(Four) Seasonal affective disorder

JB

A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with one of my best friends, a musical theater composer who has impeccable and refined taste. I had mentioned that I was going to review the Jersey Boys movie and he told me that when he saw the stage musical, it was so thrilling, “I wanted to throw my panties on the stage.” The musical was directed by the brilliant Des McAnuff, who also directed The Who’s Tommy and was the artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse when Jersey Boys premiered there in 2004. I never saw it on stage, but I take my friend’s word for it that the Four Seasons jukebox musical deserved the adulation and the four Tony Awards. I have to take his word because as a film, as directed by Clint Eastwood, Jersey Boys is nostalgic pabulum. Based on the film, it was hard for me even to understand why anyone would care so much about the Four Seasons, who are one of the most successful musical acts of all time, having sold more than 100 million records.

The film is a typical musical biopic, tracing the rise, peak, fall, and redemption of the band. It is narrated by the four original members of the band in succession. First is Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), an ambitious New Jersey tough guy who claims the only way to get out of the neighborhood is join the army and probably die, join the mafia and probably die, or get famous, like Frank Sinatra. He did the latter two, and it’s his mob connections that help propel the band he conceived, played bass, and arranged vocals for onto the charts. Much of that has to do with putting his younger, unsure friend Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young) on lead vocals. Frankie, getting an ego, changes his last name to Valli before they meet the serious, wise, and absurdly talented Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), the second narrator, who wrote or co-wrote all of the band’s hits. They meet Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle), a flamboyant producer, and with his help, release three number one hits in a row: “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and “Walk Like a Man.”

While this is happening, the band starts fighting, partly because Tommy resents Frankie and Bob’s talent and closeness and but also because Tommy’s financial and managerial control of the band veers between incompetent and criminal. Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) takes over narration as the band falls apart because of Tommy’s ill-advised dealings with a loan shark and his accrual of $500,000 in back taxes. Finally, after Nick quits, Tommy is kicked out of the band, Bob decides only to work in the studio, Frankie is left alone on stage, earning money to pay back the band’s debt and trying to repair relations with the family he left at home while he was on the road. Somehow, there is a redemption of sorts when Frankie sings “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which would have been a more interesting sequence if the true story of its inspiration was told: Bob Crewe came up with the lyrics while staring at his sleeping young male lover.

There’s certainly enough drama and certainly enough good songs for a stellar musical, but Clint Eastwood, known best for his no-nonsense naturalism, is a strange choice to make it. He does well with the 1950s New Jersey organized crime sections, but his staging of the songs is so, well, realistic that there’s little thrill to them. It’s felt as if I was just watching four guys singing. As usual with his movies, Jersey Boys has impeccable art direction, cinematography, and editing, but unlike with Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, or Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood isn’t working with brilliant film actors. (A notable exception is the slyly hilarious Christopher Walken, playing a mafia don.) John Lloyd Young constantly over-expresses his emotions, as if he were still on stage, and Vincent Piazza seems to be doing a poor imitation of Ray Liotta from Goodfellas. Michael Lomenda and Mike Doyle provide comic relief, but it’s weirdly cheesy, like much of the film. Worst of all, at the end of the film, when the band reunites for their induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, the aging make-up is gasp-worthy terrible. They’re all supposed to be in their fifties, and they look like corpses. Who’d throw their panties at that?

Jersey Boys
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice
Starring John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, and Erich Bergen
Inexplicably rated R
At your local multiplex

 

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Dude, don’t say, “Dude, you’re a fag.”

22-jump-streetWhen I reviewed 21 Jump Street two years ago, I praised the broad comedy about cops going undercover in high school for being very funny. But I was unnerved by how much of the humor was firmly based in homophobia. Officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are such good friends that they had to mock gay sex to make their friendship not seem too close, or inappropriately gay. I wrote that “an abnormally high – even for a vulgar, hard R comedy – percentage of the jokes in 21 Jump Street involve fear of gay sex. While Schmidt and Jenko state clearly that they don’t dislike gay people, their and the film’s extensive use of gay sexuality as something to mock and fear belies a homophobic subtext that isn’t very funny at all. The film is ultimately about male friendship, and it’s sad that the filmmakers, felt the need to basically scream ‘no homo!’ throughout the movie to make such a theme palatable to their target audience.” The movie was a big enough hit to garner a sequel, and I was worried that 22 Jump Street, in which our heroes go undercover in college, would continue the perpetuation of my sexuality as one big joke.

