Monthly Archives: April 2013

Iron Man 3

Film Reviews

Crackerjack popcorn entertainment done overwhelmingly right, Iron Man 3 is a robust example of what Hollywood can do right when it puts its mind to it — bringing tremendous resources to bear upon a larger-than-life story, entrusting it to smart, capable people, and turning them loose with fully invested confidence. A fun ride brimming with nice character details that fit together in comfortable and occasionally savvy ways, writer-director Shane Black takes over the franchise reins with a breezy aplomb, delivering a movie packed with both thrills and amusement.

Taking place in the unfolding Marvel superhero universe after the events of last year’s The Avengers, the film finds billionaire industrialist and erstwhile playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) struggling not so much with faithfulness as a properly apportioned sense of time commitment with his now-steady squeeze, new Stark Industries chief Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

A string of bombings by a media-manipulating terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has left intelligence agencies baffled, owing to their lack of forensic evidence left behind. Meanwhile, inventor turned magnate Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) has — perverting the research of Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), an old one-night stand of Stark’s — figured out a way to regenerate missing limbs, and entered into a shady and unsafe program involving unwitting injured war veterans. Complications, explosions and wisecracks ensue.

As embodied by Downey, Stark is brash, cocksure and quip-happy — not a superhero who wears his cloak (or in this case suit) heavily, but instead with a confident, forward-leaning pleasure. In this regard, while the first film was released five years ago almost to the day, still during the tenure of President Bush, Stark can be seen as a metaphor for a re-energized American patriotism, shaken free from doubts and missteps of the early millennium, and pointed upward and onward with vigor and clarity of purpose. The subsequent sequels have each picked up on this theme to varying degrees (“Failure is the fog through which we glimpse triumph,” Iron Man 3 at one point asserts), and after his trusted former bodyguard Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is injured in a blast, Stark even delivers a come-and-get-it address directly to the Mandarin (“No politics — this is just good, old-fashioned revenge”), giving out his home address on live television.

Black, working from a screenplay co-written with Drew Pearce, deftly walks the line between being true to his established leading man and telling a story more rooted in a post-Avengers world. References abound to the “events in New York,” but Stark also wears a sheen of post-traumatic stress disorder that seems properly to scale, and sized to his own ego and peccadillos. The biggest, most pleasant surprise of Iron Man 3, however, may be how well the action filmmaking works. Black — in a huge step up, budget-wise, from his only other directing credit, 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — imparts a nice sense of spatial recognition throughout, and all of the set pieces seem to fit smartly within the story, instead of as adjunct showcases for CGI gimmickry.

It’s true that Stark’s friendship and alliance with James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), the government-outfitted War Machine, now officially rebranded as the Iron Patriot, is handled in more or less functional strokes. And the explanation and deployment of Stark’s stockpiled Iron Man army is, well, if not a cheat then sometimes seemingly a bit of a winking narrative fix.

But the performances here are highly enjoyable (in addition to the regulars, young Ty Simpkins scores highly as Harley, a kid whom Stark befriends), and the rakish Iron Man 3 accomplishes the rare three-quel feat of actually leaving you wanting even more from a franchise. (Disney, PG-13, 129 minutes)

Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama bin Laden

Film Reviews


The story at the core of this curiously directed and somewhat misleadingly titled documentary — an adaptation of Peter Bergen’s excellent, bestselling book — is an innately fascinating one. Unfortunately, as either a primer on America’s terrorist takedown infrastructure or a megaphone for the insights of the (many female) analysts who helped untangle the ambiguity of information in aid of that cause, director Greg Barker’s messy Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama bin Laden, premiering May 1 on HBO, doesn’t forcefully connect, and as such remains a frustrating viewing experience.



The story of the ALEC Station group — the first CIA team tasked with finding bin Laden, formed in 1995 — is an engrossing one, and the putative leaping-off point for this nonfiction inquiry, whose strongest selling point may be the array of direct interviews with these former intelligence analysts. The regret and guilt is evident on the officers’ faces as they recall the weeks following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, for which they were suddenly “responsible” in the words of many pundits outside of government and several voices within it — even though their clear warnings about bin Laden had either gone largely unheeded and/or lacked operational intel. There was a “foundational change in organization” post-September 11, of course, and sharing information rather than compartmentalizing it became the de facto governmental position.

Bergen’s book, while comprehensive, is far from unwieldy, even as it chronicles bin Laden’s rise from his tangles with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan up through bombings on the USS Cole and American embassies. The movie version of Manhunt, on the other hand, is a thicket of distracted impulses, themes and half-litigated theses. While analyst interviewees like Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude, as well as Marty Martin, the former senior CIA case officer in the Middle East who became the day-to-day manager of the organization’s worldwide operations against al Qaeda, give Manhunt an undeniable insider authenticity, the movie ping-pongs from an early, 1990s study of Al Qaeda (quite interesting) to the terror attacks and the CIA’s embrace of black site foreign prisons (“Let’s just say boutique locations,” says one subject), before alighting back on Bergen and Peter Arnett’s March 1997 CNN interview with bin Laden, in which he first formalized his declaration of war on the United States.

Other parts of the film cover CIA analysts moving on to work as “targeting officers” in various war theaters (Nada Bakos, for instance, heads to Iraq, where she spends so much time hunting brutal Al Qaeda in Iraq emissary Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that soldiers jokingly start referring to him as her boyfriend). There’s trenchant analysis buried amidst these competing threads, as when retired Army General Stanley McChrystal says of the United States in general, “We haven’t taken the time to not be blind, deaf and dumb in areas of the world that matter to us.”

But Manhunt can’t decide if it wants to tell a history of Al Qaeda, the story of the overhaul of the American security and spying apparatuses post-September 11, the story of the enhanced interrogation/torture debate and American foreign policy adventurism more broadly, or just the Abbottabad OBL raid. The success of the book — distilling the essence of each of these strands, and connecting them — proves too difficult a lift for Barker, who employs a couple empty directorial tricks to try to enliven a graphic depiction of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, but doesn’t winnow his sources effectively. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against anyone watching Manhunt. But there are also better resources — starting with Bergen’s tome, and inclusive of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty — that chronicle the search for bin Laden from 2001 until his death. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 102 minutes)

Déjà Viewing: Bottle Rocket

Musings

An unapologetically bawdy blast of florid, drugged-out kidnapping, violence and steroid-addled dark comedy, the bizarre true crime tale Pain & Gain, Michael Bay‘s first non-Transformers flick since 2005, nudged out holdover Oblivion at the top of the weekend box office, pulling in just over $20 million. It’s part of the caffeinated wing of the “Idiots Behaving Criminally” subgenre, reminiscent in fits and starts of colorful movies like Savages, Domino, Wild Things, True Romance and Very Bad Things.

