DVD Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in a sophisticated, elegant thriller of predestination.

There’s an old proverb, certainly hundreds of years old and probably British, that begins with a horseshoe losing a nail and ultimately leading, through a cascade of dire consequences, to the collapse of an entire kingdom. Such small twists of fate – seemingly random yet maddeningly well- and ill-timed, holding the potential for disaster or joy – lie at the intelligent heart of The Adjustment Bureau. Helmed by first-time director George Nolfi (who also adapted the Philip K. Dick short story), the film trusts its audience to reach their own conclusions and rewards their patience with genuine suspense and characterization of an elegant, old-school Hollywood flavor. Until its last few moments, when the script veers into a pat ending, it’s one of the year’s best films.

Matt Damon stars as David Norris, a New York congressman whose hard-partying past (which fortunately does not involve Twitter) has cost him a Senate race in a bitter upset. Moments before his concession speech he meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a free-spirited woman who’s crashed a party elsewhere in the labyrinthine hotel. The two have an immediate, undeniable romantic chemistry, their flirtation relaxed and smart without seeming forced or purely sexual: more than simply attracted, they’re fascinated by one another. Norris has to make that speech, however, and thanks to Elise’s inspiration he gives one that revitalizes his political fortunes.

But forces are literally conspiring to keep them apart: Norris has been watched since childhood by “adjusters,” men in mid-20th Century clothing who periodically fine-tune reality on behalf of a vaguely defined “Chairman” who lays out intricate plans for everyone on Earth. Norris and Elise must not be together, the group’s leader (John Slattery) explains, because their togetherness violates the plan intended for Norris. (The Chairman, we learn later, wants him to be President.) When Norris intrudes on the adjustment team tweaking the venture capital firm where he works, the team makes him swear to not pursue Elise again. Confused and frightened, he agrees.

The film jumps ahead three years, to when a chance encounter brings the two would-be lovers together again. But the adjustment team is right there to intervene, even as one of their number (Anthony Mackie) decides to work on the couple’s behalf. Norris’ attempt to reach Elise through narrow Manhattan streets, while the adjusters manipulate reality and circumstance around him, makes for an unusual but gripping chase sequence that’s breathlessly staged and handsomely photographed.

Comparisons to last year’s far murkier Inception are unavoidable, but where that film sacrificed plot for spectacle Nolfi’s script and direction keep emphasis on character – particularly Norris’, but also allowing Elise ample screen time to develop into something more than the object of Norris’ obsession. She’s a well-rounded character in her own right, deserving of happiness and even sometimes pitiable: suffering without benefit of knowledge of the adjuster’s machinations, much of her life through the story is lonely and frustrated. (How many of us have wondered, sometime in our life, if vast forces weren’t keeping us alone? Elise becomes our proxy for that dilemma.)

The two leads, as mentioned above, deliver performances rich with maturity and depth. Damon the actor has virtually grown up on camera since his earliest appearances in the 1990s, and here he’s able to convey confidence and vulnerability without coming across as showy, and to his and Nolfi’s credit the screenplay never provides him a showy monologue or expressive scene in which – as we can imagine lesser films might – he gets to rage at the heavens. The film is too smart for that.

Can you imagine if the plan for your life included her?

Blunt, without benefit of Damon’s comparatively greater screen time, matches Damon’s restraint while making her character alluring on several levels. In that initial men’s room scene, her dialogue suggests a free-spirited type similar to the over-used and (and perhaps over-celebrated) pixie dream girl trope. Thankfully Elise the character outgrows that shoebox in seconds; she’s too old for the impish behavior suggested by the scene, for one thing; for another, such contrivance would derail the film’s better aspirations. Blunt’s best moment in the film comes later, when Elise confronts Norris for abandoning her: rather than allow herself to sink into bitchiness or spite, her hurt and anger fuel her reasoning with him.

The adjusters, meanwhile, carry frustrations with their job but keep a brusque professionalism with each other. John Slattery, playing the adjuster Richardson, makes an effective foil for Norris’ determination, at once amused by the humans’ resolve but wary of the consequences of defiance. His impatience and disappointment with Mackie’s rebel angel, communicated with impatient gestures and harried asides, speaks volumes without lapsing into bald exposition. “Three years later and I’m still cleaning up your mess,” Richardson tells him bitterly, as they pass in a hallway. You get the sense the adjusters feel as mystified by the Chairman’s plans as anyone else, but their’s isn’t to question why, no matter how much the job drains them.

In turn this only raises larger issues, but they’re the issues that the movie wants to face. Predestination is an old, old subject in art and culture, and here the film’s split-the-difference explanation of determinism grinding against free will might either intrigue or annoy you, depending on how you felt about such matters in the first place. Thompson (Terence Stamp, imperious as ever), the adjuster’s “hammer” sent in to separate Norris and Elise once and for all, explains the rises and falls of human history as a series of interspersed periods of free will and divine engineering. Agree with him or not, his perspective is both smart and chilling. The film’s submerged theme – that there is a plan, but it’s imperfect, and it changes all the time – is also troubling on any number of levels. The film doesn’t provide any answers, but there’s something to say for a mainstream film of this day and age even asking the questions.

With so much done right and most often done very well, it’s almost inevitable that the film underwhelm a little at the ending. It does, but only mildly and only very narrowly. A resolution that allows for – well, a happy ending, honestly – comes along too tidily and too conveniently to earn its place among the scenes preceding it; listen to the dialogue closely and you may even be reminded of The Wizard of Oz, and realistically we can imagine that wasn’t Dick’s or Nolfi’s intent. Until those last moments, however, The Adjustment Bureau is handsome, near-excellent filmmaking.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: X-Men: First Class

Clumsy, hollow prequel makes for summer’s first train wreck.

Neither a fresh reimagining of the stagnant X-Men film franchise or a back to basics return to what made Bryan Singer’s first two efforts in the series often (if never completely) enthralling, director Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class struggles to find its narrative footing and then collapses beneath a Frankenstein script and leaden, arrythmic pacing. Squandering an intriguing retro setting and a premise that ought to write itself on derivative and pained action sequences and mawkish dramatics, the film amounts to a long, tired rehash of a lot of hoary marketing gimmicks. And amid a widely divergent field of performances it includes an aggressively terrible performance by a veteran character actor who ought to know better.

