The Bank Job

It’s a credit to the filmmakers that “The Bank Job” is not a three hour film. It could have been. It’s a marvel that they were able to distill so many plots into just under two hours. With that much plot, though, there’s little room for anything else.
The movie is supposedly based on a true story, but the facts are a bit hazy; there’s clearly lots of conjecture here. Rather the point is to try to explain away the mystery surrounding one of the biggest bank robberies in history amidst an atmosphere of vice and corruption in the 1970s.
The basic premise is this: a member of the royal family is photographed in a compromising situation on a Caribbean island, and the photo ends up in the hands of a black revolutionary figure. He uses it as leverage to get out of any legal trouble he runs into.
The government is tired of his evasions, and so it secretly contracts a group of thieves to rob the bank and unknowingly recover the photograph. Meanwhile, it also sends a spy into the black revolutionary gang to try to obtain any copies that might exist.
Unfortunately for the thieves, the robbery also draws the ire of the regular London police who don’t know of the government’s plan, a pornography magnate who has to recover evidence of his bribing other London cops, and other government officials whose photos were taken in compromising situations by a conniving brothel owner.
It’s a large amount of characters to keep track of, and with so many different allegiances, particularly among the various government and law enforcement types, it can get a bit confusing. Luckily director Roger Donaldson is up to the task, imbuing the narrative with all the certainty of a Scorsese film.
However, by the time all the plot devices are in place and the story is running at full speed, there’s no time left for character development, or reflection of any other kind. The story’s entertaining enough, but the weight of it crushes everything else in its path.
Still, there’s an interesting style here, with a muted color palate trying to reflect memorable 70s films. It would have been easy to try to make an intricate Tarantino-esque odyssey with lots of quick shots and frenetic visuals, but Donaldson wisely keeps things more conventional. It’s more like “Rififi” than “Reservoir Dogs.”
The cast is led by perennial British tough guy Jason Statham, who thankfully shows more humanity than in the truly awful “The Transporter.” He doesn’t have the greatest range, but his previous work in Guy Ritchie movies serves him well here. The rest of the cast is capable enough, and because the movie’s all plot, they never have to dip deep into the well of emotion beyond anger or excitement.
Now that I think about it, the whole movie is a little like a Guy Ritchie film. It’s essentially a 70s “fact-based” version of “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels,” which has its merits. Thankfully the filmmakers here seem to have a better handle on their style, and a better sense of purpose.

Semi-Pro

I am making a new law. Let’s call it the “Law of Diminishing Shorts.” This law will state that any film featuring Will Ferrell in 70s-style basketball shorts, that is, short shorts, cannot try to be serious. Ever. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Such is the central flaw of Ferrell’s latest 1970s farce “Semi-Pro.” The story takes place in the world of the American Basketball Association (ABA), facing its waning days and the promise of a merger with the NBA. All the ridiculous grandstanding and flamboyancy of the 70s combined with the almost-ludicrous energy of professional basketball makes for a rather exotic locale.
And this is the kind of world that Ferrell does best in. His pompous fools Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby could not exist in a normal world; they need to be surrounded by characters just as silly as they are. The same is true for Jackie Moon of “Semi-Pro.” When he starts the film by singing his love ballad “Love Me Sexy,” you think things are off on the right track.
So you can imagine the disappointment every time the filmmakers try to plug in a serious subplot or a relatively serious emotional moment. It doesn’t jive with Jackie Moon, and so he wanders through the picture, occasionally wrestling a bear or jumping over cheerleaders while wearing roller skates. Besides the occasional scene with Andy Richter or Will Arnett, there seems to be no one who will play along.
The serious moments I refer to mostly revolve around an aging ex-NBA player (Woody Harrelson) who is trying to connect with his ex-girlfriend. The pieces of the subplot are sparse and random, and create nothing but sluggishness as we wait for Ferrell’s next crazy stunt.
Also in the mix are a couple of mismatched commentators, the afro-hooded “Coffee” Black (Andre Benjamin), and a clueless hippie (Jackie Earle Haley). These are the characters that make Jackie feel at home, and the comedy is strongest when it indulges in their ridiculous banter. The best scene of the film is the one that most feels like improvisation. It features poker, a gun, and Tim Meadows, and that’s all you need to know.
Some might consider this a sign that Will Ferrell needs to move on, forget the 70s, and start doing some more sophisticated comedy or serious roles. I would have to disagree. In the right hands, Ferrell’s energy and persona can work wonders. They just have to be harnessed to the right task, in the right world. A clown’s just not as funny outside of the circus.
One thing is for sure, though. He stills has that manic energy and conviction that makes him talented, in my eyes. Few comedians will jump through the hoops that Ferrell does with such gusto, and a feeling of genuine investment in the often foolish concerns of his characters. It takes a sort of courage that you don’t often find. Unfortunately for him, “Semi-Pro” was a losing battle from the beginning.