A somewhat smaller profile yet no less genuine antecedent highly worth checking out, however, is 1996’s Bottle Rocket, which not only served as the debut of director Wes Anderson, but also the first screen appearances of brothers Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, the latter of whom penned the script along with Anderson. If male adolescence and indeed its extension into twentysomethinghood is a disorienting combination of bravado and insecurity, Bottle Rocket illustrates, in an amusingly idiosyncratic way, the deep feeling and fraternity attached to it all. I write more words about the similarities and differences between the films over at Yahoo Movies as part of a recurring new feature, so click here for the read.

Rob Zombie on the Salem Witch Trials, Howard Stern Knock-offs

Interviews

I exchanged words with Rob Zombie recently, in occasion of The Lords of Salem, and not all of the exchange made the edit. Ergo, a few more questions and answers, below:

Brent Simon: Your film touches on the Salem Witch trials, which always felt like the dirty part of history for me, like sneaking a glance in a porn mag, because there might be one or two lines about it in the officially approved school textbooks, but then you had to go off to the library and find some dusty old book to get more information. What was your first contact with the history as a kid?

Rob Zombie: I think for me I probably took it a little more for granted, because being from Massachusetts I remember going to Salem when I was really young. And funnily enough, the main thing that I remembered about Salem was that that was where the Milton Bradley factory was. I’d see the logo and be like, “Oh my God, that’s where they make all the toys!” We’d go there on school field trips; they used to do a thing where they’d re-enact the witch trials, and there’s a witch museum. I probably thought, “Does everybody have a witch museum in their town?”

BS: Heidi (the main character of your movie) is the co-host of a very voluble “morning zoo” radio show, so I have to admit I was amused by the idea of you selling this movie on exactly those types of radio shows, because it felt like a social statement.

RZ: That’s so funny. Yeah, the king of that is Howard Stern, who’s a genius of radio. But around the time that Howard really blew up gigantic, when Private Parts came out, it seemed like every deejay was just a tenth-rate crappy Stern knock-off. So when I would have to do radio interviews, it was almost literally unbearable to do those shows. They’re not really like that anymore. People have moved off that a little bit. But then it was like every show was hosted by Fart Man and Dog Breath! There’s one episode of Family Guy where Brian and Stewie have a radio show, and that’s exactly what it was like. So in the movie, I wanted to make them really, really annoying.

For the rest of the interview, click here to check it out over on Yahoo Movies.

The Revolutionary Optimists

Film Reviews


Unfolding in the urban slums of India, documentary The Revolutionary Optimists attacks the notion that where one is born should alone determine their prospects for health and happiness. If Whitney Houston’s soaring voice once awakened a populace to the notion that children are our future, The Revolutionary Optimists again highlights the fact that the best chances for change lie not in the simple rescue of adolescents, but in empowering them to become agents of change.

The movie centers on Amlan Ganguly, an ex-lawyer and the charismatic founder of Prayasam, a Kolkata-based NGO. Known as “Dada” to all the kids of the neighborhood, Ganguly pushes and cajoles them, demanding that they help work for better futures. He’s up against some difficult and troubling statistics; 12 percent of children ages five to 14 in India work, and 47 percent of girls are married by their 18th birthdays. These and other factors contribute to a deficit of hope, a tamping down of aspiration levels, Ganguly admits.

Co-directed by Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen, The Revolutionary Optimists doesn’t quite wrestle to the ground a more focused dramatic through line; in focusing on the lives of several kids, it’s sometimes rather unclear in marking time or elucidating consequences, which impacts its connection a bit. But neither does the film ever lose its capacity to casually shock or move a viewer, as when Ganguly shares with the children that he was raped by a family caretaker when he was six years old. It’s a stunning moment, rendered more amazing by Ganguly’s explanation of how he used that terrible moment to focus his life. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie itself, click here to visit its website. (Shadow Distribution, unrated, 85 minutes)

The Bling Ring Stacks Up Sunglasses

Posterized!, Trailer Watch

Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring drops on June 14 from A24 Films, based on the true story of a bunch of young, party-happy fame junkies who take to knocking off the homes of tabloid celebs like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and the like. Its teaser poster, below, is a catchy thing, stacked up as it is with five pairs designer sunglasses. For auteur filmmakers and young ensembles, as is the case here, this is the type of imagination for which more one-sheets should be aiming.



That’s the movie’s visual shorthand selling, though. Its trailer is a slightly more conventional thing, pitching it as a gum-snapping, bubbleheaded heist version of The Perfect Score, with maybe a pinch of Spring Breakers. We’ll see if it possesses the latter’s allegorical punching power. Time will tell. I’ll say this, though — Emma Watson totally nails that voice of vacuous, proudly blithe entitlement, for whom demi-celebrity is an occupational aim. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website.

The Lords of Salem

Film Reviews


Rocker-turned-writer-director Rob Zombie has, in a fairly interesting and definitely surprising manner, carved out a certain multi-media genre niche for himself, spinning off horrific visions both original (The Devil’s Rejects) and adapted (his Halloween remakes). His latest film in some ways seems like a no-brainer, the type of easy-fit movie Zombie could churn out every 18 months or so if he desired. In it, a Salem, Massachusetts radio deejay starts having strange flashbacks of her town’s violent, witchy past after receiving a mysterious record addressed to her at work. Could it be… Satan?! Or maybe just some of his minions?

Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, again serves as his leading lady, playing Heidi, the obligatory shot of estrogen alongside morning zoo radio show partners Whitey (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman (Ken Foree). After a guest, author Francis Mathias (Bruce Davison), appears to discuss his latest work, said package arrives. On its heels follow entrancing visions, as well as a couple increasingly awkward interactions between Heidi, her landlady Lacey (Judy Geeson), and her landlady’s friends, Megan (Patricia Quinn) and Sonny (Dee Wallace). After that, more ominous stuff happens, and the bodies start accumulating.

Zombie, as one might expect, has a nice sense of aural construction. The metronomic bass thump of the tune which puts Heidi in a trance is mesmerizing in its own way; Zombie also sneaks in some classical music as well. The Lords of Salem, too, is definitely a movie of considerable production design (hat tip to Jennifer Spence), insofar as its nightmare sequences pack a to-scale punch of jangly, unsettling discomfort.

But while Zombie trots out a few interesting and provocative premises (“A lack of sensory pleasure is the principle root cause of violence,” intones the TV in the background in Heidi’s apartment), he fails to fully chase down and wrestle to the ground any of these themes in an engaging or meaningful way. Instead, The Lords of Salem basically just works its way through very familiar notions of rekindled pagan idolatry and evil. The movie charts a weekly timeline, but there’s not really much of a ticking clock driving the plot, so its swan-dive into arbitrariness from the second act on is fairly complete.

The best of Zombie’s big screen efforts have a sense of leering, organized chaos — of merrily depraved yet finely calibrated manipulation. The Lords of Salem, though, feels… well, tame isn’t the right word. Zombie exploits the history of the Salem Witch Trials a bit, but not in quite as wild and memorable a manner as one might expect. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 101 minutes)

Pain & Gain

Film Reviews




As an avowed, no-nonsense peddler of cinematic excess, director Michael Bay would in some respects seem to be the ideal candidate to bring to the big screen the deliciously weird and over-the-top true crime story at the center of Pain & Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson. Unfortunately this down-and-dirty air-quote character piece, a florid and casually misogynistic action dramedy that marks Bay’s least expensive production since his debut film, comes unglued early on, and then spends two hours-plus thrashing about wildly, to only middling effect. Madly trading off rambling voiceover narration from character to character, like a relay race baton, Pain & Gain takes the tale of a group of brutal yet idiotic criminals and twists it into a series of hyper-masculine poses masquerading as some sort of statement on the new American dream. It’s like Bottle Rocket by way of Savages, but not really in a good or interesting way. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Paramount, R, 129 minutes)

Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?

Film Reviews


On April 20, 2011, 40-year-old photographic journalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Misrata, Libya, where he was covering that country’s bloody civil war. His death marked the end of a brilliant and difference-making career during which he covered conflicts in Liberia and Afghanistan, and helped notably reshape notions of war photography.

Helmed by his friend and co-director on the Oscar-nominated Restrepo, Sebastian Junger, and debuting on HBO in conjunction with “Sleeping Soldiers,” an outdoor exhibition of Hetherington’s work at the International Center of Photography next door to HBO’s headquarters in New York City, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington serves as a fitting capstone for a warm-hearted man who saw the best in people during some of the worst circumstances.



Hetherington, who with his crooked but quick smile sort of favored a taller Daniel Tosh, was born to well-off parents in Great Britain, but gravitated toward photography in some of the world’s most war-ravaged regions. His work received several major awards, including four World Press prizes. Integrating multiple media formats in his work, Hetherington had a special gift for forging sympathy with his subjects; he rejected as nonsense the notion that interaction with his subjects ruined the objectivity or sanctity of images, noting, “I’m a big white guy in their country, it’s stupid to pretend I’m not.”

From 2007 through 2008, in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, Junger and Hetherington holed up with the Second Platoon, Battle Company, at a remote outpost named for a fallen comrade. The resultant film of the year-long embedding, Restrepo, would debut at the Sundance Film Festival and go on to be nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award. After many years in Liberia and other spots, the movie was in some ways the culmination of Hetherington’s quest to understand and document the different human emotions crystalized in armed conflict. (One of his favorite photos from the time period, entitled “Man Eden,” underscored what someone would later tell Hetherington — that war represents men’s best, most socially acceptable chance to express and receive unconditional love.)

Junger, who sits for interviews but doesn’t try to impress his own stamp of personality on the film, also doesn’t try to inject a lot of stylistic flash into Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? After all, there’s no need to. Hetherington’s life was an interesting enough one that it stands on its own, and the footage here — inclusive of his time in Liberia, outtakes from Restrepo, and his time in Libya, and buoyed by reminiscences from family and colleagues — is engaging, thoughtful stuff, no matter its surface narrowcast appeal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 78 minutes)

Not Suitable for Children (Blu-ray)

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Ryan Kwanten headlines director Peter Templeman’s Not Suitable for Children, a romantic dramedy of young adult drift that trips familiar wires of too-cute-by-half when its forces upon its protagonist the plot device of him coming to grips with testicular cancer.

The story centers around a trio of twentysomething roommates — Jonah (Kwanten), Stevie (an appealing Sarah Snook) and Gus (Ryan Corr) — who enjoy their shared lives of hedonistic, responsibility-free partying. Things come to an abrupt halt, however, when Jonah is diagnosed with the aforementioned disease, and told that he’d be rendered infertile by the most aggressive treatment that would save him. This news triggers a strange reaction in him — Jonah suddenly wants to become a father. Predictable antics ensue, with the intention of tugging heartstrings.

Michael Lucas’ choppy, prefabricated screenplay trades in well-worn set-ups and base-level complications and dialogue, playing its hand pretty much entirely in the first act until settling into a plaintive slog. This would be less of a problem if the film had greater stylistic pizzazz or a more compelling lead, but Kwanten (HBO’s True Blood) delivers a mostly one-note turn, of blinking himbo entitlement. Why would Jonah actually be a good father, really? Why, because that’s the entire reason for the movie’s existence, of course.