The film starts with a scene lifted verbatim from Singer’s vastly superior X2, detailing Erik Lensherr’s - the boy who will grow up to become Magneto – struggles in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. This film continues his ordeal under scientist/cackling maniac Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), whose sadistic methods kickstart the young mutant’s abilities. Meanwhile in England, a young Charles Xavier befriends homeless, shape-shifting waif Raven, promising her a safe haven despite her otherwordly appearance.

Probably just a headache: McAvoy as Charles Xavier

Jump ahead to the early 1960s, when Shaw is under investigation by the CIA for interfering with U.S. military operations. Agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) infiltrates his casino/brothel and witnesses the mutant powers of several of his henchmen, but is dismissed by stodgy superiors who use her findings as evidence women shouldn’t be operatives. Instead, she contacts Oxford University grad Xavier for insight into mutations. Though the young geneticist’s earnest briefing is likewise met with skepticism, he and Raven are recruited by an agency scientist (Oliver Platt) to head up a division of mutant spies.

An aborted attempt to catch Shaw brings Xavier into contact with Lensherr, who’s spent his adult life stalking his former tormentor around the world in search of vengeance. Lensherr reluctantly joins the fledgling group, accompanying Xavier on a recruitment drive around the country. The script uses a familiar structure for this, one for which TV Tropes.org has a pretty ironic name, and it allows for a surprise cameo given extra spice by the precise use of an f-bomb.

The children of the atom model their fall catalogue.

The new recruits, who include a cab driver named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) who can adapt instantly for any situation and a stripper with dragonfly wings (Zoe Kravitz), continue their training until Shaw orders an attack on their compound. The resulting combat under Vaughn’s orchestration becomes both belabored and mean-spiririted, with repeated and derivative violence that fails to establish the bad guy’s menace so much as their one-dimensionality. One of Xavier’s team is murdered, and another defects, in efforts the script ostensibly intends to bring context to the Xavier-Magneto struggles of the later films. In fact it returns to that ambition time and again (at 132 minutes long, it’s got plenty of time) but seldom completely pulls it off.

Because Xavier, Lensherr, and Raven (played in adulthood by Jennifer Lawrence) are the only fully developed characters the script allows, the rest of the “first class” are practically cyphers, distinguishable solely by their powers or, more cynically, their boy band-esque personality types: the bad boy (Lucas Till), the sensitive one (Caleb Landry Jones) the geeky one (Nicholas Holt). Their training, free of the government’s meddling – us kids can do it for ourselves! – goes off with little impediment or setback, save the semi-humorous kind typical of such sequences. The evil mutants working for Shaw – teleporting Darth Maul knockoff Azazel (Jason Flemyng) and Euro-chic tornado thrower Riptide (Alex Gonzalez) – are similarly underdeveloped.

Shaw’s master plan sets the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Xavier, Lensherr and the gang scramble to stop. The ensuing set piece makes for the film’s best sequence, allowing all the mutants to finally let loose with their powers. Though too much of the sequence details the U.S. and soviet navies looking on in fear and hostility, until its conclusion the battle is well-orchestrated and even suspenseful, a welcome relief after the previous plodding 90 or so minutes. Having said that, plot holes and continuity errors trouble its narrative coherence all the while.

When the battle’s over and the character interaction resumes, the film again finds itself in trouble. The reasons for Xavier’s confinement to a wheelchair are revealed with the grace of a sledgehammer, and with a bathos that defies common sense. Lensherr’s character arc ultimately lands him on the side of the devils, as we knew it would, and in joining him Raven becomes the terrorist Mystique (Rebecca Romihn puts in a cameo as her grown up self, too.)  The film can’t resist indulging in multiple denouement, letting Xavier and Lensherr both come to their epiphanies about their identities.

Fassbender is compelling and charming as the haunted Lensherr, and Lawrence is affecting as the shape-changer with no sense of herself. The worst turn, ironically, belongs to the film’s most seasoned veteran. Bacon is hammy and nonchalant playing a villain who ought to be halfway between Dr. No and Dr. Mengele, and his nonchalance works against the film’s sum dramatic weight. In terms of performance his idea of evil apparently runs more to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor than Heath Ledger’s Joker, in a way that sometimes patronizing; at other times the apathy seems to waft off him. Another weak turn comes from January Jones, playing Shaw’s operative/concubine Emma Frost. Perhaps because of the 60′s setting she recycles her Betty Draper iciness, but only to diminishing returns.

The film’s screenplay carries no less than six writing credits, including Singer and Vaughn both, and the confusion typical of too many cooks in the storytelling kitchen create persistent, debilitating troubles that the final film product never takes time to figure out. At the risk of second-guessing, it’s sometimes tempting to try to spot the segments that must have come from the aborted Magneto-only prequel rumored several years ago, and then to call out the parts that must have accumulated with successive treatments – the toyetic Azazel, the tween-friendly Xavier recruits, the cursory understanding of Cold War geopolitics. All in the name of money, of course, and served up with enough bombast that maybe you won’t notice. X-Men: First Class is a film that doesn’t expect very much from itself. It hopes you won’t either.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Crime Cinema: The Seven-Ups

The French Connection‘s spiritual successor completed the trilogy of modern police action films begun by Bullitt.

For as much as Bullitt presaged and The French Connection ushered in a new era of violent, realistic police procedural movies, 1973′s The Seven-Ups took that gritty baton and barreled away with it, bringing a depth of character and dramatic pathos to its narrative that, by and large, those earlier films had little interest in developing. A tough and morally complicated story with a deep melancholy at its heart, the film isn’t just a copy or derivative of its predecessors’ successful tropes (though it shares many of them), it’s also a more mature and well-rounded work of filmmaking. And for those reasons, many will find it a more rewarding viewing experience.

Small wonder, considering the shared talent involved. Produced and directed by Philip D’Antoni, who had previously produced both The French Connection as well as Bullitt, The Seven-Ups featured a story by NYPD detective Sonny Grosso, whom Roy Scheider had played in The French Connection. The film’s crew included stunt legend Bill Hickman, who had masterminded the car chases of both earlier films , and by Don Ellis, whose French Connection soundtrack won a Grammy. Finally, both Scheider and co-star Tony Lo Bianco returned in similar roles to their French Connection originals, playing respectively a rogue cop and low-level mobster.

