Monday at the Movies - April 6, 2015

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week... well, have a look!

Stranger than Fiction (2006) – Given the very literary quality of this Monday’s film, I’d like to start with an analogy from the realm of the book. They say (and my experience has proven) that every time you read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, you find something new, a clever play with the graphic novel form or an allusion that clicks another cog of the text into coherence. In the way that rereading brings clarity to Watchmen, re-watching Stranger than Fiction sheds an intense light on just how beautiful this movie is. Now, beauty isn’t something upon which I remark often here, but there is something very transcendent about Stranger than Fiction’s interrogation of what makes a life significant. Will Ferrell stars as Harold Crick, a tax auditor whose midlife crisis takes the form of his life being narrated by a novelist (Emma Thompson) prone to killing off her characters. Amid Harold’s attempts to stay alive, he falls in love with anarchist baker Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in what is honestly one of my top ten love stories of all time. The script by Zach Helm is so smart, living up to the metafictional braininess of the concept, and director Marc Forster controls the pace of the film with a grace that was sorely missed in his Quantum of Solace. Ferrell, better known for his often irksome work with the rest of his Frat Pack ilk, gives a wonderfully understated performance here, ostensibly a career-best; he can break your heart with a murmured “Oh...” or lead you to more fulfilling laughter with his subtle quirks than in ten shouty Zoolanders. The supporting cast is a very successful ensemble, including Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah, but there is an overall sense of being in the quiet presence of inconspicuous greatness that I take away from Stranger than Fiction. It very well may be a perfect film, for it has never disappointed me in all the times I’ve come back to it.

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

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.

Monday at the Movies - March 24, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a less than unfortunate flick.

Lemony Snickey’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) – Midway through my recent binge-reading (can this be a thing?) of the thirteen books in the series, I stepped aside for a few hours with the film, which loosely adapts the first three books (The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window).  The film and its source material find the Baudelaire orphans (Emily Browning as inventive Violet, Liam Aiken as bookish Klaus, and their baby sister Sunny) bounced from guardian to guardian after their parents perish in a fire.  The first guardian, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), turns out to be a cad of many costumes; the third, Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) is a paranoid whackadoo ruled by her fears.  In between is the kind herpetologist Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), a character who gets far too little screen time in contrast to his zanier counterparts.  The elephant in the room is Carrey; he’s at his best when he’s restrained (as in The Truman Show), but here his penchant for plasticity plays well with the character’s own fondness for disguises.  Each disguise Count Olaf dons is transparent, but it’s fun to see Carrey step behind Olaf’s theatricality and inhabit these alternate takes on the character (i.e., the meek Stephano or the gruff Captain Sham).  The three Baudelaires are mostly fine, though the film curiously steps away from Violet’s distinctive hair ribbon and Klaus’s definitive glasses.  But one of the most fun bits in the film is what I’ve always held as the cinephile’s true delight – a cast of celebrity cameos, including Streep and Connolly, of course, but also Timothy Spall, Craig Ferguson, and Dustin Hoffman doing his best Stan Lee impression.  Ultimately, the film feels a lot like a Tim Burton film – the best way, I suppose, to describe Snicket’s distinctive prose voice – but as a Burton fan and an admirer of the books, Lemony Snicket’s was engaging enough.  If only the film told us who Beatrice was!

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