313. Wreck-It Ralph

313. (22 Dec) Wreck-It Ralph (2012, Rich Moore) 50



Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer and Jane Lynch seem like they're in competition to give the worst voice performance. Other than that, this is generally inoffensive. The throwbacks to video games of my childhood are rather enjoyable, but they're references that are surely lost on the targeted audience. The anti-bullying message is very "in," but clumsily handled. The enjoyable and varied set pieces keep this from being a slog.

WRECK-IT RALPH

WRECK-IT RALPH
Written by Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston
Directed by Rich Moore
Voices by John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer and Jane Lynch

Wreck-It Ralph: I’m bad and that is good. I will never be good and that isn’t bad. There is no one I would rather be than me.

I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be very happy if every day you went to work only to be despised and misunderstood by everyone around you. Thus is the plight of one reasonably oafish, apparently stinky, video game character who goes by the name of Ralph, WRECK-IT RALPH, to be more precise. He has no friends; he sleeps in a dump; and he has freakishly huge hands that seem destined for only one thing, wrecking stuff. Here is the worst part. This has been his day in and day out for 30 years! As miserable as Ralph’s life is for him, his attempt to turn it all around is a great delight for all of us.

Ralph is the “bad guy” from a classic arcade game called, “Fix-It Felix Jr.”. As Ralph (aptly voiced by John C. Reilly) destroys a building full of innocent people, Felix (voiced by the apparent go to guy for innocent, yokel types, Jack McBrayer), with his trusty magic hammer, comes along to fix everything. When he’s done, Ralph is tossed off the building and into a pile of mud. When he realizes he hasn’t even been invited to the game’s 30th anniversary party, Ralph simply leaves it on a mission to change the way people see him. Ralph has had enough of being a bad guy and wants to be good for a change, but what he really needs is a lesson in personal acceptance. Naturally, Ralph starts wrecking stuff in other games because he has yet to accept that wrecking stuff is in his nature. If Ralph were crossing a river on the back of a frog, no matter how well intentioned he may be, he would inevitably wreck that frog before they reached the other side.

WRECK-IT RALPH is a unique and imaginative take on the world of gaming. Classic video game characters, from Sonic the Hedgehog to Pac-Man, come alive after the arcade closes for the night, and travel between games through dozens of electrical wire train tubes, that converge in a central station that deserves to be called grand. And as they come to life, so does the film, a remarkable effort by first time filmmaker, Rich Moore. There were times I questioned just who the film was made for though. I seriously doubt young kids would know who Q-Bert is but yet, more often than not, the humour was aimed primarily toward a younger sensibility. Despite some minor focus issues and some overused family friendly themes (don’t kids know that they just need to be themselves by now?), WRECK-IT RALPH is great fun all the same. It may not get a perfect score but it definitely makes the leader board. Pretty solid bragging rights for a first time player, I think.

228. Nightwatch

228. (29 Sep) Nightwatch (1998, Ole Bornedal) 41



Though there's a creepiness to the setting and premise of Nightwatch, it's too strained and arty to feel especially scary. Ewan McGregor, Patricia Arquette, Josh Brolin and Lauren Graham all lack chemistry with one another, which doesn't help matters. There's also such a limited pool of possible murderers, this barely works as a mystery, especially when you consider how much of the plot defies logic.

011. We Need to Talk About Kevin

011. (07 Jan) /We Need to Talk About Kevin/ (2011, Lynne Ramsey) 74

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
Written by Lynne Ramsay and Rory Kinnear
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilley and Ezra Miller


Dr. Foulkes: He’s a floppy little boy, isn’t he? But there’s nothing wrong with him.

