Marquee Marquis

Flash of Genius

2008-10-02T02:22:00.002-04:00

I'm staying in a van down by the river

Grade: B –

Director: Marc Abraham

Starring: Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney, and Alan Alda

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours

The typical David-Goliath story seldom troubles itself with such pesky questions as “At what price victory?” since cost of defeat is usually so much higher. Nevertheless, this query lies at the heart of the parable of Robert Kearns in Flash of Genius. The true life account of one man’s lone stand against the corporate giant who wronged him reads like low hanging, Capra-esque fruit ripe for Hollywood’s picking.

The narrative is irresistible: in the early 1960s, Kearns (Greg Kinnear), an engineer, university professor, and part-time inventor, perfected an electrical process for intermittent windshield wipers in automobiles. After applying for patents, he demonstrated his invention for eager engineers at the Ford Motor Co., who initially agreed to purchase motors from Kearns to install in their cars. Ford soon rebuffed Kearns’ offer only to come out with their separate version of intermittent wipers soon thereafter. Upon inspection, Kearns discovered that Ford’s electrical wiper design was identical to his process.

So began decades of legal wrangling that would consume Kearns’ for the remainder of his life. It is easy to sympathize with such a figure and cheer his single-minded quest for justice, and Philip Railsback’s script invites you to do just that, all the way through the clichéd courtroom climax. But, when Kearns begins to rebuff increasingly lucrative offers to settle his lawsuit, despite the pleadings of his first attorney (Alan Alda) and his wife (Lauren Graham), a different perspective begins to come into focus.

When the attorney explains that “money is how justice is dispensed in this country,” the declaration comes across as sage truth instead of the blind motive of a greedy attorney. After all, Kearns’ primary impetus for developing and marketing his wiper invention was the opportunity to profit off it, thereby securing he and his family’s financial wellbeing. By rejecting million dollar settlement offers, does not Kearns’ sense of “justice” morph from altruistic to selfish? Kearns is not quixotic in the classic sense – he does slay a corporate giant or two whilst jousting legal windmills. But, his fixation on cockeyed idealism over practicality assumes an added dimension when the ideal and practical are both honorable and mutually exclusive. While Kearns eventually earns much of the professional vindication he desires, he also loses his family and, at times, his sanity.

Helmer Marc Abraham seems to recognize this subtext, but the long-time producer – but first-time director – seems simply incapable of amplifying it with a murky, often bland presentation along with cinematographer Dante Spinotti’s murky, lifeless visuals. In contrast, Steve Zaillian’s A Civil Action, in many ways Flash of Genius’ fraternal twin, is a flawed film that at least had the wisdom to embrace its protagonist’s righteous folly. And, one needn’t image what a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese could forge out of this sort of tragic character arc; just pop in a DVD of Raging Bull or even The Aviator.

Even the ever improving Kinnear suffers in an otherwise fine performance. For all his recent success, Kinnear has yet to be pushed outside his acting comfortable zone. Flash of Genius presents his best chance to date to do so, but it, like the film itself, turns out to be a squandered opportunity.

Neil Morris

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist

2008-10-02T02:12:00.004-04:00

Where's Cloverfield when you need it?

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Sollett

Starring: Michael Cera, Kat Dennings, Alexis Dziena, and Ari Graynor

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Like its central leitmotif, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist is an eclectic mix tape, intertwining alt-rock edginess with sappy love ballads while elevator music drones incessantly in the background. For his feature-length sophomore effort, director Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas) fashions a nocturnal valentine to NYC, particularly its alternative club scene, fostering a buoyant sense of time and place.

Nora (Kat Dennings) had a crush on Nick (Michael Cera) before she even met him, thanks to rescuing the rad mix CDs Nick burns for a catty ex-girlfriend (Alexis Dziena) who promptly tosses them in the high school garbage can. By night, Nick plays bass guitar as the token straight in a Queercore rock band, while Nora tries to sift guys attracted to her earthy personality and good looks and those trying to nestle up to her father, a renowned record label owner. When the two finally meet-cute, they squeeze into Nick’s yellow Yugo and embark on an all night odyssey to track down New York City’s most popular indie rock band – along with Nora’s drunk best friend (Ari Graynor) – while coming to grips with loves both lost and newly found.

