The unlikely combination of funnyman Will Ferrell and the boozy “dirty realism” of the great short story writer Raymond Carver pays offs in “Everything Must Go,” a sardonic look at hitting bottom before you can start the climb back up. It’s a bleak yet optimistic film, and Ferrell perfectly underplays his Carver anti-hero and delivers a rich, layered and subtle performance.
The doctor comes to the remote clinic and tosses the chanting African children the gift of a soccer ball.
Then he sets to work. Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a surgeon, a member of Doctors Without Borders bringing medicine and healing to this remote, dusty part of the world. All around him he sees evidence of the brutality of the Men with Guns. He is patching up those he can, victims of the violence of a thuggish gang leader named Big Man, a bully protected by his fellow bullies.
“Jumping the Broom” is like a Tyler Perry movie with polish. An ensemble comedy about a wedding that joins a wealthy, Martha’s Vineyard family of African American professionals with the groom’s more down to Earth working-class Brooklynites, it is well-cast, well-played, passably written and filmed in the warm glow only the top drawer cinematographers can achieve.
This cinematic sociological experiment has been going on so long that director Michael Apted, who has Bond and Narnia credits under his belt, in addition to “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Enigma” and “Nell” and “Thunderheart,” might be thinking of handing the directing reins over to somebody new.
But he isn’t. After catching up with seven typical Brits every seven years since the first of these documentaries, “Seven Up,” in 1964, and learning how their lives are going, how they’ve changed, how much they’re like the seven year old version of themselves, he’s not stopping now.
It’s always fascinating to catch up with these people and see for ourselves how we’ve been molded, almost since birth, into the personalities we carry around with us. At least one of them is “getting the band back together.”
“56 Up” is in limited release, and opening wider over the next few weeks.
The New BET comedy series “Second Generation Wayans” begs the question – have their really only been TWO generations of the professionally funny family that gave us “In Living Color,” the “Scary Movie” franchise, and “White Chicks”?
“I’m pretty sure there were some really entertaining Wayans before us,” says Marlon Wayans. “You know, some hilarious slave Wayans. They could’ve been in Tarantino’s movie. Pickin’ cotton, and tellin’ jokes. That’s us.”
At 40, Marlon is part of the same generation of Wayans that produced Damon, Keenan Ivory, Kim and Shawn. He has “always been the most talented” of the clan, says George Thomas, film critic for the Cleveland Examiner, capable of low comedy, but also of stealing film from the likes of Tom Hanks (“The Ladykillers”).
Wayans’ latest function in the funny family enterprise is “A Haunted House,” an attempt to move on from the “Scary Movies” that he helped launch but which the family is no longer a part of. With the “Scary Movie” installments – launched as a response to the “Scream” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises — growing more watered down with each year, Wayans saw an opening for another parody.
“There’s a fine line between that moment when you’re a fan of the movie, the first movie in a series maybe, or you’re a fan of a genre – and the first films in it are the good ones – and then the bad ones start coming along and you hate them,” Wayans says. “When I see common denominators, common situations, common characters – a genre of films or a series of films becomes all the same movie – that’s when I go ‘That sucks. But it’s funny that it sucks.’”
That’s where he figures the “found footage” genre of horror is, “Paranormal Activity” and its many imitations.
“By the time the recent ‘Paranormal Activities’ and the rip offs came along, I said, ‘Wow. White people do some DUMB stuff in these freaking movies. You know what would be funny? If ‘Paranormal Activity’ happened to a black couple. Who would THEY call? What would go wrong with THEM?’”
He couldn’t do much with the original found footage horror film – “The Blair Witch Project” – because “Black people don’t camp. We came from Africa. We KNOW what’s in the woods.”
But what if, say, a black couple had “thug cousins” they could call in a crisis? “That’s what I would do. And that’s funny, to me. There are things even a thug is afraid of.”
(REVIEW of “A Haunted House” is here)
Next up for Wayans is a co-starring role in the comedy “The Heat,” with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. He plays Bullock’s character’s love interest.
“ We don’t have any love scenes. Or any chemistry, really. But I’m pretty sure that in my mind, they do the nasty. A man’s got to have hope.”
The BFCA Awards used to be the most reliable Oscar indicator of awards season.
But that’s not likely to be the case this year. The Oscars seemed to limit the field to those already touted other places this year, more than usual anyway. And the BFCA went its own way, giving the best director award to Ben Affleck for “Argo,” and since best directors direct best pictures, he won best picture for “Argo” as well.
Since Oscar didn’t nominate Ben for best director, and best directors direct best pictures, that won’t play out at the Academy Awards. “Argo” still has a shot, but leaving Ben out makes that a longer than long shot.
Jessica Chastain, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence won awards (two, inexplicably, for Lawrence). “Wreck-It Ralph” won best animated film, “Searching for Sugar Man” best doc.
Full list of winners and nominees below. The BFCA — best indicator for — Golden Globes? Indie Spirit? Or “awards for people who won’t get Oscars”? We’ll see.
Editing, knowing what to winnow out, is every bit as important in documentary films as it is in novels, where Hemingway advised us to be ruthless thinning the ranks of our “little darlings.”
“Brooklyn Castle” is an overlong but engaging look at a Brooklyn middle school, Intermediate School 318, where disadvantaged sixth, seventh and eighth graders have ruled the roost among America’s chess playing middle schools for 20 years.
“He had time” is the finest compliment the drummer Ginger Baker can give. This fellow or that one has a sense of rhythm that meets with the cranky Cream drummer’s approval.
Jay Bulger, an opportunistic journalist, may not have that, but Baker gave him lots of his time when Bulger pitched first a magazine profile of the reclusive percussionist, then a documentary film project. And as Bulger discovered and we see in the film’s opening moments, when Baker disapprovingly smacks the movie maker in the nose with his cane, some people are recluses with good reason. Ginger Baker has spent a lifetime wearing out band mates, lovers and nations of residence with manic ill temper.
Kids and other Robert Pattinson fans won’t be running off to join the circus after seeing “Water for Elephants,” the brutish and violent screen adaptation of Sara Gruen’s novel. Whatever romance Gruen summoned forth from these rough and tumble show people living by their own laws in a traveling, self-contained world of poverty and cruelty, director Francis Lawrence has ground it off.
“Bridesmaids” is a frat boy’s idea of what a funny “chick flick” should be. So, hat’s off to Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo for scripting a movie that is a raunchy hoot, that plays to that demographic and yet doesn’t lose its femininity.
This is “Her Hangover,” a smarter and sweeter stumble to the altar that never quite gets to Vegas, and doesn’t seem to mind. Paul Feig directs this to the rhythms of Wiig’s quirky timing, blowing through big, gross gastronomic laughs but pausing for the “My best friend’s getting married and leaving me” moments of self-loathing and panic.
