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 Wolf of Wall Street

Flair Jordan

Grade: A–

Director: Martin Scorses

Starring: Leonardo DiCapiro, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau and Jean Dujardin

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 3 hr.

After a career spent exploring the mean streets of his beloved New York City, Martin Scorsese finally trains his lense on its most corrupt, nefarious byway: Wall Street. And whether motivated by guilt, revelation or inspiration, Scorsese amply compensates for previous oversights with The Wolf of Wall Street, a three-hour Grand Guignol of white-collar decadence.

In the memoir of stock swindler Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCapiro), Scorsese finds his gateway into the feral financial markets of the 1980s and 90s that ushered in the likes of Belfort and his outlaw brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. By day, Belfort and his disciplines peddle junk stocks onto unwitting marks. After hours, their trading floor becomes a Caligulan debach, where brokers blow off steam using profanity, prostitutes, alcohol, marching bands and dwarf-tossing. Testosterone flows freely, and hookers are ranked in descending order of quality as “blue chip,” “Nasdaq,” and “pink sheets.” And, oh, the drugs. Belfort’s likes his ludes and cocaine, but his hallucinogenic holy grail is the Lemmon 714, whose discovery features in (quite arguably) the film’s most maddcap sequence involving Belfort, his skeevy friend Donnie (Jonah Hill), a Ferrari, and juxtaposing Popeye's spinach with inhaling a vial of blow.

The ungainly core of The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t an exhaustive exposé of our bacchanalian securities market or even an engrossing biopic. This is Scorsese’s raised middle finger to the orgy of excess endemic to a privileged class that flouted while Rome nearly burned. But that protruding digit is also directed somewhere else.

The Wolf of Wall Street is the imperfect but audacious product of a seemingly younger, feistier director … or a cinematic capo di tutti capi looking to reclaim his turf. American Hustle, another Greed Decade favorite of this holiday season, has been called an homage to the 71-year-old Scorsese. But if that film is Scorsese redux, The Wolf of Wall Street is Scorsese 2.0.

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

Zero Dark Thirty

This is going to make a great video game someday.

Grade: A - 
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt and James Gandolfini
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.


Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, is a cinematic Rorschach test that any given viewer is bound to come away from with their own interpretation. Some will see the amoral exploitation of the torture inflicted by the CIA upon dark-skinned detainees inside concrete bunkers at clandestine black sites. Others may see a chronicle of the tenacious, even courageous personnel who brought justice upon the world's most wanted terrorist, Some will see a paean to feminism, while others will decry a movie—named for half past the witching hour—whose notion of strong, successful women are those most adaptable to man’s genetic bloodlust.

Controversy has swirled around Zero Dark Thirty, from the level of access to sensitive intelligence allegedly given to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (allegations that both deny) to its depiction of torture (and its investigative value). There are brutal depictions of sleep deprivation by means of loud music, chaining a detainee in stress positions so long that he soils himself, and stuffing a prisoner into a small wooden box.

But the fact is, torture was deployed repeatedly, and depicting its graphic nature is not only essential to an accurate telling of this history but is itself a form of condemnation for right-thinking viewers. The screenplay hints that vital evidence was occasionally obtained from the Bush-era torture program while recognizing the wholesale unreliability of intelligence extracted solely by such duress. Indeed, the film posits that it wasn't until the torture program was shelved and the intelligence community forced to shift focus and resources toward old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground detective work that they finally achieved success.

As a CIA operative newly deployed to one black site, Maya (Jessica Chastain) recoils at the sight of waterboarding during the film's opening scene. Although "Washington says she's a killer," Maya's killer instinct is that of an analytical assassin recruited by the CIA straight out of high school. Like many in Maya's generation, her age of innocence ended with 9/11, which set into motion a career motivated by the overarching aim of finding bin Laden.

Maya is patterned after a real-life counterpart whose degree of contribution to the war on al-Qaeda is a matter of debate. Perhaps because of legal and ethical purposes, all the film's characters are fictionalized, even down to someone meant to be Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini) credited only as "C.I.A. Director." Bigelow's clinical approach creates a compelling procedural, but there's also a conspicuous lack of character development and emotional depth, unlike Bigelow's last film, The Hurt Locker, for which she won the Oscar for best director.

The branch tasked with tracking bin Laden is depicted as understaffed and underfunded, but that doesn't mean its staff members aren't subjected to the weight of great expectations. Still, the geopolitical context of their mission is merely hinted at. The presidential transition from Bush to Obama only comes in the form of a TV interview in which Obama denounces the use of torture, a broadcast that plays in the background as intelligence operatives pay little attention to it. Otherwise, the tumult over the torture program only arises during a key conversation between Maya and her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke), a frequent purveyor of "enhanced interrogation techniques" who eventually accepts a transfer back to Langley to avoid being "the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes."

Reportedly, Bigelow and Boal planned to film a far more open-ended version of Zero Dark Thirty that concluded with bin Laden's apparent disappearance into the mountains of Tora Bora. Then bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, and the filmmakers had to adjust their finale. The result is a taut 30-minute final act chronicling the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one of the most gripping, compelling movie sequences of the year and where Bigelow should have nailed down another Oscar nomination. It's also noticeably distinct from the film's previous two hours, a more more detailed and deliberate recounting than the broader, comparatively disjointed perusal that precedes it.

