Movie Review: Leatherheads

As the timing goes, so goes the comedy. Timing is, of course, important for any sort of film, but in comedies it assumes a role of such prominence that the success of the entire piece is dependent upon it. An unlikely character is pardonable; poor action choreography is of no moment; we can even forgive a distracted and unfocused plot, but if the comedic pace is off the comedy simply cannot be successful. In Leatherheads, George Clooney’s third directorial effort, there are sporadic moments where the project works, but these are islands in an ocean, and they grow sparser as the movie progresses.

It takes place in 1925, at a time when the popularity of football was centered around the college game. Jimmy ‘Dodge’ Connelly (George Clooney) is the de facto captain of a professional football team from Duluth, Minnesota, an impecunious squad which must forfeit a game because it does not have money to provide a second game ball when the first is stolen. They travel from blue collar Midwest town to blue collar Midwest town, drying their laundry by hanging it outside the train as they go, changing destinations if their next opponent goes bankrupt in the middle of the week. In an effort to achieve greater financial stability for the league, Connelly recruits a young Princeton star, Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to play for the team. But Lexie Littleton, played by Renee Zellweger, is a reporter who has been hired to try and uncover an embarrassing secret in Carter’s military service, and when she begins to travel with the team, Connelly and Rutherford both begin to fall for her.

As a football player, the smooth and handsome George Clooney is miscast. His character is a forty-something football veteran who has made a living for years doing little else. When his Duluth team temporarily disbands and he seeks employment, he comes face to face with the reality that he has no skills or education to make him attractive to an employer. And yet, this uneducated Midwestern football player, who gets in multiple fist fights during the course of the movie, is oh so smooth with Ms. Littleton, master of the frank look and the tilted head, the slight caress to the chin before his soft lips brush hers. No French noble was ever more debonair. My grandfather played semi-professional football for a blue collar Midwest city back in the 1920’s and I can tell you that this is not how he wooed his women. Nor, to judge from his stories, did his teammates operate anyway similar.

There is more than just Clooney’s effete charm that feels out of place. The radio announcers sound like they are working for ESPN, for instance. I have heard old time radio broadcasts and the cadences and rhythms and vocal tones of these men sound nothing like what one hears today. A couple hours with some archival tapes might have helped to add some authenticity to the picture.

The football action isn’t impressive either, not that this distinguishes the movie from any other football movie I’ve ever seen, but it would be nice for once to see a football movie in which the director was less interested in rigidly composing the action of a play to the point where it feels stilted and the camera interferes with the flow. Why not just line the boys up and let them play some football with the cameras rolling? This would have the added benefit of cutting down on plays which one sees two or three times in a season but in the movie one sees with a frequency that makes them boring.

But these are small complaints. A bit more problematic is the script itself, which often has trouble choosing a story to pursue and leaving many in their incipient stages. In the beginning of the movie some ado is made of a new recruit from high school that will be joining their team at the next train stop. It turns out that the teenager is a whale of a man and capable of beating the snot out of anyone who comes near him. But after this introduction, his importance in the movie is reduced to appearing in the background during some of the games. One wonders what the point was of spending time introducing him. There are a couple distracting scenes which seem to have been filmed simply because they were opportunities for slap stick comedy, not because any role they play in bringing us to the third act. And the third act itself is less satisfying than it might be because the various threads of plot are not brought together in a last madcap rush of adrenaline, but rather fizzle out one by one. The end of the second act, to the extent that I am even confident I know when this occurs, doesn’t leave one yearning for the third as it should, tingling with anticipation.

A comedy can survive, however, with a middling story if the scenes are funny enough. The Good Lord knows that Monty Python’s Meaning of Life is not as good as its predecessors, largely due to a wandering script with little cohesion between scenes, but many of the individual scenes themselves are hysterical. Leatherheads has moments when it is amusing in a charming and clever way – mainly when Clooney and Zellweger are interacting – but all too often the right notes just aren’t hit at the right tempo. And not enough hay is made with the different characters’ objectives, which are at cross purposes with the others, nor with all the deceit and trickery in which they might have engaged.

