Miscellaneous Debris, September 2009 Edition

A round up of news, rumors and opinions at the edge of the fall season.

September’s pretty much over, and the whole industry greets the coming of autumn and winter not with cooler temperatures but with meatballs. Lots and lots and meatballs. Once again a CGI spectacle rules over adult-oriented films like The Informant! and Surrogates, even while the rest of the Top 10 looks like a scrap heap. The coming months at least bring a few intriguing films: the Gerard Butler-Jamie Foxx ne0 noir Law Abiding Citizen, the perfect storm of hipsterness Where The Wilid Things Are, the Coen Brother’s A Serious Man, and dozens of others. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel, even as the days grow shorter.

The following few news items are a miscellany of observations and opinions we’ve built up over the last month. The opinions are our own, though you’re welcome to discuss.

Does it still happen if no one's watching?

1. As far as box office goes, September was notable not for what made money but for what didn’t: Jennifer’s Body, the double flash-in-the-pan teaming of Megan Fox and Diablo Cody, was dead on arrival despite a saturating media campaign. Meanwhile the Jennifer Aniston romantic drama Love Happens (which we like to call Pointless In Seattle) also went nowhere, even in a year in which other romances like The Proposal and (500) Days of Summer have exceeded box office expectations.

We think the lesson to be learned is pretty simple: people are bored, and ready for something new and fresh. Aniston and Fox are both overexposed, though Proposal star Sandra Bullock isn’t. The public won’t pay money to see faces they see too much already, for free, on magazine covers.

2. We bitched some about the season premiere of Mad Men, but the show has gotten substantially better with each episode, and the last couple especially can stand with the best of the series. Watching the Sterling-Cooper ad agency unravel from within is a suprisingly gut-wrenching process, even as Don and Betty Draper (Jon Hamm and January Jones) seem to prepare themselves to finally go their separate ways. Cheers also for bringing back Draper’s nemesis Duck Philips, played so well by Mark Moses.

As last night’s episode, “Seven Twenty Three,” was the halfway point of the seasons, we’ll risk predicting that by season’s end both Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) and Don Draper have left Sterling Cooper, either by choice or through firing. We also hope there’s some resolution to Joan Halloway’s flailing marriage, though we can’t help but see domestic violence on the horizon.

Jon and Kate plus hate.

3. Has reality television finally, at long last, neared its tipping point? Scandals such as the murder mystery surrounding VH1′s Megan Wants A Millionaire and the ongoing tabloid marketing scheme that is the Gosselin’s marriage seem to be the kind of negative-buzz generating backlash events that signal the end of a trend. We hope so. In roughly a decade the advent of “reality” based television has rearranged the television landscape, and largely for the worse. As the major networks grow increasingly desperate, quality programming has fled to some cable networks, while other cable channels, such as VH1 and especially TLC, cater to a lower denominator than was even thought to exist ten years ago. Television does not have to be a vast wasteland, the efforts of most reality programming to the contrary. Enough already.

4. One potential bright light for network scripted drama arrived last week in the form of Flash Forward, the ABC sci-fi drama adapted from Robert J. Sawyer’s novel by David Goyer (The Dark Knight) and Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Enterprise). The Goyer-directed pilot was a long way from perfect, lacking as it did the confidence and effortlessness that accompanied previous landmark debuts such as ER and Lost to the screen. We’re also not sure about star Joseph Fiennes’ ability to center the somewhat expansive cast, which includes Courtney B. Vance, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Dominic Monaghan, and Gabrielle Union.

Still, the premise – everyone on Earth gets a 137-second glimpse of their near future, six months hence - is intriguing enough to earn our loyalty for two or three episodes, by which time the show will have probably found its sea legs or not. Ratings for the debut were solid, meaning the show’s fortunes now depend on word of mouth. If not, hpefully ABC will show the series more patience than it extended to other sci-fi fare like Invasion and Life On Mars, neither of which we imagine carried Flash Forward’ s hefty payroll.

Yo ho, yo ho hum: Depp

5. In what must be the answer to a question nobody asked, Disney is moving forward with a fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, this time with or without Johnny Depp’s involvement. Depp is reportedly aware the second and third Pirates movies lacked quite a bit in quality, and wants script approval after former Disney studio chief Dick Cook resigned last week.

