I LUV VIDEO - An Austin Original Since 1984 - New Releases, June 9, 2009

New Releases, June 9, 2009

New Releases

For June 10, 2009

Clive Owen does some banking in The International, Clint Eastwood has Hmong madness in Gran Torino, a cast of thousands prove three's a crowd in He's Not Really That Into You and more...

Fired Up (D: Will Gluck, 2009)

Well, there's nothing remotely nourishing about this air-headed little high school sex romp, but it doesn't hurt much & there are just enough laughs to keep me from slathering the display box with lamb's blood. In a plot that cops moves from so many other youth comedies that it could almost be mistaken for a quirky original, high school playboys played by Nicholas D'Agosto (Rocket Science, TV's Heroes) & Eric Christian Olsen (Beerfest, Sunshine Cleaning) ditch football camp for the obvious pleasures of bedding as many pom-pom girls & shapely acrobats as they possibly can at a competitive retreat for cheerleaders. Their plan is to go through them the way lions go through lame gazelle & then skidaddle to a friend's summer house before the final competition. But, of course, they soon learn to respects these hotties & their spunky craft. Elements of Road Trip, Bring It On, American Pie (a section of which actually appears in Fired Up) & a dozen other teen flicks cross-pollinate with lazy ease throughout Fired Up & the good-natured dunder-headedness will develop some viewer good will after awhile if you're the kind of viewer that doesn't mind dialing back critical thought for 90 minutes. The best moments here result from a series of odd cameos by the likes of master thespian Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia, Dogville), as a foul-mouthed, doddering football coach; the great John Michael Higgins (Arrested Development, Kath & Kim, A Mighty Wind) as the predictably homo hetero cheerleading guru; and -- the best reason not to use Fired Up as a one of the wheels on a Tinker Toy Truck -- relative newcomer David Walton. As Dr. Rick, the college boyfriend of D'Agosto's cheerleader love interest Carly, Walton ups the ante for all preppie teen movie slimebags to come & easily delivers the movies most earned moments of mirth. On the downside, Fired Up represents a new low for the "Unrated" versions of DVDs. For a movie so driven by adolescent lechery, the film is almost irresponsibly tame: Philip Baker Hall says "shit" about 20 times, we're treated to three seconds of some pretty unremarkable bare breasts & ten seconds of REALLY unremarkable Asian boy buttocks.

Gran Torino (D: Clint Eastwood, 2008)

Clint Eastwood attacks his role as racist curmudgeon Walt Kowalski with such cartoonish glee in Gran Torino that it's impossible to take any of the tragic elements of this profane After-School Special plot very seriously. A Korean war veteran with a mean streak as wide as the Autobahn, Kowalski snarls at his family, his priest & his barber, but saves the real venom for his Hmong neighbors. At the beginning of Eastwood's film, we encounter Kowalski scowling at everyone in attendance at his wife's funeral & it's immediately apparent Mrs. Kowalski was the only tenderizing influence in this man's haunted, angry life. Slowly though he develops an uneasy attachment to Sue (a thankfully modulated performance by newcomer Ahney Her), the teen Hmong girl next door & then to her sensitive brother Thao, both of whom are being persecuted by the kind of street gang that only exists in movieland. After Kowalski performs a few reluctant good deeds for the family, he becomes a neighborhood hero & his front porch is flooded with flowers & exotic foodstuffs. Not that this in any way tempers our protagonist's vocabulary. Even his most compassionate moments come peppered with words like "gook" & "zipperhead." But the racism in Gran Torino feels unbearably forced, as if the script were written by people who'd never really encountered a racist & thought it enough to grab racial epithets at random from a slang dictionary. The moments with Kowalski's barber (the usually reliable John Carroll Lynch), in which they trade racial slurs like Laurel & Hardy at a Klan rally, ring especially false & are not nearly as entertaining as the two actors seem to find them. It seems as though they are barely containing laughter, which is a very strange tone to take in a movie that pretends to so many dark undercurrents. While it's fun to watch Eastwood chew up the oddly generic Detroit scenery, the movie is basically full of shit from the get-go & doesn't, to my mind at least, contain even one moment that seems authentic or lived. Still, that titular Gran Torino, Kowalski's most valued possession, is one hell of a fine car & deserves a better movie.

