Miscellaneous Debris, May 2010 Edition

The end of another month means our monthly roundup of news and analysis miscellany. 

Well, that was May 2010, and as far as films go it was distinctly underwhelming, with the television landscape not looking an awful lot better. The biggest releases of the month both disappointed, with neither Iron Man 2 or Robin Hood meeting the promise that their predecessors or creative talent suggested. With three new large-scale films - Prince of Persia, George Romero’s Survival of the Dead, and the already dated-looking Sex And The City 2 slamming into multiplexes this week there’s no doubt the summer season is upon us. (We remember when the Memorial Day weekend was the starter. Like the holiday season, summer comes a little earlier every year now.) 

At the end of every month we roundup some news, information, and analysis that we never got around to giving our complete blogging attention. They’re listed below, in no particular order of importance. 

 1. What exactly was so disappointing about Iron Man 2, or for that matter Robin Hood? Both films look superb “on paper,” and the spectacles inherent in their concepts alone promised at least diversionary thrills. In retrospect, now that the buzz around both films has dissipated, we think Iron Man 2 suffered from a surplus of corporate enthusiasm. With too many new characters – the film desperately wants audiences to demand Black Widow and War Machine spinoffs – too many storylines and too little time for character development, the whole effort feels in retrospect like clanging, top-heavy overkill. 

Robin Hood, meanwhile, seemed entirely the answer to a question nobody asked. Glum, excessively violent, and sometimes almost misanthropic, it was a new look at a character that most audiences possibly weren’t thinking needed a  gritty treatment. On the other hand, it may age better than Iron Man 2, growing a respecting fan base with DVD and cable showings.  

No future: FlashForward

 2. The ratings deathmatch between FlashForward and V, ABC’s two sci-fi franchise hopes once touted as the heirs apparent to Lost, came to an end with V getting the second season greenlight and FlashForward airing its season finale May 27. Ratings analysts had speculated that the network would renew one – and only one – series, and a modest late season bump in V‘s ratings let it edge ahead. We’re not going to armchair showrun either series, but FlashForward had potential it deferred too long; V needs to turn the heat up on most of its plotlines and jettison at least two characters if it has a chance of growing a larger audience. Now comes news that ABC may revive Alias, which seems like a knee-jerk reaction to losing Lost. 

3. On the far other end of the television series lifespan graph, Law & Order is also cancelled after a mere twenty – count ‘em, twenty – seasons. By way of perspective, the people born the year it debuted are in college now. (Unfortunately, it falls just a single season short of the longest-running drama series record still held by Gunsmoke.) Its cancellation might be something else to blame on the Jay Leno debacle: had NBC not shuffled everything to accommodate Leno’s 10 PM time slot, Law & Order might have held on to a larger audience as more people could actually find it on the schedule. All is not lost, however. Franchise mastermind Dick Wolf plans to explore other avenues for the show to continue, including a two-hour TV movie as a last resort. Meanwhile NBC plans to trot out Law & Order: Los Angeles this fall.

We miss seeing Bridget Fonda.

 4. Quentin Tarantino’s most accomplished but least appreciated film is on track for the prequel treatment. Writer-director Daniel Schechter (Goodbye Baby) has adapted Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch, which featured several of the characters that later appeared in Rum Punch, the novel Tarantino reworked into Jackie Brown. Specifically, The Switch relates an early crime adventure of Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, the roles played in Jackie Brown by, respectively, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro. Tarantino reportedly won’t be involved in the project, which is tentatively scheduled for a 2011 release. The search for a director and cast is currently underway. 

5. We’ve eagerly, obsessively collected and even suggested ways to build your own, and this July 13 Warner Bros resumes their Film Noir Classics box set collection with a new four-disc set. Volume 5 includes eight films, a slight downgrade from Volume 4, which boasted ten, but also showcases lesser-known works from noir auteurs including Anthony Mann and Robert Fleischer. The charmingly noirish titles include Cornered, Desperate, Backfire, and Crime In The Streets. 

Continuing the noiry excitement, two weeks later Paramount Pictures releases its own trio of offerings, including the William Holden-Barry Fitzgerald noirish thriller Union Station, the Charlton Heston-starring Dark City, and the Alan Ladd vehicle Appointment With Danger. 

6. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, Criterion may release their edition of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line if a bare-bones preorder page at Amazon.com proves to be correct. Based on the novel by James Jones, author of From Here To Eternity (and featuring many of the same characters, albeit renamed), the film structured the events of World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign into a series of vignettes about the men fighting it, taking in every human emotion and failing along the grueling way. 

Upon its 1998 release the film was unfairly ignored by a public that preferred the more simplistic jingoism of Saving Private Ryan (released earlier that year) or felt leery of its sorrowful, meditative tone. Nevertheless, Malick’s eye for arresting imagery didn’t dull one bit after an almost twenty year hiatus; the trailer alone is more picturesque than most films. 

 

Here's looking at you, kid.

7. Finally, we want to invite you to post your feedback. In a weird inverse ratio, the number of comments posted to our site has dropped off even while our traffic has steadily grown. Discussion being the root of understanding, we’d like to hear your own ideas, especially about some of the more obscure material we blog about. If you’re just posting a comment to build links, however, don’t waste your time. We delete those immediately, without approval.

Next week we’ll be back with a review of Prince of Persia. Have a good Memorial Day weekend and remember to stay safe on the roads.

- Michael Kabel

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Our June 2010 Movie Guide

Some of the biggest releases of the year’s biggest movie month, and our over/under analysis about them. 

The month of June, maybe more than any other, represents excitement for the future. It’s the first month of summer vacation, the first true month of the summer season, and the favorite time to get married. It’s also, of course, the biggest month of the movie year, in which the studios roll out some of their biggest releases, the better to take advantage of the seasonal movie crowd. Actually going to the movies in the summertime is as much of an American tradition as habit; we look forward to going to the movies in June because that’s when the biggest movies come out. 

June 2010 promises some truly big films, even though each comes with its own problems and reasons for skepticism. The following seven are a random sampling, not meant to show the entirety of any release schedule so much as what’s already got our attention. 

We say that about some of our ex-girlfriends.

Splice (June 4) – The creepy, slick advertisements for this genetic engineering-gone-wrong thriller show us just enough of the lab-created hybrid creature to get our attention, even if the poster gives its apparance pretty much completely away. More enticing for us is the casting of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley (our college crush after her surly turn in Go, way back when) as the scientists bringing the monstrously exotic Dren to life. Ramping up the chic horror factor, the film’s directed by Vincenzo Natali, who made a stir sometime back with his low-budget mindfuck Cube, while Guillermo Del Toro serves as executive producer. 

We hope the film will be: exactly what Natali has claimed, an intelligent look at the consequences of a rapidly emerging science. We’re afraid it will be: Vacuous, over-stylized fluff, much like Del Toro’s own Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Watch the embedding-proof trailer on YouTube here. 

Get Him To The Greek (June 4) – A record company intern (Jonah Hill) struggles to get a washed-up, debauched rock star (Russell Brand) from London to Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre in seventy-two hours. Awkward, but hilarious, hijinks presumably ensue. Brand reprises the role he played in 2008′s Forgetting Sarah Marshall; Hill, who also appeared in that film, does not; Nicholas Stoller directed both. 

We hope the film will be: A pleasantly surprising, deft satire of the music industry that’s more about character than vulgar gaggery; a modern-day My Favorite Year, though that seems like a long shot.  We’re afraid it will be:  Shrill mugging from two actors too quick to fall back on familiar shtick. Overall, we’re expecting this summer’s Year One.  Watch the embedding-proof trailer on YouTube here. 

The A-Team (June 11) – An elite group of soldiers looks to clear their name with the U.S. military after getting framed for a crime they didn’t commit. This adaptation of the beloved 80s television series, co-written and directed by budding action auteur Joe Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces), updates the group’s tour of duty from Vietnam to the Iraq War. Liam Neeson plays team leader Hannibal Smith, with Bradley Cooper as Face, Rampage Jackson as B.A. Baracus and Sharlto Copley as Howling Mad Murdock. Jessica Biel and Patrick Wilson co-star. 

We hope the film will be: A throwback to the action films of the TV series’ decade, which relied on elaborate stuntwork and a blistering pace to wow audiences. Its inspiration was big, dumb, well-executed fun; the movie should live up to that unpretentious tradition. We’re afraid it will be: something that doesn’t. 

 

Toy Story 3 (June 18) – When their owner leaves home for college, Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the gang are shipped off to a daycare center, where they must survive a whole roomful of rambunctious kids. Pixar mainstay Lee Unkrich returns to direct, with a screenplay by Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine). 

