The pleasures of pure-form genre storytelling, top-shelf acting and accomplished filmmaking all come together in 3:10 to Yuma, a dusty treat that’s certainly the most rousing Western in recent memory and probably the best since Unforgiven.
It’s a movie that fires on all cylinders and recalls Muhammad Ali’s old
assessment of his fighting strategy: “Float like a butterfly, sting
like a bee.” Full of quiet, lulling character moments, but visited as
well by tense, charged action passages, director James Mangold’s film tells a line-in-the-sand tale of at-odds wills that could easily be transposed to any number of settings.

Russell Crowe),
who, along with his vicious gang of thieves and murderers, has plagued
the powerful Southern Railroad’s plans for expansion by preying on
their delivery routes and robbing their bank shipments. After his
latest strike leaves Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda, above right) wounded and a handful
of others dead, Wade holes up in a nearby town, intent on squeezing out
a few last ounces of pleasure with the fetching local barkeep (Vinessa Shaw) before escaping to Mexico.

When Wade is captured, however, a dilemma presents itself. Knowing that
Wade’s crew will be back to attempt to spring him, McElroy and
ineffectual railroad employee Grayson Butterfield (Dallas Roberts) make
the call that holing up and waiting for reinforcements — in effect
making targets of the entire town and all of its citizens — isn’t the
best plan. Volunteers are sought to help deliver Wade alive to an out-of-town depot and the scheduled train to Yuma two days hence, a
train that will take the killer to trial and return some small sense of
safety and normalcy to their region.

Partially crippled Civil War veteran Dan Evans (Christian Bale) steps forward. Struggling to survive on his drought-plagued ranch,
Evans feels quietly emasculated by a wife, Alice (Gretchen Mol), and
headstrong teenage son, William (Logan Lerman), who each in their own
way question his cautious nature and every decision. “I’m tired of the
boys going hungry, tired of the way they look at me, and tired of the
way that you don’t,” Evans tells Alice. “I’ve been standing on one leg
for three years waiting for God to do me a favor, and he ain’t.” Out on
the trail, Evans and Wade start to feel one another out, engaging in
restrained forms of psychological battle. A cool,
curious respect for Evans even springs forth in Wade, but with his outfit — led by the leering, psychopathic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster,
strengthening his power-play grab at becoming the Gary Oldman of his
generation) — on their trail, and violence and other dangers at every
turn, the odds of success for Evans’ mission soon take a dip southward,
culminating in a holed-up showdown with each man’s future at stake.

3:10 to Yuma isn’t what you’d call modern, per se, but neither
does it hew to what Rudy Giuliani might dub a strict constructionist
interpretation of the Western genre. Michael Brandt and Derek Haas’
reworking of Halsted Welles’ screenplay for the original film takes
only moderate liberties in dialogue, but adds in bits with Apache
warriors and transcontinental railroad workers that give the movie a
nicely fleshed-out feel and broader narrative backdrop. Meanwhile,
composer Marco Beltrami’s score (especially the opening theme) has a
glorious old-school ring to it. It’s most in the design and visual
telling of 3:10 to Yuma
that flared bits of modernization creep in. Mangold and cinematographer
Phedon Papamichael (a frequent collaborator of the director who’s also
captured disparate outdoor tones and palettes in movies like The Weather Man and Sideways)
beef up the action and infuse proceedings with a galloping energy.
Arianne Phillips’ costume design, meanwhile, faintly but effectively
conveys the notion of Wade’s gang as swaggering, rock-star seizers of
whatever they want; in a high school flick, they’d be the perfectly
coiffed jocks, in a horror film, vampires.

What most works about 3:10 to Yuma, though, is just the natural, slow-burn pull of its two stars, each working at the top of their games here. Crowe oozes edgy charisma in real life, so it’s no great shock
that he excels in a role requiring a bit of malevolent seduction.
Equally important, though, is Bale, who gives a superlative performance
as a broken family man awakening to the invigorating strength of a task
greater than him, and the power of a lasting lesson he can teach his son. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here. To view the film’s trailer, click here.

As self-centered illusionist Gob Bluth on the brilliant if short-lived sitcom Arrested Development,  Will Arnett wrung laughs out of his character’s flamboyant combination of
insecurity, competitiveness and showmanship. During his career as both
a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live, Will Forte has
shown a penchant for embracing the absurd — whether in recurring bits
as soft-voiced politician Tim Calhoun and the bearded, woodsy loner
known as the Falconer, or in a sketch last year with Peyton Manning in
which he played a high school coach who delivers his halftime stump
speech in the form of an extended, goofy, improvisational dance. While
each actor has appeared in a couple movies up to this point — most
notably Arnett in this spring’s $100 million-plus hit Blades of Glory, opposite wife Amy Poehler — both performers are trying to find their way when it comes to movies.
In a way, they’re each attempting to follow in the footsteps of SNL alumnus Will Ferrell,
who, largely courtesy of his golden touch with intense himbo
vacuousness, has successfully transitioned from small screen funnyman
to someone that audiences would actually pay to see on the big screen.

