Terribly stupid, totally fun.

I needed a laugh when I saw This Means War. And I got it. Terribly stupid, but totally fun. Also: Tom Hardy.

I broke my rule last week. I read a review of This Means War before I saw it. I only read one: Roger Ebert’s vicious pan of the film. While I’ve not always shared Ebert’s taste, I have developed a deep affection for him as a champion of independent movies, liberal politics, and, after cancer surgery left him without the ability to speak, how to live with a disability with integrity.

So I was rather dismayed at the tone he took in his review of This Means War,which not only attacked Reese Witherspoon for not being a sexpot and therefore absurd as a woman that Chris Pine and Tom Hardy would go to war over, but also blasted the relationship between best friends Pine and Hardy, who do everything together and adore each other like brothers. “Because surely they’re gay,” Ebert writes.

If only. I’d love Tom Hardy to play gay. With me. But there’s nothing gay about Tuck (Hardy) and FDR (Pine) and their friendship unless you believe, like so many adolescent homophobes seem to, that any vague display of affection between two men must mean they’re sleeping together.

I saw the film in a theater full of young straight guys and they seemed to love the movie. Partly, I’m sure, because of the competition between Tuck and FDR, and partly because it’s very, very funny.

This isn’t to say that This Means War is a brilliant film. It is absurd; the plot requires more than your average suspension of disbelief. Tuck and FDR are twoCIA agents who are grounded after turning a covert mission in Hong Kong into a frenzied gunfight that ends with the brother of their target falling from a skyscraper. Instead of doing their desk jobs, they both start dating Lauren, who doesn’t know they are CIA agents or that they know each other. As the men compete for her affections, they devote more and more CIA resources to tracking and sabotaging each other. And then the target of the Hong Kong fiasco shows up to take revenge. Insanity ensues.

As silly as it is, I found This Means War very funny and very entertaining. McG paces the comedy and the action equally well, but he also has Reese Witherspoon, something like a cross between late ’80s Meg Ryan and mid ’60s Doris Day. Tom Hardy, who is distractingly sexy, oozes charm and winking humor. Chris Pine, who has a distractingly large forehead, pulls off FDR just fine, but I would rather the role had been cast with someone a bit less safe, a little more dangerous. I doubt a little more edge would have pleased Ebert; he just hated it, and possibly for all of the wrong reasons.

This Means War
Directed by McG
Written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hardy, Chris Pine and Chelsea Handler
Rated PG-13

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Some kids shouldn’t have powers

I totes loved Chronicle. Here’s my review, which can also be found here.

A few weeks ago, I watched Dane DeHaan, one of the stars of the new teens-with-superpowers movie Chronicle, answering questions at a press conference about what made Chronicle different from other “found footage” movies. He claimed that the difference was that every shot of film – every spliced together piece of camcorder shots, close circuit clips and news coverage – propelled the story. I’m not sure how this is different from Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and Paranormal Activity, since all of those films, the greats of the genre, have pretty clear and propulsive stories. Isn’t it all in the editing? And isn’t it just carefully crafted and constructed footage made to look “found?” Chronicle doesn’t reinvent the wheel. But it does make the wheel shiny and new. Unlike the three movies mentioned above, Chronicle is not just good sci-fi action with smart special effects; it’s a character-driven drama. At times, it’s even moving.

Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is an awkward, easily bullied senior in high school. His drunken father beats him, and his mother is dying of what seems to be emphysema. Andrew’s cool, philosophically minded cousin Matt (Alex Russell) drives him to school every morning and is his only friend. Matt advises Andrew to stop bringing his camera everywhere he goes, because it’s “weird.” And as one cheerleader says, asking him to stop filming the cheerleading practice, “It’s creepy.”

But Andrew doesn’t relent, even bringing his camera to a rave. This is convenient when the big man on campus, Steve (Michael B. Jordan), comes looking for Andrew to film a strange discovery he and Matt had made in the woods. It’s a big hole, and it looks to have been created by an asteroid of some sort. The three boys descend down into hole and find a giant glowing crystal-like thing. The next thing we know, they all have telekinetic abilities.

As they learn to control and hone their powers, Matt and Steve focus on having fun, but Andrew’s home life and his history of being bullied, of being a social outcast, make his goals and his interpretation of what these powers mean more layered, problematic and ultimately sinister.

