Showing posts with label Robert de niro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert de niro. Show all posts
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Strange Bedfellows
Robert De Niro plays a retired 70-year-old businessman who takes an unpaid internship for seniors at Anne Hathaway's Internet clothing business and soon teaches everyone how to live, love, and tie a tie. Probably the most startling thing in the movie (other than two more of modern Hollywood's drinking scenes written by people who have apparently never had a drink) is the uncanny resemblance the actor playing Hathaway's stay-at-home husband has to writer Chuck Klosterman. Lightly recommended.
Cranston is superb portraying the canny, volatile, profane Johnson. Supprting turns from Melissa Leo and Anthony Mackie are also superb, as is Frank Langella's nuanced, wounded portrayal of Dixiecrat Senator Russell. Bradley Whitford is excellent and almost unrecognizable as Hubert Humphrey. The narrative becomes a bracing examination of the seemingly lost Art of political compromise, as LBJ must work Republicans, Democrats, and the leaders of the Civil Rights movement to achieve something compromised by lasting. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Threed Murray
The actors are all terrific from the leads to all the fine character actors like Eileen Brennan, Ray Walston, and Charles Durning who fill out the roster. They don't really make Hollywood blockbusters with clever scripts like this any more -- it's a relic of a more elegant age, the early 1970's... Highly recommended.
Murray conveys a fair bit of menace in his handful of scenes as a mob guy who dreams of being a stand-up comic. De Niro is painfully withdrawn, and Thurman charming. The movie doesn't avoid the tougher issues raised by its premise, though it does sugarcoat them -- and anyone tired of the massive age gaps between male and female leads in Hollywood movies could use this one as Exhibit A. Recommended.
Everything stays just enough on the comedy side of things to forgive the movie some of its improbabilities, not to mention its occasional resemblance to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino. The leads are all winning. Murray is irascible but occasionally serious and haunted. McCarthy seems to be relieved to be playing an actual sympathetic character instead of a caricature. Jaeden Lieberher is extraordinarily good as the small but feisty Oliver -- it's a totally non-annoying kid performance. Hallelujah! Naomi Watts is funny in the somewhat thankless role of a wacky, malaprop-spewing, pregnant Russian prostitute with a heart of, perhaps, copper. You'll see most of the prop beats coming, but they are well-handled, and Murray's character is never forced to undergo a complete domestication of his often unlikable character. Recommended.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Bury the Lead
The cast is strong, and given enough decent lines and character bits to keep everything percolating in what may be a slightly too-long film. Michelle Pfeiffer is terrific as the arch-witch Lamia. Several transition scenes involving walking and riding are photographed pretty much exactly as these things are done in Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies, possibly in the hopes of tricking some people into thinking they're at a Lord of the Rings movie. The score also comes pretty close to Horner's LOTR score at points. I do wonder whether these things were done at studio insistence -- certainly the majority of the movie is lighter and cleverer than Jackson's Middle Earth. Recommended.
Seen now, The Fisher King is a document of a much dirtier New York, one that hadn't yet had Times Square turned into a food court at Disneyland. Williams manages to modulate manic and melancholy as he did in few other movies, and Bridges is his usual Jeff Bridges self, making the acting appear too effortless and invisible for him to be recognized for how good it always is. He's probably the perfect fit for the role of a vain, self-centred, but potentially decent talk-radio shock-jock: he may be handsome, but he's not afraid to look awful in a variety of ways.
This is probably Gilliam's biggest commercial success (along with 12 Monkeys). He tones down his weirdness without ever losing it -- his vision of New York suggests the medieval at the right points, and not the shiny medieval, but the crap-covered ground-level world we laughed at in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It isn't Gilliam's best film, but it's certainly his sunniest. Highly recommended.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Stubborn Angels
Hjortsberg nails the cynical prose-poetry of the classic hard-boiled detective novel, with P.I. Harry Angel handling the world-weary, occasionally cruel but mostly well-meaning first-person narration. Angel repeatedly comes off as the world's oddest New York City tour guide as we move in and around the New York of the late 1950's.
A mysterious client hires Angel to track down a popular singer in the Frank Sinatra mode who was supposed to be in an upstate mental asylum after injuries sustained during World War Two left him mentally and physically disabled. The only problem is, the singer -- stage name Johnny Favorite -- isn't at the asylum, and hasn't been for years. And the trail is cold. But as Angel pursues Favorite, everything starts to heat up, and people start dying in increasingly horrible ways.
