MOVIE REVIEW: LEATHERHEADS

LEATHERHEADS

Leatherheads, starring and directed by George Clooney, is a bit like a hidden-ball play, where the audience spends half the movie looking for the point. Perhaps that’s being a little hard on what is ultimately a slapstick affair, but it is a big-budget movie and arrives with a great deal of fanfare. Moreover, football’s infancy is an era ripe for Hollywood’s attention. This movie simply doesn’t do it justice, and that’s a pity.

Let’s get one thing straight; George Clooney is a movie star. Not an actor – in this case emphatically not an actor -- but a movie star. He can fill a screen, charm an audience, and as a director he does a fair job of capturing an era. But his role as Dodge Connolly, an aging professional football player, is essentially a reprise of his role in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. He plays the same 1920’s era bumpkin charmer, and with him at the helm as director you see a lot of him, too. Rare is the scene without Clooney front and center, and his wisecracking gets a bit wearisome. Did they not have time for a sub-plot or two, or did the screenwriters just forget?

Renee Zellweger, on the other hand, is an actor. It’s just that in Leatherheads she’s made to act like a creep. Playing a sleazy, world-wise newspaper journalist, she matches Clooney’s character wisecrack for wisecrack, which is often fun to watch. If her character, Lexie Littleton, were someone we’d like to know, the one-upsmanship would be enough to make the movie mediocre. It’s not.

Carter Rutherford, played ably by John Krasinski, is as close to a protagonist as this movie has to offer. As America’s favorite football phenom he’s fine, but his character is shallow and lacks the presence to steal the spotlight from Clooney. Not that Clooney, as director, is about to let that happen.

If Leatherheads does succeed at all, it’s as a period piece. The sets are fascinating, as are the costumes. Watching the stadium’s parking lot fill with cars from the period was an especially nice scene. If only the rest of the movie were half as rewarding. Suffice it to say that if this movie were a football game, that beautiful old stadium would be empty before the start of the fourth quarter.

MOVIE REVIEW: LEAP YEAR

LEAP YEAR

Two of Seven Cows

Some movies are so formulaic, so clichéd, and so completely void of an original thought that it seems a mystery why they were ever made. For the haughty few among us that think of film as art rather than product, films like Leap Year are an affront. While on my more lucid days I am both haughty and few, I do recognize that the vast majority of moviegoers simply wish to be entertained and try to view each film with that in mind. Not every movie has to be a Zoolander – my personal benchmark for movie-making greatness.

             

All that having been said, Leap Year is wretched. It is vile. It is not good. Most of all it is to be avoided, lest we encourage the making of more of the same.

            

 Adams plays Anna who is seeing Jeremy (Adam Scott), who has failed to propose after four years of dating. Jeremy goes to Dublin on a business trip, and when Anna learns of the Irish tradition of women proposing to men on February 29 she follows. Encountering travelling difficulties she is forced to hire a driver, played by Matthew Goode, to take her the rest of the way. They have nothing in common. They squabble. They fight. 

They fall in love. Gag me.

            

 This script could have been written by my fourteen-year-old niece, except then it would have had a fighting chance at being funny. A formulaic script can be saved by some inspired humor, but there is nothing inspired in any of this. Seriously, I was able to forecast every single gag and every single twist in this plot, and I was battling the sleepies for most of it.

            

Amy Adams stole my heart as Amelia Earhart in the last Night at the Museum movie. After Julie & Julia I was ready to propose. Now, after seeing Leap Year I don’t even feel like I know her anymore. Assuming that the script was available to her prior to filming, and assuming she can read, I have to wonder what she was thinking. Is she really this callow and opportunistic?

             

There is no language or sex to speak of in Leap Year, and the only real violence is that done to my opinion of Amy Adams, so if you don’t like your children very much and absolutely must see this dreck I don’t imagine it will kill them. I just can’t imagine why you would want to. I give it two cows.

MOVIE REVIEW: LAKEVIEW TERRACE

LAKEVIEW TERRACE
Five Cows



A mixed-race couple moves into a new home, and the neighbor is a bigoted cop. Sounds like the premise for another tedious, politically-correct treatise on white guilt, doesn’t it? Yeah, well, get this: the bigoted cop is black. Now there’s something you don’t see from Hollywood every day, a town so immersed in political correctness that its stereotypes have stereotypes.

I don’t even know what that means, but it’s true.

Billed as a thriller, Lakeview Terrace is more of a slow-burn than thrill ride. When Chris and Lisa Mattson, well-played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, move into a home next door to a subtly-spooky cop you know what you’re in for – at least if you’ve seen the trailers for the film. What you may not expect is the attention paid to character development. This is both the film’s strength and weakness.

In the real world, hostilities turn tragic by degrees. There are dirty looks and subtle slights, followed by angry words and non-violent gesturing, and the guns and yard rakes generally don’t come out until the final chapter. That’s how I roll, anyhow. Hollywood, however, rarely has time for such laborious storytelling, fearing that if a body’s not be rolled off on a gurney in the first ten minutes the audience will fall asleep.

