Tag: James Franco

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2017: The Year In Film

In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.

Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.

Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.

Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.

Overlooked Gem: Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error

Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.

Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.

MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.

Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”

Best Screenplay: The Big Sick
Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.

Best Performance (Honorable Mention): Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.

Best Performance: Francis McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.

Best Picture: Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Disaster Artist

Have you ever been at your job, or at school, or on the playing field, and felt like you’re faking it? It doesn’t matter if you’re actually good at something. All of your successes have been sheer dumb luck. One day, you’re going to be exposed as a fraud in front of all these people.

If these thoughts have ever crossed your mind, you’re not alone. It’s a full-blown psychological phenomenon called impostor syndrome. In the words of Wikipedia, “Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved.” The doctors who discovered imposter syndrome in the 1970s first identified it in highly successful women, but later studies found that 70 percent of the population had felt like that at one time or another. But the case of Tommy Wiseau raises the question: Is it still impostor syndrome if you actually are an impostor who is bad at their job?

Wiseau is the writer, director, and producer of The Room, the 21st century’s leading contender in the race for the Worst Film Ever. Even in Hollywood, a place where strange things roam, Wiseau is a weirdo. First of all, he wears a lot of belts. Not different belts at different times, but rather, many belts, all at once. He claims to be from New Orleans, but his accent is clearly Eastern European. No one knows how old he is — which, come to think of it, is really not that uncommon in Hollywood. And nobody knows where he got the enormous pile of money he used to make The Room. But one thing is certain — he didn’t have the faintest idea how to make a movie.

Dave (left) and James Franco make movie magic with their film about the making of The Room.

If you’ve never seen it before, The Room is kind of indescribable. Imagine a movie about love and betrayal made by an alien who has only the roughest idea of what humans look like and how they behave. In a recurring scene that epitomizes the whole thing, Wiseau and his friends Mark and Denny throw around a football while having vague conversations. At no point do you get the impression that any of them know what a football is for, or have ever seen a football game before, or even understand what kind of emotions a person throwing a football in the park with his friends would likely experience.

And yet, in the decade since it was released, The Room has found a large and enthusiastic audience among people who love bad film. There’s something endearing about the film’s hardscrabble ineptitude that you don’t get from $100 million debacles like Dracula Untold. Among the cult of The Room was James Franco, who was compelled to adapt The Disaster Artist, a memoir by Greg Sestero, who played Mark in the original production. In a deeply nested irony, the movie about the making of the worst movie ever made is actually really good.

Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber take inspiration from Ed Wood for the well-paced script, which wrings laughs from the increasingly ridiculous situations that arise during production without stooping to open mockery. Dave Franco, the director’s brother, stars as Greg Sestero, a blandly handsome, marginally talented guy who meets Wiseau in a San Francisco acting class and soon finds himself moving to L.A. to pursue stardom with the long-haired mystery man. Then, after years of frustration and an impeccably staged run-in with actual producer Judd Apatow, Wiseau decides he has had it with the audition treadmill and proclaims, “Hollywood reject us! We do eet on our own!”

It’s the familiar rallying cry of the indie filmmaker, even if delivered in a funny accent. James Franco, the comedic leading man who directs William Faulkner adaptations in his spare time, surely knows that feeling. He and his co-conspirator Seth Rogen, who plays The Room‘s beleaguered script supervisor, have been an insurgent force in mainstream filmmaking for a decade now. You don’t make The Interview without getting a few doors slammed in your face. Some actors would just get the weird tics down and ham it up, but Franco’s portrayal of Tommy Wiseau is a living portrait of impostor syndrome. You cringe with every inappropriate gesture, idiotic utterance, and awful decision, while also feeling a flash of recognition of all the times you’ve faked it and gotten away with it.

The Disaster Artist seems like it started as an excuse for Franco and Rogen’s crew of Hollywood stoner buddies to recreate their favorite hilariously bad scenes from The Room, but when Wiseau cries in the lobby at his labor of love’s disastrous premiere, the audience sniffles along. By directing and acting in a movie about a bad actor/director, Franco the movie star made himself vulnerable — and created the best film of his career.

