Richard Jewell: Grim slaughter of innocents

Richard Jewell (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Perhaps the most reprehensible lingering disgrace in the ordeal suffered by Richard Jewell — during a lengthy nightmare laden with hourly indignities — is the fact that, to this day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution maintains that it behaved responsibly.

Centennial Park security officer Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser, center) points law
enforcement officers to a suspicious-looking backpack that has been abandoned
beneath a bench near the sound-and-light tower adjacent to the performance stage,
where Jack Mack and the Heart Attack are entertaining thousands of fans.

To borrow a phrase from the younger generation, I call BS.

Jewell deserves to be remembered solely as the hero who, while working as a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, discovered a bomb-laden backpack and helped evacuate the crowded area before it exploded. He undoubtedly saved many, many lives.

Instead, he’s more likely remembered as the hapless individual who, three days later, was identified as the probable suspect who planted the bomb, thanks to an overzealous FBI investigation, inflammatory “reporting” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the hundreds of media outlets that subsequently fanned the flames. 

Despite being cleared after an 88-day siege by media and all manner of law enforcement, Jewell undoubtedly remained a question mark in the minds of many, particularly since nobody initially was arrested for the heinous crime. It’s easy to imagine the rumor-mongering: “Maybe he did do it, but the FBI just didn’t have enough evidence…”

Even when Eric Rudolph confessed to being the bomber after being arrested in 2003, there was no way to wholly eradicate the avalanche of accusatory publicity that had buried Jewell and his equally hapless mother for 88 days. Retractions and “fresh truth” rarely have the impact of three months’ worth of screaming headlines.

Director Clint Eastwood and scripter Billy Ray — adapting Marie Brenner’s mesmerizing profile of Jewell, in the February 1997 Vanity Fair — have done their best to restore his honor, in a compelling drama fueled by powerhouse performances from Paul Walter Hauser and Kathy Bates, as Richard and his mother, Bobi. The result is a terrifying cautionary tale about the fragility of one’s place in society, and the ease with which an ordinary life can be ruined by authority and bad publicity.

Jewell’s ordeal truly is straight out of Kafka.

Life Itself: Should be put out of its misery

Life Itself (2018) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for profanity, dramatic intensity, relentless heartbreak and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang

This is the most relentlessly, manipulatively, cruelly depressing film I’ve ever had the displeasure to endure.

Abby (Olivia Wilde) and Will (Oscar Isaac) linger in bed with their beloved little pooch,
convinced that every morning — every day — will be as giddily, lovingly happy as this
one. Obviously, they haven't read the next page in this unspeakable film's script.

Writer/director Dan Fogelman obviously had some serious demons to exorcise, but that’s no excuse; he could have poured his heart into a journal, and spared the rest of us this soul-numbing slog of gloom and despair.

It’s also counter to what we’ve come to expect from the writer who brought us droll, sharply observed ensemble dramedies such as Crazy Stupid Love, Danny Collins (which he also directed) and the ongoing TV series This Is Us, not to mention Tangled, his clever animated take on the fairy tale Rapunzel. This has been a go-to guy for guaranteed entertainment for more than a decade.

What the hell happened?

And what in the world made Amazon Studios think people would want to watch this?

As becomes clear immediately, Life Itself also suffers from obnoxiously contrived structural and presentation tics, any one of which seasoned filmgoers generally recognize as a signal of Bad Things To Come: 1) tedious, said-bookism narration; 2) cutesy “chapter titles”; and 3) far too much time spent in a psychiatrist’s office.

At times, this is a deliberate deconstruction of cinema’s traditional storytelling process, in service of a running subtext concerning a fictional device known as the “unreliable narrator.” Hitchcock employs this quite notoriously in Stage Fright, when the “flashbacks” related by Richard Todd’s character turn out to be lies. More recently, The Usual Suspects tricked us grandly with an unreliable narrator.

But Fogelman’s use of this gimmick isn’t clever; it’s simply mean-spirited, as if he derives some sort of sadistic pleasure from shattering not only our expectations, but the investment we have in a blossoming series of captivating characters. By the end of the first “chapter,” the message becomes clear: Neither Fogelman, nor this film, can — or should — be trusted.

His apparent point: Life, itself, is the ultimate unreliable narrator, because just when things seem to be going wonderfully, true happiness can be shattered by tragedy.

Okay, fine … but must that happen over, and over, and over again, in the same dreary slice of rancid cinematic pie?

