PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW

The Dilemma (Three Stars)
U.S.: Ron Howard, 2011 (Universal)

Vince Vaughn and Kevin James make a nice couple in The Dilemma, a buddy-comedy-drama (or maybe a drama-buddy-comedy) in which they play a couple of Chicago pals-since-college and business partners. Vaughn is fast-talking huckster Ronny Valentine and James is slower-talking design genius Nick Brennan. Chums to the end, Ronny and Nick work together, play together, pal around as a foursome with their significant others. They‘re Chicago to the core, and they talk Bulls and go to Black Hawks games and have deep-dish Chicago fun — even though now they’re jammed in a time crunch, trying to finish a car-engine project for Dodge on a diminishing deadline.

You think that’s a problem? They’ve got another one, a worse one, or at least Ronny has: Scouting out the proper botanical setting to properly propose to his nonpareil girl friend Beth (Jennifer Connelly), Ronny overhears and sees Nick’s wife, and Beth’s pal, Geneva (Wynona Ryder), in a hot-and-heavy clinch among the big leaves with an unknown (to Ronny) but very enthusiastic tattooed stud (Channing Tatum).

So. Should Ronny tell Nick, and maybe make Nick crack up and foul up the project, plus complicate Nick’s marriage? Should he get more proof? Should he confront Geneva? Should he clam up? Or should he let it hang out, and let chips, or whatever, fall where they may? That’s The Dilemma.

Ron Howard directed the movie, Allan Loeb (Wall Street Money Never Sleeps) wrote it, and it’s pretty damned good. I enjoyed it, and I think it’s a movie that shows off well some of the top-chop, money skills of its cast and of its filmmakers.

Not everybody feels that way. In fact, a lot apparently don’t. Howard, Loeb and the cast have been accused of reckless machismo, of shifting modes too much, of moving back and forth too abruptly between comedy and drama, of creating tonal confusion. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Why is it? What is it?

Tonal confusion? Tonal Schmonal. Life is sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and even if The Dilemma doesn’t always work right (and it doesn’t) there’s nothing wrong with mixing the two up like this, or trying to.

Howard and Loeb and their actors do at least one thing very well here, one thing I haven’t seen recently in many buddy comedies, or buddy dramas (or even buddy musicals).This movie is loaded with good, smart, crackling dialogue, both comic and dramatic, well-crafted by Loeb, and delivered with maximum panache and lots of energy and style by all four of the lead actors and by some of the supporting ones as well — like Tatum as Zip, the tattooed stud and Queen Latifah as Susan Warner, a scrumptious overseer on the engine project. (Nick is trying to make an electric motor roar under the ‘60s power hood like a ‘60s power engine — so that, as Ronny says tellingly, the car won’t look gay.)

Most movies, most dramas — and sadly enough, most comedies — don’t have good dialogue, or dialogue that snaps, pops and races along like this, in the tradition of the Ben Hechts and the Preston Sturgeses and Billy Wilders. Mind you, I‘m not saying Loeb is as good as that trio of dialogue giants — he’s not — but simply that he’s trying to play that game when most others don‘t, and that, not too infrequently, he’s scoring.

When the laughs (temporarily) stop in The Dilemma, it’s because they’re supposed to stop, because Howard and Loeb are deliberately shifting tones and emotions (as most of the best directors can and do), and because the moviemakers want us to see Ronny’s genuine anguish about his dilemma, just as much as the absurdity of him spying on Geneva and Zip and tumbling off a building.

The dramatic heart of the picture is the lie Geneva tells, and that Ronny gets caught up in, partly because he has a secret or two himself. Ronny and Nick are a typical pair of college pals, like Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in “Carnal Knowledge.” Ronny is the glib, macho, streetwise lady-killer; Nick is the shier guy, the brain who idolizes him. (How much he likes Ronny, Nick later, embarrassingly reveals.)

But, as in most such odd couples, there’s a side of Ronny that’s good-hearted and sensitive like Nick, and a side of Nick that’s brash and take-charge like Ronny. They’re buddies, in a way, because they can complement each other and shave the bad stuff from each other’s psyche. (Vaughn’s best scene though, and one of the best in the movie, is without Nick. It’s his yowling, slamming, half-crazy street-fight with Tatum’s Zip — a scene that’s only hurt by what seems a puzzling lack of response from the neighborhood as these two guys massacre each other.)

