We’ve known there was some sort of James Bond tribute headed for Oscar night. The early money says Sean Connery won’t show, but some other Bonds? Bet on it.
And the Academy is rolling out Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Charlize Theron, Channing Tatum and Please Come to My Next Movie Daniel Radcliffe, whose post-Potter career is just now picking up steam.
“Oooh, honey, less is more,” the flamboyant hair stylist whispers, out of earshot, at Diane (Melissa McCarthy) as she bombs her head with hairspray and trowels on the eye shadow.
That’s never the case with McCarthy, the bawdy, rude, larger-than-life comic whose big movie break was “Bridesmaids.” She riffs, tosses back belts of booze and punches galore as the crass and crude title character in “Identity Thief.”
But “less is more” might have helped this cumbersome comedy which has Sandy, Jason Bateman’s mild-mannered office drone trying to wrestle Diane across the country to save his job, clear his criminal and credit records and make this opportunistic crook see the consequences of her actions.
It’s overstuffed with villains, from Sandy’s sneering, Ayn Rand-quoting boss (Jon Favreau) who greedily keeps all the company profits for himself, to the two thugs (Genesis Rodriguez and T.I.) chasing Diane for ripping them off, to those thugs’ imprisoned boss (Jonathan Banks) who wants Diane dead, to the skip tracer (Robert Patrick) determined to fetch her for his bail bondsman client.
There are car chases, rowdy sex romps in cheap hotels, and lots of scenes where Diane trots out her skills at lying, conning, stealing, copying credit cards and opening handcuffs.
But while the filmmakers might have shot for “Midnight Run,” but settled for “Due Date,” they wound up only achieving “Guilt Trip.” “Identity Thief” is sputtering long before that mid-movie moment when it turns all sentimental and goes off the rails.
It’s Thursday, and we’ll talk a little about why Steven Soderbergh has no business retiring from directing — “Side Effects” being his latest effort. Not a masterpiece, but he is consistently quite good, and there aren’t many others in Hollywood who can make that claim.
We’ll make fun of the geographical ineptitude of “Identity Thief,” which takes Jason Bateman from Denver to Winter Park, Florida. Where I am typing right this instant. Where there is no “beach” for the jetliner to swoop in over. Where there are NO plainly-marked Georgia state highway signs (the state’s outline is on them) in the background.
Melissa McCarthy plays the stealer of credit card numbers, identities, etc.
And with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, we’ll talk up some moviegoing options this weekend and next week for guys and ladies to CYA as far as Significant Others are concerned.
That’s at 745 AM on 740 AM, The Game, Open Mike with Mike Bianchi and Brian Fritz. Or listen online at the link.
Dreamworks Animation shares fell — for some reason — today. And Some are speculating that it’s because the studio had to move a potential animated blockbuster, from fall 2013 to spring 2014.
Then, there’s this suggestion by Jeffrey Katzenberg, suggesting that someday video consumers will pay by screen size — “by the inch.” So a phone download would be cheaper than a PC and cheaper than streaming a movie to your TV. That might have driven down shares, too, as the one price fits all structure is pretty entrenched.
The Visual Effects Society spread the love around, honoring “Life of Pi” and the ways it digitally plopped a tiger, zebra, orangutan and Indian lad on a lifeboat together, “The Avengers” for its modeling work, and “Brave” for its animation.
Lawrence Kasdan hasn’t had much success getting projects onto the big screen and in front of audiences in the past decade. Anybody who saw “Darling Companion” would be hard pressed to remember this was the writer-director of “Grand Canyon” and “The Big Chill.”
But back in the day, Kasdan was the screenwriter guys like Spielberg and Lucas turned to when they wanted a “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” script that worked and set off sparks.
Kasdan’s one of two people Disney lined up to work on “stand alone” films built around “Star Wars” characters. His experience with the characters, the galaxy and the storylines make him a good choice to get the ball rolling on such films, though whether he would be allowed to direct one, or even script it on his own, seems unlikely.
Simon Kinberg is the other writer new to Disney’s payroll on this two-film project. He scripted the recent “Sherlock Holmes”.
Witches — teen witches. Hot teen witches in high school. In what looks like Deep South. So’s they can drawl, y’all!
Emmy Rossum and Alden Ehrenreich have to hold their own with Oscar winners Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson, as well as Viola Davis and Margo Martindale, in this hi-tone horror tale based on the Kami Garcia/Margaret Stohl young adult novel.
Steven Soderbergh, rightly considered one of Hollywood’s smartest movie makers, is at his cleverest in “Side Effects,” a canny, cunning big idea thriller in a minor key, an engrossing zeitgeist whodunit about Wall Street, Big Pharma, prescription drugs and the power we give psychiatry and psychologists.
Put simply, it’s about a death, perhaps caused by an under-tested depression drug.
Channing Tatum plays a Wall Street type just getting out of prison for securities fraud.
Rooney Mara (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) is Emily, his seemingly-overwhelmed wife, a morose beauty burdened by the responsibilities she now carries (she’s the one working) and the memory of the life they lost.
Her attempted suicide-by-car puts her in the care of Dr. Jonathan Baker (Jude Law), a seemingly sincere psycho-therapist who must come up with a drug — on the fly — that keeps a distraught but apparently sane Emily out of the hospital.
We’ll do this and then that drug, he suggests. And if one or the other produces problems, we’ll prescribe something else to counter those. How about this new thing, the one she’s seen the ads for on TV – “Ablixa”?
