Monday at the Movies - June 30, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, we tackle two truly despicable movies.

Despicable Me (2010) – Hardcore Disney snobs like myself often miss out on good animated films from other studios simply as a matter of personal prejudice, and Despicable Me is certainly among those nearly-missed opportunities.  I say “good” and not “great” not because Despicable Me is a disappointment – it isn’t – but it never fully accesses the transcendent quality of, say, an Up or a Toy Story 3.  Instead of striving for exceptionalism, Despicable Me is quite satisfied with telling a rather familiar story; here, sinister supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) finds his heart warming when he involves three adorable orphans in his scheme to steal a shrink ray and, by extension, the moon.  It is a story, as Beauty and the Beast would have it, as old as time, but the filmmakers work to tell a solid rendition of that story.  What they bring to the table – and what I say is ultimately the film’s greatest success – is a cuteness factor that goes up to eleven.  It’s funny that Gru is somewhat sidelined (at least, for this reviewer) in his own movie; I, and I suspect other audience members as well, was more captivated by the pygmy-like yellow jabbering Minions and their setpiece antics.  The scene-stealer, though, is the youngest of the orphans, Agnes (Elsie Fisher), who has a way with both youthful naïveté (mistaking a Cheeto for a caterpillar) and boisterous overexaggeration (“It’s so fluffy, I’m gonna die!”).  Perhaps the reason these two contingents steal center stage is because the main antagonist, voiced by Jason Segel, is neither interesting nor tolerable; consequently, we want to see Gru succeed not on his merits, but rather so we can be shut of Vector and his irksome antics.  Fortunately, the film compensates with an “aww”-inspiring supporting cast.

Despicable Me 2 (2013) – As much as I liked the first film for what it was, I enjoyed the sequel even more because it rectifies the first film’s major sin and continues to spotlight Agnes and the Minions.  Carell is back as Gru, this time contracted by the Anti-Villain League to find a villain who’s stolen a MacGuffin; Gru is partnered with an affable newbie, Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig), while beginning to suspect Mexican restaurateur Eduardo Perez (Benjamin Bratt) of being the former villain El Macho.  By giving Gru a more compelling plotline and a more engaging cast of immediately supporting characters, the film gives Carell more interesting material, which subsequently sharpens his game.  Despicable Me 2, still directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, is acutely aware of what worked in the first film – namely, Agnes and the Minions – and pulls off a remarkably difficult feat:  it’s a sequel with restraint.  Rather than pelt us with overdoses of essentially the same jokes, Coffin & Renaud amplify without deafening.  There are more Minions, yes, but they’re still funny because of the non sequitur nature of their nattering and flair for costuming (personal favorite: “French Maid Minion”).  Ditto for Agnes, who’s still soul-crushingly cute, but now for different reasons than before.  All told, Despicable Me 2 feels more organic, less storytelling-by-numbers than its predecessor, which makes me optimistic about the two forthcoming entries in the franchise.  These aren’t genre-bending films, nor are they tremendously innovative, but don’t mistake their unsophistication for drivel.  Despicable Me 2 is plenty of fun, with a strong additive of cuteness – a solid middle-of-the-road animated film without lofty ambitions but with instead a keen earnestness.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!

Chef (2014)

As much as I love a good big-budget popcorn summer movie, I have the sense that a lot of smaller films are lost amid the explosion-heavy hype surrounding the tentpole franchises and blockbuster features.  Case in point – Chef flew very low under the radar, but those who find it are in for a treat.

Chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) faces a midlife crisis after a social media meltdown against a mean-spirited food critic (Oliver Platt).  On the advice of his ex-wife (Sofia Vergara), Casper seeks true happiness by opening a food truck with his son and his sous chef (John Leguizamo) and embarking on a road trip.

That is, essentially, opening shot to closing shot, a complete synopsis of the film, but it doesn’t seem like a spoiler, and not just because the trailers have given away as much.  Chef feels very much like a film that proceeds along a clear path from the beginning, without a need to try to surprise the audience or pull one over on it.  Instead, Favreau – who also wrote and directed – clearly wants to make a very straightforward film with a very simple message.