While the first half of the film might be considered slow by some, I was glad the time was taken to add depth to the personalities involved. The Mattson’s at first come off like a stereotypical yuppie couple, but true sympathy develops along with their characters. Wilson and Washington bring a recognizable humanity to their roles that rings authentic.

Samuel L. Jackson, on the other hand, is one scary dude, all evil-sly smiles and repressed hostility as Abel Turner, one of L.A.’s finest. I was thinking to myself that the only role in which I didn’t find Jackson scary was as “Clean” in Apocalypse Now, but when I looked it up it turns out that was Lawrence Fishburn. So I guess I’ve always been afraid of Samuel L. Jackson. If Walmart starts selling Jackson masks I’m locking my doors on Halloween.

Refreshingly, while this is no Disney after-school special, none of the language or violence is gratuitous. It’s just a surprisingly mature, thought-provoking thriller that an adult can watch without first enduring a lobotomy. I give Lakeview Terrace five cows with their frontal lobes still intact.

MOVIE REVIEW: KNIGHT AND DAY

KNIGHT AND DAY

Three of Seven Cows

I was looking forward to Knight and Day, not so much because I expected it to be good but because everything else released recently has been so bad. On occasion Tom Cruise has been known to appear in a big-budget cheese ball, but at the very least they’ve been competent cheese balls. More often, his movies are actually good. The best that can be said for Knight and Day, on the other hand, is that it has delusions of mediocrity.

             

Tom Cruise plays a rogue CIA agent and Cameron Diaz plays his unwilling accomplice/love interest. He’s hyper-competent, and she’s a big chicken. Hilarity ensues. But of course it doesn’t, mostly because the script is rather inane, but also because for the first time that I know of Tom Cruise seems to be going through the motions. His magic has always been that even while his face has become iconic, he could still make you believe in a character. Not here.

             

Diaz, on the other hand, seems to be giving this one her all, knowing that playing opposite Cruise is an opportunity to climb one of the few remaining rungs on her career ladder. I’ve always been ambivalent about Cameron Diaz, liking her well enough but not really considering her an actor so much as a personality. Knight and Day hasn’t changed my opinion there, but I do like her a bit more.

            

 Now, a word or two about body waxing. When did this happen? When did men stop being hairy? Is this going to be expected of me? Will a hairy chest or back be greeted with the same half-hidden snickers that are now reserved for women with hairy pits? When I’m at the beach with a date (it could happen) and I begin to take my shirt off, will I get the same subtle, pleading shake of the head that I typically get now when I start a conversation with “Let me tell you what I think about…”? Must I now conform to some ridiculous, unrealistic and unhealthy standard of beauty set by a society that only wants to objectify me and make me feel inadequate? If women knew what this felt like it wouldn’t be allowed to happen. I’m just saying...

             

Knight and Day is harmless enough, with little for anyone to object to. I don’t recall much language or any nudity, but then I was dozing a bit and could possibly have missed some. And that pretty much says it all: This is an action-comedy and I was dozing. That’s never good. I give Knight and Day three sleepy, thoroughly underwhelmed cows.

MOVIE REVIEW: KICK-ASS

KICK-ASS

Six of Seven Cows

I’ll admit it: I can be amazingly dim sometimes. Having seen the trailer for Kick-Ass, I assumed it was a kid’s movie. There were make-believe super-heroes, ninja action, and kids. Why would I not think this was a kid’s movie? Well, my first clue might have been that it’s named Kick-ASS. Oh, and it’s rated R. Believe as I might that our culture is on the fast-track to Hell, I can’t claim that this particular hand-basket wasn’t well-labeled.

Any notions of innocent kiddy-fun disappeared within the first thirty seconds of Kick-Ass. Crude dialog, scatological humor, and adolescent sexual references disabused me of any notions I might have had. And, frankly, I couldn’t have been more relieved. I’m not a kiddy, nor do I have any, so children’s movies are not my thing. I am neither easily-offended nor squeamish about violence, and am definitely more prone to hop onboard for a hand-basket ride than is seemly for someone of my advanced years.

My only concern in this regard is that it be made easy for parents to make appropriate movie choices for their kids, so allow me to state the obvious: Parents, if it has the word “ass” in the title, and the main character is not a donkey, it may not be appropriate for the munchkins.

So, what is Kick-Ass? Easily the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in recent memory, that’s what. When teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) decides that being a super-hero requires no super-power beyond epic self-delusion and naiveté, he embarks on a hilarious, painful, and constantly surprising course that’s as violent as Inglorious Basterds and as crassly-funny as Superbad.

Nicolas Cage is at his unhinged-best as a deeply-tormented ex-cop who possesses not only the coolest weapons room since Men In Black but the most disturbingly-violent adolescent daughter (Chloe Moretz) in movie history. Mobsters, high-school bullies and geeky friends fill out the cast in fine style, though most do not survive to the end of the movie. Should this be so much fun? I don’t know, and I don’t care.

