Movie Nation

Can a movie be utterly done in by a botched ending? Maybe.
The one Oliver Stone & Co. cooked up for his take on the drug trade, “Savages,” is dishonest and patronizing. But in a film that overtly references “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” it’s only natural for the filmmaker to be thinking of other Newman/Redford pictures and how they conclude.
Stone has always been a cinematic preacher, and in Don Winslow’s novel — sort of a “Blow” set in the west coast marijuana trade — he found a great vehicle to sermonize about the violence and greed that have taken over the once-benign Baby Boomer narcotic of choice.
Ben and Chon (Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch) are mellow Americans who are thriving as medical marijuana “independents,” with a shore side home in Laguna Beach and a shared girlfriend — “O” — played with a certain blitzed bliss by Blake Lively. She loves them both, sleeps with them both, and narrates the tale.
But only one of the lads, Ben (Johnson) the Buddhist with high-ideals, promoting Third World anti-poverty and sustainability projects, is mellow. Chon is an Iraq War vet, a man with physical and emotional scares.
“I have orgasms,” O says of sex with him. “He has wargasms.”
Their happy menage a trois is interrupted when the drug violence of Mexico storms into their lives. The Baja Cartel kills people with chainsaws and posts the video online. Lado (Benicio del Toro) is their enforcer. Alex (Demian Bichir) is their suit. The boss of bosses? Salma Hayek.
And they’ve made the boys an offer they cannot refuse.
Ben is all “Chill” and “Let them have the business.” But Chon takes a darker view.
“You let people think you’re weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.”
Thus begins the downward spiral from idealism and pot-entrepreneurship to carnage, kidnapping, torture and mayhem.
The characters are neatly sketched in — each with an obvious weakness. Their histories set the scene for heightened violence when the story’s pre-ordained action side takes over. Of course, the war vet has fellow vets who are friends. They’ll come in handy when the Mexican “Savages” take the one thing Ben and Chon won’t surrender — O.
Stone’s film flirts with racism even as it sermonizes that each side regards the other as “Savages.” The film’s sympathies, and ours, lie with the gringos. The Mexicans put on their cowboy boots, eat their all-meat and frijoles diets and treat life cheaply. One chilling ingredient should give every gringo pause — Mexican hit men posing as yard service workers, running their leaf blowers to cover the sounds of gunfire and torture.
The Americans? The worst you can say about them is that they’ve indulged in too much of their product, and are a bit slow on the uptake even as they’re sure they can “outsmart” the savages on the other side.

Continue reading →

Most of us know to take any election year psychological analyses of political candidates with a shovel-full of grains of salt. You have to filter any book or article that declares Mitt Romney a bully, dog-abuser, a flake for believing in magic underwear or, most recently, that he’s just like George W. Bush — running for office to exonerate a politically humiliated father — through the prism of politics.

Such skepticism is handy to have when watching  “2016: Obama’s America,” a documentary by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, a psycho-political hatchet job by an ex-Reaganite who believes Obama is bringing down America due to some issues with the father he barely knew, and never saw past the age of 10.

D’Souza’s dubious thesis is as obvious as the title of the book he wrote that this documentary is based on — “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

“Rage?” When has the cool-cucumber in the White House ever blown his cool?

D’Souza, who wrote, narrates and co-directed “2016,” paints a sinister portrait of a sort of Manchurian Candidate in the White House, acting out of impulses driven by his parents’ intense anti-colonialism to end the “American Empire,” which D’Souza honors as “an empire of ideals.”

Using Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from My Father” as a promising starting point, D’Souza goes after Obama’s influences, childhood and college age associations. Starting with Obama’s own words (including excerpts of Obama reading the book on tape), D’Souza talks to family associates, under-credentialed “experts,” right wing pundits like himself, step-family members in Kenya and others in the Six Degrees of Separation from the man to paint a portrait of “The Other,” the guy D’Souza and his fellow travelers love to hate. And as he does, the author drifts from facts into speculation, from speculation into invention and cynical hyperbole.

It’s the invention that seriously undermines what will be, to many, a film full of details about our sitting president’s life and past that many of us who don’t get all our news from Fox didn’t know. Fascinating stuff.

Poll after poll tells us that the most geographically, historically and socially illiterate class of Americans are D’Souza’s target audience here. Are they patient enough to sit through D’Souza’s longwinded, vain and smug “personal” story (He was born he same year as Obama, sees a kinship in their lives, but takes pains to give the evidence that yes, Barack Obama was born in America.), D’Souza’s life in India, his history lessons about colonial Africa, India and Indonesia?

All that is prologue to the red meat for ultra-conservatives — “What the liberal media is not telling us” about Obama.

D’Souza, the latest in a long line of foreign-born conservative Pied Pipers to pump his ideas into America’s far right — from Ayn Rand to Rupert Murdoch, Rev. Moon to Andrew Sullivan — may have an Ivy League polish to him. But he’s a clumsy demagogue, smirking and straining mightily not to undercut his own arguments with his own autobiography.