For all that shared talent, it’s tempting to under-value The Seven-Ups as a cash-in to its predecessors’ immense popularity. The 1970s were an age of quick, cheap sequels that did little justice to their inspiration, all too often made hurriedly while the first film remained fresh in the pubic awareness. Yet The Seven-Ups’ elaborate plot, rooted as it was in character and police culture, belie such an easy dismissal. Scheider plays Bobby Manucci, leader of an elite “dirty tricks” squad of detectives who orchestrate sting operations that facilitate arrests by conventional police. The rank and file cops see Manucci’s group – named because their arrests are guaranteed to bring at least seven years in prison – as dangerous compromises of police tradition and morality. The squad keeps to itself, not especially close to their colleagues or even with one another. A leader by example, Manucci builds the group’s intelligence with a wallet full of mug shots of known gangsters combined with hearsay from childhood friend Vito Lucia (Lo Bianco), now a working-class wiseguy with a wife and children.

What Manucci doesn’t suspect of his old friend forms the crux of the film’s tension. Though supplying him with information, Lucia is using Manucci’s wallet file to target upper-level mobsters and loan sharks for kidnapping by two thugs (Hickman and Richard Lynch) that pose as police to bypass their victims’ defenses. The mobsters are ransomed off but seethe with hostility towards the police, and when one of the Seven-Ups is caught while conducting undercover surveillance a twist of fate ends in his murder at the hands of Lucia’s men. What follows is the film’s intense chase sequence, an effort that must surely have been D’Antoni and Hickman’s conscious effort to top The French Connection‘s landmark car-vs.-train set piece.

The sequence was shot in Uptown New York, down crowded city streets and busy thoroughfares. While its higher ambition lacks the novelty of Bullitt or The French Connection, like those other films’ sequences it improves with repeated viewing, when new camera angles and details come into better focus.

Scheider plays Manucci much as he played The French Connection‘s Buddy Russo, but minus Gene Hackman’s scene-swallowing screen presence his intense reserve and brooding intelligence hold the story’s center through moral ambivalence. Always an actor who understood the importance of not revealing everything, Scheider often seems more dangerous than other action stars of the period simply by remaining aloof. The realization that his lifelong friend has betrayed him plays out entirely in his eyes, as a scene in which their back and forth movement slows to a stop, indicating Manucci’s cold determination.

Yet Manucci never suffers for want of ruthlessness. Following the death of their compatriot he leads the remaining Seven-Ups on a midnight raid to a mobster’s home, threatening the gangster’s wife while holding a gun to the man’s face. Later, he coaxes information from a hospitalized mafioso by repeatedly removing his oxygen hose. The final shootout, set in what must have been the ugliest vacant lot in New York, is nasty, brutal, and merciless, while the denouement meeting between Manucci and Lucia makes a grim a comment on justice as opposed to legal procedure.

The film is not without its flaws. The hard-to-follow plot at times gets lost in the gritty atmosphere. Important plot points that bear further explanation (character movements, exposition that establishes characters’ relations to one another) are skimmed over, so that first-time viewing can provoke some searching-back and reviewing of key scenes to clarify story movement. In particular, the opening set piece in which Manucci and his men set up a sting against counterfeiters never quite comes together as much as it should; Lucia’s exact stature and position within the Mob also remains frustratingly nebulous.

But the film completes a growth set in motion by Bullitt and continued through The French Connection: whereas the former was about innovation and the latter about realism, both at the expense of conventional audience expectations, The Seven-Ups infuses its main character with depth and angst. Unlike Frank Bullitt’s glacial self-confidence or Popeye Doyle’s self-igniting rage, Manucci is troubled by self-doubt and self-recrimination. He tortures criminals but approaches his superiors with a trepidation born of doubt. He exacts revenge for his subordinate’s death, yet betrayal even to avenge betrayal leaves him miserable. The film’s frozen last image suggests as much: “You can’t do this to me, Buddy!” Lucia protests, as Manucci prepares to rat him out to the gangsters he kidnapped. “You watch me!” Manucci retorts, before storming away as the camera fades to black.

In our next installment we’ll have seven more classic crime films of the gritty 70s. Please join us then.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in a sophisticated, elegant thriller of predestination.

There’s an old proverb, certainly hundreds of years old and probably British, that begins with a horseshoe losing a nail and ultimately leading, through a cascade of dire consequences, to the collapse of an entire kingdom. Such small twists of fate – seemingly random yet maddeningly well- and ill-timed alike, holding the potential for disaster or joy - lie at the intelligent heart of The Adjustment Bureau. Helmed by first-time director George Nolfi (who also adapted the Philip K. Dick short story), the film trusts its audience to reach their own conclusions and rewards their patience with genuine suspense and characterization of an elegant, old-school Hollywood flavor. Until its few moments, when the script veers into a pat ending, it’s probably the best new release of the year to date.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a New York congressman whose hard-partying past has cost him a Senate race that, it’s explained to us, most voters felt certain he’d win. Moments before his concession speech he encounters Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a free-spirited woman who’s crashed a party elsewhere in the labyrinthine hotel. The two have an immediate, undeniable romantic chemistry, their flirtation relaxed and smart without seeming forced or purely sexual: more than simply attracted, they’re fascinated by one another. Norris has to make that speech, however, and thanks to Elise’s inspiration he gives one that revitalizes his political fortunes.

But forces are literally conspiring to keep them apart: Norris has been watched since childhood by “adjusters,” men in mid-20th Century clothing who periodically fine-tune reality on behalf of a vaguely defined ”Chairman” who lays out intricate plans for everyone on Earth. Norris and Elise must not be together, the group’s leader (John Slattery) explains, because their togetherness violates the plan intended for Norris. (The Chairman, we learn later, wants him to be President.) When Norris intrudes on the adjustment team tweaking the venture capital firm where he works, the team makes him swear to not pursue Elise again. Confused and frightened, he agrees.

The film jumps ahead three years, to when a chance encounter brings the two would-be lovers together again. But the adjustment team is right there to intervene, even as one of their number (Anthony Mackie) decides to work on their behalf. Norris’ attempt to reach Elise through narrow Manhattan streets, while the adjusters manipulate reality and circumstance around him, makes for an unusual but gripping chase sequence that’s breathlessly staged and handsomely photographed.

