A quiet, somber and downbeat story of 9/11 victims and efforts to get their survivors to sign onto a blanket compensation plan, “Worth” takes on “importance” thanks to its subject matter and its A-list cast.
Michael Keaton and Amy Ryan play the attorneys authorized by the Bush Administration to negotiate and recruit widows, children and other survivors to forgo lawsuits and settle for a cash payout. And Stanley Tucci plays one survivor/activist who pushed back at their number-crunching and tried to inject humanity into the considerations.
The “names” lend extra gravitas to a movie that doesn’t really need it. Their real “worth” in this Sara Colangelo (The Kindergarten Teacher,””Little Accidents”) is in showing as a simple journey from officious compassion to genuine empathy. The picture and the characters portrayed are almost myopic, buttoned down and narrow in their focus to “save the airlines, etc. from lawsuits” task. These very good actors show us lawyers — some of them anyway — discovering their humanity.
Keaton plays Ken Feinberg, a rich, DC-connected lawyer who, with his partner, Camille Biros (Ryan), specializes in fending off class action suits via mass settlement schemes on big cases on everything from Agent Orange to Big Asbestos.
We meet Feinberg as he’s teaching at Georgetown Law, prodding his students into discussing “What is life worth? The question actually has an answer and that answer is a number.”
Keaton, affecting an accent that fades as the film progresses, never lets this flippant, glib lawyer slip into caricature. Feinberg’s a sharp cookie, a professional, but a man with blinders that he puts on to avoid letting any case turn “personal.” Others may attack him because “to you we’re just numbers,” and have a point. But he’s no monster.
When 9/11 happens, Ken and Camille use their connections to land the “special master” role in setting up and running a compensation commission designed to save airlines and various corners of government from the lawsuits that would, Bush, Ashcroft and assorted Republicans are sure would “wreck the economy.” The lawyers will work pro bono, because this is something they “can do to help.”
“Worth” shows the clumsy, heavy-handed first steps they take, their first meetings with victims’ families, the “dispense reasonable payments” plan that operates on a financial formula built on insurance companies’ actuarial tables. That isn’t going to fly.
“My daughter’s life is worth as much as anybody in a ‘corner office!'” “He’s just hear to shut us up so we don’t sue!”
Tucci plays Charles Wolf, who lost his wife on 9/11 and who organizes other victims in pursuit of compassion, humanity and “fairness.” Tate Donavan plays the true villain of the film, a lawyer for the rich who wants to ensure that the survivors of the rich are the ones who get the lion’s share of the payouts.
The built-in pathos of any tale of 9/11 applies here. To turn the story into something that doesn’t drown in numbers and montages of tearful interviews with widows and family, “Godzilla” screenwriter Max Borenstein focuses — somewhat — on the conflict between the deadline-oriented lawyer and the “give these people their due” and “listen to their stories” survivor/activist. To do that, he leans on the two men’s (perhaps true) shared love of opera, which is the first thing in the movie that feels trite and cliched.
“Worth” can feel ungainly, at times. The film tends to stagger through the middle and late acts as Ryan has far too little screen time as the partner who “sees the light” first, and likewise Shunori Ramanathan is given short shrift as she ably plays a new attorney who narrowly escaped being in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 and is thus even more inclined to humanize what their work with still-grieving families.
I like Borenstein’s depiction of the “messy” lives that “don’t fit into the mold” that Feinberg’s formula was designed to apply — a fireman with a secret second family, a gay couple living in a state where homosexual civil unions weren’t recognized, which makes the surviving partner another “mold” breaker.
But it is the film’s stars who convey the larger message of “Worth.” We see adults with serious disagreements acting like adults, trying to ignore the “get re-elected” politics of the mostly-off-camera Bush Administration officials, and find compromises.
Sad to say that adults in positions of authority acting like adults — diplomatic, courteous — is the most refreshing historical artifact resurrected in “Worth.” There’s just enough screaming, name-calling and throwing drinks at the “blood money” lawyers to remind us that’s a lot more common in America these days.
