RATING:

Bank robber John Dillinger was so good at what he did, no law man could stop him. So the law got better.
The engrossing Public Enemies, directed by crime auteur Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice, et al), is about the showdown between the cocky, smooth-talking, slightly jaded Dillinger (a captivating Johnny Depp) and the up-and-coming FBI, led by the smarmy and ambitious J. Edgar Hoover (deliriously creepy Billy Crudup).
Hoover wisely places his best agent, Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale) on the case—knowing that the dogged Pervis will make him look good.
Mann does a great job of showing you Dillinger’s world. Everything—from the fedoras, to the Tommy guns, to the audacious way Dillinger and his men broke out of prison (twice!) and their balletically choreographed bank heists— bristles with authority. (And no wonder: Mann payed meticulous attention to detail, even recreating some pivotal shootouts in the actual locations they occurred.) The film looks gorgeous—all sumptuous blacks and grays and inky figures in the night—and the soundtrack is equally seductive.
But, as is often my complaint with Michael Mann films, Public Enemies feels a little cold. Mann tries to up the human factor by highlighting a romance between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a pragmatic but beautiful hat check girl (Dillinger woos her the way he approaches a bank heist—with little doubt of his success) but the director’s mind is clearly on the cops and robbers.
There’s little sense of the Depression Era mood and only a glancing reference to Dillinger’s status as a folk hero. More importantly, we hardly get to know Bale’s Pervis. There’s a moment, early on, when Hoover surprises Pervis by introducing him to the media as the new head of the Chicago crime bureau. Pervis never blinks—he takes the mike and calmly talks about catching Dillinger. I understand this is supposed to demonstrate how cool under pressure Pervis was. But if Bale (and Mann) could’ve just given us something here—a tiny tic, a bead of sweat on the lip, an awkward clearing of throat—to show Pervis’s humanity, it would’ve gone a long way. Instead, Pervis, like the film itself, is as smooth and focused as a bullet.

RATING:

The thorny ethical issue at the core of My Sister’s Keeper is the stuff of juicy late-night debates: What if a family had a sick child and essentially engineered another child to give that sick child bone marrow and blood? And what if that younger, healthy child got tired of being stuck with needles and hospitalized and decided to sue her parents for emancipation of her own body? Whose side would you be on?
In both Jodi Picoult’s novel and Nick Cassavetes’ film adaptation, you find yourself mostly sympathizing with young Anna (Abigail Breslin), partly because her mother (Cameron Diaz, unglammed and completely believable) has such crazy tunnel vision when it comes to her eldest daughter.
At the same time, the mother’s fierce protectiveness is touching: I have one sick child, Diaz’s Sara says at one point, so she is the child I simply must care about the most. Her other two children—there is also a son, played by a sad-eyed Evan Ellingson—are slightly neglected, but they are relatively well cared for. You can almost take Sara’s side.
The film, like the book, does a great job at showing the heartbreak of having a child with leukemia. I continue to be haunted by the flashback scene of 3-year-old Kate, lying half-naked on an examination table—skinny and vulnerable and so impossibly young—moments before her parents hear the dreaded news: leukemia. But to contrast that image, we get to see flashbacks of Anna, also a toddler, squirming and fighting against needles that draw blood and painful bone marrow.
All this stuff is great. And the acting is superb. Alec Baldwin is perfectly cast as the slick lawyer who takes on Anna’s case—he may be self-promoting, but his interest in Anna feels genuine. As a teenager, Kate is played by Sofia Vassilieva, who is nothing short of remarkable. And Jason Patric goes against type, playing the sympathetic dad, who loves his wife but perhaps sees their other two children more clearly than she does.
Indeed, there is so much to like about My Sister’s Keeper, I wish I could report that I was giving it a rave review.
But I can’t. Nick Cassavetes, who also directed The Notebook, stacks the deck with impossible sentimentality—it’s borderline kitsch. Many of the scenes of the family are staged like grainy home movies—meant to evoke the maximum of nostalgia. If Cassavetes were making a statement about the facade of family photos and memories—how they often distort an unpleasant reality—now that would really be something. But he’s not. He’s simply using those images—the family having a barbecue, or laughing around the dinner table—to tug at our heartstrings, in the most facile of ways. (A scene where the sick Kate is taken to the beach is particularly gratuitous.)
One fault of the film lies with Picoult’s beloved source material, which ultimately cops out on the ethical debate with an ending that almost manages to undermine everything we’ve just seen.
A shame. If Cassavetes and Picoult had only trusted their story (and their audience) more, My Sister’s Keeper might’ve been something truly special.

