Tag: Scarlett Johansson

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Film Features Film/TV

Hail, Caesar!

Fewer Communists, more Clooney.

That’s a film critique I never thought I would offer, but here we are. Like all right-thinking Urban Achievers, I am a Coen Brothers fan—a fanatic, even. Who else has been able to create great films in so many different genres? They’ve produced two great film noirs in Miller’s Crossing and The Man Who Wasn’t There, expanded the crime genre with Fargo and the Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men, added to the Western legacy with True Grit, and crafted some of the greatest comedies in film history with Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Basically, if Joel and Ethan Coen make a movie, I’m there, no questions asked, because there’s always going to be something great onscreen. This is true even in the case of misfires like Hail, Caesar!

The strengths of their comedies have always been rooted in crackling wordplay, characterizations which walk the line between the wacky and sympathetic, and a burgeoning sense of the absurdity of life. The premise of Hail, Caesar!, an eventful day in the life of an Eisenhower-era Hollywood fixer named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) seems like perfect fodder for the brothers. If you’re looking for absurdity, Hollywood presents a target-rich environment. Capitol Pictures, Mannix’s fictional studio, is a circus of stars like DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a squeaky-clean protagonist of water ballet pictures whose image is put at risk when she gets pregnant; Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), the singing cowboy whose almost superhuman roping and wrangling skills are of no use when the studio thrusts him into the role of a big city swell in Laurence Laurentz’s (Ralph Feinnes) latest chamber drama; and Frances McDormand as accident-prone film editor. Best of all is George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, the epically vain actor whose kidnapping from the set of his newest sword-and-sandals flick by a group of communist screenwriters who collectively call themselves The Future provides Hail, Caesar!‘s plot momentum. Clooney, rocking the praetorian haircut like it’s 1998 on the set of ER, is loaded for bear, ready to go O Brother, Where Art Thou? big. And that’s what we all want, right? Critics like me have to pay lip service to subtle naturalism, but there’s nothing like seeing a really great actor vaulting over the top, grabbing scenery to chew. But Clooney’s efforts are largely wasted as he ends up imprisoned by the communists for much of the film while the Coens try to wring humor out of mid-century Marxist rhetoric. The basic joke is sound—the commies claim to have scientifically cracked the code of history, and yet they were unable to predict defeat by the capitalists—but the scenes meander endlessly. Clooney’s manic energy should have been at the heart of the picture, but he’s just the MacGuffin.

Let the kidnapped Clooney chew the scenery.

The Coens are operating in Lebowski mode, so the kidnapping plot is just a contrivance on which to hang the comic digressions and character moments that are the film’s real meat. The Hollywood setting allows them to try on different genres every few minutes, such as Channing Tatum’s gay sailor musical number “No Dames,” but too often it comes off as empty riffing. The Coen’s clockwork timing seems broken.

I personally enjoyed Hail Caesar!, but I cannot recommend it to anyone outside the Coen cult. It is their least funny film since The Ladykillers in 2004, but, to be fair, the last decade has seen the brothers occupied with existential dramas like 2009’s A Serious Man. Roger Deakins’ photography is, of course, first rate, and the production design is off the charts good. In a way, Hail, Cesar! reminds me of a mid-period Woody Allen picture, expertly crafted but lacking a certain energy. And consider this: When The Big Lebowski was released in 1998, it was considered a disappointment after the universally hailed Fargo, but time was good to the Dude, and it is now rightly ranked as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Considering the majesty of the Coen’s True Grit remake and the crackerjack work they did on the screenplay for Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, maybe the days of the gonzo Coen comedy are over, and the brothers should stay serious.

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Film Features Film/TV

Avengers: Age Of Ultron

In “The Freshman,” the first episode of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our heroine, having killed the villainous Mayor by exploding her high school, discovers that the vampires have followed her to college. Buffy’s trusty sidekick Xander knows what to do: Get the gang back together.

“Avengers assemble!” he exclaims.