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language (profanity) and thematic elements
Cast: Michael Keaton, Amy Ryan, Stanley Tucci, Talia Balsam, Shunori Ramanathan and Laura Benanti
Credits: Directed by Sara Colangelo, scripted by Max Borenstein. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:59
Little Accidents, The Kindergarten Teacher
Godzilla screenwriter
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language (profanity) and thematic elements
Cast: Michael Keaton, Amy Ryan, Stanley Tucci, Talia Balsam, Shunori Ramanathan and Laura Benanti
Credits: Directed by Sara Colangelo, scripted by Max Borenstein. A Netflix release.
If you’ve ever switched on a television, you probably figure everything that can be done with the idea of a “New York romance” has already been done. And thanks to “When Harry Met Sally,” Woody Allen, “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “Living Single,” you’d be right.
Or maybe the genre hasn’t been beaten to death. It’s just that everybody coming along now has been so exposed to all the earlier rom-coms that finding “fresh” is nigh on impossible.
“Dating & New York” is another variation of the “Friends with Benefits” school. We’re cute together, we get along, why not try “all the benefits of a relationship without the miserable torture of actually being in one.”
Sure, never seen THAT before. But if the script is witty and poignantly romantic and the leads engaging and fun to hang with and enough “new” New York slang, locations and metrosexual practices are thrown in, it can be perfectly watchable, right?
Right. Except “Dating & New York” misses a few items on that checklist. Most of them, in fact, including the most important. The “romance,” which pairs up perky but bland Francesca Reale (“Stranger Things” with comically bloodless JaboukieYoung-White (“Set It Up”), isn’t romantic in the least. Going for a Hallmark PG (How they rated this inoffensive pablum PG-13 is a mystery) just underscores how serious writer-director Jonah Feingold was about making this the least sexy New York romance since we figured out what a creep Woody Allen actually is.
And as insipid and formulaic as it plays, adding cloying, tin-eared voice-over narration by Jerry Ferrara (“Entourage”) is like a pork rind topping for your fat-free yogurt cone.
Wendy and Milo meet via app, hook up and stumble into each other again after an accidental ghosting. Their friends — Catherine Cohen is Jessie, Wendy’s BFF, Brian Muller is Hank, Milo’s wingman — meet each other at the same time.
So we have that “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” set-up, with the secondary couple coupling up and advising the delusional lead couple through their “relationship contract” arrangement.
Wendy offers that she’ll be comfort food companionship, “like that episode of ‘The Office’ you know line by line. You know what to expect.”
So do we.
Wendy and Milo will dine out, hang out and hook up, and occasionally counsel each other through “dates” outside their “arrangement.” No tears, no ghosting, no hard feelings. And they won’t be what every single New York without a dog fears the most — “alone.”
If you’ve ever seen any of the sitcoms listed above, or “How I Met Your Mother” or “Living Single,” you know where this is going and can guess every single step taken in that journey.
Narrator Ferrara plays Cole, a doorman and “voice of reason” who asks the obvious — “What happens when one of you ‘catches feelings?'”
A couple of bit characters come closest to landing a laugh. None of the leads do.
The script is social media savvy, making tepid jokes about the “commitment” difference between a couple selfie “in your story” or on “your grid” on Instagram.
There’s got to be a women are “playing chess, we’re playing Nintendo 64” crack, an “only in New York” observation or three, a “We need to talk” moment.
But as helpful as it is to know that Tompkins Square Park is “New York’s break-up hot spot,” and the difference between a “boug-dega” and a “BO-dega,” that’s not enough to warrant the 90 minute teeth-grind that is the instantly-dated “Dating & New York.”
Rating: PG-13 “for sexual material and brief language,” but really much closer to PG.
Cast: Francesca Reale, Jaboukie Young-White, Brian Muller Catherine Cohen and Jerry Ferrara.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonah Feingold. An IFC release.
Although I liked the sweet, sentimental vibe the weeper “Afterlife of the Party” reaches for, it never comes close to transcending its modest aims and becoming special.
But I’m totally on board the idea of Netflix being the after-teen-stardom home for Victoria Justice, whose taste or offers still put her on the “family friendly” side of the Hollywood equation.
She’s the perky, sometimes manic anchor of this story of a party-girl/party planner who meets an untimely end. Her “Afterlife” sees her forced to spend a short stint in purgatory taking care of “unfinished business” with the BFF (Midori Francis) she had a falling out with just before her accident, with her sad and lonely yoga instructor Dad (Adam Garcia) and the wife and mother (Gloria Garcia) who walked out on them both years before.
