Miscellaneous Debris, February 2010 Edition

The latest installment of our Movitetone-newsreel-in-blog-form recurring feature.  

Seriously, is it Spring yet? Like a lot of the United States, winter’s icy fingers continue to clutch and grab at us even while February goes out like a lamb. A frozen solid lamb, encased in thick, sticky ice. We didn’t get to the movies much this month, mainly because a lot of the new releases didn’t interest us and anyway we were working on other things. Still, a few items popped up on our radar, and they’re listed below in no particular order of importance.  

All opinions are our own, by the way. They may be different from yours. That’s okay.  

1. Following up our earlier obituary for Brittany Murphy, the Los Angeles Coroner’s final report  indicates there were no signs of drug or alcohol abuse, and that the actress’ body was not dangerously thin at the time of her death. The 84-page report was released Febuary 25, and reiterated earlier conclusions that Murphy’s death was accidental but also preventable, and that no foul play was suspected.  

2. Ungracefully moving from the tragic to the inane, rumors circulated the Internet this week that John Krasinski (The Office) may sign to play Marvel Comics’ super-patriot Captain America. We’ll just add our voice to the chorus of skepticism. Krasinski isn’t a bad actor, yet we don’t see him as the World War II battlefield leader that the script to The First Avenger: Captain America reportedly requires. Of the possibilities mentioned in this latest round of rumors, we’d probably go with Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights), even though we think most of them – including Michael Cassidy, Mike Vogel, and Chace Crawford – are all too young for the role. Remember that Iron Man was a surprise hit thanks in large part to the irresistable performance given by a 43-year old Robert Downey, Jr.  

3. If you’re not already watching Southland, the serial drama TNT rescued from the ever-widening NBC vortex, the show’s second season begins this Tuesday, March 2. Its initial half-dozen or so episodes had some rough patches, including a surfeit of characters jockeying for clarity in the breakneck plotlines, but the episodes themselves were excellent more often than not. So far the standouts among the cast are Regina King as a LAPD homicide detective slowly buckling under the strain of her job, and Shawn Hatosy as a gang task force agent trying to balance a neurotic wife (Emily Bergl) with working against a ruthless gang that may have him outsmarted.  

  

4. With the Academy Awards just nine days or so away, we’re still mulling over our predictions. We sort of expect Avatar to get Best Picture, given the Academy’s hunger for populist appeal just now, though we’re usually and embarrassingly wrong about such things. If we got to choose the winners, we have to say we’d pick The Hurt Locker from the (long) list of nominees. At the least, that film’s Jeremy Renner deserves the Best Actor nod.  

We’ll have our complete list of awards picks next week.  

5. A recent viewing of The Magnificent Seven got us to wondering who’d play the mighty group of gunfighters in a new version. We’re actually a little surprised Hollywood hasn’t tried it already. (The burly excess of the upcoming The Expendables with its vaguely similar concept notwithstanding.) We imagine Chow Yun-Fat in the Chris Adams role (played in the original by Yul Brynner), with George Clooney as Vin (Steve McQueen) and Clive Owen as the knife-throwing Britt (James Coburn.) We can also see Mad Men‘s John Slattery as the dapper, nerve-wracked Lee (Robert Vaughn) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the firebrand Chico (Horst Bucholz). Finally, who better than Javier Bardem to play the bandit king Calvera (Eli Wallach)? Post your own ideas below, please, but here’s the trailer to the original:  

  

6. Pixar’s John Carter of Mars project keeps picking up talented cast members, and as longtime fans of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels we keep getting more enthused for the film, the studio’s first attempt at live action. Besides stars Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, the cast now also features Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes), Ciaran Hinds (There Will Be Blood), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Willem Dafoe (Platoon), Samantha Morton (In America), Polly Walker (Rome), Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) and Dominic West (The Wire).  

The swashbuckling story (think Lord of the Rings crossed with Star Wars) tells of an American Civil War officer’s adventures on the barbaric world of Mars, or Barsoom, eventually uniting its several warlike races. Burroughs wrote more than a dozen stories set on the fictionalized planet, so Pixar undoubtedly has trilogy or more in mind. The film is set for release in 2012.  

