Scrooged

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If you’ve seen Scrooged then you might know, and if you’ve never seen it you still may have guessed, it’s not a great movie. It’s not bad, but there are better Christmas movies out there. In fact, there are better Dickens-inspired Christmas movies out there. But do you know what this movie has and others do not? Bill Fucking Murray.

The man’s a legend, so any movie he deigns to appear in has immediate cool factor. And in Scrooged, you get 4 Murrays for the price of 1: three of his brothers appear in this movie with him, one playing his brother, and another playing his dad! (The third plays “party guest” – you can’t win em all).

Murray plays the would-be-Jacob-Marley character, and there’s no one better suited to play such a depraved, misanthropic, crotchety role. That’s him at his best. So why then did director Richard Donner muddy it up with gimmicks, forced laughs, and production values that nobody asked for? It feels like Donner didn’t trust his leading man, but this movie would have been a heck of a lot funnier if Murray had been allowed off his leash.

In the holiday mood? Feeling Christmassy? Read Jay’s review of Love Actually here, and be sure to cast your vote for all-time favourite Christmas movie. Expect more Christmas reviews in the days and weeks to come.

The Madness of King George

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I’m actually kind of partial to the films of 1994 because it was the 1995 Oscar ceremony, honouring the best of ’94, that got me hooked on all things Oscar. In honour of my upcoming 20th annual Oscar party, I decided to check this movie out- one of the few that I still hadn’t seen from that year.

In The Madness of King George, Nigel Hawthorne plays King George II during his struggle with mental illness (never so-called in the film for obvious reasons) in the late 1780’s. The pretty much always awesome Helen Mirren plays his wife Queen Charlotte who has no idea what to do with him. “It was something he ate!” she yells at no one in particular while the King derails a concert by storming the stage swatting away anyone trying to assist him.

The Madness of King George is quite well-done until the photo finish ending where the king races to Parliament to prove that he’s sane again before his son the Prince of Wales, played as a complete dickwad by Rupert Everett, can be declared Regent. I still have mixed feelings about this movie though, mostly about Dr. Willis, played by Ian Holm (old Bilbo Baggins). On the one hand, his theorizing about power’s connection to madness is interesting. All mad men think of themselves as kings, he muses. What fantasy then does a mad king take refuge in? It’s the feedback we get from others, including the insults and constructive criticism that shapes us so how can you keep a grip on reality when everyone around you looks to you as royalty? It’s a good question worth thinking about. Although, with medical hindsight being 20/20, they seem pretty sure now that the king’s madness was due to a rare blood disorder, not believing his own hype.

Dr. Willis’ answer to this is behavioural modification, basically meaning that the patient will be put in restraints every time he misbehaves (e.g. talking crazy, not eating, swearing etc.). Ok, I know that this is 1788 but, working in mental health myself, I was a little disturbed to see this practice potrayed as almost heroic rather than (again, hindsight 20/20) primitive. Compared to the king’s other doctors, of course, Willis was quite forward-thinking. One doctor is hilariously outraged at the impropriety of conducting a physical examination of the king while another just can’t get enough royal crap to examine.

It was hell to be declared mad in 1788. You can see it on the king’s face every now and then, when he becomes temporarily lucid enough to wonder what is happening to him. I would have rather the film focus on this more, instead of finding a doctor to declare as hero just because he is a little less incompetent or inhumane than the rest.

Mixed Nuts

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A small group of dedicated counsellors are working a crisis line on Christmas, even though they’re about to get evicted. It features an all-star cast: Steve Martin, Rita Wilson, Madeline Kahn, Adam Sandler, Liev Schreiber, Anthony LaPaglia, Juliette Lewis, Rob Reiner, Joely Fisher, and Garry Shandling. Victor Garber lends a voice, tiny Haley Joel Osment can be spotted, and Jon Stewart and Parker Posey play yuppie rollerbladers who are comparatively not worthy of top-billing.

I watch this movie without fail, every year. Admittedly, this is in part because for the past 7 I have found myself working at a crisis line on Christmas.

Now, the thing that you must understand about this movie is that it is bad. Quite bad. But lovable.

Rita Wilson is a goofball who probably shouldn’t be in movies. She’s way too earnest and tries too hard. She seems to mistake acting for clowning and all her lines are shouted, all her gestures hammy and over the top. But writer\director Nora Ephron had just finished making Sleepless in Seattle with Tom Hanks, and may she owed him one (Wilson is his wife).