I know we’re supposed to talk about him but I have a very hard time talking about WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. (I meant to write this review three weeks ago and just couldn’t do it until now.) From the moment it opens, with a jubilant Tilda Swinton, dousing herself, the people around her and the entire screen in deep red tomatoes and their juice at the Tomatina festival, in Bunol, Spain, I was consumed by the film. The imagery and the intention were so vibrant and alive, it was almost intoxicating. And then it gets drab and ugly and we are thrown into a world where every trace of Swinton’s former life is absent. All that remains is a run down shack on what is clearly the wrong side of town. The red is still there but now its the painted curse words on the front of her home. How did her life go from one extreme to the other? She had Kevin.

Swinton is mind blowing in Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s popular novel. She plays Eva Katchadourian. Once upon a time she was a successful travel agent who would travel to the most exotic of locations with her happy husband, Franklin (John C. Reilley). Like most people, her life changed when she had a baby. Before long, she and her family were leaving New York City for a quiet place in the suburbs, as they do. Eva struggled though to find happiness in her new life. She never seemed to connect with her son, Kevin (played primarily as an adult on screen by the disturbingly lanky, Ezra Miller), and began to fear there was something wrong with him. It doesn’t take too long though before she starts to suspect that Kevin is just being spiteful and directing some fairly disturbing anger solely at her. It gets so callous she can hardly seem to get the words out at some point. She loves him but she also hates him simultaneously. It’s as if she knows she is obligated to love him but cannot for the life of her figure out how to accomplish this. And for as much direct suggestion the title provides, no one ever seems to talk too much about Kevin, when clearly they should.

Ramsay slowly reveals to us in flashback how Eva fell from grace and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN becomes a modern telling of a familiar horror story. Personally, I find it quite refreshing to see a film about an evil child that isn’t possessed by some spirit or satanic force. Kevin has done something truly horrible but we don’t know what that is, just what it did to Eva’s life and that she never abandoned him despite any of it. The back and forth in time and space, which I loved being lost in, makes it near impossible to situate yourself directly in the narrative for too long at any one time, likely very similar to the blur of Eva’s fractured mind. To piece the puzzle together means having to ask whether or not Kevin’s troubles came from his mother or perhaps whether Kevin is just plain evil. It’s nature vs. nurture but it forces us to acknowledge that if we side with nature, we must not only admit that some apples really are just bad but also remember the trees they fell not too far from.

PS. If you or anyone you know is thinking about having children, you might seriously consider seeing this first (or not).

CARNAGE

CARNAGE 
Written by Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski
Directed by Roman Polanski
Starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly

Penelope Longstreet: Why can’t things be easier? Why does everything have to be so exhausting?

There are some plays that seem as though they could never be adapted for the screen and Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” is certainly one of them. Although I have not myself seen it on stage, I can imagine its physical scope is quite limited as all the action takes place in one apartment over the course of a few hours. On stage, this can be riveting, as long as the conversation itself is sharp and insightful and as long as those partaking in said conversation give brilliant performances. On film, one location with the same four characters can be a static stand still. Fortunately for Reza, all involved in the film adaptation of her play, now called CARNAGE, are precisely the right people to keep things moving.

At the CARNAGE helm is infamous director, Roman Polanski, a man who has seen his own fair share of carnage in his life. Reza herself collaborated with Polanski on the screenplay so the fundamentals are firmly intact. Essentially, two couples meet to discuss an altercation that took place between their boys in a playground that resulted in one of the boys losing teeth. Things naturally don’t go as well as anyone had hoped. And who does Polanski amass to captivate us with their wit and humour? Four brilliant actors of course as the entire acting community seem to clamor to work with him. Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play parents to the boy who lost his teeth while Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz play parents to the boy who was armed with the stick - sorry, who was carrying the stick - that knocked out the teeth. I don’t know about you but I can think of way worse people to be stuck in a room with for ninety minutes.