Ask your parents: Leno

  7. We harbor little respect for the man and even less affection, but Jay Leno’s return to The Tonight Show and NBC’s willingness to bring him back on at the expense of the much funnier Conan O’Brien indicates something that a lot of the entertainment media likes to pretend doesn’t exist: the millions of television viewers who don’t give a shit about what’s hip or edgy or even on the pop culture radar at all.  As commentator Steve Sternberg points out, Leno’s audience isn’t anywhere near the over-celebrated 18-24 demographic, and likely remained unphased by the public sentiment that bolstered O’Brien in the recent debacle. We imagine Leno’s fan base typically skews toward having plenty of money, too, a quality we’re sure advertisers find appealing.  

8. Finally, we recently saw – and loved – Robert Siodmak’s 1948 film noir Cry of the City, starring Victor Mature and noir heavyweight Richard Conte (The Big Combo) in some of their finest performances. Lieutenant Candella (Mature) stalks career criminal Martin Rome (Conte) through as realistic a ghetto as was put on film up to that point. The film isn’t as famous as Siodmak’s next effort, Criss Cross (which we frankly find a little overrated), but it’s every bit as enjoyable for noir afficianados.  

The film isn’t available on DVD yet, but it is available on YouTube, and Fox Movie Classics has aired it several times recently, as well.  

  

We’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading.  

- Michael Kabel 

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70s Cinema: Murder On The Orient Express

Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of the famous Agathie Christie mystery is an opulent, sophisticated diversion.

In his charmingly candid 1995 memoir Making Movies, director Sidney Lumet discusses at length the painstaking art direction and production design that went into recreating Murder On The Orient Express‘s  mid-1930s setting. Lumet and production designer Tony Walton worked endlessly, “polishing every tile” to try to recapture the famous train’s ultra-luxurious Art Deo trappings, in many cases using authentic Wagon-Lit furniture and paneling in their own sets. Lumet was determined to make the film entertaining and frothy, admitting such tones weren’t normally his strength but that he was going to create a cheerful spirit “if I had to kill myself and everyone else to accomplish it.”

That weird duality – determined to amuse – infuses the film with a sophistication and chilly elegance that’s fun to watch but that become almost intangible once the film is left to memory. As a filmmaker Lumet is always a master craftsman if not always an artist,  and his straightforward approach to material that’s similarly two-sided – smart but not pretentious, weighty but not substantial – sometimes feels workmanlike. Then again, Christie’s novels aren’t known for their humanity or emotion, either, and half the fun is watching the clues and motives fall, machine like, into their proper place.

The story involves Christie’s master sleuth, Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) and his attempts to solve the murder of one of the train’s passengers as it was caught overnight in a snow bank. The victim, an American millionaire (Richard Widmark) with a shadowy past, had attempted to hire Poirot as his bodyguard only the night before. Relaxing in the next sleeper car, Poirot hears the crime and agrees to assist his Wagon-Lit executive friend Bianchi (Martin Balsam) solve the murder before the train is dug loose and the local police arrive.  But the first class coach is packed tight with a dozen suspects of several different nationalities, and the crime may connect to a notorious kidnapping and murder (itself immediately evocative of the Lindberg baby abduction) five years before. Much of the film’s second half concern’s Poirot’s meticulous, crafty interrogation of each suspect, with hard-focused flashbacks serving to illustrate their alibis.

Though getting neither the time nor the space to truly stretch out into distinct characters, the stellar cast makes the most of their screen time, alternately loud or quiet, or quietly loud. Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award for her turn as Greta, a simple-minded Swedish missionary, but the rest of the players, like a full if slightly too-rich meal, satisfy in giant doses. Of the loud set, Lauren Bacall is brassy and imperious as an American aristocrat, while Tony Perkins gives his role as the victim’s secretary a shifty, overzealous spark. On the quiet side, Bergman is memorable, as always, and Jean-Pierre Cassel is poised and haunting as the train car’s conductor.

More or less underused, considering their star power, are Sean Connery and John Gielgud as two very British veterans hiding behind their military and national bearing. “Why must the English conceal even their most impeccable emotions?” Poirot wonders aloud, one of the dozens of subtly penetrating observations that Paul Denn and Anthony Shaffer’s screenplay gives Finney to chew and bellow. Poirot, a self-professed “ignorant Belgian,” is the center of the whole piece, and Finney plays the character big enough to fill the train’s narrow aisles and passageways. In a film meant to be a nostalgic trip back to vanished grandeur, the sheer hot air of Finney’s performance, full of Old World pomp and pretension, provides the gravitational pull to hold everything around it in place.