Just so this doesn’t go unsaid, Depp’s post-Jack Sparrow career is nothing to crow about: Secret Window, Public Enemies, and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory are nobody’s idea of classic cinema, and the upcoming Alice In Wonderland looks like standard Tim Burton weirdness. Depp might do well to get out the eyeliner once again.

Gong Li in Shanghai

6. A rare highlight of the last Pirates film was Chow Yun-Fat’s appearance as pirate warlord Sao Feng. The long delayed Shanghai, in which Chow co-stars with John Cusack and Gong Li, has been delayed yet again, this time looking at a release sometime next year. Directed by Mikael Hafstrom (1408) and featuring Ken Watanabe and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the saga of an ill-fated romance in the months leading to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seems a treat for older film audiences, offering the kind of film spectacle Hollywood rarely attempts anymore. So why the delay?

7. Finally, we forgot to mention While The City Sleeps in our recent list of movies watched while under the influence of DVR-enabled cinematic insomnia. If you’re a fan of classic cinema, Fritz Lang, movies about newspapers, Ida Lupino, and/or lurid trash, this film has something for you. Basically, its sprawling plot follows the staff of a major newspaper as its department heads race to outdo each other pursuing “the Lipstick Killer,” a freudian nightmare of a serial killer preying on women who live alone.

Lang directs the 1956 film with a kind of dreamlike detachment, keeping the characters in close proximity to one another even as they never really establish meaningful contact, even when intimate. The always-underrated Dana Andrews plays the television commentator leading the hunt for the killer, with Vincent Price, film noir siren Rhonda Fleming, and John Drew Barrymore also swirling around the tangle of events. Part film noir, part melodrama, and part Hollywood ensemble piece, it’s a weird mixture that doesn’t come off as well as it should, yet still remains completely, if cheaply, entertaining.

UPDATE: We’ll be back Monday. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel
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DVD Review: Observe And Report

Seth Rogen’s walk on the dark side of comedy arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

In the past we’ve criticized Seth Rogen for repeatedly giving the same performance of the same character with little variation. But in Observe and Report, out this week on DVD and Blu-Ray, he finally takes a big risk by playing Ronnie Barnhardt, a bipolar and dangerously unstable shopping mall security guard. Clearly intended to be a hilariously uncomfortable misfit in the vein of Robert DeNiro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, Rogen never quite manages to create a complete character, largely due to the fractured script and direction of writer/director Jody Hill.

The intensely dark comedy follows Ronnie the would-be alpha dog as he tries to apprehend two criminals terrorizing the local mall: a compulsive flasher (referred to merely as “the Pervert”), and a seemingly invisible thief. His efforts are frustrated, however, when police Detective Harris (Ray Liotta) arrives and promptly puts the moves on Brandi (Anna Faris), the cosmetics saleswoman whom Ronnie obsesses over. Ronnie earnestly tries to prove his mettle to the vapid Brandi, but a series of disappointments and betrayals makes him a threat to everyone around him. 

Oddly, the humor shines brightest in the film’s darkest moments, such as a squirm-inducing psychological evaluation as well as anything involving Ronnie’s degenerate mother (Celia Weston). But the gags miss more often than not, and Hill relies too heavily on gratuitous shock value. (He seems particularly intent on breaking records for the most droppings of the f-bomb and for the longest unedited tracking shot of male genitalia.) For that matter, whole sequences feel uninspired and derivative, borrowing liberally from braver films including Office Space and Borat! 

Most distracting of all is Hill’s over-reliance on musical montages: it’s a crutch he can’t seem to shake when the story – his own story, at that - calls for character development. The result is a barrage of repetitive, tedious vignettes that provide the cheapest of laughs in the spaces between the more unsettling moments.

Given such uncertainty, it’s possibly no surprise that his treatment of violence borders on schizophrenic. Though not as irresponsible as the gunplay of Pineapple Express (also starring Rogen and frequent Hill collaborator Danny McBride), the violence here is alternately grotesque and laughably absurd. In a film that seems at least intrigued by the ugliness of human aggression, it’s disconcerting that Hill glosses over the consequences of violence. It’s as if he wants to throw the issue into the spotlight without disturbing anyone too badly – in other words, to play it safe. That might be excusable for a brainless comedy, but such timidity diminishes the toll that Ronnie’s aggression takes on his psyche and undercuts the integrity of the film as a whole.