These two couples, as portrayed by this amazingly talented and dynamic cast, start out as sensible, civilized adults who are doing what they all think is right according to societal standards given the situation at hand. After all, what matters most is the well being of their children and ensuring that they come out of this as positively as possible. It’s the fact that the children are involved though that makes their exercise so futile to begin with. Their children were in a fight and hurt each other. The natural impulse for these parents would be to protect their children no matter what. And so it is not at all surprising to watch as their facades slowly but surely fade away to reveal not only their anger over the current situation but also the deep seeded disgust that has been festering in all of them for as long as they’ve had to hold it in. And given how polite our Western society can be at times, I’d say they’ve been holding back for a very long time.

Polanski does everything he must in order to keep a picture that almost never leaves the living room feel like it is in constant motion. Much of that comes from the rapid unravelling of the characters themselves. Their descent is delicious making CARNAGE a truly stimulating experience. Still, I imagine that if these four people exhibited just as much passion on stage, the immediacy of it would make their madness that much more meaningful.

460. We Need to Talk About Kevin

460. (10 Nov) We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay)* 76



It's a compliment to say this is one of the most upsetting movies I've seen in quite some time. Though Ramsay missteps with some heavy-handed visual metaphors and initially questionable structuring, her film's intensity makes up for any shortcomings. She doesn't make a cartoonish evil child movie, but something far more demented and real. It's extraordinarily uncomfortable watching the punishment delivered to Tilda Swinton's Eva throughout the film, but Swinton makes the most of that discomfort, elevating every scene and turning out one of the performances of the year. Ezra Miller's older Kevin has gotten acclaim, but the actors who portray him as a younger child are far better.

430. Carnage

430. (10 Oct) Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski)* 62



Having seen the deliciously fun Broadway production, it's immediately clear that Carnage would have worked better as a television movie than as a motion picture directed by somebody like Polanski. He's so stage-bound by the script he helped adapt. While he tries ever so slightly to open it up, it's very challenging to make something so confined work on this scale.

Polanski gets a particular lot of help from Christoph Waltz, who is positively delightful here. Kate Winslet also gives a fairly impressive turn once she starts getting sloshed late in the picture. Jodie Foster is predictably annoying and John C. Reilly is miscast.

The joy of the script remains. It's hard not to be amused by the scenario that plays out, but this is hardly great filmmaking. They could have done just as well to film the stage production and play it on PBS.

Roman Polanski's a god of "Carnage"

Below, we have the trailer for the highly-anticipated and Venice Film Festival opener Carnage.  Based of a ridiculously successful stage play, Roman Polanski's adaptation stars a trio of Oscar-winners and one lone nominee.  Waltz and Winslet in particular look marvelous, with Waltz perfectly capturing the attitude I always imaged when reading the play.  It's still a mystery how this will play in this year's forthcoming Oscar race, but it sure is looking strong.  (Please mind it's enormity, overrunning the posting space).



And the poster, for good measure.

[trailer and poster via Twitch] 

Yearly Perspective – 2002 – Supporting Actor Edition

In case you missed my explanation of Yearly Perspectives or my 2002 Best Director analysis, please check them out.  

Pound for pound, throughout the history of the Oscars—and film in general—supporting men are always the strongest.  At least for me.  In a male-dominated film industry, men are typically allowed to be more “out there” and can inhabit less typecast roles.  Grieving wives and hookers fill a good portion of historic supporting female performances, but supporting males and their types are all over the board.  It’s just the strongest race and usually the most interesting array of nominees.

Except for 2002.  There’s no question the eventual, shockingly-inspired winner Chris Cooper was a great choice and totally deserved the win.  I’d rank his no-holds-barred performance among some of the best work done in the 00s.  But his competition in 2002 was relatively weak.  The platoon of Christopher Walken in Catch Me If You Can, Ed Harris in The Hours, John C. Reilly in Chicago, and Paul Newman in Road to Perdition we nipping at the champ’s heels.  His closest competition was likely SAG and BAFTA champ Christopher Walken for his wacky and tender turn in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.  A likely cause for his SAG win was that the young awards organization hadn’t yet rewarded the acting vet, unlike the Academy did in 1978.  That’s not to say his performance wasn’t very good.  In fact it was fine; just fine.  One of those performances that aren’t championship caliber, but are good enough to make the top five.  A filler nominee.  He was subtle in his Walken sort of way, but wasn’t even the best supporting turn in the film if you ask me.