We hope the film will be: Even half as entertaining as the first two installments of the franchise. Still, we’re skeptical. Pixar hit their first true misfire with last year’s Up, and if the trailer below is any indication this time around the emphasis is on sentimentality and slapstick noise over true whimsy and smarts. We’re afraid it will be: an indication that Up‘s mawkishness and mean-spirited violence were only the beginning of a trend for the formerly infallible studio. 

 

That the poster takes pains to hide Hex's scars is a bad sign.

Jonah Hex (June 18) – Wild West drifter and sometime bounty hunter Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is offered a deal that he can’t refuse: in exchange for clemency from the multiple warrants on his head, the U.S. Army wants him to kill the terrorist (John Malkovich) planning to unleash an army of undead upon the Earth. Megan Fox co-stars as Hex’s prostitute love interest and sidekick. Warner Bros has the same sequel hopes that have become standard operating procedure for comic book movies. 

We hope the film will be: At least somewhat faithful to Hex’s DC Comics adventures in the 70s, but we doubt it: the original Hex was a pretty transparent Man With No Name/Outlaw Josie Wales… ahem, “homage” who proudly wore his Confederate Army uniform and killed without hesitation. The zombie aspect to the plot is also pretty disappointing. We’re afraid it will be: Another misbegotten comic-to-screen-adaptation that went off the rails when they changed too much about the subject matter. Judging by the trailer, they changed everything that wasn’t nailed to the ground. 

 

Cyrus (June 25, limited) – A recently divorced man (John C. Reilly) romances a lovely, lonely single mother (Marisa Tomei), only to encounter resistance from her teenaged son. Mumblecore auteurs Jay and Mark Duplass make their (by and large) mainstream crossover, including their trademark frenetic camerawork and reliance on improvised dialogue. Catherine Keener co-stars. 

We hope the film will be: another smart character showcase for Reilly and Tomei, who besides their higher-profile roles have been creating quieter but much more substantial work in smaller pictures for going on two decades. We’re afraid it will be: yet more hipster piffle along the lines of Greenberg.  The trailer alone reminds us of any number of other works, ranging from films including Punch-Drunk Love, Step-Brothers and The 40 Year Old Virgin to at leat one plot thread from probably every family melodrama ever put on television. Still, a film like this is all about performance, and we can see the chemistry between the two stars already. 

 

Knight and Day (June 25) – When a secret agent (Cruise) crosses paths with a hapless civilian (Diaz), he’s forced to drag her into the hunt for a battery that may contain the source of unlimited energy. An international chase ensues, putting them at odds and in alliances with any number of competing groups. 

We hope the film will be: another throwback. These kinds of big-star, big-stunt spectacles used to be the norm for summer movie seasons, back in the 90s heyday of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson. Nothing wrong with that; after all, you shouldn’t need a comic book collection to want to go to the movies. 

We’re afraid it will be: an effort by two fading stars to shore up their careers with a proven formula (see also Killers, the Heigl-Kutcher variation on this same theme arriving June 4.) Director James Mangold’s last effort, the Russell Crowe vehicle 3:10 To Yuma, was deplorable largely because of its dependence on threadbare plot tropes. 

We’ll be back later this week. Thank you for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: Get Low

Bleak indie comedy shows Robert Duvall throwing his own funeral with Bill Murray’s help.

Like the specialty dish of a long-beloved restaurant, there are some actors in some parts that we never tire of watching, no matter how often they present variations on what’s essentially the same performance. Jeff Bridges comes to mind, playing laid back cool, or Robert Downey, Jr. appearing once again as the smartest guy in the room. The pater familias of such actors, however, remains Robert Duvall, who’s plaid the eccentric, rural loner type so many times he’s practically synonymous with the part itself. The type was his career breakthrough in 1962′s To Kill A Mockingbird, and he’s played it enough times since to lampoon it in a brilliant Saturday Night Live bit  in 1998. It’s not the only role in his repertoire, but it’s the one for which he’s most famous, the one for which he’ll be remembered.

Duvall returns to the character yet again in July’s Get Low, the debut feature from Academy Award winning short film director Aaron Schneider (Kiss The Girls) and with a script co-written by C. Gaby Mitchell (Fallen Angels) and Chris Provenzano (Mad Men) from a story by newcomer Scott Seeke. Duvall plays Feilx Bush, a notorious mountain man and recluse in 1930′s Tennessee whose decades of seclusion have made him the object of both gossip and lore among his neighbors. Out of the blue, Felix contacts local funeral parlor owner Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) for help in planning his own funeral. Felix wants to see the event himself, when he’s still alive, to hear what people say about him. Quinn agrees, even building a publicity campaign to herald the upcoming event.