Which is probably for the best, because the climax of the film essentially requires him to yell at the giant supporting cast in one long and complicated explanation of his murder hypotheses. (He has two, of course. A story such as this would consider having a single theory unforgivably crude.) The ending, as most solutions to good mysteries usually manage, achieves the balance of seeming a surprise at first but inevitable upon reflection. The explanation is spelled out, acted out, and then reiterated just to make sure the audience gets what’s going on; the mystery train doesn’t leave stragglers. Poirot gets his man, or men, or women and men, and with nothing else to say the film stops, and the effervescence begins to dissipate at once. Ultimately, Murder On The Orient Express is not a great film, but it is a great film while you’re watching it, which is all it wants anyway.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: The Informant!

Matt Damon redeems Steven Soderbergh’s “tattle-tale,” available next week on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Director Steven Soderbergh has spent a good chunk of his career unabashedly paying homage to the films of the 1960s and 70s, whether remaking them outright (Solaris) or channeling their peculiar, very specific rhythms and textures (The Limey, Out of Sight). With The Informant!, he’s supplied with true-life source material that fits approximately alongside such period semi-classics as Serpico and, though it didn’t arrive until 1983, Silkwood. While the overall effort is mercifully free of the self-importance and dogging pace that plagues typical whistle-blower dramas, it doesn’t quite come together as well as it should thanks to an erratic tone and frequent lack of clarity in explaining its myriad details. But it has Matt Damon, who takes another step towards succeeding Tom Hanks as the Great American Movie Star by giving his strongest and most surprising performance in years.

Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, a PhD biochemist recruited into the management division of agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland. The company produces all kinds of foods as well as the chemical and natural ingredients that go into making them, including the amino additive Lysine. Whitacre, a self-described “technical guy,” has a hard time fitting into the company’s help-yourself management culture, so he’s taken aback upon discovering ADM conspires with its global competitors in an ongoing price-fixing conspiracy. “The average American is a victim of corporate crime by the time he’s finished breakfast,” he complains.

The corn identity: Damon

Whitacre contacts the FBI under the pretense of an extortion attempt launched by one of their Japanese collaborators. Awkwardly befriending FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) as he investigates the phony scheme, Whitacre reveals the true skullduggery within the company. Eventually, he wears a surveillance wire for more than two years as Shepard and his colleague Bob Herndon (Joel McHale) collect evidence against ADM and the other corporations.

But Whitacre is jumpy under the best of circumstances, prone to weird delusions of grandeur as well as struggles with paranoia. He buys too many cars and obsesses about his frequent flier miles, and plans elaborate or fantastic get-rich-quick schemes. Part of his angst, the script by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) explains, comes from the strain of maintaining his duplicity, a toll with which even trained federal operatives have trouble coping. But more problems surface as the investigation turns into a sting against ADM, and years of details come to light in the slugfest between prosecutors and ADM attorneys. Chief among them: Whitacre embezzled millions from the company, a fact that jeopardizes Shepard and Herndon’s hard work. Later, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder meant to bolster Whitacre’s legal defense spins their relationship into malicious new territory.

Leave it to Soderbergh to make the federal government seem vulnerable, even needy. Bakula and McHale play their lawman characters not as crusaders but as middle-management types not far removed from Whitacre’s own employees, right down to the off-the-rack suits and low-maintenance hairstyles. The case could make the agents’ careers, and they know it, and that awareness infuses every decision they make and sets the tone for every meeting with their superiors. As Whitacre comes unglued in the film’s third act Shepard emerges as the most visible victim of his machinations and also, strangely, possibly the one with the most to lose.

Understanding exactly what happens following the government’s sting against ADM requires the closest attention possible, as the narrative thread becomes submerged in a long and repetitive series of scenes displaying meetings, conferences, and confrontations between the characters. There’s a sense of consequence, in that the actors are all believable and modern audiences are anyway bitterly aware of what a federal investigation entails. But the many scenes blur together, with little sense of meaning or connection with one another, until the total result feels less than the sum of its parts. Besides jail sentences, you’re not sure what’s at stake.