A fairly hearty slate of supplemental material anchors Not Suitable for Children‘s Blu-ray debut, which comes in a vortex case and is presented in a 1080p 2.35 widescreen transfer, with a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track. Apart from a bit of over-saturation, it’s a solid transfer, and the aural design is mostly hiccup-free, if just a bit heavy in the bass mix in some of the more raucous scenes. A behind-the-scenes featurette runs under 15 minutes, but the Blu-ray’s best offering is nearly a hour’s worth of interviews with Templeman and his cast, which is nice for those inclined to have a more forgiving attitude toward the movie. A gallery of trailers, for both Not Suitable for Children and other Well Go USA home video releases, rounds things out. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Thale

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews


Supernaturally tinged Norwegian mystery-horror import Thale unfolds, on a narrative level, like some weird hybrid of Sunshine Cleaning, Splice and Lady in the Water — a work that dances around a couple moods and genres without ever really wholeheartedly committing to one in particular. Telling the story of a surprise woodland contact between a pair of guys and an awakened, captive huldra — a nymph-like creature of Scandinavian folklore — writer-director Aleksander Nordaas’ work gives off a certain eerie vibe that, along with its regional specificity, add up to give the movie a pungent originality. But Thale is ultimately all wind-up, failing to take its characters to more interesting places.



The unflappable Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) heads up “No Shit Cleaning Service,” a crime scene scrubbing company. Perhaps against better judgment, he’s thrown a bit of work to his friend Elvis (Erlend Norvold), with vomitous consequences. Tasked with finding the scattered remains of an old man at a cabin in the woods, Leo and Elvis instead discover a mute girl (Silje Reinåmo, above) and a bunch of audio tapes in which said man can be heard talking about the girl’s highly adaptive nature, and how she’s “different than” her sisters. As Elvis starts to seemingly become able to bridge the communication gap they also make a couple rather shocking discoveries (she has a tail, for one), leading them to question just how dangerous this girl might be.

If there’s a nice fog of intrigue that surrounds Thale for a good long while, there’s also an imperturbability to the entire movie, which kind of dawdles and drags. For a long time Thale isn’t really a horror movie, even in any Gothic sense, but instead just a mystery about this girl’s origins, and how she’s survived seemingly on her own for an indeterminate length of time. This works, but only up to a point. At around the 45-minute mark, there’s a nice conversation between Leo and Elvis in which some of their vulnerabilities are stripped bare, and for a moment it looks as if Thale is going to dive headlong into a story of fraternal drift, with its mysterious title waif serving only as a joint kickstarter and metaphorical connection for the two. This doesn’t come to full fruition, but it would have likely been more rewarding than some of the moves Thale ends up making.

At a certain point, the movie’s slow-peddled nature either becomes wholly mesmeric or a bit of a put-on. For me it was the latter — it felt like a lot of artful dodging in service of a story that wasn’t really fully fleshed out, or at least not taken in interesting directions. Thale doesn’t really delve substantively into mythology — its characters aren’t scientists, admittedly — so when others come looking for Thale, plunging Leo and Elvis into a greater danger, it feels like a leap into tension unearned, nipped from some screenwriting manual.

Serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator and editor, Nordaas delivers an enigmatic aria in many respects. A director like Brad Anderson would be able to turn this into a work of suffocating anxiety, though. As is, Thale is a movie that’s a bit less than the sum of its parts — interesting around the edges, but not fully developed, and lacking any sort of revelatory punch. Still, genre cineastes with an affection for foreign treats may find enough here to validate their curiosity.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Thale comes to DVD presented in a solid 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, free of any edge enhancement or grain issues. Audio comes by way of two discrete tracks — a Norwegian language 5.1 version, and an English language 2.0 track. Unfortunately, apart from chapter stops and a couple trailers for other XLRator Media releases, there are no supplemental bonus features of which to speak, which further undercuts this title’s value, which might otherwise be a bit higher for genre fans and would-be DIY filmmakers. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)

Tom Cruise’s Oblivion Tops Weekend Box Office

Box Office



His last movie, December’s Jack Reacher, may have lost its opening weekend showdown with hobbits, but Tom Cruise reasserted his box office superiority over the past several days with the science-fiction action drama Oblivion. Grossing an estimated $38 million in its debut frame, and facing no real wide release competition, nor a weekend with still-on-the-lam Boston Marathon bombers, the film easily unseated the Jackie Robinson tale 42, which grossed $18 million-plus in its second week, bringing its cumulative domestic total thus far to $54 million. Animated family film The Croods held steady in third place, pulling in another $9.5 million and bringing its five-week total to just under $155 million, while the fifth sequel in the Scary Movie franchise dropped 55 percent in its second weekend, pulling in just $6.3 million. Slotting fifth, in its fourth week of release, G.I. Joe: Retaliation grossed $5.78 million, raising its Stateside haul to just over $111 million, and probably guaranteeing another installment.

Rounding out the top 10, Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines pulled in $4.74 million; Die-Hard-in-the-White-House Olympus Has Fallen rang up $4.5 million; the Evil Dead remake scared up $4.1 million; Jurassic Park 3D pulled in just over $4 million flat; and Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful conjured up an additional $3.05 million, pushing past the $220 million domestic mark in its seventh week of release.

Family Weekend

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

If you’ve ever pined for a cross between The Parent Trap and The Ref, then Family Weekend might be for you.

Overachieving 16-year-old jump-roping star Emily Smith-Dungy (Olesya Rulin) is fed up with her self-absorbed parents Samantha and Duncan (Kristin Chenoweth and Matthew Modine, the latter of whom is done up like a cousin of Dumb & Dumber‘s Jeff Daniels). Her mom is a work-obsessed business executive, while her dad is a happy-go-lucky artist who can’t be bothered to earn a paycheck. So, enlisting help from her eccentric grandmother GG (Shirley Jones) and younger sister Lucinda (Joey King), an aspiring actress, Emily hatches a plot to kidnap them and bring some order and affection to the home.

If it at times seems to ping-pong between familiar-to-a-fault plotting and reaching over its shoulder to achieve leftfield wackiness in its characterizations, Family Weekend scores because of its cast — particularly the charming young Rulin and King, who turns in a lively performance. They help elevate the material, written by Matt K. Turner and directed by Benjamin Epps, and the movie works more often it doesn’t owing to its energy and differentiation from so much of its teen-comedy brethren, of which this is only nominally.