For me, knowing that Favreau is wearing every creative hat in the film, it seems like a very authorially guided project, Favreau’s own statement about himself.  What’s interesting to me is the way that Chef reads like a treatise on why Favreau isn’t directing Iron Man movies anymore; like Favreau, Casper attained fame quickly for his indie work before settling into a critically derided routine with “the man,” embodied here by an overbearing Dustin Hoffman who demands sameness from Casper’s menu.  Instead of staying with the lovely Scarlett Johansson (in Chef, a maître d’ seduced by Casper’s prowess in the kitchen), Casper/Favreau breaks off and does his own smaller thing, finding greater success and fulfillment than ever before.

Whether or not Chef is a manifesto on why Favreau has left big-budget Hollywood (for now), Chef is exceptionally entertaining, feel-good in the least derisive sense of the word.  I can honestly say that I had an embarrassingly wide smile on my face for much of the film, even between the punchlines.  That’s because Chef plays like a passion project, which makes the food truck plotline feel very metaphorical – one senses that Chef is Favreau’s food truck.  In fact, it doesn’t seem accidental that the man who sells Casper the truck is played by Robert Downey Jr., in one of the film’s funniest scenes; without the RDJ-sponsored success of Iron Man, we might not have a Chef.

This is all very beneath the surface, and I don’t think the moviegoing public at large are meant to focus on the metaphorical content the way I have.  But it does emphasize the degree to which Favreau’s heart is in the film, an emotional investment that carries over to the audience, who can’t help but fall in love with Casper, whether he’s playing sad sack or genuinely content.  While Favreau has that everyman charisma that one would need for this role, he surrounds himself with a fantastically talented supporting cast of scene stealers who all possess a deft comedic timing that sells lines like “You’re trending, bro.”

Chef is a classic story told very well, without the burden of overwhelming ambition or franchised expectations.  It’s both narratively and literally a back-to-basics piece for Favreau, a kind of (appropriately enough) palate cleanser for him and for the audience.  With an emphasis on simplicity and substance, Chef is a sweet dish wholly recommended for anyone seeking a bit of lighthearted fun at the box office this summer.

Chef is rated R for “language, including some suggestive references.”  There are a surprising number of F-bombs (at least, surprising based on the trailer), though it feels organic for the characters.  There are verbal fisticuffs and an occasional crude remark about romantic partnerships.

Maleficent (2014)

I won’t bury the lead on this one:  Maleficent is not an unwatchable film, but it is colossally disappointing.

And I won’t do the usual plot summary bit here because the plot of the film is essentially a “sympathy for the devil” take on Disney’s 1959 animated Sleeping Beauty, starring Angelina Jolie as the eponymous fairy queen who’s betrayed by the kingdom of men before she curses the young princess Aurora (Elle Fanning).  While this sounds like a prime opportunity to reinvent the story, promising us the version of the fairy tale we hadn’t heard before, Maleficent very much amounts to a pulled punch.

I’ll start with the good news, and it’s probably something you’ve already heard because nearly every film critic agrees:  Jolie is perfectly cast as Maleficent; she does a phenomenal job delighting in her own wickedness, she walks with the grace of a fairy queen, and her delivery captures flawlessly the intonations Eleanor Audley brought to the original.  And there’s a curious moment near the middle of the film where Maleficent restages the curse scene from the original Sleeping Beauty animated film.  I say curious because it is unequivocally one of the best moments in the entire film, and it leads me to wonder why Disney bothered with all the trappings of a retelling and didn’t just opt for a straight remake. 

I hate to be cynical, but frankly this film is aimed at the grungy Hot Topic crowd, who are probably going to love it.  Maleficent is part of Disney’s recent push to reinvent classic films, as with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and the upcoming Kenneth Branagh Cinderella (March 2015), but it’s not as successful as Wonderland was because it never commits to a core idea – or rather, it commits to too many.  Angelina Jolie is so good that her character deserves a better vehicle, one more certain of what it wanted to do with the character.  Either Disney should have given us the true between-the-scenes take on what Maleficent was up to, or it should have given us a truly sympathetic portrait of Maleficent the misunderstood.  Instead, the film tries to give us both, and the result is a film that never fully invests to itself.