The Brothers Solomon, starring Arnett (above left) and Forte (right, also the film’s writer) as two goodhearted but romantically challenged
brothers who decide to try to father a baby in order to give their
coma-stricken father (Lee Majors) something to live for. Coming on the heels of both Knocked Up and Superbad earlier this summer, The Brothers Solomon combines elements of the former’s prenatal hijinks with rudiments of the latter’s fraternal bonding.

While there’s just a pinch of Dumb & Dumber-style comedy to
the proceedings, John (Arnett) and Dean (Forte) are mostly just
socially inept, yet still somehow unflappably, unfailingly
positive-minded. After a string of dates leave them still unable to
find a woman “to enter,” as John puts it, the undeterred siblings
change tactics and place an online ad for a surrogate partner. Janine (Kristen Wiig) responds to the brothers’ entreaty
and, for a hefty fee, agrees to carry a child to term for them, even as
John works on a back-up plan in the form of neighbor Tara (Malin Ackerman). As the
pregnancy progresses and Dean and John embark on an ill-advised
crash-course of their own devising on parenting, Janine and her
ex-but-now-on-again boyfriend James (Chi McBride) — a strange fourth
wheel in the relationship — eventually begin to warm to the brothers’
full-court-press enthusiasm.

Some of the script’s few baroque touches — like the fact that the
brothers, upon hearing that their father is in the hospital, hurriedly
stop by the video store to dispute a late charge on a rental of Ulee’s Gold — make for nice laughs, but, for the most part, The Brothers Solomon is a wan showcase presentation; it’s the filmic equivalent of a performance-centric one-man show that just happens to have two stars. The problem, though, is that the brothers’ serial oddness — both of the actors’ performances are powered by waxy, perpetual smiles — could and probably should be taken as creepy, or at least a little more strange. For much of the movie, though, there’s a strange absence of conflict or tension, which means we’re just playing out a string. Ergo, devoted fans
of the principals will be suitably entertained, others by degrees less so. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here.

Having pulled in over $30 million, good for the top spot at the box office over Labor Day weekend, Rob Zombie’s Halloween is a bonafide success, and one that couldn’t come a moment too soon for the hit-starved, re-formulated Weinstein Company. It’s also a complete creative misfire, indicative of Hollywood’s backwards thinking with respect to how to build (or re-start) a horror franchise.

the Halloween franchise, but only in the most wan and nominal fashion imaginable. The manner in which traditional notions of development were clearly abdicated here speaks volumes about how and what Hollywood thinks of horror franchises — which is to say certainly not anything seriously, but rather only as a slick, goosing means to an end, that end being dollars. For the Weinstein Company, the notion of a Halloween movie directed by Rob Zombie — a not-untalented guy who’s made increasingly savvy use of his devil’s minion image in both music and film — clearly had more appeal than a Halloween movie directed by just about any other established filmmaker who could be coaxed to tackle such an assignment. The film’s box office results seem to bear out the fruit of this line of reasoning.

To that end, Halloween is a thrown-together mixture of Zombie’s usual company of actors (wife Sheri, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Danny Trejo, et al), other horror “faces” (Ken Foree, Dee Wallace, Clint Howard, Brad Dourif, Halloween veteran Danielle Harris, Udo Kier) and a few bizarre stunt cameos (Mickey Dolenz, Richmond Arquette), all then given a merrily depraved punch of gore and slashing. Casually misogynistic and at times almost comically over-the-top in its vulgarity, Halloween is essentially partially a yawning prequel exploration of the roots of a psychopath and partially a remake of the first film in the series, John Carpenter’s 1978 genre classic.

Zombie’s last film, The Devil’s Rejects, was unapologetically degenerate, but completely streamlined in its exploitative impulses. Here there’s a split focus. Halloween follows a recent trend of horror prequels, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, which delve into the back stories of genre icons, attempting to answer the “hows” and “whys” of a faceless killing machine’s inner motivations. The problem, here as in there, is that the answers to these questions are so perfunctory as to lend the franchise no additional psychological weight or menace. Furthermore, Halloween additionally undercuts their set-up by spending the first 25-30 minutes of its running time explaining how Michael is to some degree a victim of circumstance — and thus loving to his little sister, the one person in his life who causes him no pain — only to then hurriedly throw that conceit under the bus when it becomes most convenient. Credulity is bent to pretzel-like extremes, and because of the film’s elongated set-up we don’t know or care about these characters. Ergo, the violence and other acts of intrusion hold absolutely no meaning. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

With young star and Pavel Checkov-to-be Anton Yelchin‘s long-delayed Fierce People just around the bend, what better time to swell the rolls with this only slightly redacted look at David Duchovny’s directorial debut, House of D, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005? To wit:

X-Files
star David Duchovny, House of D, is a
loose-knit coming-of-age tale for which perhaps the best word is baffling.
Just: baffling choices, baffling incongruities, bafflingly touching scenes
followed closely by ones just as bafflingly recondite, half baked or otherwise
not fully formed. House of D will
find a limited warmhearted reception in American art house audiences with a
special fondness/tolerance for New York-set “filmic postcards” where no
knuckles of indulgence are ever rapped. Others, however, will find the movie
too tedious and its emotional rewards too minuscule to bother investing their
time.