Miss “Victorious” plays Cassie, whose insistence on a week of partying — “Cassie-palooza” — to celebrate her 25th birthday is pretty much her undoing.
Paleontologist, childhood friend and roomie Lisa (Francis, of “Good Boys” and TV’s “Dash & Lily”) would rather stay home and do jigsaw puzzles, “like we used to.” Nothing doing! Champagne with my “friends!”
“It’s like you aren’t worth anything if you aren’t seen,” Lisa whines.
Cassie is shallow, sure. Always perfectly turned-out, too. But she doesn’t stay in touch with her father, and is flat-out estranged from her mother.
And since yes, you can die from a hangover (tripping), she’s a goner. This helpful guardian angel (Robyn Scott, kind of funny) is here to “help you with the transition” and lay out the rules — the number of days the unseen/unheard Cassie has to “fix” what she left broken in life.
Hallmark movie veteran Carrie Freedle scripted this, and one sign of a lazy script is when it goes to the trouble of introducing “rules,” and then can’t figure out how to write around them. That “can’t see me/hear me” thing falls by the wayside at the drop of a hat.
The cleverest bits stick to that rule — Cassie hiding all of Lisa’s frumpy clothes so that she wears her cutest outfit to work, and dazzles the Brit composer (Timothy Renouf) neighbor she’s been crushing on, Cassie putting an LP on the Brit’s turntable that puts romantic ideas in his ears and then his head.
Director Stephen Herek, who went from “Critters” and the original “Bill & Ted” to directing Dolly Parton movies, Christmas TV movies, and Dolly Parton Christmas TV movies, doesn’t stand in the way of the schmaltz here. The picture works well enough when we hit the emotional peaks, but the film dawdles along, with only the tiniest of laughs and the limpest of one-liners.
“Somebody call Marie Kondo,” Cassie chirps at seeing her dad’s forlorn beachside house. “‘Joy’ is NOT sparking here!”
The best line spins out of Cassie’s crush for a singer she was just dying to meet before, you know. Val the angel isn’t letting the ghost Cassie score time with him.
“Way to ANGEL block me, Val!”
Justice, running through countless cute and sexy outfits and gobs of glittery makeup, plays a slightly more adult version of her teen TV guise here. Maybe she’s not “growing” as an actress, or broadening her image. No R-rated “Spring Breaks” for her.
But Justice carries off this tear-jerker, mainly because she has to. Francis is the one co-star in her league, charm and charisma-wise. Almost everybody else cast in it is “adequate,” and not much more.
If a lot of people Netflix it, maybe this will be her “afterlife” — light, family-friendly entertainments for the streaming service. Wonder if Dolly needs a Christmas sidekick this year?
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Victoria Justice, Midori Francis, Robyn Scott, Adam Garcia, Gloria Garcia and Timothy Renouf
Credits: Directed by Stephen Herek, scripted by Carrie Freedle. A Netflix release.
“Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is more martial arts than Marvel, and that’s a good thing. Even the in-movie winks at the Marvel “stick the superhero landing” formula have grown stale. “Shang Chi” allows the universe to access all sorts of Chinese folklore, legend, history and myth — as well as martial arts movie tropes.
If only they’d done more of that.
It’s a film of dazzling effects, with the psychotronic bolts and shock-waves emanating from characters’ fingers taking a back seat to some truly Next Gen level water effects, bamboo forest maze scenes, and a pull-out all the stops Spider-Man-styled battle with bad guys in a moving, articulated (two-coach) bus up and down the streets of San Francisco. Stunning, and fun.
But that’s pretty much the high water mark for the Marvel moments in this two-hours-plus saga. The air goes out of the balloon, bit by bit, through a Macau fight club and high rise scaffolding chase, and the long middle acts settle into tedium, exposition and entropy.
“Kim’s Convenience” alumnus Simi Liu was tapped to play the title role, a young guy raised by his supervillain-who-settled-down Dad (Tony Leung of “In the Mood for Love”). His immortal Dad trained him to fight, but Shaun fled China for San Francisco. Now, he happily parks product-placement BMWs at a swank hotel with his joker BFF, Katy (Awkwafina).