It’s a cop-out to boot – either you want us to sympathize with the character or you don’t (or, if you’re Breaking Bad, spend six years exploring that gray area).  The film’s conclusion that Maleficent was both a hero and a villain is, truthfully, an evasion.  You do see the hand of uncredited rewriter Paul Dini here; he famously brought pathos to the backstories of many Batman villains in the early 1990s animated series, though the fact that only Linda Woolverton gets screenwriting credit suggests why Disney’s Maleficent can’t do in 97 minutes what Batman’s “Heart of Ice” did in 20.  (I’m referring, of course, to the definitive rebranding of Mr. Freeze as a tragic villain out to avenge his cryo-frozen wife.)

Honestly, I’m not sure if the bigger problem with the film is a studio that wants to have its fairy cake and eat it too, or if first-time director Robert Stromberg is juggling too much at once.  The film does have a very appealing look, and the shots are very interesting.  The special effects look good, especially the climactic dragon battle.  Interestingly, the film also participates in Disney’s recent trend of rejecting “love at first sight” and backing away from “love conquers all.”  With Frozen and Brave, Maleficent makes three films where the studio offers a self-reflexive critique of its early, easier boy-meets-girl narratives.  The difference is, however, that by now we’ve already seen this new spin, and the film doesn’t really break any new ground on that front.

Maybe I’m just being excessively vitriolic because I haven’t written a truly bad review in a while, and the bile’s built up.  I will say that I’m not sorry to have seen it.  I’m a fantastic Disney shill and will watch just about anything the studio puts out, and although it may not sound like it I truly do not begrudge Maleficent the ninety-plus minutes I spent watching it.  It’s fine for what it is, but it’s impossible to watch the movie and not see snippets of a much grander, more ambitious project.  But, as the film states explicitly, ambition is supposed to be bad, and so the result is a somewhat neutered update on a fairy tale which, this very update proves, didn’t need updating in the first place – at least, not the kind of halfhearted updating we’ve been given.

Maleficent is rated PG for “sequences of fantasy action and violence, including frightening images.”  The scene after Maleficent’s wings are taken is disturbing – many are reading it as a rape metaphor – and some blood is seen on her back.  As for frightening images, there’s nothing scarier than what a conventional Disney film offers; there is some swordfighting, and iron is seen to burn fairies in a few scenes.

22 Jump Street (2014)

We were all caught off guard by 21 Jump Street, which led every cynical filmgoer to scoff at the idea of rebooting the silly premise of a late-80s TV show best known for giving us Johnny Depp.  But retrospectively, these being the same directors behind The Lego Movie, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised.  I don’t think 22 Jump Street is as good as its predecessor, in part because Phil Lord and Christopher Miller don’t quite – and can’t, in fact – surprise us the way they did last time, though it is enough fun and better than your average sequel.

In a bit of meta-commentary, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are reassigned across the street to 22 Jump to “do the same exact thing” – track down a new designer drug – albeit in a college setting this time.  That is essentially the whole plot; Ice Cube returns with a slightly larger role as Captain Dickson, and Peter Stormare plays drug supplier Ghost with his reliable brand of comic menace.

First of all, I will say that 22 Jump Street is very funny.  It’s not as funny as the first one, but it is funny enough.  In fact, interestingly enough, had the first film not been so good, I think 22 Jump Street might have come off better; that is, it suffers only by comparison, which is paradoxically both unfair and (in this case) inevitable.