Penelope

Once upon a time, there were these fantasy stories that people called fairy tales. Kids loved them, adults respected them, and so on. Then came the modern age. Yes, kids still like fairy tales, for the most part, when they’re not playing video games or watching television. Adults, it seems, are too busy to be interested. But that doesn’t stop movie studios from trying to create quirky comedies that they can bill as “fairy tales for adults.”
Producer/actress Reese Witherspoon has found one such tale to present in the movie “Penelope.” It’s not exactly for kids, really. But I’m not sure adults will like it either. Indeed, there seems to be a battle throughout the film about whether to make a sweet children’s story or a hip deconstructionist morality play for grown-ups. Either way, I doubt either group will be completely satisfied.
The film stars Christina Ricci, who finally seems to be breaking out of her eccentric macabre teenager mode, as the title character who is stricken with a family curse that caused her to be born with the nose and ears of a pig. Now nearing adulthood, she is pressured by her parents (mainly her mother, played by Catherine O’Hara) to find a fellow aristocrat to marry, since falling in love with “one of her own kind” will break the spell.
Naturally, her face frightens off most every suitor, including one spoiled brat who goes to great lengths to get revenge by hiring a diminutive reporter to help him get a picture of Penelope and clear the charges of insanity leveled at him by the public.
To infiltrate Penelope’s mansion, they hire Maxwell Campion (James McAvoy), a gambling addict who has lost all his money and is desperate enough to go on the mission for them. Oddly enough, and probably predictably, he falls in love with her, but a secret he carries keeps him from declaring his feelings for her.
And so begins the star-crossed love story with themes that echo “Beauty and the Beast” and other nursery stories. It’s a simple theme, but one that is burdened by an overly complicated story. It seems that ff you’re going to present a complex story, you should then present complex emotions and themes.
While the story is smack in the middle of the modern age, albeit in some imaginary cross between London and New York City, the emotions are a little too simplistic for a modern, adult audience. But kids will likely be confused by some of the more subtle machinations of the plot.
Still, it has some charm. Ricci and McAvoy make good romantic leads, and Peter Dinklage gives a surprisingly memorable turn as the reporter. There is some comedy here and there, but there’s too many failed eccentricities and quirks for the humor to remain consistent.
To its credit, there is a very fine line here, between juvenile and adult fantasy. To balance it, the filmmakers would need to employ both that knowing adult edge and a refreshing kind of innocence. Here, the alternating lopsided game of tug-of-war just wears thin.

Vantage Point

About halfway through the film, the groans started. The audience was audibly frustrated, and they had no qualms expressing it. By the third or fourth time that the film “Vantage Point” rewound to start the events over again from someone else’s perspective, that frustration was starting to get loud.
Such is the inherent problem with the gimmick behind the film. The basic premise, of at least the first hour, is that you will see several different viewpoints of a presidential assassination and terrorist bombing during an international summit in Spain. Owing an obvious debt to Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” the goal is that each viewpoint holds different clues to unraveling the mystery at hand, which in this case is who assassinated the president and set off the bomb.
You’ve got the secret service agent Thomas Barnes, played with an ever-present grimace by Dennis Quaid. There’s an American tourist, Howard Lewis, played by last year’s Best Actor winner Forest Whitaker. There’s a Spanish police officer, Enrique, who is enigmatic and possibly useless to the story.
And let’s not forget the President (William Hurt) and the terrorists themselves, who occupy the last frame of reference. Between each section, the director employs a rather obnoxious and obvious rewind effect and then displays a ticking clock showing us that we’ve gone back to the beginning. After a while it feels like several episodes of “24.”
But the clock is not the only thing that makes the film feel like television. Each section ends with a cliffhanger, and it starts to feel very contrived. There’s enough to this story to keep us interested, so why rely on artificial suspense?
There are some merits to the style, though. It’s a fresh take on what could (or might be) a very average story. And we are allowed the perspective of people who would not normally be caught up in a thriller like this.
It could be done well, but it gets to be a little too messy. The timelines don’t always match up and the aforementioned rewind effect and other elements tend to dumb it down a little, as if we could not pick up on it on our own.
Luckily, after an hour, that technique is exhausted and we get to the payoff: a thirty-minute non-stop action sequence that is meticulously choreographed and finally gives us the gratification the audience deserves by then. Car chases, espionage, betrayals, kidnappings, murder, all boiled down into a frenetic and tight scene that almost makes up for what’s gone before.
When it all comes together, it makes sense and we can sit back and enjoy. It just makes you wish the rest of the film had just dispensed with the gimmick that it could not employ flawlessly. There’s the end of a good movie here, but you have to settle for less in order to get there.
It takes expert filmmakers to pull off the kind of film that director Pete Travis has tried to present here. You have to have a certain respect for your audience’s intelligence and a strong sense of narrative momentum. I’m just not sure those involved were up to the task this time.

