And So It Goes: And so it went

And So It Goes (2014) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for sexual candor and drug content
By Derrick Bang

This feels like a Reader’s Digest Condensed Movie. And not a very good one.

Although blessed with occasional charm and a fair number of well-delivered verbal zingers, And So It Goes is destined for instant oblivion. The premise is strictly TV sitcom lite, the delivery by the numbers, the outcome completely predictable.

When Oren (Michael Douglas) gets saddled with a granddaughter he didn't even know
existed, he asks next-door neighbor Leah (Diane Keaton) to watch the girl. For an
unspecified period of time. Which Leah improbably agrees to do, despite having very little
use for Oren. Which makes about as much sense as anything else in this dim-bulb flick.

In one respect, this gentle rom-com is a breath of fresh air: a (mostly) family-friendly affair designed for older viewers who will appreciate seeing pros such as Michael Douglas, Diane Keaton and Frances Sternhagen do what they do best. By simple virtue of offering an alternative to summer’s noisy, vacuous popcorn flicks, this film should enjoy a reasonable opening weekend.

After that, sadly, word of mouth will bury it completely.

I simply cannot believe that this clumsy mess comes from director Rob Reiner and scripter Mark Andrus. The former has a string of hits going back to Stand By Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally; the latter earned a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for co-scripting 1997’s As Good As It Gets, and then went on to write 2001’s marvelous Life As a House.

Point being, both Reiner and Andrus excel at whimsical, multi-character dramedies with a bit of bite; it’s their bread and butter. So what they heck went wrong this time?

And So It Goes is suspiciously short, at 94 minutes, which suggests the sort of eleventh-hour tampering that might explain some sub-plots that pop up and then just sorta vanish. But that doesn’t excuse a few of Andrus’ hammer-handed narrative hiccups, most particularly a sidebar so glaringly unpleasant that it feels yanked in from some other movie: a true what-the-heck-were-they-thinking moment.

Our central character is Oren Little (Douglas), an irascible crank who nonetheless is the most successful Realtor in a bucolic Connecticut lakefront community: the sort of place where the rich have more money than God. Oren probably belongs in their company, but — following his wife’s recent death, from cancer — he has chosen to reside in a cramped multi-apartment unit dubbed Little Shangri-La. He shares this building with adjacent first-floor neighbor Leah (Keaton) and two upstairs tenants.

All of whom regard him as a grouch and a pain in the keister, an image Oren does nothing to discourage.

Once upon a time, Oren might have been a nice guy, but spending two years watching his wife die drained all of his finer qualities. Now he’s just one big commission away from being able to retire, and he can’t wait to leave. Which seems odd on the surface, because he’d also be abandoning his wife’s grave site, which he visits frequently.

The Wolf of Wall Street: A howling disappointment

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rating: R, for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, pervasive profanity and drug use, and some violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.13

Boobs, blow and bad language.

That’s my takeaway, from the 180 minutes I wasted — nay, endured — while watching The Wolf of Wall Street.

This is where Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) feels the most comfortable, and the
most powerful: at the microphone in front of his troops at Stratton Oakmont, preparing
to deliver another do-or-die speech designed to encourage everybody to hit the
phones and fleece ever more working-class suckers out of their hard-earned savings.

Root-canal surgery would have been less painful.

Director Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio have made beautiful music on numerous occasions, but this symphony of wretched excess plays more like a botched rehearsal.

There isn’t more than 20 minutes’ worth of actual narrative in Terence Winter’s sloppy excuse for a screenplay. Indeed, this plays like the parody sketch Saturday Night Live might have made of a much better movie ... or, perhaps, the Mad Magazine take on far superior material.

Great, expansive chunks of this bewildering project could have come from the improvisational, goof-laden antics of a Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow farce. Pointless exchanges of inane, profanity-laden, frat boy “dialogue” go on and on and on and on. Our stars seem to make stuff up from one scene to the next, pretending that frenzied hysteria is some reasonable substitute for actual acting, with Scorsese apparently content to let the camera roll.

That sort of babbling slapstick nonsense wears thin very quickly ... and yet it continues for what seems an eternity.

I want those three hours of my life back.

Winter’s script is adapted from Jordan Belfort’s 2007 “memoir” of the same title, a book that can be called laughably unreliable at best, perniciously self-aggrandizing at worst. Belfort was yet another opportunistic Wall Street swindler who made the most of the high-flying 1990s, largely by defrauding investors with penny stocks via the “prestigious” brokerage firm front of Stratton Oakmont.

He was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering in 1998, investors having lost somewhere north of $200 million. Belfort served just shy of two years in federal prison, then re-invented himself as a “motivational speaker” and wrote the aforementioned book — and a sequel, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street — mostly to revel in the notoriously bad behavior he and his colleagues enjoyed while fleecing the unwary.

Actually, he’s the perfect egotistical show-off for the share-all Facebook generation.

Flipped: Engaging points of view

Flipped (2010) • View trailer for Flipped
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.12.10
Buy DVD: Flipped • Buy Blu-Ray: Flipped [Blu-ray]

Girls know these things. 

A second-grade girl can meet a boy her own age and know it's love at first sight: deep, passionate, swooning love that, if properly nurtured, could stand the test of time. 

Second-grade boys, totally clueless, invariably miss getting struck by Cupid's bolts. 

More's the pity. 

After raising chickens as a classroom project, Juli (Madeline Carroll) discovers
she can make some extra money by selling eggs. She wouldn't think of
charging Bryce (Callan McAuliffe) and his family, though, because she has
been sweet on him for years. But this act of generosity becomes a catastrophe
when Bryce's father rather arbitrarily demands that the eggs be returned,
uneaten ... and the boy can't figure out how to obey that edict without hurting
Juli's feelings.

Director Rob Reiner's generally engaging adaptation of Wendelin Van Draanen's Flipped will be enjoyed by anybody with fond memories of television's The Wonder Years. Reiner's film — he also co-wrote the screenplay, with Andrew Scheinman — hearkens back to the sensitive touch he brought to 1986's Stand by Me, a different sort of coming-of-all saga. 

This new film evokes a similar time period: the transition from the Eisenhower '50s to the Kennedy '60s. Children still are polite to their elders, families customarily dress up for dinner in their own homes, fathers are the de facto heads of the household — even if they don't deserve the role — and rock 'n' roll hasn't yet moved beyond the innocence of bubble-gum boy bands and girl groups. 

And assertive girls are branded tomboys and regarded as "strange." 

That label certainly fits young Juli Baker, immediately struck by Bryce Loski's gorgeous eyes when his family moves into the house across the street, in the sort of bucolic neighborhood that seems to exist only in fading memories. Juli boldly insinuates herself into Bryce's life, much to the wary amusement of the boy's father, Steven (Anthony Edwards). 

Bryce wants nothing to do with this pushy girl, but his disinterest only emboldens her further. School life for a second-grade boy stalked by a girl becomes a living hell. 

The gimmick employed by this film is a classic "he said/she said" depiction of events: We first witness Bryce's point of view, accompanied by his voice-over. This continues through a series of encounters — sometimes lasting weeks and months, sometimes only hours and days — and then the clock is re-wound to allow Juli's version. 

Specific developments occur the same way — both kids are reliable narrators — but the emphasis shifts. Juli reads more into something Bryce regards as a casual comment; he perceives her constant attention as intrusive and freakish, whereas she believes herself merely devoted. Expressions and body language change, as well, depending on who's telling the story.