The Lazarus Effect: Dead on arrival

The Lazarus Effect (2015) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, horror violence and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

This is what passes for scary these days?

This laughable, ludicrous swill?

Modern audiences are getting very short-changed.

With his suddenly homicidal fiancée prowling the darkened corridors outside their lab,
Frank (Mark Duplass) cautions Eva (Sarah Bolger) to stay quiet, while he concocts a
silly plan to save the day.

This flaccid rubbish is bad in so many ways, one scarcely knows where to begin. Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater’s irrationally asinine script? David Gelb’s artless, hammer-handed directing? The cast of blithering idiots who couldn’t inject credibility into their dialogue if their lives depended on it?

In fairness, bad line readings aren’t entirely the fault of the cast; nobody could have made this clumsy nonsense sound persuasive. That said, the performances also don’t deserve placement on anybody’s résumé.

At its core, this is just another sloppy re-tread of the hoary Frankenstein saga, with bioengineered chemicals taking the place of good ol’ lightning. This, too, is part of the problem; Dawson and Slater haven’t an original thought between them, and seem content to blatantly rip off vastly superior predecessors.

And they can’t even do that well.

Frank (Mark Duplass) and his fiancée Zoe (Olivia Wilde), running a research lab at a fictitious, Berkeley-based university, are being assisted by graduate students Niko (Donald Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters). The team recently has hired an undergraduate videographer, Eva (Sarah Bolger), to record their progress.

(One cliché of bad writing, by the way, is the affectation of granting people no more than first names: Nothing calls faster attention to wafer-thin, one-dimensional characters.)

Although Eva’s presence gives Gelb an excuse to dabble in “found footage”-style video inserts, this affectation — mercifully — quickly is replaced by Michael Fimognari’s conventional cinematography. Which, to be fair, is a point in Gelb’s favor.

Anyway...

Frank and Zoe apparently obtained their original grant to develop a chemical “boost” that would help revive patients who code on an operating table: something akin to adrenalin or defibrillation. Somewhere along the way, though, they began attempting to resurrect deceased animals with their gloppy white formula; they finally succeed with a dog named Rocky.

Champagne all around.

But Rocky has come back ... ah ... different: warier, stronger and more aggressive. (Cue strong memories of Stephen King’s vastly superior Pet Sematary ... and I mean the book, not the lousy 1989 film adaptation.) Clay spouts the pseudo-scientific gibberish that “explains” this transformation: Thanks to the injected glop, Rocky’s brain is building massive neural networks, moving well past the usual limits of his species. Or some such nonsense.

Not sure why that would make him so violent, but hey, I’m no brain surgeon. (Neither is anybody in this movie. Obviously.)

Third Person: Provocative points of view

Third Person (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, nudity and sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.18.14

Writer/director Paul Haggis’ film is too long, too self-indulgent and often too precious.

That said, it’s also intriguing, mysterious, and oddly compelling. And, to a degree, there’s a reason for the many contrivances. Whether the “ultimate answer” justifies the prolonged journey, however, will be up to the taste — and tolerance — of the individual viewer.

Monika (Moran Atias) angrily refuses to share a hotel room with Scott (Adrien Body), and
accusing him of "the obvious" motivations; she chooses instead to make the best of a
bench at the railway station. Of course, this just amplifies Scott's protective instincts, so
he follows and winds up keeping her company for the entire night.

Haggis is a seasoned writer, having cut his teeth on various TV dramas before leaping to the big screen with several high-profile assignments with Clint Eastwood: Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima and most particularly Million Dollar Baby, the latter two garnering Oscar nominations. Haggis also helped revive the James Bond franchise by collaborating on the gritty scripts for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.

Most notably, though, Haggis is known for taking home twin Academy Awards for 2004’s Crash, a victory that remains controversial to this day. Some Best Picture Oscar winners are universally embraced; others divide movie buffs into polarized camps. Crash belongs to the latter group, its interlinked storylines alternately praised as insightful social commentary or ridiculed as puerile left-wing twaddle.

Third Person is an equally personal film that employs a similar template of seemingly disconnected narratives that slide in and around each other. The crossovers aren’t as direct as those in, say, Babel, Love Actually or even Crash; sometimes it’s no more than two people passing each other in a hotel hallway, Haggis’ camera using that excuse to shift quietly from one point of view to the other.

Except that there is more going on here, as we eventually discover.