Housed in a regular plastic case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Family Weekend comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Bonus features consist of a brief making-of featurette, as well as a handful of webisodes. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

In Another Country

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews


An intriguing little cross-cultural curio that plays like a woozy, jazz-improv riff on romantic futility and destiny, South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo’s In Another Country is a trifling cinematic doff of the cap to French New Wave cinema, but kind of beguiling nonetheless. It’s an arthouse bon-bon all the way, but one that fans of French actress Isabelle Huppert will surely not want to miss.



The movie, which played in competition last year at the Cannes Film Festival, unfolds in three segments. In each, Huppert plays Anne, a French visitor to a small South Korean beach town named Mohang. In the first, though, she’s a filmmaker visiting a colleague (Kwon Hae-Hyo, above right) and his pregnant wife (Moon So-Ri), who is suspicious and jealous of their relationship. In the second, she’s the well-off wife of a traveling businessman who slips away to rekindle an illicit affair with a Korean filmmaker (Moon Sung-Keun) in turn gripped by his own petty covetousness. In the final story, Anne is a lonelier divorcée traveling with her friend (Yoon Yeo-Jeong), a university instructor. Undercurrents of infidelity and spiritual and romantic settledness factor into each segment, as does a kind of goofy lifeguard (Yoo Jun-Sang) with whom Anne repeatedly crosses paths.

Hong is considered one of the more established (and prolific) auteur filmmakers working in South Korea today, and with In Another Country he again delivers an aesthetically bold work, a movie of watchwork-like moving parts in which characters can variously feel three-dimensional and entirely representational. Like many writer-directors, his work often plumbs some of the same themes (neuroses born of relationships) and unfolds in familiar settings (beaches are a favorite). In this regard, In Another Country sometimes feels like a whimsical yet serene repackaging of past material.

Huppert, however, gives the movie — Hong’s first work in predominantly English, though there are Korean portions accompanied by subtitles — a fresh and amusing spin. (A scene of her baying at goats is a left-field delight that keeps on giving.) Hong elicits engaging, naturalistic performances from his actors, and in sketching out these different possible lives of Anne he seems to be making a commentary on the ephemeral nature of romance, while also fetishistically indulging his love of the French New Wave.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, In Another Country comes to DVD presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and Dolby digital 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Unfortunately, apart from chapter stops and the movie’s Stateside theatrical release trailer, there are no other supplemental features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; if Half is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) D+ (Disc)

Oblivion

Film Reviews

A visually gorgeous dystopian sci-fi think piece from Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, Oblivion is far more ruminative than the average action flick of its ilk, but it collapses under the weight of its own webby, familiar plotting, which is little more than an expensive grab-bag of genre tropes wrapped around a characteristically invested and empathetic performance from Tom Cruise. A boldly rendered film with faulty nuts, bolts and wiring is still, at its core, a movie that doesn’t work when it eventually comes time to pay off narrative set-up and beats.



Set on Earth in the year 2077, following a nuclear decimation that was part of a last-ditch effort to fend off an invading alien race that had already destroyed the moon, Oblivion centers around a restless drone mechanic, Jack Harper (Cruise), who lives thousands of feet up in the sky in a nice little Jetsons-type condo with his communications officer partner and lover, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, quite good, if purposefully cool). They make “an effective team” the latter consistently assures Sally (Melissa Leo), from whom the pair receive daily directions and oversight via satellite, while Jack jets off to and fro, repairing the flying guardian weaponized robots that help keep the remaining alien “scavs” (or scavengers) away from the technology humans are using to harness energy from Earth’s remaining resources.

It’s just a couple weeks before Jack and Victoria are supposed to join the rest of what remains of humankind up in the monolithic “Tet,” after which point they’ll all repair to Titan, a moon of Saturn. Victoria is all ready for the reunion, but Jack is more restless. He’s plagued by dreams of Julia (Olga Kurylenko), a mysterious woman who may or may not be from his past, prior to his mandated five-year “memory wipe.” He also eventually crosses paths with Malcolm Beach (Morgan Freeman), who, you know, is also mysterious. It doesn’t give things away to say that along with the external threat, a confrontation with his own past ensues for Jack.

It’s far too early to consign Kosinski to the bin of Zack Snyder — that is to say, a visually gifted filmmaker who should be kept away from screenwriting software and simply steered to story ideas more fully developed by others. He obviously has a broad imagination, encompassing both physical worlds and bigger ideas. But Kosinski has a rather leaden, conventional touch with character and sets up his world — Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn take screenplay credit, but Oblivion is based on an unpublished graphic novel co-wrote — via some exposition-heavy voiceover, which means that the sludgy conveyance of these thoughts tip his film’s direction long before the plot has a chance to fully ripen.

Oblivion dreams big — its canvas is expansive. (Special IMAX presentations only enhance this effect.) Shot largely on location in Iceland, the film has a great look and mood, particularly in its opening hour, which has moments of trance-inducing beauty. Working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda and composers Anthony Gonzalez (of M83) and Joseph Trapanese (who collaborated with Daft Punk on the great Tron soundtrack), Kosinski trades in declamatory storytelling that lacks the more overt pomposity of something from Michael Bay. He aims to attach naked feeling to evocative imagery and sound; it’s like he’s aiming for involuntary audience response, akin to a doctor’s knee tap.

But Oblivion’s source material, and many antecedents, give it the feel of a cobbled together greatest hits album being dutifully plugged through by a reconstituted rock ‘n’ roll band. The Matrix, The Island and Total Recall are among the big touchstones here, but there are echoes of Moon, Solaris and THX-1138 as well. Even with its extraordinarily distinctive visual telling, paradoxically, little of the movie gives off the scent or vapor of originality. When it’s not papering over more interesting offshoot questions it raises, its narrative is busy ponderously cycling through clichéd dramatic obstacles on its way to a very familiar stand-off and climax. Cruise invests this tale with much intensity, but there’s not a depth or matching verve to the storytelling itself. (Universal, PG-13, 125 minutes)

Déjà Viewing: Moon

Musings

All signs point to Tom Cruise‘s newest science-fiction action flick, Oblivion, a collaboration with Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski based on the latter’s unpublished graphic novel, making a significant splash at the box office this weekend. It’s a gorgeous-looking blend of several dystopian greatest hits, such as The Matrix, Total Recall and The Island. Yet Oblivion also echoes a few smaller movies. So for those seeking either a cinematic aperitif to Oblivion or a comfy home video capper to a sci-fi double-header, check out 2009’s Moon, the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, who earlier this year was announced as the director of the film adaptation of the Warcraft videogame series, taking over for Sam Raimi. I write more words about the similarities (and differences) between the two films as part of a new regular feature over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the read.