Worst of all, the movie can’t – or perhaps it is more correct to say refuses – to keep its momentum going. For all the other irritations, the worst part is when Carter’s back story, whose culmination is premature, deviates into some sort of government-worshipping morality tale when Congress assigns a commissioner to the professional league – something which, as far as I can tell, is entirely fictional – who starts to impose order on the affairs. What would we poor folk do without a government? The commissioner immediately imposes rules, licenses the players – God forbid that people start playing football without bureaucratic say-so! – and with a threatening stare and a tough-guy voice begins to generally throw his weight around. In a scene which flattens the momentum – a scene devoid of the quick banter that provided the most humorous moments – the story slows down so that the tough guy can deliver a lecture and, one cannot help but feel, so that Mssr. Clooney can lecture us a little as well. It was far too serious, too slow and too preachy for the movie in which it appeared.

For all that’s wrong with it, however, it still has its charm. Zellweger and Clooney have some very good moments filled with snappy dialogue, and Randy Newman’s score is the perfect compliment to the picture; indeed, his score is what the movie should have been: relentlessly lighthearted, brisk, old-fashioned and too caught up with having fun to slow down and get serious. Maybe Newman should have composed the score first and the script could have been written, and the scenes shot, while the artists listened to it on their IPods.

Final Grade: C+

Movie Review: Vantage Point

Perhaps more so than other hobbyists and enthusiasts, the cinephile must brace himself for disillusionment, which comes to him more frequently than parallel disappointments do to fans and dabblers in other fields. It is not that a football fan does not frequently suffer, but he does not see his expectations so recurrently shattered. A football fan, or fan of any sport, if he is moderately knowledgeable, does not often see his predictions proved grossly inaccurate. If he believes his team a championship contender, and they instead finish 10-2, he has suffered only two true disappointments in twelve games, a pace which any lover of movies envies, for the lover of movies is plagued by the preview.

Even an experienced and circumspect moviegoer cannot completely inoculate himself from heartbreak and letdown, for the artful editor, in selecting certain shots and moments that run no more than a couple minutes out of a movie that may last hours, has fashioned a deceptive trailer. In all but the most lopsided of football games, a losing team is yet able to cobble together intermittent moments of competence and even artistry. The losing team nearly always scores, and only rarely does the winning team never punt the ball, or at least fumble or suffer a sack. The difference is that the football fan of the losing team has not been shown these bright moments beforehand to the exclusion of everything else, whereas the wretched cinephile, no matter his cynicism, must yield at least a little to the enticements of a trailer. These repeated disappointments are exacerbated by the fact that when a movie disappoints, the entire theater suffers, whereas when a football team underachieves the other contingent of fans is happy. There is a guarantee of balance in football, but in cinema, when a movie is a disaster, only the director’s ex-wife rejoices.

Which brings us to Vantage Point. Advertisements for this particular flick have been around for a very long time by the standards of the industry. We have seen a solid cast assembled and the premise is alluring. The shots we have glimpsed were competently taken. No big name director was at the helm but the project, having passed through the filter of a trailer, had come out looking as if it had originated from a good movie. It is your humble blogger’s duty, as critic, to slice away the mendacity of advertising and expose what could not pass through the filter.

Set in the current political climate but linked to no specific year or administration, the story takes place in Salamanca, Spain, on the occasion of a visit by the president of the United States. As Secret Servicemen take the scene and news crews record it, the president arrives at the Plaza Mayor to give a speech, but an assassination attempt followed by bomb explosions derail the proceedings. From the vantage point of several different characters, we view and review the event nearly to the limits of human endurance.

If a single flaw in the movie were to be cited which no amount of excellence in other aspects of filmmaking could overcome, it would be the very structure of the story. No fewer than seven times that I can recall, a storyline progressed to the threshold of the climax only to freeze, rewind, and finally start again at the beginning from a different vantage point. This very soon grows tedious and quickly passes from tediousness to a point where the viewer simply stares in tumescent disbelief that the filmmakers are going to make us sit through the same scene yet again.

Sadly, the structure of the film is not its only impediment to pleasure. It suffers from such an earnest proclivity for the dramatic that it sweeps aside realism in its pursuit, crossing characters with improbable coincidence, or giving them absurd behavior in order to place them in more precarious circumstances. Sometimes realism is eschewed for no better excuse than what I take to be rank laziness, and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. The procedures and protocols of the Secret Service, for instance, do not strike one as thoroughly fleshed out and genuine. In the Line of Fire, whether or not it was well researched, at least convinced one ignorant of such matters that it had been. Vantage Point does no such convincing. The crowd in the Plaza Mayor is full of faces that seem suspiciously New World, lacking the classic Castilian features, and the bits of Spanish that are tossed about often have a decidedly Latin American accent, excepting, of course, actor Eduardo Noriega. One character is magically teleported to a distant part of the city so that a scene of poignant reuniting may take place. The worst of it is to be witnessed in the president’s hotel suite, where the commander in chief and his advisers carry on in such a juvenile manner that one marvels at the puerility of the mind that conceived it.

