50/50: The Film Babble Blog Review

50/50 (Dir. Jonathan Levine, 2011)







Mining the misery of coping with cancer for comedy may not sound like a promising premise, yet 50/50, based on screenwriter Will Reiser’s bout with the illness, pulls it off with humorously heartfelt aplomb.

When Seattle public radio writer/producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is diagnosed with the disease he’s unsurprisingly devastated, but he has a devoted girlfriend(Bryce Dallas Howard), and a supportive best friend (Seth Rogen) to help get him through.

Uh, make that just a supportive friend, as Rogen discovers at an art gallery that Howard is cheating on Gordon-Levitt and has photographic evidence of this on his cell phone. Howard is soon out of the picture, and Gordon-Levitt turns to Anna Kendrick as a therapist who’s adorably awkward in her newness to the job as she admits he’s only her third patient.

You got to love a movie that makes a convincing case for exploiting your ailment to get laid, a plan that anyone could guess was the scruffy Rogen’s. After helping shave Gordon-Levitt’s head with his “ball trimmers,” Rogen takes his friend out to a club in one of the film’s funniest scenes where they learn that “I have cancer” is not an effective pick-up line.

So the profane, yet mildly profound 50/50 is essentially a bromance in the Apatowian tradition, but it doesn’t try too hard for laughs, they come naturally from conversations and situations that feel lovingly adapted from real life.

Take the case of Gordon-Levitt’s parents. The always welcome Anjelica Houston has the well-worn worried-sick mother part, but doesn’t overplay it. Likewise Serge Houde as the father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Neither character is exaggerated for comedic effect, or absorbed in messy melodrama and that’s incredibly refreshing to witness.

I was amused as much as I was touched by this film. I’m fine with Gordon- Levitt doing big ass Christopher Nolan flicks, and Rogen trying to find his footing in stoner superhero movies (or whatever the Hell you’d call the upcoming JAY AND SETH VS. THE APOCALYPSE), as long as they do funny small scale stories with emotional pull like this every once in a while.

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Take Shelter (Friday, September 30, 2011) (84)

So this is Jeff Nichols' sophomore effort, and as such it's slightly inferior to his debut (Shotgun Stories). This is a very good movie about paranoia also starring the transfixing Michael Shannon. (Shannon is perhaps the most interesting, strangest actor working today, or really ever to appear onscreen. He seems totally unhinged, like a modern-day Kinski. Amazing.) Here Shannon's character believes the world is going to end with a weather event, so he builds a storm shelter in his back yard, at the expense of his job and his family's faith in him. I do generally like the final product, but find the whole work less-than-totally perfect. The magical Jessical Chastain (2011 is the year of Chastain, dontcha know) plays Shannons's wife who is dealing with his mania and again gives a near-perfect performance. Nichols is turning into a really wonderful American auteur and I love what he does with atmosphere, in the weather and the thematic sense of the term. The film's European ending is fun and interesting, but a slight bit less than totally fulfilling. I do love the sum of its parts, though: Nichols, Shannon, Chastain, psychodrama, American-Gothic (albeit a more Northern one, this time Ohio).

Stars: 3 of 4

The Debt (Tuesday, September 27, 2011) (83)

This is an American update of a little-known Israeli film from a few years ago. It's a story about a Massad group from the '60s who was supposed to kill a Nazi doctor but actually botched the job. They said they did the job, and thought they got away with it, until there is a small possibility that their lie might get out. They try to fix the job, but that opens up all sorts of other ethical questions that had previously been closed. It's basically The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, but if Ransom Stoddard had tried to make it right with Tom Doniphon for no particular reason. It's a good movie, but not a great one. It does continue Jessica Chastain's amazing year of acting (this time she's a ginger Jewess! Sigh.). It's a bit better than meh, and hurt mostly by it's moral grayness.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

MONEYBALL: The Film Babble Blog Review

MONEYBALL (Dir. Bennett Miller, 2011)

 

Some of the best camaraderie I’ve seen on the big screen lately is in the exchanges between Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill throughout this unorthodox take on the traditional inspirational sports story.

Pitt plays the real-life Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who recruits Hill, as a Yale economy major based on Paul DePodesta, to help him think outside the box in putting together a baseball team on an extremely low budget.