Rob Zombie Talks Strippers, Hell, Lords of Salem

Interviews




When you take zombie as a surname, you might seem to be limiting your career options, not unlike getting a face tattoo. Yet Rob Zombie, who burst onto the scene as frontman for the theatrical hard rock act White Zombie in the late 1980s and early ’90s, has carved out not only a successful but a varied entertainment career as a musician, multimedia producer, filmmaker and graphic novel impresario.

His latest film as writer-director, however, The Lords of Salem, is a horror offering right in his experiential wheelhouse. When Massachusetts radio deejay Heidi Hawthorne (wife Sheri Moon Zombie) receives a package with mysterious music, it triggers headaches, hypnosis and visions of her town’s violent past. Is Heidi, a recovering addict and trauma survivor, slipping back into madness, or is something even more sinister afoot? Recently, I had a chance to speak with Zombie one-on-one, and while I didn’t ask him about his studded iPhone case we did chat about his movie, what hell is to him (hint: in involves drunk strippers), and what’s next professionally. The conversation is excerpted over at Yahoo, so click here for the read.

The Kitchen

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Modesty has its place in film, as much as Hollywood studio filmmaking would like to wallpaper over that fact, with noise and computer-generated effects. Case in point: The Kitchen, an amiable little low-budget, Los Angeles-set comedy that takes its name from the self-restricted party setting of its chatty young adult angst.



Neither groundbreaking nor overly pretentious in its aims, The Kitchen simply cycles through the talky, sometimes inebriated fallout from emotional waffling and various bad decisions, but does so with enough charm and aplomb to win over viewers. Penned by Jim Beggarly and directed by Ishai Setton, the film centers around a 30th birthday party for Jennifer (That ’70s Show‘s Laura Prepon), who’s on the precipice of much change with a new job and an oven-fresh split from her philandering boyfriend Paul (Bryan Greenberg). While various casual acquaintances drift in and out, Jennifer’s cynical sister Penny (Dreama Walker) makes folks uncomfortable with an inappropriate announcement, and Kenny (Tate Ellington) and nervous party-planner Stan (Matt Bush), respectively, nurse unrequited crushes on Penny and Jennifer.

Even as a douchebag, Paul is problematically written, and Greenberg’s smarmy, one-track performance doesn’t do the material a lot of favors. Still, the vast majority of the acting here is playful and engaging (in addition to the aforementioned players, Jillian Clare makes a solid impression as a ditzy dropped-off girlfriend, while Amber Stevens and Pepper Binkley grapple with guilt, or the lack thereof), and a good fit with the material, which is of the psychologically wheels-spinning variety. If it doesn’t achieve the high-bar pleasures of Whit Stillman, neither does The Kitchen embarass itself. It’s simple, fun and appealing, in its own little self-contained way, and sometimes that’s enough.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Kitchen comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen aspect ratio, with 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks that more than adequately handle the movie’s rather meager and straightforward sound design. Five deleted scenes run about five-and-a-half minutes, and there are trailers for The Scenesters and three other films. The meatier supplemental features, however, arrive by way of an amusing five-minute bit in which cinematographer Josh Sileen basically cuckolds director Ishai Setton, resulting in a Christian Bale reference. There’s also a two-minute mock cooking show gag with Setton and Bush, and a seven-minute-plus making-of featurette, the latter of which includes cast interviews which spotlight the many animals (dog, turtle, parrot) on set. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. Or go brick-and-mortar retail — seriously, I won’t mock you or tell anyone. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Sexcula

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Sexcula, a 1974 Canadian sexploitation import being presented on DVD for the first time after having been assumed for many years to be lost, has a rather amazing story at its core. Unfortunately, none of that is really on screen. The Argo-type version of this tale — the story behind the story, of its actual making and subsequent abandonment — would make for an interesting period piece seriocomedy. Sexcula, though, is just kind of a baffling mess.

The film nominally uses the framing device of an old diary being discovered and read, and then spins back in time to — again, sort of — tell the tale of a female doctor (Jamie Orlando) who’s created a sex slave, Frank (John Alexander), who has trouble sustaining an erection. So she… calls in the titular family member (Debbie Collins) for help? There’s also a striptease-and-grind sequence involving a gorilla, plus a deformed hunchback, Orgie (Tim Lowery), who runs around wanting to dry-hump the female sex-bot (Marie McLeod) that the good doctor Fellatingstein has stashed over in the corner.

Directed by John Holbrook under the pseudonym of Bob Hollowich, Sexcula sounds a bit like a campy, totally deranged romp, I realize. And for roughly its first half-hour, when it’s more of a stylized (albeit terribly acted) softcore romp attempting to poke fun at horror conventions (minus the whole gorilla thing, which doesn’t track), it is. The dialogue is of course terrible (“Listen, Frank — this may be your last opportunity to understand. My cousin Countess Sexcula of Transylvania is an expert at erotic, sensual… uhh, well, she’s basically a hooker”), and delivered in wooden fashion. At a certain point, though, things go off the rails. The story is more or less abandoned, and the fleeting glimpses of hardcore action that marked the first half of the movie give way to an explicit, wedding-set foursome that unfolds over fifteen-plus minutes… during which, inexplicably, cameramen and grips eventually also just wander into frame.

The story behind the movie’s completion (this more hardcore bit was apparently part of a separate, reconvened shoot), its awkward single public screening, and eventual discovery and rendering to the digital format (the transfer for the Sexcula DVD was struck from the single remaining theatrical print, stored in the basement of the Canadian Film Archives) is a long and winding one, recounted in part in a textual accompaniment to this release’s packaging (more info still is available on the Interwebs). Maybe someone can write that story and slip a script to Ben Affleck… or maybe Larry Clark?

