From Paris with Love: Frantic French free-for-all

From Paris with Love (2010) • View trailer for From Paris with Love
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, profanity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.5.10
Buy DVD: From Paris with Love• Buy Blu-Ray: From Paris with Love [Blu-ray]

Live-action cartoons rarely are worth writing home about, but the better ones can be fun to watch.

And when it comes to crazed action thrillers, few filmmakers deliver the goods better than Luc Besson, the French writer/director/producer who seems responsible, at times, for every third film released in France. At his best, Besson has brought us La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Transporter series, and even lesser efforts — Danny the Dog and Angel-A — are intriguing misfires.

Impulsive black-ops agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta, left) thinks nothing of
breaking into an apartment in order to spy on somebody across the street, an
act of questionable legality that draws reproach from neophyte partner James
Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Charlie's response to James' raised eyebrow is
always the same: a long-suffering glance and an unspoken "Do you want to
get the job done, or not?"

From Paris with Love is a hoot 'n' a holler, not to mention a triumph of clever directing (Pierre Morel, strutting the same stuff he gave us in Taken) and slick editing (Frederic Thoraval). It couldn't have been easy to turn paunchy, 55-year-old John Travolta into a credible action hero, and yet his Charlie Wax (love the name!) brings down the bad guys with the panache of an actor 20 years his junior.

Besson takes credit solely for story here — scripting chores having been handed to Adi Hasak — but all the usual elements are firmly in place: oversized weapons, laughably overblown gouts of gunfire, plenty of male bonding and a tendency to treat women as appendages.

Despite being preposterous beyond words, though, Morel moves things along at a pace slick enough to minimize questions, while Travolta and co-star Jonathan Rhys Meyers keep us amply entertained every step of the way.

Folks seeking a rip-snortin' way to spend 95 minutes on a Friday evening couldn't do better.

Rhys Meyers plays James Reese, personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador in France (Richard Durden). James is a capable young man who has earned the respect of his boss, with whom he frequently plays chess. James also has a gorgeous, loving girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak, as Caroline) who designs clothes and dotes on him, and an enviable Parisian apartment with a rooftop perfectly suited to dining beneath the stars.

More than anything else, though, James likes his side job as a low-level operative for the CIA: a bit of moonlighting that he hopes, one day, to transform into a career as a bona-fide agent. This desire takes an unusual turn when his never-seen handler sends him on an urgent mission to collect somebody at Customs.

Enter Travolta's Charlie Wax, introduced as he verbally abuses the French Customs agents who are refusing to allow a bag of canned sports drinks into the country.

Edge of Darkness: Not too sharp

Edge of Darkness (2010) • View trailer for Edge of Darkness
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.4.10
Buy DVD: Edge of Darkness• Buy Blu-Ray: Edge of Darkness [Blu-ray]

Mel, Mel, Mel ... you do suffer so.

Whether getting goosed by a cattle prod (Lethal Weapon), tortured by the sick fear that his belligerence may have doomed his kidnapped son (Ransom) or disemboweled, drawn and quartered (Braveheart), Gibson's on-camera meltdowns are the stuff of legend.

Boston homicide detective Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson, left) comes home one
evening to find shadowy government operative Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone)
in his living room. The two retire to the kitchen and some vintage whiskey,
where Jedburgh drops cryptic hints while promising not to kill Craven ... yet.
As might be imagined, that's rather cold comfort.

He's never less than wholly persuasive at such moments, and many of his film roles clearly have been designed to capitalize on this talent for anguish on demand.

Even if the Christ-on-the-cross parallels have grown tiresome over the years.

And Gibson's Thomas Craven certainly gets plenty of opportunities for agonized self-doubt in Edge of Darkness, which concerns a veteran Boston homicide detec-tive's stubborn, rage-fueled mission to discover why his only child — 24-year-old Emma (Bohana Novakovic) — was killed under rather puzzling circumstances.

Gibson does reasonably well in his first big-screen starring role since 2002's Signs; he continues to exploit the riveting presence that has served him so well, during a long and varied acting career.

Alas, as a comeback vehicle, Edge of Darkness rather lets him down.

This story began as a six-hour British TV miniseries back in 1985, each episode scripted by Troy Kennedy-Martin and directed by Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale). The latter has returned to helm this big-screen American movie adaptation, but the writing chores have fallen to William Monahan and Andrew Bovell ... and, frankly, they've screwed it up.