It’s also surprising how the female characters leave the most lasting impressions. Weston in particular steals her scenes: her character’s half-hearted desire to play caretaker is constantly thwarted by her own brutal and ambivalent honesty. Faris, as the object of Ronnie’s obsession, has perfected the grating, toxic airhead that she’s previously dabbled with in Lost in Translation and Just Friends. Collette Wilson ably conveys some much needed purity as Brandi’s good-girl rival for Ronnie’s affection.

By way of contrast, Michael Peña is both disappointing and misused as Ronnie’s best friend and “partner in crime” Dennis. Sporting a horrible jheri curl wig and speaking with a cartoonishly effeminate lisp, Peña’s character amounts to little more than a walking sight gag. Considering Peña’s previous gut-wrenching turns in Crash and The Lucky Ones, I  expected more than an indefinable caricature that unnerves without managing to amuse. 

Ultimately, however, the film is a Seth Rogen vehicle, and his perennially affable presence limits the degree of menace that the script demands.  To his credit, anyone would be endearing – even noble – when compared to the reprobates surrounding him. Yet Rogen’s innate likeability translates into vulnerability in his scenes with Weston and Wilson, and the tenderness of these scenes help make the pat, “all is forgiven” Hollywood ending bearable. And to be completely fair, even veteran actors have failed to find the proper balance between humor and danger – just look at Robin Williams’ dreadful Toys or Death to Smoochy, or Jim Carrey’s little-loved The Cable Guy.

Its many flaws aside, Observe and Report manages to be an entertaining ninety minutes, and it proves that there’s more to Rogen than just his stoned slacker shtick. He could probably create a truly compelling walk on the dark side, if he could find a director willing to take him all the way.

- Stephen Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Up All Night With Too Many Movies

Five films we recently recorded and then stayed up too late checking out.

What film insomnia sometimes feels like.

For the movie addict, DVR’s are the enemy of sleep. With their easy to use onscreen plot summaries and simple recording features, it’s nothing to set something to record, day or night, and come back to it when you’ve got the time. Besides the premium networks, Fox Movie Channel, American Movie Classics, and the incomparable Turner Classic Movies all show dozens of films a week, most of them – to us, anyway – too tempting not to hit the jolly, candy-like record button.

We’ve recently checked out these five films, going over them in multiple sittings and then browsing the web for background information to give their virtues and faults some (often much-needed) context. A few of them are markedly better than others, while one or two are just about at their proper level as a late-late-LATE feature. But, we realize every old film is probably somebody’s favorite, and the opinions below are just our own.

FM (1978): Long on style and short on character development, this loose dramedy is a pleasant enough romp about disc jockeys at a freewheelin’, free-format Los Angeles radio station, one seemingly a million miles away from both the disco and punk revolutions. The rambling plot sometimes tries too hard to embrace Robert Altman’s formlessness via legendary cinematographer John A. Alonzo’s (Chinatown) direction, while too many characters clutter up the proceedings. Cleavon Little and Martin Mull do impress, however, as jockeys using their star power mostly to get laid. Thoughts before turning off the light: A missed opportunity to make a true cult classic, unfocused and trying too much at once to settle on a tone or meaning. Like the vanished AOR format it celebrates, it’s only fun until something comes on you don’t care for.

Music Within (2007): A feel-good, true-story movie that wants you to like it, and you want to, too, except it doesn’t quite come together like it should, despite a hell of a lot of advantages. Ron Livingston (Band of Brothers) stars as Richard Pimentel, who overcame a strained childhood with a schizophrenic mother and then almost total deafness sustained during the Vietnam War to crusade for disabled persons’ rights. The film follows Pimentel as he gives up a safe corporate job to follow his dream and talent of public speaking, as well as his long friendship with a writer almost completely debilitated by cerebral palsy (Michael Sheen). Thoughts before turning off the light: Too many cliched scenes and too much underwritten dialogue spoils a great story. Though it’s not exactly the case, in retrospect two-thirds of the film seemed to take place in musical montage. Pimentel, for all his accomplishments, probably deserves a better tribute. Livingston is almost always better than the films in which he appears.