Perhaps sensitive to the warring camps he created with Crash, Haggis avoids even a whiff of political content this time, focusing instead on interpersonal relationships and issues of trust. All the characters here are in various stages of flirtation, love or rejection, their behavior determined by anger, frustration and impatience.

And by hope. Hope for understanding; hope that things will get better; hope that past transgressions can be surmounted, catalogued and forgiven.

Julia (Mila Kunis) can’t get her life together, much to the vexation of her attorney, Theresa (Maria Bello). Forever between jobs and frequently down to pocket change, Julia nonetheless hopes to regain visitation rights with the 6-year-old son living full-time with his father Rick (James Franco), a famed New York artist, and his girlfriend Sam (Loan Chabanol). We’ve no idea what Julia did, to be shunned so thoroughly by her ex; her flakiness alone doesn’t seem sufficient cause for such total banishment.

her: Character flaws

her (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

Writer/director Spike Jonze’s new fantasy is an intriguing cautionary tale aimed squarely at the narcissistic, self-absorbed millennials who increasingly behave as if social media isn’t merely an acceptable substitute for personal contact, but in fact deserves to become the preferred method of interaction.

After confessing that he may be falling in love with his computer operating system,
Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is surprised when his longtime friend Amy (Amy Adams)
doesn't react with disgust. Indeed, she seems quite okay with the concept...

In that respect, Jonze displays an uncanny instinct for depicting our deeply disturbing near-future, if such conduct continues unchecked along its current path.

Much as I admire the message, however, the delivery system leaves something to be desired. At 126 minutes, this film is self-indulgent to a fault, moving s-l-o-w-l-y to the point of ponderous tedium, en route to a resolution that we can see coming from miles away.

Were Rod Serling alive today, I’ve no doubt he could have turned this premise into a dynamite half-hour installment of his Twilight Zone TV series (assuming placement on HBO or some other pay-cable network, to preserve the essential adult themes). Jonze, taking a much more leisurely approach, drags us for an monotonous ride that had me checking my watch during the entire second hour.

Jonze burst onto the cinema scene with 1999’s Being John Malkovich — which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best director — and has built his subsequent big-screen career on eccentric and downright bizarre relationship dynamics. He most famously teamed with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman for 2002’s Adaptation, the latter insisting on co-crediting that script with his “fictitious twin brother” Donald, both of whom were depicted in the film by Nicolas Cage.

Adaptation was an alternately hilarious and disturbing analysis of the creative process, and Jonze’s new film certainly follows that template. But instead of a fictitious twin, this story’s co-protagonist is the disembodied voice of a computer operating system that possesses intelligence, perception and a capacity for emotional growth.

In other words, the perfect example of artificial intelligence.

The setting is Los Angeles in a “slight future” that is a welcome utopian relief from the Blade Runner-esque hellholes envisioned in too many recent sci-fi films. The overall infrastructure in this vision of Southern California looks and feels familiar, aside for a greater emphasis on towering buildings, and the ambiance is warm, comfortable and embracing. People wear nice clothes, the weather seems ideal, food is plentiful and tasty, and there’s no trace of crime, neglect or poverty.

OK, so maybe it’s a bit soulless ... which is, of course, precisely the point.

Rush: Quite a ride

Rush (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity, nudity, sexual content, brief drug use and disturbing images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.27.13

Friends tell you what you want to hear. Enemies tell you what you need to know.

Director Ron Howard’s Rush isn’t merely the fact-based account of an intriguing sports rivalry; it’s also the most exciting auto racing movie to roar into theaters since 1971’s Le Mans ... which, given Steve McQueen’s passion for authenticity and the superb efforts of cinematographers René Guissart Jr. and Robert B. Hauser — not to mention a team of five (!) editors — is high praise indeed.

The calm before the storm: No love is lost between rival racers James Hunt (Chris
Hemsworth, foreground left) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), each determined to
out-drive the other en route to a Formula 1 World Championship. But that isn't the
whole story by any means: Their saga is the stuff of sports legend.

No matter. Howard’s collaborators — cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and editors Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill — are up for the challenge. They’re also given a sensational assist by sound designers Danny Hambrook and Markus Stemler, whose ear-splitting attention to detail delivers everything except the pungent, eye-watering stench of high-octane fuel. Which you’ll probably imagine anyway.