But just so that Wilson doesn’t feel left out, the others join in on the sub-par acting. Steve Martin resorts to slap-stick. Adam Sandler does a bit with a ukelele that feels like an SNL sketch just wandered randomly onto the set. Juliette Lewis, never the last to board the crazy train, goes balls-deep in the fruitloop department. She delivers her lines as if she’s reading a book to a group of small, not very brightl children. Maybe they’re all just trying to get noticed? Too many cooks in the kitchen? Tooo many clowns at the circus?

This movie is SO bad that it actually uses a recording of the Jingle Cats doing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Fruitcakes are abundant, both literally and figuratively. Liev Schreiber wears a dress and does a fierce tango in his feature film debut – oh what a career that man could have had! And by the way, who taught Juliette Lewis how to empty a gun?

But to me, all the bad pieces add up to a silly, fun movie, exactly the kind of thing I need in between depressive, suicidal callers when I’m at work early on Christmas morning. Madeline Kahn is perfection, and Rob Reiner, as the straight man, is pretty fun too. And despite the many problems, Nora Ephron is still Nora Ephron, and this movie is full of quotable lines. Is this required Christmas viewing? Certainly not. But if you’ve got a dearth of Christmas cheer, or hours to fill at work over the holidays, then give it a try. You may even find it becoming a Christmas staple.

Don’t forget to vote for your favourite Christmas movie!

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

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For a blow-by-blow account, read Jay’s live blogging of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

“I’ve gone and done something again. Wish I could remember what”.

Marv (Mickey Rourke) has gone and done it again. It’s bad to forget your medicine when you’ve got a condition. This opening, based on Frank Miller’s short story Just Another Saturday Night, does not bode well for the rest of this sequel that I’d been anxiously awaiting for nearly 10 years. The first scene of Sin City, where Josh Hartnett plays a contract killer who completes a contract that a woman apparently put out on her herself, was not like anything I had ever seen. Sin City 2’s opening felt so much like a movie that I’d already seen before that, when watching it with Luc, it took me five minutes to convince him that we weren’t accidentally rewatching the first one. This had better get better fast.

“Poker. Savage power in gentlemen’s hands”.

If you’ve read my other reviews, you might have noticed that I have a bit of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt bias that I might as well come clean about. With that kept in mind, this next segment of the film, an original story by Frank Miller written for the movie, is the strongest by far. JGL plays a gambler who wins more than he should have against the beastly no good Senator Roark. He’s cocky but with more than his share of demons and if there’s one thing JGL knows, it’s cocky with more than his share of demons. Plus, movies like Brick and Looper have prepared him for lines like “Sin City’s where you go in with your eyes open. Or you don’t come out at all”. It isn’t just him that makes this the best of the four stories though. Everyone involved seems to be having more fun, especially Powers Boothe as Roark, who seems to get hard with every ruthless word.

“It’s another hot night, dry and windless. The kind that makes people do sweaty, secret things”.

This is really the main segment of the film, a nearly panel-for-panel adaptation of one of Miller’s more popular graphic novels, A Dame to Kill for. Eva Green plays Ava Lord, a damsel to kill for who seduces men into doing horrible things, including our old pal Dwight (this time played by Josh Brolin). The almost constantly naked Green is even more wicked than in Miller’s 300: Rise of an Empire earlier this year. She seems to relish playing her, even if she never seems sure what to do with her accent. Everyone else is phoning it in though. Brolin growls through all his lines like he’s trying to out-Marv Marv. Rourke, as Marv (over-used in the sequel) sounds like he showed up to the ten-year Sin City reunion only to find that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as he remembered. And Ray Liotta, in a short cameo, uses the campy dialogue as an excuse to go full Liotta. This story might have been a better fit for the first film, when the novelty was still there.

“I don’t use the stripper logic anymore”.

We end with another original story, this time focusing on Jessica Alba’s character. It gets off to a pretty good start. Nancy starts to fall apart after the death of Bruce Willis’ character in the first movie and Alba plays it better than I would have expected. The segment itself starts to fall apart very quickly though with more skull-crushing from Marv and a crossbow-wiedling Nancy. It ends with the death of a character that may kill the possibility of a third Sin City, which I would have been disappointed by 9 years ago. After watching this sequel though, it’s probably for the best.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s Still Got It

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Have you noticed on the radio lately that Michelle Pfeiffer has mysteriously reappeared into our collective consciousness?

Vance Joy’s song Riptide makes reference to her – “I swear she’s destined for the screen\ Closest thing to Michelle Pfeiffer that you’ve ever seen.” Which I’m guessing is a hipster compliment.