Continue reading →

It’s tempting to write off the light-on-wit, shorter-on-laughs Young Adult as yet another reminder that “You can’t go home again.” As in, writer Diablo Cody can’t go back and recreate that Juno magic with director Jason Reitman.

But forget the nagging feeling that Cody used up all her witty-youthful repartee on Juno,  that Reitman lost some confidence after gracelessly snatching the Oscar from his own hand by grabbing too much credit for himself for Up in the Air. Ignore how flat and generally unlikable and joyless and artificial and theatrical Young Adult feels.

They’ve still managed to get at a fundamental truth that screenplays traditionally ignore. People don’t change. Character “arc” is one of those myths that movies perpetuate. Sometimes we change and grow, but usually we find a way not to.

Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary has never felt a need to mature beyond her high school meangirl prom queen self. She’s 37, divorced, an alcoholic ghost writer who knocks off installments in the fading Waverly Prep young adult fiction series, sort of a failed Sweet Valley High for high school readers.

And yet Mavis is sure she’s made it. She’s certain she has the right to still look down her nose at those she left behind in Mercury, Minnesota, a town o chain restaurants, big box stores, a new “Ken-Taco-Hut” and a Hampton Inn, where Mavis checks in on getting a wild hair that the ex-boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) who sent her an announcement of the birth of his first child was really trying to lure her back to town so that she could win him back.

Yeah, she’s like that. And yeah, the movie’s like that. Only less. This promising mean girl comes home premise never takes flight — weighed down by dull genre conventions and a serious lack of spark in the dialogue, situations and characters.

The good folks of Mercury are still intimidated by Mavis — a beauty who left their midst and comes back just as thin and stunning as the day she left. And she’s never learned tact, never taken one emotional baby step beyond her cruel high school persona. The old flame’s wife (Elizabeth Reaser) is in a punk bank for 30something moms (only in the movies), and Mavis blurts “Oh my God, how embarrassing.” She’s always making inappropriate come-ons to the married guy, which he ignores, or taking the emotional high ground when she has no right to it. “Sometimes, in order to heal, a few people have to get hurt” is her excuse for making this unforgivable play for a happily married man.

Continue reading →

Terry Crews discovered his special gift way back in high school.

No, we’re talking about football, which he grew up playing and which took him to Western Michigan University and a seven year career in the NFL as a defensive end. It was something else, something that’s served him well as he jumped into acting.

“I’d be walking the high school halls, and people would look at me and go, ‘Yo Terry, you OK? Something wrong?’ No, I’m fine. What? ‘You’ve got this intense look on your face.'”

Crews laughs. He laughs a lot. But when he isn’t laughing, he can scare you half to death with just a scowl.

“I realized I could really flip it on people. All I do is furrow my brow and people get worried. I have to tell a joke to let ’em know everything’s cool. It became my thing.

“I learned that could be a cool way for a big guy like me to be.”

Crews, 44, is the big scary dude who turns up, often as not, in comic roles. He was the scary but henpecked dad in “Everybody Hates Chris,” an assortment of bouncers, bullies and jocks in films from “Friday After Next” to “The Longest Yard.” If you saw “Bridesmaids,” you almost certainly laughed at Crews, as a fitness boot camp instructor who lights into the leading ladies for spying on his class without paying for it.

“He can look scary, but he’s really a total sweetheart,” says Dax Shepard, who worked with Crews in “Idiocracy” and who cast Crews in his upcoming action comedy, “Hit & Run.” Crews had to bow out of that film at the last minute, but Shepard knew better than to make an issue of it. “I mean, LOOK at him!”

“I call myself ‘The Amusement Park,'” Crews says. “The Amusement Park is funny and scary, all at once.”

Continue reading →

Get past the cynicism behind Sony wanting to milk another movie from the “Spider-Man,” franchise and you might notice how much more real the web-slinging effects are. This feels less animated, a problem with the Sam Raimi “Spider-Man” pictures of the last decade. And “Amazing Spider-Man” gives us the best Stan “The Creator” Lee cameo ever.

But that’s about all the praise this feeble re-boot deserves. Character by character, scene by scene, actor by actor, this is strictly inferior product, a movie that never answers that one simple question anyone outside of a corporate boardroom will ask.

Why was this movie made?

Continue reading →

Hugh opened huge. “Django Unchained” the Tarantino fanbase. But by Wed., “The Hobbit” was back in second place as Django shot his wad.

But the real surprise among the Tuesday openings was “Parental Guidance,” which could collect as much as $30 million by midnight Sunday. The only family friendly/kid and grandparent friendly comedy this holiday season is making the most of having the field all to itself.

The Box office Guru figures that “Les Miz” will have collected $70 million, Tuesday-Sunday, when all is said and done. New Year’s won’t hurt it either. Will it hit the “Hobbit” heights? No.

“Hobbit” is holding audience, “This is 40” is doing better than its weak opening would have indicated.

“Django” will be flirting with $30 million by the time the weekend is done.

As will Bette and Billy and their limp little farce about “old school” vs. “new school” parenting.