White House Down

Redrum...REDRUM!

Grade: C +

Director: Roland Emmerich

Starring: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods, Jason Clarke, Richard Jenkins, and Joey King

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 11 min.

The rank similarities between White House Down and the Olympus Has Fallen, just released three months ago to tepid reaction, are obvious and regrettable. Both involve terrorist assaults on the presidential residence, kidnapping the Commander in Chief, a turncoat Secret Service agent, attempts to co-opt the nuclear launch codes, and so on.

But White House Down (and Olympus, for that matter) is more like White House Die Hard in more ways than I reasonably have space to delineate. And, that action apogee is only the most overt blueprint for a cheeky thriller that threatens to actual entertain before overstaying its welcome. Along with John McTiernan, director Roland Emmerich also apes Wolfgang Petersen (Air Force One), Michael Bay (The Rock) and Season 7 of 24, not to mention a not-so-casual mention of Emmerich’s own Independence Day—actually, this is now the fourth film in which the German-born director has wrecked the White House. Discuss...

This time around, Capitol cop John Cale (Channing Tatum) is a decorated war hero with a messy personal life hoping to land a job on the President’s Secret Service detail, headed by the retiring Martin Walker (James Woods, his casting alone an obvious bit of foreshadowing). After an unsuccessful interview with old flame (or something) Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Cale his precocious daughter Emily (Joey King) get caught mid-tour in an armed takeover of the White House by a band of paramilitary mercenaries aimed at kidnapping President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). Of course, it falls to Cale to save the president...the country...the world!

After touring the White House last year, I actually found myself marveling at the meticulous set design. But, it’s the affable byplay between Tatum and Foxx carries the film, which works best when it’s not taking itself too seriously—a car chase around the White House lawn involving the presidential limo is the over-the-top highpoint. Sawyer chomping nervously on some Nicorette gum is a not-so-subtle allusion to President Obama’s cigarette habit. Still, it’s a bit uneasy when the notion of character development is an African-American president gravitating to high-end sneakers, an automatic rifle and a Cadi when things get real—”Get your hands off my Jordans!”, Sawyer yelps at a tenacious terrorist.

Ultimately, one (or a half-dozen) too many implausible and hackneyed twists eventually bring the story an inevitable, wearisome end. The 137-minute running time is at least a half-hour too long, stacking on plot turns that aren’t logical or necessary. Among the bloat are a bevy of supporting characters that do little besides stand around looking inert or saying inept things. And once the gleeful goofiness dissipates, that more than anything brings White House Down down.

Killing Them Softly

What, were you expecting Brad Pitt or something?

Grade: C
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta and Vincent Curatola
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

“America’s not a country, it’s just a business.” While uttered in the closing moments of writer-director Andrew Dominik’s gangster pastiche Killing Them Softly, this subtle-as-a-sledgehammer motif smacks you in the head beginning with the film’s disorienting open shot. In it, Dominik shoots a two-bit hustler emerging from a New Orleans culvert—as if exiting through the dull end of a kaleidoscope—with a disembodied 2008 speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama acting as narrator.

While George V. Higgins’ 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade was set in the seamy seventies Boston underworld, Dominik updates the tableau to post-Katrina New Orleans, the 2008 U.S. Presidential race and the Wall Street bailout. Billboards, speeches and television news clips are omnipresent, as candidates bloviate about America as the land of promise and President George W. Bush explains the supposedly dire need for why $700 billion of no-strings-attached cash must be immediately earmarked to purchase failing bank assets.

Of course, analogizing mob syndicates as a subset of American capitalism has long been a pop culture staple. It’s no small wonder, then, that Dominik populates his cast with actors meant to evoke memories of previous cinematic touchstones, including Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) and no fewer than three regulars from The Sopranos, including James Gandolfini. Richard Jenkins plays the consigliere for a group of faceless mob minders—I guess Robert Duvall wasn’t available.

Dominik also reteams with Brad Pitt, who collaborated on Dominik’s previous film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a masterful examination of America’s affinity for celebrating its criminal heritage. In spite its shopworn premise, Killing Them Softly could have also served as a spiritual sequel, an ironic take on how American cinema has exploited and even furthered that very mythologizing. Unfortunately, the film proves ill-equipped for such heavy-handed allegory. Dominik adopts Higgins’ affinity for using pages of dialogue to illustrate events rather than chronicling them as they occur. While that might be an intriguing literary conceit, it proves infuriating on the screen when what’s being said (and said and said...) isn’t all that interesting.

Pitt is mesmerizing as gang enforcer Jackie Cogan, who is brought in to “manage” the fallout after three swindlers conspire to rob a Mob-sponsored card game run by local lackey Markie Trattman (Liotta). The film comes alive whenever Jackie is brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, interrogating a poor dolt (Scoot McNairy) involved in the heist or just jousting with Jenkins’ middle man about the complexities of mob bureaucracy. Unfortunately, those moments are subsumed by elongated conversations that do little to contribute to the storyline. One scene designed to advance a single plot point is extended to excruciating length by repeatedly cross cutting to the drug-addled point-of-view of one participant (Ben Mendelsohn). Gandolfini plays a washed-up hitman with a disintegrating home life and an unhealthy hankering for drink and degrading hookers, but his only two appearances comprise overlong, profane ramblings in which Jackie is relegated to passive listener.