In a way, complete comprehension of every detail isn’t crucial. Most audiences have seen enough of these kinds of films (not least of which Soderbergh’s own Erin Brokovich) to understand the meetings scenes are just way stations on the trip to the big courtroom resolution finale, followed by the inevitable post-scripts. Still, there ought to be more sense of context, and importance given to the scenes for as much as Soderbergh obviously spends a great amount of time correctly representing their details. Talented performers like Tony Hale, Patton Oswalt and Clancy Brown appear on camera but find no use for their considerable presences except than to fill positions extras could probably handle just as well. Casting 60s-era satirists Tom and Dick Smothers as, respectively, ADM’s patriarch and a federal judge is an interesting, if possibly gratuitous, decision.

Through it all Damon manages to give his character an innate likeability that rests partly on pity: Whitacre simply cannot get out of his own way long enough to give a straight answer, no matter how important the question. Even at the end, as he sits in prison begging on camera for a presidential pardon (for helping to police big business – and from George W. Bush, no less) you can’t help but feel sorry for him despite his many mistakes and egregious arrogance. Had Soderbergh and/or Burns framed the story (based on Kurt Eichenwald’s book) as a character piece, the muddied details might seem less important to understanding. But in attempting to make a film that’s half-character study, half-social crusade, both narratives feel slighted.

A coupe of parting gripes: it’s puzzling that Soderbergh composes the film full of dreary earth tones and heavy fabrics and brass, suggesting the aesthetic of the early 1980s. Yet the film is set firmly in the 1990s and the current decade, when most such designs had long since gone out of style, even in relatively rural places like the film’s Illinois setting. The Sixties-groovy title graphics also serve no purpose either, though they do distract.

- Michael Kabel

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

Nuclear Winter

Ride out the dregs of late winter with three Cold War milestones.

Movie audiences of roughly a half-century ago had a wildly popular, intensely topical genre whose basis probably no one in the world today would bring back if they could: the Cold War/nuclear war thriller. Reaching its peak shortly before the United States’ mid-1960s escalation of the Vietnam War, these deliberately polemical suspensers and melodramas often took the form of “what-if” scenarios that played on the era’s literal worst fears and taking their stories down to the most heart wrenching - and heart-stopping – conclusions. And unlike the B-movies that form the crux of modern socially conscious film, they did so with A-list casts that included some of Hollywood’s most distinguished screen performers and behind the camera talent.

The following three films were all of that insane, determined era “on the brink” of the end of civilization, and each one is available on DVD. We recommend seeing them all, but probably not in a row, for your own sake.

Seven Days In May (1964): After the president (Fredric March) signs a sweeping disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the politically ambitious Air Force general James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) leads a cabal of officers, Congressmen, and media personalities in a planned coup d’etat disguised as ordinary military maneuvers. The  president is weak, they argue in a weirdly prescient echo of modern flak, and deserves impeachment rather than jeopardizing the nation with trust in an implacable foe. General Scott, by comparison, is a “real American” war hero and ideologue, accepting nominations and accolades like a modern Caesar. Opposing the plot are his own aide (Kirk Douglas), a drunken Georgia senator (Edmond O’Brien), and a skeptical White House adviser (Martin Balsam).

Director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) keeps the ambling script by The Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling on course, building suspense with each new detail revealed. But there’s not much of a payoff, with a final confrontation between March and Lancaster lacking the showdown punch it demands. A  love story between Douglas’ Colonel “Jiggs” Casey and Scott’s former mistress (Ava Gardner) doesn’t amount to much either. Still, the thrills in this movie are in the trip and not the destination. The buildup to the seventh day, as well as seeing the cabal’s plot emerge, make for riveting entertainment.

On The Beach (1959): After a nuclear war eradicates all life in the Northern Hemisphere, a lone American submarine comes to Australia, the last outpost of civilization. As the sub’s captain (Gregory Peck) falls in love with a local drunk (Gardner again, virtually photocopying her character from Seven Days In May), he prepares to lead the sub on a reconnaissance mission to the California coastline. He’s joined by an Australian naval lieutenant (Anthony Perkins) deeply reluctant to leave behind his young wife (Donna Anderson) and infant daughter. Meanwhile Australia prepares for the deadly clouds of radioactive gas and debris slowly coming its way, including dealing with food and gas shortages and receiving government-issued suicide pills.