RATING:

If a critic screams in a middle of a Michael Bay film and the film is too loud for anyone to hear, did it ever actually occur?-My thoughts, after leaving the Transformers screening.

Okay, so I didn’t actually scream in the middle of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But I sure wanted to.
Part of my dismay was not just the film’s bone-crushing noise, stupefying action, gung-ho conservatism, thinly-veiled racism, predictable sexism, bloated running time (two and a half freaking hours!), and crass commercialism (actually, compared to the film’s other sins, the crass commercialism is kind of quaint)—it was knowing that no matter what I say, it won’t amount to squat. Transformers II is going to make its buckets of money, paving the way for a third and possibly even a fourth iteration of this soulless franchise. Hoo-yah.

“That was AWESOME!”-Actual 11-year-old boy leaving the Transformers screening.

I suppose it could be argued that the world can be divided into two groups of people: Those who want to see giant robots battling for world supremacy and those who don’t. And maybe the people who fall into the former group can actually distinguish their Autobots from their Decepticons because I sure couldn’t. They all looked like giant heaps of moving scrap metal to me. (This is no small complaint, by the way. In the fight scenes, and there are many, I could never tell who I was supposed to be rooting for.)
The plot in a nutshell: Giant robots have been battling since the beginning of time; now the good robots, who are working in league with U.S. Military, are in danger of being overtaken by the Decepticons unless our hero Sam (Shia LeBeouf) can stop them. Discuss among yourselves.
Much like the original Transformers, director Michael Bay takes time out from his robot smackdowns and military maneuverings to goose us with sit com level jokes, and titillating, lad-mag sexuality. To wit, I give you Megan Fox as Sam’s mechanic girlfriend. Her character essentially amounts to a combination between a Carl’s Jr. ad and a Maxim photo spread. She spends a lot of time licking her lips in half shirts and running in slo-mo. And they’re calling this actress the next Angelina Jolie? Squirrel, please.
The jokiness comes in the form of Julie White and Kevin Dunn, reprising their roles as Sam’s kooky parents; Ramon Rodriguez as Sam’s conspiracy-minded, wimpy college roommate; and Jon Turturro, back as former secret agent (now working in his parents deli) Simmons, who joins the film midway to add more unnecessarily twitchy humor. (When Shia LeBeouf is your leading man, you kind of already have the twitch factor covered.)
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the offensive stereotype of the foolish Autobot twins, who speak in street jive (one even has a gold tooth), are bumbling incompetents, and can’t read. I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll defer to this guy, who nails it. (Head’s up: If you click, you are moving from a PG kinda site, to an anything goes kinda site. You’ve been warned.)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen left me exhausted, in a foul mood, with a pounding headache, and a general feeling of concern for the future of our youth. In short, it was a Michael Bay film.

RATING:

I’m trying to figure out if I liked The Proposal more when it was called What Happens in Vegas or when it was called The Wedding Date or when it was called Green Card.
Come to think of it, I’m trying to decide if I like this story better when Sandra Bullock plays the demanding boss, as she does here, or when she plays the put upon assistant, as she did in Two Weeks Notice.
You get the point. Been there, done that with this rom-com formula: Bullock’s Margaret Tate is a humorless book editor who has her staff jump through hoops, no more so than her dutiful personal assistant Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds). Andrew is tethered to Margaret because he wants to become an editor himself, and she’s his ticket to a promotion. So when Margaret demands that Andrew marry her (she’s been threatened with deportation), he reluctantly agrees.
Of course, there’s a suspicious INS agent, forcing Andrew and Margaret to take a trip to Andrew’s hometown of Alaska for the 90th birthday of his “Gammie” (a game Betty White).
Cue Bullock teetering in heels, schlepping way too many bags onto a boat, and having a hard time adjusting to the Paxton family bonding.
The problem with The Proposal, other than its own limited aspirations, is that Margaret doesn’t warm up in a believable way. One minute, she’s uptight and prudish, the next minute she’s sharing intimate stories of  her tattoo and singing Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock songs with Andrew. There’s a kiss that’s supposed to show all the great physical chemistry Andrew and Margaret have, but they look like they’re in pain.
It’s a shame—Bullock and Reynolds are both such naturally likeable actors (although Reynolds has to be careful not to come across as glib), but I’m not feeling them here. And any movie that manages to make Sandra Bullock unlikable is what the kids call an epic FAIL.