You do the math: The original miniseries ran 317 minutes, and this film clocks in at 117 minutes. So if the result frequently feels like a Readers Digest Condensed Books version of a much more substantial narrative, you're not imagining things.

A Single Man: Singularly compelling

A Single Man (2009) • View trailer for A Single Man
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, and much too harshly, for nudity and mild sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.29.10
Buy DVD: A Single Man • Buy Blu-Ray: A Single Man [Blu-ray]


We spend our lives searching for precious moments of clarity: the shock of epiphany that may come, if we're lucky, a few times before we shuffle off this mortal coil.

The recognition that, at this precise instant, everything makes sense.

Much as he might like to, George (Colin Firth) cannot freeze this pleasantly
intimate moment with Charley (Julianne Moore), despite her desire that he do
so; he's not in a position to provide what she needs. More to the point, he has
an appointment with his own pending suicide.

George Falconer (Colin Firth) thought he had found his place in life, the universe and everything, thanks to a deeply satisfying 16-year relationship with his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode). Everything made sense. But in a flash, during a drive on a snowy road in an entirely different state, Jim lost his life in a car accident.

Months later, George still hasn't recovered from the loss. He fantasizes being at the crash site, and approaching Jim's body to give him one last kiss: a comforting bit of closure denied to George, because Jim's parents — who never approved of the relationship — restricted the funeral and services to "immediate family only."

Director/co-scripter Tom Ford, working with screenwriter David Scaearce, has turned Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, A Single Man, into a beautifully constructed film with a captivating attention to detail. Much has been made of Firth's starring role, and deservedly so; it's an achingly melancholy portrait of a man who, much to his regret, can't hold himself together.

Ford brings his skills as a world-famous fashion designer to every frame of this film, which is composed with the skill of a master musician.

The film's most fascinating aspect, however, is its ingenious use of color: a technique not employed with such creativity since director Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau capture the mundane aspects of George's life with a washed-out palette: a muddy, sepia-hued filter that reflects the despondent cloud that poisons his brain.

Crazy Heart: A bit too crazy?

Crazy Heart (2009) • View trailer for Crazy Heart
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.28.10
Buy DVD: Crazy Heart • Buy Blu-Ray: Crazy Heart [Blu-ray]

Despite fine performances by Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal — and they're both exceptional — I simply could not get past the key plot point in Crazy Heart.

In no real-world scenario would an attractive and reasonably perceptive young woman such as Gyllenhaal's Jean fall for a slovenly, smelly, chain-smoking, burned-out alcoholic such as Bridges' Bad Blake.

Despite prudent instincts that silently scream advice to the contrary, small-
town journalist Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) allows herself to be moved by the
seductive heat that radiates from her subject, aging country singer Bad Blake
(Jeff Bridges). Savvy viewers who watch the movie and then take a second
careful look at this photo will notice, however, that the studio publicists
cleaned Bridges up -- a lot -- before snapping this publicity still. In the film,
during this scene, Blake looks much, much seedier. (One assumes that's why
they call it "movie magic.")

It'd never happen.

She's in her late 20s, early 30s tops: single parent to an adorable 4-year-old son. Blake, at 57, is a shambling, falling-down, vomiting-as-a-recreational-sport career drunk.

No way.

Mind you, I hold this opinion despite being a guy who, in the usual Hollywood fantasyland style, would love to have somebody as cute as Gyllenhaal give me even a second glance when I hit 57. A good many of the women who attended last week's Sacramento preview screening were much more troubled, and quite vocal in their objections and disbelief.

Writer/director Scott Cooper's film is based on a novel by Thomas Cobb, who I'll assume dealt with this issue more persuasively. Maybe Jean's character is older in the book. Maybe Blake isn't quite that much of a wreck.

Whatever. On the big screen, it's an insurmountable hurdle.

So is the notion, a bit later, that Jean would trust her young son — absolutely the most precious thing in her life — in Blake's unchaperoned care. Again, no way.

Crazy Heart also suffers from deja-vu; we've definitely been here before, most notably with Robert Duvall's Academy Award-winning performance in 1983's Tender Mercies, which also concerned a washed-up country singer seeking redemption. Switch careers, and we again saw this saga played out a year ago, when Mickey Rourke impressed everybody so much with his starring role in The Wrestler.

That film also had a May/October romantic subplot, but with an important distinction: Marisa Tomei's career stripper was pretty down and out herself. She and Rourke were cut from the same cloth to begin with, and had been equally disillusioned by forever getting stuck with — to quote Marilyn Monroe, in Some Like It Hot — "the fuzzy end of the lollipop."