But the past — detailed in enchanted opening scenes showing how Xu Wenwu (Leung) met, and fought the woman (Fala Chen) who became his wife and made him give up his never-ending search for power — catches up with Shaun. Hulking minions, including the magic-blade-armed Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu) catch him on that bus.
Sure, his fight is live-streamed by a net-lump (Zach Cherry) helping Shaun go viral as “Bus Boy.” But the bottom line is, they stole his mother’s jade amulet.
He and Katy must dash off to China’s pre-Vegas Vegas — Macau — track down his sister (Meng’er Zhang) at her fight club and, after a throwdown in the ring, warn her that her amulet is on evil Dad’s mind.
“I don’t know what he wants with them, but we both know it can’t be good.”
The jokes, including a light sample of Awkwafina’s wide-eyed, profanity-punctuated gawking, are mostly low-hanging fruit, although the live-streaming bus fight is a hoot.
The dialogue, concocted by a “WW84” scribe, writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton and his “Just Mercy” screenwriter, is thin on jokes and weak on The Wisdom of the Far East.
“You are a product of all who came before you…A blood debt must be repaid by blood.”
The inclusion of a cute, headless, winged fantasy dog critter and retrieving Oscar winner Ben Kingsley from an earlier Marvel movie show that Cretton, who also did “Glass Castle” and “Short Term 12,” knew the tone to go for — light — and did his best to find it.
But the sitcom-vet leading man is seriously wooden, never showing us much in the way of range, never finding the character’s heart or funnybone.
Leung is an actor known for understated, sublimated performances. That doesn’t get the job done, playing Dad-the-Heavy here. He’s terrific at the fight choreography, but tentative in delivering his lines in English.
The over-exposed Awkwafina may have burned through any extra wit she could bring to the set to juice her character.
And Munteanu doesn’t have to do much as “Razor Fist,” but he never lets us forget his acting limitations as he does.
Bringing in Kingsley suggests the producers knew this wasn’t quite there in the script stage, and he adds a couple of grins. But nothing more.
Zhang and Chen make their female leads more interesting in performance than any of the menfolk. And that charisma gap is underscored when the effortlessly cool and commanding Michelle Yeoh shows up in the third act. Her presence and gravitas dominates her scenes and delivers a lot of what the leading men do not, even if that third act plays more like “The Chronicles of Narnia” than “House of Flying Daggers” — magical creatures galore.
Cretton wasn’t a natural choice to helm this, but when it works, you’re keenly aware he gets it. When it doesn’t, you wish he’d had the luxury of a script doctor before the cameras rolled.
And let me add that “Shang Chi” ends with not one but two post-credits Marvel “teasers,” and that they are the lamest in Marvel movie history.
All that said, it was smart of Disney/Marvel to try and further diversify/grow-the-brand by digging deep into Marvel’s archives for another culture to represent.
And maybe there’s a Chinese historical/political allegory in the thousand-year story of the immortal, ten-bracelet-empowered Xu Wenwu more aimed at Asian viewers that I only saw faint traces of. Here is a dictatorial villain who scores nationalist points for vanquishing Medieval Islamic and colonial British foes in a montage, a bad guy who softens with the love of a good woman, but who returns to his ruthless, power-mad ways after her death.
A poke at China’s long history and the sort of figures who ruled it, with or without popular support? Maybe.
Sadly, the impressive-looking but unemotional, only-sometimes-fun superhero movie they wrapped any “message” in plays like The Long March, a bit of a slog.
Rating: PG-13, for sequences of violence and action, and language (profanity)
Cast: Simu Liu, Tony Leung, Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Florian Munteanu, Benedict Wong, Ben Kingsley and Michelle Yeoh
Credits: Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, script by Dave Callaham, Andrew Lanham and Destin Daniel Cretton, based on the Marvel comics. A Disney/Marvel release.
I’ve seen more than a few Tony Leung films, because he’s been around a pretty long time.
He was on “Hero” and “Red Cliff” and “2046” and kudos to Marvel for casting an overlooked demographic for this latest superhero tale — guys pushing 60.
I missed earlier preview showings of this to catch “Reminisce” and “The Protege” as previews. I know, right?
Movie Nation 