Nonetheless, Boal's screenplay opens and closes with acts of cold-blooded violence whose righteousness is left to the viewpoint and conscience of the beholder. The refusal of Zero Dark Thirty to take a moral stand mustn't be confused for immorality. And while this narrative about the search for Osama bin Laden is sometimes as muddled as the mission itself, its clarity of purpose is as steadfast as SEAL Team 6.

Super 8

Scenes from the making of "Bonnie and Clyde II"

Grade: B

Director: J.J. Abrams

Starring: Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, and Riley Griffiths

Running Time: 1 hr. 42 min.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Of the dozens of films Steven Spielberg has produced without directing over thirty years of filmmaking, never has his stylistic influence been so wholeheartedly appropriated as in Super 8. The latest thriller from director J.J. Abrams (whose Star Trek reboot was also an example of updated homage) is not just a cater-cousin to Spielberg’s iconic canon. It is a nostalgic paean whose fervent devotion is both its forte and, in part, a conspicuous shortcoming.

Beyond tiptoeing through the Spielberg’s cinematic tulips, what Super 8 accomplishes best of all is managing to mix and maintain childlike charm amid its chills and thrills. In other words, it’s a resurrection of the spirit of Spielberg’s films pre-The Color Purple, the unofficial start of his unabashed chase for acceptance as an auteur.

The technical similarities to Spielberg’s late-1970s/early-1980s work are obvious – indeed, the film is set during 1979 in a small town in Ohio, Spielberg’s home state. From a subfusc palette to distinctive camera pans, zoom into close ups, and lens flares, you feel as through you’re watching a revival of Spielberg’s early thrillers.

Moreover, there are the familiar themes of father-son relationships, suburban settings, and adolescent maturation, friendship, and first-love. It’s a story about otherworldly forces discovered by a bunch of kids just trying to make their first homemade movie.

Abrams also borrows Spielberg’s ever-keen ability to speak volumes with a single camera frame, starting with the opening shot of a worker changing a steel mill’s “Days Since Last Accident” tally from 784 down to 1. Four months after the untimely death of his mother, Joe (Joel Courtney) remains emotionally adrift and otherwise disconnected from his dad, Jack (Kyle Chandler), a deputy sheriff who still blames his wife’s demise on the town’s drunken miscreant, Louis (Ron Eldard).

Joe’s intermittent joy comes from palling around with his schoolmates as they try to make their own low-fi zombie flick, including portly, fast-talking director-in-waiting Charles (Riley Griffiths) and Alice (Elle Fanning), an ingénue who steals all the boys’ hearts with her fetching looks, access to a car, and ability to cry on cue.

While filming a nocturnal scene at an abandoned train station, the children witness the calamitous derailment of an Air Force locomotive, deliberately caused by a truck driven by their middle school biology teacher. His dying warning to them, coupled with the train’s mysterious cargo and the sudden arrival of military heavies, send the preteens into a state of panic that morphs into curiosity once something starts scaring away all the local canines, stealing electronic and mechanical devices, and attacking local townsfolk.

You can make a game out of ticking off the Spielberg and, yes, Abrams archetypes. There’s a creature whose menace is heightened by the fact that it goes unseen for the opening half film (Jaws along with Abrams’ smoke-monster in Lost and the beast in Cloverfield, which Abrams produced). Like Roy Scheider in Jaws, Jack is a small-town cop forced to confront forces beyond his job description and control – you’ll immediately recognize a scene in which Jack scampers down a city street, navigating menial concerns being lobbed in his direction to while en route to more pressing concerns.

And, there’s a science-fiction backdrop that Abrams uses to turn the clock back from Spielberg’s post-9/11 dread (War of the Worlds) to his post-Cold War themes of coexistence and innocence. Specifically, there’s a close encounter with – spoiler alert – an extra-terrestrial whose violent terrorizing turns out to be the consequence of human mistreatment and the being’s innate desire to go home. Indeed, the E.T. homage extends to the kid-centric protagonists – Joe even resembles an Elliott clone.

Be warned – Super 8 is not a film for small children, for both its violence (seen and unseen) and salty language. However, the strengths of this Spielberg simulacrum are as basic as the obsolete film technology from which it draws its title. Capable, enthusiastic acting, character development, smart cinematography, and actual storytelling combine for an enthralling, rewarding movie. The audience remains engaged, from the bone-rattling train wreck and the ferocious razzing of a gas station, to quiet, introspective moments, like Joe delicately applying zombie makeup to Alice or the two kids watching home movies of Joe and his mom.

The regrettable byproduct of this myth-raking is that Super 8 ends up feeling less a sturdy standalone than merely evocative of the films it photocopies. It’s also a predictable demerit that the climax is both derivative and incapable of living up to its buildup.

Regardless, it is the best big-budget movie thus far this season, conjuring not just the spirit of summertime youth but also summertime cinema. Indeed, it says something about the state of movies that the completed amateur film submission that’s finally played over the closing credits is easily more entertaining than most fallow superhero-of-the-week rubbish.

Neil Morris