Thieves Highway (1949): When his truck-driver father is crippled by a crooked San Francisco fruit merchant (Lee J. Cobb), war veteran Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) drives a truckload of apples up the pre-freeway California coast to get even. Gorgeously directed by noir master Jule Dassin (The Naked City) and tautly written by A.I. Bezzerides, adapting his own gritty novel. The performances are all flawless, especially Valentina Cortese as a hooker put into Garcos’ line of fire and Millard Mitchell as the doomed trucker trying to do right by the Garcos family. Thoughts before turning off the light: Criterion deserves props for including this film in its catalog; the chase sequence was riveting.

A Woman’s Secret (1949): A singer with a burned-out throat (Maureen O’Hara) stands accused of shooting her more successful, though far more uncouth, protege (Gloria Grahame). Her piano player lover (Melvyn Douglas) sets out to prove her innocence, instigating a series of flashbacks. Director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) does the best he can with the potboiler material, though there’s a going-through-the-motions feeling throughout. Grahame, always disdainful of her singing voice, lip-syncs her musical numbers. (The film’s production brought about Ray and Grahame’s disastrous marriage). Thoughts before turning off the light: Were it made today, this sleek little b-movie would be a centerpiece of any ratings period for the Lifetime Movie Network, or even a comeback project for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony.

Deterrence (1999): Set in the then near-future world of 2008, the nation’s first Jewish president (Kevin Pollak) and his staff scramble to deal with Iraqi aggression while stranded in a snowbound Colorado diner. Far from having a mandate, President Emerson is an appointed veep who came to the office through attrition, and his races, ethnic and campaign both, only complicate the rapidly escalating tension. Critic-turned-filmmaker Rod Lurie (The Contender) wrote and directed this, his debut feature, and his grasp and reach haven’t quite come together yet. Pollak is energetic, while Timothy Hutton is convincing as his pragmatic chief of staff. Thoughts before turning off the light: The ending is a total cheat, as frustrating as a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone but without the creepy ambience; Pollak’s presence is missed on the current movie landscape.

For what little it’s worth, here’s what up next in our DVR queue: The 70s sci-fi classic Westworld; The ebullient mystery Shadow of the Thin Man; Noir heavyweights Sterling Hayden and Dan Duryea facing off in Manhandled; and the early-career Marilyn Monroe suspenser Don’t Bother To Knock. Feel free to post your own recommendations below.

- Michael Kabel
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Patrick Swayze: 1952-2009

Everyman movie star succumbs to long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Patrick Swayze, star of such such iconically 1980s films as Red Dawn, Dirty Dancing, and The Outsiders, died of pancreatic cancer Monday at his Los Angeles home. He was 57.  

A native of Houston, Texas, Swayze’s thirty year career spanned theatre, popular music, television and of course film. His earliest professional work included co-starring in the Broadway production of Grease and a guest appearance on M*A*S*H, and a regular role on the short-lived TV drama The Renegades. In 1983 he gained widespread notice as Darry Curtis, the older brother of C. Thomas Howell and Rob Lowe, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders. The role defined his early screen persona as the steadying influence to a younger character’s recklessness, both in 1985′s Red Dawn, opposite Howell as well as Charlie Sheen, and Lowe again in the hockey drama Youngblood (1986). He also appeared in two parts of the top-rated mini-series North and South in 1985 and 1986.

His breakthrough role came in the 1987 musical Dirty Dancing, playing dance instructor Johnny Castle opposite his Red Dawn co-star Jennifer Grey. Though not expected to peform well at the box office, the film was the year’s highest grosser, eventually making $213 million worldwide. Its best-selling soundtrack included his own vocal debut, “She’s Like The Wind,” which reached #3 on the Billboard charts. But the success was short-lived, with Swayze next appearing in a string of box office disappointments including Tiger Warsaw and Next of Kin, films that typecast him in redneck action roles with little depth. The most notorious of these, 1989′s Road House, became something of a cultural punchline throughout the 90s.