But while the visceral exhilaration is palpable, it’s mere backdrop; this film gets its emotional heft from the fascinating narrative crafted by British scripter Peter Morgan, whose well-deserved Academy Award nominations for Frost/Nixon and The Queen — not to mention his work on The Last King of Scotland, The Damned United and quite a few others — demonstrate considerable skill when it comes to sketching characters through well-composed dialogue.

James Simon Wallis Hunt (played by Chris Hemsworth), British to the core, and Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) meet — and immediately clash — as ambitious Formula 3 drivers. They couldn’t be more different: Hunt is a womanizing, hedonistic toff who wears flamboyant aristocratic superiority like a cloak, while Lauda is solemn, remote and blunt to the point of insolence. Hunt is the pluperfect London playboy, Lauda the Teutonic precision; neither apologizes for his behavior, or would think of doing so.

Hunt loves the champagne-hazed thrill of victory, and is happiest when posing for photographs as he clutches an award. Lauda quite famously gave his trophies to a local garage, as “payment” for having his car washed and serviced.

But they both take racing seriously, albeit from different sensibilities. Hunt is as bold and reckless on the track as in real life, embracing the challenge for its romantic, death-defying aura; Lauda, meticulous to a fault, calculates odds and works them to his favor. Hunt relies on the largess of sponsors he can impress; Lauda drives mechanics crazy by ordering design changes ... which inevitably prove advantageous.

As a result, Morgan’s script focuses on the attitude of racing, as much as the sport itself. At a time when drivers were expected to die every season — as Brühl’s Lauda informs us, in his dryly ironic, off-camera narration — professional racers truly were a breed apart. (It could be argued that NASCAR, with its ever-safer vehicles and protective body gear, has stripped some of the rogue spirit from auto racing.)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone: Hey, presto!

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for profanity, sexual candor, fleeting drug content and dangerous stunts
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.15.13

Las Vegas magic acts — with their glitzy, overwrought buffoonery — are ripe for parody, and director Don Scardino attacks this subculture with verve, in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.

Having discovered that his childhood idol is living in a retirement home, Burt
Wonderstone (Steve Carell, left) is delighted when Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin)
eventually consents to do a few tricks for the other residents.

Armed with a witty script that hits most of the right notes, Scardino demonstrates his own gift for prestidigitation, by shaping a gaggle of scene-stealing camera hogs into a well-balanced ensemble comedy troupe. That’s no small thing, when dealing with the likes of Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi and Jim Carrey, any one of whom could ruin a project by being too uninhibited ... and all have done so, in the past (in Carrey’s case, rather frequently).

Not this time. Scardino keeps his stars on point while also drawing deft supporting performances from Alan Arkin, James Gandolfini and Olivia Wilde. The latter, in particular, demonstrates an unexpected talent for comic timing that was nowhere to be seen in her token hottie roles in Tron: Legacy and Cowboys & Aliens. Given her work here, Wilde actually may have an acting career in her future.

The biggest miracle, though, is that this film’s script manages to stay reasonably well focused — and dead-on perceptive, as it skewers Vegas’ wretched excess — despite being a committee affair from four writers: Jonathan M. Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Chad Kultgen and Tyler Mitchell.

Gentlemen, my black top hat’s off to you.

Scardino clearly learned well from a long, Emmy Award-winning television career that has seen him helm shows as diverse as 30 Rock, Law & Order, Ed and even the wonderful Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. The common element: rich ensemble casts with characters we care about.

The story opens with a brief prologue in the early 1980s, as latchkey kid Burt (Mason Cook) celebrates a birthday by himself, forced by his working mother’s absence to bake his own cake (a droll and endearing touch that hints of great things to come). His one present: a celebrity magic set that will evoke strong memories from viewers who remember being a kid back in that era, when Marshall Brodien — as Wizzo the Wizard —hawked his “TV Magic Kit” of “mystifying tricks” on syndicated stations.

In this case, young Burt is awestruck by the kit’s videotape, wherein tuxedo-garbed Rance Holloway (Arkin) promises that magic can change one’s life. Burt, enchanted, starts pulling scarves out of thin air; his school time antics attract the attention of the similarly geeky — and bullied — Anton (Luke Vanek). The two become fast friends, energized by a desire to invent newer, fresher and ever more amazing tricks.

The Words: They fail

The Words (2012) • View trailer
Two stars. Rating: PG-13, for profanity
By Derrick Bang 

I cannot imagine why anybody ever thought this thuddingly dull script could have made an interesting film.

