Love & Friendship: Witty and delightful

Love & Friendship (2016) • View trailer 
4 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

I wonder if late 18th century aristocrats actually were so unswervingly polite with each other, or whether that’s an affectation we’ve grown to expect from Jane Austen stories.

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) has designs on the much younger Reginald
DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), a potential match that horrifies his sister and their parents.
Lady Susan couldn't care less about their objections, so the question remains: Can
anything save the poor lad from this black widow's clutches?

Whatever the actual truth, dramatic adaptations of Austen’s tales always are a treat, in great part because of the diabolically deceptive manner in which characters cut each other dead, with such cleverly scathing turns of phrase ... always delivered quietly, with a disarming smile that leaves the victim in stunned silence.

Director/scripter Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship has many such delectable moments, with plenty of tart dialog exchanged between the various good-hearted characters who do their best to survive encounters with the predatory schemer in their midst. The film is based on a lesser-known Austen work: the epistolary novella Lady Susan, likely written in the 1790s, before any of her published longer works, and then withheld. It remained unseen for half a century after her death, until a nephew published it in 1871.

Aside from its relative brevity, Lady Susan differs from Austen’s “classic” works — most notably Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma — in that its “heroine” is neither honorable nor admirable. Lady Susan Vernon is selfish, conniving and utterly ruthless, caring not a whit for the bruised or shattered feelings of those left in her wake.

In short, she’s a monster.

And yet, as played here to saucy, unapologetically haughty perfection by Kate Beckinsale, she’s utterly irresistible.

From a safe distance.

The saga begins as the recently widowed Lady Susan flees a scandal, choosing to “hide out” at Churchill, the estate of her in-laws, Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards) and his wife, Catherine DeCourcy Vernon (Emma Greenwell). Charles is magnanimous, by nature believing the best in everybody; Catherine is wary, recalling how her marriage was so vociferously opposed by Lady Susan.

Still, Lady Susan now appears chastened and friendly; Catherine cautiously hopes for the best.

She should have gone with her first instinct.

Total Recall: Thanks for the memories

Total Recall (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, and quite generously, for intense, relentless violence and action, brief nudity, sexual content and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Whatever else may be true, this sucker moves.

Ultimately, a bit too much.

Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) thinks he is about to experience a
harmless, James Bond-ian fantasy that he'll retain as a pleasant
memory. Alas, reality is about to trump fantasy, when Quaid discovers
that his life as a blue-collar factory worker isn't quite as "real" as he
has been led to believe.

Director Len Wiseman’s remake of Total Recall starts well and has much to recommend it, most notably plenty of striking production design and not one, not two, but three imaginative, cleverly filmed and all-stops-out chase scenes.

Unfortunately, the frantic pace grows tiresome after that third pursuit, particularly since we’re only halfway through the film by then. Wiseman and a veritable gaggle of scripters — Kurt Wimmer, Mark Bomback, Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon and Jon Povill — simply don’t know when to let up.

This film suffers from the same problem that derailed the second Indiana Jones epic (Temple of Doom): all chases and furious activity, with almost no respite. The characters never get a chance to catch their breath, and neither do we. Successful action flicks alternate between pell-mell activity and quieter moments: the latter for reflection, plot advancement and perhaps some tension-easing quips.

Wiseman’s update of Total Recall is almost without humor, grim or otherwise. While it’s true that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s outsized presence and personality overwhelmed the 1990 version, at least he cracked wise now and again. This remake’s Colin Farrell barely gets a chance to smile.

Let it be said, as well, that this new version doesn’t stray any closer to the Philip K. Dick story — “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” — on which both films are (very) loosely based. The reality-bending premise is present, as is the notion that our hero’s “false” memories might be genuine (or not) (or not not). Beyond that, Wimmer & Co. have grafted an entirely new narrative atop this mind-twisting concept.

Not a bad thing, to be sure, and this new version takes far greater pains to establish its credible future dystopia: all the more reason to be annoyed when the frenzied melees prevent our being better immersed in what seem to be fascinating background details.

The time is a century or so in the future, after chemical warfare has poisoned the majority of our planet. Only two nation-states have survived: the upscale United Federation of Britain, and the blue-collar “Colony” — formerly Australia — on the opposite end of the globe. Colony resident Douglas Quaid (Farrell) commutes daily to a grinding factory job in Britain, where he helps build robotic policeman on an assembly line.

Contraband: Slick, smarmy and suspenseful

Contraband (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for violence, pervasive profanity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang


Goodness, this is a sordid little piece.

Scandinavian crime thrillers have been on the rise of late, thanks in great part to the Stateside interest in Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, the latter recently brought to these shores via actor Kenneth Branagh’s sterling TV adaptations.

Chris (Mark Wahlberg, left) thoroughly hates the idea of "rescuing" his stupid
brother-in-law by embarking on a fresh smuggling heist, but circumstances
have left him no other options. Fortunately, Chris has the underworld savvy
of best friend Sebastian (Ben Foster) to help grease the wheels.

Longtime readers of European thrillers are wondering what the heck took the rest of us so long, of course, since they’ve known about such writers since the arrival of Swedish novelists Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose “Martin Beck” series generated some heat here in the 1960s and ’70s. The fourth book, The Laughing Policeman, was made into an American film vehicle for Walter Matthau in 1973; the adaptation was loose, but certainly engaging.

Icelandic novelists belong to this club as well, with Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir leading the charge. All of which serves to introduce Contraband, an American adaptation of 2008’s Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which was Iceland’s official submission for the Academy Awards’ foreign language category in 2010.

This American remake’s pedigree is even more interesting. The Icelandic original, co-written by Indriðason and Óskar Jónasson (the latter also directed), starred Baltasar Kormákur as a former smuggler forced by circumstance to re-embrace his larcenous past; Mark Wahlberg has taken this role in the new version, which is directed by Kormákur.

I can’t think of any other cases where the star of a foreign film — rather than the director or writer — went on to direct an American remake.

Point being, Kormákur certainly understands the atmosphere required by this grim and thoroughly tawdry story. So does first-time scripter Aaron Guzikowski, a former New York ad agency employee who popped up on Hollywood’s radar a few years ago, thanks to a spec script that drew Wahlberg’s attention. And since Wahlberg also is one of the many producers attached to Contraband, we can deduce that he liked Guzikowski’s writing chops.

So do I. Contraband certainly won’t win any awards, but it delivers plenty of tension and a veritable rogue’s gallery of dodgy characters. These are all bad folks, in one form or another; the trick is to make at least one of them a “hero” who deserves our trust and sympathy. In that, Kormákur and Guzikowski succeed quite well, and Wahlberg inhabits that fellow quite credibly.