And then Mark Ronson’s song Uptown Funk (featuring Bruno Marks doing all the hard work) does the same –

This hit
That ice cold
Michelle Pfeiffer
That white gold

So what’s with all this Michelle Pfeiffer worshipping? She hasn’t done anything recently, so I’m assuming there’s a nostalgia factor here, but Michelle’s heyday was arguably the late 80s, maybe early 90s. Bruno Mars was BORN in 1985. Vance Joy? 1987, which means they weren’t even ALIVE when Scarface came out. They would have been in diapers for The Fabulous Baker Boys. They were still pre-pubescent for her Catwoman role in Batman Returns, for christsakes! Even Dangerous Minds is “before their time” and she was already sporting Mom jeans by then. Michelle was born in 1958, which makes her 56, and OLDER THAN MY MOM. And I’m not saying she’s not hot, because, hello.

But the truth is, these random song lyrics are the most relevant she’s been in over a decade. She’s probably not hanging on a lot of dorm walls right now, is all I’m saying.

So, internet, what gives?

Looper

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After reviewing Mysterious Skin yesterday, I was inspired to buy and rewatch Looper. I think this movie was high profile enough for me not to bother with my usual summary of the plot so I will just offer a reminder that this is the one where Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the connection to Mysterious Skin in case you were wondering) plays a specialized hitman who must hunt for his future self (Bruce Willis) who has been sent from the future for assassination.

If you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend it. Director Rian Johnson (Brick) creates a version of the future that is different enough from our present to be interesting but similar enough to be relatable. Because people are sent from the future just to be executed, not to change the past, Looper even avoids most of the logic problems that are usually par for the course with time travel movies. Okay, there are still a few “yeah, but wouldn’t…” moments but maybe that’s even part of the fun. JGL apparently spent a lot of time watching old footage of a younger Willis and, with the help of some talented make-up artists, the two actors do a better job than you might expect of being convincing as the same guy. Oh, and you have Jeff Daniels playing a gangster. So, see it.

But I’m mostly writing this not to the people who haven’t seen it but to those who have. Or at least to those who have either seen it enough times or seen it recently enough to remember what I’m talking about. Please, please, explain that ending to me! When I first saw it back in 2012, I promised myself that if I saw it again, I’m a smart guy- I could figure it out. But I just rewatched it and I still don’t understand how the last five seconds could possibly fit. So, if you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comment section.

Frank

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Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) is a slightly dorky guy on a beach, free-associating song lyrics, trying to hit on something that sounds like music. Instead he stumbles upon the scene of a suicide attempt, a raving lunatic being hoisted out of the sea. The hypothermic man is taken away by ambulance, leaving his bandmates scratching their heads around their van – how will they play their show tonight without their keyboardist? But wait! Jon plays keyboards! So he shows up that night to a gig and finds that this group isn’t just some unknown indie band, it’s an ultra-unknown and perhaps unknowable avant-guard indie band that’s lead by Frank (Michael Fassbender), an enigmatic man never seen without his papier-mache head, and Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) a super angry woman with bad haircut and a grudge against her theremin.

Back at work the next day, Jon’s life seems even more dull and meaningless than ever. His latest sandwich is the highlight of his twitter feed. So when his phone rings and it’s the band asking him to join them again, he jumps at the chance. Only this time it’s not for a gig, it’s for an indeterminate recording session in a remote cabin in the woods. At first Jon is elated to be part of Frank’s charismatic genius, believing that Frank can summon untapped corners of Jon’s own musical aptitude, but things are not easy with the music or between the band members. Ever the optimist, Jon gamely decides that this experience will substitute for the traumatic childhood he never had, fuelling and giving direction and “theme” to his songwriting.

Or so he thinks.

This movie never does what you expect it to, even after setting up parameters pretty much right away indicating that this is not exactly going to follow a straight and narrow path. It’s quirky and weird but also kind of sombre and introspective. It doesn’t hide behind easy choices, and as a device, the papier-mache head actually seems to unmask people’s true feelings rather than obscure them.

Michael Fassbender gives a surprisingly solid performance from behind his huge head. He plays that aloof, outsider rocker genius thing awfully well (almost as well as Maggie Gyllenhaal does the sour bitch, and that’s saying a lot). But the movie debunks\demystifies the glam-nutbars in a band thing, and Jon is soon learning just what it means to be the only straight one around.

In a World…

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Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) makes a living (more or less) doing voice work and teaching celebrities to perfect their accents. She’d like to break into her father’s business doing voice-over work for movie trailers, but the industry doesn’t want a female voice. But a huge gap has been left by the death of Don LaFontaine (the real-life king of voice-overs) so she finds herself competing against her childish and jealous father, an industry giant, who champions his smug protegé, up-and-comer Gustav, to revive the “In a world…” work.