Adapted from what must have been one hell of a novel by Nevil Shute, the mesmerizing concept is hampered somewhat by pacing and tension that often lack the punch they deserve, partly due to inappropriately relaxed staging by director Stanley Kramer (Guess Who”s Coming To Dinner) that lets the reality of the characters’ situation slip out from under the story. The problems are further abetted by undercooked performances from Peck (playing his usual noble stiff persona) and Perkins (who’s never completely convincing as a Naval officer.) However, Fred Astaire is charming in his debut dramatic performance as a rattled scientist who feels at least a little complicit in Armageddon. The third act redeems the early sluggishness, however, with Kramer’s shot compositions taking an increasingly stark perspective as the human race fades out. The final shot, heavy-handed as anything, gets you in the gut nonetheless.

Fail-Safe (1964): After a computer error sends a squadron of nuclear-armed American bombers on a mission to annihilate Moscow, the U.S. President (Henry Fonda) and a group of scientists and policymakers (including Walter Matthau in a rare heavy role) sweat out the bombers’ flight from a bunker deep underground. The final sacrifice Fonda’s unnamed president makes is uniquely poignant but completely terrifying nonetheless.

Using claustrophobic close-ups and narrow, oddly lit sets, director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon) creates a deliberate sense of nightmarish dread. The action is played out remotely, using only impersonal maps that underscore the removed distance of the devastation to come, while the tension comes from the palpable anxiety played out through finely wrought performances. All in all an exhausting film experience, but an unforgettable one nonetheless.

Following the success of Stanley Kubrick’s similarly themed Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (released earlier that same year, to much greater box office than Fail-Safe ), Cold War thrillers faded somewhat from the American cinema landscape as the Vietnam war intensified and the Cuban Missile Crisis faded from the national memory. Still, the films’ sense of bleak outrage and leery cynicism tinged with hope would influence much of the best science fiction of the following decade, including films such as Silent Running, Damnation Alley and especially Soylent Green. Perhaps suggesting the cyclical nature of such works, both On the Beach and Fail-Safe were remade for television in 2000.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: Robin Hood

The director and star of Gladiator team once again for a new take on the classic English legend.

One of the most enduring heroic legends of all time gets a polished, violent new treatment this May as director Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood looks to reprise the same blood-soaked but substantive spectacle as his previous Gladiator. It also re-teams him with that film’s star Russell Crowe for their fifth collaboration, and co-stars Cate Blanchett and rising stars Matthew Macfadyen and Kevin Durand in major roles.

During the 12th Century, Sir Robin of Loxley, Earl of Huntington, returns home from the Third Crusade to find his local village and possessions under the control of the politically ambitious Sheriff of Nottingham (Macfadyen). Reluctant to bow to the local demagogue’s authority after devoting years in service to his country, Robin takes to the nearby Sherwood Forest, recruiting a gang of “merry men” to fight a guerilla war against the Sheriff and his cohorts. Along the way he romances Lady Marian (Blanchett), a role reinterpreted by Brian Helgeland’s (L.A. Confidential) script as a recently widowed local noblewoman.

Joining Robin in his campaign are names that fans of any of the many, many previous interpretations will easily recognize: Little John (Kevin Durand, Lost), Friar Tuck (Mark Addy, The Full Monty), and Will Scarlett (Scott Grimes, ER), among others. Rounding out the cast of characters are King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and the less-than-noble King John (Oscar Isaac, Body of Lies).

Production on the film was a long time in completion as Scott and Crowe worked out differences in the script: early versions put Robin, Marian, and the Sheriff into a romantic triangle while casting the Sheriff as a conflicted anti-hero and something of a forensics investigator. The final screenplay reportedly uses more real-life characters than previous versions while staying truer to actual historical events. Shooting was further slowed by the 2008 Writer’s Guild of America strike, eventually completing by using locations in Wales and outside London as doubles for the famed Sherwood Forest and Nottingham.

All of which sort of makes us worry. As with this month’s The Wolfman, we wish we more enthused about this new treatment of classic material than we are. Crowe and Scott’s four previous collaborations have been decidedly hit-or-miss, including the masterful Gladiator, the adequate American Gangster, the tepid Body of Lies and the virtually unseen A Good Year. This new film seems like a return to winning formula for them, which is great, but it’s also hard to see the battle images in the trailer below and yet not compare them to Gladiator‘s thrilling Romans-vs.-Barbarians slugfest. Lastly, the trailer’s WWE Raw-style music doesn’t entirely sell the accompanying visuals. Still and all, we fondly remember Gladiator as one of the few bona fide classics of the last decade, and this new work will at least offer grownups something in the of way of summer blockbuster to call their own.