While much of the film’s edge can be attributed to the scrappy, hand-held and sometimes telekinetically-held found footage, and to Dane DeHaan’s fiercely angry and emotional Andrew, director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis have constructed a thrilling exploration of adolescent angst through fantastical situations. The dialogue rings true; these teenagers sound like teenagers, even when Matt is quoting Jung and Schopenhauer. And when the action starts, it is quick and exciting and terrifying.

Chronicle
Directed by Josh Trank
Written by Max Landis
Starring Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell and Michael B. Jordan
At your local multiplex
Rated PG-13

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I love it when Streep is Streepy

It wasn’t even my lead review the week I wrote about The Irony Lady, but it ended up being the cover story for LGBT Weekly. Ha.

The buzz on The Iron Lady has been that Meryl Streep is amazing as Margaret Thatcher and the movie isn’t very good. Since I don’t read reviews before I write mine, I’m not sure why the buzz isn’t that Streep is amazing and the movie is excellent. Because I loved it. Told in flashbacks from the perspective of an elderly Thatcher heading into the dementia from which she now suffers, The Iron Lady is in some ways a typical biopic; we see her go from an eager and brilliant daughter of a grocer to a prickly and ambitious member of parliament to become, finally, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century – the century’s most powerful woman.

True, the film isn’t perfect. It is top-heavy with Thatcher’s elderly doddering, and at times I felt that Streep was perhaps too funny, that Jim Broadbent, as Mr. Thatcher, was too silly. And worse, I was worried that I was developing a deep fondness for someone whom my liberal heart wants me to loathe. But by the end of the film, I found it to be balanced; Thatcher’s downfall in 1990 is depicted as deserving, and her flaws as a mother and wife are never hidden.

But director Phyllida Lloyd and the brilliant screenwriter Abi Morgan do what Clint Eastwood failed to do in J. Edgar. They didn’t make a dull history lesson; they created something artful, inventive, intriguing, wry and entertaining. Much – but not all – of this is because Streep gives a performance as towering as any in her career. There isn’t an emotion that she does not nail, and, of course, her accent, delivery and body are more than imitations of Thatcher. Streep’s performance is funnier, bolder and more moving than anything one could get from documentary footage.

The Iron Lady
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Written by Abi Morgan
Starring Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent
At your local multiplex

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Close to the vest

I’ve long had a weird obsession with Glenn Close. Albert Nobbs is the best work she’s done on film in 20 years. Here’s my review, also found here.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that 2011 was a great year for queer cinema because of Heartbeats, Weekend, and most recently Pariah. And there’s a fourth film, which is now just opening in San Diego:Albert Nobbs, a period drama about what we would now call transgenderism starring Glenn Close in her best performance in nearly a quarter century. Close not only stars in the film, reprising a role she performed Off-Broadway in 1982, but she also co-wrote the script, the original song and she produced the movie. If you’re trying to see all of the Oscar bait movies before the big show in March, Albert Nobbs should be at the top of your list.

In Victorian London, the titular character (Close) is a fastidious, formal, and, according to those who know him, quite odd butler in a hotel. No one Albert works with is aware that he is actually a woman who straps down her breasts and never appears remotely undressed in front of another person. Albert is not a wink-wink man pretending to be a woman, à la Yentl or Victor/Victoria. When the one person who knows what he is hiding asks his “real” name, he says, “Albert.”

Albert is who he is, and the problem is that he is both lonely and trapped by his secret. Then he meets Hubert Page (McTeer, brilliantly wise and tough), a house painter who is hired to do some work around the hotel. When Albert is told that Hubert needs to sleep in Albert’s room, Albert is terrified. And rightfully: Hubert sees Albert undressing. But Hubert, it turns out, has the same secret. Except that Hubert is successfully living as a married man, working for himself, and is happy. Albert sees hope and possibility and tries to do what Hubert has, and key to this is wooing a maid in the hotel, the young and shallow Helen (Mia Wasikowska).

The smart script is without cliché or pedantic explanations of gender, and it is economically handled by the director Rodrigo Garcia. My only qualm is that it is perhaps too tidy, but it is a Victorian tragedy, and its tidiness fulfills its genre expectations without being either gothic or exploitative.