Variations are worked on the usual suspects and usual characters of hardboiled detective fiction and film, from shadowy businessmen through shady lawyers to jilted heiresses. As Angel's case proceeds, odder characters arise, and previously introduced characters get odder. There will be voodoo. There will be Satanism. There will be horoscopes and morphine addicts and one weird trip to the theatre.
Hjortsberg's period and genre-specific style works wonderfully throughout Falling Angel, falling always just on the serious side of near-parody. Angel's a tough customer with no friends and his own troubled past, but like all great hardboiled detectives, his essential quality is absolute stubbornness. He'll solve the case regardless of the cost. And what a cost! Highly recommended.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Twins
The title refers to a river in North Carolina where our protagonist (Gregory Peck) and his family have a cabin and a houseboat. And that's where the movie will climax, after Peck, as prosecuting attorney Sam Bowden, runs through every other gambit he can think of to get ex-convict Robert Mitchum, as Max Cady, to leave him and his family alone. Peck's testimony helped put Cady away years ago for a sexual assault and battery case. Now, Cady wants vengeance.
A strong supporting cast, led by Martin Balsam and Telly Savalas, helps keep things interesting. But it's Robert Mitchum's portrayal of the obsessed and monstrous Cady that makes the movie sing. Here as in the earlier The Night of the Hunter, Mitchum creates a classic movie villain. And he's utterly believeable even in some of the more overheated moments. Slow-moving, almost stately, Mitchum's a full-sized creep-out. He underplays Cady throughout, increasing the menace by decreasing the potential for melodramatic acting excess.
Peck, who produced the film, does that whole Gregory Peck thing in which he's a pillar of decency. A better director might have tightened up some of Peck's reactions to things in a few scenes -- at times Bowden seems a bit slow to react. And a couple of the scenes in which Bowden's or daughter get isolated with Cady around creak and groan with the weight of implausibility. They're saved by the fact that we accept that people whose lives have hitherto been undisturbed by the threat of violence may indeed not take a threat seriously for awhile, regardless of evidence.
The movie simmers and simmers before boiling over in its shadowy, desperate climax. There are other fine setpieces prior to the end (which makes me think of the then-nascent Viet Nam War), especially Cady's pursuit of Bowden's daughter through her school. Cape Fear frames the whole thing as a battle of wits, one in which Cady is surprisingly hypercompetent. He may be a beast, as we're told again and again, but he's a smart one. Recommended.
This movie, director Scorsese's first real thriller, isn't quite so interesting. Where the original had Robert Mitchum underplaying as the menacing Cady, this one has Robert De Niro in full-blown cuckoo-banana mode. And eventually Scorsese and the writing join De Niro.
It's still an enjoyable movie. There are some genuine scares and thrills, especially in the first 75 minutes. But then the movie cooks up a lengthy set-piece in the Bowden house that acts as a false climax before taking us to the Cape Fear River, as the original did, for the final showdown. The false climax is excruciating, though not in a good way, and increasingly witless.
By the time a Hitchcock homage rolls around and Nolte starts slipping and sliding in a pool of blood, the thrills have been replaced by unintentional comedy. Five minutes later comes a revelation that caused the entire theatre I saw Cape Fear in when it came out to erupt into jeering laughter. And it is a ridiculous moment.
Scorsese doesn't seem to be invested one whit in making a believeably overwrought thriller, but it's De Niro who's the biggest saboteur of verisimilitude. He's a superhuman blabbermouth. Unlike Mitchum's mostly soft-spoken Cady, De Niro never shuts up, and a lot of his talk is pseudointellectual babble about philosophy and the Bible and great American writers.
Admittedly, it's not so much that he's an expert on Henry Miller or Thomas Wolfe that staggers the imagination -- it's that Bowden's 15-year-old daughter has been assigned Thomas Wolfe's gargantuan Look Homeward, Angel for her summer-school English class. Really? No wonder she's having problems in school. What's the next text assigned, James Joyce's Ulysses?
Because the entire movie exists within a frame narrative, one could argue that the most ridiculous aspects of the movie are embellishments of the narrator. Even then, the movie's sudden loss of conviction is damning.
