Movie Review: 50/50

50/50 (2011) 

Directed by Jonathan Levine 

Written by Will Reiser 

Starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anjelica Huston, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anna Kendrick

Release Date September 30th, 2011 

Published September 30th, 2011

Cancer is a topic of grave seriousness. To even attempt to place the word cancer near the word comedy could be seen as folly. Yet, we have 50/50 a very funny comedy about a young man who faces death from cancer. The tightrope that 50/50 walks in creating its comedy, a broad swath of Knocked Up style irreverence, Seth Rogan is a co-star in 50/50, and the kind of gallows humor that permeates many war movies.

If you were a casino game, you'd have the best odds

Adam (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is 27 years old, he has a pretty artist girlfriend named Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), a great job working at NPR in Seattle, and he has this pain in his back that just won't go away.

That pain turns out to be a malignant tumor attaching to his spine. Adam has cancer and faces the 50/50 odds of survival with a serious course of chemotherapy. First however, he has to survive telling his family and friends.

Rachael seems to take the news as well as could be expected. The relationship is relatively young for such a heavy burden to be placed on it but she takes it on, first buying him a dog and then being there when Adam tells his mother (Angelica Huston).

I'm moving in!

Adam next tells his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogan). Kyle's emotional reaction is indicative of most reactions to Adam's news. Kyle doesn't process the info well and Adam ends up having to console him.

The same can be said of Kyle's mother who is already caring for Adam's Alzheimer's afflicted father (Serge Houde). Mom wants to move into Kyle's house to care for him but Adam tells her that Rachael is taking care of him.

We know, and he will soon know, that this will not be the case. Rachael isn't a very good person but in fairness, who could be prepared for such a shocking turn of events. The fact that the relationship was sputtering before the cancer diagnosis should also be noted.

Humor from the gallows

Though Kyle proves to be a stalwart friend he to struggles with how to help Adam. Being a typically Rogen character, one lacking in maturity or a filter for his thoughts, Kyle's notions of helping amount to helping get Adam laid and getting high with him.

The only people who react appropriately to Adam's diagnosis and offer honest comfort are two men Adam meets in chemotherapy. Played by Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer, their journeys could likely make wonderful movies of their own.

Somewhere in the middle of the appropriate and the misguided is Adam's therapist, Katherine, played by the terrific Anna Kendrick. We get right away that these two have chemistry beyond the patient-therapist relationship; Levitt and Kendrick however, surprise us by underplaying the attraction to great effect.

A very funny movie about a guy who has cancer

Trying to recommend 50/50 is more challenging that it should be. 50/50 is very funny and humane and is populated by terrific performances, especially from Levitt and Rogan. It's just difficult to get past the idea of a 'Cancer Comedy.'

If you can get past preconceived notions about cancer and comedy being mutually exclusive and give yourself over to this being Adam's specific experience of cancer you will be rewarded with a great movie going experience.

Movie Review: Choke

Choke (2008) 

Directed by Clark Gregg

Written by Clark Gregg

Starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly McDonald, Jonah Bobo 

Release Date September 26th, 2008

Published November 24th, 2008

The thing about Choke is if you aren't a fan of Chuck Palahniuk's disturbing prose I cannot think of one reason why you should see this movie. Choke stars Sam Rockwell as a sex addict who doesn't learn anything, doesn't really grow and really doesn't do much of anything but revel in his own crapulence. If you find that idea appealing, maybe you might like this movie.

Or you should just read Palahniuk's book.

Sam Rockwell stars as Victor Mancini. A tour guide at some nameless olden days village, Victor only maintains so he can hang out with his pal Denny (Brad Henke) and pick up the occasional quickie with a tour goer, chaperone or fellow employee. His real job, the one that pays to keep his mother in a nursing home, is getting people to save his life in restaurants.

Victor intentionally chokes on food and enjoins the person performing the heimlich maneuver on him to take care of him. Generally, when people save someone's life they feel good about and are open to further helping the victim. Victor takes full advantage of their charity. In his spare time Victor attends a support group for sex addicts. He's not there for counseling but rather to meet easy women.