RATING:

John Krasinski’s character Burt Farlander is afflicted with something I’ve decided to call the indie stupor.
We’ve all seen this before, in films as varied as Garden State, American Beauty, Broken Flowers, and Elizabethtown. Our hero is a sheepish and sometimes benumbed observer of the wacky world around him. The wackier the supporting characters, the more our wounded hero looks blankly at the camera, as if to say, “Everyone is crazy except for me. In contrast, I am a deeply sensitive and intuitive human being.”
But it begs the question: Why would I care about such a passive hero? I prefer someone who is actively engaged in the world around him, not just standing around in an “I’m With Stupid” shirt.
Burt is supposed to be a stand-in for novelist and indie lit hero Dave Eggers, who cowrote the screenplay—about a rudderless 30something couple about to have their first child—with his wife, Vendela Vida. We know Eggers to be a highly intelligent, possibly even brilliant man. So why make his cinematic double such a drip? (Burt’s ludicrously unattractive beard and haircut combo was my first clue that he was a series of cutesy affectations, not a real character.)
Of course, the indie stupor only works if our hero has lots of crass humanity to rub up against, and, brother, does Burt have some doosies to choose from.
As he and his girlfriend Verona (Maya Rudolph) travel the continent, looking for clues about parenting and personal fulfillment, they spend time with the vulgar Lily (Allison Janney) who cheerfully mocks and sexualizes her tween children; the pretentious New Age queen LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who refuses to put her children in strollers because “why would I want to constantly  push my children away from me?”; and Burt’s selfish parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels), who brightly announce that they are moving to Belgium months before the birth of their first grandchild.
There is a scene in the movie where Burt comes to life: He takes action at the home of LN and her guru-like husband (Josh Hamilton), ridiculing them and causing a bit of a ruckus. But his behavior seems so wildly out of character, it was almost jarring.
Much of Away We Go rubbed me the wrong way—from its indie-ready soundtrack of dreamy/quirky folk tunes to its awkward vacillations between pathos and broad comedy. And while I appreciate the fact that director Sam Mendes found a more earthy visual style for this film (his films tend to be a bit pristine), I’m beginning to see a pattern of knee-jerk misanthropy with him. (Besides American Beauty, he also directed last year’s art house bummer, Revolutionary Road.)
One shining note? Maya Rudolph shows real promise as Verona. Unlike Burt, Verona has an inner life—she hasn’t fully processed the death of her parents several years ago—and she seems slightly annoyed by her boyfriend’s man-child antics. That makes two of us, honey.

RATING:

