A Simple Favor

Single Sprightly Female

Grade: B

Director: Paul Feig

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, and Henry Golding

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 57 min.

Though enveloped by echoes of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, A Simple Favor has a wicked wit that makes it more enjoyable, more accessible, and at times more subversive than its genre forerunners. Much of the credit goes to director Paul Feig, whose keen ear for women’s comedy runs throughout his oeuvre, from Bridesmaids to Spy to his all-female remake of Ghostbusters. Here, Feig’s shrewd casting choices deserves principal merit, as the pairing of Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively is the inspired fulcrum on the film. However, A Simple Favor isn’t another bawdy laugher. It’s a psychological thriller that embraces its dark, albeit byzantine plotting, infusing it with a farcical flair.

Kendrick plays Stephanie Smothers, a single mommy vlogger whose perky persona masks a truly tragic and disturbing background. Stephanie has her moppet but no one else, so she’s giddy when a put-together blond mom, Emily Nelson (Lively), pays Stephanie some attention, asks Stephanie the simple favor of watching her kid, and invites Stephanie over for martinis. The Stephanie-Emily byplay is immediately engrossing, between Stephanie the mousy housemom with Kendrick’s quirky wit, and Emily the brash beauty with Lively’s California confidence. Even the eight-inch height difference between the actresses informs the power dynamics of their relationship. Indeed, for a while Stephanie’s infatuation with Emily’s attitude, lifestyle, and successful literary husband, Sean (Henry Golding of Crazy Rich Asians), flirts with a Single White Female-style obsession.

Suddenly, Emily vanishes without explanation, leaving Stephanie as an eventual target for both Sean’s affections and police suspicions. As the story unspools, A Simple Favor opens up new new fronts in its plot that culminate with an overly muddled final third that rushes through a cascade of patricide, fratricide, twin envy, and deceptions that become too complicated to follow—I’m still not completely sure about Sean’s allegiances at each point of the story. The film is overlong, and if it was a half hour shorter, the finished product would have been a sleek, sardonic genre entry. Despite its flaw, A Simple Favor is entertaining and the among best recent work by Kendrick and Lively. It’s a trashy potboiler, but it winks at the audience enough to let us know that it’s in on the joke.

Into the Woods

It's OK, dear ... I'm still getting an

Oscar nomination out of this.

Into the Woods

Grade: D

Director: Rob Marshall

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Chris Pine, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Mackenzie Mauzy,  Billy Magnussen, Lilla Crawford and Daniel Huttlestone

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hr. 4 min.

It’s not homage to the foreboding Grimms’ Fairy Tales creeping into Into the Woods that makes this musical mash-up an excruciating experience. While Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella are regarded as classic children’s literature, it’s forgotten that the subject matter of these and other Brothers Grimm stories are quite dark and violent—in the original Snow White, the Queen, Snow White’s actual mother, wants her daughter killed so she can eat her liver and lungs.

Instead, it’s a schlocky plot that’s further jumbled by unsavory plot turns to both preserve and limit the onscreen body count. It’s the unremarkable Stephen Sondheim soundtrack that provides just one memorable song, “Agony,” a duet between preening princes. But mostly it’s just a rapey, murdery mess that’s neither pleasant nor poignant.

Director Rob Marshall (having long since blown his Chicago credit) ties together the stories of Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk with Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. The narrative lynchpin is a Baker (James Corden, heir to “The Late Late Show” after Craig Ferguson departs) and his wife (Emily Blunt), who are cursed with infertility by the village Witch (Meryl Streep) unless they can deliver a quartet of objects to the Witch in three days’ time to break her spell. The four items are the slipper of Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), the cowl of Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), the flaxen locks of Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) and a white cow belonging to Jack (Daniel Huttlestone, last seen playing the French boy who croons with a cockney accent in Les Misérables).

The fable meanders through its mundane paces, including a detour down the gullet of the Big Bad Wolf (Johnny Depp). Its off-beat interpretations of the classic fairy tales are convivial enough. But once Jack, having pilfered one too many items from the Giant, chops down the beanstalk and kills the colossus, it causes the Giant’s wife climbing down to exact vengeance on Jack and the kingdom.

It’s here where Into the Woods transforms from tedious to terrible. One character dies at the hands of another character for no discernable reason. Then there’s an out-of-left-field act of infidelity that triggers the equally sudden, misogynistic demise of only the female wrongdoer. Adding to the confusion and literary cowardice, all these deaths occur off-screen, while one character who dies in the stage musical is spared, since I guess two deaths are plenty.