There’s a delicious deadpan thing happening with Pitt and Hill as they employ a statistical approach to scouting for new players, no doubt due to the thoroughy witty screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian. It’s a pleasure to see Pitt as basically a regular relatable guy - a divorced dad who is driven to shake things up in his career - trading ideas with Hill, in one of his most likable and believable roles.

A dour Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the field manager of the team, doesn’t quite get what Pitt and Hill are up to so there are some flare-ups, but a rag tag roster of players is assembled (including Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Casey Bond, and Royce Clayton) that pulls off a 20-game winning streak.

Despite such factors as Pitt’s overly precocious daughter (Kerris Dorsey) and his ex-wife (a barely registering Robin Wright), there’s not much of an emotional impact to this material, but the backroom break-downs which make up the bulk of this film are engaging enough to draw one in.

Subdued yet extremely sharp, MONEYBALL isn’t a movie just for baseball fanatics, it’s for anybody who enjoys character driven drama about people experimenting with new methods with compelling determination. Pitt provides one of his most down to earth performances that carries the film superbly, and the inventive pairing of him with Hill works way better than one would think.

Not being a baseball guy, or a sports guy at all for that matter, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this film. It has the drive of the best docudramas – the ones that educate as much as they entertain – and folks should walk away with a good sense of how a couple of everyday guys can really be gamechangers.



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Restless (Wednesday, September 21, 2011) (82)

Restless is a Gus Van Sant movie about a boy obsessed with death (Henry Hopper, fils de Dennis) who becomes friendly with a girl who has a few months to live because she's about to die of cancer (Mia Wasikowska). It's slight and facile and generally boring, but it does portend nice things from Master Hopper... and once again begs the question: why the fuck does Young Mia get work - she's really not good at all. There's nothing here that you didn't see done better in Harold and Maude (though this time the sex is at least age-appropriate... though that was part of the beauty of Harold and Maude that it was so wrong). There's really nothing about this film that's wonderful or terrible. It's mostly a fart in the wind.

Stars: 2 of 4

Contagion (Monday, September 19, 2011) (81)

Why Steven Soderbergh made a big budget, ensemble disaster film is totally beyond me. Contagion is not as bad as you've heard, but far from good. It tells the story of a virus that began somewhere in China (that new evil-empire, for it's vastness as much as for its secrecy) and moves along the line to all continents and all people until a viable antivirus can be found (this time with crowd-sourcing and YouTube!) (ugh). I like how it feels like a modern zombie movie with allusions to 28 Days Later and World War Z, but the fact remains it's only a movie because it's about a virus that affects white people in suburban Minnesota (aw, how nice). There's a fun 80s'ish score by Cliff Martinez that feels a lot like Vassal Benford and Harold Faltermeyer's score for The Running Man. Still, the script here, by Scott Z. Burns is terrible and inconsistent and begs for a scene in the New York City subway. This is a dog with only a few tricks.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Drive (Sunday, September 18, 2011) (80)

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn makes really interesting movies that are about suberficiality and technical surface qualities as much as they're about genres. Drive is an operatic noir but also a baroque driving movie and borrows from all of those subgenres in a very interesting visual way. There really isn't much of any narrative in this film: Ryan Gosling plays a driver who works part time at a mechanic's shop, part time as a Hollywood stunt driver and part time as a getaway driver for Los Angeles heist gangs. He has a direct way of dealing with everything he does, a style that can easily get ultraviolent in the blink of an eye. He falls for a typical noir mol, this time played dully by Carey Mulligan (that's the only way she knows how to do anything), who enters the plot only as a device to move the story to its next level. Any search for depth of story will lead one down blind alleys and into oblivion. This is a film about surface and it is interesting and quite beautiful in that context. Albert Brooks plays a wonderful bad guy here and is deserving of any acclaim he might get. All in all a fun film and pretty one, but not a great one.

Stars: 3 of 4

Blu Ray/DVD Review: CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP

This documentary drops today on Blu ray and DVD:



CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP (Dir. Rodman Flender, 2011)

The title shot of this film has Conan O'Brien backstage strumming his guitar framed exactly like Bob Dylan was in the title shot of the 1965 documentary DON'T LOOK BACK. The font is even the same so it appears that director Rodman is attempting to do what D.A. Pennebaker did definitively for Dylan: capture an icon on tour during a pivotal period of transition.

