’T want to scare the horses!”
She never did. What a doll.
Zach loved Beth — past tense. But his girlfriend put in her earbuds, trekked off up into the hills, and…something happened.
Because we meet Zach (Dane DeHaan) after her funeral. He’s in shock. His parents (Cheryl Hines, Paul Reiser) are ready to move on to “Life After Beth.” They talk up vacation plans. But even though Beth’s folks (John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon) may be barely maintaining a brave face, they make time to comfort him. Heck, Morty (Reilly) even shares one of Beth’s joints with him as they play chess into the wee hours, fretting over the last words each said to her before that fateful hike.
That doesn’t help. Zach grows more morose and more obsessed. They give him a woolen scarf, which he wears in the summer.
“It’s my dead girlfriend’s scarf. She’s DEAD.”
Jeff Baena’s “Life After Beth” has a variety of fascinating directions it can head off in at this point. The college boy’s unhealthy fixation, the adults’ insistence on moving on, the girls’ desire for escape.
And when Beth reappears, there are still plenty of options as to where this could go.
“What kind of grift is this?” the kid demands of his dead-now-alive girlfriend’s father. A grift would be odd and kind of funny, maybe an insurance scam or something. Maybe they’re trying to free their daughter from this lunatic boy she’s in love with. But no.
“It’s a…resurrection!”
“Life After Beth” — the title is a pun — is about Zach’s comical confusion about how to react to this heart-wrenching loss that no longer counts as a loss. All those things he never got to tell her?
“Go! Say everything you meant to say to her!”
But Beth? She’s DIFFERENT. She has no memory of being dead, and since she’s played by Aubrey Plaza, that means a lot of eye-rolling.
She’s volatile, violent and sexually insatiable. Musically, she can only tolerate smooth jazz. And her parents are acting just as strange. Her mom can’t stop taking pictures of her, urging them to go off and, you know, be alone. Her dad wants to keep her indoors. Especially during daylight hours.
“Discretion, Zach. Discretion.”
Zach hints that he has a clue. He must have seen “Twilight” or “The Walking Dead.” What’s clever here is how he ignores what he’s figuring out and what the adults may not be telling him. Beth, for a while at least, is the most fun she’s ever been and they can’t get enough of each other. He’s not questioning that.
DeHaan doesn’t get across Zach’s grief in the early scenes or his desperate denial in the later ones. He simply mentions these feelings.
Plaza (“Parks and Recreation”) on the other hand, is all-in for this romp, veering between dopey and demented.
“Life After Beth” attracted a good cast — Garry Marshall is a grandparent, Anna Kendrick shows up as “a girl I knew from childhood” — and this dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be.
Whether it was his choice or one dictated by production financing, “Life After Beth” contents itself with taking that road well traveled to a genre of film that has been shot, bludgeoned and beaten to death.
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some horror violence, sexual content, nudity and brief drug use
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, John C. Reilly, Cheryl Hines, Paul Reisner, Molly Shannon
Credits: Written and directed by Jeff Baena. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:29
He just turned 25. So there’s no calling Daniel Radcliffe “kid” any more.
But there is something of the “kid in a candy store” to his wide-ranging
choice of roles in the short time since he hung up Harry Potter’s invisibility
cloak.
He played a lawyer contending with a vengeful ghost in “The Woman in Black,”
gay poet Allen Ginsburg during his formative college years in “”Kill Your
Darlings,” and paired up with Jon Hamm for the short TV series about physicians
in Revolutionary Russia in “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.”
Every so often, he devotes a few months to the theater, most recently
starring as “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”
“Kid in a candy store — that’s pretty much how I’m looking at it,” he admits
with a chuckle. “I’m …kind of trying a little bit of everything. Playing one
part for a long time builds up in you a desire to play lots of different roles,
see what you’re like, what you might be good at.”
So he donned “Horns” to play a young man who grows horns after his
girlfriend’s mysterious death, a film due out this fall. And he took on his
first-ever romantic comedy leading man role, in “What If,” starring opposite Zoe
Kazan, now in theaters.
“I’m still finding out who I am as an actor, what I like doing and what I’m
best at,” Radcliffe says. “That’s how I have the most fun, facing the unexpected
every time out. If I have the chance, at this stage in my career, I’m going to
do the widest variety of roles.”
He has that “chance,” that freedom of choice, because he was in “the most
commercially successful film franchise of all time.” There’s no pressure to find
another film franchise, or even to star in another blockbuster.