He's Just Not That Into You (D: Ken Kwapis, 2009)

Considering the sharp, often edgy TV shows Ken Kwapis has directed & produced over the years (the U.S. version of The Office, Grounded for Life, The Larry Sanders Show, Freaks & Geeks...), it's surprising what an underdeveloped, overcrowded mish-mash this movie is. Trying for the kind of large-ensemble interplay that worked so well in films like Love, Actually, Kwapis managed to assemble a pleasing cast, but there's just not enough character delineation to go around, leaving the majority of these sketched-out "types" stranded with a few cringe-worthy platitudes & fashionable clothing. It's a cast of hundreds with enough ideas for three & possibly a dog.

He's Not That Into You concerns the interconnected lives of a group of upscale Baltimorians, all struggling with varying degrees of lovesickness. The theme here -- though it's loosely developed at best -- is that, while there are social rules to the mating dance, almost everyone longs to be the exception to those rules. While that's probably true, watching ten characters deal with it results in a severe self-involvement overload & creates a world where people are either infantile & impossibly needy or cynically bound to a set of icy rules & glib witticisms.

Flighty Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers) is married to obsessive Jennifer Connelly, but he's obsessed with flighty Scarlett Johansson. Ben Affleck & Jennifer Aniston co-habitate happily but he doesn't believe in marriage & she begins to think that's a signal that he's not committed to her. Kevin Connolly (Eric on HBO's Entourage) digs Scarlett Johansson but he can't get her into bed to save his life & he's quite obviously her fall-back romance. Bar manager/ladies man Justin Long (Drag Me to Hell, Zack & Miri Make a Porno) becomes the cynical guru for unlucky-in-love (but eternally optimistic) Ginnifer Goodwin (HBO's Big Love), who soon develops feelings for him. While these are the main players shouldering through this heavy traffic, some brave casting director figured there was still room for Drew Barrymore, Kris Kristofferson, Luis Guzman, Busy Philipps, comedian Natasha Leggero, Bill Brochtrup & a host of other familiar faces, most of them television regulars. Jennifer Connelly's neurotic Janine is about the only fleshed-out character & in this antiseptic environment where everyone seems to be learning the same lesson at once, she seems like a freak, and this flesh & blood complexity makes her the only character whose romantic life isn't tied up with a shiny red foil ribbon by film's end.

While this is a passable confection, it's made for those who want the toppings ladled on with a snow shovel.

The International (D: Tom Tykwer, 2009)

German director Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) has concocted the kind of slick, globe-trotting espionage thriller we haven't really seen much since the heydays of John Frankenheimer, Fred Zinnemann & Billy Friedkin. Harking back to epic thrillers like Sorceror, Day of the Jackal & The French Connection, The International is gorgeously mounted & has several eye-popping set pieces that combine action & angst in perfect measure.

The story, though it seems twisty at first, is really fairly simple. A big international banking concern called IBBC has taken to arms dealing in order to control the debt accrued from armed conflicts around the world. Though this pretty much sounds like something banks actually do, IBBC resorts to multiple assassinations in order to achieve their goals, making what would otherwise be simply unsavory into a worldwide criminal conspiracy being investigated by Interpol agent Clive Owen, a rumpled insomniac with a blotchy past & his U.S. counterpart Naomi Watts, who's all but wasted in this role.

The mark of a fine thriller in this mode is having the dialogue & verbal exposition be as ominous & thrilling as the gunplay & car wrecks. Like Frankenheimer's fascinating Ronin from 1998, The International achieves this perfectly (unlike, say, the Bourne films). Discussions of debt accumulation & the sullied history of international banking rivet the attention only slightly less than the insane Guggenheim Museum shoot-out that serves as the film's bloody & masterful centerpiece. Ricocheting from Paris to Milan to Istanbul to NYC, The International revels in location shooting, finding just the right sinisterly impassive corporate buildings, just the right winding cobblestone streets, just the right terracotta rooftops & Turkish minarets. The faces too, from bedraggled police officers to Armin Mueller Stahl & Ulrich Thomsen (The Celebration) as the devils of IBBC, rendered dead-eyed by greed & avarice, seem molded perfectly into the sprawling surface of this film. Special mention should be given to Irish actor Bryan F. O'Byrne (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Million Dollar Baby), whose nameless professional assassin is so enigmatically & subtly crafted here that you almost don't notice how much soul he's bringing to his scenes. He's sinister without raising an eyebrow or cracking a sneer.