After opening on an American ex-pat artist living in Paris,
the bulk of the film centers on young Tommy (Hearts of Atlantis’ Anton Yelchin), a bright and facile private
school teenager who nurses a crush on a sweet girl, Melissa (Zelda Williams,
daughter of Robin), and enjoys using his French instructor’s tenuous grasp of
English slang to his humorous advantage. The death of Tommy’s father has left
him alone with his well-meaning but emotionally crippled mother (Téa Leoni), so
he spends as much time as he can out of the home. Tommy runs delivery routes
with his best friend Pappas (Robin Williams), a 41-year-old mentally
handicapped man who is also an assistant janitor at his school. Tommy and
Pappas hoard the bulk of their delivery savings in a buried tin can just
outside a women’s detention center (hence the title); Tommy one day strikes up
a conversation through the bars with an unnamed lady (Erykah Badu), and
eventually comes to value her warped advice when his life further unravels.

Duchovny is, off camera, a pretty smart guy, something you
might have gleaned from any number of interviews with him — where, given their
collective self-conscious preening, actors frequently come off as a bit dim —
or even just his screen performances. So as a writer’s piece, House of D has a few brief passages of
literary mellifluousness, particularly an auspicious opening narration which
compares blooming adolescence to old Hollywood noir flicks, and talks about
“the safe of life” opening up at age 13. But as directed, the film never really
coalesces into anything more than a bunch of jumbled musings starring the same
faces.

Reportedly based on unfastened recollections of his own Greenwich
Village youth and stories from Duchovny’s mother, House of D has a few moments of uncommon
tenderness, such as when Tommy fishes from the toilet several of his mother’s
cigarette butts in an instinctive play at holding on to her memory. Too often,
though, issues of logic and pacing belie the film’s sort of itinerant artistic spirit. It
makes absolutely no sense for Tommy and Pappas to bury their money blocks from
their brownstone apartments (Pappas has an alcoholic father, but there’s no
reason Tommy couldn’t hold it), and I’m not sure I understand the merits of the
delivery boy buddy system, other than its narrative convenience. House of D, in other words, feels deeply, intrinsically personal,
but it lacks a universal cohesiveness. Too many of its narrative elements seem
utterly arbitrary (Tommy is an aspirant artist whose connection to art we
barely see and never understand), dashed off descriptors and twists in a
headlong dash toward raw, uncalculated emotional expression. (LionsGate,
PG-13, 95 minutes)

Another Sean Penn flick looms just around the bend — his adaptatin of Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed bestseller, which I’ll be seeing next week. To stuff the archives in anticipatory fashion, a re-posted review of the little seen but highly worthwhile The Assassination of Richard Nixon, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2004. To wit:

The
Assassination of Richard Nixon tells the story of Sam Bicke, a
self-described grain of sand on the beach of America, and as such isn’t
destined to find the audiences of Ray,
The Aviator or Finding Neverland, bigger pictures with insurmountably larger
palettes. In fact, its rewards are so modest and reserved that it’s a small but
appreciated wonder that the film is seeing a theatrical release at all.
Nonetheless, anchored by an emotionally arresting lead performance by Sean
Penn, the movie stands as a gripping portrait of run-into-the-ground, working
class decency teased up into a furious rancor.

Inspired by a true story, the film is set in the early
winter months of 1974, when a rising tide of social inequities and injustices —
the fallout of the CIA-sponsored killing of Chilean leader Salvador Allende,
the stand of Russell Means and others at Wounded Knee, campus violence, and the
slow, creeping sprawl of the Watergate scandal — have come to make the very air
aspirant small businessman Bicke breathes seem oppressively thick and full of
bleakness. Sam believes that a man doesn’t give up his rights at a job, nor
should he have to lie to make a decent living, but he finds his values and
mores being tested in his new post selling office furniture and equipment for a
pop-and-son outfit.

There — goaded, hectored, humiliated and hazed, his
marginalization increasing tenfold every day — the socially awkward Sam slowly
falls out of favor with the few people in his life keeping him at all grounded,
namely his estranged wife Marie (Naomi Watts)
and would-be business partner, Bonny Simmons (Don Cheadle). President Nixon,
for him, embodies the sneering face of elitist and discriminatory contempt, and
so Sam eventually decides — in less a hatched plan than a followed flight of
fancy — to head to Washington D.C. and kill the commander in chief.

