Game Night

Enough of the "bored" games, amirite?

Grade: B +

Director:  John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein

Starring: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons, Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, Kylie Bunbury, Jeffrey Wright, and Danny Huston

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 33 min.

Landing is that rare category of movies that are better than they have any logical reason being, Game Night is an early-year diversion that sneaks up on you. On (and yeah, below) the surface, it lands on the well-populated space of Jason Bateman comedies where he plays the snarky straight man opposite some form of inanity. I was going to reel off a few examples, but even a cursory list would eat up my review space—suffice it to say that directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein penned the screenplays for both of Bateman’s Horrible Bosses films. In truth, writer Mark Perez’s Game Night script is a snappier brand of silliness, presenting a cinematic exhibition in which the audience already knows the rules, yet the gameplay this time is surprisingly more entertaining.

Max (Bateman) and his wife Annie (Rachel McAdams) meet cute over an evening of intense bar trivia, but the carefree, ultra-competitive personalities that make them whizzes at charades have also (somehow) inhibited their advancement towards parenthood. Enter Brooks (Kyle Chandler), Max’s successful, devil-may-care older brother, who invites Max and Annie’s weekly game night coterie to his rental mansion for an elaborate murder mystery. Things go haywire when two ruffians nab Brooks, leaving Max, Annie, and their four friends floundering to win a contest that may or may not be real.

Movie buffs will enjoy innumerable references that start with overall premise itself, a takeoff on David Fincher’s “The Game.” There’s a recreated Pulp Fiction monologue, a running Denzel gag that’s actually key to one subplot, and copious cues to The Terminator, The Matrix, Ed Norton plus every other actor who played the Hulk, and a mashup of Eyes Wide Shut and Fight Club, another Fincher film. The abode of one creepy character contains avian taxidermy revealed with a Dutch angle, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The movie subsists on three simple filmmaking elements: a snicker-a-second script that keeps the audience guessing just enough, complemented by game cast. Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury play Kevin and Michelle, a lifelong couple suddenly rocked by the revelation that she once slept with a secret celebrity. Billy Magnussen plays Ryan, an affable doofus who invites an Irish workmate (Sharon Horgan) to the game as his ringer because, well, she sounds smart.

But besides Bateman, the real winners of this Game Night are three actors whose skills are particularly illuminated in this comedic setting, one in which the directors also give each the space to find their distinctive personas. Chandler plays the obnoxious Id to Batman’s backseat brother. Jesse Plemons is a revelation as a neighboring cop who’s wound way too tight since his divorce. And McAdams, so often pigeonholed as the supporting love interest, gets an equal spotlight with Bateman, and their comic alchemy carries the film.

Into a worthy season of Oscar hopefuls and a superhero movie turned cultural touchstone, Game Night arrives as a suitable date night, an enjoyable outing that’s somehow both smart and mindless. We could all use a little escapist comedy right now.

The Master

I'm Still Here...

Grade: B

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers and Jesse Plemons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Of all the influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s post-World War II American saga The Master, the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard ranks no higher than Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and tycoon Edward L. Doheny did on There Will Be Blood. While Anderson acknowledges using Hubbard as an inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shaman-cum-charlatan heading an Eisenhower-era spiritual movement called “The Cause,” don’t expect a roman à clef chronicling the birth and belief system of Scientology.

The Master’s central focus isn’t even the nature of personality cults, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though that’s certainly one of many undercurrents to this enigmatic epic. Instead, Anderson returns to familiar themes found throughout his short but resplendent filmography: the search for a father figure or lost son; dysfunctional family relationships; and flawed men fated to self-destruction.

The biggest surprise, however, is that The Master isn’t really Dodd’s story—indeed, the film’s title is a misnomer, referring not simply to Dodd but rather those things in everyone’s lives that preoccupy or even control them. Rather, the real protagonist is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sailor stationed in the Pacific Theater who spends his R-and-R humping anatomical sand castles and masturbating in the surf. Returning stateside and suffering from some unspecified emotional disorder, the dissipated Freddie’s only real passion is mixing bootleg liquor using darkroom chemicals, paint thinner, cleaning supplies and anything else at his disposal. When he loses a job as a department store portrait photographer fighting one of his many coifed, well-heeled subjects, he lashes out at an ideal he knows he’ll never appreciate or attain. After he’s chased away from work as a Steinbeck-ian cabbage picker, Freddie winds up a stowaway aboard a yacht being chartered by Dodd and a handful of his followers.

Dodd takes in the brutish Freddie, whom he likens to a fearful animal that eats its own excrement. However, it’s never clear whether the Master’s motives are altruistic, opportunistic or even sexual. Through a system of “processing”—undoubtedly modeled after Scientology’s “auditing”—Dodd seeks to exorcise Freddie’s demons and assimilate him into the fold.

Encased in atmospheric amber, The Master emulates the pace and palette of There Will Be Blood—if you splice Jonny Greenwood’s score for both, you couldn’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Although Blood is 20 minutes longer, theater viewers may exit The Master believing the opposite to be true. However, while Anderson’s oil epic was a character-driven allegory about Americanism and religion, the writer-director came to his newest project full of big ideas but became both enamored and distracted by his formidable actors along way.