Sadly, this is hardly a definitive or essential piece of work. It's a sloppily assembled, horribly uneven, and only fitfully funny film that jumps around spastically as much as its subject often does during his monologues - only it's less annoying when Conan does it.

I expected so much more from the director of LEPRECHAUN 2!

At the beginning Flender sums up the situation that I'm sure everybody reading this surely knows, so I'll try to keep it brief - after losing his Tonight Show gig on NBC in early 2010, Conan contractually could not appear on television, radio or the internet for 6 months, so he went out on a tour dubbed "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour."

Okay, so that wasn't very brief.

There are a lot of clips of amusing stage antics, and some entertaining excerpts of the stable of songs (mostly rockabilly) played on the tour, but the choppiness of the presentation prevents immersion into the material.

The soundbite nature of the editing makes the interview bits unable to provide much insight. We hear Conan talk about the raw deal he was given (at point he says "sometimes I'm so mad I can't even breathe"), but you're better off with the 60 Minutes interview from last year if you want anything approaching relevations.

Still, Conan is an extremely funny guy so the film can't help have some hilarity - you gotta love a guy who says "it's in God's hands now" after sending a tweet. Sometimes Conan comes off mean with his constant comical verbal abuse of his assistant Sona Movsesian, the school boy punches to the shoulders of staff members, and the merciless ribbing of 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer - but hey, that's just the man's patented attention seeking persona. He acknowledges as much: "I might be a fuckin' genius and I might be the biggest dick ever, I don't know. Or maybe both - that's what Patton was."

It's obvious that Conan is always "on" when he's in front of a camera (I bet a lot of the time off camera too), so its a documentary that will be most enjoyed by hardcore fanatics i.e. Team Coco.

Although CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP isn't a great documentary, it's a worthwhile Blu ray/DVD because of its abundant special features.

The commentary with Conan, Flender, and the crew is much funnier than the movie (Conan says he wanted the tour's lengthy name to be even longer: "I wanted to call it 'The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour Because of Jay Leno Tour'"), there's a fairly insightful 11 minute interview, and a nice smattering of watchable outtakes which are listed below.



Special Features: Commentary with Director Rodman Flender, Conan O'Brien, Andy Richter, Mike Sweeney and Sona Movsesian, Interview with Conan O'Brien, Interview Outtakes, Additional Scenes.



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ATTACK THE BLOCK: The Film Babble Blog Review

This British sci-fi comedy is playing exclusively in the Triangle at the Colony Theater in Raleigh:



ATTACK THE BLOCK (Dir. Joe Cornish, 2011)

A breath of fresh air after this superhero/sequel saturated summer, "Attack the Block" posits a teenaged South London street gang versus an alien invasion with thrillingly funny results.

There's a bit of a GOONIES filtered through the sensibility of SHAWN OF THE DEAD (Edgar Wright co-executive produced) thing going down as the kids race around a grimy low-income apartment building known as "the Block" (as in Block of flats), battling black furry monsters with green glowing teeth that they call "bear/wolf/gorilla motherfuckers."

The leader of the gang is the unsmiling John Boyega as Moses, who seems destined to the life of a go nowhere drug dealer until this unexpected attack puts him to the test. Boyega's crew is made up of Simon Howard, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, and Leeon Jones.

The underaged hoods first encounter the aliens in the middle of mugging a nurse (Jodie Whittaker) on her way home to the same complex they live in. Whittaker gets away as the gang go after the creature and kill it figuring that it's something they can maybe sell on Ebay.

Moses stashes the dead monster at the apartment of deadly drug kingpin Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who has a weed selling underling played by Nick Frost (there's some of that SHAWN OF THE DEAD vibe I was talking about).

Despite their prickly first meeting, Whittaker joins forces with Boyega and his boys (boyz?), while the spot-on Luke Treadaway, as a geeky stoner gang member wannabe, also gets wrapped up into the warfare.

The film builds into a chaotic action-packed blast as the kids pull their resources (mostly fireworks) to battle the bunch of bear/wolf/gorilla motherfuckers (just wanted to type that again), and there are tons of laugh-out loud lines (like "this is too much madness to fit into a text!"), every step of the way.