I think I’ve covered the child-appropriateness of Kick-Ass, so parents consider yourselves warned: This is not a kids movie. What it is, however, is fresh, funny, malevolent, mischievous, vaguely disturbing and off-the-wall fun for the eternally-adolescent, and easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in the past year. In short, Kick-Ass does. I give it six cows.

JULIE & JULIA

Six of Seven Cows

Wow, did I almost blow it: Given my choice of two new movies this week that I knew next to nothing about, Julie & Julia and the conspicuously-unpromising G.I. Joe, I very nearly missed a jewel. With nothing but a poster to go by, I assumed Julie & Julia to be an estrogen-drenched chick-flick of the first order, and G.I. Joe, well, you pretty much know what you’re getting there. Bemoaning my fate, I chose the one whose schedule was most convenient: Julie & Julia.

Starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, Julie &Julia is the true story of the parallel paths of it’s two title characters, Julie Powell and Julia Childs. Julie Powell is a failed writer in present-day New York who starts a French-food-related blog to give her life focus. Julia Childs is the wife of a Paris-based post-war diplomat who is likewise trying to give her life meaning. Sounds exciting, huh? Yeah, I yawned too – before I saw it. These two stories, separated by more than half a century but told in parallel, make up one of the most charming, humorous and spirit-lifting movies you’re likely to see.

I’ll confess, having grown up in the post-Julia Childs era, I was more familiar with Dan Akroyd’s Saturday Night Live lampooning of Childs than I was of the woman herself. That Streep would do her character justice was a given – she’s one of our greatest actors and could probably do a convincing portrayal of Hitler if she set her mind to it – but that in Childs she had such a character to work with was a revelation. Full of life, humor and clumsy charm, she is a joy to get to know, even if second hand. Amy Adams is great as the title’s Julia as well. A much smaller character, both literally and figuratively, than Streep’s Childs, she is no less charming. This is a real person, vulnerable and full of doubt and hope, and her joy is infectious.

While Julie &Julia is as near-perfect as any film in recent memory, I do have two nits to pick. First, one or two political interjections could have been left out, and secondly, was it really necessary for the character of Julie Powell’s husband Eric, played by Chris Messina, to have such atrocious table manners? Seriously, there’s lots of eating in this movie; we get that he loves Julie’s cooking, but couldn’t he chew with his mouth closed? Yuck.

Julie &Julia is a great movie, and one I feel lucky to have seen. There’s very little to take offense at, with the exception of the stray expletive, but young children will probably be bored. I give it six cows bathed in a burgundy sauce. Bon Apatite.

MOVIE REVIEW: JONAH HEX

JONAH HEX

Two of Seven Cows

Often, if I can’t decide between two new movies, I’ll go to Rottentomatoes.com for help. This website concentrates movie reviews from scores of sources in one place, and awards a percentage-score to each movie based on how many positive reviews that movie has received. I’ll simply chose which movie had the highest score and go see that one. There is, however, another method: Using the same website I’ll access the promotional poster for each movie and see if either has one of the surest signs of quality entertainment – Megan Fox dressed like a tramp.

Sorry Toy Story 3, but your practically unheard of 98% positive rating simply cannot overcome that. I am a big boy now, and there is nothing an animated spaceman can do that would be nearly as entertaining as watching Megan do, well, practically anything.

But, so as to not confuse the issue, Jonah Hex is a bad movie. Eighty-six percent of the reviewers on Rottentomatoes.com are with me in that assessment. Adapted from a comic book and starring the erratically-good Josh Brolin, Jonah Hex is short, disjointed and inane.

Brolin plays a haunted former confederate soldier with a super-natural ability to talk with the dead. John Malkovich plays his nemesis and evil genius, General Quentin Turnbul. Malkovich is always good, though why he’s slumming in this flick is beyond me. Megan Fox plays eye candy and caused me actual physical pain every time she appeared on screen. I kid you not.

Brolin’s character is clearly modeled on Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti western-era outlaws. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that had there been no High Plains Drifter there would be no Jonah Hex. This is good source material – Eastwood’s westerns were my bread and butter growing up. Should Jonah Hex evolve into a franchise, which is highly unlikely, no one will be saying that about it in thirty years.

The producers seem to have recognized that this is not a good movie, because they mercifully cut it short after barely an hour and twenty minutes. I can endure almost anything for that short a time, and so although this is a bad movie I actually sort of enjoyed it – and not just because Megan is dressed like a harlot and runs around going bouncy-bouncy-bouncy a lot, though that certainly didn’t hurt (yes it did).

Actually, Jonah Hex seems like exactly what it is: an old Clint Eastwood western that was turned into a cartoon and then turned back into a movie. It’s dumb, puerile and too short to be taken seriously, just like me. I give it two cows.