But success found him again with 1990′s Ghost, co-starring Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg. That moody romance proved an even bigger hit than Dirty Dancing, earning more than half a billion dollars worldwide and winning Swayze People magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year award. In a surprising career pivot he followed that success with the Kathryn Bigelow-directed heist adventure Point Break, which has subsequently become a cult favorite.

Following a little-seen starring turn in 1992′s City of Joy, his film appearances remained steady but drew progressively less public attention even as they became more diverse. He appeared as a transvestite opposite Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo in 1995′s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar while starring in the family dramas Three Wishes and Tall Tale: The Unbelievable Adventures of Pecos Bill that same year. By the end of the decade he was back in blue-collar action star mode, playing a trucker in 1998′s Black Dog.

His career remained low-profile through the current decade, including a guest appearance in the 2004 sequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and starring as Alan Quartermain in the Hallmark Channel original King S0lomon’s Mines. In 2008 he seemed poised for a major comeback, playing an undercover FBI agent on the A&E Network original series The Beast, even as news of his battle with pancreatic cancer dominated tabloids. The Beast debuted in January of this year but was cancelled six months later as his health declined.

Though much of his filmography is seldom considered classic cinema in the conventional sense, the best of his 1980s work helped introduce a generation of audiences to the thrill of moviegoing, while The Outsiders demonstrated how cinema could speak to our own lives.  Our best wishes to his friends and family.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Dreary, disappointing prequel arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Since his introduction as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk thirty-five years ago, the Marvel Comics character Wolverine has come to symbolize a particular type of comics storytelling. Far from the gifted aliens, self-improving millionaires or brilliant scientists who traditionally make up the bulk of comics’ protagonists, the mutant known simply as “Logan” had powers thrust upon him not once but twice. Born a mutant and later subjected to military experiments that enhanced his natural abilities even further, his adventures are violent, uncomplicated, and thick on the spy/military tropes found in drugstore paperbacks and B-movie combat actioners.

Wolverine as a superhero is not a genius, not a strategist and not even much of a thinker, really. He’s a brute force of nature with no end of machismo, a lowbrow hero for our ever-increasingly lowbrow culture. So if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not an especially well-thought movie, if it places its expensive emphasis on action over clarity of plot and characterization, then in a shabby sense it’s true to its subject. Does that make it a good movie? No, though its range of flaws makes it a bad one.

Directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), the film opens with a visually and narratively murky prologue that shows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as a young boy escaping the murder of a man who may be his father. He’s abetted by his playmate Victor (Liev Shreiber), who also may or may not be his brother. Possessed of special healing powers that make them both more or less immortal, the two go on to serve in every major conflict of the next 130 years, depicted as a thrilling opening credits montage that has the pair laying waste to enemy soldiers from several armies (They always pick the right side to join.) In time they’re recruited into a special military unit composed of mutant soldiers whose leader, Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston), encourages their growing bloodlust. Logan quits the group when their – and Victor’s especially – savagery pushes him to his ethical threshold.

Jump ahead six years – David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script lets its chronology all over the place - and Logan has found solitidue in a new life working in Canada’s logging industry while romancing a local school teacher (Lynn Collins). But her apparent murder at Victor’s hands drives Logan back into Stryker’s influence. Offered the chance to have all memory of his dead love erased, he volunteers for an experiment to coat his bones with a special alien metal called “adamantium” that will make him virtually indestructible. Once so empowred, the rest of the film finds Logan getting revenge against Victor and Stryker, and liberating Stryker’s gulag of mutant prisoners on Three Mile Island.

Perhaps part of the problem is the murky structure of their source material. As their most popular character, Marvel has revised and re-imagined their hero’s origin story multiple times over the years, the better with which to entice audiences into buying “now it can be told…”  comic “events.” Possibly as a consequence, Benioff (Troy) and Woods (Swordfish) have a lot of complicated and tangled back story to address while keeping the action moving. But like the recent Watchmen, their screenplay puts spectcle above narrative, so that fight scenes (or, more frequently, Victor’s cruel execution of his targets) are constant and prolonged. That’s at least true enough to the genre: the basics of the superhero story has always boiled down to “come for the action, stay for the pathos.” Comic books are by design a visual medium, and character depth is actually a fairly recent development in their history.