Cera yet again successfully reprises his Arrested Development nebbish, and the film’s final half hour offers a harmonic, Linklater-like apogee of romantic discovery. Unfortunately, the rest of the screenplay and supporting characters are like the single, icky piece of chewing gum that winds its way through the entire evening: flavorless and highly disposable.

Neil Morris

Blindness

2008-10-02T02:05:00.007-04:00

Grindhouse Presents...

Grade: C

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya, and Gael Garcia Bernal

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours

Who does not like a healthy dose of nihilism in their movies now and again? The problem with Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness is that the end of civilization has never looked so bleak and irredeemable.

As an outbreak of blindness suddenly afflicts the world’s populous, the first patch of victims are quarantined inside a dilapidated hospital. Among their number are an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), the latter being the only sighted person in the number. Frustration leads to unrest leads to disintegration as the blind patients divide into tribes, one of which hijacks the hospital’s food supply and begins to ration it out for a price: first valuables, then sexual favors. The latter sequence is a scene brutally raw that could have been audacious if it were not so utterly ugly.

About the time the patients start running the asylum, they discover that the rest of the world is also in the dark. That leads to an extended coda showcasing a society gone mad just before Meirelles (City of God; The Constant Gardner) and screenwriter Don McKellar, adapting Jose Saramago’s novel, flash a light at the end of the tunnel. It is a giant shoulder shrug capping off an art-house, high-gloss B-horror film that does not have the strength – or humanity – of its ambitions.

Neil Morris

Nights in Rodanthe

2008-09-25T14:38:00.004-04:00

This is how we say 'Hi' in Tibet

Grade: C +

Director: George C. Wolfe

Starring: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Christopher Meloni, Scott Glenn, and Viola Davis

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes

Ah, so THIS is what North Carolina’s coastline looks like on film.

As a lifelong resident of the Tar Heel State, it is difficult to maintain complete objectivity in reviewing a film like Nights in Rodanthe. When two of Nicholas Sparks’ novels were previously adapted for the big-screen, the Low Country of South Carolina substituted for the Cape Fear region of North Carolina in The Notebook, and makers of Message in a Bottle tried to pass off the coast of Maine as Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Perhaps Sparks, a longtime resident of New Bern, has finally achieved a level of creative control over the cinematic adaptations of his novels. Regardless of the reason, the opening scenes of Nights in Rodanthe play like a mini-travelogue for those familiar with the journey from the capital city to its crystal coast. It begins with a shot of the Raleigh skyline as Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere) leaves town after closing the sale of his former home. Images then fly by of sundry exit signs along I-40, the immense Hwy. 17 bypass around New Bern, and several bridges traversing the Intercoastal Waterway.

His trip ends at an oceanfront inn on Hatteras Island in the tiny Village of Rodanthe, the easternmost point in the state. [Filming took place on-location in Rodanthe, with an actual rental house named Serendipity doubling as the inn. Presently, there are no actual inns or hotels operating in Rodanthe, although some shrewd entrepreneur is probably thinking about opening one to capitalize on this film’s potential popularity.] Paul, divorced and estranged from his adult son (James Franco), comes to Rodanthe to make amends with a family who is suing him for medical malpractice. Tending the inn is Adrienne (Diane Lane), herself torn over whether to reunite with her estranged husband (Christopher Meloni) after he walked out on her and their children 7 months ago.

This is Gere and Lane's third onscreen coupling, following The Cotton Club and Unfaithful, and they exude a palpable chemistry that carries the treacly script through many lulls. And, Gere’s presence sates the appetite of a film’s target audience every time they glimpse that feathered coif and trademark twinkle in his eye. Nevertheless, Gere strikes the wrong note as a man purportedly racked with personal and emotional guilt; Paul always seems more intent on charming the pants off the woman in the room than exorcising his personal demons. Contrast that with Scott Glenn, who, as the reticent widower whose wife died on Paul’s operating table, expresses more raw emotion in under 5 minutes of screen-time than Gere does over the entire film.

Indeed, the storyline itself navigates few uncharted waters, wallowing principally in meet-cute treacle - Paul and Adrienne's surrender to passion whilst a hurricane nearly rips apart the inn is a silly sequence worsened by director George C. Wolfe's jump-cut editing. The script marks time between longing gazes and manufactured melodrama – the storyline feels padded even at a relatively svelte 97 minutes – until the time comes to deploy the typical tear-jerking Sparks climax.