It's fun to see Scorsese try and fail to make a conventional thriller, however, and the acting by Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, and Joe Don Baker is fine, though Nolte does seem miscast as Bowden. Indeed, Nolte's acting skill-set really suggests that he should have played Max Cady. That would have been really interesting. Still, by the time De Niro starts speaking in tongues, you really will wish he'd just shut up. Possibly because he sounds an awful lot like Porky Pig. Lightly recommended.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
The Ocean and All Its Containers
The narrative instead focuses on Ron Woodrof, a heterosexual Dallas-area rodeo cowboy and electrician whose HIV diagnosis sets him off on a quest for better drugs to combat HIV and AIDS at a time when the U.S. medical establishment was fumbling in the dark.
McConaughey's Oscar-winning performance is fine, in that creepy Machinist way that relies an awful lot on our body horror at an actor's Methodistic emaciation. I'll be damned if I know how Leto won an Oscar for Supporting Actor, though. Oh, right. He played a guy who wants to be a woman in a movie based on a true story. Though apparently of the three leads (sexy, button-down doctor Jennifer Garner being the third), only McConaughey is playing an actual person.
Really, the movie succeeds or fails on how much one enjoys McConaughey's performance. And it is fine, though it's very much in line with the history of his performances in all those terrible Romantic Comedies he's inhabited like a plague for more than a decade. He's a bad cad who learns better. And a homophobe who, through discrimination against himself, becomes a heroic pariah. And he will ride that bull again!
Is there something morally dubious here in making a heterosexual male (who in real life was purportedly bisexual) into the hero of a movie about the early days of the AIDS crisis? I'm not entirely sure. Per Oscar Wilde, if it were a better movie, I probably wouldn't be asking these questions. There are no moral or immoral books. Except when there are. Lightly recommended.
All is Lost: written and directed by J.C. Chandor; starring Robert Redford ('Our Man') (2013): Perhaps a bit more grueling than is workable, All is Lost nonetheless is a worthwhile journey into apparent doom. The obvious model for this story of Robert Redford vs. The Ocean is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. However, Hemingway's fisherman had a giant fish to get home. Redford's unnamed character is just trying to survive after his one-man sailing trip across the Indian Ocean goes increasingly FUBAR.
Much of the cinematography is haunting as we alternate between a lot of very close camerawork on Redford and a series of establishing and re-establishing shots of the ocean, the sky, and the surface of the water shot from below. The contrast between claustrophobia and the Sublime works wonderfully at points. The soundscape of the movie also works marvelously, with a particularly effective scene set on a rapidly sinking sailboat that groans and moans like the walking dead.
As Redford almost never talks in the film (his character isn't a self-talker, and he doesn't have a volleyball or a parrot to hang out with), pretty much everything rests on his physical acting, his physical presence. Well, and one drawn-out 'Fuck!' that's both funny and heart-breaking.
Does it all go on a little too long? Yeah. There's at least one false climax too many. But Redford, 77 and apparently unafraid to look old, holds the screen throughout the ordeal. His character does pretty much everything right (or a lot more right than most audience members who aren't experienced sailors would) while things go increasingly wrong. As Hemingway had one of his characters note in The Old Man and the Sea, it's better to have luck than to have skill. Recommended.
Midnight Run: written by George Gallo; directed by Martin Brest; starring Robert De Niro (Jack Walsh), Charles Grodin (Jonathan Mardukas), Yaphet Kotto (Alonzo Mosley), John Ashton (Marvin), Dennis Farina (Jimmy Serrano), and Joe Pantoliano (Eddie) (1988): One of the five or ten great comedies of the 1980's was a cult hit at the time that's grown in stature over the years to also become one a handful of the great Odd Couple movies in the history of cinema.
Do I even have to give a plot synopsis? Bounty hunter De Niro must find and return accountant Grodin to Los Angeles by midnight Friday to collect a $100,000 fee from a bail bondsman who set bail for the subsequently-gled Grodin. The Mob, the FBI, and another bounty hunter are also after Grodin, who stole millions from mobster Dennis Farina and gave most of it to charity. He's now the key material witness against the mobster.