When Rory (Bradley Cooper) finds a battered — but somehow
dignified — old briefcase in a cluttered Parisian shop, his wife (Zoe
Saldana, as Dora) insists that it's just the sort of thing that he needs
to have. Rory is, after all, a would-be writer; surely a briefcase like
this would be a good-luck charm? Alas ... maybe not.

Writer/directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal have concocted the sort of pretentious twaddle that snooty English department college professors publish for each other in stuffy academic journals. The first miracle is that they secured the interest of a mid-size film studio; the second miracle is the involvement of A-list actors such as Jeremy Irons, Bradley Cooper and Dennis Quaid.

Utterly astonishing.

You’d think the result would be worth viewing, with those folks on board. You’d be mistaken. This tedious study of morality — as it pertains to literary cheating — keeps dangling the promise of some “great revelation” in the final act, but the conclusion is frustrating, anticlimactic and ambiguous to the point of inciting a riot among viewers.

The tone was quite evident among the unhappy audience members at Tuesday evening’s preview screening: All that purple prose and soap opera-style build-up ... for this?

Indeed.

The narrative occupies three timelines, each with different sets of characters, all nested within themselves like Russian dolls ... or, if you prefer cinematic comparisons, like the layered dreams within Inception. We spend the most time with Rory Jansen (Cooper), a young writer introduced on the eve of a posh awards reception for his critically acclaimed first novel.

Rory and his wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana), are very much in love. Rory seems overwhelmed by the suddenness with which he has been thrust into the spotlight ... at least, that’s our assumption. In truth, Rory’s emotions are a great deal more complicated.

We slide back five years, to the moment when Rory and Dora, as a freshly minted couple, move into an impossibly small New York studio apartment. He writes constantly, hoping to impress the world with his narrative panache; we never get a sense of what Dora does outside the apartment. Does she have a job? A career? Plans for same? Beats me.

But they adore each other, and make do with occasional financial infusions from Rory’s father (J.K. Simmons, obviously snagged for a single day’s worth of quick scenes).

Magic Mike: No rabbit in this hat

Magic Mike (2012) • View trailer
Two stars. Rating: R, for pervasive sexual content, profanity, drug use and fleeting graphic nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.29.12

For perhaps 15 minutes, Channing Tatum’s title character seems an honorable fellow, deserving sympathy and worthy of our hope that he might escape the unusual lifestyle into which he had trapped himself.

Despite his best efforts, Mike (Channing Tatum) can't get Brooke (Cody
Horn) to take him seriously: no surprise, really, since his "best efforts"
at sincerity inevitably ring hollow. Which begs the crucial question:
Would it actually be a good thing if this independent young woman
were to fall in love with this jerk?

But that, it soon became clear, was giving far too much credit to Reid Carolin’s vacuous, soulless and utterly pointless screenplay. Magic Mike is worse than disappointing; it’s boring. It can’t even succeed as a titillating guilty pleasure, and that’s a harsh indictment for a project so consumed with the world of male strippers.

We’re never made to care about any of these guys, let alone the few women who revolve around their self-absorbed orbits. Nobody deserves redemption, and not even Tatum’s Mike deserves happiness; he does nothing to earn it. Carolin’s core plot is as old as Hollywood’s hedonistic hills — dewy-eyed innocent gets seduced and quickly overwhelmed by the sybaritic delights of his new occupation — and this slog of a film does nothing to freshen up the material, or make it interesting in any manner.

All of which is quite a surprise, considering that the man at the helm is Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh. What a waste of time and talent.

We must remember, though, that Soderbergh comes in several different flavors. He’s the consummate observer of human nature who brought us exceptional dramas such as King of the Hill, Erin Brockovich and Traffic; he’s also the crowd-pleasing entertainer who delighted us with star-studded confections such as Ocean’s Eleven, Out of Sight and The Good German.

For the purposes of this discussion, however, Soderbergh is the kink-obsessed voyeur and stylistic renegade who began his big-screen career with 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, and then tortured us 13 years later with the jaw-droppingly inept and deadly dull Full Frontal, truly one of the worst films ever made by an A-list director.

That's the guy who made Magic Mike.

This film’s most irritating stylistic tic surfaces quickly, with Soderbergh’s reliance on a seemingly spontaneous approach to dialogue delivery. All his actors fumble and stumble through their lines, obviously deliberately, as if to suggest verisimilitude by mimicking the way ordinary people talk to each other in real life. Our speech often is punctuated by pauses and struggles for the right words, as opposed to the sparkling, perfectly timed bon mots traditionally delivered in movies.

