The Tender Bar: Wisdom served wry

The Tender Bar (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for considerable profanity and some sexual candor

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.21.22

The best coming-of-age stories possess a carefully calculated blend of warmth and gentle humor, along with the beating heart of such sagas: the relationship between mentor and mentee.

 

J.R. (Daniel Ranieri, left) soon realizes that school books aren't the sole source of
education. Some of life's best lessons come in a bowling alley, particularly when the
wisdom is dispensed by the boy's doting Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck).

Director George Clooney’s precise touch with The Tender Bar absolutely honors the tone of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer’s best-selling memoir, with its rich cast of quirky characters. At times, this feels like a modern, true-life Charles Dickens story: not a surprise, since books — and particularly Dickens — play an important role.

I only wish William Monahan’s screenplay had done a better job with Moehringer’s book. Condensing a 384-page tome into a 106-minute film obviously requires compromise, but — due to an ill-advised narrative decision — viewers likely will be dissatisfied with the result.

 

The story begins in 1972, as 9-year-old J.R. (Daniel Ranieri) spends hours each day scanning radio channels for “The Voice,” as he calls the deadbeat DJ father who deserted him and his mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) years earlier. Despite her best efforts, she can’t make ends meet; reluctantly, she packs J.R. and their meager possessions into a car and drives to Manhasset, Long Island, returning to the now-dilapidated house where she grew up.

 

The homecoming isn’t entirely welcoming. Her curmudgeonly and unapologetically blunt father (Christopher Lloyd) views this as a sign of failure; we get a sense that he never forgave Dorothy the mistake of having taken up with her ex-husband. Her mother (Sondra James) is more cordial; her brother Charlie (Ben Affleck), still living with his parents — also to his father’s disgust — is pragmatic and sympathetic.

 

To J.R. — who goes by those initials because he’s actually a junior, which he refuses to acknowledge — Charlie is Uncle Charlie: an attentive, doting purveyor of wisdom and sage advice. J.R. does not want for love; Dorothy is fiercely protective, and a great believer in his potential — she repeatedly insists that he’ll one day go to Yale — but she also battles chronic depression.

 

Laid-back Uncle Charlie takes the edge off. While his approach to “parenting” probably wouldn’t win the approval of Social Services, he’s just what J.R. needs.

 

Affleck’s performance is sublime. Charlie is a self-educated truth-seeker with a closet full of classic books — this fascinates J.R. — and he works as a bartender at a local pub called Dickens, where additional stacks of books vie for space with the colorful liquor bottles. Affleck’s bearing is charismatic; it’s no surprise that the bar regulars hang on his every word, just as J.R. does.

 

Affleck’s line deliveries invariably include a trace of New York sass or snark, stopping just short of smugness. Charlie is never condescending; he grants respect to all who deserve it. (J.R.’s estranged father, who drops in just often enough to disappoint the boy further, is one of the exceptions.) 

 

Fifty Shades of Grey: Colorless

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for strong sexual content, profanity and considerable nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.13.15

While it’s certainly true that this film is better than the atrociously written book on which it’s based, that’s damning with very faint praise.

Because this film still is a stinker.

Hunky gazillionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) makes Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) an
offer she absolutely should refuse: to become his "submissive" during a brief "relationship"
that he promises won't include love. Hey, it's every girl's dream, right?

Dakota Johnson is reasonably persuasive as Anastasia Steele, the naïve, freshly minted college graduate who enters a web of sexual sin with a blend of curiosity, wariness and endearing, flirty innocence. Kelly Marcel’s screenplay also makes Ana smarter and spunkier than the dim-bulb imbecile of E.L. James’ so-called novel, who constantly talked and behaved as if she were 21 going on 12.

But Jamie Dornan is a total joke as billionaire, super-stud businessman Christian Grey. Dornan couldn’t act his way out of a snowball in hell; he actually makes Keanu Reeves look talented. Dornan is as uncomfortable in this role as his Grey is in his impeccably tailored clothes: stiff, awkward and wholly unconvincing.