Because the movie is two hours long, things obviously don't go smoothly. There are lots of great scenes both action- and character-related. There's fine supporting work from everyone involved, and a fun, piquant script from George Gallo. Martin Brest, who directed the first and best Beverly Hills Cop movie, does solid work. His characters have time to breathe, and if the police chases get a little Blues Brothers at times, they're at least funny and not tiresome.But everything really comes down to the chemistry between De Niro as the terse, eternally F-bombing bounty hunter and Grodin as the soft-spoken, sarcastic accountant. It's a great comic bromance. Grodin, underplaying in his usual way, is great, and De Niro would never be (intentionally) funnier. Highly recommended.
Saturday, June 21, 2014
The Dark Brotherhood
Goodfellas works as a groundlevel, non-romantic response to Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films. It's also clearly the father of The Sopranos: David Chase's great HBO gangster epic goes where Goodfellas went before, only with a lot more time and space to flesh out its often toxic but recognizably human characters.
For the most part based on a true story, Goodfellas follows the New York crime adventures of half-Sicilian, half-Irish Henry Hill from his childhood in the 1950's to his exit from the Mob life in the early 1980's. Ray Liotta is terrific as Hill, who acts as co-narrator of the movie along with his wife, played by a sharp and sympathetic Lorraine Bracco. The rest of the main cast gives us a focused Robert De Niro, an award-winning Joe Pesci, and a quiet and brooding Paul Sorvino as Hill's three main Mob connections.
Among all the supporting actors who would go on to roles in The Sopranos and later mob movies and TV shows is a young, skinny Samuel L. Jackson; Scorsese's mother also appears with a winning cameo as the doting Italian mother of Joe Pesci's monstrous but loving son.
Pesci's showy role steals a lot of scenes -- he's the world's most dangerous clown, a sociopathic chatterbox with almost no fuse at all. De Niro's role is quieter and trickier as the seemingly genial James Conway who, though valuable to this segment of the Mob, can never become a "made man" because, like Hill, he's not fully Sicilian. Joe Pesci can be made, though. Boy, can he be made.
Scorsese's camera swoops and dodges and sometimes comes to rest, unflinchingly, on the grotesque aftermaths of assorted murders. Popular hits of the times rise and fall on the soundtrack; different singers at the favourite hang-out mark the passage of time.
Scorsese even nods to a famous scene from his Taxi Driver which the censorship board required him to overlay with a red filter because the violence was deemed too bloody. Here, that overlay now comes from something within the film world -- the tail-lights of a parked car. And there's very little blood to be seen. That all comes without colour overlay in other scenes, without any masking of the ugliness.
One of Goodfellas' great accomplishments was to make the appeal of crime as visceral as its horrors, and then to up-end all the chummy associations as the movie comes to its climax. Henry Hill's love of organized crime may come from the camaraderie and the financial benefits, and from the way it makes him a man who can get into any show or any nightclub whenever he wants. But the movie strips all that away as things tighten up. In the end you're a man alone, with everyone gunning for you. The honour of thieves is an illusion born of good times.
Is this Scorsese's best film? I suppose my other candidates for that position would be Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Goodfellas offers a more expansively novelistic world than either of those movies, and it certainly offers a slightly lighter touch in many scenes. Really, it's a toss-up -- the films supply such markedly different experiences that it's almost impossible to judge them in relation to one another. Highly recommended.
Saturday, June 14, 2014
The Enemy of My Enemy
After the bizarre bollocks that was 2004's Chronicles of Riddick, Riddick returns its titular anti-hero to the more familiar, monster-fighting ground of the first Riddick movie, Pitch Black. Diesel and Twohy also give Riddick lots of people to fight, with bounty hunters lining up on the planet upon which Riddick is stranded to collect the price on his head, and double the price if Riddick is dead.
It's all competent stuff, and the assorted CGI landscapes and monsters are entertaining enough. As in Pitch Black, we appear to have an ecosystem that produces an endless number of predators without there being any naturally occurring prey in the vicinity. Stupid planet! One's enjoyment of Riddick, which runs a bit long, mostly depends on how much one likes Vin Diesel. I like him fine, but I really wish he'd get better dialogue. Lightly recommended.