Comparisons to last year’s far murkier Inception are unavoidable, probably, but where that film sacrificed plot for spectacle Nolfi’s script and direction keep emphasis on character – particularly Norris’, but also allowing Elise ample screen time to develop into something more than the object of Norris’ obsession. She’s a well-rounded character in her own right, deserving of happiness and even sometimes pitiable: suffering without benefit of knowledge of the adjuster’s machinations, much of her life through the story is lonely and frustrated. (How many of us have wondered, sometime in our life, if vast forces weren’t keeping us alone? Elise becomes our proxy for that dilemma.)

The two leads, as mentioned above, deliver spotless performances rich with maturity and depth. Damon the actor has virtually grown up on camera since his earliest appearances in the 1990s, and here he’s able to convey confidence and vulnerability at the same time. His performance isn’t for a moment showy, and to his and Nolfi’s credit the screenplay never provides him a showy monologue or expressive scene in which – as we can imagine lesser films might – he gets to rage at the heavens. In this way, too, the film is too smart for that.

Can you imagine if the plan for your life included her?

Blunt, without benefit of Damon’s comparatively greater screen time, matches Damon’s restraint while making her character alluring on several levels. In that initial men’s room scene, her dialogue suggests a free-spirited type similar to the over-used and (and perhaps over-celebrated) pixie dream girl trope. Thankfully Elise the character outgrows that shoebox in seconds; she’s too old for the impish behavior suggested by the scene, for one thing; for another, such contrivance would derail the film’s better aspirations. Blunt’s best moment in the film comes later, when Elise confronts Norris for abandoning her: rather than allow herself to sink into bitchiness or spite, her hurt and anger fuel her reasoning with him.

The adjusters, meanwhile, carry frustrations with their job but keep a brusque professionalism with each other. John Slattery, playing the adjuster Richardson, makes an effective foil for Norris’ determination, at once amused by the humans’ resolve but wary of the consequences of defiance. His impatience and disappointment with Mackie’s rebel angel, communicated with impatient gestures and harried asides, speaks volumes without lapsing into bald exposition. “Three years later and I’m still cleaning up your mess,” Richardson tells him bitterly, as they pass in a hallway. You get the sense the adjusters feel as mystified by the Chairman’s plans as anyone else, but their’s isn’t to question why, no matter how much the job drains them.

In turn this only raises larger issues, but they’re the issues that the movie wants to face. Predestination is an old, old subject in art and culture, and here the film’s split-the-difference explanation of determinism grinding against free will might either intrigue or annoy you, depending on how you felt about such matters in the first place. Thompson (Terence Stamp, imperious as ever), the adjuster’s “hammer” sent in to separate Norris and Elise once and for all, explains the rises and falls of human history as a series of interspersed periods of free will and divine engineering. Agree with him or not, his perspective is both smart and chilling. The film’s submerged theme – that there is a plan, but it’s imperfect, and it changes all the time – is also troubling on any number of levels. The film doesn’t provide any answers, but  there’s something to say for a mainstream film of this day and age even asking the questions.

With so much done right and most often done very well, it’s almost inevitable that the film underwhelm a little at the ending. It does, but only mildly and only very narrowly. A resolution that allows for – well, a happy ending, honestly – comes along too tidily and too conveniently to earn its place among the scenes preceding it; listen to the dialogue closely and you may even be reminded of The Wizard of Oz, and realistically we can imagine that wasn’t Dick’s or Nolfi’s intent. Until those last moments, however, The Adjustment Bureau is handsomely excellent filmmaking.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Get Low

A cast of legends can’t get Oscar-winning director’s dark comedy off the ground.

As we said in our preview of the film, Robert Duvall has played the eccentric, misunderstood loner so many times now that his screen persona has become virtually synonymous with the role. Defining a character as a “Robert Duvall” type will in the years to come likely provide an efficient verbal shorthand for such parts, at the same time establishing a benchmark against which similar performances can be measured. In the same way no one played an angsty teen like James Dean or a swaggering badass like Lee Marvin, no one plays a wily old coot like Duvall.

Get Low, the feature debut for Oscar-winning short film Aaron Schneider, lets Duvall go through the motions of his trademark performance yet again, cementing a based-on-true story about a 1930′s-era Tennessee mountain man’s odd, grasping last chance at redemption. It also features Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and prolific character actor Bill Cobb in parts they too could play standing on one leg. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily: it’s always a pleasure to see all three do their work so well. The film sinks, however, beneath scattered, arrhythmic direction from Schneider and an undercooked script by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, becoming ultimately a journeyman effort that feels unfinished and unrealized, despite its veteran cast and wooly, lived-in production design.

This time Duvall plays Felix Bush, an irascible mountain man who’s kept to his own rustic cabin and property for 40 years, long enough to become a local bogeyman among the nearby townsfolk; children dare each other to throw pebbles at his windows, and his infrequent visits to town offer an occasion for gossip. But Bush is getting old, and fearing his impending demise he contacts the local minister (Gerald McRaney) for help in staging a “funeral party” in which guests will share the lore he’s acquired for himself over the long, lonely years. When the minster refuses, Bush turns to the town funeral parlor managed by Frank Quinn (Murray), a semi-hucksterish salesman fled into the hinterlands after an unhappy divorce in Chicago.

Desperate for business, Quinn agrees to Bush’s plan, even helping him plan publicity for the event. When Bush announces on a radio program that he’ll raffle off his 300 acres of virgin timber woods at the party, expectations and attendance begins to snowball. Amid the mounting expectations, Bush is reunited with old flame Mattie Darrow (Spacek), who’s recently returned to town after the death of her husband. There’s a spark of the old romance between the two, and the rumpled Bush is still able to charm her until secrets of a long-buried affair start to come to light. Meanwhile he’s also restarted communication with a distant preacher (Cobb) who’s aware of his shameful past but reluctant all the same to grant the anguished Bush the absolution he fairly demands.

They mystery of that affair, announced by the opening scene’s of a man on fire fleeing a burning house, drive the script towards its climax, in which Bush finally comes clean with the assembled townsfolk about the fateful night that drove him into seclusion decades before. Interestingly, and not completely successfully, the revelations are presented not as narrative flashback but as a long, rambling address by Bush to the crowd. Duvall is a master actor, of course, and he’s able to command the attention just telling a relatively simple story. But as presented the revelations feel anticlimactic, and too familiar to gather much shock value or depth of tragedy. For as well as Duvall carries his character’s secrets, the secrets themselves are strangely inert, and rote.