Jack Black, all gleeful id, and Michael Cera, all fussy misery, seem like a match made in buddy film heaven. Throw in writer/director Harold Ramis, a zany, pre-historic plot, and plenty of chances to bring hipster humor to the events of the Bible, and it seems like you can’t lose.
That may very well be the problem.  When everyone is sitting around a Hollywood boardroom thinking, “We can’t lose!” a kind of torpor sets in.  The result of that torpor? The flat out lazy Year One.
Black plays Zed, a hunter, and Cera plays Oh, a gatherer. Oh is fairly content with his uneventful life in the village (he derisively refers to a malcontent peer as a “self-loathing gatherer.”) But Zed thinks there’s more to his destiny. When he eats of the forbidden fruit of knowledge and accidentally sets the village on fire, he runs off to the edge of the earth, with a reluctant Oh in tow. Oh thinks they’ll fall off the end. Zed thinks there’s life in them hills.
While the first 15 minutes of Year One is squarely Caveman mode (clubs and loin cloths, et al) from there we head into Monty Python (by way of Mel Brooks) territory. The boys watch Cain (David Cross) repeatedly bludgeon Abel (Paul Rudd in a cameo), and later save Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) from sacrifice by Abraham (Hank Azaria, in danger of becoming “that guy who does funny voices”). Eventually, they end up in Sodom, where Oh becomes the pet of the preening High Priest (Oliver Platt, who actually seems to be trying) and Zed falls under the spell of Princess Inanna (Olivia Wilde).
Of course, there are chuckles to be had along the way. At one point, Oh, having heard about the debauchery of Sodom and Gomorrah hopefully asks, “Which one of the cities has the most whores?. .. Just so we know to avoid it.” Later, Cain tells the boys: “What happens in Sodom stays in Sodom.”
But the actual jokes are few and far between, replaced with bathroom humor and extremely obvious riffs on the Bible. Even pros like Black and Cera need some structure. Otherwise, as Mel Brooks might say, you just end up with a big pile of schtick.

RATING:

As I was settling into my seat for the screening of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a young man came up to me and asked, “Are you excited?”
“I guess,” I said (unconvincingly). “I really loved the original, so I’m not exactly sure why we needed a remake.”
“This is a remake?” the kid asked.
And there you go.
To be honest, I actually feel sorry for people whose sole experience with this film—about the hijacking of a New York subway car—comes courtesy of Tony Scott’s slickly efficient but soulless version. The original was gritty, funky, funny, and humane—positively redolent with a sense of New York City and its people.
The new flick has its moments—mostly the scenes between Denzel Washington as Walter Garber, the mild-mannered NYC transit worker, and John Travolta as Ryder, the pissed off philosopher-hijacker he must negotiate with—but Scott is clearly much more interested in keeping the action swift and the body count high than giving us a sense of place.  In Joseph Sargent’s original, we felt the  anxiety of the hostages, plus a bit of their fighting New York spirit—here, they’re largely anonymous. (Scott could hardly seem to be bothered with them.) Likewise, in the original, we got to know all sorts of characters—an antsy sniper who waited on the tracks, the deputy mayor, some cops on the beat, the hijackers themselves. But Scott stays mostly fixed on Washington and Travolta (although John Turturro, as a savvy hostage negotiator and James Gandolfini, as a Bloomberg-like mayor, make impressions.)
Travolta is clearly having fun with his flamboyant role, but it’s Washington who’s really doing work. Watching Garber’s split-second reactions to Ryder’s changing demands and provocations is a lot of fun. (I don't think he quite tops Walter Matthau’s menschy take on the role, but Denzel certainly comes close.) Still, they give Garber a murky back story (not in the original) that is supposed to justify his unlikely heroics at the end. I didn't buy it.
The new The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is just fine if you’re looking for a swift rush of adrenaline to the head. But the original was a genre-film classic. Hooray progress?

Had drinks with the talented young filmmaker Matt Porterfield last night. After graduating from NYU Film School, he came back to Baltimore to make the critically acclaimed Hamilton, a dreamy, elegiac work about his home town. His next feature, Metal Gods is ready to shoot, with a cast (including Sky Ferreira, above), a script, and a crew lined up. Only one problem: Porterfield hasn’t raised enough money to shoot yet. And he says that Baltimore’s onerous taxes are part of the problem.  A state like Michigan, he says, has many more tax incentives for filmmakers.
According to their film offices’ respective websites, a Michigan film production earns a 42 percent tax rebate compared to Maryland’s 24 percent. Likewise, a Maryland production must spend $500,000 to be eligible for the incentives; in Michigan, only $50,000 needs to be spent. (Porterfield doesn’t blame the Maryland Film Office. He says its hands are tied by the state legislature.)
Porterfield notes that Detroit would be a great place to make a film like Metal Gods.
“But I really just want make movies in Baltimore,” he sighs.