It’s hard to believe Ed Harris’s last nomination was nine years ago.  For an actor who so quickly raked up four nominations (only took him eight years), the latter portion of the 00s have not been friendly to this actor’s actor.  A mass of buzz met distribution woes last year in Peter Weir’s The Way Back, and a series of baity flops have kept Harris dry this decade.  But his last nominated performance as a haunted AIDS-ridden poet in Stephen Daldry’s lyrical The Hours was probably his best.  Though his screen time in The Hours is quite small, his impact in unspeakable.  As Virginia Woolf’s tragic poet, Harris brought a sense of frailty to the role that I don’t think most actors would have found.

With Chicago’s John C. Reilly, you have somewhat of the surprise nominee in the category on Oscar morning (what with Alfred Molina’s libido-ridden painter in Frida, and the duel attack of Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert from Far From Heaven snatching a strong majority of the precursor nominations).  Reilly made quiet acting seem powerful, and made effective use of his single song and subtle role.  As Amos, he was charged with a difficult task, one that, should he falter, the film would ultimately fail.  He was the moral compass, we must not only want to root for him, but feel compelled to in a sea of tricksters, lies, and erroneous lawyers.  One of those performances where an actor does their job, and in doing so, turns in a good performance.  (On a related side note, I constantly go back and forth between Richard Gere’s category placement in the same film, and momentarily, I’m considering him Lead).  It's a shame that he's yet to return to this level of performance after sinking into the slapstick depths of Will Ferrell comedies.

Then there’s Paul Newman—in his last live action role—as a mob boss with a heart of gold in Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition.  I won’t whine too much about his nomination, as I’m more indifferent to it than anything.  If you ask me, Jude Law was handedly better in the same film, but then again it would have been hard as a voter to deny a screen legend a nomination for doing such quality work at his age and in his sixth decade of acting.  It’s a stalwart performance in a gem of a film (added bonus from Perdition: pre-James Bond Daniel Craig).  He’s strong, reserved, and commands the screen whenever graces them with his blue eyes.  Looking back, it’s really hard to understand how more voters weren’t swayed by the Legend status, but I for one am glad they weren’t.  His final scene is beyond beautiful, specifically in how he demonstrates leagues of emotion with merely an accepting glance.

Then we’ve the oh-so deserving victor: Chris Cooper.  A character actor’s character actor.  Unfortunately, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation was a hit and miss during the 2002 awards season, taking both supporting Golden Globes, then a SAG loss by Cage and Cooper (and a Streep snub there to boot), and finally a trio of BAFTA losses coupled with an inspired screenplay win.  So the fact that this film eked out a performance win is a relief.  And I’m very glad it was Cooper.  As spoken numerous times within Adaptation, “[John] Laroche is such a great character,” and in reality it’s nothing short of the truth.  Toothless and philosophical aren’t exactly conductors for critical praise or an Oscar, but Cooper manages it with ease.  He plays an eccentric, which as a character type shows up time and time again in the Best Supporting Actor race, and they can either be histrionic misfires or divine homeruns.  Paired against the near-perfect performances of previous Oscar-champs Meryl Streep and Nicolas Cage, he steals the show.  I simply can’t say enough about his performance.  How can you deny a character the convincingly says in complete earnest, “I’m probably the smartest person I know”?  If you haven’t seen it—or Adaptation—I highly suggest checking adding it to the top of your queue.