Schneider won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2004, for adopting the William Faulker short story “Two Soldiers.” Get Low, with its hinterlands setting and impoverished atmosphere ripe with secret passions and desperation, is by its nature and scope Faulknerian to the point of derivation. But the film stops short of dwelling on the psychological darkness that motivated so many Faulkner characters – good and evil alike – in favor of a redemptive ending that falls flat for that exact lack of character depth. Bush confesses and everything more or less falls into place, and everyone gets what they want.

There also sometimes doesn’t seem to be enough story to stretch the plot through to its 103 minute runtime. Scenes drag on, and plot elements are introduced but not fleshed out or followed through. The funeral home is burglarized, but the thief is never revealed; Bush’s confrontation with a local bully implies forthcoming retribution that doesn’t materialize. Of the principal characters, Quinn’s assistant Buddy has lots of screen time but his importance to the events remains opaque.

Of all the performances, it’s only a slight surprise to find Murray doing the best work, investing yet another sad sack with subtle gestures of compassion, anxiety, and fear. Quinn is a lifelong salesman, not proud of his work but not ashamed of it, either, and Murray seems at home in that sliver of acute self-awareness (Small wonder. After a decade of superb dramatic work he’s still largely known for comedies he made twenty-five years ago.) As we used to say about Jeff Bridges,  that Murray doesn’t have an Oscar yet is a more damning comment about the Oscars than it is about Bill Murray. Duvall, Cobb, and Spacek are handsome and comfortable in handsome and comfortable roles, and Black is workmanlike.

Ultimately, Get Low is a modest film. Modestly budgeted, with modest aims and modest accomplishments, it’s entertaining enough and not too much of a disappointment to feel as if you’ve wasted your time. Its cast and crew didn’t waste time making it, either, and Schneider could yet prove himself a director to watch. For the film to be better, with the exception of Murray everyone might have set their sights a little higher.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, August 2010 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news that caught our eye and what we have to say about it. 

We’ve complained about it for months, so here’s our last word on the subject: this was the Summer of Disappointment, with little in the way of surprise but plenty in the way of letdown. Even the surprises were themselves born of relief, with films like Despicable Me and The A-Team offering more than we expected; when the best you can say is that some films weren’t as terrible as you feared,  it’s a bad time for film and a bad time to be a movie fan. This month there’s been precious little to lure us into multiplexes, aside from the occasional goofy pleasure like The Expendables and The Other Guys, and even those weren’t quite alluring enough. 

All of this is to apologize for the comparative dearth of reviews posted over the last several weeks. We’re working on it. Anyway, once a month or so we get together all the news items of the previous four weeks and offer commentary on what they mean for the entertainment industry and the audience alike. The opinions are purely those of SBR. Thanks for sticking with us. 

1. The Emmy awards ceremony this past Sunday night was virtually surprise free, with Mad Men getting Best Drama and show creator Matt Weiner also winning for best writing. Bryan Cranston won best dramatic actor for Breaking Bad and Kyra Sedgewick won best actress for The Closer. On the other hand, Modern Family was something of a welcome surprise to win in the Best Comedy category; we’d guessed voters would just hand it to 30 Rock (I show whose appeal is lost to us) once again. 

Kudos to Mad Men, but we’re curious to see how this year’s kick-’em-when-they’re-down fourth season will fare at next year’s awards. Don Draper and company are in some murky waters just now, and it wouldn’t surprise us if the show’s winter of discontent translated into a chilling factor among Emmy voters. 

2. A couple of weeks ago we posted how The Sorcerer’s Apprentice represents something of a dying breed among films – the star-driven, big budget summer vehicle. Add to the pile of flops mentioned in that review the Jennifer Aniston tanker The Switch, which debuted in seventh place at the box office a couple of weeks ago and has since grossed only about sixteen million dollars. 

There are lots of reasons for the film’s failure and why it won’t derail Anniston’s career, as indieWire’s excellent analysis provides, but we think it’s unfair to blame Jason Bateman’s unproven leading man bankability. The simultaneously cloying yet distasteful television ads, omnipresent for weeks leading up to the premiere, surely had something to do with the public’s indifference. The public may also (finally) be growing tired of Aniston playing yet another variation of Rachel Green. 

3. TV Guide’s assertion that the Hawaii Five-O reboot is “fall’s hottest new show” despite its premiere remaining three weeks away would normally make us wonder if the fix was in. In this case, however, they’re probably right. Stars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan are overdue to break through with the right vehicle (this is O’Loughlin’s third show on CBS) and co-stars Grace Park and Daniel Dae Kim will likely draw curious fans from, respectively, Battlestar Galactica and Lost. 

It gets a plum timeslot, too, inheriting the Monday at 10/9 Central berth that CSI: Miami has enjoyed since its premiere eight years ago. (That show moves to the same time on Sundays.) 

4. Joel and Ethan Coen are probably few people’s idea of theological teachers, but religion journalist Catherine Falsani makes an oft-compelling case for the brothers as  spiritual guides in her breezy 2009 book The Dude Abides. Examining each of their fourteen films, from Blood Simple to A Serious Man, Falsani illuminates the moral and philosophical issues the brothers subtly raise (if not always address) in each film, analyzing plots and themes as well as characters from an allegorical perspective. She reaches a bit in molding her thesis to the films of their middle career – Intolerable Cruelty lacks text, let alone subtext – but her readings of major works including Raising Arizona and of course The Big Lebowski are articulate and convincing. A fun read for the brothers’ fans or anyone looking for a spiritual treat. 

Kramer's 1959 melodrama about nuclear fallout

 5. On the subject of reading material, Saul Austerlitz’s online essay calling for a re-thinking of the career of director Stanley Kramer (Judgment At Nuremberg, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner) is both fearless and illuminating, bucking a lot of conventional wisdom of the last forty years while extending the maligned director some fresh respect. 

Without meaning to sound disparaging, Kramer made films that if produced today would be released in December and considered unabashed Oscar-bait. All the same, as Austerlitz contends there’s plenty of rewarding material both in Kramer’s pragmatic camera eye and in his approach to his subject matter, and his body of work remains laudably diverse. In fact, you’ve probably seen one of his films without realizing it. 