Thor: The Dark World: based on characters and concepts created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, and Walt Simonson; written by Robert Rodat, Don Payne, Stephen McFeely, Christopher Markus, and Christopher Yost; directed by Alan Taylor; starring Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Natalie Portman (Jane Foster), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Christopher Eccleston (Malekith) and Kat Dennings (Darcy) (2013): Five credited writers and Odin knows how many more uncredited script doctors (including Joss Whedon, I'm pretty sure) manage to turn writer-artist Walt Simonson's terrific Thor comic-book Surtur Saga of the early 1980's into an ungodly mess. The whole thing remains enjoyable because of the performances of its leads -- Hemsworth and Hiddleston in particular, squabbling as reluctant brothers-in-arms Thor and Loki. Unfortunately, the writers have dumped a giant crap-load of ridiculous exposition on top of the movie. Where originally one had a comic-book epic derived from Norse mythology's end-times and Thor's desperate attempts to prevent the last battle, now we have pseudo-scientific babble derived from too many viewings of The Lord of the Rings.
Yes, Tolkien. Because once upon a time, a bad dark lord made a thing which he could use to conquer the universe. But Thor's mighty ancestors defeated the Dark Lord. They didn't destroy the weapon, though -- they just buried it. Will someone find the weapon, thus drawing the dark lord into the light so he can grab the weapon for himself? Will we get a fiery, boat-riding Viking funeral for somebody? Will everybody speak in vaguely British accents? Why the hell do the dark elves all speak in a language that has to be sub-titled?
I hope Christopher Eccleston got paid a lot for the role of the dark elf Malekith, because between the whole not-speaking-English thing and the heavy slathering of make-up and prosthetics, he's completely unrecognizable. So, too, the actor who played Adubisi on Oz and Mr. Eko on Lost -- as Malekith's right-hand man, he was so unrecognizable that I only realized it was him while I was reading the credits.
But, you know, superhero fun! Whee! I actually think the ponderous, often nonsensical fake mythology expounded upon in Thor: The Dark World may be worse than the similar gunk we had dumped upon us in Man of Steel. Hemsworth is noble as Thor, anyway, and Tom Hiddleston actually invests Loki with something resembling human motivation. Someone get these guys a better movie. Lightly recommended.
The Family: based on the book by Tonino Benacquista, written by Luc Besson and Michael Caleo; starring Robert DeNiro (Giovanni), Michelle Pfeiffer (Maggie), Dianna Agron (Belle), John D'Leo (Warren) and Tommy Lee Jones (Robert Stansfield) (2013): Vicious black comedy from French action-auteur Luc Besson plays with audience expectations and sympathies. As a New York mobster in Witness Protection in Normandy, France (!) with his family because he ratted out his comrades, DeNiro is surprisingly loose and funny. He's also playing a near-psychopath, as are all the other actors playing his family. What is for much of its length a seemingly jolly (albeit violent) comedy takes a surprising turn with about half-an-hour to go. I don't think it's entirely effective, but the violence does serve a thematic and cultural point. Recommended.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Dancing in the Dark
Lawrence, who won the Best Actress Oscar for 2012 for her role in this movie, is very good. She's developed some sort of weird muscle control that gives her a mask-like face at times, the features softening at others. Is it acting or is it Botox? I don't know. But it works with the character, whose depression precedes the death of her husband, after whose death things fall completely apart.
Cooper is also excellent. He nails the delusional rhythms of mania, the boundless delusional energy. And he conveys the subsequent exhaustion nicely as well. He's a sharp actor with surprising depths. He sells certain aspects of his mental problems without recourse to exposition, and rings true throughout. Robert de Niro is anachronistically measured and controlled as Pat's occasionally delusional, OCD-afflicted father, and Jacki Weaver shines as Pat's long-suffering mother, who seems to be the only fully sane person in the movie.
The fairy-tale quality of Silver Linings Playbook probably irked a lot of people who deal with mental-health issues on a daily basis. And it really is a fairy tale, though thankfully one with a certain measure of permanent darkness. Most of the comedy flows from plausible scenarios -- I especially liked Pat repeatedly waking his parents up at 3 a.m. to rant about a novel he'd just read. And Pat's obsession with his estranged wife's high-school English course syllabus rings true as well, something that's funny from the outside but also a symptom of deep mental distress.
Ultimately, Silver Linings Playbook is a romantic comedy about severely screwed-up people, and if it's not truly realistic, it's still a more laudable portrayal of characters with mental-health problems than, say, the ludicrous A Beautiful Mind. Recommended.
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