Jennifer Connelly, who got an Oscar under Howard’s direction in A Beautiful Mind, doesn’t have much to do here but be supportive and understanding and a little mystified, especially when Ronny turns her parent‘s anniversary into a nightmare. But she does it well. It’s Ryder who has the plum female role, and it’s another witchy part like she played in Black Swan: cheating Geneva, who knows how to lie and cover her tracks and becomes a formidable foe to Ronny.

A word about Ron Howard. He should do more comedies. (Sorry, that’s five words.) If there’s one thing Ronny Howard should definitely understand, it’s how to get laugh lines. He was certainly around enough of them on the Andy Griffith Show, and, to a lesser extent, on Happy Days. From Howard’s Opie’s priceless interplay with Andy and Barney on the “Griffith Show,” to his straight man act with the Fonz, he’s shown himself as one of the most alert and generous of actors — and he‘s an alert and generous director too.

But I wouldn’t keep demanding that he get tonal control of himself and, dammit, push for those laughs. I doubt he wants to make that kind of comedy anyway, since, starting with “Andy Griffith,” he‘s spent his life in shows that mixed moods, and did it expertly.

By the way, there are some things I didn’t like about The Dilemma, and one was the ending, at the second Black Hawks game. Too much comedy. Not enough drama. But “Go Hawks,” anyway.

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CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC

Smiles of a Summer Night (Four Stars)
Sweden; Ingmar Bergman, 1955 (Criterion Collection)
Bergman is a director I truly love. And this famous romantic comedy is the first of the mid’-50 films (along with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries),  that made him internationally famous: the reigning champ of the world’s movie art houses. Smiles shows him in his rare comedy modem while the 1956 medieval mini-epic The Seventh Seal was one of his most characteristic (and favorite) works and 1957’s Wild Strawberries was a masterpiece that provided a grad valedictory for the great Swedish actor-director Victor Sjostrom — and that also made me fall in love with Bibi Andersson. (She’s also in Seal and, very briefly, in Smiles.)

The cast of “Smiles,” set at a 19th century country estate during the long bright Swedish night, includes Gunnar Bjornstrand as a philanderer, Jarl Kulle as a hot-tempered aristocrat, and Harriett Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson and Margit Carlquist among the ladies they fight over. The mood is Lubitschian and and also reminiscent of Bergman’s fellow Swede Mauritz Stiller (Erotikon). The cast of “Smiles” and the other two ’50s masterpeices includes many Bergman regulars, future movie great who also worked for him at his repertory theater in Malmo.

 Bergman, one of the supreme directors and screenwriters in film history, is at his best and most vital in Smiles of a Summer Night. And the film is also brimming with those qualities many claim Bergman just doesn’t possess: giddy humor and a flair for high comedy. Summer Night is a great classic, and he would go on to make many more. (In Swedish, with English subtitles.)
 
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK, CLASSIC (In Memoriam: Sidney Lumet):
12 Angry Men (Four Stars)
U.S.; Sidney Lumet, 1957 (MGM).
Henry Fonda, as Juror No. 8 — the lone holdout in a murder trial where all his fellow jurors are convinced of the Latino defendant’s guilt — tries to convince a group that includes bigoted Lee J. Cobb, cynical baseball fan Jack Warden, smoothie Martin Balsam, nervous Jack Klugman, adman Robert Webber, and punctilious E.G. Marshall.

It’s a hot, hot day. We’re only out of the jury room for a few minutes at the beginning and end and director Lumet (In his Oscar-nominated feature debut) actually makes the walls slowly close in on the angry twelve. as they argue, and vivisect the facts and expose their own prejudices. One by one, calm, liberal, idealistic Juror No. 8 turns them around.

And though Reginald Rose’s famous script — which was earlier broadcast on TV with a cast that included Bob Cummings (as Juror 8) , Edward Arnold and Franchot Tone — is certainly dominated by a schematic concept, making Men the kind of likeably old-fashioned message drama that usually doesn’t age well, you’d have to be tone-deaf cinematically to argue that this move isn’t a terrific job and that it doesn’t punch across its themes and characters with formidable skill. It’s Lumet at his peak, crafting a tremendous social drama and a superb actors’ showcase. It’s actually gotten stronger over the years.

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

The Green Hornet (Two Stars)

U. S.: Michel Gondry, 2011 (Sony)

The Green Hornet is a comedy-action extravaganza done in a deliberate pop art/ironic style by director Michel Gondry — a pseudo-Marvel super-movie about a super-hero who’s also a rich little schmuck. It’s also about the schmuck’s super-talented Asian sidekick, their sexy Girl Friday, who has issues with them both — and a maniacal and over-sensitive villain who runs the drug kingdom in a huge city, and kills people or unleashes a crime wave, whenever he feels insulted (which is often).

