The ballad of Phil Spector is sadder than any song this strange, reclusive man wrote or produced in a career spanning some 50 years. It's one thing to be a megalomaniacal genius whose work has given immeasurable hours of pleasure to teenagers of all ages. It's another to be a murderer: In May 2009 Spector was convicted in the 2003 killing of Lana Clarkson and sentenced to 19 years to life. Squaring the contradictory corners of Phil Spector's life would be impossible. To his credit, in The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector filmmaker Vikram Jayanti doesn't even try.
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Today Movieline introduces a new video feature: Not-so-live, from my living room, reviews of this week's movies. My video review of the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action-comedy, Knight and Day, now in theaters, can be found here. And click below for my take on Grown Ups, starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, and Chris Rock, which opens in theaters tomorrow and which just may make you rethink your views on public swimming-pool etiquette. As always, more in-depth reviews can be found in our review archives. Enjoy!
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An extended belly-bump of a documentary, South of the Border is Oliver Stone's feel-good take on the new South American politics. A vanity project by proxy, Stone attempts to restore (in the case of Hugo Chávez) and establish the reputations of the new guard of South American leadership, a superfriends conglomerate that rejects the imperial interests of the United States. Though he lavishes praise on his subjects for being hyper-masculine and free-thinking, Stone is downright girlish in his devotion, scoffing at charges made against the leaders rather than examining them. The plethora of Fox News-based inanity makes such elisions pretty easy: Obviously the haters -- notably a pair of anchors who can't tell the difference between cocoa and coca -- are nuts, right?
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The perhaps intentional irony of Grown Ups is that it doesn't appear to have been made by -- or even for -- actual grown-ups. Maybe that's supposed to be part of its charm. A riff on the idea that boys will always be boys, no matter how old they get, Grown Ups brings together five middle-aged characters who have no idea how they ever got out of short pants, though in reality, they haven't gotten out of short pants at all: They wander through the movie in those boyish baggy shorts that hang to the knee, unable to commit to being actual trousers.
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In early summer 2007, filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington settled in with a platoon of 15 soldiers newly arrived in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, a Taliban and al-Qaeda stronghold considered one of the most dangerous postings in the war. Restrepo, the movie they made there, is remarkable not because it heightens the drama of the combat experience -- one that, face it, doesn't need any heightening via filmmaking magic -- but because it so unassumingly captures the everyday rhythms of these soldiers' lives. One minute they're ducking Taliban bullets that come seemingly from nowhere. The next they're cutting loose at an impromptu nighttime disco party, a short one (apparently dictated by the length of one dance track queued up on an iPod) and one with only four guys total. But the basic image -- the sight of young people dancing and horsing around -- is so joyous and elemental that it's nearly devastating: Only then do we get the full measure of what it means that those bullets missed.
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I know of a 100-year-old woman who still thought of her 69-year-old son as her "boy"; when she died last year he mourned the loss of his status as somebody's child. Such feelings endure naturally enough: Most of us are born into a familial or relational structure that shapes -- along with just about everything else -- how we identify ourselves. The trick is in the balance -- the difference, say, between "You'll always be my little boy" and "You'll always be my little boy." Some parents struggle to keep absolute power from corrupting their best intentions, as Cyrus's creepily co-dependent mother and son pointed out, to comic effect. The limning of those boundaries is often played for laughs; the alternative is very dark indeed. Swap those laughs for a kind of mordant horror and you get Dogtooth, a brightly lit nightmare of patriarchy run amok.
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With the end of middle age within tippy-toe reach, Georges Palet (André Dussollier) has pulled into a kind of defensive crouch; he's not going willingly, and open to distraction. Alternately resigned and bitterly combative, he is treated by his wife Suzanne (Anne Consigny) like a recently released mental patient, which might not be that far off: When we meet Georges he is being driven to thoughts of homicide by a passing woman's visible panty line. But then the stream of consciousness can run pretty wild, and is subject to theoretical whims as brutal as they are benign. The roots of romantic feeling, as explored in Wild Grass, Alain Resnais's jazzy ode to cinema and the love impulse in later life, are equally, spectacularly random.
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Tom Cruise is no longer cool, a truth he just can't face -- if he could, he'd be cooler. In the opening moments of Knight and Day, Cruise strides through an airport in a uniform of coolness that may as well have been assembled from a checklist: Distinctive Persol sunglasses, an obviously cashmere V-neck sweater layered over a surely-not-Hanes T-shirt, a Baracuta jacket -- I'm only checking off the brand names the same way he and his costume department must have. The ringtone on his character's phone is "Louie, Louie." And he actually does some of his own stunts, just to show he can. Cruise really may be the hardest-working man in show business right now, but on him (in direct contrast to James Brown), all that sweat just isn't cool. Once coolness leaves you, how do you get it back?