But Felix’s sudden re-emergence from seclusion stirs up old memories and unresolved relationships, including local widow Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), the woman who may have caused Felix’s flight into the wilderness decades before. Others find themselves drawn towards the “celebration” after Felix declares he’ll use the funeral as a forum to explain his self-imposed exile, making the event more of a spectacle – which is possibly what Felix intended all along.

The veteran cast behind Duvall  all but guarantees a handsome ensemble of performances. Murray is always good, even when appearing in films that, the past few years, have often been too precious by half. Spacek, much like Duvall, has played strong rural women for so much of her forty-year career that probably no one is better suited to her role. Lucas Black has played supporting roles in a peculiar succession of big productions that missed – Cold Mountain, Jarhead, All The Pretty Horses, so maybe a smaller-scale effort will get him some recognition that’s so far eluded him through no fault of his own.

Indie comedies, especially during the summer months, have for a while now consisted of romcom fluff targeted at hipsters and of little appeal to anyone else. As a result, the opportunity to see something more mature as the summer blockbuster season goes through its annual implosions offers a temptation all by itself. Schneider’s previous directing effort, a short film adaptation of the William Faulkner short story “Two Soldiers,” won the Best Short Film, Live Action Oscar in 2003, and his return to a similar time and place also feels promising.

Get Low opens in limited release nationwide July 30.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Cinema: The Great Gatsby

Star-packed adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel isn’t all that… well,…

Even the poster, suggesting Disco Gatsby, is wrong-headed.

Depending on when in your life you read it, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby was either a haunting, romantic indictment of the American Dream or the best sleep you got junior year. Considered by its admirers as a likely choice for Great American Novel if ever such a thing existed, it’s a timeless story that’s also the summation of its era, and a troubled love story by an author who lived most of his life in the grip of disappointing love.

The 1974 film adaptation represented the third time Hollywood attempted to bring the story of doomed bootlegger Jay Gatsby to the screen. The first, in 1926, came immediately after its publication but has been lost to time. A 1949 version starred a well-cast Alan Ladd but is also unavailable. The 2000 A&E Network version, starring Mira Sorvino as Gatsby’s blue-blooded love Daisy Buchanan and Paul Rudd as his friend and celebrant Nick Carraway, is what it is. But the 74 model, with its script by Francis Ford Coppola and boasting an all-star cast for its period, is the version that towers over the others. That is a shame, because it seldom deserves such status.

At least it gets the setup right: Gatsby’s (Robert Redford) story takes place over the summer of 1922, in the tony Long Island neighborhoods of East and West Egg. The old-money aristocrats, including Daisy (Mia Farrow) and her troglodyte husband Tom (Bruce Dern), live on East Egg; the less fashionable, including Gatsby and Carraway (Sam Waterston), live across a narrow inlet on West Egg. As Carraway narrates, Gatsby has purchased an elaborate mansion directly across from the Buchanan house and devotes himself to throwing lavish parties, the better to attract Daisy’s attention. The two had loved each other years before but Gatsby’s poverty made marriage impossible. Now, thanks to a distinguished war career and the help of a gangster, he’s ready to win her love over again. But their reunion is short-lived, and an attempt at confronting Tom ends in the accidental killing of Tom’s mistress (Karen Black), the frowsy wife of a sad sack garage mechanic (Scott Wilson).

The cast does the Kansas City Shuffle.

Directed by Jack Clayton (Something Wicked This Way Comes), the film gets all the Jazz Age period details right but doesn’t have any idea how to translate the admittedly complex structure of Fitzgerald’s novel to screen. Instead, Clayton’s style is shapeless, almost indifferent, and at times the camera placement seems randomly selected: Gatsby and Carraway seem dwarfed by the indoor spaces around them, and the raucous parties often feel staged but lifeless, like tableaux. Scenes of intense emotional pitch play out in static close-ups that display the characters’ overheated faces but not much else.