Why is Victor who he is? It's his mother. Ida Mancini is a manic depressive. Her wild mood swings found young Victor constantly on the run, often from the authorities. Victor went to a number of foster homes but was always 'rescued' by Ida when she extricated herself from whatever trouble she found for herself. Now Ida is suffering from dementia and Victor spends hours pretending to be whoever she thinks he is that day.

Choke is a character study. We are to examine and I suppose learn something from Victor. Myself? I was left to observe how unappealing Victor is. Sam Rockwell is a good actor and in the right role he is exceptional. Here he seems to get Victor on a human level but he doesn't seem to bring anymore to him than what was on the page.

The role of Victor requires an actor who plays things with his face and body and voice. Rockwell puts on the airs of Victor but doesn't go much deeper. Director Clark Gregg tries to flesh things out with flashbacks to Victor's childhood but the whole Oedipal story is a non-starter.

I just can't figure out what I am supposed to have enjoyed about Choke. It's the unpleasant story of a man addicted to sex who doesn't have sex for love or to connect with another person but only for the temporary escape from his misery. I don't doubt there are people like Victor in the world but I don't want to watch a movie about them either.

There simply isn't anything to recommend about Choke. Victor begins a miserable slob and ends as a miserable slob. He doesn't really learn anything and though the ending teases a lesson learned it's confusing as to what the lesson is or whether we are seeing what are really seeing. Even if the ending meant to tease a change in his life Victor never earned the change. He didn't change his life he merely demonstrates again and again his misery.

How can anyone recommend you watch that?

Movie Review Material Girls

Material Girls (2006) 

Directed by Martha Coolidge 

Written by Jessica O'Toole, Amy Rardin 

Starring Hilary Duff, Haylie Duff, Anjelica Huston, Lukas Haas, Brent Spiner, Maria Conchita Alonso 

Release Date August 18th, 2006 

Published August 20th, 2006 

Trashing a movie like Material Girls is like shooting fish in a barrel. You could rip this movie just from having seen the press materials. So how does a critic approach a movie like this? My tactic is to try and be understanding of the niche audience the film is meant to entertain. In the case of Material Girls, the audience is 12 year old girls. So, what do 12 year old girls have in store for them in Material Girls? Nothing they haven't seen before. Vapid, shallow starlets in haute couture learning shallow lessons about love and family and how to be yourself.

Is the movie funny? Not to me. But, will the target audience laugh?

The Marchetta sisters Ava (Haylie Duff) the oldest, and younger sister Tanzy (Hilary Duff) are privileged Hollywood socialites living in the lap of luxury thanks to the fortune provided by their late father's cosmetics company. They are the face of the company, modeling the products on billboards across the globe affording them a lavish lifestyle of parties and rich friends.

Secretly however Tanzy harbors the ambition to go college and become a chemist while Ava looks to become the wife of a famous TV star. Things go bad for the Marchetta's when a shady reporter breaks a story that Marchetta cosmetics are causing consumers to get nasty rashes. This just as a ruthless rival, Fabiella (Angelica Huston), makes an offer to buy the company, something the girls top advisor and their father's former best friend Tommy (Brent Spiner) suggests they do.

The girls are more stubborn than expected, they plan to fight for their father's company. Unfortunately the scandal bankrupts them, a fire takes their fabulous mansion and Ava's TV star fiance dumps her. This jovian series of events leaves the girls living in the ghetto with their loving maid Inez (Maria Conchita Alonzo) and seeking the help of the common people they had so long looked down their noses at.

The characters may evoke comparisons to the famous Hilton sisters or even Mary Kate and Ashley Olson, but Material Girls is no satirical gloss on excess in celeb-land. Rather, this is yet another simpleminded exercise in teen girl empowerment. The message of Material Girls is to be false and bad things will happen, be true to yourself and good things will happen. There are post cards with as much wisdom that cost a lot less than the price of a ticket to see this film.