Still, for an action movie the special effects should be better – really, they have to be for the film to be worth the audience’s time and money. And for a film both prefacing and expanding on the already profitable X-Men movie franchise (composed so far of two good movies by Bryan Singer and one terrible one by Brett Ratner), they should be better still. Instead, the fight sequences – and there are many - are redundant and blurred, with CGI that’s convincing only about half the time. It’s hard not to think that with such an expansive cast, many of whom also have super powers, the money was spread too thin. A scene in which Logan toys with his new metal claws while at a bathroom counter is especially unconvincing. Most unconvincing, given the carnage, is the lack of blood onscreen, obviously removed for the sake of that crucial PG-13 rating.

Jazz hands, with claws: Jackman

Making his fourth screen appearance as the hirsute Logan, Jackman is serviceable as always, but he’s seldom given anything to do except respond to events surrounding him. For an action hero he’s curiously passive until circumstances demand his attention. He’s also never entirely sympathetic as a character, as there’s no explanation for why he fought in so many wars or why he feels repulsed by his “brother’s” violence in the first place. After 150 or so years together, you’d think he’d know his constant companion better. Jackman is also given to striking dubious poses before running at his enemies, throwing his arms and legs into weird Tai Chi-like contortions that often look mannered.

Shreiber, playing the borderline feral Victor as a method exercise in animal snarl and pent-up menace, nevertheless shows again why he’s among the most underrated American actors working right now. Ryan Reynold’s (Definitely, Maybe) charm is underused as the wisecracking ninja Wade, while the normally wooden Kevin Durand (3:10 To Yuma) is effective buried beneath layers of fat suit padding as The Blob. Collins (True Blood) as Logan’s doomed love Kayla Silverfox does the best she can with a stock role that begs for further development. Despite an intermittent gumbo drawl, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) overachieves as the fan favorite mutant Gambit, a character whose appearance in a Bourbon Street nightclub is one of the film’s few truly suspenseful moments.

It’s no coincidence the film appears on home video so quickly. Debuting at the top of the box office with a strong $87 million opening weekend, it nevertheless sank quickly thereafter as comics fans gave only lukewarm response. And no wonder.  Wolverine is not a good film, but more significantly it is not a good film even for the kind of movie it is. Logan may not be a genius, but his long-awaited solo feature shouldn’t be so dumb.

-Michael Kabel

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(Note: A previous version of this review appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Preview: Surrogates

Bruce Willis stalks a killer through worldwide virtual reality.

Remember virtual reality? The semi-realized gaming/entertainment medium was all the rage in the early 90s, promising an ersatz dimension of “cyberspace” in which people would interact with computer-generated stimuli for fun and adventure. Hollywood had a field day with its story potential, concocting a variety of thrillers including Virtuosity, The Lawnmower Man, and Strange Days, to take advantage of its cutting-edge hip factor and near-future sheen. Except virtual reality never really came to pass, becoming – like jet packs and moving sidewalks – a cross between a punchline and an unfullfilled futurist promise. Hollywood quickly lost interest in the concept, too, only briefly finding it again with The Matrix trilogy at the turn of the decade.

This month’s Surrogates, based on the Top Shelf comic book series, stands the basic premise on its ear, imagining a near-future society in which people interact with reality through the use of “surrogates,” or idealized robot duplicates of themselves. Real people live in isolation, while their proxies go about living their lives for them (sort of like critics’ worst opinions about television.) Because everyone is safe in their own little world, crime and want have effectively vanished, even as human-to-human interaction becomes increasingly rare.

The shock to the system happens when the surrogates’ inventor is murdered, becoming the first human victim in fifteen years. The crime sets off a string of surrogate-human related killings, in which violence to the robot is felt by the flesh and blood controller. FBI agent Greer (Bruce Willis), who investigates surrogate-on-surrogate crime, leaves his house for the first time in several years, teaming with another agent (Radha Mitchell, Man On Fire) to find who’s responsible. Also appearing are Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day) as Willis’ wife, Ving Rhames (Out of Sight) as a spiritual leader opposed to surrogate use, and the great James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential) in an undisclosed role.