6. Ever see a preview for something and think it’s going to either be spectacular or go spectacularly wrong? The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s pilot to the HBO series Boardwalk Empire gives us that sense of optimistic dread. On the plus side, there’s a fantastic cast in a sprawling and lavish retelling of the early days of prohibition. On the other hand, it’s been a long time since Scorsese really impressed us, especially when dealing with organized crime (The Departed, Casino, and Gangs of New York were all variously near and wide misses), and this level of ambition rarely pans out when produced for television. At any rate the cast is intriguing: we’ll watch Steve Buscemi, Kelly MacDonald and Gretchen Mol in anything. 

 

7. The comic book movie genre has reached its tipping point, and it’s likely that 2010 will likely be remembered as the year everything started to fall apart. Following the box office disappointments of The Losers, Jonah Hex, Kick Ass, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, it’s likely that studios will become increasingly cagey about which comic-inspired projects are greenlit. Meanwhile the Green Lantern and The Avengers projects seem increasingly problematic: Green Lantern for its inauthentic-looking CGI costume, and The Avengers for its slowly deflating scope and scale. 

Time Out magazine recently posted its list of 50 essential comic book movies. That there are fifty at all boggles the mind.

8. Finally, the handsome previews for Ben Affleck’s upcoming The Town made us realize it’s about time again to re-watch Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 similar exploration of conscience-plagued thieves and the relentless cops who pursue them.

Besides the three stars in the poster, Heat features Ashley Judd,  Jon Voight, Diane Venora, Dennis Haysbert, Amy Brenneman, Nathalie Portman, and William Fichtner. Not an entirely perfect movie, but for its kind it comes as close as any film ever did. The trailer below basically implies that if you don’t see it, you don’t deserve to go to the movies.

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

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris: July 2010 Edition

Our end-of-the-month wrapup of reviews, news, and observations that didn’t get a full post.

Here come the dog days of summer, but it’s not a complete loss. For as blah as the summer has been so far - and it’s been a giant yawn, by and large – the coming weeks show plenty of promise. In the meantime, last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con and the upcoming fall television season has given probably half the Internet several weeks worth of blogging and complaining fuel.

Some of our own complaints and blogging fuel are listed below. All opinions are our own, and as always they’re presented in no particular order of importance.

1. Actually, first things first: Mad Men‘s fourth season premiere was a virtuoso bit of television, as good if not better than the series’ vaunted pilot and a jump ahead in quality from the season three debut. With its characters entering the post-JFK era – some leaping, some getting pulled along by the undertow of changing times – the show seems at once re-energized and recommitted. Jon Hamm continued to bring new range and depth to Don Draper, as Matthew Weiner’s script stood the character on his handsome head, while Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) finally emerged as the confident grown-ups fans have waited for them to become.

Weiner made some comments last spring that the show would only run six seasons, and it’s not hard to see this ep as the halfway point in the story’s evolution. This coming week’s episode reveals – just in time for summer – the first-ever Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Christmas party.

2. It’s fun to get what we want. After complaining last year that we wished some former A-list leading men deserved and were due for comebacks, two of our picks have movies opening this week and next. Kevin Kline’s indie comedy The Extra Man, co-starring Paul Dano and John C. Reilly, opens in limited release this weekend. Next week’s The Other Guys, starring Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, co-stars Michael Keaton; we’ll mention again that The Merry Gentleman, Keaton’s directing debut, remains one of our favorite films released since this blog began a couple of years ago.

In the meantime, here’s the trailer for The Extra Man:

3. Nothing came out of the San Diego Comic-Con that really amazed us, but a few things surfaced that sort of disappointed. We’ve made the case before that Joss Whedon isn’t the best choice to write or direct the upcoming Avengers movie, but now that he’s confirmed to do both we’ll give him an even chance. Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac) is a trade-up in replacing Edward Norton as the Hulk, and it’s good to see Jeremy Renner finally confirmed as Hawkeye. All the same, it’s still a bummer to hear that Avengers founding member and mainstay Hank Pym will not appear in the film. The full cast list was revealed at the convention’s panel.

For no good reason, here’s an episode of The Avengers: United They Stand cartoon from the late 90s. Actually, it’s so painfully 90′s it might as well be sporting a pair of Doc Marten’s and a Friends haircut.

4. Better late than never: we’re happy to report that The Unusuals, the exceptional police comedy-drama that Renner headlined last year, has been available on DVD for a while now. Co-starring Terry Kinney, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, the show mixed black humor with sometimes surreal drama and plot twists, creating something unlike anything else on network television. Naturally, it lasted just ten episodes before ABC pulled the plug. Renner immediately went on to acclaim in The Hurt Locker, so hopefully the network regrets its cancellation. Nine episodes are available for streaming on Netflix.

5. October sees the release of The Social Network, which except for its pedigree might seem cause for suspicion; still, an Aaron Sorkin script directed by David Fincher is too good to pass up, and anyway a film that’s intelligently made about current events is seldom a bad thing, if ever.

Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, the film chronicles the rise of Facebook. By the way, please join our Facebook group.

The film opens nationwide October 1.

6. In previous installments of Miscellaneous Debris we chastised both Rescue Me and Leverage for their egregious product placement, devoting too much time to mentioning or in some cases outright singing the praises of their commercial sponsors. Happily, both shows have toned that down quite a bit in their current runs. After a hit-or-miss second season, Leverage seems to have found its legs, with each episode by and large more entertaining than the last. Meanwhile Rescue Me, though too quick once again to fall back on the Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary)-as-human-trainwreck plotlines, has returned to ideas from earlier seasons that worked well before getting abandoned. In particular, the ace comic chemistry between firefighters Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale) and Mike Silletti (Mike Lombardi) and the reappearance of slain firefighter Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey) improve every episode in which they’re used.

7. Ten years ago, Ang Lee’s martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon caused something of a quiet sensation, re-defining how audiences (particularly sci-fi and fantasy audiences) thought about the limits and potential of the action film genre. The  film’s luxurious cinematography and eye-googling special effects, combined with a simple but moving story of revenge and deferred love, made larger Western franchises including the then-popular Matrix and Star Wars prequel trilogy seem instantly cumbersome and outdated. Subsequent imitators and similar wuxia efforts trickled through Western multiplexes for years afterward.