Mostly, however, the plot itself is merely background noise for a visual ode that also conspicuously incorporates such local delicacies as pirate lore, indigenous music, and wild horses that roam the northern Outer Banks. Sparks might peddle in pap, but it’s our pap, dagnabit. Nights in Rodanthe: come for the movie, stay for the view.

Neil Morris

Miracle at St. Anna

2008-09-25T14:30:00.004-04:00

Sir, can't you see this has sitcom written all over it?

Grade: D –

Director: Spike Lee

Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Early, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Pierfrancesco Favino, Valentina Favino, and Matteo Sciabordi

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hour, 40 minutes

There is no doubting the high-minded and long-overdue goal of Spike Lee to pay adequate cinematic homage to the contributions of African-American soldiers during World War II, who fought bravely to protect their country and preserve freedoms they were not even allowed to enjoy. However, the sad truth is that if it had been made by anyone other than Lee, Miracle at St. Anna would be roundly ridiculed and dismissed as a hyper-reductive, racist rant. Written with the sophistication of a Robert Benigni script, this World War II epic failure trades in equal-opportunity stereotyping: all whites are single-minded bigots; blacks alternate between buffoons, oversexed, and/or blinded by uncontrollable violent rage; Italians are histrionic and hot-blooded; etc. At one point, a redneck Army officer (and in Lee’s world, there isn’t any other kind) exclaims, “What is this, a minstrel show?!” Startlingly, I was already asking myself the same question.

Betraying that Lee seems guided more by an impulse to settle a score with Hollywood’s traditional, whites-only depiction of WWII, he opens the film in 1983 with an elderly African-American sitting at home in front of the TV, muttering angry epitaphs at John Wayne’s war pic, The Longest Day. That man, postal clerk Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), later guns down a man who tries to buy some stamps. The question of how Hector was able to keep a loaded Luger concealed behind his post office window for years is never answered. The mystery over why Hector shot the man and why Hector has a priceless statue head pilfered from Florence, Italy decades ago forms the uneasy foundation for the rest of the film.

Rewind back to 1944 and the 92^nd Infantry’s “Buffalo Soldiers,” an all-black unit patrolling the Italian countryside. Four members of the company – Hector, dutiful Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), profane horndog Bishop Cummings (Michael Early), and the rotund Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) – find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and forced to hold-up in a tiny Tuscan village.

Along the way, Train, who lugs around the aforementioned statue head everywhere he goes as his personal good luck charm (without explaining how this does not interfere with transport and miles of humping through the European war theater), rescues and semi-adopts an Italian, seemingly magical moppet. There is are extended subplots involving the Italian Resistance, a comely Italian sexpot (Pierfrancesco Favino), and lots of snarling Germans, whose every appearance is accompanied by the sort of brass crescendo normally reserved for James Bond villains. Lee even manages to squeeze in, via flashback to basic training in Louisiana, the de rigueur scene in which some Bayou bigot refuses to serve the black soldiers in his restaurant, followed quickly Lee’s shout-out to contemporary, hip-hop era audience when the soldiers’ return armed with hilt to force the soda jerk to fork over some forbidden ice cream sundaes.

James McBride’s lunkheaded screenplay, adapted from his own novel, is as tone-deaf as it is insulting, reducing the whole of WWII to an extension of America’s race war. Good actors are made to look ridiculous, spouting dialogue filled with non sequiturs, clichés, and era-inappropriate slang; Miller, in particular, plays the sort of Bagger Vance/Green Mile magical Negro Lee would rail against were it in any movie other than his own. Even the numerous battle scenes are staged haphazardly, revealing that no director, even an accomplished one, can just pick-up a camera and shoot a war movie. Through it all, Terence Blanchard’s nail-on-a-chalkboard orchestration is more grating, intrusive, and incongruous than ever, plodding its way through scenes it is suppose to compliment.

The end result is a bloated, meandering misfire that is as unbearable after 20 minutes as it is by the end of its unfathomable 2 hours and 40 minutes running time. When it comes to issues of race, Lee has always been a welcome one-man wrecking machine. In Miracle at St. Anna, the problem is he doesn’t know when to take his foot off the gas.