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Sexcula comes to DVD via the fine folks at Impulse Pictures, presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with a 2.0 mono audio track that works fine for the meager aural demands of such a production. Its static menu screen yields to a similarly static screen with a dozen chapter stops, and while there is a copy of the movie’s trailer, the only other supplemental feature is a two-sided liner notes sleeve with a solid little essay of historical framing by Dmitrios Otos and an amusing cartoon by Rick Trembles. For period piece cult completists, there may be something worthy of exploration here; for less specialized audiences, however, this isn’t the horror titillation for which you’re looking. To purchase the Sexcula DVD, click here. D (Movie) C (Disc)

Director Adam Leon Talks Gimme the Loot

Interviews




The winner of Best Narrative Feature at last year’s SXSW Festival, writer-director Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot takes a premise seemingly made for dark twists and turns — over the course of two summer days a pair of Bronx graffiti artist teenagers, Malcolm and Sofia, try to scrape together and possibly steal $500 to pull off a big stunt that will humiliate their rivals — and turns it into a keenly observed, vibrant, livewire work coursing with adolescent energy. As a result, the young director has been rewarded with attention as one of the top up-and-coming filmmakers of the under-30 set. I recently had a chance to speak with Leon one-on-one, about race, class and taking his little movie around the world. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal

Film Reviews


A quirky but unfulfilling Canadian-Danish horror-comedy that offers up neither quite the deliciously mad slapstick-y gore of its title nor a more penetrating treatment of its character-rooted instincts, writer-director Boris Rodriguez’s Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal has a substantial helping of originality on its side, but not much in the way of inspired execution.

A one-time darling of the art scene, inspiration-starved, foreign-born painter Lars (Thune Lindhardt) takes a teaching position in the small, snowy town of Koda Lake, where he’s enthusiastically received by a school headmaster, Harry (Al Goulem), seeking to put his burgh on the map. His class comes with Eddie (Dylan Smith, resembling a brawny John Turturro), the lumbering, cereal-obsessed mute son of an important patron, and when she dies Lars agrees to take him in in order to preserve the promised funding in her will. It’s only then that Lars discovers the docile Eddie has a sleepwalking problem, during which he tends to, well, kill and eat things.

The rub? This bloodletting rekindles Lars’ artistic flame — so he’s less appalled than intrigued, and invested in figuring out a way to abet its continuation. When Eddie’s symptoms seem to wane, Lars mulls over whether this burst of creativity has been enough, and if he should instigate unease in Eddie in order to try and revive his murderous disorder.

Even though it possesses a rather vivid title that seems to offer up a wink of knowing parody, Eddie is mostly rooted in a realistic tone. And despite the seemingly outlandish nature of its concept, there’s actually a good deal of intrigue baked into the story, which reads like a twisted, modernized spin on an old Edgar Allan Poe tale. It’s just that this is a thin, gruel-like version of it — even a pair of post-dénouement, add-on twists land with more of a pat than an oomph — not funneled with enough energy and cleverness through a singular viewpoint.

Working from a story by Jon Rannells, Rodriguez delivers a script that, in its streamlining, is downright malnourished for clarifying background and detail. There’s meant to be a connection in all the bloody violence to Lars’ past prolific period, which brought him such fame and acclaim, but Rodriguez fumbles away the chance to delve into this with any satisfying depth. The film’s set-up is utterly perfunctory (“It happened so long ago I didn’t think I needed to tell you — Eddie has always been… different”), and its dialogue and plotting so mechanical as to invite various flights-of-fancy as to whether this is all part of some elaborate rope-a-dope scheme.

Lindhart (Keep the Lights On) is an appealing enough peg upon which to hang this tale, and Georgina Reilly (rejoining her Pontypool co-star McHattie, who cameos as Lars’ frustrated agent, Ronny) is cute and engaging. But the acting isn’t strong enough to cancel out such lethargic, incomplete storytelling. In better hands, this could be a wickedly engaging story of outsized ambition and misguided inspiration by way of sort of a hybrid cross of Fargo and Warm Bodies. As is, it’s a mildly stimulating concept that never achieves imaginative lift. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal is also available on VOD. (Music Box Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

42

Film Reviews

The story of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke baseball’s tacit color barrier, and thus in many ways helped lay the groundwork for the untangling of Jim Crow laws and other racial prejudices that would stretch out over the Civil Rights era, is a remarkable one — full of compelling resolve and steadfast character in the face of real, sustained nastiness. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, 42 (so named for Robinson’s jersey number, retired by every major league baseball team) skims pleasantly enough along the surface of this potentially roiling drama, a biopic of carefully crafted but ultimately superficial uplift.



Chadwick Boseman (above) stars as Robinson, and the movie is mostly built around the plan for his ascension to the major leagues, as first crafted and then implemented, by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), starting in 1946. Wooing Robinson from the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs, Rickey goes against the advice of some of his consultants, putting the speedy, five-tool player on a fairly fast track for the big leagues, routed through the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm league squad.

Come 1947, Rickey’s plans seem momentarily waylaid by the year-long suspension of the Dodgers’ manager at the time, Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni), a no-nonsense guy sympathetic to Robinson as much because he wants to win as anything else. Rickey presses ahead however, tabbing Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), a Pittsburgh Courier baseball beat writer and fellow African-American, to try to help ease the transition.

Boseman has an undeniably engaging screen presence, and it’s nice to see Ford — chomping cigars and buried under some bushy fake eyebrows — fully engaged, and diving wholeheartedly into an actual character, something he’s never really done. Many of the supporting players, too, are well rendered; John C. McGinley makes a nice impression as radio announcer Red Barber, while Alan Tudyk registers in effectively uncomfortable fashion as Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman, a racist, heckling foil of Robinson’s during an early season series.

But there’s a posed and overly polished quality to almost all the drama, not much aided by composer Mark Isham’s relentlessly prodding score. Helgeland builds his screenplay around a lot of smartly chosen moments — a player coming to Rickey with a piece of hate mail, only to discover the much larger amount Robinson himself has been receiving; another teammate attempting to talk Robinson into showering at the same time at the rest of them, instead of self-isolating — but these moments are as often as not undercut by simpleton staging, with blocked-off, back-and-forth medium shots and close-ups. When Rickey tells off a fellow team owner over the phone, Ford faces forward the entire time, performing for the camera. Similarly, platitudes flow freely in the dialogue.