However, the film’s true crime is its hamfisted attempt to blend the fantastic with real-life lessons about pain and responsibilities. The clash of tones ill-fitting narratives is jarring, and the already off-putting plot is made more confusing by some selective sanitizing. If you venture Into the Woods, you’re liable to become a supporter of deforestation.

Pitch Perfect

Glee: The College Years

Grade: C +

Director: Jason Moore

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Skylar Astin, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Rebel Wilson and Alexis Knapp

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

Here’s the sum total of what I learned watching Pitch Perfect: a) Anna Kendrick has a shoulder tattoo; and b) some member of the Screen Writers Guild thinks doing snow angels in a pool of puke is just hilarious. Oh, and that sometime in the evolutionary history of music, a cappella singing began including musical accompaniment.

Pitch Perfect is like Glee (except it’s not) crossed with West Side Story (except it’s really not) transported into the competitive world of collegiate a cappella (except it isn’t). It projects a sort of pseudo-hip movie world in which people named Beca, Chloe and Lilly congregate, and groups of (mostly white) school kids can instantly lyricize and harmonize any pop/hip-hop ditty—even ones they express no sign of ever having heard—via means of arty osmosis.

As a freshman at Barden University, the perception of Beca (Kendrick) as a dour “alt-girl” lasts just long enough for director Jason Moore to label her such. Motivated by her dad’s vague promise to move her to California and explore a musical career if she’ll only give college one year’s chance, Beca doffs her multi-piercings and dons the blue blazer of the Barden Bellas. The Bellas are a troupe of Stepford singers looking to salvage their campus rep after their uptight lead, Aubrey (Anna Camp), upchucked during a tournament performance of Ace of Base’s The Sign (hey, who hasn’t been there?). Consequently, the only crooners the Bellas attract this season are a group of misfits that include a black lesbian, a low-talking, pyromaniacal Asian, a sex-obsessed soprano, and an overweight Australian (Rebel Wilson) who actually calls herself Fat Amy.

The story follows the path to the college a cappella championship at Lincoln Center. Along the way, half-written subplots involve Beca’s affinity for creating mix beats and musical mash-ups on her laptop, the Bellas’ beef with a nerd-filled rival named The Treblemakers, and Beca’s slow-building flirtation with Jesse (Skylar Astin), a Treblemaker member. If you get past the faux-hipness of “impromptu” renditions of Blackstreet’s No Diggity and Rihanna’s S&M, there’s an infectious energy in the musical compilations and Broadway-style choreography.

Kendrick can do little wrong in my admittedly subjective eyes, and here she both carries a tune and adds some essential wry levity. The presence Wilson, a bit player in Bridesmaids, seems intended to convey that film’s mix of gal laughs and lewdness—still, she’s the actor with the sharpest comic timing.

While Pitch Perfect is hardly so, it’s mindless musical merriment. Just don’t see it on a full stomach.

50/50

 "As president of the Michael Stipe fan club, I promise...

I'm sorry, you were saying something about a break-up?"

Grade: B

Director: Jonathan Levine

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogan, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Anjelica Huston

Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 39 min.

After his critically ballyhooed turn in the 2007 dramatic thriller The Lookout, it seemed as if stardom was right around the corner for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, previously best known as a regular on TV’s Third Rock from the Sun. Unfortunately, aside from his lead in the criminally unheralded (500) Days of Summer, his most exciting performance since was an acrobatic song-and-dance rendition of “Make ‘Em Laugh” while hosting Saturday Night Live two years ago.

Gordon-Levitt’s greatest strength as an actor is also his largest impediment to celebrity. He prefers to inhabit a role rather than inflate it, plying an acting style that is unpretentious and nuanced. These attributes serve him well in 50/50, a dramatic-comedy about a 27-year-old’s grueling struggle with cancer.

The film’s title holds dual meaning. It represents the odds a cold, impersonal oncologist gives Adam Lerner (Gordon-Levitt), a Seattle NPR staffer and aspiring documentary filmmaker, to survive the malignant tumors found along his spine. Moreover, it’s the approximate division between drama and bawdy humor employed by screenwriter Will Reiser’s semiautobiographical script.

In the hands of less capable filmmakers and cast, this balancing act between somber sentimentality and Apatow-esque comedy could nosedive into something ill-advised and even offensive. The greatest testament to 50/50 is that director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) integrates its two halves in a way that elevates the whole.

The film is as much about the way Adam’s intimates react to his illness as the impact it has on him. The key players are Kyle (Seth Rogan, ably playing Seth Rogan), Adam’s oafish, heart-of-gold best friend; Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), Adam’s live-in girlfriend and as aspiring artist; Diane (Anjelica Huston), his overbearing mother; and Katherine (the equally undervalued Anna Kendrick), Adam’s perky, inexperienced therapist who eventually takes a shine to her new patient.

