Cops and Robbers

September brings a whole new season, and with it many changes. Around the country, leaves change color and fall from the trees, the sun sets earlier and earlier, and Hollywood starts churning out the movies they think will actually have a chance of making an impression on critics and moviegoers. Yes, hidden amid the glut of Summer blockbusters and early-year critical fodder have been several intriguing films, including The Place Beyond the Pines, Mud, Fruitvale Station and The Way, Way Back. But with the soon-to-be-released likes of 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, Saving Mr. Banks, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street... I could go on, but you get the picture. The coming months are so jam-packed with Oscar bait that even movies that would have been sure things a year or so ago will almost certainly find themselves on the outside looking in. Autumn (and winter afterward) brings with it the Big Boys, and the first officially serious candidate to rear its head is Denis Villeneuve's ensemble title Prisoners.

Jackman trying out as the "older, weathered" Bruce Wayne, perhaps?

In his follow-up to the Academy Award-nominated Canadian Incendies, Villeneuve takes his all-star cast and pits them against an unenviable foe when the daughters of friends Keller Dover (a poorly-monikered Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are kidnapped in broad daylight near their suburban homes. The police and Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) apprehend prime suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano), only to discover no evidence linking the mentally-underdeveloped man-child with the crime. Days pass without any clues, and with the families driven mad by the tragedy, Keller decides that the only way he will see his daughter alive is if he takes matters into his own hands.

Oh, wait, he just has that face all the time.

It's the above-mentioned veteran actors - plus talented performers like Viola Davis, Maria Bello, and Melissa Leo - who give Prisoners it's most compelling strength, with Jackman front and center as a distraught father who desperate choices in an attempt to rescue his daughter. Since Jackman so often appears in relatively simple action films like The Wolverine and Real Steel, it's always wonderful to be surprised by the acting muscles he doesn't often flex, even if they belong to such a dark and despondent plot. Jackman owns his material, and while I am ragging on him in the photo comments about his stone-carved angry face, he does so much with vocal inflection and his actions that it makes up for any other weaknesses in his performance. Gyllenhaal also stands out, though a lack of character development means that those easily-recognizable demons from his past (which manifest themselves in neck tattoos and conspicuous eye twitches) are never explained. The film splits its time between those two actors, and not once do they fail to keep you hooked.

A little help from the rest of the cast.

Now if only the rest of the cast had been treated as reverently as the two leads. After the first act, I assumed Dano would be my favorite actor in this. Besides the fact that he has some great films on his resume (Little Miss Sunshine, Ruby Sparks and Looper just to start), Dano is a natural talent who is really going into new territory with this role. As the mentally-disabled prime suspect, he puts real fear in the audience in his early scenes. But sadly, despite still playing a major role in the remaining acts, he is relegated to the background. The rest of the supporting cast is also misused, most getting one or two front-and-center scenes before fading back into obscurity. It's certainly not due to talent issues; this is one of the best-collected casts in recent memory, with more than enough ability to keep things interesting. Given more to do, they might have helped improve the film's mood, as well as director Villeneuve's pacing. Instead, they are mostly wasted.

He still can't believe he graduated from the Police Academy.

And it's the hands of Villeneuve where Prisoners gets a little sketchy. He gets some great performances out of his actors, and knows how to perfectly frame a shot. The director's technical prowess is certainly not my concern here. However, he might have been given a bit too much control over the movie's final release this past weekend. For one, the film is two-and-a-half hours long. Typically, I don't care about length; unlike many ADHD-riddled moviegoers, I can actually sit through a movie that's longer than an hour and a half and not be fidgety by time the credits roll, so long as the movie is actually good. I'm willing to sit through such a long film when the time is actually used to tell the story, as opposed to relatively short films who use so much filler you have to wonder about why they got made in the first place. Sometimes I even think that standard two-hour movies SHOULD add another twenty minutes to flesh out certain characters or elaborate on particular plot points, which would have made all the difference in the world. But Villeneuve tries to mimic the pacing of award-winning thrillers like The Usual Suspects with mixed results. Scenes are deliberately paced, there are far too many side-plots, and the red herrings become far too distracting as the story leads to a formulaic, mediocre ending. By my reckoning, an entire subplot containing a copycat kidnapper could have been cut without any major issues, perhaps to the benefit of allowing the side characters to become more significant (okay, I'm done with that rant). I'm rarely a fan of studios clamping down on a director's "artistic vision", but this was a situation where Warner Brothers perhaps should have stepped in and requested some cuts to the final product.

Obligatory pointing-of-the-gun cliche.

Perhaps Villeneuve just got a little overly-excited about directing his first American feature. He's still a talented director, but his treatment of Prisoners wasn't his best effort at expressing that ability. He's got a great cast, a solid story and the perfect mood, but the material doesn't quite gel in the way it really ought to. It's still a decent flick, and one I'd recommend for a decent DVD perusal. But awards bait this is not, likely forgotten in a few months time. It's truly a shame, as with the talent involved, it could have easily turned into one of the year's best. In a nutshell, that  is the difference between potential and the real world.