Based on the hit Depression radio show about the Green Hornet and his faithful Asian sidekick Kato (a show which later became a TV series with Bruce Lee as Kato), it’s a real mess: a movie that would like to be Iron Man, but lacks the wit, the action, the look, the story, the sense of character, the high spirits, almost everything.

Green Hornet has its moments, but you’d expect many, many more from a cast and filmmakers like this: director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), with a nifty ensemble including Seth Rogen as the rich schmuck/superhero Britt Reid/Green Hornet, Jay Chou as sidekick Kato, Cameron Diaz as gal-pal Lenore Case, and (the one performance that almost works) Christoph Waltz as sadistic crime czar Benjamin Chudnofsky. (Chudnofsky, to make himself as media-friendly and colorful as his Green Hornet nemesis — wants to call himself “Bloodnofsky.”) The script is by Rogen, and his Superbad writing partner Evan Goldberg, along with Fran Striker and George W. Trendle. I don’t know all of them, but sounds good to me.

Instead, Gondry and company pull us into a frenzied pseudo-comic chaos that has all the clunky, campy excess of the ’60s “Batman” TV series (“Holy Hornet!”) , and little of its loopy charm — into a movie that, as you watch it, seems as anachronistic as the so-called newspaper, The Daily Sentinel, that Britt inherited from his media giant dad James (Tom Wilkinson), and is supposed to be running, in his off-SuperHero time.

Believe me, I’m on the side of any movie, however goofy, that wants to revive the fantasy-image and movie-iconish presence of newspapers, and use them as a backdrop for anything, including a new Pauly Shore comedy or a remake of Can‘t Stop the Music. (No, that’s going too far.) After 24 years with the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, I miss newsrooms more than I can say.  But there’s nothing about The Daily Sentinel that’s witty or exciting either, not even when they drag in all the villains, heroes, cars, hardware and automatic rifles, and stage the final rip-roaring action basheroo right in the Sentinel offices.

Rogen and Goldberg and company write Britt as a spoiled-rotten rich kid and high-timer who suddenly wants to be a super-hero, after he becomes a journalism nabob and bonds with his dad’s ex-car mechanic, chauffeur and coffee-maker supreme Kato. There’s nothing that explains why Britt gets such a mad notion, or why he figures he can pull it off after years of lazy-rich-kiddery — except maybe that he sees all of Kato’s martial arts and mechanical skills, and figures that his driver will be doing all the work anyway.

So the Legend begins, wackily, and the Green Hornet (Britt, demonstrating his lack of touch, first wants to call himself The Green Bee), is launched on his crime-fighting career — made more complicated because Britt decides to pose as a super-criminal as well as hero. But Britt hires a super-secretary-turned-business whiz (Diaz as Lenore) to help run his paper while he’s not around. And carves aside enough time to become a local media sensation and lock horns with the murderous Chudnofsky a.k.a. Bloodnofsky.

Waltz makes a good, nasty, crazy heavy out of Bloodnofsky. But Rogen’s comic forte is usually playing nice, shaggy guys who tell the truth, not rich would-be playboys who lie their heads off and throw their weight around. He always looks here like he’s putting us on, putting himself on, and it doesn’t help the comedy.

Scene after scene in The Green Hornet is wasted on Britt acting unconvincingly schmucky and on an idiotic rivalry and silly bash fests between Greenie and Kato, who descend into a love/hate relationship that’s neither resonant or amusing — though homo-erotic undertones keep erupting, especially since the one-time stud Britt seems to forsake women, except for a few weak passes at Lenore, after he and Kato set up Superhero shop together. At one point, he falls into a coma for eleven days or so, which was probably a good strategy.

The fights are forgettable. The chases are so-so. The romance is comatose. The comedy is rib-nudging or hysterical.

Michel Gondry can be a jazzily innovative director (Eternal Sunshine), but he can also take us into fantasy dopey-land (Human Nature) — and most of “The Green Hornet” doesn’t even look good, or snazzy or exciting. That includes Greenie and Kato in their superhero garb, which consists of suits, fedoras and toy-store-looking masks that make them look a bit like The Blues Brothers on their way to a masquerade ball.

Maybe they should have been wearing 3D glasses instead — which at least would have underlined the fact that the movie was shot in that process, something I barely noticed. The Green Hornet is only recommended to kids who really would like to put on masks and fedoras and go out and bash Chudnofskys. Or maybe inherit a newspaper.

Extras: Filmmakers’ commentaries; gag reel; Featurettes

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