OK, fair point. But it simply doesn’t work here; too often these actors — most particularly Tatum — look and sound as if they can’t remember their lines. Or, worse yet, like they’re improvising dialogue on the spot, and doing a truly terrible job of it.

There’s a world of difference between naturalistic and incompetent, and Magic Mike too frequently feels like the latter.

In Time: Fast-paced sci-fi thriller

In Time (2011) • View trailer for In Time
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for violence, sexuality, fleeting nudity and profanity
By Derrick Bang


Andrew Niccol has quite an imagination.

The New Zealand-born writer/director landed with a splash in 1997 with Gattaca, an intriguing sci-fi thriller that has aged well. Then Niccol really caught my attention with his Oscar-nominated script for The Truman Show, the following year: truly a work of genius.

Will (Justin Timberlake, center), out of his element in fancy dress, and
surrounded by wealthy people who instinctively realize that he doesn't belong,
nonetheless catches the eye of the headstrong Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried),
daughter of corporate titan Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser).

The Truman Show anticipated the realty TV craze that subsequently infested the world; Niccol’s next film, S1m0ne, explored the ethical parameters likely to emerge if computer-enhanced substitutes replace actual film and television stars (an issue that subsequently hit the headlines when advertising companies began to use dead celebrities such as John Wayne and Fred Astaire, shilling for — respectively — Coors Light and Dirt Devil).

All of which brings us to In Time, Niccol’s intriguing sci-fi spin on our real world’s increasingly deplorable divide of wealth between the have-nots and the have-everythings. Such social commentary notwithstanding, though, the approach here is more exploitative than contemplative; this is a B-thriller in fancy dress.

Nothing wrong with that, of course; plenty of gritty — and quite entertaining — action flicks have made excellent use of sci-fi elements, from 1973’s Soylent Green to 2009’s Echelon Conspiracy.

Here, in Nichol’s rather disturbing view of the future, immortality has been achieved: Everybody ages normally to 25, and then never looks a day older. One’s mother, sister and daughter become de facto physical peers ... which leads to some amusingly disorienting issues.

But the world’s resources are finite, and the entire population cannot be allowed to live forever. Ergo, time has become money ... literally. Somehow, everybody is born with a body clock embedded within the lower left arm. (We cannot ask how this occurs, or was allowed to happen; reasonable questions have no role in this scenario.) On a person’s 25th birthday, an inner clock starts ticking downward for one final year of life.

Except that it’s far less than a year, because everything in this world — food, clothes, lodging, entertainment — also costs time: an hour for a bus ride, several hours for a meal. This “price” is withdrawn electronically from one’s inner time-meter; should that meter drop to zero, heart failure and instant death follow.

The rich and powerful never need to worry about time; they control its use — and frequently misuse — in the manner of rapacious Wall Street brokers. Working-class citizens are a different story; they rarely have more than 24 hours on their body clocks, and must toil every day, in factories, to earn another day of precious life. Many fail.

The Change-Up: Same old, same old

The Change-Up (2011) • View trailer for The Change-Up
2.5 stars. Rating: R, for pervasive strong crude sexual content and language, nudity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.5.11


The Change-Up makes me want to gather signatures for a petition to be circulated throughout Hollywood, demanding a moratorium on three things:

1) Body-swap movies. I suppose this premise goes back to Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, but it didn't become a movie subgenre until the original Freaky Friday, in 1976. Since then, we've endured All of Me, Vice Versa, Dream a Little Dream, 18 Again, Like Father, Like Son, a remake of Freaky Friday, It's a Boy Girl Thing and ... you get the idea. Enough, already!

Mitch (occupying Jason Bateman's body, center) listens as Dave (occupying
Ryan Reynolds' body) attempts to explain their predicament to his
understandably dubious wife, Jamie (Leslie Mann). Actually, this is one of
the film's funnier scenes ... which doesn't set the bar very high.

2) Flying excrement. Apparently, this is considered the height of vulgar humor these days. And with the initial envelope having been shredded, now we're scraping bottom by making the consequences worse. Ergo, in The Change-Up, dedicated daddy Dave Lockwood (Jason Bateman), pulling late-night diaper duty, winds up with a mouthful of projectile poop. What's next ... being forced to watch the victim involuntarily swallow?