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There's something to be said for having low expectations, especially when it comes to summer movies. The pictures we expect to be great, if only because they've been sold and hyped to the heavens (a la Iron Man 2 and Robin Hood), so often disappoint us. The way movies are made and marketed these days, junky, throwaway fun is in short supply: With some big releases costing $200 million or more, the studios just can't afford it. That's why a picture like Jonah Hex -- hardly a work of genius but wholly serviceable as a bit of summer silliness -- feels completely suitable, in an old-fashioned way, for a hot summer weekend. When the stakes are low and the AC is on high, why not make a date with a maimed but righteous post-Civil War-era bounty hunter?
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The problem with sequels isn't always, necessarily, that they're worse than the movies they're piggybacking onto. Some -- The Godfather, Part II, The Empire Strikes Back -- actually improve on their predecessors. The worst thing about sequels is the air of desperation about them, which often starts gathering long before they're actually released. Particularly in this economic climate, everyone in Hollywood wants a hit, so the marketing machines for big summer sequels kick in early and hard. As a way of protecting ourselves from disappointment or, worse yet, heartbreak, moviegoers tend to respond with a mix of anticipation and suspicion. Which is why, in the past few months, plenty of us have been asking, "Do we really need a Toy Story 3?"
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A clamorous Italian counterpart to Summer Hours, last year's lyrical meditation on French tradition in decline, I Am Love also examines fading nationalist notions of legacy and institution through the story of a prominent family's slow slide from grace. Or that's one way to look at it: Bold, weird, and a little stalkerish in its intensity, Luca Guadagnino's third feature is an open cinematic buffet, as ready to satisfy as it is to displease, depending on your taste and appetite. It lends itself to a number of persuasive primary readings -- from proto-feminist awakening to sexual-identity crisis; bitter cultural critique to soaring infidelity melodrama; sui generis tour de force to sweaty exercise in the ecstasy of aesthetic influence -- and has plenty of flaws that might be dwelled on as well. It's a lot of movie; the choice is really yours.
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The brash violence of Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me -- adapted from Jim Thompson's merciless and enthralling 1952 pulp novel about a psychotic West Texas sheriff -- began dividing audiences last January at Sundance. It also appears to have divided Winterbottom himself, though he doesn't know it. The controversy involves two particularly violent scenes, one a protracted sequence in which a character played by Jessica Alba is beaten until her face resembles what one character calls "stewed meat, hamburger." The nutso sheriff, played by Casey Affleck, throws perhaps some 20 punches; we see about six or seven of them land, as Alba's face becomes progressively bruised, bloodied and misshapen, until it resembles a cracked-open, oversized plum.
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The Duplass brothers (co-writers and -directors Jay and Mark) are devout practitioners of something I'll call moment-based filmmaking. Graduates of both the Mumblecore school and its ambient hype, they have coaxed a more palatable style from that movement's core of strident naturalism. They build self-effacing stories from off-handedly naturalistic moments, the assembly of which serves an organizing theme. Tough to pull off and magical when it works, moment-based filmmaking is intrinsically opposed to plot -- to machinations of any order -- and aggressively favors the spontaneous over the crafted, evoking the narrative satisfactions of a three-act structure as if by a sort of ingenious accident. The Duplass brothers are determined to remain true to their eccentricities and equally bent on breaking into the big time, and their struggle manifests itself quite nakedly in the curious case of Cyrus, their third film and also first to feature a cast of well-known actors.
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Scheduled to be released on the second anniversary of California's legislation of gay marriage, 8: The Mormon Proposition marks the occasion with a furious requiem. Mournful and righteous in its retracing of the months between the bill's passage and election night in November 2008, the film assembles a damning case against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), which spearheaded a massive campaign to revoke gay marriage rights. Directors Reed Cowan and Steven Greenstreet make their agenda clear from the first frames, which depict a Mormon "prophet" calmly denouncing gay marriage in extreme close-up, his face distorted with scary, Poltergeist-style pixilation. The opening impression -- that the LDS acted villainously with regard to Prop 8 -- will soon be supported by a raft of facts; that the Mormon church couldn't have done it alone is a complication the film sidesteps almost completely.
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A gangster epic with a geopolitical twist, Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema prefaces its portrait of a young man's rise in the criminal underworld with the assurance that the story was "inspired by real events." The picture was shot in South Africa and spans almost 15 years between post-apartheid and present day; the country's struggle for freedom and free enterprise informs much of the action. And yet there is a competing sense that the "real events" that served as inspiration occurred in a series of theaters in which writer/director Ralph Ziman took in the gangster canon, from Scarface to Shaft and all the way to Gomorrah. Al Capone is invoked early and often, hip hop-style, giving the mistaken impression that Ziman might not intend to play the genre's clichés absolutely, numbingly straight.
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