Moviegoers hoping that Public Enemies would have been the film to save the summer season from its own worst impulses will be disappointed to learn that the Michael Mann production, while hardly part of the problem, is certainly no solution. A classy motion picture whose individual moments are greater than the whole, this period gangster saga may be filled with exciting gun battles yet can’t deliver the firepower in ways that matter the most: empathy, originality, and a willingness to burrow beneath the legend.
To both my horror and delight — horror because of my general disdain for the Michael Bay oeuvre, delight because of my desire to enjoy every picture I see (contrary to popular belief, film critics don’t enter a theater wanting to hate the movie; what sort of dreary, masochistic career would that make?) — I somewhat dug 2007’s Transformers, writing in my original review that “even folks who wouldn’t know a Transformer from a Teletubby can expect to have a good time” and praising the film for being “decidedly more character-driven than expected” and “balancing action with emotion.” For this, I credited the presence of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who was described in the press notes as being a “hands-on producer” during the making of a film that, in its best moments, recalled the mirth of Spielberg’s own 1980s output. Well, Spielberg must have been on an extended vacation and far away from the set during the making of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.
Making a weepie for mass audiences can’t be that hard: Just place a person in a tragic situation and steer clear of the resultant flood. But making a weepie that doesn’t feel manipulative, exploitive or sloppily sentimental is another matter altogether. With My Sister’s Keeper, an adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s novel, director-cowriter Nick Cassavetes largely succeeds in respecting both his subject matter and his audience.
One of the best films of 2008, director Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road offered a powerful and penetrating study of a bickering couple trapped by the conformity they felt defined — and controlled — their lives. Mendes’ latest picture takes a different tack, examining a loving pair who forge their own path in an attempt to find their place in the world. It’s a nice about-face for the director, even if the results prove to be wildly uneven.
Michelle Pfeiffer has been excellent in all manner of movies, but in such period pieces as The Age of Innocence and Dangerous Liaisons, she has proven to be especially memorable, ably portraying passionate yet stifled women who find themselves as constricted by the mores of society as by the corsets they don under their dresses. In Cheri, the movie itself is the corset, strangling the actress and everything surrounding her until all the breath has been driven out of the material.
THE PROPOSAL
**1/2
DIRECTED BY Anne Fletcher
STARS Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds
After the stereotypical rom-com inanities of 27 Dresses, director Anne Fletcher partially redeems herself — as both an able filmmaker and a progressive woman — with her latest effort, The Proposal. Working with debuting screenwriter Pete Chiarelli, she’s managed to put out a picture that paints its heroine in one-dimensional strokes only part of the time.
True, The Proposal depicts protagonist Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock) in the same manner as most Hollywood flicks (see New in Town for another recent example): Because she’s a career woman, she has no time for friends, lovers, hobbies or, apparently, even a rascally Rabbit (the battery-powered kind, that is). She’s a ruthless, soulless workaholic, and the only reason Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) works as her assistant at a New York publishing house is because he figures it’s a good career move. But when it looks as if Margaret will get shipped back to her Canadian homeland because of an expired visa, it appears as if his future will similarly get derailed. Margaret, though, has a plan: Force Andrew to marry her so that she can remain in the country. He reluctantly agrees, and they spend a long weekend in his Alaskan hometown so she can win over his parents (Mary Steenburgen and Craig T. Nelson) and 90-year-old grandmother (Betty White).
That these two will eventually fall for each other will come as a surprise to absolutely no one — not even your own 90-year-old grandmother — yet the predictability of the plot isn’t a detriment, since the film fits as comfortably around our expectations as a favorite old robe hugs our frame. And while the picture occasionally goes out of its way to make Bullock’s character a ninny, the actress refuses to let the role manhandle her, and she and the ever-charming Reynolds work well together. Furthermore, their characters’ relationship is rare in that it offers an older woman-younger man hookup that’s generally a nonentity in mainstream fare (Bullock’s 44 while Reynolds’ 32) and then goes the extra mile by never making their age difference a running, tittering gag at Margaret’s expense.
Unfortunately, Fletcher and Chiarelli can’t help but go for the easy, imbecilic laugh at several key junctures, and the film even stoops so low as to include one of those cringe-worthy moments in which a person declares his devotion to his beloved in front of a crowd of people — honestly, has this ever happened in real life, or do I simply hang out in the wrong coffeehouses/offices/parks/stores? Still, this Proposal has enough merit to warrant some consideration.
Biblical times were milked for raunchy but riotous laughs in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but the well seems to have run dry when it comes to Year One, a disastrous comedy that’s the cinematic equivalent of an old-fashioned flogging.
As far as documentaries go, Tyson is a crock. Director James Toback is an acknowledged friend of former boxing great Mike Tyson, so for 90 minutes, he turns on his camera and allows the man to speak at length about his troubled life, both in and out of the ring. There are no other participants, no other voices to support or oppose whatever Tyson says — even Toback himself refuses to ask any pressing questions.
One of the many delights tied to the 1974 drama The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is that it’s a New York picture down to its Big Apple core. Between a principal cast comprised almost exclusively by NYC natives (apparently, birth certificates were required at the auditions), screenwriter Peter Stone capturing the colorful colloquialism without lapsing into parody, and director Joseph Sargent never downplaying the grit and grime that defined the city during its most notorious decade, this film-buff favorite benefits as much from its pungency as from its nifty plot in which four men hijack a subway car and holds its passengers for ransom.
The surprising thing about Land of the Lost isn’t that it contains several hearty laughs; the surprising thing is that it contains any laughs at all. After all, Will Ferrell vehicles are increasingly becoming known for their inability to generate honestly earned guffaws, as the comedian generally calls it a day after establishing a slight variation on his idiotic man-child routine and then throwing a couple of on-screen tantrums. Yet the reason this new picture works on occasion is precisely because it isn’t a Will Ferrell movie; rather, it’s a movie that just happens to star Will Ferrell.