However, the script and the direction are easy not to even notice because Close’s performance is so entrancing. In the 1980s, when only Meryl Streep rivaled her as the great American actress, Close was often so strong and haughty as to be called mannish. This time, playing a woman who is a man, Close uses that masculinity even more skillfully, almost like a hot potato: It’s there, it’s not – will he be found out? But Albert is not only trying to convince the world that he is who he wants Albert to be. He is also nervous, amused, eager and it seems, in love.

MOVIE REVIEW
Albert Nobbs
Directed by Rodrigo Garcia
Written by Glenn Close and John Banville
Starring Glenn Close, Janet McTeer and Mia Wasikowska
Rated R
At Landmark Hillcrest

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Maudlin & Infuriating

This will run next week in LGBT Weekly, but I just had to get it up today.

About ten minutes after the end of maudlin 9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I was standing outside the theater, feeling the tears drying on my face and the crying jags subside, and I got angry. I asked my friend who I now feel guilty for bringing along, “Why in the world was it necessary to make this movie?” You can ask that question about all sorts of terrible movies, and usually the answer is “to make money.” The Transformers franchise and just about every Adam Sandler vehicle exist simply as methods to earn cash, to make profits, to please shareholders of multinational conglomerates. But movies like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close have loftier goals. Sure, everyone involved is making money and wants to make as much as possible, but directors like Stephen Daldry and producers like Scott Rudin value prestige and artistic excellence as much if not more than their bank accounts. Unfortunately and bizarrely, none of these laudable goals are met or even visible in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which is a cruel and blunt assault on the audience’s basest emotions. I didn’t think I would ever see a movie more offensive than Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni’s cynically manipulative slapstick comedy about the Holocaust. But I have.

The plot is admittedly somewhat ingenious. Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is a precocious, oddly articulate 9-year-old boy who probably has Asperger’s Syndrome, a kind of autism. His father Thomas (Tom Hanks) was killed on 9/11; he was on the 106th floor of one of the towers and probably was one of the jumpers. Oskar’s mother Linda (Sandra Bullock, as good as she’s ever been) is beside herself with grief and depression. About a year after Thomas’s death, Oskar is rummaging through his father’s closet and finds a key in an envelope at the bottom of a vase; on the envelope is written “Black.” Believing that this is a message from his father, part of one the elaborate adventures of investigation that the two shared, Oskar is determined to find what the key opens. This involves talking to everyone with the last name Black in New York City and trying hundreds and hundreds of locks. It is only through this quest that this analytical, emotionally destroyed little boy can find meaning in what happened on “the worst day.” Eventually, Oskar is joined by the mute old man (Max Von Sydow, moving and Chaplinesque) renting a room from Oskar’s grandmother.

Since it is clear to the old man and to the audience that this quest is going nowhere, watching Oskar run around the city, desperately searching for a grand meaning to 9/11 seemed sadistic to me. That Oskar is at times adorable, but is also at times dreadfully mean, makes this even more problematic and discomfiting. But the biggest problem is how Daldry zeroes in the grief of this boy and his poor mother; I felt as if I was a finger rooting around in a gaping wound. At one point, the old man tells Oskar – via his notepad – to stop playing the answering machine messages Thomas left while the tower was burning. Stop. He can’t take it anymore. The entire audience is crying, and I wanted to scream at the screen just what the old man had written.

Extremely Loud is based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, which was published four years after the September 11th attacks. In addition to a great deal of praise, it earned a great deal of criticism similar to what the film has: that it was sentimental and obvious and attempted to create false and unbelievable profundity. I didn’t read the book; my experience of 9/11 and its aftermath was traumatic enough that descriptions or images of the events sent me into a tizzy of grief and anxiety. However, it took me ten years to write about it, but I have. I can listen to Bruce Springsteen’s brilliant album The Rising now without crying. But I still cannot bear to be asked, “Oh, you lived in New York then? What was it like?” It was awful. Awful. Why any filmmaker would want to berate an audience with this awfulness or why anyone would want to pay $12 to experience this awfulness is simply beyond my comprehension.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Directed by Stephen Daldry
Written by Eric Roth
Starring Thomas Horn, Sandra Bullock, Max Von Sydow
Rated PG-13
Opens January 20 in San Diego
At your local multiplex

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