Too Dumb

All I wanted to do was see a stupid movie. Why did the creators behind Movie 43 have to ruin that?

A series of sketch shorts from the minds of Peter Farrelly and Charles Wessler (who ruled Hollywood in the nineties with hits like There's Something about Mary and Dumb and Dumber) and filmed over the course of many years, Movie 42 uses a dozen directors and an insane number of A-list stars in fulfilling the most base of art forms; they try to out-gross one another with scenes that include a young couple with a poop fetish, superhero speed dating, teen menstruation, a truth or dare game gone out of control, violent leprechauns, and a man with testicles dangling from his chin. No connection other than existing within the same 90 minutes is made apparent, and if any of that appealed to you, I guarantee that Movie 42 will still find a way to disappoint you.

Yup, Emma Stone will officially do ANYTHING.

What fools you at first into thinking that there's something here is the multitude of top-notch talent involved in the process. There are two Academy Award winners (Kate Winslet and Halle Berry) in this cast, countless former nominees (as well as current noms Hugh Jackman and Naomi Watts) and even more respected character actors, all of whom apparently didn't realize what they were getting into when they signed on for the ride. Gross-out humor is one thing when it comes from people you expect (the Scary Movie and associated spin-off franchises use most of the same low-budget talent) but with the exception of Anna Faris (in a scene with real-life husband Chris Pratt), you wouldn't expect the same from this particular class of actor. Watching these celebrities do things they wouldn't normally on film was much of the appeal of seeing Movie 43, and likely the only thing to draw audiences this past weekend.

Anna, I thought you had gotten past this!

The problem is that for all the gross-out, completely obscene humor Farrelly and company put forth, they often forgot to make sure what we were seeing was FUNNY. You can get through entire scenes without even cracking a smile, and that happens far too often. It would be one thing if there were just spots of weakness, misogyny and the over-reliance of sex jokes that interrupted the gut-busting laughter, but that is tragically THE WHOLE THING. Even if the scene in question had a promising concept, it was quickly lost to easy sight gags and rampant stupidity. For instance, watching Richard Gere, Jack McBrayer and Kate Bosworth argue over why teenage boys are having sex with their company's new music player, the iBabe (which represents a full-sized, naked woman) gets old quickly. And Liev Schreiber and Watts playing homeschooling parents who don't want their son to miss out on all the bullying, awkward situations and humiliations of high school plays like a scene out of time. Berry, Winslet, Jackman, and Greg Kinnear are all wasted as they do little or nothing that could possibly get a rise out of the audience. The only moments I found remotely funny were the skits "Veronica", in which Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone murmur dirty things they want to do to one another over the PA system of a supermarket late at night, and "Victory's Glory", in which Terrence Howard plays a coach giving an inspiring speech to a black basketball team who believe they are inferior to the opposing, all-white team. In fact, Howard's emphatic screams of "You're black! They're white! This ain't hockey!" were the only times the entire film that anybody in the theater laughed out loud.

Yup, that's the whole game plan.

It's sadly obvious that Peter Farrelly has no freaking clue what funny is anymore. While he was able to get away with gross-out gags back in the nineties, those at least were both outrageous and hilarious when they needed to be. Here his antics (and those of directors like Brett Ratner, James Gunn, Steve Carr and Steven Brill) fall completely flat, easily maintaining the targeted level of obscenity but almost never getting off the ground with anything representing actual humor. As a result, it's easily the worst movie of 2013. Sure, it's still early, but you have to WORK to be this bad, and I can't imagine anyone else falling this low in the near future. My old movie-watching sidekick Anne used to speak of the "Stupid Factor", a phenomena in which something could be so stupid that it was actually pretty funny and clever. That used to be Farrelly's M.O. not all that long ago. Now he gives stupid movies a bad rap, possibly putting out not just the worst movie of 2013, but of the whole decade.

War Games

Well, it’s finally here. After twenty-three years, George Lucas has at last released Red Tails, his film celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen, a squadron of all-black fighter pilots who flew over Europe in World War II and are relative unknown in this day and age. In a recent interview on John Stewart’s The Daily Show, Lucas (who is credited as the film’s executive producer) revealed that in fact the reason it took so long to make Red Tails was in fact due to the fact that major movie studios balked at financing it, not knowing how to promote the title to an overseas audience, from which a movie will make about sixty percent of its profit. After so long a time, it’s remarkable that it was finally made, but is it true? Is a film like Red Tails not as marketable when other war films can all but walk away with guaranteed grosses? It wasn’t all that long ago that Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor came in and capitalized on major WWII pride to the tune of a combined $400 million. Saving Private Ryan especially has resonated, to the tune of eleven Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director award for Steven Spielberg. But did those films deserve that level of appreciation, and is there really that much difference between Red Tails and the enjoyable but far overrated Ryan?