When the seemingly interminable rewinds and replays are finally finished, ninety percent of the climactic scene is taken up by a car chase. It is the same car chase that the good reader saw last week, which was the same car chase he saw the week before and the week before that. But for the quicker cuts and more mobile camera it was the same car chase he saw in 1985. I have reached a point where, no matter its incongruity with the established character of the villain, rather than lead the hero on another dull, high velocity/multiple impact car chase, if no fresh and interesting perspective on vehicular pursuit can be found, I would prefer that he simply hand over the keys, turn himself in and end the movie a few minutes sooner. If the hero is the one being pursued, then he should allow himself to be shot and his offspring can catch the villain in the sequel.

One last flaw I will expound and then leave off, with the understanding that the enumeration of certain defects in the movie shall not be construed as denying or disparaging other defects contained in it. This last shortcoming is the entire terrorist enterprise, which is so grand in scale, so intricate in execution and so dependent upon a variety of players from a myriad of backgrounds that a credible explanation for how such an endeavor could be undertaken is quite simply an obligation on the part of the storytellers. There is nothing wrong with a fantastic conspiracy, even if it breaks through the bounds of what could reasonably occur in real life, so long as the filmmakers demonstrate how it might plausibly be put together. Such a demonstration would not only alleviate incredulity but could prove quite interesting in and of itself. Failing that, leave it in mystery. Don’t show us who carried it out, or at least not all of them. Don’t fill in all the details; leave the audience with the chill of unfulfilled suspicion. Make the investigation only a partial victory or, better yet, no victory at all. I merely offer some suggestions for when the movie is remade in 2032.

Final Grade: D+

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Uwe Boll makes movies. This is beyond dispute as ample evidence for it has been offered up on several occasions. What is lacking is a sufficient explanation as to why he makes movies, or rather, why other men not involuntarily committed to an asylum read his scripts, put the necessary capital at his disposal to film them, distribute the results and then, contrary to all sense and decency, repeat all three steps of the process when experience should have made them wiser. I suppose that Uwe can no more be blamed for seizing the opportunity to make movies than Lyle Lovett can be blamed for seizing Julia Roberts in a lustful embrace of connubial bliss. But what does the other party get out of the arrangement?

I have heard that loopholes in German tax laws make it easy for someone so inclined to raise money for a movie. This may be true, but it still does not elucidate the conundrum. There are eighty million German citizens, give or take, the loopholes in the laws presumably apply equally to them all and yet the money finds its way specifically to Uwe’s projects and does so with regularity. A brief touch of the hand to a hot stove will so impress the careless cook that such an event becomes unlikely to repeat itself. Why, then, does viewing an Uwe Boll movie not provide the same sort of corrective to producers?

Dr. Boll, for so he demands to be addressed, has recently labored to produce In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. It does not differ from his other movies by so much that my critique of it, if we expunge the specific details, could not serve as a perfectly accurate appraisal of everything he has ever done. Every film from him is the same bewildering waste of time, as entertaining as a hippopotamus trying to dance ballet and for the same reasons. It is true that he does have some sense of story structure, but this is no more significant than remarking that the burger-flipper at the local fast food restaurant has some sense of the structure of the human body. Ask him to draw it and you will probably get a good representation of Uwe’s storytelling skills translated to visual art. He also manages to take some shots that one might see in a greater work, just as a foreign student, after his first English class, might grab a dictionary and scribble onto paper the words that he sees there. Missing is any indication that the soul and significance of the words are felt and understood, as well as any coherence between them. It is not that Uwe Boll is a bad director; the plain fact is that Uwe Boll is not a director at all. Yes, he directs movies, but this no more makes him a director than chewing on grass and wearing a bell would make me a cow.

Shall I summarize the plot? As best as I care to remember it was this: Evil orcs (called Krugs in the movie), attack a town, led by a traitor from within the walls of the king’s castle. Farmer, played by Jason Statham, loses his family either to death or enslavement and vows revenge while the king searches for warriors to swell the ranks of his army so that he may fight the Krugs. Hilarity ensues.