Neil Morris

Eagle Eye

2008-09-25T14:22:00.005-04:00

This whole Wall Street bailout debate
is getting way too emotional

Grade: C –

Director: D.J. Caruso

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, and Billy Bob Thornton

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

A crackerjack premise riffing on our omnipresent technological age rapidly devolves into a pseudo-political howler in Eagle Eye, director D.J. Caruso’s latest stab at an Alfred Hitchcock revue. Caruso’s last film, Disturbia, sought to unofficially ape Rear Window. This time, Caruso cooke-up a helping of North by Northwest with a dash of The Man Who Knew Too Much thrown in for seasoning

Shia LeBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are strangers who find themselves enslaved by the techno machinations of an unknown, omnipotent force. Matters remain suitably taut while the antagonist’s identity and motives remain cloaked in mystery. Unfortunately, enter a HAL-meets-Skynet supercomputer named Aria, buried deep below the Pentagon, that starts interpreting the clause in the Declaration of Independence about “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” their government a bit too literally.

Four credited screenwriters slap on layers upon layers of twists and turns in hopes of stumbling upon a sensible endgame. The consequence is mind-numbing and riddled with plot holes, barreling headlong toward a ludicrous climax capped by a laughable, test audience-approved coda. Tack-on half-baked, ham-fisted political invectives directed against the war on terrorism and Patriot Act domestic surveillance, and you have a film geared chiefly toward paranoid conspiracy theorists. Think of it as Hitchcock…by way of Ed Wood, but with a bigger budget.

Neil Morris

Choke

2008-09-25T14:13:00.006-04:00

No, it's never too early for Halloween

Grade: C +
Director: Gregg Clark
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke, Bijou Phillips, and Joel Grey
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 29 minutes

The emented yet strangely endearing Choke, screenwriter-director Gregg Clark’s adaptation of “Fight Club” author Chuck Palahniuk’s source novel, is the blackest of comedies, cobbling together the “lighter side” of sexual addiction, dementia, religion, and parental abandonment. When not deliberately choking in restaurants in hopes of being saved by wealthy, generous patrons, Victor (Sam Rockwell) sates his sexual cravings with fellow addicts in his weekly support group and the nurses at the assisted living facility housing his ailing, psychotic mother (Anjelica Huston).

Razor-sharp wit and several mordant sequences evoke Palahniuk’s subversive tone, including virtually every scene at Victor’s day-job working at a colonial America theme park and his encounter with a rape-fantasist with a few too many rules. Unfortunately, the production collapses under the weight of its diffuse subplots: Victor’s search for his father’s identity; his “wholesome” dalliance with a hospital doctor (Kelly Macdonald); allusions to Victor’s possible sacred lineage; and poorly conceived flashbacks to his childhood, just to name a few. Clark never establishes a consistent rhythm or cohesive focus for a satire that is ultimately as thematically hollow as its protagonist.

Neil Morris

Moving Midway

2008-09-18T00:28:00.009-04:00

Director: Godfrey Cheshire

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

Near the conclusion of Godfrey Cheshire’s documentary, Moving Midway, a family reunion of sorts takes place at the recently relocated antebellum manor that once served as the epicenter for a sprawling Southern plantation. Cheshire’s family, including his mother and the cousin who owns the white-board house, meet their African-American kin with whom they share a common bloodline dating back to Charles Lewis Hinton, twice treasurer of North Carolina in the 1840s and the founder of Midway Plantation.

As the families gather in the driveway, the home’s owner, Charlie Silver, cordially invites the elderly Hinton patriarch, Abraham, into the house. “Oh, I can go in?” the black man responds with equal parts courtesy, hesitancy, and surprise. The answer to Abraham’s query is obvious, especially by the end of Cheshire’s multi-layered personal, historical, and literal odyssey. The real significance stems from the mere fact that Abraham deems it necessary to ask the question.

In 2004, Cheshire, a longtime New York City-based film critic, returned to his native Raleigh upon learning that his family planned to relocate the ancestral Midway plantation home as a means to save it from (and make way for) encroaching suburban sprawl that had gradually supplanted the tranquility of moonlight and magnolias with the den of multi-lane highways and strip malls. Against the backdrop of the actual move, Cheshire explores the Southern plantation phenomenon, from its nefarious historical roots to the mythos concocted by such pop-culture icons as Gone With The Wind and Birth of a Nation.