Robin Hood opens nationwide May 14.

- Michael Kabel
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DVD Review: Couples Retreat

Underachieving ensemble comedy arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

One of the most frequently heard gripes about American cinema the last couple of years is that adult movies – films made for grown-ups, about grown-up issues or at least matters relevant to audiences over 30 years old – are on the wane. It’s wondered if people who aren’t in college, or better yet high school, haven’t got the time to trek to a movie theatre and sit still for two hours. (Note to Hollywood: these days most of us are working too hard.) Films made for this demographic, the occasional romcom aside, don’t do as well as the superhero and vampire fluff that have become the studios’ meat and potatoes.

Certainly, marriage and parenthood are relevant, if not crucial, topics for “older” audiences, as are such ideas as romance and keeping some sense of youth and spontaneity alive once the day-to-day living takes on a limitless routine. Life goes on, like the man said, long after the thrill of living is gone. Hollywood has a proud tradition of films that confront such quiet crises: The Big Chill, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Two For The Road, The Ice Storm, and quite a few others all tackled its dangers. Notice that all of those films are dramas, however. Not one saw the lighter side of marital ennui and pre-midlife regret.

Just here to get lei'ed: the cast.

Couples Retreat could have been a smarter movie, a more mature film, and a sharper examination of the same topics if it tried harder than it does. But instead its script (co-written by stars Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau) too often panders to its presumed audience without ever really getting beneath the skin of the problems that lurk, like the lemon sharks of its lone suspense sequence, just beneath its surface. As with far too many major studio releases these days, the film takes pains to make sure the audience isn’t provoked into reflection, or into questioning the issues the characters only passingly mention they have. In lieu of that approach there’s too many lazy jokes, too much easy humor, too many cutesy-cute sitcommish gags about precious kids. It’s a safe film, from top to bottom and every frame between.

Uptight couple Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) have hit a rough spot in their marriage, largely from their inability to have a child. Strapped for cash and desperate to make their marriage work, they approach five of their friends – two other couples and a recently-divorced male (Favreau and Kristin Davis, Vaughn and Malin Ackerman, Faizon Love) – with a group-rate package vacation to Eden, a tropical resort that doubles as therapeutic boot camp for troubled marriages. The couples agree, with Love’s hapless Shane bringing along his party-hardy 20-year old girlfriend Trudy (Kali Hawk). Once at the resort the couples’ plans for a vacation are foiled by resort regulations that demand they engage in therapy and communication skill-building sessions.

It’s just a little predictable, maybe, that each couple is in a different phase of disintegration: Favreau and Davis’ Joey and Lucy tolerate each other only until their teen daughter leaves for college; Vaughn and Ackerman’s Dave and Ronnie are just beginning to hit the skids; Shane and Trudy barely know each other. So far, so good, except each actor takes their character’s problem and amplifies it to ten. Part of the problem is that with so many characters, respective characterization gets lost in the shuffle: how can the audience keep up with everyone, unless they stand out? But it’s annoying nonetheless that each character has to go loud to be heard, and everyone’s behavior inevitably becomes childish and plot-focused. There’s very little sense these people know each other, past some laborious exposition dropped into a belabored first act.

Director Peter Billingsley keeps the plot moving, and again with so many characters there’s a lot to juggle. But individual scenes suffer as a result, with episodes trailing off and getting whisked from the viewer’s attention before they’ve reached their dramatic or comedic payoff. The result is an uneven middle and a too-tidy resolution that relies on too much convention, at least one out-of-left-field plot contrivance, and more than a little schlock. A film about adults in marital trouble doesn’t need one gag about a child using a sales floor demo toilet. The story in which two such jokes are necessary doesn’t exist.