Now, 16 years later, Buffy mastermind Joss Whedon has released his second, and if the director is to be believed, final, Avengers movie to a different world. In 1999, “Avengers assemble” was a reference to Marvel Comics’ B team — it was funny because it wasn’t the X-Men. Now, Captain America (Chris Evans) helms the flagship of the biggest film franchise in the world. Disney’s success with Marvel has set the standard for the 21st-century blockbuster, and all other Hollywood studios are trying to emulate it. Even Star Wars, the original modern film franchise, is adapting the model. It’s no accident that Furious 7 has the same number of main characters as The Avengers. Whedon’s 2012 film, the first to unite all of the different strains of the Disney-owned end of the Marvel Universe, was used as a blueprint, with Vin Diesel playing the Captain America role and Dwayne Johnson playing Nick Fury. The results of that cargo cult appropriation was laughably bad but extraordinarily profitable for Universal. Even car chase movies have to be superhero movies now. Comic books are rewriting film in their own image.

Is this a bad thing? If it means more quality movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron, maybe not. It’s a sprawling epic that represents the best work the corporate Hollywood studio system can produce. With Whedon’s work, that’s not damning with faint praise, it’s just a statement of fact.

Contemplate, for a moment, the extraordinary difficulty Age of Ultron‘s screenplay alone represents. Whedon had to juggle Captain America, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), from the first film, while introducing new villain Ultron (James Spader), as well as three new members of the team, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and Vision (Paul Bettany), and integrating Don Cheadle’s War Machine from the Iron Man sub-franchise and Anthony Mackie’s Falcon from Captain America: The Winter Soldier into the outfit. That’s 11 superheroes and a supervillain. The Batman franchise has repeatedly choked on one superhero and two supervillains. Only a few of the X-Men movies were able to pull off something so complex, and Whedon moonlighted as a script doctor on the first one of those back during the Buffy days.

Creativity often flourishes while pushing against restraints, and in this case, Whedon is in one of the tightest straitjackets any writer/director has ever had to don. With so many subplots and characters to deal with, every beat in the screenplay has to be accounted for. Whedon pulls it off, even accounting for the fact that the first cut he turned in to the studio was reportedly more than 40 minutes longer than the final 2-hour-20-minute running time.

Whedon is the best in the business at teasing out real human emotions from fantastical characters in unbelievable situations. One of the ways he does this is by being honest with the audience. As Hawkeye, who seems to serve as Whedon’s voice in Age of Ultron, points out late in the picture, here’s a guy with a bow and arrow fighting an army of robots in a city that is currently being levitated into space. “None of this makes any sense!” He’s telling Scarlet Witch, the new member of the team who just a few minutes ago was an enemy, to cowboy up, and it works, both in plot as a motivational speech and as a Shakespearian aside to the audience.

Shakespeare looms large in Whedon’s world. When he worked himself into exhaustion on the first Avengers movie, he directed an all-star cast in a low-budget adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing to unwind. He has also absorbed the greatest lesson from the English language’s greatest humanist: “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth

Early in the film, while our heroes are busting up yet another Hydra base in Eastern Europe, Scarlet Witch uses her mind-bending powers to trap each of the heroes in a hallucinatory world where they are confronted by their fears and desires. At that point, Whedon has been in action mode from the word go, but things suddenly slow down and get weird. Captain America sees what his life would have been like had he not been frozen in ice before World War II ended. Black Widow relives her childhood dream of being a ballerina perverted into a life of killing in a brutal Soviet training camp. Thor sees Asgard ruled by evil. And Iron Man sees himself unable to prevent the destruction of the Avengers and the world. The sequence, which cuts back and forth between frantic action and reverie, is the single greatest moment in any Marvel movie to date.

Ultron is a creation of Tony Stark’s hubris. Tony’s worst fear is the destruction of humanity by superpowered cosmic forces, but his solution is to create an artificial intelligence that wants to accomplish just that. Ultron is the best kind of villain: One who honestly believes he is the hero of the story. He thinks if he can just explain the plan in clear enough terms, everyone will be on board with human extinction. Think of the benefits! The cyborg race he will create to replace us will be a great improvement over this mortal coil. Spader’s performance is mostly a voice performance laid on top of motion capture and CGI work, but that doesn’t make it any less brilliant.