Cheshire also embarks on a journey of self-discovery, scaling the once concealed, now forgotten branches of his family tree. He fortuitously meets Robert Hinton, a professor of Africana Studies at New York University, whom Cheshire learns is a distant cousin and fellow transplanted Southerner who grew up in Raleigh’s Chavis Heights projects. While Cheshire’s ancestry is of the master’s house, Hinton’s lineage reaches back to the slaves who once toiled in Midway’s fields, beginning with Mingo, a West African slave who accompanied the first Hinton inhabitant to central N.C. in the mid-1700s.

Cheshire admittedly and unabashedly emulates the filmmaking style of Ross McElwee, placing himself squarely on-camera throughout the film and contributing voiceover narration off-camera. The narrative is steady yet leisurely; the footage of the long, arduous house-moving itself, in particular, unfolds with the pace of a Sunday afternoon stroll.

Still, for all its personal and historical appeal, the true jolt – and enduring lesson – of Moving Midway comes into sharp focus after the move. The former plantation property is quickly flattened and bulldozed to make way for “The Shoppes at Midway Plantation,” a cookie-cutter shopping center. And, just beyond the preserved slave burial ground, a sign advertises the opening of Knightdale’s newest residential subdivision, “Mingo Creek.”

For all the earnest evocation of discovery, reconciliation, and change, Midway Plantation is ultimately reclaimed by the very thing that gave rise to it in the first place: commerce. Cheshire opens Moving Midway by accurately reciting that the plantation was the “original foundation of the American economy.” Here, its agrarian utility is pushed out to make way for more retail-oriented commercialism. And slaves – or at least their identities – are still being exploited for economic gain. Midway may have been moved, but its purpose stayed behind.

Neil Morris

Lakeview Terrace

2008-09-18T00:28:00.008-04:00

Time for Lasik and a diet

Grade: C –

Director: Neil LaBute

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington, and Ron Glass

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

For fun, squint hard and trying seeing Lakeview Terrace as an examination of the disparate viewpoints on Obamamania. In one corner, we have the GOP bogeyman: an intelligent, upper-middle class African-American wielding authority. Across the ring is a lefty, Prius-driving, multi-culti archetype besieged by society’s prejudices and governmental intrusion into their private lives.

Trust me, that correlation not nearly as silly as this ugly, unpleasant thriller about a widowed LAPD cop, Abel Turner, (Samuel L. Jackson), who unleashes his anti-miscegenation demons onto an interracial couple – Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington – who moves next-door. A devoted yet domineering dad, Abel demands his children use proper diction and sport a Shaq jersey instead of Kobe’s (presumably because of the race of their women). Never mind that Abel’s knuckle-dragging bigotry somehow exempts his extrageneous coworkers or other neighbors. Or, despite the offense to his puritan values when his kids witness the new neighbors canoodling in their pool, he still hosts a bachelor party littered with booze and strippers.

Chris courts Abel’s wrath by merely moving into his cul-de-sac, magnified by Abel’s annoyance at Chris’ penchant for rap music and his nasty habit of flicking cigarette butts onto Abel’s lawn. The standard neighbor-terror genre melds with a Training Day knockoff that grows more cartoonish by the minute, partly thanks to Jackson’s pauchy, menacing-stare slide into self-parody.

The true sin of Lakeview Terrace, directed by the filmmaker formerly known as Neil LaBute (a long, long way from In The Company of Men) is that it is neither insightful social commentary nor an entertaining, sensible thriller. Frankly, it plays more like a bastard vignette from Crash left on the cutting room floor because even Paul Haggis thought it was too heavy-handed.

There is a far more provocative, intelligent movie to be made out of Lisa’s affluent father (Ron Glass) and his disapproval of her choice of husband. Unfortunately, that subplot is subsumed by Abel’s increasingly irrational antics and LaBute’s half-hearted attempts to rationalize them. Through it all is the metaphor of an encroaching wildfire that, like this mistake of a movie, ultimately produces lots of smoke but few visible flames.

Neil Morris

Burn After Reading

2008-09-11T13:54:00.009-04:00

Tonight's feature presentation: "Righteous Kill"

Grade: B
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, and Richard Jenkins
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

I probably rehash the following observation every time I review a Coen Brothers' movie, but it always bears restating: the corrosive influence of greed and/or temptation are the overriding themes in nearly every one of their films. The sometimes compulsory, always creative ways the Coens conjure their moral(istic) object lessons rank them among the most acclaimed American filmmakers of the last half-century.