A pair of pencil thin Hollywood sisters telling America's teens that being yourself is the true path to happiness has a falseness to it that is far too obvious to bother pointing out. But trashing a movie like Material Girls for being shallow is like criticizing the clouds for the rain. This movie was shallow from the moment it was conceived to the day director Martha Coolidge completed principle photography.

For her part Martha Coolidge does little to distinguish herself as a director. Material Girls is not a movie that will stand out on a resume, even one whose biggest highlight is the TV movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a slight but compelling memoir. It's not that Coolidge is unskilled but her talents are put to task in Material Girls creating something so superficial and so mindless that whatever skills she has feel like wasted effort.

The Duff sisters are a pair of attractive young women who at the very least can rely on their looks to draw a crowd. It's a shame that the only pleasure derived from Material Girls comes from objectifying the two lovely young stars but you have to take what you can get when it comes to something as insipid and banal as Material Girls.

Among other very minor pleasures to be found in Material Girls it's nice to see Lukas Haas get some mainstream Hollywood work. His role as a legal aid lawyer and love interest for Haylie Duff is nothing to get excited about but I have always liked Haas, all the way back to his breakout performance as the mute child of Witness.

Shallow, mindless, a waste of film. All valid criticisms of Material Girls. All judgements I could have made without having seen the film. I did see the film. The key assessment is that this movie was not made with 30 year old film critics in mind. This is a movie made for the attention spans of the modern 12 year old girl. Whether or not they like the film I have no idea. I know that if I had a 12 year old daughter I would not want to expose her to such a vapid waste of 90 minutes.

Movie Review Buffalo 66

Buffalo 66 

Directed by Vincent Gallo 

Written by Vincent Gallo, Allison Bagnall 

Starring Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke, Anjelica Huston 

Release Date June 26th, 1998 

Published August 11th, 2003 

Actor Vincent Gallo courted controversy at the 2003 Cannes Film festival with his latest film, The Brown Bunny. It was called the worst film in the festival’s history and was roundly trashed by Roger Ebert amongst others. Gallo didn't take the rebukes lightly, lashing out at journalists at the film’s press conference and later chastising Ebert and calling him a fat pig. This is not the intelligent discourse one attributes to a great artist. Despite Gallo's horrible attitude and childish behavior at Cannes, he is undeniably an artist, as he showed with his most famous directorial outing, 1997's fresh oddball love story Buffalo 66.

The Buffalo of the title is Buffalo New York where our pseudo hero Billy Brown (Gallo) was born and raised until he went to prison. As we meet him Billy is leaving prison and headed home to Buffalo. Poor Billy desperately needs to use the restroom after his long bus ride, but finds every bathroom either out of service or locked until finally he wanders into a dance studio. Even then, an odd encounter with a male student causes Billy the inability to go. Instead, he uses a payphone to call his mother to tell her he's coming home.

Billy never told his parents he went to jail, his Byzantine excuse for his disappearance includes working for the government and a fictional wife. Desperate to appease his mother Billy decides to kidnap Layla (Christina Ricci), a dance student who just happened to overhear Billy's conversation with his mother. The abduction isn't very violent or frightening for Layla who seems to take this odd occurrence and even Billy's raging hostility in stride.

Once arriving at Billy's home, Layla is told that her new name is Wendy and that her only job is to make him look good to his parents, a task she takes to with relish.

Billy's parents Jan (Angelica Huston) and Jimmy (Ben Gazzara) are quite the odd couple. Mom is an obsessive Bills football fan whose photo albums contain only photos of Bills players and the one picture of her son is difficult to find. Billy's Dad is a former lounge singer who even serenades Layla in a strange almost dreamlike sequence. Angelica Huston has the film’s most telling and dramatic moment when she off handedly explains the film’s title.

Layla/Wendy does everything she can to make Billy look good to Mom and Dad, telling them about Billy's job with the CIA and his covert activities in the spy world. It isn't until she tells them that she’s pregnant that she gets their attention away from the Bills game.

While at the parent’s house, Billy calls his best friend Goon (Kevin Corrigan) and we learn the details of how Billy went to jail and his plans now that he is out. Billy it seems lost a great deal of money on the Bills Super Bowl loss to the Giants. He paid his debt to his bookie (played in a small cameo by Mickey Rourke) by confessing to a crime committed by one of the bookie's associates. Now that he's out Billy is going to get revenge, not on the bookie but on the Bills kicker who missed the game winning field goal.