Oh, yeah, he's a star

 

Well, one difference would be each film’s plots. While Saving Private Ryan focused on an obscure war rule to set up a tale of men versus long odds, Red Tails by comparison has a far more important tale, that of an all-black fighter squadron who undergo discrimination in the air and back home, where racism keeps the pilots far from the front lines. The best these beleaguered pilots can hope for is to mop up where white units have already stopped patrolling. Their commanding officer, Colonel Bullard (Terrence Howard), has been hard lobbying for the unit to have a more active role in the war in Europe, and that has finally paid off when bomber squadrons need escorts to protect them in delivering payloads deep into Nazi-occupied Germany. Fighting through a sky full of Luftwaffe and preconceptions about their abilities, the pilots manage to prove their ability to both themselves and the rest of two opposing armies certain they will fail.

Here they are; recognize any of them?

 

There’s not a whole lot of difference outside the general story however.  As a director, Anthony Hemingway has nothing akin to the experience that Spielberg had before Ryan was released in 1998. Hemingway, who has directed episodes of cable shows Battlestar Galactica, The Wire and Treme, has never before directed a major motion picture, and that is readily apparent when you stand back and watch him in action. While competently done, the story gets bogged down by cliches that are as natural to a war film as guns, bullets and death. Nobody likes to mention how many of those cliches made their way into Spielberg’s release however, and for a war film the stock characters, obvious plot lines, predictable outcomes and nick-of-time rescues are no more prevalent in Red Tails than any major WWII title of the past two decades. Hemingway’s work on The Wire and Treme also means he’s used to working with a black cast, several of whom he worked with on those two shows. Say what you want about George Lucas, but he knew enough that he couldn’t get the job done in the director's chair in the same way that Hemingway would.

The best pilots you've never heard of

What the characters may lack in depth, they make up for in exuberance from the film’s acting corps. Terrence Howard is the unrivaled star of the film, despite the fact that he doesn’t once enter the cockpit of a P-51 fighter. When Howard enters the room, he demands attention, and when Colonel Bullard tells a racist superior officer that he and his men don’t care what he thinks, the entire audience rallies behind him. Despite his singular acting strengths, it’s the pilots who are the focus of the story, and fortunately most of them are very good actors deserving of their shot at prime time here. David Oyelowo had a good 2011 with American audiences, with supporting roles in The Help and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, two very good films that showed his flexibility as a performer. Here he’s a cocky fighter jockey who look for trouble and love in equal doses. Other standouts include Nate Parker as an alcoholic flight leader with daddy issues, The Wire and 90210’s Tristan Wilds as a young pilot desperate to prove himself, and Andre Royo as a cantankerous mechanic. Even while most of the others are not especially detailed characters, the sheer joy the actors take with them on the set is infectious and translates to a strong communal personality that overrides the inability to sometimes tell the secondary pilots apart. Not that there aren’t disappointments, especially Cuba Gooding Jr. as Bullard’s second in command, who has a few too many scenes and gets overshadowed by the talent of just about everyone else.

Ooh, that's going to hurt

 

An unfortunate side effect to making a movie about WWII in this day and age is that it’s usually cheaper to create all the action in CGI than the old methods, which usually involved building replica machines of what was actually used at the time. So instead of rebuilding a squadron of P-51 fighters and dozens of B-19 bombers to shoot aerial dogfights, not to mention dozens of German fighter planes, the entirety of sky battles are fought in a computer program. While the visuals themselves are beautiful and chaotic in their execution, they do sometimes feel a little off, especially when a plane is shot down. It’s a little disappointing when you look at some of the best special effects of the past few years, but considering that Red Tails has a much lower budget than most of those special effects juggernauts, what they do show is really not all that bad.

I may not know how to pronounce his name, but Oyelowo deserves to be a star

 

So what is the real difference between Red Tails and other war movies? On the surface, the all-black cast is definitely unique for a major motion picture. If it does well that would certainly separate it from Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, another movie about a segregated WWII unit that was a box office bomb and a main argument against these variety of films. Other than the color of the actors’ skins, however, there is absolutely no reason to go to any other WWII film over Red Tails. While this is by no means a GREAT film, it is an enjoyable one, and doubtlessly an IMPORTANT one to see on the big screen. There’s no reason Saving Private Ryan can make over $200 million all by itself and be so lauded, just for similar movies like Red Tails to be so ignored by audiences. There are few enough minority stars in this business that when such a concentrated effort is made to put them forward, especially in such a strong manner, it says a lot about us when we don’t bother to support it. Don’t make that mistake now. See Red Tails when you can. Even if it’s no more than an enjoyable action movie, that should be reason enough to want to see it.

For now at least, it's the #1 film of 2012.