The movie is a bit too dark - not thematically, but lighting-wise - as some shots are hard to follow through the murky shadows, yet its small scale special effects work well enough to serve the story and tone.

ATTACK THE BLOCK looks destined to be a future cult movie, perfect for late night viewings, but don't wait until then - this is well worth seeking out now while it's still on the big screen.



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Autobiography of Nicolae Caucescu (Saturday, September 10, 2011) (

OK - so I admit that I have a never-ending boner for anything Romanian these days, but this is such an amazing film it's hard not to be totally bowled over by it. It's 3+ hours of found footage of Commerade Nicolae Caucescu official films (with some home movies thrown in for texture in a few places) cut together as an "autobiography". As a theoretical piece it's one of the most interesting pieces in a long time (at least since Alexander Olch's The Windmill Movie, an autobio-doc made by a third party). It brings up important questions about what makes an "autobiography" and what makes a "documentary". The suggestion here is that Caucescu's persona was a creation of the Party, therefore his autobiography would be a creation of texts (films) of him in an official capacity. The suggestion is that there was no there there with him from a psychological point of view, so his autobiography is simply a superficial view of him looking at stuff (mostly of parades). This totally brings to mind Kundera's assertion that commies loved parades and how fabricated they are themselves. (Who walks down streets to music and choreography... and then who would think they're anything but concocted simulacra of reality?) It is a marathon in length, but I think that's part of the point as well: aside from the formal qualities of contemporary Romanian narrative pictures, only a megalomaniac could create an "autobiography" that was so long.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

CREATURE: The Film Babble Blog Review

CREATURE 



(Dir. Fred M. Andrews, 2011)

With its skinny dip in the swamp beginning featuring the full frontal nudity of Jennifer Lynn Warren, we get a good sense of what’s in store in the low budget directorial debut of Fred M. Andrews. Warren is attacked from underwater by an unseen entity, and she frantically tries to swim back ashore. She loses her legs then her life, so there we have it - the first casualty of CREATURE.

The film has the familiar set-up of a group of young couples on a road trip camping out in dangerous territory. The guys (Mahcad Brooks, Dillon Casey, and Aaron Hill) are Marines, and Serinda Swan, Lauren Schneider, and Amanda Fuller play their girlfriends. They stop at a old country store run by Sid Haig, where they learn about the local legend of Lockjaw, a half-man, half alligator that they first dismiss as a “Southern fried version of Bigfoot.”



They soon find out otherwise when they make the mistake of setting up tents in the backwoods of the Louisiana Bayou.

On the way to that destination we get the intense back story that the creature began life as an inbred man named Grimley, portrayed by Daniel Bernhardt. It’s cool that the monster is not a CGI creation, but Bernhardt in a full body costume – a scary sight that was effective enough to make the cover of Fangoria magazine.



There’s lots of blood and gore plus plenty of violence, and the before mentioned nudity so brace yourself for a gripping, if at times grueling, good time.



In an ensemble cast of unknowns, Haig stands out. Film fans should recognize him from movies such as HALLOWEEN (the Rob Zombie remake), KILL BILL 2, HOUSE OF A 1000 CORPSES, and many more.



It obviously recalls SWAMP THING, and, of course, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but director Andrews, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Morse, pays homage to those movies by playing it straight.





In a phone conversation with Andrews, he told me that he thinks of the film as an “anti-horror horror movie.” I think that’s a good way of putting it.



Although it's a bit disjointed and definitely not for the squeamish, CREATURE is a creepy cheapie that should delight old school horror fans and lovers of monster movies. Exploitation die-hards will likely embrace it too.



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Senna (Thursday, September 8, 2001) (78)

A very nice biodoc about the Ayrton Senna, the major Brazilian F-1 driver of the late-'80s and early-'90s. The film shows how he rose up to become one of the world's biggest sports heroes (albeit one that most Americans have never heard of... because F-1 is a dumb "sport") and how his "drive on the edge of sanity" style worked its way into his clashes with F-1 brass. There's a weird non-politics to the film suggesting that Brazilians loved him and his sport during one the biggest economic depressions in that country's history... a bit of bread and circus... er, circuits... (heh heh). Not enough is explained about the rules of the sport, but it's generally works as a good biography piece.

Stars: 2.5 of 4