I was particularly concerned when Jonah Hill – who is one of the film’s stars, producers, and writers – was caught on tape by TMZ calling a paparazzo a “faggot.” However, Hill’s swift and heartfelt apology was, as celebrity apologies go, rather amazing. He seems to understand how homophobic language works: “I said the most hurtful word I could think of at that moment and, you know, I didn’t mean this in the sense of the word…I didn’t mean it in a homophobic way. And I think that doesn’t matter, you know? How you mean things doesn’t matter. Words have weight and meaning and the word I chose was grotesque and no one deserves to say and hear words like that.” It was hard to reconcile this apology with 21 Jump Street’s gay panic, and it made me wonder whether the criticism of the film had gotten to him. Maybe 22 Jump Street would be different.

And it is. In a way. 22 Jump Street is, lucky for the gays, not a two-hour mockery of gay sex. At one point, Jenko even rages at one of the bad guys for calling him what Hill called the paparazzo: “In 2014, you can’t say the word ‘faggot’!” However, 22 Jump Street is unfortunately a two-hour mockery of gay love. There are long bits focused on how Jenko and Schmidt’s fights seem like those of lovers; one is about how Jenko’s desire to investigate another man is like asking to be able to see other people and another is done in the office of a therapist who thinks they’re lovers. This mockery is not particularly cruel, and the film, like its predecessor, is a celebration of male friendship, even if that friendship seems a bit gay. It’s fumbling towards an enlightened view of masculinity, but in 2014, “even if” is unnecessary and retrograde.

All of that said, the 22 Jump Street is funny. In addition to a bunch of silly but laugh-worthy lines about sequels having bloated budgets and a dearth of ideas, both Hill and Tatum get to show off their ever-increasing movie starshine. Hill, who has now been nominated for two Oscars, bases much of his comedy on the humiliation of the needy nerd, and Schmidt is a nice encapsulation of a Hill character. (His parotic take on slam poetry is the best scene in the film.) When I saw 21 Jump Street, I thought casting Tatum as dumb jock Jenko perfect for his limited skills, but since then, I’ve come to realize he does dumb and pretty as Marilyn Monroe did – with great and underappreciated skill. Tatum is as good at being mentally clueless and physically flawless as Hill is at being schlubby and smart. They are perfect foils for each other. Maybe 23 Jump Street will jettison the homophobia and their comic pairing will become less cynical and daring. Or better, it will focus on how Schmidt and Jenko have been in love with each other the whole time. That would make all of this worthwhile.

22 Jump Street
Directed by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Written by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman
Starring Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, and Ice Cube

Rated R

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Dying young

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I am not ashamed to say that I cry easily. I can dissolve into tears while listening to an NPR story about school reform, a play about climate change, or while watching a bad TV show kill off a character that I only kind of liked. Yes, tears streamed down my face during that Glee episode about Finn’s death. I don’t get mad when I cry during a bad movie – at Michael Keaton’s Ghost for kids, Jack Frost, for example — because I know that the movie isn’t doing any work, but rather some image or line or situation is triggering an old emotion. However, I do appreciate it when the work justifies my emotional outburst, when screenwriters construct characters that deserve both my love and sadness and when directors resist the temptation of easy sentimentality and instead attempt profound pathos. The Fault in Our Stars, the hugely successful tearjerker starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, earned my tears, even if the filmmakers took a few shortcuts to get them.

Unless you’ve managed to ignore all of the advertising and hype surrounding the movie, you know that The Fault in Our Stars is a story about kids with cancer. The narrator is teen-aged girl with wry wit and ponderous emotions named Hazel, who is played by the preternaturally gifted Shailene Woodley. At 13, Hazel had thyroid cancer that spread to her lungs. While the tumors are gone by the time the story begins, her lungs are still damaged, and she must cart around a tank that pushes oxygen through tubes into her nose. Her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) are concerned that she spends too much time alone and moping, so they encourage her to join a support group for teens with cancer. Though she is resistant, she goes and meets a tall, cocky, very sardonic boy who’d had much of his right leg amputated when he’d had “a touch of cancer” the year before. Augustus is played with young John Cusack charm and River Phoenix depth by Ansel Elgort, who played Woodley’s on screen brother in Divergent.