A Blu-Ray edition was released this month (a previous edition was available in a three-film wuxia box set), and though we haven’t seen it yet we can only imagine how Lee’s incredible vision appears in high-definition. If you haven’t seen the film, you should. If you have, it might be time to revisit it.

8.  Criterion has officially announced the Blu-Ray and two-disc DVD release of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Set to debut September 28, Criterion’s edition includes a new digital transfer supervised by Malick, thirteen minutes of outtakes, interviews with cast members, newsreels of the actual fighting on Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, and audio tracks of the Melanesian chants heard throughout the film.

To reiterate what we said a couple of months ago: 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 from filmmaking; the trailer alone is more picturesque than the entirety of most films, and also more moving. 

Our annual summer hiatus runs through next week. We’ll return Tuesday, August 10 with more of what you come here for. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Our (Rest Of The) Summer Movie Guide

Quick previews of nine films premiering in July, August, and September.

How’s your summer going? Enjoying the heat wave? The first official day of summer was just a couple of weeks ago, June 21, though of course it felt like that time of year, both in the climate and in our culture, for weeks before that. The summer movie season continues to go through its ups and downs, with slam dunk hits like The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Toy Story 3 raking in cash hand over fist, with more predictably lucrative fare like Grown Ups and The Last Airbender also making bank.  

We still believe it’s been a paltry summer for film, with not even a surprise like last year’s Moon to break up the doldrums. Still, there’s hope on the horizon. The following films all come out in the next few weeks, some in limited but most with wide release schedules planned. We’ve tried to include a range of tastes.

Salt - (July 23) When CIA covert operative Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is accused by a Soviet defector of plotting to kill the president, she goes on the run to try and clear her good name and get to the truth. Directed by Philip Noyce (The Quiet American) from a script by Kurt Wimmer (Street Kings) and Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential).  Our take: This is the third time in five years Jolie has played a spy/assassin, and we kind of think she could slink her way through a part like this in her sleep. Also on familiar ground are the always-welcome Liev Shreiber as Salt’s colleague and the ubiquitous Chiwetel Ejiofor as a fellow agent. We’re lukewarm at best about this one: for all our complaints about wanting more films for grown-ups, this seems like an auto-pilot effort by all involved.

Get Low (Limited July 30) – A notorious mountain man (Robert Duvall) plans to attend his own funeral with the help of a wily funeral director. Old secrets and grudges come to light as the event turns into a local sensation. Our take: High hopes for this one, as we suspect it could be the oddball surprise of the year given the talent both veteran and emerging involved. We’re anxious for more Murray after cracking up at his beyond-meta cameo in last year’s Zombieland, and Duvall all but owns the copyright on these kind of grizzled roles. Academy Award-winning short film director Aaron Schneider (Two Soldiers) makes his feature debut, with a script co-written by C. Gaby Mitchell (Fallen Angels) and Chris Provenzano (Mad Men) from a story by newcomer Scott Seeke. Read our full preview here.

Middle Men (August 6) Set in the far-flung past of 1995 (We were in college!), the based on a true story reveals  how an otherwise upstanding businessman (Luke Wilson) started the first online billing company to deal exclusively with the adult entertainment industry. Along the way he gets involved with porn starlets, Russian gangsters, federal agents, and any variety of con artists. Our take: We are shocked to learn that pornography is available on the Internet. Seriously, with a cast full of underseen stars – including  James Caan, Kevin Pollak, and the mighty Robert Forster – and an offbeat subject, there’s no end to the Boogie Nights-like potential of director George Gallo’s (Midnight Run) latest effort. Wilson is a natural for roles such as this, and anything to get him off those embarrassing cell phone ads is all right by us. The following trailer is redband, meaning it’s NSFW.

Eat, Pray, Love (August 13) – Based on the gargantuan best-selling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, the story centers on a newly divorced woman (Julia Roberts) who embarks on a journey around the world to find happiness and contentment. Our Take: We imagine August multiplexes including the twi-hards viewing Eclipse for the third time while their moms check out this sort-of comeback for Roberts one theatre over. Glee mastermind Ryan Murphy is likely exactly the right choice to adapt the material, while the supporting cast including Javier Bardem, James Franco and Billy Crudup means plenty of eye candy for its target demographic.

The Expendables (August 13) – A team of mercenaries is sent to a South America country on a mission to kill its ruthless dictator, even as other forces including a traitor in their midst conspire against them. Our take: Overkill is the name of the game for Sly Stallone’s latest trifecta effort, both in the plot and special effects and also in the tough-guy roundup casting. A good thing, too: pretty much everyone involved could use a career tune-up, and a group effort like this makes good sense. Too, it’s irresistable for anybody that grew up watching action movies on cable. One question, though: Was Chuck Norris busy?

The American (September 1) - A professional hitman and weapons maker (George Clooney) flees to the remote mountains of Italy before awaiting his next, final assignment. While holed up in a tiny village he befriends a priest and romances a local girl, either of whom might offer salvation. Our take: The flip side to The Expendables in so many ways, Anton Corbijn’s second feature effort looks to be a more deliberate and cerebral take on some familiar genre tropes. Clooney has our attention as usual, though much like Jolie it wouldn’t hurt him to lay off the spy and smooth criminal parts for a little while. Read our full preview here.

The Adjustment Bureau (September 17) – A rising politician (Matt Damon) begins a fledgling but powerful romance with a ballerina (Emily Blunt), even while shadowy and mysterious forces rearrange reality so as to keep them apart. Loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, adapted and directed by George Nolfi (The Bourne Ultimatum.), and co-starring Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Terrence Stamp, Daniel Dae Kim and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Our take: Damon has as much claim to the title  ”America’s Leading Man” as anybody else right now, Blunt is a rising star worth watching, and brainy, romantic science fiction is always a welcome sight. Nevertheless, if Inception disappoints this film could likewise fail to connect with audiences.

The Town (September 17) – The leader of a gang of thieves (Ben Affleck) struggles with feelings of responsibility and attraction for a bank manager (Rebecca Hall) traumatized by one of his heists. Meanwhile an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) pursues her as well, all the while closing in on the thieves. Our take: Has Affleck made a modern-day, grittier Tequila Sunrise? Damon’s former partner returns to their hometown of Boston for this character drama that opens the same day and also features a Mad Men star in a prominent role. Affleck’s earlier writing-directing effort Gone Baby Gone was a pleasant surprise, but for no good reason we’re less enthused about him directing himself. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) also co-stars as Affleck’s henchman.