RATING:

When the trailer for The Hangover first came out—with its promise of a bachelor party run amok (tigers! babies! Mike Tyson! oh my!)—it became an instant YouTube classic. But I wondered, could the film sustain that kind of hilarity? Could it really continue to up the ante of outrageousness?
The key to a film like this is to reveal the insanity in pieces: How did square dentist Stu (Ed Helms) lose his tooth and get married to a hooker (Heather Graham)? How did Doug the groom (Justin Bartha) get lost? Why does the hotel valet think they’re cops? Why is there a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and a naked man in the trunk of their vintage Mercedes? And most importantly, why can’t the guys remember anything? (The in-retrospect ironic toast, the night before the mayhem? “To a night we’ll never forget.”)
The details are meted out brilliantly as the boys search for Doug and try to recreate the events of their lost evening. It would be easy to do it all in flashback, but director Todd Phillips (Old School) plays it more like a mystery: Until an obscenely (and hilariously) rococo flourish at the very end, we learn about the debauchery as the boys do, detective style.
Casting is great. Bradley Cooper excels as the super-chill alpha male of the group: We know when he loses his cool, things have really gotten out of hand. Comedian Zach Galifaniakis—with his shaggy beard, roly-poly physique, and slightly disconcerting 1,000-yard stare—adds an element of unpredictability as Doug’s socially awkward brother-in-law. And The Office star Helms enlivens his somewhat stock role—the dutiful, hen-pecked husband (he tells his wife that he and the boys are on a wine tasting trip in Napa) who is secretly itching to let loose—with memorable flare.
Some things don’t work: The film’s attitude toward women is predictably retrograde (a hooker with a heart of gold? really?) and a minor character—a mincing Chinese gangster, who I imagine the filmmakers thought would launch a thousand catch phrases—feels borderline offensive (and not particularly funny, at least to me.)
But I truly marveled at the ingeniousness of The Hangover. In a world of manufactured buzz and internet hype, it actually manages to exceed expectations. How often can you say that?

For my complete review of The Hangover, check out the July issue of Baltimore.

RATING:

One of the reasons why A Chorus Line lasted 15 years on Broadway was not just because of the marvelous dancing and songwriting, or even because of the unique (at the time) behind-the-scenes glimpse at the Broadway casting process. It was because the stories of the dancers (this one too old, this one too flat-chested, this one too homely) rang so incredibly true. Turns out, they rang true because they were true.
Thirty-five years ago, A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett assembled some dancer friends (and a giant jug of bad red wine) and recorded their stories, which were later turned into production numbers for the play. Those tapes, along with interviews with the original cast and creators (including composer Marvin Hamlisch) and archival footage of Bennett (who died of AIDS in 1987), form the backdrop to Every Little Step, a documentary about, yes, the casting process of A Chorus Line’s 2006 Broadway revival.
If you’re a fan of A Chorus Line, you’ll love the juicy tidbits revealed about small but pivotal changes made to the original play— the kind of changes that amount to the difference between Broadway success and Broadway immortality (I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing them here). There’s also an enormously moving monologue by an actor named Jason Tam, who’s trying out for the role of Paul, a young gay man who talks about his shame in coming out to his parents. The audition is fabulous, but it’s the reaction of the revival’s director Bob Avian and his crew (many gay men) that really gets you—they’re reduced to awestruck tears.
Of course, Every Little Step is absorbing: Documentaries about the audition process always are. You root for your favorites and feel their pain when they are cut. There’s also some great singing and dancing. But the novelty is gone—blame reality TV. We’ve seen all sorts of TV shows about auditions (I watched one recently on PBS about the casting of Billy Elliot)—and we get to see great dancing on our TV all the time. (I was DVRing that night’s episode of So You Think You Can Dance as I watched the film.) What’s more, A Chorus Line has a distinctly pre-AIDS era feel to it: It was made in a time when gay men felt isolated—they hadn’t yet banded together for a cause and come out stronger on the other side.
Every Little Step is a foolproof formula—and indeed it works here. But much of what made the original play so great feels dated. Maybe that’s why the Broadway revival closed after just two years.