Phoenix, appearing in his first film since the underappreciated I’m Still Here, gives an engrossing, awards-worthy performance. He compresses Freddie’s morass of rage, insecurity and anti-social behavior behind an inarticulate mumble, frozen sneer and graceless gait, a vessel that sometimes appears only vaguely human. Dodd—who describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher”—leans on charm and polish to peddle his mix of mysticism, science fiction and dime store psychology. But, he’s most revealing when Hoffman flashes an anxiety and anger simmering just below his well-scrubbed facade, such as when a naysayer challenges his dogma at a dinner party or a benefactor (Laura Dern) frets over a word change to a processing question made in Dodd’s second tome—through Hoffman, Dodd responds to this incident with irritation tinged with a vague surprise that anyone would notice, much less brood over such vagaries.

Together, Dodd and Freddie are two sides of the same animalistic coin—a scene in which they meet, physically and emotionally, in the middle of conjoining jail cells is unforgettable. Still, there’s only so many ways to (re)make this point. Anderson doesn’t pivot away from his two leads long enough to fully develop the many underwritten supporting characters, including Dodd’s biological son (Jesse Plemons) and daughter (Ambyr Childers), and his son-in-law (Rami Malek). Amy Adams is terrific as Peggy, Dodd’s wife, the power behind the throne who is part feminine ideal, part Lady Macbeth, but her performance becomes frustratingly one-note the more it plays second fiddle to Hoffman and Phoenix.

As a result, narrative opportunities are squandered. When the police show up to arrest Dodd, Anderson not only leaves viewers to assume Dodd is guilty of an unexplained financial grievance, he also wastes screen time show Freddie yet again fight someone (this time cops) that could have been used to elaborate on big ideas like a historical intolerance, sometimes hostility, by the government towards nontraditional faiths in a country that promises freedom of religion.

The one question The Master does lucidly pose is whether reforming the personality of a lout like Freddie is possible or even prudent. In so doing, Anderson—an avowed Stanley Kubrick devotee who reportedly filmed portions of The Master using the actual 65mm camera used to shoot 2001—has made his version of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a comparison underscored by such scenes as a dinner party in which Freddie visualizes all the ladies in attendance naked, and a final shot that I half expected to be accompanied by a voice over proclaiming, “I was cured all right.”

In one of the film’s more tedious montages, Dodd assigns Freddie an “application” that involves walking back and forth across a well-furnished room and finding different ways each time to describe the wood wall and windowpane he touches on either side. It’s an exercise not unlike watching The Master, a handsome canvas that’s open to interpretation, not explication.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Battleship

When terabytes attack!

Grade: D +

Director: Peter Berg

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker, Rihanna, Liam Neeson and Tadanobu Asano

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 10 min.

Although officially based on a Hasbro’s board game, the true and more egregious inspiration for the utterly pointless Battleship is the Michael Bay formula of F/X sensory overload, insipid dialogue (“It’s been an honor serving with you, captain./The honor was all mine.”), grade school romance and rank jingoism. It’s hard to find another movie that can act as both a 2-hour-plus recruiting film for the U.S. Navy and an advertisement for Beyblades (also a Hasbro product).

Responding to deep space salutations, an alien armada splash lands in the Pacific just off the Hawaiian coast. When the terabytes start to attack, Earth’s defense falls to a stable of sailors as nondescript as the maundering invaders. Hunky Slacker (Taylor Kitsch), beau to Supermodel Actress (Brooklyn Decker) who happens to be the daughter of his Ramrod Commander (Liam Neeson), finds himself improbably in command of a ship of its crew, which includes Pop Star Moonlighting As Actor (Rihanna) and Comic Relief (Jesse Plemons).

Director Peter Berg is kind enough to afford his actors the change to exorcise some reality-based demons. Kitsch supplants John Carter as the most irksome film he’s headlined in this year, and Rihanna gets to turn a Chris Brown-by-proxy alien who bloodies her lip into literal cannon fodder.

The aliens happen to invade in conjunction with the annual RIMPAC exercises, affording Berg the ham-handed spectacle of American and Japanese sailors fighting side-by-side to defend Pearl Harbor. No matter, since the evil E.T.s are indestructible until the plot doesn’t need them to be, most notably when one ironclad predator comes to blows with a legless war hero (Gregory Gadson). While saluting wounded warriors and retired veterans is laudable, concocting ridiculous scenarios to accomplish this aim is sheer pandering. The only thing more dubious than a handful of octogenarians recommissioning the USS Missouri back into action in mere hours is the notion that Big Mo is still housing live armaments even after being converted into a floating museum

And don’t even bother to ask why the aliens can destroy most of Hong Kong, Hawaii and the bulk of the Pacific fleet without breaking a sweat yet are somehow bested a single ship, their ragtag crew and their accidental captain’s physical therapist girlfriend. Or why the aliens didn’t bring reinforcements from the start. Or when deep space radio signals started to resemble laser beams.

Battleship is for folks who think Transformers had too much plot complexity and Pearl Harbor didn’t have nearly enough flag-waving. The lone nod to the actual game comes when a computer map displays a grid of underwater buoys to track the movement of alien ships. Otherwise, there is more aptitude in trying to decide whether to plug a peg into B-3 or F-7 than this loud, mind-numbing shipwreck.

Neil Morris