Million Dollar Arm

Snapshot of the target audience for

"Million Dollar Arm"

Grade: B –

Director: Craig Gillespie

Starring: Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Jon Hamm, Pitobash, Lake Bell, Aasif Mandvi, Alan Arkin and Bill Paxton

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 4 min.

For a moment, imagine the families of Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, real-life young men plucked from obscurity in their native India to travel to America and try to become Major League Baseball pitchers, settling in to watch Million Dollar Arm, the Disney-produced film about the boys’ improbable stories. Then imagine their reactions they instead see a film about the love life and obstacles facing their white benefactor, sports agent J.P. Bernstein (Jon Hamm).

The irony is that a film about the globalization of sport is skewed so obviously toward a particular ethnic audience. It’s patronizing, and it’s Hollywood. But, despite these deep, endemic faults, it’s also a formula picture that manages to contort itself at times into a charming, even earnest tale.

Low on clients and high on expenses with his business partner (played by Aasif Mandvi, because it's a movie with Indian characters), Bernstein toggles his large-screen TV channels one night between an Indian cricket match and Sarah Boyle’s performance on “Britain’s Got Talent” [despite the fact that Boyle’s 2009 TV appearance postdates the real-life events depicted in this film by two years].  This eureka moment becomes the titular reality show contest, where Bernstein and his company would trawl the streets of Mumbai in hopes of signing MLB’s first Indian player.

After a long, frustrating search, the contest is won by Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Dinesh (Madhur Mittal), poor villagers who fly to America and proceed to express wonderment over everything from pizza to elevators (because, you see, they must not have elevators in India). As Rinku and Dinesh attempt to cope with homesickness and their new training regime with Southern Cal coach Tom House (Bill Paxton), Bernstein neglects his new de facto wards while he tries to regain his jetsetting sports agent lifestyle.

Bernstein soon figures out what’s Really Important In Life™ with the help of Brenda (Lake Bell), his non-model renter who Bernstein discovers is actually pretty groovy and cute. Meanwhile, Rinku, Dinesh and Amit (Pitobash), Bernstein’s imported Indian interpreter/manservant, are reduced to fish-out-of-water archetypes. Still, director Craig Gillespie and usually reliable writer Tom McCarthy manage to inject some humanity amid the studio-imposed narrative strictures. They don’t shy away from casting Bernstein as a self-centered jerk, perhaps as penance for Hamm’s extreme screentime. And, the final figures of courage and uplift are Rinku and Dinesh … with a lot of help from J.B. and friends.

But, what Million Dollar Arm ultimately—and somewhat inadvertently—speaks to is the demystification of modern sports. Bernstein is a cynical, struggling money-peddler is a world of entitled athletes, greedy executives and commercially compromised media. In India, Bernstein supposedly gets his groove back. Nevermind the glitzy commercial, neocolonial endeavor he employs for this purpose, where participants are lured by the promise of a million dollars in cold cash. And nevermind that Bernstein’s financial motivation is not just personal, but also the chance to mine over a billion untapped consumers. Million Dollar Arm casts an eye abroad to rediscover the purity of sport. In actuality, it discovers that greed knows no boundaries.

Argo

I hear we're looking into some sort about a meth lab...

Grade: A –

Director: Ben Affleck

Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr.

Of all the indelible images in Argo—blindfolded American hostages; burning U.S. flags—perhaps the most jarring is a shot of a ramshackle Hollywood sign circa the 1970s, three of its whitewashed lettering gone and the rest well into decay. The thing is the landmark was actually restored to its once and present form in 1978, a full year before Islamist militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and triggered the Iran hostage crisis, the setting for the film. The question of why director Ben Affleck would include such a patently anachronistic visual goes to the heart of why he made Argo.

While Iranian students and other extremists took 52 Americans hostage, six others managed to slip away while the embassy was being raided and took sanctuary in the home of the Canadian ambassador, unbeknownst to anyone except the upper reaches of the U.S. and Canadian governments and their intelligence services. With the clock ticking until the group’s inevitable discovery, CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Affleck) concocts a cover story to ferry the stranded diplomats out. Drawing from the popularity of sci-fi cinema in the wake of Star Wars, Mendez develops an elaborate back-story involving a fake film project titled “Argo,” a ostensible science fiction flick with a Middle-Eastern flavor looking to film at locations inside Iran. Working with a venerable Hollywood director (Alan Arkin, terrific) and make-up artist (John Goodman) to lend credence to the Wag the Dog ruse, Mendez flies to Tehran armed with fake Canadian passports and dossiers assigning each of the six diplomats their role in a Canadian film crew that Mendez hopes he will fly to freedom.