Buried (September 24) –  A civilian truck driver working in Iraq (Ryan Reynolds) is taken hostage by terrorists and buried alive with only a knife, a cell phone, and a lighter. Initially suffering from amnesia, he begins to piece together his fragmented memories as his day’s worth of air slowly runs out. Our take: This effort by Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes seems an unusual choice for Reynolds, who up until now (and the upcoming Green Lantern) has stayed largely away from heavier concepts. There’s a Hitchcockian feel even to just the basic story pitch, and Cortes has reportedly followed that muse towards including plenty of innovative camera angles and perspectives to help tighten the tension. If audiences are willing to buy the former Van Wilder in such grim surroundings the film could be a surprise hit.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, June 2010 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news, reviews and speculation that didn’t wind up with a full post.  

It's hot outside.

 The problem with movies is that they’re too often interrupted by the more meager demands and rewards of real life. We meant to go to the movies this weekend but never got around to it, busy instead with one dreary thing after another, and anyway there’s nothing playing at the local theatres that seems exciting (We’re not twelve years old, and as aging Whedonites we don’t care for Twilight).  

Actually, we’re taking the rest of this week off for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, returning Tuesday, July 6. In the meantime, here’s all the stuff we thought mostly worth discussing over the month of June, items that didn’t rate an entire blog post of their own but nevertheless seem noteworthy for one reason or another.  

1. Besides the ignominy of so many thuds, maybe the nastiest thing about this summer of woe for the box office isn’t the quantity of flops but rather the media’s glee in pronouncing several films as failures. We haven’t crunched the numbers, but we don’t imagine 2010 necessarily has more or bigger turkeys than most other summers; without a giant tentpole movie – like the kind Toy Story 3 is shaping up to become – the desperation at the box office has just seemed worse.  

If The A-Team, Prince of Persia, and a few others have underwhelmed, it’s not necessarily a comment on their quality or on the public’s shifting tastes. It means audiences ignored them for whatever reasons normally affect such things, not a little of which inevitably seems to have something to do with marketing. Actually, The A-Team has good word of mouth, as did Prince of Persia. Some of the bombs, admittedly, were odious: both Jonah Hex and Sex and The City 2 were answers to questions nobody asked, efforts apparently massaged into oblivion by studio meetings and conferences. Elsewhere the sharks have circled the Tom Cruise – Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight and Day for weeks; our guess is that the film will quietly make a modest profit.  

2. The idea that such older-skewing films as Knight and Day and Sex and The City 2 should fail echoes a topic that’s gone around for a couple of years now: the idea that the time of the movie for grownups is in its twilight. This summer the two biggest successes so far, The Karate Kid and now Toy Story 3 – are both distinctly kid-friendly. Not to over-simplify, but this is partly because children don’t go to school in the summertime and these two products – both reminders of beloved films from other eras – are likely irresistable to thirty-something parents who remember the one film from their teens and the other from their 20′s.  The films aren’t kids’ movies so much as entertainment that’s palatable all the way around the SUV.  

3. Steve Carrell says he’s leaving The Office at the end of the series’ upcoming seventh season in order to spend more time with his family. We lost interest in The Office a while back – the “Dwight always wins” story policy froze us out – but nevertheless we’re curious to see how they handle Carrell’s exodus. Meanwhile his animated feature Despicable Me opens next week, with his adult feature Dinner For Schmucks (in which he seems to combine his Michael Scott schtick with George Clooney’s haircut circa 1994) opening at the end of the month.  

4. Speaking of that film (and its vaguely amusing trailer below), it’s another project to co-star Zack Galifianakis, his fourth released since The Hangover last year. Nothing against him getting rich, but we’re thinking he might start to worry about over-exposure. The industry has made similar mistakes before: taking a promising character actor and throwing him into every project available at the time seldom turns out well, either for the audience or for the performer. For lack of a better term, we call this accelerated career half-life the Zahn Effect.  

  

Yelchin in Terminator Salvation

 5. With rumors that an announcement regarding the next actor to play Spider-Man just around the corner, we want to officially endorse Anton Yelchin for the role. The young Russian actor did great work in both Terminator Salvation and Star Trek, giving better performances than anyone expected. With the upcoming fourth film reportedly a reboot (goodbye, disco-dancing hipster Spidey), Yelchin is exactly the rising talent that a fresh take on the franchise needs. Now, who to play Mary Jane Watson? Hopefully, Easy A’s Emma Stone.  

6. Mad Men, the best show on TV, makes it season four debut in just under four weeks, on July 25. The sleek new preview poster started showing up online a couple of weeks or so ago, apparently hinting at the wide-open future that Don Draper and his fellow Sterling-Cooper refugees face now that they’ve struck out on their own. We’re also glad to learn, somewhat belatedly, that Jared Harris, who plays sensitive British executive Lane Pryce, has been promoted to regular cast member as of the upcoming season. Plot and story details still remain maddeningly elusive – series mastermind Matt Weiner could/should run the CIA – which makes the wait that much harder. Our own small wish is to see the return of schoolteacher/Barbara Hershey lookalike Suzanne Farrell (Abigail Spencer). 

7. A week later, AMC premieres (or re-premieres, following a June 13 sneak peek) its brainy new thriller Rubicon, starring James Badge Dale as a government intelligence analyst who realizes his bosses take part in a vast conspiracy pulling the strings of world events. Ostensibly a complex, cooly intelligent mind-bender of a serial – think The X-Files without the geeky weirdness – it’s as different from the network’s other two shows as Mad Men and Breaking Bad are from each other. Miranda Richardson, Arliss Howard, and Jessica Collins co-star, with the great Peter Gerety (Homicide: Life On The Street) in a crucial guest-starring role in the pilot. Expect something adrenalin-fueled, like 24 or Alias, and you’ll be disappointed. The show has moodier, slower-burning intentions in mind. 

8. Finally, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate America than with this clip from The Candidate, director Michael Ritchie’s still-topical skewering of politics and the otherwise good people who get drawn into its seductive vortex. Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, the activist running for a Senate seat against a folksy conservative incumbent with the awesome name Crocker Jarmon. Released in 1972, McKay’s exhausted meltdown into a gibberish of buzz words remains hilarious – and relevant – almost forty years later. 

Happy July 4, everybody. God bless America.

- 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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