They start spending a great deal of time together, with Augustus courting a wary Hazel and them bonding over their love for a novel about a young girl with cancer written by a now reclusive man in Amsterdam. When Augustus finds out that Hazel used her Genie wish – a wish given to kids with cancer, like those from the Make a Wish Foundation – to go to Disneyworld when she was 13, he decides to use his wish to go to Amsterdam with Hazel and meet the reclusive writer and find of what happened to the characters in the book they love. When Hazel ends up in the hospital, she dumps Augustus because she doesn’t want to hurt him. Despite that and despite the difficulties in traveling with barely functioning lungs, Augustus, Hazel, and Hazel’s protective, insanely understanding mother go to Amsterdam. The writer is not who they imagined, and as played by a typically unhinged Willem Dafoe, he is the catalyst for two major changes in Hazel and Augustus’s relationship.

I won’t reveal what happens in the next 30 minutes of the film, but suffice it to say that if you have a heart, you will cry. Director Josh Boone does overuse several tropes to egg on our emotions, including somewhat treacly music and dreamy montages of happy memories. But both Hazel and Augustus eschew the trappings of tragedy, with Hazel mocking cancer story genre conventions in her narration and Augustus making numerous jokes about cancer, often at his own expense. Hazel and Augustus are not raging against the dying of the light, as most characters in these sorts of stories do. Rather, they ponder the meaning of their lives and how they will be remembered while they stumble through frustration, illness, grief, fear, and adolescence. The surprisingly philosophical and yet utterly believable dialogue comes from Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber adapting John Green’s novel, but it is ultimately the delivery of the lines with phenomenal empathy and naturalism by Woodley and Elgort that set off my tears.

The Fault in Our Stars
Directed by Josh Boone
Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
Starring Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, and Willem Dafoe
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

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The past is prologue

JLaw

The X-Men storyline called “Days of Future Past” appeared in issues 141 and 142 of The Uncanny X-Men in January and February, 1980. I first read it in mid-1980s when I was 12 or so and had just discovered the comic about outcast mutant superheroes. The story has haunted me ever since. It is set in horrifying dystopian future of 2013, when giant robots called the Sentinels have started a world war after slaughtering or enslaving all the mutants they can find. Among the few remaining are a handful of aging X-Men and their progeny. Kitty Pryde, who in 1980 is the newest and youngest of the X-Men at 13, is one of the survivors and she and Rachel Summers, the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey, have a daring plan to fix the world. They are going to send Kitty’s consciousness back to her 1980 body and convince the other X-Men to stop the assassination of anti-mutant demagogue Senator Robert Kelly, whose death at hands of shape-shifting Mystique and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants justifies the anti-mutant hysteria and leads to the building of the Sentinels. “Days of Future Past,” as created by writer Chis Claremont and artist John Byrne, inarguably the greatest X-Men storytellers, was extraordinarily dark and full of death and existential dread, which was almost unheard of in mainstream comics at the time.

“Days of Future Past” is considered one of the most influential narratives in not just comics but science fiction in general, and it was adapted twice for animated X-Men televisions in the 1990s, and it is the basis for Bryan Singer’s latest X-Men movie, his third and the franchise’s seventh since 2000. While “Days of Future Past” is as perfect a story as any in comics history, Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg drastically changed it for their film, partly because the Singer had decided (and was inexplicably allowed) to recreate and remythologize the X-Men for the first film, X-Men, back in 2000. In the latest film, it is franchise star Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who is sent back, and this time it is to 1973, when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), by herself, is going to kill Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of the Sentinels.

Wolverine is sent by Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who somehow has developed the super-psychic powers needed for the time shift. He is tasked with convincing a young and depressed version of Professor X (James McAvoy), the Beast (Nicholas Hoult), and a superfast juvenile delinquent named Peter (better known as Quicksilver, played Evan Peters) to break young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) out of prison and stop Mystique, who at a younger age was the Professor’s adopted sister and Magneto’s lover. Meanwhile, in the future, the surviving X-Men, including Storm (Halle Berry), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Bishop (Omar Sy), must battle the Sentinels to protect the Kitty and Wolverine’s entranced body.

If it sounds a bit overstuffed with superheroes, it certainly is, but Singer and Kinberg manage it well by making sure that only the drama in 1973 has any emotional heft, and giving the future’s characters barely any lines. (Oscar-winner Berry, for instance, is fifth billed and speaks maybe four times. Anna Paquin, another Oscar-winner, is seventh billed and doesn’t even speak during her one-second appearance, as her one real scene was cut from the film. No wonder the movie cost $200 million to make) McAvoy’s Professor X, who must find a way to escape wallowing in self-pity to save the world and mutankind, is the only character with a believable arc, since Fassbender’s Magneto changes his mind for unwritten and perplexing reasons, Mystique’s motivation never wavers, and Wolverine is always the same: kick ass, save the world, smoke a cigar, have mournful thoughts about Jean Grey.