The film’s division feels roughly right — the first half covers both Rickey’s rationale for integration (money, with a pinch of nobility) and Robinson’s minor league assignment, while the latter hour covers Robinson’s arrival in the majors, with a heavy emphasis on the first week — but there’s precious little inner boil here, no captured translation of the ongoing psychological toll on its protagonist, apart from an awkwardly conceived breakdown scene on the hidden inner steps of the dugout. Instead, Helgeland invests more heartily in Robinson’s domestic life, with his wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) and their new baby boy. This plays fine enough but seems kind of yawning, desultory and generic given the rich potential for something a bit more chaotic and genuine. 42 dutifully elicits sympathy, but lacks the sort of grander multi-dimensionality its subject merits. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 129 minutes)

Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Narrated by Catherine Keener, Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home provides a poignant, illuminating look at the titular downtown Los Angeles area which serves as the residence to a large portion of the city’s indigent population. Far from just serving as an audio-visual grief mop — prodding viewers with images of despair — director Thomas Napper’s deeply humanistic movie throws a non-exploitative spotlight on people who have both found a way to make a life for themselves within this community of homelessness and also make themselves of greater service.



Covering about one square mile, Skid Row serves as home base for as many as 11,000 Los Angelenos, two-thirds of whom struggle with some form of mental illness, drug addiction or both. In uncompromising fashion, Lost Angels tells its story, funneled through eight inhabitants as well as a variety of advocates and volunteers who man the Midnight Mission, first opened in 1914, and various other community outreach service programs. In doing so, the movie lays waste to certain misconceptions about both those who pass through Skid Row (meet Danny Harris, a scholarship track athlete and former Olympic medalist) and their reasons for being there, since single-dwelling units on a meager disability stipend are hardly affordable anywhere else (“We’re not here because we’re homeless — just less of home, maybe,” says one woman).

The film also shows the squeeze on the homeless on both sides — how the increased gentrification of the area has coincided with the tail end of changes in the mental health care system and the increased criminalization of behavior (loitering and the like) that is not as strictly policed elsewhere. The latter is sorted through the prism of Los Angeles’ controversial September 2006 “Safer Cities” initiative, a $6 million campaign launched under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Bratton in which 50 new dedicated police officers were given new mandates for enforcement without the promised expansion of social services.

Lost Angels has its roots in 2009’s The Soloist, which told the true story of a homeless musician with Julliard training. As the second unit director on that film, Napper, like many others involved with the project, was charmed and affected by the many homeless people who auditioned for parts as extras in the movie, which was shot on location in downtown Los Angeles. That personal connection is evident throughout the deeply humanistic Lost Angels, shot over three years ago over the course of almost six months.

Both in its focus on those on the margins of society and its frequently artful blend of direct-address interviews and landscape footage, Lost Angels recalls Interview Project, a 2009 web series executive produced by David Lynch. Interviewees like UCLA law professor Gary Blasi and others provide an articulate (and much more traditional) academic assessment of the different causes of this social blight. However, it’s the Skid Row residents themselves — like transgendered, self-described “freak” Bam Bam, dedicated street sweeper OG, and stray cat lover Lee Anne and her protector and fiancé KK (both above) — whose faces and stories will stick with you.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Lost Angels comes to DVD via Cinema Libre, presented in widescreen with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Bonus features consist of the movie’s trailer, a gallery of photos of some of its subjects, and an audio commentary track from director Napper. To purchase the DVD, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

The Company You Keep

Film Reviews


The Company You Keep, Robert Redford‘s ninth film as a director, is about secrets, principles and the melting value of absolutes. In dramatizing the present-day, assumed-identity circumstances of a group of former anti-Vietnam War radicals who in real life in the 1960s and ’70s advocated the overthrow of the United States government, it offers up a decidedly American story of graying moral certitude to match graying temples. If that sounds interesting, in a certain stage-crafted throwback fashion, it is. If that also sounds like it has the potential to be overly schematic, and turn into a parade of Notable Faces, well… it is that as well.



Redford stars in the film too, as public interest lawyer Jim Grant, a recently widowed single father in upstate New York who finds his life of quiet, ordered domesticity upset when Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a former radical fugitive having lived for decades as a housewife and mother, is arrested just prior to planning to turn herself in. With a strident federal agent (Terrence Howard) looking to shake the cold-case trees and roust old colleagues of Sharon’s who are still wanted on a murder charge for an act of protest gone wrong, Jim rightly senses his past may be about to catch up with him. Stashing his daughter with his brother Daniel (Chris Cooper), Jim flees.

Meanwhile, beaten to the initial story scoop, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), a brash young newspaper reporter eager to make a name for himself, starts plumbing his own set of contacts and digging into Grant’s past, which in turn unwittingly abets the FBI’s investigation. Working a scattered network of his old Weather Underground comrades (including Nick Nolte and Richard Jenkins), Jim tries to track down old girlfriend Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), whom he believes will be able to exonerate him personally, and help him keep his daughter.

In collapsing the disparate viewpoints of a lot of different aging radicals and battered idealists into a streamlined dramatic vehicle, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, working from the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon, crafts a number of solid, morally inquisitive exchanges. There’s a real push and pull here; tough, honest questions are asked (where does complicity end, for instance, and can good acts outweigh a past transgression?), for which there are frequently no easy, pat answers.

The film’s framing device works a bit less successfully, though, as person after person who has no particular compelling reason to talk openly or honestly to Ben continues to do so. LaBeouf has a squirrelly persistence that tracks well with Ben’s indefatigability. It’s just that parties who’ve kept secrets for decades seem somehow checkmated by a cocky assurance and a couple crackerjack investigative moves.

The procession of recognizable actors and actresses — almost all dialed in, and punching out smart dialogue that defends their life choices — is what gives Redford’s movie its hold. There’s a lot to like here, but at the same time some performers are given so little to do that a longer treatment, perhaps even on stage, often feels like it would be a better servicing of the same material. Abdicating, especially in its conclusion, any cathartic punch of shown change, The Company You Keep spins a tale about heavy, universal issues — the weight of guilt, the shadows of regret and the shelf life of swallowed confidence. Would that all its pieces just fit together a little more precisely. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 125 minutes)