“Side Effects” nicely describes the slow-moving “fog” of depression as waves of it overwhelm Emily. And it plays like a case-study in her treatment by drugs – her downcast behavior replaced by other manifestations of “not quite right.” Suddenly, she has energy and can function at work and in her marriage, where “new energy” translates to a vigorous sex life. But she’s up at all hours, sleepwalking. She can’t remember things.
Then, a crime happens and we wonder if it was the drug, the doctor (legally paid by the pharmaceutical company to test the drug on patients), the patient’s predisposition (Catherine Zeta-Jones plays her previous doctor) or something else that led to tragedy.
It’s a film that sees quiet menace in the everyday. Soderbergh elegantly suggests that if you’re suicidal, every trip down to the subway, every boat ride in the harbor, every moment behind the wheel or meal prepared with sharp knives has the threat of an impulsive, irreversible act.
Soderbergh, working from a Scott Z. Burns (“Contagion”) screenplay, transforms this tricky mystery into hints of something trickier – Wall Street machinations, the murky relationship between psycho-therapists and the courts, between doctors and pharmaceutical companies.
“You watch the commercials on TV,” one puzzled character complains. “People get better.”
Law uses his years of playing cads as useful baggage here, giving suspicious layers to this married, overextended workaholic. Tatum is never more believable — no matter what the character — than when he’s in a Soderbergh movie. He should single-handedly prevent Soderbergh from going through with his announced retirement.
And Mara, trussed up to resemble a young, troubled Kristen Scott-Thomas, retains the touch of “unstable” she wore so well in the Hollywood version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Is she sleepy-eyed, or psychotic, deeply depressed or poker-faced?
“Side Effects” loses some momentum in its third act, piling on implausibilities as it grasps for a satisfying conclusion. But even then Soderbergh never lets things slip from the implausible to the impossible. Remember, even in the “Ocean’s Eleven” movies, he was too smart to let that happen. Is he smart enough to see he has no business retiring after this year?
(Roger Moore’s interview with Rooney Mara is here.)
MPAA Rating: R, for sexuality, nudity, violence and language.
Cast: Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones
Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Scott Z. Burns. An Open Road release.
Running time:1:45
Oh well, there’s no fighting big box office –– soulless or not. Marc Webb is back on the set with his web slinger.
It’s been a dizzying couple of years for Rooney Mara, the young actress who gained a little attention in “The Social Network” and then worldwide fame for starring in Hollywood’s version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
The offers have rained down in a torrent, a veritable embarrassment of riches. She was set to do “Zero Dark Thirty,” but that would conflict with films directed by Terrence Malick and Steven Soderbergh. So no “Dark Thirty,” and Jessica Chastain lands the Oscar nomination. But being a 27 year-old kid in the candy store, Mara isn’t fretting.
“It’s a good problem to have, I guess,” she says. There’s an untitled Malick film in the can, co-starring with Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling. There’s another directed by Spike Jonze on the way, a 1950s period piece by Nick “High Fidelity” Hornby.
“I feel like I’ve eaten TOO much candy over the past year,” Mara laughs. “It’s got me dizzy. But I know how blessed I am to have had these opportunities presented to me, and I’ve been really anxious to make the most of the moment.”
It’s all come so suddenly for Rooney, younger sister of Kate, member of the family that owns the New York Giants football team. You’d be tempted to hate her, or at least resent this strikingly beautiful child of wealth who is burning through a lifetime of “big breaks” in just a year or two. But she’s so good it’s hard to turn hater.
She pulled down enthusiastic reviews for her shaved-head turn as Lisabeth Salenader in “Tattoo.” And her notices for “Side Effects,” her new film for Steven Soderbergh (opening Feb. 8) have a touch of “She has arrived” about them. In the film, she plays a young woman whose pill-treated depression threatens to blow up on her life and that of the doctor (Jude Law) who prescribed the medication for her.
“Without resorting to melodramatic quirks, Mara externalizes the emotional pain of Emily’s depression, her quietly anxious face suggesting the desperation of this suicidal young woman,” Tim Grierson wrote in Screen Daily.
Mara came at Emily in the usual ways – taking advantage of “ten years of research” that screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (“The Informant!” “Contagion”) did in building the character, meeting mental health professionals and depression sufferers.
“And now, on Youtube, there are all these video diaries. People with depression make video diaries, and you see how they look, how they sound, how they say they feel all the time. Interesting. You watch those and you see confirmation of the reading you’ve done, and it helped me get a feel for the overall mood of someone who is carrying that around with them all day. You can read about it all you want, but seeing it on a lot of different faces confirmed how I wanted to play her.”
As convincingly as Mara internalizes every role she plays, Emily was “not someone I could take home with me.” Soderbergh’s sets are notoriously tranquil places where the actors keep civilized hours, “unlike other roles in others movies, where you work twelve hours or more a day, so you can’t help but let her take you over. If she’s going through something awful, you live with that. This wasn’t like that.”
That said, she is ready to take a break after grabbing as much candy as she could for two years. There still are no firm plans to do Hollywood versions of the other “Dragon Tattoo” movies, so there’s no pressing engagement on her schedule, for one. She’s looking at her director, Soderbergh, who has announced his retirement from making movies after finishing a Liberace TV movie.
“I could see taking a break,” Mara says. “Now, I have to. Except I’ve forgotten what you do when you’re not working. It’s like learning to walk all over again.”