I found it amusing to reflect on some of the potentially controversial revisionist history implied by the movie. Of course it was an accident of incompetence much like the likeness of Abraham Lincoln is an accident of the wind pushing at the cumulus clouds, but for the imaginative mind it is there all the same. For instance, medieval farmers’ parents had homes in the suburbs on real estate overlooking the sea. Their wives properly moisturized their skin and conditioned their hair. Africans served as soldiers in medieval, European style armies – officers so as not to offend modern politically correct sensibilities but nothing too central to the story so as not to be intrusive. And of course, a theme whose like is repeated in most bad action movies: medieval farmers, with no other training than that they get from the time they spend with hoes and ploughs, are warriors of the most fearsome sort.

Apart from a good belly laugh, there is but one modestly valuable result of watching such a flick: filled as it is with actors of some name, the movie gives us a good chance to gauge the real ability of these actors based on how much of their dignity they lose by participating in this project. In other words, how many of them are simply extroverts with a little screen presence who have been getting by through the simple artifice of portraying themselves on screen, and how many are truly actors and to what degree? By this metric, we can say that John Rhys-Davies is an actor of no small ability. Burt Reynolds gets his hair mussed a touch but otherwise comes out alright. Jason Statham makes out OK, but his character is lifted from all the other movies he has done, the laconic and surly warrior which makes only small demands on the thespian. Kristanna Loken has a similarly undemanding role, escapes similarly unscathed but for the same reasons fails to impress. Ron Perlman could have done much worse; Matthew Lillard does. One feels a sympathetic embarrassment for Leelee Sobieskie and Claire Forlani.

But the most outstanding actor of them all, outstanding in the sense that he stands out, like a gigantic white-headed zit on the tip of a nose, is Ray Liotta. Ray Liotta is a great buffoon on stilts on roller blades. The effect of his acting is much the same as that of a bullfrog singing first tenor. I’m rather inclined to recommend it, actually, but only on those nights when the humdrum day has left one with an appetite for the other extreme, for something so absurd that the sheer weight of its ridiculousness balances the scales. In this respect, Ray Liotta is a tiny representation of the entire movie; the Boll actor par excellence.

However, it must be mentioned that In the Name of the King has perhaps the best closing credits in cinema history. This is not attributable to the relief that the end of the movie brings, nor to any inherent cleverness in the credits themselves, but rather to the three songs played during it. As a fan of European Heavy Metal, I was rather pleased to hear Blind Guardian and Hammerfall playing as the names of those who forgot to tell the editor they did not want credit for the movie passed by. Uwe Boll, in a feat as improbable as his fundraising, managed to keep me in the seat to the very end of the credits, much as if I had just finished my first viewing of Schindler’s List but, again like the fundraising, for entirely different reasons than one would normally expect.

Final Grade: D-

Cloverfield

Cloverfield has many times been described as Godzilla meets The Blair Witch. Having seen the movie, I can attest that the description is spot on and, with few words, does a great job of conveying what it is like to watch it. Indeed, I have the feeling that a hundred independent viewers with no foreknowledge of the project would have each come up with the same phrase to describe it. The question remains, however, whether Cloverfield is a cheesy flop of a monster picture or if, more like The Blair Witch, it is a somewhat shallow but intense and thrilling ride for that demographic which appreciates this sort of thing.

The plot is simple and the story is short. A party is thrown for a young professional, Rob Hawkins played by Michael Stahl-David, about to move to Japan. He is falling in love with a girl, Beth McIntyre played by Odette Yustman, but has withdrawn of late because of the anticipated move. When she comes to the party with another man they have an argument and she leaves. Then the behemoth creature arrives and Rob, getting a voice mail from Beth in great distress, decides to cross town on foot, with the monster rampaging around, to try and save her. The entire story is told from the point of view of the same in situ camera.

I thought the movie a definite success, an intense roller coaster that leaves one exhilarated, dizzy and a touch nauseous. Like The Blair Witch, the camera is jumpy and, on the big screen, merciless. As much as the intent is to overwhelm the viewer, I think it might actually be more enjoyable on DVD, where the family room TV is less apt to provoke such queasiness. But when one can summon the will to look at the screen, the movie captivates.