Age of Ultron has one of the things The Avengers lacked: romance. It pairs the most emotionally vulnerable of the team, Bruce Banner, with the most emotionally cut off, Natasha Romanoff. But, this being a Whedon joint, the gender roles are switched. Johansson’s Natasha pursues Ruffalo’s Bruce, who flees like Cinderella from the ball at the stroke of midnight. The two actors have great chemistry together, even when one of them is a green CGI creature the size of a front-end loader. When Natasha, faced with a choice between love and duty, inevitably chooses duty, her solution will look very familiar to Buffy fans.

Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.

That Banner, for the first time, has a possible future outside of super science and “Avenging” gives the big, mandatory fan service moment emotional heft. When the Hulk, driven insane by Scarlet Witch, goes on a rampage in a populated area, Iron Man has to super-size his armor to subdue him. Iron Man fighting the Hulk has been a fanboy favorite ever since it played out on the comic pages 30 years ago, and Whedon’s interpretation proves just how good at this stuff he is. He out-Transformers Michael Bay in the giant robot fighting department while simultaneously echoing and outdoing the city-destroying brawl between Superman and General Zod in Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel.

Most importantly, Age of Ultron does what big studio movies have been trying to do since before Errol Flynn took up his bow and rapier in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood: It’s a fun flick to watch in a big theater full of people. Is it a perfect movie? No, but its failings are set by the limitations of the genre. Is it the kind of movie Whedon would be doing in this critic’s ideal world? Not really. His skills and vision are bigger than men in tights. Historically, we’ve had Westerns, adventure movies, spy movies, science fiction, war movies, and all the other action movie variants to deliver swashbuckling good times. Now, with Marvel banking $187 million in three and a half days, and Warner Brothers planning at least 10 more movies set in the DC Comics universe, the superhero template is all we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

Whedon’s contract with Disney/Marvel is up next month, and he’s been telling everyone who will listen that he’s not coming back. Marvel’s still got a crackerjack team, but Whedon is the secret sauce. Age of Ultron seems like the end of an era.

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Film Features Film/TV

Lucy

I don’t tend to pay attention to script footnotes, but writer-director Luc Besson’s pre-production “Nota” about his new movie Lucy more or less says it all: “This film is extremely visual … the beginning is Leon the Professional; the middle is Inception; the end is 2001: A Space Odyssey … Don’t interpret this as pretension on my part, merely a visual, emotional, and philosophical point of reference.”

Lucy is many things — self-aware Asian gangster flick, crackpot neuroscience TED talk, half-cocked female empowerment fantasy, pants-optional F/X bacchanal, pop art companion piece to Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 SF novel More Than Human — but it is not pretentious. It’s too self-aware and self-deprecating to take itself completely seriously. As a result, it’s really fun to watch, most of the time.

Scarlett Johansson stars in the fun and visually stunning film Lucy.

Like Taken, which Besson co-wrote and co-produced, Lucy begins as a paranoid thriller about an American abroad who gets mixed up with the wrong kind of person. Our titular hero is a bleach-blonde bimbo (Scarlett Johansson) forced by a sleazy dude in a cowboy hat to deliver a mysterious briefcase to an office building in Taiwan, where a high-level hoodlum (Min-sik Choi) spends his days in a giant suite, soaking his hands in the blood of those who’ve crossed him.

After a scary-funny reveal of the briefcase’s contents, Lucy is knocked out, operated on and impressed into service as a drug mule. However, when the fluorescent blue contents of the package surgically implanted in her belly start to leak, Lucy discovers that she can access up to 100 percent of her brain. Pretty soon she’s mowing down low-level thugs, contacting Professor Noman (Morgan Freeman) for advice about her altered state, changing her hair color at will, ignoring gravity’s pull, and bending the laws of space and time.