3) Deliberately unpalatable nudity, often blended with kinky sex. Once again, numbnuts writers chase each other down the drain of depravity, looking to break yet another taboo. In this case, career horndog Mitch Planko (Ryan Reynolds) enjoys getting it on with a 9-months-pregnant hottie. Whom we see in the altogether. Note: The scene is designed not to demonstrate the radiant, healthy sexuality of a pregnant woman — which I'm sure is uppermost on the minds of all pregnant women — but solely for a cheap, gross-out laugh. Making it offensive on two levels.

Ahem.

As expected, The Change-Up is nothing more than yet another of this year's tedious and vulgar moron comedies: a derivative, desperate, deliberately disgusting waste of its stars' talents.

Bateman and Reynolds are funny guys. No question. Reynolds demonstrated quite a flair for physical and situational comedy with 2009's The Proposal, and Bateman has been the best part of numerous misfired flicks that didn't deserve his participation. (Honestly, Jason, you need a better agent.)

Director David Dobkin previously brought us Wedding Crashers and Fred Claus, so he's obviously accustomed to lowest-common-denominator humor. Nothing wrong with that, as long as something about the project feels fresh; casting and energy deservedly turned Wedding Crashers into a hit. But The Change-Up feels like something cobbled together by a couple of junior high school lads seeking to include as much profanity and as many bare breasts as possible ... even when neither is justified.

No surprise there: Scripters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore come to us from Four Christmases and both Hangover entries. I cite all these titles to let fans of the above-mentioned flicks know that they'll be in familiar territory here.

Or perhaps not. The Change-Up attempts to wring a moral from its tired, high-concept premise, and that works against the arrested adolescent hijinks crammed into damn near every scene.

Cowboys & Aliens: When genres collide

Cowboys & Aliens (2011) • View trailer for Cowboys & Aliens
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, and rather generously, for intense sci-fi action and violence, brief partial nudity and a fleeting crude reference
By Derrick Bang

Scientist and sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Scott Mitchell Rosenberg had plenty of fun with that concept, in the 2006 graphic novel he created and chaperoned with artist Luciano Lima and writers Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley. The basic premise is so beguiling, that it's amazing nobody else thought of it first: What if, instead of repeatedly bothering post-WWII Earth, extraterrestrials had arrived 100 years earlier?

Having tracked an unknown whatzis to its rather unusual lair, cattle baron
Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, left) and wanted train robber Jake
Lonergan (Daniel Craig) ponder their next move ... while both men wonder if
the strange gadget on Jake's left wrist will prove helpful.

Surely the average citizens of our Wild West would have believed themselves beset by demons who wielded magic beyond their comprehension.

Director Jon Favreau's big-screen adaptation of Cowboys & Aliens takes numerous liberties with that original graphic novel; a press-gang of six (!) credited writers has shaped this rootin', tootin' saga around its two big-name stars, while also moving the core plot in different directions. But the story's foundation remains the same: How would 19th century folks have reacted to such a threat?

While Favreau sends up hoary film western conventions with a few chuckles here and there — the sort of levity he also brought to his two Iron Man films — Cowboys & Aliens is, at all times, a much grimmer saga (grim enough to test the boundaries of its PG-13 rating). We're quite removed from the cute, inquisitive outer-space visitors of Steven Spielberg's E.T.; the aliens in this tale are brutish, nasty and Up To No Good. They think nothing of kidnapping hapless Earthers and then studying them at great length.

And you can forget about the eyebrow-raising rectal probes discussed with such insistence by obsessed modern "victims" of alien abduction; these extra-terrestrials go straight to vivisection and cellular disintegration. Not nice folks. At all.

But that's getting ahead of things. Favreau's film opens as a man with neither memory nor name (Daniel Craig) wakens one morning, in the sun-blasted land just outside the small New Mexico town of Absolution. It's 1875, and our protagonist hasn't the faintest idea how he got there, or how he wound up with such a peculiar bracelet-type gadget around his left wrist.

The latter won't come off, and its purpose remains hidden.

Shortly after wandering into Absolution — following a brief encounter with three would-be bounty hunters — our stranger learns that he's Jake Lonergan, and that he's wanted for all sorts of crimes. He encounters a young woman — Olivia Wilde, as Ella — who seems unusually interested in him; he also realizes that the entire town is in thrall to local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), whose ne'er-do-well son, Percy (Paul Dano), is an untouchable thorn in everybody's side.

Until Jake touches him, anyway. Quite a solid touch, at that.