This film does a lot of things well, but I really enjoyed watching a woman try to break into a male-dominated industry, and witnessing the different things that need to fall into place in order for it to happen. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of back-stabbing and sabotage that goes on as well, some of it by Carol’s own father, a man who believes that there is no place for women in his workplace (and that things were better off when there weren’t women in any workplace, period).

But this is not some heavy drama about sexism. I mean, first of all, there’s Eva Longoria, as herself, learning how not to sound like “a retarded pirate” (this is her attempt at a Cockney accent). Longoria seems pleasantly game and wins some major not-taking-herself-too-seriously points. Then there’s this: (are you sitting down? you may want to sit down.) DEMITRI MARTIN and NICK OFFERMAN in the same movie. In the same scene! In the same several scenes! I nearly fainted from the awesomeness. They play the good dudes who actually believe in Carol and want to help her succeed.

This movie is Lake Bell’s baby – she wrote it and directed it. She casts this movie like it is her baby, like she knows she has to get everything perfect, and does. She surrounds herself with talent and milks it for every ounce, but she’s no slouch: listen carefully and you’ll hear her own voice-over work sprinkled throughout the film. Girl’s got chops. The script is a lot of fun, there’s a lot of great lines, and great opportunities to showcase herself from every angle.

Watch out for Lake Bell – she’s been popping up in random places over the past few years, but with this effort, she’s truly made herself known.

Mysterious Skin

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In the early 1980s, two 8 year-old boys are molested by their baseball coach. They react to the trauma in very different ways. Neil, who had been abused by his coach repeatedly, grows up identifying with his abuser, carrying around some secret pride that he was coach’s favorite. At the age of 15 (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), he starts working as a prostitute. Brian, on the other hand, a quieter and shyer kid than Neil, grows up having no memory of his abuse and, as a teenager (played by Brady Corbet), has spent years fascinated by stories of alien abductions, convinced that he himself had been abducted. Searching for answers, he tries to track down Neil hoping he can explain the gaps in his memory.

Mysterious Skin is not for everyone. Many will be turned off just by the quick synopsis that I offered in the first paragraph. It deals unflinchingly with subject matter (child abuse, prostitution, and rape) that most of us don’t want to think about in such graphic detail.

Many of us can forgive a mediocre action movie or convenient twists and lazy writing as long as they keep us entertained. For most people, though, if we’re going to sit through a movie with subject matter like this, it had better be GREAT. Which this isn’t. Not everything works, Corbet’s performance as Brian rings true but a subplot involving an alliance with 24‘s Chloe, who plays a reclusive 32 year-old with an alien abduction of her own, is particularly unconvincing.

But director Gregg Araki gets most of the details right. This film is refreshingly, even brutally, honest about the traumatic impact of childhood sexual abuse. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s half of the film is particularly convincing. JGL has made a career of playing tortured young men and he’s at his best here. Neil is charming but unreliable, constantly letting down and pushing away the people that care about him. He seems to have a bit of a death engaging in increasingly risky and unsafe sex. We see a gentler, more compassionate side to him though when he finally reconnects with Brian, leaving us with a glimmer of hope that maybe there’s hope for these two characters after all, quite a feat for a film that is a mostly bleak and punishing experience.

Force Majeure

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A Swedish family vacationing at a ski resort in the French Alps are enjoying a nice lunch at a restaurant admiring the beautiful view of the slopes and eating food off each other’s plates. Tomas is a workaholic and spending a little too much time on his phone but overall not a bad family trip so far. Suddenly, a “controlled” avalanche begins to get a little too close for comfort. At first, Tomas reassures his nervous wife Ebba and his panicking son that everything is under control. Then, the avalanche is WAY too close for comfort and Ebba instinctively runs to protect her son and daughter while Tomas instinctively grabs his phone and his gloves, pushes a stranger out of the way and gets the hell out of there. Within seconds, it becomes clear that no one was in any real danger and with some nervous laughter, everyone is enjoying their meals again, with Tomas sheepishly returning to the table as if nothing had happened.

What happens from there is best seen for yourself than read about in some review so I will not give anything away except to say that you should not miss Force Majeure, a strong candidate for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. What happens at the restaurant shakes this family to the core and no one knows what to say or what to feel. Some of the best scenes involve other couples listening to Tomas and Ebba’s very different versions of what happened. Their story seems to wreak havoc on anyone who hears it, leaving them wondering what they (or their partner) would do in the same situation.

This is a thought-provoking film that is a must-see even if just for the fun of arguing about it later. I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of every character, wondering what I would do in their ski boots (definitely not run).

See Jay’s review of Force Majeure here, and Sean’s over here, and then tell us who’s right!