The Best Films of 2007

It was a great year for film. No doubt about it. About midway through the fall I started to worry: I haven’t written a bad review in a while. Am I losing my edge? My credibility? My discretion? I was writing one good review after another. But they deserved them. I can’t remember a time so saturated with good cinema as this year has. There were a lot to choose from, but here’s my favorites.

The Top Ten

1. There Will Be Blood - The most ambitious, audacious, epic, classic, groundbreaking, thoughtful, evocative, engrossing, and memorable film of the year. This film is a cut above in so many ways. If you haven’t seen it, go. Now.

2. Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street- It’s my favorite musical. Perhaps there’s no way I couldn’t have enjoyed it. But I also know all the ways it could’ve gone wrong. And it didn’t. Wonderfully performed and visually rich. And Tim Burton has never been better.

3. Ratatouille- I don’t think I’ve ever used the word sublime in print before, but I will now. Because I think that’s the best word to describe the joy at work in this film. Artistically, the most fully realized and satisfying computer animated movie ever. All that would be enough to make the list, but on top of that it’s incredibly enjoyable. I’m convinced that if this film doesn’t warm your heart, you don’t have one.

4. I’m Not There- Bob Dylan is my artistic hero. One of the reasons for that is his refusal to be pigeonholed, to give into the impulse to satisfy anyone. He is solely ruled by his own artistic instincts, a quality I hope I could develop one day. Therefore, there’s no way to do justice to such a man by making a movie trying to depict him as just one man. Six actors was the right way to do it. Todd Haynes has given the biopic a well-deserved kick in the pants.

5. No Country for Old Men- I’m not sure what I can say that hasn’t already been said. Well acted, excellently adapted, deftly directed. The consistent mood sustained in this film creates an atmosphere I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. And I liked the ending, for the record, because the movie’s conclusion is correct. What can you really do in the face of such irrational, senseless violence?

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford- One of the most underappreciated movies of the year. Surprisingly good performances all around in what amounts to our American version of the story of Judas. It’s at once a legend and a deconstruction of that legend, with images that tap into our collective American unconscious. Watching it is an experience unlike any other.

7. Atonement- The movie was marketed incorrectly, I think, as a kind of classic wartime romantic drama. There are elements of that, to be sure, particularly in the central love story. But to boil the movie down to that would be an injustice. It’s much more complex than you would expect, with a final message that’s artistically relevant and heartbreaking at the same time.

8. Once- The simplicity of this film gives it a charm not found in any of the big studio releases this year. It might not reinvent the genre, but it does unearth a kind of musical that doesn’t rely on big dance numbers and operatic discourse. More than any other musical, here the characters are truly singing from the heart.

9. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead- one of the most straightforwardly tragic and intense dramas in recent memory. The display of acting here is an achievement in itself, and Sidney Lumet doesn’t pull any punches in his old age. It’s brutal and sorrowful, like a Greek tragedy, but with the kind of energy of a truly modern story.

10. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Kudos to the filmmakers for turning what might have been an average sob story into a truly unique experience. A story that’s always engaging with emotion that’s not the least bit artificial. And Max von Sydow will break your heart.

The Second Tier

11. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days- Really brutal, at times painful and frustrating, in terms of the characters and their choices. Artistically, confident and thoughtful direction never shy away from the harsh realities.