Sitcommish: the cast

The cast, by and large, brings exactly what you’ve come to expect from them in other performances. Bateman and Bell are charming in their sunny respectability; Vaughn and Favreau are smart-assed and cranky. Davis is Charlotte York, once again. Ackerman is charming and pretty, and seems vastly more comfortable than she appeared in Watchmen earlier this year. Love isn’t a bad actor, but watching his sad sack performance I couldn’t help but wish, and not for the first time, that Bernie Mac was still with us. Of the other cast members, Jean Reno is amusing as the resort’s spacey therapy guru, while Peter Serafinowicz does an effective Jonathan Pryce impression as the resort’s maitre ‘d.

Ultimately, it’s hard not to imagine this film as a better choice for a January or February home video release than something worth a trip to the theatre, no matter what your age. Its quality notwithstanding, all the sun and surf lovingly displayed will no doubt offer a welcome escape now that winter is at its heaviest around the nation. You don’t have to be snowbound to enjoy Couples Retreat, but it’ll definitely help.

- Michael Kabel

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

Preview: The Losers

The critically acclaimed espionage comic comes to the big screen this April.

Mixing traditional spy genre tropes with modern War On Terror cynicism, April’s The Losers adapts the Eisner-nominated Vertigo comics series into what looks – from the trailer below – like an old school shoot-em-up, the kind of film that Renny Harlin or John Woo might have made in their 1990s prime. It’s got a cast of rising stars going for it, too, as well as a script by Peter Berg (The Kingdom) and James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) that adapts comics author Andy Diggle’s unique narrative voice.

The setup is straightforward enough: After getting double crossed and left for dead by their CIA handler Max (Jason Patric), five members of a black-ops special forces team join forces with a mercenary against the agency and its various shadowy collaborators. As their campaign continues they uncover a web of subterfuge and conspiracy with their former boss as its center, taking each operation down as they uncover it.

The group individually follow the tried-and-true nickname/broad character stroke makeup. Their leader, Franklin Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bears an almost irrational hatred for Max. His second-in-command, Roque (Idris Elba), harbors such intense greed he’s motivated to betray the group; Jensen (Chris Evans), the computer hacker, is a flamboyant motormouth; Pooch (Columbus Short), the pilot, is a laid back family man; Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), the sniper, is sullen and withdrawn as a result of his combat experiences. The group is joined by Aisha (Zoe Saldana), a hot-tempered professional killer with her own grudge against Max.

The film’s greatest strength, besides the escapist value of the potboiler plot, is likely its assemblage of talent, most of whom seem on the verge of career breakthroughs just as the film arrives in theatres. Morgan in particular has been circling leading man status for a while now, after appealing turns in P.S. I Love You and especially Watchmen. Saldana gave a standout performance in last year’s Star Trek, while Short made strong showings in little-seen fare including Whiteout and Armored. Of the others, The Wire‘s Elba gave a lukewarm performance on The Office last season, though to be fair the part was pretty under-written and the role of Roque plays more to his strengths, anyway. Evans, meanwhile, seeems always one good performance away from officially arriving as an actor. If five years from now the cast have all risen to the A-list, and there’s no reason to suspect otherwise, the film could become an interesting trivia piece whether it’s any good or not, much like the “before they were stars’ value of such recent classics as Dazed and Confused and Heat.

The film is directed by Sylvain White, whose previous credits include Stomp the Yard and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. It’s been remarked several times already that co-writer Berg isn’t also directing, given his familiarity with high-concept, high-octane action movies.

The Losers opens nationwide April 9.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, January 2010 Edition

Our irregular roundup of news, observations and events that didn’t get a full post.

January came and went pretty fast where we live, with a lot of it buried underneath bitter, immobilizing cold and snow. We didn’t get to the movies much this past month, though we saw plenty of good ones and bad ones on the various movie channels (more on that below.)

Still and all, a lot happened in movies and television alike that was worth talking about or passing on, if only briefly. The following is our semi-monthly, semi-punctual roundup of items we think are interesting but yet don’t merit a complete blog post all on their own. You, our audience, seems to like these features, so if you’ve got suggestions on how to make them better our email address is just down there on the right. Now for starters, a couple of points on Avatar…

1. We didn’t review the film, or rather we haven’t yet, because the story didn’t interest us that much and anyway the word of mouth coming from people we respect was lukewarm at best. (One of our frequent collaborators even tried, then walked out from boredom.) But the film has made more money than Jesus now, and somehow that makes evaluation seem irrelevant, even though it shouldn’t. Films such as this, and indeed most of James Cameron’s work, defy criticism anyway. Assessing them as works of cinema, or even for their longevity, is almost beside the point. They thrill, make money by the wheelbarrow full, then fade away into endless cable reruns and home video releases. That’s not art, but it’s certainly good business.

