Weekend Films
I have to say, Lionsgate never extended an invitation to see For Colored Girls, even if I was the only one holding out hope for the film as an awards movie for a while there. And Manohla Dargis’ review makes me wish they had… or that I had bothered them about it. I have no idea whether I would agree with Manohla’s take, but as is too often the case, the dismissive reviews in the trades read like outlets all too happy to be dismissive of a passionate effort.
Speaking of which, even though it’s not opening this weekend, I’d like to put my two cents in on Love & Other Drugs, which also got pummeled by critics who, in my opinion, were not really watching the movie they were being shown, but were too busy finding a way to disconnect emotionally from a surprisingly emotional film. It isn’t a Viagra sex comedy. it’s Love Story and Sweet November… combined with a Viagra sex comedy.
I got a very strong feeling that Zwick and Herskovitz were going back to the work that they didn’t quite hit out of the park in adapting Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago as About Last Night. Here, they get a lot of the raunchiness of Mamet, but in combination with a big melodramatic story that is, by its nature, very close to crossing the line into male-unwatchable mush… and they overcome the obstacles. And it’s not, as some would position it, just because we spend a lot of first act time with Anne Hathaway’s naked body splayed across the screen. It’s because of very smart writing and a truly awards-worthy performance by Hathaway. This kind of part has eaten up some really talented actresses over the years and Hathaway just grabs the whole thing by the balls, makes very decisive acting choices, and pulls rabbits out of her hat through the whole movie.
The only reason Love & Other Drugs isn’t a truly great film is the problem of Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who I adored when he was younger and who has me more and more perplexed over time. On paper, he is a great choice. Young, dumb, and full of cum. But he needs to evolve in this story. And while he does okay with the role, you just never get the kind of light out of him that seeps out of Hathaway’s every pore. Ruffalo might have been the right guy, though he is a little older now. It could have been the role of Ryan Reynolds’ career, though we have never seen him quite hit this note. The one who might have turned this film into a classic would have been Michael Fassbender. The role is Jerry Maguire, in many ways. Cruise is now too iconic (and too old) to make it feel real.
I’m not saying this is a perfect film. It’s not. But it is a daring, challenging piece, and deserves to be seriously considered for all of its strengths, as well as the weaknesses. And when I look at Gurus and see that Hathaway has fallen completely off the chart, that’s a shame, because she glides through it with great assurance, no doubt supported by a strong director who helped her push and keep those boundaries.
Anyway… back to this weekend and the movies I have seen…
127 Hours kills. It’s just that simple. It’s like one of those sugar sculptures you see on Food Network in competitions. It can’t possible hold together, it is so precariously on the edge at all times. It’s going to crack. It’s got to shatter. But it holds together and brings you out the other end feeling good about a man’s (figurative) life, death, and resurrection.
ironically, I think that the skill with which Boyle & Co pull this thing off makes it look easier than it was. This is a movie that should be studied in future, especially with an eye to a strong directorial focus and a lot of use of techniques to keep it fresh – in collaboration with James Franco – within that strong idea.
Unless you have severe issues and watching a trapped person for more than an hour will given you a panic attack, I highly recommend this film to everyone, pretty much of all ages over 12. That might seem a little young to some, but has TJ Lavin gotten out of the hospital yet? I think Jackass is a lot of fun. But balance it out. Balance it out.
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is a very solid doc. Somehow, it feels like it would be incomplete without a look at Inside Job as well, in which Spitzer appears as an expert on the economic disaster of the last few years. It lends a balance. Client 9 isn’t, however, just about Spitzer’s spritzer. It is about the politics of taking down this one particular John in a world where this crime is the rule, not the exception. It’s about the hubris of the righteous. It’s about the long slow race that The Bad guys are willing to run to achieve their ends. It’s about all kinds of things.
Alex Gibney is one of our best documentarians. He shows us this again, here, with his skill, style, and meticulous attention to detail. (DP/30 with Gibney on Client 9 is here.)
Due Date is the latest from Todd Phillips, who turned from a director to a walking oeuvre with The Hangover last year. This film stinks of Trains, Planes & Automobiles in the ads, but its soul is much, much darker. And that’s why it works… and that’s why it doesn’t always work.
Essentially, Robert Downey, Jr plays a prick. His prickness is allayed by occasional bouts of decency and having Michelle Monaghan as a wife, back home. After all, how bad can he really be if he goes home to the natural sweetness that is Monaghan.
What I found myself wondering about with this character was not about his redemption, but about the weird space he inhabits, not bad enough to be BAD, not a jerk with a heart of gold… but also not a dozen other things he might have been. And my sense was that the interest Phillips and his co-writer had in this character was not making him any clear thing, but keeping him unpredictable and undefinable. Interesting. But even on Downey, who seems unable to fail in recent years, there just is no there there. Even though it was as clear as could be, I never really believed that getting home to his wife, whose due date is Now, was really driving him. I never really believed that holding his child in his arms that first time would change his life very much. I never really cared about this guy for a single second.
