Pulped Prisoners

maxresdefaultAbout half way through Denis Villeneuve’s haunting, absorbing, and morally problematic Prisoners, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are screaming at each other. Keller is insisting that he knows that Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the man who has kidnapped and hidden his and Franklin’s young daughters; Franklin, in tears, keeps saying, “You don’t know!” He’s in tears because Keller has kidnapped Alex and is torturing him, and Franklin has reluctantly helped. (This isn’t much of a spoiler because the previews for the film tell you all of this, more or less.) This scene is intense and loud and both Howard and Jackman are convincingly falling apart, but I couldn’t help but agree with Fanklin. Keller is wrong; his obsession with Alex is based on an impotent rage and only a shred of evidence that Alex, who has an intellectual abilities of a 10-year-old, took his daughter. As Keller becomes more violent and more sure of himself, I found him less and less sympathetic and more and more hopeful that Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) would catch Keller before he finds Keller and Franklin’s daughters. It’s a strange, if fascinating experience to cheer against the film’s hero. Continue…

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De Niro’s Self-Parody

family13f-5-webAfter seeing Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook last year, I was hopeful that he had turned a corner. Once considered the great actor of his generation, for almost twenty years, he had been mostly phoning it in. But in Silver Linings Playbook, he worked his ass off. He was subtle, sweet, sympathetic, and I immediately thought he would get attention from awards at the end of the year; he did, and was nominated for an Oscar for the seventh time. But then I saw The Family, and he had returned to self-parody. And I don’t mean that he’s happy to be typecast as an Italian-American tough guy and just recreate expressions and noises from Raging Bull or The Godfather, Part II, though he’s done this a couple dozen times.

In Luc Besson’s new mob comedy The Family, he plays Giovanni Manzoni, a vicious mobster in witness protection in Normandy, France, who passes himself off as writer. In comic irony, the locals think Gio is an intellectual of some sort, and they ask him to discuss The Harder They Come at the local film society. The movie turns out to be Goodfellas, one of De Niro’s greatest roles, and Gio earns rapturous applause after telling the crowd all about mob life in the United States. This is supposed to be moment of meta-comedy, but it was more successful at reminding me not only how derivative The Family was, but also how far De Niro has fallen. Continue…

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Mr. Manly Action Star

RIDDICK-superJumboA few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who has been working at a large Hollywood studio. The conversation came around to closeted actors and actresses, and my friend repeated what another friend told her, “Vin Diesel? Oh, she a lady.” I laughed, not because it would be funny if Diesel were gay and closeted, but rather that he’s done something to lead to such a camp pronouncement. His screen persona is solidly and profoundly macho, complete with roided muscles and a deep voice that rarely utters any words with more the one syllable, and if it turned out that he was actually a big old queen, well that’s some good irony. Maybe he is a great actor, at least in one role: manly action star. Maybe that character, Mr. Manly Action Star, is a bad actor. Maybe he’s not only a terrible actor, but also a retrograde chauvinist. Maybe Mr. Manly Action Star is just an overcompensation for being a self-hating homosexual. Continue…

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Forest Whitaker Gump

the-butler-oprah-winfrey_612x380One of the problems with starting a movie with the words “Inspired by a true story” written on the screen is that most people will focus on “true story” and not on “inspired by.” That phrase opens Lee Daniels’ The Butler — which I will refer to as The Butler from now on both because the stupid copyright fight that forced Daniels’s name onto the film is stupid and also because the editor in me is appalled that they used Daniels’ and not Daniels’s – and it began to bother me about ten minutes into the film, when the first series of utterly absurd plot developments occurred: In 1926, on a cotton farm in Georgia, the boy who will become the butler for six presidents watches his mother (randomly Mariah Carey) dragged into a shed where she’s raped and then his father shot in the head for protesting. In some vague form of sympathy, but not guilt, the murderer’s grandmother (randomly Vanessa Redgrave) tells the boy to stop crying before informing him she’s going to teach him how to become a “house nigger.”

And I muttered in my seat, “Really? All in one hour?” Obviously, this could have happened; worse has and will happen. But it strained credibility for me. As it should have. Despite the word “true,” and the publicity story that the film is actually about the black butler who served six presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, almost nothing in the film is true, except that a black butler served six presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. The real man, Eugene Allen, must not have had as interesting a life as his work history might indicate, so Lee Daniels and his screenwriter Danny Strong have turned him in Cecil Gaines, who is basically the black Forrest Gump, witnessing just about every single event of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike Forrest Gump, however, The Butler is not meant to be a fable, nor is it well directed and certainly not well written. The Butler is a nicely acted and enormously earnest movie about civil rights, honor, duty, and the value of hard work. It’s also obvious, bombastic, and, occasionally, unintentionally funny. Continue…

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A lady of the canyons

The-Canyons-Lindsay-Lohan-James-Deen3To say the least, it’s rare that a movie with a budget of $250,000 becomes the subject of a 7,600 words article in The New York Times Magazine. It makes a little more sense, when you know that The Canyons was directed by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directed American Gigolo and Affliction. More sense when you know the movie, a psychological sex thriller about LA bottom feeders, was written by Bret Easton Ellis, the gay novelist who gave us Less Than Zero and the infamous American Psycho and whose obnoxious Twitter feed sends many people into fits of rage. And they cast the troubled and troubling Lindsay Lohan and the porn superstar James Deen as their leads. Among the unsurprising revelations was that Lohan was incredibly difficult to work with; among the surprising was Schrader directed a sex scene in the nude to convince her to do the scene without clothes. When the movie was finally released in a handful of theaters and on demand, critics arrived with freshly sharpened knives. Many of the reviews have been savage, even cruel, while a few reviewers, like Variety’s Scott Foundas, gave both Lohan and the film raves. I don’t think it deserves either derision or too much applause. It’s beautifully shot, Lohan is good, but Deen isn’t, and Ellis’s screenplay is limp, lacking insight or taste. Continue…

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