It’s a comparison that’s made all the more apparent by the film’s central conceit of “do the exact same thing” – and indeed, it is very similar to the first film despite the apparent self-consciousness at play.  This is a very funny gag at first, particularly in a scene in which Nick Offerman’s police chief stands in for studio executives, expressing puzzlement that the first film/case worked as well as it did before sending Hill & Tatum back to the grind.  I say “at first,” however, because this is a clever gimmick that runs out of steam about halfway through the film, after which the writers continue to introduce it with diminishing wit.  I see a lot of film critics falling over themselves to praise this move, but it certainly grows tiresome by the one-hour mark.

Fortunately, 22 Jump Street isn’t predicated solely on satirizing the sequel.  Instead, it wisely remembers that the big success coming out of 21 Jump was the surprise chemistry between Hill and Tatum, and the two continue to play off each other well.  Tatum in particular gives the break-out performance of the film, continuing the simpleton (self-)caricature from the first film but giving Jenko moments of clarity and self-awareness.  His are some of the funniest scenes in the film, particularly his well-timed delayed reaction to a key revelation, though Ice Cube is still the key scene stealer with his boisterous delivery and clear disdain for the protagonists.

There is, ultimately, not much else to say about 22 Jump Street.  It’s not better than the first one, which is, to be fair, a rather tough act to follow.  It is, however, better than most comedy sequels, which often merely replicate the success of the original.  But I don’t think the difference between 22 Jump and sequels like The Hangover: Part II is simply down to self-awareness.  22 Jump Street is actually quite funny in its own right, even divorced from its predecessor.  It only becomes something less by comparison, and while I’m still not sure if it’s fair to judge a movie “by comparison” I do know for a fact that I had enough fun with 22 Jump that I can recommend it, especially for fans of the original.

22 Jump Street is rated R for “language throughout, sexual content, drug material, brief nudity and some violence.”  F-bombs abound, as does talk about “hooking up” and the like.  The premise of the film revolves around a new mystery drug, which causes characters to “trip” in a very cartoony sequence.  There is gunplay, explosions, and some blood, but I don’t recall any nudity (nor does IMDb’s Parents Guide).

Come back on Thursday for a look at Disney’s latest, Maleficent!

The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

The Fault in Our Stars is the latest film adaptation of a wildly popular young adult novel, and while that all may sound tiresome, Josh Boone’s adaptation of John Green’s text thankfully departs from what you’re expecting both by avoiding the impulse to franchise and by crafting itself eloquently and movingly.

Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), whose thyroid cancer has settled into her lungs, falls in love with fellow support group attendee Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a one-legged survivor of osteosarcoma.  The two fall in love “the way you fall asleep – slowly, then all at once” and bond over Hazel’s favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction.  Soon, they travel with Hazel’s mother (Laura Dern) to Amsterdam to meet the author, Peter van Houten (Willem Dafoe).

What most people will have heard about the film is that it is an unabashed tearjerker.  It is, in fact, the weepiest film since About Time.  The target audience is, apparently, young adults, but don’t be deceived by where the publishing house had slotted the book; the filmmakers are emotional snipers who take aim at the heartstrings of anyone in the audience.  And based on the screening I saw, I suspect that this is one of those “not a dry eye in the house” films.

The Fault in Our Stars is a film about teenagers with cancer, and in a sense a teary audience is a bit like fish in a barrel.  What sets Fault apart from the Lifetime movie-of-the-week version of this story is that the emotions the film engenders really do feel earned.  This is something to which I’ve given a lot of thought – why does a film like this work so well when we’re (or at least, I am) immediately aware that we’re about to be manipulated emotionally?  Part of this, I think, has to do with the way the film frames itself; Hazel tells us repeatedly that hers is the only accurate story about cancer (An Imperial Affliction aside), which sets us on her side quite instantaneously, especially because the entire film is told from her perspective.

The bigger reason that Fault works, ultimately, is that it’s very well told.  Rather than rely on the “kids with cancer” crutch, Boone gives us a pair of very engaging star-crossed lovers in Woodley and Elgort.  Woodley’s gotten a fair bit of press for headlining the Divergent series (though critics seemed less enamored of it), but I do hope that this right here is a star-making performance (gosh, how many “star” puns can I come up with?) because Woodley is for a book reader a definitive Hazel Grace.  She captures all the snarky charm Green gave her, but she’s able to switch on the audience’s waterworks with a well-placed choke in her voice.