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Film Features Film/TV

Sausage Party

You know those movies where the premise is so out-there that you say “Wow, these guys must have been really high when they came up with THAT one!”? That’s usually a sarcastic joke, but in the case of Sausage Party, it’s almost certainly true. America’s Stoner in Chief Seth Rogen, who reportedly worked for eight years to get this film made, gives away the secret to its creation in the middle of the second act, when Druggie, voiced by James Franco, gains the ability to communicate with inanimate objects after injecting a solution of bath salts. “Everybody told me not to do this,” he says. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

One can easily imagine Rogen and his partner in crime Evan Goldberg pitching the idea of a movie about talking supermarket food items to their crew of Hollywood’s Most Blunted over bong hits and nachos. I’m sure many, many people told them not to do it, because it’s one of those ideas that sounds great when you’re stoned but doesn’t survive contact with the “real world.” But these grasshoppers have pulled off an unlikely coup by bringing their bonged-out vision to the screen and making it work.

Rogen is the voice of Frank, a hot dog who, like everyone . . . I mean, everything … in the Shopwell big box grocery store lives more or less contentedly in his cozy packaging with seven other bro-dogs. Everything the products know about the world inside and outside the supermarket comes from a song they sing ritualistically each morning, which provides the film with its first opportunity to mock animation conventions. The big opening production number delivers the same world-building information as “Circle of Life” from The Lion King, only with a lot more casual cursing. The song tells them the people shopping in the Shopwell are benevolent gods who choose the most worthy among the products and take them away into an eternal paradise. Those who are not found pure and worthy are condemned to be thrown into the trash by Darren (Paul Rudd), the pimpled stock boy who roams the aisles seeking whom he may devour.

Frank and his mates are feeling pretty good about their chances for ascension into paradise, because they’re prominently placed on the 4th of July special rack next to a pack of buns that is home to Frank’s would-be girlfriend Brenda Bunsen (Kristen Wiig). But the day before the big 4th of July sale, a bottle of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store, and he tells the foodstuff a harrowing tale of gods who mercilessly mutilate and devour the food. When Frank and Brenda try to save Honey Mustard from suicide, they cause a catastrophic cart collision that plays out like every urban disaster movie since 9/11.

Turns out, when your characters are talking food, you can skewer a lot of sacred cows. Our heroes are accompanied by two refugees from the ethnic food aisle: Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) talks like a Woody Allen character, and Lavash (David Krumholtz) is a Persian flatbread. The quest forces the two rival carbohydrates to put aside their differences and work together. The other member of the party is a lesbian taco played by Selma Hayek. The villain is, naturally, a Douche, played with psychotic gusto by Nick Kroll.

In a year plagued by some of the worst screenwriting in recent memory, the script, credited to four writers including Rogen and Goldberg, is surprisingly tight. Co-directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan are two veteran animators with only a handful of directoiral credits between them. They have fun staging one hilarious set piece after another. Pixar has been the dominant animation studio for a generation, but there have been surprisingly few Pixar parodies. Sausage Party is among the first to stake out that ground, riffing on Ratatouille and Toy Story. But their ultimate achievement is a climactic pansexual food orgy that really must be seen to be believed.

Just in case the words “pansexual food orgy” didn’t clue you in, this is one animated film that is not for children. Fans of the Rogen/Goldberg flavor of raunchy comedy, however, will find that Sausage Party is the duo’s greatest achievement.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Flashbacks: Vinyl and 11.22.63

Two new TV series obsess over the details of a certain moment in time, but with vastly different approaches.

Bobby Cannavale as hard living record executive Ritchie Finestra in Vinyl

As Martin Scorsese’s new series for HBO, Vinyl is focused on 1973, a time which, in retrospect, was the height of the recording industry. Co-produced with Mick Jagger and much of the same production team behind Boardwalk Empire, including writer Terence Winter, Vinyl is a tale of out of control excess on all fronts. Bobby Cannavale, veteran of that show as well as Will And Grace, plays record executive Ritchie Finestra, head of the fictional American Century records. Ritchie is trying to turn his company’s fortunes around by signing Led Zeppelin and selling out the the German company Polygram, and turn his life around by getting clean and moving to Connecticut with his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde). But with cocaine bumping all through his hard partying social circle, it’s clear from the beginning that sobriety was going to be an uphill battle.