That may seem like an actual plot but Buffalo 66 never settles into a conventional narrative. Instead, Gallo, who also wrote and directed the film, prefers to simply observe his characters and their reactions to the strange circumstances surrounding them. He employs a unique visual style, very gritty at times then straying into dream sequences that include musical interludes and a tap dance by Ricci. These flights of visual and narrative fancy are a welcome change from the downer story. Not that it's a bad story, it's very unique.

It is Ricci who carries much of the film with her sympathetic eyes and endearing sweetness, not to mention a weird quality that makes her character’s willingness to stick with Billy and even fall in love with seem perfectly natural. Characters thrust into the situation her character is in are supposed to be frightened and attempting to escape and other very correct and conventional reactions. Then again, there is nothing conventional about Buffalo 66

Movie Review: The Royal Tenenbaums

Rushmore (2001) 

Directed by Wes Anderson

Written by Wes Anderson

Starring Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, Owen Wilson

Release Date December 14th, 2001 

Published December 24th, 2001 

In Rushmore, Wes Anderson took two very unique characters and used them to establish an unusual comic tone of irony and pathos that, for all it's quirks, seemed grounded in a weird sort of realty. In The Royal Tenenbaums, he applies that same unusual tone to an awesome ensemble cast to an even greater effect.

The Royal Tenenbaums is the story of a family of geniuses and the father who was the catalyst for their self destruction. Gene Hackman plays the father, the aptly named Royal Tenenbaum, a disgraced and disbarred lawyer whose luck and money have run out, and who now seeks to reconcile with the family he destroyed years earlier; not out of any emotional need for forgiveness, but rather because he just needs a place to crash.

Angelica Huston is Royal's soon-to-be-ex-wife, Etheline, a genius in her own right who is about to marry a man named Henry, played by Danny Glover. Luke Wilson is Richie Tenenbaum, a tennis prodigy washed up after a breakdown in the middle of a major match. Gwyneth Paltrow is Margot Tenenbaum (whom Royal makes a point of noting is adopted,) a genius playwright who wrote her first play at age 11 and has written nothing since. Ben Stiller is Chas, a widower who was a financial whiz at age 9, whose resentment of Royal is just one of the family's many dysfunctional aspects.

Bill Murray and Owen Wilson round out the cast in truly funny supporting roles. The whole cast is sensational, and though Stiller seems a little off key at times, everyone maintains this wondrous magical tone that makes the movie hum; never too loud, never too soft. Combine that brilliant tone with Mark Mothersbaugh's inspired score and the soundtrack of 60's tunes like the Beatles' "Hey Jude," and you have what amounts to a comedic symphony. The New York setting is as strange and wonderful as the rest of the film and when combined with the soundtrack give the film a feeling of timelessness. 

I don't know if there is a director I have higher hopes for than I do for Wes Anderson. I cannot wait to see what he does next. 

Movie Review: Daddy Day Care

Daddy Day Care (2003)

Directed by Steve Carr 

Written by Geoff Rodkey 

Starring Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Steve Zahn, Regina King, Anjelica Huston 

Release Date May 9th, 2003 

Published May 10th, 2003 

How many times can one actor be written off? If you’re Eddie Murphy, apparently as many times as you can make a movie. Every time Eddie comes out with a film it's greeted by cynics in my profession as his last chance to be a big star. And each time, Eddie comes back. Eddie has found the back door to maintaining a waning career. He has sold his cool action-comedy persona and adopted a kid-friendly persona that has proven to a career salvation. His latest by-the-numbers kid friendly flick is Daddy Day Care, a rote family comedy, factory produced by the Hollywood machine.