Willis’ twenty-two year film career has had its ups and downs, but some of his best work, and his best films, are within the science fiction genre: Twelve Monkeys was a rare moment of critical (if not popular) success, and Unbreakable was a much better film than it ever got credit for being. Even The Fifth Element had its moments, drenched in goofy spectacle as they were. No leading man working now has aged or seems ageless quite like Willis, and playing both the younger and older versions of himself is a gutsy choice that’s bound to invite at least some ridicule. Regarding the rest of the cast, for our money Rhames and especially Cromwell are two actors who can’t work enough.

The creative team is a little more worrisome: director Jonathan Mostow and screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris all previously worked on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a lukewarm effort that effectively ground the Terminator franchise to a halt for several years. Though the premise here is solid, the most obvious plot explanation – the machines are rising again, the surrogates are revolting for their independence – feels derivative and tired. Between Moon and District 9, it’s been a great year for smart sci-fi, and we hope the Surrogates script offers something more thought-provoking and original (as Moon did with a similar trope). One last gripe: the production design has an overly familiar feel to it, full of the shiny office buildings and walls of flat screens that have come to indicate a penny-wise vision of tomorrow. On the other hand, it’s a dreary truth that the future probably won’t look all that different from today, whether you see it with your own eyes or through those of a machine stand-in.

Surrogates opens nationwide September 25.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Extract

Mike Judge’s new workplace comedy could use some more flavor.

Extract, the new comedy by Office Space and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, isn’t a bad film, though it’s not a great one, either. A sweet-natured ensemble piece until almost its very end, full of the wry observational humor at which Judge has always excelled, it’s a work that’s almost impossible to have strong feelings about one way or the other. That’s either faint praise or damning criticism, depending on your point of view. Maybe the biggest gripe will also be the one most repeated: “It’s not Office Space.” Given the cultural reverence that earlier film enjoys, it almost couldn’t be, at least not immediately.

The premise, at least, is promising enough: Joel (Jason Bateman) co-owns a flavored extract factory, a small business he and partner Brian (J.K. Simmons) built up  themselves. Joel’s prosperous and content with his work but not at home: his sex life with wife Suzie (Kirsten Wiig) has fizzled, leaving him bemoaning his celibacy to buddy Dean (Ben Affleck), the bartender at a local sports bar. “We’re gonna be one of those brother and sister couples,” Joel complains.

Meanwhile a freak, hilariously-staged accident at the factory renders veteran employee Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.) the victim of a painful testicular injury and entitled to a huge insurance payout. A newspaper story about the incident catches the attention of local “criminal drifter” Cindy (Mila Kunis), who begins temping at the factory while romancing Step as a means of convincing him to sue, the better to milk him for cash. She also flirts with Joel, leading him to ponder his chances of stepping out on Suzie. Dean suggests Joel hire a gigolo friend of his to seduce Suzie, so that Joel can enjoy his fling with Cindy without guilt. Hazy from some ketamine Dean offered him, Joel agrees. Suzie and the gigolo begin an affair that continues long after the one-time-only proposition Joel envisioned, pushing him further towards Cindy.

Much of the film’s long and winding second act covers the buckshotting plots and subplots as they only occasionally overlap. As with Office Space, Judge places his scenes in a world that feels real and lived-in, full of sports bars, anonymous business hotels, and suburban myopia; that he overpopulates this near-world becomes the film’s biggest obstacle. There are a lot of characters, and the many subplots all jockey for time, resulting in a story that never settles on one plotline long enough to build momentum or depth. In that sense it’s much more similar to the nuances of Judge’s long-underrated King of the Hill than his barbed farce Idiocracy. But bereft of an explicit point to make (corporate America eats the soul, the world is getting stupider), Extract often doesn’t seem to go anywhere fast. At least one set piece, a long and tepid interlude in which Joel does bong hits in a shitty apartment, feels almost completely needless.