Coppola’s script plays up the melodrama of Gatsby’s reckless and implacable passion for Daisy but misses the subtext of what she represented given his impoverished upbringing and his desire for upward social mobility. Instead, the film presents the plot’s events in more or less straightforward order, sacrificing the elliptical and foreboding layout that gave Fitzgerald’s narrative its poignancy but amplifying the screen time of minor characters to the point of distraction. Coppola has seldom understood subtlety and restraint in his long career, but that shortcoming is here especially stark in contrast to the felicities of the source material. Watching the events unfold is like hearing a delicate ballad played at stadium levels of noise.

The cast is hit and miss. Following turns in The Candidate and The Sting two years before, Redford must have seemed a slam dunk to play a maverick iconoclast in the Roaring Twenties. He looks the part, his glacial reserve seeming cool even while the other characters swelter – literally, for much of the film’s second half – while giving Gatsby periodic flashes of both innocence and anger. But his performance rarely gets beneath its lovely surface, so that opportunities to explain Gatsby’s obsession or to translate it to a larger point remain missed. Waterston fares somewhat better, giving the more expressive Carraway alternating degrees of wonder, haplessness, and everyman decency. In the novel it falls to Carraway to learn from Gatsby’s life and death; here he’s the center of the plot around which things spin.

The rest of the performances are problematic. Dern is miscast, lacking the athleticism and weapons-grade entitlement complex that made Tom blandly, casually evil. Wilson is affecting as the doomed garage owner with the same name, but too many repetitious images of him looking anguished make the third act ponderous. Worst of all is Farrow, a risky choice for her role under the best of circumstances. Her performance is terrible, as brittle as tinsel and with about as much depth; she often seems at a loss what to do except squeal or look overwhelmed.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and thirty-five years later it’s simple to second-guess or cherry pick the talent of the decade and speculate how they might have treated the material. Producer Robert Evans offered Robert Towne the screenwriting chores, but Towne turned the commission down in favor of writing Chinatown; Truman Capote submitted a script that wasn’t used. It’s difficult, too, not to wonder how Sydney Pollack, given his fascination with social outsiders - and his partnership with Redford, then at its zenith - would have treated the material. British director Clayton was an odd choice to direct, and the film’s critical failure contributed to his ensuing eight-year absence from the industry.

Fitzgerald himself famously said that there are no second acts in American life, that nobody gets a second chance at realizing their potential. Fans of all great novels feel an almost innate need to see their work successfully translated to film. Few American novelists understood disappointment quite with the same exquisite sorrow as Fitzgerald, and to see this most American of works mistranslated as the country looked towards its bicentennial must have seemed especially unfortunate. A book this beautiful and important deserves another chance – every chance it can get, until Hollywood gets it right.

- Michael Kabel

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Night Flights, May 2010 Edition

Our regular reviews are like entrees. This recurring feature is like the sampler plate. 

And this month we start our gallery of night-themed movie posters

There are literally more movies already made than there exists time to watch them. That’s even true – in some ways more so - if you’re insomniac and rely on movies to help lull you to sleep. Movie channels, especially our favorites Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel, show films virtually around the clock, all year long. Most of their programming is worth watching, too, and a good chunk of it is, for us anyway, pretty much irresistable. 

The happy consequence of all this plenty is that we also see more movies than we have time to write about. This recurring feature offers smaller-sized reviews and commentary on films we saw that, for one reason another, didn’t get a full blog posting. The opinions are our own, of course. They may differ from yours. That’s okay. 

Journey Into Fear (1943) - One of the lesser-known efforts from Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre collaborators, this espionage drama casts Joseph Cotten as an American advisor to the Turkish Navy marked for death by a Nazi spy (Eustace Wyatt) and his henchman (Jack Moss). A Turkish police chief (Welles) puts the panicked American onto a tramp steamer crossing the Black Sea between Istanbul and Georgia, but the enemy agents follow him aboard, stalking out his movements. 

Directing credit is given to Norman Foster, but the Welles touch is ever present, especially in the sumptuous ennui of an early scene set within an Istanbul nightclub. Cotten also wrote the script, adapting it from Eric Ambler’s novel, giving him his only screenwriting credit. The film itself ultimately plays not as well as it could, and often drags despite its brief 68-minute run time. Still, fans of Welles’ early work, or of exotic film noirs such as The Mask of Demitrios or The Shanghai Gesture, will most likely want to check it out. 