To be honest, I did have my reservations about Elgort.  I’d never seen him before, and Augustus Waters is a very difficult character to get just right.  His dialogue can come off as stilted, though this is entirely the point, but Elgort sells lines like “I reject that out of hand” by giving us an Augustus perfectly in line with Hazel’s assessment of him at a picnic near the film’s end.  He’s charming, and the audience falls in love with him when Hazel does.

The nice treat in the film is Willem Dafoe’s turn as the disaffected writer for whom Hazel and Augustus share a fondness.  (He’s also a welcome inclusion for parents or significant others who feel dragged to the film, but that’s neither here nor there.)  Now, Hazel and Augustus travel halfway across the world to meet him in what feels very much like the center of the film, though it’s a scene that doesn’t behave exactly like you would expect.  I’ll try not to spoil things – though I suspect that the kind of people who care about spoilers have already read the book – but putting this scene squarely in the middle of the narrative tells us something important about what I think Green’s endgame is.  Ultimately, I think the film speaks to Louis CK’s line about death; he says, “Lots of things happen after you die—they just don’t involve you.”  Van Houten is one of those things; Laura Dern’s role as the mother is another.  Now, again, this isn’t spoiling anything, but the film is such a heavy meditation on death (“oblivion is inevitable”) that I think it offers something equally poignant about what is left behind – about living in the face of death.

The obvious counter to the threat of death is the promise of memory, and the film is able to end optimistically because of that note.  I think that audiences too will remember this film in a way that we don’t necessarily remember bigger, bloatier franchised young-adult books-to-films like Twilight or The Hunger Games.  Self-contained and infinitely compassionate, The Fault in Our Stars is a fine change of pace from the big blockbuster films of the summer, so pack a tissue or two.

Okay?

The Fault in Our Stars is rated PG-13 for “thematic elements, some sexuality and brief strong language.”  As a movie about teens with cancer, the feels are at eleven, and these “thematic elements” will make you cry.  There’s heavy contemplation about death and the scars cancer leaves behind; the film has a very cheer-worthy F-bomb.  There are two make-out scenes, one played for laughs and the other a very intimate encounter in which clothing is removed but nothing is exposed.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow is literally Groundhog Day with space aliens; more accurately, it’s Groundhog Day meets Aliens, right down to the inclusion of Bill Paxton and a kickass female lead in a robotic suit.  It’s a fine popcorn film, engaging without any real dead spots and bankable in the best Tom Cruise tradition.

Cruise stars as Major Bill Cage, a military spokesman who is shanghaied into service on the front lines of a conflict between humanity and the invading “Mimic” aliens.  His first day of combat goes disastrously, but his newfound ability to “reset the day” and travel back in time brings him to legendary soldier Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt), who trains him to become a better fighter and take advantage of his time traveling powers to end the war.

Regardless of what one makes of Tom Cruise personally, the man is one of Hollywood’s more reliable action heroes.  His recent work has been consistently entertaining, due in large part to his charismatic on-screen personality.  Here that quintessential Cruise persona gets inverted a bit; when we first meet Cage, he is essentially a deserter, more at home selling a war than fighting it.  Cruise plays these early scenes very well, and he does a comparably good job with Cage’s transformation into a battle-hardened soldier.

In some ways, though, he’s still playing a version of Tom Cruise.  Don’t get me wrong – I very much like that character (he was plenty of fun in the underrated Jack Reacher), but it’s not really news.  What Edge of Tomorrow does give us that we haven’t seen a dozen times before is the commanding performance of Emily Blunt as the “Angel of Verdun.”  It’s a performance that does recall Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, especially with the mechanical exoskeleton iconography.  It’s not, however, a metaphor for her own resilience as was the case in Aliens; instead, Blunt humanizes Rita and saves her from the worst fate of all – the stereotypical romantic subplot.  And honestly, thank God – where Groundhog Day relegated Andie MacDowell (also playing a Rita – coincidence?) to the object of Bill Murray’s desire, Edge of Tomorrow flips that and gives us a hard-as-nails woman who is uninterested in Cruise’s amorous affection for her.  It helps that she’s incredibly immersed in the role, which could make its own successful feature in and of itself.