2. The entertainment media, always a giddy celebrant of the hot property of any given moment, had a lot of fun speculating which new release would knock Avatar off the top of the box office charts. Nothing managed that, but really no film could have. This January was fairly typical, with only a couple of over-pedigreed B-movies – Edge of Darkness, The Book of Eli - making exceptions to the usual assortment of studio leftovers and also-ran new releases. Smaller-scale projects like Daybreakers and The Tooth Fairy were never going to make a lot of money, under any circumstances. We imagine much of Avatar‘s business, meanwhile, was either repeat viewing or otherwise disinterested people going to see what all the fuss was about.

So long, Sal: Batt

3. We were disappointed to hear that Bryan Batt, who plays the elegant, tortured Salvatore Romano on Mad Men, won’t return for the show’s fourth season. Series creator Matthew Weiner told TV Guide that the character’s departure was necessary for the show’s progress. In happier news, Aaron Staton’s contract was renewed, meaning Ken Cosgrove and his haircut will play a role in the show’s new era. January Jones will also come back as Betty Draper. A date for the season premiere has yet to be announced.

4. The web of acrimony surrounding Spider-Man 4 grew thick and taut this past month, with Sam Raimi quitting the production and Sony Pictures promising a bootstrap reboot featuring an all-new cast. From a financial standpoint, which is probably the only one the studio is considering, a reboot makes a lot of sense. Spider-Man is a story for the young, and when the new film opens in 2012 a full decade will have passed since the 2002 first film. To be honest, the Raimi cast was getting a bit old for their parts, and there’s no escaping that Spider-Man 3 was sabotagued by unchecked self-indulgence from almost everyone involved.

5. We’ve recently grown enamored of  Turner Classic Movies‘ morning and daytime programming, which has become a versatile showcase for little-remembered films from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Often there’s a classic work that deserves a new appreciation, such as the recent Paul Newman-starring Somebody Up There Likes Me or the 30s melodrama Rain. Though the quality of the films slips occasionally, for classic film enthusiasts it’s cast miss DVR fodder. We’ve recorded so much good stuff we’ve recently started an anthology series of blog posts to follow it all.

Fox Movie Channel, by the way, runs a close second to the venerable TCM, though their choice of films runs more towards works of the 60s and 70s. This can include cult favorites like Mother, Jugs, and Speed and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, but FMC also tends to show the same few films over and over again. That’s sadly surprising, given the huge vault of films for which they presumably have access.

6. Leave it to MTV to use the country’s Great Recession as a means of introducing yet stupider programming. Jersey Shore, a program as willfully lowbrow as probably anything ever put on television, has effectively supplanted the far more opulent The Hills as the network’s tentpole attraction. There’s a point to be made that replacing the rich brats of the The Hills with the blue-collar troglodytes of Jersey Shore only seems appropriate given America’s dire economic straits. But was either program really necessary in the first place?  

Mick LaSalle, the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, tears the new show’s championing of “guido culture” into little tiny pieces on his blog.

7. We can’t help but feel, given its cast, that The Wolfman would have excited us more were it released seven or eight years ago. The embedding-proof trailer looks an awful lot like those stuffy Francis Ford Coppola-produced monster flicks of the early 90s, and while we shouldn’t hold that against this new film we’re not entirely enthused about it, either. We also can’t help but imagine the Wolfman using his fangs to try and chew as much scenery as co-star Anthony Hopkins.

8. We recently came across this picture of Baton Rouge’s defunct Cinemark Tinseltown Cinema, which got us to thinking about derelict movie theatres and the scars they leave on their communities. Movie theatres are an important part of any neighborhood, even the otherwise anonymous corporate multiplexes, and once they go under they’re very unlikely to reopen as anything else. If you’re going to the movies soon, please consider supporting a theatre you think might be suffering. You’re probably right, and they can use the business.

Having more movie theatres increases your chances of getting a wider variety of films to watch. Help out the theatres for your own sake if nothing else.

We’ll be back later this week. Thanks for reading.

-Michael Kabel

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