This is an excellent B-picture set-up. And like many excellent B-picture set-ups, it only really works if it’s accompanied by a manic, unflagging sense of style. That’s tough for anyone — even someone with Besson’s pedigree and flair for showmanship — to maintain. (Maybe it’s a two-person job: What would Neveldine/Taylor or Lord/Miller have done with this?) Once Besson depicts all the mobile-phone signals in Paris as a forest of multicolored data strands, what can he show us next? After he stages an exciting kung fu battle where nobody lands a punch, what can he trot out to top it? Luckily, Besson’s playful, smash-cut storytelling earns so much good will that when it all breaks down, it’s no big deal. The movie doesn’t make too much sense as it goes on, but that’s not a problem.

Not when Johansson is on hand, anyway. Writers such as Salon.com‘s Sady Doyle and others have noted that Johansson’s most recent roles — computer program in Her, alien huntress in Under the Skin, unflappable secret agent in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, next step in human evolution in Lucy — have shown her tinkering with, if not completely abandoning, her pre-ordained position as the latest curvaceous sex kitten in the Hollywood firmament. So what may be most striking about this muddled movie is that it restores intelligence and a sense of purpose to a potentially great American actress.

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Film Features Film/TV

Jon Favreau’s Chef satisfying, not spectacular.

That Eli Roth’s cannibal film The Green Inferno played as a trailer to Chef appeared to be a good omen, but Jon Favreau’s foodie film, of which he serves as writer, director, and star, is a chain restaurant movie — serving up fare that is reliable, if not spectacular.

The story revolves around Carl Casper, a chef anointed the biggest thing going in the L.A. food scene, but that was 10 years ago, and where Casper sees beauty in the greens of a bundle of beets, his boss, Riva (Dustin Hoffman), sees it in the greens of a bundle of money brought in by customers who’ve been coming back for the same decade-old menu.

A visit by an important critic finds Casper and Riva at odds. Casper wants to try something new and exciting, Riva wants to play it safe by serving the same old scallops and lava cake. The chef gets slammed by the critic, and what follows is a violent confrontation (one that is filmed and goes viral) that leaves Casper without a job and doubtful about his future. Thrown in the mix is the relationship Casper has with his 10-year-old son, who yearns to spend more time with his dad.

As a food film, Chef never reaches the heights of 1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman, but it does capture the giddiness as seen in 2009’s Julie & Julia of creating and sharing a meal so fine that the mood is electric. And, if the film doesn’t quite make you want to be a chef, it will certainly make you want a sandwich.

It’s clear that Favreau did his homework. It’s seen in such foodie flourishes as the Lucky Peach magazine in Casper’s apartment and the appearance of culinary stars like Aaron Franklin of Austin’s Franklin Barbecue and Roy Choi of the Kogi BBQ Taco Truck in L.A. At one point, Chef becomes a road-trip movie, with Casper, his right-man, and Casper’s son driving across the country, from Miami to L.A., in a food truck. The trip serves as a primer for Casper’s son — Cuban sandwiches in Miami, beignets and muffulettas in New Orleans, and Texas barbecue in Austin. (Interestingly, there is apparently nothing noteworthy foodwise between Texas and California.)

The film is well served by its supporting cast. Scarlett Johansson is Casper’s sympathetic and (duh) sexy sounding board, while John Leguizamo adds humor and energy as Casper’s sous chef. There’s a cameo by Amy Sedaris as well, stirring up memories of the fantastic Jerri Blank as the too-tan, not-hearing-a-word publicist. The film’s biggest laughs, however, go to the brief though wonderfully weird and awkward scene with Robert Downey Jr. playing the ex-husband of Casper’s ex-wife.

It’s ironic, then, that another of these supporting roles points directly to the chief weakness of Chef. Hoffman, as the nervous restaurant owner, does not want to try anything that stretches the imagination. And while Favreau’s character fights the static, Favreau as a writer and director does not push the boundaries. There are at least three musical interludes (two too many), and the ending, while pleasing, is about as pat as they come. Ultimately, Chef feeds you just enough to be satisfied.