The film is surprisingly funny, which will definitely bring up those Groundhog Day vibes, and it’s to director Doug Liman’s credit that the film never feels uneven in that regard.  What holds it back from being a truly great film and restricts it to the province of popcorn blockbuster is that a lot of the film does feel somewhat undercooked.  We have two very compelling protagonists, but the villains are a bit underdeveloped; aside from a neat and original look, they’re really only there to fill the antagonist quota.  We don’t know what they want or why they’re on earth, which wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that the film reminds us a few times that these questions are lingering.

Similarly, the members of J Squad (the military troop into which Cruise is drafted) aren’t very well crafted, functioning mostly as bodies when in combat and comic relief when not.  There’s value in comedy in the midst of a war film – see above for the unexpected humor in the film – but there are a few jokes that don’t feel earned and especially a few deaths in the supporting cast that never quite resonate because a) you’ve seen them die plenty of times before in rejected timelines, and b) you have to remind yourself, “Okay, they said he died, but which one was he again?”

All of this is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is a bad film.  It’s at worst serviceable and at best a fun and entertaining flick that does enough things right to justify its own existence.  If I had to do it over again, I would.

Edge of Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and brief suggestive material.”  There are a lot of military combat sequences between armored humans and tentacled alien monsters, though they’re closer to the frenetic shaky-cam of video games than the brutal gore of Saving Private Ryan.  We see one bare bottom, Tom Cruise gets a rather funny three-quarters of an F-bomb, and a suggestive pick-up line (more of a shrug, really) is quickly and mercifully defused.

Check back on Thursday when The Cinema King assesses The Fault in Our Stars!

Goldeneye (1995)

There is a distinct sense with Goldeneye, even more so than in For Your Eyes Only and Licence to Kill, that the filmmakers are declaring quite emphatically, “All right, enough kidding around, here’s your James Bond for the modern era.”  Third time’s a charm – Goldeneye is an unqualified success, arguably one of the better Bond films in the franchise.

In a distinctly post-Soviet era, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) finds himself butting heads with the new M (Judi Dench) while the Janus syndicate steals military-grade weaponry as part of a revenge plot undertaken against Britain by Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) and the lethal Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen).  But for Bond, this one is personal – Trevelyan was once his partner, the presumed dead 006.

Nearly everything about this film screams “New Direction,” and looking back on it I’m finding it difficult to say bad things about it.  You know I like to get the bad news out of the way first – and I don’t want to call Goldeneye a perfect movie just yet, because as good as it is it still isn’t that distillation of quintessential Bond that Goldfinger was – but there’s really not bad news to be given here, other than perhaps the fact that the soundtrack is a little dated, a very clear artifact of the mid-90s action movie boom.

But other than that, it’s a rousing smash of a film, exuberantly entertaining and all in a very rightly earned show-offy kind of way.  It reinvents a number of wheels, most successfully the arrival of a female M, played brilliantly by Judi Dench.  Dench brings all that classic Judi Dench-y quality, for lack of a better term – she’s spirited and confident, taking none of Bond’s chauvinistic attitude and even turning it around on him in one of the more memorable speeches in the franchise.

Bond himself gets a new coat of paint here, and I’m not just referring to the new lead actor.  Brosnan is impeccable in his first outing as Bond, completely nailing a more human characterization without sacrificing any of the secret agent’s notable tongue-in-cheek nature.  Indeed, Brosnan finds a fantastic middle ground between Timothy Dalton’s sturm and Roger Moore’s drag, ladling on the innuendo without feeling like he’s breaking character to do so.