If there's a problem with The International it's perhaps that all this sleek vision occasionally defeats the film's internal tension, which doesn't quite ratchet-up as it should. That, and that the presence of Watts (who deserves better) seems a mystery, even to the filmmakers. Beyond that, this is a high-caliber suspense classic-to-be.

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Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008)

Based on a 1961 novel by the late, great Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road is a sumptuous study in marital disappointment & sits nicely between Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? & Ang Lee's The Ice Storm as worthy descriptions of that frightening time period when couples began to question whether the compromises of monogamy didn't damage more than they nurtured. Mendes dresses up the production in Mad Men's high-style, giving you the feeling that the whole torrid affair's being filmed through a hi-ball glass. In Yates' book -- as in many novels of infidelity & wedded warfare from the 60s -- NYC's bedroom suburbs in Connecticut serve as ground zero for the sexual revolutions to come, a bucolic paradise everyone was supposed to want even though it mainly served as a petri dish for growing dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Wheeler, an aimless, charming Peter Pan without the conviction to even be a proper beatnik. When he meets beautiful wanna-be actress Kate Winslet (her role here, not a comment on Winslet personally), Wheeler bucks up, gets the kind of office job God meant robots to do & the two scattered, terminally distracted dreamers start playing a very unconvincing game of house in the suburbs. Winslet simply radiates dissatisfaction & resentment, which drives DiCaprio into the arms of comparatively uncomplicated secretaries at work. Both of them know they're no catch. It's obvious Winslet knows she's intolerable to live with & it's equally obvious DiCaprio has no fundamental personality whatsoever.

But the two develop a giddy little plan that might save them both from spousal Armageddon. They'll sell the house, pack up the kids (barely blips on their radar anyway), move to Paris, she'll work as a government secretary & he'll figure out what the hell he's supposed to do with his life. How a viewer feels about this plan will entirely depend on one's ideas about responsibility & duty. It's one of the joys of Mendes' film that many in an audience might side with the neighbors & friends who tell the couple they're making a rash, uneducated decision, while others will see this migration to Paris as a completely sound solution to their mounting discontent. All these friends are just jealous, torpedoing this dream within a dream because they have none of their own to speak of. The answer's somewhere in between of course, but it's nice that Mendes lets it cut both ways, involving the audience actively in the conflict at hand.

While the Wheelers are preparing for their controversial journey abroad, a few dizzying peripheral characters graze their lives. One is a young academic named John Givings who's recently been released from a mental hospital & the others are the next door neighbors, the husband (the cartoonishly square-jawed David Harbour from Quantum of Solace) who finds Mrs. Wheeler an exotic tonic for his own pasteurized dreams & his mildly unhinged wife (a frightening Kathryn Hahn). Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Bug) adds another awe-inspiring performance to his resume as the young intellectual & he gets the most revealing lines in the script. When DiCaprio tells him he's leaving his job because of "the hopeless emptiness," Givings is mock-starstruck, as if he's finally met a fellow traveller. He responds, "Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness. Wow."

I've come to admire DiCaprio's performances lately, especially as buffed-up soldiers of fortune in Body of Lies & Blood Diamond. I was never a fan of his watery boyishness & it unfortunately returns a few times in Revolutionary Road. There's still too much of the simpering, shrill child showing through his Frank Wheeler & mid-film he has a tantrum that I wanted to echo one of Burt Lancaster's breakdowns in Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968), but instead it reminded me of the painfully sensitive 70s actor Robbie Benson.

Of course, none of this ends very happily & there's a truly creepy breakfast scene towards the end of the movie that might spoil any wedding plans you have if you let it get under your skin. There are actually many moments of grave, palpable terror in Revolutionary Road, which is rare in a period piece & that's just as Yates would have wanted it.