To his credit as a director, Judge has the sense to trust his actors to handle his naturalist, free-flowing dialogue. Such an approach almost always works, except in cases where the actors can’t quite get a grip on their characters: though an interesting stunt casting, Affleck seems unmotivated in playing the spacey Dean, while a hustling lawyer played by Gene Simmons never really comes across. On the positive side, Bateman is charming in the role of the decent guy slowly coming if not unglued then very nonplussed. Kunis and Wiig both shine as, rspectively, the woman Joel wants but shouldn’t have and the woman he should have but can’t seem to close the distance between them. In what must be compliance with some weird federal regulation, the ubiquitous David Koechner shows up as Nathan, Joel and Suzie’s pestering neighbor. His part is largely superfluous, though with a pair of thick-lens eyeglasses he bears a striking resemblance to Hank Hill.

Actually, Nathan plays a big part in the film’s conclusion and a resolution to one of the central plotlines, albeit in a grim manner that stands in stark contrast to the earlier scenes’ froth. It’s a weird ending, one that reaches for a note of hope and renewal but instead plays clumsy and random. Some credits-accompanying postscripts feel added as an afterthought, an attempt to compensate for the downer just preceding them.

One telling comment about Judge’s attention to detail that might reveal some of his priorities: watch the exterior shots of the Reynolds Extract building. Based on an actual former extract factory in Austin, TX, it’s typical of the kind of sturdy mid-century business architecture that still exists in the older parts of so many American cities, not yet replaced by a glass box or aluminum shed. If only the rest of the movie were so clearly envisioned.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: The Men Who Stare At Goats

George Clooney and Ewan McGregor star in a story too strange to be anything but true.

Maybe we’re getting jaded in our old age, but the idea that the U.S. Army might try and utilize psychic powers, including telepathy and clairvoyance, makes a certain shabby kind of sense. Compared to the crazy-ass science fiction weapons already in use or development – robot planes, guns in space, smart missiles – the idea that government money gets spent researching psychic weapons doesn’t seem that far-fetched, especially in the anything-goes years of the Cold War but also in its sequel, the War on Terror. Why shouldn’t the military extend its reach into the unnatural, and what would happen if it did?

November’s The Men Who Stare At Goats deals with just those true-life subjects, adapting British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2005 book of the same name. Directed by Grant Heslov (Good Night and Good Luck), the film brings to the screen the three-decade history of the First Earth Battalion, the group of New Age mystics, adepts, and eccentrics charged with using their ostensible extraordinary gifts to help the Army in a variety of intelligence gathering and offensive goals. The title refers to a project based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which Battalion recruits attempted to kill goats through mind control, simply by staring at them. Other objectives included walking through walls, reading minds, and telepathic communication.

The film centers on story-starved Iraq War correspondent Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who accidentally makes contact with Battalion veteran Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). Cassady claims to be a master mentalist – a “Jedi warrior” – and ex-battalion operative. He’s been reactivated in the aftermath of 9/11, he says, and his current mission is to find missing unit founder and leader Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). Wilton accompanies his new contact through Iraq in exchange for the lowdown on the government’s extra-normal agenda; along the way they run into Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), a former unit member now running a prison camp, who may himself be involved in Django’s disappearance.

Also apprearing are Stephen Root, Stephen Lang, J.K. Simmons, Robert Patrick, and Terry Serpico in various roles. We’ll use our psychic powers of second-guessing to propose that Root and Lang play Battalion members while Simmons, Patrick, and Serpico appear as the straightforward military types. The trailer below shows the actors, especially Bridges, comfortably brandishing familiar personas for which audiences have loved them before.

It’s tempting to think of the film, as other sites have suggested, as a Coen Brothers project minus the brothers themselves: the weird subject matter, the cast full of ringers, the bleak humor. Yet as the Coens’ cinematic vision grows ever darker and nastier, a void opens for others to attempt the kinds of comedic free-for-alls they used to make (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), and using the Iraq War as the setting for such a black comedy feels right and appropriate. The creative team is relatively untested, but ambitious: Peter Straughan (How To Lose Friends & Alienate People) wrote the adapted screenplay, while Heslov has previously directed only one feature-length project, 2002′s indie dramatic comedy Par 6.  Finally, the film represents the second major release from Smoke House Pictures, the production company Heslov and Clooney founded in 2006. Their debut offering, last year’s Leatherheads, was often uneven but nevertheless unfairly ignored by the public. 

The Men Who Stare At Goats opens nationwide November 6.

- Michael Kabel

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