Despite the thinness of the characters and the continued bastardization of the X-Men’s best stories, X-Men: Days of Future Past is still a pretty great action film, and undoubtedly the best of the franchise. Singer and Kinberg keep the adrenalin pumping from the first scene and only let up for scenes of exposition that are probably only too short for film critics. The massive superhero battles are choreographed well, and the production design, of both the 1970s and the dystopia, is impeccable. I have a hard time cheering for Singer, who is embroiled in a sexual assault lawsuit that few in gay Hollywood find remotely surprising, but X-Men: Days of Future Past is a triumph for him, his best film since his classic The Usual Suspects.

X-Men: Days of Future Past
Directed by Brian Singer
Written by Simon Kinberg
Starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, and Michael Fassbender
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex
Unnecessarily in 3-D

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Beneficent

Angelina-Jolie-as-Maleficent1-1024x682

A few times in these pages I’ve criticized the marketing departments of film studios for advertising films as the opposite of what they really are. There was 50/50, a movie about cancer that was sold as a comedy because Seth Rogan is in it and says a few funny things. August: Osage County was marketed as a dramatic comedy; it’s a tragedy that is occasionally funny and not always deliberately so. Those are relatively low budget bait-and-switches, however. I think the advertising campaign for expensive Disney blockbuster Maleficent is the biggest lie in quite some time. The billboards have all featured Angelina Jolie dressed as one of the most iconic screen villains of the last century – the evil fairy Maleficent from Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty – and the commercials and trailers feature her sneering, battling armored armies, swooping through the sky with creepy wings. And Jolie is perfectly cast as an evil demoness. Her beauty is otherworldly, and her most famous roles, from her Oscar win as the dangerously crazy Lisa in Girl, Interrupted to the assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, are fierce, violent antiheroes. Maleficent was sold to us as Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the villain, with Jolie vamping about and camping it up. It’s not: It’s a complete rewrite of the fairy tale, in which our villain becomes the hero.

If you have fond childhood memories of Sleeping Beauty, forget them. In Maleficent, the story is structured by two neighboring kingdoms, one human ruled by a nasty king, the other peaceful and communal full of happy, magical creatures. One day, in the latter, a teen boy is caught trying to steal a jewel from the fairy kingdom, and a winged and horned teen girl save him from the anger of some tree creatures. The girl is Maleficent, and the boy is Stefan. They fall into a teen love before Stefan grows up to become an ambitious, vicious lapdog (crazy-eyed Sharlto Copley) to the king. One day, the king inexplicably decides to invade the fairy kingdom. Maleficent is now an adult and the protector of the realm. She and the tree warriors handily beat back the human army.

The king says that anyone who defeats her will be made his successor, so Stefan rekindles his romance with Maleficent as a trick. He drugs her and cuts off her wings and is made king. She’d not pleased and in her anger becomes, for about 20 minutes, the villain we were promised. She forcefully becomes queen of the other fairies and then, per Sleeping Beauty, curses Stefan’s baby daughter Aurora (an uncharacteristically vapid Elle Fanning): she will be pricked by a spindle on her 16th birthday and fall into a sleep that she can only be woken from by the kiss of true love. Stefan has three good fairies hide Aurora in the forest, but Maleficent and her werecrow henchman Diaval (Sam Riley) find them immediately.

And here’s where it all goes sideways. Spoiler: While spying on Aurora, Maleficent becomes enamored with the beautiful, sweet girl. She tries and fails to remove her own curse, and the final third of the film is a reformed Maleficent trying to save Aurora while battling the vengeful forces of Stefan. The plot hole is gaping here. If Maleficent just told Stefan she was trying to save his daughter from the curse, the whole final confrontation would have been moot.

I expected a great deal more from screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who also wrote the impeccable Beauty & the Beast and problematically racist but perfectly structured Lion King. Jolie only has a few snarky lines, and nothing really for even a low-rent drag queen to work with. I appreciate the feminist reconstruction of the story, making the central bond about mothering and sisterhood and not about a mythically perfect prince. But this was done much better in Brave and Frozen, and not at the expense of drama. Director Robert Stromberg, who won Oscars for the production design of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, does a passable job with the action and a brilliant job with the visuals, even if the fairy kingdom does look a little too much like a magical Pandora.

Maleficent
Directed by Robert Stromberg
Written by Linda Woolverton
Starring Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, and Sharlto Copley
Rated PG
At your local multiplex
Unnecessarily in 3D

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