Junior Bonner (1972) – Another minor entry in the careers of all involved, Sam Peckinpah’s first team up with Steve McQueen displays a family of rodeo riders approaching the end of their era. Favorite son J.R. (McQueen) is a former but unbowed bull riding champion in the mold of his legendary father Ace (Robert Preston), while younger brother Curly (Joe Don Baker) has plans to convert the family ranch into a housing community. Ace, long past any of his primes, has plans to mine for silver in Australia, even though matriarch Elvira (Ida Lupino) has left him in frustration and impatience. 

Peckinpah works the films themes of family loyalty and encroaching commercialization of the West so subtly it’s sometimes hard to see the text for the implied subtext. The director never seems to nail the pace or the texture of Jeb Rosebrook’s relaxed screenplay, with an unfortunate lack of drama left for the audience to absorb. In the end, the payoff with its too-pat conclusion and treacly sentimentality feels almost smug. Preston and Lupino are both wonderful, however, giving lived-in and understated performances. 

Richard Pryor Live On the Sunset Strip (1982) – Representing something of a comeback following his well-publicized self-immolation, this concert film shows Pryor actually and triumphantly at the height of his legendary craft. Merging his observational humor with a series of one-man, one-act character performances, his monologues and diatribes – always funny and acerbic, but often surprisingly reflective and melancholy, as well – show the comic’s gift for understanding human nature. 

Pryor’s legacy has been over-simplified by modern audiences, who too often remember his scathing vulgarity but not the smart rhythmic and observational purposes lying within it. Seeing this film again reminds us of his versatility, including his gift for nuanced and intelligent storytelling. The following clip is aggressively NSFW. 

 

In Country (1989) – Adapted from Bobbie Ann Mason’s period-classic novel, Norman Jewison’s disappointing film nevertheless contains several impressive performances but gets hampered by a miscast lead and TV movie-of-the-week pacing and texture. Kentucky teenager Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) longs to connect with the memory of her father, a soldier killed in Vietnam years before. All the men of her town, including her roommate and uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), bear scars psychic and physical from their war service but won’t discuss them. Her mother (Joan Allen) isn’t talking either, especially since Emmett’s behavior grows increasingly erratic by the day. 

Arriving near the end of the decade’s brief mania for Vietnam reconciliation, the movie skims the surface of its material thanks to often clumsy pacing and a weird mid-plot set piece that goes nowhere. Willis gained serious critical notice for his subdued turn as the war-scarred loner, yet the film rises and falls on Lloyd’s coming-of-age performance. Unfortunately she’s too earnest by half, and seems distanced and at times uninterested in the story’s setting and context. The novel was a good read that deserved better. 

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – Author James M. Cain’s thriller novels provided the source material for a trio of classic film noirs, including Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and this slow burning erotica starring James Garfield and Lana Turner. Garfield’s the drifter who falls to the elusive charms of the unhappily married Turner, and the two conspire to kill her husband (Cecil Kellaway) to gain control of the roadside diner he’s managed with cold-hearted miserliness. Of course the murder doesn’t go as planned, and a shrewd district attorney (Leon Ames) begins circling the doomed lovers. 

Director Tay Garnett (Bataan) can’t match the edgy cynicism of Billy Wilder’s spin on Double Indemnity or Curtiz’s posh, jaded take on Mildred Pierce. As a result the film walks when it could saunter, with an undercooked and procedural pace that sometimes works against the palpable chemistry of its stars. Ames, who judging by his filmography didn’t sleep in the late 1940s, is reliably upright as the DA who knows something is up; more entertaining still is Hume Cronyn, playing against his screen image as a shifty, amoral defense attorney who masterminds his clients’ acquittals despite them. Overall, however, it’s themes and barely restrained sexuality make it archetypal film noir, among the best examples of its genre. 

We’ll be back next week with our review of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Iron Man 2

Robert Downey, Jr. and an ace supporting cast hustle to keep an overloaded script aloft. 

If sequels to successful films rarely live up to their fan bases’ expectations, then sequels to films that surprised audiences have twice as much work cut out for them. The surprise of discovery and the thrill of infatuation clear away, and the hard work of earning an audience’s respect – while justifying their initial enthusiasm – settles over the sequel like a heavy cloth from which the story has to emerge.

The first Iron Man surprised almost everyone a couple of years ago by presenting better entertainment than even fans of the Marvel Comics superhero likely anticipated. Its sequel, arriving barely two years later, feels rushed and over-reaching for much of its wall-to-wall, action-packed proceedings. Luckily an enviable ensemble of actors, including most especially Robert Downey, Jr., work to keep the whole project from dissolving into noise and chaos. But it takes their combined efforts, and they succeed just barely.