What’s left is a film with high-minded posturing but little style or substance. Heck, it’s not really a gangster flick. It’s a portrait of an America ruled by avarice, where the have-nots are racked by vice and the haves are left to jockey for an even bigger piece of the pie. Lars von Trier would be proud.

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Eat Pray Love

Pretty Bipartisan Woman

Grade: C

Director: Ryan Murphy

Starring: Julia Roberts, Billy Crudup, Viola Davis, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Javier Bardem, and Anakia Lapse

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hour, 13 minutes

Eat Pray Love couches itself as a chronicle of self-discovery and enlightenment. But, call it female wish fulfillment or fantasy camp for the bourgeoisie, it is a self-indulgent, idealized travelogue that challenges you to care about the woes of the wealthy.

Based on the memoir of American author Elizabeth Gilbert, the film follows a successful writer (Julia Roberts) living in New York City and in her seventh year of marriage to a doting husband, Stephen (Billy Crudup). He pontificates about current events and wants to go back to school for his masters degree. This just isn’t enough for Liz, however, who spends her nights crying on the bathroom floor and knelling on bended knee, begging God for a sign on how to further improve her blasé existence.

Oddly, the Almighty seems to have better things to worry about. So, Liz leaves Stephen and starts an affair with David (James Franco), a struggling off-Broadway actor. Still dissatisfied, Liz decides to reboot her life by living abroad for a year in Italy, India, and Bali.

Each stop is essentially an extended pictorial, not unlike the National Geographic magazines Liz collected under her bed a child. Italy is a panoply of food porn and lessons about “the sweetness of doing nothing,” which is, ironically, a prerequisite for enduring this film. Liz lives in an ashram in India, mastering something vaguely resembling Eastern spiritualism. Finally, Liz returns to Bali to learn at the foot of an aged medicine man, Tutti (Anakia Lapae), but ends up raising enough money to build a home for a single mother, giddily rebuffing the advances of a naked surfer boy, and shacking up with Felipe (Javier Bardem), an exotic, scruffy Brazilian and fellow divorcee.

That the film is visually stunning comes as no surprise given the involvement of Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson. At age 42, Roberts still lights up the screen with her nostalgic mix of radiance and charm. And, as an American expat searching for redemption in India, Richard Jenkins takes his limited screen-time and absolutely walks away with the film, magnificently channeling a man with a Texas lilt and a proud but shattered psyche.

Unfortunately, Eat Pray Love is also as shallow as an episode of director Ryan Murphy’s Glee. The film’s lynchpin is an emotional investment in Liz’s journey. True, many of us (not-so) secretly yearn from time to time to pull the plug on our stifling workaday. But, it is difficult to absorb the greater mystical meaning behind someone lacking financial, health, or family crises (beyond her own making) who just wants to “find herself.” No wonder Oprah Winfrey recommended the memoir to her book club and devoted two episodes of her television show and a whole section of her website to it.

Liz – and Eat Pray Love – presents a life without consequences and calls it real life. What color of wine goes best with that?

Neil Morris

Dear John

After we finish kissing, it's time to hang sheetrock

Grade: C

Director: Lasse Hallström

Starring: Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Jenkins, and Henry Thomas

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

For all their schmaltzy underpinning, two things have always buoyed the movie adaptations of New Bern-based author Nicholas Sparks’ novels. Employing critic’s prerogative first is their North Carolina setting (even if they’re not always filmed in the state). Second is their durable casting, particularly romantic leads that include Kevin Costner and Robin Wright Penn (Message in a Bottle), Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (The Notebook), and Richard Gere and Diane Lane (Nights in Rodanthe).

I will not hold against Dear John that it relocates the book’s Wilmington, N.C., setting to Charleston, S.C., a change probably motivated less by artistic license than variances between the states’ respective film incentive programs. But, the casting of Channing Tatum, the hunky hulk who has mumbled his way through roles in Step Up (1 & 2), She’s the Man, Stop-Loss, and G.I. Joe, is troublesome on its face. The choice becomes downright dire once Tatum is called upon to tiptoe his way through the story’s dense emotional minefield.

While on leave from deployment as an Army Ranger and visiting his father’s beach house, John Tyree (Tatum) meets and falls for Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), a doe-eyed college student whose summer job appears to be relentless do-gooder. She works for Habitat for Humanity! She looks after her friend’s autistic child and want to work with the developmental challenged after graduation! She successfully diagnoses John’s elderly father (Richard Jenkins) as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, apparently something no health professional had ever done judging by John’s shocked reaction!

Dear John goes AWOL as a love story, the typical raison d'être for Sparks’ books/films. Contributing factors include Tatum’s performance, a splintered narrative that constantly veers from South Carolina’s shores to John’s post-9/11 reenlistment and deployment, and director Lasse Hallström’s ponderous direction, which distills John and Savannah’s coupling down to frolicking in the surf, making-out in the rain, and monotonous voiceovers of their overseas letters to each other (eventually including the eponymous missive).

The film’s saving grace is the complicated relationship between John and his father, who Jenkins plays with great skill and pathos. John’s dad loves his son but doesn’t possess the ability to fully express it, while John loves his father but lacks the understanding to cope with his emotional deficits. Their strained bond throws the emotional gut-punch inherent to every Sparks tearjerker. More importantly, it’s also Dear John’s most earnest and reflective segment.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com