And Zach Galifianakis is a bit of a cipher in all his work. He is funny. In many ways, he is Richard Dreyfuss without the energy. But like Downey, he seems a bit like he is in his own movie here and Downey is just coincidental. So much of what he does here is just being the joke, however broad or nonsensical. Get the laugh, be the stooge, move on.
Thing is, the movie does make you laugh. And for that, it deserves credit. And in some ways, it is an experimental comedy, as though Phillips looked at Planes, Trains and said, “Let’s remake it, but let’s see what it looks like without a soul.” That is a daring choice. And with the impending baby and Galifianakis, they do have some soul in there. it doesn’t feel like gag-gag-gag, like something like Starsky & Hutch. But as almost none of the insane adventures really stick to the characters – aside from various kinds of dirt and torn clothing – it really is. And that’s where it gets to be a bit more interesting than, perhaps, it deserves to be.
Doug Liman’s Fair Game is a testament to the relentlessness of some smart liberals. I’m not going to drag it out and I hope to actually talk to Liman in the weeks to come about his process. What I got from this film was a director trying to make a thriller out of a BBC drama. One act of Valerie Plame, superspy, and her unsuspecting husband, Joe, the intellectual. Then she is exposed. Then the marriage suffers, but is reborn in very chatty righteous indignation against those who exposed her.
It’s hard to see pretty women and blown-dried men in nice suburban home with full access to the media as uber-victims. It just is. Yes, a great injustice was done and the law was broken in the vain effort to change the news cycle. It could not have been fun to live through. But walk down any block in New Orleans and you will find more than one significantly more compelling, tragic, dramatic story. So the only way to make a drama about comfortable people who are a little less comfortable because someone did something to them is to find an angle inside of that story that isn’t The Story. In some ways, Liman tried to do that with the first act. But that was only one act. Perhaps this is a story about being an insider and then the small push off of that core. Maybe it;s about media failing to see the importance of something…or seeing it from too personal a perspective. I don’t know. All I know is that the central story here is just not that heartbreaking. This is not to diminish or excuse… but we’re talking movies, not real life. Liman has real skill in upping the ante and making more of something that seem mundane or vice versa, putting a “that’s life” twist onto a real thriller. But this hill was a little too much of a molehill to make into a mountain.
Anyone else think Due Date might underperform? I see boxofficeguru pegs it for $28 million while ComingSoon and boxoffice.com have it over $30M. The Hangover spots had people talking and the movie had such strong buzz prior to its release. I think the Due Date spots are falling flat and the buzz doesn’t seem to be there at all. Is anyone here truly psyched to see it?
Just got back from For Colored Girls. Two things: It’s a pretty good movie. The acting is stellar across the board, which compensates from some of the choppy narrative. Perry’s neat trick is to turn the film into a quasi-musical, with the monologues (presumably from the show…?) serving as ‘musical numbers’. This allows the rest of the film to generally avoid over-the-top melodrama and hysterics. Second of all, there’s no nice way to say this, but the kind of movie this is with the subject matter it contains, it absolutely would be an Oscar front-runner (at least for nominations) if it were a cast of prominent white actresses (think Catherine Keener, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, etc).
Due Date and Megamind (which I don’t think was mentioned in this article, oddly enough) are two films that I wanted to see when I first read about them, but my interest in them has diminished greatly in the weeks just prior to their shared release date. I hadn’t checked out the B.O. predictions yet, and since I’m not paid to predict these things I no longer watch TV commercials. Therefore, I can’t speak much about how hard and well it’s being marketed (aside from web ads). That being said, I think it could hit $30 million, though it will drop off quite a bit in the next couple of weeks.
By the way, when does 127 Hours go wide?
And finally, I find it interesting (and I’m not at all saying this in a bad, condescending, or sarcastic way) that Poland often seems eager to promote (or at least keep an extremely open mind) about certain films that most critics feel don’t warrant the Academy’s attention. And yet, in the same breath, he’ll be cautiously pessimistic toward some films that seem to be getting a lot of love and Oscar hype. I don’t know the man or his history well enough to say that it’s something he does every year, but it seems like I’ve noticed it on various occasions.
Of course, if I worked for a site like this in 2007, I’d be trying to get people to remember and properly appreciate Zodiac as the award season loomed. And I would have been rather vocal in my disappointment when it failed to nab a single Oscar nomination. But then again, I can’t imagine For the Colored Girls or Love and Other Drugs are in the same league as films like Zodiac or TWBB (which I seem to recall him being wary of). Of course, I also haven’t seen them yet, and maybe that’s part of his point, although if the people have actually seen it and still dismiss it I’m not sure anything can be done about that.
Sorry, none of that may make any sense. It’s been a long day and I need to go home now.
I am a big fan of Client 9, perhaps even more than The Inside Job. I see Client 9 as a bit of a Greek Tragedy, about a man who could be on top of the world, made too many enemies (even from the people who should be on his side), made a fatal mistake and fell as the enemies feast on this mistake. And no one helped him in the end.
I think the plan on “127” is Nov 19.
HEY POLAND…
How come there doesn’t seem to be a SINGLE period detail in LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS, a movie that’s ostensibly set in the mid-1990s? The fashions, hair, everything from the trailer look pretty current.