Following Tony Stark’s (Downey, Jr.) revelation to the world that he is in fact the armored hero, his use of the suit has rankled his competitors and lawmakers alike, especially his bumbling rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a pompous senator (Garry Shandling) who would like the armor’s secrets for, respectively, themselves and for the government. But the maverick Stark ain’t having it, insisting he has “successfully privatized world peace” and that he serves the people at his own pleasure. “You can always count on me to pleasure myself,” he quips.

But pride goeth before a fall, and when Russian physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) attacks Stark during the Monaco Grand Prix, it sets off a domino chain of events that crash Stark’s world down around him. “All I have to do is sit here and watch,” Vankdo taunts from a jail cell, “as the world will consume you.” Hammer later recruits him to perfect his own flawed armor technology, while the U.S. military exerts increasing pressure through Stark’s buddy Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) to cooperate with their own agendas. Making matters worse, the palladium that powers the reactor in Stark’s chest is slowly poisoning his blood, provoking increasingly erratic and self-indulgent behavior that alienates him from Rhodes as well as secretary/love interest Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Relief and assistance come from directions both expected but welcome and unexpected and disappointing. The spies of SHIELD, led by the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have the means to treat the blood poisoning but want Stark’s cooperation in their own efforts; to that end, they’ve had a sexy agent (Scarlett Johansson) posing as a legal assistant within his company for weeks. Stark also learns his father Howard (John Slattery) was a founding member of the organization, and that an old filmstrip contains the aloof elder Stark’s vision for his son’s greatness and salvation. At this point the film comes closest to coming completely off the rails: to see the individualist Stark reduced to daddy issues, and to have a solution handed to him, is probably the film’s greatest and cheapest fault.

All of this and more is compressed into a two-hour runtime, with the result that the script often bulges at its seams.  The first hour is a flurry of exposition and explanation that sometimes loses its coherence, and for audiences no already well-steeped in the comic mythology the confusion is likely to be moreso. The translation from comic book to screen is almost never without a few bumps, but here a persistent sense of something going unsaid, something taken for granted, permeates the characters’ dialogue and interaction. Little is done with the new characters to establish their connections to one another, save for some brief explanation by way of tossed-off speech. Typically, that speech is Stark making a wise crack about them.

The hurried sense of chaos unfortunately takes its toll on the performers. Rourke’s casting was heavily publicized, but his role remains opaque and largely devoid of nuance. He’s a bad guy, evil and driven by revenge, with little else complicating him. For as entertaining as Cheadle and Johansson are in their parts, there’s no compelling reason for their participation except that their characters are mainstays of the source comic; in a telling sign, none of the new characters are ever called by their comic code names: Stark dubs Cheadle “War Machine” out of context, Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is never referred to as “The Black Widow,” Vanko is never called “Whiplash.” To be fair, Johansson’s fight sequences have an exciting fluidity in contrast to the high-tech armor everywhere else while Cheadle, the consummate actor’s actor, manages to seem completely at home in what’s essentially a fighter jet worn as a suit.

Rockwell does his best with an underwritten part, but Hammer is too self-sabotaguing to ever seem a credible threat to Stark’s genius; if ever a villain performance actually needed more mustache twirling, this may be the case. John Slattery plays Howard Stark as an unmistakable riff on Walt Disney in the 1960′s, when the animator had turned his energies towards a utopian futurism that likely seemed naive even then. It’s a weird counterpoint to his normal role as the cynical Roger Sterling of Mad Men. Of the returning characters, Downey Jr. is excellent yet again, building on Stark’s less endearing qualities while undercutting them with vulnerabilities and needs he has no idea how to express. Paltrow is exactly the same as she was last time, no more and no less; Jackson is fine but looks somewhat less than convincing marching around in a leather trenchcoat and riding boots in broad daylight.

But the Marvel Universe is nothing if not interconnected, and all the superfluous characters and story threads piled over one another are all leading to 2012′s The Avengers. Like last time, fans will want to stick around after the credits for a brief scene that teases the ongoing build-up to that film. In the meantime, this flm feels too rushed, too ambitious, and preoccupied to match the giddy revelation of its predecessor. But it’s still entertaining thanks primarily to what was right with the first film, even while introducing some new elements that stand on their own. It’s an above average sequel to a superior action film, not great but pretty good, moving the ongoing story forward while only sacrificing some momentum.

- Michael Kabel

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