Hail, Caesar!

Magic Mike USN

Grade: C +

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Channing Tatum

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

One of the panoply of old Hollywood parodies in Hail, Caesar! is a high society film project directed by venerable studio hand Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). At one point, Laurentz instructs his ill-suited leading man, singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), to begin his lines by expelling “a mirthless chuckle.”

'A mirthless chuckle' is also what most merits the Coen brothers’ homage to 1950s moviemaking. The filmmakers lovingly and gorgeously—thanks to their longtime collaborator, cinematographer  Roger Deakins—skewer everything from sword-and-sandal pictures, to Westerns, to song-and-dance musicals. But the screenplay’s disparate parts and characters never coalesce, so the whole of Hail, Caesar! is strikingly less than the sum of its parts.

The film’s protagonist is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” for Capital Pictures tasked with rescuing starlets from risqué photo shoots, jousting with twin columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton) looking for a scoop, and working damage control over the impending out-of-wedlock pregnancy of DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a fussy, Esther Williams-type aquatic musical star.

A burned-out Mannix is also weighing a lucrative 9-to-5 job offer from an aeronautics corporation. But as his final decision looms, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the bankable star of the titular peplum pic—subtitled The Tale of the Christ, an obvious allusion to Ben-Hur—is kidnapped by a gaggle of Communist screenwriters holed up in an area beach house.

As Mannix frantically tries to find Whitlock before his movie implodes, he must also cope with the sundry calamities of his job, including Laurentz’s complaints about Doyle, whose aw-shucks drawl clashes with an urbane comedy named Merrily We Dance. Mannix visits a soundstage where Channing Tatum channels Gene Kelly in a Navy musical patterned after Anchors Aweigh—the dance routine to a diddy titled “No Dames” is a showstopper. Along the way, we strumble across glorified cameos by Frances McDormand as a grizzled film editor, Jonah Hill as a shadowy notary and Christopher Lambert as a lascivious movie director.

Watching Hail, Caesar! becomes an exercise in star-gazing, as any hope of an engaging, cohesive storyline vanishes sometime between Whitlock’s umpteenth humorless prattle with his blacklisted captors, and the appearance of a Soviet submarine off the coast of Malibu. The Coens’ trademark deadpan absurdism grinds along like an engine trying to find its gear. The whip-smart wit of the directors’ seminal farces is lacking, save for an uproarious scene in which clergy of disparate faiths debate the proper cinematic depiction of Jesus.

The Coens appear torn between lionizing and lampooning the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, a fine line they expertly traversed in Barton Fink. Hail, Caesar! is like Whitlock’s climatic “Speech at the Feet of the Penitent Thief”—rousing at its best, but ultimately bloated and leading nowhere.

The Good Dinosaur

Jurassic Lark

Grade: C –

Director: Peter Sohn

Starring the voices of: Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Marcus Scribner, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin and Sam Elliott

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

The Good Dinosaur imagines a world where dinosaurs didn’t become extinct. Unfortunately, the resulting butterfly effect produces an alternate Pixar Animation Studios that makes lazy, unoriginal movies. After reclaiming its reputation with Inside Out earlier this year, this is arguably Pixar’s poorest production to date.

The film conceives a backstory in which the asteroid that wiped out the dinos veers away from Earth. Rather than merely lending dinosaurs anthropomorphic features (as Pixar has done with nonhuman protagonists in nearly all their animated films), here they evolve over millions of years into English-speaking frontiersman. Poppa Henry (voiced by Jeffrey Wright) and Momma Ida (Frances McDormand) are rearing three apatosaurus kids to eventually take over the family farm. However, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), their youngest, is kind-hearted but weak and fearful.

Henry tasks Arlo with killing the critter stealing their winter corn in order to earn his familial bona fides. But as Henry and Arlo track the culprit, a snarling prehistoric caveboy, Henry is swept away and killed by a flash flood. When Arlo next chases the caveboy, it also ends with Arlos being carried away by raging rapids and deposited far from home. Arlo and the feral Neanderthal boy, who Arlo names Spot, join together to traverse treacherous terrain and find their way home.

The Good Dinosaur quickly transitions into Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, if re-imagined by a focus group of fourth graders. Arlo and Spot—seemingly patterned after Chris Kattan’s old Mr. Peepers character from “Saturday Night Live”—encounter a surreal setting that includes a disturbingly dimwitted styracosaurus and psychotic, predatory pterodactylus. For some reason, this dino evolution mirrors human culture, so we also have an American West complete with redneck dialect spouted by yokels with names like Bubbha and Lurleane. Arlo and Spot join up with a trio of T. rex ranchers (including one voiced by Sam Elliott, natch) to thwart a herd of velociraptor rustlers. Cue the fiddle and harmonica.

The lurching mood fluctuates from syrupy to trippy to dark. Likewise, gorgeous animated renderings of the high Sierra landscape contrast with the reductive representation of Arlo’s Dino the Dinosaur look. Characters intone feel-good bromides like, “Sometimes you gotta get through your fear to see the beauty on the other side.” Huh?

Initial production on The Good Dinosaur began in 2009, and this final product betrays the project’s troubled history, which includes several changes of director, writer and cast. What’s left is sweet but boring, a film that’s visually stimulating but thematically slight. In other words, it’s more Disney than Pixar, resulting in the latter’s first mediocre effort (yes, even worse than Cars 2).

