The Words

Don't sorry, honey. Hangover III comes out next year.

Grade: C –

Director: Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde, Ben Barnes and Jeremy Irons

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 36 min.

I like to envision the developmental scene behind a film self-indulgent enough to call itself The Words. It starts with a couple of fresh-faced, first-time writers/directors, Lee Sternthal and Brian Klugman (nephew of Jack), serving up their romantic-drama about anguished writers to be ground through the Sundance sausage maker. Enter a trio of young actors—Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana and Olivia Wilde—looking for the right portal for their entry into “serious moviemaking.” Snare a fading name like Dennis Quaid, looking for one more prestige project en route to a latter-day career of supporting roles in G.I. Joe sequels, ‘80s remakes and TV series. Hire Marcelo Zarvos—a poor producer’s Alexandre Desplat—to wind up the Oscar Trax 2000 and crank out an incessant, string-laden score that practically wails, “This is important!” And finally, imagine the day they all find out that a bona fide Oscar winner had signed onto the project: “We got Irons…We got Irons!”

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the Kodak Theatre. Although blessed with an intriguing premise rife with ethical and morality conundrums, The Words never becomes more three-dimensional than, well, words on a page. The principal storyline dovetails off a book reading by celebrated author Clay Hammond (Quaid) to an adoring audience that includes Daniella (Wilde), a comely, college-age literati groupie.

Hammond’s titular novel is about Rory Jansen (Cooper), an aspiring writer looking for his big break and also in the throes of newlywed bliss with his wife, Dora (Saldana). During their Parisian honeymoon, the couple pays homage to a plaque honoring Ernest Hemingway just before Dora buys her husband a tattered satchel that, unbeknownst to anyone, contains a yellowed, unsigned manuscript that Rory immediately recognizes as transcendent literature. Circumstances contrive to have Rory innocently type the story into his computer and then not-so-innocently present it to a literary agent who leaps at the chance to publish the book to great acclaim.

Rory’s new-found high life is upended when an old man (Jeremy Irons) follows Rory to Central Park and reveals that not only does he know of Rory’s subterfuge, but that the geezer is the actual author of the mysterious tome, the lost chronicle of the old man’s life and star-crossed marriage to a young French girl named Celia (Nora Armezeder) in post-WWII Paris.

It’s emblematic of Sternhal and Klugman’s erratic editing that I went a long time believing Rory’s misappropriated manuscript was actually a long lost Hemingway; maybe that’s also because Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, once lost a suitcase full of the author’s manuscripts at a Paris rail station, an event duplicated in the film. Instead, we get The Old Man and his Celia, one of three diffuse plot strands held together with muddled melodrama, prosaic narration and some of the least convincing scenes of fake crying seen in cinema (from Bradley and Ben Barnes, as the younger Old Man).

There’s a good story lurking in The Words. Unfortunately, the only words most viewers will use to remember the film are, “Wait, isn’t that the one with the guy from The Hangover?”

Neil Morris

Footloose

Coming soon: The Dukes of Hazzard 2

Grade: B -
Director: Craig Brewer
Starring: Kenny Wormald, Julianne Hough, Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell and Miles Teller
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 53 min.

The opening moments of Craig Brewer’s Footloose gives something old and something new. It begins with a static close-up of sneakers stomping on a beer-smeared dance floor strewn with crushed Dixie cups, gettin’ footloose to the familiar strains of Kenny Loggins’ smash title track. The nostalgic mood is abruptly interrupted, however, when a carload of teenagers leaving the dance party are killed in a head-on collision.

In response, the city council of sleepy Bomont, Ga., led by Presbyterian minister Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid), whose son was killed in the crash, passes a series of ordinances intended to prevent the teen revelry town elders blame for the tragedy. Restrictions include a curfew and prohibitions against loud music, public alcohol consumption and, most of all, lewd and lascivious dancing.

Brewer (Hustle & Flow; Black Snake Moan) places his affinity for Southern settings front and center. He transplants the original film’s fictional Utah locale to a Georgia burg perched, like so many cities in the Deep South, on transcending its traditional race, class and religious divisions.

The impetus for Bomont, GA’s prohibitions are more believable than the sheer fundamentalist bent at the heart of the 1984 film. And, while Brewer goes to great lengths to incorporate the original soundtrack throughout - sometimes in their original form, sometimes rerecorded with new artists - he also mixes in a contemporary blend of country, rock and hip-hop, backed by performers ranging from Blake Shelton to Smashing Pumpkins to Wiz Khalifa. The hoofing itself now runs the gambit from parking lot krumping to country line. Even the memorable tractor battle is changed to a school bus demolition derby.

Still, despite this tinkering around the edges as well as Brewer’s distinctive gritty palette, Footloose’s basic plot remains otherwise unchanged and just as hokey. Boston boy Ren McCormick (Kenny Wormald) moves to town sporting shades, a 21 Jump Street hairdo and a big-city attitude. Trouble comes his way after he plays his music too loud and, more precariously, dances too close with Ariel (Julianne Hough), the preacher’s flamboyant daughter who fancies halter tops and red cowboy boots.