Middle-aged directors (Zwick, George Gallo, Tony Goldwyn) apparently had ZERO awareness of the precise trends and styles during the 90s. That shit is as dated now as disco was in 1995, and can you imagine anyone in 1995 making a movie set in 1977 with ZERO period wardrobe or hair?
Just got in from a (packed to the gils) “Colored Girls” matinee, too, Scott, and I’m thinking we must have seen two completely different movies.
The one I saw was an outright fiasco: atrociously directed, abysmally written (lifting monologues directly from the original play at key moments was a disastrous miscalculation–one of many perpetrated by Perry) and, for the most part, dismally acted. Perry brings all the trademark sledgehammer subtlety of his previous movies to play, and adds an unhealthy dollop of rank pretentiousness to boot. The result is his most insufferable film to date…even without a Madea cameo.
Whatever Oscar hopes Perry and/or Lionsgate may have been dreaming of should be nipped in the bud PDQ. “Precious” this ain’t.
Guess they’ll be sniffling all the way to the bank.
The movie is better than I thought it would be, too, but I disagree about the Oscar thing. It’s just not good enough, like plenty of Oscar-baiting all-star movies that didn’t get Oscar nominations. (And it would have the same problem they’ve had: Everyone is supporting and how do you pick which one to focus on? I’d argue Washington and Rashad are the best performers, but everyone would probably have different choices.)
I saw Client 9 on VOD at my house, then went to see Inside Job the following evening. They’re both on the same topics and DP’s summary is correct. Not just about Spitzer, it’s about Wall Street culture and Spitzer’s tiny threat to that got them all riled up. The doc nor Spitzer interviewed within it diminish what he did “morally” wrong, but they bring up that hookers and drugs are just necessaries to keep these very wired guys wired day in and out.
I’m still relatively young, 29, but I’ve met folks like Spitzer (not as famous obviously) with that drive. And that drive is what causes the reckless behavior. These folks don’t sit down to watch four hour football games, long walks with the family, DVR’ing 30 Rock. No, they’re up at 5am and in bed at 1am working, thinking, writing, planning. I’m half in awe, half curious where this drive comes from.
Glad to hear that Due Date is not the Farley/Spade level comedy it looks like in the ads.
And I am suprised at how excited I am about Love and Other Drugs, the common thread to Zwick movies always seems to be that there are great ideas that would have been much better if directed by somebody else. Maybe I’m just moony over Hatheway but I think this is going to be good (and a big hit, I’ve said it before but I think this will be Fox’s biggest release this year).
I suspect some folks will take issue with all the “Love/Drugs” nudity. And even more will be annoyed when they find out it’s a disease-of-the-week movie about how noble the non-diseased person is for sticking by the diseased one.
My thoughts on that form of DRIVE are three fold.
1) Fear: Spitzer’s dad wanted his son to be the first Jewish president. If that does not drive you to not fail your father then I have no idea what does.
2) They lack imagination: If you can’t sit still. If you always have to be in ridiculous overdrive mode then you most like lack the ability to sit down for a minute and not have it freak you out. If Tiger Woods could just entertain himself for two seconds, I doubt his mistress problem would have been so epic. Not stating he would not have cheated but it would not have been that epic.
3) The void: If you have a drive that epic, that it makes you work long hours and not enjoy life for more than an hour. You are working pretty damn hard to fill something inside of you that no amount of effort seems to fill.
Those are my three guesses on the drive of people like Chucky Gruden. Now on to Lex’s complaint about that Anne Hathaway movie set in the 90s but not appearing to be set in the 90s. WHAT THE FUCK? Seriously Ed, you are a part of the team that brought us MY SO CALLED LIFE! When did MY SO CALLED LIFE air? 1994-1995 and YOU FUCKED UP YOUR COSTUME DESIGN IN A MOVIE SET IN THE SAME TIME FRAME? Shameful, sir. Shameful.
Wow Chris, you pretty much just stated that Love and Other Drugs is nothing more than Dying Young and Sweet November with some hot Anne Hathaway nipple action? Wow. That will go over real well with you know… people.
is there male nudity in ‘love and other drugs’, or does ‘nudity’ actually mean, as it so often does, ‘female nudity’?
(gotta say, i hope for his sake zwick was clever enough to at least have some bare-ass jake in there, because a LOT of chicks dig them some jake in a big way — and contrary to what DP likes to tell himself, they’ll pay in hoards to watch hot-bod honey jake making it in a rom-com-dram love story; i know i wouldn’t exactly object to some naked jake)
Jake Gyllenhaal, who does plenty of nudity despite some scenes having hit the cutting room floor, also understood Anne’s fear.
“I’m naked a lot,” laughed Jake. “But particularly her. For a woman it can be…yeah, scary.”
http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b209785_love_other_drugs_costar_on_naked_anne.html
thanks for the heads-up, josh_A (i’ll email that esquire quote to my mate who’d give annie wilkes a run for her money as jake’s crazed NO. 1 FAN, she’ll squee)