Mueller doesn’t fully connect the dots between Sam’s
desperate, choking personal uncertainty and anger and the full-blown mania of
his assassination plot (at just over 90 minutes this is a movie of
masterful mood more than psychological substance) and Cheadle and Watts aren’t
given enough to do. But Penn, in his angsty, swallowed depression, totally
sells this soul-crushing portrait of besieged civility. He takes what could
easily be tongue-in-cheek scenes of high-camp disaffection — strolling into a
Black Panthers office with $107 and pitching them earnestly on a more inclusive
mascot to draw in untapped Caucasian donations; awkwardly re-enacting a
potential “honest sales pitch” to an indifferent loan officer during a meeting;
and suffering the indignity of having to shave his mustache in order to look
more like a family man — and makes them heartrending mini-portraits of
uniquely American estrangement and alienation. Spare and unassuming, just like
its subject, The Assassination of Richard
Nixon doesn’t have the flash and pop of many of this awards season’s bigger
biopics. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a solid film, one of the better
character studies of 2004. (THINKFilm, R, 96 mins.)

A big, sprawling ensemble in which the events leading up to and following a drug deal are told from three different points of view, Go crash-landed in 1999. Starring Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr and Timothy Olyphant, among others, it was a perfect marriage of sorts between the stuttering, alternately wry and flippant style of screenwriter John August (who would go on to slave over the Charlie’s Angels films and pen a trio of movies for Tim Burton, including Big Fish) and the kinetic, hipster visual sense of director Doug Liman (who would go on to helm the first installment of the Bourne franchise). Even if one didn’t like the film, I think they’d concede that it felt of a piece in its construction. There wasn’t a jarring, at-odds collusion of visions; Go was sleek and lupine, if not exactly a box office hit.

The Nines, loosely retains the same triptych structure as Go, as well as the same sort of healthy disregard for purely linear pleasantries. The Nines is also notable because it’s August’s feature debut behind the camera. Unlike the thematically timid, familiar stories of half measures that many a writer make for their directorial debuts — more intimately scaled movies that feel like reaches across the table for salt and pepper — August’s The Nines is, psychologically speaking, a big, freewheeling affair, stuffed back within the confines of a tightly framed story.

Featuring three actors playing three parts apiece in three different stories — roles that, apart from their place within discrete narratives, may or may not have something to do with one another — The Nines could be described as being about the concentric circles of creativity, and getting lost in the hazy mist of formation and development, both personally and professionally, spiritually and emotionally. It’s about creation and responsibility, and where those ideas overlap and end. Confused? We haven’t even started yet.

The film’s first strand, dubbed “The Prisoner,” tells the story of a troubled actor, Gary (Ryan Reynolds), the hunky star of a small screen cop show, who goes on a boozy binge and finds himself placed under house arrest, with a chipper junior publicist Margaret (Melissa McCarthy) and disillusioned next-door neighbor Sarah (Hope Davis, above right) as his only links to the outside world. Eventually, Gary comes to wonder whether one or both women are deceiving him about the nature of his incarnation.

“Reality Television,” the movie’s second segment, charts the production of a half-hour episode of a Project Greenlight-type show tracking the creative progress of a network television drama making its way through pilot season. Having shot the series opener, writer-creator Gavin (Reynolds) faces some tough post-production hurdles and challenges from development executive Susan (Davis) about the suitability of his best friend and lead actress (McCarthy, playing a same-named iteration of herself).

Finally, in “Knowing,” an acclaimed videogame designer, Gabriel (Reynolds), faces car trouble deep in the woods. Leaving behind his wife Mary (McCarthy) and mute daughter (Elle Fanning) to track down help, Gabriel runs into Sierra (Davis), who regards him suspiciously at first, but then slowly reveals that she knows more about him than she was initially letting on.

In the film’s press notes, August talks about The Nines being “a question, not an answer” — that its three sections are deliberately incongruous, overlapping rather than snapping together neatly. Despite, or maybe because of this tack, The Nines doesn’t really cohere in a meaningful way; to call it too cute by half would be terse, but also not at all inaccurate. The casting of Reynolds, Davis and McCarthy give August a home run, and he additionally has an undeniable touch with dialogue, finding artful ways for his characters to say things in a manner that imparts both necessary information and true personality. But the movie, never moving much beyond the feelings it generates solely in the moment, doesn’t work one’s id into a tizzy in the same manner that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or François Ozon’s Swimming Pool, two films that bear loose association, do, and its ending induces only sort of a shrug. If songs could sire movies, Brit pop band James’ “Born of Frustration” would be the father of The Nines. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (Newmarket, R, 102 minutes)