“I’m never going to get that level again, for starters,” Radcliffe says. “But
financially, I only have to do things that I’m passionate about. I don’t have to
do stuff I’m not interested in just to make a living. For as long as I’m in this
position, that’s what I intend to do.”
Estimates of his vast Harry Potter earnings vary widely, but suffice it to
say he doesn’t sweat the Monday morning box office figures. If a “Woman in
Black” hits and a “Kill Your Darlings” doesn’t, it was the interesting work that
mattered to Radcliffe.
“What If” began life as a script titled “The F-Word,” as in “friend,” as in a
young man who meets young woman he clicks with (Kazan) only to discover she’s in
a long-term, committed relationship. She values his company, but he’s smitten
and condemned to “the friend zone.”
“It’s an odd term, a very modern term — ‘the Friend Zone,’ he says. “In a
way, being in a relationship with somebody who is your best friend is kind of
the ideal. You want that person you fall in love with and marry to be your best
friend.
“But if somebody says, ‘That girl put me in ‘The Friend Zone,’ it implies
that the only attraction you have for that person is sexual. I don’t think all
men are like that. To be honest, we’re not all that shallow.”
So, decades of living with that “When Harry Met Sally” rule, “Men and women
can’t be friends,” was a mistake?
“I just don’t believe that’s the case any more. But the movie’s more about
‘Is it ever right to maintain a relationship that’s a denial of your own
feelings?’ My character meets this girl, finds out she has a boyfriend and
instead of going, ‘I’ll just move on with my life,’ he chooses to torture
himself by being around her because she makes him so happy he can’t NOT spend
time with her.”
Critics have been enthusiastic about Radcliffe and Kazan’s obvious chemistry,
their way with witty/flirtatious banter. Peter Rainer of The Christian Science
Monitor praised their “nerds-in-clover rapport,” and even though she found “What
If” “too cute for its own good,” The Village Voice’s Stephanie Zacharek said
“it’s so enjoyable from moment to moment that it’s easy to forgive.”
One thing the Michael Dowse film uses, to great effect, is a sight gag. The
5’5″ Radcliffe and 5’4″ Kazan are forever being paired up with Adam Driver
(6’3″), as Radcliffe’s character’s best friend, and Rafe Spall (6’1″) as Kazan’s
character’s live-in beau.
“I didn’t care,” Radcliffe says, declaring he’s not touchy about playing a
sight-gag. “I have met tall people before. The shot of me and Adam walking down
the street, it takes a special lens to keep us both in the frame!”
But ask him who he looks to as a career role model and there’s no hesitation.
It’s one of his “Horns” co-stars, a man of similar stature.
“As I neared the end of Potter, I started paying a lot of attention to what
James McAvoy was doing. He’s having an extraordinary career and it’s still only
just getting started. He’s done it his own way.”
Radcliffe has a turn as “Igor” in a new film about Frankenstein, and has
another movie project or two in the planning stages. He longs for that next
chance tread the boards in London’s West End or on Broadway.
“I love the theater, because it forces you to be accountable. You have to be
on, every second you’re on the stage. Because the audience can tell if you’re
not.”
But those lingering rumors of J.K. Rowling having more to say with Harry
Potter, the young wizard now grown to adulthood, and possible films that might
come from that do not interest Radcliffe. The role that made him rich and famous
is over, as far as he is concerned.
“I cannot envisage a scenario where I would be going back into that world,”
he says. “Maybe you’ll be confronting me with that answer in a few year’s time,
if I say ‘Yes.’ But at the moment, I am having too fun to see what would be gained by me going to Harry.”
I was in a screening tonight when I learned Robin Williams had taken his life. It was for “The Giver,” and the screening format was a red carpet telecast of the NYC premiere, to be followed by nationwide preview showings of the movie. “Giver” star Jeff Bridges, interviewed on the red carpet, broke the news, said “He was a fantastic cat,” and burst into tears. His “Fisher King” co-star finally gave in to the demons. Drugs, depression, decades of wrestling with stuff he never let you see when he was “on.” Which was most of the time. Met Williams a few times over the years, manic sometimes, somber others. A funny man who talked about loneliness more than was normal for somebody in his position. The last time we were to talk, it was about that Armistead Maupin adaptation, “Night Caller.” His pal Christopher Reeve died, so naturally he canceled. A tender soul. A hilarious man, a wonderful actor. But depressed. So yeah, Robin, we get it. Sad, but we get it. Rest in peace