The nighttime shots and the city sets make for a great atmosphere. There are no memorable characters, but the director and writer take enough time and care in introducing them, and evoke a pleasant mood with the party, so that we are well disposed towards them when they find themselves in peril. The situation becomes more engrossing in proportion as the bits of news filter down to the stunned people of Manhattan. Half the attraction of the film is the contrast of the mammoth proportions of the crisis and all its attendant effects recklessly spinning and interweaving about the island, most of them only implied, imagined or at most briefly glimpsed, with the smaller but omnipresent perspective of the main characters.

The movie is too short for a great number of adventures, but the few they experience along the way are gripping and increasingly extraordinary. Despite how fantastic the adventures become, they are at all times well founded in realism. The behavior of the characters is generally believable – no one, for instance, suddenly reveals unlikely prowess in battle – and the laws of physics are either obeyed or at least not broken to the extent that a moderately skeptical layman must become incredulous. This authenticity, in my opinion, gives the movie a certain integrity that many lack, and makes the adventures more compelling.

The movie does have its little faults, to be sure. Given the situation, Hud, the doofus who spends most of the time holding the camera, makes too many humorous remarks, remarks whose humor escapes his character but not the audience. There are times, after all, when even a doofus must sober up. The other actors, capable enough of portraying young urban professionals at a party, are at times taxed beyond their abilities by the more emotional sequences, but they miss convincing us by only a small amount. The decision of one of the military men ,in light of what occurred in New Orleans, is not authentic. But my complaints are small in number and light in impact.

One scene taken with another, it is a very good way to start 2008. I hope it’s not the best that cinema will offer us this year, but if once per month something of equal value comes to the silver screen I shall consider it a good year.

Final Grade: B+

El Orfanato (The Orphanage)

The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, in keeping with his penchant for Spanish stories with Spanish actors, has assumed the role of producer for The Orphanage (El Orfanato). A horrific tale of ghosts in a spooky house, it is just the sort of movie you would expect to interest Sr. del Toro. Though lacking the touches of color and imagination that are characteristic of his own works, the movie’s direction feels less awkward and the resulting average makes for a similar grade.

Set in Spain, the movie is about a couple and their adopted son who move back to the orphanage where the heroine spent much of her youth. Laura (Belén Rueda) and her spouse Carlos (Fernando Cayo) have plans to take in a few orphans at some point in the future, but a horror movie’s plot will not permit such idyllic dreams without protest. First, Laura’s son begins talking to invisible friends and insists they are real. Next, like clockwork, strange occurrences beset the family, occurrences which become increasingly harder to explain through rational means. The heroine eventually, of course, becomes convinced that there is a supernatural explanation and her spouse, of course, stubbornly refuses to countenance such nonsense. She throws herself into an investigation and he begins to withdraw from the affair.

There is never any question in the moviegoer’s mind that supernatural events are indeed transpiring. This does not give anything away that is not felt almost immediately and confirmed soon thereafter. Rare is the ghost story which wraps up with a perfectly natural explanation, or at least leaves us with an ambiguous ending, but it seems to me that The Orphanage could have left us with a bit of doubt through Act I at least. Instead, there are obvious clues which leave no room for a natural cause. Perhaps I have simply seen too many of this sort of movie, but the moments that are supposed to give us goose bumps feel expected and habitual. Naturally she will see footprints where none should be found; of course objects will be moved when none but one of the invisible friends could have done it. I haven’t read the manual of horror writing, but I have seen enough of its products to be able to turn out a close approximation.

Though The Orphanage does not revolutionize the genre, it does manage to achieve some authentic thrills. There is a séance – there must be a séance! – but at least the ceremony is reasonably unique and the filmmakers are judicious in what they show us and what they leave to our imagination. And the moment when the heroine makes contact with some of the spirits through a children’s game is effective enough to chill even when we know exactly what is going to happen.

The actors perform well as forgettable characters in undistinguished roles. But for a bit of back story, the heroine is interchangeable with characters from the majority of other horror movies (truly exceptional roles have always been less abundant than actors capable of filling them). The other characters are flat and cliché: for instance the man who introduces the heroine to the medium Balaban (Edgar Vivar) and the medium herself speak with foreign accents. Apparently, in Spain, like America, arcane knowledge of another world must come from another country. With what accent do vampires speak in Romania?

The movie is too formulaic to be truly great, but it is competently filmed and well acted. Even some of the scares you see coming from a mile off manage to have an effect. It doesn’t make you love the characters or grab you and hold you in its world, but it is modestly entertaining. If you like the genre I would recommend it as worth seeing.

Final Grade: B-