12. Lars and the Real Girl- one of the best original screenplays of the year. It’s genuinely moving, with a tenderness found in few films of the past few years.

13. Across the Universe- a fitting companion to the musical innovations of the greatest band in history. A weak story is forgiven by surreal musical numbers that never cease to surprise.

14. 3:10 to Yuma- A hopeful sign that exciting, thrilling Westerns are making a comeback. This is the genre we Americans do best. It’s about time we got back to it.

15. The Savages- A serious comedy indeed. It feels real and genuine, with one of Laura Linney’s best performances.

16. The Bourne Ultimatum- the smartest action movie in years. It’s good to see such a well-made product in such an underappreciated genre.

17. Michael Clayton- a fine directing debut for Tony Gilroy. It could be called a thriller, I suppose, as some do classify it. But it’s much more thoughtful than that label would suggest.

18. Juno- A little overrated, I have to say, but a good film nonetheless. The script drove me nuts sometimes, but it’s much more emotionally complex than I originally gave it credit for. Good performances all around, and good to see the Arrested Development alumni thriving.

19. Into the Wild- from Sean Penn, I had expected a politically liberal hippie tribute/odyssey, but what I found was a film that refused to glorify this flawed person, mourned the tragedy of wasted potential, and managed to make him into a hero.

20. Romance and Cigarettes- John Turturro’s crazy surreal/realist musical is hard to classify, even harder to judge. For sheer audacity and experimentation, it earns a place here. Though the ending is a mess, it’s one of the most artistically brave movies this year.

Honorable Mention

21. Grindhouse
22. Charlie Wilson’s War
23. The Darjeeling Limited
24. No End in Sight
25. Eastern Promises

Guilty Pleasure of the Year Award:
Transformers

Worst film of the year (tie):
Year of the Dog
Waitress

R.I.P.

Roy Scheider

1932-2008

"I can do anything. I'm the chief of police."

Youth Without Youth

I’m starting to think that Francis Ford Coppola wants to be immortal. Two of his last three films, though they span over a decade, deal with the trouble of aging. The peculiar “Jack” starring Robin Williams depicted a boy who ages at several times the normal rate, and so becomes a boy trapped in a middle-aged man’s body. Now, with “Youth Without Youth,” his commentary on aging becomes even stranger, and incredibly convoluted.
The director of “The Godfather” brings us the story of Dominic, played by Tim Roth, a professor who we first see at age 70 in 1938. He is struck by lightning and suffers terrible burns, but when the doctors remove the bandages, he looks no more than 35 or 40 years old. The doctors are baffled, but the appearance of Dominic’s strange doppelganger, seen only to him, seems to hint that Dominic knows more than he is telling.
With the renewed youth come strange powers, none of which are explicitly explained. He can sometimes see the future, read books without opening them, or read minds. His abilities and reverse aging make him the target of a mad Nazi scientist who is doing experiments with electricity to change human evolution.
The aforementioned story takes the first half of the film. Throughout, Dominic keeps trying to finish his “life’s work,” which is a study of the origin of language and human consciousness. This study comes into the foreground in the second half of the film, which seems to be another film entirely.
That hour shows Dominic encountering a woman who randomly starts spouting ancient languages. She keeps regressing back to older and older tongues, and Dominic thinks she will eventually arrive at the first language. He is excited to complete his research, but when she begins to age at a rapid rate, he knows he cannot sacrifice her for his work.
I have given a great deal of plot synopsis, which I normally don’t like to do, but I feel that doing so for this film is a personal achievement in itself. The film’s editing and cinematography make following the narrative difficult, with two Dominics often wandering the same frame, or flashing back to different parts of Dominic’s life, which, since he aged backwards, are difficult to distinguish.
I could easily call the film a mess, and it probably is. Yet Coppola still has that kind of directorial confidence that makes me still wonder if there was something I didn’t see, if there was something he was hiding from me. I almost feel stupid that I didn’t “get it,” but then again maybe it’s not meant to be “got.” Either way, I can’t say it was a very satisfying cinematic experience.
If the story I told confused you, then the ending won’t help. I am always very annoyed by films that end with the doubt that everything that happened before may not have actually occurred. Indeed, we are not even sure when the ending happens in the long, complicated chronology. If Coppola meant to give us a grand statement on human consciousness or existence, then I have to say he has failed. There may be something to this film, but I just don’t think I have the patience to try to revisit it again.