In that vein, Burn After Reading is a return to classic Coens: a black comic rendering of morally duplicitous people lured and eventually destroyed by greed, yes, but more so the lure of a life supposedly better than their own. Such was the theme to 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, the last original screenplay the Coens penned. Yet, as the Coens enter their 50s, what has changed is the cynical edge of their material – call it cranky Coens. At the end of Raising Arizona, the baby gets returned to his family while H.I. and Ed settle down for a long life together. In Fargo and Blood Simple, the bad guys get their comeuppance while the righteous are left to ponder the inanity of it all. A change of sorts is found in the Coens’ last film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men; sure, Tommy Lee Jones is left scratching his head at a devolving world, but Anton Chigurh also gets to walk away, battered but alive to kill another day.

In many ways, Burn After Reading is even more pessimistic, despite the fact that it is more of a smiling cobra. An A-list cast gets to cut loose by cutting up, but unlike the Coens’ previous moral plays, there isn’t a canary to be found in this nefarious coalmine. A disgruntled, chronically drunk ex-CIA analyst, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), decides to write his memoirs. At the same time, his ice-cold wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is having an affair with a married, low-level Treasury agent (George Clooney), whose penchants run the gambit from post-coital 5-mile jogs to exotic food allergies. When Katie decides to file for divorce, she copies the family finances along with Osborne’s memoir onto a CD. A copy accidentally turns up at the local Hardbodies and into the hands of two dimwitted gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand), herself locked in an ongoing struggle over how to pay for some “much-needed” cap-a-pie cosmetic surgery.

Linda and Chad’s attempt to return the disc to Osborne – with the expectation of compensation, natch – is met by Osborne’s raging temper. Convoluted circumstances also involving the Internet dating phenomenon eventually bring each character into the same orbit, with disastrous consequences. Private eyes are mistaken for G-Men and chance encounters are viewed with heavy suspicion. In this postmodern satire, greed and paranoia form a combustible concoction in which the hoi polloi reflexively buy into whatever bogey man the government or infotainment conglomerates prop up, whether it is domestic surveillance or rivals from abroad. “The Russians?!,” a CIA chief (J.K. Simmons) repeats with puzzlement when he is informed that Linda and Chad tried to sell their disc of Osborne’s “drivel” to the Russian consulate. [You couldn’t blame them if they’ve been listening to our current presidential campaigns, who have recently dusted off old Cold War rhetoric to gin up votes.]

The subtle brilliance of Burn After Reading is that it is really an anti-spy, nonpolitical film, where the governmental espionage is a MacGuffin masking the fact that the actual intrigue flows wholly from the foibles of flawed, regular people who, although living in an increasingly interconnected world, are more personally estranged from their neighbors than ever. All the while, the actual intelligence community watches on both bemused and confused, armed with near omnipresence - if not omnipotence - but clueless as to how to exercise their power.

Unfortunately, that disengagement also leads the Coens to yet another truncated, shoulder-shrug ending, a la No Country for Old Men, made worse by the fact that nearly all the key climactic events take place off-camera and are only vocalized by bureaucrats trying to make sense of it all, postmortem. “So, what did we learn?”, asks Simmons’ CIA head. Only that the Coens are not yet willing, or able, to share the answer to that question.

Neil Morris

Righteous Kill

2008-09-11T13:45:00.010-04:00

At long last, we've found the remains of our careers

Grade: D +
Director: Jon Avnet
Starring: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, Curtis Jackson, Donnie Wahlberg, and Brian Dennehy
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Back in 1986, 70-somethings Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas teamed together one last time playing elderly gangsters in the buddy comedy, Tough Guys. While the production was steeped in Hollywood nostalgia and a few guilty chuckles, it was more than a bit melancholy to witness two of the silver screen’s finest actors relegated to B-movie schlock. Their best days – and roles – were far, far behind them.

Righteous Kill trods similar ground, with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino starring as aging, tough-talking NYPD cops – nicknamed Turk and Rooster – teetering along the edge of the moral dividing line. However, with its obvious typecasting and palpable joylessness, the macabre spectacle reminds me more of the uneasy, strained collaborations between Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi during the latter days of their careers. It is a movie 20 years past its expiration date, and the only extraordinary sights to behold are Pacino’s efforts to still tease-up his increasingly thinning bangs, and De Niro laboring to propel his expanding girth through the Earth’s gravitational pull.