Reiser treads familiar territory, like the physical ravages of chemotherapy. But, he also shares stories only a survivor could tell, such as the complex dynamics of a support group of fellow suffers, new friends who might pass on as quickly as you get to know them.

The most glaring misdiagnosis 50/50 makes is its treatment of the women in Adam’s life. Most notable is Rachael, whose indefensible response to the sudden pressure of coping and caring for a terminally sick boyfriend is nevertheless grounded in genuine and complex emotions worth exploring in an intelligent fashion. Instead, she gets called the c-word and ridiculed as a personal and professional failure.

Diane’s histrionics barely subside long enough for a late, fleeting expression of motherly concern. And Reiser seems oblivious that Katherine, the story’s ostensible heroine, oversteps the ethnical line separating doctor and patient.

The tonal duality of 50/50 is more than a mere gimmick. It’s the language of ironic distance spoken by Gen-Y moviegoers who largely have not faced their mortality. When Adam, on the eve of a make-or-break surgical procedure, locks himself in Kyle’s car and finally unleashes some pent-up primal therapy, all the cackles that precede it – along with Gordon-Levitt’s talent – make the moment feel all the more real.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com – http://goo.gl/1z64n

Scott Pilgrims vs. the World

I think you're invading my space

Grade: C +

Director: Edgar Wright

Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Anna Kendrick, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Brandon Routh, and Jason Schwartzman

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

Filmmaker Edgar Wright excels at uproarious parodies that double as durable entries in the very genre he lampoons. Shaun of the Dead is a genuinely scary horror-movie spoof. Hot Fuzz parodies Hollywood buddy-cop films but has a whodunit subplot and enough car chases to keep things interesting. Even his faux-movie preview Don’t, which played between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse double-feature, is a 1970s’ Hammer House of Horror film trailer send-up that also boasts some truly disturbing imagery.

Wright’s film adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s popular graphic novel series, aims for more of the same. Like O’Malley’s source comics, the film revolves around the arrested development of the titular twenty-something slacker (played by Michael Cera, natch), who lives in Toronto with his sardonic gay roommate Wallace (Keiran Culkin) and wiles away his days jamming bass with his marginally talented garage band, Sex Bom-omb. He has also just embarked on his latest seemingly ill-fated relationship, this one with a 17-year-old Chinese-Canadian high-schooler, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong).

However, Scott becomes enchanted with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a delivery girl with a curt personality and ever-changing hair color. As Knives starts stalking, Scott discovers that in order to capture Ramona’s heart, he must battle and vanquish – in ascending order of difficulty – her seven evil exes, including a skateboarder movie star (Chris Evans), identical twin DJs, and an all-powerful record producer named Gideon Gordon Graves (Jason Schwartzman).

The most memorable exe – and the film’s highpoint – is Todd Ingram (Brandon Routh), a vegan, rival bassist defeated after he advertently ingests some half-and-half. There’s knowing glee when the actor who last played Superman is rendered powerless by a green ray gun wielded by the Vegan Police.

Wright faithfully replicates O’Malley’s marriage of manga-inspired artwork and video game conceit into an overcaffeinated visual fest that plays squarely to its under-30 target audience. Scott’s world is populated by thought bubbles and acquaintances with designated “player ratings.” Successful exploits can earn you an extra life; even urinating is accompanied by a yellow bar that gradually slides to empty. And, each battle sequence is a hyper-edited melee squeezed into a replicated framework of comic book panels and video screens.

Breathless attendees who screened Scott Pilgrim vs. the World several weeks ago at the annual San Diego Comic-Con scurried to instantly label the film a generational milestone. In truth, viewers will feel as through they are not so much in a movie theater as trapped in some arcade peering over the shoulder of a seventh-grade gaming savant as he tries to beat his high score. That, or perhaps confused that they’re re-watching the Wachowski Brothers’ overcooked Speed Racer.

Either way, Wright’s normally astute ability to have his satirical cake and eat its narrative underpinning too falters in Scott Pilgrim. First, it is not insignificant that Simon Pegg, Wright’s longtime collaborator, isn’t around to star or co-written this screenplay, as he did with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Moreover, while the imagery is eye-popping and the dialogue generally witty (although occasionally banal), the film’s core resides with an emotional connection to and between characters that evaporates in the setting’s stylized ether. Instead, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with the welcome – and too infrequent – appearance of Anna Kendrick as Scott’s busybody sister and figuring out why the underrated Culkin has remained relatively AWOL since his breakout performance in Igby Goes Down eight years ago.