The most remarkable thing about Goldeneye is the quality of action setpieces, which could make or break a Bond film.  Fortunately, the ones in Goldeneye are all memorable, very entertaining, and most importantly relevant to the plot.  Director Martin Campbell makes these scenes very personal, keeping the camera tight in and snapping out for perspective; the fact that there’s little digital fakery only makes the film more appealing.  Easily the standout sequence is the chase through St. Petersburg, in which the villain drives a getaway car while Bond pursues in a tank.  It’s an idea that doesn’t work on paper, but it’s executed in a very clever way that never gives a campy wink to the audience about the sheer impossibility of the feat.  Instead, we’re allowed to revel in the sheer fun of it, right down to the beat when Bond straightens his tie.

It’s a moment that tells us so much about Brosnan’s Bond.  He’s able to do insanely cool things and look damned good while doing them.  It’s an apt way to describe Goldeneye itself, because it is one of the best Bond films in the canon, certainly the best in a long while in the history of this review series.  Bond really is back, and golly are we glad to have him.

Goldeneye is rated PG-13 for “a number of sequences of action/violence, and for some sexuality.”  By this point, we know what to expect from a James Bond movie – lots of explosions and gunfire, mostly bloodless.  Bond beds three women, and the villain makes leering remarks at one of them; the lead female villain kills men with her thighs, and Bond nearly kills the audience with some really heavy innuendoes.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) on July 7, 2014! 

Monday at the Movies - June 2, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two takes on Tennessee Williams!

Blue Jasmine (2013) – Woody Allen is nothing if not prolific, but the sheer volume of his work often means that every film can’t be a success.  Blue Jasmine – Allen’s post-recession take on A Streetcar Named Desire – is, however, a triumph; in fact, it’s probably his best in at least a decade.  In a powerhouse performance, Cate Blanchett stars as the eponymous Jasmine, at wit’s end after the imprisonment and death of her too-big-to-fail husband (Alec Baldwin).  To cope with her fall from grace, Jasmine lives part-time in a fantasy world while moving in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) and her boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale).  As this iteration’s Blanche Dubois, Blanchett puts the “pathos” back into “pathetic” and more than earns her Oscar; her Jasmine is scattered and schizophrenic, slipping between realities while never failing to tell the audience which version of the world she’s actually experiencing – her own or the real one.  The supporting cast, too, is very potent in this one; Louis CK turns up for a bumbling note of levity, Baldwin as Jasmine’s husband is more important to the story than Blanche’s ever was, and the decision to split the Stanley figure in two – Cannavale’s Chili and Andrew Dice Clay’s Augie.  This gives us a fuller sense of Ginger, liberated from a reductionist “Stanley bad” approach that might be encouraged by Brando’s thuggish performance.  For those who think the filmmaker has lost his touch, this is a fine example of Allen’s late style, contemplative and sobered.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) – Look, every now and again, I review a movie where all I can do is point to the decades of preexisting critical consensus and add little more to the discussion than to say, “Yeah, what they said.”  Case in point:  Elia Kazan’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play is nothing short of iconic.  While watching this tour de force rendition of the fall of Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) in the home of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), one feels distinctly that one is in the presence of a greatness which more than lives up to its reputation.  Every note-perfect beat in the film strikes a resonant chord with the audience, be it Leigh’s fragile beauty or the frankly inspired decision to film in black-and-white.  And when it comes to Brando’s mumbling hulk Stanley, you’re talking nothing short of definitive; he performs as though Williams’s pen had literally given birth to Stanley, fully formed like Athena from the foamy scalp of Zeus.  Readers of the playscript will be forgiven for thinking this is anyone’s show but Stanley’s, for he is everything you could want from a Stanley.  Kazan’s direction cements the place of the film in cinema history; his directorial sensibility lends a tragic inevitability to the proceedings, such that Stanley’s line “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning” becomes the distressing centerpiece to the play.  But the film, subject to the Hays Code, contains a slightly tweaked ending, a nuanced gesture toward a moral universe, which makes the film a distinctly unique experience when compared to the play.  It’s not Williams’s ending, that’s for sure – but it does make the film, in the final analysis, a masterpiece by Kazan.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, but come back on Saturday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!