For his third directorial effort, Affleck graduates from well-crafted genre pictures (The Town; Gone Baby Gone) to more formidable filmmaking. Argo is narratively taut and efficient in its composition. A prologue ably summarizes America’s contribution to the Islamic uprising and its anger towards the U.S., seguing into a white-knuckle rendering of the storming of the embassy. The rest of the film conveys both the inanity and bravery on display in freeing the band of terrified, stranded diplomats.

Affleck manages the difficult task of maintaining tension throughout a story with a known outcome. Like the rescued Americans, the audience doesn’t feel relief until their plane clears hostile airspace. Still, Affleck doesn’t overly wallow in any single crisis, and there’s no bureaucratic snafu that can’t be resolved with a couple of phone calls and some vociferous theatrics.

The director’s primary interest lies more in the context of these events, not their mere recounting. You don’t have to buy into Reagan’s vision of “Morning in America” rising just over the horizon to acknowledge that Argo takes place at a crossroads for both America as a whole and the movie industry, a junction point between a period of decline and the revitalization poised to follow. The hostage crisis capped a tumultuous time for the U.S., over a decade of political assassinations, social unrest, war in Vietnam, Watergate and economic calamity. Likewise, that derelict Hollywood sign embodies the ebb of the once renowned studio system. Repeated references to Star Wars as the harbinger for a new crop of sci-fi scripts—and a reference point making a B-movie project like Mendez’s Argo more believable—is quite deliberate. Principal shooting of George Lucas’ modern blockbuster took place in Tunisia and England, not the Hollywood back lots. Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic after discovering that 20^th Century Fox’s visual effects department had been disbanded.

Only truth could justify a script in which an audience is asked to believe that in the midst of a radical religious revolution in which individual liberties are being suppressed, dissidents are being hanged in the street and Americans are being kidnapped en masse could a group of white filmmakers (Canadian or otherwise) be allowed passage and access to scout the Grand Bazaar in Tehran as a possible shooting locale. For Affleck, Argo isn’t just an ode to American heroism. It’s a salute to its most durable, exportable commodity: movies.

The Change-Up

Call Child Protective Services ASAP!

Grade: F

Director: David Dobkin

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Justin Bateman, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, and Alan Arkin

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

During the opening minutes of The Change-Up, a baby projectile poops into his dad’s mouth. It’s the most telling scene in this revolting rehash, which apparently believes that a familiar formula becomes instantly edgy simply by smearing it with figurative (and sometimes literal) excrement.

The “body switcheroo” movie has been done (1940’s Turnabout) and done (Like Father, Like Son) and done (18 Again!) and done (Vice Versa) and done (Freaky Friday). The only discernable changes brought by The Change-Up are that the swap occurs between best bro buddies and the comedy is the hard-R variety.

Dave (Justin Bateman) is a ladder-climbing lawyer, husband and father of three who is weary of his pressure-cooker job and domesticated life. His friend, a profane, pothead lout named Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), is also a struggling actor living in a filthy bachelor pad who quit school plus pretty much everything he ever tried.

During a drunken night out, Dave and Mitch proclaim in unison that they wish they had the other’s life whilst urinating into a magical public fountain…you know, that old yarn. Presto chango, the next morning they awaken to the discovery that they have switched bodies.

Bateman and Reynolds are reliable comedic actors who cleverly portray two distinct characters. However, their performances are as creative as this tired gimmick gets. The rest of the film is an endless array of scatology and profanity foisted without wit or purpose, including when Dave’s booty call turns out to be a gravid nympho (Mircea Monroe), a startling number of race/religion-based wisecracks, and director David Dobkin’s predilection for showing as many characters using the toilet as possible.

A late stab at sappy sentimentality feels phony because writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (The Hangover) spend most of the film hurling hostility towards the very values they eventually try to prop up. Dave and Mitch don’t want to live each other’s lives until they decide they do, which only lasts until they decide they don’t again. In the meantime, Mitch abandons his desire to shag his best friend’s wife (Leslie Mann, natch) after witnessing her bout with diarrhea, while Dave declines to hookup with his gorgeous, sports & tattoo-loving secretary Sabrina (Olivia Wilde) only after going on two all-night dates and getting her naked.

At one point, Dave (as Mitch) finds himself trapped on the set of a lorno (light porn), forced by its demanding director to simulate sex with a busty, aging actress and a middle-aged lecher. The shame and disgust Dave feels can’t be much different than the cast of The Change-Up, or its audience.

Neil Morris