With his cronies Zak (Ray Romano) and P.J. (Scott Levitt) at his side, he uses his “golden ear” to find acts to create hits for the label, cringing when he finds out his A&R people had a turned down ABBA as uncommercial. Ritchie’s big breakthrough, which forms the frame of the pilot episode, is finding the New York Dolls and opening up the American glam rock scene. We also flash back to the 1960s, when Ritchie got his start in the business promoting soul singers. Ritchie is another totally unlikeable protagonist in the Scorsese mold of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. Record executives and Wall Street junk bond traders both live near the bottom of the list of careers that inspire sympathy, and Ritchie’s cavalier attitude towards paying his artists justifies reflexive hatred.

But drug-crazed macho preening is not Vinyl’s biggest problem. It’s characters seem to lack motivation (beyond “he’s drug crazed”) for almost anything they do, flying into fits of rage and falling in lust almost at random. And for a historical story made by people who were there, it plays fast and loose with anachronism. Punk and hip hop arrive three years too early, and the concert scenes, which should be the series strong suit, come off like Rock Band: The TV Show. There’s a long way yet to go in Vinyl’s first season, but Scorsese and company will be hard pressed to get themselves out of the corner that the pilot’s frankly ridiculous ending painted them into.

James Franco gets anachronistic in 11.22.63

Better with the historical details is Hulu’s 11.22.63. With 50 years of conspiracy theorists picking over the Warren Report and Zapruder film, few historical events have been obsessed over as thoroughly as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stephen King, who wrote the short novel that the series uses as a jumping off point, created the story out of seemingly the same impulse that drove Oliver Stone to make JFK: to wallow in the details and try to emerge with a coherent narrative. But there’s no Stone-esque psychedelia here. Director Kevin MacDonald’s pilot is a workmanlike table setting exercise, spelling out the rules of the time travel scenario that sees New England writing teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) going back to 11:58 AM on October 21, 1960 by merely stepping into the closet in the back of the neighborhood diner run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) Jake is convinced by Al to use the portal to try and stop the Kennedy assassination, and thus Vietnam and a host of other bad things from happening. He’s got a carefully researched dossier accumulated from his own time travel adventures, and advice like “If you do something that really fucks with the past, the past fucks with you.”

King has had a spotty record with adaptations of his work, but this 11.22.63 does a good job of capturing him at a moment of storytelling tightness. Franco is an appealing presence, and his experience in genre work, which often requires actors to convey information about plot and emotional states very quickly, shines through. The first of eight planned episodes finds Jake experimenting with all of the information advantages being a time traveller 50 years in the past brings, which, when done intelligently and with a sense of play, is the fun part about time travel stories. The trademark King supernatural creepiness comes into play in the person of the Yellow Card Man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who periodically appears to Franco to point out that he doesn’t belong in the past. With the expositional formalities out of the way, 11.22.63 looks ready to take off.

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True Story

The crusading reporter character has a deep history in America. Superman, the very embodiment of the American ideal, chose a journalist, Clark Kent, as his alter ego. But even though we have the institution of the press enshrined in our founding documents, our portrayals of reporters reveal an ambivalent attitude toward the Fourth Estate. For every Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein uncovering the truth about Nixon’s corruption in All the President’s Men, we have a Kirk Douglas as the cynical Chuck Tatum, the self-serving tabloid writer who jazzes up a story by letting his subject slowly die in a dark cave in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole.

Jonah Hill’s portrayal of real-life magazine writer Michael Finkel in True Story falls somewhere between those two extremes. When the film opens, Finkel is at the top of his game. He’s had 10 New York Times Magazine cover stories in three years, and he thinks his latest one about slavery in Africa might just earn him the Pulitzer he wants so badly. But there’s a problem: It seems he has conflated — or perhaps wholly invented — the lead subject in his story, and when his bosses at The Gray Lady find out, he gets the boot. But did Finkel punch up the story on purpose, or was it a mistake by a writer who was relying on translators and bribery to get a story in an unfamiliar land?