Dornan’s line readings are the stuff of acting workshop nightmares ... although, in fairness, I’m not sure anybody could breathe credible life into this wooden dialogue.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson has precisely two tricks up her sleeve, and she uses both to wretched excess: constant tight-tight-tight close-ups on her two stars, and instructions that they deliver every word with breathy, clipped, arched-eyebrow hesitation. Both affectations are the stuff of turgid afternoon TV soap operas, a level to which this film constantly sinks.

An over-reliance on tight close-ups minimizes a story’s sense of time and place; it’s also boring. Most significantly, it denotes a director who doesn’t trust her cast, the theory being that (for example) it’s easier for Dornan to emote if cinematographer Seamus McGarvey moves his camera close enough for us to count the pores on Christian Grey’s cheeks.

That’s the trouble with theories: Not all of them turn out to be true.

Taylor-Johnson has only one previous feature film to her credit: Nowhere Boy, 2009’s thoughtful biography of John Lennon’s early years. It’s leagues better than this dull, turgid, over-hyped and under-delivering mess.

Sabotage: Vicious, vulgar trash

Sabotage (2014) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rating: Rated R, for strong bloody violence and gore, relentless profanity, nudity, drug use and sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.28.14

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Our rough 'n' tumble "heroes" — from left, Neck (Josh Holloway), Breacher (Arnold
Schwarzenegger), Pyro (Max Martini) and Tripod (Kevin Vance) — infiltrate a drug cartel
safe house, taking down all opposition while cracking wise. Because real DEA agents
behave like this all the time, donchaknow.

Once upon a time, in the 1980s and early ’90s, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger vied for the crown of box-office action champ: the former riding the momentum of his Rocky and Rambo franchises; the latter embracing a string of solid sci-fi/fantasy entries such as Conan the Barbarian, Predator and — needless to say — The Terminator.

Now they’re in a race to the bottom.

I was astonished — and saddened — when Stallone popped up about a year ago, in the loathsome Bullet to the Head. Exiting that bit of distasteful junk, I couldn’t imagine any (former) big-name star doing worse.

Color me surprised, because along comes Schwarzenegger and this repugnant turkey.

Back in the day, you’d have had to stay up late on a Friday night — at home — to see this sort of grade-Z shoot-’em-up on Cinemax. No self-respecting actor would have signed on for such grindhouse trash, and no self-respecting studio would have dared release such a thing theatrically.

My, how times have changed.

Sabotage isn’t merely offensively, viciously, gratuitously violent; it’s also stupid beyond measure.

Director David Ayer has made a minor splash with gritty urban thrillers such as Harsh Times and Street Kings — don’t feel bad, if they escaped your notice — but his primary Hollywood rep results from his impressive one-two punch as a writer, in 2001: collaborating on The Fast and the Furious, and as sole scripter on Training Day, which brought Denzel Washington an Academy Award.

Based on his subsequent career, Ayer has been chasing the belief that amorality for its own sake is what sells in these United States. Why bother with plot or character, when one can wallow in the sleaze of ghastly depravity?

He has teamed here with co-writer Skip Woods, who also made some noise in 2001, with the stylishly nasty Swordfish, and more recently got involved with glossy action junk such as The A-Team and A Good Day to Die Hard. Nothing to brag about, to be sure, but also nothing to be ashamed of. Until now.

Captain Phillips: Take-charge thriller

Captain Phillips (2013) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, violence and substance abuse
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.11.13

Some stories are so astonishing, they could only be true; you’d never believe them as plots in a novel.

Utterly helpless at the hands of four heavily armed Somali pirates, Rich PHillips (Tom
Hanks, center) nonetheless weighs every option, primarily concerned about the safety
of his crew, but also — at all times — seeking a psychological edge that might allow
him to outwit his captors.

The credibility-stretching 2009 saga of Captain Richard Phillips and the U.S. container ship Maersk Alabama is just such a narrative, and it has become a taut, tension-laden drama in the capable hands of documentarian-turned-filmmaker Paul Greengrass.

Thriller fans know Greengrass for his superlative entries in the Jason Bourne series, most notably 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, by far the best of the bunch. But Greengrass also is the writer/director who uncorked United 93 five short years after 9/11, constructing a tense, deeply unsettling real-time depiction of what likely happened that horrible day.