With the fragile assistance two younger detectives (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg), Turk and Rooster are on the trail of a serial killer on the loose. The first, and and by no means only, with Russell Gewirtz's (Inside Man) ponderous screenplay is that it makes the mistake of forecasting upfront that Turk is secretly the killer. Fed up with rapists, pedophile priests, and drug dealers (including a kingpin played by Curtis Jackson, aka rapper 50 Cent) beating the rap and roaming the streets, Turk dispenses vigilante justice as some odd mash-up of Dirty Harry, The Star Chamber, and Se7en.

Or so it seems. You can be assured of one of two things while watching Righteous Kill: either this early revelation makes the rest of the film a gigantic waste of time, or there is going to be a twist ending you can see coming a mile away…and the film is still a gigantic waste of time. Director Jon Avnet helms this police procedural with the dexterity of a lumberjack as one implausible scene after another is strung together to form a head-scratching, tedious saunter through Madame Tussauds. An opening credits montage shows Turk and Rooster target-shooting and pumping iron (and, oddly, coaching Little League baseball and playing pickup chess), and Avnet spends the remainder of the film trying to prop up this masculine artifice.

No one is buying it, particularly when the cost includes being repeatedly subjected to De Niro’s creepy sexual escapades with a comely fellow cop (Carla Gugino), always shot from camera angles that obscure the actor’s paunch. Add to that De Niro’s animatronic line readings, poorly written supporting roles, and consistently stale repartee between the two leads (including a reference to the cartoon character Underdog as closeted pill-popper that is even older than De Niro and Pacino’s acting heydays), and you are left with a geriatric revue kept on life support way past the point somebody should have pulled the plug.

Neil Morris

Traitor

2008-08-28T01:19:00.003-04:00

Yet Another 48 Hrs.

Grade: B
Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Starring: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Neal McDonough, and Aly Khan
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Traitor is another in the increasing line of films that strive to blend sober examination of historical Middle Eastern unrest and, in particular, recent Islamic terrorism into a familiar action-adventure construct – The Kingdom springs to mind. The perspectives of both the American foreign policy apparatus and Islamic-based terrorist organizations are presented with often discomforting objectivity. A terrorist co-opts a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. to support his wicked cause, and when a covert U.S. intelligence contractor declares, “It’s a war; you do whatever it takes to win,” it is sagely noted that he is speaking the same language as the terrorists.

However, the most radical part about Traitor is that it chooses to draw the dividing battle lines between good and evil not along nationalistic or jingoistic grounds, but instead as a religious conflagration. It is here where the film’s title finds it double-meaning. Initially, the moniker of “traitor” seems to apply to Sudanese-born, American-educated expatriate Samir Horn (the eternally underrated Don Cheadle), who as a child watched his father perish in a car bomb and then grows up to seemingly become a devout Muslim peddling arms to terrorist groups. Samir’s association with a terrorist cell headed by an Arab Muslim named Omar (Saïd Taghmaoui) lands him in a Yemenese prison, and after an escape the streets of France and the United States, where he is pursued by two FBI agents played by Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential; Memento) and Neal McDonough.

Along the way, we eventually learn that Samir is a top-secret U.S. operative posing undercover to infiltrate the terrorist group. However, instead of being viewed as another sort of traitor (to his own people), the true betrayal the film chooses to spotlight is also Samir’s driving motivation: the belief that those who kill innocents in the name of Allah are blaspheming the true nature and meaning of Islam. Samir’s relationship with his C.I.A. handler (Jeff Daniels) is an uneasy one because while the American fights for country, Samir sees himself as fighting for God.

Writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, working from a story originated by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin), melds the weighty themes into occasionally edge-of-your-seat entertainment. All the elements of a neo-1970s spy thriller are in play: double agents; moles; disparate and dysfunctional government agencies; cloak & dagger intrigue; etc. And, the performances are uniformly top-notch, especially Cheadle, Pearce, and Taghmaoui.

It is only during the film’s final stage that is suffers a near-crippling identity crisis, as Nachmanoff transitions from Syriana to something akin to The Departed starring Jason Bourne. Holes and conveniences begin to infect the script, eroding its intelligent underpinning. Still, thanks largely to Cheadle’s skill and an uncompromising first-half, Traitor tries to become that rarest of breeds: a Hollywood blockbuster with a brain (released in August, no less).

Neil Morris