How you interpret the opening sequence of the film, based on a memoir by Finkel, will determine your attitude toward the meat of True Story‘s story. Hill is a sympathetic presence in the film, but his disgraced reporter character operates under a cloud of suspicion, both from colleagues and the audience. While he’s frantically pitching comeback stories from his cabin in Montana (The Times clearly pays more than Memphis journos are accustomed to), he gets a call from another reporter asking why a fugitive from justice in Mexico was claiming to be Michael Finkel when he was caught.

Finkel finds out the fugitive using his name is Christian Longo (James Franco), an Oregon man accused of killing his wife and three children. Now, Finkel’s got a killer story with a winning angle, and when he travels to Oregon to meet Longo in the flesh, it gets even better. Longo is an aspiring writer and fan of Finkel’s work who says he is innocent. But even though he writes novella-length letters to the reporter from his holding cell, he won’t reveal who the real killer is. With a charismatic, articulate white guy who is about to be wrongly convicted of murder as his protagonist, Finkel’s magazine story turns into a book deal with Harper Collins. But is Longo really, as he says, a “nice guy 99 percent of the time,” or a low-key Hannibal Lector?

Hill is playing against the type he created in comedic roles such as Superbad and 21 Jump Street. I was reminded of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre where Humphrey Bogart played a completely unsympathetic and unscrupulous character, but his onscreen charisma made him appear to be a hero. Even Finkle’s wife Jill (an underused Felicity Jones) expresses her doubts about his reporting skills, but he dives deep into the case, and we’re along for the ride as he vacillates between the conviction that Longo is innocent and that he should be convicted. Franco has more experience at playing charismatic sociopaths. His road to leading manhood took a deliciously devious turn as Alien, the archetypal Florida gangbanger in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. Franco deftly walks the tightrope between soulful boy next door and cold-blooded murderer, and his finely tuned performance ultimately saves True Story from the turgid, CSI melodrama the source material suggests.

Director Rupert Goold has roots in the English theater, and he’s more interested in watching the sparks fly when he puts Hill and Franco together in a prison visiting room than he is in composing compelling images. True Story lacks the technical bravado of Gone Girl, but it’s a worthy addition to the true crime genre — even if it leaves viewers questioning the meaning of “true.”

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The Interview

Have you ever heard of The Streisand Effect? Back in 2003, Barbara Streisand somehow spotted her Malibu home in one of 12,000 aerial photographs of the California coast on a photographers’ website and sued him because she didn’t want anyone looking at her house. But here’s the thing: If she hadn’t pointed out that her home was the subject of one of 12,000 pictures, no one would have known, or probably even cared, that it was there. But now, because of Striesand’s attempt to suppress the photograph, it has its own Wikipedia page. The act of trying to suppress something brought more attention to it than it would have gotten anyway.

Diana Bang, Seth Rogan, and James Franco in The Interview.

You’ve probably heard the story of The Interview by now: Seth Rogan, the “stoner king of Hollywood”, and his friend from the Freaks and Geeks days, James Franco made another of their middlebrow comedy movies to be released last Christmas. The plot involved Franco’s character, talk show host Dave Skylark, getting a chance to interview North Korean leader Kim Jon Un. The CIA, represented by Agent Lacey (Party Down vet Lizzy Caplan), makes them an offer they can’t refuse: Assassinate Kim. Will they do it, or are they too stupid to pull it off?

There are a few times in history when a group of filmmakers have made big, lasting political statements or captured the zeitgeist just right. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, lampooned Hitler on the eve of war. The backdrop for Casablanca’s love story was a community of political refugees from war-torn Europe, a description that fit many of the actors on the screen. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove skewered the insanity of a world preparing to destroy itself with nuclear weapons. Now, to this rarefied list of films, we must add The Interview. And you can blame the Streisand effect for that, because The Great Dictator, it ain’t.

Donna Dixon, Dan Ackroyd, and Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us.