As with United 93, Greengrass’ new film is ripped from disturbing headlines, with screenwriter Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, Breach) adapting the 2010 memoir A Captain’s Duty:Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS and Dangerous Days at Sea.

That book is written by Phillips, with an assist from Stephan Talty ... which does, by definition, dilute some of this film’s suspense. But that hardly matters; to a great degree, Phillips’ ordeal is well known by Americans who sat glued to their TV sets during five days in April 2009. The key point here is that Greengrass depicts this saga with a degree of verisimilitude, and an attention to detail, that border on documentary realism.

Add superlative performances from Tom Hanks and the actors playing his Somali captors, and the result is can’t-miss cinema: You literally won’t take your eyes off the screen.

The film opens quietly, as veteran merchant mariner Rich Phillips (Hanks) packs in anticipation of another routine assignment; we get brief face-time with his wife, Andrea (Catherine Keener), but then she’s never seen again.

(Which, just in passing, might be a missed bet: Just as much drama unfolded in Vermont, as media crews bird-dogged an agonized Andrea Phillips, while she followed these events ... and I’d love to have seen the impressively talented Keener play that role. Then again, Greengrass may have felt that her end of the saga would have diluted the drama.)

Pacific Rim: Monster Mash

Pacific Rim (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for intense sci-fi violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.12.13

Guillermo del Toro must have loved Godzilla movies as a kid.

His newest action fantasy, Pacific Rim, is a valentine to the dozen or so romp ’em, stomp ’em features that starred “the big G” during del Toro’s formative years. (Quite a few more have been made since then.) This tip of the hat clearly is deliberate, since the director and fellow scripter Travis Beacham refer to their ginormous critters as kaiju, the Japanese term — literally “strange beast,” but more commonly “giant monster” — coined, back in the day, to describe Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and their ilk.

Strapped into the high-tech body suits that make them "one" with the giant robot
warriors into which they've been placed, Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako (Rinko
Kikuchi) prepare for a battle they already know is unwinnable, against a monstrous
beast with adaptive "enhancements" that have made it far stronger than their
mechanical avatar.

Throw in plenty of 21st century whiz-bang special effects, and the result is a high-tech thrill ride that blends big monsters, equally massive robot-like avatars, and the stubborn pluck of a puny human race unwilling to go quietly into that good night.

During a summer laden with end-of-the-world scenarios — zombie apocalypse and Kryptonian apocalypse, not to mention the biblical Book of Revelations — this one takes the prize for cheeky absurdity. At the same time, del Toro and Beacham pay careful attention to the human element, giving us would-be saviors who are inspiring for their fortitude, and endearing for their flaws.

Not to mention, it’s always nice when a screenplay takes the optimistic view, and shows world powers uniting in an effort to save the planet. Such all-for-one selflessness goes all the way back to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the reminder is refreshing in this divisively cynical age.

Audacious fantasy has been del Toro’s stock-in-trade ever since 1997’s under-appreciated and genuinely creepy Mimic. He also was the perfect choice to adapt graphic novelist Mike Mignola’s lunatic Hellboy series, and — as an executive producer — del Toro has chaperoned riveting projects such as 2007’s wonderfully atmospheric The Orphanage.

And let us not forget his masterpiece: 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the Oscar-winning horror film that brought adult sensibilities to a genre too frequently willing to settle for much less, and which demonstrated that human monsters can be much, much worse than anything cooked up by our vivid imaginations.

Pacific Rim doesn’t wade through such high-falutin' waters, though; this is simply del Toro’s first stab at a crowd-pleasing, mega-budget summer blockbuster, and he has done a commendable job.

The film, set in the not-too-distant future, opens with an extended flashback: An unseen narrator recalls the unexpected arrival of the first kaiju, an enormous — and quite savage — amphibious creature bent on death and destruction. It rises from the ocean depths and wreaks considerable havoc before being brought down by conventional military hardware.

Apparently passing this off as an isolated incident — perhaps a lone, Bradbury-esque behemoth, driven by curiosity to the surface world — mankind is similarly unprepared months later, when the next one arrives. And then another. And another, at noticeably shorter intervals. Scientists realize that they’re coming from some sort of dimensional portal deep in the Pacific Ocean.