It falls to this rebel without to rumba to woo Ariel, beat back her roughneck boyfriend and try to convince the council to rescind its bans via a speech that finds Ren quoting Psalms and Ecclesiastes. As in his previous features, Brewer’s characters often veer into caricature, especially Ren’s new friend Willard (Miles Teller) and the rest of the hayseeds in Bomont, a place where folks still work at the cotton gin and call each other “darlin.” And, for all the director’s heightened attention to verisimilitude, the town is some alternate Southern universe where there is no hint of racial tension.

Wormald and Hough make an alluring pair, and while their acting won’t wow audiences, their energetic bump-and-grinding will titillate viewers of both sexes. Is it all corny? Yes, but Brewer makes it OK for everybody to cut Footloose...just fight that feeling of deja vu.

Neil Morris

The Express

If I'm playing the Express, why do you get top billing?

Grade: C +

Director: Gary Fleder

Starring: Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Darrin Dewitt Henson, Omar Benson Miller, and Charles S. Dutton

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

The Express might be the story of Ernie Davis (Rob Brown), the first African-American to win college football’s Heisman Trophy. But, it is the recurring apparition of Jim Brown (Darrin Dewitt Henson), Davis’ late-1950s running back predecessor at Syracuse University, whose personal complexity and heft all-too-fleetingly transcend an otherwise paint-by-bigot biopic.

Charles Leavitt’s (Blood Diamond) screenplay, adapted from a biography by author Robert Gallagher, decides to focus mostly on Davis’ sophomore season with the Orangemen, when they battled to an undefeated season and a NCAA championship. In an extended coda, the film then flash forwards as Davis wins the Heisman, is drafted as the first overall pick in the NFL craft by the Cleveland Browns, and is tragically stricken with incurable leukemia. Even clocking in at an overlong 2 hour-plus running time, it is a compelling story that is both heart-warming and heart-wrenching.

Why, then, does director Gary Fleder fall back a rote of soft focus visuals and sports clichés? Whites are raging racists, African-Americans are noble and virtuous, and in middle is Coach Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid), an imperfect personification of the conflicting camps in pre-Civil Rights America. Every gallop by Davis is momentous, every game a microcosm of societal struggle, and everywhere musical swells ordain the audience’s emotional response; seriously, will someone please tell these directors they need not saturate every moment of screen time with fanfares and flourishes?

Quaid’s blustery brio keeps matters entertaining, and Rob Brown’s (Finding Forrester) quiet dignity single-handedly elevates Davis above the hackneyed fray. But, the film fares best only when graded on a curve, compared to such woeful kinsman as Glory Road and Remember the Titans. The Express the best of both worlds: A glowing hagiography laced with social commentary. What it achieves is less fulsome: A TV-worthy biopic following a dog-eared playbook.

Neil Morris

Vantage Point

Look here...the Others strike again

Grade: C
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Edgar Ramirez, and Said Taghmaoui
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Even a prestige cast and whiz-bang machinations cannot save Vantage Point, the, oh, thousandth resurrection of Rashomon, this time as a 24-inspired deconstruction of the apparent assassination of the U.S. president (William Hurt), on the eve of an international counterterrorism summit, from six different perspectives. The problem is that by the third or fourth rewind/replay, revelation turns to repetition. The tableau ultimately proves a hollow gimmick designed to stretch the film’s running time to the requisite 90-minute mark. By the time you realize that you could just watch the overextended final segment and glean the entire plotline, you have already sat through 70 minutes of filler with nothing to show for it besides a bad case of déjà vu.

The round-robin format leaves several actors – particularly CNN-style press hounds played by Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana – with little to contribute while relegating others to their base impulses. Chief among the latter are veteran Secret Service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid), who once took a bullet for the president and spends this entire film sporting Quaid’s trademark scowl while constantly staring into a video monitor and growling some variation of “My God…” or “Jesus Christ…” As an American tourist with a camcorder, Forest Whitaker manages to over-Method a role that requires little of him besides running through the city streets of Salamanca, Spain filming his own personal Cloverfield.

Hurt and Lost's Matthew Fox acquit themselves well; in particular, Fox’s brand of intense masculine vulnerability gives him star potential that can be realized in the right role. But, so absorbed are director Pete Travis and debut screenwriter Barry Levy in their fastitious formula that before all the disparate narratives conveniently collide at a single intersection in the middle of town, they attempt to package zeitgeist about overseas anti-American sentiment and the nobility of a president who refuses to reflexively bomb a friendly Arab country based on “solid intelligence” inside a storyline that features unfriendly Arab jihadists killing hundreds in an effort to off that same president.

An improbable car chase, a POTUS body-double, and the interminable plight of a lost little girl are the frosting on this bland layer cake. The most useful vantage point, it turns out, is the view of the theater’s exit door on your way out of it.

Neil Morris