But to me, only three of these men deserved a nomination, and surprisingly neither of the two legends made my cut.  So, we keep Reilly, Harris, and Cooper.  But what of the other two?  As I said earlier, I was indifferent to both Walken and Newman—I don’t hate their performance, but rather, I just don’t merit either as awards quality.  However, there is a performance in Catch Me If You Can that I would find worthy of such praise, and it’s Tom Hanks.  Aptly handling a brilliant screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, Hanks is the glue which holds the film together.  He never attempts to make the role cliché or sappy, but rather he plays the role straight as a human being rather than a man on a mission.  Too easy the cat of the cat-and-mouse role is left devoid of personality or soul, but Hanks delivers a man with both infused.  His frankness with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale Jr. is his strength; treating the cunning con man as a kid instead of a mastermind, and thereby always having the upper hand in their latter conversations.  Also too, he makes it a fun performance, capturing the buffoonish nature of so smoothly being had by a teenager.  The final scene in the airport is his strongest: imbuing the feeling of being both enthralled by and sorry for a kid who’s lost in the world.  Sure his accent is a little questionable at times, but thankfully that doesn’t impede his performance.

My final nominee is someone who likely would have gotten a nomination had him getting a nomination been legal under Academy by-laws.  Don’t quote me on this, but I’m fairly certain voice-performances, even those done in motion-capture, are not eligible for a nomination at the Academy Awards.  So, even though what Andy Serkis did as Gollum in the second installment of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is nothing short of master class acting, he wasn’t even allowed on voting ballots.  He would repeat this perfect puppetry three years later in Jackson’s King Kong as the title ape, and with equal character study on scale with that of Sean Penn in Milk or Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.  As Gollum, Serkis crawled, gouged, and hopped his way to a character that is unquestionably the most famous of the franchise, and with good reason.  Every scratch in his voice, every movement and eye glance is 100% Serkis’s.  No amount of CGI can airbrush desperation and devotion like the human actor can.  Simply for discovering such a perfect character within Tolkein’s work is enough for a nomination, and pulling it off is nearly worth a win.

So there you have it.  My Yearly Perspective on the 2002 Best Supporting Actor race with comments on the real nominees and my personal selections.  Expect Best Actress later this week.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

***Chris Cooper, Adaptation.***

Andy Serkis, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Ed Harris, The Hours

John C. Reily, Chicago

Tom Hanks, Catch Me If You Can

.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” is a ham-fisted parody of musical biography films that’s not nearly as funny as its makers believe it is. The script was co-written by the criminally overrated Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan (son of director/writer Lawrence Kasdan). Kasdan also directed, if that is the word.

The Johnny Cash biography film “Walk the Line” (2005) being an obvious model here, “Walk Hard” gives us Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) as a dim bulb of a man who enjoys great success as a country singer in the 1950s. The film follows his life as he changes musical styles and goes through an assortment of women, drugs and decadence before finding contentment as an old man, scarred by life but ultimately triumphant.

I guess the musical biography genre could be a ripe one for parody, but not under Apatow’s hand. Jokes are sledge hammered with all the subtlety of someone yelling in your face. A meeting with the Beatles is painfully unfunny and goes on forever, with the different Beatles continually calling each other by their names, as if we’re too stupid to get the jokes. (Apatow has an annoying habit of force feeding jokes two and three times until he’s sure we get it.)

Reilly is OK in the role I guess, but he’s never remotely likeable. Jenna Fishcher plays wife number two Darlene, a character who is an obvious riff on June Carter Cash, but that’s as far as the joke goes.

Tim Meadows is the film’s bright spot as a band member who leads Dewey into all kinds of temptations. When he’s on the screen the film achieves its best moments, but the rest of it is truly painful to sit through.

I saw this movie three days ago and can barely remember anything else about it.

Apatow is the hot thing in Hollywood right now thanks to the inexplicable success of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”, “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” (which I enjoyed) and it appears he can do no wrong in the eyes of many. Until “Walk Hard” which bombed big time. Good. A few years ago the Farrelly Brothers were the hot commodity, but now their films barely cause a ripple. Maybe the same thing will happen to Apatow. His penchant for celebrating men who have the emotional maturity of 10-year-olds is already getting real stale.

Rating for “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”: One-and-a-half stars.