In Daddy Day Care, Murphy is Charlie, an ad executive who loses his job after a product he was working on tanks badly with test audiences (how amazingly ironic). Left at home waiting for responses to his resume, Charlie gets to spend some much needed private time with his son Ben (Khamani Griffin). One day Charlie takes Ben to the park and has a conversation with a mom desperate for a new day care center. With this inspiration and the help of a friend who also lost his job, Phil (Jeff Garlin, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), Charlie opens a day care center in his home.

Regina King plays Charlie's wife though it's difficult to tell as she disappears as quickly as she's introduced. Steve Zahn rounds out the cast as a doofy assistant with a fetish for Star Trek and a knack for dealing with kids. Speaking of the kids, none of the little actors makes much of an impression beyond being cute.

The setup is so simple it must have taken all of an hour to think of and write down. Well known personality is paired with a group of cute kids. We haven't seen this teaming but, oh, a dozen or so times, and Daddy Day Care doesn't have much of anything new to add to this familiar story. Even the great Anjelica Huston can't do anything to make this film interesting with her role as the film’s villainous pre-school owner Ms. Harridan. Get it, harridan, oh so clever.

Daddy Day Care isn't offensive, it's not poorly made and to it's credit it doesn't overdo the bathroom humor that has become a staple of similar films. Director Steve Carr, who previously directed Murphy in Dr. Dolittle, shows once again that he is a technically proficient director in that he knows where to point the camera and shoot. That said he brings little else to this uninteresting and overly familiar movie.

Movie Review: Blood Work

Blood Work (2002) 

Directed by Clint Eastwood 

Written by Brian Helgeland

Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Jeff Daniels, Dylan Walsh, Anjelica Huston 

Release Date August 9th, 2002 

Published August 8th, 2002

As one of our greatest living actors, Clint Eastwood can be forgiven for many things. We can concede him the indulgence of playing a codger in a space comedy like Space Cowboys. We can forgive him, and even take a little pleasure watching him, in the trashy thriller Absolute Power. However, our good faith can only go so far, and when Eastwood releases a retread cop thriller like Blood Work, even Dirty Harry can't be forgiven this indulgence.

Blood Work stars Eastwood as a famous FBI criminal profiler--a job that is not nearly as glamorous or exciting as Hollywood would have you believe--Terry McCaleb. As we join the story, McCaleb joins a pair of cops, played by Paul Rodriguez and Dylan Walsh, as they walk through a crime that has a message specifically for McCaleb. Scrawled in blood on the wall is a code and the message "Catch me McCaleb." As McCaleb is exiting the crime scene, through a throng of reporters, a piece of evidence tips him off to a man in the crowd who may be the killer. McCaleb chases the suspect until he is felled by a heart attack, but not before popping a bullet in the suspect.

Two years later, McCaleb is the beneficiary of a heart transplant. The operation saved his life but ended his career. Now living on a boat in a marina, he passes the time fixing the boat and talking to his neighbor Buddy (Jeff Daniels). Out of the blue, a beautiful woman named Graciella (Wanda De Jesus) shows up on McCaleb's boat claiming to be the sister of the woman whose heart was given to McCaleb. She tells McCaleb that her sister was murdered and implores McCaleb to use his cop connections to find out what is happening with the investigation into her sister's murder.

From there you know what is going to happen. McCaleb is drawn into investigating the crime, which will inevitably connect to other crimes; innocent people will look suspicious; and the one least likely will turn out to be the killer. If you can't figure out this movie's secrets in the first 20 minutes, turn in your moviegoer's card and never come back to the theaters. 

If you don't feel like seeing Blood Work, rent The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington; the same lame thriller minutia populates both films. Blood Work is slightly more believable, but both are police procedurals. Normally, these films appear as straight-to-video trash starring people like Jeff Fahey and Patrick Bergin.

The most disappointing thing about Blood Work is that Eastwood also directed it. How can such a skilled director as Eastwood not see the obvious cliches in the script from Joel Schumacher wannabe Brian Helgeland? 

Eastwood knows the proper camera moves and his direction is studied and logical but the story Blood Work is too predictable to be either suspenseful or entertaining. After seeing this film, one is left to wonder if Eastwood's best work is behind him, a sad thought but one you can't help entertaining. I hope that is not true. Only time will tell.