There is a parallel worth exploring between reality and the labyrinthine, fatalistic milieu of a video game: both are worlds in which you either die prematurely or, if you’re lucky, live long enough see your preeminent success and achievement rendered meaningless once life’s levels simply and unceremoniously end. Either way, game over.

None of that is present in Scott Pilgrim, which packages passing allusions to disaffected youth and uncertain, unrequited love with FX-enhanced rock band battles and a fracas between erstwhile Sapphic lovers: “It was just a phase,” explains Ramona between dropkicks. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a heady spectacle, but it’s ultimately a war without meaning.

Neil Morris

Up in the Air

I've heard of cardboard cutout characters,
but this is ridiculous

Grade: A –

Director: Jason Reitman

Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Maybe Diablo Cody wasn’t really the brains behind Juno after all.

With just three feature films now under his belt, Jason Reitman has ensconced himself as a talented, unique filmmaker and torch-bearer for the seriocomic lineage. For today’s movie audiences, he is the mature antidote to the cut-rate knockoffs of Judd Apatow’s comedies of arrested development. More broadly, Reitman brings to mind such comic past masters as Ernest Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, who were all adept at depicting love in dark and cynical settings.The Reitman formula—as best it can be distilled—consists of quirky romances set within tableaus informed by weighty social topics, whether it is the tobacco industry in Thank You For Smoking, teenage pregnancy in Juno or mass unemployment wrought by corporate downsizing and Cost leadership in his latest, Up in the Air, a film that has already garnered widespread honors and Oscar buzz.

The intelligence of Up in the Air lies in its ironies. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a smooth-talking, veteran “career transition counselor,” a euphemism for being a hired gun paid to handle employee layoffs by corporate bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. Ryan and his company rely upon the misery of others for their own success. In this most impersonal of settings, the jocular Ryan specializes in providing the illusion of a human touch. Walter Kirn, from whose 2001 novel the film is loosely adapted, says in the film’s notes that “Ryan is like a masseur who comes in and sort of rubs your shoulders while rolling your desk chair into the elevator.”

Personally, however, Ryan is an isolato who embraces the nomadic lifestyle that comes with his profession. Living hub-to-hub, he has mastered the nuances of air travel, from choosing the proper luggage to the gauging the fastest check-in line, and navigates terminals with the agility of Baryshnikov. But spiritually, Ryan is as vapid as his spartanly decorated home apartment: He eschews deep personal entanglements or ambitions, his sole dream being to finally reach the rarified air of 10 million frequent flyer miles.

It is no accident, then, that romance falls his way during a layover in a hotel bar with a fellow traveler, Alex (Vera Farmiga)—one thing leads to another after they begin comparing platinum club cards. Their burgeoning relationship leads Ryan to reassess his views on love and companionship. Meanwhile, he also finds his professional life in tumult thanks to a brash neophyte, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who sells Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) on a cost-cutting method of video conferencing that will enable terminations to be handled without Ryan or his coworkers ever having to leave their Omaha, Neb., home office.

Fearing this threat to his airborne existence, Ryan takes Natalie on a cross-country firing expedition in an effort to teach her the folly of her system. At the same time, Ryan struggles to cope with his growing feelings for Alex and the pressure to attend the impending nuptials of his kid sister (Melanie Lynskey). Facing midlife, Ryan starts to wonder if it’s finally time to grow up.

Ryan’s firing sessions are the film’s most tense, affecting scenes. Reitman and screenwriter Sheldon Turner occasionally struggle to balance their populist and satirical impulses by playing too clever with the jobless zeitgeist, a deficit aggravated—not alleviated—by the fact that Reitman fills these scenes with real people who’ve recently lost their jobs. This sort of self-congratulatory casting carries an unsavory aroma similar to the search for destitute extras in Slumdog Millionaire or Joe Wright’s The Soloist. However, the film exonerates itself from the charge of exploitation by giving these extras screen time during the closing credits, where they reveal more information about their situations.

Up in the Air hearkens back to such socially conscious comic masterpieces as Wilder’s The Apartment, Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. Clooney’s retro leading-man charisma is perfect for this material, while the talented Kendrick would feel right at home in a screwball comedy and Farmiga radiates the sophisticated sexuality of classic film noir divas. And, just when you think you’ve got the film’s flight plan figured out, Reitman takes an unexpected detour toward a more open-ended, melancholy denouement that evokes the title of this timeless and timely film.

Neil Morris