That said, it’s almost worth enduring the rest of the film just to hear Sam Elliott growl, “If you ain’t afraid of a crock biting you on the face, then you’re not alive.” Almost.

Promised Land

The latest in State Fair chic

Grade: D +
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Matt Damon, Frances McDormand, John Krasinski, Hal Holbrook and Rosemary DeWitt
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 50 min.

The makers of Promised Land want you to hate fracking, and they aren’t going to let little things like a script, acting or the filmmaking acumen of Gus Van Sant (taking the day off) get in the way. Steve (Matt Damon) and Sue (Frances McDormand) are a couple of natural gas sales people sent by their big, bad corporate minders to buy up the mineral rights in a small backwoods town named McKinley (filming took place in rural Pennsylvania), populated by sort of prideful but vulnerable hicks Hollywood imagines are ripe for such plucking.

Space does not afford a discussion about the pros and cons of hydraulic fracturing (I rather side with the filmmakers). But it’s hard to achieve high-minded aims using this single-minded, half-baked screenplay penned by Damon (who once co-wrote something called Good Will Hunting) and John Krasinski (not a typo). We’re told Steve and Sue are savvy, flannel-clad operators, but they’re apparently unprepared for the entirely predictable obstuctions of a meddlesome environmentalist (Krasinski) and a cantankerous fogey (Hal Holbrook). And despite the fact they a seemingly vast majority of property owners sign away the family farm or the land below the singlewide, it all somehow comes down to the Big Vote™ by townsfolk in a high school gym who will decide, well, I dunno. Whether fracking is bad? Whether property owners have the right to control their own land? Why Steve particularly cares what the resident hot schoolteacher (Rosemary DeWitt) thinks about him? Why Matt Damon has started making dreary, uninteresting movies?

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

Neil Morris

Burn After Reading

Tonight's feature presentation: "Righteous Kill"

Grade: B
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, and Richard Jenkins
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

I probably rehash the following observation every time I review a Coen Brothers' movie, but it always bears restating: the corrosive influence of greed and/or temptation are the overriding themes in nearly every one of their films. The sometimes compulsory, always creative ways the Coens conjure their moral(istic) object lessons rank them among the most acclaimed American filmmakers of the last half-century.

In that vein, Burn After Reading is a return to classic Coens: a black comic rendering of morally duplicitous people lured and eventually destroyed by greed, yes, but more so the lure of a life supposedly better than their own. Such was the theme to 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, the last original screenplay the Coens penned. Yet, as the Coens enter their 50s, what has changed is the cynical edge of their material – call it cranky Coens. At the end of Raising Arizona, the baby gets returned to his family while H.I. and Ed settle down for a long life together. In Fargo and Blood Simple, the bad guys get their comeuppance while the righteous are left to ponder the inanity of it all. A change of sorts is found in the Coens’ last film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men; sure, Tommy Lee Jones is left scratching his head at a devolving world, but Anton Chigurh also gets to walk away, battered but alive to kill another day.

In many ways, Burn After Reading is even more pessimistic, despite the fact that it is more of a smiling cobra. An A-list cast gets to cut loose by cutting up, but unlike the Coens’ previous moral plays, there isn’t a canary to be found in this nefarious coalmine. A disgruntled, chronically drunk ex-CIA analyst, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), decides to write his memoirs. At the same time, his ice-cold wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is having an affair with a married, low-level Treasury agent (George Clooney), whose penchants run the gambit from post-coital 5-mile jogs to exotic food allergies. When Katie decides to file for divorce, she copies the family finances along with Osborne’s memoir onto a CD. A copy accidentally turns up at the local Hardbodies and into the hands of two dimwitted gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand), herself locked in an ongoing struggle over how to pay for some “much-needed” cap-a-pie cosmetic surgery.

Linda and Chad’s attempt to return the disc to Osborne – with the expectation of compensation, natch – is met by Osborne’s raging temper. Convoluted circumstances also involving the Internet dating phenomenon eventually bring each character into the same orbit, with disastrous consequences. Private eyes are mistaken for G-Men and chance encounters are viewed with heavy suspicion. In this postmodern satire, greed and paranoia form a combustible concoction in which the hoi polloi reflexively buy into whatever bogey man the government or infotainment conglomerates prop up, whether it is domestic surveillance or rivals from abroad. “The Russians?!,” a CIA chief (J.K. Simmons) repeats with puzzlement when he is informed that Linda and Chad tried to sell their disc of Osborne’s “drivel” to the Russian consulate. [You couldn’t blame them if they’ve been listening to our current presidential campaigns, who have recently dusted off old Cold War rhetoric to gin up votes.]

The subtle brilliance of Burn After Reading is that it is really an anti-spy, nonpolitical film, where the governmental espionage is a MacGuffin masking the fact that the actual intrigue flows wholly from the foibles of flawed, regular people who, although living in an increasingly interconnected world, are more personally estranged from their neighbors than ever. All the while, the actual intelligence community watches on both bemused and confused, armed with near omnipresence - if not omnipotence - but clueless as to how to exercise their power.

Unfortunately, that disengagement also leads the Coens to yet another truncated, shoulder-shrug ending, a la No Country for Old Men, made worse by the fact that nearly all the key climactic events take place off-camera and are only vocalized by bureaucrats trying to make sense of it all, postmortem. “So, what did we learn?”, asks Simmons’ CIA head. Only that the Coens are not yet willing, or able, to share the answer to that question.

Neil Morris