Don’t get me wrong. The Interview is not a bad film, per se. It has some funny moments, and some decent performances by Franco, Rogan, and Diana Bang as Sook, the North Korean handler assigned to Skylark.  It’s a surprisingly old fashioned action comedy in the John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd vein. It wants to be The Blues Brothers, but its nearest antecedent would be Spies Like Us, the 1985 John Landis comedy that was originally supposed to star Ackroyd and Belushi but ended up replacing the deceased half of the duo with Chevy Chase. Like Spies Like Us, The Interview has its comic duo (Rogan plays Franco’s producer Aaron Rappaport) as untrained, and none too bright, field agents thrown into a totalitarian Communist dictatorship on a perilous mission of international import. The only reason the filmmakers chose North Korea as a target for humor is because they’re the only totalitarian Communist dictatorship still around 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, and their internal propaganda looks ridiculous to the West. 

Randall Park as Kim Jong Un

But some movies are born great, and some movies have greatness thrust upon them. That’s what happened to The Interview when Kim Jong Un ordered a cyber hit on Sony Pictures after hearing that Hollywood was imagining his assassination. One of the many intertwining ironies of this whole affair is that the actor who plays Kim Jong Un, Randall Park, gives the best performance in the entire movie. Sure, his Kim is a privileged buffoon, but so are Rogan and Franco’s characters. Had the North Korean dictator simply ignored the movie’s provocation—if it can even be said to rise to the level of provocation—it would have made some money providing cheap laughs to theatergoers over the holidays and then been flushed down the memory hole with Spies Like Us.

But as it is, The Interview will have repercussions far beyond the multiplexes of the world. It’s an attack on a private company inside the borders of the United States by a state actor, and the United States has decided to respond. We still don’t know exactly who did it, although I find it unlikely that anyone but Kim was ultimately behind it, no matter who was hired by whom to do the dirty work, for the simple reason that the movie is so innocuous. Equally implausible is the theory that it was all a publicity stunt by Sony, as the damage to that studio is real and likely to be lasting, depending on exactly how many people Sony owes money to that have their lawyers and accountants pouring over the studio’s leaked financial information right now. The decision to pull the movie from release in the face of anonymous terroristic threats makes more sense if you consider that the theater chains were likely more concerned about their IT infrastructure being turned inside out than a physical attack.

Rogan and company didn’t do anything but set out to make a funny movie, and they were reasonably successful. The filmmakers were just artists doing their job, until they got swept up in something bigger. Maybe that’s how art is supposed to work. 

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Third Person

What turns a comedy into a drama? It’s a good question that Third Person writer-director Paul Haggis would never deign to answer. But it’s a question the film raises, and you might come up with a few theories after watching it.

Like his Oscar-winning 2004 film Crash, Third Person is a sprawling and ambitious network narrative powered by pretty people in big cities trying to connect. One story set in NYC follows a downtrodden former soap opera star (Mila Kunis) engaged in a custody battle with her ex-husband, a world-renowned finger painter (WTF?) played by James Franco. A second story, which features a sad-sack corporate lackey (Adrien Brody) who slowly and justifiably grows infatuated with a mysterious beauty he meets in a bar (Moran Atias), takes place in Rome. The third story concerns a successful writer (Liam Neeson), who, when he isn’t staring meaningfully at the MacBook on the desk in his gigantic Paris hotel room, is carrying on an affair with a woman (Olivia Wilde) young enough to be his daughter.

As Third Person‘s stories unfold, a few provocative cross-cuts combine with some odd coincidences and repetitions to suggest a deeper connection among these people.

Wilde, however, stands out. Like Cameron Diaz, Wilde uses her intense, playful sexiness to go two places instead of one; the way she lounges about on couches and beds also heightens her cutting coolness, intelligence, and emotional distance. Wilde’s aspiring writer and gossip columnist character may be smarter and more attractive than anyone around her, but even she can’t breathe the necessary life into the perfectly sculpted and obviously written dialogue she’s given.

When the script’s literary aspirations mix with the rough-draft incompleteness of its interpersonal encounters, Third Person‘s deliberate yet roughed-in feel starts to undermine the weightier moments. Big emotional scenes can’t be trusted, and any bite or zip in smaller moments is lost; every meaningful frame, gesture, and slow-motion action sequence starts to look funny. Humorless ambition may be the currency of dictators and football coaches, but it makes for lousy art.

Third Person

Opens Friday, July 18th

Studio on the Square